Mastering Sales Enablement: From Classroom to Virtual Coaching

You can’t fake practice.
How SalesHood’s Brad Elrod is helping reps win more deals by training like athletes

Most sales orgs spend more time fixing decks than training reps. Brad Elrod thinks that’s backwards.

He started his career in the trenches, dialing CEOs on day one. Now he helps teams at SalesHood scale what works with AI-powered training, messaging, and content delivery. Whether it’s your first pitch or a new product rollout, Brad believes reps win when they know what good looks like and actually practice it.

In this episode of Knocking to 10, Brad breaks down the building blocks of world-class enablement and why AI isn’t replacing reps — it’s making the best ones even better.

The myth of the “natural” rep

Brad’s first sales job was brutal.
Forty to sixty dials a day. Three percent pickup rates. One to two real conversations on a good day.

But he learned something fast: success wasn’t about charm, it was about process.

“You can’t control who picks up. You can control how prepared you are when they do.”

Brad managed noisy, competitive sales floors where scripts were studied, call recordings reviewed, and roleplay was mandatory. Those habits shaped his view on enablement today: top reps aren’t born, they’re built.

Enablement is a system, not a slide deck

Brad describes sales enablement as the power grid for the go-to-market engine. Not because it generates demand, but because it powers everything else:

• It defines what good looks like
• It scales consistent onboarding and product messaging
• It gives reps confidence before they ever pick up the phone

He breaks enablement into two roles:
Operations for systems and data. Enablement for coaching and execution.

And he has a simple rule for early-stage teams: if you have 10 reps, you need enablement. No exceptions.

Why practice is the new performance driver

SalesHood is leaning into a big shift: reps want feedback before deals, not just after them.

With AI-powered roleplay, Brad’s customers simulate real sales calls, get automated coaching, and improve their talk tracks before they’re in front of buyers. One enterprise customer completed more than 11,000 practice sessions in a single month.

SalesHood also helps sellers ask questions inside Slack or CRM and receive curated responses with relevant assets. Instead of guessing or reusing outdated PDFs, reps are coached in real-time, using content and playbooks already approved by enablement.

It’s not just saving time. It’s making reps better.

What separates high-performing sales orgs?

Brad didn’t hesitate: leadership.

The best teams don’t just install software. They lead from the front.

• Sales managers participate in training
• CROs announce new programs and explain why they matter
• Reps see the bar set high and want to hit it

On the flip side, when leaders treat enablement as a checkbox, reps follow suit.

Rapid-fire takeaways

• Sales blooper: booking a call with a Mexican CEO while butchering Spanish in front of 30 people. The CEO asked him to switch to English. The meeting still landed.
• Best advice: Be the first in and last out. Show up. Help your teammates. Speak up and be honest.
• Cold calling in 2025: Still relevant. Not the only channel, but it’s meaningful.
• AI SDRs: Skeptical. Great tools should augment reps, not replace them.

Final takeaway

If you want to improve your win rate, start by improving your team’s reps. Not just the people. The repetitions.

“Sales is like sports. You can’t just read the playbook. You have to run the plays.”

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Learn more about SalesHood at saleshood.com
Follow Brad Elrod on LinkedIn

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