Field Enablement

Maintained by:

Overview

The Field Enablement team's mission is to help customers successfully grow and evolve in their journey with GitLab to achieve positive business outcomes with effective enablement solutions aligned to Gitlab’s values. How we do this:

Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders (including but not limited to Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, Sales Ops, Product/Engineering, and the People team) to address prioritized knowledge, behavior, and skill gaps in the GitLab Field Team to achieve desired business outcomes.
Define, coordinate, and/or lead the development and delivery of effective enablement solutions (training, technology, knowledge, content, process, and tools) for GitLab Sales, Customer Success, and Partners throughout all phases of the customer journey as well as different stages of each team member's tenure and/or experience at or with GitLab.
Champion the needs and interests of the Field Team (all routes to market) – ensuring that they are regularly informed about relevant business and organizational updates and have access to enablement materials necessary for their day-to-day work to meet and exceed business objectives.
Cultivate a culture of curiosity, iteration, and continuous learning & development across the GitLab field organization.

Contact Us

Want to chat with us? Please Slack us at #field-enablement-team.
Have a Field Enablement request? Please use our quick request process below.

Key Programs

Strategy

Handbook-First Approach to GitLab Learning and Development Materials

Chat between David Somers (Sr. Director, Field Enablement) and Sid Sijbrandij (CEO)

Key Discussion Points

Our Mission is that Everyone Can Contribute, and our most important value is Results. Like we've extended that to the Handbook, we want to extend it to our Learning Materials.
We want to leverage the best of an e-learning platform, with the benefits of reminders, interactivity, and more but make sure the materials we produce are also available to those who aren't using an e-learning platform, while fulfilling our mission.
There are benefits to keeping our e-learning material handbook-first:
- Folks who have already completed a formal training through an e-learning platform may want to return to the materials
- Those who never go through the formal platform may also benefit from the materials
- The handbook continues to be the SSOT, with the e-learning platform leveraging handbook materials through screenshots, embeds, and more

Learn how Field Enablement takes a Handbook-first approach to interactive learning.

Six Critical Questions

Inspired by The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni

1. Why does the GitLab Field Enablement team exist?

See our team mission in the Overview section.

2. How do we behave?

On our best day, we show up with a positive attitude while demonstrating GitLab’s values along with the following behaviors to overcome the Five Dysfunctions:

Trust: Extend trust, actively listen, and assume noble intent; give and receive feedback with respect and solicit feedback often
Embrace Healthy Conflict: Engage in constructive conflict for the purpose of achieving shared goals & objectives; resolve personal issues, quickly and directly
Commitment: Support decisions once decisions are made with a GitLab team-first approach
Accountability: Hold ourselves and each other accountable while encouraging each other & celebrating successes
Results: Strong drive for results and a focus on the customer; demonstrate passion for continuous learning & improvement

3. What does the Field Enablement team do?

See "How we do this" in the Overview section.

4. What does success look like?

The below is a work in progress as we define success measures across each stage of the customer journey:

Engage & Educate the Customer
- Increase # of rep-sourced opps
- Accelerate sales cycle time and improve conversion of MQLs to SAOs
- Accelerate and improve predictability of new rep ramp time
Progress the Opportunity & Close the Deal
- Increase # of closed deals per rep
- Accelerate sales cycle time and improve conversion of SAOs to Closed/Won deals
- Increase average sale price (inclusive of improved product mix to sell more Premium/Silver and Ultimate/Gold)
- Accelerate and improve predictability of new rep ramp time
- Improve forecasting accuracy
- Improve win rates
Retain & Expand
- Improve renewal rates (inclusive of up-sell and cross-sell)
- Accelerate customer time to value
- Increase breadth of stage adoption

5. What is most important right now (2HFY21)?

Improve field efficiency by training and sustaining prioritized knowledge and behavior/skill gaps
- Field certification program (Sales, CS & Partner audiences)
  - Product feature, tiering, and customer use cases
  - Moments That Matter across the customer journey
  - Continue to operationalize Command of the Message & MEDDPPICC
- Deliver enablement program aligned with top competitor GTM initiatives
- Embrace partner enablement as an extension of GitLab Sales and Customer Success enablement
Promote a culture of continuous learning and development
- Improve learning experience by implementing new Learning Experience Platform (LXP)
- Develop and execute robust change management plan that taps into team members’ inherent desire to pursue excellence
- Continued execution & ongoing iteration of functional onboarding training to accelerate time to productivity for new field team members
- Continued execution & ongoing iteration of continuous learning programs (CS Skills Exchange and Sales Enablement Level Up Webcast series)
Ensure that the GitLab field organization is regularly informed about relevant business and organizational updates and has access to information & resources necessary for their day-to-day work
- Continue to mature and advance field communications strategy
- Make it easier for Sales to discover & access information/resources they need when they need it
- Keep planning for SKO 2021 on track

6. Who must do what?

Sr. Director, Field Enablement
- David Somers
Manager, Field Enablement Programs
- Kris Reynolds
Program Managers: Enterprise Sales, Commercial Sales, and Technical Sales / Customer Success
- Kris Reynolds (Customer Success Enablement)
- Kelley Shirazi (Commercial Sales Enablement)
- Alvaro Warden (Partner Enablement)
- TBH (Enterprise Sales Enablement)
Field Onboarding Program Manager
- Tanuja Paruchuri
Sales Training Facilitator
- John Blevins
Field Communications Manager
- Monica Jacob
Technical Instructional Designer
- Issac Abbasi

Making a Field Enablement Request

If you have a great training idea and/or enablement request, we'd love to hear it! Please make an enablement request by following this quick process:

Submit an issue using this issue template
- Please be descriptive in the issue in order to give our team the necessary context to review and prioritize your request. Note that ALL questions must be answered prior to Field Enablement triaging your request.
Upon submitting your request, the issue will be tagged as FE priority::new request and FE status::triage
Field Enablement will triage the request as quickly as possible. Upon examining the request, they will assess the priority and status by labeling it with one of the labels (please see label definitions in section below):
- Priority:
  - FE priority::1
  - FE priority::2
  - FE priority::3
- Status:
  - FE status::wip
  - FE status::backlog
Field Enablement will collaborate with the requester on the request details directly in the issue to clarify any missing information, set up a discovery call, and/or update on next-steps.

If you have a Field Communications request (process change, announcement, etc.), please see the request process outlined here.