For our whitepaper on the future of Sales Enablement, Mimecast's Nick Saunders was kind enough to grace us with an accompanying foreword on sales enablement, centered around the moon program of the 1960s. Find the first and second parts here.

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In JFK’s original Moonshot speech, there is a phrase that I’ve found to be a motivating call to action. He said “This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.”

Enablement as an industry and as a practice, has gone through significant shift, so much so that I would argue that 2020 was a watershed moment. Enablement technologies have accelerated more in the last year than in the past decade. The role of enablement has seen more elevation as a strategic function – just take a look at social media and you can see how enablement has gone from being a behind the scenes training function to seeing the rise of enablement thought leadership.

We all collectively have a role to play in defining enablement. We are all part of mission control, we are the thousands of ordinary people that make a moonshot successful. There will always be failures, it will always be hard. But that’s why we do it.

My CEO once said, we are curators and custodians of talent. Like the mission control of the original Apollo 12 mission, ordinary people committed to an extraordinary responsibility, we as enablers need to have the courage to embrace the “breathtaking pace of innovation” and be brave in asking the right questions to solve the right problems that helps our customers (internal or external) achieve their goals.

Be curious, always ask yourself and others, what is the problem we’re trying to solve. Be focused on equipping your people with the tools and knowledge they need and empowering them with the confidence and capability to use it. Enjoy the journey.

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