CAPSTONE: Developing / Clarifying Your Role

Now that you have completed this course, it’s time to create and update your own role profile, and gather input from your peers.

A role profile defines a broad cohort of individuals whose shared attitudes and goals help them drive measurable value and impact aligned to the company’s business strategy. While a role profile might describe the community generally, it helps you clarify your impact in terms of what is needed, not what is written in a job description. A role profile moves beyond the confines of a “job title,” which is a position on an org chart. More specifically, it is a description of the value and can be used to hone your enablement strategy. Your role profile should describe in a very detailed and specific way an individual fictitious person will engage. That’s right, don’t make it about you specifically. Make it about what customers need, what salespeople need, and what executives and investors need (and expect) from someone who is in this role.

A role profile document paints a broad portrait, with enough detail to allow the enablement team, sales team, marketing team, and HR team to put your actions and activities into a broader context. Building one requires you to understand and describe the role’s organizational position, motivational drivers, decision-making authority, and sources of influence.

To pull this material together, you need to:

Step 1: Gather primary and secondary research about the role

Like any research project, you’ll turn to a variety of sources. Internal interviews with people who currently or have previously held that position as well as others with tacit knowledge of the role — salespeople who engage with enablement, for example — can provide lots of detail and color. The materials in this course have also provided you a jump-start for defining your role.

More structured efforts, such as online or phone surveys, can gather quantitative data about budget authority or organizational dynamics. They can also provide qualitative insight into the role’s biggest challenges or most important goals for others in the role you’re defining.

Step 2: Create a draft document.

Distill the findings into a quick snapshot — three pages at the most — of the desired role. Avoid the almost irresistible temptation to build the document as an inside-out view of what you already know, or what projects you’re already engaged in. The role profile is about the impact you need to have, not about your inbox, and some of the goals and challenges you define will help you clarify your value proposition. It’s important to document the whole role — and the value it can bring, even if you’re not necessarily able to achieve that value today. If you identify areas where you can expand, consider the “white space” where you can’t help today as a business opportunity for you in the near future.

Role Profile Components:

Step 3: Test, get feedback and adjust

Don’t be shy; send copies of the draft role profile document out to internal customers, sales reps, marketing managers, and colleagues and make time to get their comments. Do these resonate well with your internal customers? How will it impact sales conversation? Is the role too broad or too constrained? Does it adequately describe the role’s business decisions and spending authority? Do people (like you) in this role have a clear sense of community? Do some role-playing: Sell your role and then try to sell a job description. Think: “gather, draft, repeat.” And remember, to elevate your thinking beyond the status quo, into the strategic gaps you will likely find.

Step 4: Keep refining and adjusting

The first pass through the profile development process will yield a solid starting point, but engaging with internal customers and peers in the context of their own roles will help you test your assumptions and provide invaluable feedback. As you clarify your role, they will naturally want to clarify theirs. Keep an open mind and acknowledge that the role profile is a living document. Think about (and engage like) it will be an ongoing process for adding, deleting, and updating the role. And again, remember to document the broad impact of your roles, also others clarify their role.

Something as subtle as narrowing a role from “Enablement Manager” to “Enablement Architect” entails much more than revising the profile document and sending it around. Invoke good project management discipline and be ready to action the feedback as you evolve your role on paper.

Step 5: Making the business case for role change

Role changes should be made only if the changes contribute to the long-term financial upside. Develop a rationale and rough metrics that would inform a debate on whether it’s worth the effort. Factors might include splitting a role at a
certain critical mass to support two more specific roles, identifying a number of current client contacts who would cluster around a yet-to-be served role or opening up a new market by focusing on a select set of key decision-makers.

· Establishing a schedule for periodic revisions. Setting expectations for when ideas, criticism, and new data will be folded back into a new role marketing initiative will keep the feedback flowing while preventing the paralysis that comes with constantly changing the spec. Schedule annual or semiannual cycles of surveys, message testing, internal discussion, content reviews, and role re-launches

Take Action: Next steps

Now that you have completed this course, it’s time to get feedback from your peers. The steps above as a guide, create your own moral profile for your role. Think aspiration only and follow the process to elevate your role based on its forward-leaning value contribution to the business strategy.

Using your participant guide templates, craft your role and submit it to the group for review. Use the group discussion board to get feedback on your role and make sure you provide feedback to others as they post theirs as well.