WiSE: You started your career selling John Deere tractors and quickly discovered a method to hit your quota faster. Tell us about that journey and how it brought you to enablement.  

Meganne:  Like most of us, I fell into it! I spent the early part of my career selling John Deere tractors to racetracks and horse farms around the US and Canada through an organization that supported memberships to equine groups. I quickly figured out that I hit my quota much faster when I took the time to educate local Deere dealers in my territory on how to sell to people in the equine industry; it became a multiplier factor for me. Fast forward a few years and I found myself in the digital marketing space, filling a gap on the team where I was providing information to help them do their roles better. Through this role, I had an opportunity to speak at an internal conference for 300+ sellers on how to better utilize the tools in their tech stack and after the conference, the Head of Enablement came up to me and said, “What are you doing here? You need to be in Enablement!” And the rest is history. 

W: Enablement can mean a lot of different things to different people and companies.  What does enablement mean to you and your role within an enablement company?  

MB:  We have a very unique view of Enablement at Seismic, since our ICP consists of practitioners like me! We have the joy of sharing the best practices of Enablement with our field, since they need to be positioned as experts to our prospects and customers. As a result, we have a close connection with our sellers and leaders and they have a good understanding of what we do and why we do it. 

W: What is one of your favorite enablement programs you've been part of and what you learned from implementation?  

MB:  Launching the Value Selling methodology is a particularly memorable project for me. We partnered with a vendor to introduce and implement the training, but the mechanics and integration of the methodology taught me deep lessons on the importance of managerial buy-in, scalability, and partnership with revenue operations and other stakeholders. It gave me opportunities to do more live training; any opportunity to share knowledge and run practical exercises with sellers is a great use of time in my book. Lastly, it illuminated the importance of patience in enablement - so much of what we do is a “long game” with little immediate satisfaction. Investing in a longer-term project like a sales methodology rollout taught me how daily efforts can pay off in a big way as we celebrated shorter deal cycles, higher win rates, and higher average deal size. 

W: What is one enablement program you are working on now and how does it correlate to success at your organization?

MB:  We recently cracked the code on measuring enablement’s impact in the organization. Too often, practitioners try to hang their hat on business metrics like win rate, ACV, ramp time, etc but the reality is that we influence these metrics, but we do not own them. We shifted our view to ‘control what we can control’ and through this approach, we are able to optimize how we present enablement and get a direct correlation to how our efforts impact the business instead of trying to guess or assume that our initiative had an influence on a business outcome. This has made building our business case internally to drive 20+ headcount a no-brainer and our executive team is fully bought in to our approach. 

W: How do you get satisfaction from the role and what is your favorite thing about being in enablement?   

MB:  There is a special joy that comes with sharing knowledge with others in the spirit of helping them do better work. Enablement is a space of continuous learning and that challenge is not so much a daunting one as a welcome one. Satisfaction comes with the comfort that we don’t know it all and that there is always something to learn - and the supportive enablement community helps us all fill the gaps in our own learning. What a delight to have so many like-minded people rallying around common challenges and having the vulnerability to ask for help, while celebrating others who share their success. 

W: What is the most important advice you can offer to someone who is looking to get into the enablement field? 

MB:  Raise your hand: If you are in your first role of enablement, ask for opportunities to get your hands on everything and anything to determine which path of Enablement excites you the most. Having exposure to many areas will help you discern your career path while providing you with a well-rounded approach to your practice.

Be an insatiable learner; the world is a boundless place of information. If you think you have mastered something, keep digging deeper. There will always be a new perspective or a fresh way to do it.

Ask the hard questions: the most successful practitioners I know are those who ask the tough questions and aren’t satisfied with the first answer they get.

Put your sellers first. By putting yourself in the seller’s shoes whenever you roll something out, you will accelerate buy-in while building your credibility. 

If you're a woman in enablement and would like to be interviewed for the site,

 email WiSEGlobalContact@gmail.com with the subject line, 'Interview'