Alex Granquist • Senior Sales Enablement Manager • Minneapolis
Designing enablement that helps sales navigate complexity, ask better questions, and sell smarter
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 bring the same disciplined, empathetic, and analytical mindset from my six years as an AE to enablement—helping reps grow into thoughtful, curious, and resilient teams that ask great questions and keep improving.
By the numbers.
I can’t help but chuckle (since I come from Sales) when my colleagues call me our team’s “data guru”
Because whenever I’m translating my insights from key data, I just focus on keeping things simple
So let’s start there, breaking down my years of experience in some key Enablement categories…
My journey to enablement.
Recruiting Roots → AE Promotion
Raised $20K+ as a Lead Caller at the University of Minnesota; promoted to Supervisor for strong coaching instincts
Joined Signature Consultants post-grad; fast-tracked from Recruiter to Enterprise AE
Sold into our largest account: a major enterprise financial services company
Sales Excellence → Mentorship Impact
Spent 6 years as an AE, closing hundreds of deals and generating $700K+ GP in multiple years
3x Presidents Club; named AE of the Quarter for excellence in mentoring new AEs
Led our largest account: a major financial services firm
Even had some customers within the Cybersecurity space I supported
Enablement from the Ground Up
Tapped by our COO to build and redesign enablement programs from scratch
Helped create our Enablement function post-acquisition—led onboarding and data-driven program design
Boosted first-year rep quota attainment from 19% to 54%; team scaled from 4 to 25
Despiterecent promotion, craving more mission-driven, technical, and collaborative enablement work
Scouting Report & Action Plan Program
Problem
Despite majority of AEs exceeding expectations the first 6 months, Enablement struggled to help the bottom 25% AEs ramp up in year one
Task
Our CEO tasked Enablement with creating a new program that heavily leverages data, identifies why they’re struggling, and more directly partners with the AE and sales management to improve
Program Design
After heavy research, I noticed a few lesser-discussed AE activity trends, like efficiency in prospecting within their CRM
I partnered with our junior sales enablement analyst team to dive deep into currently relevant trends
I put everything in a custom made one-pager, making some data-driven suggestions for the AE
I met with the AE’s sales manager and we all came up with an AE action plan together for how they can better focus their prospecting efforts and execution
1-2 month check-ins with the sales manager and AE to check progress and see areas they still need Enablement’s help
Results
85% of the AEs who have received this program started to ramp up faster than the expected pace.
Sales manager and VPs slowly became more bought in over 9 months, and now today most of them are asking for more Scouting Reports, as we scale to support 60+ AEs in this program
and one last thing before you go…
you should know that I’ve been putting some serious time studying, practicing and learning….
a few key areas for this role I’m not quite an expert in (yet), like….
Cybersecurity/SaaS sales cycle stages vs talent & tech solutions
I did a deep dive into how sales cycles differ between staffing and software, and I keep a whiteboard on my desk summarizing the key insights to remind myself every day
It started with a ‘Revenue Architecture’ course from Winning by Design and led to 100+ hours of research—books, podcasts, and conversations with tech software sellers
While stages like Prospecting and Closing are similar, I found key differences in Qualification, Discovery, and Post-Sales
I’ve focused on mastering those and started applying software sales enablement best practices in my current role, like building a Playbook
Head start on Cybersecurity industry knowledge
Subscribed to Darknet Diaries and Security Weekly to stay sharp on current attack methods, red teaming tactics, and security program challenges faced by enterprise clients
Researched NetSPI’s core offerings (PTaaS, ASM, BAS) and studied how they align with current offensive security trends
Followed cybersecurity leaders and red team practitioners online to learn how enablement can support highly technical sales cycles