Productivity Director – Enablement Business Partner (AMER)

Overview

You're an individual contributor enablement business partner embedded with Salesforce's SMB sales leadership across the Americas. You design, build, and deliver productivity programs that scale to thousands of sellers—from onboarding acceleration to ongoing skill development. You split time between analyzing performance data, partnering with sales leaders on strategic priorities, and executing end-to-end enablement programs that move measurable business outcomes.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Public (NYSE: CRM)

Size: 88,357 employees globally

Growth: SMB segment ranked #1 at Salesforce in recent performance rankings. Active hiring for enablement indicates continued investment in seller productivity.

Market Position: Category-defining leader in CRM and cloud software. Competing on product breadth, ecosystem, and platform stickiness rather than selling a new category.

GTM Reality

Who You're Enabling: SMB sales teams across AMER—likely hundreds to thousands of sellers across different segments (Essentials, Professional, Enterprise tiers within SMB). Mix of AEs, SDRs/BDRs, renewals teams, and frontline managers.

Enablement Structure: You sit in the COO org, reporting into the head of SMB enablement (Ashton). Direct partnership with EVP/SVP sales leaders. Cross-functional collaboration with product marketing, sales ops, learning & development, and corporate enablement teams.

Your Stakeholders:

• SMB sales leadership (EVP/SVP level) - they set strategic priorities
• Frontline sales managers - they implement your programs
• Sellers - they consume your training and give feedback
• Ops/Analytics - they provide performance data you translate into programs

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Program Design & Execution (40%) | Stakeholder Partnership (30%) | Data Analysis & Measurement (20%) | Content Development (10%)

Key Activities

• Strategic Planning with Sales Leaders: Weekly or bi-weekly syncs with your EVP/SVP partners to understand their priorities (new product launches, competitive threats, skill gaps, performance issues). You translate "our win rate is dropping" into specific enablement interventions.

• Building Scalable Programs: Design multi-week onboarding accelerators, quarterly skill refreshes, battlecard rollouts, or methodology training. You're not delivering every session yourself—you build the curriculum, facilitate train-the-trainer, create self-serve assets, and orchestrate delivery at scale.

• Data-Driven Prioritization: Pull reports from sales analytics platforms to identify where reps are struggling (low activity, poor discovery, stalled pipeline stages). Build business cases for enablement investments based on actual performance gaps, not just requests.

• Cross-Functional Orchestration: You don't build everything yourself. You partner with product marketing for positioning, L&D for instructional design, sales ops for Salesforce/tool training, and corporate enablement for methodology. Your job is to integrate it all into coherent programs.

• Executive Communication: Present program results to senior leadership—showing impact on ramp time (e.g., "new hires hit quota 2 weeks faster"), productivity metrics (calls per day, pipeline generation), or revenue outcomes. You need to tell a story with data.

• Adoption & Reinforcement: Launch isn't enough. You build adoption playbooks for managers, track completion rates, run reinforcement sessions, and adjust based on what's actually sticking vs. what's getting ignored.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Conflicting Priorities: Every sales leader thinks their initiative is urgent. You'll have 5 people asking for programs simultaneously while you're already overcommitted. Saying no diplomatically while maintaining relationships is a constant challenge.

• Measuring Real Impact: Leadership wants to see revenue lift from enablement. But isolating your program's impact from market conditions, product changes, comp plan shifts, and a dozen other variables is messy. You'll spend a lot of time defending your measurement methodology.

• Scaling to Thousands: What works in a pilot with 20 people breaks when you roll it to 2,000. Platforms crash, managers don't facilitate consistently, content gets misunderstood. You're constantly troubleshooting logistics and adoption barriers.

• Seller Fatigue: Reps are bombarded with training. Getting them to actually engage with another program when they're behind on quota requires serious change management. A lot of your beautifully designed content will be ignored initially.

• Moving Targets: Product roadmaps shift, competitive landscape changes, leadership reorgs happen. You'll rebuild programs mid-flight or scrap work you've invested weeks in because priorities changed.

What Success Looks Like

• New hire ramp time decreases by measurable weeks (e.g., time to first deal, time to quota attainment)
• Specific productivity metrics improve for cohorts that go through your programs (activity levels, conversion rates, win rates)
• Sales leaders proactively come to you for partnership rather than treating enablement as an afterthought
• Your programs get requested by other orgs at Salesforce because they actually work
• Manager feedback shows your content is being used and reinforced in coaching conversations

Who You're Partnering With

Internal Stakeholders:

• EVP/SVP Sales Leaders: They set the strategy. You need to understand their business deeply enough to propose solutions they haven't asked for yet.
• Sales Managers: They're your program delivery arm. If they don't buy in or execute, your program fails regardless of quality.
• Revenue Operations: They own the data and systems. You need them to pull reports, track metrics, and validate your impact hypotheses.
• Product Marketing: They create positioning and messaging. You translate it into rep-facing talk tracks and objection handling.

What They Care About:

• Sales Leaders: Hitting their number. They want enablement that drives revenue outcomes, not activity. They're skeptical of "training for training's sake."
• Sellers: Making their quota with the least friction possible. They want practical, immediately applicable content—not theory or fluff.
• Managers: Tools that make their coaching easier and more effective. They're overwhelmed, so your programs need to integrate into their workflow, not add to it.

Requirements

• 7-10+ years in sales enablement, ideally at enterprise SaaS companies with large-scale sales organizations
• Experience building programs that scale to 1,000+ people, not just boutique teams
• Strong data literacy—you should be comfortable pulling your own reports and building business cases with analytics
• Executive presence to present to SVP/EVP leadership and influence without authority
• Cross-functional partnership skills—you'll need buy-in from people who don't report to you
• Experience measuring enablement impact on business outcomes (ramp, productivity, revenue), not just activity metrics
• Ability to balance strategic thinking with execution—you need to design the strategy AND project manage delivery
• Comfortable with ambiguity and shifting priorities in a large, matrixed organization
• Located in or willing to relocate to West Coast (SF preferred), Chicago, Atlanta, or New York