Newsletter: Sales Enablement of 1. Edition #1.

This newsletter is for three particular audiences:

1. You are the sole sales enabler in the company. Your role is Enablement of 1. You’re probably stretched task-wise, and you haven’t hit the transform button yet. But you can.
2. You have a broader Learning & Development brief that includes the likes of sales training. So you have an Sales Enablement of 1 role that can be challenging to manage as part of a wider set of responsibilities. But you can make a bigger impact for Sales.
3. Your company has a big growth milestone that is or will be sales team-dependent, and you need to build a sales team that is the guarantor of growth, not a firefighting distraction along the way. You’re ripe for Enablement of 1.

Expanding the Role of Enablement: From Support to Strategic

Even two years ago, we couldn’t have written about Enablement of 1; one role taking on the task of creating an A-Player environment that builds the sales capability that becomes the company’s competitive commercial advantage.

The tooling simply didn’t exist. Until recently, learning, training, and enablement meant big departments, big enterprise LMS systems, and a small army of content curators. And it was seen as a nice-to-have sideline service, while the reps got on with the “real job” of selling.

New tooling means we can start to think about an expanded role for full-time enablement and make it accessible for many more – often long established – companies that have great growth potential.

1. Building the A-Player Environment

High-performance sales teams don’t happen by accident. They require infrastructure. An Enabler of 1 designs and protects that environment, making it one that top performers want to join, no compliance needed. For decades the sales world has sought out “A-Players” but a more enduring asset is creating an A-Player environment that attracts the right caliber and mindset, and supports personal mastery.

2. From Content to Codification

Enablement is evolving. It’s no longer about curating endless content, but codifying the language that defines a company’s unique value. Messaging aligns when language does. This aspect of modern enablement is only possible because of AI and related software developments. Enablement is no longer a prisoner of powerpoint outputs; it’s a capability building machine.

3. From Training to Practice; The Practice-Based Sales Team

The old training model of courses, classroom role plays, imported methodologies and generic workshops, rarely moved the needle. The future is practice-based teams, where salespeople become a source of differentiated – and reliable – advice for the customer. Human advice is going to become a premium product, but the giver of the advice needs to be more than a personality. Buyers have raised the bar!

4. Enablement’s Role in Hiring is Overlooked

The most overlooked contribution of enablement – and especially the Enabler of 1 – is possibly hiring. Enablers, with a backroom vantage point, know what “basic” sales talent looks like and should help shape the candidate pool, not just selection and onboarding. Done right, this saves companies years of wasted effort.

The A-Player environment that an Enabler of 1 creates, also acts as a filter for talent: the environment acts as a test of fit rather than – just – leaning on unprovable experience, fanciful “rep profiles” and legally-checked references.

5. Supporting Individual Mastery

The Enabler of 1 doesn’t just think about training, they think about individual mastery. A full-time enabler builds the tools and programs that create mastery in selling the company’s unique story. Unlike frontline sales managers, they have the time and focus to make it happen.

6. Thinking Together

The master Enabler of 1 builds a “thinking together” culture across sales, product, marketing, service, and delivery. With the right technology, they align teams around shared insights and, most importantly, a common language that reflects the company’s value. Many senior management teams talk about “alignment”, but it takes someone with the time, tools and skills to make that happen.

7. From Silos to Company-Wide Fluency

Sales has long been defined too narrowly, often viewed as a mysterious group of individualists working in isolation. An Enabler of 1 changes that by broadening sales’ internal impact, bringing its know-how, messaging, and language to the rest of the business.

Instead of leaving “alignment” as a vague ideal, the Enabler of 1 makes it practical, ensuring that functions like product, marketing, and delivery understand what sales is trying to achieve.

A practical example would be certifying everyone in the company in not just understanding the company’s value proposition, but articulating it in different situations. This would also secure a greater appreciation among non-sales staff of what “doing sales” is really like. They will in turn give thanks for their own role!

Use The Lever of Enablement

Millions of companies are packed with silent, anonymous, and unsold value. You can now introduce the role of the Enabler of 1 to amplify your company’s value and turn it into a daily competitive edge.

The Enablement of 1 role is that lever. It shapes the company’s story, codifies it into a language of differentiation, and create an environment where improvements are captured and shared as a working culture.

Don’t Depend on the Hiring Shortcut Cycle for Growth

For decades, sales leaders leaned on the “hiring shortcut” for growth; keep recruiting until a few salespeople carry the load – the 20% carrying the 80% model. That kinda worked when you had 20 years to make it work.

With the right tooling now available, a new option is to place your bets on acquiring a level of talent that can survive and then thrive in the A-Player environment your Enabler of 1 has created. That way, you don’t import in shortcut standards that are not equal to the growth task.

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