How to build proactive sales enablement programs with Lish Barber

Lish Barber wasn’t supposed to work in sales enablement. 

She started out in sales at iHeartMedia, then “fell into enablement” out of frustration with the existing tools and processes available to the sales team.

Sound familiar? 

Lish has since gone on to build large-scale programs for technical products at Algolia, Lattice, and Sigma Computing. We got her take on the best way to build an enablement function that sales teams will genuinely appreciate (not just put up with!) 

:::box [Growth Bytes], [Top takeaways: 

• Enablement is a business within a business. Run discovery to uncover sellers’ pain points, co-develop solutions, and market your programs to drive adoption. 
• Build training around the pain, not the product. Instead of teaching reps about technical features, help them to identify and address the pain points your product solves. 
• Use data to be proactive, not just supportive. Conversational intelligence data and funnel data can help you spot problems sales managers don’t even know they have. 
• Scale by finding internal champions. Influential reps can help roll out new initiatives at the regional level. Use their success as proof points to encourage adoption in resistant reps. 

]

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How to build enablement programs that drive revenue 

“RevOps is the efficiency driver, meaning they own the process,” says Lish. “Enablement is the effectiveness driver. When done well, revenue goes up and cost of sale goes down.” 

Here’s how Lish builds enablement programs that have a measurable impact on revenue: 

Think of enablement as a business within a business

Effective enablement leaders need to run their programs like a business.

“You’re doing the sales part. You’re listening. You’re doing discovery. 
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“But then, you’re also having to be the product. You’re building the solution with the customer—you’re co-designing it with your sales leaders. 

And then you’re also the marketer, because you’ve got to sell it back and then track the adoption of what you’ve built.” 

Like many enablement teams, Lish initially struggled to get buy-in for her programs.  “Who am I to tell these sales managers, who have been running their markets for years and years, how to do their job in a different way?” 

Instead of trying to persuade reps to change their behavior, Lish found it was more helpful to start with internal “customer discovery”: “Going in, hearing their pains, doing discovery, and then being like, ‘Well, hey, do you realize that you can do it this way? This would actually make it easier for you, and faster, and more efficient and more effective.’” 

Iterate your onboarding (and skip the perfectionism)  

It can be tempting to develop enablement programs, such as onboarding, by creating a “laundry list” of topics to include. But this sets you up for an impossible task. 

Instead, Lish recommends you start with the bare minimum. When creating her first onboarding scheme at iHeartmedia, she narrowed her focus to “What’s the most important thing [new reps] need to know in week one?” 

She then developed the onboarding process in real-time, building week by week as new hires joined. Continuous iteration allowed her to refine the program, addressing gaps from previous cohorts and improving the experience over time.

Build training around the pain, not the product

When you’re enabling reps in highly technical fields, it can be easy to get bogged down in the complexities of the tech involved. Lish suggests that it’s more effective to leave the techy bits to your sales engineers, and make sure your new reps nail the pain points instead.

“What I've tended to do with a very technical product is to focus on the problem we solve."

• What does that pain look like? 
• How do you just do discovery to find that pain?
• What's the result of not solving that pain? 
• What does that ideal state look like?

This problem-focused approach also applies to even the most experienced enterprise sales teams:  

“I’ve always found that with enterprise sales teams, as much tenure as they've got, a lot of time, it's just going back to basics. Making sure they know how to run that first call, and that they know what good discovery looks like.”   

Think in terms of habit formation 

Too many enablement teams rush through the process of introducing a new approach or system, says Lish. “It takes 68 days of repeating a behavior for it to become a habit.” 

To make change stick, you need to create a system where it will become a repeated behavior, and add accountability. And you need to give it enough time: 

“The best programs I've seen drive impact are focused on for at least 2 quarters.” 

Prioritize actionable takeaways 

“We did some embedded analytics training recently at Sigma, and the sales team walked away with a list of accounts that they could go after with brand new messaging that they could use for their outbound.” 

This approach removes the friction for sellers and also helps the enablement team measure their results (and prove their impact to leadership). “Our managers could be looking at, ‘OK, did they work that account? Did our messaging work? How many SQLs did we get?” 

Also, be highly selective about when you use a live training versus when you can just offer a simple checklist. For example, “learning how to build a quote could probably just be a list of instructions. Click here, then click here. I don't really need to do a full-live training for that,” says Lish. 

Focus on pushing essential information only, while making additional resources easy to find. 

What it takes to scale up an enablement team 

Lish started as iHeartMedia’s lone enablement professional, supporting a regional sales team of 100 reps. She soon transitioned to the corporate team and needed to scale up her regional work to support all 1,600 AEs. Here’s how she did it: 

Find internal champions 

Much as when scaling your sales motion for enterprise, scaling enablement means identifying and leaning on your internal champions. 

To build the new enablement function at iHeartMedia, Lish identified enablement-savvy colleagues in regional offices, ultimately creating a new role—Regional Sales Operations Lead—who then helped roll out her programs at the regional level.

Champions also help you sell enablement programs to resistant sales reps:

“If I know that someone's a detractor, a blocker, and I'm not going to be able to get them to adopt something, I go find my champions.”

Lish will find a “tiger team” of reps who are fully bought into the approach she’s pitching and then use their performance data to persuade reluctant reps. 

Hire for enablement earlier than you think 

Lish joined Algolia during hypergrowth. She learnt that it’s a good idea to bring in enablement early, as soon as you’re hitting product market fit. “Typically, I find that enablement gets on board too late into that journey. And so then they have no time to build.”  

Instead, bring in enablement early so they can “pour gas on the fire” as you grow: “The earlier your enablement person is in the seat to build out the assets to support scaling, the better off you'll be.” 

Partner with sales managers, RevOps, and product marketing

Don’t try to scale your enablement programs alone, Lish warns. Her priority is always to seek out internal partnerships.

Her team holds bi-weekly meetings and quarterly roadmapping sessions to ensure alignment across sales leadership, PMM, product, and RevOps. 

In fact, they often end up sharing a workload with product marketing. Lish keeps workflows tight by clearly defining roles upfront with a RACI framework. 

Meanwhile, sales managers act as accountability partners, making sure that reps engage with enablement resources and keep performance high. 

Use certification—but back it up in the real world 

Lish does “believe in certifications”—they can be a good way to incentivize reps to adopt a new approach or process. 

But she cautions that you shouldn’t be able to get certified until “you’ve proven you’ve done it in the wild”—for instance, by demonstrating the new skill with real customers during recorded sales calls in Gong. 

Use data to become proactive, not reactive

The key to being a true strategic partner—not just an "order taker"—is balancing listening with bringing insights.   

Don’t ask how you can help, Lish says—you’ll end up as the “cleanup crew.” Instead, use sales data to proactively identify problems that sales managers may not even know they have. 

Data can also let you quantify the pain that reps are dealing with. "If a sales leader says, ‘No one knows how to pitch this new success program,’ I want to go and verify that that's actually a pain."  

If you want to be a proactive enablement team, you’ll need the right tech. Lish’s pick: a conversational intelligence tool and a lightweight LMS. For her, a CMS is the lowest on the list: reps don’t want to engage with yet another tool.

Watch the full episode

Watch Lish's full conversation with Alex Kracov, CEO of Dock, on Grow & Tell—Dock's podcast for revenue leaders.

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