Trust Enablement

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Team-of-one Sales Enablement Managers – Preparing for Strategic Growth

[buzzsprout episode=’9538739′ player=’true’]

Team of One - Preparing for strategic growthMost Sales Enablement Managers work in organizations as a one-person team. They dream of growing their organization to achieve outstanding outcomes, transformational results.

Team-of-one host Devon McDermott and our friend, Adriana Romero, sat down in this episode to discuss their multiple journeys on this same path and how each of them went about preparing for strategic growth along the way.

During this conversation, they discussed:

  • Best practices
  • Planning for growth
  • Mastering the art of delegating

If you are preparing for strategic growth, this is an episode you will want to check out.

Audio Transcript

Devon McDermott 0:00
All right. Hello everyone. Welcome to Coffee collaboration and enablement the team of one edition, where we chat with and learn from enablement stars who are currently operating as a team of one and others who started as a team of one and came out on the other side. I’m Devin McDermott, former solo enablement practitioner, currently part of an amazing revenue enablement team at pr Sato. During today’s team have one conversation, we are spending time with a fabulous enablement thought leader Adriana Romero, we are going to talk about everything. So best practices for crushing it as a team of one planning for a seamless team growth and mastering the art of delegating when you’re used to doing it all. Hello, Adriana, and welcome to the show.

Adriana Romero 0:46
Oh, Devin, thank you so much. It’s so good to be here. You know, every time I come back to any of these sessions, it feels like coming back home. So I love being here and having the opportunity to talk about different topics. And as we spoke when we were preparing for the session, TEMA one is such an important topic for both of us because we have we have done it we have you know, we survived it, it is important that we came out the other side. And as I tell people, we’re still doing enablement, so it means something was was good, right?

Devon McDermott 1:15
Yes, we’ve earned our badges. Um, I will, I am so pumped that you’re here and, you know, loved our conversation prepping for this. But I always just love talking to you learning from you hearing me speak at conferences, and I’m just I cannot wait to hear some of your team have one insights today. So we’re gonna kick it off how we usually do. So I want you to share a little bit about yourself, where do you currently work some exciting updates there? Um, how you got into enablement. And what you consider your enablement superpower to be

Adriana Romero 1:47
Oh, I like that. So I am currently working at Salesforce, where be the acquisition from level jump that happened earlier this year. So that has been an amazing journey. So you know, I went from a team of one to a team of many, which is super interesting, because I’ve done the team of many I’ve done the team of one, but this is an interesting transition, right? So I am doing this, I got into enablement, surprisingly enough, also in a big company. So I got into enablement when I was at open text, and I was an account executive who went through a crisis of do I really want to continue to do sales, but I love sales, and I didn’t want to leave. So I decided that, you know, saw somebody giving me a training one day and I said, What did you guys do? And he’s like, we work in sales enablement. I’m like, Tell me more, what is this sales enablement? And I sold myself into a role. And did you know onboarding your sales person

Devon McDermott 2:48
to action? I love it.

Adriana Romero 2:51
No one wants a salesperson or a sales person, you find a way, right? Like, you got to see me doing the fundraiser for my kids, you know, a school. Um, so I got myself into enablement. I was two, we were a team of 20. It was not huge, but it was big, considering you know, where enablement was in 2016, right? We’re talking that enablement was not this hot topic it is today and and this kind of famous thing it is today. It’s like funny because sometimes now I tell people, I worked in enablement, they kind of know what it is. And some people are like, Oh, I would love to hear more, because they want to move into enablement. You’re like, Okay, super funny. Like, tell me gardener? Yeah. Oh, that’s so cool. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. So that has been my journey. So it’s going to be six years in enablement in January, which seems sometimes like, little, sometimes it feels like a lot. So yeah.

Devon McDermott 3:44
It’s so funny. Like, I love hearing everyone’s timelines for how long have you been doing this? And really, if you look back at all of the work you’ve done, even in sales, like you’ve been doing parts of enablement or like some sort of enablement. At some point throughout your career, I even like look back, like, Oh, when I was doing implementations, there were training component. Yeah, we’re coaching. Yes. So it’s kind of cool.

Adriana Romero 4:04
Which is funny, because I remember now that you bring back that memory, I was doing implementations of warehouse management solutions. And I was doing, you know, enablement. And I was doing like customer training. But all I had to prepare because I was the implementation consultant. I was the sales consult. It was everything consultant back in the day. And I remember prepping these boardrooms with my PowerPoints and my sandbox environments. And I’m like, This is so interesting, right? I would have never said that this that happened in 1999. And yes, I’m gonna date myself, is what I’m doing right now, right?

Devon McDermott 4:42
It’s awesome. Um, so, what is your enablement superpower?

Adriana Romero 4:48
I would say my enablement superpower is that I have great listen to yours. And I really I’m really close to the field, which is something that I’ve always enjoyed, and it doesn’t mean that I have to be in In the field, like it’s great to be in the sales floor. But I think it’s very important to keep those open ears with the people that you talk to always be curious. Always ask them, how are they doing? And always have because at open text, for example, I could not be in the field similar to you know, when you know, from Salesforce, but you can always ask and you can always have friends and you can always know people and say, hey, I’m interested, what is not working? What is working? What can we change? If you would do this? How would you do it like, that is for me my superpower, because that allows me to be immersive enough into the situation, that when I’m solving their problems, I’m solving it from their perspective.

Devon McDermott 5:40
That is so incredible. And like, you know, in every sales role that I scope, it’s like active listening, active listening, but for us to it’s a such an important characteristic, super important. And I feel like the field too tends to be more comfortable coming to enablement to share their honest feelings, your honest challenges where you may not want to tell your manager you’re not comfortable in certain situations or an executive conversations, and we’re kind of like, the safe space. But we’re also the folks that can like help them, which is kind Yes.

Adriana Romero 6:09
So funny enough, in one of the companies I was at, there was one of these, you know, these these, they have these these offices nowadays, like meditation rooms, and you know, whatever, there was a room that was like, I would say, kind of like a meditation room, but it had like a chest long for people to like, lie down. I call it a therapy room. And it was where when my reps were not feeling it was like, Okay, let’s go in the room, nobody can see that we’re in there. You know, we had a window that looked outside. And I think it was great, because they would actually like sync up and give us everything, just like you said,

Devon McDermott 6:43
Oh, my gosh, that is so awesome.

Adriana Romero 6:46
Thank you, Felix. I appreciate that. Thank you. That is awesome. Yes.

Devon McDermott 6:53
So I want to take a step back a little bit. So yes. And you’re not a team of one now. And you’ve been a team of one in many roles. So what would you say? Were some of your like, consistent core responsibilities when you were a team of one? And more importantly, because I feel like this is where it gets interesting. How closely aligned are those responsibilities to what was shared with you in the hiring process?

Adriana Romero 7:16
Yes. So the hiring processes for a team of one are very vague, right? Usually, it’s a very desperate head of sales, saying I just need a right hand or I need somebody to help me with this. Or we need a process or we’re in hyper growth. And I need onboarding, right. There’s always like a big problem to solve. In my case, for some reason, that problem was always starting with hiring, we’re in growth, we’re hiring, we need to get people ramped. And then it was like consistency in the process. And in some cases, it was that growth came with, we’re going to grow, we’re going to bring tech, we’re going to bring some other things. So we need this to evolve and grow and the head of sales that I brought it to one place, right? So I would say that always one of those core responsibilities was onboarding that was always there as a team of one. And there was always that need of create consistency in the sales motion with the sales floor, I would say those two are always kind of like, when you’re a team of one. That’s kind of like what they’re looking for, without really knowing what else you’re gonna do. And even though it sounds very general, there’s a lot.

Devon McDermott 8:28
Yes, yeah. And we’re gonna get into all of that. Like this, but so again, like, the expectations fairly consistent, what did you find were some of the most challenging things when you and I were in a role as a team of one. So like, if you had to pick the top three most challenging areas,

Adriana Romero 8:49
I would say, you know, not having a clone of myself or three clones of myself to do everything I wanted to do. But that would be like challenge number one. Challenge number two was also the fact of buy in from people that were not the head of sales or the person that hired you, right? So sometimes that that was even executives that were not really aligned of what you were doing. I have an anecdote of a company where I worked, and I once went to meet the co founders, and we were meeting for something else. And they actually looked me in the eye and they said, We have a question, what is really enablement? And I’m like, I’ve been here tomorrow. It’s over this, you know, yeah. It was very interesting. And of course, it’s the fact that you need to earn so you need to earn the credibility and from the executives and other people and stakeholders, but there’s also having this floor listen to you, and really understand that you’re not their manager. You’re there to help them but you have guidelines that they have to follow. And when you’re in smaller companies and startups and scale ups, usually the the leaders of The sales floor look at you as that other helping hand like a manager, right? So you need to kind of gain that. So it’s like being the I don’t know, the the, the oldest sibling in the household, and kind of having responsibilities but also being able to be a sibling. So it’s kind of an interesting dynamic, right?

Devon McDermott 10:19
Yeah, it’s there. So I’m feeling a lot of pros and cons here. And something interesting. I don’t know if you experienced this. So my organization is growing rapidly. And there’s always new leaders joining. And for the folks that are, you know, in role currently they get it, they understand enablement, we’ve done some sessions on it. But I always get the question like, well, how are you different than sales operations? Aren’t you exactly the same role? And I get this question so often, because I feel like there’s this like moment where you’re like, Okay, people get it. They understand enablement. I don’t have to explain it all the time. But then I get that question fairly often. And sometimes it sells operations are or something else. So, you know, I put together a slide of like, here’s the difference. Here’s how we partner, but how do you address like those, you know, those moments where you’re constantly having to educate someone new around what you do? Like, what’s your approach to that?

Adriana Romero 11:08
So I did something similar to you, I created this kind of like six slide that slide slide deck, and it was like, What is enablement? What is not enablement? Yeah. That was like a clear distinction. Yeah. What are the things that we what is the technology that we kind of manage? What are the things we bridge because that was another thing, there’s such a blurred and gray line between you are the sales floor IT help desk to, I can help you with that. But I’m cannot solve the technical issue, right? Especially with tools like a CRM or conversational intelligence, or, you know, any of these engagement tools. It’s like, I can help you. But I am not tech support, where I can help you. But there is an analyst or an admin for this tool like that is the person ultimately who makes that decision? So I think that that’s, that’s one of the things that you constantly have to educate. I think it’s super important that in the onboarding process of these leaders, they’re the ice started to include how do you work with enablement? Like, what is enablement? You know, how do you work with enablement? And I started to do that, like one hour session, where I would sit down with the leader and say, this is enablement. This is what we do. This is why we’re doing this is why you see me in meetings, and you see me doing this, and you see me presenting, this is how I can serve you. These are the things that I help you with. And this is what I need from you. And that was kind of like we’re starting a relationship with kind of like, you know, setting expectations. And that helped a lot, especially with managers who had never worked with enablement, right. Yeah. And I had, at one point, I’m pretty sure it has happened to you as well. When you have younger frontline managers, maybe people that just got promoted, or people that came from another company that are very young, very eager to tutorial. Like, yeah, I’m not here to take control of your territory. Yeah, your people know, I’m here to help you. But we need to work together. You can’t go rogue on me and do a bunch of things that you feel that you can do. And sometimes you have to have those hard conversations. I remember having some very interesting Heart to Heart conversation with manager and say, We need to go for a walk and have a conversation because yeah, you can I don’t know if it happened to you, but I wouldn’t say something to the floor. And then that would go and say like, no, don’t do that. And I’m like, wait a minute. Yeah, let’s let’s get let’s let’s kind of sync up here. Right. So yeah, interesting. Yeah. And

Devon McDermott 13:33
it’s like, you have to start with this as a partnership, and I am your secret weapon. Let’s like, let’s get on the same page. Let’s support each other. And that tends to work really well. Like even you know, scoping tech, there’s a fine line of who owns which tech, who’s building strategy, who’s leveraging it? And yeah, I think just being really clear about like, where the lines are, what you know, whatever, if you want to use the RACI model, whatever it is, who’s responsible for what, but here’s how we can partner and support you. We’re not here to take anything away from you. We’re here to

Adriana Romero 14:00
elevate. But oh, percent I remember, I think I told one manager, I’m like, if I would have wanted to be a sales manager, I would be a salesman. Right, exactly. You know, so let’s get that out of the way. I do not want to be a sales manager. This is why Yeah, but sometimes you need to have those very open in your face conversations. And there’ll be like, Oh, okay, now I get it.

Devon McDermott 14:22
Yeah, I love the idea that you shared of like getting in front of this and onboarding, because I think that is such a game changer. Because usually, you know, will interact with folks like to point in a meeting, and they’re like, Who’s this person here that has an opinion about my strategy and my program like I, so I’m gonna borrow that that is incredible.

Adriana Romero 14:40
By all means, and anybody who’s listening who’s a team of one and you’re going through this and you’re hiring one, and we’re going to talk about this more, you know, a little bit further in the conversation, but your managers, your manager, onboarding, your manager enablement is one of the key things that you should be using your time with, and I will talk a little bit more about that. And it’s starts with their onboarding. However you design manager onboarding. Yeah. Even if your head of sales says don’t worry, don’t worry about the managers. I’ve got this. You know how it is on my managers, I’m going to onboard them to write and add things that you believe are important for them. Right? Like, yes.

Devon McDermott 15:20
Yeah. And yeah, it might sometimes onboarding winds up ever happening if you don’t take control over it. So very quickly, because this has been a super hot topic. For me, and in conversations I’ve been having with other enablement folks over the last few weeks. So this is about, um, growing your team. So you know, the dream as a team of one is like, oh, someday I’m gonna be able to build this team and have support create incredible programs. How do you think about or how do you think about team structure? Meaning? What’s your strategy like program based hiring, ratio based hiring, like what was in your mind? And how did you approach that team build out to have the greatest impact?

Adriana Romero 16:03
100%. So I have, I believe that it really depends on how the sales floor dynamic works. Some sales floors, and majority of them are specialized by role, right? You have people that report into a BDR, SDR or top of funnel, you know, function. Sometimes that function reports into marketing, right? Not even into sales. Then you have the people that are in the funnel closing deals, and then you have the people that take care of the of the customer that can be PCs, or ATMs. Or maybe you have an AE that does fullcycle. Yeah. Some other companies have a pod structure, right? Where they have a pod where they have people from different areas. And that pod is like a little big family, and they do everything. So depending on the dynamic of the floor, you should think about where is the floor better served when you start hiring people, and not only the floor? How are you as enablement better, better served, right? Is it a structure where you hire people that are going to be geared towards each one of these roles? Do you need more supporting creating a center of excellence and supporting the enablement function and being more, I would say more detailed and more specialized, and having people that are dedicated to content or instructional design? Or, you know, product enablement? Or, you know, anything? Like, I think it really depends on where, you know, the gaps you believe are, where can you continue to operate as is, for example, I, I’ve been in companies where the complexity of the sale was not that big, we didn’t have a bunch of content, it was one product, maybe four, but they were kind of like the similar nature. And I have an incredible product marketing team that would help me with content. So that was not my gap. So I didn’t have a blind side there. My blind side was helping the floor, learn rapidly understand rapidly. So I needed more people that were like more coaching roles, facilitator roles. I needed help in onboarding, because I have classes every 30 days starting right. Yeah. So for to give you an example, when I was in that situation, I envisioned a team that was, you know, a mixture between geographies and specialized by roles with like a little bit of a center of coordination and strategy, right? That was kind of like my idea. But I said, who was my first hire? Right? And I’m like, Okay, I need to organize this house. So I need somebody that can come in, grow into my role, but whose forte is in a project management, I need somebody who’s organized. And it was an interesting combination in that role, because I interviewed a lot of people that had great facilitation backgrounds and training backgrounds. And I’m like, This is not what I need. I already have that. That’s me, I can I can, I can pile through facilitation for an entire week or a month, right? I need somebody to keep this house clean as I was piling up technology, and I was piling up processes. And I said and that person should be able to learn and be coachable that they can evolve. And then I said, I can hire somebody, I hired somebody from the floor and said, This is the person that can specialize in my biggest gap on the floor. That was the SDR function, right? We had a top of funnel issue conversion rate was not where it was. It should it needed to be. And I’m like, because my, my frontline managers are collapsed because they had more people than they could handle in their teams. And I said, I need somebody to help that team. If I dedicate 1% of that team. I free up my time. I kind of organize the house and I give them what they need. So you know long winded answer to say Oh, this is great. You know, look where what your floor needs. Look where it’s growing. And and think about it into This is my ideal state. And these are all the steps tracing back of how I’m going to do it.

Devon McDermott 20:05
That is so interesting. And I do love to how every organization is really different. And so I love the idea of like business need, and also leveraging, like, could I have internally that I can, you know, this role that I can grow into this role? And that is awesome. I know, it’s like a hot debate for me and other folks, like, you know, and you know, we have this many sales reps, we need this many enablement folks, like, I don’t think that’s the best approach. So I’m not you’re out.

Adriana Romero 20:31
Yeah, I’m with you. Into ratios, ratios will never, ever be perfect for enablement.

Devon McDermott 20:37
I agree. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. So I love I love this. And I love how thoughtful again, your your team development was, but something you and I talked about. And again, I think this is not unique to enablement, maybe it’s, it’s, you know, enablement, but also for for new managers in general. But once you started building out your team, how did you approach delegating? So I know for me, like, as a team of one of my, this is mine, it’s my baby, it’s, you know, has to be a certain way. And I really struggled with that as I started to grow my team in previous roles. So how did you approach delegating? And like, what went well, but what did you learn? And how did you shift your approach?

Adriana Romero 21:15
Oh, this is a good one. So there’s, there’s a couple of things, what you describe is the feeling we all have, it’s like, I built this, like, you know, this, this is mine, like I felt this, like you can’t come in and just like destroy it, right? And I think that enablement, we’re very protective, because we fight so much for our, you know, our role in our structure, and in our permissions and everything that we’re very protective. But then we’re also protective of this new hire. So there’s like this weird combination of I’m protecting what I’ve built, but I’m gonna protect you have these elements of these tigers that you’re going to confront right in here. Yeah. And I don’t want you to, to, to be exposed to that. And I have to be very, I think that the best thing that happened was that I had a team that didn’t have any fear of telling me things. And of course, that was based on the type of relationship that we were very open. I was very human, we were you know, we would talk about different things I would know about their lives. Like, if they were not having a good day, I was I’m the type of Manager I’m like, if you’re feeling off, like if we were in an office, take your things, go take care of yourself, like yes, just do it. Just do it. Right. And I think that type of relationship, they felt the comfort of coming and telling me by you trying to keep things from us, this is not helping us we need to learn. And I said, I realized, oh my god, this is when like when you have a kid, and you want to put them into like, you know, a wrap or a bubble so they don’t get hurt, right? It’s exactly the same thing. Yes. And I said, it’s not helping you. And I said, You’re right. Yeah, so we agreed that a, they were free to, to roam and get exposed, be, I was open for their feedback for whatever I had created. And I was going to sit down and take it and say, You’re right, I’m going to see it with a different pair of eyes. And when I told them, but if you go through this, and a tiger bites you when you’re out there, I’m here, and we’re gonna fix this, right. So I think that having that relationship kind of helped me evolve into letting go. And even noticing, and I’m pretty sure it happened to you how good it felt when you like,

Devon McDermott 23:32
oh my god, like the pride you feel to your like this, like, knowing like, I’ve hired this amazing person. I think we all know, like, I always want to hire somebody that’s way smarter than me way better than certain things and like just seeing them shine. It’s like, this incredible moment. Um,

Adriana Romero 23:48
yeah, it’s hard to get our parents Yeah, it’s like our parents.

Devon McDermott 23:51
It’s so awesome. Like, seeing them just like, you know, rock out in a meeting. But also just a side note, I feel like you should probably lead some sort of a session or a training on like, building trust as a manager, because it’s really hard to get people to feel like comfortable, safe, vulnerable. And I think it sounds like because you’ve, you’ve nurtured that relationship, your team was just a well oiled machine. And when you were in, there wasn’t any fear about expressing that. So

Adriana Romero 24:17
oh, 100% I would be the person that would come and say, This is how I’m feeling. And this is my situation like I was not always happy. Or in agreement, or I was I would you know, I would be frustrated and say and that they would see me in a meeting when things were getting tough being vocal about it. And maybe you know, people saying I don’t care if your vocal were shutting down that idea and coming back and see that was frustrating. Yeah, like you know, I’m gonna like this is it or saying sometimes you have to win some and sometimes you don’t? Yeah. And, and being that open and kind of having I I’m a very big believer that trust in human relationships are super important and I that trust as a man As a coworker, as somebody who reports to somebody as a friend, yeah, as the person as whoever and that respect and that trust, you have to have it with everybody, my sales reps than you hire. Anybody in the in the sales floor is that person that deserves that. And to be honest with you, I’m going back a little bit into all those things that kind of like added these elements, because to your point, we never know what adds, yeah, when I was years ago, very, you were gonna say, How does this have to do with enablement, I worked in the beer industry. And I was in, I was in charge of sales for a specific product, my product line, but it was interesting enough back home, I was in charge of the revenue of the refrigerators. So it’s, it’s a concept in the beer industry, where the product is there’s revenue in different like, there’s different revenue streams, those refrigerators remind, I got to say, where they were, who got them, how much they sold, and all those things. And I had to subcontract these group of young folks that all their job was to go and do maintenance of refrigerators, like, think about the most basic job, your turn refrigerator, clean it and make sure it was completely stocked and all that, yeah, those those, that team for me was so important. Because I knew that nobody else a had a contact with the customer and the point of sale as they did, and that they had the one of the most like, horrible jobs in the company that was going clean somebody else’s fridge, right. And you can imagine what kind of beer fridge and they helped me and I said, But in return, I’m going to help you become what you want to become here. Do you want to be in sales, we’re gonna, we’re going to train you. So you can be in sales, when there’s an opportunity, I will put you forward. And those type of things is when I see that, and when you fast forward four years, and you see where those people got. And you left that legacy. That is what really helps you so so however, you’re building your enablement team, think about the legacy that you’re leaving, and that you want to leave in your enablement team. And that should be your North Star.

Devon McDermott 27:19
Yeah, I love that story. And it’s, you’re investing in people, right? So you’re spending the time to grow them, elevate them build that trust, because I think like, you know, we all want to be the managers that we wish we had. And it’s figuring out how do I get there in an authentic way. And I’ve definitely had managers I try to like command trust and command honesty, but didn’t give that back. And so you’re like, What do I do is this is this really like a safe environment? And so I love hearing the way like, you know, you’re nurturing your team for their next steps for their growth and celebrating that, but also being vulnerable yourself, which is not easy to do. And I always, I always like question myself, like, is it unprofessional for me to say like, Hey, I’m having a really bad day, or this, this person really stressed me out rejected my idea. And I feel like that’s so important to do that with your team. Oh, it

Adriana Romero 28:03
is so important. Yeah. I mean, with within the parameters of respect, I think everybody has had a day where they say, Oh, my God, why does this person though, doesn’t get it? Like, yeah, I am so frustrated with. So yeah, and I think it’s human to actually just let that all out. vent it out. Yeah. Because you never know if your team says by maybe you’re explaining it a different way. Or maybe you should do this a different way. Or maybe you don’t have chemistry with the person. Let me do it, you know, and that’s fine. Yeah. Yes,

Devon McDermott 28:37
it’s so true. Um, so one quick thing. And then I want to dig into your approach to manager onboarding, because I do think that is like the Forgotten thing. And I know for myself, it’s like, always an afterthought, but I’m like, oh, it’s super important. So but I want to just quickly and have you dig into when you finally got to grow your team? What surprised you? Meaning like, what was just exactly what you expected? And what surprised you? So I like to think of like, you know, that meme expectations versus reality? Like, what are your hopes and then what? Actually,

Adriana Romero 29:11
just, that’s just me trying to bake a cake, you know, or recipe it’s like expectation, my family’s gonna see this plate and then reality is whatever turns out, right? Yeah. I think that’s such a good question. I think the surprise, the biggest surprise was how people respected my team and valued them. That was such a big surprise because it’s something that you’re you want, or you don’t think is going to happen. And, you know, when I when I was speaking to you about legacy, I remember one company left and it was a thing that part of my team left as well. They they the team built for us this kind of like goodbye, PowerPoint, that has like a slide per person in the sales floor saying goodbye and What I loved about it was that everybody had a moment where the a person of one of my team made a difference to them. And I think that is that was surprising and happy surprise. And I’m like this. This is what all that sweat. Tears is worth it for this moment. Yeah.

Devon McDermott 30:23
That’s incredible. It’s just it’s such a good feeling that like, see the people that you are just that you care about so deeply and seeing them be super successful? Yeah, great. It is so awesome.

Adriana Romero 30:34
100%.

Devon McDermott 30:36
We don’t have too much more time. But I would love for you to dig into what you shared before about your manager onboarding program and the importance there. And then I have one final question before we wrap up. But I feel like we are going to need a part two at some point, Adriana, because we

Adriana Romero 30:50
might need to John gives me permission to come back. I’m kidding. John Devin doesn’t need your permission. Oh, man. So manager enablement as we as you said, it’s the Forgotten child, right? Because everybody knows it’s important. But I will give anybody who’s in a team of one this advice. Treat your new managers as a new hire exactly the same way. Put them through your onboarding program, as weird as that sound, get them to experience what their reps experience, because A, you’re going to have that one of the best feedback loops is going to be from your managers, right? Yeah. Be they’re gonna learn how their sellers do their job every day and what they need. And then you’re starting to build that relationship with your managers, right? And start building that foundation, as I said, Get have a session of how enablement and you can work together, have one on ones with your managers. And if you have too many frontline managers, do at least a monthly sync up with your managers to kind of go over what’s going on with enablement and how we can help each other right. I had a dedicated Slack channel with my frontline managers I had every, every third Thursday, we would have a meeting where we would sync sometimes that meeting, we were having a lot of things sometimes we just chatted about life, you know, but it was super important. If if you know, to have that and to understand that. Talk with your with your sales leaders and say, let’s create a manager playbook. What does being a manager on this floor looks like? Right? Because yes, being a sales manager has a very specific guideline and playbook. But what does that mean for the culture of that Salesforce? And add that as part of the onboarding and add that in, like month two, and and remind that and do versions of that, you know, to a one three, a one in an Escale where another guy and make sure that you give them the time because it’s gonna have a great payback? Oh, that’s, yeah,

Devon McDermott 33:04
that’s awesome. And also, you’re like, you know, you get to teach them about the program a little bit, because I feel like that’s always really hard. But no, that’s fantastic. Um, I know, we are basically out of time, but we do have a question that came through from one of my amazing former team members, Nipkow Meyer. So Nick wants to know, I’d love to know how you became a team leader, meaning how did you jump the gap from IC to people leader?

Adriana Romero 33:32
That’s a great one. And I think it’s something that you build, Nick, you know, I remember, it’s something that you ask for, and you say, A, when I’m an enabler of one, I’m going to do all these things. But if we’re growing, my team needs to grow. So you always have to come from that growth perspective. Coming up people leader, it’s something that you also I would say, just as we enable people enable yourself like if you feel that there’s an area or a skill that you would like to learn more empathy, more, you know, emotional intelligence, more time management, learn, get a mentor, who was a people manager, who can tell you what are the best practices, take a course read a book, I would say the most important piece of being a people manager is that you’re going to spend a lot of time in coaching, and, and kind of managing the human side of the person, right? If you think about, you know, one on ones, one on ones are not so much about. Let’s talk about the business. Let’s talk about the person development plans. Where do you want to go with your career? So getting to know the person for what they are and what they want to be? I think it’s one of the biggest things that when I have had great leaders, they have done that, right. So and I would say, I’m a very much sink or swim person. So along with say, you want to become a people leader, just start growing that team, Nick, that’s it, just start to start asking for that headcount. Right.

Devon McDermott 34:57
Yes. And I do love to like constantly reading, learning, finding things that are interesting to you that can help you level up enroll like love, like sales methodologies, I get real geeky about it. And it’s something that’s exciting to me. And I’m always trying to find opportunities to teach back. But the more you can read, learn, there are so many great communities for enablers that didn’t exist, even, you know, five years ago,

Adriana Romero 35:25
two years ago, you know, let’s, let’s think about it. And I was just gonna say join us enablement, there’s so many great people managers there that are coaches and they’re willing to coach you and that are, you know, so much experience in that group that I would definitely say, Nick, you know, you know, Devin, get her to get you into trust enablement get you to to introduce you to some people, and I am sure you will find a great starting point.

Devon McDermott 35:51
I couldn’t agree more. I love it. I think this is the perfect place for us to wrap up for now. But I’m going to call this part one Adriana, because I want to keep talking to you. I have so many more questions for you. But first, thank you so much for chatting with us sharing all of your recipes for success. Very quickly. You mentioned trust enablement, but where else can folks find you to continue learning from you and to access you for enablement help in the future?

Adriana Romero 36:18
Well, thank you so much for having me here. If you join trust enablement, I’m there I try to you know, be as engaged as I can go. You can always message me LinkedIn is always a great way. I am as I am Adriana Romero, so just look for me request to connect and say, Hey, I saw you with Devin having that great chat and would love to connect and you know, seek some of your opinions or brainstorm. I’m always open for that. So thank you for the opportunity. I love being here and let’s definitely do part two.

Devon McDermott 36:45
Yes, I can’t wait. And for those of you currently listening or listening in the future, if you are or have ever been an enablement team of one and want to share your experience with us reach out you can also find me in the trust enablement community and on LinkedIn. Adriana, thank you again, and thanks everyone for joining us.