
Meredith Dowd
Director of Sales Excellence at BetterCloud
How do you define enablement?
In the simplest terms, enablement is empowering people to do their jobs successfully and ensuring they have the skills, resources, and tools in order to do so.
Describe your current role.
At BetterCloud, I am the Director of Sales Excellence. I am responsible for all sales excellence efforts; GTM enablement across our scaling GTM teams (SDR, Account Executive, Account Manager, Solutions Engineer, Partners, Customer Success), revenue operations, sales strategy, and I additionally serve as a revenue leader for all major cross-functional initiatives.
Briefly share your career path.
My career began in recruiting and then sales. After carrying an individual quota for a few years, I was tapped to build a BDR team from the ground up. In founding that team, so much of the work went into enabling our BDRs - skills, resources, tools. Shortly after standing up the team, my role expanded to include owning enablement for the entire rapidly growing sales team.
After that, I took a brief 2 year sidestep to lead mergers and acquisitions integrations for the company I was at as they went on a very quick M&A spree (acquiring 5 companies in 12 months). In that role, I learned so much more outside of the revenue function and learned a ton about those other businesses in a short time, giving me a much wider perspective than previous roles.
I found after all of the M&A work I did, I missed working with the sales org, and I wanted to get back to a smaller company I could really help to scale. That ultimately landed me at BetterCloud leading our Sales Excellence efforts.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
Am I allowed to have 2? :) (Yes, yes you are!)
1) Our team landing on Selling Power's 50 Best Companies to Sell For in 2020 list alongside some AMAZING companies #bestisthestandard
2) Joining BetterCloud and standing up the foundational layer for the sales org as we scaled from a team of around 20 in the sales org to a team of closer to 100. My first two milestones were standing up an onboarding program and standing up an ongoing product release enablement process. As a result, we have now had 30 onboarding classes (in just shy of 2 years) go through the program and complete it 100% successfully. That program has led to 63% reduction in time to first meeting (for SDRs) and a 44% decrease in time to first sale for our sales team.
What’s your advice to someone getting started in enablement?
Network, attend virtual events, get involved in your local sales enablement group (WiSE, Sales Enablement Society, etc.). Take on a project in your current role that helps to enable someone to do their job more successfully - can you teach someone a skill, give them a resource, etc., to do their job better?
What are you doing to develop yourself?
I have 2 hours blocked every Friday AM from 7:30-9:30 AM for professional development. I spend this time reading, listening to podcasts, and sometimes taking vendor demos of new sales enablement tools to keep a pulse on the market. I challenge myself to get a little better each day and I hold myself accountable to my development time block.
Connect with Meredith on LinkedIn!
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