Who Owns Product Enablement?

In my career as a learning professional (often called a trainer), my organizations has sat in the following departments: Professional Services, Support, Marketing, Customer Success, and as its own department reporting to the CRO.

When we think of product training we think of times where the customer is being educated - and in fact the customer is being educated by so many teams! Marketing is tasked to provide product education to motivate a customer to purchase the product and engage the customer post-sale. Support provides on demand education to use a product. Customer Success Managers are informal educators that help their customers adopt and realize their full potential ROI. And Professional Services is doing some training (even if not formally) to educate a customer on their solution and configuration to hand the keys over. That’s a lot of enablement!

There is no right or wrong answer, because ultimately product and service education are core to all areas of your business. Where to actually seat a training team will depend on a number of things. There are a few things we suggest considering:

• Do all enablement functions live together, or are they within functional areas? Training can be centralized, or can sit within respective groups for internal and external training.

• Is your training monetized? If the answer to this is yes, at least that portion of the team should live within a profit center vs. a cost center.

• Which business unit will provide the most benefit in alignment with training?

Ultimately like anything there is no correct and incorrect option, and the decision is fluid and be reorganized if needed.

Where does your team sit within your organization? Is there a reason why you love it or hate it? Let us know in the comments.