Alex Granquist • Sr Sales Enablement Manager • Minneapolis
Empowering sales teams with scalable strategies & data-driven enablement.
Being a sales enabler who loves baseball, marathons, movies, and diving deep into what makes all their best parts tick, it kind of makes sense that I love doing the same for salespeople...
whether it’s the constant search of finding the moneyball success factors within our superstars…
training and coaching the next generation of rookies to treat their time selling like a marathon, not a sprint…
or helping leaders understand the messy numbers and trends from the prior week’s box office (or, sales activity) reports…
I still take the same disciplined, empathetic, and analytical approach I had in my 6 years of selling, and use it to help salespeople grow into some of the most curious, coachable, and gritty teams you can find.
By the numbers.
I often am called “the data guru” at work. But for me, that’s always just meant keeping things simple.
So let’s start there, breaking down my years of experience in some major Enablement relevant categories…
My story.
Recruiting.
While in my last couple years in college as a Lead Caller at the University of Minnesota’s fundraising call center, I personally raised over $20k in donations and was soon promoted to Supervisor, where I provided on-the-spot coaching and training to callers.
With a head start practicing the art (and science) of selling on the phones, I weighed my options and accepted an offer for a Recruiter-to-Sales role at a local, mid-sized IT staffing company: Signature Consultants.
I’ll always be so thankful for starting my career at a company that practices what they preach in training, mentoring, and coaching their people. Good for business and the right thing to do.
Within a year, I was running our 15-person team’s daily morning standup meeting that decided who will work which roles, and was promoted to Account Executive for our company’s top client (no pressure, right?)
Selling.
Turns out, I like the pressure!
Flash forward five years through hundreds of deals, coaching dozens of mentees in our mentor program, including three years of President’s Club trips, a couple years with $700k + in Gross Profit, and AE of the quarter, I had plenty to be proud about, while still always trying to find the next gear.
Majority of my time was selling into the biggest enterprise account at the company, but also broke a couple logos at the mid-market and startup size. I filled anything and everything in my client’s IT departments, and even had success in Marketing, PMO, and Business departments.
Long days and nights were packed with cold calling, client entertainment, showcasing new products and solutions our company had to offer, training and mentoring the new hires, and of course…closing deals.
But after 18 months of selling remotely in Covid, despite coming off of my best years in sales, something was still missing…
Enabling.
I expressed interest to leadership that some day, I’d like to a role where I can help salespeople work smarter through my data-driven insights and coaching. This was already a part of my job as a seller, but I wanted more.
I was prepared to wait a while for an opening like this, but within a month, our Head of Field Ops created a new role from scratch for me. We were recently acquired by DISYS (later rebranded as Dexian, Global Tech & Talent Solutions) and they needed someone to help with Sales Ops & Enablement for their sales teams unfamiliar with our heavy training focus.
This got me super hands-on with the data, our CRM, exposed me to what works and doesn’t for hundreds of salespeople, and enhanced my skills analyzing and translating key sales activity reports.
Soon after, me, my manager and two other colleagues were formally tasked with recreating Sales Enablement for the company, because only 19% of first-year salespeople were hitting their on-ramp Gross Profit quota.
After just 12 months of getting our hands dirty reshaping all our sales programs, we bumped that up to 54% of the first-years hitting their quota. We knew we still had work to do, but a solid foundation had been laid. Company Leadership agreed, fully bought into our work, and we quickly went from a small team of 4 to a department of 25 by the end of 2024.
