Murtuza Hussain
Sales Enablement Manager, Celonis
How do you define enablement?
I define enablement as the act of preparing, training, and continuing the growth of individuals to be fully equipped for their position and skill set.
Describe your current role.
As the Sales Enablement Manager at Celonis, I am managing the training, enablement, onboarding, and coaching for the North American sales organization. A majority of my efforts are targeted toward ramping the Business Development team. When I'm not onboarding a new class of BDRs, I spend a lot of time on content creation. Some examples include creating LMS courses, recording training podcast episodes, and updating our sales playbook.
Briefly walk through your journey to get where you are today.
I started at Celonis as one of the first BDRs in North America and along the way found a passion for coaching new hires. My manager & mentor at the time, Ryan Gold, had created a strong foundation for onboarding and promoted me to Team Lead to make training, onboarding and enablement a more structured, robust, and scalable process. A year into being Team Lead, I stepped up into the Sales Enablement Manager position, under the management of Richard Dunkel, to take on more responsibility and further develop the BDR onboarding and ramp process.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
Recently, creating and hosting an internal company podcast is one of my proudest moments. A lot of my colleagues talked about listening to podcasts during their workouts, breaks, commutes so it inspired me to make one for internal training purposes. I interview peers who excel in a certain skillset (sourcing, account research, social selling, etc.) and release 15-20 minute episodes weekly, company-wide. So far it has great reception and new hires love learning from them.
I remember staying up until midnight teaching myself how to edit through Youtube videos and trying to figure out how to work my Blue Yeti microphone! If you're looking for a fun, interactive way to teach content to reps...highly recommend getting into the podcast game.
What’s your advice to someone getting started in enablement?
Enable important topics in 5 different ways. Everyone's brain works differently and having different avenues to learn skills and best practices have been a major part of my success with my teams. Whether it's through an in-person session, an LMS course, listening to a podcast episode, or watching a video on the topic, make sure there are options. Be creative and have fun.
What are you doing to develop yourself?
Paint. It puts me in a meditative state and helps flex my creative muscles. It's my favorite thing to do when I'm not at Celonis.
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