Introduction

My name is Brendon and I’ve been the Customer Success Enablement Specialist here at PandaDoc for a little over a year now—starting in January 2022. Before this, I worked in a number of different fields, though my passion has always been to help others. During my undergraduate, I wanted to be a secondary English teacher. That path didn’t quite work out as I dropped the education portion of my degree in lieu of a pursuit in rhetoric—the art of persuasive speaking and writing. However, the desire to help others remained and I found that I can help others through a career in enablement. 

While I mainly work with our Customer Success Managers (CSM) and Account Managers (AM), you can also find me teaching our Getting Started for Account Owners and Admins class, and hosting our customer Office Hours. Because of this, I have the opportunity to make an impact not only for our customers but for my fellow Pandas as well, and that makes this job highly rewarding. 

What is an Enablement Specialist?

One of the best parts about being in Enablement is that every day is a bit different. One day could be focused on a large company initiative that the teams need to be ready for and the next could be spent working one-on-one with teammates and customers, teaching them how to use the platform. Despite the predictable unpredictability of the role itself, I do have a few consistent parts of my day—routine and question-asking. 

Given the unpredictable nature of what may need to be covered, I like to keep a certain level of structure and routine to my days. It could be from my time playing sports, but I’ve found I am most productive and efficient in the early morning—which is when I do much of my mentally-demanding work. I answer messages and emails from the day before, create skills assessments, develop curricula, and generally try to finish the majority of the heavy writing I need to do for the day. In the afternoon, I do less writing-intensive work and focus more on other things—like building courses in our learning management system (LMS). 

The other aspect of being an enablement specialist that remains constant across my days is the need to ask questions. I ask a lot of questions. Why? Because part of my role is finding out what people need to know and getting them motivated to learn that material. By asking (probably too many) questions, I can understand not only the material I’m teaching but how I can get buy-in from those absorbing my content. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but the more relevancy I can build into my work, the better. 

One of the single most rewarding things about my job is hearing from customers and Pandas that they understand the information that was presented to them. The reason for this is two-fold: not only does it mean that they have what they need to accomplish their tasks and make their lives easier, but it also means that I asked the right questions during the project's beginning phases. There’s something about seeing someone excited about working through a troublesome issue or learning a new concept that satiates my desire to help people. Lucky for me, I get to see that look often. 

Recap & What’s Next

Enablement is a career I didn’t expect to find myself in. If I remember back to a younger me who wanted to teach at a high school with the hopes of professorship, I had this idea that learning was confined to the brick and mortar of academia. 

Enablement isn’t always easy. Sometimes, you ask the wrong questions. Sometimes, you aren’t able to connect in the right way with a learner to truly help them overcome their obstacles. Sometimes, you don’t have the exact right answer. However, through the unpredictability and the nuance, you get to help people achieve understanding and that is simply a great feeling. 

Stay tuned to hear from more of my colleagues over the coming weeks. In the meantime, how do you like to learn best? Maybe you’re part of your company’s enablement team. If you are, how do you like to share information?