Strategic sales support that gets results. That’s the chief role of our new Sales Enablement Manager, Erin Dennis, but there’s much more to it than that.

Like most salespeople, I’ve always had the gift of the gab.

But after a long career in sales, what lights me up these days is really being able to help others in that space, and to coach people and teams around their own sales strategies and processes.

That’s why I joined Hunt & Hawk as its new Sales Enablement Manager – and why I’m looking forward to working closely with our clients and leaning on my crystallised intelligence to really get the most out of our collaborations with them.

Crystallised intelligence, for those who don’t know, is wisdom sharing – it’s the act of synthesising all the knowledge gained from years of experience and using it to help others.

I’ve got plenty of that from more than 20 years in sales, which is why I’m keen to share some of that knowledge with our clients to help them get the most out of their sales efforts.

I’ve had a really interesting career so far. To get my first job, I had to go out and really sell myself.

I grew up in the ‘90s, so I went straight to a mobile phone shop once I’d finished high school because I could see even then that tech was becoming cool.

I went and knocked on heaps of doors and back then, all the old Optus Worlds were individually owned and franchised.

I knocked on one of those doors and volunteered a week of free labour for some work experience. After a couple of days’ trial, the owner offered me a permanent job.

So I got my start in sales working the floor at Optus World, handling walk-in enquiries and learning how to close. That was my first experience of selling.

Fast forward to where I am today, and I took a bit of a winding road to get here.

After a lengthy stint in recruitment working firstly for global agency Hays in Brisbane, then in a leadership role in their Toronto office for four years, I eventually returned to Australia and joined boutique agency, u&u Partners.

Recruitment gave me a really solid base of skills in both outbound and relationship selling, as well as the grit and resilience needed to survive and thrive in the industry.

After that, and being keen to expand my horizons, I was drawn back into the world of tech and ended up joining HubSpot.

It was here that I learned not only the art of selling SaaS – or Software as a Service – but also the power of using tech to drive sales, along with the value of a well-executed inbound methodology for lead generation.

And now, combining it with tech and inbound marketing techniques, is a total game-changer!

One of the biggest reasons I joined Hunt & Hawk was because I wanted to combine my background in sales with the knowledge I’ve gleaned from working in the tech industry.

I’ve always felt really comfortable doing relationship-based selling – and I still love picking up the phone and doing exactly that.

But you can’t rely solely on old-school sales tactics in this economic climate and I’m really keen to combine my background in relationship sales, with all the tech and data now available, to really drive results.

These days you need to use that combination of tech, data, outbound strategy, and inbound methodology to really capture the entire market and get in front of the largest audience possible.

But I still love building relationships and getting in front of clients and trying to really understand their needs.

I like to find out what’s working for them and what’s not, drill down and find their pain points, and develop a really thorough understanding of exactly how and where I can help.

It’s hard to do any of that if you haven’t built a relationship in the first place.

That’s what helps create the foundation for what you’re trying to do. And once you’ve developed that relationship, it’s much easier for you to collaborate on a solution to their pain points.

I’d been working with Hunt & Hawk’s co-founder Ryan Devlin as his HubSpot Channel Account Manager for about a year and a half before he and Sonya Vanjicki asked me to join the business.

I feel like Ryan and I cut from the same cloth as salespeople, because we are both incredibly outcome-driven and all about getting results for the clients we work with.

I know there are many different ways of selling, and I feel like I’ve come full circle by joining Hunt & Hawk – which is very much a data-driven, tech-savvy kind of company.

But at its core, the art of selling is as much about being a people person – and being resilient – as it is anything else.

That’s why I always say ‘no is one step closer to a yes’ – which is a saying I know Ryan is also fond of – because I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of plenty of rejections throughout my career!

You have to be resilient to work in sales, and I think having that outcome-driven mindset – one that’s focused on trying to find solutions and solve problems – is one of my biggest strengths.

Like most things in life, the first step towards solving any problems you have with your sales performance and processes is simply identifying them.

For that reason, when it comes to untangling the sales process for our clients, my first step will just be to identify where all the pain points lie.

It’s something I did a lot in my time at HubSpot – this kind of consultative style of selling – where I asked a lot of questions and really drilled down into what was working, what wasn’t, and where the gaps were in processes and systems.

Then I can steer people in the right direction by helping to identify where they can improve – whether it’s people, processes, or systems – and address each of these with a plan.

One of the reasons that’s so important is because I’m usually dealing with businesses that have already, over time, grabbed a bunch of standalone solutions and are now frustrated about the disconnect between departments and overall lack of performance.

That’s why at Hunt & Hawk, we focus on providing a range of seamless solutions.

So my role as a Sales Enablement Manager is really a bit of a dual one.

On the one hand, I’m looking inwardly at Hunt & Hawk and our sales processes and practices and figuring out what’s working, what’s not, and how we can improve them across the board.

On the other hand, I’ll be looking outwardly towards our clients and helping them to improve their own processes and systems, get an understanding of what’s working for them, and really leveraging my varied career experience and crystallised intelligence, as it were, just to see how and where I can add value.

I just really enjoy helping people… and I can’t wait to do that for Hunt & Hawk and our clients.

Whether it’s sales support or marketing or branding assistance, the expert team at Hunt & Hawk is ready to help.

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