Carla Price, Enablement Leader

Career Summary / Enablement 101 / Career Insights

Career Summary
Carla Price is a Revenue Enablement leader who’s carved a path into startups, leveraging her education, to give her colleagues the tools they need to succeed. Through her career she’s been influenced through the help of family, friends, and colleagues. Especially her dad, a former social worker who’s battling Alzheimers. Carla has learned a lot from her father about what it means to find fulfillment in her work. He has been a lifelong teacher for her and others teaching countless students how to demonstrate leadership, communicate, and build relationships.

Carla had strong foundational educational experiences at St. Mary Academy – Bay View and Providence College. Originally thinking she might want to pursue a career as an attorney, she was a Philosophy major at PC and took some Psychology classes too. After college, she moved to New York with a friend where she entered the world of Marketing. Beginning as a Marketing Coordinator in real estate, she eventually transitioned to digital advertising at agencies before eventually breaking into advertising technology.

Carla gravitated to advertising because of her previous studies in trying to better understand how people’s minds work. She even completed a Masters in Education, attending night classes for two years while working full time, to continue her learning. This experience helped her realize her talents are best spent inside of rapid learning environments – growing technology startups. She doubled down on adtech, joining xAd (now GroundTruth) before landing at Liftoff, a rapidly growing ad tech startup later acquired by Blackstone.

At Liftoff, she spent 4+ critical years in Customer Success working inside of Revenue teams before transitioning to Enablement by way of Strategic Operations. Carla was Liftoff’s first Customer Success hire in New York at Liftoff as the company expanded East from its Bay Area HQ. She worked closely with Enterprise customers and the East Coast Enterprise Sales team helping to build out their New York revenue team. Through it all she learned a few things. She loved helping teams grow and she enjoyed teaching them and equipping them with the tools to succeed even more.

When there was an opportunity to join a newly formed Strategic Operations & Enablement team after 4 years at Liftoff, Carla transitioned from Customer Success to help manage cross functional project teams for strategic company initiatives. As an enablement leader, she collaborated with internal teams to develop playbooks and adopt best practices across the company. 

Liftoff was undergoing rapid change in complexity and personnel as the company scaled. Carla began to focus on Enablement full time, leveraging her background in education & counseling to help the growing Commercial team develop. 

She partnered with subject matter experts to teach team members new skills and knowledge by creating a “Liftoff Academy” program after a large company merger onboarded a bunch of new employees. As the Enablement Team Lead, she advised on the creation & formatting of the program and established a monthly cadence of company wide Enablement sessions. Managers and team members supported content creation and the enablement team leveraged feedback  to determine how the teams would best learn the content. Experimenting with different learning formats, the enablement team helped the revenue teams understand how to talk about different emerging product areas with their customers.

Enablement 101 – Keep It Simple, Be Repetitive, Don’t Assume
As an Enablement leader you need to assist the leadership team by gathering the right information, figure out how you’re going to deliver the content, and then distribute it at a cadence & in a format that makes the most sense. Enablement, after all, is about supporting people and giving them the tools to be successful in their roles. When Carla explains her approach to Revenue Enablement, it’s about three things:

• Keep it Simple
• Be Repetitive
• Don’t Assume, Get in the Field

Keep it Simple
Carla explained to me “when you’re leading a team, there are inevitable pitfalls”. At the speed and complexity with which a technology startup operates at, leaders often relay complex information that isn’t as complex to the experienced veterans inside of a company. There’s a learning curve for new hires that can be taken for granted. If you don’t give newer team members the time, space, and tools they need to get up to speed it can cause problems. There’s a daunting amount of acronyms, buzzwords, and new vocabulary that must be learned.

So you have to keep it simple. 

Be Repetitive
Repetition is critical too. Carla emphasizes that “you need to think of yourself as a teacher, relaying basic concepts consistently.” People might not always feel comfortable speaking up either. And you can’t get stuck in your LMS (learning management system); you have to figure out what message resonates from the platform because misuse ends up in suffering by the end user, your customer (the revenue teams), resulting in wasted time.

Accessibility is another way to make sure lessons are repeatedly learned. Not just physical accessibility but various messaging for different people that learn in different ways. You can’t assume people work or learn the same. It’s just like in school where you have in class learning, homework, projects, etc. You need to repeat your message in various ways through combinations of learning to have your message resonate and be retained.

Don’t Assume, Get in the Field
How do you know what your team even needs to learn? Well, you need to get in the field obviously! You know what they say about people who assume.. Carla explains that “being an enablement leader is about supporting people and helping give them satisfaction in their roles. You can’t just assume something is already being done because you told them to do it or their manager told them to do it.” You have to get in the field and understand what people are actually doing (and why!), shadowing calls and understanding the day to day of the teams you support. In the same way as if you’re working with a pro sports team, as a coach you need to have a keen understanding of everyone’s role and the unique challenges they experience.

There are so many different Enablement tools for people to learn and receive content. It’s imperative to be strategic, intentional, and thoughtful about how to leverage them. Sometimes it’s micro learning, like a short video. But you need to avoid getting stuck in “textbook learning” by referring people to a CMS (content management system), like Seismic for example, without clear guidance and saying “it’s all in there”. As Carla put it “you might have encyclopedias downstairs but that doesn’t mean you know how to access all the information you need at any given time.”

Career Insights
Here are three career learnings Carla shared on her journey from marketing to agencies to ad tech across Customer Success and Enablement:

Empowerment – “If you can find your way to feel the most empowered, you will be in your best place. Especially as someone who is neurodiverse, and didn’t realize that until my early 30’s, feeling empowered has helped me thrive in my career”

Navigating Relationships – “Whether it’s working with sales people on account teams, or with different managers, you are going to have to learn how to work with all types of people. There will always be difficult people, some for you & me and sometimes just for me. I have learned that the same type of difficult person will continue to come through your life until you learn how to work with them, which inevitably improves your emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills”

Have Flexibility – “if you have the opportunity to have fluidity in your career and where you want to focus, keep yourself open to opportunities. It’s good to have goals, but it’s also good to have an open mindset which has helped to take me on a path to something that I really love”

Carla loves working in Enablement and wants to build a legacy of doing good…well. This functional area has lit a fire in her and she feels like she’s found a role where her skills fit best. She’s most happy & thriving when she’s able to lead and help others be their best selves. Furthermore, Enablement gives her the opportunities to help creatively solve problems in partnership with go to market teams and improve operational efficiencies. All with the goal of supporting businesses to run as well oiled machines across people, processes, and performance. Just like her dad, Carla wants to help others be their best.

For more about Carla, you can reach out to her on LinkedIn, leading the Providence Chapter for WiSE (Women in Sales Enablement), or hanging with her two active children at a Rhode Island beach just south of Boston this summer. Thanks for sharing. We’re all looking to see how you continue to empower teams as an Enablement leader in the years ahead!