Sales Enablement: How to Collaborate Effectively Across Functions

Collaboration, especially cross-functional collaboration, is often given low priority because it always seems to work. Until it doesn’t. Sales enablement is a discipline that has to collaborate on a daily basis with departments such as marketing, sales operations, sales management, L&D, HR, IT, product management and third parties. But how is this collaboration set up?
More than 60% of organizations don’t set up their cross-functional collaboration efforts in a formal way. It happens on an ad hoc basis. “It works.” I hear you. It works until it doesn’t.
The ad hoc approach typically crashes when tough deadlines have to be met, when a product launch has to be sped up, when an acquisition is made, etc. In other words, the ad hoc approach falls apart when sales enablement is forced to scale its efforts.
Parallel initiatives that require the same rare resource, scalability and precision force sales enablement to organize its collaboration efforts.