Mark Eckstein
Revenue Enablement Manager, Bizzabo
How do you define enablement?
I define Revenue Enablement as the organization of actions to make all revenue generating employees more efficient and effective; basically, how can we increase productivity and results while also improving the employee experience.
Describe your current role.
My role and department of two supports organizational enablement, Sales and Customer Success. For some tangible examples:
Develop, manage and own onboarding for all roles, as well as the ramp tracking, benchmarking and reporting
Co-manage a cross functional task force that's responsible for our company successfully achieving a primary organizational objective
Own, facilitate and manage employee training
Design, develop and manage tools and processes which enable our revenue organization to scale successfully
Briefly walk through your journey to get where you are today.
I studied business in college, but it was very broad studies and nothing that really prepared me or aided me specifically for enablement. My career began as an Analyst at a fin-tech company helping Investor Relations Officers understand what's happening in the financial markets and how to best drive ROI on their time.
I was noticed for some creative initiatives I designed and developed that were far outside my general responsibilities, which led the company to offer me the opportunity to build out the company's first Enablement function.
I was grateful for the opportunity, but knew nothing about what Enablement was or could be at the time. So I threw myself into learning as much as I could on anything related to Enablement. I experimented constantly, focused on what was working and haven't looked back since.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
As we are all well aware, Covid has created very obvious industry winners and losers. Some companies saw massive demand for their product due to the 'New Normal' which Covid created, while other companies saw their entire market shut down and were facing grim prospects.
My proudest accomplishment was to have the opportunity to play a small part in enabling our company to pivot from one of those grim potentialities to the highly prosperous other path. We sold software into a market of in-person events which ceased to exist in a matter of weeks. Through bold decisions, followed by massive collaboration, creativity and fast action we innovated a differentiated solution to a massive market problem paving the way for a new category of event software; Hybrid events.
What’s your advice to someone getting started in enablement?
First, start by doing extensive discovery to understand the current state. Understand your organization's top objectives, individual stakeholders you'll be supporting, the problems that exist and what are leadership's priorities.
Then, learn as much as you can about the problems you're likely to be focused on solving, the skills and knowledge you'll need to solve them and current best practices for doing so.
Next, align with the organization on what your priorities are, how they support leadership's goals, how you're going to measure and report on progress.
Lastly, experiment, create short feedback loops and be confident, but flexible in your solutions.
Be empathetic, absorb information from everywhere, take proactive steps, communicate constantly, measure everything, and you'll do great!
What are you doing to develop yourself?
I've become an insatiable reader over the past few years, much to my own surprise, so I owe a lot of credit to the great authors whose books I've consumed over the years and turned more than a few into classes I instruct for employee training.
I've listened to every episode of the Sales Enablement Pro podcast and love hearing the stories of other practitioners. I've also learned a ton from my fellow practitioners as a member of the Sales Enablement Society.
Lastly, constant experimentation, iteration and evolution.
Connect with Mark on LinkedIn!