What's up friends.
I'm the Enablement Manager at an eCommerce tech company and I got hired about a month ago to really clean things up because our sales machine was/is hella broken. Our VP already went through our bottom performers and *gulp* let some poor savages and our Director go. Now I've inherited the Director role and all the problems that come with it.
My AEs are dead set in their ways. I don't blame them -- I was the same way a year ago when I was an AE. The problem is that they all feature sell and they do it very badly. I have no idea how they hit their MRR targets selling like this. I shit you not -- every email is a bullet point list of features with no value. Every Gong call is a disaster of feature breakdowns and almost nothing about strategy or outcome.
My CEO and VP fully endorse my push to shift towards value selling, but these AEs do not give a single fuck whatsoever because they've managed to scrape by with their terrible habits on high-intent partner leads and inbound demo requests for 2 years.
How do I get them to care? I've gone with direct asks, data-driven suggestions, humor, and emotional angles. I'm at a loss and don't want to look like I suck in front of my CEO. I'm fighting every urge to take the managerial angle and throw them to the wolves. Praying for good vibes, savages ๐
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