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If it Lives in your Rep's Head, New Hires are Just Guessng
By Teasha Cable
What does a complete enablement system actually looks like?
I've seen this scenario play out at almost every company I've consulted, advised, or work with. The sales team has an "unwritten rulebook," ...and it lives in someone's head.
Questions like, "Who can approve a discount?" "When do you stop following up on an account?" Or, "What's the best time of day to call a doctor's office?"
Your top sales vets knows all this stuff..and the new hire finds out the hard way.
On a recent episode of the Dynamic Decisions Podcast, I talked with Paty Araiza, lead sales enablement manager at Dynatrace and founder of Sales Career Lab, about what it takes to pull that knowledge out of people's heads and into a system.
Her answer was less about software and more about decision making...(my sweet spot).
Institutional Knowledge is a Hiring Problem in Disguise
Paty's definition of "tribal knowledge" is practical. It's the discount you are allowed to give... but nobody told you about, or knowing who to call in a big organization who will actually pick up the phone. Another example she gave was who "just knew" the best hours to walk into a doctor's office.
That last example is significant because the company was in the process of hiring its first salesperson; a rep from an entirely different industry who wouldn't have insights to this "tribal knowledge."
Paty is blunt about the risk of assuming they would just eventually "figure it out." Assuming the new hire succeeded in sales elsewhere, and they'll succeed in a new company a "big" assumption to make.
Paty's fix is as unsexy as it gets: Put the cadences, the inside knowledge, AND the expectations on paper before the hire arrives.
Boom.
Paty added if you're a growth-stage company thinking about bringing in a "unicorn" to rescue your pipeline, and you have nothing documented, you're setting the scene for failure, or missed opportunities.
You need to get that knowledge out of your top seller's head, and onto paper.
Implement the "Buddy System"
At GoSite Paty grew an SDR team from 20 people to 100. Her program generated $5.7 million in total contract value while promoting the original 20 SDRs to account executive positions. She will tell you it was also "chaos." What worked with two team leads managing ten people each, eventually broke at that scale.
Her answer was to design a methodology for new hires. They got a buddy, someone who knew the ropes and exhibited success, someone they could shadow and lean on for calls. Their Gong calls became learning examples.
And every question had a route: First, the playbook first, next, their buddy, followed by the team lead, and only after that did they get to speak with Paty herself.
That structure did something specific for her. It freed her time for strategy and coaching instead of walking first-job-out-of-college reps through their dialer.
A playbook is also a way of protecting your leaders' attention.
The Complete Enablement System
So, what does a complete enablement system actually looks like?
I was expecting Paty to go over a checklist. Instead, she starts with onboarding playbooks. For example, two or three years ago, she would not have put building AI agents in her playbook. Now she builds account planning, presentation, and outreach agents at Dynatrace and trains their reps to build their own.
The real work is getting ahead of what sellers need next.
What she offers instead of a checklist is a test.
"If a person came in and knew sales, knew how to negotiate, understood objection handling, and knew absolutely nothing about the product, nothing about the company, and nothing about how the company operates, could they come in and in ninety days be a top performer because of their skills?
If the answer is yes, you've achieved your onboarding goal. If the answer is no, start digging.
Adoption is a Sales Job
The best playbook in the world is worthless if nobody opens it.
Paty's approach to adoption runs top down first. In a small company, that means getting the CEO to commit to the metrics reps will be held to. In a larger one, it means winning over VPs and regional directors so they "inspect what they expect."
Then she treats the rollout like a deal.
"I treat this process like a sale. Getting some champions, who I can test it with. Hopefully they love it, they feel special, and now they're excited about it. And they're gonna go tell their other AEs or SDRs to use it too."
The last ingredient is consistency. When she coaches someone, she asks whether they checked the playbook, then points to the exact page or LMS section. That is how you build the muscle memory of where to go.
Prove It or Lose It
"Onboarding is often taken for granted because usually there's no one saying 'This onboarding program cut ramp time in half. It expedited deal velocity. It increased deal size'."
If you run enablement, or fund it, here's your assignment. Track ramp time, deal velocity, and deal size, and report them the way sales reports revenue. Here's the framework:
Revise a playbook when the field says it does not match how they sell
Coach a burned-out top performer through their transition rather than ask for one more quarter
Invest in career development, because it supports retention
The Takeaway
Start with one question: if a savvy seller joined tomorrow, what would they not know that your veteran sales reps take for granted?
Write that down, build a path for questions, recruit a few champions, and measure what changes.
Growth without the chaos is not about removing people's judgment. It is about making sure everyone is working from the same map.
You can follow Paty on LinkedIn, subscribe to her newsletter Selling with Soul, or visit salescareerlab.com.
Listen to the full conversation on the Dynamic Decisions Podcast.