Episode 164: Ashton Williams on Building an Enablement Function From Scratch Sales Enablement PRO Podcast

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I’m 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 Ashton Williams join us. Ashton, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Ashton Williams: Thanks, Shawnna, I’m so happy to be here. My name is Ashton Williams, I’m currently the Revenue Enablement Manager at Ada. Ada helps companies scale their CX using AI-powered automation. I was their first enablement hire, so I’ve been building from the ground up.

SS: Extremely excited to have you joining us, and that sounds like a really exciting initiative over there at ADA. As you said, you were the first enablement hire and have been responsible for building the function from the ground up. I would love to get your perspective on your experience, what are some of the key building blocks of enablement that are needed in order to create a really successful enablement function within an organization?

AW: Oh, such a good question. I think I always start by saying you really need to fail fast. I know that’s not a building block of enablement, but so much of what we do comes from learning a company, learning a culture, learning how that team needs to grow in the strategy. First, I say try things.

One of the things that I started with was really putting together what I call an MVP, or the minimum viable product. What’s that one thing I can get out the door really quick and iterate on? If I think about something like onboarding, which was always the first thing at a fast-growth company that you build, we built something really bare-bones and quick. Then we’re able to get data on that, track that, and continue to optimize that as we grew.

I’d also say, be prepared for having a team one day. When you get hired, you’re usually a team of one and you’re not ready when the time comes and you need headcount. You weren’t thinking about them ahead of time, so maybe you didn’t build things accordingly to bring people on board easily, or you’re making that ask a little late in the game when there’s too much going on. I always say future-proof yourself and be ready for a team and assume you’re going to get it.

Then, of course, that partnership with your managers. Your frontline managers especially are going to be your best allies in building anything. In any enablement function, whether you’re taking organization from good to great or starting from nothing, those have to be the cross-functional collaborators you spend time with as well as your product marketing team, if you have one.

SS: Absolutely. I think that’s fantastic. I imagine it’s not all easygoing, especially in the earlier days, so what were some of the biggest challenges that you faced in your journey as you were building out the sales enablement function? Do you have any advice on how you overcame some of them?

AW: Yeah, I’d say for me personally, I came from a large and established company, and I think I really took for granted some of the building blocks that were already there. They had a culture of coaching, they had wide staff, they had programs that were already built, and you didn’t have to spend a ton of time getting buy-in to make change, if that makes sense. The things you were changing were already part of this large ecosystem. For me, I was new to tech, I was new to startup, and being the first enablement hire, I spent a lot of time just educating on what enablement is.

I think the biggest challenge that I faced was really the Sales Ops partnership. At a fast-growth company, especially a new startup, you don’t have a ton of data or historical models to build off of, you’re learning as you go. While you can look at trends, sometimes they’re short-term, dependin