Building a Sales Enablement Function from 0 to 1: Lessons from the Trenches

With roughly 40% of enablement roles today focused on building a function entirely from scratch—or executing a massive rebuild—enablement professionals are increasingly expected to act as zero-to-one operators.

In a recent episode of the Enablement Pioneers podcast (part of the Sales Transformation Lab series by UHubs), host Laura sat down with Michael Kinder, Revenue Enablement Specialist at Redis. Mike is an award-winning enablement leader who has built over ten onboarding pathways that cut time-to-first-sell by 40%, led global SKOs through major company restructures, and spearheaded massive CRM realignments.

Here are the key takeaways from Mike’s playbook on how to build a high-impact enablement function that actually drives long-term revenue and lasting behavior change.

1. Where Enablement Reports Matters: The Case for CRO Alignment

When setting up enablement, one of the first structural decisions is reporting lines. Enablement typically lands under one of three umbrellas: Marketing, Sales Operations, or the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).

Having experienced all three, Mike argues that aligning directly under the CRO is essential for making enablement a strategic powerhouse.

• Reporting to Marketing: Tends to over-index on product messaging, positioning, and content generation, often missing the human development side (e.g., frontline manager coaching, discovery skills, negotiation).
• Reporting to Sales Ops: Can inadvertently turn enablement into a service desk for operational changes—rolling out new CRM hygiene requirements or process tweaks without focusing on holistic seller development.
• Reporting to the CRO: Keeps enablement directly tied to core revenue metrics (win rate, cycle length, time-to-sell). Crucially, it ensures that your vision remains tightly aligned with sales leadership as strategic priorities evolve.

2. Managing Stakeholders: "Vanilla Ice Cream with Sprinkles"

One of the biggest challenges in a zero-to-one build is balancing executive directives with local team realities. Executive leaders operate at a high-level strategic scale, while frontline managers care about the immediate, tactical struggles of their specific reps.

When launching a company-wide initiative, Mike uses an analogy shared by his mentor, Celine Gray: Give everyone vanilla ice cream, but let them choose their toppings.

The core framework or methodology (the "vanilla ice cream") must remain consistent across the company to establish a baseline. However, enablement must work closely with regional leaders to allow for local nuances, cultural context, and team-specific applications (the "sprinkles"). Handling objections and shaping those local adjustments behind closed doors before standing in front of the team ensures that managers actively reinforce the change rather than resisting it in private.

3. The MVP Trap: Why You Shouldn't Rush Onboarding

When building an onboarding program from scratch, stakeholders often push for a quick "MVP" (Minimum Viable Product) assembled from old presentation recordings and existing slide decks, promising to iterate later.

Mike warns that this is a recipe for failure.

In enablement, you rarely get a dedicated quarter to overhaul onboarding more than once. After launch, onboarding naturally becomes business-as-usual (BAU), eating into your available bandwidth for maintenance. If your initial build consists of dumped video archives and unorganized documents, it will likely degrade over time rather than improve.

Taking an extra month to edit recordings into concise, on-demand modules with clear knowledge checks and practical assignments creates a durable framework. A high-quality onboarding foundation is what ultimately drives a 40% reduction in time-to-first-sale.

4. The First 90 Days: Three Non-Negotiable Priorities

If you’re stepping into a new zero-to-one enablement role, focus your first quarter on three foundational pillars:

1. Build True Relationships: Get to know your sales leaders on a human level. Learn what drives them, how they like to work, and what their personal and professional goals are. Trust is your primary currency.
2. Fix the Data & Pipeline Visibility: Partner immediately with Sales Ops and Data teams to set up baseline dashboards. You need clear, filterable visibility into win rates, ramp times, cycle lengths, and time-to-first-sale—otherwise, you're flying blind.
3. Stagger the Learning Curve: Resist the urge to overload new hires in week one. Index early training on leading success indicators (cold outreach, discovery skills, core positioning). Save advanced topics like complex pricing matrices and procurement negotiation for when reps actually need them.

5. Driving Real Behavior Change Requires Empathy

Ultimately, enablement programs die at the hands of the frontline managers responsible for reinforcing them—and with reps who are overwhelmed by competing demands.

Sellers are constantly bombarded with feedback: managers asking for pipeline adjustments, product marketing releasing new collateral, executive leadership pushing strategic shifts, and personal life commitments competing for mental space.

Driving real behavior change isn't about delivering a single polished presentation; it takes 0 to 6 months of steady reinforcement. Enablement leaders must simplify the core takeaway down to one actionable skill at a time and create safe, low-stakes environments for reps to practice before they try it live in front of clients.

Connect with the Guest

Want to learn more about revenue enablement strategies from Michael Kinder?

• LinkedIn: Michael Kinder
• Email: michael@kindermail.uk

‍