21 min
Episode 109: Avner Baruch on Building an Effective Enablement Function From Scratch Sales Enablement PRO Podcast
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- Business
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs.
Today, I’m excited to have Avner from WalkMe join us. Avner, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.
Avner Baruch: Hi, thanks Shawnna for the introduction. First, I’d like to start by thanking you all for putting this together and for having me here. I think it’s a great honor and opportunity to be able to help and contribute to the entire enablement community, especially coming from a non-traditional approach, which I’ll happily share more of as we go.
So, a little bit about myself, I’m actually an electrical engineer and I feel it’s important to share that. And you know, that brings me to the next point. Unlike the traditional journey, I did not start my career in the sales space. As a matter of fact, I had nothing to do with sales but for a very specific reason, I decided to shift my career to the training space which later turned into coaching and sales enablement. My journey, that includes a few milestones if you’re boarding milestones, but altogether I was able to establish sales enablement functions from the ground up from absolutely nothing for hyper-growth companies such as Incapsula, which later turned, or was acquired by Imperva and over the last two years, WalkMe. And, I always had the privilege to start something from scratch and define and build the foundations rather than resume or replace someone else’s work and over the last 10 years or so I’ve been developing my own approach to sales enablement. Probably that explains why I have been called the nontraditional enablement guy. And as for the current role here at WalkMe, I actually joined WalkMe two years ago. I was brought in to help building and scaling a new sales organization from scratch based on my previous experience with some of the executives here.
At that time when I joined, WalkMe already had a few offices and a very successful and solid footprint in the US but the idea was to expand our footprint and establish a new sales organization that focuses on the international regions with a different sales model geared towards a quick landing followed by data and expansion. The bottom line is I see enablement as a key factor, which expands beyond the traditional training responsibility and onboarding areas. One area in particular, which I’m very fond of is revenue intelligence. In most cases, that falls under BI. But in my opinion, I think that today sales enablement more than ever needs to set foot in that area and become more dominant or at least try to contribute from their experience.
SS: Yeah, I love that. So Avner, tell us a little bit about what your approach is to sales enablement then since it’s nontraditional, I’d love to hear more.
AB: Actually, it’s a combination of a few approaches. First, I’m a hands-on person with a very strong blend of technical and sales skills, given my experience, my technical background, this allows me to wear different hats and that’s basically the secret sauce of my success. Be able to change hats according to whoever you talk to. Either work very closely with product managers, dive into bits and bites of the product, and get a better understanding of what’s our offering. And then when you go back to sales, you just, you know, change hats, play a different place, play a different language.
Sometimes you have to talk high level, sometimes you have to dive into details, but it’s not about features it’s about values. But I think what makes a very successful enablement in today’s environment, a challenging environment, is the ability to talk technical to non-tech people. So, the first approach would be really getting your hands dirty. Be able
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs.
Today, I’m excited to have Avner from WalkMe join us. Avner, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.
Avner Baruch: Hi, thanks Shawnna for the introduction. First, I’d like to start by thanking you all for putting this together and for having me here. I think it’s a great honor and opportunity to be able to help and contribute to the entire enablement community, especially coming from a non-traditional approach, which I’ll happily share more of as we go.
So, a little bit about myself, I’m actually an electrical engineer and I feel it’s important to share that. And you know, that brings me to the next point. Unlike the traditional journey, I did not start my career in the sales space. As a matter of fact, I had nothing to do with sales but for a very specific reason, I decided to shift my career to the training space which later turned into coaching and sales enablement. My journey, that includes a few milestones if you’re boarding milestones, but altogether I was able to establish sales enablement functions from the ground up from absolutely nothing for hyper-growth companies such as Incapsula, which later turned, or was acquired by Imperva and over the last two years, WalkMe. And, I always had the privilege to start something from scratch and define and build the foundations rather than resume or replace someone else’s work and over the last 10 years or so I’ve been developing my own approach to sales enablement. Probably that explains why I have been called the nontraditional enablement guy. And as for the current role here at WalkMe, I actually joined WalkMe two years ago. I was brought in to help building and scaling a new sales organization from scratch based on my previous experience with some of the executives here.
At that time when I joined, WalkMe already had a few offices and a very successful and solid footprint in the US but the idea was to expand our footprint and establish a new sales organization that focuses on the international regions with a different sales model geared towards a quick landing followed by data and expansion. The bottom line is I see enablement as a key factor, which expands beyond the traditional training responsibility and onboarding areas. One area in particular, which I’m very fond of is revenue intelligence. In most cases, that falls under BI. But in my opinion, I think that today sales enablement more than ever needs to set foot in that area and become more dominant or at least try to contribute from their experience.
SS: Yeah, I love that. So Avner, tell us a little bit about what your approach is to sales enablement then since it’s nontraditional, I’d love to hear more.
AB: Actually, it’s a combination of a few approaches. First, I’m a hands-on person with a very strong blend of technical and sales skills, given my experience, my technical background, this allows me to wear different hats and that’s basically the secret sauce of my success. Be able to change hats according to whoever you talk to. Either work very closely with product managers, dive into bits and bites of the product, and get a better understanding of what’s our offering. And then when you go back to sales, you just, you know, change hats, play a different place, play a different language.
Sometimes you have to talk high level, sometimes you have to dive into details, but it’s not about features it’s about values. But I think what makes a very successful enablement in today’s environment, a challenging environment, is the ability to talk technical to non-tech people. So, the first approach would be really getting your hands dirty. Be able
21 min