There's a phase every growing company hits where you've moved past founder-led sales, you have a small sales team, and nobody's job title says "enablement"—but someone has to do it.
This episode is a candid look at how we've navigated that messy middle phase at Dock, and what Alex learned about early enablement leading marketing at Lattice.
We dig into what good enablement actually looks like before you have a dedicated person, and why getting it wrong can waste more resources than having nothing at all. We talked about:
Enjoy the show!
Alex Kracov: What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Grow and Tell. I'm Alex Kracov, and I'm here with Eric Doty, my partner in crime.
Eric Doty: Yeah, hopefully zero crimes are committed on this podcast today. Today we're talking about early stage enablement. So just to set the scene here — in the early days of a company, there's a period where you've moved past that founder-led sale. You've hired your first few sales reps, but you don't have a dedicated enablement person yet. At this point, you probably have a marketing person or team. You might have a sales lead or you might not. But now you do have a small sales team that needs training, collateral, process, support, all that. At some companies, this phase can last for a few years — like we've been at that point at Dock for a few years now.
Alex, you've been at this position both at Lattice and Dock. I've been the first marketing hire at three startups. So today we're going to dive into what good enablement looks like during this period, who should own it when you don't have a dedicated hire yet, and when do you know it's time to graduate out of this phase and actually hire your first person.
Eric Doty: Alex, let's get right into it. I'd like to start by contrasting what early stage enablement looks like compared to a more mature enablement program. What are the biggest differences between the two?
Alex Kracov: Yeah. So the way I think about enablement in the early days — and I guess we're going to talk about it kind of like post founder-led sales — when you have a little mini team, maybe your company is like 15, 20, 30 people, what does enablement sort of look like in that early stage? The way it's always gone down, at least for me, is it sort of lives in this world of tribal knowledge versus documentation. When you're a super small company, everyone is either sitting in the same physical room or virtual room on Slack, but it's a small enough company where the way you sell your product and the way you support customers is kind of just something people figure out. You talk about it, it lives in conversations and in Slack, and it's very often not written down.
It always kind of starts from the founder, because they were the ones who, in theory, were doing founder-led sales and figuring out the initial go-to-market motion. And then that founder is passing that tribal knowledge to the first go-to-market team — the first sales rep, the first marketer, folks like that — and you're sort of just talking about it all the time.
The reason why it needs to live in tribal knowledge is you probably don't have product-market fit yet. You're still finding it — you might have some semblance of product-market fit because you've started to hire a team, but you're definitely not in the scale-up growth phase. So writing a lot of things down actually starts to become a hindrance rather than something that helps you accelerate growth.
But then fairly quickly, it kind of moves from tribal knowledge to: okay, let's take some of the things we've learned and document it. The canonical example here is like your pitch deck — it starts to move from just the founder talking about it to "let's systematize it a little bit and get a V1 pitch deck going that our first sales reps can use." That's kind of the first phase of what enablement really starts to look like.
And the last thing I'll add is: based off of the pitch deck, you also want to set up the demo environment for success. I assume most of our listeners are demoing SaaS products. The thing that you're pitching — you've got to nail that down. It's the slide where you intro and talk about your product, but also your demo environment and how you actually go about showing the product to potential buyers. Those are kind of the first things you've got to think about for enablement in the early days.
Eric Doty: And I think what's interesting too is that in the later days, enablement seems to be a lot more about standardization and driving consistency — "here's what works, let's make sure everyone does it" — versus in the early days, you don't have that archetype of "this is the perfect customer for us, this is the perfect sales process." And that's actually a benefit, because you need variety in how salespeople are approaching the problem, who you're talking to, whether founders are in the sale or not. All of these variables actually help you learn quicker. You don't want to enforce a process at scale that doesn't actually work, so you need this experimentation phase.
Alex Kracov: Totally. You need to keep it super loose. Like, at Lattice in the early days, we were selling first as a goal/OKR product, and then we moved into a performance review product. If we had gone crazy on enablement on the goal product, it would have been a completely different persona, a completely different product, and we would have just wasted a lot of effort. Same with Dock, right? Dock sort of went from this horizontal product with many different use cases — sales, customer success, investor data rooms, and so on. If we had done a crazy amount of enablement around that early on, it wouldn't have worked. We didn't even have a pitch deck in those early days.
So it's really once you start to feel product-market fit, you start to feel repeatability in your sales process — whether that's you as the founder doing sales or your first sales hire — that's when it starts to make sense to slowly invest in enablement. But even once you've figured it out, it's going to keep changing and evolving. You really don't need a big enablement program until you're truly expanding the team and hiring a bunch of folks.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And one other thing you mentioned when we were preparing for this is that enablement is more product-driven and maybe more technical in the early days. Can you say more about that?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, totally. I think that's driven mostly because — it all goes back to the product-market fit thing. The core team is obviously focused on the product, that's what you're bringing to market. And the journey to product-market fit means you're going to keep iterating the product to fulfill whatever the customer wants. In that process, a lot of the knowledge of why you're moving the product in a certain direction needs to be transferred to the people on the front lines — the go-to-market teams. So the relationship between the product team or the founders and the initial early sales team is super, super important.
And you're developing products really fast — it's not like a once-a-year release where "we're going to train you on that." It's like daily, multiple times a day, updates to the product. "We heard this thing that this customer wanted, we're going to ship a feature related to that." So a lot of what enablement looks like is really product education — "hey, we added this blue button into the product because of this reason, now you should show it off to customers." And then: "hey, go-to-market person, I actually want you to send me feedback on — was that a successful feature we just launched?" You're really teaching the go-to-market team why you're building something, how it works, and then there's this feedback loop of "did that actually improve your sales conversation or customer relationship?"
So most of it, in those really early days, is teaching your go-to-market team how the product works. That's the most important part of enablement.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And it feels like the main goal is just to get a really tight feedback loop between "here's a new thing, make sure you understand it, tell us what the customer thinks, and let's just keep improving it."
Alex Kracov: And one thing I observed at Dock, which is interesting, is that the early team learns stuff in a slow drip as it gets released. It's pretty easy to keep up with, because over the course of a year, every week there's a new thing and you learn it and figure it out.
But then what eventually happens is a new employee joins — like we had Sarah, a new customer success person, who joined last year — and she's dropped in and it's like, oh my God, she has to learn so much about the product. There's like three or four years of product she has to catch up on. She didn't get the advantage of like Maddie, who slowly learned it all over time. That's when you start needing more formal enablement and training and sessions, because the amount of things you have to learn is just so much more once the company has found its footing and it's more of a real thing.
Eric Doty: Yeah, that's a big call-out. At a big company, the main job of enablement is basically onboarding. At a small company, very little onboarding is happening — maybe one rep a quarter, maybe less — versus some of the other enablement leaders we're talking to on the show who are onboarding hundreds of reps a month.
Alex Kracov: Totally. And especially if you're a founder or founding team who came from a big company, you're used to all of this structure. But you don't want to overbuild. You can start really small. All you need to get started with enablement in the early days is your pitch deck — keep iterating on that. Maybe one product demo video recorded with Loom or Tella to showcase your product as a nice follow-up. Think about what the follow-up after the demo looks like and what little pieces of collateral people need. And maybe something around pricing and how you communicate your value there.
Those are really the two core things. Then you can start adding more sophistication — competitor enablement and different things — as you start to scale.
Eric Doty: And what is the risk of over-documenting, or over-processing too much enablement content?
Alex Kracov: You're just wasting time. Like, for example — Dock in the early days had like 90 different competitors. If I had said, "Eric, make a competitive battle card for 90 different competitors," that would not have been useful.
Eric Doty: I probably would have quit. Yeah.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, yeah. But even if I had made them — it would only be useful for a couple months anyway, because today Dock has sort of a core set of like three or four competitors. So you would have wasted a lot of resources and time that could have been better spent generating more leads or doing literally anything else.
You want to be patient with the amount of documentation you build at a company in the early days. Documentation also starts to feel like a little prison — "we've documented this is the way it has to be" — even though in the early days, you want tons of flexibility to figure out what works best.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And do you get pushback from reps in that scenario? Like, I know sometimes reps come back and say, "I need competitive documentation on this." How do you communicate as a founder that this isn't worth our time — while also telling the rep to go sell against that competitor?
Alex Kracov: So first, I think it starts with hiring a certain type of rep. In the early days, you want to hire really high-agency reps who can figure things out on their own and can deal with the ambiguity of not having a process or documentation. And maybe if they don't have the documentation they need, they actually go make it themselves. You want that type of rep.
That's really different from when you're in scale-up mode, where you want more coin-operated reps who just follow a very specific process at specific stages. In that scaled-up environment, those high-agency reps actually cause problems. It's a very different archetype.
But you also want to really listen to your reps and be aligned that we're all on the same team, we all want the same goal — close revenue. So it's like, "hey rep, what are the patterns you're hearing? How can I be helpful to you to close more deals?"
The obvious one is competitive enablement. So maybe you don't go do those 90 battle cards, but: "hey sales rep, if I was to make you one battle card, which one do you want?" In the early days of Dock, we were really competitive with Aligned, and we needed to make some competitive battle cards because our products are very different. You hear the same request multiple times — maybe you don't act on it the first time, but if you hear it again and again and there's a trend, then it's time to work on it. It often becomes more reactive in the early days — being a resource to your sales team and saying, "I don't have a lot of bandwidth, I'm building the product on the side, but what's a small amount of things I can do that would be helpful to support you?" That's kind of how I think about it.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And so we've been talking about what decent enablement looks like, but we haven't really talked about the who. When you don't have an enablement team yet, these responsibilities are going to be distributed across people — probably some combination of a founder, product, a marketer, a sales leader. How do you think about where those responsibilities lie, and what does collaboration look like between all those people?
Alex Kracov: Yeah. As you sort of hinted, it could be wildly different depending on the founding team and who those early hires are. But let me generally paint the picture in terms of roles — and those roles can be individual people, or one person doing all the roles.
You have your product person, who's building the product. You have the marketer, who's really good at writing and communicating and talking about the why and the positioning. You have the sales leader, who's going to be that bird's-eye manager helping the AEs think more holistically about the sales process. And then you might have operations, who's dealing with all the systems — the CRM being the canonical example. Those four roles — product, marketing, operations, and sales leadership — could be four different people, or it could all be one single person, or some random combination in between. It just depends on your budget, how you want to hire, and your own strengths as a founding team.
At Dock, my background is in marketing, and Dock was my first real chance at building a product. So in the early days, I was kind of all of those things — pre-Eric, I was all of those things. Then Eric started to take on some of the marketing responsibility and helping with collateral. And then Joey joined and started to be sort of the sales leader. But in the early days, I was standing up the CRM, helping draft the first pitch deck — all of that. So yeah, that's kind of how I think about early enablement roles.
Eric Doty: How different was it at Lattice? You were greener as a marketer, and the founder had a different skill set than you have now at Dock.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it was super different. At Lattice, Jack — who is the CEO — was sort of the product vision. He was the brain behind the why and the product direction on the journey to product-market fit. But Ming ran product, and Jared was our product designer. They were really the ones talking about what we were actually building and how it worked.
I was running marketing, so I was just thinking about messaging and creating collateral all day. I was basically getting my orders from the product side of things and then translating that into marketing messaging that could be useful in sales. And then Lester was our first head of sales at Lattice — he was the one standing up Salesforce and the CRM. I didn't even know how to do anything like that at the time. So it was very much divide-and-conquer.
Eric Doty: Makes sense. And at Dock, you're the founder and you're taking on some of these sales enablement responsibilities. How valuable do you feel it's been that you've stayed hands-on — while I'm doing collateral and working on sales process — you're doing product training, helping with messaging. How much do you think that's fed back into Dock as a product and the rest of your founder work?
Alex Kracov: I mean, it's insanely valuable. I think the worst thing you can do as a founder or CEO is get far away from your customers and what they're saying. One of the things I really try hard to do at Dock is stay close to those customer conversations. I'm no longer on every sales call the way I used to be, but the way I do stay close is I read every customer support ticket. I listen to a bunch of Fathom calls. I join customer calls. I talk to the sales reps all the time. I talk to Maddie on the customer success side. I'm intimately involved in what go-to-market looks like and constantly asking what would be useful to the team.
That's really all I think about for enablement — "hey, what's going on in the front lines as you talk with customers? What can we do that would be useful?" Is it another competitor battle card? Should we change our pricing? Should we update our demo deck?
But what's evolved — and this is where you've played a huge role, Eric — is I don't have to spend as much time creating the collateral anymore. You own that. You take my crappy little ideas and make them look really nice and professional. So I can go back to more of a traditional role, kind of like how Jack was at Lattice — thinking about the product and communicating that to you and the frontline folks. That's how it's starting to work now at Dock.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And what's interesting is it creates a kind of tension — maybe "tension" is the wrong word — but there's a lot of value in me being involved in the sales enablement side now, because I learn so much about the customer. I learn what our sales process looks like. I learn what's coming up in conversations. And that feeds back into the messaging on our homepage, what we say in a case study. A really good example: I learned what a common blocker in our sales process is — like "I'm really worried that my customer isn't going to open the Dock workspace we send to them." That allows me, as the marketing person, when I'm building a case study, to make sure I ask the customer about that and get them to address that objection.
There's a really tight relationship between enablement and our content. But the tension it creates for me is that I'm also responsible for top of funnel, demand gen, SEO — making sure our salespeople are busy. So there's this constant push and pull between "we need to go generate more pipeline" and "okay, now we need to flip and focus more on converting pipeline." It's reactive in a way, but the reactivity is necessary and positive. I'm always flipping between filling the funnel and converting the funnel.
Alex Kracov: This is like the marketing dilemma, right? Marketing teams are goaled on pipeline — as they should be, I think that's the correct metric. But ultimately a company is successful if it closes revenue. You could generate as much pipeline as you want, but if it doesn't convert to revenue, it doesn't matter. More and more marketers need to be thinking about the mid and late stages of the funnel, partnering with the sales team, and managing up to the CEO to figure out the right balance.
Some of that is also related to your average contract size. If you're selling super small contracts in the SMB space, it's probably all about top-of-funnel growth. But if you start to have $50K+ ACVs, it starts to look more like enterprise sales — you're not going to have as many leads by definition, so it becomes more important to convert them. You constantly need to swing back and forth.
It comes down to setting the right expectations, even though the glory in marketing is always about generating a lot of leads. But at the end of the day, it's all revenue that matters, and more marketers need to be focused on mid and bottom of funnel.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And you end up feeling yourself being pulled. When I joined Dock, I don't know what our average contract was — maybe $1,000 a year. Now it's up into much higher figures. I've felt myself be pulled from when I joined — like, "okay, we need to get a million website visitors" — because we thought we were going to be very product-led, converting into lots of $50/month users with thousands of small customers. Then our business model flipped, like we talked about on a previous episode, where now it looks more like enterprise sales, more sales-led.
And I felt myself be pulled very down-funnel in terms of the content that was most valuable — the comparison pieces between competitors, case studies — those became the money content we needed. That kind of content served dual purpose too. Whenever I'm making something in marketing, I'm asking: can this also be used in the sales process? Can this also help us convert more? If I'm going to make something, can it serve dual purpose?
Alex Kracov: And it's actually a really easy way to measure it — close rates and time to close. That's how I think product marketers should be focused and goaled. Obviously it's not as clean a goal as leads, because there are multiple people involved and multiple dynamics. It's not just a good enablement program that leads to a higher close rate — sales has a huge role, the product itself has a huge role. But it helps. And you should be able to see your close rates steadily increasing. Especially around competitor close rates — are we doing a good job competing against specific competitors? Log that in your CRM. Enablement plays a big role there too.
Eric Doty: Let's talk tech. We are an enablement tech platform, so we can't avoid this. What does the typical enablement tech stack look like in the early days?
Alex Kracov: So the business world is basically divided between Google users and Microsoft users. And so most people will start with one of those two systems — you just need a place to store content and a place to create content. Storing content is Google Drive or SharePoint or OneDrive — just a folder where you dump all of your battle cards and things. Creating content is Google Slides, Google Docs, PowerPoint, or Word. Those are the starting tools.
Then maybe a slight level up, which a lot of startups are using, is something like Notion or Confluence, where you start to build more of a company-wide wiki. But as we talked about at the beginning, most companies don't have a lot of documentation and shouldn't — so it's generally kept lightweight. Dock's Notion is, embarrassingly, still to this day very lightweight and barely maintained.
Two other things on the "starter pack": something like Figma or Canva can be super helpful for making collateral. Our early one-pagers and battle cards at Dock were always designed in Figma, and a product designer can sometimes help on the marketing side too — making things look nice goes a long way versus a black-and-white Google doc.
And then the other really important thing is your CRM — that's the central node of all go-to-market. At Dock, we started with an Airtable CRM when I was doing founder-led sales, then graduated to HubSpot, which we've been really happy with. Some companies go straight to Salesforce because they're like, "we're going to be a big company, let's just do it now." But that's generally what the early stack looks like.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And then let's talk about when that starts to break down. Because historically there's been this big gap in the platforms available — between the DIY Google Drive / Notion setup and the enterprise world of Seismic, Highspot, these platforms that are basically overkill for 5 to 50 sellers. So what comes next after that DIY phase? And how has dog-fooding Dock helped us move past being that DIY Google Drive company?
Alex Kracov: Yeah. So the DIY solution can work for a while. But you start to notice it breaking down in little areas. One example: you're a Google shop trying to send documents to a Microsoft shop. The Microsoft buyer has to log into Google, they don't have an account — that's one of the classic annoying things everyone deals with. Another: you can't really tag content in a sophisticated way in Google Drive. You have to rely on folder structures, so you can't have one piece of content live in multiple places.
There's also very little visibility into what assets your internal team is actually using — and more importantly, no visibility into whether your buyer or customer is actually engaging with the stuff. And then it's just hard for people to find things. Google Drive and Notion are also used for project management — my Google Drive folder is a disaster, I create Google Docs for random things all the time. So it becomes really hard to find what's client-facing versus internal.
That's where a tool like Dock — or what I'd call a more lightweight enablement platform — starts to be really useful. It becomes a dedicated place for the revenue team to organize all client-facing materials in one spot. That can look like a simple CMS — a slightly more grown-up version of Google Drive that still integrates with Google Drive, but creates destinations for the internal team to find what they need, with easier discoverability and better analytics.
And deal rooms have been a huge driver of our own enablement practice at Dock. We never felt the need to have a super-organized content library because we operate off of a deal room. When we think about enablement at Dock, we think about our deal room template. In the early days, this was super simple — a one-page deal room with a little intro, a lightweight mutual action plan with next steps, our pitch deck, a demo video, and once we had a case study, we'd add that. It wasn't a lot. It was super simple.
But as our sales process evolved, we started to add more pages, and the pages at the top of the deal room really aligned with our sales process. We started adding things like business cases, getting more sophisticated around value selling, building a whole case study page once we had a lot of case studies and videos to share. We started building out different product pages highlighting different SKUs — one for sales deal rooms, one for customer onboarding, one for content management, one for Dock AI. It became this medium where we could actually bring our sales process to life.
What I love about the deal room is it can be really hard to talk about sales process in the abstract, but deal rooms are such a nice visual way to define it. And it can be created in line as your sales process evolves — you can start small and it can get super sophisticated as you get more sophisticated.
Eric Doty: What's been unique for me as the marketer at Dock is the visibility it's given me into the sales process. Normally, unless I was sitting on calls, you can't really get a sense of what the sales process looks like. You get asked, "I need this deck, I need this asset," and you don't really have the ability to push back and say "you don't need that" or "sell me on why I need to take my time to do this." Whereas at Dock, because we have the sales room, I can see exactly what the sales process looks like. I can see what the buyer is looking at throughout the process. That's giving me the feedback loop of "oh shoot, they're really looking at case study videos, they're not actually reading the stories — I need to make more videos."
There's a lot of content visibility, both in terms of what customers are looking at but also just what the salesperson is doing. When I see the template, I know exactly how they're walking through it. I can see them tagging customers in it. It gives me a window, and that window has given me a huge advantage in terms of feeding back into the actual enablement content strategy.
Alex Kracov: And it makes you feel better about your work too. What was frustrating to me at Lattice was — I had a team making all this enablement collateral, and you're just sending it into the void. Is this useful? I don't know. I have a whole person getting paid 100-plus K making stuff and I don't know if it's useful or not. That's kind of what drove me to go build a tool like Dock — you want that really nice feedback loop between marketing and sales, and enablement plays a huge role in that.
Eric Doty: Yeah. No offense to sales — that should be the tagline of our show — but they're very good at asking for resources and flagging what they're missing. But you don't often hear "this thing that you made is working really well for me," because they're focused on blockers, which is great. That's a salesperson's job — remove blockers to the sale. But that feedback doesn't normally come back in the sense of "this asset is performing really well, make more of these." It's more like "here's what's missing." So having that visibility has been a major difference for me personally in terms of making content.
Eric Doty: Okay, let's get into moving past this world. The big question: what are the signals that it is time to hire an enablement person? When does not having one start to break down?
Alex Kracov: So it's different for every company. Like any role, you can get ahead of things — hire early, try to do things right from the beginning, hire an enablement person when you have a 5 or 10 person sales team and want to add structure. But most companies don't operate like that. My preferred approach is: you should really only hire people when you feel real pain — when it's a desperate need, when the current team just can't do it anymore.
You can actually last a pretty long time with a group-based approach to enablement across those four roles we talked about — product, sales leadership, marketing, and operations. But what ultimately happens, especially at a hypergrowth company, is you look at your revenue plan in December for the coming year and say, "to hit these crazy goals, we're going to need to hire 50 sales reps next year, which means five reps starting every month." And then: "we're going to need to ramp those sales reps really fast. Who's going to do all the training?"
You start to look around the room and the sales leaders are dealing with their own team and the existing chaos. That's the moment where it's like, wow, we are behind in enablement — we really need to make an investment here. That's how it goes down at most companies. When you start to have big cohorts of new reps joining, that's when sales training specifically becomes most important, and then a more formal enablement function gets built. They become the business partner to those four functions and the translator between the sales team's needs and the rest of the org — product, operations, marketing.
Eric Doty: Do you remember roughly when you decided to hire enablement at Lattice?
Alex Kracov: I don't, but it was too late. We were a couple hundred people — like Series B, Series C, something like that. I remember what would generally happen: we had one of the most important meetings at Lattice, I think we called it a pipeline review, which was run by our RevOps person Ruby. She'd run a roundtable between marketing and sales leadership, and we'd talk about initiatives — our pipeline, and then things we needed to close more deals, pain points in the sales process, how to coordinate between sales and marketing around upcoming events or demand gen.
It just got to a certain point where it was like, wow, we are all really busy in our own functions — trying to make the thing or trying to sell the thing — and we need somebody who can help us connect the two teams and add a little more formality to all of it. Because what happens is, you're just constantly piling on new things: "new training, we have to do this, we have to do that." And salespeople — like any human — can only absorb so much information at a time. You start to need to add structure to that chaos.
Our first enablement people really brought that. And it was really our CRO kind of going, "hey, it's time — we need somebody who can be a partner and help manage all these new salespeople we're hiring."
Eric Doty: That makes sense. I'm looking forward to the day we hire one at Dock — that is like the elephant in the room, right? We're a sales enablement company, but we don't have an enablement person. Partly because we've been able to use our own software and take away some of those pains, which has been an interesting side effect of using Dock ourselves.
Alex Kracov: Totally. I mean, good software can help you scale farther without one. And probably the first enablement person at Dock will be like a marketer to help be on this podcast.
Eric Doty: Yeah, exactly. And in terms of post-hire — is there anything you learned at Lattice, as a marketing leader, that you wish you had done differently pre-hiring enablement?
Alex Kracov: I think information overload was one of the traps we fell into — especially me. I looked at my role at Lattice as "I just need to do a lot of stuff." I wanted to create a ton of events, a ton of collateral, just more and more and more. And what I didn't realize was that's not always good. It can be really overwhelming. What's the thing I actually need to pay attention to?
What our first enablement people at Lattice did really well was add structure — how do we disseminate information to the sales team in a really structured way? There's a real science to learning and training. There are people who spend their whole career as teachers thinking about how to take someone from point A to point B. I was not thinking about that at all as a marketer. I don't think our sales leadership was either, because their focus was more on active coaching and management.
A really good enablement person starts to think about it from a curriculum standpoint — what are the things you need to do to make someone move through the "grades" of what a Lattice salesperson was at the time? That's where enablement becomes so important. They become the business partner to all those other functions, but they're also the leader of training and teaching the team — which becomes the most important thing in the company at that point, because the faster you ramp those sellers, the more productive they are, the quicker you're going to hit your numbers.
Eric Doty: Perfect. Well, that feels like a great spot to end — praising enablement leaders. Thanks, Alex, for another awesome conversation. Thanks, everyone, for listening to the show. If you want to check out the newsletter version, you can go to GrowAndTellShow.com. Subscribe to us on all the platforms — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. We're everywhere, we're invading your feed. Thanks so much, everyone, and we'll see you again next week.
Alex Kracov: Awesome. Thanks everybody.
Alex Kracov is the founder and CEO of Dock. He was the third employee and VP of Marketing at Lattice, where he spent five years helping grow the company from zero to over $50 million in ARR—ultimately building it into a $3 billion business. Before Lattice, Alex worked at Blue State Digital (the political adtech firm that helped elect President Obama) where he led projects for Google, and he started his career as a sales rep at Yelp.
Eric Doty is the Head of Marketing at Dock. He joined Dock over three years ago as the company's first and only marketing hire and has been building the content engine ever since. Eric has been the first marketing hire at three different startups. He's also Head of Community at Superpath, a community for content marketers.
There's a phase every growing company hits where you've moved past founder-led sales, you have a small sales team, and nobody's job title says "enablement"—but someone has to do it.
This episode is a candid look at how we've navigated that messy middle phase at Dock, and what Alex learned about early enablement leading marketing at Lattice.
We dig into what good enablement actually looks like before you have a dedicated person, and why getting it wrong can waste more resources than having nothing at all. We talked about:
Enjoy the show!
Alex Kracov: What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Grow and Tell. I'm Alex Kracov, and I'm here with Eric Doty, my partner in crime.
Eric Doty: Yeah, hopefully zero crimes are committed on this podcast today. Today we're talking about early stage enablement. So just to set the scene here — in the early days of a company, there's a period where you've moved past that founder-led sale. You've hired your first few sales reps, but you don't have a dedicated enablement person yet. At this point, you probably have a marketing person or team. You might have a sales lead or you might not. But now you do have a small sales team that needs training, collateral, process, support, all that. At some companies, this phase can last for a few years — like we've been at that point at Dock for a few years now.
Alex, you've been at this position both at Lattice and Dock. I've been the first marketing hire at three startups. So today we're going to dive into what good enablement looks like during this period, who should own it when you don't have a dedicated hire yet, and when do you know it's time to graduate out of this phase and actually hire your first person.
Eric Doty: Alex, let's get right into it. I'd like to start by contrasting what early stage enablement looks like compared to a more mature enablement program. What are the biggest differences between the two?
Alex Kracov: Yeah. So the way I think about enablement in the early days — and I guess we're going to talk about it kind of like post founder-led sales — when you have a little mini team, maybe your company is like 15, 20, 30 people, what does enablement sort of look like in that early stage? The way it's always gone down, at least for me, is it sort of lives in this world of tribal knowledge versus documentation. When you're a super small company, everyone is either sitting in the same physical room or virtual room on Slack, but it's a small enough company where the way you sell your product and the way you support customers is kind of just something people figure out. You talk about it, it lives in conversations and in Slack, and it's very often not written down.
It always kind of starts from the founder, because they were the ones who, in theory, were doing founder-led sales and figuring out the initial go-to-market motion. And then that founder is passing that tribal knowledge to the first go-to-market team — the first sales rep, the first marketer, folks like that — and you're sort of just talking about it all the time.
The reason why it needs to live in tribal knowledge is you probably don't have product-market fit yet. You're still finding it — you might have some semblance of product-market fit because you've started to hire a team, but you're definitely not in the scale-up growth phase. So writing a lot of things down actually starts to become a hindrance rather than something that helps you accelerate growth.
But then fairly quickly, it kind of moves from tribal knowledge to: okay, let's take some of the things we've learned and document it. The canonical example here is like your pitch deck — it starts to move from just the founder talking about it to "let's systematize it a little bit and get a V1 pitch deck going that our first sales reps can use." That's kind of the first phase of what enablement really starts to look like.
And the last thing I'll add is: based off of the pitch deck, you also want to set up the demo environment for success. I assume most of our listeners are demoing SaaS products. The thing that you're pitching — you've got to nail that down. It's the slide where you intro and talk about your product, but also your demo environment and how you actually go about showing the product to potential buyers. Those are kind of the first things you've got to think about for enablement in the early days.
Eric Doty: And I think what's interesting too is that in the later days, enablement seems to be a lot more about standardization and driving consistency — "here's what works, let's make sure everyone does it" — versus in the early days, you don't have that archetype of "this is the perfect customer for us, this is the perfect sales process." And that's actually a benefit, because you need variety in how salespeople are approaching the problem, who you're talking to, whether founders are in the sale or not. All of these variables actually help you learn quicker. You don't want to enforce a process at scale that doesn't actually work, so you need this experimentation phase.
Alex Kracov: Totally. You need to keep it super loose. Like, at Lattice in the early days, we were selling first as a goal/OKR product, and then we moved into a performance review product. If we had gone crazy on enablement on the goal product, it would have been a completely different persona, a completely different product, and we would have just wasted a lot of effort. Same with Dock, right? Dock sort of went from this horizontal product with many different use cases — sales, customer success, investor data rooms, and so on. If we had done a crazy amount of enablement around that early on, it wouldn't have worked. We didn't even have a pitch deck in those early days.
So it's really once you start to feel product-market fit, you start to feel repeatability in your sales process — whether that's you as the founder doing sales or your first sales hire — that's when it starts to make sense to slowly invest in enablement. But even once you've figured it out, it's going to keep changing and evolving. You really don't need a big enablement program until you're truly expanding the team and hiring a bunch of folks.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And one other thing you mentioned when we were preparing for this is that enablement is more product-driven and maybe more technical in the early days. Can you say more about that?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, totally. I think that's driven mostly because — it all goes back to the product-market fit thing. The core team is obviously focused on the product, that's what you're bringing to market. And the journey to product-market fit means you're going to keep iterating the product to fulfill whatever the customer wants. In that process, a lot of the knowledge of why you're moving the product in a certain direction needs to be transferred to the people on the front lines — the go-to-market teams. So the relationship between the product team or the founders and the initial early sales team is super, super important.
And you're developing products really fast — it's not like a once-a-year release where "we're going to train you on that." It's like daily, multiple times a day, updates to the product. "We heard this thing that this customer wanted, we're going to ship a feature related to that." So a lot of what enablement looks like is really product education — "hey, we added this blue button into the product because of this reason, now you should show it off to customers." And then: "hey, go-to-market person, I actually want you to send me feedback on — was that a successful feature we just launched?" You're really teaching the go-to-market team why you're building something, how it works, and then there's this feedback loop of "did that actually improve your sales conversation or customer relationship?"
So most of it, in those really early days, is teaching your go-to-market team how the product works. That's the most important part of enablement.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And it feels like the main goal is just to get a really tight feedback loop between "here's a new thing, make sure you understand it, tell us what the customer thinks, and let's just keep improving it."
Alex Kracov: And one thing I observed at Dock, which is interesting, is that the early team learns stuff in a slow drip as it gets released. It's pretty easy to keep up with, because over the course of a year, every week there's a new thing and you learn it and figure it out.
But then what eventually happens is a new employee joins — like we had Sarah, a new customer success person, who joined last year — and she's dropped in and it's like, oh my God, she has to learn so much about the product. There's like three or four years of product she has to catch up on. She didn't get the advantage of like Maddie, who slowly learned it all over time. That's when you start needing more formal enablement and training and sessions, because the amount of things you have to learn is just so much more once the company has found its footing and it's more of a real thing.
Eric Doty: Yeah, that's a big call-out. At a big company, the main job of enablement is basically onboarding. At a small company, very little onboarding is happening — maybe one rep a quarter, maybe less — versus some of the other enablement leaders we're talking to on the show who are onboarding hundreds of reps a month.
Alex Kracov: Totally. And especially if you're a founder or founding team who came from a big company, you're used to all of this structure. But you don't want to overbuild. You can start really small. All you need to get started with enablement in the early days is your pitch deck — keep iterating on that. Maybe one product demo video recorded with Loom or Tella to showcase your product as a nice follow-up. Think about what the follow-up after the demo looks like and what little pieces of collateral people need. And maybe something around pricing and how you communicate your value there.
Those are really the two core things. Then you can start adding more sophistication — competitor enablement and different things — as you start to scale.
Eric Doty: And what is the risk of over-documenting, or over-processing too much enablement content?
Alex Kracov: You're just wasting time. Like, for example — Dock in the early days had like 90 different competitors. If I had said, "Eric, make a competitive battle card for 90 different competitors," that would not have been useful.
Eric Doty: I probably would have quit. Yeah.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, yeah. But even if I had made them — it would only be useful for a couple months anyway, because today Dock has sort of a core set of like three or four competitors. So you would have wasted a lot of resources and time that could have been better spent generating more leads or doing literally anything else.
You want to be patient with the amount of documentation you build at a company in the early days. Documentation also starts to feel like a little prison — "we've documented this is the way it has to be" — even though in the early days, you want tons of flexibility to figure out what works best.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And do you get pushback from reps in that scenario? Like, I know sometimes reps come back and say, "I need competitive documentation on this." How do you communicate as a founder that this isn't worth our time — while also telling the rep to go sell against that competitor?
Alex Kracov: So first, I think it starts with hiring a certain type of rep. In the early days, you want to hire really high-agency reps who can figure things out on their own and can deal with the ambiguity of not having a process or documentation. And maybe if they don't have the documentation they need, they actually go make it themselves. You want that type of rep.
That's really different from when you're in scale-up mode, where you want more coin-operated reps who just follow a very specific process at specific stages. In that scaled-up environment, those high-agency reps actually cause problems. It's a very different archetype.
But you also want to really listen to your reps and be aligned that we're all on the same team, we all want the same goal — close revenue. So it's like, "hey rep, what are the patterns you're hearing? How can I be helpful to you to close more deals?"
The obvious one is competitive enablement. So maybe you don't go do those 90 battle cards, but: "hey sales rep, if I was to make you one battle card, which one do you want?" In the early days of Dock, we were really competitive with Aligned, and we needed to make some competitive battle cards because our products are very different. You hear the same request multiple times — maybe you don't act on it the first time, but if you hear it again and again and there's a trend, then it's time to work on it. It often becomes more reactive in the early days — being a resource to your sales team and saying, "I don't have a lot of bandwidth, I'm building the product on the side, but what's a small amount of things I can do that would be helpful to support you?" That's kind of how I think about it.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And so we've been talking about what decent enablement looks like, but we haven't really talked about the who. When you don't have an enablement team yet, these responsibilities are going to be distributed across people — probably some combination of a founder, product, a marketer, a sales leader. How do you think about where those responsibilities lie, and what does collaboration look like between all those people?
Alex Kracov: Yeah. As you sort of hinted, it could be wildly different depending on the founding team and who those early hires are. But let me generally paint the picture in terms of roles — and those roles can be individual people, or one person doing all the roles.
You have your product person, who's building the product. You have the marketer, who's really good at writing and communicating and talking about the why and the positioning. You have the sales leader, who's going to be that bird's-eye manager helping the AEs think more holistically about the sales process. And then you might have operations, who's dealing with all the systems — the CRM being the canonical example. Those four roles — product, marketing, operations, and sales leadership — could be four different people, or it could all be one single person, or some random combination in between. It just depends on your budget, how you want to hire, and your own strengths as a founding team.
At Dock, my background is in marketing, and Dock was my first real chance at building a product. So in the early days, I was kind of all of those things — pre-Eric, I was all of those things. Then Eric started to take on some of the marketing responsibility and helping with collateral. And then Joey joined and started to be sort of the sales leader. But in the early days, I was standing up the CRM, helping draft the first pitch deck — all of that. So yeah, that's kind of how I think about early enablement roles.
Eric Doty: How different was it at Lattice? You were greener as a marketer, and the founder had a different skill set than you have now at Dock.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it was super different. At Lattice, Jack — who is the CEO — was sort of the product vision. He was the brain behind the why and the product direction on the journey to product-market fit. But Ming ran product, and Jared was our product designer. They were really the ones talking about what we were actually building and how it worked.
I was running marketing, so I was just thinking about messaging and creating collateral all day. I was basically getting my orders from the product side of things and then translating that into marketing messaging that could be useful in sales. And then Lester was our first head of sales at Lattice — he was the one standing up Salesforce and the CRM. I didn't even know how to do anything like that at the time. So it was very much divide-and-conquer.
Eric Doty: Makes sense. And at Dock, you're the founder and you're taking on some of these sales enablement responsibilities. How valuable do you feel it's been that you've stayed hands-on — while I'm doing collateral and working on sales process — you're doing product training, helping with messaging. How much do you think that's fed back into Dock as a product and the rest of your founder work?
Alex Kracov: I mean, it's insanely valuable. I think the worst thing you can do as a founder or CEO is get far away from your customers and what they're saying. One of the things I really try hard to do at Dock is stay close to those customer conversations. I'm no longer on every sales call the way I used to be, but the way I do stay close is I read every customer support ticket. I listen to a bunch of Fathom calls. I join customer calls. I talk to the sales reps all the time. I talk to Maddie on the customer success side. I'm intimately involved in what go-to-market looks like and constantly asking what would be useful to the team.
That's really all I think about for enablement — "hey, what's going on in the front lines as you talk with customers? What can we do that would be useful?" Is it another competitor battle card? Should we change our pricing? Should we update our demo deck?
But what's evolved — and this is where you've played a huge role, Eric — is I don't have to spend as much time creating the collateral anymore. You own that. You take my crappy little ideas and make them look really nice and professional. So I can go back to more of a traditional role, kind of like how Jack was at Lattice — thinking about the product and communicating that to you and the frontline folks. That's how it's starting to work now at Dock.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And what's interesting is it creates a kind of tension — maybe "tension" is the wrong word — but there's a lot of value in me being involved in the sales enablement side now, because I learn so much about the customer. I learn what our sales process looks like. I learn what's coming up in conversations. And that feeds back into the messaging on our homepage, what we say in a case study. A really good example: I learned what a common blocker in our sales process is — like "I'm really worried that my customer isn't going to open the Dock workspace we send to them." That allows me, as the marketing person, when I'm building a case study, to make sure I ask the customer about that and get them to address that objection.
There's a really tight relationship between enablement and our content. But the tension it creates for me is that I'm also responsible for top of funnel, demand gen, SEO — making sure our salespeople are busy. So there's this constant push and pull between "we need to go generate more pipeline" and "okay, now we need to flip and focus more on converting pipeline." It's reactive in a way, but the reactivity is necessary and positive. I'm always flipping between filling the funnel and converting the funnel.
Alex Kracov: This is like the marketing dilemma, right? Marketing teams are goaled on pipeline — as they should be, I think that's the correct metric. But ultimately a company is successful if it closes revenue. You could generate as much pipeline as you want, but if it doesn't convert to revenue, it doesn't matter. More and more marketers need to be thinking about the mid and late stages of the funnel, partnering with the sales team, and managing up to the CEO to figure out the right balance.
Some of that is also related to your average contract size. If you're selling super small contracts in the SMB space, it's probably all about top-of-funnel growth. But if you start to have $50K+ ACVs, it starts to look more like enterprise sales — you're not going to have as many leads by definition, so it becomes more important to convert them. You constantly need to swing back and forth.
It comes down to setting the right expectations, even though the glory in marketing is always about generating a lot of leads. But at the end of the day, it's all revenue that matters, and more marketers need to be focused on mid and bottom of funnel.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And you end up feeling yourself being pulled. When I joined Dock, I don't know what our average contract was — maybe $1,000 a year. Now it's up into much higher figures. I've felt myself be pulled from when I joined — like, "okay, we need to get a million website visitors" — because we thought we were going to be very product-led, converting into lots of $50/month users with thousands of small customers. Then our business model flipped, like we talked about on a previous episode, where now it looks more like enterprise sales, more sales-led.
And I felt myself be pulled very down-funnel in terms of the content that was most valuable — the comparison pieces between competitors, case studies — those became the money content we needed. That kind of content served dual purpose too. Whenever I'm making something in marketing, I'm asking: can this also be used in the sales process? Can this also help us convert more? If I'm going to make something, can it serve dual purpose?
Alex Kracov: And it's actually a really easy way to measure it — close rates and time to close. That's how I think product marketers should be focused and goaled. Obviously it's not as clean a goal as leads, because there are multiple people involved and multiple dynamics. It's not just a good enablement program that leads to a higher close rate — sales has a huge role, the product itself has a huge role. But it helps. And you should be able to see your close rates steadily increasing. Especially around competitor close rates — are we doing a good job competing against specific competitors? Log that in your CRM. Enablement plays a big role there too.
Eric Doty: Let's talk tech. We are an enablement tech platform, so we can't avoid this. What does the typical enablement tech stack look like in the early days?
Alex Kracov: So the business world is basically divided between Google users and Microsoft users. And so most people will start with one of those two systems — you just need a place to store content and a place to create content. Storing content is Google Drive or SharePoint or OneDrive — just a folder where you dump all of your battle cards and things. Creating content is Google Slides, Google Docs, PowerPoint, or Word. Those are the starting tools.
Then maybe a slight level up, which a lot of startups are using, is something like Notion or Confluence, where you start to build more of a company-wide wiki. But as we talked about at the beginning, most companies don't have a lot of documentation and shouldn't — so it's generally kept lightweight. Dock's Notion is, embarrassingly, still to this day very lightweight and barely maintained.
Two other things on the "starter pack": something like Figma or Canva can be super helpful for making collateral. Our early one-pagers and battle cards at Dock were always designed in Figma, and a product designer can sometimes help on the marketing side too — making things look nice goes a long way versus a black-and-white Google doc.
And then the other really important thing is your CRM — that's the central node of all go-to-market. At Dock, we started with an Airtable CRM when I was doing founder-led sales, then graduated to HubSpot, which we've been really happy with. Some companies go straight to Salesforce because they're like, "we're going to be a big company, let's just do it now." But that's generally what the early stack looks like.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And then let's talk about when that starts to break down. Because historically there's been this big gap in the platforms available — between the DIY Google Drive / Notion setup and the enterprise world of Seismic, Highspot, these platforms that are basically overkill for 5 to 50 sellers. So what comes next after that DIY phase? And how has dog-fooding Dock helped us move past being that DIY Google Drive company?
Alex Kracov: Yeah. So the DIY solution can work for a while. But you start to notice it breaking down in little areas. One example: you're a Google shop trying to send documents to a Microsoft shop. The Microsoft buyer has to log into Google, they don't have an account — that's one of the classic annoying things everyone deals with. Another: you can't really tag content in a sophisticated way in Google Drive. You have to rely on folder structures, so you can't have one piece of content live in multiple places.
There's also very little visibility into what assets your internal team is actually using — and more importantly, no visibility into whether your buyer or customer is actually engaging with the stuff. And then it's just hard for people to find things. Google Drive and Notion are also used for project management — my Google Drive folder is a disaster, I create Google Docs for random things all the time. So it becomes really hard to find what's client-facing versus internal.
That's where a tool like Dock — or what I'd call a more lightweight enablement platform — starts to be really useful. It becomes a dedicated place for the revenue team to organize all client-facing materials in one spot. That can look like a simple CMS — a slightly more grown-up version of Google Drive that still integrates with Google Drive, but creates destinations for the internal team to find what they need, with easier discoverability and better analytics.
And deal rooms have been a huge driver of our own enablement practice at Dock. We never felt the need to have a super-organized content library because we operate off of a deal room. When we think about enablement at Dock, we think about our deal room template. In the early days, this was super simple — a one-page deal room with a little intro, a lightweight mutual action plan with next steps, our pitch deck, a demo video, and once we had a case study, we'd add that. It wasn't a lot. It was super simple.
But as our sales process evolved, we started to add more pages, and the pages at the top of the deal room really aligned with our sales process. We started adding things like business cases, getting more sophisticated around value selling, building a whole case study page once we had a lot of case studies and videos to share. We started building out different product pages highlighting different SKUs — one for sales deal rooms, one for customer onboarding, one for content management, one for Dock AI. It became this medium where we could actually bring our sales process to life.
What I love about the deal room is it can be really hard to talk about sales process in the abstract, but deal rooms are such a nice visual way to define it. And it can be created in line as your sales process evolves — you can start small and it can get super sophisticated as you get more sophisticated.
Eric Doty: What's been unique for me as the marketer at Dock is the visibility it's given me into the sales process. Normally, unless I was sitting on calls, you can't really get a sense of what the sales process looks like. You get asked, "I need this deck, I need this asset," and you don't really have the ability to push back and say "you don't need that" or "sell me on why I need to take my time to do this." Whereas at Dock, because we have the sales room, I can see exactly what the sales process looks like. I can see what the buyer is looking at throughout the process. That's giving me the feedback loop of "oh shoot, they're really looking at case study videos, they're not actually reading the stories — I need to make more videos."
There's a lot of content visibility, both in terms of what customers are looking at but also just what the salesperson is doing. When I see the template, I know exactly how they're walking through it. I can see them tagging customers in it. It gives me a window, and that window has given me a huge advantage in terms of feeding back into the actual enablement content strategy.
Alex Kracov: And it makes you feel better about your work too. What was frustrating to me at Lattice was — I had a team making all this enablement collateral, and you're just sending it into the void. Is this useful? I don't know. I have a whole person getting paid 100-plus K making stuff and I don't know if it's useful or not. That's kind of what drove me to go build a tool like Dock — you want that really nice feedback loop between marketing and sales, and enablement plays a huge role in that.
Eric Doty: Yeah. No offense to sales — that should be the tagline of our show — but they're very good at asking for resources and flagging what they're missing. But you don't often hear "this thing that you made is working really well for me," because they're focused on blockers, which is great. That's a salesperson's job — remove blockers to the sale. But that feedback doesn't normally come back in the sense of "this asset is performing really well, make more of these." It's more like "here's what's missing." So having that visibility has been a major difference for me personally in terms of making content.
Eric Doty: Okay, let's get into moving past this world. The big question: what are the signals that it is time to hire an enablement person? When does not having one start to break down?
Alex Kracov: So it's different for every company. Like any role, you can get ahead of things — hire early, try to do things right from the beginning, hire an enablement person when you have a 5 or 10 person sales team and want to add structure. But most companies don't operate like that. My preferred approach is: you should really only hire people when you feel real pain — when it's a desperate need, when the current team just can't do it anymore.
You can actually last a pretty long time with a group-based approach to enablement across those four roles we talked about — product, sales leadership, marketing, and operations. But what ultimately happens, especially at a hypergrowth company, is you look at your revenue plan in December for the coming year and say, "to hit these crazy goals, we're going to need to hire 50 sales reps next year, which means five reps starting every month." And then: "we're going to need to ramp those sales reps really fast. Who's going to do all the training?"
You start to look around the room and the sales leaders are dealing with their own team and the existing chaos. That's the moment where it's like, wow, we are behind in enablement — we really need to make an investment here. That's how it goes down at most companies. When you start to have big cohorts of new reps joining, that's when sales training specifically becomes most important, and then a more formal enablement function gets built. They become the business partner to those four functions and the translator between the sales team's needs and the rest of the org — product, operations, marketing.
Eric Doty: Do you remember roughly when you decided to hire enablement at Lattice?
Alex Kracov: I don't, but it was too late. We were a couple hundred people — like Series B, Series C, something like that. I remember what would generally happen: we had one of the most important meetings at Lattice, I think we called it a pipeline review, which was run by our RevOps person Ruby. She'd run a roundtable between marketing and sales leadership, and we'd talk about initiatives — our pipeline, and then things we needed to close more deals, pain points in the sales process, how to coordinate between sales and marketing around upcoming events or demand gen.
It just got to a certain point where it was like, wow, we are all really busy in our own functions — trying to make the thing or trying to sell the thing — and we need somebody who can help us connect the two teams and add a little more formality to all of it. Because what happens is, you're just constantly piling on new things: "new training, we have to do this, we have to do that." And salespeople — like any human — can only absorb so much information at a time. You start to need to add structure to that chaos.
Our first enablement people really brought that. And it was really our CRO kind of going, "hey, it's time — we need somebody who can be a partner and help manage all these new salespeople we're hiring."
Eric Doty: That makes sense. I'm looking forward to the day we hire one at Dock — that is like the elephant in the room, right? We're a sales enablement company, but we don't have an enablement person. Partly because we've been able to use our own software and take away some of those pains, which has been an interesting side effect of using Dock ourselves.
Alex Kracov: Totally. I mean, good software can help you scale farther without one. And probably the first enablement person at Dock will be like a marketer to help be on this podcast.
Eric Doty: Yeah, exactly. And in terms of post-hire — is there anything you learned at Lattice, as a marketing leader, that you wish you had done differently pre-hiring enablement?
Alex Kracov: I think information overload was one of the traps we fell into — especially me. I looked at my role at Lattice as "I just need to do a lot of stuff." I wanted to create a ton of events, a ton of collateral, just more and more and more. And what I didn't realize was that's not always good. It can be really overwhelming. What's the thing I actually need to pay attention to?
What our first enablement people at Lattice did really well was add structure — how do we disseminate information to the sales team in a really structured way? There's a real science to learning and training. There are people who spend their whole career as teachers thinking about how to take someone from point A to point B. I was not thinking about that at all as a marketer. I don't think our sales leadership was either, because their focus was more on active coaching and management.
A really good enablement person starts to think about it from a curriculum standpoint — what are the things you need to do to make someone move through the "grades" of what a Lattice salesperson was at the time? That's where enablement becomes so important. They become the business partner to all those other functions, but they're also the leader of training and teaching the team — which becomes the most important thing in the company at that point, because the faster you ramp those sellers, the more productive they are, the quicker you're going to hit your numbers.
Eric Doty: Perfect. Well, that feels like a great spot to end — praising enablement leaders. Thanks, Alex, for another awesome conversation. Thanks, everyone, for listening to the show. If you want to check out the newsletter version, you can go to GrowAndTellShow.com. Subscribe to us on all the platforms — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. We're everywhere, we're invading your feed. Thanks so much, everyone, and we'll see you again next week.
Alex Kracov: Awesome. Thanks everybody.
