If you think Sales Enablement is just another cost center that only exists to send out nastygrams when you fail to complete your monthly sales training (@Armand, this is your last reminder man), guess again.
Kayde Givens is the VP of Enablement at Awardco, and her team tripled quota attainment in her first 4 months.
Today we’re breaking down the rhythms that got her there:
- Weekly: Sh*t Umbrella Slide & Protected Time
- Every Other Week: Team Meeting & Sales Rhythms
- Monthly: Cross-Functional Syncs & Revenue Data
- Quarterly: QBRs & OKRs
Let’s grow!
Weekly: Sh*t Umbrella Slide & Protected Time
Each week Kayde uses two tools to protect her reps’ time and her team’s time. The first is called the sh*t umbrella.
1. The Sh*t Umbrella Slide
Everyone in the org wants a piece of your reps’ attention. Marketing feedback, questions from Product, and status update requests from Leadership. If you leave communication channels wide open, your reps will spend 6 hours a week sorting noise instead of selling.
Kayde’s solution? The Sh*t Umbrella slide:
To protect reps’ time, Kayde created an intake form for all sales-related communications. That way, her team can filter through all of them and pass along the key takeaways. She does this using the Sh*t Umbrella slide, which is sent to Sales Leaders weekly so they can present it during their weekly team meeting. It organizes updates into 3 buckets: What to Know, Action Required, and What’s Coming.
2. Protected Focus Time on Fridays
Kayde currently runs a team of 4, and because Enablement touches so many parts of the business, if she doesn’t block focus time for her team, they’ll never have time to get any work done.
So Kayde blocks Fridays from 10 a.m. until EOD. Gym, beach, happy hour? Nice try. She asks her team to commit to finishing something (playbooks, trainings, etc) in that block. At 10 a.m., an automated Slack asks each team member, “What will you finish today?” Iterations are shared for feedback throughout the day, and by EOD everyone delivers what they committed to.
Every Other Week: Team Meeting & Sales Rhythms
These rhythms are about calibrating plans. Kayde syncs with her own team, then pulls up a chair to sales team meetings.
1. Enablement Team Meeting: Rather than run the meeting herself, she has the team rotate ownership.
Here is her go-to agenda:
2. Sales Rhythms: Enablement is part of the sales team and they need to hear what’s working, and what’s broken firsthand. Kayde’s enablement manager sits in on SDR and AE team meetings and call blitzes. Kayde attends forecasting and pipeline reviews.
3. Sales Manager 1:1s: Kayde sits down with each sales leader every other week for 25 minutes to discuss what’s trending on their team, what enablement is noticing, and where reps are asking for help.
4. Sales All-Hands: Kayde runs the sales all-hands. It’s essentially the sh*t umbrella in meeting form.
Kayde keeps it tight with this 30-minute agenda:
Monthly: Cross-Functional Syncs & Revenue Data
Kayde’s weekly meetings help her identify what problems need solving, and her monthly cadence adds the context. Syncing with cross-functional teams helps her build a POV on each problem, and reviewing the numbers validates it with real data.
1. Cross-Functional Syncs: Kayde meets monthly with the teams enablement can’t function without, mainly RevOps and Product Marketing, to align on shared goals and clear blockers.
2. Revenue Data: Kayde can’t sit in on 100 calls a day to confirm her reps are struggling with discovery. So every month, she leans on Gong boards to spot new gaps and validate the ones she already suspects.
Here are her top 5 Gong boards:
- Core training initiative trackers: shows whether core trainings are actually being used on calls
- Market board: tracks competitor mentions, market trends, and product feedback
- AI theme spotters: flags skill gaps across calls
- Call metrics vs. benchmarks: tracks talk-to-listen ratio and number of questions asked
- Revenue and pipeline dashboards: shows where deals are falling off
Quarterly Rhythms: QBRs & OKRs
A calendar full of meetings means nothing if it doesn’t turn into an enablement plan that moves the numbers. Kayde runs the same four steps every quarter, in order, to lock in her enablement plan:
