Episode 2:
Matt Cohen: On bootstrapping sales enablement and onboarding!About this episode
Matt Cohen is one of those special people who have a strategic perspective, strong implementation experience and an ability to get things done. He recently joined Dotmatics to build out the sales enablement function. He is a current board member of the Boston Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society and spent three years at Seismic in enablement (isn't that redundant? ). Check his LinkedIn profile for his StrengthsFinder results (quite accurate, I'd say!)
In this episode Matt and I share a small slice of our ongoing conversation about sales enablement best practices and lessons learned. At Dotmatics, a company selling to a highly technical audience, he was pleased to find that sales enablement is considered a strategic function within the organization.
As a new employee, Matt had just completed his own onboarding, and was asked to focus on onboarding as an initial project. He considers "time to ramp" to be a critical metric to gauge onboarding efficacy.
Matt cited sales managers, and specifically, their coaching activities, as key leverage points for sales productivity...and mentioned the value of a growth mindset to the process. Matt is the second guest to mention growth mindsets...and we're both big fans of Carol Dweck's excellent book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which you can find on Amazon.
Matt also mentioned Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, which you can also find on Amazon. The author, General Stanley McChrystal (and others) provide insights into strategies to break down the effects of siloed teams and the challenges of information flow to make decisions.
We talked about whether sales people have a sense of urgency...they're not solving the world's most intractable problems, you know. And then Matt mentioned that Dotmatics sells a research and development platform very much targeted at solving big problems, and I've been on key account teams calling on Merck, J&J, Pfizer and others...who are indeed focusing on curing some of the largest health challenges.
Matt commented that the job of a sales person is to solve problems...and it's our goal in enablement to help foster the curiosity that drives the engagement, discovery and co-creation of solutions.
Ted Lasso was mentioned...Ted never kicked a football on a pitch...yet in three years he was able to turn a losing football team into a high functioning, winning machine. (Apologies to those that haven't finished watching!)
We discussed whether sales enablement people needed to carry a bag to be effective...or whether sales managers needed to be great sales people.
Key takeaways:
- A strong sales enablement charter informs prospective stakeholders of your focus and potential impact. It also keeps the sales enablement team from becoming the task "trash can."
- People before task - get to know people, build the relationship and understand their why (thank you Scott Sinek!) before you engage in the tasky stuff.
- Crawl-walk-run is better than "boil the ocean." Focus on the basics...a few basics... Take on a smallish project with good potential for impact. Ensure that it's successful, then use that success to build support for the next project.
- Never bring up a problem to management without having a proposed solution in mind