Hyper Growth Enablement with Jerry Brooner, #228

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What’s the formula for building a hyper growth organization? This has been a hot topic for debate in many business circles. Because the key to tapping into accelerated growth often starts with understanding your audience, your market, and where you can enable your teams to exploit competitive advantages.

All of this is easier said than done, but when done right, building in the key pieces you need to unlock hypergrowth can empower your sales teams to close more deals and transform passive buyers into lifelong superfans.

In this episode of The Modern Selling Podcast we explore the concept of hypergrowth enablement, what it is, how leaders can effectively spark it within their organizations, and what specific strategies are needed to build a hypergrowth focused company.

Our guest for this episode, Jerry Brooner, is the leading thought leader in this space and has worked with top technology companies to help them tap into incredible, exponential growth – while also serving their customers well.

Jerry Brooner is the President of Global Field Operations at Enable, a collaborative rebate management platform that helps manufacturers, distributors, and retailers take control of their rebate programs and turn them into an engine for growth. He has over two decades of experience as a high-growth global enterprise SaaS technology executive. Previously, he was the former Chief Revenue Officer at Scout RFP, and has built high growth teams at Dropbox, SAP, Callidus, and Siebel Systems.

Download the full episode to hear firsthand what Jerry believes is the winning formula to spur hypergrowth for any organization.

Why is hyper growth enablement important?

Enablement is a word that is often thrown around, especially in sales circles. I wanted to hear Jerry’s take on what the real power in enablement is and why he sees it as the core of being able to create hyper growth.

His insights are eye-opening, “ I think enablement is very underutilized and often overlooked, especially at startups. Companies are spending tens of millions of dollars to recruit top talent, but once they’re hired they get very little support to be successful. This model is flawed. Enablement is about getting your people excited about their work and equipped with the right tools, resources, and support to be successful on day one – if not before.”

And, it’s this concept of what you do before a new hire starts that sheds new light on the onboarding process for me.

Jerry follows a simple, yet highly effective onboarding process that goes as follows:

• Education – he provides his new hires with key information about the company, the industry, competitors – any and everything they may need to get up to speed on who they’re working for and what they’ll be doing.
• Expectations – even before someone starts, Jerry shares their 30 day calendar with them that outlines all trainings, meetings, and requirements. This is a great tool because it helps new hires coming in the door understand the expectations they will need to meet and enables them to align their personal life to meet their business goals as well.
• Empowerment – Every new hire has a “shadowing” plan that shows them upfront where and when their hands-on learning opportunities will be. This positions people from the beginning to get excited about learning and aware of where they can go for more support – without trying to figure it all out on their own.

This is such an effective strategy – Education, Expectations, and Empowerment – because here at Vengreso we employ a similar model and find that it accelerates onboarding and our reps and SDRs that do this are much more successful – faster.

How does diverse hiring drive enablement?

We hear it all the time – increase diversity in hiring to produce a more innovative organization. I was curious to get Jerry’s perspective on the role that diverse hiring has for enablement and establishing a hyper growth company.

He shares, “Diversity in hiring is super important. But, the key is not just racial, ethnic, or gender diversity. You want to also have diversity in where and what industries you hire from. We recruit people from a much wider industry background than most companies do – by design. For example, if we know we’re going after a lot of manufacturing customers, we’ll go out and hire people who have worked in manufacturing because they understand the industry.”

This is such a novel approach to diverse hiring. Jerry makes a powerful point! If you want to better serve or prospect a particular customer or industry, it would make total sense to recruit sales people who may have worked in those industries because they will know that industry, inside and out.

Listen into the full conversation to hear what other unique ways Jerry recommends hiring so that your team will be primed for hyper growth.

Or watch the video version for this interview, directly below:

What key metrics and KPIs should you track for hyper growth?

In sales, metrics are everything. My motto is: If you’re not tracking it, then you can’t improve it. Jerry agrees and outlines some key metrics he monitors within his organization to ensure that they’re exponentially growing.

“The most important part about metrics is that they need to apply to everyone in the organization. Your KPIs need to also make sense for each position or role within your company – all the way up to the VP level as well. Because the power of metrics is it helps you to keep the pulse on what’s working, what’s not and where exactly you need to focus your attention to see improvements.”

One thing that Jerry highlighted that I found to be profound was the lack of VP or Director level interactions with customers. He finds (and my experience also validates this) that when more levels of your sales team get involved with a prospect, you’re more likely to close the deal.

I mean imagine what it would mean to a prospect to have the company CEO personally reach out to answer their questions. It seems like a simple task – but so many companies don’t do it.

In our conversation, Jerry also goes through the six high value activities he focuses on to spark rapid growth. Be sure to listen to the full episode to hear these gems and hear why Jerry says it takes 98 of these high value activities to close a single deal.

This episode of the Modern Selling Podcast is brought to you by Korn Ferry. Korn Ferry transforms sales teams using their world-class Miller Heiman, methodology, employee assessments, benchmarking and talent advisor capabilities to increase win rates and quota attainment. Korn Ferry offers Korn Ferry Sell, a sales effectiveness app available in App Exchange and app source that helps your sales team develop and replicate powerful sales strategies that help sellers win more deals and crush their quotas.  Learn more at kornferry.com/saleseffectiveness.