Measuring the Impact of Sales Enablement - with Elay Cohen, founder and CEO, SalesHood

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOpSquared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Elay Cohen, founder and CEO of Sales Enablement Leader, SalesHood. Today, we'll be covering three main topics. First, the story behind Elay founding SalesHood. Second, the evolution of sales enablement as a profession and as a function, both a look back, but more importantly, a look forward. In what metrics should sales enablement leaders track and present to highlight the business impact and return on investment of a sales enablement function? Elay, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Elay Cohen** (1:16)
Ray, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I'm in San Francisco and CEO, co-founder of SalesHood. It's been an amazing journey. I'm from Toronto originally and moved to San Francisco after I finished my business degree and had a couple of jobs and really loved the internet and wanted to get as close as I could to the hub of where I thought the internet action was happening and was a product manager at a startup and product manager over at Oracle and then Salesforce led products over at Salesforce and then got promoted to vice president of sales enablement by Marc Benioff and then left and founded SalesHood. So that's my journey and here I am. Great to be here.

**Ray Rike** (1:50)
Well, let's start with a little backstory to that transition from a product manager. Great training being at Oracle and I believe you were responsible for the partner relationship management product there and then you did the same at Salesforce. How did you decide to make that transition from product management career path to sales enablement and sales productivity?

**Elay Cohen** (2:11)
Yeah, I know. It's a great question, right? I grew up in Toronto and having grown up in Toronto, my dad had a retail furniture store. So I learned sales when I was very, very young. I had the best coach. My dad, he coached me, he taught me and I love technology. So once I kind of got my hands on tech and realized that I love building and creating and working with customers, you know, I really love product management, but I was a unique product manager. I was a product manager that loved to sell. You know, the sales teams love bringing me on sales calls. I love being able to be working with customers, hearing their requirements and did it at Allegious, did it at Oracle, you know? And when I was at Salesforce, we launched the partner portal, partner relationship management. And I think when Benioff pulled me up on stage, about 18 months after we rolled out the product and recognized my team and I for rolling out an amazing product, he said, what made PRM, the partner relationship management offering, what made it successful was how Eli and his team trained, coached, enabled our global sales organization. And therefore we're going to promote them to VP of sales enablement. And so I get my dad some credit and just say, he taught me how to sell. And I've just always had coaching, been a key part of what I do all the time.

**Ray Rike** (3:19)
Well, interesting, SalesForce, what a great place to kind of start your sales productivity and sales enablement career journey. But I was talking to the former CEO of Commerce Cloud at SalesForce, Mike Micucci, last week on the podcast. And he was talking about the relentless focus on productivity metrics, especially ARR growth at SalesForce. Can I ask, when you were leading sales productivity at SalesForce, how were you measured as far as the business impact you were creating?

**Elay Cohen** (3:47)
I love it. So being the head of enablement at salesforce.com during the hyper growth years was incredible. You know, getting to work very closely with Marc Benioff, with the leadership team, just like you said, we were maniacally focused on impact. And so just think about what the world was like back in 2006, 2007, 2008 You know, Salesforce had just gone public. Salesforce had a very bright future, but it wasn't predestined that the company was going to be successful.
And so we were still reporting subscribers. We were looking at revenue lifts, you know, quarter after quarter as we were reporting to the street. And what we knew was the following. We knew if we could hire salespeople, and if those salespeople could get productive faster, meaning they could start closing deals faster, because it was a SaaS business, because we were tracking monthly recurring revenue, we knew that if we could get salespeople ramp faster, then we knew we could report to the street faster as well. So there was a direct correlation between the time to ramp and time to revenue, that we were tracking at the rep level, at the team level, at the country level, in those early days, to actual stock performance at the company level. And that's why Marc Benioff was really focused on those core metrics. We were looking on a continual basis, how we could shave off days and weeks to the new hire onboarding productivity numbers. And so we instituted programs like 30, 60, 90, because we wanted to get our sellers. So time to productivity. And we were looking at time to first deal, time to second deal. We're looking at time till they would hit productivity, which means the first month that they're contributing to quota. And then how long would it take the sellers to actually hit quota? That was all onboarding. And then the other metrics rate that we looked at very closely was win rates. We were always looking for ways to win more deals because we thought we should win every deal. And so we were always pushing up the win rates on a team by team basis and measuring the win rates. And then some of the other traditional ones as well. We looked at average deal size and we looked at sales cycle time as well. That's time to revenue. But we were tracking these numbers. We were tracking them and we were continuously rolling out new programs to just provide even like small lifts and improvements had a big, big impact. Right.