Andrey Zevakhin, Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Zywave and a 20-year enablement leader who has built functions from scratch and evolved existing ones, joins Content Amplified to argue that if you are not in sales, you are in sales enablement. His framing: sales sits on the frontier in front of the customer, and because deals are what fund the company, sales effectively cuts everyone's paychecks, which he says is not provocative, it is just math. He describes enablement as a funnel and a liaison that captures signals from sales (what customers ask, where deals stall, what resonates) and pulls the right partners into the conversation, because the enablement team is expert in sales execution, not product architecture or pricing strategy. He refuses to be a Swiss Army knife that can slice and dice everything but cannot do it well, and he prioritizes by one question, what directly impacts the top line, putting unique meetings, win rates, deal size, and bookings ahead of leading indicators like content usage and certification completion. He reframes content overload as self-inflicted, a content strategy problem rather than a content problem, and offers the Legos model: maintain one clean 200-slide master library so the rep's job is to build a story, not pick a deck, and no two presentations ever look the same. He closes with two shifts, that enablement should own revenue culture rather than training or content, and that enablement is a company responsibility, not a team.
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Andrey Zevakhin
Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Zywave
Sales sits on the frontier, and because deals fund the company, sales effectively cuts everyone's paychecks, which Andrey Zevakhin says is not provocative, it is just math. In this Content Amplified episode, Andrey, Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Zywave, makes the case that enablement was never meant to be a small team pushing content and running training. It is a company-wide responsibility and a culture. He explains how enablement works as a funnel that captures signals from sales and pulls in the right partners, why he refuses to be a Swiss Army knife that slices everything but does nothing well, and how he prioritizes by what directly impacts the top line over vanity indicators like content usage and certification completion. He reframes content overload as a self-inflicted content strategy problem and lays out the Legos model: one well-maintained 200-slide master library where the rep's job is to build a story, not pick a deck, so no two presentations ever look the same. He closes with two shifts, that enablement should own revenue culture rather than training, and that enablement is a company responsibility, not a team.
“Of course, the customer is the center of this universe, that's non-negotiable, but sales is on the frontier. They are the ones sitting in front of the customers, carrying out our story, our roadmap, our promises, and our credibility into the market every single day.”
“I don't want to be a Swiss Army knife that can slice and dice everything, but can't do it well. The best enablement teams don't try to pretend to know everything. They know who to pull in, when and how.”
“If what we're working on doesn't move unique meetings, the win rates, the deal size or bookings, it has to go to the bottom of the list.”
“The rep's job isn't to pick a deck, their job is to build a story. And no two presentations to customers should ever look the same, because every single use case is different.”
Enablement as a Funnel: Capture Signals, Pull in the Right Partners
Stop treating enablement as a content factory and start treating it as a liaison between sales and the rest of the company. Sales constantly pushes signals upstream, what customers are asking, where deals are stalling, what is confusing, what is resonating, and the enablement team's job is to capture those signals, make sense of them, and pull the right partners into the conversation. The team is expert in sales execution and deal flow, not in product architecture or pricing strategy, so it should not pretend to be a Swiss Army knife. Connect sales with product for clarity, marketing for messaging, finance for pricing confidence, and support for post-sale reality. Enablement orchestrates, translates, and simplifies so that expertise becomes something a seller can actually use on a live customer call.
Top-Line Prioritization for a Thin Enablement Team
When the team is understaffed and stretched thin, prioritization is survival, not a nice to have. The trap is staying busy without being impactful by leaning on leading indicators that feel productive, content usage, certification completion, and number of sessions delivered, because they are easy to measure. Those are meaningless if revenue is not moving, so prioritization always starts with one question: what directly impacts the top line. If the work does not move unique meetings, win rates, deal size, or bookings, it goes to the bottom of the list. In practice that means less broad generic enablement and more focus on specific moments in the sales motion, deal qualification, discovery quality, positioning value over features, and pricing confidence, and it means saying no a lot so the team does the few things that actually change seller behavior.
The Legos Model: A Slide Library, Not a Deck Library
Solve content overload by replacing dozens of finished decks with one well-maintained master library of building blocks. The belief that every product, use case, and segment needs its own perfectly packaged deck produces presentations that look slightly different, say slightly different things, and go out of date in slightly different ways, so reps cannot find what they need and recreate their own. Instead, partner with product marketing to maintain one clean, current 200-slide library where product marketing brings the message and positioning and enablement brings the sales context. The rep's job is not to pick a deck, it is to build a story from the right slides based on discovery, so no two customer presentations look the same. This is also easier to maintain, because when something changes you update it once, not everywhere, and it points toward an AI future where conversational intelligence from tools like Gong, Copilot, and ChatGPT assembles the most relevant deck from the library automatically.
Benjamin Ard00:55 — Welcome back to another episode of content amplified today. I'm joined by Andrey Andrey. Welcome to the show.
Andrey Zevakhin01:01 — Hey Ben, thank you for inviting me, I appreciate it and glad to be here.
Benjamin Ard01:05 — Yeah, Andrey, I'm excited. This is going to be a ton of fun. But before we dive in, let's get to know you. If you don't mind sharing a little bit about your background, work history, all that fun stuff, it'll be for the audience to get to know you and it'll be great to kick things off.
Andrey Zevakhin01:19 — Well, I should say this is the first year where I can officially say I have been doing this for 20 years, right? So my career started back in 2006. So now I can say I'm a seasoned enablement leader with 20 years of experience across revenue enablement, learning and development, sales training, technology evangelism, both for global and nationwide software companies. Over the years, I had the privilege to both build the enablement functions from scratch, as well as evolve the existing enablement functions. And that would be like anything you can think of across onboarding, continuous learning, coaching and skills verification, and then professional development for everyone in the revenue organizations, meaning anyone customer facing revenue generating roles. I'm glad to call it enablement.
my vocation, right? Because I find my personal motivation in people who I enable succeeding in their roles. And I kind of define my own enablement mission as making sure that people in my revenue organizations have all the skills, knowledge and tools necessary to be successful, meaning closing deals and driving revenue for the company. I'm currently leading enablement efforts at DieWave. This is the insurance technology software provider, the leading insure tech helping both insurance brokers and carriers multiply their performance anywhere from marketing and list generation to CPQ and rating into allowing them to provide better service to their customers for client portals and content. Very excited to be here today, glad to talk about enablement and content with you.
Benjamin Ard02:59 — I love it. This is going to be exciting and fun. Andrey, one cool thing that came out from our conversations earlier, you have this cool philosophy that everyone in a company that ultimately isn't selling what you do is an enablement. And that's what we're going to focus on today. How the rest of the company really focuses on that. So what does that mean in practice? Like, what does that actually look like for an organization?
Andrey Zevakhin03:25 — I'm kind of fascinated by the fact that you actually remembered this one, Ben. I appreciate that.
Benjamin Ard03:31 — I think it's a cool phrase. I'm pumped. This is going to be cool.
Andrey Zevakhin03:33 — Yeah, no, I've had this conversation pretty much every organization I had the privilege to work for. And honestly, it usually starts as a bit of a sales job on my side, right? Not the obvious type of selling, right? But more like planting an idea and letting people realize on their own that they already believe it, right? Kind of selling to them without them knowing they're being sold to. The idea is simple. If you're not in sales, meaning revenue generating customer facing roles, then you're in sales enablement. And when I say it first, right, the people smile politely, marketing will nod, the product will raise an eyebrow, the finance and HR quietly wonder if I officially lost it. But then we get real, this company exists because deals get closed, right? Sales is a function that turns the vision into the revenue, which technically means they cut all of our paychecks, right? That's not provocative per se, it's just math, right? Of course, the customer is the center of this universe, that's non-negotiable, but sales is on the frontier. They are the ones sitting in front of the customers, carrying out our story, our roadmap, our promises, and our credibility into the market every single day. So the question becomes, if your work impacts what a seller says, what they can demo, what they can price, how fast they can respond, how confident they feel in a deal cycle, then how are you not part of enablement? And to me, enablement was never meant to be a small team pushing content and running training, right? It's a mindset. Helping sales sell is a joint responsibility across marketing, product, finance, HR, IT, support, everyone, right? And this is where I should say I'm really fortunate at Zywave right now because this idea genuinely resonates and I don't have to convince people anymore. I have real partners. Product leaders who show up to enablement sessions and explain the why behind the roadmap decisions. The marketing leaders who don't just throw decks over the fence and try to see what sticks. They actually help reps think through the positioning objections. The finance partners, the revenue operations who help sellers understand pricing with confidence instead of fear. we've had people roll up their sleeves, join enablement sessions, share expertise, jump on customer calls. And that's when enablement stops being a function per se, it becomes revenue culture. And when that happens, the productivity for sales is not just sales problem anymore, right? It becomes a company lever, company advantage. Hope this makes sense.
Benjamin Ard06:13 — I love that. That's incredible. So like you said, a lot of companies have it where there's a dedicated team for enablement. So why do you believe it actually requires collaboration across marketing, product support, finance, and others? Like, why do feel like it has to go that far when so many companies really keep it to one team?
Andrey Zevakhin06:34 — A lot of good question. I think it builds well directly on what we just talked about. If enablement is owned by one team, it almost always turns into a service function instead of a growth lever, right? We become those legwork people, order takers, doing all tactical, usually very reactive work instead of being proactive strategic partner to the business. So enablement can just be owned by one team because the complexity of selling doesn't belong in one place. One way I describe enablement is as a funnel or a liaison between sales and the rest of the organization. Sales is constantly pushing signals upstream, right? What customers are asking, where deals are stalling, what's confusing, what's breaking, what's resonating. And enablement role is to capture those signals make sense of them and then pull the right partners into the conversation. But here's the key part, right? We enablement team, not experts in everything. And we shouldn't pretend we are, right? We are not the deepest experts in product architecture. We are not the owners of pricing strategy. We do not design every internal process or build the entire tool stack for sales, right? What we are experts in is sales execution, sales process or reward, the deal flow. What sellers actually need in the moment to move a deal forward. All right. And that's why collaboration is required. Then enablement connects sales with product for clarity, with marketing, for messaging, with finance, for confidence in deal structure and pricing, with support and services for post sale reality. We enablement orchestrate, we translate, we simplify. When enablement tries to operate in isolation, it becomes a content factory, really. When it operates cross-functionally, it becomes the leverage point. I don't want to be a Swiss Army knife that can slice and dice everything, but can't do it well, right? The best enablement teams, don't try to pretend to know everything, right? They know who to pull in, when and how. to turn that expertise into something a seller can actually use on a live call with their customers. And that's the difference between enablement as a team and enablement as a system per se, right? Where the entire company is there, right? In helping sales sell.
Benjamin Ard08:51 — Yeah, I love that. That's so cool. love that. So I want to double click into the actual enablement team. love that it's a team effort. Everyone's getting in and participating. The enablement is quarterbacking with the other departments to help when there's expertise needed, things of that nature. But there's still a lot that an enablement team has to do. Like you talked about understanding the funnel, how to help the sales team, everything going on. And often these teams are not fully staffed. like to the, the amount that they necessarily need at the business. How do you prioritize where to spend time and effort to make the biggest impact, especially when your team is a little thin. Cause I can almost guarantee every person who is an enablement leader is listening and saying, it'd be great if I could do all those things, but I don't have enough time. Like how do you prioritize?
Andrey Zevakhin09:43 — Nailed it then, right? We're all spread-thin. this is where the enablement leaders really earn their keep or their seat at the table because almost every enablement team I know is understaffed and stretch-thin, which means prioritization isn't nice to have. It's actually a survival for all of us. The trap is, and I've seen us falling into that, like learn hard way myself as well, it's very easy to stay busy without actually being impactful. Enablement teams fall into leading indicators because they are measurable and they feel productive on content usage, certification completion, number of my enablement sessions delivered. None of those are wrong, right? but they're meaningless if the revenue isn't moving. I've seen teams celebrate record high course completion rates while numbers of unique meetings is flat, or win rates are declining, or average deal sizes in budgeting. At that point, we're measuring the activity, not the outcomes. And for me, prioritization always starts with one question, what directly impacts the top line? If what we're working on doesn't move a unique meetings, the win rates, the deal size or bookings, it has to go to the bottom of the list. That usually means focusing less on broad generic enablement and more on very specific moments in the sales motion. Deal qualification record, discovery quality, how sellers position value, not features, how confident they are explaining pricing and negotiating. Those things pretty much show up directly in your pipeline quality and close rates. It also means saying no a lot. Every enablement team has more asks than capacity. The job isn't to do everything. The job is to do very few things that actually change seller behaviors that are reflected in the revenue, right? And I think enablement leaders need to be brave about metrics. We should absolutely track adoption and completion, but we shouldn't be hiding behind them, right? The scorecard has to roll up to revenue. Our sellers having more meaningful conversations. Our deals progressing faster. Are we winning more of the right deals? And when enablement aligns its priorities to those questions, even a small team can have a kind of outside impact. When it doesn't, no amount of content and training hours will save you.
Benjamin Ard12:15 — I love that. I love the focus, the priority, really helping move the needle on what matters the most for the business. Now at the very end and kind of the subject of this whole podcast here, content, you mentioned the magic word of content. Now, often reps and companies are kind of faced with this content overload. They have so much. How do you simplify that? How do you make sure that that's not a crazy mess?
Andrey Zevakhin12:40 — Yeah, well, this one is kind of very near and dear to my heart, right? Because content overload is almost always, always been self-inflicted. We don't have a content problem as much as we have a content strategy problem, if you know what I mean. What I've seen fail over and over again is the idea that every product, every use case, every segment needs its own perfectly packaged PowerPoint deck, right? and you end up with dozens of presentations that look slightly different, say slightly different things, and are all out of date in slightly different ways. Raps can't find what they need, so they either reuse their own thing or recreate it themselves. And my perspective has always been, instead of creating multiple decks, build a single well-maintained library of slides. Think of building blocks, the Legos, right? Not the finished presentations, not the full-blown structure created, right? The rep's job isn't to pick a deck, their job is to build a story, right? And based on the customer they're talking to, what they learn in discovery, and their homework, they should be choosing the right slides and assembling a presentation that's specific to that conversation. And no two presentations to customers should ever look the same, because every single use case is different. And also ironically, this is actually much easier to maintain. I'd much rather partner with product marketing and maintain one 200 slide master library that's clean, current, and intentional than try to keep pretty different accents. And when something changes, you update it once, not everywhere, right? This goes back to the story we've been talking about. Enablement isn't the owner of all content. Product marketing and enablement of partners is in crime here. product marketing brings a message repositioning the narrative and enablement brings the sales context. How it lands in discovery, how it shows up in late stage deal, how it gets used in a real customer conversation. And when you get that partnership right, two things happen. The reps stop drowning in content, and they start thinking more critically about how they sell. The content becomes a tool for good selling, not a crutch. Right? And the goal isn't to make selling easier by giving reps more decks. It's more, it's to make selling better by helping them tell smarter stories. And content is there to support them. Now think about it this way, with where the AI trend is going right now, at some point, they won't even need to select those slides or blocks anymore, right? They will be feeding the conversational intelligence into Copilot and Gong, Chat, GPT, right? And say, based on these, like everything we discussed with the customer and these findings, please create me a deck, right, from this library of slides that would be most relevant for this particular conversation.
Benjamin Ard15:39 — I love that. And what I love is that you're focused on allowing the reps to actually tell the right story. You've given them the building blocks and you're giving them the opportunity to say, okay, what is the storyline? This particular account actually needs to hear. And you've given them the tools and the resources they're confident, but it's also not overly prescriptive to say, Here's the exact do everything exactly how I tell you it allows that flexibility yet it adds the accuracy and everything in one place, which is really cool.
Andrey Zevakhin16:16 — I that.
Benjamin Ard16:17 — All right, Andrey, we're almost out of time and this is a ton of fun. I've loved this episode. One thing we always like to do is leave the audience with tactical advice, things that they can start with today. So anyone listening who's hearing this message today and thinks, okay, what can we change in our organization to improve? Whether it's the mindset, whether it's our actual actions, anything along those lines, any tips or advice. One or two things that any business could start doing today.
Andrey Zevakhin16:45 — This is a loaded question then, you know that, right? You and I really could talk about this for hours. Well, I'll force myself to keep it to two things that I think matter most and kind of go full circle to where you and I started. The first shift is very simple, but also very hard, easier said than done. Enablement has to own revenue culture, not training. not content, culture. Culture is what you celebrate, what you tolerate, what you consistently enforce, right? Enablement should help the organization be explicit about what good selling looks like here. How we engage customers, how prepared and well versed in our homework we should be, right? How we define value, how we talk about outcomes instead of features and so on and so forth. And when enable and owns revenue culture, selling stops being a collection of individual styles and start becoming a shared standard, right? No long walls per se, right? Everyone's following to the same, marching to the same tune. And that's when performance becomes repeatable, not heroic, right? The second mindset thing would be recognizing that enablement isn't a team, it's a company responsibility. If you truly believe sales is on the frontier with customers, then everyone in the organization has a role in enabling that moment. Marketing, products, finance, HR, IT, pretty much everyone in the company, all of us influence how confident, credible, and effective sales is in front of our customers out there. Enablement doesn't do selling for the company, but it helps align the company around selling. Well, hope this makes sense. And when that mindset clicks, something powerful happens. Enablement stops being something that those people over there do, right? It starts being something we do together. And well, sounds a lot like preaching, right? I don't want to be a preacher, but Once a cultural shift happens, all the practical things we talked about earlier, prioritization, content simplification, cross-functional collaboration, they become symptoms of very healthy system, not continuous internal battles. And that's when enablement wins and that's when enablement really works. And that's why I decided enablement to be my vocation, right? Because seeing organizations win that way is really something that motivates me in my career.
Benjamin Ard19:16 — I love it. Andrey, this has been incredible. This is a master class of what you can do in an organization. Thank you so much. For anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Andrey Zevakhin19:28 — Well, the best way would be to connect on LinkedIn. I'm glad to serve this community, all fellow enablement professionals, brainstorm on ideas, on approaches, basically reflect on what works, doesn't. So I'm glad to connect. And in fact, I'm serving on some of the enablement community forums as an ambassador this year. And this is yet another way I'm trying to give back to my community on fellow enablement professionals. So I'd be glad to connect.
Benjamin Ard20:00 — love it. For everyone listening, regardless of what platform you're on, scroll down to the show notes. And you'll see that we have linked directly to Andrey's LinkedIn profile. Click on the link, connect with Andrey say you came from the podcast, all that fun stuff. Again, Andrey, thank you so much for the time and insights today. Really do appreciate it.
Andrey Zevakhin20:18 — Likewise, Ben, I really enjoyed the opportunity and looking forward potentially for more of these. It great experience. I appreciate you.
Benjamin Ard20:27 — Absolutely appreciate it.
About the guest
Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Zywave
Andrey Zevakhin is a seasoned enablement leader with 20 years of experience across revenue enablement, learning and development, sales training, and technology evangelism at both global and nationwide software companies. He has built enablement functions from scratch and evolved existing ones, spanning onboarding, continuous learning, coaching, skills verification, and professional development for every customer-facing revenue role. He currently leads enablement at Zywave, an insurance technology provider that helps insurance brokers and carriers multiply their performance across marketing, list generation, CPQ and rating, client portals, and content. He describes enablement as his vocation, and he says his personal motivation comes from watching the people he enables succeed at closing deals and driving revenue. He serves as an ambassador in several enablement community forums.
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Andrey means that enablement is a company-wide responsibility, not the job of a single team. His logic is that the company exists because deals get closed, and sales is the function that turns the vision into revenue, which technically means sales cuts everyone's paychecks, something he frames as just math rather than a provocation. The customer is still the center of the universe, but sales sits on the frontier, carrying the company's story, roadmap, promises, and credibility into the market. So if your work shapes what a seller can say, demo, or price, or how fast and confidently they respond, you are already part of enablement, whether you sit in marketing, product, finance, HR, IT, or support.
Because the complexity of selling does not belong in one place. Andrey describes enablement as a funnel or liaison that captures signals from sales, what customers are asking, where deals are stalling, what is resonating, and then pulls the right partners into the conversation. The enablement team is expert in sales execution and deal flow, but it is not the deepest expert in product architecture or the owner of pricing strategy, so pretending otherwise turns it into a Swiss Army knife that does everything poorly. When enablement operates in isolation it becomes a content factory, and when it operates cross-functionally it becomes the leverage point, which is the difference between enablement as a team and enablement as a system.
Andrey prioritizes by one question: what directly impacts the top line. Almost every enablement team is understaffed, so the danger is staying busy with leading indicators like content usage, certification completion, and sessions delivered, which feel productive but are meaningless if revenue is not moving. He has seen teams celebrate record course completion while unique meetings stay flat and win rates decline, which is measuring activity instead of outcomes. If the work does not move unique meetings, win rates, deal size, or bookings, it goes to the bottom of the list, and that requires saying no a lot so the team does the few things that actually change seller behavior in ways that show up in revenue.
The Legos model replaces a pile of finished decks with one well-maintained library of slides, the building blocks, that reps assemble into a story. Andrey argues content overload is self-inflicted, a content strategy problem rather than a content problem, because the idea that every product, use case, and segment needs its own packaged deck produces dozens of slightly different, slightly outdated presentations reps cannot find. Instead, he partners with product marketing to maintain a single clean 200-slide master library, where the rep's job is to build a presentation specific to the conversation rather than pick a deck, so no two presentations ever look the same. It is also easier to maintain, because a change is updated once, not everywhere, and it sets up an AI future where conversational intelligence assembles the most relevant deck from the library.
Join listeners who get episode summaries, key takeaways, and content strategy insights every week.