Enablement Mastery Quotes

“Here’s a proven sales meeting checklist of pre-meeting, during meeting, and post-meeting best practices and tips to follow and live by every day: Have clear meeting goals and expected outcomes documented and stated in email before and after meetings. Put agendas that are agreed to by your customers in meeting calendar invites. Meeting agendas should start with introductions and customers’ priorities/challenges review. Meeting agendas should close with discussion and time for questions. Research the company and recent announcements and know how their business is doing. Understand the context of their industry, too. Research the people attending your meeting and identify shared interests and shared executive connections. Connect with meeting attendees on LinkedIn before meeting. Some people believe this should be done after a meeting. My point of view is that it’s an important touch point when a prospect accepts your request to connect. Make the connection, and use your connection’s response and speed of response as a gauge of their awareness. If they connect fast, then it may mean they are excited to meet with you. If they don’t connect quickly, it could mean it’s not top of mind. Both are important to know. Don’t forget to personalize the message. Reconfirm agenda and meeting attendee participation. It’s good to do this the day before the meeting is scheduled to happen. Prepare a list of discovery and qualification questions to ask the prospect. The questions should preferably be open ended. Share the questions with your internal team to get alignment. It’s a requirement and best practice to brief executives attending the meeting with you beforehand. Share with your executives the context, current situation, and everything you learned during company, industry, and executive research. Your executives are busy. Help them help you. Be clear on what their role in the meeting is. Introduce meeting attendees at meeting outset, and let everyone have a voice. Go around and have people share their role and what they hope to get out of the meeting. Take thorough notes, capturing your customer’s words. Listen more and talk less. Watch the clock to begin and end meetings as promised. Leave time for questions and discussion at the end. Recap meeting outcomes and next steps before ending the call. Send meeting follow-up notes with clear action items the same day of the meeting using your customer’s words.”
― Elay Cohen, Enablement Mastery: Grow Your Business Faster by Aligning Your People, Processes, and Priorities

“Buyer Personas: Document your buyer profiles, including their roles, attributes, the problems we can solve for them, compelling or trigger events, and how to communicate with them. We want to create content that will help our salespeople truly understand what’s most important to our buyers.”
― Elay Cohen, Enablement Mastery: Grow Your Business Faster by Aligning Your People, Processes, and Priorities

“Their leadership team recognized how amazing this sales productivity number was to the company and ultimately to one of the factors that led to the acquisition by Verizon. I love this quote from Kelly: “We could close deals faster and bigger than our competition.” What sales leader, salesperson, sales manager, or chief executive officer does not want this too?”
― Elay Cohen, Enablement Mastery: Grow Your Business Faster by Aligning Your People, Processes, and Priorities

“ultimate key performance indicator at Telogis is to help sales sell bigger deals faster,” he said. At Telogis, they improved time to first deal by 70 percent. They reduced the average number of days from 266 to 85. The business benefits are extremely positive and the dream of many enablement professionals”
― Elay Cohen, Enablement Mastery: Grow Your Business Faster by Aligning Your People, Processes, and Priorities

“content represented a lot of different types of knowledge from a variety of groups: marketing-generated content in the form of corporate presentations; content generated by product management and engineering in the form of product knowledge; content generated by subject-matter experts from weekly company calls that are recorded and shared; user-generated content from individual contributors like salespeople; executive-generated content, including business plans and quarterly goals; and customer-generated content from customer interviews and stories. Kelly then said that the sum total of this content is what makes his company who they are. He said that it was bigger than their culture, that it was their secret sauce.”
― Elay Cohen, Enablement Mastery: Grow Your Business Faster by Aligning Your People, Processes, and Priorities

“Some use Salesforce. Others use Excel. Others use analytics tools. Each leader has their own scorecard. Enablement professionals need to be part of the conversation about what is working and what is not. We need to connect the dots between the great work we do and the results. We want to be able to walk into our leadership’s office and show the correlation between performance by seller and by team and enablement activity. We need to be able to turn a subjective dialogue into a fact-based and analytical conversation. We need to be able to provide answers to the most important question: What can we do to improve performance and achieve our go-to-market goals?”
― Elay Cohen, Enablement Mastery: Grow Your Business Faster by Aligning Your People, Processes, and Priorities

“Set up committees that you can tap into when you have questions, and have a few salespeople on speed dial. As a salesperson, I care about closing more business with less work. Salespeople want shortcuts to success, and they want the secrets of success, now. Know this as you tailor your vision statement and business case and communicate value.”
― Elay Cohen, Enablement Mastery: Grow Your Business Faster by Aligning Your People, Processes, and Priorities

“Another way to look at the business case is from a sales headcount perspective. What will deliver more return on investment: another quota-carrying salesperson or using that money to drive an initiative? These are the kinds of open and transparent conversations you want to have when discussing the business case. Make the ROI clear, and communicate it to all stakeholders. There is no reason to be shy about the business impact you expect to see. That is the ultimate tool to gain organizational buy-in for your top sales initiatives.”
― Elay Cohen, Enablement Mastery: Grow Your Business Faster by Aligning Your People, Processes, and Priorities

“book Buy-In, Harvard Business School professor John Kotter explains the importance of gaining others’ support in order to create real institutional change: Buy-in is critical to making any large organizational change happen. Unless you win support for your ideas, from people at all levels of your organization, big ideas never seem to take hold or have the impact you want. Our research has shown that 70 percent of all organizational change efforts fail, and one reason for this is executives simply don’t get enough buy-in, from enough people, for their initiatives and ideas.”
― Elay Cohen, Enablement Mastery: Grow Your Business Faster by Aligning Your People, Processes, and Priorities

“enablers I know: results-oriented high achievers. They have real experience working with customers, communities, and constituents. They are practical. They are hardworking. They always have an appetite to make things better. They have a diverse set of jobs in their career that can be tied together with an enablement theme. They are great storytellers. They are mentors. They are technical. They are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and do hard work. They work many thankless hours. Q is all of the above and an inspiration to us all. How do we find and develop more people like Q in corporations? How do we make sure that every team, every department, and every company has their quota of enablers met? If we agree that having more enablers in our businesses will yield great results and build culture, then the next step is to recruit, develop, and mentor more enabler leaders.”
― Elay Cohen, Enablement Mastery: Grow Your Business Faster by Aligning Your People, Processes, and Priorities