Sally Ladrach

Sales methodologies have become a hot topic in the last couple of years. As the post-COVID...

I recently read a book by Joshua Seiden, one he wrote to help software product teams better...

Have you ever seen an Enablement conference keynote or webinar titled “How Our Enablement Charter Saved the Organization”?

Me neither.

And yet, we spend an absurd amount of time and effort finding templates, customizing them, meeting with stakeholders, explaining (for the tenth time) what exactly Revenue Enablement does, and getting all of our stakeholders to literally sign on the dotted line… only to end up with the same problems we had before.

We fight fires.

We become fixers of broken things.

Sellers still think of us as harbingers of pointless busywork (training), instead of strategic partners in their success.

As a profession, we in enablement give far too much stock to these charters. We cling to them like they’re some magical shield that will save us from the chaos of stakeholder requests. We find the perfect template, make it our own, and get the “buy-in” we so desperately covet.

And yet, the same issues arise—the very ones we wrote a charter to save us from in the first place.

So why don’t I like charters? Here’s where I’ve seen them fail, and how we can fix it.