Two Pillars, One Team

Ava: I had a conversation last week that reframed how I think about enablement. An SE leader — runs about thirty SEs across multiple markets — told me he split his enablement into two separate tracks. Two teams, two mandates, deliberately no overlap.

Nate: Separate how? Like product training versus soft skills?

Ava: Close. Pillar one is internal — a small team of two, later three, all former SEs from his own org. They handle everything product-related. Demo environments, feature rollouts, technical onboarding, keeping thirty people current on a platform that went from one product to eight in two years.

Nate: That's a full-time job.

Ava: It IS a full-time job. That's the whole point. Before this team existed, his SEs were doing all of that themselves — maintaining demo instances, figuring out releases on the fly, teaching each other. Chaos at scale.

Nate: Welcome to Leading PreSales. I'm Nate.

Ava: And I'm Ava. Every episode, one idea, five minutes. Today: the two-pillar enablement model.

Nate: Alright, so pillar one is internal product enablement, staffed by former SEs. What's pillar two?

Ava: External sales enablement. An outside partner focused entirely on sales skills — discovery, value positioning, business cases, structuring customer conversations. The stuff that has nothing to do with which buttons to click.

Nate: And the reason to keep them separate? Some SE leaders would say... why not have one enablement team do both?

Ava: Because when one team does both, one side always wins. Always product. A new release drops, everybody pivots to feature training. A big deal needs a custom demo, the team builds it. Meanwhile the sales skills work keeps getting pushed to "next quarter." Sound familiar?

Nate: Painfully. I've watched that cycle play out in three different orgs. The enablement team starts with good intentions — workshops on discovery, roleplay sessions. Then Q2 hits, product ships a major update, all hands on deck for certification training. The sales skills agenda dies quietly.

Ava: And there's a deeper problem. When the same people who teach the product also teach you how to sell... they're coaching their own blind spots. They know how THEY would position it. What worked for THEM. They don't have an outside perspective on whether it's actually best practice.

Nate: That's a sharp observation. You're saying the internal team is too close to the product to teach positioning objectively.

Ava: Exactly. The internal team is incredible at answering "what does this feature do?" The external partner is better at "why should the customer care?" And those are two very different muscles.

Nate: I'll push back. I've run enablement programs where we brought in external firms, and the biggest complaint was always relevance. "Nice framework but it doesn't apply to our product." Or "the examples were too generic." How does this leader avoid that disconnect?

Ava: By choosing a partner that's embedded, not episodic. Not a two-day workshop you forget by Thursday. His team does continuous external training — weekly sessions, monthly challenges, roleplays, a community of SEs from other companies. The partner learns their context over time, SEs build muscles gradually instead of cramming.

Nate: Continuous. That's the key word. I've seen the workshop model fail so many times. You bring someone in for two days, everyone's fired up, three weeks later it's back to old habits. The half-life of one-off training is measured in days, not months.

Ava: He used a sports analogy that stuck with me. He said "nobody trains for a marathon in a two-day workshop." You build the muscle over weeks, over months. And you practice in safe environments before you perform in live ones.

Nate: The training ground versus the match. Right. But how did he staff that internal pillar? Finding people for full-time product enablement isn't easy. Most SEs don't want to leave the customer-facing track.

Ava: That's what was clever. He had two SEs ready for a change — strong technically, deep product knowledge, but they'd lost the spark for customer work. They wanted to build things internally. Instead of losing them, he created roles that matched what they actually wanted.

Nate: So retention play PLUS capability. Two problems, one structural move.

Ava: Right. And the onboarding results were immediate. They onboarded six new SEs in January across multiple markets — strongest feedback they'd ever had. Without that internal team, he said flat out, they couldn't have absorbed that many hires at once.

Nate: Okay. I'm convinced on the model. What's the move?

Ava: Separate enablement into two tracks. Internal team owns product knowledge, demos, technical onboarding. External partner owns sales methodology, discovery, positioning — outside perspective. And protect both tracks equally. The moment a product release eats your sales skills calendar, you're back to one pillar pretending to be two.

Nate: Two pillars. Neither one optional. I'm Nate.

Ava: And I'm Ava. See you next episode.