Tenika Seitz

January 10, 2025

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What were some major unlocks and/or mindset shifts you experienced as you moved through your training, enablement, and revops roles?

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• Relationship Building: Something I brought with me from the sales foundation is holding onto, but reframing this concept; the shift being in simply how I think about my audience. In the sales role the audience is external. There is plenty of cross-over in competencies to be effective when it comes to training/enablement/ops, but the audience switches to internal. When you’re in any kind of leadership position, regardless of the tactical output of the job, you’re effectively always working to get/keep your people bought-in, invested, and motivated by whatever it is you’re “selling” — whether it’s a new process, a tweak in strategy, adjusting to change, or just believing in your leadership. If you can focus on relationship building as a pillar of the job, everything else becomes a lot easier.
• Aligning Business Ops to Customer Journey: Rather than viewing processes and tools primarily from an internal efficiency perspective (making workflows smoother for teams), consider the impact of designing systems that prioritize the customer experience. The framing here is considering revenue operations as the connective tissue that ensures every touchpoint feels seamless and value-driven for the customer throughout the entire pipeline/funnel, and that the teams involved are aligned with that motivation.
• Embracing adaptability and constant iteration WHILE not being afraid to ship at 80%: Practice finding conviction quickly. In order to have strong conviction, you have to have strong self-awareness. That means fully understanding and trusting your emotions, motives, preferences, and abilities. It goes hand-in-hand with authenticity, which I also value as critical for the role. Having unbiased processing, acting in ways congruent with your values, and being able to orient yourself across different relationships appropriately encourages people to trust you, even if they disagree with you. Really practice challenging yourself on how you make decisions, what your motivations are, whether decisions align with your/the company values, and how you can stay focused on waking the line despite strong forces of influence or distraction.
  • Something I was told early in my career that has stuck with me which is “if you’re in the role, it’s because you’re needed in the role.” While imposter syndrome can be real and higher-level leadership with opposing opinions can be intimidating, part of your job is to stand your ground as the expert in your space. As long as you feel good about your ability to think through what you’re solving for, this becomes so much easier over time.
• Alignment is ongoing & No solution is ever final (I’ll touch on both of these later ⭐).

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What were some practical changes you implemented that had a big impact?

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Standardizing definitions across teams. Selfishly one of the first things I look at in any organization. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t know what you’re talking about and I can’t help to solve it. I’ve found implementing a unified set of definitions, especially for data metrics, immediately creates improved alignment across teams. Ask yourself and your stakeholders: what are the most important metrics and how do we define them? Do we all agree a “lead” is a “lead”? Etc. This ensures everyone is speaking the same language when analyzing performance, and speeds up decision making bc you needn’t debate the meaning of data/key metrics, but instead can focus on what are the most strategic actions for improving them. Areas to consider investigating for consistency: CW/CL Reasons, MQL, SQL, Lead/Prospect, Pipeline Stages. Lots more but those are some big hitters.

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What are some common misconceptions about sales enablement / revops you see or things you learned that didn’t work?

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Misconception I learned so quickly:

• An effective Sales Process is never one size fits all. Early in my career I thought implementing best-practice frameworks would automatically solve problems. Later, I would face huge (& fun) challenges in this sense navigating different, more technical products. With different products, so are usually the ways in which we need to interact with customers, and different stages in the funnel can be incredibly unique. It’s critical to design processes that fit the business instead of forcing the business to fit the process.

Things I learned don’t work:

• Ignoring frontline input: I don’t think I’ve ever done this intentionally, but it has happened. Building processes without the direct input of the actual end user will often lead to poor adoption, and possibly even resentment. Always involve stakeholder leadership, but also sales reps themselves in the design and feedback process. This ensures buy-in and relevance. It helps to have a process for yourself to do this so you don’t randomly approach one sales rep/leader, and another feels left out. I talk about round-tables and workshop ideas later.
• Over-Engineering / Tools over Strategy: tools are great but complexity or too much at once can be overwhelming. It’s tempting to think the right tool can solve all problems, but I’ve seen teams invest heavily in software without a clear cut strategy, which can often just lead to chaos.

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How do you balance the need for personalized sales training with the practicalities of implementing scalable solutions across diverse teams?

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• First and foremost, it helps to have a flexible core framework. What are the core sales methodologies? What are the CRM best practices and does everyone know and live by these? What is the baseline expectation for the team’s proficiency in product knowledge? Getting everyone to this “base layer” is a good starting point to be able to scale from there. From there, you can customize content and information for specific roles, industries, customer segments, etc. For example: an account executive selling to enterprise clients may need support with negotiation training, while a BDR servicing a specific industry may need support with scripting in how to best reach those unique decision makers. This was actually one of the main functions of my role at Aura as we were scaling strategic partnerships. What worked really well was having a core GTM strategy for the products/services, and then tinkering that content/strategy and formulating training/support as needed depending on the audience/seller.
• Another point here goes back to what we talked briefly about referring to sales competencies, (FYI, Korn Ferry). Data should play a huge role in identifying skill gaps and tailoring training. Analyze win rates, deal velocity, and CRM usage patterns to pinpoint where teams or individuals need extra support. For instance, if data shows that reps in one specific region are struggling with a specific part of the funnel, you can dig into that in a vacuum and develop targeted training rather than overhauling the entire program/content.