Who Owns Sales Enablement? (It depends on your stage)

Sales enablement: Everyone agrees it's important—but no one’s ever quite sure who owns it.

Is it a job? A team? A shared responsibility?

Yes.

Sales enablement is one of those functions that’s absolutely essential, but notoriously ambiguous. 

In most companies, it starts as everyone’s job and then slowly evolves into someone’s job…until it becomes a whole team’s job.

So, who should own sales enablement? Well, the answer depends entirely on the stage of your company.

Who should own sales enablement?

Here’s the TL;DR progression:

1. Early-stage startup: Founder or first marketer (with some help from Sales)
2. Growth stage: Product Marketing takes the lead
3. Post-Series B: First sales enablement hire (typically reports into Sales)
4. Scaling org: Dedicated Sales Enablement team working cross-functionally
5. Mature enterprise: Enablement becomes strategic and may report into Revenue or stand alone

Of course, this is a generalization. Let’s break it down by possible enablement owners.

1. Early stage: Your founder or first marketer

• ‍Who owns enablement: Founder, Sales leader, or first Marketing hire
• ‍When: Pre-seed to seed stage, or when the first few sales are being made
• ‍What they focus on: Ad-hoc assets, sales decks, and deal support
• ‍Biggest challenge: Messaging and product are changing weekly

At the earliest stages of a company, sales enablement is pretty informal and reactive. 

You’re not onboarding a ton of reps, and even if you’re launching new products every week, you don’t need to train a whole sales team on them yet. It’s more about scrappy collaboration—getting the first sales deck together, writing a one-pager, and hopping on calls to see what messaging works.

The founder or first marketer is usually the one closest to the customer story, so they work closely with Sales to arm them with the basics. 

Even though it’s too early for a full-blown sales enablement platform at this point, it’s helpful to have a centralized hub for sales content that makes it easy to organize scattered collateral and share it with potential customers in a way that feels polished and professional. 

For example, with Dock, you can create a sales deal room template with synced sections that update regularly so buyers always get the most up-to-date messaging. 

Even busy founders and first sales hires can quickly organize and deliver the right content at the right time to the prospect’s team.

2. Growth stage: Product Marketing

• ‍Who owns enablement: Product Marketing
• ‍When: Seed to Series A, or once there’s a repeatable sales motion and a small but growing sales team
• ‍What they focus on: Messaging, sales content management, and product training
• ‍Biggest challenge: Drowning in reactive sales asset requests

Once you have some revenue and a few reps, the need for enablement starts to shift from ad-hoc support to more consistent messaging, rep-to-rep consistency, and building a solid foundation of assets. 

At this point, you’re not just figuring out how to sell, you’re evolving what you’re selling, too.

In this situation, Product Marketing becomes the natural owner of sales enablement—but with a focused scope. 

While the Sales leader typically still owns rep onboarding (since hiring is limited), Product Marketing steps in to lead content and training for new launches. They already manage customer research, positioning, and product updates, which makes them well-suited to own sales content like decks and battlecards, and to run launch-specific enablement initiatives.

Product marketers can use Dock to build and maintain a unified and up-to-date content library with version control, so reps always have access to the latest materials. 

Plus, Dock’s engagement analytics and activity feeds reveal which content is actually helping move deals forward—making it easier to prioritize what to create next.

3. Scaleup stage: First sales enablement hire

• ‍Who owns enablement: Dedicated Sales Enablement Manager
• ‍When: Series A to B, or when the sales team is scaling beyond a few reps and needs formal onboarding and enablement processes
• ‍What they focus on: Rep onboarding, ongoing training, and scalable sales processes
• ‍Biggest challenge: Balancing short-term sales impact with long-term scalability

When the sales team starts to grow more rapidly, onboarding and training become real bottlenecks. That’s usually the tipping point for hiring a dedicated sales enablement person.

The first enablement hire typically shows up when:

• You’re hiring reps every month or quarter
• The sales leader can’t train everyone
• Product marketing can’t keep up with internal education
• You’ve found product-market fit and need to scale what’s working across a growing team

Achieving product-market fit in particular is a pivotal milestone. As Lish Barber, Senior Director of Enablement at Sigma Computing, puts it, “That’s when you’ll want to pour gasoline on the fire, and to do that, you need someone who’s going to help you scale.”

“Typically, I find that enablement gets brought in too late on that journey, and so they have no time to build.”

Your sales enablement hire’s primary job is to empower reps by formalizing training, building onboarding programs, and taking over some of the internal education that Product Marketing was doing ad hoc. 

For example, some companies might hire their first enablement person around 20 sellers and 100 employees, which is typically Series B stage.

This is where it’s vital to have a sales deal room plus content management solution in place. Dock gives reps a consistent process they can follow—so even new reps can follow up with the same clarity and structure as seasoned sellers.

Here’s Nectar’s Sales Director, Andrew Hollis, on how Dock helped standardize their new reps’ follow-up:

4. Beyond: Sales enablement team

• ‍Who owns enablement: A dedicated team, often reporting to Sales
• ‍When: Series B and beyond, or when go-to-market teams are scaling quickly and require specialization and systems
• ‍What they focus on: Training programs, onboarding, coaching, playbooks
• ‍Biggest challenge: Cross-functional alignment

Once you’ve got enough sales reps, product lines, or regional teams, enablement can’t be a one-person show anymore.

At this stage, enablement becomes its own team. It’ll still work closely with Product Marketing, RevOps, and Sales—but this group owns the end-to-end rep experience, including:

• Building repeatable training
• Managing onboarding programs
• Creating and updating sales playbooks
• Supporting frontline managers with sales coaching resources

Because the responsibilities here are much broader and more comprehensive, and the typical CMS or LMS won’t cut it—those sales enablement tools often fall short when it comes to delivering personalized, trackable, and easily accessible enablement content across the entire sales org. 

With Dock, sales enablement teams can standardize the entire post-onboarding experience, whether it’s curating playbooks, sharing competitive intel, or tracking rep engagement with resources. 

At this point, it’s much better to think in terms of team-wide revenue enablement.

Dock provides a shared platform where all revenue teams can collaborate, and ensure consistent messaging and a unified approach to customer engagement. 

This centralized approach improves GTM-wide alignment, reduces silos, and provides a better overall buyer experience.

It also helps facilitate a smoother Sales-to-CS handoff by letting both teams access and share relevant prospect information and content, which promotes alignment and continuity in customer interactions. 

Not only that, Dock also allows for the curation of enablement content that’s tailored for CS teams, empowering them with the tools and resources needed to support and expand accounts effectively throughout the customer journey.

Where should the Sales Enablement team sit in an organization?

If you do have a Sales Enablement function, who should team members report to? 

Normally, this team reports into Sales but works cross-functionally with Product Marketing and RevOps. 

Why? It’s generally best to be as close to revenue as possible. If you’re seen as directly impacting sales, it’s going to be more valued than reporting to Marketing. 

“The reality is that the work we're trying to do—whether it's a problem we're solving that's being driven from sales leadership that might need PMM support, or Product is launching a new thing that's going to need sales enablement support—our roadmaps overlap,” says Barber. 

“The same can be said for our RevOps partners. They might be updating a new process in our systems or our tools. They might have CPQ that they want to update and roll out. So all of those partners, we all impact each other's roadmap.”

Here are the most common reporting structures:

Under Sales (most common)

Why? Since the primary purpose of enablement is to improve sales productivity and quota attainment, it frequently sits under the Sales department—often led by the VP of Sales or Head of Revenue.

Focus: Onboarding, skill development, role-specific training, tactical sales plays, and deal support strategies.

Best for: Mid-sized to large B2B companies with complex sales cycles and sizable salesforces.

Under the CRO or Revenue team

Why? When there's a need to unify all go-to-market functions under a single revenue umbrella, enablement is often aligned with the CRO to stay close to performance KPIs, tooling, and cross-functional strategy.

Focus: Streamlining workflows, driving adoption of sales tools, revenue performance analytics, and improving collaboration between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success.

Best for: SaaS or product-led growth (PLG) organizations where RevOps manages the GTM tech stack and end-to-end revenue operations.

Under Marketing

Why? In cases where the biggest need is sales content and messaging support, enablement may be positioned within Marketing to ensure tight alignment on narrative, brand, and campaign execution.

Focus: Creating and distributing sales collateral (like case studies, decks, battlecards), refining messaging, and supporting product marketing initiatives.

Best for: Early-stage startups or companies where equipping reps with effective content is the biggest barrier to sales effectiveness.

As its own function

Why? As companies mature, some treat enablement as a critical, strategic pillar of growth. By giving it a dedicated team and budget, they can scale it across functions—not just Sales.

Focus: Long-term sales enablement strategy, cross-functional alignment, executive coaching, scalable onboarding, and leadership development.

Best for: Hyper-growth or enterprise organizations that prioritize talent development and strategic readiness across the business.

Where Dock fits in

No matter who owns enablement, Dock helps you control the chaos.

For enablement teams: Manage new rep onboarding, organize training materials, and track adoption. Dock enables you to create structured onboarding programs, monitor rep progress, and ensure consistent training delivery across your team.

For product marketers: A centralized content library + analytics to see what actually moves deals. With Dock's content management system, you can organize marketing materials and understand which assets are most effective in influencing buyer decisions.

For sales leaders: A system to standardize follow-ups and coach more effectively. Dock allows you to create standardized follow-up templates and provides insights to help identify areas where reps may need extra coaching.

For RevOps: Visibility into buyer engagement that’s deeper than CRM signals. While CRMs track basic metrics like email opens and meeting logs, Dock gives you detailed analytics on how buyers interact with shared content, like viewing proposals, engaging with case studies, or revisiting pricing pages.

From your first sales deck to a global onboarding program—Dock grows with you.

Who owns sales enablement in your org?

Sales enablement is inherently cross-functional, regardless of where it sits on the org chart. Whether it reports into Sales, Marketing, or Revenue Operations, enablement only succeeds when all go-to-market teams are rowing in the same direction.

Effective enablement isn't just about onboarding or content creation—it's about aligning your teams around a shared understanding of the buyer journey and providing reps with the tools, messaging, and coaching they need when they need it. 

Dock facilitates this by offering a centralized platform where sales, marketing, and customer success teams can collaborate seamlessly, ensuring consistent messaging and a unified approach to customer engagement.

Dock gives your team a centralized place to manage the entire buying process, including sales training, relevant content, and buyer engagement. Whether you're in Sales, Marketing, Enablement, or RevOps, Dock brings visibility, structure, and real-time insights to your enablement efforts.

Try Dock for free and start building a more aligned, scalable enablement motion today.