Fiamma Jean-Baptiste
Director, Sales Enablement at Electric
How do you define enablement?
I define Enablement as the strategic, collaborative discipline, designed to increase predictable sales results by providing consistent, scalable services that allow customer-facing professionals and their managers to maximize every buyer interaction at each stage of the customer’s journey.
Describe your current role.
I am the Director of Sales Enablement at Electric. I have the privilege of formally standing up the Enablement function here with the goal of ensuring our client facing teams are developing the skills and knowledge needed to be successful.
Briefly walk through your journey to get where you are today.
Like many Sales Enablement folks, I started in Sales myself. After spending a few years in the Retail channel at T-Mobile, I was promoted to a B2B AE role where I was fortunate to have found a bit of success. I realized early that my externally hired peers weren't finding the same success. I'd love to tell you I was a wizard at sales but the truth is, I had a "cheat sheet" so to speak. Working in our retail channel gave me an opportunity to become intimate with our ICP, value prop and tools.
Our B2B sales training at the time didn't address those areas, which is why I believed my externally hired peers were failing. As a result, I wrote an email to the company's CEO and told him that I wanted to be a part of the training team - he didn't respond. I assume he shared the email with the right people because a few months later I was tapped by my leadership and was encouraged to apply to apply for a training role.
That was six years ago and I've spent the majority of my career in Enablement since.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
The accomplishment I'm most proud of is building our Sales Academy. Prior to my joining, we didn't have a formal onboarding program. As the new Sales Enablement Director, it was my responsibility to ensure we build a program that will reduce sales new hire time to productivity.
In my experience, many sales onboarding programs are often too templatized and fail to address individual weaknesses; they emphasize corporate processes rather than critical sales skills, lack clear assessments to predict likelihood of future success, and are ignored or even contradicted by sales managers.
In just two months, in partnership with Sales leadership and cross-functional teams, we developed our first iteration of our Sales Academy which is designed to accelerate new hire sales readiness by assessing the new hire’s ability to execute essential activities in the sales process.
Our first cohort is still underway so we'll have to follow-up to see what the results are.
What’s your advice to someone getting started in enablement?
Tap into your network! Enablement 100% is a team sport so leverage the folks that are in the role to learn and collaborate with them. Join your local Sales Enablement networking groups (Sales Enablement Society, WiSE) and Slack Communities (The Enablement Squad).
What are you doing to develop yourself?
I am pursuing Sales Enablement Pro Certification but what's been truly invaluable in my development, is speaking to my peers on a regular basis. I currently have three monthly calls on the books to learn from some of the most brilliant Sales Enablement Professionals in the business.
Connect with Fiamma on LinkedIn!