Episode 78: Landing Strategic Initiatives With a Global Enablement Strategy Win Win Podcast

A Gartner study found that organizations prioritizing revenue enablement see a 41 percent increase in revenue attainment per seller. So how can you build an enablement strategy that drives results?Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.




Here to discuss this topic is Anthony Doyle, the director of sales enablement at Turnitin. Thanks for joining us, Anthony. I’d love for you to tell us all about yourself, your background, and your role.




Anthony Doyle: Sure thing. Thanks for having me, Shawnna. My name is Anthony Doyle, I’m the director of sales and development as Shawnna said, at Turnitin.A little bit about myself, I started my career back around 1998 working in the education sector, building interactive multimedia learning materials for education. I started out on the tool side of the game and really building materials and building learning programs for UK institutions.And that was at the time when the VLE space, the virtual learning environment space had just started being created. So I was working on some of the early prototypes and software development for those types of systems. That led me to a sales role for around nine years, and that’s where I really learned my sales craft and my different selling methodologies. I think of solution selling, Milleheim, and those types of frameworks.Through that career, I built a massive knowledge of sales and marketing and went on to lead sales and marketing organizations at various ed tech companies. And what I found at those companies I was doing a lot of enablement. Before enablement was a thing and before it was coined as a type, a term, or a category, I was naturally developing sales teams, developing sales processes, selling systems, and things like that.So that led me to a bit of a consulting career, working with organizations to develop their sales and marketing practices. And then a couple of years ago, I decided I really wanted to get into a long-term role and join an organization where I could have a good tenure with, and be part of something from a longevity perspective, rather than going in and fixing and putting things in and then putting it in the hands of somebody else, to really see the long term development.I’ve been familiar with Turnitin since probably the late nineties. So when Turnitin was first founded, I’ve seen Turnitin grow up as a company and mature. So it was good to join them and get on the other side of that. And now I lead the sales and development practice here at Turnitin, which is part of the RevOps organization here. SS: Anthony, as you mentioned, you have extensive experience in enablement and you also have a very clear vision for your enablement strategy at Turnitin. What are the core components of your strategy and what are the key strategic initiatives you’re focused on driving this year through enablement?




AD: It’s first important to say that when I joined the organization around just under three years ago, this strategy wasn’t what I led with initially. I led by really trying to figure out where the organization was at, what the goals of the org were, and figuring out some of the kind of key gaps initially that we needed to put in place in order then to be able to develop a strategy for the long term.




So we focused initially on some of the competency development and a competency framework around what we wanted to really be driving in terms of our sales process and the skills underneath that. And then at the beginning of this year, I got together with my team ahead of the sales kickoff to really develop the sales and neighborhood strategy that would take us from 2024 through to 2026.




And where we’ve landed with that, is we’ve got three pillars in the strategy. The first of those is: align and engage. And that pillar is around really aligning with the differen