Episode 01 - Amanda Whiteside - Building Companywide Credibility in Revenue Enablement

Amanda Whiteside is a trailblazer for Enablement at Freshworks and has made significant strides in transforming the field while championing female empowerment.  She highlights the importance of building credibility for enablement to secure organizational support and stresses the need to align initiatives with business outcomes.  Amanda also recognizes the unique challenges of global enablement, emphasizing the importance of prioritization and tailoring content to different teams.  She believes leveraging technology and AI can significantly enhance the enablement process and underscores the critical role of collaboration between marketing and enablement.  For aspiring leaders, she advises focusing on understanding stakeholder pain points to drive success.

With over 15 years of experience driving transformative initiatives for Fortune 100 companies, Amanda is currently the Global Vice President of Revenue Enablement at Freshworks, the leading provider of Cloud-based Customer Engagement software. In this role, she leads high-impact teams to create customer-centric solutions that deliver measurable growth.

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Chapters

• 0:04 Revenue Society Stories From Trenches
• 11:35 Revenue Through Strategic Alignment
• 15:38 Building Next-Gen Revenue Enablement

Transcript

Norf: 0:04

Welcome to the Revenue Enablement Society's Stories from the Trenches, where enablement practitioners share their real-world experiences. Get a scoop on what's happening inside revenue enablement teams across the global RES community. Each segment of Stories from the Trenches shares the good, the bad and the ugly practices of corporate revenue enablement initiatives. Learn what worked and what didn't work and how obstacles were eliminated by enablement teams and go-to-market leadership. And join me, your host, Ppaul Norford, for casual conversations about the wide and varied profession of revenue enablement, where there's never a one-size-fits-all solution. Hi and welcome. We're back after the summer of 2024 with a brand new series of the Revenue Enablement Society podcast Stories from the Trenches. You'll also note a slightly different voice from the one that you may be used to.

Norf: 1:06

My name is Paul Norford and many know me as Norf and I have the distinct pleasure of being your RES Stories from the Trenches podcast host. Before we get into it this week, I want to personally and profusely thank Paul Butterfield for starting off the podcast. That has become a bit of a movement in our revenue enablement world and, as he hangs up his RES podcast microphone, I have the pleasure of continuing the great work started, having been a big fan and a guest on the podcast myself. As far as I know, we are the only revenue enablement podcast by enablers for enablers, and we search far and wide looking for enablement practitioners talking about what they're doing, how and why they're doing things differently and what outcomes they're achieving as they adapt to the constantly changing world of sales and revenue enablement.

Norf: 1:52

One of my favorite things is to learn something new with every guest we bring on and to share that with you. I am really, really excited today. I know that this is the first Revenue Enablement Society Stories from the Trench's podcast that I've done, but I am super, super excited today to have Amanda Whiteside on. I know you're super busy, Amanda, but I'm so pleased that you managed to spend a bit of time and you've joined me today on the podcast. It's good to have you here.

Amanda: 2:18

So excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Paul.

Norf: 2:22

Of course, absolutely. So first and foremost, before we get into the dinner question and that will all become clear a little bit later can you just let me know who you are, what you do and how you've got into enablement? What's your story?

Amanda: 2:37

Yeah, of course. So my name's Amanda Whiteside. I am the Global Vice President of Revenue Enablement at Freshworks and I lead initiatives to optimize revenue generating functions across sales, customer success and partner teams. Previous to this, I was at Amazon, where I spent six years of my time both on the retail side of the house as well as at Amazon Web Services.

Norf: 2:58

So your role, I believe, is new right, You've just been promoted to it.

Amanda: 3:02

Yes, I started in a very traditional sales enablement capacity. Freshworks had a couple of predecessors before me that was doing the more traditional version of enablement and it was really my role to come in and transform it. So I'm looking forward to telling you a little bit more about how I did that.

Norf: 3:18

Fantastic and, of course, congratulations on your new role. I think it's great.

Amanda: 3:23

Thank you. It's always nice to be recognized in the enablement community. We get a tough time, so I take this as a badge of honor for the broader community. For sure, yes, do that for us.

Norf: 3:35

Fly that flag, fly that flag!! So, as we were preparing for this, there was a question that I asked you, which is, and if I just set the scene, you're having a chef come in to prepare dinner for you and you're permitted three guests around your table, can you tell me who those guests would be and why?

Amanda: 3:51

Yes, and I love this question, and it was a very easy one. For those of you that may know me, I really believe in female empowerment, so I would love to have a dinner with three female powerhouses. One would be Meryl Streep. I don't think there's any explanation required, but she is the epitome of versatility and grace, and I think she would be a wonderful dinner guest to share her experience in Hollywood and also add some humor to the table.

Norf: 4:16

I concur yeah.

Amanda: 4:18

Jane Fonda. She's unapologetic force of nature who's done it all. If anyone has seen any information or background about her. She's done acting, activism and fitness. She's done everything, so I would love to have her there. And then, of course, Michelle Obama the one and only she is a symbol of strength, grace and leadership, and there's really no one like her, so I think that would be a pretty good dinner conversation.

Norf: 4:44

I think you're right.

Norf: 4:48

I think that would be a pretty good dinner conversation. I think you're right. I think you would probably have to have them back again because I don't think they'd get through everything they wanted to talk through Fantastic Brilliant.

Norf: 4:54

So could you just tell us a little bit about your sales enablement journey and I use the word sales enablement loosely because of what we're going to be talking about in today's podcast. So what's your sales enablement journey? How did you get into it? I'm sure it wasn't you kind of thought okay, I'm 16 years of age, I'm going to become a sales enablement professional. What was your journey?

Amanda: 5:18

Yeah, I am proud of the fact that I've taken on many different job roles and different job families, and I'm very lucky to have a company like Amazon that has allowed me to do that.

Amanda: 5:31

You'll see, from my background, I've done everything from sales to product management to broader leadership roles and program management, and I've really learned a lot about understanding different functions, all within the discipline or background of customer experience, and so enablement is more of a new function for me. Over the last couple of years, I had some curiosity about how I could directly impact frontline sellers and really impact customer experience from that angle, and so I don't sit here and pretend that I have 20 years experience, like more of our tenured enablement professionals, but what I believe that brings me is the ability to be more disruptive and really think differently about how this function could continue to evolve and be different. And so, coming into Freshworks, I took on this sales enablement position that really needed a bit of a refresh. It was traditionally known as really just supporting our sellers, giving them playbooks, and it was very much what was on the shelf they would get. Nothing was really customized, and so I like to use the term peanut butter spread, so it was the same for everyone.

Norf: 6:35

I happen to like peanut butter.

Amanda: 6:37

I like it too. So, yeah, it took us on a bit of a journey to really think about how could we make this function much more impactful. We also struggled a little bit with enablement just being wildly respected across the organization. So I had to do a bit of a brand pick me up for this entire organization and really give them back the credibility and recognition that they deserved. Mm, hmm.

Amanda: 7:00

And so we built out something called revenue enablement that if you look at Gartner, there's a whole bunch of resources that really tell you from thought leadership that this is the way to go, and it can include a whole plethora of different sub functions.

Amanda: 7:15

And really what I did at the time was go and just say, ok, what is going to work most for Freshworks in this state and time?

Amanda: 7:23

And so we picked up a couple of different ones traditional sales enablement as it was, but lifting it up, partner enablement is something that we brought into my organization as well as sales programs, which is really the whole model of bringing a new product launch to market in kind of a T90 motion, so really preparing everyone involved for any new product launch so that you hit revenue from day one.

Amanda: 7:49

And then we built a whole content team, so we needed to take content generation seriously and we needed to build curriculums for specific job families, so we built a very dedicated specialized team of learning designers. And then, last but not least, we built a go-to-market tooling team, and so this team was responsible for taking all of our tools today as we know them, across sales tech and mar tech and really build them in a way that was a more holistic seller and customer experience on top of the CRM, and make sure that they connected they weren't just point solutions and that has facilitated and expedited a lot of our journey for how we build a better experience for sellers go away and figure it out to actually an entire end-to-end system where you have everybody involved in creating their own elements of sales enablement, all orchestrated and overseen by you.

Norf: 8:56

Do you think that that is a common practice in the sales enablement world, or the revenue enablement world we should call it now?

Amanda: 9:04

I haven't seen it, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and if there's anyone who's trying to do something similar, I would love to hear from them, because this has really been a bit of a quest an independent quest, along with my team and the support of Freshworks but it's difficult. We continue to be misunderstood and in some places people have a very distinct opinion of what sales enablement is and they bring that with them. Particularly if you engage with a new sales leader that comes into the organization, they have a very strong opinion of what they've experienced and what has worked for them. So it's been a real journey to help the team and leadership really understand where we're going, and it's an everyday job. So, you know, it's really important to help them really get a sense of what we're trying to deliver and why.

Norf: 9:52

You hit the nail on the head beautifully. Actually, a lot of new dare I say seasoned sales leaders do have a specific perspective on. Well, in my experience, this has been sales enablement. All it is is you're just a training team. How do you respond to that?

Amanda: 10:09

Yeah, it's been a challenge, but I also empathize with sales leaders because I think they need to have an enablement person as their right-hand person as part of their extended team.

Amanda: 10:20

So the way I designed the sales enablement sub-function within revenue enablement is that I created a dotted line organization so that each of the regional sales leaders would have a local enablement person in office with them.

Amanda: 10:35

Example UK and Ireland sales leader. There would be a UK and Ireland enablement leader and they would be part of their team and really deeply understand their business and what needed to happen. That individual then really worked across all of the job families within that region and was very deeply connected to their business but also was responsible for rolling up and rolling down all of the things that my organization was delivering. So it helped me really get the information on what we were doing out and to each of the SEALs leaders in a way that they felt supported on an everyday basis. Now that doesn't mean we don't do ad hoc stuff. The UK and Ireland SEALs leader may decide that he or she wants to do X type of training and we need to accommodate for that, but I think it gives them the daily support that they feel like they need, while we can continue to build some of this strategic kind of process and framework.

Norf: 11:35

Love that, Just for maybe some people that are listening. Amanda, this is great. This sounds wonderful. This really does sound like revenue enablement utopia. How long has it taken you to get to this point?

Amanda: 11:48

Yeah, I've been at Freshworks for a year just over a year, I think, maybe 14 months and one of the first things I did and I would recommend this to any enablement leader that was going in fresh to their organization is to audit the current state of the business, as well as, obviously, from the sales and skills gaps that are around today, as well as the current state of the organization and its ability to support. So within my first 30 days, I audited the team and it was a very, very, very small team. At that time it was a few folks and really I put a huge proposal together to say, if you're really serious about enablement, this is what I want to build and this is what I think is going to be high impact for Freshworks. Now, in order to get that buy-in and to get that headcount investment, it's important for you to align to business outcomes. Otherwise, you're just building an organization that does training and for the sake of building an organization in many cases.

Amanda: 12:43

And so I had to be very articulate about what was going to change for the business, and that was a combination of win rates, conversion rates, and we looked at a framework of not just driving skill but also will and being able to assess those on a monthly basis. We looked at seller level competencies, we looked at quota attainment and we started to build a project level inspection every month and every quarter about our sellers and so that allowed us to really track the impact that we were making and then report that to the business. And as we continue to drive success, we continue to unlock greater investment and greater support from leadership greater investment and greater support from leadership.

Norf: 13:30

So what you've effectively created is you've audited what's going on currently with the revenue enablement team. Let's use the new vernacular now. You have aligned your outcomes to the business outcomes, so that is in perfect lockstep. How do you then convince the stakeholders that the outcomes will deliver what you've envisaged?

Amanda: 13:50

Yeah, this is where your systems and processes and tools come into play, because a lot of what I believe enablement needs to drive is input metrics.

Amanda: 13:59

So, if you consider your output metrics and often the way the best way to think about input is, if you want to get a six pack and that's your output, you should do a whole bunch of sit ups, which would be your input, so that's a nice way to remember it.

Amanda: 14:13

So, for input metrics, I really wanted to make sure that we had those very well articulated and measured across the business. So, for example, if you're looking at something like conversational intelligence and you launch a new product so for us it was Freddie AI we really wanted to understand how many times were sellers talking about our new co-pilot product on these calls, and so that would be a direct impact metric that we would want to try to drive and improve. And so when you can identify those specific metrics, it gives you an opportunity to be able to be very tangible about your impact. But it takes time to make sure that you've correctly found these metrics and that you A know how to measure them and then B can report on them, and I don't say that lightly. There's parts of the job today. That reporting is not always perfect and it takes a lot of work to try and join the dots together, but that is the best way in which you can get those real, tangible impact metrics to tie to the initiatives that you're driving and really convince those stakeholders.

Norf: 15:14

Absolutely so. How many cycles have you had to go through to get to where you are at the moment?

Amanda: 15:20

Yeah, it's been a journey and you know, please, please, you know, hear me when I say it's not perfect.

Amanda: 15:29

I just very much believe in the vision and the mission and the direction that we're going in and I think this is where we want and we should all aspire. At least, if it works for your business, if this resonates, this should be a direction that you should at least pilot and test because it, when it does resonate, it really resonates and I can see, even in my leadership today, them go, them really saying, wow, this, this is the impact that I was looking for our training to deliver and for our sellers to see and feel. And so it takes more work than I think traditional enablement teams are staffed for. That's another challenge. We've noticed that a lot of the work is highly programmatic. Not all enablement functions have kind of a program management function or folks that know how to do really good program management, and sometimes data isn't always available. Often that's held by our neighbors in RevOps, so you've got to make some friends over there to make sure that you can get the right dashboards built in the right way possible. So it takes time.

Norf: 16:44

I wouldn't know the number of cycles, but it's definitely a quest worth going on. If anyone's considering it, give additional responsibilities to your revenue enablement team to then go off and kind of now figure out what's next or go and figure out what could be next.