Starting a new job is always very exciting, but planning what you need to do in the first 90 days will make it even more efficient and fun.


Welcome to another Coffee Break With Pam.

In this video, I talk about how to nail your first 90 days as a new sales enablement manager.

First 30 days: Know the lay of the land and talk to as many people as possible.

Second 30 days: Start showing up at crucial regular meetings and have a basic understanding of who’s who, tools, and processes.

Third 30 days: Create a preliminary plan on what you will do in the next 3-6 months.

The plan may change over time due to the new information you gather, but your objectives will likely stay the same. Be agile and nimble.

As a B2B Marketing Consultant, Author and Speaker, I focus on helping marketers to build marketing and sales alignment. I also help global companies tailor their marketing to a local audience. In addition to my YouTube Channel, I also write blog posts and own my podcast. Check out blog posts and podcast episodes and subscribe to Apple Podcast.

Want to see how I can help you? Schedule a call with me. Let’s talk.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello, welcome to another Coffee Break with Pam. Today I will answer one question, in general, which is three questions, and the question came from Brandon Parent. And let me talk to you about how I met Brandon and what this question is all about in 60 seconds, okay?

Brandon was searching for sales enablement videos on YouTube because he started a new job as a new sales enablement manager on January 4, so congratulations, Brannon. And he was not looking for one or two, like a short video. He was looking for in-depth sales enablement and how-to videos. And somehow, he stumbled onto my YouTube channels after several calls and videos, and he set up a call with me, and we ended up having a great conversation.

He asked me one specific question, what can he do to be a successful sales enablement manager? How can he nail, like, you know, his new job?

What an excellent question. And that’s what I want to talk about today. How to nail your first 90 days. And that’s what I told him. You have a list of things you want to do, which is great, but categorize that list into your first 90 days because your first 90 days will be super critical. And everybody is watching what you do and how you will tackle the challenges and your new job. So I broke down my answer into the first 30 days, the second 30 days, and the last 30 days. So that’s taken from there.

And I told you first things first. The number one thing that you need to do in any new job is open-minded. Make an effort not to have any preconceived notion of how things work in the new company.

Okay, this is very important. Don’t judge.

It’s hard for an Asian lady like me. So be very open-minded and listen and learn. It’s why you need to listen and learn. I have no opinion about it. Just trying to understand who is doing what and how things are done. Okay, so that’s the number one thing is your mentality, be very open-minded about it. And then the objective of the first 30 days is to understand the law of the land. Right? And how do you do that? Talk to as many people as possible. And then introduce yourself, right? Tell people, hey, I’m Brian, and I’m starting a new job. I’m a new sales enablement manager. And also try to learn from others. Talk to them, talk to as many people as possible if your sales enablement job, you probably should talk to as many salespeople as possible.

Also, talk to the product team. Yeah, the marketing functions, and even the sales ops and any other people that, from your perspective, you probably will work with directly and indirectly. So the number one thing is to set one-on-one conversations with as many people as possible. And, of course, given that viewer stakeholders are salespeople. So interview as many salespeople as possible and understand their needs, challenges and desires. And talk to high performers.

There are many salespeople that you need to support.

But there are some that are high-performance. They constantly hit sales quota, talk to them, find out how they close deals and have them walk through in terms of their deal-winning success, right?

So knowing what they do very well can help you to plan in terms of how you’re going to support them better and build rapport with them. So talk to as many people as possible, especially the salespeople. Another thing I suggested a brand and do is understand what content is used by sales at this time, right? And to review the content list, especially the most views, most downloads and most current content, either by products, by industry, verticals by personas, or by purchase funnels.

I know many companies don’t categorize the content by persona, verticals, or purchase funnel.

Still, if you review the content, you should put the different content, especially popular content, in different categories. And that will help you to determine what content can be used, or you can make suggestions to the salespeople. Another thing I think is very important to understand in the first 30 days, in addition to talking to the salespeople and other people you may work with, is the sales organization structure, the sales methodology and the processes.

For example, the sales organization might be structured by territories, or different verticals probably structure them. So understanding how the sales organization is structured can help you determine how you will create content to support them. Does that make sense? So if they are done by territory, you probably wouldn’t do your content by territory. Still, if different industries structure them, you probably can look into the content by different industries to help them out.

So that’s the first 30 days to understand the lay of the land, talk to as many people as possible, and introduce yourself, right? In the second month, what you need to do you start, you need to start showing up on some regular calls. Right? You know, there are some calls you probably need to attend, find out what they are, and also understand who schools, tools and processes.

So let me talk about that a little bit more. Number one is, can you sit on a sales call?

Often, the sales team has weekly huddle meetings, which you can attend initially. Also, they start talking about the challenges and the count game plans, and then you can start connecting the dots and trying to understand what you can do to support them. Okay, attending a sales call, from my perspective, is super, super important. You must be part of the team if you are a marketer supporting sales. Another thing I think is important, and the second 30 days is to review the sales dashboard. And it depends. Many sales organization has very simple sales dashboard, some have very complex ones, and they measure many metrics, but in general, are we meeting a sales target? Okay, that’s number one.

The second thing is, do we have enough opportunities in the pipeline? And the third is, what is the closure rate of sales? Right? What are some of the important dashboards that salespeople are reviewing? Make sure you understand that, learn as much as possible about losing and winning sales, like the lost deals. Try to understand the reason behind the last deals and winning deals. So review the dashboard. And the other one is, in the second month, after talking to many peoples? And after understanding who is who and what kind of process your company follows, you probably can start identifying and prior and, and, and, and see some of the gaps.

So know what some of the gaps will impede you from doing your job.

Try to write those down and see what you can do to address them, either with your direct managers or other people working on some of the processes. Does that make sense? To identify the gap, see what they are, and identify what you can do, especially the gaps that will impact your job. What can you do to remove that? So another thing I think it’s very important is to learn the existing processes and platforms.

Don’t make any changes in the first 90 days. And try to learn even though the process can be cumbersome and manual, trying to understand what that is, trying to follow the process, make the changes later or make the recommendation later. But learn, try to learn the process.

Learning existing processes and tools is very critical. Very important.

You should know how to use the CRM tool, right? Understand how they pull the dashboard, understand how they track the metrics, understand how the sales use the CRM to send out maybe the customized email, for example, right?

So know your CRM tools and also understand how you’re going to use them and how salespeople use them. So that’s pretty much on the second month, you start showing up on some of the regular calls and have a solid understanding of who’s who. And you also can use the tools and processes that are currently established. So that’s the second month.

The last 30 days are different from the third 30 days, and you should have a preliminary plan on what you will do.

Because you have only been there for less than 90 days, you will not have a comprehensive plan. You won’t. Okay. So it would be best if you had a preliminary plan on what are the things that you’re going to focus on. Based on the information you have gathered up to now out? Does that make sense? And the reality that I want to share with you is once you have that preliminary plan, you will notice within the next three to six months, after the 90 days, your plan will change because you have added more information you have gathered. It would help if you were agile and nimble. I want to make sure everybody understands agile and nimble don’t mean a lack of focus.

That means your job will still be chaotic occasionally, but that doesn’t mean you have no focus. All right, there are things you know, like you still need to do. Suppose you say your objectives nicely. That means the priorities probably need to be shifted. Does that make sense? So when you have a preliminary plan, remember that it will change, and you must be nimble. And some focuses need to be shifted. But you can still gather more information.

Your preliminary plan needs to be thrown away. You need to create a new one.

In general, I have seen what can happen with a different marketing manager, especially a new marketing manager that just came to the job or a new sales enablement manager. They know what they need to do. They have a sense of it. And your gut tells you that and sticks to it. Okay. Like, for example, we need to provide better content to salespeople. Okay, that’s universal across multiple industries and companies. And the approach is how and how will you make that happen?

But the objective or the direction? Stay the same? Does that make sense? So Bill, your initial plan, that’s number one. The second thing is getting buy-in from your direct manager and the sales team. Because you are enabling sales. So whatever you do, the recipient them, the end recipient is a sales team. So you need to make sure that you communicate with them about what you will do, why you will deliver, and when. Okay, so make sure they understand that. So getting buy-in is super, super critical. And then, once you have your initial plan when you start once you start attending the regular huddle meetings. Now is just implementation and modification, implementation and modification.

So now you need to deliver something and focus on some low-hanging fruit.

If there’s low-hanging fruit from your perspective, you can get it done quickly. And then that will have a certain kind of impact and benefit that salespeople can see, that will be great. Right? In the third month, you should also build your routine. That means you have your weekly schedule. There are certain things that you will do on Monday. There are certain things you will do on Tuesday and Thursday. Right.

So your weekly schedule will start to crystallize. There are regular meetings you will need to attend. There are some people you will meet regularly. So try to build that routine. It’s not 100% down, but you should be able to get it to a 50% in terms of the regular meeting you go to, and they are regular people you meet with. Lastly is tracking results. Now you have a plan, which is great.

Based on your plan and implementation, you will start noticing what works and doesn’t.

So monitor your progress and performance and also provide an update. It’s very important to quantify your contribution to some extent. It’s even better to map some of your success metrics to existing sales processes. And also, sales metrics are probably not possible initially. But think from that perspective, how can you map your success to the existing dashboard? So that’s the third month, have a preliminary plan on what you will do, then modify it based on the new information you’ll get. You’ll get and be agile and nimble, and then take it from there. So that was my conversation with Brennan.

And we had a great time, and I’m very impressed that Brennan spent his holiday researching and trying to make himself proud and up for his new job. And I’m also very grateful, Brandon, that you found my YouTube channel. And here are some key takeaways for the first 90 days.

Whether you are a new sales enablement manager or a new marketing manager, the following pointers apply to all the new jobs you are taking out.

Always try to know who is who and who is doing what in your first 90 days.

Understand and learn the tools and the platforms of your new companies. Get to know as many people as possible. That’s number three. Number four, ask questions, ask questions and ask questions. Number five is asking for help. It’s okay to ask for help. Even though you’re coming as a senior, you can still ask for help, including a budget. Be bold about asking for money to do your job. All right. Brenda, it was wonderful talking to you. And thank you for asking that. Excellent, excellent question. And it gives me the idea to do this live video. Well, I wish you the best of luck.

And if you have anything you would like to add regarding what Brennan or any new professional business professionals are taking on a new job, what are the additional comments and thoughts new sales enablement manager should do for the first 90 days? Love, love, love to hear from you.

What can Pam Didner do for you?

Being in the corporate world for 20+ years and having held various positions from accounting and supply chain management, and marketing to sales enablement, she knows how corporations work. She can make you and your team a rock star by identifying areas to shine and do better. She does that through private coaching, keynote speaking, workshop training, and hands-on consulting. Contact her or find her on LinkedIn and Twitter. A quick note: Check out her new 90-Day Revenue Reboot, if you are struggling with marketing.

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