Michelle Greener Goodman, Director of Revenue Enablement at TeleSign
How do you define enablement?
A strategic, actionable, empathetic and ongoing function that helps customer facing teams become and continue to be revenue ready.
Describe your current role.
I am the Director of Revenue Enablement at TeleSign, where I work strategically with our Go To Market leaders on creating meaningful and actionable programs that help drive revenue and align with our company goals. I am in charge of planning and producing our global Sales Kick Off and building and executing our sales onboarding program. This year we'll be growing our enablement team to support different GTM functions (Customer Success, Sales, MarketDev, Solutions Engineers, etc.)!
Walk through your journey to get where you are today.
I spent a decade in customer facing roles, including sales, account management and customer success. What I loved most about my time in that phase in my career was the opportunity to build relationships with prospects and customers and set them up for success. I enjoyed being their coach, supporter and strategic partner. I also realized how much I enjoyed strategizing, creating, operationalizing and coaching on processes that created a better workplace for myself, leaders and peers.
I remember seeing a job description for an enablement role and in that moment I wholeheartedly knew that this was the path for me. To be honest, I found it really challenging to make my way into enablement. Since I had no "formal" experience I did not allow myself to believe that this was something I could pursue. I was a decade into a career path where I knew I could continue to find success, but I knew it no longer fulfilled me. I turned to The Artist's Way - an amazing workbook that helped me rediscover my creativity and ultimately helped change my career. I spent so much time limiting my belief system that I didn't realize the level of skills I had that matched enablement roles. So I applied my presentation, listening, process, operational and relationship building skills to reinvent myself and enter the world of enablement.
Today, I am excited to have created an opportunity for myself, and to have executive support I need, to build an enablement team and function that will support our GTM teams at TeleSign.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
My proudest accomplishment is planning, producing and executing a Global 3 day virtual SKO. Our GTM team was hungry to get together in person, but since I couldn't make that a reality, I was committed to creating the best virtual experience possible for our teams. Leveraging Hopin, SKO was a regional and role based event, where we hosted 60 speakers (both, internal and external) and had 36 live sessions, yet we still found a way to create unity and one vision across our global company. Every speaker (executives and individual contributors alike) had rehearsals and tech run throughs. Together, we worked through their presentations, timing, and aligning on messaging. The hard work paid off, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. We're now taking what we started and applying follow up sessions to support our GTM teams' continued development and growth.
What’s your advice to someone getting started in enablement?
Build your network. Connect with enablement professionals, ask how they got started. There's a ton of people putting out great content around enablement- read, join webinars, be active. Know what makes you passionate about this field. There are so many avenues to take, so knowing what you're interested in will be a helpful way to get you started.
What are you doing to develop yourself?
I join webinars, take courses, read content on LinkedIn, connect with game changers in the field, and ask them how they got to where they are. I call on my peers, network and friends and we pick each others' brains. The advice I shared to get started is virtually the same advice I continue to follow.
Connect with Michelle on LinkedIn!