Stephanie White
Director, Sales Enablement, Loopio
How do you define enablement?
Sales enablement is people enablement. Enabling our sellers to be more effective so they are better positioned to enable our customers in achieving their goals. The framework, training, analysis, processes and metrics put together all centre on what customers are experiencing and the value it brings to their business. A good sales enablement program will always bring it back to the “why”.
Describe your current role.
As Director of Sales Enablement with a rapidly growing team of passionate sales professionals, we are focussed on ensuring we provide effective on boarding, ongoing and mastery training, with efficient processes and tools to deliver a exceptional buyer and employee experience.
Walk through your journey to get where you are today.
I feel very fortunate that the early stages of my career have been full of what I know were incredible GTM roles. After starting a career in marketing and customer experience, I moved into client management roles working with key accounts, then leading operations teams deploying solutions and onboarding clients before pivoting into a technical role and then beginning my journey in sales leadership. As a sales leader, I found myself often creating new processes, initiating modifications to tools to be more effective for my team and partnering with marketing to create training collateral. Before I knew it, there was an opportunity to share these best practices across other sales teams and so began my pivot to sales operations and finally enablement supporting the global sales team. Having carried a quota to sell myself, directly managed sellers and been responsible for onboarding of clients from an operations perspective, I consider myself very fortunate to have had the 360° experience of working with clients from first engagement through go live and on to a successful customer journey.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
At a former organization, our business was rapidly expanding and it was increasingly critical to have a consistent framework to support our sales organization. Taking a leap of faith and committing to our shared goal, I began a solo initiative to spin up a Sales Enablement practice for the first time. Through hard work, team collaboration and challenging myself to quickly acquire new knowledge and skills, within a few short months our newly formed sales enablement team had expanded to training, collateral, sales operations and financial reporting on behalf of the global sales team. Within weeks, we were able to share our success with measurable impact to the business and the team.
What’s your advice to someone getting started in enablement?
You don’t need to come from sales to be successful in sales enablement. In fact, some of the best practitioners weren’t. You do need to be someone who loves providing support, is genuinely curious and can shift perspectives to empathize.
A zigzag career is a gold mine for sales enablement. The nature of the sales enablement oral positions us to collaborate and work cross functionally across teams seize opportunities to partner with other functions to gain perspective, form relationships and build your expertise
Enablement is a team sport. In everything we do, we will succeed or fail as a team. Each team may look different but having stakeholders across multiple departments will help to ensure you are driving towards key objectives for the overall business as well as the revenue organization.
So much of what we do happens behind the scenes without public recognition. Keep a list or folder handy to celebrate your successes and wins with your team.
What are you doing to develop yourself?
There are fantastic sales enablement communities. I like to keep up-to-date on content and best practises from sales enablement pro, sales enablement collective, sales enablement society and, of course, enablement enthusiast.
Courses and learning modules to stay up-to-date on data analytics and new tools available in the space
I’m always looking to engage in interesting discussions with people from diverse backgrounds. Some of my most successful sales enablement ideas started from the most unexpected places.
Connect with Stephanie on LinkedIn!
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