Does Sales Enablement Training Belong To HR?

The key is to foster close collaboration to unleash potentials

In addition to talent recruiting, performance reviews, and pay structure, training has been one of the core competencies provided by HR. With the rise of technology, training is no longer confined to class-room settings or online courses. It can be micro-training through mobile apps with snackable doses of information, virtual and interactive hands-on training, even just on-point educational videos on YouTube or topical-driven podcasts.

 

Technology not only offers different mediums for education, but also improves our efficiency and productivity by ‘doing’ our work or ‘integrating’ and ‘merging’ different tasks and processes. For example: training content can easily be created or produced by employees using readily-available video editing tools. The boundaries between different functional groups have begun to fade.
 
It raises the question: who owns sales training? HR, functional or product groups?
 
Conventionally, sales training tends to reside within the sales organizations. A sales enablement manager or a sales training manager who is responsible for sales onboarding and training may develop a continuous training regimen, from a pre-on boarding curriculum and an on-boarding boot camp to a set of course work for the first 3 to 6 months, as well as annual refreshers and updates using different medium and technologies.
 
To accomplish this effectively, it may be necessary to integrate the company’s email system (IT department), the employee performance system (HR department), the training platform (sales enablement department), and the content management library (marketing department). When sales people complete the pre-onboarding curriculum, their managers will receive an email notification or a management dashboard will be updated with the results.
 
After sales people take tests for each subject in their curriculum, the score will be sent to their managers and automatically recorded in their HR records.
 
Sales training can belong to several departments. If the sales enablement training methodology and platform being used is recognized as best practice, then the HR department can easily argue that sales enablement training should be folded into its responsibilities to drive corporate efficiency. The sales team can argue that sales enablement training has unique requirements that only apply to sales and, therefore, the sales function should retain ownership of the entire effort.
 
The marketing team can make the case that a big chunk of sales training content comes from the marketing team, therefore, it should be run by marketing. Organizational structures and roles and responsibilities will continue to morph as markets, customers, buying habits and technology evolve.
 
So, who should own sales training?
 
Well, it depends on the budget, timelines, skillsets, resources, tools, roles and responsibilities of different groups, senior management direction and even the maturity of the sales organization. Even after taking into consideration these factors, ongoing adjustments will have to be made based on a changing external environment as well as the fact that sales enablement itself is still evolving.
 
Even though the end goal is the same, every company structures its sales training support based on what works, or what they believe will work for them at that time. Then, they likely will pivot the team structure as time goes by.
 
I have seen the sales enablement training function report to marketing, sales, sales operations, HR and even product teams. In some companies, sales training might be put under HR because one of the more important responsibilities of sales enablement is training, and HR is responsible for hiring and training company-wide.
 
Amy Pence, sales enablement manager at Alteryx, reported to the sales team. Then, her team was moved from Sales to HR to scale her best practices across the corporation. In some cases, subject matter experts or product engineers are responsible for creating product training for the sales team and, therefore, the training function is incorporated into the product teams. Emma Hitzke, Senior Marketing Manager for Intel’s IoT division, leads a sales enablement team that reports to one of the product groups.
 
When I talk to sales training managers, most prefer that training stay with the sales team. The sales team has better control over sales enablement priorities and is able to allocate budget and resources to support it. However, they don’t mind sharing their training methodology with HR or any department who is interested in adopting it. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter where sales training resides.
 
The key is to foster close collaboration across departments to share best practices and provide knowledge and tools to unleash employees’ and salespeople’s potentials.