Navigating the Sales Enablement Landscape: Orchestrate Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation: There is a whole class of leaders in an organization who must work cross-functionally to marshal resources and coordinate the work of people who do not report to them.

They need to orchestrate outcomes and results, meaning:

• Be mission and goal-focused
• Prioritize the right goal at the right moment
• Must guide the narrative by confronting reality
• Drive results by design
• Unlock energy and create momentum
• Catalyze change through collaboration

These orchestrators often work in the commercial system to help simplify complexity and improve execution to support the portfolio of sales teams necessary to improve sales conversations. Sales Enablement has evolved to streamline the business processes required to help salespeople be successful.

Sales Enablement Orchestrators must marry executable insight with scalable success methods to drive traction in one or more of the critical sales enablement areas of specialization:

Enablement in Digital Transformation

1. Pipeline enablement: Orchestrating the pipeline to help salespeople target the right stakeholders, get access, have relevant meetings, create a shared vision, and build a business case with their customers in partnership with HR, IT, Finance, and marketing.
2. Message enablement: Orchestrating the sales-specific messages sellers need to achieve quota in partnership with IT, sales, and marketing.
3. Organizational enablement: Orchestrating business processes in support of sales conversations to simplify the commercial system working with HR, Legal, and Finance.
4. Talent enablement: Orchestrating the human capital programs required to recruit, onboard, develop, and assess sellers in partnership with HR, IT, Finance, and Marketing.
5. Commercial enablement: Orchestrating the orchestrators to improve the Commerical ratio through targeted growth programs in partnership with sales, marketing, and operations.

These Orchestrators are masters of the middle blending strategy and execution together while running their function as a business within a business to provide measurement services to the executive team with resources that don’t always report to them.

Orchestrators blend strategy and execution. They do not over-rotate to plan and do not click too deep into tactics. They operate in the middle between strategy and tactics. These means engage people, process, technology, and information to activate the right work through:

1. Strategic Translation: Moving from idea to execution by scoping and framing the right initiatives to achieve the vision over time.
2. Cross-Functional Integration: And access and enroll the right set of capabilities necessary to achieve outcomes, even if those people don’t report directly to them.
3. Activation: Create the right environment where people with broad cognitive diversity can use their skills and contribute to the stated goal or outcome.

Much of today’s sales and marketing work, people need to be very clear about the goals they are pursuing at the same time they need to contribute a high level of expertise and knowledge to tackle more complex challenges.

The problems they solve make it challenging to move from a conventional way of working to something more transformative.

Scott Santucci

It’s also really hard to keep that balance between being disruptive enough and over-engineering. That’s why Orchestrators must run a Business within a Business mapping to the sales enablement domains:

• Process
• Technology
• People
• Information

When hiring Orchestrators, the attributes we suggest you look for include:

• Growth mindset
• Curiosity
• Systems thinking
• Pragmatic lens

There is a difference between results-driven and mission-driven. On the one hand, results-driven team members want to get stuff done, achieve the checklist, and drive to the project plan. They perceive their value in their ability to stay busy.

On the other hand, mission-driven goal-driven team members work to figure stuff out, make progress, and drive to the strategy. They perceive their value in their ability to stay productive.

Results-driven team members analyze the inputs they receive. They examine to find out what’s wrong. Their definition of progress begins with checking off the checklist of items they have.

Mission-driven team members look to find patterns among the different disparate parts. They synthesize. Their definition of progress is about the outcome. Mission-driven teams learn how to tackle the problem and iterate to achieve a higher quality outcome. That means they take quality over getting done as their measure success. The time horizon can be short and long-term.

These are essential considerations when you think about the contribution of workers today. In most organizations, 20% of the people doing 80% of the work. In most organizations that the focus is so short-term, it’s hard to find white space and creative space to drive innovation. The standard of performance is often so low, and some employees can get a false sense of security – where it’s more important to be comfortable than to perform.

In today’s business world, team leaders need to make sure their team is clear, and their team is proactive. They need to make sure their team achieves high-quality work, and their team moves fast enough. They also need to make sure their team is producing the right value, and they have the trust of the organization. With these indicators, team leaders differentiate themselves by performing.

The evolution of individual contributors performers and team leaders means that work teams become the lever and team leaders become the force multipliers who can coaching orchestrate goals team performance cannot be achieved by mandate, and team results are both process and attorney

Key questions to consider:

1. How do you hire for an orchestrator?
2. How would you build orchestrators?
3. What’s the mix of orchestrator and doers?
4. How do you help doers become orchestrators?