Irina Soriano
Head of Enablement at Seismic
How do you define enablement?
To keep it simple: "Equip your customer-facing teams with everything they need at the right point in time so they can be successful in their roles". For me this means four things:
Provide ongoing and scalable Enablement services such as your onboarding program or continuous skill development paths as well as ad-hoc Enablement.
Manage the Enablement tech stack to ensure technology is breaking down silos between customer-facing teams.
Design, develop, and distribute Enablement content and drive collaboration with Marketing on assets provided to customer-facing employees.
Implement go-to-market processes and drive strong accountability.
Describe your current role.
I am the Head of Enablement at Seismic, the industry’s leading enablement solution and storytelling platform. I oversee Seismic’s global Enablement team supporting all customer-facing roles: sales, marketing, customer success, and channel partners.
Briefly describe your career path.
I started in various sales roles, progressed to leading large regional sales teams and eventually found my way into Enablement. I have lived and worked across different countries in EMEA, continued my career in Asia-Pacific while being based in Singapore building an APAC-wide enablement & learning department and moved to the US 6 years ago. I now live in New York City. During my career across different continents I had the pleasure to work with and mentor females from various backgrounds and have made it my passion to make a significant contribution to narrowing (and maybe one day closing) the gender gap in the workplace. If you wish to be part of my journey and support this important cause, please follow me on Instagram (@irina.soriano) and/or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/irinasoriano.is/).
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
While 2020 brought its challenges, I focused on what I can do to give back to the community and wrote a book that will be published early in 2021 about a new, fresh perspective on how we can enable the next wave of professional females to be strongly positioned to drive gender parity at all levels across organizations.
What’s your advice to someone getting started in enablement?
Build a strong network, give back to the community by sharing ideas, thoughts, experiences, and be an active contributor in public Enablement conversation. This community is special and will allow anyone exploring the career path of Enablement to develop quickly.
What are you doing to develop yourself?
Keep surrounding myself with skilled Enablement professionals and aspiring women that are an inspiration to others around them. Having people in my real-life and virtual network that bring positivity is very important to me.
I also read a lot; studies, research, publications etc. to make sure I stay up to date on current issues and developments.