Trust Enablement

Improving Sales Performance with Enablement Recruiting, Consulting, Outsourcing, Coaching, and Insights on Strategies, Tactics, and Tools

Hiring and Preboarding Enablement Professionals to achieve success

[buzzsprout episode=’9093393′ player=’true’]

Hiring and Preboarding Enablement Professionals to achieve success

Dave Lichtman, Founder of of Enablematch, Rockstar of Recruiting Enablers, joined us for a private event in our community, focused on sharing insights and tips for Enablement Managers looking to hire and preboard Enablers.

The Collaborator shares the highlights in this recording, including:

? Tips for managers on how to think about their hiring needs.

? Great questions for both managers and job searchers to ask during the interview process and the use of projects/presentations.

?  Preboarding ideas that energize and excite your new hire, preparing them for success when they walk in the door.

Give a listen and remain curious.

Do you believe that every human should have a place to share, learn, and collaborate to achieve their personal best — all while being treated with respect and empathy?  We do, join the Trust Enablement Community to bring this belief to life for all Enablement Professionals.

Audio Transcript

Anyway, we had a great conversation today with Dave Lichtman, Dave Lichtman is one of the only people out there, and probably the only person out there focused entirely upon the enablement space. His recruiting agency enable match, specializes, their focus is there. And that’s his bread and butter. That’s all he does each and every day. Now, as Dave came in and talk to us, we had a really engaging conversation with a mix of current managers and a mix of people actually looking for work. So the conversation that we had was a little bit dual purpose, but it focused on the hiring and pre boarding of enablement managers, and came from the perspective

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of those people now, thank you to the folks that actually reached out to me and said, john, we can’t hear you because that’s a really embarrassing thing to happen as well. All right, Gail. All right, Gail. All right, Amanda, hopefully, you’re still listening and there, and hopefully, this is worthwhile. Well,

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anyway, so as we had that conversation, we started by talking about the hiring process in general in terms of being ready and prepared for who you need to hire, who you want to hire, what that person looks like, what their skills are. And one of the things and bits of advice that they provided to us, which is spot on, in my opinion, is understand where the business is going over the course of the next year or two. If you’re working closely with your CRM, or head of sales, or, or whatever that organization’s top leader role is, from a go to market perspective, this should be an easy conversation for you to start to pull apart, pull apart those threads and understand where the business is going. Once you build that understanding, you should be working in combination and collaboration with that leader, to put together a plan that mirrors what they’re doing, from the structure of the organization, perhaps they’re hiring a certain number of outside sellers to focus on a certain vertical, perhaps to focus on a new set of products, understand what to look at and make sure that whatever your hiring plan is, it aligns and maps and mirrors with what they’re doing as well. The other thing that Dave, spend some time talking about, and I think this is also really important, is we need to not lose sight of where the investment is the return on the investment for every hire that we do. Whether you’re a team of 100, or a team of two,

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every single new hire that you bring in the organization, every human being who has a family to support at home, has the right to be working in an environment with their work is measurable, their impact is clear to the rest of the organization to themselves. So what you want to do is as you’re hiring and putting together the job descriptions for who you’re hiring, think carefully about what their impact will be, and attempt to map it to

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the ROI attempt to map it to KPIs I should say. Now as an enablement organization, hopefully you’re being measured based upon KPIs that tie back to business outcomes. Let’s not debate whether it’s caused whether we can do a cause, cause and effect type relationship, direct impact or whatever. The bottom line is, your organization should be measured based upon its impact or win rate, ACV, you know, deal size, or some other measurement that directly impacts and influences business. When you hire, think about how you’re going to measure the impact of that new hire against those metrics. Simple example, if I’m going to hire a new content creator, for the organization, I want to be able to measure the impact of all the content I’m creating, how it’s being leveraged in certain deals, what content is moving the needle, what content is not moving the needle, and at least be able to measure to some degree of accuracy, the amount of revenue influenced as a result of the use of the content I’m putting forward. It’s not easy, it’s not a perfect science, but you got to do it, I can tell you some of the things that we’re doing are, you know, in Salesforce building reports that measure the content that we use, and attempting to at least do a poor man’s job of identifying me is this content influenced this amount of this amount of revenue, these other pieces didn’t influence anything and looking hard in the mirror to understand what we’re doing and the impact of it. And you need to do that ahead of time. You don’t want to wait until a person comes on board and scratch your head and figure out what the impact is. Do it upfront, put it into the hiring plan. Think about it as you read the job description and think about it as you interview the candidate. So when a candidate sitting down in front of you and you’re thinking about measuring their impact in a certain way

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questions that will help them define for you or guide you, in cases where they’ve done that before or similar things. The other thing that David brought up, which is a really good point is you may not be hiring someone who has enablement experience to come in and do a certain job, maybe you’re looking at to hire someone to develop content. And they wrote marketing content before or they wrote product marketing content, have them walk through how they did their job before, how they measured the impact. And don’t let people stay at the 50,000 foot level, in terms of the impact that they’re having. If you do that, more often than not, or at least some percentage of the time, you’re going to find people that are really smart in the theory, but don’t really understand how they’re going to get the job done. That’s going to be a mismatch, or it’s going to be a great deal of extra training that you’re not expecting and planning for. And it will absolutely impact how quickly they start to impact the business in the way that you’re planning and expecting them to. On the flip side, because we talked about this as well, if you’re looking for a job as an enabler right now, and you’re sitting down talking to the head of sales, or the CRM in the business as part of the interview process, which you should be because if you’re not, then it’s not a company that really appreciates enablement, in my opinion. If you’re sitting down with them, ask them about what they do today in terms of working with the enablement team. What does that relationship look like? And again, don’t let them talk at the 50,000 foot level about, hey, we have a great relationship, have them explore in a polite and friendly way. You know, how often do they meet? How are they you know, when they roll out a new product or new strategy or new x or y or z? How do they involve the enablement team? How do they actually work together today, you’re looking for people that understand the value of enablement that see you as a strategic partner that want to drive that relationship forward. And that way, they need to understand what good looks like if you’re going to be successful. It’s I know, that’s an oversimplification. There are amazing people out there, I see Gail, chair, chairs, putting chairs, putting great comments in the feed reminded me that I was muted for the first 10 minutes. Um, Gail is someone who couldn’t get anything done with anybody because she’s that good. Most of us require most of us mere mortals require if we’re walking into an existing organization, a partner on the sales or revenue side who really has had a good experience and understands what enablement enablement relationship looks like. That’s our opinion. The other sorts of questions that you should really consider asking, are having them take the time. So back to being the manager is giving them a project to do as part of the interview process. Now, don’t use this as a way to get cheap labor focused on a project that you haven’t had time to get to, don’t have them put together your 30 6090 day enablement plan, don’t have them build the first week of enablement from scratch for you. Because you know, at the time, a, it’s not super ethical and be these people are real human beings just like you and me, they deserve to have the opportunity to prove that their value is real, without it being an excuse for you to get cheap work done. So give them a project. That’s, that’s easy for them to start and prove to you how they think, how they approach how they communicate. So a great example could be something where you’re hiring an enabler in the team. And then their last job, they had a similar kind of role. Have them come to you and provide you training on their past product set. Think about, have them build a simple plan, have them deliver some simple training, see how they’re thinking about what they’re delivering, consider how they’re communicating, don’t worry about the details, that doesn’t matter that that’s the stuff that they know, you don’t have to worry about knowing the same thing. But think about how they’re thinking, how they’re communicating and their overall approach. You’re looking for people that have solid approaches, who can demonstrate that they can present in a coherent manner with the mute button turned off. So I’m not a good example. So that’s a little bit of advice there. The other things that we touched upon that I simply want to share with you for a couple of minutes is is the pre boarding strategy. So pre boarding is a wonderful time. And let’s just define it for a second. Pre boarding In my opinion, not in my opinion, pre boarding is from the time that you made the offer and a candidate has accepted until the day they start to leave

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Start. Now they’re not full time employees yet they don’t work for you, they probably are closing out of the jobs, they’re taking mental health breaks, they’re doing whatever they need to do for themselves. So it’s unfair of you to load them up with work and training materials and all of that. It’s going to give them a bad taste in their mouth, you don’t understand them as a human being they’re going to question if they went to the right company, instead. And again, this is a great example that comes from the lips of David Lichtman directly. And I love these examples. If you have them, share customer stories with them, whether they’re in video format, or written share deal wins, if you do deal win reviews, or you have your sellers talk about those deal wins, share them with them, if you have sellers recording their pitches, and you have examples of a really good pitches look like, share that with the enabler that you’re hiring. This will get them super excited, a that you have all of these processes and level of maturity in place. It will get them stoked about the quality of your sales team seeing all of these wonderful examples, these wonderful wins. And there will be something that most people will want to consume because it’s interesting and educational and won’t feel like you’re asking them to do work. They will come today one of the job having some understanding of what your business does. Some of the great, amazing people you work with some of the success stories you have, and they will be energized that they picked a great company to come work at. They will have that base level of understanding. And you’ll have an employee who’s just ready to hit the hit the ground running. Anyway, I apologize so much. Hey, Gail, and let me see Amanda and others. If you’re still there. I appreciate you and I apologize to everyone who suffered through my poor video skills by working on mute for the first seven minutes. I’ll chop that out in this video as I share it. Anyway, I appreciate you. I hope you have a fantastic day. I hope you found some value in this conversation. Peace. Talk to you later john on the collaborator and I’m out