Function-Specific Sales Priorities Explained

When I built the Enablement function at Calendly, the sales team had 11 sellers. The goal was to scale to 150 by the end of the year. 😱 That specific target dictated exactly where Enablement needed to start. When you are building or scaling a function, the temptation to jump straight into "standard" programs is high. It feels natural to start with training sessions, content libraries, or tool rollouts. However, the most effective starting point is a simpler question: What specific business problems are we trying to solve? 💡 You find the answer by looking at the company’s strategic priorities. 🔎 Listen to what revenue leaders repeat in every meeting. Look at where friction shows up in the sales motion. Those answers determine how you deploy resources and where your first hires go. At Calendly, the priorities were clear. 1. Rapid Headcount Growth We were hiring more than 100 sellers in a single year. Onboarding became the immediate priority. My first hire focused entirely on building a scalable onboarding program and a repeatable ramp process. 2. New Products We were introducing products for mid-market and enterprise customers. These were entirely new go-to-market motions. My second hire was a Product Enablement Manager who worked with Product Marketing to ensure sellers could confidently position these new offerings. 3. New GTM Motions I then allocated two additional Enablement partners to align with our biggest bets: - One dedicated to the mid-market motion. - One dedicated to the enterprise motion. These segments had unique nuances. We needed experts close to the field who could listen to calls, hear customer objections, and refine our positioning as we learned. The first four hires followed the business strategy: - Onboarding to support rapid hiring. - Product Enablement for new offerings. - Segment Support for mid-market and enterprise. This structure worked because it mapped directly to the company's biggest bets. If you are building an Enablement function for the first time, look at the problems the business is trying to solve this year. That answer tells you exactly what to build first.

If you’re leading any sales function, you need to be thinking about these key levers in your business. ✅ Audience - Who SPECIFICALLY are you selling to a what problem are you solving. ✅ Positioning - Why you and what value do you bring that is unique and ‘must-have’ ✅ Data - Accessing the best prospect data from multiple providers. Analyse the data source and validity regularly. ✅ Infrastructure - Have you got the right tools for the job. Think CRM, Dialer, Task Management, Analytics. Make your team’s life easier. ✅ Process - Have you got a proven, repeatable and scalable outreach and sales process? No? Build one and iterate, regularly. ✅ People - Hire for the outcomes you need from role, not solely because of work history. Build an unbeatable culture. ✅ Ability - You’ve got the team and the culture now enable your team to improve their skills by giving regular training and coaching, while using evidence-based competency frameworks ✅ Sales Enablement - What are you doing to get non-sales activities away from your team. Think Assets, Resources, Automation, Process Improvements, Lead Generarion, Generative AI (the list can go on and on) You might be lucky enough to have a specialist for all of these areas, but if not, make sure your educated and aware on how to dial these in. Master this and you’ll be growing pipeline faster than anything you’ve ever seen before. Be deliberate. Go and win! 💪📈 #Sales #Revenue #Pipeline #Outbound Second Voice

Most B2B companies fail to align their market entry strategy for new technologies with how customers actually evaluate product alternatives. Let me break it down for you. At any given moment, a customer’s purchasing decision hinges on the most critical unmet requirement. These requirements follow a simple but powerful framework called the Windermere Hierarchy (think Maslow’s hierarchy, but for B2B market development). The hierarchy shows the order in which customers prioritize when comparing solutions: 1️⃣ Functionality – Does it solve the core problem? 2️⃣ Reliability – Can I trust it to perform consistently? 3️⃣ Convenience – Is it simple and easy to use? 4️⃣ Cost – When everything else is equal, what’s the price? Here’s where most companies - especially those with limited resources - stumble: they focus too much on proving their disruptive technology is reliable, convenient, and affordable. In doing so, they overlook the market segments where functionality, the top priority in the hierarchy, remains unmet. By spreading their efforts across all buying criteria, they dilute their scarce resources and end up targeting customers who are already satisfied with mature, reliable solutions that excel in convenience and cost. This is a critical misstep. The real opportunity lies in identifying and prioritizing customers whose specific use cases aren’t addressed by existing options, where functionality is still a pain point. Think of it this way: 👉🏻 If a product doesn’t meet the functionality requirement, it’s out. 👉🏻 If multiple solutions meet functionality, the choice shifts to reliability. 👉🏻 Then convenience becomes the differentiator. 👉🏻 Finally, cost decides the winner when all else is equal. Once your product competes on cost alone, it’s seen as a commodity. So, what’s the winning play? If you’re leading the charge for a new, disruptive, or unproven technology, laser-focus your efforts on these two priorities: 🔍 Identify application domains where your product excels in functionality. Ask yourself: What does your product do 10x better than anything else? What are the unique, game-changing capabilities of your technology? 👩💼 Find the customers who can’t afford to compromise on that functionality. These are the customers who need your solution to stay in business. Don’t waste time chasing mainstream markets that are spoiled by mature, reliable, and convenient options. Instead, zero in on solving the functional problem that no one else can—because the size of the problem you solve matters more than the size of the market. Pour your energy into the spaces where functionality is non-negotiable, and own those spaces with conviction. Drop your thoughts in the comments! 👇