NEWS
I had the pleasure of working with Elay Cohen during my brief stint at Salesforce.com and I reviewed SalesHood, his first book, over four years ago. We were early and happy customers of the SalesHood application at Host Analytics. I’m basically a big fan of Elay’s and what he does. With the average enterprise SaaS startup spending somewhere between 40% to 80%+ of revenue on sales, doesn’t it make sense to carve off some portion of that money into a Sales Enablement team, to make sure the rest is well spent? It sure does to me.
I was pleased to hear that Elay had written a second book, Enablement Mastery, and even more pleased to be invited to the book launch in San Francisco several weeks back. Here’s a photo of Cloudwords CEO Michael Meinhardt and me at the event.
I have to say I simply love salesops and sales productivity people. They’re uniformly smart, positive, results-oriented, and — unlikely many salespeople — process-oriented. A big part of the value of working with SalesHood, for a savvy customer, is to tap into the network of amazing sales enablement professionals Elay has built and whose stories are profiled in Enablement Mastery.
I read the book after the event and liked it. I would call it a holistic primer on sales enablement which, since it’s a relatively new and somewhat misunderstood discipline, is greatly in need in the market.
Elay’s a great story-teller so the book is littered with stories and examples, from his own considerable experience building the impressive Salesforce.com sales productivity team, to the many stories of his friends and colleagues profiled in the book.
Some of the more interesting questions Elay examines in Enablement Mastery include:
- Why sales enablement?
- Where to plug it organizationally? (With pros and cons of several choices.)
- What to do in your first 90 days in a new sales enablement role?
- What to look for when hiring sales enablement professionals?
- How to get organizational (and ideally strong CEO) buy-in to the sales enablement program?
- How sales enablement can work best with marketing? (Hint: there is often tension here.)
- What is a holistic process map for the sales enablement function?
- How to measure the sales enablement function? (And it better be more than instructor ratings on the bootcamp.)
- How to enable front-line managers to be accountable for their role enabling and developing their teams? (Elay wrote a whole chapter on this topic.)
- How to conduct a quarterly business review (QBR)?
- How managers can use basic Selling through Curiosity principles to coach using curiosity as well?
- How to build an on-boarding plan and program?
- What core deliverables need to be produced by the marketing and sales productivity teams?
Elay, never one to forget to celebrate achievement and facilitate peer-level knowledge sharing, also offers tips on how to runs sales kickoffs and quota clubs.
Overall, I’d highly recommend Enablement Mastery as a quick read that provides a great, practical overview of an important subject. If you’re going to scale your startup and your sales force, sales enablement is going to be an important part of the equation.