While sales enablement has emerged as a dedicated discipline over the past decade, it remains an ambiguous domain that organizations struggle to fully define and operationalize. Those working in sales enablement often find it challenging to succinctly articulate what they do and the value they provide. Lack of clear vision can undermine efforts to secure leadership buy-in, protect from organizational whiplash, and cement sales enablement as a strategic function.
Developing a formal sales enablement charter is the antidote to the ambiguity that often plagues the function. A thoughtfully crafted charter essentially serves as the enablement team's "constitution" - definitively laying out their mission, core responsibilities, goals, decision-making authorities, and underlying existential purpose.
A robust charter is akin to erecting a foundational boundary for the sales enablement discipline within an organization. It stakes a clear claim about why the function exists, what it does, and where its efforts should be focused. Here's the value of implementing a sales enablement charter:
Organizational Alignment
One of the biggest challenges sales enablement teams face is a lack of organizational understanding about what they do and why it matters. This often stems from the sales enablement role being relatively new and rapidly evolving. Different stakeholders may have different perceptions of the team's purpose, priorities and remit.
For example, sales leadership may view enablement as solely focused on onboarding and product training. Marketing may expect them to create sales content. Finance might see them as a cost center. This misalignment creates unrealistic expectations that enablement inevitably fails to meet.
The process of collaboratively developing a sales enablement charter gets stakeholders on the same page from the outset. It forces key leaders from sales, marketing, operations, finance, and other functions to come together and hash out the explicit mission, scope and objectives for sales enablement.
This collaborative process surfaces and resolves any potential dissonance about the team's role. For instance, if sales leadership wants a heavy coaching focus but marketing expects content creation, those conflicting expectations get addressed upfront when defining the charter rather than lingering unresolved. Stakeholders have to openly discuss priorities and reconcile them into one cohesive charter that all parties buy into. Negotiating through these potential sticking points proactively prevents misaligned expectations down the road when the enablement team inevitably can't be everything to everyone.
Additionally, the process of charter creation builds stronger champions for sales enablement. By being involved in designing the function's purpose and decision-making principles, stakeholders develop a vested interest in the team's success. The charter becomes their mutually agreed to strategic blueprint - not just an edict from on high.
With stakeholder fingerprints all over the charter, there is broader organizational awareness of what sales enablement does, why it's important, and how it creates value. This bounded context-setting manages expectations proactively and garners leadership alignment that can be referred back to going forward.
Rather than shooting in the dark, the enablement team has transparent guideposts for operating. And stakeholders understand the rationale behind the team's priorities, making them more likely to champion and enable their success. The collaborative charter process harmonizes different voices into one unified enablement strategy.
Clarity of Mission
For a function like sales enablement that touches so many different areas of an organization, it's easy for its purpose to become muddied over time. Are they a support team for sales? A content creation group? Trainers? Without a clear mission, sales enablement can devolve into an ambiguous catch-all that struggles to show its direct business impact.
A well-crafted charter eliminates this ambiguity by definitively articulating sales enablement's reason for being. It goes beyond just listing tactical activities, instead crisply encapsulating the overarching mission and value proposition of the entire function.
For example, a charter might state upfront: "The Sales Enablement team exists to maximize [Company]'s revenue growth by driving optimal seller performance and customer experience through enablement services."
This succinct mission statement immediately establishes sales enablement's fundamental purpose - revenue amplification through stellar execution. It makes crystal clear that the team isn't just a content farm or training department, but a force-multiplier for the seller experience and ultimately the bottom line.
From this foundational mission framing, the charter can then map specific goals, activities, and decision-making principles that ladder up to actualizing the core purpose. Perhaps competency development, coaching enablement, content operations, and buyer experience optimization emerge as the key pillars.
With the overarching mission so crisply defined, the entire sales enablement function has an unflinching view into how their work adds value. Each initiative can be prioritized by whether it serves the fundamental mission or not. This mission clarity allows sales enablement to proudly evangelize its role to the broader organization. Rather than being perceived as an amorphous and undervalued support function, the charter elevates sales enablement's strategic positioning as a revenue-driving growth engine.
Members of the team can confidently assert how their efforts connect directly to the company's P&L performance. Recruiting and retention become easier when you have such a compelling organizational mandate. Even when working cross-functionally with other teams, sales enablement can partner from a position of purpose-driven authority rather than subordinate status.
A clearly defined charter turns sales enablement from a fuzzy unknown into a mission-critical business function. It eliminates any hazy doubts about the "why" behind the team's very existence. With that foundational clarity established, the entire organization understands the importance of fully resourcing and empowering sales enablement to maximize its impact.
Scope Control
When ad-hoc requests come in from the wider organization, the charter allows the sales enablement team to objectively assess whether initiatives fall under their purview. Potential scope creep from activities not core to the charter can be politely de-prioritized or re-scoped. Here's an example: Let's say the head of product marketing approaches the sales enablement team asking them to create a series of tutorial videos walking through the latest product release. On the surface, this request seems reasonable - providing product education for the sales team. However, the sales enablement charter clearly states that while supporting product training is within their scope, actual content creation falls under product marketing's domain. The charter designates that sales enablement's role is to work with other teams to incorporate their content into formal sales learning curricula, reinforcement tools, etc.
Armed with this codified division of responsibilities, the sales enablement manager can have a thoughtful discussion with their product marketing counterpart:
"Thanks for bringing this request to create tutorial videos. As our charter outlines, content creation is actually under product marketing's responsibilities, with sales enablement's role being to package that content into our overall sales learning programs. Perhaps we could collaborate where your team builds out the videos, and then we take those assets and incorporate them into the formal sales training courses, reinforce them through post-training activities, and so on. That would allow us to stay aligned with our defined charters."
Without that charter as a governing document, the sales enablement team may have just accepted the request for creating videos despite it falling outside their scope. Or there could have been an unproductive turf war over who should own it. The charter prevents mission creep and he-said-she-said disputes. It provides an objective tool for evaluating whether work falls under the enablement team's purview or should be handled elsewhere. Requests that map to the charter's areas of responsibility get prioritized, while those that don't can be re-scoped or re-assigned politely and constructively.
Maintaining Focus
In a role plagued by competing priorities and motivations, the charter serves as a lodestar - reminding the enablement team of their true priorities when they risk getting distracted by bright shiny objects or bogged down by tactics.
Strategic Intention
Developing the charter elevates sales enablement leaders from tactical order-takers to strategic partners. It forces them to take a big-picture view of how they create value beyond just reacting to the latest demand.
At our firm, we frequently help clients develop and solidify their sales enablement charters and integrate them into broader enablement strategy efforts. One example client charter reads:
"The Corporate Sales Enablement function exists to maximize [COMPANY]'s revenue generation by ensuring our sellers have the knowledge, skills, processes, tools and enablement to consistently execute [COMPANY]'s defined selling methodology and drive optimal customer buying experiences..."
The charter continues by listing out the team's specific activities, goals, priorities, decision authorities and what success looks like. It sets clear Principles to govern how the team operates, collaborate with other groups, and evaluate new initiatives.
Bringing It Home
In essence, a well-constructed charter establishes boundaries, principles, and strategic guideposts that enable sales enablement to be properly scoped and empowered within the organization. It serves as a grounding constitutional reference that futureproofs the function's focus amid inevitable organizational changes. Without this framework, sales enablement runs a perpetual risk of ambiguity, distraction, and being viewed as a tactical service provider rather than a strategic enabler of revenue.
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