Inside: Sales Enablement

ISEs3 Ep20: Sheevaun Thatcher - Gaining Gravitas from the Get-Go

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 10:00:00 -0500

We’re thrilled to announce the release of the grand finale of Inside Sales Enablement Season 3, featuring none other than Sheevaun Thatcher, the Godmother of the global Enablement community, whose fun-lovin fancy shoes, servant's heart, and ear-to-ear smile have brightened every Enablement Society Experience from the very beginning.

🎙️ In This Episode:

True Enablement Identity: Discover Sheevaun’s take on the evolution from Sales to Revenue Enablement and why she believes in redefining enablement as a holistic go-to-market growth strategy.
AI’s Role in Enablement: Uncover the transformative potential of AI tools in enablement processes, and why prompt engineering is the future every enabler should embrace.
Breaking Down Silos: Learn the art of fostering cross-functional collaboration from a seasoned executive who’s mastered bringing marketing and sales together.
Walking with Gravitas: Find out how Sheevaun’s concept of gravitas can empower you to walk into any room with confidence and impact ...once you earn it.
Becoming the Hub: Get insights into positioning enablement as the indispensable hub of any organization, ensuring every department aligns with strategic goals.

🌟 Fun Fact from the Episode: Sheevaun once stood up in a roomful of peers and boldly declared herself the “Chief Productivity Officer," reminding everyone that it’s not about what HR labels you – it’s about how you see yourself - and inspiring them to walk in similar confidence and pride.

Thank you for being part of our journey through Season 3! We are immensely grateful for your engagement and support. This episode with Sheevaun is a treasure trove of wisdom, and it’s the perfect way to wrap up this series.

Tune in now to Episode 20 and let Sheevaun inspire you! Don’t forget to visit sheevaunthatcher.com and keep an eye out for her insightful articles. Share your thoughts in the comments and let’s discuss how we can all walk with a little more gravitas!

Until next season, keep enabling excellence!

Love, Erich

P.S. Don’t miss the chance to network and learn more at the next Revenue Enablement Society conference – maybe you’ll catch Sheevaun and her iconic shoes! Just leave her alone in the bathroom. 😉

Mentioned in this episode:

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ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

GTM AI Academy. The only AI curriculum curated by Enablement for Enablement ...and the entire cross-functional GTM team. Don't get tangled up in all of the random vendor driven offerings in your feed. Learn AI from a globally trusted source - Coach K - Jonathan Kvarfordt Their bundle "Enablement AI Mastery" includes BOTH the core "Generative AI Foundations" course AND "Enablement AI Mastery" specifically. Each course has a value of $599 individually, but Coach K is offering them as a bundle with reduced pricing. AND as a listener of the Inside Sales Enablement podcast, if you "ACT NOW" you can use code "ISE30" to get an ADDITIONAL 30% off of the entire thing. You will also receive FREE access to the GTM AI Tools Demo Library. Coach K has done the demos so you don't have to and offers his straight shooting opinion through an Enablement lens. Go to www.gtmaiacademy.com and enter code ISE30 TODAY and elevate your AI Enablement game!

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ISEs3 Ep19: Jen Marie Jacober - SES O.G.

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 10:00:00 -0500

We're thrilled to bring you episode 19 of Inside Sales Enablement, Season 3 - Enablement History, featuring the one and only SES O.G. Jen Marie Jacober, or as some of you might know her, Bacon. Join us as we dive deep into the origins and growth of the Sales Enablement Society with someone who was right there from the start!

🧠 5 Keys You'll Learn in This Episode:

Origins of a Movement - How Jen Marie stumbled upon sales enablement and played a pivotal role in launching the Sales Enablement Society.
The Power of Networking - Discover how the community fostered invaluable professional relationships and connections.
The Birth of Chapters - Learn about the formation of local chapters and how they contributed to the society's mission.
Evolution to Revenue Enablement - Explore the transition from sales to revenue enablement and what it signifies for the industry.
AI and the Future - Jen Marie shares her thoughts on AI's role in the future of enablement and the importance of being an orchestrator in a digital world.

🥓 Fun Fact From the Episode:

Did you know Brian Lambert gave Jen Marie the nickname "Bacon" because he said she makes everything better, just like the breakfast staple? Now that's a compliment worth savoring!

Mentioned in this episode:

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ISEs3 Ep18: Dale Dupree - Enabling A Sales Rebellion in Totality

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 07:00:00 -0500

WELCOME to ISEs3 Episode 18 where The Leader of The Rebellion Dale Dupree joins Erich Starrett in the OrchestrateSales.com studios in anticipation of the first ever face-to-face event of The Sales Rebellion - Totality.

Dive into the world of sales, art, and rebellion as Dale shares his insights on disrupting the status quo to choose legendary and crosses the 300 mark of hosting or attending podcasts as he guides the Enablement world off the beaten path to the Rebellious road less traveled.

Explore the intriguing origins of the Sales Rebellion and the influence of Dale's father on his journey.

Understand how to transition from status quo to legendary in sales with Dale's unique perspective.

Learn about Dale's groundbreaking outreach methods that create curiosity and impact.

Discover the rebel sales process with a twist and what being a warrior in sales truly means.

Get a sneak peek into Dale's global event, "Totality," and what makes it radically different from typical sales conferences.

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

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ISEs3 Ep17: Stu Heinecke – Enabling Growth and Meetings with ANYbody …in Totality

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 07:00:00 -0500

JOIN us for Episode 17 where, in anticipation of finally meeting each other face to face at The Sales Rebellion / Dale Dupree's inaugural Totality the following week, ISE Season 3 host Erich Starrett gets WAY into the W.E.E.D.S. with THE Irrepressibly Optimistic Stu Heinecke. Dive into the world of competitive advantages and growth strategies with THE "father of contact marketing." From the importance of adaptability to leveraging internal and external collaboration, this episode is a must-listen for those looking to enable business success.

The concept of "unfair" advantages and how to create them.
The role of CWOs - Chief Weed (Growth!) Officers - in focusing on growth and revenue.
Using weed strategies for business resilience and opportunistic growth.
Real-life examples of innovative disruption techniques with contact marketing.
Marketing success stories and upcoming insights from Stu Heinecke's upcoming (early 2025) re-release of "How To Get A Meeting With Anyone."

Don't miss out on these invaluable insights that can transform your business approach! Duck your head into the Orchestrate Sales Studios and take a listen.

JOIN US at Totality! Only a handful (literally!) tickets remainin... https://www.thesalesrebellion.com/totality/

5 Keys You'll Learn:

Competitive Advantages:

Discover how to create those "unfair" advantages that your competitors just can't match (legally, of course! 😉).

Surviving and Thriving Amidst Chaos:

Learn how to not only survive disruptions but turn them into your biggest growth opportunities, following lessons learned from weeds.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work:

Understand why collaboration, both internal and external, is the secret sauce behind thriving businesses.

Self-Disruption Tactics:

Get inspired by Amazon's disruptive mindset and see how self-cannibalization can lead to innovation.

Weeds Strategy for Business:

Explore Stu's unique analogy comparing business strategy to the relentless growth of weeds – resilience, collaboration, and adaptability. And that is JUST the beginning!

Fun Fact from the Episode:

Did you know Leonardo da Vinci was one of the O.G.s of contact marketing? That he was commissioned to craft a horse head lute to be used as a gift to secure an essential royal meeting? Talk about using art (and your (horse's) head) to get ahead in business!

ABOUT STU:

Stu is a bestselling business author, marketer, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist.

His first book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, introduced the concept of Contact Marketing and was named one of the top 64 sales books of all time.

His latest release, How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed, lays out a complete model for explosive business growth, based on the strategies, attributes, and tools weeds use to grow, expand, dominate and defend their turf.

He is a twice-nominated hall of fame marketer,

Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center author-in-residence,

and was named the “Father of Contact Marketing” by the American Marketing Association.

He lives on the beautiful Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, Washington. (A favorite destination from Erich's childhood!)

Mentioned in this episode:

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ISEs3 Ep16: Jonathan "Coach K" Kvarfordt - GTM AI + Enablement on the RISE

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 07:00:00 -0500

Join Erich Starrett in the Orchestrate Sales Studios as he interviews Jonathan "Coach K" Kvarfordt on the transformative power of AI in Enablement. Delve into Jonathan's insights on evolving the role of enablement professionals and the strategic impact of AI.

Jonathan's journey from survival-focused to strategic thought leadership in sales enablement
Active involvement in opportunities to improve Enablement
The formation and goals of the RISE initiative for research-based enablement insights
The role of AI in feedback, coaching, and automating administrivia
Future of enablement with AI and the necessity for adaptation and innovation

We can't wait for you to listen to this episode and harness the power of AI to elevate your enablement game. Jonathan's insights are not just enlightening but will truly redefine how we look at sales enablement’s role in the future.

Don’t miss this in-depth discussion on the future of Enablement!

5 Keys You'll Learn in This Episode 🎓

Jonathan’s Journey: Discover how Jonathan transitioned from a survival mode to becoming a pioneering figure in sales enablement, learning from industry leaders and engaging with professional organizations.
AI in Feedback & Coaching: Learn how AI tools like Momentum are transforming feedback processes, making coaching multilingual teams more efficient and strategic.
Philosophical Shifts in Enablement: Jonathan challenges the traditional reactive role of enablement, advocating for a shift towards being proactive strategic partners within organizations.
Strategic Use of AI: Get insights on how AI can automate routine tasks, freeing up time for more creative and impactful enablement activities.
Future Vision: Jonathan introduces the RISE Initiative, which aims to clarify enablement roles and responsibilities using data-driven insights. This initiative involves thorough research and academic collaboration to define what good enablement looks like.

Fun Fact of the Episode 🌟

Did you know Jonathan discovered AI’s immense potential even before ChatGPT became a household name? His early adoption of generative AI tools has paved the way for groundbreaking applications in enablement, from crafting precise feedback to creating competency models that require minimal tweaks!

Mentioned in this episode:

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ISEs3 Ep15: Danny Wasserman - Gong! Tableau and Databricks

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Wed, 01 May 2024 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com‘s Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.

On ISEs3 Ep15 host Erich Starrett is joined in the Orchestrate Sales studios by new friend Danny Wasserman, whom he finally met F2F at Corporate Visions Emblaze #DigitalNow24 in early April. Danny has done game-changing tours of Enablement duty at top logos including Databricks, Gong! and Tableau.

Q: So how *DOES* #RevenueEnablement gain a seat at the table in "the room where it happens?

And what does THAT have to do with peanut butter, sausage, and Shake Shack?

A: (in part) "whether it's in sales. Or whether it's in CS or it's in enablement, you cannot trivialize or overstate the importance of the intersection between hospitality and the world of business."

Dive in with me and Danny to talk Strategy, Technology, Human Connection, and...

PAST:

⌛️ Danny was onboarded at Tableau at about employee 2k. The IPO had just recently happened, and his first "real" taste of enablement was onboarding with "the truly incomparable" Sarah Bedwell

⌛️ Joining Enablement at after a sales spiff started a bit of a riff. "I was fortunate enough to be within the cocoon of Mother Goose (Nate) Vogel."

⌛️ "My dirty little secret is that I'm an enablement? Dude. You couldn't have captured the essence of how I felt about being a former seller who had sort of taken a bite of the forbidden fruit."

⌛️ Frank Slootman boldly came out and said, why am I going to put all of the customer success on one person?

⌛️ Nate recruited Danny to re-join Enablement forces at DataBricks.

PRESENT:

💼 "If I'm not fighting that hard for my cabinet seat with whatever executive I'm trying to maintain my position with, there's a dozen people behind me that will absolutely eat my lunch."

💼 Per Danny Meyer - American restaurateur and a guiding voice in Danny's career: In addition to IQ, do you have what he calls HQ: hospitality quotient?

💼 "Genuinely what enablement provides is service. And I think if you feel that passionately, if you feel that authentically and genuinely, the beneficiaries of what it is that you're providing will also sense that ...you will not allow or tolerate yourself to serve a mediocre product."

FUTURE:

🤖 Kyle Healy, who's the SVP of Enablement at a insurance company "When we think about AI's place in our profession, do you want to embrace that technology like Iron Man, or do you want to attempt to resist it like Terminator?"

🤖 Potential impacts of AI and technological advancements on the enablement profession

🤖 Necessity to adapt and integrate new technologies while preserving the human element

🤖 Ongoing collaboration and learning opportunities in enablement practices

Please click 👇🏻, subscribe 📲, listen 🎧 ...and 🎙️ join the conversation!

ORCHESTRATE Sales!

Erich

#RevenueEngine #DigitalTransformation #ChangeManagement

#Orchestrate #SalesEnablement

Mentioned in this episode:

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ISEs3 Ep14: Todd Caponi - Sales History Nerd + Transparency Evangelist @ Sales Melon

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Sat, 20 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0500

Mark Twain - the PIONEER of Sales Enablement who empowered a LITERAL customer facing frontline of 10,000!?!!!

On ISEs3 Episode 14, Erich Starrett is out-history-nerded ENTIRELY when he is joined in the Orchestrate Sales studios by Sales Melon's Todd Caponi. Todd is not only an aficionado (and collector!) of SALES history, he is a man on a mission to further a movement towards sales TRANSPARENCY. This includes authoring a 3x award-winning book (𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘦) and 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳 that just won its second award recently.

Highlights from the episode include...

PAST:

💬 "If the truth won't sell it, don't sell it." 💬 Arthur Dunn, 1921

⌛️ Todd's first Sales Enablement experience at Exact Target (now Salesforce) began when COO @Andy Kofoid sent him to their NEST - New Employee Sales Training as part of his sales management onboarding. It was so ineffective, he left. A few months later they asked him to rebuild enablement. He had to Google the word.

⌛️ His search led him to Scott Santucci who had a Forrester event coming up in San Francisco. He attended and sat next to Jill Rowley.

⌛️ He also came across (Dr. Ohio) and flew out to do a few day deep dive with him on adult learning. He brought the combined knowledge back and built a successful, scalable Enablement program for Exact Target.

⌛️ Post $3B acquisition by Salesforce his team used the sale e-learning modules, and recorded role plays (back in 2012!) they had built for their internal team to train all of Salesforce on Exact Target. He was given a shoutout by Mark Beinoff himself.

⌛️ Todd's three core Enablement responsibilities:

1️⃣ Amalgamate: identify and align top 5 CxO priorities

2️⃣ Orchestrate: optimize resources, identify the optimal path to enable the revenue organization to drive the five.

3️⃣ Evaluate: Provide feedback and close the loop.

💬 "(As a CRO) I always felt my Enablement team had a closer eye into the successes, the failures, the struggles, the strengths, the weaknesses of my team before any of us did. 💬

⌛️ Todd's application of transparency enabled PowerReviews to became Chicago's fastest growing tech company from 2014 to 2017.

PRESENT:

💼 As the economy gets tight, as it gets harder to sell, you need two things: better sales leadership and better sales enablement. However, the knee jerk reaction - which is happening now - is to train leaders less and downsize enablement because "it's overhead."

💬 "As things get tougher, those investments need to go up, but ironically, they've gone down historically over and over again." 💬

💼 Today, the "as a service" economy means that closing the deal is no longer the peak. It's the beginning. You need to create long term value for these customers. And that's that long game helps you win the short game too. Simliar approach to Jacco's Revenue Architecture Bowtie at Winning By Design.

💼 The shift from growth at all costs to long term recurring value is history repeating itself. 1914 to 1923. It was the forgotten depression of the early 1920s.

FUTURE:

🤖 The future of sales is two things.

1️⃣ Going back to a service oriented mindset. "Salesmanship is the science of service." - Arthur Sheldon (1911)

2️⃣ Providing better homework for the buyer. "Buyers know more nowadays" - Thomas Herbert Russell (1912)

🤖 History reveals the risk of "ruining" technology. From the phone, to email, to video, and now #AI.

🤖 Enablement will be needed in the future as long as we embrace a service / value oriented mindset.

💬 Don't be worried about technology. Just keep doing the right things. Control what you can control. There's always going to be a place for you. And I think it's going to be highly valuable and maybe even more valuable into the future." 💬

Please click 👇🏻, subscribe 📲, listen 🎧 ...and 🎙️ join the conversation!

ORCHESTRATE Sales!

Erich

#RevenueEngine #DigitalTransformation #ChangeManagement

#RevenueEnablement #Sales Enablement

#AiCuriousHumanEnthusiast

Mentioned in this episode:

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ISEs3 Ep13: Meganne Brezina CCMP™ - Seismic

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 07:00:00 -0500

On a superfun ISEs3 Episode 13, Erich Starrett is joined in the Orchestrate Sales studios by Meganne Brezina, CCMP™. Meganne is not only the Senior Director of Enablement at Seismic, she's published Tomorrow's Enablement for Today's Leaders: The Strategic Guide to Demonstrating Value and Driving Outcomes alongside Irina Soriano.

Highlights from the episode include...

PAST:

⌛️ While carrying a bag for the National Thoroughbred Racing Association (in partnership with John Deere) she quickly learned that hitting four or five dealerships and educating their salespeople how to sell to horse people was far more productive than going directly to 50 farms.

⌛️ Meganne's next stop was Exact Target, which was in the process of being acquired by Salesforce. She moved into an operations role and saw an opportunity to educate the customer facing team about the power of their internal "customer data warehouse" and spoke at SKO. That is when Meghan Gendelman came up to her and said "you need to be in Enablement!" And thus it began.

⌛️ In search of "what the heck is enablement?" Meganne searched the company directory and and up popped Brian Noss and Nina LaRouche (who co-leads the Indianapolis Chapter of WiSE with her today!)

⌛️ Her early experience in Engaging the Revenue Enablement Society was being sold by vendors vs. solving problems in community.

PRESENT

💼 The the RES has evolved into "such an incredible community." Meganne and I met F2F for the first time last fall at the 2023 Sales Enablement Society Experience conference in San Diego.

💼 Position two - that in order to be effective Enablement should be run as a business withing a business - is a big part of why Meganne got into Enablement.

👉🏻 She is passionate about Enablement teams being grounded in a charter and mission statement.

👉🏻 Enablement "requires the orchestration of so many pieces within an organization to bring it to life."

👉🏻 Enablement built with a North Star driving the practice forward results in tangible business outcomes.

💼 The biggest #Enablement opportunity in present day? Putting forth a proper enablement strategy.

💬 "Getting the executive buy-in for it, doing their socialization across the business, and then start to execute on it. That is the only way we're going to get out of the fire department world and into the fire prevention world." 💬

💼 The digital copy of Meganne and Irina Soriano's new book - Tomorrow's Enablement for Today's Leaders: The Strategic Guide to Demonstrating Value and Driving Outcomes - is OUT NOW and available for free from Seismic's site! Paperback coming soon. 📚

💼 The concept of the EVC - Enablement Value Chain - was born of Meganne and Irina preparing to go in front of their executives to give a semi-annual report and struggling to connect the dots with the business outcome that their Enablement team drove.

💼 The resulting data and analytics report from the EVC empowered them to secure executive buy in and gain the necessary resourcing to effectively enable their organization going forward. To be seen as part of their company's revenue engine.

💼 RE: the move to "Revenue" enablement...

💬 "I view the idea of enablement as (serving) anybody who is customer facing. Anybody who is customer facing deserves to be included in an enablement strategy because we are here to service the events that are happening along the customer lifecycle. Customer lifecycle does not start and end with the buying journey. It doesn't stop at the first signature. In fact, that's the first of many milestones that you should be expecting from your customers."

FUTURE

🤖 Meganne and Del Nakhi, CCMP™ see huge opportunity for Enablement to more fully embrace change management. Meganne just picked up her CCMP.

🤖 The opportunity *still* remains for many in Enablement to gain the gravitas (shoutout Sheevaun Thatcher, CPC and @Dr. Stephen Timme) of an executive sponsor / seat a the C-table ...AND to equip their customer facing teams to "speak CxO" and gain the same credibility with customer execs.

🤖 AI will fundamentally change everything that we do. Enablement teams will shift from AI education mode to developing and executing on strategy to harness productivity gains. Must have a clear plan for the revenue generating activities for teams to lean into with the time recouped.

🤖 Practices will be leaning into data and analytics much more to drive their decision making processes. To make decisions faster ...even in real time.

💬 "This idea of launching a campaign, launching a program, and then waiting six months to see if anything's happened with it? Done and gone and dusted."

Please click 👇🏻, subscribe 📲, listen 🎧 ...and 🎙️ join the conversation!

ORCHESTRATE Sales!

Erich

#RevenueEngine #DigitalTransformation #ChangeManagement

#RevenueEnablement #Sales Enablement

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

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ISEs3 Ep12: Dr. Shawn Fowler - Salesloft and RevenueReady

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 07:00:00 -0500

Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com's Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.

On ISEs3 Episode 12, Erich Starrett is joined by Dr. Shawn Fowler, whom he originally met when Shawn was VP, Sales Enablement (a true cross-functional #Orchestrator) at SalesLoft, and a gracious host of his first executive board meeting as President of the Atlanta Revenue Enablement Society back in early 2020. Before then, Dr. Fowler had been the World Wide Director of Enablement & Learning for IBM, and is now a Partner in his own sales strategy and sales enablement consulting venture: RevenueReady.

Highlights from the episode include...

PAST:

⌛️ Shawn "stumbled" into the profession working as the first services salesperson for Silverpop - essentially selling desired business outcomes. The SVP of sales, Todd McCormick, announced he was hiring a head of sales enablement and the hiring manager Drew Pronté said "hey, the CEO said that you should probably be the guy."

⌛️ He didn't know what sales enablement was. At the time he was pursuing a PhD in educational psychology so he combined what he learned from working as a sales engineer and as a services salesperson with what he knew about how psychology of learning works ...and he found himself implementing their first ever Sales Enablement program.

⌛️ His first Sales Enablement event was hosted by SiriusDecisions in Atlanta. "I was thinking we need to start something where we do that on a regular basis. This was easily the most valuable thing that I've done in the last six months."

⌛️ "Getting a seat at the table was probably the biggest factor in helping me be successful in sales enablement."

⌛️ Silverpop was purchased shortly thereafter by IBM when he then developed and executed their global expansion go-to-market plan. "I had the opportunity to see what it looks like in a much bigger level. IBM is basically a handful of multi billion dollar companies all put together. And I was part of one of those multi billion dollar companies inside of it. I got to see how these really big enterprise complex sales work, how you have to enable people across multiple different continents."

⌛️ Shaw was responsible for internal sales enablement including customer service and sales engineers and external - partner enablement - as well. "I think it makes a lot of sense, honestly, when you are in that position you have the opportunity to identify and eliminate a lot of the organizational issues that negatively affects your customer and that negatively affect the team as well."

PRESENT:

💼 Dr. Fowler diagnosed a few challenges that Sales Enablement faces today:

🩺 "I think there's not enough sharing of best practices"

🩺 "The quality of sales enablement as a profession has gone down pretty dramatically in the last five years."

1 - A lot of heads of sales are hearing from their investors that they need sales enablement but there was a period of time where I don't think a lot of them really knew what it meant.

2 - Heads of sales aren't always great at hiring enablement. Recognizing talent can be difficult.

3 - There is a lot of fluff. There was a period of time where sales was a lot easier and there's an entire generation of people who are in sales enablement who didn't have to figure out how to build a better machine. They could get away with adding more people to the machine and adding revenue by doing that. With venture capital drying up there's a much bigger focus on productivity. In order to achieve productivity per rep, you have to build a better machine.

🩺 The Doc offers REMEDIES to these challenges.

💼 Shawn shares a sample dive into RevenueReady's Customer Journey Workshops and parallel playbook creation approach.

💼 The power of a bottom-up approach, involving Sales Managment / the front line in the problem framing and in the solution process. A top-down only approach lacks the tactical information from the field needed to correctly identify and frame the problem, make good decisions, and design a solid solution. It also increases adoption because the front lines were involved in shaping it.

💼 In order to succeed you must both design an effective intervention, and then execute the reinforcement required to drive real change.

💼 "Sales (Revenue) Enablement is the change management arm of revenue." WGLL shoutout to Hillary Headlee who exemplified this at Zoom, having owned both global Ops AND Enablement ...during the height of Covid! And now she's doing it at the global Advisory Leader, Growth Team @ Insight Partners

for 500-700 companies.

💼 Interview advice for Enablement: Focus on the first 90 days through the lens of the CRO. Have the attitude that you will onboard as if you are planning to be in the top 10-15% of their sales team.

FUTURE:

🤖 There's increasing recognition of the role of enablement in change management and increasing recognition of the need for an explicit change managing function in organizations. At least in more successful companies, that's what what enablement is going to be seen as.

🤖 Increased focus on frontline managers on both the new and existing sales side of the house, because the reality is everything lives or dies with the frontline manager.

🤖 AI is going to evolve and facilitate some things. The power of artificial intelligence to comb through, for instance, the thousands of minutes that are produced on a weekly basis in Gong or SalesLoft or whatever, and distill that down into insights or into moments that everyone should take notice of can be really powerful when it comes to training, coaching, and identifying what works.

Please click 👇🏻, subscribe 📲, listen 🎧 ...and 🎙️ join the conversation!

ORCHESTRATE Sales!

Erich

#RevenueEngine #DigitalTransformation

#RevenueEnablement

#AiCuriousHumanEnthusiast

Mentioned in this episode:

Visit us on the Orchestrate Sales Property

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast

ISEs3 Ep11: Bob Perkins, Founder - AAISP (now Emblaze)

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 07:30:00 -0500

On Episode 11, Erich Starrett hosts Bob Perkins, the Founder AAISP, the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (now Emblaze) in the Orchestrate Sales Studios on the eve of the #digitalnow conference in Chicagoland next week (including a special promo code if you have not yet RSVP'd!)

We begin with his origins in telesales to Inside Sales to forming the AAISP. And from where he first crossed paths with #SalesEnablement in the journey to modern day where Emblaze is partnering with the Revenue Enablement Society for track next week.

Highlights from the episode include...

PAST:

⌛️ Bob was on the first ever Inside sales implementation of Siebel. "We used to pull out a stopwatch and time how long it would take to pull up a customer record."

⌛️ Bob and Larry Reeves held the first AAISP conference for 50 people in Minneapolis in 2009 using a sound system borrowed from Bob's church.

⌛️ By year two they had 200 and started getting calls from places like Japan, Afghanistan, France begging to start a chapter in their location.

⌛️ The explosion of Inside Sales created a need to scale the training of less experienced reps. Which created demand for Sales Enablement.

⌛️ Bob reflects on how Jill Rowley "The EloQueen" ushered the social selling mix onto the sales scene.

⌛️ In Bob's early experience the SES he talked with Scott Santucci about the similarities and differences between the two organizations.

PRESENT

💼 Sales is improving and growing with technology and with that growth there's need for training. Witness colleges that now have sales programs.

(Can I get an AMEN, Dr. Howard Dover Robert M. Peterson, Ph.D., Stefanie Boyer, PhD💧?)

💼 A behind the curtain look at the continuing evolution of the AAISP into Emblaze as Bob continues his transition from founder-operator to executive board member.

💼 Great salespeople make it about the other person. What does that mean? Empathy. Caring. Attention. Listening more than you're speaking. Those are the traits that winning sales reps carry. (shoutouts to Steve Richard and Dale Dupree)

FUTURE

🤖 The future of sales is being Amazonized. "We all know what Amazon is. It's everything. It's point and click, order, return, customer service, pricing, availability, everything at your fingertips, and sales is moving in that direction."

🤖 Leaders continue to need development. We should not lose an emphasis on enabling sales / revenue *LEADERS.*

🤖 What is the future of the AAISP in it's new incarnation as Emblaze? Where is "inside sales" headed? "We need to treat this profession like it's one of the most critical professions in the world."

🤖 Is AI friend or foe? What might be possible if AI enables sales to fully tap into their unconscious competence?

Please click 👇🏻, subscribe 📲, listen 🎧 ...and 🎙️ join the conversation!

ORCHESTRATE Sales!

Erich

#RevenueEngine #DigitalTransformation

#RevenueEnablement #Orchestrator

#RevenueEnablement

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast

Visit us on the Orchestrate Sales Property

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

ISEs3 PROMO CODE for Emblaze DigitalNow Revenue Summit 2024 in Chicago

Hit salesenablement.captivate.fm/diginow24 and it will plug in promo code OSCISE automatically -- for $745 off of the Emblaze DigitalNow Revenue Summit 2024 registration fee! Hope to see many Enablement Insider Nation smiling faces soon in Chicago. Or, more specifically, *just* outside of the Second City ...on April 2nd!

Emblaze DigitalNow Revenue Summit 2024

ISEs3 Ep10: Dr. Brian Lambert Pt 2 – Co-Founder, Orchestrator, and Value Architect

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 17:00:00 -0500

In Episode 10 Dr. Brian Lambert is back in the Orchestrate Sales Studios with Erich Starrett, for part two of a two-part interview. Dr. Lambert is a Digital Value Architect at Elastic, co-founder of OSC, SES, and co-host of Inside Sales Enablement seasons one and two.

In this segment we pivot from past to present and future, with an emphasis on the impact of AI and the new data = fuel paradigm. Highlights from the second part of our interview:

PAST

⌛️ What is Brian's take on the recent move by primary research companies to shift from "Sales" to "Revenue" and the Sales Enablement Society following suit to Revenue Enablement Society?

PRESENT

⌛️ Now that Brian has moved into the Marketing organization, what is his experience like compared to the Sales or Ops or Talent Enablement functions?

⌛️ How does data collection compare among the functions?

⌛️ What would it mean to truly be Revenue Enablement?

⌛️ In line with recent interactions with @Hilary Headlee, Erich suggests the best first step towards true Revenue Enablement may be for Enablement leaders to engage with #RevOps and Brian reacts to the suggestion.

FUTURE

⌛️ Brian talks about the shift in focus from company to employee to customer ...and now we are shifting towards a data focus. A data centric view. One for which individuals, functions, and entire companies are ill prepared to pivot towards and fully embrace and benefit.

⌛️ A potential new paradigm of looking at data less as a byproduct of doing work and more as a fuel for the digital economy.

⌛️ The promise and potential hurdles of AI for Enablement.

>>> Understanding, embracing, and tapping into a hybrid human + artificial "collective intelligence."

>>> Using AI to generate structured inputs that we as humans synthesize vs. outputs that leave the creativity to an unknown artificial third party.

⌛️ A "future of work" vision where we understand how data becomes information, how that information becomes knowledge, how that knowledge becomes insight, how that insight gets leveraged to make decisions and then how to effectively put AI on top of that to fully leverage what makes the company unique.

⌛️ There are a series of continuums:

>>> Data awareness: From data aware to data led.

>>> Organizational: From data "laying everywhere" to organized digital mastery.

>>> Enablement: From being an Analyzer to an Orchestrator removing silos and creating the organizational structure of tomorrow

"You have to be a synthesizer of all this information and AI can help you, but if you cannot synthesize this stuff across marketing operations, training, sales, customers, let's not forget, then you're not going to be an Orchestrator."

Please click 👇🏻, subscribe 📲, listen 🎧 ...and 🎙️ join the conversation!

ORCHESTRATE Sales!

Erich

#RevenueEngine #DigitalTransformation

#AICuriousHumanEnthusiast

#RevenueEnablement

Mentioned in this episode:

Visit us on the Orchestrate Sales Property

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast

ISEs3 Ep9: Dr. Brian Lambert Pt 1 - Co-Founder, Orchestrator, and Value Architect

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 07:00:00 -0500

Erich Starrett hosts Dr. Brian Lambert - co-founder of OSC, SES, and co-host of Inside Sales Enablement seasons one and two, back in the Orchestrate Sales Studios, for part one of two. A treat to have the epitome of past, present, and future enablement back on the property.

And yes, of course he was there at the original founding and one of the ~hundred four founders I'm on a mission to interview over time was right there with @Scott Santucci and the other 99-ish.

And BOY has it grown! He did a Google search on Sales Enablement way back in 2008 and got a hundred hits. He just did it again in the pre show and ...how about six million!

Brian architected an early "PhD in Sales" building on an organizational behavior degree with an emphasis on sales in his dissertation, and multiple publications in academic journals. Having also been cited over 200 times he may just be on Dr. Rob Peterson and Howard Dover's heels.

He's been a salesperson with a quota. He's been a sales manager with a team. He's been a sales enablement manager with a team of ~20. And most recently he took on the role of Big Data Value Architect at Elastic, where he is in a marketing messaging role, messaging enablement.

Highlights from the first part of our interview

PAST...

⌛️ Brian's reaction when he first heard the word "Enablement." (hint: it wasn't positive)

⌛️ Brian first crossed paths with @Scott Santucci at a conference an heard him speak about his blueprint. That's where he originally heard Scott share the vision of value architects, communicating value and being orchestrators.

⌛️ When at Forrester, Scott had to do a lot of work to sell this idea that there were people doing "this thing called Enablement." That people where challenging the status quo siloed view and breaking down the walls among sales training, marketing, ops, and other functions.

PRESENT

⌛️ Since corporate silos were born of the industrial revolution, why are they still the status quo and such a massive challenge in a hyper connected digital world where technically silos shouldn't matter?

⌛️ What does it mean to be an #Orchestrator? Why is it important?

⌛️ What if Enablement is not the right home for orchestration?

⌛️ Of the "four flavors of Sales Enablement" set forth at the SES founding, what percentage of each flavor would most who identify as Sales / Revenue enablement be?

💰Pipeline Enablement?

📝 Message Enablement?

👥 Organizational Enablement?

🎓 Talent Enablement?

FUTURE

⌛️ Brian's take on whether or not Sales Enablement will ever become the vision that the SES founders had of a cross-functional strategic function.

⌛️ Was the opportunity Covid presented by accelerating a move from the status quo to digital economy one that has been missed or is there still a hero's call to adventure for enablement?

⌛️ Accountability is not prevalent in most Enablement, or marketing, or operations. Salespeople are grounded in data and accountability. They are the ones that get fired. When will there be more accountability for the support team?

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

Visit us on the Orchestrate Sales Property

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/

ISEs3 Ep8: Bob Kelly - Sales Management Association

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 07:00:00 -0500

On the eve of the Sales Management Association's annual Sales Force Productivity Summit right here in the ATL at Emory University (NEXT week! March 12-13th ...use promo code TAGFAM for nearly half off at salesmanagement.org) SMA founder and commander-in-chief @Bob Kelly joins me to discuss the past, present and future of enablement through the lens of a globally recognized ambassador of Sales Management.

HIGHLIGHTS from the SHOW:

The first time bob heard Sales Enablement was from John Aiello and his partner Drew Larsen at the Savo Group in the late 90s/early aughts. They had created a system for distributing content, they called sales asset management. Craig Nelson of iCentera was doing this as well.
At that point Bob saw Sales Enablement chiefly as a solution for marketing. Due to Sale's uncertain agency marketing couldn't really see nor control what the sales force was doing with their content and feared much of it was going to waste.
The Sales Management Association tends to be more broadly sales effectiveness focused, but they have had sales enablement sponsors / underwriters co create content with them including Brain Shark, Highspot and Seismic.
Bob's appeal on behalf of the SMA to those who have a niche focus in sales enablement / supporting the sales force is to learn about the bigger, broader issues affecting sales leadership, sales governance.
"(At the SMA) we try to put our arms around a very diverse membership with that basic proposition, learn about the big ideas and get a broad understanding. A liberal arts education about what it means to work and to manage the sales function."

QUOTES of NOTE:

"A criticism of sales enablement that I have that it's too overreaching in its scope and definition. Only because it's poorly defined."
"I would like to see sales enablement making better managers. That should be the charter."
"The traditional function of sales management, a nanny function of supervising, making sure people are doing the right things in the right spots, it's largely a problem we automate now. So this has at least in theory, freed up some capacity to focus on more substantive things like making the sales organization better."
"Our research shows on average, large sales forces reorganize every three years. And often that's in response to this fundamental need to change how the sales organization delivers value."

Don't wait - hit PLAY! - to hear about all of the above

...and so SO much more.

Join in the journey with curiosity

alongside those courageously treading

the past, present, and future frontlines

of a growing function and global profession.

Please click 👇🏻, subscribe 📲, listen 🎧 ...and 🎙️ join the conversation!

ORCHESTRATE Sales!

Let's #ElevateEnablement TOGETHER!

Erich

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast

Visit us on the Orchestrate Sales Property

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

ISEs3 Ep7: Tim Riesterer - Chief Strategy Officer, Corporate Visions + Chief Visionary, Emblaze

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0500

Tim Riesterer - From Sales Enablement Origins to Orchestrating the Future of Revenue:

On Episode 7, host Erich Starrett hops in the OSC Studios time machine with Tim Riesterer - Chief Strategy Officer, Corporate Visions + Chief Visionary, Emblaze.

Tim shares his wealth of experience in sales enablement, spanning from the early days of automated RFPs and proposals to the evolution of the sales enablement function. He discusses the origins of sales enablement, its role in bridging marketing and sales, and its potential for strategic impact in the future. Tim also provides insights into the organizational hierarchy of enablement and its relationship to strategy, as well as the future of digital selling and the upcoming Digital Now Revenue Summit. Join us as we delve into the history, current landscape, and future possibilities of sales enablement with one of its foremost experts.

Tim and Erich talk all things sales enablement, the evolution of the industry, the future of Revenue Enablement, and even share a few sips 🥂of Tim's unique Enablement 🍾 Champage. Key takeaways:

> The Evolution of Sales Enablement: Tim shared his journey in the sales enablement space, from the early days of creating automated RFPs and proposals to the current landscape of integrated digital selling experiences. The industry has come a long way, and the future holds even greater strategic potential.

> Where Enabling Growth meets SCIENCE!: Tim discussed the concept of orchestrating science-backed "growth plays" as the future banner for enablement, emphasizing the importance of leveraging data, original research and strategic initiatives to drive sustainable impact and compelling customer experiences.

> Synergy of the CSO/CRO: Tim intentionally architected his role as Chief Strategy Officer for direct access to strategic levers across silos. This allows for adaptability across nearly everything - enablement, marketing, research, product development - from original research to front line sales execution.

> Book NOW! RSVP ASAP for the upcoming summit in Chicagoland from April 2nd to 4th! An opportunity to meet Tim and SO MANY other thought leaders face-to-face at the 2024 digitalnow Revenue Growth Summit in association with OrchestrateSales.com's ISEs3 podcast.

Hosted by Emblaze, powered by Corporate Visions, bringing together sales, marketing, and success leaders to address the challenges and opportunities of digital selling. The link below includes an embedded "OSCISE" code for specially discounted ISE Insider Nation access! https://salesenablement.captivate.fm/diginow24

Don't wait - hit PLAY! - to hear about all of the above

...and so SO much more.

Join in the journey with curiosity

alongside those courageously treading

the past, present, and future frontlines

of a growing function and global profession.

Please click 👇🏻, subscribe 📲, listen 🎧 ...and 🎙️ join the conversation!

ORCHESTRATE Sales!

Let's #ElevateEnablement TOGETHER!

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast

ISEs3 PROMO CODE for Emblaze DigitalNow Revenue Summit 2024 in Chicago

Emblaze DigitalNow Revenue Summit 2024

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

Visit us on the Orchestrate Sales Property

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/

ISEs3 Ep6: Christopher Kingman - SES Fore-founder, RES + Emblaze Exec Board Member

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0500

Hello and welcome to OrchestrateSales.com's Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.

On Episode 6, Erich Starrett hosts Christopher Kingman M.S., Global Head of Digital Sales Enablement at TransUnion, in the OSC Studios. And - SPOLER ALERT - this Ep is COMPLETE with a first of its kind opportunity to meet our guest IRL and face-to-face! Along with some of the best-of-the-best who have made (and continue to make) Enablement and Digital Sales history. And with not one but two ISE Insider benefits to make it easy on the travel budget.

Chris has a captivating Enablement past as the youngest SES Fore-founder in "the room where it happened" ...just up the street from his Florida home. He is also well known for standing up in that very room as the voice of the next generation. He shares his unique perspective on the past, while concurrently holding executive board roles with both the Revenue Enablement Society and Emblaze.

Don't miss insights from this consistent practitioner, leader and volunteer on the Enablement front lines about the past, present and future of the function and profession.

Highlights include:

PAST:

> Participating in the founding meeting of the Sales Enablement Society with people who came from as far away as the Netherlands like Thierry van Herwijnen and big names like Gerhard Gschwandtner and Jill Rowley invested their time, talent, and travel generously.

Dr. Robert M. Peterson, who never lets Chris forget that he was the "youngster" there.

PRESENT:

> Chris' board role with Emblaze (fka AAISP) is informed by years of involvement including at the F2F events.

> RES and Emblaze have partnered around the concept that your enablement person and your CRO/CSO are two sides of the same coin.

FUTURE:

> Developing the first standards-based Enablement Executive Education program.

> The 2024 Emblaze #digitalnow Revenue Growth Summit in which the RES is cultivating the Enablement track, and Chris and RES President Gail Behun will be hosting a "How to speak CRO" session.

We also announce an ISE Season Three exclusive...

Hosted by Emblaze, powered by Corporate Visions, bringing together sales, marketing, and success leaders to address the challenges and opportunities of digital selling. The link below includes an embedded "OSCISE" code for specially discounted ISE Insider Nation access! https://salesenablement.captivate.fm/diginow24

(Check out the "mentioned in this episode" section👇🏻)

Don't wait - hit PLAY! - to hear about all of the above

...and so SO much more.

Join in the journey with curiosity

alongside those courageously treading

the past, present, and future frontlines

of a growing function and global profession.

Please click 👇🏻, subscribe 📲, listen 🎧 ...and 🎙️ join the conversation!

ORCHESTRATE Sales!

Let's #ElevateEnablement TOGETHER!

Mentioned in this episode:

ISEs3 PROMO CODE for Emblaze DigitalNow Revenue Summit 2024 in Chicago

Emblaze DigitalNow Revenue Summit 2024

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

Visit us on the Orchestrate Sales Property

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/

ISEs3 Ep5: Craig Nelson - SES Fore-founder and Entrepreneur

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 07:00:00 -0500

On Episode 5 Sales Enablement Society Fore-founder and Entrepreneur Craig Nelson joins Erich Starrett in the OSC Studios to go in the wayyy back machine to a coffee shop in 1998 when he registered the domain Sales Enablement dot com and remembers wondering "do I reserve it for one year or three?"

He breaks his journey down into three generations of Enablement history:

Gen 1: Centralized Sales Content Thing (2003-2013)
Gen 2: Content Packaged with Training, a Sales Thing (2013-2023)
Gen 3: Sales Execution Across Buyer Journey, a Sales & Customer Success Thing (2024 - )

Please take a listen (and subscribe to!) the podcast to hear about all of the above, and so so much more.

Let's Elevate Enablement TOGETHER!

Join in the journey at OrchestrateSales.com/podcast

Mentioned in this episode:

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

Visit us on the Orchestrate Sales Property

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast

ISEs3 Ep4: Gail Behun – President, Revenue Enablement Society (2024)

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0500

On Episode 5 we begin in the present as Erich Starrett is joined in the OSC Studios with Gail Behun who was announced just last week as the new President of the Revenue Enablement Society!

In this episode, Gail shares insights gained from many milestones on her personal Enablement journey including...

> Her PASSION for the elevation of the Enablement profession, including many companies (and namely those who laid off entire Enablement teams) coming to embrace the reality...

"What was happening to our community wasn't about enablers not showing value. It wasn't about us not doing a good enough job at our job.

It was very reactionary. It was our CROs and CEOs not understanding the value of Enablement.

Going from mentality of growth at all costs to a mentality of profitability at all costs." And that meant they had to cut anything that didn't directly lead to profitability, which meant cutting Enablement because Enablement adds to the cost of sale.

...this crash was not just because of our performance and that we had to be able to own the parts of it that we didn't do well enough. We needed to understand how to better build a bridge to our CROs, and then we needed to understand how do we go forward from here."

"We really need to bring this function back and bring it back strategically. "

> The Sales Enablement Society's decision to rebrand in 4Q23 to the Revenue Enablement Society...

"This is a real recognition that our profession is evolving dramatically...that we have a much bigger footprint that we're empowering, not just sellers, but customer success, solution consultants, marketing, working across product marketing. We really are that connective tissue to the sales organization."

"The title is how people are seeing us. But for me and my passion is how are we seeing ourselves? How do we define what we're doing so that whatever our title is, we know we're having the biggest impact, whether you are, a support level, whether you're just coming in, whether you're a VP level and everything in between, really having a clear understanding of how you can have an impact on those bottom line revenue metrics. How what you're doing ties back to revenue.

> How her love of the live conference community experience led her to lead the annual global SES/RES event...

"It lets me really bring my passion for face to face marketing and the power of conferences and the power of connecting into an organization that I feel so strongly brings so much value to members. One of the things I love about sales enablement is it's still a niche profession. There's not a lot of us, we're still figuring a lot of stuff out. And so you have this community of people who are. Incredibly brave, incredibly creative, incredibly scrappy, and perfectly happy to show you what they're doing."

> Her take on the future of Enablement, and elevating the profession...

"The evolution for me is to continue to make sure that people have outlets to have good discussions with their community on a regional level, on a national level, on a slack level, that they have those conversations, and that those conversations can focus on 'What makes our strategy impactful?' Yeah, we've got to talk about the tactics, like how are we actually going to pull this thing off? But the more conversations we have about the strategy, the more that we speak that CRO / CEO language, the more likely we are to elevate our entire profession."

Please take a listen (and subscribe to!) the podcast to hear about all of the above, and so so much more.

Let's Elevate Enablement TOGETHER!

Join the rise at OrchestrateSales.com

Mentioned in this episode:

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

Visit us on the Orchestrate Sales Property

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast

ISEs3 Ep3: Paul Butterfield - President, Revenue Enablement Society (2023)

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 10:00:00 -0500

ISE Season 3 is focused on the past, present and future of Enablement History. And timed perfectly as we just celebrated the seventh anniversary of the official signing of the Sales Enablement Society into reality by the ~100 SES Fore-founders in Palm Beach, November of 2016.

For Episode 3, Paul Butterfield, President of the Executive Board of the (as of recently) Revenue Enablement Society joins us on the Orchestrate Sales Property and shares his take on Enablement History:

⏪ BEFORE the Sales Enablement Society:

❇️ Building out the enablement function for multiple companies including Vonage, Instructure, and General Electric's CoE.

❇️ Googling "Sales Enablement" and being introduced to the research of Scott Santucci

⏯️ Paul's introduction to the SES via Jill Rowley and ultimately getting involved locally.

❇️ A review of the three founding positions and how they, in part, solidified Paul's findings from having built Enablement programs organically

❇️ A peek "behind the scenes" at the catalysts, current events, and decision making process that informed the executive board's transition from the SES to the RES

⏩️ Paul's take on the present and future of Enablement and his personal mission to empower enablement through the lens of Customer Journey

❇️ Enablement has yet to fully embrace and apply "business within a business"

❇️ The impact and opportunity of A.I.

❇️ A challenge for all to embrace becoming Enablement Challengers vs. Waiters

❇️ Drop the "ROI calculator" and rather focus on reasonable correlation to results

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

Visit us on the Orchestrate Sales Property

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/

ISEs3 Ep2: Scott Santucci Pt2 - The Birth of the Sales Enablement Society

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to Inside Sales Enablement, Season three, where we take a leap into the enablement time machine and...

> Take a look back with those who played a part in enablement history.

> Pause in the present and hit on a few modern themes

> And then shift our focus to the future and what it may bring for enablement teams.

Hello and welcome! I'm Erich Starrett. I started out as an ISE "Insider Nation" devotee of Sales Enablement Society founding father Scott, Santucci, and trailblazer Dr. Brian Lambert. I then collaborated with them to build OrchestrateSales.com, the global home for the podcast and related resources for Enablement Orchestrators and sales enablement history.

Why? Well as a sales enablement history nerd with a passion for the continued elevation of the profession. I see it as the Sales Enablement Smithsonian and, more specifically, an opportunity to serve you - the global enablement community.

Together, we will revisit the wisdom of the treasures therein as well as uncover some new ones with a series of special guests, which may even include you.

The foundation of cross-functional and enablement orchestration was established in the three founding principles signed into existence by the hundred-ish fore-founders of the SES back in Palm beach in 2016, for which this week in the studio is the seven year anniversary.

So in celebration after a year of hiatus, we're knocking the dust off the orchestrate sales.com property.

In the first episode we had Sales Enablement Society founding father Scott Santucci as our special guest, focusing on before the SES and how it almost didn't even exist.

Today, Scott rejoins me in the orchestrate sales studios, as we land alongside the a hundred-ish, fore-founders in Palm beach, back in November of 2016, where, and when the Sales Enablement Society officially began.

Mentioned in this episode:

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

ISEs3 Ep1: Scott Santucci Pt1 - Before the Sales Enablement Society

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 10:00:00 -0500

Episode 64: ISE Season 3#1: BSES

Welcome to "season three" of Inside Sales Enablement ...ISE - focused on Enablement History. I'm Erich Starrett. I started out in the ISE audience listening to SES Founding Father Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Dr. Brian Lambert', and then collaborated with them to build OrchestrateSales.com to be the global home for the ISE Podcast and related resources for Sales Enablement #Orchestrators, including Sales Enablement Society history.

It is the week of the seventh anniversary of the official signing of the SES into reality by the ~100 Fore-founders in Palm Beach, November of 2016. We begin ISE Season 3 with a focus on "Before the SES ...and how it almost didn't exist" with SPECIAL GUEST Sales Enablement Society Founding Father Scott Santucci himself.

Was Sales *Enablement* the first choice, or were there a few left marked through on the the whiteboard?
What HEROic role did the four days of Scott and Brian Lambert's Forrester Sales Enablement Conferences play?
Would the Sales Enablement Society have even become a thing if Jill Rowley didn't engage a cynical Scott in a Social Media challenge centered around Tiffani Bova, with a few extra nudges from across the pond thanks to Tamara Schenk?
The significance of Lisa Pintner not just letting Scott sulk in a corner at the happy hour?
How do you create a forum that fosters creative conflict and to challenge each other in a positive way?
What was the role of vendors including Corporate Visions (@Jody Kavanaugh and Tim Riesterer,) SAVO Group (now part of Seismic) and @iCentera (Craig Nelson)?
What came into reality of the intersections of Sheevaun Thatcher, CPC, Jill Guardia (she/her), and Daniel West introducing Scott to @Jim Ninivaggi?
...with involvement of key players like Walter Pollard, Carol Sustala, Mike Kunkle, Lee Levitt)
How long did it take Rahul Gupta to come up with the SES Lion brand marketing package and approach?

And THOSE questions don't even yet have us to the Palm Beach MEETING! Enjoy part one! Part two coming soon...

Mentioned in this episode:

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Ep63 Helping Salespeople Communicate Value with Jen Burns

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to Inside: Sales Enablement Episode 63

How do we make sales today and one of the things that we need to concentrate on is selling the value of what is actually value mean in the first place? No human being on the planet can live without water. But water is cheap, and prevalent, and inexpensive in most places. Whereas none of us need diamonds to survive. But diamonds are expensive. So what actually is value?

In this episode, the guys are joined by Jen Burns who runs sales enablement globally for IQVIA. The reason the concept is so important today is as we move into a digital into the digital economy where customer experience becomes so vital.

The key questions you must be able to help your sellers answer are: What actually is valuable? Is the product and service that you have, is that what is valuable? Or is it the outcome the customer achieves? Is that what's valuable. That's what we're talking about today.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:49

Together, Brian, I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way, what works and maybe what's more important, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:03

And our focus is on you, as a sales enablement leader and Orchestrator, sales enablement, leaders need to develop specific characteristics that we call Orchestration, operate in the blended domain of strategy and tactics, where you do both. Our goal on this podcast is to help you clarify what that looks like, provide examples that you can then take an action in your own company and give you confidence to engage up down and across the organization. And as usual, we have a centering story. So Scott, what do you have for us today?

Scott Santucci 01:34

So I'm going to lead with a quote, and I'm going to ask you to see if you can think place the quote and the time period.

Brian Lambert 01:42

Okay.

Scott Santucci 01:44

Here's the quote. Why is water that is vital for all life. cheap. And diamonds are so expensive.

Brian Lambert 01:56

Isn't this say? Something tells me that this is like the 1980s or something that a technology reference like a Steve Jobs keynote or something?

Scott Santucci 02:06

Close?

Brian Lambert 02:06

It is

Scott Santucci 02:07

very close. Yes. It's Aristotle. And it's about 300 BC. You were right. Close. My hopes

Brian Lambert 02:17

only to bash it upside that. Okay. Well, fine. Aristotle's a smart dude. I can get go for that.

Scott Santucci 02:22

I guess he's Steve Jobs. Yes. And essentially, he's got, you know, big thoughts.

Brian Lambert 02:27

And they probably are more like sandals.

Scott Santucci 02:29

There's the close part. So why are we talking about this and diamonds, around the time of Aristotle, many of the people many of the Greeks actually believe diamonds were literally tears of the gods. And between, then, and in the dark ages, many kings wore diamonds on their armor because it was a great, it was a great sign of health and virility and safety. And then in 1477, I guess that's the Renaissance time. maximillian, who at the time that this happened was the Archduke of the Habsburg Empire, babe later became the Holy Roman Emperor. So there's your Italian Kwazii connection there for you. Thanks. You're welcome. Nice pay out there. But this, this is pretty interesting. And 1477, he became the first person to actually propose to a woman using it using a diamond ring.

Brian Lambert 03:32

So it's his fault. I see.

Scott Santucci 03:34

It is his fault. So set so that then so we fast forward to 1938. And the reason 1938 is a is a good is a very important time is because at this point in time, that De Beers organization we all know about the beers cornered the diamond industry. And they commissioned a study because most of the diamond sales were happening in the United States at the time. And what's significant about 1938 Yes, it's during the Great Depression. And there was a big dip in diamond sales. They commissioned a study figured out that before 1938 you know, who they were trying to sell diamonds to directly to women. And what they found out is that they needed to sell diamonds to men, and specifically around this whole engagement ring phenomenon. So a woman named Dorothy diam did did a bunch of this research and when it first came out, they came out with a she's the one who came up with the Diamonds Are Forever program.

Brian Lambert 04:37

What's her name?

Scott Santucci 04:38

Dorothy was Dorothy Diane.

Brian Lambert 04:40

I thought I thought you said Dorothy diamond. I'm like what that did she changed her name. Okay.

Scott Santucci 04:46

Great. Yeah, actually credited as being one of the first people to do product placement so that

Brian Lambert 04:52

diamonds are forever. That's right.

Scott Santucci 04:55

So that's that became a slogan and wrote by By the 1950s diamond sales that drunk jumped at the time they were promoting one, one month salary for what you should pay for a ring that went so well they doubled it to two months. So those things are all going on. Now what's interesting then, and at the same time, in 1954, so think about alchemy, we've talked about alchemy, before people trying to make gold, and people have been trying to make diamonds or synthesize diamonds. And it wasn't it wasn't until 1954 that synthetic diamonds could be produced today, synthetic diamonds are its own industry and upon itself. So you have the regular mined diamonds that are used mostly or for gems. But then the synthetic diamonds are used for machine and cutting tools. They're used as thermal conductors, they're used as optical materials, electronics, and increasingly as gemstones and to bring this full circle. Part of the reason gemstones are becoming an option is because of environmental reasons and be poked, people are becoming more concerned with it. So for example, it takes about 250 tons of earth to produce one carat of diamonds, or also some of the poor working conditions are like, so what you have is, you know, coming back full step full circle to Aristotle. Why is water? vital? And why are diamonds so expensive? Well, there's a whole bunch of reasons for for diamonds, and a whole bunch of people have different value for it. So that's our centering story, full circle from Aristotle, the Aristotle between 300 some odd BC to 2020. And we've covered a lot of ground here.

Brian Lambert 06:56

Yeah, thanks. Great, great lesson, I guess. But I got to ask. So what? So what does this have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 07:05

So this has to do with sales enablement is the first part of that word is sales. How do we make sales today and one of the things that we need to concentrate on is selling the value of what is actually value mean in the first place? No human being on the planet can live without water. But water is cheap, and prevalent, and inexpensive in most places. Whereas none of us need diamonds to survive. But diamonds are expensive. So what actually is value. And the reason that that's so important today is as we move into a digital into the digital economy where customer experience becomes so important. What actually is valuable? Is the product and service that you have, is that what is valuable? Or is it the outcome the customer achieves? Is that what's valuable. So that's what we're talking about today.

Brian Lambert 08:02

Great. Well, we have with us to help us unpack this. And actually, we're using this and it this podcast in a in an interesting way. I think our listeners are gonna love to hear about this. We've got Jen burns with us, Scott, why don't you tell us a little bit about Jen and have her introduce herself. And then I'll come back at the end and recap what all this means to orchestrators.

Scott Santucci 08:22

Well, I'm super excited to introduce Jen for a variety reasons. So Jen and I go back aways. Jen actually was one of the participants, Brian, if you remember, the sales enablement society didn't start as a sales day was sorry, started as the washington dc local sales enablement. networking group, which I titled that was my baby.

Brian Lambert 08:47

That's why you're not in marketing.

Scott Santucci 08:48

That's true. I'm not in marketing. So Jen, Jen, join us there. Jen has been the been on the board of directors of the sale today and once it along the way. And now she runs sales enablement globally for a company called a cavia. So when they The third thing there for actually The fourth thing that I'm excited about is I'm really interested to see how Jen reacts to our centering story and connects the dots of what we're going to talk about. Jen, would you care to add some color about who you are and introduce yourself to inside our nation?

Jen Burns 09:23

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm kind of nervous about the pivot to the centering story, but we'll see what we can do. From that perspective. It was a great one. So see, I'm Jen burns, and Senior Director of Sales, global sales strategy, enablement training at IQ vs. Scott mentioned. And and I'm really excited to be part of this podcast and it I think it's been quite a number of years actually, since Scott, you and I have been on a webinar or podcast together and Brian similar to that, so. So it's great and a lot of has happened since then. Particularly since our early days. It days for sure. But um, you know, but I'm very excited to kind of get into this topic today, particularly because we're preparing for a keynote, this coming week at our global sales conference, which Scott is, is going to be leading, and I will be joining him in the discussion. So really important that we start to flesh this topic out and wanted to use this platform to really kind of think through some of the key issues to ensure that when we put it in front of the sales team, you know, it makes sense, and they can start leveraging some of these techniques. So it's really important, you know, for me, and for my organization to ensure that we continue to drive, you know, value to our customers, and very, very excited to discuss what that actually means today. So yeah, really great to be here, guys. Thanks for having me.

Scott Santucci 10:46

Oh, no problem. So in case you're wondering. And following along, let's make sure we're paying attention really clear, crystal clear, Jen is doing this podcast, because she's practicing. And she's practicing for a keynote presentation, that, well, we're gonna do, we're gonna do, we're gonna do together. So we're gonna do a keynote presentation for the sales kickoff that she's got in a few days. And we're practicing landing some of the concepts. So I just want to make sure that everybody recognizes that we all have to practice we all have to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations, we're asking our sales people to do it don't get outside of their comfort zone. I think this is a great opportunity to highlight that Jen's doing exactly that. So with that, having said that, let's talk about value. And why is this topic so important? Don't doesn't everybody know what value means? Gen y's, why is talking about values such a central theme for sales organizations in 2020?

Jen Burns 11:52

Yeah, so I think, you know, it reminds me back to the days when we were trying to put a definition behind sales enablement, right? It kind of means something different to every person. And, you know, I think for every sales enablement practitioner that's listening to this, or even a salesperson or marketing professional, it's the word value is a very nebulous term. And I think, you know, frankly, we throw it around, you know, in a way that it doesn't really clearly provide value. Right? So when we say we're value selling, or we're driving value to our customers, I think we really need to be careful about how we use that term, because what ends up happening is it doesn't carry meaning. And, you know, one of the reasons you know why Scott, I'm so excited to, you know, to be working with you, and growth enablement and trying to, you know, work through what, what the definition of value really means to to our sales, sales organization, so we can continue can continue to drive growth, it's really thinking about, you know, what it means to the customer, because I think we all want to define it from our lens. But really, you know, the value is what the customer thinks it is not what we think it is. And so there's a lot of, you know, ways that I think we can get to that answer. And so really excited to, you know, to start working through, you know, one, how we do that, and to how we communicate it to sales so that they can articulate it in a much stronger way to our customers,

Scott Santucci 13:22

right. And one of the things that where this problems begins, or starts, really comes down to as businesses, we tend to go to market. And when we go to market, we think, let's make a list of all the different products that we've got our capabilities that we've got. Now let's compare those capabilities, and how do we compare those capabilities, either by the speeds and feeds that we can prove and demonstrate or what we can demo, or by how we compare against our competitors. And I think the observation that we're on Jen and love, you get some add some more clarity about that, is, as we build more and more capabilities, one, we can't communicate all that stuff to people, it becomes overwhelming. And to from a customer standpoint, one of the challenges is how are we going to get everybody who is who's involved in that on the same page? And how are we going to turn those capabilities into value for us? So are you seeing similar similar situations? And how do you go about preparing the right kinds of materials to have a value driven conversation?

Jen Burns 14:32

Yeah, so let's, let's unpack this a little bit, because I'll give you my perspective. And then actually, I'd like to get yours right on, you know, potentially a different direction. so well done in a very, in a very simple way, right? The way that that you know, and I and I will come out and be transparent and say that this is how I typically view value right and i think others do as well is that when we're trying Trying to prepare our sales organization to sell more effectively and have better deeper conversations with buyers, we often anchor that conversation to what our solutions are going to drive. Right? So, you know, what can we increase or decrease? Can we drive revenue growth rate, all of the key buzzwords that everybody uses in their marketing materials or sales conversations. And you know, of course, that's all talking about product. And while we absolutely want to share those things, and they're very meaningful at different parts of the conversation, and conversations that we have with buyers and other key stakeholders, I don't think they're the things that really set us up for a good consultative relationship so that we can help our buyers understand, you know, what is that value that that they're looking for? Right, because we think myopically that it's directly, you know, related to our product and what it can do versus what actually is going on with an organization that directly impacts that definition to them. So I would actually turn it back to you, Scott, and just get your thoughts on, you know, one is, is the pattern kind of that you see, directly correlating value to product versus, you know, people actually digging into the value that the customer believes that they're trying to drive, which may be influenced by things going on in their environment? And then how do we actually think differently about that? As we're crafting, you know, our resources and tools for sales? Because it's a very difficult thing for me to kind of get my hands around? Yes.

Scott Santucci 16:35

So Jen is leading with all of you guys. She has a more refined view than what she's what she's sharing. The Jen, you and I both have had experience talking about this concept of prototypes. And it's been really the width inside your company. I think that's really where where things start, is that we've just got so much muscle memory, about wanting to talk about what we've got, that we're losing sight of what's valuable for customers. That's one point. The second point is, I think it's really difficult when we so let's say that Brian, were a real estate agent and genuine I had a business partnership where we're looking to buy some real estate. Brian referred to us as buyers, we're going to be put off because we haven't bought anything yet. So I think another another challenge is let's, let's move off of thinking about the people that we're trying to sell to as buyers because it desensitizes it, we treat them like there's some formulaic thing out there just waiting. They have all this demand for whatever our product and services, but the reality is they don't. The reality is to create demand with them. And maybe we don't treat them as buyers, we treat them actually as customers and human beings.

Jen Burns 18:06

Yeah, no, that's that's a fair point, honestly, and, and frankly, if we were doing our jobs well, as salespeople, you know, we want them to recognize, you know, in many cases, problems they may not realize exists. So if there's no problems in their mind, they're not buyers. That's right. So it actually makes sense to say it that way, I agree with you.

Scott Santucci 18:26

So when we when we when we unpack that, then what makes it be makes it very difficult is we're in the b2b world. So in your case, Janet acuvue, you sell to pharmaceutical companies. So pharmaceutical companies are multinational, large, complex entities and word that's what we're technically selling to. However, we're also selling to human beings as well. And I think this is where things become challenging is to not confront the complexities that exist in a b2b organization to start off with. So one of the things that we have developed is a, what we call a value equation. And there's three simple parts to it, there is the impact that we can bring to bear to the company that you have to co create or agree on. There...

Ep62 Leading the SE Function To Achieve Impact with Brian King

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 10:00:00 -0500

In this episode , we're joined by Brian King. Sales Enablement leader who brought a cross-functional team together to develop and clarify the value of his team at Intercontinental Hotels. In this podcast, we talk through bringing together cross-functional leaders (all who have a myopic lens of "value") as well as understanding the commercial ratio and how to leverage to elevate the strategic conversation and strategies.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

Scott Santucci 00:48

together, Brian, I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way, what works and maybe what's more important, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:02

Our focus is on you as sales enablement leaders and orchestrators as a sales enablement orchestrator, you need to develop specific skills to blend both strategy and tactics together to help your company succeed. As you work across the sales and marketing, you're also bringing together a lot of different inputs, and you're turning those inputs into value for your company. As usual, we have a centering story, Scott, what do you have for us today?

Scott Santucci 01:27

So our centering story goes way, way, way, way back.

Brian Lambert 01:31

usually say that it doesn't isn't that far. Either way.

Scott Santucci 01:35

With that.

Brian Lambert 01:36

When you add all the emphasis you blow it that it's not that far back.

Scott Santucci 01:41

We have the benefit of actually knowing what the story is because I'm including you on this one. So that's a little unfair. I'm using

Brian Lambert 01:47

the fact that I'm not in the dark this time.

Unknown Speaker 01:50

Exactly.

Scott Santucci 01:52

But so we've we've had stories that go way back as I remember around BC period, BC when we talked about the invention of improv.

Brian Lambert 02:05

That's right.

Scott Santucci 02:06

That's how far back we've gone. So this time, we're going all the way back to episode six gaven, episode six of our actual podcast. So how modern are we getting here? So if you haven't, if you haven't listened to Episode Six, you probably shouldn't do it. It's we published this in in June of 2019. And there's actually a funny story about that. What prompted us to do this episode was a call that I made to you, Brian Lambert, of when I was in Atlanta, what was that call? Like?

Brian Lambert 02:42

That's right, you called me and you're like, guess where I'm just leaving this meeting. And first you had some sort of travel disaster you went through, because there was some sort of major issue in the meeting had to start without you or something. And then you

Scott Santucci 02:54

think our guests might have some comments on that.

Brian Lambert 02:59

And then, you went to you told me about this guy who was like, you're not going to believe this. Brian, he got Lambert, you have this guy who brings who brings us all in when we're going through this idea of his charter. And then he actually at the end of this meeting, get this he briefs and brings in his executive team to do the readout. And that's what this two day meeting was about. How awesome is that? That this guy would put his, you know, team through this. And this is a group of people that actually was coming together for the Conference Board. It wasn't even his team. That's right, we're just super jazzed up about it.

Scott Santucci 03:34

I am always so if anybody if any of our listeners has a idea to tackle something different out of the box, call me and I'll get in the foxhole with him because I just love anybody who does that. And our special guest, this is the guy or we'll talk about who he is in a second. I was the program director, whatever you call it for the for the Conference Board. And for those who don't know, the conference board's 100 and x 160 year old organization. It's actually the organization that came up with the 40 day 40 Hour Workweek that's that's true story, got labor and management together. And then during the Industrial Revolution, and ever since then, has been creating these councils. And that's how I met our guests. This guy, his name's Brian King, and he was one of the members. And we were having a meeting. I think it was at Tiffany's. We literally had breakfast. Two days at Tiffany's. Brian and I right. That's right, Brian,

Unknown Speaker 04:35

right. Yeah. Ray would have breakfast. Every everyone's dream.

Scott Santucci 04:40

Yes, exactly. So we were at we're having our meeting at Tiffany's. And we we had the situation where had everybody present out what their, what their sales enablement. Charter would be if we were on CNBC and it didn't go well. So we realized we needed to work on our messaging instead. We've got to adopt this idea of a business with our business. So Brian King goes while do that, that makes sense. I'll do that. So we decided on the spot. You know, little did we know, why don't we have our next meeting, our next Conference Board meeting at in Atlanta at international, intercontinental hotels group in Atlanta, so they have a big hospitality company. And what we're going to do is we're going to put all of us on the spot and create an agenda, where we're going to provide a readout for as executives. Now how cool is that?

Brian Lambert 05:38

I that's amazing. That's,

Scott Santucci 05:39

I think it's I think it's the coolest thing. So anybody who's got the stones to be able to pull that off is immediately going to be somebody that I idolize. And we have that person now with us, Brian King. So Brian, tell us a little bit about that story. And, you know, pick us up and what we're going to be talking about today.

Unknown Speaker 05:58

Yeah, well, thanks. It's great to join. Both you gentlemen today, always have a great time chatting with you With you both. And talking about sales and commercial enablement, that that meeting was so interesting, because we had pulled together a considerable number of corporate executive board members, they all came to Atlanta, we sat in our boardroom. And for two days, we talked through challenges around value propositions for sales for sellers, about our product, and our product ID, intercontinental hotels, at that point in time was our brands. So everything from a Kimpton to a Holiday Inn to, to an intercontinental across our brand categories, and why our sellers who sell to them in the b2b space, so they would sell to the IBM's, the Cisco, the Coca Cola has, etc, in order to get their business travel, as well as their groups and their meetings and titles. And so we spent a lot of time really kind of focused on value propositions as well as loyalty. And we, as a sales organization, had a kind of working knowledge of what, what our ideas were, but we wanted to have loyalty and brands Come and join us in the room and listen to what other corporate executive board members like. Like Ernst, and young and Tiffany and Microsoft and anhand are really exceptional group of sales leaders. And listen to what they think about these value propositions and where we were going with with loyalty. Anyway, long story short, that room represented over half a billion dollars worth of business travel.

So a great opportunity for our executives to get in front of the those groups who travel most predominantly salespeople, these are all sales leaders, and really kind of worked through the the output of that session. And it was was a phenomenal session. I think everyone participated. Great. But it shows something it should cast the light on this idea that you guys have been talking about with the insider nation around Productitis. You know, that real belief that the features and the functions of the product, which in this case is a hotel, really have more meaning or more value for our customers for our customers experience than than what the sales relationship is really providing. And so I'm really saying that those executives kind of came in and they nodded their heads, they listened. And then they exited stage left. And

Scott Santucci 09:00

it was those executives You mean the executives within IHG? Correct?

Unknown Speaker 09:05

Right? That's correct. Yeah. I think it was the guy who ran loyalty to the brand leaders ran upscale brands. And it was a it was a an eye opening experience. For me. It was an eye opening experience for the team of people that I had brought in on my team, whether we're speaking marketing or sales enablement teams, and then we actually had sellers come in as well, and sellers who are actually aligned to the accounts that are representative. So a great a great experience and a great learning for me. A lot of different

Scott Santucci 09:42

levels. to Brian, I'm getting fired up. Because you're making me remember and I know you're holding me at gunpoint making me remember right like it's Yeah, but I am remembering that situation. We should probably do a whole podcast just on that but go through each part.

Unknown Speaker 10:00

How

Scott Santucci 10:02

people in loyalty just kept asking questions about loyalty and how it didn't connect at all with

Unknown Speaker 10:08

like, yeah, yeah, they want to have a points conversation,

Scott Santucci 10:12

right? What are you talking about? What do you mean? What

Unknown Speaker 10:14

are you talking about here?

Brian Lambert 10:16

And there's a couple of things on this. Like, there's the whole idea of just bringing these folks together, which I think a lot of our listeners would be intrigued by, like, how did you actually pull that off? And then there's the what happened in the room? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 10:28

yeah. Yeah, there's, and there's also it would probably be great to have one of the other attendees come to it too. Because I think there were two perspectives of the folks that came into the room, there was, Hey, I'm, I'm coming. I'm going to help Brian. But I actually have the same challenges that Brian's got with value propositions or with, let's call it loyalty or retention of our clients or, or what have you. And so I can wrap my head around me helping Brian is actually helping myself. And then there were other folks in the room who were like, no one sent me the memo on this, or I didn't understand what's happening. I'm just here helping Brian, like, I really would prefer to maybe engage in a different way. And in this, so I think there are there are so many different perspectives and layers of how that meeting down that Yeah, we could totally do an entire.

Scott Santucci 11:18

So Alright, well, let's do this. We're gonna call out so we're gonna, we're gonna I'll reach out to Greg and Samir. Yeah. And let's try to recreate that that magic a year later. Let's see what happens. But the purpose of this is, is your reactions to the last of our commercial, commercial enablement seminar series. Before we get into that, can you introduce and tell folks about how you ran or runs, run sales in a month, a little bit about your department, your your game plan and how you did it?

Unknown Speaker 11:55

Yeah. So I, in my last position, which is with hp, which I left about a year ago, I ran global sales operations enablement,

Scott Santucci 12:07

I want to hold off on Wait, before we do that, when I mention a qualifier, there is no correlation between Brian leaving in this meeting that we had, I just want to make sure that correlation doesn't exist, there's other factors go on.

Unknown Speaker 12:21

That's true. That's very true. And so I came into the organization and I was winning strategic accounts, and I had some other aspects to my role. And, you know, the system was broken. The, the dots were not being connected on the inside of, from everything, from analytics, to operations, to process, to engagement with legal and other business partners. The technology that was there was fragmented, we had over 29 different product technology products that we used in the world of sales, which was bizarre to me. And ultimately, what I did is I ended up taking an internal position, because I wanted to kind of start to sort all of that out. And in doing that, we had to centralized specific parts of the team of teams where maybe analytics have been regionalized, for, you know, Greater China and for the Americas or Europe. It was really bringing all of those together as centers of excellence, which I'm not really a fan of that term. But who says you're Excellent. So I am, I would give

Scott Santucci 13:38

myself labeling. Yeah, I mean, I could bring my own exercise, right.

Unknown Speaker 13:43

Yeah. So but but really centralizing a lot of these functions that we're having pregnant for a long time. So the team grew to about 200 people across eight different countries. That really was set to enable the global sales organization. And we developed a really a vision statement with the leaders as I brought everyone together. I said, Well, what is our purpose was our mission here. And we we said, you know, it's really to unlock the value of sales. So when you guys talk about value, and without clear clarifying value, and how that's really not rocket science is you're right, it doesn't have to be. And what we did is we make sure everyone can see themselves in that mantra every single day, that regardless of whether they were working in the technology area, or if they were working operations or effectiveness or training or you name it, they were they were all contributing to unlocking that value so that our sales people could do what they needed to do best. So and help simplify and make things seller ready for the sales teams because we had so many different parts of the organization. burdening them with their own agendas and we kind of became The stock app to prevent that from happening. And with design and simplify, in order to help release that burden from salespeople reduce the workflow or just the number of approvals reduce the produce all of the internal stuff that our customers don't care about. Because they, they don't need to hear from the salesperson, it's gonna take another week and a half to get the contract, when they're waiting for it. The holdup is on our and we should be able to move in a much more agile pace. So anyway, so we had that organization out. And I'm really aligned each of my direct reports to their to their most relevant business partner in the organization, whether it was finance or it or HR, HR for training and effectiveness and talent. For for, for all of our technology with it was our product management teams, etc. So, um, and as we've created those partnerships, a lot of the, the business partners were like, Well, wait a minute, why are you doing training and sales when we have a training learning department, we, we feel like you're kind of getting in our space. And we spend a lot of time saying, actually, we can do this together. And this was really, when orchestrating things really started for us, we can actually bring this together, you can still have a role in all of this.

But we're the subject matter experts in sales, you're the subject matter experts and adult learning, let's actually combine those two things, and figure out how we do this together and weave our agendas or priorities together, when we did that across a number of fronts. So when I met Scott, it was through that corporate executive board. And I thought, I thought organization was kind of like the last to the party on this. And so when I first met Scott, I was very kind of quiet in terms of what we would have been able to accomplish that he and, and this concept of orchestration, and really come to the forefront of my mind on Well, that's what we were doing. And Scott would talk about this was you call your unconscious, your unconscious,

Scott Santucci 17:15

unconscious competence?

Unknown Speaker 17:17

Yes. And every time I would talk about something that you'd say, well, there's that unconscious competence. And so it became more and more evident that what we were doing was really starting to orchestrate the enterprise around how to more effectively enable salespeople at every step of the buying journey. And, and that's kind of that's just a little bit about what I was doing. And he, um, and so I guess, I have to say, um, you know, thinking about this goes to customer webinar that, that we just

Scott Santucci 17:56

let me let me go produce that that topic gives some space. So okay, as a list or sort of digest that I want you to sort of imagine this is what Brian's doing. This is how he's running in his organization help you level set about the scope and scale of what he's working on. So I asked, I asked Brian, hey, you want to do a podcast and react to our go to customer? webinar? So as you know, we've we've asked other people to do that. So I don't know anything? He may hate it. I have no idea. So um, hopefully he does. He doesn't hate it. But I asked him to come up with three thoughts. But I think it's important that you, as a listener, have a frame of reference of where he's where he's coming from. Yeah, thank you.

Unknown Speaker 18:44

So...

Ep61 Quantifying SE Contribution with Erik Host-Steen

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 04 Nov 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to Inside: Sales Enablement Episode 61

In this episode we're joined by long-time listener Erik Host-Steen who appreciates getting into the meat of some issues. Since we like introducing ideas and inviting people to participate and push back, Erik reached out to discuss business outcomes and business impact of Sales Enablement.

Erik finds that sales, marketing, and product leaders are often working at cross-purposes. One way to get alignment is through business impact measures. What are the goals of the organization? And certainly, growth is usually a part of that. And that growth is for some purpose, value creation, profitability, etc. And then if it's a venture capital backed, firm, there's an exit. So then we have to have an eye toward valuation. And the top typical valuation models have many other factors involved rather than the Commercial Ratio we discussed on the show.

What does the Commerical Ratio really add to the toolkit in terms of being able to solve growth problems being able to drive toward a particular valuation or profitability? Find out as we walk through the top-down view of business impact measures so you can quantify your business impact of the sales enablement function.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Brian Lambert 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci. I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian, I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement issues. As analysts, consultants, we're practitioners, we've learned the hard way, what works, and maybe was more importantly, what doesn't. And

Brian Lambert 01:01

our focus is on you as sales enablement, leaders and orchestrators. In that role as an orchestrator, you have to blend both tactics and strategy to execute. Our goal is to help you clarify the measures of success, provide an example of what that looks like to execute, and work together across your function across your organization. And then give you confidence to engage up down and across so you can drive results. And on this podcast today, we're just really excited. And it's really awesome to have another insider join us. We've got Eric hosting with us. Hi, Eric, how you doing?

Erik Host-Steen 01:37

Great, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lambert 01:39

Absolutely. And I was, I wanted to bring you in, because you and I had both had a conversation on the heels of the Commercial Ratio webinar. And I learned a little bit about you, you've got you fixed sales and marketing and product problems. You've been with Rogers Corporation, and hoche and Red Mountain, and you're very process driven and quality focused, and have a product marketing background in business development. And, you know, one of the things that I learned about you as you really are focused on having a dialogue, to understand but also where things maybe don't necessarily come together for you, you want to have a discussion. And that's what we're doing here today. I thought, Well, you know what, instead of having the conversation between us, between you and Scott, let's have you on the show. And you can ask Scott yourself. So thanks for joining in, tell us tell us a little bit more about yourself, Eric will do.

Erik Host-Steen 02:31

Yep, longtime listener or I've been listening here for for quite a while. And if the podcast is made the cut into my the ones that I always listened to. What I appreciate about it is not just sort of soft, fluffy interviews, but get into the meat of some issues and introduce some new ideas and you invite people to participate and push back. And that's what I'm why I'm here. My practice what I do I explain it in a fun way I fix or prevent a condition that most sales enablement people have experienced, I call it round canoe syndrome. And round canoe syndrome happens when we have sales leaders, Marketing Leaders and product leaders all in around boat, each with a paddle rowing in the direction they think they need to go.

Brian Lambert 03:18

Awesome. That's a great setup for this conversation. So tell us and tell our listeners and tell us why you're here. And what your questions about the Commercial Ratio.

Erik Host-Steen 03:30

Yeah, I you know, so I listened to the prior podcasts that talked about Commercial Ratio and watch the webinar also. And, you know, I appreciate this idea of how do we try to drive sales and marketing efficiency and alignment. But what I've thinking about it, I come up with two words, incomplete and unnecessary. And that's what I would like to explore a little bit today and try and find out from a question standpoint, what, what really is this Commercial Ratio trying to accomplish? And what does it do that other tools and methods that already are in place don't accomplish?

Scott Santucci 04:11

Excellent. So I think let's start with to our listeners know, we so we've published a podcast on the Commercial Ratio or two podcasts, we have Commercial ratio.com microsite and then we also have done a whole webinar on it. So we've shared a lot about that. Let's talk about let's let's break down incomplete and unnecessary. Let's first talk about incomplete what what about from from your lens? What, what is your perspective of it? What's incomplete and what is the purpose of the ratio from from your understanding?

Erik Host-Steen 04:51

Sure. So when I think about the things that drive revenue, it's it's more than marketing and sales and Something that I always think about is is left out in the sort of sales and marketing alignment piece is what about the product. And that's not captured in here. So if we're if we're looking at it trying to drive growth, and neglecting whether or not the product portfolio is keeping up whether product quality is where it needs to be, whether customer support is what it needs, what needs to happen. You know, one of the stories I like to add observations from my past experiences, we do a great job bringing customers in, but the rest of the organization would run them out back to our faster than we could bring them in the front.

Scott Santucci 05:39

Excellent. Okay, so then what? So you're saying, What would be your alternative for what's, what would make it more complete?

Erik Host-Steen 05:50

Well, I think that the bigger question is, what are the goals of the organization? Right? And certainly, growth is usually a part of that. And sometimes not, you know, sometimes you think of a lifestyle business. And growth really isn't all that important. But the sense of the types of organizations that were usually involved with growth is usually a component. And that growth is for some purpose, value creation, right profitability. And then if it's a venture capital backed, firm, there's an exit, right? So then we have to have an eye toward valuation. And the top typical valuation models have many other factors involved rather than a Commercial Ratio. So you know, that's, that's the it gets to Well, what what does it really what does it really add to the toolkit in terms of being able to solve growth problems being able to drive toward a particular valuation or particular profitability?

Unknown Speaker 06:53

outcome?

Unknown Speaker 06:55

That's, that's part of it. Mm hmm.

Scott Santucci 07:00

So let's, um, let me provide some responses back in a in an ordered way, and not overwhelming way. So first and foremost, having conversations about these things are awesome. So this is what we want to have what we want to have happen. So step number one would I did? Do I disagree? That there are many factors that go into revenue? No, of course, not. As a matter of fact, the entire company's revenue engine, everything it does, should be driving to revenue. Totally agree with there's no disagreement there. So the question then becomes the role of the Commercial Ratio, and what what its intent is to drive balance across not, it's not just about driving balance across sales and marketing, it's a lens to look at the driving balance between how finance is accounting, and what investors see. So the difficulty is from an investor's standpoint. So just as a reminder, we co created this Commercial Ratio in partnership with TCV, which is a very large, well known private equity firm. And in talking with, after having published that publish that work, we've now been in contact with other leading private equity firms who are all seeing a similar problem. So from their perspective, what they see again, their investors so that they'll look at things more like the income statement. And to your point, and I'm glad you brought this up, Eric, the kinds of things that go into making the company valuable, versus the kinds of things that investors see as valuable. So we'll cover the the valuation metrics later, are two different things. So I'm gonna pause there. Are we in alignment so far?

Erik Host-Steen 08:56

Yes, yes. And this, this accounting thing is, I think important.

Scott Santucci 09:03

Yes. And I think this, it's really important. It's where we, where we can get where we can get lost. So I'm going to share with you some really interesting things, I was anticipating about the incomplete part, because how exactly do you account for marketing investments that aren't earmarked for growth, for example, or there's all these little nuances, unfortunately, there about accounting rules. And, and, and when you're looking at metrics from a financial standpoint, from the investors, we have to worry about the ways that things are accounted for, and also the rules of what goes into what bucket. So unfortunately, unfortunately, we can't be theoretical at all there because there are laws that people follow. And if you look at the revenue recognition laws and rules that people follow. Each company can make different choices amongst themselves. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done to figure out which being goes into what bucket. Right? Okay.

So that's one of the things that's been so challenging from the investor to the company view, about how to get clarity of what's happening. I will tell you that over the past five years, the degree of frustration, of the return of investment that investors are seeing and sales and marketing has grown increasingly more frustrated. And maybe we have a negative consequence that a lot of these random acts of sales enablement, are coming from frustrated investors who are just telling them to go do different things. So I will definitely say that investors are part of the problem. And I think part of what we need to do is better understand where they're coming from, and what what metrics that they're looking at. So I'll let you I'll let you respond to that. Because and by the way, Eric, I'm I'm trying to do is be very step by step approach, so that we can find out where we agree, where we disagree, and then how might we amend this analysis so that we can make it more complete? And then hopefully, if we make it more complete, then we'll see why it's valuable or necessary, instead of being unnecessary. That's, that's my goal.

Erik Host-Steen 11:25

Right? So from a gap standpoint, gap standpoint, yeah. Sales and Marketing belong in SGA. And I think I picked up one of the things that creates some some of the trouble which is there are very few people on the commercial side that have a deep enough understanding of accounting. And then they hear the term cost of sales, which is just an out just a nother term for cost of goods sold. Even though it says cost of sales, it gets lost in the translation of accounting English into normal person's English

Scott Santucci 12:05

spot on right.

Erik Host-Steen 12:08

And so, you know, they're in and of itself creates a lot of confusion.

Scott Santucci 12:12

Whoa, glad we're having this conversation. Keep going.

Erik Host-Steen 12:15

Yeah, we call it costs of sales. But we don't put costs of sales in that bucket. Well, one of the phrases I have in my in my in my in my toolkit is that the beginning of alignment starts with the definition of terms. And cost of sales might be one of these great examples that causes confusion, because when you deconstruct it from an English standpoint, anyone except for an accountant would say, Well, of course, sales goes in there.

Scott Santucci 12:44

So that's, so what we're talking about for those of those of you who need a visual because I need a visual when I think about an income statement. Eric and I right now are talking about the definitions of an income statement. So you've joined this podcast, and yes, we're actually talking about gap financial standards, and we're talking for sales and marketing. So yes, it's super exciting stuff that we're getting into.

Brian Lambert 13:10

We're just I'll say, also, for our listeners, because sometimes I take the voice of our listeners, and I interrupt people at awkward moments. But if, if you're wondering if you should go switch to something else, I would say do not do that. Hang in there. And if you're not sure what's happening, reach out to us because, as Eric just said, there are very few people in sales and marketing who actually understand this. And, and this is part of the challenge. So hang in there,

Scott Santucci 13:37

no huge part of the challenge. It's it's. So let's first talk about cost of sales. So Part of , and then let's talk about sales and marketing expense or SG&A. Right? What what they're saying, in plain speak language is that there's money that you spend in order to get the revenue. That's what's cost to sales. Sometimes it's referred to cost a revenue. You can you can call it either one, then there's sales and marketing expense that we would think of that is OP x or operating expense. And what the investors are looking for is, and this is where some of our sales leaders are where we've gotten some challenge on Commercial Ratio, Eric, from from people from the sales perspective, right? their view is 100% of the revenue coming in is related to the sales effort. If you're looking at it from an investor's standpoint, they're saying even if we got rid of the Salesforce, we would still be generating 80% of our revenue anyway, and the Salesforce is very expensive. So to talk like that is an invitation to get a practical exam on what your expenses are. Right? So that's one challenge.

So to your point, Eric, this is all about the accounting. Now the other angle, It is, what do investors think the purpose of the sales and marketing expense are. And they think it's to drive revenue growth, not revenue, revenue growth. So that calculation is the difference between what you saw last year, what you sold this year, whatever that delta is, that's what your contribution was. And then that's what they want to do is hold that line item that's on the OP x expense accountable for it. Now, the other key aha moment for me talking to these investors, so we talked to when we were working on it, we talked to so how how investors work is they put one of their portfolio people, one of their operating partners, they sit on these boards. So we talked to six of them. So basically, six people who are on boards of directors, each of three different companies. And universally, they all said that when they look at the retain revenue bucket, they expect most of that money to be paid for out of cost of revenue. So for example, your your customer support, people are going to be allocated or accounted for in that cost of revenue bucket. So just having that clarity was illuminating for me, because I was thinking, How much money do you spend to retain your customers? I thought that was a sales and marketing expense. And yes, there's some gray area, there's no absolutes, I'm just trying to give the rationale of where, where they're coming from with this ratio. And part of what they're trying to do is, of course, the investors think the only two people in the company that know anything are the CEO and CFO. Right. So that's, that's their bias. And the difficulty that the CFO has is how do I connect the dots between these budget expenses and these levers that our investors are driving pressure for, to the activities that sales and marketing keeps asking for more and more budget? And that's really where the tension point rests from the top down perspective?

Erik Host-Steen 17:09

Yes, right. And there are none of these. And within the frameworks of gap, or whatever financial standards of private equity VC firm is going to use. There are there are guardrails. And there's the cliff where you go to jail because you break the rules. Yeah, right. And there's a lot in between, yep. And to correct. And when we start thinking about getting into the publicly traded realm, and let's say, your portfolio manager for Goldman Sachs, or someone like that, being able to do apples to apples comparison, when there are no standards within gap on, you know, does Customer Success belong to sales, marketing? Or does Customer Success belong to cost of sales, because their job is to retain customers, using a ratio based on publicly traded publicly available information to draw broad based conclusions, I think is dangerous

Scott Santucci 18:14

to what makes that dangerous versus empowering. So I would argue, literally, for everything that you just said, I would argue the opposite perspective, and it's actually empowering. So tell us why you think is dangerous,

Erik Host-Steen 18:27

because we don't know what's included in different numbers. And at the end, we have some, you know, the mathematics is very straightforward, right? I mean, revenue at the end of the period minus the revenue of the previous period divided by marketing and sales expense, like that's pretty straightforward. And we get some number, and what's it mean? And what's good enough. And if you're at, you know, 1.5 today, and you're given a, you know, you're not going to get your bonus next year, unless this gets up to 2.0. Is that really the right thing to start measuring and incenting on versus we want to see top line growth and top line and bottom line growth, customer retention, customer satisfaction, other other metrics that are more direct to what it is that we're trying to achieve, which is to build and grow a valuable...

Ep60 Creating Shared Experience for the SES with Bill Ball

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to Inside: Sales Enablement Episode 60

We're in the experience economy and Sales Enablement Orchestrators are working to bring together the valuable contributions of multiple departments in their organization to improve the customer experience. How are they doing that? By pulling together people, processes, technology, and information to benefit sellers and address the gaps in the selling eco-system.

Curiosity is the new competitive advantage, as savvy leaders are taking a "how do we figure it out" approach and learn by doing. Forgoing the big-bang efforts for laser beam experience "labs" to figure out what works.

In this episode, we’re joined by Bill Ball, a founding member, and one of the members of the Sales Enablement Board of Directors. As sales enablement society founders and members Scott, Brian, and Bill share their examples of creating an all-digital organization of volunteers through a shared and common experience to elevate the role.

As Bill shares in the podcast; "We're navigating an evolving profession together. We have to get to know people and to help people, to figure it out together."

Listen in as the guys share what they're seeing, and more importantly, what they have learned to help your own organization orchestrate and bring together people through a common and shared experience

SES EXPERIENCE 2020 - Forward Momentum for a New Decade October 26 - 29 Virtual

Join the members of the Sales Enablement society at their annual conference http://ses2020.sesociety.org/

Make sure you join Scott Santucci (SES Founder) in the Founders Room on Wednesday, October 28, 2020 at 4:15pm Eastern.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies. Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way, what works and maybe what's most important, but doesn't. Our focus is on you as sales enablement leaders and orchestrators in that role that you have in your company, you've got to develop specific characteristics that we call orchestration. That means blending strategy and tactics together to achieve results to help sales sell and simplify the selling ecosystem. And as usual, we have a centering story, bill, bill, what do you got for us?

Bill Ball 01:29

Thanks, guys. I want to take us way back to the year of 2016. I know that's not quite as far as you gentlemen generally travel back in your centering stories, but it's important.

Brian Lambert 01:45

It's important,

Scott Santucci 01:46

you know why? It's so it might as well be that Fargo. Right,

Bill Ball 01:50

right, right. I mean, cuz who can tell at this point anymore? It seems like 1000 years ago is my relationship with you guys go what's happened this year, and how far the sales name one society has come. So um, the reason I'm going to talk about 2016 is that's the year all the wheels started to turn in the sales enablement society. Now, I wasn't involved right at the very beginning. Because I didn't know Scott and Scott didn't know me and I didn't know what sales enablement was. That's right. I'm saying I didn't know what sales enablement was in 2016, until I found a LinkedIn group called the sales enablement society. And so I joined it. I was like, that sounds like some of the things that I do. You know, I'm helping grow sales people. I'm helping train sales people, I'm helping them with their messaging. But you know, that that sounds a little bit like what I'm doing. It sounds a lot cooler than trainer. Yeah. Or, you know, that kind of thing, right? Because Because, my, my students or, you know, the, my colleagues aren't dogs. So, so I can get behind this.

And so I joined the group, you know, and I was like, okay, you know, maybe I'll get a digest or something, if people actually talk in this thing, because like, back back, then you subscribed to a lot of LinkedIn groups and hope, you know, one out of 15 was good. And within that same week, I got a phone call. And it was Brian. And it was like, Okay, this is weird, because I feel a little stocked, I joined a LinkedIn group. And, and Dude, you're breaking the fourth wall, like what's going on right now? And, and he proceeded to vet me, you know, but like, in a really nice and thoughtful way, like, Hey, I see you're, you're in DC, and I'm in DC. And that's where the sales enablement society was, you know, originally had a chapter. And we talked about my role a little bit and he was super complimentary. You know, I taught it and now knowing all the things that Brian's done, like it was really nice for him to say that, right? Because I was just beginning my journey as well not beginning but like, this is my first role in what anybody would classify as sales enablement. And he was like, so you're kind of like the Yoda for SDRs and and I thought like, Yoda, I would never say that. But But yes, I have to be sometimes and definitely my age versus the SDRs I'm easily Yoda that way so so so we'll keep that so so we talked again after that, I was like, Wow, that was really weird at first and then super nice. And like now I'm more curious about this thing. And so we talked again, and he was like, Hey, we're actually having a meeting. And I found out it was like way out in Leesburg at some Country Club. Yeah, like I was like, do I have banjo to get in

Brian Lambert 04:46

his city slicker he's out cuz

Bill Ball 04:49

Yeah, cuz I'm in Arlington, Virginia and for those on the podcast like Leesburg and DC traffic like that's a haul from from from where I am and you know, that's just part of living in a big City. So, so yes, I know, I know. And I know it's hard Down on the Farm, Scott. So So I went out to the country club. And you know, I didn't have to have a banjo and I saw Brian and and I saw, I got to meet Scott. And I saw other people who, around that same time, Terry was doing that podcast on sales enablement, which was like, super groundbreaking at the time, and he was interviewing people in the sales, manual society. So I was like, you know, I know a little bit about Scott, I know a little bit about Nicola, Brian, because she talked about all the Van Halen shows that she went to like in the 70s, or the 80s, or whatever that happened. And I was kind of jealous. So I have heard him talk about that with but, you know, so I thought I was gonna have these, like, you know, one off personal discussions, and we got serious really fast in that meeting. So we laid out a few things about business within a business and a lot of the things that we're trying to establish at that time. But then we had an exercise, and I was like, I have never been to, you know, I've been to all kinds of sales meetups and all those kinds of things. I've never been to one where we actually had to do an exercise. And I was like, Okay, this is this is for real. And this was the exercise.

So there was a marketing business plan, you know, given with a scope and an amount of time and an ROI. And, and Scott was leading this exercise, and he said, Okay, I'm going to split you up into two groups. So he divided the two groups into one group, which was, you need to make the business case for this, your sales enablement, you need to come up with reasons to support this. And then the second group, you're the CEO, you need to find reasons to shoot this down. Because part of being in sales enablement, little did I know at that point was selling your initiatives and making a business case your initiatives upstream, even at the CEO level. So to my delight, I worked at a small business at that time, and I reported to the CEO. So to my delight, I got to play the CEO groups, I was in a group with Brian and Rao Gupta and a couple of other folks. And I knew exactly what my boss would say about this. And so when we came back as a group, like we like, wrote on notepads, and we came up with talking points, and we came back as a group and debated, I did not hold back, I totally went CEO, and I rip that plan to shreds. And it was an amazing plan, but I just played the CEO, and I ripped it to shreds, and I could just, you know, Scott was facilitating, but I could also see his face kind of contort a few times when I was when I was kind of going at the plan. And did I know at the end of the meeting, that it was a plan that Scott had submitted. So I felt like a huge ass, but I also felt like, you know, dude, you put that out there, and you gave me permission to take some swings. And this is awesome. And I cannot wait to come back to this thing. That's awesome.

Brian Lambert 07:59

Yeah, remember that? there? Yeah. Yeah. So let me ask bill, I always ask asked after our centering story, so what?

Insider Nation 08:08

So what?

Scott Santucci 08:09

Well, wait, let me help you out, Bill. So okay. So first of all, who the heck are you? Who's this person talking? And who's taken my space for my centering story? That's like my, my value contribution. That's what I do. So for those of you who don't know, Bill ball joining us, Bill ball, it gave us his story about his first experience within the sales enablement society. And now you're on the board of directors, right?

Bill Ball 08:36

Yep. So I practice sales enablement. For an IT staffing and managed services firm. I'm in the process of transforming my practice from a traditional learning and development practice, because it's a traditional business into field enablement practice. And so, so I'm super excited about that. But yes, I have the pleasure and the privilege of being not only a founding member, and a past Board of advisor for the sales enablement society, but now I'm on the board of directors with four other awesome hard working volunteers.

Scott Santucci 09:14

So the reason that this is this centering story is important in the so what Brian so now, that way they know who the heck this bill guy is in the first place. He just starts talking about getting calls and making fun of us rednecks out and media. And he's making history again, the first ever centering story. That's not Scott. That's right.

Scott Santucci 09:34

That's right. But I think the bigger issue is, where is sales enablement as a profession today and how much influence has the sales enabled society had with it? There's been a huge explosion since 2016. And funding for companies like seismic highspot, etc. A lot of that is because of the visibility in sales and a warrant that was created to make investors feel more comfortable with it. There's way more research out there. So those businesses are converting some of that research that money that investment money. So high spots, got the sales enablement, sell the name or Pro, because of that traction, you've got other conferences now that are, you know, squatting on the sales enablement society, timeframe, but that's a different issue. All of this has been done and built. So let's kind of review what's all been built by volunteers serving and it says Key Point bill, how much money you get every year for your your efforts as being a board member?

Bill Ball 10:36

I have two answers to that question. One, the overwhelming amount of zero dollars, infinite and, and a lot of pride. And then and then also I pay to go to every single conference, I've paid for my travel, and this year won't be paying for my travel. But I've paid for the conference as well as as a board member and as a practitioner.

Scott Santucci 10:58

So not only are you going out of pocket, so you're paying for your part, but you're not getting any money either. And I think that's really important for you, as our audience to really pay attention to understand what the society is all about. The cells in a one society is driven by volunteers who care about the profession. And the volunteers are people like Bill, who are practitioners who believe in this role. And I think that's really, really important. Because as you think about all the different things that you could attend, and all the stuff that you could do, having insight of how things really work matters. And you should be participating in the things of where people are putting their money where their mouth is, there's a lot of other resources out there that are quote unquote, sales enablement, where people aren't putting their money where their mouth is. But what we're going to talk about here is the remarkable thing of Orchestration.

So you guys all know that since COVID, we're shifting our podcast to be much more about Orchestration. As Orchestration really happened, how two volunteers who've never worked together, don't work in the same company aren't getting paid? How do they put together a conference? Oh, and by the way, even when there is a template for a conference to follow, guess what COVID hits. Now you have to do a virtual conference as well. How does that actually happen? So we've we've asked bill over here for two reasons. One is to get you motivated, so that you will join the conference. The entity is a nonprofit organization, they need the money. But more importantly, you should be supporting an organization done by your peers. But I think more importantly, to for our listeners of our show, how does this stuff actually really happened? So don't? Where does it start? Where does it begin from? How do you decide that? What what topics you're going to cover?

Bill Ball 12:53

A couple of ways. So so we we think about the theme. And there were a lot of foundational themes, when we all met together for the first time at the end of 2016. In, in Palm Beach. And then there were greater themes in that when we had our actual first conference in Dallas, where we were trying to just build foundations for this thing and talk about what happened, you know, with technology companies in 2008. Scott, you did a presentation on that. Howard, Dr. Howard over talked about the Dust Bowl, and how hiring more salespeople wasn't the answer. So there was all of this build and momentum of the need for sales enablement, in that first conference. So since we built on that, two conferences after one in Denver, and then one last year in San Antonio, this year, we had originally planned to talk about the forward momentum, meaning a lot of our practitioners are growing up, we talked to our members, that's how we find out we don't start with the technology and say this is how you do sales and eight, when we talk to our managers, we see what are our practitioners, we see what's happening in our chapters. And what a lot of us, a lot of them were telling us was, you know what, I'm starting to expand beyond my army of one, you know, I'm starting to build out my team. What does that look like? What does forward momentum look like for me, and then there's some people at a at an even greater level that, that that are that are still looking for ways to scale. And you know, there's conversations of different types of enablement at this point, you know, I don't want to get into that too much. But But we, we have a huge audience. And so to do something memorable and experiential for them, we have to talk to them.

Scott Santucci 14:43

Yeah, and I think part of the difficulty, at least from my experience, with regards to society, it's really hard to share what that experience is to other people. And that's what that's what that's the cause. If you will make makes all this work is it's not so much you don't go to the sales enablement society conference. For the speakers, even though the speakers are great, you go there to build the connections that you need, and to be able to have honest conversations with other people so you can do your job better. Was that? Is that what you're what you're after bill? So how do we give more insight of what happens behind the closed doors?

Bill Ball 15:29

It's, it's, it's exactly what I'm after. And that's something that nobody told me. You know, nobody gets told that. I mean, maybe I'm saying it and you're saying it now, Scott, but nobody says that. I'm in the sales enablement society. You find that out, you figure that out, you discover it. When I went to our first founding meeting, back in 2016, started to take us back there again, but it was a big year. I got to meet people that I'd heard on podcast before like Daniel West, right. So like, Who's elevated to a huge role in Australia now? I'm sure mon batcher. Officer. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's massive, right? So So Siobhan Satcher, who she you know, a lot of people know shavon. But when I met her guys, she was an army of one. Yeah. Now she is a major Orchestrator Vp at ringcentral. With with lots of successful sales named leaders underneath her.

Scott Santucci 16:27

So Palm Beach meeting that people will recognize. So Mario was there, right?

Bill Ball 16:33

Mario was there. Bob Britton was there? Giuliana Stan can pianos there? You me and Brian were there. We had

Brian Lambert 16:44

to think Who was there? Niccolo Brian

Bill Ball 16:46

Cole O'Brien was there Raul Gupta was there. A lot of all of our original founding castle there Michael Abadi. It was one who was um, who also just took took a new role. He's heading up a region, I believe doctors,

Brian Lambert 16:59

the doctors were there. Peterson,

Scott Santucci 17:02

Michael avani. That was his first experience. Yes. He's a board member as well. He was at this he was at meeting the doctors, right. Yeah. So that one of the doctors. So Dr. Dover, a lot of you guys know, actually the sales name was society donated a large sum of money in that first conference to pay his foundation because they were doing the most work. And were offered to host the first conference, then we have been also, Dr. Peterson. Peterson is leading one of the roundtables.

Bill Ball 17:43

Yeah, it's so tying that back to what you're talking about Scott. I don't just hear Daniel west on a podcast anymore. I reach out to him. You know, my 5050 and call a friend right now is pretty awesome. Um, and and it is 100% of the sales success, do the sales enablement society. And and why that's important is not just okay, I have awesome connections. It's because we're navigating an evolving profession together. And who wants to be Sisyphus and push a rock up a hill by themselves, you know, so but by being a part of these experiences, and it's one thing to be a member, right, and join and be on our message board and that kind of thing. But by being a part of these experiences, you get to know these people. And if you get to know...

EP59 Gaining Executive Buy-in to your SE Charter with Tamara Schenk

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Laying the foundation is critical to Sales Enablement Orchestrators. Laying the foundation is a foundational step to create the survival kit for an enablement leader. It's absolutely mandatory for the enablement leader.

In this episode, we're joined by Tamara Schenk. Tamara talks with us about the blueprint Sales Enablement Orchestrators need to create with all teams and roles that are involved. Laying the foundation requires approval by senior executives so that this is your blueprint you're going to achieve.

Laying a foundation is not an exercise you do for somebody else, it's not something you you do for finance or controlling. And it's definitely not filling out a form. That's the absolute the last step, when you put all the pieces together. It's a creative process of creating the blueprint you need in your organization, in your context, where you're currently at to achieve your goals. You You have to achieve an enablement to meet your company's sales objectives.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci,

Brian Lambert 00:35

Brian Lambert, we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies

Scott Santucci 00:48

together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way, what works and maybe what's more important, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:01

Our focus is on you as sales enablement leaders and orchestrators as an orchestrator, you need to be able to blend both strategy and tactics in order to execute. Our goal on this show is to help clarify the metrics of success, provide examples of what that looks like, and give you confidence to engage up down and across the organization. As always, we start with a centering story, Scott, what do you have for us today?

Scott Santucci 01:25

Okay, so today's centering story, the timeframe on this is 1400 1400. Okay, got it. It was it was it was imagine that a little imagine that in 1400. And Florence, the Republic of Florence commissioned a whole bunch of sculptors, because to celebrate, hey, you know, we're done with the plague. I thought this was a little time, like, given where we are today. Maybe some wishful thinking with maybe, maybe co it would be over. Yeah. And one of the people who was commissioned one of the sculptors that was commissioned is someone we've talked about on the show before Brian, who might

Brian Lambert 02:05

have a, I don't know, we've talked about so many Italians for some reason.

Unknown Speaker 02:12

I know a lot of times, um,

Brian Lambert 02:16

my favorite though, was vilfredo Pareto.

Scott Santucci 02:19

So his tamaraws that's a little foreshadowing. Okay. Uh, well, it's one that you brought up

Brian Lambert 02:27

to Vinci. Oh, Which one is that? Oh, um, I don't know. I can't remember. Man. You stuck in me. I love it. So it's 55 shows in man,

Scott Santucci 02:37

the lipo Bruna.

Unknown Speaker 02:41

Rinna leschi. There you go.

Scott Santucci 02:43

That's right. So he actually started out as an engineer, and you brought it up in your podcast about perspective, right back divx. But, so he didn't have perspective at this time in 1400. Well, he didn't. concept of perspective, obviously, we all have a perspective,

Brian Lambert 03:00

right? I think he just didn't put it on paper and make machines around it yet.

Scott Santucci 03:03

So in 1400, he was just a sculptor, and the sculpting. He wanted to make it more and more real. So we developed the concept of, of a perspective. But I think one of the things that people don't realize about him is he's considered the father of modern architecture. And if you go back and think about the Duomo, if you know anything about Florence, there's this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Duomo. And it's the largest dome that had been built since the antiquity since the senate says the largest dome ever built. And it's a big, big, big, significant event, in terms of architecture construction. And one of his biggest innovations that hadn't been done before, was the creation of drawings, or what are now called what are called technical technical diagrams, which a lot of us today refer to as blueprints. So if he hadn't have done that, it would have been very impossible to break down the work to describe the machines required to build this innovation to help get everybody coordinated, dare I say, orchestrated? In order to do that.

So there's a whole bunch of things that we have. And Bruno lasky is considered the father of modern engineering, of planning, construction, super construction, supervision, all of these things he did. And he started out as a sculptor, he had to develop the concept of perspective in order to create this, this amazing masterpiece, which a lot of people call is, you know, sort of the birthplace of you know, the the Renaissance. You can't really put a pinpoint on it, but from an architectural standpoint is a big difference between the dark ages and where we are today. It's a very pivotal moment.

Brian Lambert 04:59

All right, there you go. So what? So what

Scott Santucci 05:05

does that have to do with sales enablement? Well, the reason it has something to do with sales enablement is in today in today's modern world, have you ever wondered, how is it that a company can assemble a whole bunch of laborers together, that many of them aren't even college educated, can pull all those people together. And they can build a building or build a house really, really quickly, with a lot of changes that are being made to beat to the spec of different people, and everybody has their own lens and their own perspective, and this thing gets built, right hva see works, the electricity works, the laborers know what to do, because things are coded and diagrammed out. You can hire individual contractors to do to do that work, all of it, is because it's orchestrated to be to these, these construction designs. And the reason that this is important. And one of the things that we're going to talk about on this show today is how important it is to have a charter and really envision what your charter really is, what your mission is, what's your what's your focus, what foundations are you laying, because ultimately, we have to move out of the dark ages with how we're doing with sales in a way and have a Renaissance period of where we think differently. And that's really what we want to talk about today.

Brian Lambert 06:28

Awesome. That's great. Well, I'm excited to talk about this. And I know we have a very special guest on the show today. Scott, why don't you introduce her?

Scott Santucci 06:37

So I'm very excited. So our guest today is Tamra shank, and Tamra and I go but way back also with with with you, Brian Tamra was one of the members of the sales enablement Leadership Council that we had put together at Forrester. And when I met Tamra, she was the she was in charge of the energy vertical at at t systems. And she was so frustrated with the amount of materials provided for provided for for sales, she got she developed this concept that she called spot on, which was a content based way to to address some of these challenges. And she actually moved from being in the business unit into running sales enablement. So what I love about Tamra story is that she's got a different entry point than a lot of us a lot of us a lot of our sales enablement members come from training or come from the field, a few of them come from marketing, not too many come from come from business unit background. So tamaraws perspective is so interesting and fascinating. And one of the things that I talk to her a lot about is we got to get more, we have to do a lot better job of making sure people realize where you came from, and why you advocate the things that you do. The other thing that I'm really excited about, Tamra Joyner show a lot of people know or a lot of people have read her blogs, and many of many of the people have read her book, and her book is a great way to have a foundation. So, Tamra, how did you how did you arrive here on the show to give us a little bit of background about our relationship? And you know what, why are you here today?

Unknown Speaker 08:19

Yeah, so what a great story. Opening story from yours. Scott, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I mean, you're basically in touch over the last 10 years. And yeah, I'm following the podcast is for me, it's always hard to make the time to really sit down and listen to an hour podcast or so. So whenever I am in the car, and I'm going to see my mother it is two hours one way and two hours back, then I take the time to catch up with the inside on a podcast. And I have to say what I love a lot about it is that podcast provides different perspectives looks at the same issue from different perspectives, different roles, discusses different concepts and principles people can apply. And I think this is especially in our fast moving world rarely where change in volatility is, is the normal thing, the normal state of doing things, it's very important to understand basic principles so that we can apply them in every situation. I think this is especially important for any person who is in any kind of enablement role. So this is why I reached out to you what, what we frequently do and so this is I think how I got here today.

Scott Santucci 09:45

Yes. So one thing that you'll know as an insider nation, we want you to come up with with ideas. So Tamra sent us an email about I think was the the one that we did and Systems Thinking recently and and, you know, then it triggered a lot of past conversations that we had is that

Unknown Speaker 10:06

vilfredo Pareto. That's right, my favorite.

Scott Santucci 10:10

So there's always going to be something. So it's interesting, whether it's the centering story that gets us like, oh, or whether it's what what the conversation was. But what we want to do is encourage you to just shout out like, Hey, here's what's resonating with me, here's what you think, then I'm going to contact you. And then we're going to put together when we say, hey, let's do a show. And the show that we're going to talk about here is laying foundations. And one of the things that I know about Tamra that is near and dear to her heart, is the idea of a charter. So talk to me about why a charter is so important. And then hold on. Before we do that. Audience, I'm going to ask you to do something here. Don't roll your eyes. Stop it. Just listen for a second. Because a charter is not a shopping list of a bunch of tasks to go do. Oh, it's not that. What is it, Tamra?

Unknown Speaker 11:05

To me, it's a survival kit for an enablement leader. So it's absolutely mandatory for the enablement leader. So if you're in that role, you want to have that blueprint for yourself, that has been created with all teams and roles that are involved, that's approved by senior executives so that this is you, blueprint, you're going for it. So it's it's not an exercise you do for somebody else, it's not something you you do for finance or controlling. And it's definitely not filling out a form. That's the absolute the last step, when you put all the pieces together. It's a creative process of creating the blueprint you need in your organization, in your context, where you're currently at to achieve your goals. You You have to achieve an enablement to meet your company's sales objectives.

Scott Santucci 12:11

So let's unpack this a little bit together. So if I'm listening, I might think a blueprint. Wow, that sounds really heavy technical diagram and everything like that. What I just heard you say earlier on tamaraws, we got to be principles and dealing with a rapidly changing world. How does a document do that I think about a charter is just a document. what actually is, what what does that mean? What is the charter? And how does that help me lay a foundation for being successful.

Unknown Speaker 12:42

I mean, it's first of all, a really a living document, I would call it a living asset. So I would look at it this way, for everything you do in life, if you don't take the time, and get into an acceptance mode, and assess where you currently are, and are really honest on where you currently are, then you cannot map out where you want to go. And only if you have this point A in this point B you can say okay, this is where we're at, this is what we need to do, in order to achieve a certain goal and all the journey in between, that's a journey, you can't win alone, you can't walk it alone, you have to do it in an enablement role, always with other team members. And to map this out, so that actually everyone knows at the end of the day, what to do and how to do it is the creative process and laying out the steps and then also the principles how you want to work together. So this is how I would look at this. So it really helps you because you will always run into situations that I had. This was a couple of clients this year. You know what we we've had a charter and some really had done great Berg and great efforts and beginning of the year, then coverted and everyone was getting into panic mode. And then all the great ideas and strategies for set apart. And then how should I call it? You call about Productitis is this action tonight is how should we call this? You know, it's just audit in it when stuff to do stuff sake? Yeah, it is exactly it's so we just want to show that we do things that we take action, whatever it is, but we have taken action. And then the strategies the way we do maybe before back into patterns we we've had in the past we know they're actually not not working very well. But we showed Hey guys, we showed that we have taken action. And this is rather difficult. I'm currently working with clients to help them to work with their senior executives to get back on You know what the crisis mode was actually not so very successful, we still have done the same basic challenges. So let's map out how we could actually get back on track and really tackle them in in a more effective way.

Scott Santucci 15:14

Yeah, I think one of the things that comes to mind and i'd love your reaction to this, what comes to mind is that quote by Einstein is what's the definition of insanity, doing the same things over again and expecting a different result? And I think what, what what you're talking about here, and the way that this is relating to me, is a charter is really the opportunity that you have to talk through or write down or codify some way. So it doesn't need to be just a Word document. It could be PowerPoint, shoot, it can be hieroglyphics and pictures, whatever works for you. Yes, but really, the idea is, we need to write down here is our problem. Let's make sure people understand what our real problem is, we're not chasing symptoms, here is the nucleolus, or the the enabling capability we have to develop. And then here's the sequence of events that we need to lay it out so that we get forward momentum, and we can fix the plane while it's flying. That's that's what I'm hearing from you. And that if you don't have that documented, or clarity of thought, clarity, I'm using that word on purpose for you, I'm setting you up.

Unknown Speaker 16:24

I see that.

Scott Santucci 16:27

But that that clarity of purpose, then it's almost impossible to galvanize and really orchestrate all the resources around you. That's that's what I'm taking from that. Is that right? Is that what you're laying down? Or how would you add to that?

Unknown Speaker 16:42

Yeah, so it did, the clarity is really very, very important, especially in the beginning. So if I don't know where I'm at, I have a hard time, you know, to to even define a departure point for all my team members and collaboration partners, I want to start on this journey. So I really need to know where I'm at. So if I can map this out where I'm at, we will all start at different at different stages and rollout will come together. So we want to make sure that we can take everyone on the hike on that journey together. That is why clarity on where you're at right now is really key to success. And then the clarity on the point of the project. What does it really mean, as you said, Scott, it's about or what is the real problem you're having. And I think this is for enablement. Teams dealing with different business units, different senior executives, that all have different agendas really challenging, which is why I'm saying this is your survival kit throughout the year. Because in that role, I mean, Scott, you know that I mean, there is not a single week, when somebody will come into your office now call you or zoom you and tell you, you know, I need this. And I need that. And what you've done here is great, but we need it differently because we are so special. So if you don't have this survival kit, your child or business plan, whatever you call it, this blueprint, this structure, then you can say, Oh great, by the way this is on this is on our agenda, maybe in a month from now on or no, sorry, but this has not been prioritized, you're not going to do it right now. Or we map it to the current situation, maybe there were changes we reflected. But then you have a foundation from where you can actually do it. Otherwise you will be moved around from left to right and back to the left and and so on. And you will do a ton of stuff you will be extremely busy without without achieving anything. That's the danger Roman enablement is run into. And then they have a hard time to actually show it. This was the business to sell we were impacting. And then you have a crisis like COVID or whatnot. And then a finance guy comes around the corner and says, do we need these guys?

Scott Santucci 19:06

Right? Yes. So let me there was so much there that I went on, unpack a lot of these things to help you our listener relate to them. So one thing, that pattern. So one of the challenges that's difficult for a lot of us to think about is more or less like a story arc. And then when we're in sales enablement, we have to be thinking about the end in mind. And...

Ep58 Orchestrating Message Enablement to Co-Create Value with Steve Goas

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 10:00:00 -0500

One thing that we like to do on our podcast is to make this very conversational. And the reason that we want to make it conversational, as we go through a structured format, it can get overwhelming. The things that we're all talking about are very, very complex. In this episode, the guys are joined by Steve Goas who is passionate about co-creating value in Message Enablement.

Topics:

The vision of Message Enablement programs
Creating Routes to Value
Orchestration across the organization
Defining what "good" looks like with Sales

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:34

Scott Santucci 00:47

together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works and maybe what's more important, what doesn't

Brian Lambert 01:00

Our focus is on you the sales enablement leader and Orchestrator, as a Orchestrator in sales enablement. You have specific characteristics and skills that you need to leverage in order to blend both strategy and tactics to execute. Our goal is to help you clarify what that looks like, provide examples that you can reference as you're engaging across the organization, and give you the confidence to gauge up down and across the organization. So you can drive the simplification that salespeople need to be successful with their customers.

And on this podcast, we have a special guest. His name, Steve, Steve Goss. And Steve is with a very large financial services company. He's got a very strong background in b2b content and b2b messaging enablement or Message Enablement. He's very passionate about sales enablement, as an enabler of the content and the message that salespeople need to have as they engage with their clients and their customers.

And when you think About the sales enablement landscape that Scott shared in early 2020. We obviously we had Talent Enablement, we had Pipeline Enablement, Organizational Enablement and commercial enablement. Steve, one of our listeners here is in the Message Enablement space.

Steve and I met at the sales enablement soiree, actually in 2019. We actually hit it off really well. That event is great to walk the hallways with him and just talk about sales enablement and what he was seeing, as he was helping his large sales teams. And he's been texting and emailing Scott and I ever since he's been a big listener of our show, and actually since COVID, we've had the largest body of post COVID sales enablement research with over 25 episodes and obviously all the state of sales enablement research we did. And Steve's been involved and digesting all that and he reached out to Scott and I said So that's how this started. And Steve so much. I just want to thank you so much for being on the show today. And can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and anything I missed in that setup?

Steve Goas 03:10

Yeah. So thanks for having me. And actually, I just want to tell real quick story about meeting Brian up at the soiree in Boston. So pretty big event, I want to say at least 100 people were in that room, Brian and I were both parts of panels. And at the end of the soiree, when things were winding down, everybody kind of like went into their own groups and went off to dinner. And I really didn't know who to go to dinner with or what to do. I didn't really show up knowing people. So everybody had kind of gone off in their own groups. And then there's this group of like five or six people at the end. And Brian is one of them. So we just kind of get together and say, you want to go to dinner, just us. And I looked at Brian and said, You look like a trustworthy, dude. Let's do this. And the rest is history.

Brian Lambert 03:51

That's cool. That's great. So did that. Did I meet you first, or did you meet Scott first?

Steve Goas 03:56

I met Scott would have been a little bit earlier than that as a salesman. Have them in society special event in New York City where he and another founding member were presenting.

Brian Lambert 04:06

Ah, dang it. I thought I met Steve first, but nope, Scott. Scott knows everybody. It's amazing. That's awesome. So anything else you want to share on your background? Steve is awesome. We talk a lot about your role.

Steve Goas 04:20

Yep. So b2b sales enablement and a large financial services company. We mostly do content strategy, you know, when we think about the world of enablement, how it comes together, you've got content coaching, and training, all coming together to help sales sell more quickly. I believe that what we've done has bled into all three. But our entry point is going to be content or you know, Message Enablement content strategy. So that's gonna be a lot of what we're going to hopefully get into today.

Brian Lambert 04:50

Great, thanks so much for that. Scott. Bunch of kick us off with real organic conversation here. Bringing the listener on, I love it. When the members of Saturn nation attend and jump on a call with us. So you guys take it away. And what I'll do is I'll summarize the Orchestrator attributes at the end. As a recap for our listeners.

Steve Goas 05:10

Well, actually, Brian, before you hand it over to Scott, do you mind if I just ask you a couple quick questions just as kind of like a way to kind of break the ice here?

Brian Lambert 05:18

Yeah, sure.

Scott Santucci 05:19

So one is, are you guys ready to co create some value? Because that's what I'm here to do with you guys.

Brian Lambert 05:27

Going for the hard close? Yeah, that's a given. Yep. Absolutely.

Steve Goas 05:31

And to now that I am on inside sales enablement the podcast, does that mean I'm now in the big leagues? Can I tell people I'm a big time enablement person yet?

Scott Santucci 05:42

We'll see how the call goes.

Brian Lambert 05:46

You'll always, you'll always be an Insider and that that means you get you do get to hear about things a little bit earlier than others and we invite you to help us out with things and keep the conversation going after the show. That's definitely part of it. And because one of the things we find on this is we build common experience. And that's really critical when you're co creating value.

Scott Santucci 06:09

Yeah, so I think we can pose that question to Insider Nation and and have them judge themselves and then we'll give you

Brian Lambert 06:18

That's right.

Scott Santucci 06:20

So that's awesome. So first and foremost, one thing that we like to do on our on our podcast is as hopefully, you know, we're trying to make this very conversational. And the reason that we want to make it conversational is if we go through in an analyst format, it can get overwhelming. The things that we're all talking about are very, very complex. And I love that. Steve's talking about co creating value because that's something that we've talked about in other podcasts before. So I think somewhere in Chad, Chad's inner heart is palpitating, so if you know Chad Quinn, he was on one of our other ones. other episodes. But what we're doing here normally we have a framing story. But let's let's frame this out a little bit.

As Brian alluded to, we've done a tremendous amount of post COVID research. And what we're trying to do is to help our audience make sense out of everything that's going on with the assumption that when this is when the dust settles, everything's going to look very differently. So what we've done is we've done a variety of panels and interviews and several webinars. One of the webinars that we're going to zoom in right now on is the webinar called routes to value, enable customers and enable customers to buy. And that's what we're going to concentrate on and to connect some dots. We've already had two sales leaders comment on it. And what I'm excited about is Steve's been in this spot of working on the marketing side of supporting sales. So it's very rare that We get this opportunity to have this conversation. So what we're going to ask them our format is going to be essentially this. I'm going to ask Steve, what are three things that you got away or took away from this so you can compare what his his insights were to Bob Apollo's insights, or Joe, Joe Hayes's insights. And what we want you to do is sort of mix them all together and come up with your own plan. Then what we're going to have is a conversation about what his observations are, how he's connecting the dots, and then we're going to wrap it up together. Brian's gonna wrap it up together to see how he's exhibiting as a as a Orchestrator. So, how does that sound for you, Steve, you're ready to get going?

Steve Goas 08:45

Yeah, of course. Let's do it.

Brian Lambert 08:47

And I like that too. And real quick just for our listeners. These episodes are on our website so you can get the episodes that Scott's talking about. Also, the webinar recordings are on the website too the route to value recordings.

Scott Santucci 09:00

And what's that website, Brian?

Brian Lambert 09:01

It's at OrchestrateSales.com.

Scott Santucci 09:04

OrchestrateSales.com. So please go and visit that now. Okay, so the first question that I have would be so Steve, what would be three things that you took away from that webinar?

Steve Goas 09:19

So I don't know that it's three things per se. It's more like one big thing with lots of little sub components. It's, it's Productitis, and the role of customer centricity in selling and in business strategy. So what why don't we go ahead and start with Productitis? I'll start by saying maybe a little bit of a historical perspective here.

So product centric selling was really the dominant sales strategy of 20th century. You know, we all know the narrative that goes back to Henry Ford, the assembly line, you know, you manufacture more products, you do it more cheaply as sell more at the virtuous cycle.

Scott Santucci 09:59

You can have anything any color you want, as long as it's black,

Steve Goas 10:01

any color you want, as long as it's black. Yep. But there are cracks in the foundation. And I think that we would all agree on most of inside our nation would agree that product centric selling is not particularly well suited to the 21st century. That being the case, there's always going to be exceptions.

So I hate to be the guy that uses Apple as an example. But in this case, I have to. So I'll start by saying, I don't consider them a customer centric company. I believe that they try. I believe that that they create really innovative products really, you know, shiny stuff, they they promote it really well. They have really cool slick commercials with music and celebrities and all that. And they usually kick things off in press conferences that are around this time of year like around September. Um, I'll give you an example of something that they did that's not particularly customer centric, which is they didn't decommission iTunes until 2019. You know, to me that years too late. You know, it was clunky. It was outdated. Just think that that was the wrong approach for that. But look, that having been said their market cap is 2 trillion. That's amazing. that's larger than the GDP of a lot of countries.

Scott Santucci 11:10

Right cue Dr. Evil pinky.

Steve Goas 11:13

Yeah, yeah. So so it with them, I believe that they're going to have to start making changes as we get, you know, further down the road. But if I'm them, if it's not broken, do we really want to go fixing it. And then the other example that I want to use and then Scott, I'll kind of throw it back to you is BMW. So my father-in-law is a lifelong BMW owner. He has been buying them like one to the next for four decades now since then, since the 1970s. And I've talked to him about it. And he has basically said, it is not through my experience in the showroom in the dealerships, with the sales people. You know, with like the virtual tours on the website, it's really not through the experience. It's because when I get in there and when I get behind the wheel, it is thrilling. It's kind of like the perfect blend between a luxury vehicle and something that could also have racing harnesses and could go 170 miles an hour on a race track. So with that, I kind of see the two of them as competing on the basis of product innovation. And our last CEO here at TD Ameritrade kind of said that I believe that there are generally three ways to compete and our CEO before him had the same point of view. So you've got product, which is innovation, you've got price, which I mean, that could be just a race to the bottom, and then you've got the customer experience. That's where customer centricity comes into where we need to overcome Productitis. So I'll kind of stop right there and wait for you guys to chime in.

Scott Santucci 12:43

Sure. So let me let me share some thoughts here. So one thing is, I think what what is challenging for those of us who are b2b which is everybody in insider nation, is we have a lot of these examples of working backwards from cost From a b2c companies, right, so you're talking about mass market BMW is a mass market, Apple's a mass market. How do we blend a whole bunch of different individual capabilities into something unique that somebody wants to buy what that outcome is? So part of what we're what we're talking about here is I like what you're where you're going and sort of challenging who's actually really customer centered or not. I think what we need to do is we need to bring that conversation into a b2b frame of reference. Me personally, I don't think we have nearly enough examples that we talk about you, for example, in the b2b space, we've used the word persona a lot. Persona is a great valuable tool and label and concept for b2c marketing. I question whether it's really valuable for b2b marketing when we're targeting individual roles and stakeholders. I think that what I want us to do is challenge ourselves to use these examples to talk more on the b2b side. And before we get into that, for those who haven't listened to the webinar, what exactly is Productitis? And why does it resonate so much with you?

Steve Goas 14:15

So to me, Productitis is basically an inward focus. So you're focused inwardly on your company, your products and services, less on the customer and their problems and their business issues. And the way that it manifests itself at the conversation level as you just get bogged down in features and benefits, a lot of which is not going to be relevant and it undermines your own credibility, and is going to, you know, hamper your ability to win deals and you know, be successful in a business development role. But the simplest way to put it for me would be inward focus versus focused on the customer, their issues, their problems, their initiatives. One of my favorite quotes from from the last couple of podcasts is "budgets don't get from funded to buy products. They get funded to, you know, fuel initiatives.

Scott Santucci 15:03

Amen.

Steve Goas 15:04

Yep, so there we go that that says just about at all.

Scott Santucci 15:08

Perfect. So let's, let's unpack this a little bit. One of the things that I appreciate so much about you, Steve, is you're really pushing the envelope. You've got a marketing background, you're a customer content advocate. What are some of the, what does being customer centered really mean for you in the lens of a b2b organization? Well, first of all, what does it mean? And then second of all, who has the authority to say, this is the voice of the customer Says who?

Steve Goas 15:40

So to me, being customer centered from an enablement standpoint, means really having what I call your design points in place, it's really going to be fundamental to customer centricity. So you mentioned personas before. Um, I do think that personas in the b2b world are important.

So personas is going to be one The pains and the problems that they're having is going to be two. And where they are in the buyers path is going to be three. And these are kind of like our anchor points that ensure all enablement services that we come out with our customer centered. Let me actually pivot back to personas here. Because I agree that they're valuable, but they are hard to get right. So there's a difference between doing them and doing them right. I believe having a loose sense as to the role that you're selling to like, let's say a, you know, an IT director, Chief Marketing Officer or CEO, whoever, if you just have a loose idea of you know, who they are, what they do, etc, it's not going to be helpful.

What is helpful is what's called the JTBD. So the job to be done. Clayton Christensen talks about this in his book, innovative solution came out about 15 years ago, but you really got to know how do they go about their day, who's holding them accountable, who do they report to? What resources that they have available, it really goes much deeper and it is very difficult. To create effective personas in the b2b space, and when you do create them, they have to be continuously updated. And that's done, you know, with the sales folks that work with these types of people. So I don't disagree that that it's hard to get it right. But I do believe that there's value in doing it in the b2b world, as well as the b2c world.

Scott Santucci 17:20

Well, let's pause on that.and discuss it. So one of the things that's difficult is we use terms often like persona. And there, we you'd agree, there is not a standard set of what a persona is. So if we were to pull and look at the...

Ep57 Message Enablement in a Post-COVID World with Louis Jonckheere

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Are you embracing real-world reality? What is the impact of change on your customer’s conversations right now?

Think about it: Are best practices really going to help you move forward when those practices were built and defined before COVID? Who really KNOWS the customer today and what are you going to do about it?

Join Louis Jonckheere - President and Co-Founder of Showpad, a leading sales enablement messaging platform - as he talks about the ingredients of successful message enablement initiatives, the buy-in required to get results, and what it takes to gain a broader perspective – to elevate and improve messaging. He also talks about what it means to be customer-centric in a COVID-impacted world.

Topics include:

Why perspective matters
The evolution of the sales enablement market
Using technology to improve the quality of sales conversations
Being a leader with the courage to act and engage
The impact of COVID on “Best practice”
What it means to be customer-centric

Additional Resources:

The Commercial Ratio
Watch the Sales Enablement Is at a Cross Road Webinar ON DEMAND
Join us at Showpad's Transform2020 Virtual Conference Oct. 1-2 to learn more about the future framework of sales enablement

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci,

Brian Lambert 00:36

I'm Brian Lambert, we're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, issues as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way, what works and maybe what's more important, what doesn't

Brian Lambert 01:00

Right now our focus is on you as a sales enablement leader and orchestrator who operates in the in the gap between strategy and tactics and was blend those together to drive outcomes. Our goal is to help you clarify what works and also clarify the measures of success so you can engage up down and across your organization. As always, we start with a centering story, Scott, what do you have for us?

Scott Santucci 01:24

Okay, well, here's our centering story. Have you ever heard of Gregor Johann Mendel?

Brian Lambert 01:31

No.

Scott Santucci 01:33

Well, if you were in the genetics business, you would definitely would know who this is. Gregor Johann Mendel was actually a friar, a church friar,

Brian Lambert 01:45

Like Robin Hood,

Scott Santucci 01:47

from the Augustinian sect. And between 1856 and 1863. He did a lot of experiments with pea plants, pea plants and what he would do is he would observe these pea plants, I guess when you're, I guess when you're a friar, you have to do a lot of soul searching and maybe you're not allowed to talk. So you occupy yourself with making good observations and the like. But what he would do is he would watch his pea plants grow, and he would chart make lots of very detailed observations on plant height, their shape and their color, the shape of the seed and the color of the seeds, their flowering positions in color. And I bet an 1856 a lot of people thought this guy was crazy what the heck are you doing, that's a lot of data to be collecting about stuff that's growing. But the major, the major aha that happened here was towards the end, he made this observation that when he would pair or mate, bring together pea plants that had yellow seeds, versus ones that had green seeds 100% of the time. The ones with the Yellow seeds would be the ones that were dominant. So they would produce more and more yellow seeded pea plants.

So that was pretty interesting. He came up with this idea of recessive and dominant traits of based of an observation. And that work didn't get picked up for 30 years later. And then what happened then is that became the boom of what we now know is genetics. And today that's gone so far is that a pharmaceutical company can take can extract an enzyme from you, Brian, and they own the intellectual property of that because they've done the extraction even though you're you biologically produced it. That's how far we've come with genetics in a relatively short, short timespan. And we have this guy, Gregor Johann Mendel, who made lots and lots and lots of observations to help us through that.

Brian Lambert 03:52

There you go. That's awesome. And I think friars are also the ones that came up with beer but I'm not sure maybe they came through the same process of Lots and lots and lots of trial and error. But I got to ask you, so what?

Unknown Speaker 04:06

So what!?!!

Brian Lambert 04:09

So what does that have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 04:12

So so why would that has to do with today's theme and today's Today's topic is really where is sales enablement heading. And we have this belief inside businesses to follow best practices, and we rarely question where those best practices come from. So we have a tendency to repeat the same things over and over and over again and there's a quote that I love from Mark Twain. It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. So with that, what we want to highlight and I'm interested, I'm really excited to share with our special guest is, as most of our listeners know, we've taken on the biggest amount and the most in depth post COVID research about where sales where sales enablment is going, as you know, we did over 100 surveys, we interviewed 43 people. We've done six panel conversations, all of which you can go back and listen to today and watch those observations from the plants and how things are growing. And we've done four high quality webinars. And what I'm what I had the luxury to do is I got the chance to interview several of the CEOs of the leading technology companies and joining us is Louie, I'm not even going to try to pronounce your last your last name you can do it for us who's the president and founder of Showpad, Louis, would you care to introduce yourself?

Louis Jonckheere 05:36

Absolutely, Scott and thanks for inviting me for this podcast so it's Louis Jonckheere, but it's it's I mean, it's impossible to pronounce in English. It's "john care" is fine. But But yeah, I mean, I have a running joke in the company with our with our team in the US that if they pronounce my name correctly, they get access to president's Club by default and so far, that never happened. So, but great to be here. So Founder and President of Showpad started the company a bit over nine years ago. I mean, we've been in the market have seen sales enablement evolve from very small tactical program in a sales or marketing organization to becoming a real platform for change in revenue and the market today so super excited to be here.

Scott Santucci 06:20

I'm excited to

Brian Lambert 06:21

have Sorry to interrupt but I got it as is so as Louis is he a pea plant or what is he on this analogy that you've brought in?

Scott Santucci 06:29

He's a fellow friar,

Brian Lambert 06:31

He's a fellow friar. Okay, awesome.

Scott Santucci 06:34

I'd never call a guest but as a fellow friar, what we wanted to connect the dots to is having been a participant in that research. What was really great about Louis is just how engaged he got in the process, and how fun our conversations have been and it's so rare for any, any market to get the perspective Have a seat have a executive leader, president of a company. And what we have to keep in mind is think of the things that that Louie has to keep in mind. He's got investors, he's has to make happy, which of course want more money from you. He's got customers that he needs to make happy. And he needs to think about what what the products and services, the combinations of products and services are that are needed. And we really connected a lot in terms of the research process and really identified that there's a really fantastic opportunity for a sales enablement to lead some some big transformations. And that's that's really the conversation or the connection point that that I wanted to share. So with that, as a segue, we have a few talking points to get into. Louis. So what did you think of the post COVID research that we did? Why were you so engaged with it?

Louis Jonckheere 07:56

Yeah, I mean, because I think there's some first of all I like I think any any industry needs solid research to understand what's happening and where trends are going. So So research is super important. I think, given the current times anything, there's like two big events that are coming together. I think on the one hand, you obviously have the pandemic, who really changed drastically how businesses think about engaging their customers about how they go to market about their value proposition. So I think on the one hand that is really shaking up the world and businesses as we know it, so it's a perfect timing, to understand or to research, what what changes is triggering and because there's definitely change out there in the market, but like, what is it exactly, and I think measuring that researching that is super important. And then secondly, I think specifically to sales enablement. Like we already we're at the point where like sales enablement is undergoing a drastic transformation and I think what a COVID definitely showed is our strengths, the weaknesses and the opportunities For sales enablement as we know, and so taking that perspective, your research is extremely important for discovery.

Scott Santucci 09:07

So one of the things then is to put some context around that. Do you think that COVID was in upon itself, an event to respond to, or did this highlight and exasperate fundamental changes that were already occurring and it just exposed them?

Louis Jonckheere 09:26

It exposed, for example, it exposed how badly organized revenue organizations are in companies and exposed how board messaging is of many companies out there it exposed how bore alignment there is between sales and marketing service and customer success organization. So I think it highlighted what many of us already were seeing. And I think it's overall a really good thing for this industry. But yes, it exposed what sales enablement is trying to or will eventually change.

Scott Santucci 09:57

So I think that's really important because What Louis has the luxury of being able to do is to look at a market in its, in its totality, like in a wholeism standpoint. And most of our listeners work inside companies. So we work in individual departments. So we see maybe different colored glass of the stained glass window, and Louis has the opportunity to see the entire stained glass window. And he's got, you know, individual customers to highlight to. So if if the sales enablement market is going through a shape shake up or transformation, or whatever you want to call it, what do you see? Let's give some descriptors to that. Let's make it more tangible.

Louis Jonckheere 10:42

Absolutely. I mean, if you look at sales enablement, in the last I would say like, like 10 years, I think that about 10 years ago, that's when the term sales enablement practice started to become a thing. I would say like like to just simplify it either started from a marketing team or Content team saying like, Hey, we need to have a better way to deliver content to a sales team to make them more productive. Or it came from a training department that said, like, Look, we need to make our sales training much more tailored. It's much more micro much more effective. And, and lots of companies out there if you ask them what sales enablement is, and most of the scenarios, you will either hear a golden story, or you will hear a training story. And that is, how it how it evolved, or how it started studying. And in the last 10 years, I think we're now seeing a change happening. And I think like that is exactly what COVID highlights.

I mean, for a customer, there's no sales per customer. There's no marketing team. There's no services team. There's the company they're doing business with. And I think we're going to see with sales enablement that it is not going to start from "hey, I want to solve a content problem" or "I want to solve a training problem." No, it's about making sure that you can have as many qualitative engagements orchestrated with your customer as possible that really drive growth that drive success and I think the big change we're going to see is that sales enablement will start from the customer. And I have a strong belief that that sales enablement platform that sales enablement technology should start with listen to what the customer is saying. And a lot of the engagement we have today is virtual and virtual meetings, email, virtual collaboration. And I think if marketing, if sales enabled the screening messaging, if they're creating content, that it all starts with building that message, building that content based on real customer conversations, I think there's a lot of opportunity for organizations to start to craft their value propositions, their messaging their content, in a very strong way on what they hear from customers. And then in the past, I mean, this has been a huge challenge and a lot of companies talked about this right. Like you asked me the question in one of our first conversations, like, who really knows the customer? Yeah, yeah, very little executives out there own the customer and like not many companies truly understand what their customers is saying. So, remember that was a great discussion we had Scott.

Scott Santucci 13:03

Yeah, I and I wish that this were a video so that we could show the whiteboarding that we definitely get into but let me help paint a picture a mental picture if you're listening. Yes. So I love let's, let's start start with the origin. So 10 years ago, so the origin story of our hero's journey, right? A sales enablement, professional starts off as, hey, you've been tapped on the back to go fix something broken. These are my words. This is the way that I describe it. It's very similar to the way Louis depicted it, which is, Hey, I'm tapping on the shoulder, something's broken. And we're going to fix a misalignment between say sales and human resources that typically deals around with training, probably onboarding, or learning how to sell the value, something like that. Another top on the shoulder is it's in marketing, and, boy, we're really frustrated that no salespeople aren't using our wonderful content, let's create a mechanism, sort of a cable set box, if you will, for programming to distribute all that content.

So it evolved in a very tactical way. Now we fast forward to 2020. And COVID has exposed a lot of synapse problems that we've been glossing over, because our organizations are so siloed. And our customers that we're selling to, particularly with b2b and broad product portfolios, don't really care about our silos. They don't care about marketing, they don't care about sales, they don't care about they want results. And they want Wait, they want you to combine the various capabilities that you've got into something that's more valuable. So that's, that's something that we see. And I think we really, we really bonded a lot on that. So that's sort of the history part.

Are we on the same page there I want to get to the next part, which is, what is customer centric centered, really mean?

Louis Jonckheere 15:00

I mean, we're definitely on the same page. And I mean, I think good customer centricity for me means that I think, first of all, I starting to understand like, like high level how the customer has changed, right? Like in general, what are their expectations when they're engaging with the company. And I think one of the the keywords that I mean, we've been talking about, which show that over the last eight, nine years, like customers are looking for convenience, it needs to be easy to do business with you, it needs to be valuable to engage you need to learn something, I think, and that's interesting when it didn't, and we're going to highlight this in our transform customer conference, in October is empathy is going to be something customers are also increasingly going to demand from the companies they engage with. And I think like that is definitely something that COVID that definitely surfaced, so convenience, value, empathy, and you need to enable your commercial organization to deliver that at scale. And that's really where where sales enablement Revenue enablement growth enablement, wherever you want to call it as well.

Scott Santucci 16:03

So this is where I want us to start walking really slow together. So I agree with everything that that Louis shared. I think the difficulty that we have is step number one, and this is what Louis is going to do a great job of focusing on for us is, let's make sure that we have the right technical platform that can pull many of these content assets together, that can be mass configured based on the need that the salesperson identifies to match with a scenario of a customer. Right, that's sort of like a technical design that somebody needs to have instead of just buying piecemeal, individual parts. Is that fair, Louis? Because I want to get into some of the other parts, but I'll just make sure that I'm speaking for you correctly.

Louis Jonckheere 16:50

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I would say like one of the key pillars of sales enablement is really that as an organization, you have the technology that allows sellers to access extremely easily find the stuff they need to engage with the customer gives them the tools to personalize and ultimately deliver value to the customer. So like that is one of the firmaments of sales enablement. Absolutely.

Scott Santucci 17:12

Yeah. So one of the things that we've got to...

Ep56 Embracing the Complex Conditions that Lead to Breakthrough Results with Amy Benoit

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 56

The close of the 19th century found Samuel Pierpoint Langley and Orville and Wilbur Wright in a competition to create a powered and controllable flight. Langley worked with a lot of government support and enormous public exposure, while the Wright brothers worked quietly using their own resources.

Langley built a monolithic 54-foot-long flying machine had two 48-foot wings -- one in front and one in back. It was launched from a catapult on the Potomac River in October of 1903 and it fell like a sack of potatoes into the water.

Just nine days later, the Wright brothers flew a trim little biplane, with almost no fanfare, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their advantage? They'd mastered the problem of controlling the movement of their plane by focusing on the environment in which they operated. Windy, uncontrolled, volatile, requiring the plan to harness those conditions.

The results were remarkable, and as they say, the rest is history.

In this episode, we're joined by Amy Benoit. An Orchestrator who is also focused on harnessing the often volatile, uncertain, and complex environment that salespeople operate within. While many (most?) organizations build out their monolithic sales engines with overlays, technology, and management support, Amy focuses on working "light and lean" to get moving and get results.

There's a lesson in this episode for all of us, what do you think?

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

I'm Brian Lambert. We're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies

Scott Santucci 00:48

together, Brian and I've worked in over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners, we've learned the hard way. What works and maybe what's most important What doesn't,

Brian Lambert 01:01

and our focus is on you as a sales enablement leader and orchestrator, as you know, sales enablement, leaders need to really operate in the gap between strategy and execution. And blend those tactics and strategies together to be mission and goal focused. prioritizing the right goals at the right moments, guiding the narrative by confronting reality, to drive results by design and not effort, so that you can unlock energy and create momentum by catalyzing change through collaboration. That's our list of what it takes to be a great orchestrator. And you heard about that on an earlier episode. On this podcast, we're gonna start with a centering story, just like we usually do, and I'm gonna hand it over to Scott and then we'll introduce our guests. Scott, what do you have for us?

Scott Santucci 01:46

Okay, I love this, this centering story. So if you don't like it, or if people don't like it, so what i love it and you know, it's partially my podcast too. So I'm gonna start out with this. So First of all to give everybody a little bit of hint we're starting. We're starting out our story in the late 1860s. And have you ever heard Brian or Amy have someone named Samuel Pierpont Langley? Samuel Pierpont

Brian Lambert 02:15

Langley Air Force Base? Yeah.

Scott Santucci 02:17

So what does that? Tell me more about it. What is Langley sound like?

Brian Lambert 02:24

The Air Force Base? Yes. There's an Air Force Base named after him.

Scott Santucci 02:28

That's right. And also there's Langley Virginia where the CIA's headquarters.

Brian Lambert 02:34

Yeah, that's right.

Scott Santucci 02:35

So there's a lot actually named after Langley. That's That's because of Samuel Pierpont Langley. And Samuel Pierpont Langley, Langley. He his story. We'll get to how this how this matters here in a minute because it's pretty interesting. In the 1860s, he took over the Allegheny observe Observatory in Pittsburgh, they were completely broke. It pretty much didn't have any working materials and by 1868 He'd raised funding together, he'd done a lot of analysis and came up with the Allegheny time system. Around this time as you guys, as everybody knows, the railroad industry is exploding. And one of the things that was really difficult is how do you tell time. So he devised a really hyper accurate timing system that he would use the telegraph to dispatch at the morning and at night, the exact timetables that were used to run all the trains. And that became a profit center for the Allegheny observatory between 1868 and 1883, when the US government took that over and had taxpayers funded, so that's pretty smart. Then he went on to do to keep doing that, that research and then he won the top astrophysics awards in the US and in France in 1886 and 1889, respectively. And here's where the story becomes very interesting. And then we're going to hear hear about some people everybody knows about In 1896, he created the first steam powered glider over the Potomac. He had a steam engine, it was the first sort of unmanned propulsion unit. And the government. He had friends like by this time Alexander Graham Bell took a picture of this you can go find this on the on the internet took a picture of this photo in 1896. Andrew Carnegie was also his friend by this time in 1896. He was the head of the Smithsonian Institute, which a lot of people heard about. And the opportunity of creating manned flight was really a big deal. So he got he raised $70,000. And if this is before 1900, so if you adjust for inflation, that's basically a $2 million Seed Fund, you know, if you will, to get flight. He hired a bunch of teams of other people who are similarly well represented. In what well respected to him, but was he the first person to fly? No, no. the Wright brothers were and In contrast, the Wright brothers are two guys out of Dayton, Ohio. Neither of them have a college education. None of the people worked on it were college education, and they had zero dollars, yet.

They were the first people to fly to create a man play a flat plane and fly it successfully. And one of the kinter interesting things about this and where this pertains heavily to our Stuart's story. What Langley did is do all these flights on the Potomac River, he created a launching device actually like a sort of like a mini aircraft carrier. And the reason he was doing on the in the Potomac is that the the woods and everything around it, he could control the environment as best he could. Whereas the Wright brothers used the design point of having a lot of wind and One of the things that was really important to them is making sure that they could have the gears to adjust and make the flight adapt to the to the weather. And that turned out to be the critical success factor because aerodynamics are so unpredictable that you need to be able to create tools for it. And that's not something that Samuel Langley factored in. So basically, with $2 million, a star studded cast, a guy who's got a incredible success track record behind them, with a lot of great science behind it and great minds, was beaten out by a bunch of guys who were bike mechanics, who really just worked on confronting the complexity and repeating it, repeating it and repeating it. That's our story.

Brian Lambert 06:46

Great story. I love that. And also just a little tidbit on that that I remember is, the Wright brothers actually figured out how to operate on three axes. And that's why because there's little adjustments you're talking about, not just two up and down. Left and Right, they had to figure out the third axis. And that's what one of the one of the little things that made it work. But that's a great story that I remember I got to ask so. So what what the heck does that have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 07:15

So what? Well, here's what we're getting. Here's how it ties together. One of the things that we're talking about is Stratecution. And we've been talking about this concept of Stratecution for some time. And one of the things when we think about strategy is we think about, hey, let's hire in a Bain and McKenzie or people like that to go do the studying. And certainly on a sheet of paper, if we were betting people, most of us if we were forced to bet, we would probably would have bet on Lange Lee's team instead of the Wright brothers team. The issue is what the Wright brothers did, that the Langley team didn't do was lean in on the complexity and Tinker and Tinker and constantly widdle and change And make rapid adjustments in day to day, based on specific observations by leaning into the complexity. And that's really what we're talking about here is that's really the role of orchestration is being able to think strategically. So in other words, have a vision of what you want to do. At this point in time, no one in the world had created manned flight flight apparatus. However, in order to make it work, you have to be on the ground doing the work, and balancing between both of those different points. So that's really what our what our goal is of how do we make this idea of Stratecution come to life? What is it Orchestrator do and how do you activate success?

Brian Lambert 08:43

That's great. And to help us with that topic. We've got a special guest somebody who's living in that that space of Stratecution Orchestration and making it work. It's Amy Ben, wha How you doing Amy?

Amy Benoit 08:55

Hey guys, I'm well, thank you for having me.

Brian Lambert 08:57

Great. Thanks for being here. So let me interrupt. Do you see a little bit you and I go back to the CES conference in 2019, where you and I first met and we actually broke bread together at the sales hood meeting with Eli Cohen. And you and I talked there, we had Erich Starrett, with us and actually Scott was there as well. And he had his simpletest, jacket off, lab coat. And you and I chatted a little bit. And we've been in touch ever since. And we've been talking about the concept of activating a team, enrolling the strategic view with the executive team, and then cascading that down through the organization and across the organization to get the right people involved. So I'm glad you're here on the podcast with us to unpack these concepts. And can you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself?

Amy Benoit 09:49

Sure, can. Thank you a couple of things just from your story. Langley is from just outside of Boston, Massachusetts, as my mind I am now Living in San Diego but born and raised natively to the Boston area. And similar to the Wright brothers, I would say one of my approaches to my work is leveraging experimentation. And I'm always trying to, as you said, Tinker, to make sure that we are doing things to create value. I'm, I'm a consultant I started a business a couple years ago and helping executives make decisions. And once we have those priorities, making them into reality as fast as possible. I've learned over the years that if you state the obvious and create some action oriented plans and you get the buy in from the right people, you really can create the energy to move and make momentum for those plans that you need in place. I help organizations operate to scale and more smoothly. And it's really fun to do. I always say that I'm a persistent person who believes in ambitious goals. And if, if you hire me, I provide you with this impetus, if you're a dreamer to kind of stop dreaming and just do it, and I think that oftentimes is, is the difference between getting things done and not just starting.

Brian Lambert 11:29

That's certainly one of the things that I appreciate about you is that idea of engaging and getting things done. And so back to the centering story, when you think about flight, it's interesting, it seems simple. You get up in the air and you fly. But when you look at what it takes to figure that out, and I love the word tinkering, the Wright brothers did a lot of that tinkering. And they had to figure out things like how much you know, how do you provide the thrust? How do you provide the lift How do you, you know, make it light enough to get off the ground? And then as I mentioned, you know, this idea of how do you control three dimensions or three axes. So let's start with that centering story and the concept of tinkering. I'd love to hear from you, Amy. Just what are you tinkering with right now? And do you have any examples of of how you're you're in that space trying to figure it out to tackle that complexity and operate on multiple axes.

Amy Benoit 12:25

Side note, I have flown in 1947 Cessna, which is completely off topic. But now that we're talking about planes, I feel like I need to say

Brian Lambert 12:34

that's the thing about planes if they, if you if you maintain them, they last a long, long time.

Amy Benoit 12:40

That was a cool story. We can get back to that at the end. But my client right now I have a client that I'm working with, and I'm working to build continuous learning and sustain effectiveness in this organization. That's a big goal to take on. And something that is in need of a lot of advising and continual work. And if I, if I give you some background to this, I think it might help just from the terms of what I'm working with, particularly with this client, and we're get a little hairy. Sure. Um, at the beginning of this year, this particular business unit, and the whole company merged into a very public software company. And it wasn't determined until the end of q1 which ended in April for this fiscal year that they were going to actually remain within this larger organization and the business unit then at the beginning of May started to be able to create their go to market strategy and get financial metrics, goals and everything like this. And they brought me into partner with them to develop their go to market strategy and actually just build this culture of effectiveness. They wouldn't call it that we're calling it that. They just want their folks to hit their goals, a huge plan for me. And typically, you will have an annual kickoff or something with companies. There wasn't one this year because they passed the threshold of kickoff, and then there was the pandemic.

So, we created a business unit kickoff, or what I'll call an off site, virtually, of course, we needed to, to figure out why we were doing this and the goals for the entire organization. First and foremost. And I think that's oftentimes where business leaders and people in general lose focus. You know, they're trying to kind of just tackle everything and anything that comes their way. And an enablement. And in life, a lot of folks lose traction because of this because they're just like, Alright, here's an open area, I hope something resonates, whatever it does, we're gonna, you know, lean on that and make it work. I had to pare back with the Vice President and really focus more on helping them see what the plan of attack was going to be. And focus in on that like laser sharp.

Brian Lambert 15:48

So let me let me unpack this a little bit, right. So yeah, this situation where a lot of variables right so leaning into the reason this story is a bit of a proxy here. Going out and tinkering with, you know, we've got our, our leather helmets on the right, right brother style. And we're trying to figure this out. So we know what are the things that are known and a bit unknown. So we know that there's this need to either communicate or drive change with the sales team. Because the merger is happening. We know that there needs to be some sort of cascade of the strategy. It sounds like because of that, and then there's this idea of driving the the results and the y that you're you're alluding to, right, but then there's these variables like COVID, we're not going to be in person, we're going to have to figure out something else. And I can, I can imagine that there's a lot of questions in that, right. Is this a huge event where we strap everybody to chairs for three days is this, you know, a couple hours a day, you know, how do we adjust for these conditions and make this land right? So let's stay at that level. Tell us a little bit about How'd you guys go about figuring this out? And what did some of those conversations look like? Because I would imagine there's some tension there between. I've seen, you know, this idea of let's keep doing what we've always done and just moving all virtual, versus, to your point, driving the why,

Amy Benoit 17:16

yeah. So if we go a layer above, and we figure out that the team has now set priorities, and one of the priorities is of course, hitting quota. However, we have a new business, we're in a whole new organization. So perhaps our life is staying the same, but the context around our life changes. And for this team, what that meant was the fear of the unknown and really, a need to understand does my messaging change part Understanding that and unpacking that, in this continuous learning effectiveness was to create a team off site. And that would do two things improve employee engagement. And I say that and I do also mean talent retention and also help you to as a sales organization hit your numbers because the messaging aligns the concept of going virtual we abdun flowed in and out of throughout the, the few weeks that we were planning this. Originally it was perhaps the leadership team will get together and everyone else will be virtual. We ended up doing a full complete virtual based off of the environment. And focused on just the content that we were delivering.

Brian Lambert 19:06

Yeah, that makes sense. And if you want what I'm seeing in my mind's eye, you know, as we're thinking about this, it's there's balancing acts, or there's trade offs here, trading off or balancing the long term with the short term. In one, one situation, as you think about this, there's a need to move fast, at the same time be programmatic and not random, right? And then you're also really, there's this juxtaposition or this trade off between what the executives want to tackle versus what the reality of the reps are, where their heads are at, for example, and then you've got the time challenge, right? There's, we have we have a certain amount of time, how are we going to use that wisely. So those are, those are some of the things that you're alluding to here and this gap between strategy and tactics, because what I'm not Hearing is, hey, we need to do some sort off site. Let's go. Is it...

Ep55 Unpacking Social Media Interactions To Find Insight with Greg Smith

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 55

Our focus is on you a sales enablement leader and orchestrator. In your role, you've got to be mission and goal-focused to drive results by design, not effort, unlocking energy, and creating momentum and catalyzing change through collaboration. In this episode, the guys are talking about utilizing social media to gather information and insight. Not with the purpose of amplifying what's already known, but rather, for the purpose of understanding different perspectives. A key concept of Orchestration.'

In this episode, we're joined by Greg Smith, a long-time listener. He joins the show to talk about one of his most recent posts on "SDR bashing" and what happened when he posted, what he learned, and why the subsequent discussions were valuable.

That's really what we want to talk about here is we have a great opportunity for an awesome topic that requires a good healthy exchange and conversation. When we think about digital, why are we treating it as a separate medium? Why are people using it to share information, instead of understanding different points of view?

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Scott Santucci 00:47

Together, Brian, I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, issues as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way, what works and maybe what's more importantly, what doesn't

Brian Lambert 01:00

And our focus is on you the sales enablement leader and orchestrator, as you know, you've got to be mission and goal focused to drive results by design, not effort, unlocking energy and creating momentum and catalyzing change through collaboration. Those are just some of the attributes of being a great orchestrator. And as we continue to advance through COVID-19, we're having to do that a lot more digitally. It's a digital driven need for orchestrators. And that's what we're going to talk about today, the idea of digital environments and leveraging them to help us orchestrate success. And Scott, why don't you kick us off with the story and introduce our guest?

Scott Santucci 01:42

Thanks, Brian. And we're not going to go back very far in history, because how far back in history can we go when we talk about digital environments, but we're going to do is maybe it's more of an anecdote. So in 2017, I started the sales enablement society. One of the things that was really interesting about that is it was all run on my cell phone and through LinkedIn. So the ways of engaging what I learned about how people engage, what the techniques are, etc, if you just sort of look at LinkedIn as a big collection, sort of like a conference, or you know, you go to a basketball game, and you want to talk to people in the stands, if you look at it that way, then use the rules of how you engage others. And that's really what we want to talk about here is we have a great opportunity for a awesome topic that requires a good healthy exchange and conversation. But I think one of the things is when we think about digital, why are we treating it as a separate medium? Why don't we look at it as just yet another way that we can have conversations with people. So that's our centering story.

Brian Lambert 02:54

So, so what so so what does that have to Do the sales enablement.

Scott Santucci 03:01

what it has to do with being an Orchestrator sales enablement and thriving in this, in this rapidly changing world is to find the sources of insight. The idea of taking quote unquote best practices and rolling out inside your company is almost silly right now. And this is why conversations are more important. And I think one of the things that's really fascinating is when you look at somebody posting something, or even somebody who's done a presentation, or a keynote presentation or like a webinar, there's always stuff to learn after the fact. And that's really what we want to do here is we've got Greg Smith joining us. And actually, what we've what we've got is a we're really picking up a conversation on LinkedIn, Brian, once you once you frame that out a little bit of knowledge, and then I'll introduce Greg more specifically.

Brian Lambert 03:56

Yeah, that's great. So you guys were having a conversation and Greg started it and the title of his post was something like bashing SDRs is cheapening, LinkedIn and your own brand. And then he goes through and says, here's what I'm saying, here's what I'm seeing and basically wraps up the post with, hey, hashtag COVID coaching. We're all we're all new at one point, let's have some empathy for those starting out during tough times. And then, you know, my favorite part was the last line he had, which is SDRs need coaching, not humiliating. And I thought that was great. And this this was early on in the in the back and forth and Scott chimed in and said, hey, I've tried to do what you suggest. And basically, he gets many scathing curse word laden diatribes about what, uh, what a jerk. He is, and this is literally, you know, publicly in on LinkedIn. And so that now, here we are, I think about two weeks later in that and Greg has about 33,000 views on it and many, many likes and shares. So in that discussion, we said, hey, let's carry this forward over to the podcast. And to your point, Scott, this is a a medium in which a conversation is happening. What we want to do is use this as a bit of a case study for how to engage, how to enroll different perspectives. And then also, what's the value add here, because as many would agree, arguing back and forth adds little value. However, when you look at what's happening here on this post, there's something valuable going on and what is it so we're gonna bring in Greg, on this. And Greg, thanks so much for joining us here on the show. And also, you know, thanks for being transparent and just putting that out there. I would love for you to just share your background and and then why did you post what you did? And then what was your What was your angle on posting that?

Unknown Speaker 05:53

Yeah, thanks for thanks for the intro. And thanks for having me today. It's good to join with you both. So my current role is Is to head up digital offerings for sales performance improvement company in partner based here in London with a well known virtual presence all around the world. Whereas we've had offices in the past. I've spent my whole career kind of why started out as an SDR at IBM. And I think that's kind of where the origin is my feelings game for that particular post. But since then, I've very much been at the intersection of sales, training and sales technology. And so for whatever reason, and that's just become Yeah, my forte, and I don't know, I think, you know, having worked from home all year and probably spent more time on LinkedIn because of that. And you know, a lot of people having a rough time, I just kept seeing people kind of just bashing on young salespeople or sharing screenshots of what they deemed to be a poor prospecting attempt and, and sharing that around. I just thought that that's really not helping, like right now. More than ever, I think people just need to kind of put all their ego and pride aside and just kind of help each other and get on with the job. Because, you know, we're kind of all in this together, I see our GDP in our recovery as sort of a joint quota for us all to be trying to attain, and I think we'd be better served helping each other.

Brian Lambert 07:17

Yeah, that's great. Greg, and I, you know, let's not forget that there's actually buyers and potential prospects on LinkedIn, as well. So when the when the the sales community starts turning on its own and eating their young, so to speak, what does that say for the profession as a whole? Because, you know, LinkedIn is a huge platform. I mean, I'm not everybody knows that, I believe, right? If you do, so. This is an interesting, so you didn't, he didn't come back and call people out with your own screenshots. What was the angle on your post? You know, you're talking a little bit about something a little bit more aspirational or maybe just your point of view and you put it out there. Tell us a little about that. And then what happened?

Unknown Speaker 07:59

You Yes, it was. I mean first, firstly, disclaimer, I don't purport to be some sort of expert on on these things. I just know what

Brian Lambert 08:07

isn't what an expert to post on LinkedIn though?

Unknown Speaker 08:11

No, I don't know, I don't think so I think it should be for everyone. And I think you can learn something from everyone. So, yeah, I mean, I just posted I didn't expect such You're such a response to be honest. There was something like, as a well over 100 comments on there. So I've had to go through all of that. And it was all very positive. And if someone was challenging it was in the way Scott was in a really constructive manner, versus like, you know, what the hell's your problem now, all this kind of stuff. So I found it being really constructive. And whereas I probably sounded really down on LinkedIn just now I think that's, it served a really strong purpose there to kick off conversations and so yes, it was a little cheeky dig at some of the sort of self appointed, you know, quote unquote, gurus and all of that because, you know, I don't rebind to that, I think I think everyone has The right to, to chip in and help but um, yeah, yeah, it was a little cheeky dig but also just a friendly suggestion from my inexperience. Again, I'm just a 33 year old who spent, you know, a number of years in this space and just wanted to share a different perspective.

Brian Lambert 09:14

Well, let me break this, this post down and then I'll get Scott's reaction because he posts a lot too. But you said you start with, hey, I've noticed an increase in gurus railing against STI. So you start with a personal observation. And then you in your next paragraph, you you kind of say look, you know, SDRs are working hard then then you say in a third paragraph, I was one. It's a hard job, it's a beating. And then you you subtly call for something, you know, a little bit more aspirational, which is I would be made way more impressed if if they shared a screenshot and then responding with some coaching points. Yeah, right, something a bit more positive and constructed and and then and then a challenge. Let's take LinkedIn from a shaming, like baiting dumping ground. Yes, you wrote that, yes. And then into a place of peer. So this is the, you know, hey, go forward and then and then you gave three suggestions, try this instead declined politely for some feedback, and then maybe even follow up with them and see how they're doing 30 days later, right. So that's the post in and of itself. Scott, what's your reaction to that? And then how would you How would you categorize what Greg did here?

Scott Santucci 10:33

Well, I think it for me, it's more the reaction. So first of all, I know Greg, and, and I like Greg so it's, it's, I always have the mentality of how can I get somebody back? However, there was a you know, a lot of what it was saying, I mean, I definitely an anti shaming. Let's let's get that really clear. However, the idea that knee is a buyer should follow up 30 days later to see whether or not they're they're doing it or evolving, just isn't didn't really resonate with that because I actually tried that having been a salesperson, myself. Heck, I personally called the back in the day, the personally called the CIO of Campbell's soups, 80 days in a row, getting less and less various, various voicemails, I know what it's like. And I wish that somebody would have told me what's valuable or not valuable. However, when I've tried to do that with, you know, I can't distinguish whether it's a BDR, SDR, digital salesperson or all these labels that we give to it. It's just somebody trying to connect to me. And when I've tried to give advice or suggestions of what would resonate with me, I've been aggressively with curse laden responses back given feedback, something like man, you know, it kind of goes two ways, right? You have to be the individual on the other end needs to be coachable, and recognize that they want my time and my money. And if I'm going out of my way to give them some tips on how to be more valuable to me, to call me in a hole for doing it is, seems to be very extreme.

So I just wanted to I thought Greg's what I liked about Greg's posts or what resonated with me, was, it's it came off as very authentic. And when I see somebody comment on us, often in an authentic way, I can't help but want to engage. So that I just found myself starting to engage and then I'm trying to accomplish it, you know, make sure that I'm being polite and respectful to Greg, knowing full well that other people are going to read it, but also offer a different perspective so that we could have a conversation about how we had This issue, which would be the effectiveness of salespeople, making contacts with with folks. So that's, yeah, that was the the dialogue, the difficulty is words get into can can get interpreted in a variety of different ways. How do you have a conversation about it? So it was happy to see more and more people chime in and engage with, with Greg with respect. I'm curious, before we get into the conversation that I want to have. I'm curious what Greg learned from putting it out there. Because I think that's another thing that we're not doing enough of is learning from the people who put the stuff out there in the first place. Because they have an idea. They're making themselves vulnerable. They're putting themselves out there. What did you learn by putting that post out there, Greg?

Unknown Speaker 13:46

Yeah, good question. Um, well, firstly, firstly, it was clear that a lot of people agreed. Secondly, it was it was nice hearing that you have responded and others said similar things, but how You know, I've tried coaching. And and I think it is unrealistic to do that with everyone, right? You couldn't possibly nobody would have the time with the amount of prospecting that's going on to get back to all of them. So

Unknown Speaker 14:15

yeah, I definitely appreciate that.

Unknown Speaker 14:18

But it kind of learned that, you know, perhaps there's a failure somewhere and in some cases, it's going to be on the individual str or BDR. Right. So in your case, they just didn't want to get better. I don't know if that's the exception or the rule. I would lean towards it being an exception. I actually did a not a follow up post but one this week about SDR as being mostly Gen Z and I used to coach some Gen Z university students through different sales programs around the US and I think they're gonna be brilliant, because they're curious and they're tough. And I think they do want to improve and get better So, so yes, I, I completely agree that Yeah, you're going to try and help some of them and they're just going to burn you think what the hell's the point? You know that they don't seem you know that they can the gift horse in the mouth right so yeah, yeah so yeah, I think there's probably somewhere along the line this is where I think we're exposed that there's some something's broken just

Brian Lambert 15:23

yeah so let me offer a bit of a Let me ask you guys so you're on LinkedIn Do you guys get pinged by SDRs in your roles? Yes, obviously obviously Scott you have I have to. So you know, for the last two years because in prep for this podcast I was going back and thinking the number of people that have reached out to me to fill the top of the funnel with some sort of funnel system, marketing lead gen system to get me leads, etc. It's probably 100 times greater than anything that I could actually relate to, like, for example, I'm not into filling my funnel. I'm, you know, trying to be more sales driven, etc. I've had zero reach outs around things that I care about, and 100 hundred people reaching out around pretty much the exact same can message. I mean, it's fascinating to me that 100 people can reach out with the exact same thing, selling the exact same thing. So, um, that's what's happened to me. And I tend to agree with you, Greg, if that's happening, this is a somebody there's something going on where that's expected. Like, that's normal. I would prefer to have somebody engage with me around what what I would consider a bigger challenge of messaging, for example. So this is what's happened to me. Do you guys have any stories about trends about how you've been reached out to and are you seeing the same thing where it's a bit

Scott Santucci 17:00

Well, I didn't give her perspective on that, Brian, I don't necessarily think it's an issue of trends. This isn't new. Social media allows us to scale behavior. So putting myself in the BDR shoes. So what I liked about Greg's post is and here's another key point, I think it's incredibly important to engage. If you're not engaging with people having conversations. There's no way you're going to learn what's going on. So that's a tip to our, to our audience, engage with us get on the podcast, put yourself out there like Greg is doing right now and having a conversation without any script or any any forewarning. But what I think is happening is I myself as a rep, once email came, so I'm much older than you Greg, when email came into place, and like wow, this is a great, much more effective way I can cut and paste a rap and send it off to 30 people for the time. It takes me, you know, that will take me one minute. And in this case 30 people, it would take me, you know, 10 minutes time.

Brian Lambert 18:08

In this case the wrap is a scripted email, right? Actually around that m&m

Scott Santucci 18:14

practice that was before, before midnight, so a story or some hook or something, right. And I would cut and paste and you know, blast those away before there was email rules and everything like that. Or, you know, I got into sending faxes because I didn't think people were checking faxes anymore, anything to get to get attention. I think what's different today is that we've gone to LinkedIn and we think LinkedIn is sort of the safe, the safe environment to engage yet people are using the the end credits to bombard bombard people. And I think what's happening is that a bit Is...

Ep54 Applying Systems Thinking to Solve Complex Problems with Dr. Jerry Brightman

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 54

System thinking is a disciplined way of understanding dynamic relationships. It's an approach that enables you to make better choices and avoid unintended consequences. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Jerry Brightman, who teaches courses on systems thinking at Harvard University.

The guys talk with Jerry to unpack a real-world example to understand the components and repeatable approaches to viewing the commercial system as an integrated system of people, processes, technology, and capabilities.

In this episode:

The definition of systems thinking
The difference between managing and leadership
The pros and cons of systems thinking
The importance of short-term wins in service of the broader solution
The best way to prioritize action in the day-to-day

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian, I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales and they were knishes analysts, consultants or practitioners. We learned the hard day our way not hard day saved. This is all part of the process. We have a hard way what works and perhaps what's most importantly, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:08

And our focus here on this podcast inside sales enablement is on you as a sales enablement leader and orchestrator, as you know, sales enablement orchestrators has very specific characteristics, and I'm going to share those with you. Now, first of all, your mission and goal focused, you've prioritize the right goals at the right moments. You guide the narrative by confronting reality to get the right stuff done. You drive results by design, not by effort, you unlock energy to create momentum and catalyze change through collaboration. Those are the six attributes of an orchestrator. And you can find out more about that on an earlier episode on orchestrators as we usually do, we're going to start with a centering story on this particular episode. So Scott, what kind of centering story do you have for our audience today?

Scott Santucci 01:56

Well, I've got a great one. So I first want us to dwell on how cool This name is okay. And how awesome the Italians are at naming people.

Brian Lambert 02:07

Go figure says the Italian

Scott Santucci 02:09

is well, I don't have to Scott isn't an Italian name like I just have to laugh. I'm half right. But listen to this name vilfredo Pareto. Oh, nice Hellenic in it.

Brian Lambert 02:24

Yeah, it's very nice to have properly dwelled on that so let's move on. It's very elegant.

Scott Santucci 02:30

So who is this person? And why are we talking about about him. But as you as you many of you may know, you might know this idea of the 8020 rule. And the 8020 rule is also called peredo analysis or peredo distribution or he's got a lot of other other things and as many people call him, the father of micro economics. So if you look at economic theory, like Adam Smith, and you've Read it, it sounds like oh, this is a like a sociology book. And then when you look at our Philip philosophic, philosophical book, when you look at parados works, it looks more modern. He's got tons and tons of tables and statistics and things in there. And one of the things that he really observed is, in trying to figure out distribution of power and distribute, you know, where power really resides. He was caught up in a lot of the revolutions in in Europe during the during time, so let's let's frame it out. He was born in 1848 and died in 1923. As you can imagine, there's a lot of turmoil and he's Italian.

So if you know about Italian history, they didn't. They started the process of revolutions after the Civil War, the United States so the 1860s and and on, and making these observations about getting in big problems and arguments with With the governments, the local governments about what things need to do, because he was a very, very much a laissez faire or classic liberal in those senses, not not what we would call today a liberal. Definitely, if we call them today, he probably be very conservative or probably a libertarian. But the key observation that he made that was so groundbreaking was that he found that 80% of the wealth or not so much the wealth, but 80% of the land owned in Italy, was owned by 20% of the population. And he had to keep double checking that and what he found is that pattern, that pattern is a reoccurring pattern. And you've heard us talk about that pattern before in some of the other podcasts that we've done, because we found that pattern exists with salespeople, about 20% of salespeople are generating 80% of the new growth, about 20% of your customers are generating 80% of your profits. All of these things work and that we Have vilfredo Pareto, again, the poetic name to Frank. Thank you mentoring story.

Brian Lambert 05:09

Thank you. vilfredo Pareto, I just wanted to say that I'm on

Scott Santucci 05:14

peredo fan club.

Brian Lambert 05:17

So I got to ask that and our listeners do too. So what? So this has to do with sales enablement.

Scott Santucci 05:27

So what this has to do with sales enablement, and our topic today is that there's a one of the things that we tend to do, and drive a lot of cost is we do a lot of activity. We do lots and lots and lots of stuff, but a lot of stuff. Are we doing the right things? And how do we figure out there's a there's always a mathematical element, if we embrace it, most of us don't embrace these things because they you know, it's just far too easy to say, well, let's go fix the sales force. Instead of saying let's find the 20% of the sales force to improve What can we do? And really what we're talking about here is the introduction of systems thinking. And when we talk about that, as you all on our on our show have have adopted that you want to be orchestrators, part of what we're trying to do is highlight the business value of being an orchestrator the business problems that we're looking to solve. So that's why this matters so much the centering story and the topic that we're going to do is so what is systems thinking? Is it some new age idea that we have to have a crystal and you know, hug trees over? Or is it something real and something tangible?

Brian Lambert 06:37

Yeah, I love that. And to help us with this today, we've got a, an expert in the space joining us. His name is Jerry Brightman. He is a bright man, so we're gonna help us on this topic. Yeah, you've got him. I do too. And Jerry is a great guy. I've learned I've learned a lot from him over the last 20 years. I met him when I was first coming out of the military and he was in program project management. He's done some great fascinating work in industry. All over the world. He's been to 100 different countries. But right now in his phase of what he's doing, he's he's a professor at Tufts and at Harvard. And Jerry, one of the things that I was reconnecting with year round was I saw on LinkedIn, you had posted this really cool post about teaching this really interesting class, to folks at Harvard. And that class was on systems thinking. So I reached out and I said, Hey, our listeners are asking about this. They're also you know, quite frankly, pushing back on Scott and I a little bit around some of the topics and wrestling with them. So let's get Jerry on. And let's ask him some questions that perhaps our listeners might have, and explore this topic of, of systems thinking. So Jerry Brightman, thanks so much for joining us here on insider nation.

Unknown Speaker 07:50

My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

Brian Lambert 07:52

You bet. Can you share a little bit about your background that maybe I've missed?

Unknown Speaker 07:57

Well, it's um, it's a it's a very diverse background but it does. It does have a way of connecting dots. I started out as a very young guy went to school seemingly forever getting an undergraduate, an MBA, and then even a DBA doctor Business Administration. And then guess what? teaching at a university, and out in Western Michigan University in the wilds of Kalamazoo, Michigan. And I was asked to teach an off campus course in Grand Rapids to a real live working business people in that area. And it was very quickly known to me and the moment that I was a fake. The only advantage I had over these people who were working all day and going from an MBA an evening was they were actually doing business and I had an advantage of being one chapter ahead in the book. And I realized that I love the teaching. I really loved being in front of students, graduate students, real practitioners of business every day. But if I was going to be helpful to them, I had to quit teaching and get into the business world. And I was very, very fortunate to join a global chemical company for about a dozen years, that wound up being the very first company ever to do business in the People's Republic of China. And during that period of time, I was very lucky along with my CEO to be pioneers in the trade with China being the very first to go to China. And without any knowledge of the of the country, of its history of its culture of its ways of negotiating even its currency and contracts. we wind up doing a billion dollars worth of two way trade with China, a country we didn't know at all. And so what were the tools of our trade? And one of one big one was was thinking more systemically about the work we were doing.

Scott Santucci 09:45

Excellent. So to kick us off what I'm going to ask you two pretty basic straightforward questions. And I'd like some, you know, basic, straightforward answers from Jerry. So the first question I want to ask is to systems thinking, is that a thing?

Unknown Speaker 10:03

I wish it were more of a thing. I think that real leaders around the world would would benefit systems thinking as an addition to their toolkit, especially in the areas of decision making and seeing the the broader interrelationships. And interconnections have their, their own work staff, and their own people, and the people that they try to do business with. So it's very real. It's just not seen by many people quite honestly.

Scott Santucci 10:30

interested. So what I'm hearing you say is that it's a very real thing. Just a lot of it a lot of people aren't taking advantage of it.

Unknown Speaker 10:39

And frankly speaking, it's not unlike the quality movement years ago, which was a real thing and and However, people pick the low hanging fruit expected great results, and didn't do the work behind it to make it real so

Scott Santucci 10:53

well. And also to wasn't that wasn't that true that it was a real thing in Japan, and it wasn't a real thing in the United States and Our car, our automatic fractured covers got slaughtered, and then they adopted it.

Unknown Speaker 11:05

Well, Dr. Deming was was preaching loud and clearly in the United States and people didn't listen to him. So he said, bear with you guys, I'm off to Japan. And those folks loved it, embrace it. And that's why the Japanese carmakers for over a decade was such a fierce competitor to the United States. And, but we expect quick results. We're a country that wants quick results. And I think systems thinking similar to the quality movement is somewhat counterintuitive. It takes time to implement, it takes time to understand it. And it does work miracles, in our sense of we ignorant people going to China for the first time knowing nothing, doing a billion dollars were the two way trade in a wide range of areas, and even even developing our own consulting firm that helped American and European firms understand what the China business was all about. I'd love that. So that gives me my second sort of blunt instrument question. My second question is,

Scott Santucci 12:05

so if systems thinking is a thing, what is that? What is it? What is this stuff? What is systems thinking?

Unknown Speaker 12:14

Yeah, there's a very great quote by Albert Einstein. So I want to bring in Einstein to prove that I'm a professor, right? You can't do better than quoting Albert Einstein, right? And I assigned says that the problems we face today cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that existed when the problem began. Time is time is gone very quickly from the start of that problem, to the present time. So what he's what Einstein is saying pretty simple and down to earth, is we've got to change the level of thinking that we have today to deal with that older chronic issue. And systems thinking is a wonderful, wonderful way to do that. The big thing that executives have to do is they have to change their thinking. That's To change where they're coming from changes the level of thinking, just like they had to do with the quality boom. And, you know, let's face it, habits are hard to break. I've got young kids who still have habits that they started when they were four years old, three years old. So habits are tough to break, if they can break the habits and open up their minds and new ways of thinking systems thinking will be a valuable tool to build leadership, guaranteed.

Scott Santucci 13:24

So are you saying systems thinking is like a mindset thing? What Why don't I do yoga? or Why don't I do meditation? What do you what do you mean, man?

Unknown Speaker 13:33

Here's what I know. I'm not going to quote Einstein anymore. But my buddies at a corporation that I worked for, for a number of years had a very interesting word called metanoia. Which, which is the definition of metanoia is shift of mind. So yeah, I they don't necessarily have to do yoga, but I you know, you won't believe this, but I start all my Harvard classes. With the required reading, called the miracle of mindfulness by teknon, hot, who was a Vietnamese monk nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, then by Martin Luther King. And mindfulness is just understanding the world around you and being truly present. It's not a way out. It's just a consciousness of what's happening around you. And for some reason, and I usually get classes of 30 people from 18 to 20 countries, ranging from Europe and the former Eastern Europe, to China and Asia, to Latin America. And it seems to be a common thread, it attracts them to the idea of systems thinking, they have to be present in which they are both in the class and when they leave me. I keep in touch with them for many years. It connects the diversity of people to a common way of thinking which is systems thinking that we do in our class.

Scott Santucci 14:53

So I'm gonna ask or challenge a little bit here. I'm trying to change Some of our maybe more traditional thinkers, thinkers in our audience, and putting myself in the situation advocating for systems thinking. I would get say, it's just crystals and healing. That's what all Yoga is. How would we describe it to be more concrete? And what maybe what do you teach? teach your students in your class like in your class that you go through? I love that you're starting out with, Hey, you got to be more open minded to be able to embrace some of these concepts. And I like that you brought up counterintuitive, but what's the meat on the other side of all the counter intuition, a lot of people just don't like all that anxiety or ambiguity of getting getting to the point.

Unknown Speaker 15:45

But what they don't like more than that are the chronic issues that they face in their everyday business world. And when I say chronic problems, I mean problems that they thought they had solutions for that six months later, come back And rear their ugly head. And the reason for that is the busy pace of business today. And it's going to be even busier tomorrow is executives think like managers, they have to do lists. And the greatest achievement of their day is knocking off their to do list, right and go to tomorrow. So quick fix becomes a very valuable rep a tool in their repertoire. However, and actually quick fix has a good place in systems thinking. However, it doesn't get to the root of the problems and that's why six months later, these chronic problems, come back and bite them in the leg and they're stuck why we had a great solution for it. Well, you didn't have a great solution you had a quick fix that knocked it off your to do list. And now you got to come back to it. So take it down the can't kick the can down the road. Again down the road. So the so the attraction to not only my students but my clients is. So you're going to tell me you're going to send me a bill of goods maybe Alright, let's be setting Next year, you're going to sell me a bill of goods that's going to get my chronic problems off. So it stays sold. And I look him straight in the eye. Maybe from the back of a snake oil

Scott Santucci 17:11

wagon. I don't know. You got it? Yeah, I think we should adopt, like at the yoga studio, you're in the back of a yoga studio teaching me how

Unknown Speaker 17:19

to, like, know exactly. Who Kumbaya, you're gonna make me stretch. It ain't but but, but it's gonna make your problem chronic problem go away. And so here's, here's the deal. here's, here's the way your audience is working today around the world, no matter who your clients are. They're working at three levels. One is at an event level. And so if you picture a an iceberg, okay, so picture an iceberg in your mind. the very tip of the iceberg is working in an event level. So I asked my clients and my students, how many of you are problem solvers or put out fires and 90% Have a hit 90% of the hands go up. And they say 90% of their time is occupied, putting out fires and solving problems. So I, of course, play a jerk in the room, right? And I say, so let me get this straight. You're sitting in your office, twiddling your thumbs, waiting for the phone to ring with a problem. And then you can jump in and be that problem solved. Or you have your fire extinguisher ready to go and put out the fire. And by the way, one of my friends once said, beware of

Ep53 Overcoming the "Go Sell Value" Challenge with Chad Quinn and Jason Cunliffe

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 53

Nine 4x2 Lego blocks have over 9 Billion unique combinations. How many "legos" does your product, solution, or service have? No matter how you define a "lego" at your company, the permutations are astounding, and yet this is the challenge salespeople navigate daily.

On top of this, your company is changing -- rapidly. Moving from one form or the other. This journey represents another challenge salespeople must navigate.

In this podcast, Brian and Scott are joined by Chad Quinn, the CEO & Co-Founder, Ecosystems and Jason Cunliffe, Group VP Content Marketing Services at IDC. Chad and Jason have created a partnership. How did it form? By a shared client's definition of value and the blending of capabilities to help sellers navigate a complex buyer-seller relationship.

In this podcast, you'll hear:

The definition of value
Ways company's evolve their value communication approach
Ideas to make value clear
Ways to relieve seller burden in the sales process

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci,

Brian Lambert 00:36

Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian, I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives, as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way. What works and maybe what's more Important, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:02

Our focus is on you as a sales enablement leader and orchestrator. As an orchestrator, you need to develop specific characteristics to operate in the blended domain of strategy and tactics where you do both together well to help your company win. Our goal on the podcast to help you clarify the measures of success, gave you confidence to engage up and down and across the organization, and provide real examples of what it looks like to execute strategy and execute tech. As always, we start with a centering story. So I'm gonna pass it over to Scott Scott, what do you have for us?

Scott Santucci 01:36

So today's centering story is about a glass of water.

Unknown Speaker 01:43

There we go.

Brian Lambert 01:44

So well, that's gonna be hard to date.

Scott Santucci 01:47

No day Exactly. Well, it's timeless, right? So water is a is timeless with with regards to humanity's concerned. But when you think about water, it's its chemical composition is it's a bunch of molecules. those molecules are bouncing around. And what's interesting about water isn't the only substance on earth that exists in three different states. It's a, it exists in a gaseous state, so we breathe it in all the time. It exists in the liquid state. So Jason has a bottle of it right now. So it can deal with the heat down in Miami. And it also exists in a solid state. And that's really what we're going to zoom into is, is that the difference between the liquid state and the solid state? So did you know Brian, that ice actually is considered a mineral?

Brian Lambert 02:40

I did not know that. I might have known that, but I probably forgot it.

Scott Santucci 02:44

And so what's interesting about that is at at at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, zero degrees for our international listeners, something amazing happens is those molecules START STOP bouncing around so fast. They go really, really slow, and literally stop or freeze. And when they freeze, a lot of things happen. So one thing that happens is that the volume of this what was a liquid that now is now a solid is 9% larger. So if you've, if you've ever frozen a glass of water in your in your freezer, why does the glass break? It's because it's bigger. The other thing that's interesting about that is that in an in a solid state or a mineral state, it's less dense, so it floats on top of water. So there's a lot of interesting things about it. And what's even more interesting about that is when you just add something as simple as salt to the equation at a certain, you know, at a certain ratio. We're not really here to do a chemistry experiment, but that freezing point can drip down to negative six degrees Fahrenheit, and I didn't do the calculation for our international community. Sorry, I'm American. I know No matter,

Brian Lambert 04:00

the only international sometimes

Scott Santucci 04:02

Yeah, exactly. So somebody can go calculate it and post that out. But that's a 38 degree difference between a freezing point by just adding salt, salt to the equation. So those are some interesting facts about water. The last point that I want to make before I get the dreaded question from you hear, Brian, is that what's also interesting is, when you think about the people who study scientists who study water in its liquid form, they're very different than the people who study water in its frozen form. So think about glaciers. glaciers are just ice, they're studied by geologists. They're not studied by any other people. So and also the, when water gets transformed to water vapor, it's studied by meteorologists. So there's a whole bunch of different dynamics going on here with this simple liquid that we take for granted. I don't

Brian Lambert 04:58

know if you know this, Scott. But I think he said The word interesting seven times. And I'd have to ask our listeners, how many were interested that much in water ice. And I do have to ask you, though, because I'm really curious about this. So what?

Unknown Speaker 05:13

So?

Brian Lambert 05:15

So what is this?

Scott Santucci 05:17

What does this have to do with anything? Right? Yeah. Well, I, I love this quote from Mark Twain. It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure. That just ain't so. And what we're talking about here is that, let's really think about the difference. So as us as human beings, literally outside it's one degree if we're in London, or it's to me in DC, it's 33 degrees. Can we really tell the difference between one degree and zero degrees? Or one degree or 3033 degrees and 32 degrees? Can you tell that difference? None have us can observe that difference or tell that difference. We can't feel it. But it has a major transformative effect of going of converting ice from a liquid to a frickin mineral. Think about that.

So the reason that that that's, that's so important for our theme here today is that in the state of change as we're in this digital world, where we're we have all these different social capabilities, we've got digital capabilities, we've got new ways of rearranging content. We've got different ways to combine different different capabilities and an entirely new things like look at Uber, for example. They don't own a single cab, but yet they're the biggest transportation fleet on the planet. What's going on here? So the reason that I think water is a great metaphor to talk about our theme here, which is what what makes something valuable in a rapidly changing in a rapidly changing environment. That we do have something to base against, which is water. It's something that all of us take for granted. But it's the only substance that exists in three different states that that, that we all can relate to.

Brian Lambert 07:12

I love it makes sense. And, you know, we're in a very transformative state. And some of us are boiling and some of us might be frozen and locked up. And we need to transition states. I love that analogy.

Scott Santucci 07:24

And the reason that we're bringing that and the reason I'm excited for our special guests here today, is that sometimes going back to that quote, it ain't what we don't know. That gets you into trouble. AKA be curious. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so. It's not freezing out. It's just cold. Well, the ice around you will tell you differently. So I'm really excited to introduce Jason and Chad to join our show, and they'll introduce themselves a little bit here. Jason works with With ITC, and he's, he's responsible for their sales enablement and content and contact practice. And Chad is the CEO of ecosystems. And these two people have mixed their water and salt together or they're, you know, in our prep, we were calling a chocolate and peanut butter. They've got some new ingredients together. So I've known Jason for quite a bit bit of time, he was very helpful in helping us launch the sales enablement society. So Jason, welcome to the show. Would you like to introduce yourself a little bit to our audience?

Unknown Speaker 08:36

Scott, thanks very much. Yeah, it's name is Jason Cunliffe group VP of our content marketing services team at IDC responsibility for sales enablement practice as well. And, you know, I am a also a former bag carrying quota carrying sales representative prior to my career at IDC and One of my, you know, personal objectives that I'm constantly trying to solve for is being that icebreaker if you will, between attended, right between the marketing and the sales function, right is it sometimes you know where we're stuck in the ice up in the frozen tundra in the Bay of Fundy if you will. And we need to we need to see movement between these two functions. So happy to be on the on the show today and have a good conversation.

Scott Santucci 09:36

Excellent. And Also joining us is is Chad. So I mentioned Chad, Chad. I know I've known Chad mostly by following what he what he posts. Chad's been way out on the vanguard way, way, way, way out on the vanguard about advocating outcome selling and if you've been following on our on our podcast, Episode 51, we had a deep dive into it. Come sound with Bob Apollo. Well, Chad's been advocating this kind of approach for just eons of value and value selling approach. So Chad, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and your company and what you're doing.

Unknown Speaker 10:13

Thank you, Scott. Great to be here. great pleasure. Also, thank you, Brian. And great to have some time with Jason Chad Quinn, CEO of ecosystems, really, our passion and purpose and ecosystems is to make value clear. And we have a sales excellence platform that does that. To kind of riff a little bit off of Scott's centering story, if you think of that glass of water, and you think about value value is always subjective. It's always in the context or relative to the situation you're in. So having gold you would say arguably, a gold bar has a lot of intrinsic and extrinsic value. But if you're in the desert, a glass of water is much more valuable. And so that's the fun excitement we can have in our discussion is the relativity and the subjectivity around values. And how to best convey to our customers.

Scott Santucci 11:03

I was so hoping you were gonna go there. The reason I picked a glass of water is because of that exact analogy about intrinsic versus objective value. And you you will work perfectly. Oh, that's fantastic. I'm so excited. This is unrehearsed by the way. So this is how great our our guests are. So what we're what we're doing is what I'm really fascinated with is in the state of change, as our listeners have. We've done more post COVID research than anybody we've published. Over 20 different podcasts of accessible content. We've had four keynote quality deep deep dive webinars, we've got another one coming up. And what we're seeing is a lot a lot of change around and what's what sparked me was there was this announcement maybe a month ago, where ecosystems and IDC announced a partnership and I want to unpack that but What I want to first start off with is, let's get to know our our guests a little bit and figure out the origin story of how the heck these two ingredients got got together. And let's figure figure out how we mix the mix the water together, so to speak. So Chad, you've been on the soapbox for a long, long time, as I alluded to earlier about selling to value. What trends are you seeing that that are happening that b2b companies are missing?

Unknown Speaker 12:30

I think Scott, let's do it as a visual for our listeners. So let's visualize together that there's a door between you and your customer. And that door represents access into how they see value. Today, regrettably, I think sellers are looking through the keyhole. And that's the challenge. They're looking through the keyhole of that door, and only within this very small sliver of what I would call functional value. And we want to work with them to open that door with the customer and look at all the dimensions of value, so that they're not having this very narrow lens into what that word means.

Scott Santucci 13:11

Awesome. That's great. It's very illuminating. So Jason, can you comment on on that? What are you from an IDC perspective? What are you seeing in terms of gaps in value? And what kind of research are you illuminating to highlight that gap? How do we make it better to where b2b companies can get customers to open that door?

Unknown Speaker 13:34

Right. So certainly the buying landscape has changed dramatically, right? In the past few months, companies reinventing themselves in the context of the next normal. Many, in many cases face an existential threat to survival. And I see this every day in calls in terms of, you know, the sales and marketing function, the leaders are still wrapping their heads around On what normal is supposed to look like today, right. And of course, the the selling communities is boxed into the virtual world and have an entirely new value script and buyer landscape that they're dealing with. And, you know, I think these are themes that we've, I've been working on personally, but I think, you know, recent events, economic crises, and so forth, it's just really put all of this under the microscope and force factoring it to, you know, to be solved for in a more meaningful, full way. So we, you know, at IDC, we've put out some research as well on the five stages to recovery. We've worked with Chad on that as well, in terms of helping our own customers figure out how to flatten their own curve, and move you know, through from, you know, cost optimization, the business resiliency to targeted investments through to you know, what the future and future enterprise is supposed to look like. So we've got we've got a lot of talk, a lot of times to want to talk about today in terms of business value and the research that IDC produces to help solve for those challenges

Scott Santucci 15:08

on it. So in other words, the the overall economic climate is not unlike changing the temperature around a glass of water. All right, we were accustomed to one, maybe a lukewarm environment or the maybe the molecules were moving around, not as fast as the molecules when it's super, super hot. And, you know, now things are freezing, or maybe they're freezing, maybe they're heating up. But whatever the case is the the current state or status quo, our current glass of water, it's going to change and it's going to change into something out and that's, that's what both of you guys are observing. Is that fair?

Unknown Speaker 15:51

Yeah. Yeah, I would say that the cost of doing nothing is really high.

Scott Santucci 15:57

Right, right. And so that's been one Have those points? Well, you know, to quote rush if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice, right? Right. status quo is probably the worst thing that you can do. Awesome. So let's go into, you know, the next thing. So, okay. That was an interesting conversation about value and concepts of value. I'm still trying to figure out, Okay, we've got ecosystems has a software platform to help people do that. And IDC have always known. Aren't you guys that the people that write reports on stuff? So Jason, you're in the content business, right? So how would people go about using IDC content to help with sales? Isn't that for analyst relations people or marketing people? I don't, I don't get it. I'm just trying to be like, you know, put some red meat on the table to get us thought acting good acting, Scott.

Unknown Speaker 16:53

Thank you. That's Yeah, that's

Scott Santucci 16:56

it. Thank you. I was gonna go there.

Unknown Speaker 16:58

So So we've You know, we've known for a long time that in the in the content marketing world that that, you know, salespeople will use pretty much any piece of content at their disposal to carry a conversation forward. Right. And some of that content is limited in its value to do that, and some of it is extremely valuable. And over the years, we've found that, of course, our ROI and business value practice that produces a lot of this custom content fits that that latter bill, right, which is, which is business value studies, ROI studies, but these are things that have traditionally been used or what we would call marketing purposes. Right. And, you know, over time, we you know, through discussions with our customers and speaking with sales leaders within those organizations, you know, we really keyed in on the fact that you know, the all of these engagement activities that that the market function typically tees up, it really has to be aligned and put forth in a way that the sales function can carry forward not only in an intelligent manner, but in a measurable way. Right. And so solving for that dynamic sort of been the key to solving for that dynamic has really been a key focus of mine for for many years now because to me that unlocks the whole value of the marketing function where you can tie that back to the impact it's having on sales pipeline, so forth.

Scott Santucci 18:35

Got it. So my reaction to that and I'm putting words in your mouth, please feel free to spit out what doesn't fit in but my my reaction to that is okay, having myself been in a research business. Well we want to do is we want to figure out what do our customers the end customers care about? And want one thing that I think we can all agree on is a lot of the times the things that Customers care about is so different from the agenda of the b2b sales and marketing company, that there's a big rift there. So we can do...

Ep52 Orchestrating Relevant Sales Conversations with Imogen McCourt and Doug Clower

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 52

What happens when you get people together remotely or in-person to build something to "help sales sell?". Take an Insider's look at what it takes to navigate internal perspectives, challenges, and vision to co-create value together.

Imogen and Doug join the guys to discuss their work. They provide real-world examples that illuminate and provide structure to the challenges they overcome while working with marketing, sales, and product groups. You'll hear a lively discussion about what it means to orchestrate by blending together both strategy and tactics to simplify sales while achieving business objectives.

Take a listen to learn more about:

Why orchestration is valuable to executives
What orchestration "looks like" to the leaders involved
Ways to overcome internal bias and people who want to "steamroll" the solution
Overcoming siloed thinking by creating clarity through the work

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Scott Santucci 00:47

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, issues as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works and maybe most Importantly, what doesn't?

Brian Lambert 01:01

That's right Scott. And our focus is on you. The sales enablement orchestrator. As you know, as leaders in your business, you need to develop specific characteristics that we've been calling Orchestration, we want you to understand what it means to help clarify the measures of success. We want to give you examples, Orchestration looks like as you you operate in the gap between strategy and execution to do both at the same time. And we want to give you confidence to engage up down and across your organization to help with that and breathe life into this concept of Orchestration. We actually have two guests with us today, and they've been on the show before, but they're also helping and they're very passionately involved in clarifying the role of sales enablement, as orchestrating role and what it means to be an orchestrator. So we've got Imogen McCourt and Doug Clower joining us today. Hey guys, how you doing? Can you introduce yourself?

Unknown Speaker 01:54

Certainly, Brian and Scott. Thanks for having us on again. I guess we didn't do too badly Last time, so we get to come back and do a little bit more. Anyway, my name is Doug clower. I'm a, I'm a global enablement director and and I'm an orchestrator to I guess that's the best way to describe it. I'm passionate about this. It makes so much sense. And it does give so much value to the companies that we work with. So thanks.

Unknown Speaker 02:19

Yeah. And I'm imaging McCourt, and it's lovely to be back, spending some more time with you chaps, I co founded an organization called and grow.io. And we focus on helping companies with the business of sales, helping the senior executive team understand exactly how they should be orchestrating things like that. So I'm really delighted to be part of this today, and also the other work that we're doing at the side.

Brian Lambert 02:39

That's awesome. Yes, very excited to have you guys on and thank you so much for the time that you continue to invest in sales enablement and sharing with our listeners. And what we had is a bit of a shared experience this week, all all four of us. So me, Doug, image in and also Scott. He did a webinar this week, and he did the webinar on the concept of routes to value. And this was a great discussion you can find out more about it if you go to Commercial Ratio comm you can get the recordings and I definitely encourage everybody in insider nation to listen to that recording is a really important concept about linking your your company's capabilities to your customers challenges and outcomes, and the role of salespeople and the selling ecosystem and closing that gap in a route to value. This particular podcast. What I wanted to do is really slow down and talk about the concept of orchestrating what seems to be a simple concept of, of helping salespeople connect the dots and, and sell to customers. And I wanted to ask you imagine, you know, how did the webinar relate to you and what takeaways Did you have from it?

Unknown Speaker 03:49

Well, I mean, it's a fantastic the whole series has been really powerful to listen and learn and be part of and, and the webinar yesterday, I'm going to have to pronounce it root value. I'm sorry, when you listen to the webinar, you'll know that there's English to English translation thing. I'm just, I'm sorry, I'm protecting the global political audience. But yeah, it was really interesting. I, you know, there's such complexity in keeping focused on the strategic work that we need to do is orchestrators, but also understanding some of the practical and tactical things too. And so much of it resonated. But there's one slide, which was a panoramic view of a workshop very, lots going on lots on the walls. And I'll be honest, it was like, it was like flashbacks to a workshop that Brian and Scott You helped me design and run when I really just started as head of sales namens at Forrester.

So I don't know how much you guys remember about that. But we were trying just to simply think about the new go to market strategy that they were they were pivoting around, and how what value that might mean to our clients, but actually, what we were trying to do and what we ended up Doing was just trying to get a pick list of priority for the sales enablement group for my small and immaculately formed team. And I'll be honest, it escalated out of all control. So we started with a pick list of heads of department, head of marketing, things like that, to try and do this to try and get us all on the same page about how we work together. And then I think there was 30 plus people in the room, and all hell broke loose. And we were just trying to get everybody to come together around the story of why we had decided to move to this and what value it brought to the marketplace. And it was everybody had an opinion, everybody brought their agenda into the room. So you know, seeing this workshop sort of slide put out in front of me with all of these incredibly important and valuable things to do that it just took me straight back there, right. That's the beginning of running sales name of departments. And I'll be interested what you thought of that session and whether you have any memories from it.

Brian Lambert 05:55

Yeah, well, I'm gonna ask, you know, Scott, actually to help our listeners out To make sure that our listeners Scott are aware a little bit around why workshop and kind of what was happening in the workshop that that slide generated from the webinar. Because it's a it's a panoramic his his image and said there's a lot of things that happened in the room I was in the room and there was a lot of things like value map or stakeholders and, you know, here's a space to think out loud, or here's a different space to show some tools or progress. And there's a lot of things on the wall. And but really, what was the purpose of the workshop? Scott and what why workshop and how does that relate to what imaging was talking about everybody coming together? Yeah. So

Scott Santucci 06:38

let's distinguish a few things. So Imogen talked about routes to value and her past experience with that, and it took her back to a time I don't know maybe 810 years ago at Forrester. Yeah, yeah. Trying to get a whole bunch People together. So one of the one of the concepts that we had talked about earlier in this, in this webinar was the concept of Productitis. And I think what, we didn't have that term 10 years ago, and again, but we were seeing absolute symptoms of Productitis. Individual marketers who just didn't really care necessarily about the value proposition, but Okay, so what leads do we no need to go generate for who individual are it's tough to come p&l groups, but different businesses, like Forrester had, at the time had a leadership conference counsel product, then there's the general research product, then there's the consulting group, and all we were trying to do is say, what's the what's the simple one value proposition that we give to each of these different customers, and to images point, everybody was showing up with their own ideas. I was I, you know, if I'm in consulting, I really don't care what the research value proposition is, or the Leadership Council group sort of proposition is I care of making sure the consulting value propositions delivered. And so what is this balance? What is our actual business strategy so that the business strategy images was mentioning was a pivot to be role focused. So instead of having research around topics, the research and the delivery mechanism was going to be around individual roles.

So that's a tough pivot and upon itself as well, so it's a strategic pivot. So you have all of these different variables going on at the same time. So that was then. So kind of the Wayback Machine 10 years ago, what what Imogen was referring to is a slide, which is part of the process. So at the end of our Rouse devalue presentation, we talked about, hey, here are the problems and in the middle section we talked about, let's illuminate What an outcome is from a customer's point of view. Now the second part, then the third part then would be, what methodology Do you follow to put it all in action, because you can't just have one group go and build a playbook or another group build a value map and another group do something else, because nothing's going to tie it all together. So what we were doing is introducing a series of workshops or techniques that follow design thinking principles to get everybody together. So what when Brian was saying he was in the room, Brian was in the room of the picture that was described or the panoramic view image and says it way better than I do. And what we're trying to eliminate here is let's let's plot out all of the different Verrier variables of why you people just, you know, go get people involved. So going back to the images point of view at the beginning, which was, Hey, this is simple. All we were trying to do is simply get Ba ba ba ba well Sales is simple but simple is hard. And I think that's what we're what we're experiencing. We're experiencing in this story, real life examples of Stratecution coming to life, real life examples of the need for Orchestration, what happens when you don't have it? Things disintegrate into into utter chaos that's unbelievably frustrating for everybody involved. And what's the value moving forward? Because the situation that Forrester was trying to address is exactly the situation most companies are in today.

Brian Lambert 10:36

Yeah, that's great. And you're mentioning and this is highlighting to to phenomenon I love you know, dog or image you need to chime in on this, but one is this phenomenon of, Hey, you know what, I talked to you perhaps individually, and everybody's focused on customers and everybody wants to do the right thing. Yet, however, when you get in a room full of 30 other people what what is Turn into and what happens there? So there's this phenomenon of individually doing it versus doing it in a group that that can happen. And then the second piece is, Scott, you said very specifically, well, you can't have one person do a playbook you can't have one person, maybe building a message. And then you know, I would add, you can't have one person, you know, aligning it in the in the platform or of enablement platform or whatever. But yeah, that's, that's what that's what people do. So of course, of course, they can do that, but you added the qualifier of, or else it won't be integrated, and it won't be integrated for sales. So those two phenomenon this idea of what happens individually versus a group and then the other phenomenon of how the work gets done where you parse it up out and you get it done you check it off versus integrating it from the for sales or the lifeblood of sales. What do you guys think of that? That's what strikes My mind is what what the challenges of orchestration are and a picture like this? A dog or imaging Do you have any thoughts? on that,

Unknown Speaker 12:01

I think what is so illustrative of that particular image or that picture, that panorama of it's in there. It's really about all the different elements or people that have a role or some sort of outcome that they're chasing. And in most cases, everybody says, I have the customer in mind, but a lot of times they come with their own conceived agenda is like, the customer needs this feature, or the customer wants this executable or this guarantee, or they want this price or whatever it happens to be. And the idea is, you have to collectively bring those together and bring them into alignment. That's one of the bigger challenges. I think, augmentation to this particular picture that that we're referring to, for me was the outcomes slide. The one words it's the building and there's like six different outcomes and those outcomes you have to understand what level you're talking to. So the idea of orchestration, it's hard because you got to get get everybody to begin to understand what are we targeting? What is it we're looking for? What is the customer expect? What's the outcome we're trying to get to, which I think was at the heart of the webcast. It was this beautiful discussion, it goes back to that, that one diagram, Scott, that you put together, where outcome was in the middle, and the six elements were around the outside. That was the power of that. And that's where the the challenges and at least that's the way it resonated for me. That's, that's one of the challenges I've, I've dealt with on a number of occasions.

Unknown Speaker 13:36

And then if I may, I'm going to add to that to Doug, I think you're actually right to bring it to the outcome piece as well. You know, we the last time we did our podcast, actually, we talked about how important their conversation the actual conversation between the salesperson and the client is and the value is added when you can discuss what great outcomes you can work with them, what they eat, what they can change towards them and why. But to me, I also think there's this piece about walking riches, there are so many moving parts, you know, there are so many people who passionately care about, do we understand who the wallet owner is or where the budget holders are, and that will help our sales organization and, and then that suddenly internal again that suddenly about the company structure or how we company and sell to them. But what's really hard is actually taking this, this idea of an outcome that we could deliver, and turning that into something that we can actually add value with and not complicate our clients lives. You know, the forester workshop, everybody came in, really believing that they had and having out the clients best interests in heart, but not fully understanding how you turn that translate that into something that can be sold. That is empathetic that drives and delivers value that can be understood in the marketplace. And I think that's the really smart bit about Orchestration here is simplifying enough. Without dumbing down and providing enough of the environment and facilitation to make people look at each other and see how they can come collectively together to drive more value, not look at each other and think, well, they're just going to take sales resource that I really should have because my products really powerful for our clients or, but now marketing are going to focus on something else. I want them to focus on something else. And I think the Orchestrator has to be both incredibly strong leader as Scott, you've said over and over again, but also this really powerful, quiet person who's sitting behind the scenes making sure that everybody understands. And the bigger picture the whole that the outcome that Doug's talking about, which is always client side is always client side outcome.

Brian Lambert 15:44

Yeah, these are great. I mean, you're outlining image and and this concept of many moving parts, and I think everybody would agree with that. So for example, if you have a room full of 30 people representing product and marketing and sales enablement and sales, and Maybe the Commercial Officer, they're all in the room, they're probably gonna say, you know what, there is a lot of moving parts here. There is a lot of individual perspective that we need to bring in. You know, everybody has a point of view on what's worked before perhaps, or, you know, what, we all should have the same. And we probably all Do you have a definition of value. Is it the same? I don't know. But we probably all think we know what's valuable. And we probably all believe that we should be working together to figure this figure this out. That's why we're in the meeting. So this idea of, you know, we we're going to be in an environment, and an environment is going to be created for us to to work together. And then yeah, somebody's probably going to lead this and I'm going to participate. these are these are knowable things. And yet something happens in the room that might get in the way. And, you know, what is that? And then, you know, to your point image in this idea of how do you lead through that lead a group of people who are all smart that really do want to do the right thing, however, might Not necessarily see, the bigger, I don't know, synthesis of the bigger components or the large components that need to come together in a customer conversation, right? Well,

Unknown Speaker 17:11

at least in a case like that, don't doesn't that individual or that group, that department that silo whatever you want to call them? Don't they sort of have their blinders on? They can't see the bigger picture. They're still focused on the on the customer, but they're not necessarily saying, well, they're focused on the customer too. So how can I work with them to deliver a more powerful outcome for the customer from us as the company? That's, that's one of the key things. It's it's a blinder syndrome. And, and I've seen that before imaging, you seen that analogy? Does that make sense to you?

Unknown Speaker 17:48

Yeah, absolutely. It's like and the harder it gets, the more entrenched people get, the more they focus on what they know. They're good at what they know they're particularly gold at rather than having the...

Ep51 A Sales Leader’s View of Selling Business Outcomes with Bob Apollo

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 51

Our focus on this podcast is for you sales enablement leaders and orchestrators. As an orchestrator. You need to develop skills to be mission and goal focused. prioritize the right goals and the right moments, guide the narrative by confronting reality, drive results by design, not effort and unlock energy to create momentum. To do that, today, we've got a special guest is going to join us to talk about a very important topic, and that is selling outcomes.

If you're a devout listener, and insider nation member, you will already know this illustrious guest. He was in our panel or on our sales leader COVID panel. And I'm delighted to have Bob Apollo just himself. So if you don't know about Bob, one of the things that he's doing that's really exciting, is he's launched an outcome centric Academy.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Brian Lambert 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:49

Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way, what works and maybe What's more important, what doesn't?

Brian Lambert 01:02

Scott Santucci 01:31

Absolutely. So if you're a devout listener, and insider nation member, you will already know this illustrious guest. He was in our panel or on our sales leader COVID panel. And I'm delighted to have Bob Apollo just himself. So if you don't know about Bob, one of the things that he's doing that's really exciting, is he's launched an outcome centric Academy. So before I get into more details about that, let's Bob Tell us a little bit about yourself in specific What is this outcome centric Academy in first place?

Bob Apollo 02:06

Yeah, thanks, Scott, and really happy to be back with the program again. So my career really has been one of spanning sales and marketing for a variety of organizations over the years. But most recently, I've been spending my time working with, I suppose what you're characterized as scale up b2b tech based businesses, for whom sales enablement, sales effectiveness, and all of the things that go with that absolutely essential foundations for building a growing business and delivering predictable outcomes.

Scott Santucci 02:46

Awesome. So what we're going to do here is one of the things that we're doing on our show is we're trying to create more opportunities to learn. And as you've been, as you know, we've had several webinars that are all predicated on post COVID research. And the last webinar that we did is was around routes to value enable customers, enabling customers to buy. So what we're going to do is just like we did with Joe Hayes, is we're going to get a sales leaders perspective on it. And then I expect we're going to spend a lot of time Bob talking about outcomes and what exactly they mean. So what we're first going to do is ask Bob to highlight for him, what are three things that most resonated with him about what we shared, and then we're going to get into a conversation there of who knows where we're going to go with Bob and his rapier wit. And then what we're going to do is we're going to wrap up with Brian putting together what what he heard and what's important for you as a sales enablement orchestrator. So Bob, what are what are three things that you got from the from the webinar?

Bob Apollo 03:53

What you know, the first one is, you've given a name to a date Disease the organization's have been suffering from for years.

And you call it proper eye test. And it's from my observation.

It's the sort of a reflection of an inside out perspective on the part of typically technology companies, but not exclusively, who are obsessed about, you know, the products they create the features that they've developed, you know, competitive knockoffs and so on. And all the while they're thinking about that, they're not thinking about what the customer is actually trying to achieve, or why the customer might be motivated to buy anything, let alone their product in the first place. So that's the sort of first thing you've named something that I suspect people will recognize that they've been suffering from, whether it's sales enablement people, whether it's sales People, other members of the organization, you know, I think we've all been blighted by product itis in our time.

Scott Santucci 05:08

ie blighted. That's a great word, what I think would be really fun. So if you haven't watched the webinar, you can go to inside sales enablement comm and download it and watch it. But I think will be really fun. And thinking you think hearing your response to it, I think it'd be really, really fun to walk through and go through the product, outcome view back and forth, sort of like a he said, she said with you. So what was your second second takeaway?

Bob Apollo 05:36

Well, the second one, which again resonates very much with my perspective on how people make buying decisions, is customers start on a path towards change because they've got issues. And the best thing that a salesperson could do in their early engagement with a customer is to really ask Cover and develop those issues and their implications. And, you know, we're back to what's the role that sales enablement can play in that. It's equipping the salespeople to have those issue lead conversations. And don't just stop when you've uncovered an issue and then revert to type and pitch your product, stick with the problems, stick with the issues stick with the reason to change and really explore the implications with the customer of what would happen if they just carried on their current path. So that was the second thing, you know, highlighting. I think you sort of quoted in the maybe a couple of places in that webinar, why, why and how our customers so value, a conversation about it business issues, rather than product features.

Scott Santucci 06:54

So what's interesting about that, and if you're if you're joining, there were lots of quotes They were dense quotes, and they were hard to read properly during the webinar. And I even got some feedback they shouldn't read rate them out. But the reason that I put a lot in there is that I want people to have them on their decks. Yeah, and quote them a lot because nothing helps bring to life these problems than hearing the voices of executive level buyers of what's not happening. And it's it's a ubiquitous problem. And I think we have to all do a much better job. sales enablement. People talk about buyers journey and being but buyer centered and you know, cut buying enablement we're talking about. We've been hearing a lot of these things for a long time, but we're not really addressing the challenges. So bringing these quotes to bear I think, I think help a lot. And I

Bob Apollo 07:49

think sometimes we can think that content by itself will sell but, but really, I think the purpose of content is to stimulate conversation. Yes. And you know, it's In those conversations, those one to one or small group conversations between the salesperson and the representatives of the customer, where the real traction happens.

Scott Santucci 08:10

And I think that's a, that's a great point. Because one of the things that's been very fascinating, and this is why we're trying to do this on our show, is I learn as much if not more from the feedback after these, these webinars, and we don't have a way to share it. And bataya the whole idea, the whole section that we had in there about mapping out the customers and the agreement network and everything like that resonates so strongly with sales leaders. It's unbelievable how much it resonates because they know in their heart of heart, I'm sparking a conversation so I can co create value with my customer. What's interesting, though, Bob is the people who work in the rest of the company. They tend to not see that because they want the salesperson to prescribe the product that they have, instead of the CO create whatever the outcome is,

Bob Apollo 09:08

yeah, even heaven forbid, they want the salesperson to para word for word, their company presentation not realizing that they're not just presenting into the ether. They're presenting to one or a number of people. And if that presentation doesn't stimulate a conversation that might go off piste because you learn something about the customer and you react to it. I mean, that whole idea of prescribing, coaching training people to give Word Perfect presentations almost always reinforces product itis.

Scott Santucci 09:47

That's right, inevitably. What's fascinating about that is these are things that if you talk with people who have a lot of sales experience, you're like, Well, duh, of course that's what you have to do. And then it's like, well, I'm not learning anything new. But the issue isn't about you. The issue is how do you get the rest of the organization to get aligned behind you? And that's challenged. And you have to recognize that not everybody has the same degree of client empathy that maybe you have, and maybe not all of your salespeople have, which I think gets us into what's your third takeaway?

Bob Apollo 10:26

Well, that might well be your illumination of the power of outcomes as part of successfully engaging with the customer. You know, we need to avoid product itis. We need to equip and coach our salespeople to have really powerful conversations about issues and bring insights to bear against those issues. And the third element is so I don't think a customer starts a buying process, at least in a complex search. Well, you know, it's a discretionary purchase, they won't initiate the buying process seriously, unless there's something that looks like an issue that needs to be dealt with. And I'd also suggest they won't conclude the buying process, unless they're confident in the outcomes, that the change that's being proposed to them is going to deliver.

Scott Santucci 11:21

Yeah. And I think that's so well stated. And I think what, what I'm very curious to get your feedback, so we haven't had a chance to rehearse this, that. So one of the things that we've created is an outcome wheel. And the reason that we create that outcome wheel is to provide a checklist of all the things that an executive is probably going to ask in their head, before they're willing to move forward with something. And we want to we tend to think about step one, I do this step two, I do this step two, three, I do this, but that's not the reality of human beings. We tend to operate holistically. So the outcome wheel has a, you know, a couple parts starting with what's the achieved end state. But I think some people start with that's all an outcome is. So I guess what I want to do is have a conversation with you, Bob about what actually is an outcome?

Bob Apollo 12:16

Okay. Well, you know, I think actually outcomes apply to a number of phases in the relationship between a salesperson and a prospective customer. That is an ultimate outcome, which is really what the customer seeks to achieve as a result of engaging in a change program. But I think we also have incremental outcomes, which are things which demonstrate progress towards achieving that ultimate goal and to the point you make with your wheel, some of those outcomes tap into strategic perspectives, some into operational perspective. Some into a variety of other perspectives, and you've identified half a dozen in that in that wheel. And again, this is really part of the art of conversation as to how we set up an engage conversation with the customer around these different manifestations of outcome and how we seek to move forward progressively with the customer. With many or incremental outcomes or advances however you choose to characterize them, that when they are strung together, result in the customer achieving what they need to and, and, and contrasting that with the situation they're in at the moment. And I'll make a brief reference about the importance of contrast. Because I think if there's only a narrow a perceived narrow difference between the current trajectory the customer is following and the difference An outcome they might achieve. If they accepted your change programming proposal. If there's a narrow gap, it's not unlikely that they'll stick with what they've got right there isn't sufficient meeting it. So we need to be creating a stretching a perceived gap between where they're heading today, and where they could actually get to. If we work with them, help them collaborate with them, deliver capabilities, help them adopt an approach that maximizes their chances of getting that desired outcome.

Scott Santucci 14:37

That's spot on and I what I want to do is, I want to unpack what we're talking about here for our listeners. Everything that Bob's talking about, are very specific details that you have to do on a one to one basis. The reason that we created the outcome wheel however, is that you can't prescribe For Bob, it was a let's take the role that I'm the sales enablement person, I'm enabling Bob, there's no way I can prescribe for Bob, what's going to happen because Bob can't prescribe what's going to happen with the customer because the customer is going to have their own conversation. So we have to equip Bob has to be trained and knowledgeable enough to know what value is, how to handle it, etc. And I have to be able to organize content here. So let's talk about what that outcome wheel is and what its elements are. element number one is to be able to paint or what's an achieved in state. So what I have to do is I have to be able to say, hey, Bob, here are some end results of where customer where we've helped customers be successful with other this identity. And Bob needs to understand it well enough to where he can present that in front of a customer and make it their own

Bob Apollo 15:54

because it has to be their own. And just to an observation on that. Again, thinking about how we equip salespeople To accomplish this, the power of anecdote and story exactly conveying that vision is if I struggled to think you can properly articulate an outcome without having some ability, custom stories, experiences, anecdotes, and so on.

Scott Santucci 16:22

That is so well stated. And really what we have to do is we have to blend, Bob has to have the skill of telling a story. And I have to give them the script more or less, I don't mean script, like, I need to give them the outline of the telling the story. Right. So there's the both of those parts. The second thing, the second attribute is framed through the lens of an executive owner. There's somebody who's going to who's going to get fired if that outcome doesn't achieve or is going to get promoted, if that achieved and we have to message it to that person. Speaking in the abstract doesn't work. Speaking minion level work doesn't work. It has to be in The language of that targeted stakeholder.

Unknown Speaker 17:02

Right?

Scott Santucci 17:04

And so you can imagine how much training goes into learning how to speak that language. But also we have to make sure if we're preparing content that we've done the homework that we've interviewed, enough CIOs, if we're trying to talk to CIOs are enough CFOs. And we've role played out that content because writing stuff down and talking to stuff is very, very different. And we want Bob talking with them, because we want them having conversations.

Bob Apollo 17:31

And just to the point of the executive stakeholders, I think we also need to judge because sometimes it can be a bit deceptive content. People can carry titles, but not necessarily either the authority or the desire for change, that we've got to make an assessment whether the person we're depending on not to champion our solution, but to champion the project. That's really distinction is somebody who's a change agent and respected change agent. within their organization is somebody who understands how to get things done.

Scott Santucci 18:07

That's right, and what So basically, what I would need to do is I would need to go and find other change agents in our customer base, come up with some sort of criteria to inform Bob of what that criteria is. But Bob has to know, to determine whether that person that he's talking to is, so Bob has to have the skill, but if I'm not providing him the things to look for, based on research, or based on what we're doing, we're putting all the burden on Bob, and that's not fair. How can Bob know how many people have Bob has Bob worried about or talk to,

Bob Apollo 18:43

to bring this back to the sales enablement agenda? You know, there'll be a handful of salespeople in any organization who are just naturally gifted at this and they might actually be the source for some of the insights we want to share with their peers. But the greatest impact on absolutely convinced this is by elevating otherwise, you know, good enough core competence salespeople to be that much more polished and effective.

In in having these conversations.

Scott Santucci 19:12

Yes, yes. And the Polish matters a lot. So that's why we want to have good training that's in sync. It also has to have the right structure as well. So the third, the third attribute is framed as an initiative. And what does that mean? executives fund initiatives. They don't fund your products. There is nobody out there who's going to say we're going to do project by product from you. That doesn't have it's not how it works. They come up with an initiative. They give it some sort of internal identity. They know where they're going, and they're after their business result, not your software or...

Ep50 Synthesis vs. Analysis and the Power of Improv with Brooke Spatz

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 50

Theres a huge difference between analysis and synthesis. Analysis requires you to break things down, measure them, and understand what happened. The very nature of "analysis" is rooted in the past, and the assumption that understanding what happened helps you figure out what to do. But, what happens when a pandemic hits, your company is going through digital transformation, and what worked in the past is no longer working?

That's where synthesis becomes critically important. Why? Synthesis provides you the interconnection of seemingly unrelated components and the ability to project what to do to help "skate to the puck" and add immense value as an orchestrator.

In this episode, we're joined by Brooke Spatz, a Sales Enablement Orchestrator in the middle of a transformation to help her company move from selling products to selling a platform. Tapping into her background as an actor, the guys explore the difference between success in the past vs. success today by exploring what it means to analyze vs. synthesize to create value for the organization. Improvisation seems like it's free-flowing and the like, but really to make that art form, there is a whole slew of rules that you need to learn. Brooke helps us explore so you can Orchestrate in the flow of business.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:36

Welcome to the inside sales enablement Podcast, where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions, the market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take Behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 01:07

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 01:09

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders.

Scott Santucci 01:12

Our podcast is for sales enablement leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies. Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enable initiatives as analysts, consultants, or practitioners. We've learned the hard way we just did in our pre free work here. Because this is a recording of a previous one. We've learned the hard way what works and what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:43

Yeah, ask us about it sometime. I it was interesting, warm up to this call. And I think you guys are in for a real treat, because we're gonna be talking about analysis versus synthesis. As a sales enablement leader, you're an orchestrator and perspectives matter. And one of the things we're focused on here in season two is Understanding different perspectives, and more importantly, bringing people together to move forward to help clarify measures of success, provide examples of what it means to blend strategy and execution together to drive results and really gain the confidence to have more meaningful conversations in and among those people responsible for helping sales be successful. And as you guys know, we usually start with a centering story to Scott, take it away. What kind of story do you have for us today?

Scott Santucci 02:27

What we're gonna have to do is go way back normally we start our stories in the 1800s or something like that. So we're going to go way back and we're going to go way back to his early as 391 BC. That's 391 BC. That's where we're starting our story from

Brian Lambert 02:45

All right, great. Well,

Scott Santucci 02:47

and what we're talking about is something called the attilan farce. The atone for

Brian Lambert 02:55

it the what attilan

Scott Santucci 02:58

for Exelon farce and Basically what the Italian farce is, it's, it's a style of theater that the Romans invented and if you kind of gotta go way back and you know, think about Greek mythology, and all those weird Greek plays that they did with their Lyle's, and, you know, all the stabbings and the, you know, the Greek tragedy that always end up so depressed. The Romans, of course, rip that off, because a lot of Romans ripped off Greek culture. And they were doing those Greek tragedies too. But the Romans, you know, it just, it was too heavy. A crowd, how many? How many plays Can you watch where everybody dies at the end? So what happened is, if you kind of can picture this, if you if you know, like acting and they have those masks, and they have a frowny mask and the big smiley mask with the heavy accentuated facial expressions, those come from the Greek model, so you would act with these masks on

Brian Lambert 03:58

you put them in front of your face. Good, happy now.

Scott Santucci 04:01

Exactly right? Remember that that's what acting was, I guess they didn't trust the craft and they had to have tools. You know, acting enablement Greek style one on one. Okay, so now we're fast forward to it, you do that. But what happened is in this town of a tiller, not to tell the Huns that's different in the Roman Empire, that what they really started doing is something different. And after the heavy, heavy, heavy main event, the actors would get on and sort of riff they would play on redoing that whole, that whole play, but they'd redo it, comedic and set hence, hence the idea of a farce. In no time. That became wildly popular. So it spread. And what that really is, is it's really the genesis of something called improvisation. So let's fast forward to the 50s. That guy improvisation got a renewed interest in the in the United States, particularly in Chicago. And in 1959, the second city formed and you might be aware of the Second City, a lot of famous actors that that we know about that are really funny like john candy, people like that. Jim Belushi came out of the Second City. And the second city really experimented with a lot of rules around how to do improvisation, which seems really interesting, right? improvisation seems like it's free flowing and the like, but really to make that form work. There's a whole slew of rules that you need to learn. And what's what's been very interesting now is that that form is moving into movies and TV. So if you've ever seen a show like Seinfeld, or

Brian Lambert 05:57

Saturday Night Live,

Scott Santucci 05:58

Curb Your Enthusiasm Saturday Night Live is more scripted than than that. But what? what Larry David is inside sometimes is they would etch out like scenes, and then they would ask the actors to sort of play off on each other. Right? Yep. So that's, that's what makes those shows about nothing, something about something. So what's interesting is it's really disruptive. It's disruptive to a lot of people. It's disruptive to the actors that you bring in. And that's really what our what our centering story here is going all the way back to ancient Roman to ancient Roman times of pivoting from just doing a play a certain way to doing a farce.

Unknown Speaker 06:45

So what

Brian Lambert 06:48

does this have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 06:50

So what let's so let's break it down for for everybody listening. So one thing that's changed, is that the playbook that we've all run You know, here's the product, train the salespeople on the product, go sell the product, sort of the same classic, the analogy being the same as the great play, doesn't work anymore. And so we're all learning, a form of improvisation as we're trying to work backwards from customers. So that's that's one thing. Second thing, though, is is really difficult to learn how to do that, when we know only the rules of being very specific actors. I have studied my lines of classically trained, right, and there are certain rules of stage rules to go through. And when you start changing the rules to do something different, it causes a lot of people to go batshit crazy. And then another variable that's relevant here is, I hope our listeners have heard of design thinking.

Design Thinking is a technique that's being that's gaining more and more traction, and it's an approach to tackling complex human based systems to come up with some innovative solutions for it. And in order to do design thinking, the number one rule is to move away from analysis and concentrate more on synthesis. So the reason that we're having this conversation here is that the nucleolus many of us are really, really, really wired to analyze things a ways to Sunday. If you want to understand that just ask us about what our take. Our first take was on this on this podcast, but it's just very easy to get caught up until we have to know everything there is to know with everything before we start doing, but unfortunately today, we don't have the time to do that. So Joining us today is is Brooke Spats and Brooke Spats is, you know best known she's involved in the sales enablement society. She's best known for her work at omnitrax Brooke and I have worked a lot in employment The Ross devalue program at at omnitrax. So we've got a we have a lot of sweat equity. Don't Don't we broke about how it is to introduce something new. That may sound simple, but sometimes simple isn't easy. So Brooke, would you want to introduce yourself to the to insider nation?

Unknown Speaker 09:21

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Brian, for having me on. We're talking about one of the topics that are near and dear to my heart. And in addition to Scott's intro just to add a little color, I've been in the sales enablement space for about 20 years or so now in some capacity of sales, marketing, Product Marketing roles, but always leaning toward more of an enablement focus. And one of the biggest things to me and what I'm really really passionate about are the we've been talking a lot about these words, the four words that are are always overarching for me are collaboration, problem solving, empathy and awareness. And so, this topic of of, of improv and I love the grounding story, Scott, it just it got me so excited thinking about, you know, I have so many thoughts about what, what happened. You know why they decided we don't like this anymore. We want to change was it influenced from just what they thought? Or was it the audience or both?

Scott Santucci 10:31

Okay, have you ever seen a Greek

Unknown Speaker 10:33

tragedy? Have I ever seen a Greek tragedy? I think

Scott Santucci 10:36

it all would take was one yellowing of that and say, I'm done.

Unknown Speaker 10:41

Yeah. Yeah, they're miserable. And you know, the masks that the we see that iconic image of the two masks together, I think for your listeners, the the comedy and drama, and the, the antithesis between the two, if you will, I mean, there's so opposite and That, you know that spawn somewhere and and I actually did not know the full story like you just told it I find it so interesting that what they were doing was taking what they had just done and almost replaying and replaying it in a different way. And, and we love doing that don't make Scott through these engagements we,

Brian Lambert 11:22

we love it. So, so yeah, you're you're an actress too. You have an acting background.

Unknown Speaker 11:27

I do have an acting background. Yes. And, and how's that helped you

Brian Lambert 11:33

and sales enablement? Yes.

Unknown Speaker 11:34

But, but it certainly doesn't leave you right. Oh, it's all the light ball. The world's a stage if you will.

Scott Santucci 11:40

Well, here's what we did. So Brian asked you, how's that help you in sales? Now? I'm gonna ask everybody to go search her on IMDB. Oh, that video because it is hysterical.

Brian Lambert 11:53

Gonna do that, but uh, Scott did.

Unknown Speaker 11:56

Yeah. You know, did you I if you want I can speak to that for another moment. And as far as where I think it really translates in Yeah, absolutely love to hear that for me and in the roles that I've held, you know, I listed those those words you know, especially, especially empathy and awareness, and with you know, some of the formal and just experiential training I had in acting and you know, from a very young age it very quickly you realize these, the need to have empathy, empathy that is, is putting yourself in your audience's shoes and knowing your audience. And also being able to almost, you know, see yourself in through someone else's eyes while you're doing all these other things. So it definitely, you know, helped with with, you know, the l&d background that I have with with train i'd love being up in front of folks and getting you know, facilitating, etc. But you could do that and not be really effective with it because you're not necessarily Engaging the audience. And so, you know, the, that training helped helps me tremendously with with the empathy aspect and knowing your art and being able to walk in someone else's shoes very, very quickly. And, you know, I continue to apply a lot of those concepts with, with everything that we do today. You know, always trying to empathize with clients always, you know, when we're in workshops, trying to develop things, trying to have empathy both for, you know, for really everyone involved and, and, and I just think acting helps with that.

Brian Lambert 13:32

Absolutely. That's a great story. And it really relates to our centering story. So that's awesome. And we'll keep bringing it back. Figuring out if we have a Greek tragedy here now. I'm trying to get that out of my head right now. But so the but this is great. See, the reason why you're on this call with us. This podcast, Brooke is we've been talking about analysis and synthesis for a while, but also the recent episode that we had with klauer, which was Episode 45 The modern day Marco Polo or Scott was Marco Polo. And we and you'd reached out to me and I just would love to have our listeners hear from you. What What struck you about that episode and perhaps how it relates a little bit analysis versus synthesis or improv?

Unknown Speaker 14:18

Gosh, yeah. So I reached out to to you almost immediately after I listened to that particular podcast, and there were several things that stood out to me. Of course, if you listen to it again, I forget exactly where the timestamp was. But the topic of walking in another shoes was brought up by Doug and, and Scott and yourself and, you know, throughout that podcast started, you started talking about, you know, some ideas toward the end, you know, and Doug told the story about having, I believe it was either CFO or somebody in the financial Type role in the company he was with at the time to put together a presentation about how the company made money. And that just hit me so hard. I thought it was just awesome. Because we think so much about the things that, you know, kind of at this top level of, of what we have to roll out and how we check that box. And a lot of times we we forget that there are there's a fundamental baseline of knowledge that as simple as it may seem, we may be missing translating that or communicating that to the audience. And I just thought that was so neat. And one of the other things that really stood out to me was the point made about the merging of two things, which is strategy and tactics. And that sounds cool. Sounds like something you should be able to do. Yeah, we should, we should do that. But but the actual execution of trying to do that is a completely different story. And so I found myself asking Wow, that's a really cool idea. How do we do that? You know, how do you do that effectively? And of course, with everything that we're circling around today, between synthesis and analysis, it all, it all links together, right? In order to to sort of marry those two concepts of strategy and tactics. What do you guys call it? Stratecution? Yeah, yeah. There has to be a blend of these types of thinking and approaching problem solving.

Brian Lambert 16:30

Yeah, that's great. And that episode with Doug and what you're bringing up here, I'm gonna, I'm going to kind of play off of a did some improv and play off of you with what go in here. You know, the interesting thing about where that discussion came from was this Venn diagram that Scott is shown is one of his webinars in the state of sales enablement. And the overlapping Venn diagram was with a circle of strategy in the circle of tactics, and where those overlap was Stratecution. As you just mentioned, that creates creates a space in between or an overlapping space. And the more I've worked in sales enablement, I realized that those two circles are very, very overlap not just a little bit overlapped but overlapped a lot in the more successful enablement professionals and understand that we call them orchestrators. And that's who's listening to our show. They operate in that space. And one of the things here that I'm building off of is the concept of improv the concept of creating space for the farce to happen in the first place to try something new. The idea of creating space when you walk in somebody else's shoes, the idea of creating space to understand both strategy and tactics, right, though that idea of space is something that I think Doug resonated with, that I resonate with, and I would just love to hear what your take is, with regard to being creative or improvising in the concept of space. What do you think about that? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 18:00

You know, I think one of one of the most challenging or one of the things we sort of have to ask ourselves when we think about that space, as you're describing it is, am I comfortable or uncomfortable in a place of almost ambiguity? If you have this, I don't know what the end picture looks like, Am I comfortable? And if I'm not, how can I get comfortable? Because that is what what we're talking about when you feel like you need to know what the end looks like. You tend to block the creativity that can come out of this. We're saying improv right now or the design thinking aspect of, you know, creatively solving problems and working together to do that.

Brian Lambert 18:47

So it's great. I mean, you could have space in a in a meeting, right, where you have a bunch of different perspectives. You could have overlapping space there of thoughts and ideas and in design thinking techniques, but you can also Have some space on a blank sheet of paper. And I've seen people actually struggle with, I call it you know, blank, blank sheet itis it's a blank sheet of paper. I know I need to produce something I'm gonna

Unknown Speaker 19:13

deal with this. Yeah,

Brian...

Ep49 The Commercial Ratio: Declaring War on Inefficiency with Kunal Mehta

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 49

It's a given that the sales and marketing engine is full of waste and inefficiency. Despite the best intentions of very smart people, something is still not quite right. How do we know? The Commercial Ratio tells us that most companies get .15 cents of growth for every dollar they spend on sales and marketing.

Scott and Brian are joined by Kunal Mehta from the Private Equity firm TCV. Kunal shares a behind the scene view of rolling out the commercial ratio to all TCV portfolio companies. What were those discussions? What was the focus? What happened?

Find out why the commercial ratio is such a great starting point for addressing sales and marketing challenges and how you can use the metric to engage more strategically with your executive team.

You can find out more about the commercial ratio at www.commercialratio.com

Let us know what you think!

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scotty NTG.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian, I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement and issues as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works and perhaps what's more Important, what doesn't?

Brian Lambert 01:02

This podcast is focused on you and being a great orchestrator. We've had a lot of episodes on orchestration and being orchestrated elevate your role. And on this particular episode, we're going to talk more about the commercial ratio. But before we do that, Scott, do you have a centering story for us?

Scott Santucci 01:18

I do. I've got a I've got a little short one up. Actually, a lot of us are going to be familiar with this. The story it's a children's tale from the mid 1800s, from yawns, Christian Anderson. And really, it's about the Emperor's New Clothes. And if we remember that, if we remember that story, some swindlers go into this into this village, and they say we've got this amazing new fabric, and it's the most amazing, comfortable, glorious new fabric. And here's the deal. What's makes it super amazing is only smart people can see it. The dumb people can't see or appreciate how valuable this fabric is. And the emperors like wow, I want to do that. And all the Emperor's aides would look at this, look at the progress that these guys were doing after they set up their loom and make the Emperor's New Clothes, his new outfit his new wardrobe. And they watch his progress because of course, the Emperor wants to see his advisors. And none of them wanted to admit that they didn't see anything at play. because keep in mind, these guys are scam artists, right? But no one wanted to admit that they couldn't see it because by admitting it that they couldn't see it. Guess what was happening? They were saying that I'm stupid, right? Because only stupid people can't can't see it. So Wow, that's fabulous. And then the other a would be Oh, you're right. I see how fabulous it is to It's

Brian Lambert 02:43

amazing. That's looking great.

Scott Santucci 02:45

That's looking great. So everybody sort of kicks the can down the road and the Emperor does. He puts the clothes on and the the charlatans mind mine out putting it on as close to the Emperor doesn't want to admit He can't see it too. So he just assumes everybody else's. And he walks out and parades out. And of course, no one wants to say anything to the Emperor until the little kid says, Hey, he's got no clothes. So that's that's the moral of that story. And that's our centering story.

Unknown Speaker 03:20

All right.

Unknown Speaker 03:21

So.

Unknown Speaker 03:23

So what does that have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 03:26

we're actually talking about really the the premise of that fable and sometimes simple. The simple things i'm not i'm not available to us. And what we're talking about is really the commercial ratio. And really what we're, what the commercial ratio is, is more or less the kids saying, hey, there's no close here. In sales and marketing. We spend tons and tons and tons and tons of money and tons and tons of energy and throw tons of headcount at trying to drive more sales. But is it productive and whole idea of the commercial ratio is a simple view to say, does the sum of the parts or do the sum of the parts? Are they greater than the whole. So it's a simple idea. But unfortunately, a lot of us don't want to bring it up, we want to be the ades because we don't want to upset the Emperor. So is that as a frame of reference, I'm delighted to introduce canol Mehta, and he's been really sort of advocating and developing this, this this commercial ratio concept. And what we're going to do is learn from him, what some of the experience experiences he's had, as his company, TCB private equity firm has rolled out the commercial ratio to their portfolio companies. So can all please introduce yourself and sort of set the tone a little bit what is commercial ratio and why is TCV so interested in it? And how are you guys rolling out some of your portfolio members?

Unknown Speaker 04:56

Thanks Scott, and Brian, and again, my name is Ken Math I head up the Center of Excellence for sales and marketing at TCV. And the commercial ratio is is really a it's it's a center of gravity for internally how we talk at TCV about driving efficiency across sales and marketing. And it comes naturally inside of TCV. But but there's certainly more work to do when we introduce it inside the portfolio company and, and and I love the story you tell Scott I, I was watching a YouTube video this morning and I have no idea how their algorithm works for serving up videos to me, but there was one that came up on hand gliding, and I've never clicked on anything hand gliding, related or have any interest whatsoever in hand gliding but this guy, I clicked on this one and Chris Goertz, he was the guy who was in the video, and he had signed up for this class in Switzerland and that the the instructor for that to strap him in. And he took off. And the video was about this guy holding on for dear life for about two minutes and 14 seconds. And that's all he could think about. And I feel like when we roll this out into a portfolio company, if they just trust the system and hold on for a brief moment, I think they'll see the value in the commercial ratio really quickly. But there is that moment or they just gotta, they got to overcome that and see how it's worked at other companies and kind of get get rooted in the process. There's, there's it's something that every company Ultimately though, though, comes to to talk about more naturally over time with TCP.

Scott Santucci 06:50

So that's awesome. One of the things that I'm thinking here is I love using stories and I know you do too, to introduce a brand new idea. And I know that a lot of our members and our listeners just say, Yeah, like just get to the point you just get to the point. I think the point here is that I think what you're saying canol is that commercial ratio, it's like flying. And it's something different. If you never hang glide before, the first step is stepping off that cliff and just hanging on for dear life. That fear factor, let that last for a few minutes before you go, Hey, I'm flying. You got to be willing to take that first step off the cliff in the first place. Is that more or less what you what you're trying to introduce to us? That's correct. Yeah. So that I think then what I'd like us to do is let's, let's review. What is the commercial ratio commercial ratio is a is a metric. And it's a metric that simply is it's a, I can't keep stressing how simple the calculation is, and how complex most people want to make it most most non finance people But it's taking it's basically its revenue growth, which is calculated by, say the annual revenue growth that you've got this year subtracted from the revenue growth from last year at your revenue growth. And it's subtracted by, well, that's the top, that's the numerator. And the denominator is the total spending that you've had for sales and marketing for that period during that period of time. That's it. And that's what the ratio is. That's what it is. So cool. Why is that so important? And why is that such a revealing metric for say, investors and CEOs and CFOs? What does that tell us?

Unknown Speaker 08:41

Yeah, so it's, it's it tells us about the efficiency of sales and marketing. You know, from a private equity perspective, we use we view that as as a single function of driving revenue. What you often see though, is those two functions don't operate very well. cohesively together. And that shows up in the ratio and shows up in a much lower ratio the more kind of divorce from each other that they are the the the ratio itself if you if you've ever watched the movie Moneyball it's it's the number that they came up with his on base percentage and how, you know, how do we drive that number up to generate more wins? Who are the what are the type of people we need to bring on to the team that are going to drive that number up and ultimately generate runs which generates wins. We've the commercial ratio is very, very similar in that regard. We want to look at the company through the eyes of that ratio, and what they're doing to drive more efficiency on that ratio. And any private equity company that you look at certainly will also want to look at efficiency overall, it's so funny when we could be making peanut butter and jelly and jelly sandwiches and we weren't Do it as efficiently as possible, even against their own kids. So they the way the the ratio works, it just gives us a real quick sense of how that revenue engine is working inside the company now, and then where we can we can, you know, looking through that lens, we can look for opportunities then to introduce projects that help improve that ratio. And it certainly drive companies to work closer together inside of sales and marketing.

Scott Santucci 10:28

That's awesome. So let's keep it this top down view from an investor standpoint, and let me share with you so we you know, as you know, we've been we've had a webinar on the commercial ratio, we've got commercial ratio, comm as a site to share this information. So we're getting a lot of feedback. And some of the questions really arrive at Well, why would you just focus on sales and marketing to focus on growth, really sales is involved in driving all Revenue. Why would you just track it that way? That seems like a stupid metric, which is these are exact quotes I've heard. So why would Why are we not factoring in all looking at all of the revenue growth and assigning the sales and marketing in there because if you look at sales barking through that lens, the return on investments tremendous

Unknown Speaker 11:20

the way we've calculated it, and the way the way you guys are talking about it, we've used sales and marketing primarily as the the biggest lever to driving growth. I don't think it's any surprise to any of your listeners, that the relationships between those two functions just just are often poor. So what's the fastest way to move the needle is to build a metric that combines the two two groups together and focuses them on projects that if they don't work on together, they'll they'll never move the needle on efficient So, you know, an example of that might be if we've chosen and we know, the companies that have the highest likelihood to buy, why wouldn't we focus sales on those named accounts, but also marketing on on providing air cover and ground cover specifically to those accounts? As simple as that sounds, you know, the majority of companies don't don't actually have a systematic way about going, going and doing that.

Scott Santucci 12:30

So, you know, you and I had had the great opportunity to introduce the commercial ratio, even before we did the did the webinar to a handful of some of your leading portfolio companies. Can you give our audience a flavor of some of their questions, and, you know, you have a huge advantage being the owners of businesses, you get to sort of say this is a metric that we want you to do. The rest of us are going to have to bubble that up and do it. So How How would you describe, though the introduction of the commercial ratio? And how Yeah, about doing it? And, you

Unknown Speaker 13:10

know, it's a, it's such a good question, I think I think one of the big lessons learned is, is um, with, with folks at TC, the finance and metrics come very naturally to them. And and we potentially get ahead of ourselves and how we used to communicate that to companies and and, and they may be might not have been ready for the message because it you know, while something so naturally comes to a finance person, it might not come that naturally to a sales leader or marketing leader. So we've had to really sit down and kind of explain the ratio in the meeting that you're talking about with kind of the sales ops leaders, I think there is a combination of a little bit of fear, a little bit of vulnerability and and then ultimately, it's like Ha, I get it. I get it. I think what TCP is doing as we onboard, certainly new companies now, it's we're spending much more time walking through how we think about efficiency, how we measure this metric and kind of what can move in needle on value creation. And certainly this metric and the number.

Scott Santucci 14:21

Yeah, so I want to add some add some color to this, because I can tell you and I have been working on this concept for eight, nine months, right. I mean, it's been a while. One of the things that, that I'd like to highlight is how do we arrive at the the metric we were interviewing general partners in your company, and what do they look for? And I remember one in particular, where we asked I love starting out asking open ended questions. We asked that one open ended question and one of your general partners to started listing out I think I lost track. I couldn't keep track enough.

Unknown Speaker 14:57

exactly what you're talking about. Yeah,

Scott Santucci 14:58

I know. Right? I know. You do. Right, cuz I remember us talking about it. It was like, could you keep track of all them? Like 3037 different very specific metrics that he was just rattling off in his head? Yeah, he's able to connect the dots in his head. Remember that? Could you cut? I

Unknown Speaker 15:14

totally remember I took him like a minute, like even a minute to and he just kept going.

Scott Santucci 15:18

Yeah, exactly. We had to sort of Whoa. And then what we have to recognize is that everybody has their own unconscious competence. And to be able to get all of those metrics down into one thing is really empowering because I know a lot of us are going to want to focus on all the individual details. But then when he when we asked so while those numbers, he got to one looking at productivity, I'm looking at I want to figure out the levers of how we get. So really, you're looking at this thing is it well, that's how I'd explained it to other people. You just ask me how I do it, right. And it's really funny and it's natural. Because that's the way human beings are. But I think if what what is very hard to realize is, that's what he does for a living. He helps you see the future and say this is where your business is going to be the most valuable in the future. But where you are today is your companies, the client companies, the portfolio companies are dealing in the present in most cases, the past because the data that they're looking at, so it's a big shift. And I think that's one of the things that we need to be more understanding of, so that we can appreciate what our investors are looking at. So can all we've talked then and so as this as we've gotten simplicity around the the ratio with inside your your portfolio, your general partners, now the question becomes, how do we get the portfolio companies CEO CFO, so why is it that your leaders believe the CFO is the person to introduced this metric to,

Unknown Speaker 17:02

you know, I it's, there is a, if you look at the leader that the leader inside a TCV, I think he became frustrated with over the years of saying, looking at, like, we've made these gigantic investments in sales and marketing and it often falls short of what was originally promised. And it led to it led to really him as the leader kind of declaring war, which is why this magic number two Ruta TCP, declaring war on efficiency effectively and how do we, how do we drive these two teams to work together? And this was the metric that every general partner was already using in a slightly different way, but it was what they were using to, you know, try to drive the teams to work together. Other what they didn't have and where we're portfolio ops at TC v kind of starting to move the needle overall, is building these these sets of projects that that more scientifically move that needle. But But you know, if you look at the evolution of why this matter to TCP, it really came down to a lot of companies were made promises early on in terms of sales and marketing and how, how much it's going to deliver. And, and they just got really, the leaders inside of TCV just got super frustrated that they never saw that. And they easily saw both teams weren't working together. In some cases, the way we asked for the metrics, often propagated that because we asked for marketing metrics and sales metrics. So now we've even taken a step back and we look at the numbers specifically. And then how are we moving the needle on the overall commercial ratio?

Scott Santucci 18:55

So I think so let me translate this to our audience of why I think this is so Powerful. And so it's simple, but it's transformative. What is the highlight? Is it for all my years in b2b sales and marketing? I've heard about sales and marketing alignment. Right? We've heard about that. And guess what? those departments haven't aligned on their own. So what's powerful about this metric is we the investors aren't going to ask you about sales and marketing anymore. We're interested in your commercial process of which we've used sales and marketing is...

Ep48 Strategy, Execution, Orchestration with Joe

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 10:00:00 -0500

The value of Sales Enablement continues to elevate for those who orchestrate across the company to bring together the right solutions at the right time while addressing seller burden.

In this packed episode, Scott and Brian are joined by Joe, a VP of Sales for a Mid-Sized services company that works with some of the largest media companies on the planet. Joe talks about the evolution of selling over the past 20 years and what's happening the sales right now. Especially, with the impact of COVID, and the complexity his team is dealing with.

Against this backdrop, Scott, Joe, and Brian discuss the perceived value and impact of Sales Enablement.

The discussion includes:

Peeling back the layers of VP of Sales challenges and situations, so you can gain more empathy
The perceived impact of Sales Enablement Orchestration
Tips and ideas on how to role-play sales enablement value

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation, and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Unknown Speaker 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives as analysts, consultants, or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works And maybe what's most importantly, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:02

Our focus is on you the sales enablement orchestrator. As you know, sales enablement, leaders really need to develop a core skill and competency in the area that blends strategy and tactics to stay mission and goal focused, to prioritize the right action at the right moments, to guide the narrative by confronting reality, to take more of a design approach, not just when, through effort to unlock energy, create momentum, and catalyze change. To help us out on this episode, we're going to bring in a head of sales. It's Scott's going to talk through some of the attributes of recent sales enablement initiatives. And this is an important lesson for you guys in a kind of a way to go into the lab and I really want you to listen for the space that Scott creates with this VP of sales, and how he goes about talking through some of the real issues. And as part of that at the end of the discussion, well, we'll kind of roleplay a little bit of how we might position things Some of these more comprehensive solutions to VPS sales and win together. So with that, I'm gonna hand it off to Scott. And Scott, can you introduce our guest?

Scott Santucci 02:10

Absolutely.

Scott Santucci 02:12

We have two goals that were happening here. Goal number one is, how do we start talking about one of the terms that we brought up as stratification? How do we actually bring to life, that gap between strategy and execution for our criticals stakeholders, and in this case of VP of sales, that's the one thing that's part one. And that's what I'm going to cover. Part Number two, what we're going to get at is, okay, now that you have ideas of what might resonate and not, you're not in the order, taking business for sales leaders, you're in the partnership business, Brian's gonna walk through with you, how he might roleplay out and introduce some of these ideas, and the way that we're going to bring it to bear hopefully you been tracking along and entire nations been tracking along that you're aware that Brian and I have been hosting a series of webcasts, webinars, whatever you want to talk about it around a variety of different topics. And all comes from the COVID research that we've launched for you, insider nation for our podcasts. We've done the most research around sales enablement, sales, execution, sales, productivity, whatever you want to call it, post research than anybody so far on the planet. And we've been carrying that forward by having lots and lots and lots of conversations.

One of the conversation starters definitely are these webcasts. What's fantastic is we're getting great feedback that they're very engaging. If you haven't participated in the one we're going to talk about which is called up routes devalue in enabling your customers to buy you are, you can go visit inside se comm and get a link to the download recording to hear the same thing. Joe heard. So now we're at the Joe Joe was one of the participants in that Rouse devalue webinar. Joe is a VP of sales. He's been a VP of sales for many large, large companies, we'll have Joe, introduce himself and get us more of that color. But what we're going to do now we're in part one, and we're going to talk about what his reactions are to the content that's in that in that session around routes to value. Obviously, we're doing it away that you don't have to watch the webinar, it'll probably be valuable to go back and listen to it. And again, the re re enforce what we're trying to do here, please listen and try to gain empathy first, for how a sales and sales leader may take this content. And then we'll get into step step number two, what might you do about it with Brian? Now, having said all that, I bet that's the longest preamble to an introduction you've ever had before job, radio. Yeah,

Brian Lambert 04:58

no, I think that's the A story from the early 1600s may have taken longer, but I'm not sure. Right.

Scott Santucci 05:05

taxing them with with that and Other Stories there. And I think you weren't implying that Joe's been in sales in hundreds, right? It seems like, right. So with that I'd like I'd like to I'd like Joe, if you would mind to introduce yourself as Joe Hayes. Yeah. The sales leader for quite some time. Please introduce yourself and what your background is and how you got connected with these webinars.

Joe 05:33

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Thank you, Scott. And thank you, Brian, for having me on your podcast today. Yeah, the My background is I've been in media for basically my entire career, which is now 30 years. So I started actually on the auditing side, working at one of the one of the audit bureaus on the media side of the business and then from there, I think the company felt that do less damage in sales than it actually auditing itself. So they moved me into sales. And then from there, I took a job, I was able to get a job as a sales just a regular salesperson within a company called srts, which is 100 year old business that basically connects buyers and sellers of media within an online planning platform. So I work for a company called srts. I've been working here for 20 years, worked my way up in the quickly within the ranks to head up the sales. And so my clients are both on the agency side, the largest us advertising agencies, and then also the largest some of the largest media companies that exists within the United States. So, for example, my clients are like Comcast, NBC, Viacom, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, all the way down to a large b2b publications like electrical contractor and so it really runs the gambit. But I have a sales team. I've had sales teams both on the agency side and the sell side, within the company that run into the, you know, 2030 people. And then within Nielsen it was even larger. And then once we came over to cantar, which is owned by WP pay, it's the same amount. So I've, I've had all the challenges of sales of running a sales organization. But I will say, I started carrying a bag and carrying a territory and worked my way up to managing a team. And to this day, I'm still very hands on when it comes to sales.

So Scott asked, How did I come engage with these webinars? It's because I'm always on the lookout for for good information. And so when I first started hearing what Scott what Brian Brian was doing with growth enablement. I this was this was of interest to me. So I started listening to a lot of the things Scott was posting. And then I was a lucky enough to join a couple of these webinars, which, which I found, given COVID. And what we're living through right now, at least on my side of the business on the sales side, to media and agencies, I have found made it my, my, my goal to find the time to join these webinars and I found them very interesting. I've sent notes off to Scott telling him and Brian how valuable they are to me. And Scott reached out and said, Hey, Joe, would you mind joining just a quick podcast to talk about the last one we did, which was routes to value. So I hope that helps Scott.

Scott Santucci 08:34

Yeah, that's a great lot of great context. And it's grounding for our listeners and what what we're trying to do is move to have conversations. It's one thing for you as an individual person to listen to a podcast or listen to, or participate in a webinar. It's something completely different to start piecing together how other people see it. And that's really what we're trying to do is bring that perspective. So Joe Don't want to do a lot of framing for it just for our listeners, the the scope of routes devalue is essentially, hey, look, there's a lot of content that we make available for salespeople. And because we don't organize it in a cohesive way, it creates burden for our sellers. All the while, we should be working backwards from our customers to do it. What is working backwards from our customers to do it? Well, we got a lot of stakeholders to manage, and how do we visualize all of that. So we've developed an approach that we call routes devalue, which basically we start about mapping out or modeling out the customer and their agreement network. Then it goes over to mapping and building a map of your product palette in a way that is more configurable for sales for customers to digest. And then the third part then is to create a value map to help salespeople connect the dots and it's really that simple. Wherever simple is sales is simple but simple is

Unknown Speaker 10:03

hard. Yes.

Unknown Speaker 10:06

And no, I think what you just touched on, Scott, I think even you'd be surprised at how many companies do not operate this way. And I would say later in the webinar, when you really kind of draw this out about working back from the customer, it's just not done. It's not. And that's where I think the real opportunity lies, especially now, given what COVID has done to pipelines, it's basically decimated them. And a lot of companies I know cantar, in particular, with their new owners, which are paying and just using them as an example, as well as other companies that I call on are all going through the same thing. They're looking what's happened to these pipelines and and that they're, they're they're suffering and not a lot of the information being put in there just it wasn't accurate. And some of it is on the rep but not all of it's on the route. Yeah, so So you're, well, it's easy for you to talk about Scott and build these slides working back from the customer

Scott Santucci 11:09

is when did you say it's easy to build slides?

Unknown Speaker 11:13

I know. Well, it may be easy for you to talk to those slides. Because the experience that you've had, um, it definitely resonates with me. Because it's an issue that I've had for a number of years. But it's not easy when you're working back from the customer to many companies feel that great. You work back from the customer, you work back from one person. The fact of the matter is you're not working back from one person. You got to work back from a group a network of people and you got to know where those noes are. And not only that, you got to work internally within your own organization and companies refused to look at that.

Scott Santucci 11:53

You said yeah, let's let's do that. So I don't mean any disrespect when I say this, I suppose I say this to a lot of people. As leaders all the time, but I think when we're going through a major period of change, like we are with cut digital, the digital revolution was here before COVID COVID has exasperated and accelerated it and exposed a lot of pain. What really is happening is that sales, the sales function is kind of like canaries in a coal mine. And they're seeing all this poisonous gas, but don't have the words or vocabulary to describe it. So part of what I'm going to, what I'm trying to do here is connect the dots of we have some slides that you can go and listen to, and some reactions, but how do we give some texture to this environment that is so inefficient, and so painful, but most of management doesn't see. And the sales force doesn't necessarily have the right vocabulary or ways to eliminate it. And we want to highlight these things because we want you as the audience to be able to recognize how do I actually extract out or understand what's really going on, rather than reading reports what everybody else thinks is going on. So Joe, can you elaborate a little bit on that? Is that fair to call your canary in a coal miner? Is that insulting? I don't know.

Unknown Speaker 13:12

No, I mean sales for at we're always the frontline troops. So canary in the coalmine, I think that's very true. But I will say, Yeah, you're you're right with that. And I don't take that as an insult, at least. But where the problem becomes is when you're not communicating the gases in the mind back to your organization, and in some cases, when you do communicate that it falls on deaf ears, so um, so that's part of the issue as well.

Scott Santucci 13:43

So let's walk through what are some what are three highlights that you got from? From this from the conversation around rasa value, what were some three short key takeaways, the cat,

Unknown Speaker 13:55

the first one, which you brought up on a couple of them now? Product Titus. I love that. I thought you nailed that the first time you talked about it, you continue to talk about it. I now use it when I'm on sales calls to media companies, and now they've taken it. So I've got to start giving you credit for that we got to start trademarking that. But the fact of the matter is, we all suffer from it. My team in particular suffers from it. I work for an organization that feels that they know better than their clients. So marketing teams feel that they know better. The executives within the company feel the same thing. And all we're doing is pushing out product. And then it's left to the sales team to go out and really be carry that load of trying to go into companies, huge companies like Comcast and try and sell a list of 1000 products that that none of them meet what they're looking for. The needs of what they're looking for. And, and that that's part of the problem. It's a major problem right now.

Scott Santucci 15:07

What is proctitis?

Unknown Speaker 15:08

What is it? Well, for me, it's a, I guess it's an explosion of confusing and misaligned activities. It's, it's marketing, coming to us in a sales team, with the next new shiny fish. And with the instructions of drop everything you're doing, this is what we need to be focusing on. We've had an acquisition, we want to be pushing this out. It's another division within the corporate umbrella of cantar. And we want to be focusing and getting our clients at least looking at this and buying it. The fact of the matter is, though, is the people that my team is talking to, aren't even involved in that type of decision making. So we missed the mark continuously. That's, that's to me is the product. That's the definition of product itis.

Scott Santucci 16:04

So the reason that for our audience The reason that we worked on creating that an identity is because it's really hard to talk about the poisonous gas that we're running into. So product Titus becomes that poisonous gas. And it becomes a great talking point, with very little setup you can get get traction, I doubt very seriously, Joe, I mean, I don't know, I don't wanna speak for heads of sales. But I just think it's really unlikely that a head of sales that we're going to run into in any industry is going to say, Oh, no, we don't have product Titus at all.

Unknown Speaker 16:37

Um, I yeah, I don't think you want I think most of them will say that. Or at least agree to it in some in some, in some degree. I will tell you that on in my case. And in other cases of most of the time that I've been in sales, this has been going on for quite some time. And here's the other thing, how many times can you Keep going back to the same client with a new shiny fish. I mean, after a while, they just say no what they just turned it off. So every time we go back and now with the new shiny fish, to keep pushing it, we're losing more and more credibility with the few people, the stakeholders within the organizations that we have large, large pieces of business. So think about that too. Because how many times can someone say I'm not the right person for that?

Scott Santucci 17:29

Right, and then keep meeting it the next time?

Unknown Speaker 17:32

Correct. I mean, I Scott, I've actually had a story where a the largest single piece of business that ever came through the channel at srts was my client. It was it was ESPN at the time. And like anything once people get whiff of there's large money and there's a big deal. Everyone wants to own it. Everyone wants a piece of it. So an executive wanted to join me on a call with ESPN. They wanted Go in there, they didn't care. And I was kind of forced to do this, which would upset me. But that's the way it is. So being a new guy, I kind of went in there and brought that person along. And the person launch into a new product launch that had nothing to do with the decision making or the budgets that sat with the person across the desk that we were meeting with. We'd left the meeting by the time I got back to my office, there was an email in my inbox, from now an account that had just signed up within the last six months and said, if you ever bring that person back into my office, we will cancel our program.

Unknown Speaker 18:37

Now, that's a true story.

Scott Santucci 18:38

And I, I empathize because I've had similar situations myself from my sales world. Look at what bads position you're in. How do you bring that up to your boss, you know, that executive? And why did they think that they that they're what made them think that they can go on add value in the first...

Ep47 Commercial Ratio to Unlock Value with ROI Guy Tom Pisello

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 47

In this episode, the guys are joined by Tom Pisello, the ROI Guy who shares his thoughts on the commercial ratio.

To calculate the commercial ratio of your organization (www.commercialratio.com):

Take your current annual revenue
Subtract it from the annual revenue of the previous year
Divide it by the total sales and marketing spending

The guys talk about :

Why value is so important to understand in sales
Why value is critical to sales enablement programs
How sales and marketing are viewed as "growth programs" by investors
The relationship between strategy and tactics in creating ongoing programs to improve value communication with a portfolio of sales teams
The fundamentals of calculating the commercial ratio
How the commercial ratio is used by investors and executives
The role of Sales Enablement in moving the needle on the commercial ratio

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, issues as analysts, consultants or practitioners, we've learned the hard way, what works, and maybe what's even more important, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:01

And our focus on this podcast is we are in season two is on sales enablement, leaders and orchestrators. And as you know, companies are often structured in hierarchical silos. And the topics that we're covering affect not only sales enablement, leaders in talent or pipeline or Message Enablement, but also in commercial enablement. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Because when you look at operating in the space between strategy and execution, and having to bring those together, and that's a big challenge that you're facing, because it involves the concept and the discussion with the executive leaders around, Hey, you know what, give me give me more, give me more remit, I'm going to give you more impact. You're going to spend less money and get more from it. And that's a tough concept to land as an Orchestrator. So Scott, why don't you set us up here on the podcast and share who our special guest is?

Scott Santucci 01:55

Sure. Look forward to a Brian and insider nation. Let me just sort of summarize a couple things of where we've been. We've done probably the most research about post COVID, around sales enablement, then anybody, whether it be Gartner Forrest or anybody else. And we've been expressing that in terms of a series of webinars that we're doing through my company growth enablement. So the first one that we had was about sales and a was at a crossroads, where we first introduced this Orchestrator concept. Brian's really seized the reins on that. So we've had a lot of webinars around Orchestrator. Well, part of the difficulty then is how do we communicate the business value of Orchestration. And the last webinar that we had was around Commercial Ratio. And knowing the Commercial Ratio is so challenging knowing that it's really difficult to put your head arms around this, this fuzzy notion of the value proposition to a CEO saying, hey, you should invest in a sales enablement department. And the more investment that you give me, I'll give you less stuff. And in return, I'll get you'll get more.

So how do we make that come to life. So that's really where Commercial Ratio comes in. So as if you've been participating in the webinar, if you didn't participate in the webinar, Brian will make it available. We have a micro site called Commercial ratio.com is we need to make these concepts more accessible. And as we were leading up to it, I reached out to my friend, Tom, the ROI guy, because I thought, you know, this is this is a person who's going to really resonate with it. So by by introduction, Tom, you and I have known each other for a long time, I'll let you give you some context about how much we've known each other. One of the things that Tom's done, so we started, I was the ROI guy, he built a business that was focused on visualization and simplifying ROI for salespeople. So he's been doing this for lots of companies for a long time. So much so he wrote a book on it. And he wrote a book on it called frugal nomics. And I don't know what I don't know if you've ever heard this before, Tom, but for whatever reason, I just associated with Fraggle Rock. I don't know why that pops into my head. I'm excited. Little Muppet scones. Yeah, exactly. Right. Little Muppets, and maybe we need to do that because the little Muppets will help us make talking about this stuff. simpler, right. Maybe we need to maybe do that.

So I'm really excited to have Tom on here. And we've asked Tom, hey, you wrote this frugal nomics book or I asked Tom, you wrote this frugal anomic books, you know, based on the last great recession. We're in a completely new world here. What if we update it? So as part of that part of that process, I've invited him to be an ambassador around Commercial Ratio. So we're, we're having Tom join us. So Tom, would you give us a little bit, give our audience a little more background and color about yourself and you know, your involvement and the history of ROI and metrics and all that good stuff.

Tom 04:55

Yeah. Scott and Brian, thank you so much for inviting me to the Join the nation and to be an ambassador for the Commercial Ratio. I've been in the value measurement business for a long time for about 25 years. And why the Commercial Ratio and I've had I've got such an affinity for it back in the day when I was working at Gartner. And just after I left Gartner, I partnered with a gentleman called Paul strassman. And Paul had done just some incredible articles and books and had dedicated his life to finding what he called it productivity. And it was something called the it productivity paradox that he had discovered through his research. And in this research, he crunched the numbers for hundreds and hundreds of commercial organizations, these were all public companies, and what he was trying to do, being a research scientist, and he had been basically the CIO for the Pentagon. So incredible credentials, and he was the data guy at heart and analyst at heart. And he was looking for that productivity, where was the productivity and all of these it benefits manifesting themselves in organizations. And what he found founded was, most organizations were investing a lot of money in information technology, substantial amounts of their revenue was being invested in it. And most organizations, it was not showing up in the corporate financials, it was not showing up in the income statement, it was not showing up in stock value, any and it was being squandered, somehow, along the way. And this led to a book by Nicholas Carr. And it featured Paul and myself our research and our findings in that book. And for those who remember, that was the book that really started the cloud and software as a service revolution. What was the book, it was called, it doesn't matter. And it came from an article he wrote in Harvard Business Review. And then he wrote a book about it. And it was really a changing point in the whole it landscape.

It was with that book that folks began to realize, look, we're squandering a lot of these it benefits. And we can't find them in where we'd expect to find it's not creating additional shareholder value, which is what most companies are beholden to, from their value standpoint, it wasn't showing up in massive amounts of cost savings, because what they were saving and productivity or saving and cost avoidance in one area was somehow being spent on it and development it. What it turned out to be was that companies shouldn't be spending as much on this, because it's probably isn't their core competency. And they should be outsourcing it to the cloud, and software as a service. But there was a productivity paradox there that I thought was really profound. And it led to that revolution to where it today doesn't look anything like it looked 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, right. And when you Scott and Brian introduced the Commercial Ratio to me for the first time and I saw it, I wrote down and I'm looking at the piece of paper because I kept it on my desk, and I wrote down sales and marketing productivity paradox. I wrote that down right away, because once I saw what you were doing, where you were looking at sales growth, as the output, and sales and marketing investment as the input, and the ratio of those those things, it reminded me so much of that work with Paul, and with Nick Carr. And where we looked at, you know, here's the it spending as the denominator. And then we were hunting for what what was that numeral, what was the numerator, and that there was a paradox there. And what your ratio was showing is that when most companies take a look at the input, the investment in sales and marketing investment versus the output, the growth in the company that's being experienced, that there are ratios that are really not sustainable. And I'm like, yeah, this is really hitting on something very similar.

The better thing about the Commercial Ratio, then what we struggled with was the numerator and the denominator, I think, are very well understood for the Commercial Ratio. You know, you could look at sales growth, and it's measurable. It's measurable in the corporate financials, you can look at the sales and marketing investment. It's in the corporate financials, your CFO has access to both of these metrics, whereas in the IT world, it was a little bit harder. But similarly, and why I use the word paradox is, I do think that we're at this time where we're spending so much in sales and marketing, and how much of that is being squandered? How much of that is being wasted? How much is not sustainable? And that's what really hit me was, when I started to, all of a sudden I saw the ratio, I'm like, Okay, let me run this company through it. And I'm working with let me run this company that I'm advising on, let me run this. All of a sudden, I'm looking at These ratios, Scott, and they were not good. Yeah, exactly. You know, and I'm looking at it like, Oh, now I know why technology crossover ventures why TCV is using this now with their portfolio companies. I'm going to talk about that a lot more, I'm sure.

But it became obvious to me that, that they need this because they're creating businesses that are not sustainable. And we, when we hit a crisis, like what we're hitting right now, you need that sustainability. It's not billions or bust, right? It's not billions or broke, it's, you know, we've got to have growth, right, because all of these companies that TCP and some of the companies I advise are more earlier stage companies are are involved with, they've got to grow. So you know, you're going to be spending not completely efficiently or effectively, but the amount of inefficiency and the amount of effectiveness. That's the paradox. And I love that that's what the Commercial Ratio is trying to get at.

Scott Santucci 10:58

So I love your story. Well, I want to go back to the it part. So I want to connect the dots for our listeners. So the IT organization over the history of, you know, over its history, it used to report into finance, right as today's a controlled cost center, somewhere between, you know, the late 90s, maybe after the post y2k debacle right in the post y2k stuff, it started shifting to where it was no longer a technical person running him but a business leader. Mm hmm. Because executives were so frustrated that people would show up and I want to give that paradox some color. When I was a salesperson at Mehta group, so you say Gartner group, I think great Satan. That's the way we were we had a chip on our shoulder at Mehta group about you guys competing against the Gartner budget was difficult. So you learn, let's not make it about the Gartner budget. That's that thing, go. And so you try to find new budget sources. So one of the things that we would do, or I would do, I remember specifically working with the CIO of Hearst.

So hertz is a German chemical company, they had moved their headquarters to New Jersey, which was my territory. And the CIO, was very frustrated, because all of these business unit heads, which we're now located, whom he added to support, we're just pounding on it, like so frustrated, and he wanted to show he kept showing me Look at all this benchmark data, he he had hired IBM, or any of the other people, you know, go through the laundry list. And he said, Look at all these nines, look at all these nines of performance. Look at, you know, any key he wanted to do, he wanted to ask me about, maybe we could do a benchmark study. And I said, I said that his name was Frank, I said, Frank, we could keep doing the same thing over and over again, but they don't understand these nines, what these nines of availability mean, because this is a metric that's important to you. It's not a metric important to that. And for us to solve this, we'd have to have a completely different conversation, which is more like a customer experience study. And let's figure out what the what those measures are. Well, he just couldn't get his head around that. So I said, Okay, well, I'm not going to sell you a benchmark, because that's only going to make it worse. And you know, lo and behold, six months later, he was fired, replaced with a business person who loved the whole idea of a customer's right appearance. And, you know, I sold a lot of business from that.

Now, the reason I bring that up is because that's a paradox. Hmm. You know, I think, very well stated, I think all these individual metrics are really, really, really important because I have to do it to run my technical department. And if we're not running our technical department correctly, we have to be able to, you know, and we want to show how efficient we are. But that's not what the business cared about at all. So the more he was digging down on these secondary metrics, the more he was alien himself from the business people. Now, let's fast forward to where we are in 2020. And then I'll like, yeah, and

Unknown Speaker 14:18

Scott, let me just chime in on that real quick. So the the downtime figures of the availability figures are important to deliver the customer experience, but it's the customer experience that the board cared about. And I think there's an important, you know, emphasis there that you're making. You know, you do have to measure that availability. And you do have to make sure that you're you know, that you have that measure, but ultimately, that's there to drive that experience. And you could, it's not like we're saying don't measure the nines, but go in measure the thing that's important at the board level. Yeah, the other metric that we

Scott Santucci 14:56

don't, I don't share all the nines with the practical Maybe they don't care, maybe you find out because what you know, here's an example, when we went and talked to some of the business leaders, particularly the guy responsible for sales, he was super frustrated with email. So basically what this guy did is he set a massive standard for email, because he was trying to control cost storage, and then lock down the email. But guess what, when the documents that these guys are sending, the salespeople are sending, at the end of the quarter, by the way, at the end of the quarter, there's a massive amount of these documents that they're sending, they're getting email it, they're getting alerts to the sales organization, this is shut off their set saving, what five cents, versus the risk of salespeople. So these are the examples that

Unknown Speaker 15:44

and that was the other thing at Gartner. And how I got to Gartner was with total cost of ownership, right and, and you know, you're measuring the, the input figure, which is the investment in it. But if you just did that, and you didn't focus at all on the output, you were also making a mistake. So it's not just about the cost. And it's not about these detailed metrics that are giving you the direction of where you're going, you gotta elevate up to something that's going to be meaningful to your stakeholders and your leadership, that's going to kind of get you a place at the big table.

Scott Santucci 16:23

Yep. So to highlight this, let me kind of just transition here to our next phase. So the hopefully, you can see the connection point, the connection point being, hey, look, the IT department was in a state of immaturity, you know, back in, you know, the early part of this, this century, and it's evolved a lot. And where are we in sales and marketing? Well, we're treating them as two different things. And you know, for if you look backwards, from an investor standpoint, there's a line item on any income statement, depending on which income state you can look at it, it's either gonna say s GMA, or increasingly sales and marketing. So on that line item, all that spending is is all lumped together as one thing. Now, whether or not you choose to decide sales and marketing are different things to investors, and to your CFO, they are not different. And that's what we want to transition to is that that's the goal, the Commercial Ratio. So obviously, Tom and I can geek out about these metrics and the history of metrics at ways to Sunday, what we heard a lot of feedback from the Commercial Ratio pitch, or webinar is, hey, next time you do something like that, give me a heads up so I can bring a calculator. So what we're going to do is we're going to have a way to sort of make it more relatable. So we're have Brian, lead you through and just walk you through and say what are your reactions to the Commercial Ratio? What were the key parts and sort of get your your get your take on what the conversation was like to make it more relatable to our listeners? So Brian, would you like to eat, you know, introduce that and lead us through that discussion?

Brian Lambert 18:03

Yeah, absolutely. And I think a great segue is this, this paradigm paradox you guys are talking about? And, and also the, if you think about it back then versus it now that's, that's really good. And I want to hook into that. And, Scott, one of the things that you said in the webinar when you when he talked...

Ep46 Orchestrating Cross-Functional Enablement with Cathy Rowell

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 46

There is a whole class of leader working in the gap between strategy and tactics, to blend together the right programs, actions, and processes to achieve outcomes -- often with people who don't report directly into them.

In this episode, we're joined by Cathy - a sales enablement leader working in her company to bring together groups of people to drive outcomes.

In this engaging discussion, we discuss:

The value of orchestration to the sales organization
Working with line managers who have the resources
Enrolling people to achieve an outcome
The difference between orchestrating teams and individuals
The blend of strategy, process, technology, and information
Examples of orchestrating people and groups
The differences between project management and orchestration

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:34

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way, what works and maybe what's most important, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:02

Thanks, Scott. And on this show today, what we're going to do is we're actually going to go back a couple months and we're going to talk through the state of sales, Nyland research but more importantly, the the findings presentation.

Scott Santucci 01:13

Wait only a couple months last podcast, we went back to 1217. Oh, no.

Brian Lambert 01:18

I know, I shouldn't say we're going back at all, because Dallas is nothing for you. That's right, it feels like forever ago in a way because we've been actually producing a lot of content podcasts panels, we had our one year anniversary celebration, we're now in season two. And but what I wanted to do Scott is actually bring a listener on we have Kathy that's going to join us here. And what I wanted to do is just talk through the findings presentation, because not all of our listeners were on that. And the reason why I want to do that is it's it's the executive summary of what's happening in the sales enablement space, and more importantly, where it's going. So we're not going to recap all the panel discussions in all that listeners can listen to that. But more importantly, how does this land from a sales enablement leader perspective, like we have on the show here today? And how is this being internalized in action? If at all, right, because the findings in and of themselves are great, but how do people process it? And what do they do with it? So I've got Kathy joining

Scott Santucci 02:22

me here. Before we do that, let's just remind our listeners. So what is Brian talking about? What the research. So in March, we had a panel COVID panel where we had Dr. Howard over could all meta, meta and Lindsey Gore. And from that, we launched a survey. We did a survey and we had over 100 hundred people 100 sales enablement practitioners respond to that survey we recruited and by the way, you can go to our site to look at what the research process was. We had 43 we deputize 43 analysts, so to speak, to help us out, we ran six panels, and then produced the first of a series of webinars that we're doing to unpack all the things that we learned. And that was a that was the first one, which was the findings of all of these things, I guess partial the findings, because we've had, we're getting ready to do our fourth webcast. So Brian, go ahead and take it away and go ahead and introduce Kathy.

Brian Lambert 03:24

Yeah, absolutely. So I've got Kathy on. And Kathy has been somebody that I learned from a lot via LinkedIn. And she's chiming in a lot around the inside sales enablement, content in the state of sales enablement research that Scott just alluded to. Her name's Kathy rollin. She's with nectar. Hi, Kathy, how you doing?

Unknown Speaker 03:44

Hi, Brian, I'm good. How are you?

Brian Lambert 03:46

Good. And for the last two months, we've been going back and forth on LinkedIn in a variety different ways. And I thought it'd be good to just have the public conversation. So I appreciate you jumping on the call with us here and processing together. What you learned.

Unknown Speaker 04:02

Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lambert 04:05

Sure. So um, let's go back a couple months ago, we had our inside state of sales enablement research. So Scott presented that. I just like to open it up with you. What did you take away from that? And what kind of resonated with you as you were processing that content?

Unknown Speaker 04:24

So I'll be honest with you that the webinar happened at a time when I was buried, missing that happens right to all of us in our day to day jobs. So I didn't have a chance right away to kind of absorb everything from the webinar. And I went back Scott posted something on the sales enablement society. Board discussion board and, and I was like, Oh, yeah, I should go in. I should go back and look at that. So I actually went back and looked at all the materials that that Scott had and you had pulled together The big thing all of a sudden, I had an aha moment. And it was around that you all have finally put a title to something I've been doing or felt like I've been doing for a really long time. And that was the Orchestrator title. Like, that's, that's brilliant. Because this is something I feel like I've been kind of doing for a long time he both here at nectar, and in a previous role, right in, in previous life at different sales enablement roles, where it's not always about the tactics and, and getting everything, doing things and just sitting around and getting that right, but also about the whole strategy and, and marrying the two together. So all of a sudden, it was like, Wow, you guys finally like let me know what I did. I literally that day, went on to my LinkedIn profile and changed my headline to include Orchestrator.

Brian Lambert 05:56

Wow. That's, that's amazing. And that's great to hear. Actually humbling to hear. So I appreciate that. And it's it's one of those things where you go through it, you just, you do the findings, you publish it, you don't know quite what the impact is. And one of the things that's interesting here is, you said your sales enablement, professional and you've been in this sounds like you've been in the space for a while. Why didn't it? Why don't you compare and contrast a little bit the sales enablement, title role versus the Orchestrator title and role? Why? Why does one resonate perhaps a little bit more than another? Or give me some insight into the difference between the two to you?

Unknown Speaker 06:36

Yeah, so I think, sales enablement, right, has kind of gone on this growth path. And we've all tried to figure out what is it? What is in it? How do we define it? Scott, and you and others have done a great job of saying what sales enablement is. But if you went out and at one point, if you went out and talked to 10, different sales enablement, professionals, you'd get 10 different answers about what it was. And, and not any of them were wrong if they were just different. And so I think you having a title of sales enablement, depending on your perspective was a question about what it is that you actually were responsible for. And so I've always been kind of a broad strategy person and been able to kind of see a bigger picture. And so to me, when I someone said, oh, we're going to do sales enablement, I said, well, it's not just training. It's not just content. It's not just this, we have to look at the whole, right, what what from the whole makes a salesperson successful. And it's much broader. And there's many more things than just those things that make it the whole, and then it kind of morphed from there. And I started growing back, because then it wasn't just the salesperson because there's other people responsible for the success of the company. And the revenue generation. That's your channel, where I have a particular focus today is on our channel partners. And then there's the channel and then it's like, Well, yeah, but it doesn't really stop when the order comes in from the customer. So there's this whole holistic thing.

So I think, I feel like sales enablement might have pigeonholed a little bit for me, and Orchestrator was a much better way I actually moved away from my sales enablement title a little while ago, I went to strict enablement, because I have responsibility across the revenue chain. So I took sales completely out. And then I changed it again last year. And I said, Well, that's not exactly even what I'm doing. Because I'm really responsible for the efficiency of our channel and our sales, to get the customer to success. So it just it resonated. The other thing that resonated a lot was it's about being able to work across different functions, and work with people who don't report to you and make them all successful, right to be successful together. And to be able to work across that and, and meet a common goal. So there was a lot of it that really kind of stuck in my head.

Brian Lambert 09:21

Yeah, so I'm hearing the, the sales enablement, title and role felt a little bit restrictive in a way and probably because of how people communicated or how the market was receiving as a training role.

Unknown Speaker 09:35

I think it was a perception, right?

Brian Lambert 09:38

Yeah. And then it sounds like your charter or your remit was broader than that pigeon holing if you will, or that step boxed in, right. So you thought about dropping sales and just being enablement and just enablement was something that you did actually, it's, he said, and then from that perspective, it's it became about this broader picture. which we've dubbed the the ecosystem view. And we're actually going to have a podcast soon around that. And then And then the final piece that you're talking about, which is obviously really intriguing to me. And actually what we've been chatting back and forth around on LinkedIn is this idea of working together with people to achieve an outcome and a goal together. Whether or not they report into you or not, I'll throw that in there, right? Because that's implied that you don't have to have the headcount reporting MTU to be an orchestrator. In fact, it's part of the role of orchestrators to not have the headcount actually reporting into you. Right. So what what, what do you think about that as a part of the role, this idea of working with others to achieve that outcome? And goal? And and then what have you, what have you seen or taken away from the last couple of months, that's perhaps struck a chord with you around this idea of I'm an orchestrator.

Unknown Speaker 11:09

So, you know, I have lots of experience working with a cross functional teams that don't report to me. And, and it's, it's an interesting thing, and I think we've had this conversation on a little bit on LinkedIn, right? So you have the people with a bigger challenge, when you have that is you have your tree huggers, people who are like, Oh, no, this, this piece right over here, this is my piece, and you can't touch it. That's the way it's going to be. So try and and, you know, get those people to see what the broader picture is, and, and come to a consensus. And it's it, when you put it in the context of the benefit not only to them to their departments, and more broadly to the revenue and the company, then they'll start to see and take ownership around that. And it's, it's when they start to see that piece of it that's really enlightening, and they become much less of a tree hugger, and they want to participate more.

Brian Lambert 12:11

So what's it What's a tree hugger? A tree hugger? In Kathy land? A little bit?

Unknown Speaker 12:18

Yeah, the tree hugger in my world is the someone who's on a team and is like, just holding on to the way things have always been, or they don't they just want to do their little piece. They put their blinders on, they're hugging the tree, like, nope, this is the way it is. When you can't take it, you can't touch it. Right? Touch it. Leave my tree alone. Yeah, exactly. Don't touch my tree. I'm lucky where I'm at now that I don't have a lot of tree huggers, I have a few. I don't have a lot. So that's really good. It's really nice, right? So if you think about a channel, and you you try to orchestrate around that you don't just have your training team and the channel account manager, you also have to think about, okay, who are the support, people are going to take those calls, who are the professional services, people who are going to be involved, who's the marketing person who's going to work with the channel partner to co market and get all of that marketing strategy pulled together to come to market together. So that's one of the things that I actually built into our onboarding program for our channel is to have this cross functional team assigned to every channel partner that we have a contract with. So they all understand who is this partner? What are they trying to do? What's our partnership about? What are our joint objectives? How are we going to get there? What's my role in supporting that? To get us to success? So I'm lucky here, I haven't always been that lucky. I've had some pretty hard tree huggers in the past.

Brian Lambert 13:52

So do you get do you actually call them that in the group?

Unknown Speaker 13:55

And they have not? I actually, it actually came to you or chatting on LinkedIn. I was like, Ah,

Unknown Speaker 14:00

yeah. I don't know if they would like

Unknown Speaker 14:03

they would not. definitely would not.

Brian Lambert 14:07

So I don't want to encourage our listeners to start using that

Unknown Speaker 14:10

know it. But it's a characteristic, right. And I term it as, as a not great characteristic. We want those people to be more open and to participate in that team. And

Brian Lambert 14:19

yeah, and the reason why I say that is I've made the mistake more than once to come across a bit judgmental to others that don't report to me. And it's not fun to deal with the aftermath of those things. So with with the Orchestration angle on this, it's really an interesting space to operate within. Because you would think that saying, we have a goal, we have an outcome, let's go let's roll together would be fairly straightforward. But what you're alluding to is when we say that there's a certain cognitive bias perspective, and in some ways, hard wiring around way things have always been done. So that's where, to me what we also talked about on LinkedIn, the idea of influence and relationship building. You said, Look, this has to be factored in as part of an orchestrator, the ability to persuade and negotiate and influence and build relationships to drive outcomes together. Why do you think that that's so prevalent and required? And why is it a bit difficult to have folks that are really smart, and they all want the same, the same goal, they all want to achieve it. But it requires a skill set, like what you have to get folks to row together.

Unknown Speaker 15:44

So I'm not sure why it's so hard, I think inherently people all want to do the right thing. And I have, I have trouble with people not feeling empowered, that when I go into these situations, and you know, we have a cross functional team, I want them to be empowered to, to go and do the right things. And a lot of people don't know what to do with. So, so that's when you need to kind of take a step back, and you just sit with them and say, Okay, so what, how can we make this work? What listening to those team members is really critical, just like it's critical to listen to your customers and to listen to the salespeople you're trying to enable and to listen to your channel partners. It's just as critical to listen to those team members to find out, you know, why are they not feeling empowered? Why do they want to can choose to do things the way they've always been? And how do we move past that? How do we work together? So it's really an important thing for an orchestrator to be able to have those conversations, like we were just talking about, build those relationships to get them pointed, so that we are all rowing in the same direction so that we can get to the desired outcome? You know, I don't know, I don't understand the psychology of why everyone or not everyone, but a lot of people don't feel empowered when they come on to those teams. But some of them are there, because they've been told to be there. So that's part of it. They didn't choose to be part of that team. They're being told to be part of that team. So I think that's definitely a part of it.

Brian Lambert 17:26

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack in this, this space, right. So you're by the nature of this discussion, we're not in strategy only. And we're not in tactics only we're in a translation of or combination of strategy and tactics together, which is what orchestrators live in and what they do. And when you're engaged in the work of pursuing an outcome together, what you're talking about is a bit of the phenomenon that exists that I've seen as well, which is this. Look, we can be super creative as we, as we tackle this outcome, what ideas do you have? And sometimes, I don't know, people might say, I don't know what to do, or I don't know how to go about it. Or why don't you just tell me what you need me to do? So I can go do it? Is that what you're talking about?

Unknown Speaker 18:19

Yeah, if that's, that's absolutely right. And then the other thing you have to be prepared for as an orchestrator is that if you ask them, how we get there, and what they think and how we may be more creative and innovative, you...

Ep45 Blending Strategy & Tactics with Doug Clower

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 45

A Sales Enablement Orchestrator and Sales Enablement Insider joins our show to talk about blending strategy and tactics. Doug Clower is a 20 year Sales Enablement veteran with orchestration experience in companies like MicroFocus.

Doug joins the podcast to talk about the changing sales landscape and how Orchestrating success with sales, marketing, and operations leaders requires bridging the gap between their company’s business strategy, and the way customers need to buy.

This creates space:

Between your company and your customers
Between your growth plans and activities to drive quarterly results
Between accomplishing goals and driving daily priorities
Between the sophistication of know-how and the simplicity of action
Between managing individual contribution and customer experiences
Among specialized functional departments

Companies are structured in hierarchical functional silos making them unable to react quickly to the business landscape.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Brian Lambert 00:33

I'm Scott cantucci, Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:49

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales and a one end initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way What works? And maybe what's more important, what doesn't?

Unknown Speaker 01:04

That's great. I guess it's been really hard lately.

Brian Lambert 01:08

That's got to take us up with a centering story. We're bringing back our centering story, a couple of podcasts and panel discussions and our listeners are clamoring for a story, Scott, I think it's time to go back in history. I can feel it. What do you got for us?

Scott Santucci 01:24

Well, this time, we're gonna have to go way back the Wayback Machine. And I'd like us to imagine what the year 1271 was like.

Brian Lambert 01:35

Wow, yeah.

Scott Santucci 01:37

Good times, right. This is pre pleg. Europe, by the way. So good, you know, good stuff. In 1271, a 17 year old left Venice, with his father to go off to China. And who was that person? Well, that's what people today know as Marco Polo, and Marco Polo is not famous for that pool game. Follow. That's, that's not what he's about. That's not what he's famous for. He's actually famous for his time spent in China. So we remind ourselves that in Europe during 12, you know, 1271 right when when our when our story is that the largest cities in Europe had about 20,000 to 40,000 people that was considered a huge city and European standards. And the big thing that was emerging here was the mercantile system. So trade, and the Venetians were probably the biggest innovators of that. So they, if you know about Venice, it's this little island. They have great shipbuilding. So they sail all over to establish trade routes. And one of the things of course, you want to always stop washes trade with China because China has has silk between 1271 and 1295. He spent a lot of time in China and what makes him particularly important is that he caught the attention of kubla Khan and Quba Khan was basically the Emperor of China at that time. And Koopa Khan somehow got impressed by young Marco Polo. so impressed he was impressed by he was he thought he was witty. He was impressed by his humility and his curiosity.

And what's so fascinating about this is Quba Khan basically gave Marco Polo this Emperor's pass into all at all China, he could go anywhere. And with a with a military support bond, I mean, he could do what ever he wanted. guba Khan was so impressed by Marco Polo Khan and he represented China. As an ambassador to India, and Burma, so what? because of who he was because of his intellect. And because of his curiosity, he captured a lot of stories. When he got back in 1295, he got back to eventually got back to Venice. And Venice was at a war with Genoa. So we've got to keep in mind during this period of time, these were city states, right? So, Genoa is where Christopher Columbus is from, by the way, is a city just, you know, on the other side of the peninsula of Italy, and they were at war. And within a year of coming back home after being gone for 25 years, he gets captured by the Geneses. And so while he was in prison, he wrote about his his stories. And his stories were so impactful. Because they tell they told they told stories about an accounts of how Chinese cities were had running water and sanitation. They had over a million people in many, many of the cities, which was incomprehensible for anybody in, in western civilization to understand but the accuracy and the depictions made people become curious. They're the economy that China had they were the first people to go to a paper currency or a fiat currency is that kind of economics called it and a lot of those principles. The event the mediation use behind their form of currency, which is the Duckett, which became the standard for many many years before was replaced for the foreign. And another interesting thing about that is Marco Polo influences. A lot of us associate pasta with Italian cuisine, but they actually got that from the Chinese. So that's, that's my, that's my centering story is a go off to foreign lands, get some, get some different information, put things together, come back, and if you You're really curious and positioning a different way. You can start laying the seeds for, say, maybe a resin Renaissance.

Brian Lambert 06:10

Nice. So this is very exciting. Not only have I learned where pasta really came from, we're also going to get to use our new sound effect that we recorded with our panel, Scott and that's the So what does this have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 06:26

Well, that's a good question Brian's and taking a big step back, we can focus in sales enablement, professionals on the daily tactics and what we do and what our jobs are. Or we can take a step back and look at the overall patterns and one of the overall patterns is we're responsible for change. We're responsible for finding new ways of doing things we're responsible for getting a lot of other people together we're responsible for orchestrating a lot of people in the reason I like the story is it highlights how big some of the gaps are between different worlds. So let me elaborate on that a little bit. So we talked a little bit about Cuba Khan. And I don't expect everybody to know, middle age Chinese history, but could what's how you might recognize that name guba Khan. He's the grandson of somebody called jingis Khan. And Ganga is Khan just two generations ahead, lead a massive slaughterhouse. So one of the most ruthless and effective leaders of of all time, and he threatened much of Europe as a matter of fact, he threatened a lot of elements of the of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine side and it created a lot a lot a lot of problems.

So you have this overall fear or belief that these Mongols all all in Western Europe, have a shared view that the Mongols are this horde is barbaric horde of people ride on horseback without, you know, holding their meat together between their legs to and that that and they ate that raw meat, but they were seasoning it so repulsive. And that's what the Western culture thought. Here Marco comes back, Marco Polo comes back, and he's telling all these stories about Cuba Khan, who everybody knows is the grandson of Genghis Khan, and this massive civilization that he's got going on in this thriving economy. So it's, it's this huge shift of it, you know, not only is the idea of a million of a city with a population of a million people, hard to understand, or paying things with paper, just completely hard to understand.

Brian Lambert 08:47

So this was he saw people actually people actually knew that Asia existed, or they've heard of him,

Scott Santucci 08:55

but they like maybe earth was round two, right?

Brian Lambert 09:01

They just said never been there. So when he starts bringing back details, that's the

Scott Santucci 09:06

well Pete they knew a lot, right? So they knew about, you know, the riches, the spices, the silk, they knew all of those things. What happened is during Quba Khan's reign, he modernized a lot of things so he built a whole new dynasty. And it's the modernization of all of these things and the thrive you know, the the period of Thrive ness and prosperity that was happening in China is just really hard to comprehend. Not only are the results card to comprehend but the fact that this is the grandson of of Guinness Khan remember in Europe at that time you were born in and your last name was Miller because that's what you did. You were a Miller or Hooper, you you made. You made barrels. Your name was what you did and what you did was who You are. And here you've got what was the name con means conquer. Right? So you think he's a conquer and it just you can't imagine something different. So it's this this, this creating the space to be able to comprehend it. It was so the resistance to Marco Polo story were so hard. You can even go into Venice today. And they have a section I don't know the exact Italian, but they called him a bragger. And the priest at the time, when he was on his deathbed, they were still trying to get him to confess. Come on, Marco. Good minute, you were making stuff up to be famous. And he wouldn't admit he's like it frankly. I left half the stories of the things I saw out of here because I didn't think you

Brian Lambert 10:46

would believe them. You guys are making up words. Yeah, making up words man making up concepts. So

Scott Santucci 10:52

why does this matter? Why is framing this matter so much? Well, it matters because where we are today in our business is we're going through a similar revolution. We want to, we want to apply digital. And we think we know what digital means just like the western civilization thought they knew who kangaskhan was. But digital is much more like kubla Khan, it's it's a completely different viewpoint than what we think it is. And all of this stuff creates so much friction, how how our businesses are changing. So create space, just like there was massive distance. There's geographic distance between Western Europe and China. There was cultural space. There's philosophical space, there's all standing pace cultural space. So let's look at where we are today. We have a growing space between your company and your customers. We have space between the the growth plans coming from management, and all of the activities that people know for sure of what needs to be done to drive quarter results. We have space between accomp people who think about accomplishing goals. And then people who think about driving daily activities and doing tasks and getting stuff done.

So we even have space between how how we actually go about working, we have space between the sophistication of know how subject matter experts, and then space between other people say, Hey, we have to simplify this for action, and take a little bit of all of these different parts and string them together. We can't even agree on that. We have space between managing individual contribution and saying, Hey, I as an employee, and then valued because of these earned by contributions, yet at the other end, customers don't really care about individual contributions. They care about their experience, and what does that look like? So we have space between that and then we have space among all of the specialized functional departments. So that's how we tie it all together. And because The way that we're structured, just like the way Western civilization was structured in terms of their thinking, their culture, etc, made it very difficult for, for Europe to buy in, it took really a plague to get people in a more coachable moment. We're in a very, very similar spot today. So that's that's why that story is relevant.

Brian Lambert 13:21

Yeah, it's amazing. And it's interesting, because the more you dwell in the space there, the more the space becomes real. And so Marco Polo dwelled in the space and he came back with stories and people thought he was crazy. And he was bragging. And the space though actually has definition people occupy space activities that occupy space thinking, structures, processes, there's a lot of stuff in the space. So it's a paradox between, there's nothing there, nothing to see here. Move on. And boy, there's a lot of things happening there. And I love this concept for the podcast. Cast today, let's let's dwell on the space, right? And to help with that I'm bringing in and we're bringing in Doug clower, who's one of our orchestrator, friends. And he's also been a listener of the inside sales enablement podcast. So he's a, he's a member of the insider nation. I, Doug, how you doing?

Unknown Speaker 14:20

I'm doing well. Thanks, Brian. And Thanks, Scott. Thanks for having me on today.

Brian Lambert 14:25

Absolutely. And what do you think? I'd love to hear your reaction to the Marco Polo framing story, and then how that relates to your thinking and then just tell us a little bit about yourself?

Unknown Speaker 14:41

Well, you know, right, right up front, the Marco Polo story is so compelling because it talks about us living in a world that we perceive, but then looking at a different role and seeing it's so much different and understanding what the the differences are Between the two sides, it's just wow, the exploration that he went through the the mind blowing experience that he had to have had at the time, it was certainly eye opening and something he was able to bring back to the Western civilization, even though, as you described Scott, they didn't believe it. And he didn't tell him everything because he didn't think they would. So it's important for us to remember that we sometimes have to put ourselves in the other person's shoes, think about what they see, etc. So it's kind of an important thing. These webcasts, these have been so helpful for me in terms of evolving some of the things I think about helping me put my feet in the other person's shoes, putting my my feet in the shoes of say, the canals of the world who, from a private equity standpoint, what do they see? What are they looking for, thinking about other things that have been happening? So it's really important. My background is is in a consulting type of side of the house, I started off as an architect, which is sort of a consultative selling kind of thing. I transitioned in it and was managing the sales of products for small business small partner, and then evolved over the time into an enablement role, which was so exciting because it was a new territory, a new venture. And so my background is really in, in sales excellence. And that's really what I'm passionate about. I, I sort of tag myself these days as an enablement guru. I have now started tagging myself as an orchestrator. And I continue to expect to do that. So

Brian Lambert 16:50

awesome. Yeah. And this idea of orchestrator let's let's talk about with Scott and it's really have a conversation here. In The space that orchestrator comes from. So this space that that exists, I'd love to explore it a little bit. And let's have a conversation. Doug, I'll start with you. When you went through, as you alluded to the webinars, and I know you've listened to the show, let's let's go back a little bit into the first webinar, our second webinar that Scott did, which was the state of sales enablement. And in that that webinar was the landscape of sales enablement and how it's evolving. And it was really grounded in the research that was happening in that in that time. It was about, I guess, two months ago now and what what can you share with regard to, you know, your story and how its unfolded over the last couple of months, and let's use that, that webinars and also these other touch points that you've had as a way to get our listeners up to speed on what's been happening.

Unknown Speaker 17:58

You know what, I'll tell you what Most enlightening about this and another example of me putting my shoes and somebody else's my feet in somebody else's shoes. I don't want to put my shoes on, I wouldn't like them. Anyway, the important thing is when I first went through the research and started looking at things I, I think my my visceral reaction initially was that our sales enablement resources, the people that were responding are way too tactically oriented. And I just, in my mind, I felt like sales enablement as a practice needed to be more strategic, etc. So I, I immediately just sort of pulled back from that. But as I started to think through that and started listening to things and being challenged by different stories and different points of view about this, I started recognizing how strategy and tactics have to be married in a way You know, I always said that tactics. Yeah, we have to do that. There's no doubt about it. But oftentimes, just like a recent book that I'm not a recent book, but a book that I've recently been reviewing or re reading, it really talks about the fact that there's got to be marriage, there's got to be an execution toward the strategy can't just say I've got a strategy and make it happen. So this concept of stratification, which is a term that first came up back then was so important and especially how it applies to thinking about enablement as a practice and evolving and moving forward toward the business within a business concept that Scott and you have have all begun to share with the rest of us. So it's really insightful and helpful. It's helped me transition to think you know, I have to think of it in total, I can't I can't break the two apart. Dismiss one side or the other.

Brian Lambert 20:02

Yeah, that's great. So let's use our Marco Polo analogy here. Let's say you're in the year in Europe, and Scott's Marco Polo, and he's went out, he went over there. And he, he, he taught he went through Asia. And he's bringing back all these stories about, in this case, in the modern era, the digital transformation, the impact of digital the impact of COVID the gaps that exists between...

Ep44 Women In Sales Enablement with An All Star Panel

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 44

At the end of our anniversary show the guys talked with Sarah Fricke who is passionate about laying a path for other women to join us in the enablement field while also while promoting the fact that there are many paths into enablement.

Sarah joins the show to host a panel with:

Amy Benoit - Renaissance Woman Catalyzing Change, consultant
Lindsay Gore - Microsoft
Hang Black - Juniper
Sarah Fricke - RingCentral
Alicia Leach - Salesforce
Steph Bell - Salesforce
Stephanie Middaugh - Divvy

The show topics include:

Share how great women forged a path in sales enablement and why
Share strategies of navigating career conversations within a male dominated organization that doesn’t have a definition for enablement
To help improve businesses by creating an environment where everyone benefits by the ‘melting pot’ concept of bringing people together.
The business case for diverse mindsets and cognitive diversity
The importance of allies in the workplace

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now. I'm Scott, Brian Lambert

Greg 00:36

and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:49

Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales and Avon initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners, we learned the hard way. What works Maybe what's more important, what doesn't?

Greg 01:02

That's awesome in Yep. And we know what works because we know conversations work. And we're going to have a conversation today in a very special episode with a great panel discussion with women in sales enablement. gotten I are super excited to host this panel because as orchestrators, we need to work with people who have different perspectives than us. And we need to be inclusive of those perspectives. And so what we're going to do is make this fun and informal and informational. And if you guys remember in our last podcast, which was our anniversary show, it was Episode 43. And in that particular episode, Sarah Frick from ringcentral was with us. And after we were done shooting that episode and recording it. We were talking to Sarah and the rest of the panelists about ideas for this year. And as we move into season two, what could we talk about? and Sara chimed in and said, hey, let's you know it'd be great if we brought together and created some space to have conversations with women and salespeople. And so we said, That's great idea and help us Can you help us do that. And so that's what we're going to do. We're going to I'm going to pass this over to Sarah Frick, who's going to be our guest host. And she's going to talk through and introduce the panelists. And she's going to talk about and ask them questions, like, you know, what's happening when women in leadership for enablement? What does it look like when they're working well, and when it works well, and what are some specific challenges that women in enablement face today and many, many others, and then Scott and I are going to chime in along the way. And as usual, we'll recap it at the end. So Sarah, thanks so much for volunteering to do this. Really appreciate it. I'm gonna pass it over to you. And you can kick it off how you want to.

Unknown Speaker 02:41

That sounds great. Brian Scott, thank you so much for providing the space to do this. Part of part of part of any raid group is how can I continue to get additional perspective, one of the things that you know, I started with my colleagues that bring Central is something called the ladies room. So today I like to think that we're kind of broadening that concept and bringing in a few more folks to the conversation. So,

Greg 03:10

there we go. Like, as a guy, I'm not sure if I want to be in the ladies room. I don't know.

Scott Santucci 03:18

I don't I definitely want to be in the ladies room.

Unknown Speaker 03:21

Just want to make sure.

Unknown Speaker 03:23

Well, Brian,

Unknown Speaker 03:25

you're getting a really

Unknown Speaker 03:26

good invite. We're having this conversation between.

Unknown Speaker 03:31

Ryan I have to say as a woman in technology, welcome to our lives every day. There you go.

Unknown Speaker 03:38

Men can have their locker rooms ladies are getting the ladies room here. So I really appreciate the great panel that we've got here. We have some phenomenal, strong, great enablement leaders. So I don't even think I could do justice of introducing everyone. We've got folks from the south To the west to not across the pond quite yet. Let's do that next round and tons of voices that have been highlighted by folks like LinkedIn and others of, hey, these are the people that you really should be listening to. So thank you, ladies for joining us. And I'm just going to start by asking you to introduce yourself to the crew. So Amy, would you like to kick us off?

Amy Benoit 04:24

Sure. Can you hear me? I can. Awesome. Thank you for having me. It's very nice to be in such good company with a lot of estrogen. And not generally surrounded by as much and we'll get into that. I've been in the enablement learning development space throughout my career started off at EMC, about 15 years ago, and in 2018, I started my own consulting business. What I love to be able to do is help executives make decision and influence up and down their chain to create efficiencies. I also love to make sure that we're getting all the perspectives from the different folks in the organization. I believe that that lens is not often seen by most leaders because they, their point of view is it's focused and so I widen the focus so that we get more diverse spot.

Unknown Speaker 05:32

That's awesome. Thanks, Amy, for sharing that and look forward to diving into that commentary deeper.

Unknown Speaker 05:39

Lindsay, can you introduce yourself, please?

Unknown Speaker 05:43

Yeah, hi, it's, um, I'm excited to be here today as well. So great group of women and I think this should be an excellent conversation. My name is Lindsey Gore. I've been in technology sales for about the last 12 years or so. Both in sales and sales leadership. roles and currently I'm at Microsoft today and in their cloud business, so selling data and AI solutions.

Unknown Speaker 06:10

Thank you, Lindsay. Really appreciate that. Let's say you want to give go next. Yes, thank you very much for having me. My name is Alicia Leach. I come from Salesforce. I am a field enablement director at Salesforce. Prior to being in enablement, I was in sales for quite some time. I'd say I've had I have about a 20 year, technology sales career. And like a me who likes to help leaders in decision making. I like to help sales leaders in getting deals off the table and helping them make money. So we're all here for make that money. I like that you you come from it's like you've, you've come down from space. into sales bars, which totally makes sense knowing Salesforce. That's awesome. Thank you so much. And Steph, I know you're on the same team. Can you introduce yourself?

Unknown Speaker 07:10

Yes. Hi Sara. This is Stephanie bell. I am also a Salesforce. I've been here the last five years and have been in sales the last decade, just recently moving into the enablement side of the house actually under Alicia. So I'm also a manager of field enablement. And one of my passion projects is the Women's Network at Salesforce. So I'm the president of the Salesforce Women's Network for the southeast out of our Atlanta home. We have about 350 members. So that is my passion project and helping get more women into leadership.

Unknown Speaker 07:48

That is phenomenal. And being in the southeast, you've got a part of my heart. I'm actually in South Carolina, so

Unknown Speaker 07:59

hey, Yeah. Can you introduce yourself, please?

Unknown Speaker 08:02

Hi there. My name is Hank black. I'm the Vice President of global sales enablement. At Juniper Networks. I've been here about 18 months, my route has been a little bit circuitous. I spent almost a decade in engineering, a decade in marketing, and almost now a decade in sales. And I've loved all of it, but I feel like enablement is my home because it is the convergence of all three and I to hail from Louisiana. So I'm feeling the SE vibe.

Unknown Speaker 08:30

Yeah, everyone should have moved to this alfea. Everyone should be in sales. We've all at least experienced that a little bit. But it sounds like with this core group, I think we could build a product we could market a product we can enable a product in the market, right? So we got it all covered. No, no.

Unknown Speaker 08:48

Selling. How could I do that?

Unknown Speaker 08:52

It sells itself.

Unknown Speaker 08:53

Yeah, we're going to create such a great product Scott that that it will just we'll just put it out there and people will buy it.

Unknown Speaker 09:01

Well, thank you again for joining us ladies in such great backgrounds to have and give experience to others. As just to open it up quickly. I know staff you had shared the women's group in Atlanta that you, you run, as anyone else started a group like that within your organization or doing anything within your particular teams to help create that environment for other women in the workplace.

Amy Benoit 09:29

Yeah, this is Amy. I've, when I was working at EMC, I was leaving the West Coast women's organization. So we had a west and east of the Americas. And it was something that we ran quarterly events, had newsletters and just drove a lot of conversation and awareness around women in the industry.

Unknown Speaker 09:55

Awesome in a quarterly newsletter. It's a fun way to capture it and Get it out there.

Amy Benoit 10:01

Oh, yes, this is back when newsletters were a hit right. But yes, we did have it was just a great way for folks to get the information and we found that a lot of our audience actually enjoyed reading the newsletters. So

Unknown Speaker 10:18

that's great. Yeah, I remember the, from the desk of x days, whenever you get the highest readership and you're like, yeah, now it's like doesn't have a hashtag nobody's listening.

Unknown Speaker 10:31

Anyone else.

Unknown Speaker 10:33

This is happening. I am a few years ago created a leading group called marketing mavens of the Bay Area. But since I've exited marketing, I've actually tended to be more involved in not intercompany, but intra company women's functions as sponsoring that from my company as part of engagement other companies examples would be networking with a purpose that connects some of the largest 14 companies in the Bay Area, and women Unlimited, those sorts of connections and I'm now kicking off a new group where we want to focus on actually creating action.

Unknown Speaker 11:13

That's a good one.

Unknown Speaker 11:15

There's a lot to talk and create an inclusive environment stock, but there's a whole nother part of actually taking the action and making it happen. Steph, tell us a little bit more about your group in Atlanta.

Unknown Speaker 11:28

Sure, so I can't take all of the credit for launching. So I want to be clear, there's a lot of people that helped. We are lucky at Salesforce to have a lot of er G's. And a few years ago, four years ago, they started thinking about things like wit that exists on a national level and how we bring things like that is Salesforce. So a group of women started to think through what that would look like as an ER G and the sales worse. Women's Network was born. And we decided to launch a version of that in Atlanta. So you were lucky enough to have some executive sponsors who helped us get it off the ground and say, Hey, whatever you need, we're here, both male and female, we find that it's really important to have male allies, because they tend to be the majority of leadership. So we were lucky that we had a great male ally and lots of female executives that helped us stand it up. And then basically what we do is we try and grow our membership. And every year at the global level, Women's Network, that's a v2 mom. So if you're not familiar with the v2 mom framework, it's your vision, your values, your methods, your measurements and your obstacles. So we work from that framework, work as a company and we also work with that framework as the Women's Network.

So every year we set that out and this year, our major goal is to see 50% of women in leadership. So we structured Are events in our engagement with all of our members around? How do we get them exposure to leaders? How do we focus on the intersectionality of women and other groups? And how do we build diverse teams, and offer people networking, mentorship, sponsorship opportunities. So we try and really stick closely to that one big goal and center everything we do with our members around that. So it's really interesting that we sort of have a global lead, but we get to run it how best works for our members in and around Atlanta.

Unknown Speaker 13:35

I am floored and impressed with the model that you both use right as a company and then you've put that into your ear. Geez. One of the things that I've really noticed as folks are creating them and crafting them is we don't always remember that we should use all the core business practices that we already have in place, as we're starting essentially a new team and Just for clarification for everyone er DS or employee research groups, hang Good call out there. And it really, obviously right diversity and inclusion as as part of a company have now become an actual division and typically they're running the RGS at a high level and then of course right like staffs point of view it's you can't have any RG in just headquarter say out in San Francisco like our organizations are based and expect that to apply everywhere. There's got to be these offshoots of organizations. How Tell me kind of a little bit guys, as you think about er G's that you've gotten placed within your company. How, at UNICEF, you mentioned male and female. Does everyone agree with having both parties included in the conversation? fill out a heads nodding for Harlan. No early listeners. What about you know, if you Have that diversity around the table. And you've had women that have spoken up and said I'd actually rather have a, you know, a forum. That's just women only as that happens anyone?

Unknown Speaker 15:14

Well, I think there are two types of conversations. There are conversations that are kind of, you know, Vegas rules and their conversations where you bring in allies and I don't think it's just men. I think inclusion and diversity. There's a little bit of a misnomer around. It's just around race is just around gender is just around this, that or the other. It's a non exclusion of all parties. It's it's bringing in voices and cognitive diversity to the table. And there's no social movement ever. I repeat ever in history, who that has been one without the Allies at the table.

Unknown Speaker 15:52

really true. I think. I couldn't agree with you more hang at Salesforce. We have this tagline that says is the greatest platform for change. And at first, I thought that that was branding maybe 10 to 10 years ago when we first started with that. And it's not it's actually a living breathing mantra at our, at our workplace. And if you don't diversity, inclusion is just that is diversity. It's the diversity of men, women, race, cultural background, sexual Association, all of it. And so if you don't have, if you create a group that is a vacuum of all like one person, then you're missing the diversity and inclusion part.

Unknown Speaker 16:42

It's interesting, though, on the flip side of that, I'll just sort of throw this out there it for folks that maybe haven't had as much of a voice or have had a hard time finding their voice being in a group of like folks with shared experiences, give something of that context to actually develop that voice. So then When you're in a mixed audience, I think you can show up in a different way and feel supported. So, you know, I think the allies are certainly very, very important. But I think, you know, sort of the group connection as well, is also important. So I think there's probably value on both sides, I would say from, from my own experience, and this hasn't been intentional at all. But I've never worked in an organization with as many women as I do now. And women leaders, so I've, I've never actually had a female boss until you know, the last two years of my career. And you're her boss's boss as a woman and there's a quite a chain. But my networking within the within Microsoft has been very female focused, and that hasn't really been intentional, but I found that those connections have been easier to make in terms of building up my own network versus in other places where the organization was very heavily male, and it was a lot harder. to approach executives to build out my network that way, and I don't know that that has anything here there in terms of saying one way is better than the other. But I think you've got to be able to span both directions. And, and maybe there's value in both types of conversations one with with your group and then the other, with your allies and inclusive.

Unknown Speaker 18:21

As Lindsey, I've found that, definitely to be the case, right? I think we're all in agreement. We want our allies around the table, but they're also, you know, creating space to have this more the smaller conversations and like we continue

Ep43 ISE Season Finalé Anniversary Show with 5 Listeners

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 12:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 43.

Let's Celebrate!

Join 5 Sales Enablement Insiders and to talk through the past 12 months. In the last 12 months, 14,600 listens from 46 countries. instead of going back and reviewing all our shows again and creating some sort of review, we crowd sourced it. And you're invited to the party!

Hear their top episodes, and how they action the podcast in their organization. Also, get the "inside scoop" on what we did behind the scenes!

Here are some other stats from the podcast thus far:

Listeners from 46 Countries.
USA represents 72% of listens
When people listen: Mon – Thurs around 1pm
Monday is our biggest listening day

Joining us to celebrate on the Anniversary Show:

Erich Starrett, CRO / Director of Business Development @ETA and President of the Atlanta SE Society
Sarah Fricke Senior Manager, Global Sales Enablement @ RingCentral
Meagan Davis, Sales Enablement Manager at CyberArk
Amy Benoit , Founder and Chief Consultant at AllPropos specializing in organizational design and strategy consulting
Bill Ball, Director of Learning and Development at Disys and SE Society Exec Board Member

To view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:06

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to your company? other functions, the market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Brian Lambert 00:38

I'm Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, and we are the sales enablement insiders.

Scott Santucci 00:44

Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence and increase the span of control within their companies. Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives, as analysts, consultants, or practitioners, we've learned the hard way, what works? And maybe what's more important, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:10

Welcome to our first anniversary show. It's the Year in Review everybody.

Unknown Speaker 01:15

Yeah.

Brian Lambert 01:19

So thanks for joining us. And I wanted to start the show by saying thank you so much insider nation for being listeners of our show. We started this exactly a year ago, this week, when this episode drops, it will be one year, and it's been quite a ride. We started out like trying to figure out how many of these we could do. So I've listened to this show a lot. And I said, Okay, well, Scott, how do we do an anniversary episode. And I wanted to really take it through here and say, I can go back and listen to everything or crowdsource it. So I am going to crowdsource it, you guys heard a little bit of an audience a little bit of a crowd. And I'm excited to introduce these folks that have joined us, for our insider nation. And it's our open mic podcast. And we're going to have them chime in. So I know you guys like stats, and I know Scott love stats. So let me let me give you the download here on what's been downloaded. I think you're gonna appreciate it in the last 12 months, we've had 14,600 listens of our podcast, people from 46 countries, the 770 2% of that come from the US. That's about 1200 a month.

Also, interestingly enough, Monday through Thursday, around 1pm, or our peak hours. So I don't know if folks are out taking a walk at that time, or maybe working out around that time, or what but that was interesting. Also, Monday is our biggest listening day. We appreciate you guys starting the week off with a little dose of of Scott and Brian, that's cool. Apple podcasts 40% of our listens. And that means a lot of you folks are on mobile 60% are on mobile and iOS is the biggest operating system, the largest operating system. 60% of folks are on iOS devices. In the past year, we feel the two surveys. One was on the COVID response that that gave it gave us actually five episodes, we're trying to do one, but it kept just yielding great information and in detail. The second survey and research project was on the state of sales enablement, that groundbreaking research really set the tone here for coming out of COVID. And it's really the only one I've seen the only research I've seen post COVID, especially in the sales enablement space, which hasn't had a lot of coverage from a qualitative perspective, which means not using, you know, circle number one to five. So that was rich data, we pulled that in did a webinar, and we have about 2500 people on our newsletter list. And about 400 total people have listened to almost 500 have listened to the webinar. So that's great. From our listeners from insider nation, you're going to hear about that.

But before I go further, I also have another set of statistics and I I'm doing this on purpose because Scott's such a numbers person. But Nick is our sound guy. And you guys have heard us talk about Nick before. He's the awesome voice over talent at the beginning of the show. Yes, we made him pick the music. He's also introducing the show. And he's also our engineer who edits the show and does all of our cleanup to make it sound good. So he's been tracking our stats, and we're gonna we're gonna give you guys some of those numbers now. So over the last 41 episodes, he's taken out 157 arms. So that's good. 257 double taps on Scott desk. That's that He does that a lot and actually does that when he said something really super important. So there's 257 of those 70 broken words due to it, it would. That's super annoying because it, see what I did there. That was just me, that was not a bad connection. But that's what he fixes so that you don't get annoyed. But Nick, leave that one in. Just for a fact, I thought that was cool. I'm being creative. 340 3045 squeaky chairs like this.

I have a squeaky chair. So he's always on me for squeaking my chair while I'm talking. So he can't edit it out when I'm doing that. So that's probably pretty annoying. And then, about 40 times he's inserted our famous Whoa. And that's almost one per show. So we're on track for that. And five times he's he said, he said to fix it majorly. Because I've said like, hey, Nick, go back and edit that out. We can't say those cuss words, things like that. So that's pretty cool. And thanks, Nick for doing that. Nick wrote us a quick little note. He said he's enjoyed engineering this. And he's sorry, he hasn't found this. So what noise yet? And we're gonna actually he's asking us, Scott, if we can record this. So what noise? What do you think about that? Oh, sweet. You know, that's so what you've been looking for for nine months? Yeah. We're gonna get it right now. By the

Scott Santucci 06:23

way, thank you guys so much for doing this is awesome. I'm so excited. This is Brian's pure directorial debut. at it. I'm loving it.

Brian Lambert 06:32

Yeah, we're gonna record this. So what but you are the, I guess the the director or the producer, whatever. So we have to do this. So what until you're happy?

Scott Santucci 06:42

Okay,

Brian Lambert 06:42

what do I need to do? count us down? And then we're going to do so what until we can get it for Nick.

Scott Santucci 06:48

Okay. Awesome. Okay. 321.

Unknown Speaker 06:56

Scott Santucci 06:59

you guys don't sound angry and

Brian Lambert 07:01

we got to be faster.

Scott Santucci 07:02

And you got to be angry. Like, what are the hell you talking about? Man?

Brian Lambert 07:07

Get us into the mood. Why are we so important?

Scott Santucci 07:10

I need to I need to do it the mood?

Brian Lambert 07:12

Yeah. Set the context.

Scott Santucci 07:14

A good director. Yeah, direct direct. I need director. Okay,

Unknown Speaker 07:22

what's my motivation?

Scott Santucci 07:23

Right? Well, whose motivation so what's your motivation? So you guys your motivation is this. You just heard me pontificate about something that whether it be World War One trenches, a Brooklyn Bridge, Dimitri medoff. Metal, metal often is a periodic table, something like that. And you're impatient wanting to know what the hell does this have to do with insert something you care about? sales, pipeline coaching, whatever. That's your motivation. She kind of annoyed. I get to the chase. What are you talking about, man?

Brian Lambert 07:58

All right. Okay, what needs to be fast, not a so what it needs to do what? It needs to be a jab.

Erich Starrett 08:07

So it's 123. So what?

Unknown Speaker 08:10

Like that we need we need the rhythm. And we need an example of this. So what you're looking for so so what first I'm serious. Yeah, call this up. demonstrate this. So what and then we need to count off and not a random rhythm and a 123 word,

Erich Starrett 08:28

right? And then again, we're five. So what's four or five? I'm Maxi directing.

Unknown Speaker 08:31

Sorry.

Brian Lambert 08:33

Okay. So Scott, do you want to give us your best so what is you envision it?

Erich Starrett 08:40

Scorsese? He's reflecting right?

Unknown Speaker 08:42

Is this what we've come to?

Scott Santucci 08:44

Well, I think there's a each pick your own. Oh, God. One of these. Okay.

Unknown Speaker 08:51

So what?

Scott Santucci 08:54

You can do one of those or So what? Either of those? And we have a mix of those. That'd be better.

Unknown Speaker 09:03

exasperated to irate. Yes. Got it.

Brian Lambert 09:07

Yep. You Bill. Bill, you want to count us down in a very specific rhythm.

Unknown Speaker 09:11

I got you. 123.

Unknown Speaker 09:16

Scott Santucci 09:18

that was perfect. Directors. So that

Brian Lambert 09:23

Scott Santucci 09:24

wow. Is our producer now for the next year for your next bill.

Unknown Speaker 09:28

Do you want to do one more so you guys can compare and pick which one you like better? Can we can get on with the damn show?

Brian Lambert 09:34

Yeah. All right, dude.

Unknown Speaker 09:36

Oh, what?

Unknown Speaker 09:39

123 so

Scott Santucci 09:45

nice.

Brian Lambert 09:47

So none of our listeners know who's actually joined us. So this is perfect.

Scott Santucci 09:50

Are you recording now? Yeah,

Brian Lambert 09:52

well, no, we've recorded a whole bunch and that they don't even know these folks are. It's awesome. And you're here in the studio with us live via Jim so let me introduce the five insiders that we have on this show, helping us celebrate our anniversary. I'm going to introduce them now that I'm going to explain after they introduce them a bit about themselves and after I introduce them, I'll explain how this show is going to work. So to help us on the show, First up, we have Erich Starrett. Eric is the Director of Business Development at eta creative event producers and he's based in Atlanta. Hey, Eric, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Erich Starrett 10:30

Hey, thanks, Brian. Yeah, working for at a creative event producers here where I'm focused on high tech fortune 3000 ish sales, kickoffs, and user conferences, which are more of my sales and marketing field marketing folks. And I'm also the president of the Atlanta Sales Enablement Society's Atlanta chapter, focus there, as you probably know, working with fellow practitioners to elevate the profession, and empowering orchestrators.

Brian Lambert 10:59

Thanks for joining us and appreciate that and thanks for being a big supporter of insider nation. And actually, you're our first back to back guest not only be on this episode, which is Episode 43, your episode that you helped her record on the research project is going to be 42. So you're honorary back to back first ever honoree back to back person. So thanks for doing that.

Erich Starrett 11:23

Thanks, it's an honor Brian, thank you. My favorite episode would have to be because of what I shared earlier, the rethink on sales kickoff, what is what are executives getting from the investment? And actually fanboy insider geek fat Scott in episode talks about it as Episode Five, but it is actually Episode 11 insider nation if you're looking to look it up, and the why of it is that it's a veritable buffet of multiple reasons. One, it was the first episode I believe that was recorded after you had released an episode and we're actually starting to get listener feedback. And I loved hearing that my fellow Platipi also loved the whole approach of the revisit, rethink reframe, you address the critical question of if we're going virtual, how am I going to have tequila shots with my peers? absolutely critical. And in fact, it's kind of funny, y'all were ahead of your time now that the whole sky Oh, going virtual is such a big topic. So the couple of things you covered off on that I loved how early and how often do you start planning your SKO's? Can you quantify the economic value of those SKO's? And do you have a post kickoff and pre kickoff plan and those are critical questions that I rarely hear asked and rarely effectively addressed?

Brian Lambert 12:38

That's cool. Are you gonna Are you gonna start the official insider nation wiki page with all the facts? You're loving walking library?

Scott Santucci 12:48

I love the fact that I'm getting called out of. So I would I would love to say that was an Easter egg Eric, it wasn't now. Well,

Erich Starrett 12:56

I feel like it's Easter every day with y'all. So thank you.

Brian Lambert 13:00

Yeah, he called me out. What did you call me out about over text? You're like, Hey, you said Oh, you said in the webinar. It's the heroic framework. No holistic frame. But he wrote you said it was the holistic framework. Did you really? Yeah. He wrote I'm like, Oh, my Yes, I did. I miss

Scott Santucci 13:17

being heroic framework. Got to say the beam in front of it.

Brian Lambert 13:21

Right. Thank you for catching and calling me out as well. Erich in the lab. My pleasure. I appreciate it. All right, cool. Second Person up is Sarah Frick, and she's the senior manager of global sales enablement at ringcentral. I met Sarah when I moved to Charlotte and a little known fact my daughter, who just graduated from Virginia Tech go Hokies. Right, Scott. She's actually been an intern in ringcentral last summer and met Sarah there. So Sarah, and I've talked a lot on LinkedIn. We did some of the Charlotte sex together. And so Sara, thank you so much for joining and tell us a little bit about yourself.

Unknown Speaker 14:00

Absolutely. Brian, thank you for having me. So, as Brian mentioned, I'm Sarah Frick, I actually recently got married so I do to change that last name.

Scott Santucci 14:10

A lot here.

Unknown Speaker 14:12

But my last name is Sarah gross now. And so I'm really excited to obviously be going through the time of life, right. It's been cool first year marriage and our family. We just have a kind of puppy named sir. I work for ringcentral day to day along with that fun family life. And my goal there is to take ringcentral from a billion dollars we are today to attend billion dollar company through helping folks right both communicate within their organizations and outside of their organizations. What I love most about what you're doing here, Brian and Scott is it's eight we're all able to relate to it my favorite episode, because of that is busy, active versus productive. So it's Episode 25. The reason Then I bring that one up is something I constantly struggle with, right? You're there. It's six or seven o'clock at night. Are you actually being productive with your time? Or is it something you should set aside and come back to it at another point I am and realize, right, what are your priorities constantly ranked? So thanks again for having me on.

Brian Lambert 15:20

Yeah, you bet. Thank you. Thanks for sharing your favorite episode. All right, so let's go to our third person. Three out of five. This is awesome. I'm so excited about this. We've got Megan, who's the sales enablement manager at cyber Ark. I met Megan, when she posted her picture about the show, I think I think that was the one of the coolest moments for me was I had to show my wife I was like, Look, somebody posted our show. And there was the guy running through the brick wall and his big 60 inch TV. I was like, This is so cool. She's also been talking with Scott and I about the idea of the podcast and how to learn now that we're in COVID. She's been involved with SEO as the sales enablement society. And in 2018, she was actually featured on the the coverage desk. And one of the little known facts here is Megan is had had a successful Kickstarter back in 2015. And Amy, just a heads up you guys should talk after the show you guys have a lot in common. But Megan, tell us a little bit about yourself. And also what was your favorite episode?

Unknown Speaker 16:22

Sure. So a little bit about me, like you said, I lead sales enablement at cyber. Cyber ARKS a global cybersecurity company, we provide privileged access management solutions to enterprises. And from the sales enablement perspective, I like you...

Ep42 The Five Flavors of Enablement #Orchestrator with Erich Starrett

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 42

In this episode, we're joined by Erich Starrett, President of the Atlanta Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society.

We engage in a lively, candid discussion introducing "the five flavors" of Enablement #Orchestrator: Talent Enablement, Message Enablement, Pipeline Enablement, Organizational Enablement, and Commercial Enablement.

We also discuss the differences between generating data and creating insights. These factors have massive implications for Sales Enablement Leaders looking to Orchestrate across functional groups.

Why? Because:

Gathering multiple perspectives by "shaking and sorting" each person's perspective into patterns that others can agree on is absolutely critical to orchestrating.
Confirming those patterns while gaining commitment to act, and factoring in the current "mental maps" of others and how they see the challenge is required to enrolling others.
Unifying action through clarifying where people "Get to yes" and then synthesizing the information into 2-3 executable insights are required to gain traction with important initiatives.

Scott and Brian followed this process for the State of Sales Enablement Research. That's why listening to this episode is an important ingredient to your future success. Data just doesn't provide this level of current state reality -- Data is simply too far in the rear-view mirror.

To view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

Mentioned in this episode:

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

Ep41 Engineering Valuable Sales Conversations with Scott King

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 27 May 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 41

In this episode Scott King joins the show to help "dissect" the revenue engine and discuss the wins he's accomplished in partnership with product, marketing and sales teams to drive profitable growth at his company.

We tap into their shared experiences to discuss the revenue and profitable growth "anatomy" that exists within companies and how sales enablement leaders can help decrease seller burden and elevate sales conversations at scale in partnership with sales leadership.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession. Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Brian Lambert 00:34

I'm Brian Lambert. And I'm Scott King. And we're the sales enablement insiders. This podcast is focused on helping you be successful overcoming sales complexity, so that your salespeople can be more effective in the market. If you're an enablement leader, looking to elevate your function, expand your sphere of influence, and increase your impact with customers. You're in the right spot. Thanks, Scott. Those of you who are longtime listeners, you heard that right. That was Scott King, not Scott Santucci. So Scott King, are you ready to take the guest host spot today? Yeah, man. I'm excited. I'm jumping into the co host seat so we can put Scott Santucci on the hot seat. I want to talk to him about engineering sales conversations. That's cool. Yeah, we've got to Scott's on here so we're gonna have fun and Santucci. Are you ready for this? We're all friendlies here.

Scott Santucci 01:24

I love the I love the script. It says say something witty.

Scott King 01:29

Say something.

Scott King 01:31

I watch God Scott.

Scott Santucci 01:33

That's a lot of pressure. Uh, are you excited? I'm excited. Yes.

Brian Lambert 01:36

All right, cool. Simmer down. Alright, so the reason why I've got this scripted is because I want to brag on Scott King. And usually what we do with leaders is where we first met them with their origin story is so Scott King and I go back a little bit, but he actually goes back to Scott Santucci even further and that was when Scott Santucci was at Forrester. And there was a conference in Phoenix, where Santucci was talking about sales as an ecosystem. And he had a keynote around the selling system. And for those of you at that event, he had this interactive exercise to map out your company's selling engine using like stickers on a on a board. And it was a big risk because people loved it or they hated it. And it was pretty cool. Since I had gone through this process of moving through and to a different company. I actually didn't meet Scott King at that event when he met Scott Santucci.

I was actually in North Carolina. I had reached out to Scott King. He's at a company called progress in Raleigh, and him and I started having conversations and I told him about podcast and he I said, Hey, do you know, Scott Santucci? And he said, Oh, yeah, I remember him from Phoenix and, and so as I got to know Scott King, I realized that these guys are kindred spirits. Scott Kane's been in sales management. He's been a seller. He's actually done cradle to grave sales enablement for seven different businesses. And those businesses event 20 million to 600 million in revenue. He's really at the forefront of digital transformation, coordinated content strategy, elevating productivity, and the product marketing and product management teams by 60%. And decreasing sales support needs and how they work to streamline and simplify the support that they're giving to sales. He's also got a competency based approach to hiring and sales success. And that's helped his organization exceed revenue goals by 100% year over year with an a team that had just seen substantial turnover. He's currently at 90% track record of new hires achieving quota within their first year. And I was really impressed with his approach because he showed me in that meeting, we had a bit of a whiteboard discussion around his frameworks and tools and how he was thinking about sales enablement. So I said to myself, here are two guys that have been on parallel paths. they've they've met each other once in Phoenix, they know of each other. And they've built their own sales enablement approaches. And I thought it would be good to come together on the podcast today to talk about what that looks like. So Scott King has has a copy of engineering valuable sales conversations. That's a report that Scott had written over 10 years ago when he was at Forrester, that's our centering document. It's 10 years old. So we're going back in time a little bit and now here we are, so Santucci this is not not a trial, like our listeners might be familiar with the the trial of the decade. This is not a trial. You guys are both colleagues and I got to ask you, Scott Santucci, we usually start with a centering story. So I have to take you back to 1827

Scott Santucci 04:46

I love it.

Brian Lambert 04:49

1827 do you know Henry gray

Scott Santucci 04:53

in 1827? Yeah. Henry Clay Henry gray like the South Carolina senator

Brian Lambert 05:01

Oh, no, no, that's not the one I'm thinking about.

Scott Santucci 05:05

Is it clay? See Ray?

Unknown Speaker 05:07

A Why? Or like the color gray? Oh, Henry gray.

Unknown Speaker 05:11

I've no idea who that is.

Brian Lambert 05:12

Okay. Well, he was born in 1827. And he studied the human body. And he studied the development of endocrine glands in the spleen. He was an expert in spleen science. He was appointed a lecture on anatomy at St. George's Hospital in London. In 1855, he approached his colleague, Henry Van Dyck Carter with this idea to produce an inexpensive and very accessible textbook for medical students. You know what that textbook was? It was the Grey's Anatomy book, The Grey's Anatomy book in 1853. So how would he do it? Well, following the laws that were passed in London, which was called the workhorse and hospital mortuaries act, in 1832, he could actually collect bodies from the morgue and dissect them. Yes. So he did that. And he worked 18 months on this book to make the human body accessible. And that name of the book was called the Grey's Anatomy book. There you go.

Unknown Speaker 06:18

So not the TV show. Turns out,

Unknown Speaker 06:20

not the TV show, right?

Scott Santucci 06:22

So this is the part where we're supposed to say so what, like, What in the world are you talking about here with this book, and I love being on the other end to get really, really channeled? So what so what what are you talking about? Was that anything to do with me and Scott King?

Brian Lambert 06:38

And or sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 06:40

Well, right, now, we got a guest on the show, right?

Brian Lambert 06:44

Yeah, I think, from my perspective, I think this is a it's a, it's a great starting point, I'm a little bit embarrassed to, you know, kind of admit my, you know, kind of entree into sales enablement, kind of rolling out of the field was that that event there in Scottsdale, so, you know, for me, kind of, I guess, the world started the day I was born that way, I didn't kind of look back at the, at the research that was available. So, um, you know, up until very recently, I wasn't aware that this engineering, the conversations kind of structure existed. So as I was going through it, you know, for me, there's a lot of lessons that I could have learned by not running through brick walls. And that's why I'm excited to kind of talk about this report. I know that it has been around for a while.

For me, it was new, and seems still very, very relevant. So I appreciate you guys kind of even you kind of sharing this with me, because, you know, from my perspective, it started with those stickers, and I'm a sucker for stickers and colors. Right. But I think from from my standpoint, what I'd like to do, Scott is is kind of dig in on on kind of maybe four buckets as it relates to this report and kind of how that applies to today, and what changes might be made or kind of some of the different ways that that maybe I've approached it, but the way I'm looking at it is, what is the scope? So if we've, if we've defined it, as, you know, profitable revenue growth, as it relates to this report, and as it relates to kind of the research that you guys had done a number of years ago, how did you define the scope? What do you see the scope is being? And then kind of digging down from there into? What are the components of, let's say, the anatomy? What are the components? What are the big, you know, the big organs that we're going to be concerned about, and then kind of dig down from there into the critical integration points, and then kind of taking a look at the critical parts that we could potentially dig into. I don't know if you think that sounds like a fair approach. But that was kind of the way I was, I was thinking about having the conversation.

Scott Santucci 08:42

No, it sounds great. Happy to follow your lead here. Doctor, I

Brian Lambert 08:49

think it should be scary for all of us, actually. Um, well. So yeah, as I was going through your report, and maybe it does make sense. And I'm sorry, Brian, maybe it does make sense to kind of just if you wouldn't mind kind of give us that that high level view. And the in the initial report that you did is you defined what the goals were of the CEO and the different kind of business structures that you saw, how did you come to that kind of gauge, if you can give us kind of a high level view of what those things are for those people that don't have the report sitting in front of them? To me, it was it was really insightful as a as a starting point for how revenue is impacted by organizations and how they have to align to it to achieve that goal.

Scott Santucci 09:33

Sure thing, so having had a bad carrying sales role before and then also having been a VP of sales. As the bad carrying salesperson, you think the VP of Sales has a lot of control over your destiny, and then when you're a VP of Sales and Marketing, you realize, oh my gosh, the board here really has a lot of sec or has a lot of We'll call it input. The CEO has a lot of input. So there's a lot of expectations that as a newly crafted VP of sales, sales and marketing, I was honestly dumbfounded and shocked at how little the board and the CEO really understood about sales. So what you learn is, Oh, my gosh, this is a community wide thing, it's a team sport, I can carve out my turf. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to sign up for 100% of the number, and then the products and everything like that the things the rest of the organizations doing that impact, our team's ability to hit the numbers isn't working. So that illuminated a holistic problem. And, you know, I carried that around with me, and I thought that was my own insanity. You know, like, there must be something wrong, there's got to be a way to do it better and alike. And then I joined Forrester, and we had a variety of working sessions with VPS of sales and VPS of marketing. And sure enough, they have the same problem that they call the different things, you know, because these situations that we run into, are going to be symptomatic by by the lens that we see it.

So for example, sales might say, well, we don't have we don't have the right products. Or they might say our marketing is bad. Marketing might say, well, salespeople don't know how to how to bring it up, or they don't know our customers well enough. And when you frame problems, that way, you don't get really you don't get really curious. So what we did is we brought a variety of we brought 10 VPS of sales and 10 CMOS together and said, you know, figure this out, let's let's figure out where these gaps are and put some texture around it. So that's, that's really the driving force. And then you know, sort of to do that is knowing full well that both of those parties, even if they do come together, you're going to have to have something to connect back to the CEO, because the CEO is definitely going to be involved in anything that's dealt with cross functionally, how do we go do that? So you know, the answer there was to read, I don't know, 50 annual reports. And then specifically, the q&a section and the earnings calls, and just highlight the areas, we printed all those out and highlighted all the areas where questions from the investors, we're about sales and marketing execution, and then try to put all those things together, you know, while highlighting this theme of Mad scientist's this Frankenstein, Frankenstein picture of all these pieces together. That's that's how we scoped it out.

Brian Lambert 13:00

Yeah, what I liked what I liked about the scope when I when I was reading this, and is this is absolutely not where I kind of began my journey with with enablement, I think, you know, for me, instead of looking at the whole body, maybe I articulated it, that I thought I was looking at the whole body, but in reality, I was looking at, you know, something specific, the respiratory system. And, you know, you go about trying to kind of fix that component thinking it's going to, you know, fix the body, and it doesn't, I think you brought up a couple of good points, especially in this report. And then again, which is, you know, kind of the, the creating an overarching go to market strategy is a cross functional, you know, kind of process. And, and sales really is the cap end, and from my perspective, or the execution arm of that go to strategy or go to market strategy.

And I think a lot of times, because we don't necessarily look at it as a whole, we take each individual and then ask if they're playing well together. I think there's a lot of opportunity, where, you know, the the marketing executives speak with a different language than the sales executives, right. And we kind of have to look at what those translations mean, as you're trying to drive to a, you know, kind of a larger goal. What I yeah, I just, I really felt like it was important. And it took me a long time. And once again, I'm embarrassed, I didn't I didn't get to this information earlier. But I really wasn't framing. I wasn't framing the problem, I was trying to solve at a high enough level, to I think, at least for the first couple of years, to really be able to dig in and actually start to solve, you know, kind of real problems that that, that we're going to actually help the revenue versus kind of just digging into exactly what you're talking about, which is the name calling. Well, our leads are terrible. And then you dig into the leads or you know, and at the end of the day, if I've got somebody with a heart condition, why am I Why am I fixing a sprained ankle, and I think that we have a tendency to want to do that. Mm hmm. What I really liked was then kind of how you broke that into The different styles of companies as it related to sales kind of describing the way that people kind of looked at their go to market process and what that what that motion looked like through through sales. Do you have a second? Maybe you can kind of describe what that looked like the the product base versus solution based kind of conversation?

Scott Santucci 15:21

Is that the coping with complexity part?

Brian Lambert 15:24

Yeah, I just, I really, I really feel like it says a lot if you're, if you're a sales leader, or a sales enablement leader, to me, taking a look at what the expectation is that the, of the sales team, given what they've been handed by product marketing by human capital, you know, by the sales management team, or sales operations, the structure that's put in place, I really liked the way that you did the engagement model around, you know, the commodity perception, I think we all sort of falling.

Scott Santucci 15:54

Okay, I gotcha. I like you. So one of the things that's really difficult is, for those of us that are a little bit older, and you remember the 70s, if anybody had cancer, your your grandparents or parents would whisper it be like, Brian Lambert, did you hear what happened to him. And here we are in 2020. And the diagnostic of cancer is so good, the survivability rate is so high, when you when you capture it in pretty much all forms, like pancreatic cancer used to be a death sentence. And it's got a survivability rate of 90% if they catch it early. And that phenomenon of medical science and being much more informed by just saying, look, half of the battle is we just have to talk about the problem. And the reason I that the reason I bring that up and frame that out that way is the problem that we've got is mismanaged complexity. And how many organizations do you know or people want to talk about complexity, I don't have time for that is the fingers in your ears with that.

So what we wanted to do is say, look, this complexity, and by complexity, we mean the information, the valuable information that's being transferred between your buyer and your seller. That's really the root of why you have so much inefficiency at the point of sale, your customers world has gotten has gotten more complex, your world has gotten more complex. So let's call a spade a spade. And the thing that we need to address is complexity. So that's, that's part one. So then the issue is whether you are addressing the complexity, or you're choosing to not address the complexity, like treat the symptoms, you still have a strategy, a default strategy strategy is being is happening, you are dealing with it. So if you are dealing with it by not confronting it, well guess what happens? The product, the people who are producing the messaging, maybe product marketers, product, people are producing lots of product based stuff. They're throwing it over the wall to sales, people who don't know how to discern it. And then they push that product based information onto customers. So basically, we're forcing our customers to deal with our complexity. And what do they do? Scott, you and I both know, Brian knows this too, as salespeople, if you give customers a whole bunch of stuff, when you leave, they throw all that stuff in the trash can.

Brian Lambert 18:32

That's Yeah, I agree with you. Right. And I also think there's an...

Ep40 What Being HEROIC Looks Like with Hang Black

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 21 May 2020 08:15:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 40

In this episode, the guys interview Hang Black, Head of Global Sales Enablement at Juniper Networks and Insider Nation Member. Her mantra Earn It. Own It. Evolve It. As applied during COVID: Embrace the hard of this ....”

She talks about her application and use of the HEROIC Leadership Framework and her journey to establish her charter.

On this podcast you will learn how she is using the elements of HEROIC to blend her passion for engineering and sales to find her purpose with a modern approach to sales enablement. Her mantra: Embrace the hard of this. You are out on leading the edge. You must be relevant to sales. Learn what it means to be relentlessly relevant by applying the HEROIC leadership framework.

Holistic: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts
Engineered: How the parts best fit together
Reality: How the parts behave
Ongoing Operations: Continuous and sustained improvement
Impactive: How you message to your community of stakeholders to drive action
Collaborative: Process to factor in multiple perspectives required to drive cohesion.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement to podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:32

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. This podcast is focused on helping you be successful overcoming the complexities that you find in your own company, so that your salespeople can have more valuable and relevant sales conversations, and your company wins in the market. If you're an enablement, leader, looking to elevate your function, expand your sphere of influence, or increase your impact. You're in the right spot. And today on this episode, we've got a special guest, we've got Hank black, and this is in response to the heroic framework that we published in an earlier episode.

Scott Santucci 01:14

Welcome to the show.

Hank 01:16

Thanks so much for having me. I want you to know how much it means to me to have thought leaders like yourself, introducing me to frameworks and thought processes and I particularly resonated with your heroic framework.

Brian Lambert 01:29

That's awesome. How did you guys meet?

Scott Santucci 01:32

Geez, I think it was at a sales enablement society meeting in San Francisco, on a panel hang asked a tough question about metrics. I think, I think we've gotten along swimmingly ever since. And I think that's really how we got here. We got introduced and connected.

Hank 01:48

Yes, I did ask you about metrics. Specifically, how much of a portion GMA did companies spend on sales enablement? I think I got a funny look from you.

Brian Lambert 01:56

I bet. Scott, love that question.

Scott Santucci 01:59

Oh, that was about a funny luck. The answer was 15.9%.

Hank 02:04

I think it was more than you were surprised that somebody would pick up on that particular metric. Yes,

Scott Santucci 02:09

exactly. That's the right question to ask. Anyway, so what we're going to do here is hang mentioned to being her own framework. So we introduce that as our part five of our COVID series, we had a follow on conversation with Brian applying it. And then what we want is to put more color on it, because it's a very impactful framework, just to remind everybody a little bit level set. It started out I think, maybe 1011 years ago, when we were at Forrester, we had a hero conference. We got experts, some Mitch Liddell represented the age. And we'll go through what these things mean, later, we, we had Ken Powell, representing the he, Carol Stella, the reality based, we had Oh, for operations, operation, ongoing operations by Daniel West, who's who's at Oracle now, all these different parts, and we added two other elements to it. So AI is impactive. And then C is collaboration. So that's our framework. Now, like every hero story, there's an origin story. So let's get to know a little bit about hey,

Brian Lambert 03:16

yeah, I love that setup. so far. I'm wondering if she got bit by a spider or something in a secret lab or something?

Unknown Speaker 03:24

Well, to start, I have to start from the beginning. I have a chemical engineering degree. And I had asked my parents if I could go into business. And they said, Absolutely not. You're Asian, pick one engineering lawyer or doctor, subject engineering, which I happen to love. I started work at 19. As an engineer, I did that for nine years. And then I went over to marketing for about 10 years, and then I went over to sales. So it is interesting how you will still gravitate towards what you love. I found that at some point in my career, I was very, very broad, because I was just exceptionally curious. And I wanted to learn everything there was about product marketing, I wanted to learn everything there was about product management. And so I went through product management, Product Marketing, and then over into central marketing and then over into sales. The interesting thing about each of those roles, engineering, marketing and sales is none of them has the deep respect for each of them that they should. And it wasn't until I landed into sales that I really understood how all three of those combined. It was sort of magical, having been in corporate, though at that point only for been in the business 15 years and I'd only been with two companies. I ventured on my own had my own company. I then consulted for about 30 different companies doing everything in sales and marketing consulting, sales, Ops, marketing, Ops, field marketing, sales enablement. And then I just learned that tilted towards enablement, because if you think of traditional enablement as training, there's the teacher side of you. And then if you look at where modern enablement is going, there's a revenue operation side.

So I like to think of sales enablement as business minded teaching. And it was magical. I got connected to the sales enablement society where we met Scott in San Francisco at Autodesk. And the questions that you were asking really connected me to the business within a business. And that began my journey. And I then focus my consulting company mostly on enablement. and ended up taking a job, I went back to technology, which is my love. And I stood up a program from scratch at a at a company called gigamon. And I got recruited out of there went to the larger company called eight by eight. And then that's where I had a global team that did everything sales, SC channels, and then I got recruited out into Juniper Networks where I am now where I've got sales and technical enablement for sales and services, which is collectively about 4000 people. And it's been the biggest challenge that I've had, but the most gratifying because it is extremely complex. So I always say I went into engineering because I like solving complex problems I and I like numbers. It turns out, I went into sales, because I liked numbers of dollar signs in front of them.

Scott Santucci 06:29

Awesome. And now you're in sales enablement, fixing complex problems that impact a lot of people's dollar signs.

Unknown Speaker 06:36

That's right. And it's not just sales anymore. It's above and beyond, which is an absolutely exciting time to be in enablement.

Scott Santucci 06:43

Excellent. So that's the backstory, the origin story. So now what we're going to do a setting, so bring us up to where you are Juniper, right, but before COVID.

Unknown Speaker 06:52

So we have been humming along. When I came in there, there are certain things about enablement, that is just critical in core, make sure you have a good onboarding program, make sure you have a good ongoing program, and then you build the excellence around it, which is industry best practices, learn what you can from the industry, from the analyst from your peers, and move forward. With COVID, what I found was any resistance that there was to change melted away, immediately, all the all the red tape, and all the all the I would call it speed bumps to evolution disappear because everyone had to pivot. And that's sort of my jam. That's what I love, which is change management in times of crises. So at this point in COVID, we're actually hiring more people in, we're innovating much more quickly, we're activating projects that have been on the back burner for months, we're taking this pause, and to do what I would say, Lindsay had mentioned it before, which was to evaluate, are we doing the right things? And are we doing the right things, right? My CRL has given me a lot of bandwidth to go after I tell him 25% of my job is running in front of chains and tell him to stop. So let's make sure that we're doing the right things effectively and doing less better.

Scott Santucci 08:23

So that's pretty courageous to run out in front of a train. And that's one of the things that we're talking about a lot. With the being heroic framework. We like that model, because you have to be courageous, and it's a way to help help you think it through.

Brian Lambert 08:37

Yeah, and this is Brian, I think it would be really great to hear how you're applying it that Jennifer thing?

Scott Santucci 08:46

Well, first of all, being heroic, how does that resonate with you? as an individual? What does it mean? Because some people are telling us us kind of corny or cartoonish?

Unknown Speaker 08:55

Well, it's both it is corny, and it is awesome. So they're not mutually exclusive. It's easy to remember, but it's very, it resonates very well. So, ah, as you said, was holistic. It's a sum of all parts. And I think you have to start with a mission. I think that was something that I learned very early on in enablement, especially through this society. And each of us can have a different mission that is developed within the context of the company that we're in. So my particular mission is we've heard it for years people processes and tools, but what are the enablement words that we build around that for myself, I developed an elite sales team to accelerate revenue growth by equipping sellers with relevant content, consistent process and effective technology. That's a little bit of a mouthful, but if content isn't relevant, then we're just throwing stuff out into the ether. If we add technology, it should be meant to accelerate revenue growth and not be additional time. So, so one of the things that I do is I'm a big fan of the medic framework as well. And I make sure that I have a champion in every single group, whether it's Product Marketing, Product Management, field marketing, in my organization, my sales organization in my services organization, I make sure I have a champion in each organization. And it's a continuous delivery and feedback loop so that I'm making sure that every person has a voice, and we're all collaborating together.

So one of the things that came up in the panel that we had of sales enablement, practitioners, which Yvonne dug, and imaging was this idea of learning from each other that that's, that's a key part. It's hard to be holistic, if you're just dictating to different groups, it sounds like that's something similar to what you're doing here is building relationships of representatives of different organizational functions that touch the sales organization. Truthfully, enablement is the can be kind of scary. When I came in to Juniper a little over 16 months ago, I was a powerful force of one person. And in order to bring people along, initially, you're inserting yourself and there's this fear of Oh, my gosh, she's gonna take over my job, who is she this brand new person. And the way I have positioned the conversation is, look, I'm here to help you do you better? Let me do what I do well, and we'll figure out how we can work collaboratively together. I don't actually need to own any or all of the process. But let's build the framework together. And what happens when you have that conversation is then you start peeling off a racy, you know, no one can do it all. So then you peel off a racf. You do this, you do that let's all specialize in the things that we do well individually, and put it together as a program.

Scott Santucci 11:59

So how do you handle the the feedback? We've often heard pushback, as I certainly advocate exactly what you're talking about, when you talk about races? That takes too long, we have to go now, how do you how do you rationalize that with a holistic perspective?

Unknown Speaker 12:15

Well, you can't do it without executive sponsorship. And I believe every single person that you've had on the show is that executive sponsorship. So when you have that backing, but then at least you can come in with voice. And again, it has taken me a long time to learn to speak in a way that I can resonate with the other organizations, I'm here with you, for you. And our goal is to help sales, everyone has the best intentions in place. But what is it that we can if we outline everything that needs to be done, when you look at it, I tell them, I don't need to own any or all of it. And then you look at the massive work that's in place. And then you say, but you know, I'm happy to help you take some of it on, people are happy to. And then at some point, when when there are people who are unwilling to move forward, what you'll find is 98% of the companies will willing to evolve, and there are 2% of antibodies. And what I found has worked well has been just make sure you build a great product. This is the formal train, if you want to do informal things on the side, fine. But if you can prove adoption of what is in the programmatic framework where everyone has a voice, everyone's building together, the adoption engine is 60%. To begin with 70%. And one of the metrics that I personally love is, over time I look at my programs that deliver six months later, they're increasing in adoption. So meaning the same content that I delivered six months ago, where it had 60% adoption in the first three weeks. I look at it six months later has 82% adoption. Why is that? It's because it's its content of value, it resonates and people go back to it and reference it when it becomes relevant in that moment of time in their sales cycle.

Scott Santucci 14:06

Excellent. So then let's go into E engineers. So as you react to the E part of being Iraq,

Unknown Speaker 14:15

so engineered, I love that with my background, and I know that you and Kunal have talked about being design thinkers, systems, thinkers, it's about how all the parts fit together. I love the Ford making enablement leaders take an approach to their craft. It's not about just taking orders and doing what other people say they need, but building with them. What do you need Shivani in your last podcast talked about being Mission Control, you're accepting flight plans, you're evaluating flight plans, and then you're accepting them. So those are those are programs that are in flight, you're also landing planes sunsetting programs that don't work and then taking off planes make designing and designing products and service. services that are going to be the evolution of enablement. So a very thoughtful process end to end, where you are adding strategic value with your stakeholders versus just creating what you think is good for people or even worse, taking what other people have dictated for sales and producing it.

Scott Santucci 15:18

So how would you respond when somebody if somebody were say, he engineered? Oh, gosh, you're gonna over engineer this? or How would you react react to that?

Unknown Speaker 15:27

Well, I think it flows very nicely into your reality base, there's only so much time to engineer. And you also have to be productive. So you've got to, you've got to build a plane while you're flying it and the plane actually never lands, you're you're designing for capacity, you're designing for rerouting. So you think of a plane that's always flying? Where's it going? It goes to where it needs to go at that moment of crisis of COVID is actually a wonderful time for for for enablement leaders, to flex their muscle to show their innovation and creativity, to show their ability to skate to where the puck is, as he like to mention with a Wayne Gretzky.

Scott Santucci 16:13

Awesome. And so you you went right into the reality based, what does that mean to you?

Unknown Speaker 16:19

So, reality mate base means you have to start with where you're from, you can't start with an ideal state, you can't start with Well, if these are the conditions that I have, if if only the rest of the world will tilt to me, this is the awesome product I can create. You have to start from where you are sellers know all the time that they have to start the conversation with where their customers are. So for us, our customers are our salespeople, our sales organization, the C suite, where are we today? And where do we need to go. And if you're impatient, like me, that's actually very, very hard to do. That is probably the worst, that's probably my Achilles heel is operating within the reality that I'm in because I think that I expect that everyone should be able to innovate and move at a at a pace that is probably not sustainable for a very large organization or for an organization is simply not ready for it. reality based is starting where your customers are. And for us, it's sales.

Scott Santucci 17:23

So what's interesting about this, starting where you're at, where you talked about holistic and having a strategy, how do you morph those two together? It's interesting, a lot of people have difficulty that they think it's either one or the other. If they either start where you are today, or start with a with a big plan. It sounds like you're doing both. How do you rationalize those two?

Unknown Speaker 17:48

So I can recall the last few jobs that I've interviewed for, and people would ask me, what's your 30 6090 day plan? And I would say, Well, I don't know. But here's what I would do. First of all, I need to lay the patient on the table. And I need to triage I need to fix what is absolutely, I need to remove the any cancers. And then I need to look at the patient and say, Okay, what do we need to triage? What do we need to fix? What do we need to replace what in what what has to stay in flight while we're...

Ep39 Santucci on TRIAL re: the Definition of Sales Enablement with John Thackston

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Fri, 15 May 2020 08:30:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 39

In this episode, the definition goes on trial and so does Scott Santucci. Scott gets temporarily removed from the co-host seat by John Thackston, VP of SOAR performance group.

Perhaps no case in Sales Enablement history deserves the oft-used description "Trial of the Century" more than the case of Scott Santucci's Definition of Sales Enablement vs. the People.

In this podcast, the prosecutor's arguments are presented in a trial fashion. The defendant is Scott Santucci and he's waived his right to an attorney.

More than 10 years ago, the definition of Sales Enablement has existed in the market. The definition has created unprecedented international scrutiny and media attention, captivating the sales enablement profession. In one camp, the best definition = "whoever has the most organic search hits." On the side, the best definition is "created by VP's of Sales and CMOs and executives over the course of 2 working sessions as agreed upon by a team of practitioners."

You're the juror. You decide.

By the way, the first definition of Sales Enablement was written by Scott Santucci and published by Forrester in 2010.

That Definition:

Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.

Since that time, he's received a lot of feedback on this definition, and many many many other definitions have sought to take it's place.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession. Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Brian Lambert 00:34

I'm Brian Lambert.

John Paxton 00:35

I'm Jackson and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Brian Lambert 00:49

Thanks, john. And for those of you longtime listeners, you heard that right. That was john Paxton and not Scott Santucci. Actually Scott's on this podcast with us. But, john, are you ready to do this? So you ready to go, man?

John Paxton 01:04

I am. I am. Absolutely. I'm absolutely ready to Yeah,

Brian Lambert 01:07

yeah. Scotty excited.

Scott Santucci 01:12

You know, I love being surprised, but not really sure what's going on here?

John Paxton 01:17

Well, you know, it's, it's pretty funny Scott. Bryan actually reached out to me earlier in the week. And he said, You know, I am really, really just kind of tired of hearing about how Scott defines sales enablement, and there's so much debate about it. And it's really just time to put, you know, Scott's original work, sales enablement defined, it's time to put it on trial. And he said, john, I want you to come on the show we're going to do today, Scott is put you on the spot, you really wrote the original definition around sales enablement, we're 10 years in and we're gonna put it on trial and see, Hey, does this stand up? Or were some things that were off? That's what we're gonna do today.

Brian Lambert 01:58

Right, man, you're on trial. Scott, you ready for it?

Scott Santucci 02:00

Was this lightning evolution or creationism?

Brian Lambert 02:03

That's right. Or people are People's Court. Okay. Well, let our listeners decide. Yeah,

Scott Santucci 02:10

the first Actually, I'm not giving that $400 to john, no way.

Brian Lambert 02:15

So first, let me

Scott Santucci 02:15

let me do fulfill his his duties on filling back my my lawnmower when I lent it to them.

Brian Lambert 02:23

Right. So So with this, this is for our listeners. First let me introduce john Thaxton to you guys, as our listeners of insider nation, oh, john is with soar performance group. He's one of the co founders of it. soar performance groups, a client focused sales consulting and training company that concentrates on sales transformation and enablement. JOHN is based out of Atlanta. And let me tell you something cool about him was when Scott first had this idea for the DC area, networking group of sales enablement, professionals, or whatever it was called, he put out this call, he gave me a call and said, I'm going to do this. Make sure you make sure you're all over LinkedIn. And we're going to do this networking group. I'm like, Yeah, man I'm in. So we put it out, Scott put it out. You know, we did our liking and sharing and we started getting people in and all of a sudden, this guy, john pings me on LinkedIn, I have no idea who john is didn't meet him before in my life. And he's like, Hey, can I come to this networking group? And I was like, yeah, sure, man, whatever. Of course, well, a few days before, I don't know, four or five days before he pings me on LinkedIn again, hey, I'm coming. I'm coming in from Atlanta. I'm flying in. I had to come in and leave on the same day. And my flights have me coming in. I might be a few minutes late to the start. So I'm on LinkedIn, my mobile app, you know, I'm like, okay, cool, whatever. But then, like, three hours later, it dawns on me. I'm like, Wait, what? This guy's flying from Atlanta. That's like, holy cow. This guy's flying from Atlanta. So I called Scott up. I'm like, hey, Scott, we got this guy come into the DC area networking group from Atlanta. Scott, do you remember that? That was john. And in that now, he's got you. He's booted you out of your seat, from sales enablement, insider inside sales enablement. So,

Scott Santucci 04:13

well, I love that. And I think there's, there's a whole bunch of things going on. So if you're listening to this, a couple things to remember. We were trying to just form a local, a local networking group. In order to get that going. One of our podcasts, I think it's, I don't know we can get the episode around that was following up the being heroic framework, where I highlight being heroic takes little baby steps of courage. to, to just come to help out is exactly the kind of mindset of people that I want to be around with. It takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of determination. To me, it says a lot about john human being to come in and say hey, there's a group of people here looking to do something that I personally believe in. I'm going to Lion from Atlanta to help out. So immediately there is the world according to Scott, john stock is through the roof for me. So I'm really grateful. And I'm assuming this is going to be a great experience of getting fired from my co host job. So, you know, I'm gonna have to, you know, I'm still looking in the mirror and tell him, you know, doing my affirmations, you know, I'm a good guy, people like me, my story is,

Brian Lambert 05:24

gosh, darn it fire like you.

Scott Santucci 05:26

Yeah, exactly, exactly. I'm interested in seeing how this goes. But I just wanted to stress to everybody. The way that the society grew, were little tiny baby step acts like john, john demonstrated. And if you're like that, please join inside our nation and find the little tiny baby steps to get engaged.

Brian Lambert 05:49

There you go. Great words, and well spoken. And that's how that's how you grew. And that's how you started the society. And that's what got me involved. And that's what got john involved. And, and so what we're doing now, is, we're gonna put Scott on trial, as we alluded to. So here's the roles. So Scott, you're, you're the defense. Right? You're just the defendant. Alright, and our listeners are the jury. So you're the defendant, john is the prosecutor. So he's going to prosecute you about the report hero that I was helping you with at Forrester a long, long time ago called sales enablement define. So since I'm partially biased, because I'm a big believer in the report, and, you know, help you with the peer review, etc, I'm going to just be a proxy of the of our listeners, representing insider nation. So I might chime in, I might ask clarifying questions of either of you, through this activity. And this interaction, I'll be also summarizing what we're taking away. And I'll provide a bit of a recap at the end as well. Okay. So is everybody clear on their role?

Scott Santucci 06:55

Well, yeah, I'm, I'm, I love this idea, guys. I don't know if anybody's ever done a podcast to do something like this. So I'm all in.

Unknown Speaker 07:03

I do want to make one quick disclaimer that none of us are lawyers. And you should not take any legal advice from this podcast. for any reason. If we need to legal qualifier,

Unknown Speaker 07:12

I want to make sure that no one listening for any reason believes, and you should take any of this and act on it in any legal capacity whatsoever. Please do not do that.

Brian Lambert 07:22

That's right. That's how that's how that that's awesome. This is how totally unscripted This is. All right, cool. So I feel like we should have some sort of music, but you know, we'd probably get sued for copyright infringement. So we're just going to jump into it. We're going to go with opening statements. And we're gonna start with you, john.

John Paxton 07:41

Well, Scott, I'm gonna, I'm gonna open up with this my high level summary, which is your report, I read it, I've read it several times. And the bottom line that I got to come come back around to is that definition is smoke and mirrors. It's great in theory, but there's no real examples where we can see it in practice. And on top of that, it's really let down all the stakeholder groups that it was intended to help. What I'd like to do is go through and really dig in stakeholder by stakeholder to understand, hey, based on the past 10 years, based on what happened, was the original idea valid, and where did it fall down? If we're not seeing it happening in real life? So that's, that's my point of view.

Scott Santucci 08:28

Okay, so I had no time to prepare. So this is just going to be, you know, part of me wants to say, Who the hell are you to make that kind of statement, but I'll refrain from that. What I'm going to say is what I'm going to say is this. There are companies out there that are doing this. Well, if there weren't, why would we have listeners today? The the and then also letting down the stakeholder groups. Maybe you miss read this, this is targeted at the C suite. The core of the core business problem is that the sum of the parts of sales and marketing are wasteful, and they need to be coordinated. So does that mean each of the individual stakeholder groups whom it seems like you're trying to protect sounds like you're trying to defend a hierarchical siloed based organizational structure? So we can put that on trial too.

John Paxton 09:30

And before before we dive into that, Scott, I do have one question for you. Before I really dive in to some of the you know, the deeper dive is when you wrote the report originally. So I think it's important to always start with a frame of time if we think back to 2010. You know, if we think back to the year 2010. I think I knew like one person that had an iPhone. So that's been a while. What was it that led you to write that report at that point in time. So the driver goes back to

Scott Santucci 10:01

We at Forrester held a meeting in 2008. So the report that you're referring to is titled, August 3 2010. And 2008, we came up with a definition that we wrote, I wrote a statement. And I had that we had 10 VPS of sales and 10 CMOS in the room from Blue Chip companies. And the purpose was, let's admit that there's friction between sales and marketing. Let's talk about where they're at where the gaps are in responsibilities between the two. And then let's let's leave the room all agreeing on what a role could look like. So that was that was done in 2000 2008. The definition was published in a in a report called engineering valuable sales conversations, we learned was that that definition needed to be unpacked. So the purpose of this report was to do two things. One is to provide the business drivers behind why this is happening. And then to break down each of the different attributes of the definition to provide more context.

Brian Lambert 11:17

Can I have Can I ask a clarifying question on behalf of our listeners? Scott? Yes. When you say when you clarify, this is happening, right? So what is this to what you're referring

Scott Santucci 11:29

friction business business problems, okay. Lack of execution. So this, by the way, this report wasn't written by me per se. It was based on interviews with companies from Accenture, BMC associates Citrix systems SC, Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp, Oracle, SAP and semantic. And it also include cluded, full day discussions, both in Europe and in the US with 30 sales and marketing executive executives representing Alcatel Lucent, areeba BMC, software brocade, bt, Capgemini, Cisco, Fujitsu, Jen, Jen says HP, IBM, orange Business Services SAP semantic tea systems and VMware. So I am a messenger, not the message.

Brian Lambert 12:22

So just the last clarifying question then just so I have the timeline, right. For our listeners, you Scott held these meetings with executives and CMOS, see had marketing and sales in a room. And that created a engineering valuable sales conversations view, which is not necessarily not on trial right now. Maybe it will be in the future. Anyway. So but the second piece of that that outcome was this need to clarify and to embrace and really confront the execution challenge. And that's the impetus for this report, which was a separate meeting of all those companies that you just named to which you are a mouthpiece for with this definition. Is that right?

Scott Santucci 13:05

Yes. Okay.

John 13:09

So with that with that, Scott, and I probably wasn't clear when I was talking about stakeholder views, because the stakeholders that I'm going to refer to are really the business stakeholders. And one of the things you brought up is, it was intended to knock down cross functional silos. I think you even quoted, you know, in one of your recent podcasts, that somebody who's an operating partner that looks over a large number of portfolio companies, they are noticing that their sales and marketing spend is not consolidating, is not, you know, becoming more efficient. I would imagine the average CEO, if you ask them today, are you getting a good return on your investment in sales and marketing? They would either scratch their head or they would say, No. So the thesis in the paper or one of the key thesis is there are too many people doing too many things. We need a way to consolidate all this and spend money smarter. How What do you say to that CEO or to that private equity investor that says, You know what, we have put sales enablement in place, we have a sales enablement department, our companies, but guess what? Our spend on sales and marketing, it's not going down, it's actually going up and we're being less effective. What do you say to those people?

Scott Santucci 14:22

Well, there's two things. So I'm still reacting. I wrote down your bottom line and your, your opening statement, john. So in being a lawyer, let's stick the word you said was smoking mirrors. I just don't understand how somebody can say a report is smoke and mirrors, reports a report. This is based on evidence from these different groups. I've challenged, it's the lack of execution inside companies. And the lack of execution involves number one, a failure to do a full inventory or audit of all the spending. One of the things is very common inside Inside organizations is to skip the analysis, step four in sales and marketing, for some reason, just skip it. But if you go and do an audit, and follow up a hidden cost analysis, a hidden cost, a sales support, analysis, and inventory, all of the different all the different spins that are going to, quote unquote, help sales. And it's not just in sales and marketing, it's in product groups training, you name it, and you put all of that money together. And then you divide it by the number of sales people that you actually do have the quota carrying sales people you do have, what you have is a totally incredibly inefficient system. The bulk of companies aren't doing that work. Once, when you do do that work, and there are companies who've done that work, because I've worked with companies who've done that work. When you do do that work, you actually get to see how big the waste is. The bottom line that I'll tell you, john, is that if you've hired a sales enablement group, and you're not seeing a better return on an investment, you probably didn't do a good enough job of figuring out what the root problems are, and you're treating symptoms.

John 16:10

I'm gonna concede the point on that one, let me ask the next level question down, which is, why don't people do that. I mean, if you just look at if you just look at the chart in your report, plays out so clearly, and so compellingly, hey, here's all these different money, I there's all these different money flows. And here's how much you're spending per Rep. And anybody with with any sort of financial argument would go, oh, my goodness, this is just, you know, this is just not not good. You know? So in spite of that, how is it possible if the evidence is so compelling, that people are willing to do that exercise?

Scott Santucci 16:46

So, like, literally, this is, um, I'm breaking character a little bit, because this is super interesting. JOHN, your opening statement with the smoke and mirrors is so pissed me off. And so now I'm like, I'm here to fight. But then when you can see to the point, now, you're asking a question that I have to concede a point on. So it's interesting, like how things happen in real life. So this is all like in in real real life here. So this is really interesting. But I think that I think that is such a phenomenal question....

Ep38 State of SE Panel 6: Executive Sponsors

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 13 May 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 38

Ever wonder what executive sponsors talk to about to Senior Leaders? Wonder why Sales Enablement gets funding in some organizations and doesn't in others? What about the skills and competencies of sales enablement leaders?

In this last panel of our State of Sales Enablement Research, Scott and Brian pull together an amazing panel of the executive sponsors chartering sales enablement functions to hear their take.

On this panel, we have:

Brian King, Managing Director King Consulting prior VP of Sales Enablement at Intercontinental Hotel Group
Sameer Rupani, SVP Sales & Marketing at Solvay
Greg Peelman, VP Operations at EcoLab

To view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now. I'm Scott.

Brian Lambert 00:35

I'm Brian Lambert and we're the sales enablement insiders.

Scott Santucci 00:39

Hello insider nation. We have the last and maybe the most impactful panel of our series studying the future of sales enablement. Just as a brief reminder on May 19, we're having our executive briefing presenting all of our findings, visit www dot Inside se calm to register for it again inside sc.com register may 19, for our executive briefing of our findings, so the findings of what, as many of you know, we've conducted a survey of sales enablement practitioners, we were hoping to get 25 responses. We got 70. We now have 99 responses actually we got 70 within a week, there is no way one person can process it all that information or even two so we've created a guest analyst program and asked a leading experts have been doing this for quite some time to chime in on it. We have been doing several panels so just as a review, our first panel with with sales enablement experts. The second panel that we ran was with sales leaders. The third panel that we ran was with sales practitioners who do not have it at learning and development background.

Our fourth panel was with sales enablement leaders who Do have a learning and development background, then we follow that up with our its academic series or with our professors. And now finally, executive sponsors. So the people that we have here, I met and are all part of the Conference Board. And what that is, is you can go listen to one of our earlier podcasts, we just we talked about that before. What we've got here is an amazing panel of tremendous people. It's hard to describe our all of our relationships when you're in a group or a leadership council, where you're blending a lot of expertise. It's really it's a kind of hard to describe, so maybe we'll let we'll let them do it, but I'm gonna introduce them in order. So the first person that I'd like to introduce is Brian King. Brian King, most recently was the SVP of sales and operations at intercontinental hotels. One of the amazing things that we were able to do as affiliated to the Conference Board is we brought in a whole bunch of people More business travelers to help simulate for the people at IHG. What business travelers think of with the goal of making Brian look really good while testing out his sales enablement plan. I've been really excited to work with Brian. Brian is one of the most courageous people that I know. And I know a lot of courageous people. So if you get a chance to meet Brian or work with them or hire him or something, do it because not only not only is he courageous and smart, but he's a great guy as well. Brian, would you like to introduce yourself to inside our nation?

Brian King 03:33

Yeah, thank you, Scott. It's great to be with you and Hello, insider nation. I look forward to the time we're gonna spend together one of my favorite topics, sales enablement, and with a great group of guys on this podcast, so

Scott Santucci 03:47

great to be here. Excellent. So up next, we have Samir Pani, who is the SVP of sales and marketing as Solvay, over here in in North America. This is one of the smartest guys in sales. I know he's a chemical engineer. And it's really fascinating to watch this man brain work is definitely what you see is what you get kind of guy. I really enjoy how authentic is and I really love how he publishes how he's thinking. It is for me easy to follow along. He has tremendous amount of energy. I can't wait for everybody to get to know him, Samir, introduce yourself to insider nation. Hey, insider nation.

Samir Pani 04:31

This is Samir. What's the most exciting Of course for me is to reconnect with that when you stop. And of course a great group of guys that served on the sales executive council alongside myself and for us to learn and share experiences together. So here's one more goal at the same and looking forward to it.

Scott Santucci 04:48

Yeah, and hopefully we can keep this going. This is a fantastic team. And then finally bringing up the rear is Greg Gilman. Greg pillans, Vice President of Operations at eco labs. I gotta tell you, I'm a huge fan of Greg style. One of the things that he has this great ability to do is to process a lot of information. And there's a lot of different ways to talk about it. And he just says it for what it is in the most plain spoken executable way and it activates things moving forward. I think it's fantastic. I always get energized. I also love the kinds of pictures he shares with you at dinner. I got to make sure we qualify it they're not. Well let him say what, Greg, what are the kinds of pictures that you share with us at dinner? Why am I making this comment?

Greg Gilman 05:35

Okay, Scott, this couldn't be with you today. And

Greg Gilman 05:38

I do work for Ecolab. I'm the VP of operations for North American our pest elimination division. So it's an exciting business. I know the call that a long time across a lot of international geographies with international policies and of course here in North America, so great to be with you today and look forward to the discussion.

Scott Santucci 05:56

So what about those pictures now? What kind of pictures will you share with us Dinner?

Greg Gilman 06:02

Well, let's just say there may be a few photos of different scenarios that, you know, maybe you don't want to look at while you're eating dinner. And I happen to be a pest elimination. Of course, they're all anonymous. But you can imagine I can find myself in some pretty precarious positions occasionally.

Scott Santucci 06:18

Yes. And as the benefactor of some of those pictures while I'm trying to eat if they're interesting, I'll tell you that, that's for sure. So starting off with we do the same format for our panels, we asked the open ended question. So I'm going to go through the same kind of order. I'm going to first ask you, Brian, having looked at the survey findings, what are a few things that stood out for you?

Brian King 06:41

So for me after going through the initial set of findings and reading through some of the feedback from the survey, what I found interesting was really that the data is starting to lean more toward, I'd say an evolved understanding of what sales enablement is as a practice as it Discipline than where it was about 567 years ago when I first started to get involved with with sales. At the same time, you know, kind of counterpoint to that point, you can still see that there are folks who, you know, kind of believe, hey, sales enablement is really just sales training, or it's just onboarding or it's only about sales transformation. While it's graduating, and it's understanding, and probably the understanding of company's value of, of the sales enablement practice, there's still a lot of work to be done in terms of getting that value and that understanding kind of broadly accepted and understood.

Scott Santucci 07:39

Excellent. Thank you, Brian. Samir, how about you? What were takeaways that stood out for you in looking at the survey findings?

Samir 07:46

So the first one and that's just literally just scanning through the data is the fact that wherever you had two or more options are if you had two options, you had a bi modal distribution. If you had more options you had at least a tri modal So, what that tells me is, there's still a fundamental lack of clarity around what sales enablement is, and how it's supposed to actually operate. Is it supposed to be innovation? Or is it supposed to be operational excellence or, or commercial excellence? And I think when you want to look at the the popular media today around the whole concept of sales development in any form, you know, you don't have customer excellence in sales ops and sales enablement. And so I think there's been so much slicing and dicing of the sales onion that I'm not surprised that survey broad cross section of even commercial professionals, you get their particular tape. And then of course, what I thought was particularly humorous was there was actually one person who agreed with the fact that sales enablement was a fancy word for sale string, it sort of had me laughing out loud because it just kind of goes to show you the again, the breadth of understanding or even misunderstanding about what it is So hopefully, you're feeling a real need here with with a chance to kind of make clear what it is and how to best deploy it.

Scott Santucci 09:07

Excellent. Thank you, Samir. Greg, how about you? I

Greg 09:11

think what I noticed in the data, first of all, if you look at the distribution of people, everyone is more or less in sales enablement. So the answers you're gonna get from that is, is from a group that envisions it to be a certain way, not necessarily the people that are employing that group, which may give you a very, very different opinion. So, you know, if there's overwhelming response from the group saying, it's not on the decline, it hasn't peaked, yet. It's on the rise. That's 80%. Well, of course, if you're asking a bunch of people in charge of sales enablement, they're gonna say they're on the rise, right? And they're gonna say, we buy it right, not hold it or sell it. So I think a lot of the data probably led to where I thought it would end up given, given the set of people get as we kind of go through the discussion here today. I you know, I do think there would be a divergent opinion If we looked at your what what is it those individuals that are again employing them, the managers of those those people? What is it they're getting? What do they believe they should be getting?

Scott Santucci 10:09

I think you get a very different picture here. Excellent. So that's perfect. So Brian, you get to comment. What are you? What are your thoughts on what your colleagues said?

Brian 10:19

Yeah, I think well, just to piggyback off of what Greg has just said, when you think about who your customers are in sales enablement, it should always first and foremost be the sales organization. And in that organization, you'll have different types of customers, you'll have your actual field sales people, and you'll have your sales managers, then you've got your sales leadership team. And in each one of those, you'll have a different set of value drivers and enablers that you're going to need to deploy. And if you're doing that and an orchestrator way, it'd be great to see what their purview or what their perspective of whether or not sales enablement was a stock would you buy it, hold it, sell it short it you know, better off? Because I think in some instances, you may have sales leaders say, Yeah, absolutely, you're helping deploy new coaching opportunities for my managers growing their leadership skills on how to truly coach them be transactional with their sales teams, team members may say, I don't really need all that training, or I don't need a new planning tool to help me figure out what my goals are going to be. I just can do things the way that I want to do them. So depending on what audience you're talking to, I think you're going to get a wide variety different responses to questions like this in a survey. If you're looking at your core customer set as the sales organization, if you turn the other direction, and you look back at the rest of the company of the enterprise, it'd be interesting to see what how they would respond to some of these questions. It's true, you're going to get when you're when you're pulling an audience of people who are quote, unquote, in the same field and discipline, you're going to get a very biased point of view.

Scott Santucci 11:55

So both Greg and you brought up the same thing. What do you think the answers were If you went around the horn and asked the sales leaders, what they think marketing, what they think other groups what they think, what would those answers be?

Unknown Speaker 12:10

From my point of view, I think initially, it was like who is this group of people who think that they need to get involved in my area. And what I mean by that is sales enablement from ihcs point of view in the organization we created there was this inner connective tissue and, and muscular component that kind of connected sales to the rest of the organization. So we would work with it with the data teams, we would work with comp and Ben and on sales incentives, we would work with HR and learning and development on sales training. Previously, those groups had just said we're doing the things that we do the way we do them. And then sales enablement came along and said, We need your help and doing this very specifically in this way for sales. And you don't have necessarily the sales side subject matter expertise. So let's help you understand that. And then together, let's create a joint approach to doing something different and better for sales, which ultimately means for our customers, and then hope and then hopefully hopefully means for, for the organization and the company. That's a hard proposition in the beginning. But ultimately, I think if you were to go and survey those in those different functions now, three, four years after we started that push, you would have, say, 75% of them on hold it or buy it from a from a stock point of view. Excellent.

Scott Santucci 13:41

So Samir, what was your reaction to your to your peers?

Unknown Speaker 13:46

No, I mean, they, my expectation that we would we would look at it completely differently was completely met. Yeah. I mean, you know, and again, it speaks to the variety of the responses you got, as you know, Greg pointed out the fact that the majority of the respondents Word sales enablement professionals. But despite that, you had quite a variety of responses, meaning even even the folks within sales enablement, don't look at it the same way. And I think that reflects the difference in maturity and or the way in which it's deployed in every single organization. And so, I mean, really, perhaps one of the things you can get us to do through the course of this discussion, Scott is to unify, you got three very different takes on the on the subject right here at a sponsor level. And you know, if you could help us unify and rather healthy for the benefit of the audience, and I'd say that's value add right there.

Scott Santucci 14:40

Well, thanks for escalating the expectations of my audience. Man. I appreciate that. That's helpful. All right, tough crowd. I thought that was funny. Greg, how about you what was your reaction to hearing from Brian and Samir about their take and how you processing it?

Unknown Speaker 14:56

For the most part, I'm in agreement. I think what's interesting to me As I look into the data itself is where we are and where we want to be based on the questions are very different things. So I think one of the choices we could make about what a sales enablement to you was, you know, how we simplify our commercial system for salespeople and customers? Right? Well, the overwhelming response was actually people believe it to be the linchpin to helping us execute our sales transformation. So I absolutely agree with the second but I think most organizations find themselves in the first right so now the question to me becomes how do you What's that journey look like and how do you flatten the learning curve if you will to get there I you know, I really I really liked the way that this was put together and I would encourage you and your team as you continue to do this to solicit from again that next level up you know, as you talk about who should sales enablement report to I asked him pretty strong feelings on that one. But I would reach out to that group and marry the data together and see what it is. Because if you've got a group of sales enablers, however, you know, however that title finds itself to be constructed, I think it's one direction. And then this other group comes back and says, No, that's absolutely not what I think it needs to be, you know, the position can quickly devolve into one of the others was, which was a fancy word for sales training, right?

In the absence of value or true enabling people are going to think it's worth a couple of decades behind where we are now and where we're trying to go. I think a lot of people get hung up today. And it's important, but in data and information and thinking technology, while again, it is very important that we we transform ourselves into digital, it's not everything, right? It is a data point or a series of data points, but then we have to figure in the humanity behind what it is that we're trying to do. And how do we then enable professional salespeople across an organization are very different. You have the 10% or whatever number you want. Pick, we can argue if it's 20, there are always going to be top performers. You got 60 or 70. In the middle, right, you got the lower end. So who is it you want to reach? And what's the best way to do that? And I think getting those two groups together, and marrying that data up would make a lot of sense.

Scott Santucci 17:15

Awesome. Great. It sounds like, let's focus on where we agree. It sounds like we agree that if we were to look at this data set five years ago, it's a lot more congealed, but yet not congealed enough. To really get behind as a as a true profession. Is that a statement that we can agree with?

Unknown Speaker 17:37

Like, that's...

Ep37 State of SE Panel 5: Sales Academics

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Mon, 11 May 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 37

Hello insider nation we're excited to bring you yet another star-studded panel. This time it's a dedicated panel of academics covering the Sales Enablement space from Universities such as Johns Hopkins, University of Texas - Dallas, and Northern Illinois.

For many, the COVID Crisis of 2020 was a wake up call. The guys leaned into the Insider Nation to discover and learn their thoughts in response to the global crisis. Make sure you listen to episodes 27-31.

We continue our groundbreaking research on the state of sales enablement research project this panel.

In this episode, our guest panelists include:

Dr. Robert Peterson, Editor Journal of Professional Selling and Professor of Sales at Northern Illinois University
Dr. Joel Le bon, Johns Hopkins University Digital Business Development Initiative
Dr. Howard Dover, Director, Center for Professional Sales at University of Texas Dallas

To view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:35

I'm Scott Santucci. I'm

Brian Lambert 00:36

Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. So hello

Scott Santucci 00:41

insider nation, we have another special edition podcast. We're gonna get academic, we'll talk about that what that means in a minute. But what we'd like to do is recap on what we've been doing. So far. As you probably know, as a regular listener, we've been doing a variety of special podcasts around COVID COVID response, how to be a hero and leadership frameworks. What we've also done what you also knows that we've done a survey of many of you, and we're in the process of getting those findings, make sure you visit WWW dot inside sec.com and register for our executive briefing. We already have joined some of your peers, VP and director level people and companies like Verizon, Comcast, Microsoft, Amazon, boy, the list goes on and on comm vault, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, we have a we're really, really delighted with the response that we're getting so far in that upcoming webinar, and of course, puts a lot of pressure on Brian I to make sure we deliver on that.

Moving forward to what we're talking about here today. What we're trying to do is, as part of our research process, share or be very transparent of how we're going about doing it. So we've mentioned that we did a survey, we've mentioned the idea about guest analysts. I mean, this is the kind of help that we're getting seismic TCV private equity, sales benchmark index, show pad, high spot, sales hood, or Ely, soar consulting, these are all businesses that are working to help us get the information to shape out where we're going. And that's really incredible. No one's putting any money to this. This is all just figuring out where this research takes us. So with that, we've already had a few panels, a few cohorts. As I learned from our from our distinguished panelists here, we've had a cohort around sales enablement experts, we've had a cohort around sales and eight sales leaders. We've had one around sales enablement, practitioners, sales enablement, practitioners with more of a training background. And now finally, let's hear from the academics.

So let's get let's get academic. So I'm going to introduce our panel. I'm incredibly excited. One of the things that's really fascinating for me, is I've gotten to know all three of these panelists pretty well, I consider them, I consider them my friends, where they really challenged me is looking at the world through through that different lens. So a lot of us can say, Oh, that's too academic. But you know what, if somebody doesn't look at it through that lens, maybe we get stuck in all of our thinking. So I'm going to ask you guys to pay attention and really put your be open minded and hear where they come from hat. We don't need to agree with them. What we need to do is we need to listen to them because they stretch our thinking. So I'm going to tell some stories about each one. So for I'm going to first start off and introduce Joelle Oban. Joelle is a professor and he's covering digital transformation. pretty relevant topic for the times, I'd say. I bet he's pretty busy right now at Johns Hopkins. Now Joelle I think I met you actually virtually from a maybe a moment where Dr. Dover was doing a video cast and I was maybe a little bit more liberal in my in my speech than I than I normally AM. And we've we've gotten connected and have had a variety of opportunities since he's been heavily involved in helping support the sales of a once society. You've probably seen around Joelle interest, introduce yourself and let insider nation know who

Joelle 04:34

you are. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Brian, for putting this podcast together in May, you know, academics talk and think because you know, talk and think is, is also very important for for us to understand what's going on, especially right now. You're right, actually, Scott, we met virtually, where you weren't a panel at Harvard numbers. I think there was a panel at UT Dallas, you were on or maybe a conference and you said pardon my French. And yes, that's right. Right. I like that. And I immediately put on your French, because I am partly French. So I'm a marketing and sales professor, Johns Hopkins University. And I'm also the executive director of the science of digital business development, which is an initiative and program dedicated to digital business development and by digital business development, I mean, combination of strategy, marketing and sales to facilitate companies organization go to market strategies, because obviously marketing strategy and sales, they have to work together, maybe just like for sales enablement. So this is why I'm I teach marketing, I teach sales, I do research in marketing and sales. And this is very much related to sales enablement. So glad to be on the panel. Thank you for the invitation.

Scott Santucci 06:02

Excellent. We are looking forward to hearing from you. Next up is Dr. Robert Peterson. So I met Dr. Robert Peterson, I'd like you to imagine a little bit. There's a conference room that's on the on a Friday, at the meeting started at about one o'clock, the Friday before Thanksgiving in November 2016. There's a whole bunch of people in there most of I would say mostly VP and VP level executives from pretty large, competent companies and sitting together our doctor, Dr. Robert Peterson, and Dr. Howard Dover. And Robert Peterson, was one of the people who was at that initial founding meeting to decide whether or not we need to do the sales, the name was society in the first place. So I'm really grateful that he found a way to get there, I still still think that's interesting. One of my favorite stories about Dr. Robert Peterson is that we had a we had a really awesome conversation over a couple of drinks in San Francisco that one time and it's really awesome when you respect somebody and get a chance to get to know them too. And that's always always delightful. So Mr. Peterson, please introduce yourself, introduce yourself to inside our nation. Put a little bit of color behind your name.

Robert Peterson 07:26

I've nothing but color. Let me tell you, thank you, Scott, and Brian for inviting me to the panel, the esteemed panel. Yeah, you know how we got to that place in the breakers. Um, that was beautiful. Thank you guys for inviting me to a six hour meeting that took three days because you couldn't get to west palm on a flight you couldn't get out of West Palm. So we were there for three days. So I got to meet a lot of people. But really what put that on the map for me that initial gathering of the sales enablement minded people was, um, you know, I saw Brian on LinkedIn talking about it. And I was like, Well, what is this? What is this mean? So I looked it up in the academic world. Now one thing was said about sales enablement. In any journal. It's like, Alright, well, maybe I asked, you know, I did a search term of the topic. In the title, nothing, sorry. Well, maybe I'll put that search term in the abstract, nothing, nothing, nothing. I'm like, Alright, I want to be part of nothing. So I, you know, Howard, I talked, we made it happen. The fact that Brian, essentially because I knew him from years ago when he was a young PhD guy. I said, Well, he's involved and this has to be legit. So yeah, that's how I showed up and haven't turned back since.

A little on me as I you know, I worked in sales. I was 100%. commission sales guy on the phone, financial industry. So income paper in Washington, DC, my first sales job. I'm the editor of the Journal of selling, which is an academic journal. I get I use improv in the classroom to get people thinking, get them engaged. And just don't assume that you know, some Pat answer, it's going to work you need to be thinking, so I'm just out here doing some having some fun. Howard and I have been doing some research that the academics have fought us tooth and nail, and told us we don't know what we're talking about in this whole customer journey thing. It's just terms we're making up and so it's been a good it's been a good fight, trying to talk to people about sales enablement, its role and its you know, how vital it can be for a company that embraces it correctly.

Scott Santucci 09:32

So inserted nation, one of the things that I found so fascinating is in getting to know getting to know these guys a little bit. How the world of academia actually works is interesting. I think we need to do a whole podcast on the feedback that you get about what doesn't exist when we have a whole profession of 10,000 people doing things that don't supposedly exist in the academic world. I think that would be very, very fun. Fascinating of how we don't exist because we haven't been peer reviewed or anything like that. So inside our nation, that's going to be an interesting topic. Maybe if, if you guys want to hear more about it, I've got to tell it's a very interesting and fascinating story as we delve into that. So with that, I'm going to introduce our last panelist, Dr. Howard, over whom you've already met. Dr. Dover was on our COVID panel with Kunal and Lindsey earlier. And it's, it's always great to have Dr. Pan on Dr. Howard on our show. He's the director for the Center of professional sales and sales coaching at the University of Texas, Dallas. Howard, tell us more about about yourself or add some color to conversation, please.

Howard 10:44

Well, I think, you know, it's fun to kind of connect the dots I remember. So to kind of connect, have people understand the relationship between Rob and Joelle and myself is that when we go out together, Rob and I are known as dwells bodyguards. So we and we literally will will say we're his bodyguards, if you if you run into us, so you see it as a conference come up to us and, and you know, Joel will be looking like the guy that could kill you. But Robin, I would have to take you out.

Scott Santucci 11:16

So see Joseph, the smart one, he orders the hit pan. That's right, he does.

Unknown Speaker 11:23

He has a boss like presence. And Robin, I look like the muscle. So that's an inside joke, but it gives relevance that we know each other. Rob and I have co authored several papers together. In fact, Rob didn't say it. But we we did manage to get the first paper of sales enablement, actually published in the last two months in the Journal of selling so and Rob really kind of drove that forward. But I met Rob, I met Scott at the breakers with, with Rob and Brian at the same time. And so my my job at the University of Texas, Dallas is too I'm the director of the Center, I founded the center. We also do some work around research in the area of sales enablement, and also the area of the core issue of efficiency and effectiveness in sales, specifically around sales tech stack technology, trying to see how technology is improving the performance of sales people including that's actually bled deeply into our curriculum as making pretty big impact out there in the world. As a fun note, I've picked up cycling over the last year and planned to do a 100 kilometer the hotter than hell 100 this summer unless it gets cancelled from COVID. So

Scott Santucci 12:57

awesome. And you're a Pisces, and you like swimming and golf. I'm just kidding. Anyway, all right. So with that is, obviously we were all comfortable with each other. One of the things that I'd like you guys and at insider nation to point out, innovation doesn't just happen in business, these guys are all trying to innovate within the academic community. So whenever you see them, please link them, please give them our support, it is incredibly hard. And I want to stress it's incredibly hard to get coverage on new things in the academic community. So anything that we can do, to give them evidence that we exist as a role as a profession, would be incredibly valuable to them to help help raise the cost. So that having said Having said that, all of our panelists have been given the the survey findings, and we're going to follow the same format. We're going to go and ask breakdown in sections, we're going to have their feedback on each of each opening question. I'm going to direct questions to individuals in order, they're going to say their answer, and then they're going to respond to their peers. So getting into the meat of the meat of the question, we're going to start with you, Joelle or Dr. lavonne. Question number one, having looked at the survey findings, what are a few things that stood out for you?

Unknown Speaker 14:30

Yeah, some very, very nice question, because there were very, very interesting questions in this survey. So of course, you know, when we look at our survey, we always look at the respondents, you know, who responded, what do they do, because, you know, somehow their response are influenced by the response. So of course, I look at that and we have 67% of sales enablement leaders in there. survey 47 out of 70 responded, you mentioned? And and of course, they're gonna they're gonna support the field because they also study women leaders. So it's good. First that, you know, they are engaged to participate into, you know, an initiative to understand what what's the feeling the function is about. Having said that, when I look at the survey and the response responses, I think. And I think what really was interesting for me is to admit somehow that the function, I don't even know if I should call that the function, but sales enablement, as not found its sweet spot yet, in terms of purpose and definition. And there are a lot of people are in fact talking about that, it is interesting to see that in our survey, we do have some people saying that it is in decline, and to look at the reasons why they think it is in decline, the rationale behind there, you know, they're rational. And, and one of the respondents said, we have not clearly defined what sales enablement is in b2b industry.

So, um, so I think I think that was interesting to see that even for those who are in sales enablement, of thinking that sales enablement needs to define better its purpose. And I really like also, some of the answers around it's something which is in transition. Even from those who say it was on the rise, it's still transitioning, which is very interesting for us in academia, because we can participate into the thought process of understanding what the function and the discipline is about. It is also interesting to see that a lot of people mentioned that the function is being influenced by technology, and hypergraph of technical innovation, if I remember one of the response. So so then if technology is driving a function and a discipline, you know, what's next, because technology is, you know, changing fast. And and I think that was, you know, the main the main takeaways from that the last one is, and I have to say, this is coming from an executive who actually said that even sales enablement departments, and he also say that it is on the rise. And he said that, his view is, we need to stop calling it a sales enablement. And for that person, it's more commercial enablement. And I thought that this this thought was was interesting as a way to envision what sales enablement is about or could be about

Unknown Speaker 18:05

for the future. So that's, that's the takeaway I took away from, from from the survey.

Scott Santucci 18:11

Awesome, deep thoughts already. I love it. So let's get Dr. Peterson's perspective. You had a chance to look at the survey results? What jumped out at you?

Unknown Speaker 18:22

I would say that I totally disagree with Joelle awesome. No, no. Well, as a PhD, we have to disagree right about everything. Um, there was a bunch of stuff that that that as I as I look through, it's like, Hmm, that's interesting. So I'll get into my best, or at least the one that definitely rose my eyebrow the most, which was, who is the customer of sales enablement. And it kind of dovetails on what Joelle just mentioned about, you know, the purpose and the definition. And that was the article that Howard and I just published on, on, on sales enablement in the Journal of selling, which is free, if you want, you can, you can grab it. And we had baker's dozen, we had 13 definitions, starting obviously with your sky because you're kind of the grandfather of of the initial drive into initiative into sales enablement.

Scott Santucci 19:14

With your 2010 definition. And by the way, I have some comments on Oh, I'm sure we're talking. Okay. I'm going to critique it.

Unknown Speaker 19:23

So did the reviewers trust me?

Unknown Speaker 19:26

Um, but it went from, you know, your 2010 to start it out, and it's obviously easy for me and Howard to take a retrospective and look 10 years after that and make some observations. You know, maybe you could have been more parsimonious But either way, you've got everybody in there, brother, I'm just looking at right now at the at the table. Everybody in their brother is trying to define it in some more sales, Ops, some more marketing, some definitely training, and then there was something a little bit more, you know, strategic in their, in their, in their, in their thinking. So what what what I find when I, you know, surprise, surprise, when we look at the survey results is,...

Ep36 State of SE Panel 4: Sales Enablement L&D Training

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Fri, 08 May 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 36

We here at inside sales enablement are dedicated to making sure listeners are successful overcoming the complexities in their own companies so that they can keep more effective in the market. there are many names used to describe what that, and we've been calling it sales enablement for the last 12 years

As a continuation of our State of Sales Enablement panel series, we created a “guest analyst” program. These panelists are super engaged. They are really spending time on the data, and they're here to share their thoughts on the data.

In this episode, our guest panelists include:

Barry Shields, Director, Customer Experience Training & Enablement, Avalara
Garth McKinney, L&D Sales Consultant Red Hat
David Somers, Director Field Enablement GitLab

To view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci

Brian Lambert 00:35

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders.

Scott Santucci 00:39

Hello insider nation Welcome to Insidesalesenablement.com the only destination that is designed specifically for veteran sales enablement practitioners. Brian and I are doing our part to combat all of the fake news and Saikal snake oil peddlers and the deafening hype noise out there in the marketplace. We're excited to share with you yet another special edition episode as part of our state of enablement study. Before turning it over to Brian to introduce our great panelists. Let's review how we got here so far.

In mid-March, we had an amazing COVID-19 response panel. That included that included Dr. Howard Dover from the University of Texas, Dallas, Kunaal metho, an executive at private equity firm TCV and Lindsey Gore, who is a rep salesperson at Microsoft, in the strategic accounts area. And her job was really to keep us all honest. I love that. Any rate, if you'd like to listen to what motivated to our state of sales enablement study, go into our archives and listen to episode number 28. And pay particular attention, particular attention to the part where kunaal is talking about the need for sales enablement leaders to stitch together programs, how it's not happening in pretty much any company. And what kind of friction it creates, from the point of view of investors, you're going to hear what inspired this whole study the state of sales enablement. So how do we get here, what we get is coming off of that insight, we decided, boy, we really need to investigate what's going on here. So we crafted a survey. And the survey was really designed to capture the voice of sales enablement, leaders. We had a 12 question surveys, and most of them were open into questions.

So if you know anything about building surveys, it's generally really, really, really, really, really, I could go on but I think you get the point hard to get people to respond to open-ended questions, let alone a survey that's mostly subjective to start off with. So when we when we feel that this and we feel it through my LinkedIn network, and Brian's LinkedIn, Brian's awesome, LinkedIn network, we thought this would be success if we got 25 responses. So of course, in typical sales manager fashion, I decided, I'm going to double the quota on myself and said, We need to get 50 responses out in a week. So that first the end of March, the first the first few days of April, we fielded this study, so we wanted to get 25. I set the goal at 50. How many responses to this? Did we get? What did you insider nation do? Did we get the 25? That are that was our target? Did we get 35? Like, you know, wow, that was good. We exceeded our target. Did we get the whole 50 that our goal is no none of those, you insider nation gave us 70 responses within a week. Think about that. That's amazing. And it's all open ended feedback, subjective feedback. Today, we've got 99 responses. Yes, some of us are the fashionably late crowd to parties. So that creates a high quality problem. How do you analyze 70 responses when you were planning on 25? Is it almost a 300% volume increase? How do you analyze all that? So we recruited or deputized, however you want to think of it, a guest analyst program. And what we're after and interested in are people who are veterans in the space, or practitioners from all different walks of life or angles. So we've got CEOs from companies like highspot, seismic, and show pad looking at looking at these responses and giving us input. We've got authors like Tamar shank, and Eli Cohen who are giving us their perspective. We've interviewed so far as of this recording. I've personally interviewed over 20 leaders, including executives who run incredibly large departments and major multinational company which which we'll hear about. Then what we wanted to do is, boy, these interviews are so rich, and the perspectives are so great. We wanted to create a model to synthesize that information.

So we created this idea of these panelists is these panels. So we get a group of, you know, basically you've heard that saying of birds of a feather flock together. So wanted to get people who are like-minded together and find areas where they agree. So the reason that we do these panels is one, we want to be transparent with our research process, too. We want to get information out to you inside our nation as quickly as possible so you can follow along with with the information as we get it. And three, we want to tease out common themes across the entire community of sales a day went so that when we're prepared, we have a really effective findings presentation on May 19.

Please mark your calendars may 19, 11 o'clock am Eastern time, please visit www dot inside se comm to register. You won't want to miss this event. I'm not as of today, I'm not planning on sharing my slides or making a recording available, so please make sure you attend that. Okay, so what have we done so far in the terms of panels? So far, we've already published out our enablement experts panel with Tamra shank, Mike Kunkel and Josie mashburn. We've also published our sales experts panel of skip Miller, Bob Apollo and Steve crepeau. We will be publishing so by the time this goes out, we will also have published our practitioners, practitioners panel with Shivam fetcher imaging McCourt and Doug Kleiner clower. One of the themes that's been emerging that's very fascinating is that sales enablement has a different texture, flavor perspective based on your background. So what was interesting is the last panel, not a single one of them had a learning development or any kind of formal training experience expertise whatsoever. And that tracks to my background, I have no l&d or professional training background whatsoever yet, I was pulled into the sales, sales enablement arena. So what's interesting is we want to provide the lens, the perspective of people who do have a strong lnd perspective. And with that, we asked Brian who has much more of an l&d credentials in l&d than than I do, to pull together this panel that we've got. So to give you guys all introduction about Brian. There's a reason I call him Dr. Brian Lambert. And the reason that I call him Dr. Brian Lambert is he's earned a PhD. I haven't most of you haven't. And what is this PhD is it's an organizational Buffett behavior. He's written three books on sales process and actually ran the, at the time it was called astd. Most of us now know it is a TD sales training practice. Those are the things that he did before we before he joined our team at Forrester. And the rest is, as you know, I guess history. So Brian's pulled together a great, fantastic panel of people definitely have an l&d background. Brian, could you introduce the people that you pulled together for our experts for this panel, please?

Brian Lambert 08:29

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Scott. I'm really excited about our panel today. I've known these guys for quite a long time. And they're all interestingly enough, based out of Raleigh, North Carolina, and I'm in Charlotte. So I guess we have the North Carolina crowd today, which was a bit of an interesting piece of trivia for us. They're also members of and participating in the sales enablement society. So that's, that's cool to me as well. The first person I'm going to introduce is Barry shields. I've known Barry since 2006. Actually, when I was with at the senior staff, when I launched that community of practice, which is now the sales enablement practice, I was doing global research for a sales competency framework. And one of the folks that I reached out to was Barry, and since that time, he's been great to really have discussions around everything from brain science to how people learn and also when I was actually new in my my new gig and a fortune 50 company, actually brought Barry in to run the the experience team on my team. So Barry, Barry shields, can you introduce yourself, please?

Barry Shields 09:39

Hey there, Brian. Thanks for having me. I'm Barry shields. I'm now with avalara avalara is a company that computes sales tax in the cloud for retailers both online and brick some mortar and so I currently lead the the Indian learning function, three things a few things I haven't led before Both the learning architecture and design and development, but also this time around leading the delivery side of the house also. But I do that for our go live team or implementation consultants, if you will, for account managers, folks who manage the account after the initial sale, and also for our customer support organization.

Brian Lambert 10:21

Thanks Barry. The next person is David summers. And David and I have known each other for a couple years now, I actually reached out to him as part of my, my networking when I moved to North Carolina. And he was actually just starting his global enablement role at GitHub. And GitHub had made an investment and they brought in David to stand up sales enablement from scratch. So that was a really cool position for him. And he's done a lot of work since then. And we've stayed in touch, especially around building out sales enablement, building out a team, new hire, training, etc. So, David, so glad you're on the panel today. Can you introduce yourself?

David Summers 11:00

Yeah. Thanks, Brian. I just quick clarification. I'm with Git lab. And when we get it, we get GitHub all the time. And it's funny, because that's actually part of our sales onboarding program of yeah, helping the sales team. How do they respond when somebody you know, mistaken that they're from GitHub, which was purchased from by Microsoft, and the tune of 6 billion plus a little while ago. So Git lab is a private company looking to go public later this year, or we'll see what the market conditions allow. But yeah, I lead our global field enablement team, which includes looking at how we help our pre sales and post sales field roles, be more productive faster, and accelerate their time to productivity and help reach the desired outcomes from the sales organization. So that includes both from lead gen reps to the sales team, to solution architects, and to our technical account managers as well.

Brian Lambert 11:57

Thanks, David, I appreciate that. And I guess I need to go through new hire training.

Scott Santucci 12:01

I think you just did.

Brian Lambert 12:02

I think. Thanks so much for that. Sorry about that. The next next awesome person is is Garth McKinney, and Garth is at Red Hat. And we met through my company. We actually had some folks on his sales team go through our sales management development program, interestingly enough in South Africa. So one of those attendees introduced us to Garth here in the headquarters at Red Hat and him and I have done some great whiteboarding sessions around the sales manager role, how to partner with sales, the performance and expectations that are, you know, coming in, and also they're going through the IBM merger. So that's been great to get to know Garth and Garth, can you share a little bit about your background? And welcome to the panel?

Garth McKinney 12:49

Yeah, thanks, Brian. I do work at Red Hat. We're an enterprise open source software company. And we were recently acquired by IBM. And so that's been really interesting, as we've been trying to, you know, integrating in but staying separate, right, because we are keeping our roots as an open source company, while also working with IBM that has a lot of proprietary software. So it's this, it's been an interesting connection, as we try to drive our culture forward and try to drive what made us famous, while we're merging with this larger company, and that's really my role is a sales and services learning consultant for Red Hat. So I work with the sales leadership, to kind of understand what can we do from a behavior and from a skills learning and kind of mindset perspective in order to drive the performance of their teams. And this is at the leadership level for their teams, as well as down to the sales teams, and everywhere in between. So that's what I do.

Brian Lambert 13:54

Thanks so much, Garth. Appreciate it. And thanks. Thanks, everybody, for joining. So my role on this is I'll, I'll be synthesizing at the end. I'm going to turn this over to Scott and Scott. There you go all from the tech industry, members of scfs of the l&d background, and they're all in the space of developing their sales teams.

Scott Santucci 14:13

That's fantastic. And I can't help but resist the vibe that I'm hearing. It sounds like the Raleigh chapter is calling out everybody else to say get, you know, get in gear and in terms of sales enablement society to get in gear, get active, get engaged. So maybe that's what's going on. But that's fantastic. I love competition. What we're going to do right now, is each of our responses have been or each of our panelists have been given the responses. So the 70, spreadsheet organized of of the information, and we're going to ask each of them very open ended questions. So the first question so that we're gonna break this down into segments, and then each respondent or each panelist is going to get a chance to cancel To talk, and I'm going to do it in order. So the first question is to you, Barry. And then we'll get Dave's feedback and then Garth feedback. And then we'll allow you guys to respond to each other. But I'm interested in just sharing your perspective of this question. Having looked at the survey findings, what are a few things that stood out for you?

Barry Shields 15:21

Yeah, I think one of the big things that stands out as folks are saying, you know, what kind of business should sales enablement be? And a lot of the responses are saying that it's either a consulting, business, it's a service business, or it's a coaching business. One of the things that weighs on my mind is I look even avalara and a lot of other companies have been part of is that it seems like the manager that isn't showing up, right, the sales manager is focused on reports that sales managers may be selling themself, or they're focused on things and not focused on outcomes. I think the sales enablement survey that you put together especially aligned to the question, What business would sales enablement P is the sales enablement team saying they're finding themselves doing a lot of coaching? When I came in, I didn't know that I was actually going to own a lot of the sales enablement piece, at least for account managers. But there's a counterpart who owns building things for the the sellers, the folks who make the initial sale. And he's a single point of failure. It is a small company, but I asked him about what he was doing. And what I what I realized was he was a person without llmd background. But but but a person who was a top performer who knew this the complexity of sales tax, and it is really, really confusing and complex. And so he was spending all his time coaching, he has office hours, he he has sessions that are meant on specific topics or products every Thursday and Friday. But beyond the office hours, he teaches those products, but then, and then the people show up and he finds himself really more coaching in terms of how to sell or how to overcome depression, if you're not meeting your quota, or how to have a conversation with your leader, all of the things that we would have expected, the sellers manager to have been doing. And so when you look at these results, it seems like that's what people are saying sales enablement should be consulting and services. It should be coaching, it should be, you know, like a design firm and an agency etc. So, you know, I'm thankful to be in the enablement space folks allow me to play there because of my learning and development background. But it seems like we're we're saying, maybe the issue is not with the sellers. But it's really with the managers and how they might enable their team. Wouldn't it be true that these teams could do a lot more sell a lot more if the manager stepped up for what we need them to step up to?

Scott Santucci 18:11

Gotcha. Thank you, Barry. David, how about you? What was your having? What are the studies? What was your reaction? What stood out to you?

David Summers 18:20

One of the things that even with, you know, the macroeconomic context with everything happening with COVID-19. You know, I still, I left feeling really good about the percentage of the respondents that said, for example, is about 90% of the audience said that he would you know, if sales enablement were a stock, would you they would either buy or hold things over half would buy, over a third would hold. So I wondered, going into it. My hypothesis was perhaps there would be more cynicism. And there were some comments that talked about that have a first thing to go when you're looking to cut and trim on given environments like this, then it is potentially perceived as redundant, right or unnecessary. But I was I felt reassured that others see it the same way I do it if no, this is a strategic importance to the organization. And it talked about I think over half of the respondents did consider sales enablement to be really a linchpin to help execute transformational efforts in the sales organization. So I the cynic in me went to some of the information about well, who were the folks that were saying that you know, that it's not that. And...

Ep35 State of SE Panel 3: Sales Enablement Leaders

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Mon, 04 May 2020 20:30:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 35

Continuing the ground-breaking series on the State of Sales Enablement, the guys bring industry trailblazers together to discuss the survey data and open-ended responses from over 100+ respondents.

This is the 3rd panel discussion, and it's incredibly insightful. The panel discusses three critical questions:

Having looked at the survey findings, what are a few things that stood out for you?
What was your favorite question, and why?
What do you see as the future of sales enablement from here?

The panel podcasts guests are:

Sheevaun Thatcher, CPC, Head of Sales and Global Enablement, RingCentral
Imogen McCourt, Sales Enablement Leader & Advocate
Doug Clower, Head of Enablement, MicroFocus

To view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to let us know what you think, collaborate with peers and sign up to be notified of new releases, updates, and news.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions, the market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders.

Scott Santucci 00:40

Hello insider nation, we're excited to bring you yet another star-studded panel. This time it's of your peers and part of our continuing state of sales enablement project. We hear it inside sales enablement are dedicated to making sure our listeners are successful. Overcoming the complexities in their own companies so that they compete more effectively in the market.

There are many names used to describe what I just said. We've been calling it sales enablement for the last 12 years COVID was a wake up call for Brian and I and hopefully it was for all of the rest of you and inside our nation. And we answered that call first by launching an amazing, absolutely amazing if you haven't had a chance to listen to you need to listen to it, our covert panel which we broke down into five parts because it was so rich on that we had Dr. Howard Dover from the University of Texas Dallas, we had Kanaan metha, who was a partner at TCP private equity, and Lindsey Gore, one of the top reps at at Microsoft and we had her on to keep us honest. So you know, so we won't go veer off into theoretical land. Something can all share with us in part two, you should go listen to that episode really caught our attention. He was talking about the growing gap between What investors want to see and how poorly the sum of the parts in the commercial process sales and marketing are, and that this alignment or this connective tissue isn't happening, cannot mention that that was the responsibility of sales enablement. And they don't see it anywhere happening in any of their portfolio companies.

So that was a big wake up call. And I thought, geez, we need to investigate that further. So we launched a survey to get the feedback from sales enablement practitioners, and we challenged you inside our nation to help us out. We thought, Hey, we're going to ask open ended questions, we're going to get a lot of subjective feedback, so that we can piece together what's really happening. We thought that if we got 25 responses that would be enough or suitable to give us a really good perspective. So we challenged you guys, and we said, Hey, if we want to get 25 we need to set our quota. Like I guess, your companies do two years, your salespeople at 50. So, okay, we're going to go out and get 50 How did you respond insider nation? Did you give us 30? Did you give us 50? No, in one week time you gave the 70 responses. 70. That's incredible. So thank you so much. We're very grateful for your participation. But that creates a different kind of problem. It's a high quality problem, but a problem nonetheless. How do you analyze open ended feedback from 70 people who all are incredibly thoughtful the responses were really, really thoughtful. So the other thing too is when you look at that information, I don't want to insert my bias. So all of us have bias. We have a fake news problem in business too. So please side note, if you if you take any study and use the quote, statistics, please, please, please read the methodology that they followed, please. There is so much fake news out there. It's it's really distracting.

But I digress. One of the things that we wanted to do is make sure that we don't have enough bias that we put onto it. So we've highlighted and recruited over 30 thought leader experts like the people that we have here to help us figure it out. As part of that program, we want to be able to give you insights or, or a glimpse at how this information is being combined. So we're running these panels, our first panel, we had sales enablement experts, so I'm sure you're know if you've been in the space, Tamra shank, Mike conkel and Josie mashburn. We had a fantastic panel there. We just put out our second one was with sales leaders. So if you know skip Miller, so it's great that you know cheban mentioned that skip Miller's a client is fantastic. At skip Miller, Steve Kaprow, and we also had Bob Apollo.

So we just completed that and now we're pulling up and having perspective from practitioners, practitioners. All of this is leading forward, Mark your calendar. For may 19, go visit inside se calm to register, because on May 19, we're producing a findings presentation for where all of this sits. So now let's kick off our panel. I'm really excited. So this is a panel of people that I've known for quite a long time. We have, I'm going to introduce, I'm going to introduce them first and have them introduce themselves to you. The first person is Doug Clower. Doug, as Doug, I met through inquiries, I think our first time that we actually met was at when you were at net IQ, and we were doing a briefing of the executive buyer research that we've done. When we were at Forrester, he's worked at Novell net IQ, and most recently at at microfocus. Doug has been pretty heavily involved in I would say a little bit more focus on the content side of things rather than the rest. In the training side of things, and I'm very excited to have Doug participating with us, Doug, would you care to introduce yourself to inside our nation?

Doug Clower 06:07

Yes, thanks. Thanks for that Scott, Doug Clower, obviously, I've been around sales enablement for a long time, I have a rather unique background, I did not come to sales enablement in high tech, through what some people might think is the normal business channel I grew up or my degrees in architecture. So I practice architecture for 15 years before I moved over to technology. I'm passionate really about enabling a Salesforce to make a difference with customers because ultimately, what we're trying to do in the sales enablement field is help our sales people solve problems that our customers have. That's really the approach I take.

Scott Santucci 06:44

Excellent. So that's Doug. Next up is Shivan Thatcher. So Shivan and I met I don't even know exactly when maybe it was at, maybe it was at that first conference Shivan but we met at Forrester and I think Just had many, many interactions in sessions, whether whether it be through an analyst or the like, she also was at the very first, the founding meetings. So when the sales enablement society was forming, Jim nanavati, and I did a I don't know what it was right, a workshop, I guess a group therapy session, whatever that was, we had a meeting of about 80,000 plus in, in some hotel, in out in California, and Shivam was there, you know, right then and there. That was when the the chapter the San Francisco chapter was born. So Shivan has been very heavily involved in helping get this profession off the ground for quite some time. As you know, she's a she's a leader out there in the sales enablement society and in the community. So I'm incredibly incredibly honored to have Shivan join us, Shivan. Introduce yourself to the few people who don't know you yet.

Sheevaun Thatcher 07:58

Hi, Shivan Thatcher yeah, I do definitely have a passion and a purpose around sales enablement. I did come up the more traditional business way I came up through sales than pre sales, then over to the enablement side of it. And so it was, it was a, it was a great path for me. And it was the right way to go. Scott, you and I met at the very first forester conference, and you asked how many people in the room have the title of enablement. And there are about 100 people in the room and four of us stood up. I mean, and that's how long ago that was. And then yeah, in out in Palm Desert, Palm Beach, Palm Beach, wherever we were, and then here in the Bay Area, so it's been, I've seen the growth like you from virtually nothing to now there are 10,000 15,000 people that can really, really say that their true sales enablement folks.

Scott Santucci 08:51

Yeah, it's been a long journey, huh? Yeah. Great one though. Great, very exciting. And then, last but not least, we have Imogen McCourt. Imogen McCourt and I met while at Forrester so bear with me this can be a little bit complicated. But this is all true. This is how things work out in real life, right? It's not, it's not that linear. So Imogen had this gigantic and I'm being sarcastic department at Forrester helping the Forrester sales reps with sales enablement. At the same time we'd launched the sales enablement practice for Forrester to provide research to to clients.

So I guess it's almost like we didn't want to be the cobblers son that had no shoes right imagine and so image and work with I mentioned skip Miller so skip Miller was somebody that Imogen and Greg hired to help help our help the Salesforce. And so this is sort of the weird triangle of skip, and Imogen and Scott. So and then we also invited image into participate, and she was a client of our sales enablement Leadership Council that was for clients. Okay, did that make any sense image and introduce yourself inside our nation? Oh I forgot oh my gosh, I forgot another thing. imaging also was at that founding meeting to kick off that was a great meeting by the way it for London side note the London meeting started out at the wrong address remember that people had to go find the right address but still 45 people showed up it was incredible imaging did I get anything right can you help me make make me not sound insane?

Imogen McCourt 10:32

Yeah, so I think he's got an image in the court and it was complicated. And I been forced to for some time, and they were sort of broad an interesting history a bit of that the best bit was obviously getting himself open at the same time as you were there building the practice out. And just to add extra complexity. Fourth also decided to do global sales transformation and different go to market approach at the same time. So I landed this global role, skeleton skull skeleton skull skeleton skull off. And of course, Scott Miller coming in to support us and then have to support sales organization to that transformation and try and be the best I could possibly be Scott to live up to the very high standards that even the team were were giving. So thank goodness you were all around to support me through that process. And you know that pedaling in the deep end piece really helps, right? You really learn at speed when you go through that sort of process quickly. And, and it's been fantastic to be able to continue to do that. And, and to do that in Europe. And I know we're going to talk about this later. But I think the the environment in Europe is different to the will not experience. It's working in it for Forrester leading things from the US.

Scott Santucci 11:42

Yeah, so I like that pedaling in the deep end. And I think that's why you have to have people getting your back, right because a lot of this stuff is you just have to have people that are supported that you can talk through it. And also it doesn't help or doesn't hurt to have to kill it. Right. Imagine Okay, so with that, having said that, we're now going to go to the meat of our show. So the meat of our show if you've been following along, this is our third panel. And we have three standard questions. So the first question, and again, just to set our audience's expectations, every single one of these analysts has had the opportunity to look at the 70 responses, open ended responses. And by the way, that's not a not an easy task. It's not just data. It's a lot of open ended feedback. So it takes some work to do the analysis. I've interviewed each of them too. So we've had a chance to talk about it. So question number one, and I'm going to ask you, Doug, having looked at the survey findings, what are a few things that stood out for you?

Doug Clower 12:49

Well, Scott, I thought it was really interesting. The paradox between strategy that different individuals were taking and their titles. So I saw a lot of titles associated with what we would consider a sales enablement leader, you know, the those people that were leading the department doing their thing. And they were approaching sales enablement as an operational excellence kind of approach, which seems and and it's sort of an inference on my part, it seems a little bit more like it's a tactical execution as opposed to the innovation answer to that particular question, the business strategy question. Because what I think in sales enablement we have to do especially as you underline the idea of COVID-19. We have really got to be more innovative, we have to be thinking on our feet more what I would call startup or, you know, a very nimble organization being able to respond to the circumstances that our Salesforce is facing on a daily basis, and the environment that we're working in whatever it happens to be. So I guess if I looked at it, those were, there was a bit of a discussion. between what I thought a sales enablement leader should be thinking about what their priorities were, or their strategy was and what their actual strategy was.

Scott Santucci 14:09

Excellent. Thank you, Doug shavon. How about you? What were some some of your reactions?

Sheevaun Thatcher 14:16

I would echo what Doug said. But I think the other thing that I did find gratifying was that the majority of the folks do in fact believe in are bullish on sales enablement and believe it's on the rise. There's been a lot of buzz going around that I've heard a lot of negative around enablement for the last few months. It's It's interesting, I haven't heard it before then that enablement is not working. And I get a sense, especially looking at some of the answers of the folks that don't think it's working, that a lot of that just has to do with tactical versus strategy, the same thing Doug said that if you take much more of a strategic corporate view of it, and how do you actually help move the business forward, as opposed to how do I make sure I've got these courses running? It's just I think It's just a vision that folks have on what, what enablement can be that they've restricted themselves. And when you restrict themselves, then you don't give yourself the you don't give yourself the runway to do what needs to be done.

Scott Santucci 15:12

Awesome. Imogen.

Imogen McCourt 15:15

Yeah, I mean, as you might suspect, I echo what both Doug and Sharon say. But I also think that, for me, it was always gratifying to see people talking about the fact that they see sales movement on the rise because of the complexity of doing business nowadays. It's like we've always been, you know, I think you coined the phrase, the VP of broken things we've always been that person brought in to fix things that weren't aligned to what working. And it really seemed to echo in the people who thought we were on the rise. It sounds like it was really getting more focus that it was because there's so much out there that needs to be sorted out. And we can't do that tactically one bit at a time because it's too complex. We have to go simple and we have to think strategically so people can see the big picture of how sales movement really impacts a company's ability. To drive and grow profitably.

Scott Santucci 16:03

So, Doug, how do you respond? What What did you What are your takeaways from what you heard from Shivan and Imogen?

Doug Clower 16:10

Well, you know, the the one thing that Shivan talked about was, you know, enablement is broken. And I think what happens is we get these little courses, things aren't quite working the way they should be. Sales isn't quite hitting a number or something's happening here. Or in some respects, maybe it's marketing that is, is failing to see that what their message is, is a little different than what the salespersons messages because it's a broad story as opposed to a focused story to the customer. And so when I echo the fact that we hear a lot of sales enablement is broken when it's not really sales enablement, it's a matter of somebody thinks what they have to say is more important than what sales enablement is doing. To that to that extent. Now, that's just a little bit of a, you know, takeaway on that. But it's really important for us to make sure that everybody understands it's a collaborative effort. nobody's saying marketing's doing the wrong thing or sales doing the wrong thing. It's here's the things we should be doing differently because of what our message happens to be. So I would echo what Siobhan said.

Scott Santucci 17:24

On would you get away from a get from dugin imaging.

Sheevaun Thatcher 17:30

We're all we're all pretty much saying the same thing, I think is that, you know, enablement does work when everybody is looking in the same direction. I think the the dis the disconnect between marketing and sales is the fact that each believes that they're doing a better job than the other to get the customers attention where in fact, we're all trying to do the same thing, which is to help our customers buy from us and it's getting folks to put to put that That that silo ism, newer silo ism aside and say that together if you work together on this sales and marketing, in fact, I see enablement, doing that a lot is bringing those two sides together to say there is a quid pro quo, right marketing, you give sales content in the way that they can use it and sales, you make sure as marketing and good marketing back adoption, and rock and roll. Right. So it's it's everybody's trying to do the right thing. And it's giving them the opportunity to do the right thing through conversation and training. Right, you can teach each other.

Scott Santucci 18:34

I like that image at all. Yeah,

Doug Clower 18:35

I like that to that. That's really good. We teach each other. That's the collaborative nature of what we're trying to do with sales...

Ep34 State of SE Panel 2: Sales Experts

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 34

This is the second panel discussion where leaders dissect the research data points from the State of Sales Enablement study being led by Scott Santucci.

Fielded in March 2020, the study data-set ended up with over 100 responses! There were so many open-ended responses that a "guest analyst" program was created to help sort through the massive amount of data.

In this episode, we enroll the help of sales leadership. Question: What if your sales leadership called you in for an "Account Review" of your sales enablement efforts? How would you answer, and how would you explain your teams ongoing value to the organization, the specific initiatives adding the most value, and the upside potential (forecast) of your sales enablement efforts?

Well, buckle your seat-belt, our special guest analysts cull through 100+ responses and provide their take on the Future of Sales Enablement.

Our guests are:

Skip Miller, CEO of M3 Learning
Bob Apollo, CEO of Inflexion Point Strategy Partners
Steve Crepeau, CEO of True Sales Results

To view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

Episode Transcript:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders.

Scott Santucci 00:40

So hello inside our nation. As you know, our mission here on inside sales enablement is to give you the information you need to be successful in your role. Having been in the space for a long time, we've identified where big gaps are and resources for you and we're bringing them to you As part of this process, we have started doing a variety of COVID response activities. One of them is we had a five part series, leveraging the insights from Dr. Howard Dover, Kuunal Metha, who's a principal at private equity firm TCD. And then Lindsay Gore, a top sales executive at Microsoft, and her role was to keep us all honest. So that was a great, that was a great series. And coming from that we had a very interesting conversation about what private equity firms are seeing and their frustrations with sales and marketing in general. And then really what the role of sales enablement is that of course, cause Brian and I get to get concerned or curious about what the state of sales enablement is, and we launched a study. The study has a variety of different parts. The first part was doing a survey. So we conducted a survey, our goal was to get 25 responses because our survey was very q&a oriented, open ended text, we wanted to get the words from you of what you're seeing in your own words. Rather than having you react to what we think the words that you should be reacting to. We wanted to get 24 Films completed forms completed in a week. So of course, we set the goal at 50. And what did you do inside our nation? What did you do? Well, you got to 70 responses in one week. Today, we have over 100 responses. And that wasn't an easy survey if you took it. And if you're listening, you're probably one of the people who did. So that creates a high quality problem. The high quality problem with so much of that information is how the heck are we going to analyze it? And I'll tell you, there's a being a former Research Director, one of the things that you want to look for is where you put bias in. And when you have, when you have data, one of the things to look out for is where is the researcher or the analyst bias coming in, and I didn't want to do that. So I reached out to People who are experts in their fields and ask them for their input. So we've gotten a great response from from members of our panelists that we'll talk about here. But great response from over 25 people who are participating in our guest analyst program. That includes the CEO of seismic and the CEO of sales hood, if you know Eli, and includes SBI. As you know, salesbenchmarkindex is helping us out and given us an input. We're getting feedback from a variety of different sources that maybe you wouldn't think would would provide it and it's amazing how are communities coming together? In order all of this is leading up to if you can go to our website, inside se comm and log in. You can register for our findings meeting that's going to be on May 19. Do I know what the findings are going to be yet? No, we're still we're still analyzing. So I'm feeling a little bit nervous about that. But I think if you guys hype it more and make it more pressure point it'll be better quality for all of us. So having said that we're in the stage now where we're doing panels. And we're bringing some of the interviews together and we're looking for common trends in these conversations. Last week, we had we released our panel with sales enablement experts. If you know, Tamra shank, Mike Kunkel and Josie Mashburn. That was a fantastic one. And I'm delighted, just super excited for for this one right here. Now a little bit of a qualifier. One of the things that I've learned as a researcher is when you do interviews, you want to make sure that you don't share your opinions. And these three individuals will say I had more color and the email to send out to them, these three individuals because they're so skilled at sales pulled me into the conversation and got me model about what I think too. So I'm going to work really, really hard to make sure I don't put too much of my finger on the scale, but I'm publishing out that these guys are super expert at what they do they have conversations for a living and teach other people how to have valuable conversations. So this is going to be a Trump a Will's, am I a better researcher? Or are they better conversationalist? We'll see. So the competition is afoot. Now what I'd love to do right now, we're going to introduce our panel. So just to remind everybody of our format. I'm going to go through an introductions part, then we have three sections of conversations to go through. And then Brian is going to take over and wrap up and summarize where we found agreement on. So to start off with Skip Miller, Skip is the person that I know the most. So Skip has his own sales, training and productivity consultants, and he's had it for many, many years. I'll let him tell you who it is and what they do. But what was interesting is how did I meet Skip? So Skip and I met each other when he was hired at Forrester, while we were building the sales enablement practice to basically provide sales Enabling training to our Salesforce. So that's a tough spot to be into when you've got published research and we don't really do any things that scripted. And then he's got his own point of view. And then there's a lot of questions. Well, should we be listening to skip? And you know, why? What about our research, and it was really great because immediately we aligned on some key points and there was really no problem at all. So that's one of those things where I don't know whether it's more credible for me or more credible for him or we're both equally insane whatever the case is, that's how I met skip and I'm super delighted to work on this because I've been trying to find a way to work with skip ever since and this is this was a good way to get started. So skip, would you like to introduce yourself to our insider nation?

Skip Miller 06:45

I'm happy to, and it was a pleasure to work at Forrester. We there was record growth and record opportunities there. They were hiring a bunch of great people and, and the organization had some great leaders. So it was it was kind of fun to slip in there and work with you as you were develop. in that system enablement, sales enablement and stuff. So, I mean, that was, you know, 6789 years ago, you know, we still both keep in contact with a number of people from back there. And so if we do this for a living I live in the West Coast Southern California. So a lot of sass companies we do business with, you know, people, you know, small startups like Tableau and zoom and ringcentral and stuff all the way up to big companies like Google and stuff, but we try to do small and medium sized companies and get them when they're at that point where they're too big to be small but not big enough to be big and try to get them over that that hundred million dollar hump. So that's what we do and we have a good time there.

Scott Santucci 07:38

Awesome. So introducing our next panelist is Bob Apollo. Bob Apollo has a also a sales consultant improvement organization called inflection point. And I got to tell you, the first time I saw that name, I always love that maybe it's because I've got a little bit of an engineering me and I just love that concept. But, Bob, I've known about for a long time. I've seen him post and every time he posts on LinkedIn, it shocks me a bit because like, man, he's saying it in the exact same language that I'd say it, how does he know the same language that I've got? So I was always curious, but I never really had a chance to to engage with them. So finally, we got we got this. And I was like, maybe this is my opportunity to reach out with Bob. And we had our we had our interview, and it was just so delightful to just be so aligned and not even know each other and have different backgrounds. That was I was really engaged and enlightened by that. And I think that that's something about the power of social media and how you can build connections if you listen and pay attention to people. So with that, Bob wants to share a little bit about yourself and introduce yourself to insider nation.

Bob Apollo 08:47

Sure, and I very much appreciate the insight or the the invite. Thank you, Scott. I equally have followed you for some time. You know, I think you have reputation for being the Godfather or one of the godfathers of the sales enablement movement, although it's always been a bit of a puzzle to me as to whether that refers to parental or mafia practice anyway.

Scott Santucci 09:14

I think I like the mafia part because that's cooler.

Bob Apollo 09:17

There we go. So I also run sales effectiveness consultancy. It's b2b focused. It, uh, I think our sweet spot is typically scale ups, you know, post startup pre corporate, who we're trying to build something repeatable and truly scalable. And, yeah, I chose the name inflection point because there is probably a bit of the engineer in me, because if I look back at the work we do, it's probably as much focused on creating systems as it is developing skills. Of course, they're both important, but systems that guide Practice rather than impose, rigid and inflexible process.

Scott Santucci 10:06

Excellent so then our last one, and the person that I know the least, is Steve Crepeau. So here's how I got to know Steve. I can't remember what the post was, or what it what it what it was about. I don't even remember the topic. But I posted something. And Steve blasted me, just blasted me. And I love people who have strong opinions and can back it up. So I engaged him, and he wasn't. The other thing that I love are people who have the power of convention to backup if they're going to bless somebody to tell them why. I think that's all you can ask for today. And frankly, I take that as a sign of respect, not as something that's, that's a jerk. So I love that kind of that kind of dialogue. And it turns out, we actually agree to some hot words I guess or hot terms that that we disagree with or had different ways of saying the same thing. So obviously, I thought this was a great opportunity to highlight how diverse of opinions that we're looking to bring in. And frankly, I have no idea what Steve's gonna say on this. And that's another thing I'm excited about. So Steve, take it away, introduce, introduce yourself, and who you are. Sounds great.

Steve Crepeau 11:24

Brian and Scott, first and foremost, thanks for the invitation to participate in this panel. Let me echo the sentiments of skipping Bob super excited to kind of debate and brainstorm here with with this elite pedal, and perhaps on the Simon cowl of the pedal. I don't know that I blasted you, Scott, I would refer to it as an animated healthy debate. And you earned a tremendous amount of respect because you defended with great conviction and with facts, your perspective and opinion and I think that's why we've gotten along fabulously for the last four years, but it did start off in under rather auspicious beginnings. I will admit to that. So I don't know, right? I think it's great. It's, by the way, just just just for the record, since this is gonna go out to millions and millions, maybe 10s of millions of people. I never subscribe to the theory of disagreeing with someone or trolling publicly, it's always I'll challenge a thought in a private exchange. That's the only way I do that. So if you remember was through LinkedIn messenger. I think we don't I think we've melted down LinkedIn messenger that Friday night. So in short, I'm Steve crepeau. I've been in technology sales the enterprise for 30 plus years as a sales leader, leading sales teams selling technology solutions. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called True sales results. We're a management consultancy, we focus exclusively much like Bob and Skip we have very similar ideal customer profiles based on what they heard fast growing b2b sales organizations that are looking for ways to improve their performance. So we work with our customers and help help them learn how to engage, influence and sell more effectively to their customers.

Scott Santucci 13:00

Thank you, Steve. So we're now into our into the body of our show. So we have three questions and their segments. So set the first segment question is, having looked at the survey findings, were a few things that stood out for you. And I'm going to ask skip to answer this question first.

Skip Miller 13:20

Interesting the nature of the survey and having a market research background, I spent years working at data quest and Gartner it was it was interesting on the subjectivity part of it because I'm used to, you know, zero to zero to 10, or a B to really being more objective. So reading through the subjective part was was quite interesting for me, actually seeing what people had to say, not just you know, ranges, which was really, really interesting to see, especially the stock market question and the US sales enablement people if it's on a rise if it's on a hold of It's a decline the different variables of this. So that was interesting.

Scott Santucci 14:04

At some, what did you take away from that?

Skip Miller 14:06

That life is a bell curve, and the top performing sales today, but organizations are doing really well. Most are the middle trying to figure it out and there's some that suck.

Scott Santucci 14:16

Gotcha okay, Bob, how about you, having looked at the survey findings? What are a few things that stood out for you?

Bob Apollo 14:24

Yeah, very interesting. I think one of the questions that struck me straight away was the sort of variety of responses to the question. If sales enablement, were to write a letter to shareholders, describing how you performed and what you're going to do next year, what would you say? And there was a tremendous, I think, range of different responses, including some who simply responded. That's a tough question. You know, I think it's a question that needs to be answered. I think when I look across the questions generally and the responses, you know, we heard about this idea of being somewhat of a bell curve. I think at least parts of the community are not yet performing as they and others would wish. I think the sort of elements of immaturity, maybe even schizophrenia, in that in the community, almost implying that, you know, they're still on a bit of the quest for a purpose, and yearning for respect. And that certainly fits in with some of the observations I've made of members of the community. There is this bell curve, but many of them are still, I think, struggling to earn the respect that they wish they had.

Scott Santucci 15:51

Steve, how about you? What are the highlights of what you took away from looking at the survey findings?

Steve Crepeau 15:56

So a few things that stood out to me was the coalescence In the freeform comment response around why sales enablement is on the rise, there seem to be a strong consensus that sales is complex and hard and only getting harder, which dictates the need for more effective sales enablement. But what I found interesting is if you compare and contrast the freeform comments around why sales enablement is on the decline, for the most part, those responses are quite diverse and all over the map. I was surprised that not one person said that a target their target customer should be an investor. If sales enablement was a business. I was really surprised that only one person replied that the product function was a competitor to sales enable because in my experience, often Product Marketing and or the Product Management Group metals and interferes with sales enablement. Frequently there's there's this inherent power struggle over who who kind of owns enablement, field enablement, and unfortunately, Too often the sales enablement group loses and kind of is relegated to a kind of a junior role. I loved the shareholder question absolutely loved it. It seems that a lot of people really struggled with that question there were there a number of individuals said, I don't understand this question. I would have to like write a dissertation. So catch up with you later Scott on it. And, but it didn't surprise me because in my experience, sales enablement, quite frankly, tends to struggle with developing a clear and compelling strategy for the business in the first place. And that results in them committing what I refer to as random acts of enablement. I think a lot of us do, and really being viewed as a tactical strategic function. I would say in closing, my favorite response was a proc was the reply to what question Should we have asked, which was the last question, and the single response that really stood out to me was this question was a shitty interview question. Now, that was my favorite response for two questions for two reasons. One The person actually went on to answer with a question they would have liked to see next that wasn't. So they contradicted themselves. And the second reason that I love that response is I asked that exact question at the end of every discovery conversation I have. So it's at least there's one dissenter a month out there in the audience that those are kind of my key...

Ep33 State of SE Panel 1: Sales Enablement Experts

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 33

In March 2020, the guys fielded a groundbreaking study on the Future of Sales Enablement. We wanted it to have more open ended answers to reduce the sampling error bias and to take different lenses and different tools that we could use as researchers to do our analysis. Our goal was to get 50 responses. You (Insider Nation) gave us 70 responses within a week! We ended up with over 100 responses to that start survey -- which is incredible.

To help us analyze the raw data, we created our Insider Nation: Guest Analyst Program. Our first 3 guests analysts are:

Tamara Schenk: Sales Enablement Leader | Advisor | Author | Speaker | Mentor | Empowering Human Potential in Sales Teams and Leaders
Josie Marshburn: Founder of Sales Benchmark Index with previous leadership roles in Sales Enablement at Oracle and VM Ware.
Mike Kunkle: VP of Sales Effectiveness Services at SPARXiQ

To view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci

Brian Lambert 00:36

I'm Brian Lambert, we are the sales enablement insiders.

Scott Santucci 00:40

Today we have a special edition podcast. It's actually part it's it's actually part of our overall study on the state of sales enablement. And the program that we're doing that we've been sharing with you as listeners. So, to remind everybody, our COVID-19 series started off with a panel and the panel conversation was with Dr. Howard Dover, from the University of Texas, Dallas, we had Kanaal Metha, who is a operations portfolio executive at TCP. And then we had Lindsey Gore, who's a enterprise sales executive to keep us honest. And in that, in that series, we ran into a pretty interesting conversation, which was around how are your companies going to react to all this COVID. And a discussion happened about Well, where's the state of sales enablement, going to lead to? Well, that definitely was concerning. So, what we did Brian and I talked about it, and we decided that what we needed to do is do a study. So, what we what we put together was a survey. And we wanted it to have more open-ended answers rather than asking, you know, direct questions that are, you know, yes or no, or things that you can measure, partially because we're trying to reduce the sampling error bias, we're trying to take different lenses and different tools. So, you know, as former researchers to do it, our goal was to get 50 responses, we thought that setting our target as having 25 would be rich, because this is much more qualitative than quantitative feedback. And that having 25 responses from sales enable professionals about where they think the world's heading is great. Well, what did you do as insider nation gave us 70 responses within a week? So, it's been difficult for those of us on our end, Brian, and eyes in formatting it. And then of course, on our our esteemed panelists, in which we're going to introduce here in a minute sorting through all your answers. And then as of today, so we had 77 responses in one week. As of today, there are 95 responses to that cert survey, which is incredible. So, thank you so much for insider nation, and also the sales enablement community. Now, as we've mentioned, this issue about bias, we're very interested in figuring out what's really, really going on. So, we started a guest analyst program. So, this is something that you can't do at Forest or or CSO insights or, or gardener. And really, what we're doing is we're tapping the expertise of our listeners and people in the community. And I've reached out to people who have been in the space for at least 10 years to be able to see that. So, I'm extremely excited with our with our first batch. So, what we did is with this guest analyst program, we've interviewed them, and really what I do is it's really hard for me, but I try as much as I can. And you know, our panelists, you can tell me whether I did a good job of that or not, I just try to listen to what is on the minds of others without sharing my, my perspective. Then what we wanted to do is so that the rest of the community, our insider nation, can hear about these dialogues, is pulled together a panel. And I'm incredibly honored and excited to introduce everyone, our first panel to share the findings of the findings or her I don't even know what we'll call them, maybe maybe we'll do that. So, joining me today is Josie mashburn. So, Josie has a background of running sales enablement at both Oracle and VMware among other things. I met her actually as a panelist for a learning and development summit maybe two or three years ago. And since then, I've tracked her progress and, and has been excited to see that she's joining joining the world of sales enablement, expert experts out there for hire. So welcome Josie, would you like to introduce yourself and give a little color to our audience?

Josie Mashburn 04:45

Hi Scott, thank you so much for having me on today. I really appreciate it. So, I run a consulting firm called sales enablement benchmark where we help leaders improve sales performance, and it's interesting whether you're a small startup or a very large organization There are always areas of improvement that we can make in sales and, and in including sales enablement. So, I'm very happy to have participated in the survey and have an opportunity to chat with you about it and the others today. Thank you for having me.

Scott Santucci 05:16

Excellent. Thank you. So next up is is Mike Kunkel. If you are on LinkedIn, and you don't know Mike Kunkel is I don't believe that you're on LinkedIn. Mike is very, very prolific in this space. He's been he's been involved in sales enablement, and sales training since since its inception. He's heavily involved in ATD and helping to build out that practice. He's developed his own methodology around sales and mail when he calls the building blocks, which I'm sure we'll hear hear about. And Mike and I met at least eight years ago, I remember it was at a conference at conference at Forrester. And Mike, take it away. Tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Mike Kunkel 06:00

Yeah. Hey, Scott, and Hi everyone else, really pleased to be here too appreciate the chance to talk about what's happening in the profession. Yeah, remember that 2013 Forrester conference with you in the white lab coat? Right being the the simplest that we possibly can be but not as not simpletons. Right. So that message stuck with me for many, many years. So I am, I'm the VP of Sales effectiveness services for sparks IQ. And we serve wholesale distribution and manufacturing companies, helping them with sales analytics, like strategic pricing, and territory optimization, knowing which accounts to focus on and then doing the diagnostics, around sales effectiveness, sales enablement to help them understand how to create a path forward to improve sales results. So that's a little about me.

Scott Santucci 06:56

Excellent. And then last, but definitely not least, is Tamra shank. Tamra and I go way back. Actually, she was a client of our of mine when I was at at Forster and was one of the leading members of that sales enablement Leadership Council that we had when she was working at t systems and running a big sales enablement transfer transformation effort. You might know her today as the sales enablement analyst with CSO insights. So, she's done a lot of work there. And she's written one of the most formative books around the space. I can go on and on and Tamra and I go off can go off and a lot of different tangents. So, I'm doing my best to keep it tight. Tamra, welcome. And tell us a little bit about yourself.

Tamra Shank 07:44

Hi, Scott, and everybody on the show. Very happy to be here. Yeah, so we go way back, I think a decade or so. I am now in a very interesting perspective of having done this in a leadership role for six years. And also, having looked at this for six years as an analyst, and are focusing on helping sales enablement leaders to to get this right to create impact and also helping organizations to get better than what I currently do for sure.

Scott Santucci 08:13

Excellent. So let me just walk you through it to our audience. Here's the format that we're going to walk through. I have three open ended questions that we're going to ask our panelists. My job is to, you know, to facilitate and get into answers. And then we're going to turn it over for Brian for a recap to close out. Brian, tell us about what what you're going to do. And when you chime in what's happening for our audience to follow along.

Brian Lambert 08:36

Yeah, thanks. Hey, everybody. Good. Good to be with you. I will be listening to everybody's comments. I may chime in seeking clarification. And at the end, I'll summarize what I'm hearing and make sure that our guests analysts agree with that. And from that, we'll be able to have clear takeaways from this discussion.

Scott Santucci 08:58

Excellent. So, let's get started with our panel. Question one I'm going to ask in order. So, the first, the first question is to Josie and of course, every panelist will will respond to it. Having looked at the survey findings, what are a few things that stood out for you?

Josie Mashburn 09:18

Scott, what really stood out for me as I was looking through the survey findings is the variation in answers. There are answers that people gave that are from a thought leadership position. And then there are answers that people gave that were concerning, they seem to be uncomfortable in their role. They seem to be uncomfortable with the questions in some cases. And and that's, that's concerning, especially in light of where we're at with the economy and the workforce right now.

Scott Santucci 09:51

Excellent. So, we're going to double back in this section and have you have a chance our panelists interact. Mike. What what You're having looked at the survey, what are a few things that stood out for you?

Mike Kunkel 10:04

Well, one was that it seemed to indicate that people felt as I do that sales enablement as phenomenal potential. The concerning piece for me, is how many people recognize that we need to morph toward more of some have somewhat of an internal consulting role and to be more results oriented, to move the numbers to do bottom line to not just run initiatives? Now, that's a double-edged sword, right? It's great that people are recognizing that. But it's a problem that that's where we are, largely and the results ranged from highly tactical whether the answers to the questions rather ranged from highly tactical, to pretty strategic stuff. So, you know, I think it came out a bit that organization leaders are tending to get in the way of those results, or maybe getting in the way of us doing more internal consulting. And it became clear to me that the that we in sales enablement need to be organization leaders ourselves, not not taking orders. You know, we're being whipping boys. So, you know, I saw some great potential in there, but some of those things really concerned to me as well.

Scott Santucci 11:29

Excellent thank you, and Tamra.

Tamra Shank 11:32

Um, so what concerned me as well is the very broad variation of answers to every single question. So, if you looked at the question from what is it yeah, we we had answers from very tactical up to an engine to drive transformation. When we look at the shareholder question Edwards forum, many people apparently uncomfortable to answer. And that means we basically don't know what to tell them what we have achieved. And also, when it comes to how to look at it, and what what could have been asked, in addition, so the very broad variety of very tactical steps to get things done to get things off the checklist, up to how do we basically drive transformation in a bigger picture. So that tells us we have a lot of ideas out there, we have not a lot of clarity out there. And that's where we have to get to.

Scott Santucci 12:32

So that's interesting. So, Josie, back to you since you were the first in this segment. What are your reactions to hearing from your peers?

Josie Mashburn 12:42

I loved Mike describing it as internal consulting, because in order for you to be effective in this role, there's so many partnerships that you have to create around the organization. There's so many partners that either help supply content and enablement strategies for you, there's partners that you need to work with to enable those teams as well. So, I thought the description around internal consulting was very interesting. Leaders getting in the way was the other comment that stood out to me because I think it is our best intentions to help. And that's why there's so many groups that jump in all over the place, once they understand what enablement is. And they want to be a Me too, and that the problem is, then we overload any of our customer facing team members, too, with too much information, too deep of content, not the right content for the right conversation, and we confuse them. So those are the two biggest things that stood out to me in the other conversations.

Scott Santucci 13:49

Excellent. Thank you. That's great. How about you, Mike, what did you hear from your peers?

Mike Kunkel 13:53

Well, what I heard, interestingly, since we're talking about how much variance there is, in the survey results, what I heard across the three of us, was alignment about some of the things that we liked and the concern. Yeah, that was the thing. That was the thing that really struck me is that we tried to say it in different ways. But we were pretty much all saying the same things.

Scott Santucci 14:18

Yeah, sorry to interject my I can't resist. That's exciting for me as well. What's really cool is each of you guys have different color, right? There's a texture, that's different, but you're not different in terms of your observations. And I think that's the richness that we want to bring out the rest of this call. Tamar, how about yourself?

Tamra Shank 14:38

Yeah, very interesting. To to compare this, we come from different perspectives, but at the core, we come overall to the same observations regarding the survey, and it is to me a mirror to what sales enablement seems to be right now it is a collaborative orchestrating element is what we need apparently leads to a lot of uncertainty and unclarity for many people in the space or have these roles. And what I heard across some of these answers is a lot of helping here and helping there but then not having the right position to do that. So, we can only help others with if you're in a position of strength. And and that's where we have to get to first to to really get a lot of clarity, and in a more strategic set of enablement to be actually to be able to to help others are Incheon and and customers and customers.

Scott Santucci 15:39

Excellent. So, I'm going to zoom in now we're going to go to our next question. Our next question, Mike, you're going to be our chair on this one? Um, what was your favorite question? And why?

Mike Kunkel 15:53

I think if I had to nail it down, right, because I thought about this are a couple of things that leapt out at me, but I would focus in on what business is sales enablement? Because, as we talked about the variants already have the answers. And I looked at the answers to that. It was everything from like, we're doordash delivering, which, right to, to we are, we are management consultants, right? And I saw a pattern of management consulting come out there, I saw things like maximizing human potential Mission Control for a space launch, I thought was a fascinating answer. Right, you see a ton of professional development, professional services, things came out, right. But it it again, it was all over the board, from you know, being a service business, to being someone who should report directly to the head of sales is sort of the right-hand person or right arm of the sales leader, you know, to analogies with with oil exploration and production, like to try to find out where there was opportunity and run some key tests. And some of those got really exciting for me, right? Because I'm a big believer in the consulting angle. I'm a big believer in diagnose first, then prescribe. And I'm a big believer in systems thinking. And I saw some of those themes come out there. But again, what concerned me is that it was so all over the board with some of those, you know, really cool thoughts about how I think sales enablement, can help take organizations forward in good times or difficult times, like we're going through now. And then there were some things that were just so tactical about things. I don't remember this one specifically, what I keep thinking every time I think sales enablement, I keep hearing people saying the simplest stuff like, you know, messaging tools, technology training, buy, as opposed to how do we really get into our organization, figure out where we are, where we need to go next? What's gonna close that gap and how we're going to structure and support the organization to make that journey. And I saw all of that type of difference in variants. In that one answer, we still can't really define really sales enablement, what we do and how we're going to make an impact.

Scott Santucci 18:20

There's so much there. If you follow our show, you're gonna hear this is Scott being incredibly restrained, and not because Mike gave some red meat for me to want to chime in. And I'm going to take a deep breath. And I'm going to ask Tamra. What was your favorite question? And why?

Tamra Shank 18:40

My favorite question was the shareholder question. So, what would we write in a letter to the shareholders? Because it's what I experienced in my own role, it is incredibly important to keep the senior executives and and stakeholders involved and to keep them engaged. And this can only happen if you're really aligned to what they care about, to their goals to the metrics they are measured on. And what I saw through the answers of the survey, many, many people wrote strangely uncomfortable to answer this question. Others could not even understand this question, which also tells us a lot about the big problem of how do we measure success in sales enablement. So, while people know the names of tons of hundreds

Ep32 Leadership in a world of VUCA

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 32

Fresh off the COVID-19 Series, the guys take a deeper dive on Leadership in a world of VUCA.

Volitility - Lack of consistency

Uncertainty - Impossible to know fully.

Complexity - A large number of interdependent factors.

Ambiguity - Haziness of reality - impact of many interpretations.

A new way of doing business is going to emerge. The old approach of sales responds to demand, marketing creates demand model isn’t going to work. Because we’re in an experience economy. We believe Sales Enablement leaders can usher in a new world by being heroic.

They guys talk through the Being HEROIC Leadership Framework using a real-life case study example of a project in-flight.

H (Holistic): Leaders recognize the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

E (Engineered): Leaders understand how the parts best fit together

R (Reality): Leaders understand how the human element impacts how the parts behave

O (Ongoing Operations): Leaders build continuous and sustained improvement

I (Impactive): Leaders understand how they message to the community of stakeholders will ultimately drive action

C (Collaboration)Collaboration and inclusiveness are required to drive cohesion in the commercial process

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

I'm Brian Lambert. And we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:49

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives, as analysts, consultants, or practitioners, we've learned the hard way, what works? And maybe what's more important, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:06

That's right. Hey, Scott, we're coming off of our COVID series. And, you know, one of the things that we've been talking about is what have we learned inside our nation? Oh, thanks so much for all of your feedback on that. And there, there are four things that that we learned from the COVID series and all the interactions that we've had. One, there's a lot of things going on all at the same time, a lot of choices that need to be made, especially for sales teams. Two everybody seems to be adjusting to a new normal work from home video communication, the act of getting things done is different. The economy's taking a severe hit. Since we put out this the series. Today, 14 million people have lost their jobs, unfortunately. So, helping people take action and find their path forward has really become a top concern of our listeners. And because of these things, it's unreasonable to conclude that how we've worked in the past normal will work in the new normal. And that leads us to today, in this episode, leadership, what is leadership? Well, quite simply, it's what to do, what not to do, and then creating the environment to get it done. In our view, Scott, and I both believe that sales enablement has to take a leadership role right now, a new way of doing business is going to do emerge, the old approach of sales responding to demand, marketing, creating demand, that model isn't going to work anymore, because we're in an experience economy. And we believe sales enablement, leaders can usher in the new world by being heroic. And with that said, Scott, why don't you share us a story to help us get framed around this idea?

Scott Santucci 03:02

Excellent, Brian, and thanks. Thanks for the introduction. So, Brian, have you ever heard of a person by the name of Joseph Campbell?

Brian Lambert 03:13

No, that sounds familiar. But I don't think so because you always go to like, the 1600s or something. So, I don't know if I know that Joseph Campbell far back.

Scott Santucci 03:24

So, Joseph Campbell, was a professor. So, he's a he's no longer among us for Sarah Lawrence College. So, what the heck am I referring to a professor from Sarah Lawrence College. But in 1949, he published a book called the hero with 1000 faces. So, let's think about 1949. I'm gonna come back to this because it's really compelling. But really, what what he noticed, and I don't know if you notice this a lot, but all of us have been through English class, you know, in college, and you know, high school. Many of us have had to read that dag on Beowulf, and, or the Iliad, the Odyssey, things like that. So as an English professor, he's he's reading all these things, and he starts to realize, you know, what, there's a lot of common threads regardless of what period in time they are. In a Beowulf is written in 1200s. And the Iliad and the Odyssey was written or told thousands of years before that, there's got to be there's a common pattern to this so he's gonna figure it out. And really the book of a hero with 1000 faces, what he came up with are pardon the terms. The archetype archetypical hero based on world mythologies that a called the monomyth. And really what he figured out regardless of you know religions, mythologies etc, all cultures that exists on the planet have transferred their cultures and their their code through this narrative of a hero's journey. And that's really what's remarkable about it. And what's even more remarkable about this this is that I think a lot of us can relate to Star Wars as a perfect example of a hero's journey that's inherently relatable. George Lucas, who built that referenced Joseph Campbell's work, and actually hired him as a consultant as he was making the movies to make sure he was following this particular script.

Brian Lambert 05:37

Ah, makes sense. Now, now I remember. Yeah. So, what does that have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 05:48

Right. So what? Right? Yep. So, what's interesting about it is the reason these stories work, is that, you know, throughout all of humanity, we've always been tackled with confronting change that's come that's complex to us at that moment in time. So, think about Frankenstein as a hero story. And that's about navigating through the industrial, the Industrial Revolution, and all the all the weird things that are play there. We as humanity had to emerge from the cage, this the cave, the safety of the cave, and going out and exploring new worlds, somebody had to have the courage to say, no, we're not going to be chasing around all these, all these wild animals, I'm going to plant grass right here, and I sit and watch it grow. Like all of the things that we've done as a society have really evolved by people taking risks. And in every one of those situations, they've encountered what we now call vuca. The world around them has been ever changing, and it's uncertain. And the reason that these stories resonate for us so much these heroes stories as they help us deal with it. So let me just give you a little bit of concreteness, about what vuca means for us today, and relate it to what we're dealing with and what the topic is. So vuca is an acronym. And it's used to describe the general experience that either a group of people or a society or a team confront in a rapidly rapidly changing environment. So, volatility, it is the it's basically the environment that's liable to change rapidly and unpredictably. In complex systems, it can flip from one state to another very rapidly. So, we are definitely going through that right now. Yeah, definitely, certainty is the inability to know that whole thing fully, it is impossible for us to know. So, we don't even know exactly how COVID is transmitted, for example, it's uncertain. So, we have to make decisions every day, so we get new updates. We're dealing with that today. And uncertainty comes from the large number of elements, which are independent, that are interdependent interactions. So, all of these things happen and interact with each other in nonlinear ways. And therefore, the way that we want to process information in business is step one, step two, step three. And unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way. So that creates uncertainty. The next is the one is C is complexity refers to many parts being interconnected and interdependent. So, in other words, you can't get your job done unless somebody else does their job, right. And harnessing that complexity means that you have to give up traditional concepts of strategy and leadership. But if you give them up, you need a different concept of strategy and leadership and that's our being heroic framework. And then finally, ambiguity, ambiguity. What's ambiguity, it is the quality impact of people being open to one or more interpretation. So, in other words, what happens is, because all of us can see the world around us through different lenses, and we don't take the time to understand it, what happens is it creates a lot of conflict. And that conflict results in haziness of reality and potential misreading of situations or miscommunication. So those are the those are the various things that happen and ultimately in a vuca environment. simple linear cause and effect descriptions of what's happening. Those are the tools that we all know in business, they all break down, and you're left with having to confront reality in a different way.

Brian Lambert 09:57

Like baeuwolf and tie it back to the idea of a hero's journey, because of the current environment, you can think about Star Wars being dropped on another planet or Lord of the Rings and what that environment change was any epic story that has a hero, that environment change, and they had to adapt. And that story unfolded, because the decisions they made, and also who they were as a quote unquote leader in that story, and each found their own path. And that's that also is why the being heroic framework is so critical to me. How would you react to that?

Scott Santucci 10:37

In terms of a segue, let's redefine the being heroic framework, we have another episode that for this one, covered that in detail. But just as a recap, if you're listening, you actually have a story about applying it, we do practice what we preach here on the inside sales enablement podcast. But in that space, being heroic, first of all, the being part is you have to be living it every day, it's not like you put you take the little hammer, hit the glass, and then pull out your your leadership kit, you got to live it, love it, learn it every day. So, the H stands for holistic seeing things from a complete perspective. E stands for engineered finding, that's basically embracing the 8020 rule and finding the few measurable things that matter are as confronting reality, data says one thing, but people behave something else, you got to blend both of those two, together. Oh, is a focus on ongoing operations. Just because you did something doesn't mean it's activated, you got to make sure it gets activated and run on an ongoing basis is impacted how you communicate D are using passive words or active words? And are you creating the kind of vocabulary that allows people to join together and move forward? And then see is collaborative? have you built the right processes and procedures to to work together as a team? And are you being inclusive of other groups? Are you mandating it onto other people? Those are the elements of the being heroic framework. And I think this is a great segue now into you have a great application story in flight literally happening right now. Why don't you tell us about it, Brian?

Brian Lambert 12:17

Yeah, sure. So back up a month or so ago, and it started getting engaged on a large project, and we talk a lot Scott in the podcast is in it, you know, in the 30s, here with episodes, and, you know, we have a very distinct point of view. And, you know, I was really wrestling with this idea of what we were going to implement versus the outcomes we needed to drive. And because we're, we're positioning an outcome, and we're driving results. I was like, wow, you know, what, we've got to figure out here, how to frame out the result we're going to tackle. I mean, we're gonna we're in a vuca environment, we had discussions about that. And you know, what, there's this muscle memory of just going and doing stuff and a trillion questions. And I'm like, something in my gut was like, you know, what, we can't just start answering a trillion questions here. Because if we don't know where we're going, we're going to end up there. Like, that was Yogi Bear that said that. So, I, I was like, you know, we just did this podcast, we did this podcast on being heard framework, how am I going to apply that, because I know I want to be holistic, I know, I want to be engineered, I want to confront reality, I want to build out an ongoing in program, I need to practice this idea of impactive communication. And I want to make sure that I'm being being there for my, my client, in a way that is collaborative. So how am I going to do that? So, I, I took the concepts, the framework itself, and basically tried to position that with my customer. And it was almost

Scott Santucci 13:59

What was the first thing that you did there, Brian?

Brian Lambert 14:02

Well, I listened to the podcast, I put it into like a series of tables. And then I said, hey, Scott, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give this to the client. And he's like, well, how you gonna position it? Yeah, he said that and we, we basically rolling that out,

Scott Santucci 14:21

Brian, hold on a second. For our audience. What I'm trying to do is get to step number one. What I'm trying to do here is for you, our listeners, trying to model out what steps to take that you can take what can you go do immediately after listening to this podcast to start embracing the being heroic framework? So, Brian described for us step number one, he listened to this, he listened to this podcast. He listened to our last broadcast, which was episode number 31. So, you can go back and and listen to that. It's called timeless leadership skills for modern times. He was inspired by that. And he said, how do I bring that stuff to my client? Mm hmm. What did you do specifically? You say write it up? What is write it up mean? specifically? What? What would you actually put pen to paper on? And why did you have to write it down?

Brian Lambert 15:18

Yeah, so specifically, it's a Word document with tables. But the guts of it is the open-ended questions that I felt that my client and I needed to answer to be successful in achieving our outcome? Not you know, how do I be holistic today. But for this program that we're implementing, for it to come out the other end, you know, whenever we're, we're considering this to be successful. People look back on it, say, you know what, that's a very holistic program. It was very engineered, you guys confronted reality? Right? So those is one of those, how do I do that type of approaches, and I wrote down questions like for holistic? How are we going to know that sales managers achieved results? How do stakeholders defined achieving results? You know, things like that I just sat and, and wrote that down in the tables, a series of five to seven open ended questions for each letter. And then I ran that by you.

Scott Santucci 16:25

Right. So, you and I both know that there's a lot of resistance, and why would I write it down? And then why would I share it with somebody else? So, the reason I'm bringing this up for you is the listening audience is taking action requires you to actually take action and doing something different requires you to actually do something different, and a lot of value in writing things down. And, Brian, for you, how did it help do that? Because you're more you tend to identify more as an operator than then then as a leader, right? So, what did you learn by actually having to write it down and talking about it with?

Brian Lambert 17:06

me? Yeah, I know, there, there's a perhaps a reaction to leader versus operator? Well, these are just to me, for our listeners, these are hats that that people wear. So, when you look at our being highroad framework, and your muscle memory is to implement, that can go a lot of different ways. And what what I was wrestling with was, I knew that a program like this is going to have multiple perspectives and multiple expectations. So, by listening and, you know, obviously, we spent a lot of time, and we help our listeners through this, practicing what we preach we we have to think about how things land, we have to think about the different perspectives that people have. We want to drive outcomes. We don't want to be random. I could go on and on and on of the things that we would say we don't want to do. But but the thing about being heroic framework was writing down these types of questions that I wanted to pursue helped me get unstuck, because it was overwhelming to say, look, I need to create a program that gets results, it needs to have measurable ROI, it's going to be highly inspected, because of the times that we're in. We're going to have so many so many people, I want to pile into this, how do I keep everybody focused? What's the one thing that we're going to be measured on? And if I would have just started doing activity, I wouldn't have a common thread, I would have no hero journey, really to, to help my client through. So, by writing that down, and getting over the hump on, let me put myself in his shoes and write this down and think about this. And let me just ask him what he thinks. I don't have to actually have the answers right now, I'm not at risk by putting this together and saying, you know what, I don't know the answers to some of these questions. We're just getting started. What do you think? And he goes, you know, see what he says.

Scott Santucci 19:01

Yep. So, there's a couple things right. So, if you're following along step number one, listen to Episode 31. Make, you know, write it down. You know, if you want to think about as a journal entry, if you want to think about as an exercise, however you want to think about it doesn't, it doesn't really matter. But putting words putting your ideas down on paper is a big step to actioning. that's step number one. Step number two is if you can find somebody to talk through it with talk through

Ep31 Part 5: COVID-19 Response Series: How do I lead through crisis and change?

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 09:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 31

This is part 5 of 5 in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, specifically tailored to sales enablement. As sales enablement leaders, we have a huge role to play in helping sellers navigate these trying times.

In our first four parts we covered a lot of critically important topics such as:

Part 1 (Ep27): What is really happening in the market?
Part 2: (Ep28): How are companies likely going to respond?
Part 3 (Ep29): What can Sales Enablement leaders do?
Part 4 (Ep30): What are your peers thinking and doing?

In this episode (episode 31), the guys dive into the critical aspects of leadership and provide executable insights with a leadership framework you can use to

1) assess your current leadership stance (i.e., how are you showing up)

2) how are you going to lead through this crisis and change?

To help make this topic come to life, Brian and Scott conduct a live role play in response to the COVID crisis. As you listen, you will think deeply about your leadership skills and approach based on their lively interactions.

In this episode, they provide a walk through the HEROIC Leadership Framework. A framework 11 years in the making and followed by some of the most strategic and results-oriented sales enablement leaders in the technology industry.

H (Holistic): Leaders recognize the whole is greater than the sum of the parts
E (Engineered): Leaders understand how the parts best fit together
R (Reality): Leaders understand how the human element impacts how the parts behave
O (Ongoing Operations): Leaders build continuous and sustained improvement
I (Impactive): Leaders understand how they message to the community of stakeholders will ultimately drive action
C (Collaboration): Collaboration and inclusiveness are required to drive cohesion in the commercial process

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions, the market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

Scott Santucci 00:49

Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives, as analysts, consultants, or practitioners, we've learned the hard way, what works. And maybe what's more important, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:04

Today, we're talking about leadership. And before we get into it, pop quiz, Scott, I'm going to hit you with a quiz, awesome, right off the bat, who's your favorite leader and why? And it can't be somebody from your family. Who's your favorite leader, and why from history? Mine? Mine happens to be Teddy Roosevelt. I'm going US president on that one. Because he's a he's definitely a man of action. And he, he was very courageous for his time. That's my that's my favorite definition of a leader. What about you?

Scott Santucci 01:38

So, here's what I love. I love that our prep, we didn't talk that we would be doing a pop quiz. This is I love that already gets the juices flowing. And so, I would say that, so I'm literally being put on the spot right now. And he, we do this, when we have the scrolling and just scrolled up this this thing here too. So, I did buy a little bit of time to think through what it is. And I'd said George Washington of all time.

Brian Lambert 02:06

Awesome. Cool. Like for that. And you know, we're talking leadership, because fifth episode in our COVID response. And this is interesting, because we plan on stopping that series, but we're getting so much feedback, and we're getting so many downloads, that we're continuing this series, and we're talking leadership because somebody from our team, the insider nation, actually brought up that leadership's critical in times like this. And you know, Scott, when we look at leadership to me, enablement, leaders really have an opportunity to apply timeless leadership skills to today's modern time. Anybody can be a leader, and everybody that I talked to believes they're a leader. From a sales perspective, leadership is blending to be more about consistency, and outcomes. And in 2020, here were a lot of sales teams that we're supporting, are driving change, they've got to bring change to bear salespeople have to be leaders, sales leaders have to be leaders. And you know what sales and delivery teams and marketing product teams have to be leaders too. And none of these changes are going to happen in our clients that we're supporting without aligning multiple decision makers. So, when you look at today's success in times of crisis, change management requires strong leadership. Crisis Response requires strong leadership, aligning processes, or incorporating multiple perspectives, all these things that we're talking about on the show, require strong leadership. And so, Scott, with that said, clearly, I'm passionate about the leadership topic. What metaphor are you going to use to frame out this topic?

Scott Santucci 03:58

To summarize what you said, in order to simplify the commercial system, that all of us are in that sales enablement is the biggest beneficiary of you need strong leadership? I think one of the things that we have to get into is what actually is leadership? How do we make it tangible? I think a lot of people point at leadership and think that they're a great leader, because they're empathetic or whatnot. But are they driving results? Or they point to people who they think should be leaders and can highlight what what isn't a great leader. Here's the best story of a leader that this is a true story. And I think it's very timely. We have to go back to so now we're going way back in time. Our centering story starts in 1777. That's right, 1777. And what I want you to do is sort of imagine it's it's the dead of winter, and the Continental Army, which if you can, you know, remember your history. Is this ragtag group of nonprofessional soldiers that have volunteered for this weekend romp because they were fired up about the British and what they were doing to their, to their friends in Massachusetts. And it's pretty easy to be gung ho. We've all seen that seen that happen. And by this point in time in the war, in 1777, the British Army, which was the by far and away the most powerful military, on the planet, had captured the Capitol, which was Philadelphia, things look bleak. At the beginning of 1777. The army was 40,000, strong. At this point in time in the war, there were 12,000 people, 12,000 troops, who had stayed on and the Army's barely keeping it together. If you don't have an army, you don't have an opposition. If you don't have an opposition, anybody who signed a declaration of independence is going to get hung. Let's just make sure we're clear the time period of what's going to happen and what a king does.

Brian Lambert 06:08

Seems pretty bleak.

Scott Santucci 06:10

Really super bleak. To add more bleakness to it. In this dead of winter, they were ill supplied. So, George Washington would write off notes to Congress at the time the Continental Congress, but each one of them were pointing fingers at each different state, what Virginia pay for it, let Philadelphia pay for it. I'm not gonna pay for it. We're just Delaware. So, he would write and write and write, and he wouldn't get any supplies. So, they didn't have shoes. They didn't have enough food. They lost 1500 horses during that winter, they lost 1000 people, 1000 people out of 12,000 people die. Put that into comparison about how many people are dying with with COVID across the world. And how many billions of people there are in a sample set of 12,000 people 1000 died because of disease diseases like typhoid, or smallpox. It's a side note. One of the things that came out of this is that they developed what are now called vaccines. So, they innovated to stop the smallpox to do that. During this bleak time desertion was a problem. How do you handle desertions in a volunteer army, you got to keep the army together, but their volunteers? So, George Washington did something that he didn't want to do. He had some he had some public executions to establish order. What else did they do? They brought in and they said, we need to get these guys formally trained. So, they brought in Baron Friedrich bronze student who was a prussian, and they started drilling. So they were drilling who wants to drill who definitely wants to drill when you have no shoes in the winter, and out of this when you're starving, and you're starving, and you got no horses, and you got no resources, and the British are there and Philadelphia having a great time, and super warm, and you're doing all this going up against the most well equipped, best army on the planet at the time. So, what happened as a result of this is they came out of that be a completely transformed unit, because of the because of the training stuben. They actually fought, they started fighting traditional way. So, the myth that all of the all of the Continental Congress was guerrilla warfare is just not true. It's not a it's not a true thing. They just used very innovative and radical tactics that the British thought was guerrilla. But it wasn't true. So, what they ended up doing is between after said between 1778 and 1781, they ended up defeating with the help of the French, the most powerful military in the planet. And it was this point in time, there was this pamphlet that that circulated, and a guy named Thomas Paine wrote it. And I want to just read a little passage because it's very relevant to today. In 1777, Thomas Paine wrote, these are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier in the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of their country that he that stands by it now deserves the love and thanks of men and women tyranny, like hell is not easily conquered. yet. We have this constellation with us that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Brian Lambert 09:26

Wow, that's really cool. That's a great history lesson. Again, and I obviously I am resonating with the timeliness of that especially the disease part and in the bleakness of it all. But I gotta ask, what's what's that have to do with sales enablement right now?

Scott Santucci 09:45

That's a great segue. There's so what right? Yeah, for Insider. What we're going to talk about is these are in the examples of leadership. Leadership isn't easy. Leadership requires courage. Leadership is never Cookie Cutter leadership is dealing with, with the events around us and trying to figure out how to make it better. Sometimes you have to go into deep dark places to find out what that looks like. So, what Brian and I are going to introduce is a framework that has been developed over an 11-year period of time to give sales enablement leaders the toolkit that they need to be leaders. We call it be a relic.

Brian Lambert 10:27

Yeah. And that's right. You heard that right. 11 years, and you're about to hear it right. The good thing about this is it is timeless. The second thing about this is it is evolving, the more clear, so we'd love your feedback on it, Scott, give them the framework.

Scott Santucci 10:46

Okay, so the framework is this being heroic. So why is that that highlight the highlight is you have to live breathe it, you don't just it's not an emergency, break glass, pull out, be a leader framework, you have to be a practice every day, so that when you're ready for crisis situations, you can actually just be it you have to just be it must be authentic. So, we call being heroic, why heroic, it takes a heck of a lot of courage. Imagine the courage, it took George Washington, if you imagine all the chips that are on his back, and the fact that he will be swinging from a tree, just like the other people sign a Declaration of Independence, the burden that it was on his back. No, that's it takes in a tremendous amount of courage to do something different. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to come up with the tactics and, and to have the discipline and try to say we're going to train instead of just suffer through this. All courageous moves. Yeah. So that's it, we're not trying to be you know, silly about it. But heroic also is an acronym. And our acronym stands for these are the attributes that you need to develop.

Brian Lambert 11:56

So, hang on a second before before we get into that, right. So, I know, we were gonna roll through this, but I just want to make sure you guys are tracking on this because this, this idea of heroic we're going to give you and it's not just a catchy catchphrase motivational type of thing. This is actually a clickable framework, and we're going to talk about it. So, Scott's going to give you what heroic stands for. It's an acronym. So, what is H what is E what is R what is O, I and C. So here we go, so first one is holistic.

Scott Santucci 12:30

And holistic, really is the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, what it means, is it's about being able to see the bigger picture. And we're just keep it simple right now. And then we're gonna unpack them move forward. E stands for engineered, basically, how do the parts fit together? And, you know, the practical application is, is how do you figure out the 8020 rule? What are the 20% of the things that matter the most? for George Washington, this time, the number one thing that will matter the most is keep the army together. And then when they get out of Valley Forge to actually be a fighting force, so they don't get the butts kicked, like they did up and down everywhere in 1777. R is confront reality or be reality focused. And that's really how do all of the parts involved in your system? How do they behave? This is also about looking at the data and then go and talking to people and see whether that data is really real or not. I like to think about this as confronting bias. The next one, O, is ongoing operations. How do we develop and continuous sustained improvement? Think about it, think of it this ways, oh, is the difference between throwing or rolling out a training program, and then having the reinforcement strategy to make sure that there's the adoption of that training program, big difference, it might sound subtle, but the difference in terms of business results is massive. I is impactive impact it really is the the message that you give because leaders have to have messages to address all the stakeholders in the community with which they're leading. So how you message and communicate is critically important. And we call that impact. And then finally, C is collaborative and inclusive. In order for you to succeed as a sales enablement leader, your role in order to simplify that commercial system that we that we referenced, you're not going to own all of the mechanisms. So, you're going to need to gain buy in and collaboration across many different cross functional groups. So, you don't have the muscles to do to do it collaboratively. And in an inclusive way, where they don't feel put out, you're not going to be able to get the buy in of all of the different, all different humans rolling in the right direction.

Brian Lambert 14:58

I want to make sure this is really resonating. And when I'm thinking about is okay, look, George Washington, was he holistic, that's the age, it's hard to argue that he wasn't holistic. And his approach was the engineer, you know, and how he was processing? What was going on in Valley Forge. R reality, and how is he confronting the reality? O, was he thinking about the ongoing operation? The outcome of the war? I was he impacted? Was he writing the letters to make sure that he was enrolling the right people and see, was he collaborative? In order to get this done? The answer to that would be a resounding yes. And if you thinking about it from your role, as you know, my my project, how am I being holistic in my project, my engineering and my project and my confronting reality, my project? What we're what we're talking about here, Scott, seems to be a little bit different than implementing a project, which I think a lot of people think in terms of leadership, what's your take on leadership at the this level of George Washington, and with regard to project based work?

Scott Santucci 16:12

So, let's let me answer this as if it's a decision tree. Step number one is sales enablement. Is it to you just training, and we do the things that are asked of us? Or is sales enablement, a strategic function, where you're activating or making the company better? If you're a, this podcast isn't for you, if you're B, what we need to really do is highlight what that means. So that's creating the simplification to create the commercial system sales and marketing to work together. And to in order to activate that you have to develop a skill that blends strategy and execution. So, Brian, and I call that Stratecution. So that means to the executive team, you need to be able to communicate executable insights. And that to you and to your team, you have to develop success methods to carry that out. Those two have to be blended together in order to drive the business results or the goals, the big goals that you're that you seek, rather than the activity that's easy to measure measure. Hmm.

Brian Lambert 17:31

Yep. Yeah, I know, we've talked a lot about that. And I thought it was really important to pause there and make sure that we're processing the heroic framework this way. And one of the things you're bringing up here is this commercial system and simplifying that you and I have had a history since 2008. Working on that, I think it'd be helpful to, you know, we talked about this as an 11-year journey. Let's give our listeners a bit of that overview of how we've gotten through this process and where this came from, because I really want them to have confidence to be able to apply something like this.

Scott Santucci 18:04

Okay, sure. So, one way to do that would be for our listeners to go back and listen to Episode 20, where we talk about the detailed, maybe minutia, detailed definition of what we see sale, the name of the opening line of the definition of sales enablement that we created at Forrester...

Ep30 Part 4: COVID-19 Response Series: Questions About the Path Forward

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 30

This is part 4 of 5 in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, specifically tailored to sales enablement. As sales enablement leaders, we have a huge role to play in helping sellers navigate these trying times.

If you listened to our first three episodes (episodes 27, 28 & 29) we talked about what is going on in the global market, how companies are likely to respond, and what you can do about it.

In this episode, the guys are fielding your questions. The questions are based on podcast feedback and also the responses we collected with a short questionnaire we sent to Insider Nation.

Based on a rapid fire format, you’re bound to take away many actionable ideas on what you can do lead from the front.

Our agenda for this podcast series in response to the global pandemic has five parts:

Part 1 (Ep27): What is really happening in the market?
Part 2: (Ep28): How are companies likely going to respond?
Part 3 (Ep29): What can Sales Enablement leaders do?
Part 4 (Ep30): What are your peers thinking and doing?
Part 5 (Ep31): How do we lead our teams, our companies, and our initiatives to help sellers be successful?

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is sales enablement. Leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:49

Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives as analysts, consultants, or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works Perhaps most importantly, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:03

On this episode, we're going to have part four of our COVID response series. In March 2020, we had a panel discussion of a venture capitalist, an academic, a top performing sales professional, and Scott and I. And we talked through the impact of the global virus on the economy, and more importantly, on sales enablement. We talked about the data, comparing this to previous recessions. We talked through some ideas and some approaches you can take within your company and projected what we believe would happen inside of companies. As part of that. Scott and I put out a survey to the insider nation. And many of you responded not only with thoughts around what what's happening in the current economy, but also what you wanted to ask us and what you wanted to hear about, and that's what we're going to talk about today. On this episode, the questions from insider nation regarding the current condition, and the future of sales enablement. Scott, why don't you set us up? provide a story and center us around this this concept?

Scott Santucci 02:14

Yeah. So, we're going back to our, our format. So, we recorded all of the previous three episodes all at once. And we of course, chopped it out. So that's in a series. This one, what we're trying to do is make make sure that we capture enough or we're able to answer enough of the questions. So, what we did in our survey is more like a pulse check than a real research survey. We gave our insider nation a whopping six hours to respond. And 25 of you responded well, so that's, I think that's a fantastic turnaround. So, it shows that there's a level of interest and the like and some of the things that that that we learned from you and your your peers, here's what you like about our podcasts, we're going to try to keep doing more of this allows for a wide-open look at what works. I like that because that's actually a design point that we have the presentation and discussion of structured ways to help improve our sales enable initiative. Again, that's great that that's coming out are very, very focused on on the on the structure lots what comes to mind immediately to mind our strategic frameworks role playing executive points of view, and most of the history corpus historical analogies. Tell me the ones that don't work guys because I don't know.

Brian Lambert 03:42

They like beaches, that's for sure.

Scott Santucci 03:44

Well, the beaches that plays well with the ladies.

Brian Lambert 03:47

They also like the the metaphors and insight. Yeah, that was part of it. And the content and Frank approach that means I can interrupt you more. I think that's my, that's my opening.

Scott Santucci 03:58

Okay. That's how you take it. Instead of that we're talking to addressing real issues. Right? Always timely and insightful. They either affirm what I'm actively promoting or make me stop and reconsider some of the some of my approaches. It's exactly what we are hopeful is happening. The structure the back and forth really insightful, relevant content. I like this last part. Where does it say, Brian?

Brian Lambert 04:22

Oh, it doesn't waste my time, which is great.

Scott Santucci 04:26

Exactly. We're trying to not waste your time and try to help you make you think through these things to be thoughtful and practical at the same time. topics are often relevant to me a few helpful hints on sales enablement, focused topics, useful tips, format, and openness.

Brian Lambert 04:42

relevant topics are discussed and formal down to earth tone. And I like this one, the idea of it's a bit theoretical, but also, it's got practical ideas and that's one of the things that is a design point for this series in this podcast is provide a little bit of a top down but also sink Things you can go do and take away.

Scott Santucci 05:02

Yeah, our point of view on that is, is pretty simple. If you're too focused on practice over time, and you don't innovate and bring in any new ideas, guess what happens, your practices get stagnant. If you focus too much on the theory, guess what? Nothing ever happens, figuring out that balance and what that balance should be, is a tough task for anybody in sales enablement. So now moving forward, what's our centering story? And I'm going to, I'm going to keep it short because it's more of a metaphor than it is a story. But Brian, do you ever watch the BBC?

Brian Lambert 05:40

Oh, yeah. I'm fascinated. I like I like comparing the, the way they present the news thing and BBC News versus what we do in the in the States. Yeah.

Scott Santucci 05:50

So, what I've what I love is, so we have states of the Union addresses and they have something different over there. And I'm always fascinated Because what happens is the prime minister walks into whatever the house that is I don't know what it is but addresses parliament. And he stands and he does a very short, prepared remarks sort of like a the the letter to shareholders that a CEO might write.

Brian Lambert 06:17

Oh, yeah, right. And it's game on man.

Scott Santucci 06:19

Oh my gosh is a game on so they have that giant book. And he's you know that whatever that book is that that gigantic book that they have?

Brian Lambert 06:27

Oh yeah.

Scott Santucci 06:28

And then boom, they start they start getting all these aggressive summer aggressive questions and some are softball questions from all over the place ranging from this school district has a big drug problem. What are you doing about it too? What is the global geopolitical landscape look like? I mean, right topics all over the place. And it's amazing to me, how boom spot on and how quick, the Prime Minister answers those questions. And then I compare that to the past present. that we've had, and I go, huh, wow, would it be great if they could answer questions like that? So here we are, we're trying to mimic that. And what we're going to do is in the survey that we prepared to try to collect your feedback, and what's on your mind as investors of our as investors or our listeners of our show. And what's on your mind, we put out the survey and some of we had some open-ended topics and one of the topics was what topics discussion or advice would you like to hear in this special podcast? And after we recorded our panel session that Brian referred to with Dr. Dover and Kanaal metha and Lindsey Gore, we went through and said, you know, we think we answered these questions, but in a roundabout way, let's go through and be specific. So, what we're We're gonna do is we're going to go off we're going to alternate reading in order. So, these are questions that appeared in order. We've arranged them in no particular way. We don't know who has time for that. But these are the, in the exact words of you our audience.

Brian Lambert 08:15

Yeah. And these came in 24 hours ago and we do not have a big book. So, we're just gonna go for it. Exactly.

Scott Santucci 08:22

There you go. That's, that's what our podcast is about. It's what's on your mind? And what are some some thoughts? So, I'll start off with the first one. We're going to alternate reading the questions. And then we're going to alternate having a first answer and, and then move forward. We're going to move through the series really quickly. Then we're going to talk about what we observed in the questions and then figure out what new podcasts that we need to have and then we're out. Sound good?

Brian Lambert 08:49

Nice. Yeah, let's do it. I'm in a coffee shop setting. That's my mentality. Okay. So, office shop with the insider nation right now.

Scott Santucci 08:57

You know what it is? It's It's, it's addressing Parliament but COVID so they're at it, they're having to do it remotely.

Brian Lambert 09:09

That's right.

Scott Santucci 09:11

That's what we're doing. So, we're actually the the delegates have inputted their, their their questions. So here we go, here's the first one. And right off the get go is a great one. What's the process to go from an ad an ad hoc sales enablement to a robust dedicated strategic sales enablement? Go fire!

Brian Lambert 09:37

Well, so I think you got to define the from what to what very clearly what is ad hoc in versus dedicated and things that come to mind. There are ad hoc process ad hoc programs and projects, ad hoc stakeholder management. And if you just take an inventory of what those components are, and say, how do you get to a structured Strategic view of stakeholder management processes, programs, etc. You can start painting through and painting out a journey that you can take across critical components. Obviously doing that in the context of what's really happening in the sales teams that you're supporting. And we can talk through that on a probably a separate podcast, but that comes that's what comes to mind Scott, what do you think?

Scott Santucci 10:24

Gotcha. I think there's there's two parts right part number one, I like the from what to what. So, you can use the three levels of maturity that we that we've talked about in other shows, level of maturity number one is fragmented or highly reactive. So, think about yourself as a firefighter. Maturity Level Two is managed. Think about yourself as being planful about what your sales enablement programs are and coordinated with with other people. Sales enablement level stage number three is adaptive. You it is difficult to define a process going from one state to another state without also having a maturity model to work backwards from now that now having said that, so that's basically your North Star have three different phases. If you want to have five, that's fine. I think that's too complicated myself. Three is great. Now, what you have to first do is recognize why your ad hoc in the first place and that is difficult. So, the first step in the process, it's almost like AA Brian, right? It's it's step number one is admit you have the problem. Step nine is step number two is take inventory, what are all of the things that you're being asked to do it to begin with, and then figure out if you can put a price tag on them? That price tag could either be what does it cost us to do that thing? Or what are the results of that thing? If the cost is higher than what the results are Stop doing them. A big element of going from ad hoc to robust, isn't doing more stuff. It's stopping doing the things that don't add value, you're not going to be able to do that unless you do some sort of inventory with an 80/20 rule. So, we definitely think we need to go through that concept more. But to be simple about it, if you want to move from ad hoc to robust, the first thing that you have to do is stop taking all the inbound that you're doing and just take order taking. You have to figure out what, how to learn how to say no, if you will, and get good at that.

Brian Lambert 12:39

I like it. Great next question, how to how do we guide sellers in the types of conversations that are going to resonate most with customers and prospects during the uncertain times that we're in today and in the weeks to come? So how do we guide sellers?

Scott Santucci 12:58

So, there's a two parter here is Well, you must have a North Star. And what do I mean by a North Star is these are the principles that we're going to go through. If you engage customers and prospects during uncertain times and you're inauthentic, you might as well write them off forever. The trying to engage during these times and being honest and authentic is probably the worst, worst movie that you can make. So, what you need to do is create a Northstar of you know, here are the principles that we're going to follow. The second thing then is how do you add value in uncertainty in the way that you add value is to provide anything that's clarifying. So, for example, if you are engaging with a customer, and you've been, you know, in the stages and you've, you've constantly talked about products, change the conversation topic to be about how other clients have been successful. or collect, have those sellers talk to other other customers and ask them, how are they responding to COVID? Have teach them and give them a format to collect that information and say, that’s interesting, Brian, that you're responding this way. Here's how other people are responding. And what you're doing is by doing that, you're helping them feel less isolated, the customer feels less isolated, but you're also giving them clarity in uncertain times. That'd be my, my quick answer. I think how to do that is, is a bigger topic.

Brian Lambert 14:37

Yeah, I like that. Where my head went on this one is, well, who's the guide? So, the question is, you know, how do we guide sellers? And you know, on one of the episodes, Scott, we talked about the role of sales enablement, and the role of sales management. So, where I went on this was the real guide in my opinion right now probably is sales managers. As they're dealing with change, and you know how, how is sales enablement, going to help that unit that Team Drive team outcomes that sales manager and his or her team? And I think there's three key areas one, what are they seeing? So, in a time like this, there are a lot of, I don't know, anomalies, let's call them blips changes challenges. How is the manager in the management team inventorying these anomalies and then what are we doing about it? That's one second thing is the idea of remote work or changing the teaming dynamic? If there's a manager that used to go in the office all day, and that's where their salespeople were? Now you're in a remote environment? Are you equipping that manager to have the tools to help and not just inspected and or perhaps even run things like they used to say, what changes and are you providing that that help? And then the third thing is this idea of being real and being real with with what you know, like what you said Scott with with customers, but that reality to me, starts on the sales team. So, in a time like this, you know, people are human. How is the manager in the management team processing that humaneness whether it's, you know, school closures or kids in the background? And then how do they work through that together to stay focused to to work together to be creative and have the right kind of conversation with customers? That's what I would say.

Scott Santucci 16:36

Next question. So, get ready, Brian, you're up first. Okay, translating marketing's obsession with and that's in quotes brand, down to the something that is meaningful to the field stories on improving operational efficiency to give get of removing redundancy, but asking for different behavior. I think we did that already about the You know the how to say no. And more on manufacturing the right reps.

Brian Lambert 17:05

Yeah. This one is is an interesting one. And it's because the context and the backdrop here is the times that we're in and the changes that have been happening because of COVID. And the response, this one is a symptom that's been going on, perhaps longer than just the COVID situation. I mean, the idea of Mark quote, unquote, marketing's obsession, and translating that into real conversations. That's probably something that's been eating at this person for a while doing in the context or tackling that in the context of a dynamic market like we're in and risk aversion of customers. You can create an opportunity to be more specific, but it also could create some paralysis. So, timings probably not the best to tackle that. But if you had to, I would say, look, you know, our customers are more risk averse. They have, I think No, we're having conversations. But these conversations that we're having are not necessarily on the buying journey, so to speak, they're not on that buying path. So, I need to do two things I need to relate better, what kind of content Do we have to help me relate better, other than that COVID-19 message that legal wants me to stand? And then to, how do I actually, you know, be real enough to talk through their risks that they see inside their own organization? What kind of content Do I have there?

Scott Santucci 18:32

So, here's my reaction to that. I'm a big fan of Winston Churchill's, quote, never let a crisis go to waste. If this has been and I'm going to concentrate there, this is a three-part...

Ep29 Part 3: COVID-19 Response Series: What can Sales Enablement leaders do?

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 29

This is part 3 of 5 in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, specifically tailored to sales enablement. In our first two parts (episode 27 & episode 28) we talked about what is going on, and how companies are likely to respond.

In this episode, we're synthesizing the information so you can take action. The panelists (Kunal, Lindsey, Howard) provide their thoughts and guide your decision-making by providing ideas that connect the dots and focus on what matters most.

Concepts like "stitching together growth" and helping sales teams sell have a whole new meaning against the backdrop of the global pandemic. Working together, Sales Enablement leaders can provide sellers what they need while also improving engagement, and helping teams get back to being productive. In times of crisis, great leaders synthesize the information, confront reality, and overcome the disconnects that exist.

Our agenda for this podcast series in response to the global pandemic has five parts:

Part 1 (Ep27): What is really happening in the market?
Part 2: (Ep28): How are companies likely going to respond?
Part 3 (Ep29): What can Sales Enablement leaders do?
Part 4 (Ep30): What are your peers thinking and doing?
Part 5 (Ep31): How do we lead our teams, our companies, and our initiatives to help sellers be successful?

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

I'm Brian Lambert and together were the sales enablement insiders. Today we're going to do a special edition to help our audience be the most equipped and prepared to navigate these trying times, insider nation. We're continuing our four-part series with part three, what you can do to take a leadership role in your company. If you remember the first two episodes in this series, we talk through what's going on in the global economy, how this particular situation compares to others, such as the Great Recession. And we also talked about the volatility and uncertainty and how companies likely react. You know, there's patterns to that. And we covered that in the second episode with regard to what john chambers, the former CEO of Cisco believes is going to happen, as well as the perspective of our distinguished panelists, Howard Dover, Lindsey, Kunaal and Scott as they talked through in much like a coffee shop format, what they believe is going to happen and how you as a sales enablement leader can process all of the complexity. In this particular episode, which is the third in the series, we're going to talk through what you can do to take a leadership role inside your organization. So, with that, let me hand it over to Scott.

Scott Santucci 02:01

Okay, what is it? What's that show with Joe? Joe Scarborough Morning Morning, Joe, and how they wrap up that show is, you know, what do we learn today? That's what we're going to wrap it up with and then and then close out our our special edition. So, I'll start with you. Dr. Dover. What did you What did you learn today?

Howard Dover 02:23

So, I'm not going to behave, Scott because I think there's an important piece that I don't know that we did touch. Okay, that is that as people go to work from home, we have a blind spot with sales management training, not necessarily occurring and not a good strategy to develop sales management leadership. Now we just dispersed everybody to their homes and went virtual. So, one of the pain points that exist and that need to be addressed immediately. Is this area of how do you support the work from environment when you used to be in the field and knowing that we had the blind spot before. So, transparency, things like conversation intelligence, things like analysis tools that allow us to be able to see what's happening and be able to address it quickly, are going to be essential. I've been on the phone or in communication with several CEOs in the SAS space, talking about enhancing, you know, work from home environments, their phones are ringing off the hook, because of the fact that sales management needs visibility and impact transparency into the field. I think that's a quick hit. And I think anybody who can do the lifting, I think sales nailing once again, this is an opportunity to go in and stitch the groups together and develop that transparency. What did I learn today? I think I learned I don't Know that I learned much new I think that that's the challenge is that I think many of us that are on this call have seen a lot of things that we've seen before. So, I'll stop there.

Scott Santucci 04:12

So did an educator just said and learn. Is that what I heard?

Howard Dover 04:18

I read I got information that reinforced my bias.

Scott Santucci 04:23

So that's interesting hat's interesting. I'll take that for this. I want to thank you. So how about you know, what did you learn, or do you have another thing that people should do that we missed?

Kunaal 04:37

Gosh, I learned from selling our and I should wear an Iron Man suit. And not ring the doorbell because I might get shot. Jeez like, actually, no, seriously, if if I love the Iron Man analogy, actually because he had all the tools kind of at his fingertips to be successful, and I liked where Howard was going with that, in terms of making sure our field is it has the range of tools they need to be equipped. You know, I think creativity will certainly result in a just dramatic changes to how we sell in work, because the constraints that have been applied right now are so extreme people, you know, and human ingenuity is just going to kind of rise as a result because it has to. And then three, I think, you know, what a consistent theme of continuing to bear hug your customers so to speak, will continue to be an important play that that sales enablement is going to have to equip their organizations to, to be effective.

Scott Santucci 05:54

Gotcha. Great. Thank you. How about you, Lindsay?

Lindsey Gore 06:00

thought this is a great discussion and just sort of codified a lot of points about sort of what's going on in the market right now and how to think about what's important in terms of some of the near-term stuff. And then the longer opportunity for, for innovation and creativity to to come out of the recession that we're in. Also, I thought it was interesting some of the the metrics in terms of the sales organization, so I think it was a 2018 at 5,280% increase in sales development reps and, and then all of the analogies that kind of came along with that in terms of building out a machine that's very activity focused and very, you know, trying to get those initial conversations going, hence the Iron Man analogy and the overcloud field analogy. So, you guys were going with I thought that was an interesting framing, to think about how things could be done differently and likely will be forced to be done differently. Coming up. The economic state we're in.

Scott Santucci 07:02

Awesome. How about you, Brian?

Brian Lambert 07:06

Yeah. When you look at the the bulk of this, and I appreciate everybody continuing to hang in there. And listen, I think, you know, we went with the outcome and went over on time. But you know, I think when you look at what we covered from depth and breadth perspective on this, we've got we've got an very clear inventory of of disconnects that we can go tackle. And I think that's, that's how I would summarize it. You know, we talked at length about the disconnect between strategy and tactics, the disconnect between sales and sales enablement, the disconnect between investors and those who are responsible for taking action. We got disconnected inventory items around what john chambers would do in a time like this versus perhaps what we're seeing on LinkedIn as what everybody's focused on. We've got a disconnect between the idea of history repeating itself and learning from that history to to lead. And all of these things are good to identify. And from there, take action on as a sales enablement leader. So, embrace the disconnects, is what I would say is what I've, I've learned today.

Scott Santucci 08:25

And here's here's my lesson learned. While a lot of these trends are knowable to some people, they're not no to enough people. And I am becoming increasingly light bulb, if you will, learned, incited whatever that whatever the right word is, is how little of a vocabulary we have to describe the systematic problems we're running into. So lacking vocabulary to describe things and why we had to use so many analogies and sound like Yoda all the time is we're not using parables because we're trying to be cute. We're not using a noun historical analogies, because we're trying to show how smart we are. We literally don't have the vocabulary to describe the environment around us. That the more I have these conversations, and the more I hear kunaal speak and when kunaal I talk one on one, it's got a heavy bias to financials and operating metrics. When I talk with Howard, one on one, it's very much trends and analyses and, you know, historical references, or Brian and I, it's a lot of shared personal experiences. And same thing with Lindsey but through a completely different lens, like what actually is happening. And for me, the aha moment is how important it is. That it's all of them and how Do we create an environment where I want to understand things the way I want to? But how do we bring enough people along? Because the only way that we're going to solve this problem is creating cohesion. And cohesion only comes by understanding other individuals. To me, that's really the crux of the problem here. How do we give that more of an identity, lacking the vocabulary lacking the business processes and lacking the techniques and methodologies to do it, so that we can achieve these results, and we can do it under the pressure that we're under? So those are those are, those are my lessons learned, hopefully. Hopefully, that makes sense. So, moving forward, what we'll do is hopefully you guys got a lot of value you the audience got a lot of value out of our special edition. I know I personally did and anytime I get to hear or talk with I mean, geez. Forget about what you did and what you're taking off. Think about it. You just heard from a professor Speaking extemporaneously about lessons learned, not a prepared speech, not a prepared lecture, feedback that he's dealing with on a day-to-day basis. You've heard from Kunaal, who works with, you know, dozens of portfolio companies that are struggling with this on a day-to-day basis, so you can hear the lens or the challenges that they're going through, you've gotten to hear the voice of a really well accomplished a levels, salesperson, and be able to pull all these things together. My challenge to you would be you guys are all educators, learners, professionals, what can we do as a community to start elevating that and tease out these lessons learned, and to make them more actionable, not one of us here on this call can do all of it alone. We need your help, and we need some of your ideas. So hopefully, you'll give us some feedback. And we'll use that to inform other podcasts. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you, insider nature insider nation, for being here. You are in giving us some feedback on on help this. Thank you so much Dr. Dover for this being your idea. I want to stress that it was your idea. We just took advantage of it. Thank you. Thank you Kunaal for taking your time out. The fact that a private equity person spent two hours with us is a big deal. So, it should share it share with you how important that is to him. Thank you so much. Lindsay is taking your time out from selling days to help us out. And thank you as always, Brian, for your help and pulling this together. Thank you, insider nation, and we'll see you next time.

Nick Merinkers 12:37

Thanks for joining us. To Become an insider and amplify your journey. Make sure you've subscribed to our show. If you have an idea for what Scott and Brian can cover in a future podcast or have a story to share, please email them at engage@insidese.com. You can also connect with them online by going to insidese.com following them on Twitter or sending them a LinkedIn request

Mentioned in this episode:

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Ep28 Part 2: COVID-19 Response Series: Anticipate how your company will react

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 28

This is part 2 of 5 in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, specifically tailored to sales enablement.

In words of Wayne Gretzky "Don't go to where the puck was, skate to where it will be"

Our COVID response plan is designed to help you prepare for where the puck will be -- when the economy comes back.

We're bringing back the pane of experts to provide you a well rounded, thoughtful perspective so you can lead and make an ongoing impact in your organization, and with your sales team.

Panelists include:

Dr. Howard Dover, Professor from UT- Dallas
Kunal Metha, Operations Principal at TCV private equity
Lindsey Gore, Consumption Sales Executive, Microsoft

In this episode (2 of 5), we cover:

1) What advice are CEOs and private equity firms sharing

2) The economy of the past covered a lot of inefficiencies was are in a state of reconing.

3) How important it is for someone to "stitch' together activities.

Our agenda for this podcast series in response to the global pandemic has five parts:

Part 1 (Ep27): What is really happening in the market?
Part 2: (Ep28): How are companies likely going to respond?
Part 3 (Ep29): What can Sales Enablement leaders do?
Part 4 (Ep30): What are your peers thinking and doing?
Part 5 (Ep31): How do we lead our teams, our companies, and our initiatives to help sellers be successful?

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:35

Im Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

And I'm Brian Lambert and together were the sales enablement insiders. Today we're going to do a special edition to help our audience be the most equipped and prepared to navigate these trying times, insider nation. This week, we actually hit 10,000 listeners from across the globe. I'm super excited about that. We've had listeners from 15 different countries and on seven or eight Major podcast platforms. So, thank you so much for that. And thanks for continuing to provide us feedback over at www.insidese.com so in this particular episode, Scott and I are continuing to record a four-part series with our distinguished panel of experts. Before I hand it over to Scott, I wanted to remind you that we've convened this lively discussion and debate with an academic thought leader, a top performing salesperson, a portfolio leader to some of the biggest names in technology, and also shared our analysis and synthesis of what we're seeing in the context of the COVID-19 Global virus. Why did we do this? Well, it's simple. It's to help you lead your team and make an impact while adding strategic value to your leadership and organization. Changes are going to happen, and you need to skate to the puck. So, let's recap in part one of our COVID-19 series that was Episode 27. We framed out the landscape and capital the current economic times to past recessions. In this episode, Episode 28. We're jumping into part two, where we discuss and project and make a call on what we believe will likely happen inside most organizations. So, you can make a better plan and differentiate your leadership and approached as strategic value. And I also want to let you know that in part three of our series, it's chock full of what you can do to lead from the front and balanced strategies and tactics, that's Episode 29. And then finally, we're going to wrap it up with part four, which I'm excited about. That's a rapid-fire question and answer session where Scott and I answer as many of the questions as possible that we're getting from you. So, stay tuned for that. Make sure you add us to your podcast player and let's get started. Scott, take it away.

Scott Santucci 02:50

Excellent. Now we're ready for chunk two. So, this is what we did is gave an overview of the environment to get more clarity. Now we need to predict Let's talk about uncertainty. What actions are going to happen inside your company? What's gonna happen? Now obviously, this isn't exactly true, but it gives us a template. There are common behaviors that all companies follow when they pull out the recession kit. And that recession kit gets broken by the CFO, right? So, to start this off canol had an amazing and maybe surreal experience, where he ran what was supposed to be a dinner, but it was just him. And john chambers having dinner together. Well, people were videoing in. If you don't know who john chambers is, he's the former CEO of Cisco and Cisco has a john chambers has a long history of outperforming the market and market expectations. So, he had I had the opportunity to have dinner with them. I think this gives us a foundation. Some clear insight about what tactics and actions other companies will take. So, you want to, you want to take the first stab at helping us give clarity about what's probably going to happen inside our businesses? So, you know, if you're asking me about summarizing that dinner with john chambers, um, you know, it was, it was certainly myself and a few others and we it's kind of like meeting with Yoda, right? Someone was so much wisdom and has seen the movie so many different times, in so many different angles. He just, he just has amazing advice. So, I'm just going to give you a stream of consciousness here and you know, transparency to a fault was kind of bullet point number one. bullet point number two is asking CEOs to take a look at their go to market and just pick three things or even less, and if it doesn't impact the top or the bottom line. It's not one of the things to focus on, and then report out to me employees, customers investors, your progress on those three things. Another lesson learned from him is be aggressive with your changes. Don't wait, don't witness, and watch that lead and be aggressive with your changes because he went through four different scenarios where the market had just been in chaos. And in each scenario, they gained anywhere from 10 to 20 points of market share, which, which which he outlined that in a lot of detail, they're looking at this from and john chambers is also an investor in many different companies right now. They're advising their companies that this is going to be anywhere from three to five quarters of kind of what they see is his pain of quick bounce back post that period. You know, the other areas is treating customers during a crisis. Well and engaging them matters. The top 10% of your customers should have the CEOs phone number because they They just, they don't need any in terms of services right now, so they should be able to get to you. And just more pragmatic advice was was putting your foot on the brakes and just terms of other spin, if you could associate an ROI to your spin, just cut that you can focus on on going after market share and going after the competition. And then I'd say the other really pragmatic view that he provided, he's like, there's things in in an organization that you just know are inefficient, but it hasn't been a priority to stop those processes. So, this is the time to just pull if it's inefficient, it doesn't show an ROI. It's time to pull the plug on those processes. So, there's no better time to do that than when when you absolutely have to do it. He considers his time to be certainly one of those times. So, I want to tease out a couple things and get your comments on this canal. So having been in this field for so long, with Forrester or with the sales enablement society or experience with Conference Board or working with clients, there seems to be a divide between the C suite and, and the doers. And I'm just being real simple about that. I don't mean like labor and management and anything like that, right? This isn't 1888. But there seems to be a divide in perspective. And when you talk to doers, there's a default way they're gonna cut, they're gonna get rid of our jobs because all they care about the money. What I'm gonna, what I'm gonna challenge you a little bit is here, we heard the voice and the exact words of a CEO of a CEO that's incredibly well respected. And I'm going to ask all of us to really reflect did he sound cutthroat? Did any of that tone to you? canol sound cutthroat? No, not at all. In fact, you know, I would be remiss if I didn't say he ended dinner saying how am I coordinate is to, to be integrated in your community right now as well. And make sure that you're also giving back at that time. So, none of it, none of it at all was cutthroat, I thought he was super pragmatic with the advice that he gave. So, what I want to do is I want to weave that point in, because it's really important. If you are in an individual contributor role, or you have a relatively small team, and there's a whole bunch of other people involved, you need to take a little bit of time to think about the community, aka your own business community. Does john chambers evaluate your own personal contributions? Or does he look at the sum of the parts? What are the some of the parts that you're participating in? So, this is this is something that we're going to challenge our listeners to really get because it's a gap. We don't think people see. Part of it is sales enablement. leaders don't feel valued. Okay, granted, the flip side is Do they really understand what their economic contribution is to the rest of the company and how they make customers more successful? And that's something that, that that's a debate that you have to wrestle with yourself. But I think it really wrestle, it really maps to what Brian shared earlier in our in our transition point here between the transition of, you know, you can believe what you want to leave, please confront reality. Cannot what what are some of the tips that TCB is doing and how are you guys advising your clients? Is it very similar? Is it similar advice to what john shared? Yeah, I would say it's extremely similar. There's a scorecard that focuses kind of on one on a rapid checklist to make sure we're hitting a few key areas around health and safety or in terms of protecting employees around liquidity and p&l defending against revenue declines, kind of making sure we're stabilizing the operation. For this normal that we have right now, there are scenarios to conserve cash and and take out costs where they're not necessary. But there's also I think what john said is there is this notion of also wanting to play offense, not just defense. I'm so we can bounce when we do bounce back, we're ready to bounce back fast. But also, while we're in this environment, there is an there is going to be an opportunity to go on offense as well. It's important to have checklists and all of those areas. Yeah, and I think what I want to stress is having had the opportunity through canal to interview many of the investors who sit on these boards of directors, the way that they talk is easily misinterpreted, as because they use metrics, and they understand metrics completely differently than the rest of us. If you as a sales enablement, professional or sales leader or whomever are, you know, resist metrics because of math, or whatever it is, please confront that and find a way to understand what the metrics mean, because there is meaning behind it. And just because it's a calculation doesn't mean it's cold. And when you start inferring that it's cold, and it's about the bottom line, it drives the wrong decisions, which is not what what the investors want. The investors want you to to get rid of the stuff that doesn't work and focus on finding new opportunities to make the company more valuable. That's it. So, I think that's an important thing to heed. Now, Dr. Dover, you're an educator by profession, and I think that's a good transition point. What are some of the things that you see are going to happen based on your interactions with executive leaders?

11:46

Well, I think the first thing is to realize that we were in an impotent state before the crisis started. So, I think the fact that the crisis is now hit the question is Is this going to be the tipping point? And so, what I mean by that is that there are a lot of different companies who have been doubling down on certain strategies trying to throw new tools throw new people throw new training at the problem, and, and the efficacy of those efforts have been consistently less than exciting. So, so we have actually pretty heavy turnover rates in the sales leadership position because of this fact that whatever the traditional methodology is out there, it hasn't been working. And so, behind the scenes, a lot of a lot of companies will sit down and say, Hey, you know, I had a one one global leader call me we haven't talked for three years because they quit doing work with us for three years ago. And it's a traditional more of a traditional approach but in the in the high end b2c space selling into to business executives. He said, Hey, everything we're doing its efficacy is dropping off and has been dropping off for 18 to 24 months. And I said yes. where, you know, where have you been? Did you and he had left us about three years ago, when we started seeing the beginning of this from our partners, the same that outreach had to be different. And we have to be a little bit more fine tuned. At the same time, we found scaling, and everybody's gone through the scale. So now the question is, we're scaled up we have all this capacity. One of the NBA clubs, I actually had a conversation with them after a keynote that I did in Vegas. The guy called me up and said, thank you for letting me know that, you know, we're probably overplayed on activities, because I've actually eliminated all activity tracking in my sales org. I said, that’s not what I said. I'm like, you know, he said, No, but that's what I heard. That's what I heard in the keynote is that I shouldn't be tracking activities, I should be tracking activities that that actually move revenue. And so, we're actually removing some of the some of the metrics. So, I think one of the things that's interesting I think from a sales enablement lens, and and even the leadership lens is that the root cause was here before the crisis that just hit us. So, we were already in a crisis mode as a sales and marketing space. So, this is this is actually facilitating in the last segment, but I think it's, it's relevant to this segment is, I read a book once on the stock market crash. And what it talks about is that we have manias, followed by a shock, which then induces a panic. Which then cry prices creates a crisis? Well, we were in we were in a mania prior to this moment where we were investing in demand Gen at levels and then automating that investment and demand Gen. What's amazing to me is that if that's done right, it creates a multiplier effect. But then the headcount isn't required. So, the guy from the NBA I won't say his name because I was permission to say the name. He said that they have one of the smallest head counts in in the NBA, and yet they have the most profit per seat in the NBA, and they have a losing team every year. But they've found a way to multiply the efforts of their salespeople in a productive way. But less than According to Jim Dickey, less than 1% of sales organizations, the 2% of sales organizations have even started to deploy artificial intelligence tools. And yet those artificial intelligence tools augment our capacity to do the job with precision instead of scale.

Scott Santucci 16:13

Well, how I was gonna say I think, you know, one of the things that I think you said that it's incredibly important is and not well understood is sales enablement needs to get really good at stitching together business results, like you know, growth, number of customers with two or more products or whatever the business result is that you're looking for with the objectives that that needs to happen and then the activities that need to happen, and that's teaching together on I would view is very much a broken process. And then in Scott, to your point, when general partners get frustrated and they look at a sales and marketing efficiency ratio, they have a hard time understanding why an enablement the person or the sales organization or the marketing organization, figure out the right activities to drive this ratio. I think that's I think that's great. And I I'm gonna pick up on something Dr. Dover shared with us. So, I think what we, what we have it's not I think I know, if we look at sales as one big monolith, one big giant thing. That perspective is going to lead to a lot of waste and inefficiency. And that inefficiency is going to cause the investors whether it be the C suite in a large public company, or the people who sit on boards for private equity company to replace the leadership and then you're going to get a whole new set of things you know, to worry about. There is no such thing as a one size fits all Salesforce and we're going to hear a little bit from Lindsay, you know on this, but an inside sales organization is different than a strategic account. organization is Different than a vertical specialized organization. So, one of the things that will happen, and I very much agree that there was a lot of poison in the well, but the overall economic health masked a lot of inefficiencies in sales and marketing. Absolutely. So, what we have is a day of reckoning, and we can either look at it as scary or a great opportunity for innovation. And I think what chronologist said was, this is a great opportunity for innovation. Just make sure you're aware of what that is. So, when I was at Forrester, I did a lot of analysis of what works, I became sort of obsessed with the What Works analysis or 8020 analysis, rather than just survey type of analysis. And one of the best examples or stories that we could plot over time was BMC. So, BMC had a strategy to get out of the economic recovery. So, it started that You know, in in the depths of the, of the deep, deep, deep recession, they had this vision called business service management. And a lot of investors really liked it. As a matter of fact, one of my friends was an investor and he bought into that investment, hook, line, and sinker. They made a big position in that a year later. So, we fast forward to 2010 A year later, or half a year later, what were their results while they grown their revenues 30% their market cap gains zero because they weren't demonstrating economic growth or organic growth. Here's the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was that in order to execute business service management that concept and can all you remember that we had the we you were at HP at the time and you heard from one of your clients, how much in love they work with the bsm VSM vision, for sure. Here's the problem. The problem is they built a sales engine where this...

Ep27 Part 1: COVID-19 Response Series: Making Sense of What is Happening

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Sat, 21 Mar 2020 01:36:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 27

This is part 1 of 5 in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, specifically tailored to sales enablement.

We're bringing together a diverse set of perspectives to provide you actionable insights in response to the COVID-19 Virus gripping the global economy.

Scott Santucci and Brian Lambert are joined by a group of leading experts to provide you with clarity about what's going on in a rapidly changing landscape.

Joining us are:

Dr. Howard Dover, Professor from UT- Dallas
Kunal Metha, Operations Principal at TCV private equity
Lindsey Gore, Consumption Sales Executive, Microsoft

Our agenda for this podcast series in response to the global pandemic has five parts:

Part 1 (Ep27): What is really happening in the market?
Part 2: (Ep28): How are companies likely going to respond?
Part 3 (Ep29): What can Sales Enablement leaders do?
Part 4 (Ep30): What are your peers thinking and doing?
Part 5 (Ep31): How do we lead our teams, our companies, and our initiatives to help sellers be successful?

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

I'm Brian Lambert and together were the sales enablement insiders. Today, we're going to do a special edition to help our audience be the most equipped and prepared to navigate these trying times, insider nation, we're going to focus this episode on helping make sense out of what's going on explaining what you should expect to happen, providing you with actionable insights, you can take on and in order to help your business improve. And I'm going to hand it over to Scott in a minute but before I do, I want to orient you to the flow of this call. What we're going to do on this episode is run a panel of amazing experts, whom we will introduce this conversation is going to be pretty strategic in nature to provide you with a lot of context and clear ideas.

Scott Santucci 01:23

That's right, Brian, as part of our panel, what we're trying to do is create a format. There's so many different variables going on, we want to be able to give you lots of perspectives, the opportunity to synthesize it, and the perspective in the voice of sales might react to it.

Brian Lambert 01:39

Yeah, that's great. I love that and we've got quite a quite a diverse group today and as part of insider nation, you know that Scott and I are encouraged to wear this, this bifocal lens, you know, balancing strategy with tactics. And at the end of each section, I'm going to summarize this pretty strategic conversation into something that I believe you should take Way, and what it really means to you as a sales enablement leader, Scott while you introduce folks to the to our listeners.

Scott Santucci 02:07

Okay, so let's get started. So, we're going to introduce our panel, and I'm super excited that we have friends, friends of the show. And when you get to introduce these, these folks are going to be really impressed as well. So first up is Dr. Howard Dover. And actually, it was Howard's idea for us to do something like this in the first place. So, if it goes well, he gets all the credit and if it goes poorly, it's clearly Brian and I's poor execution. That's right. Oh, that's, that's that's the way things that the way things roll. But I first met Howard at the founding meeting of the sales enablement society, at the breakers in Palm Beach in November 2016. And if you know anything about that there were 100 people, they're all trying to figure out what is the sales enablement thing should we form a volunteer organization to share information. And there were two economists sitting at a table together. Of course, they didn't go and mingle.

Brian Lambert 03:08

I was there too, and I'm not sure you're not including Howard in that are you? Was he an economist or professor?

Scott Santucci 03:15

Did I say economist? I meant, so there we go, I meantt academics, right.

Brian Lambert 03:22

That's all right. I got you. I got you. He's gonna you're gonna have to buy him a drink. Now, though.

Scott Santucci 03:26

He's a he's a classically trained economist, turned sales and marketing professor. And one of the things that's amazing about him is he's the director. His official title is the director of the Center of sales and sales coaching, working out of the University of Texas, Dallas. Now this group and what he does, he's done some amazing innovative things which we're going to get to hear about he's he's involved in many programs of studying sales and the impact of it, just incredibly honored that he's joining us.

Howard Dover 03:59

Thanks, Scott. That was very kind. As, as Brian knows, we know a lot of people in our sales industry, so there's a lot of really amazing people. And you know, I remember the experience, I had to go to the breakers, a good friend of mine that I do research with Rob Peterson, and I were studying sales enablement. And when we saw that conference, I got on the phone with Rob and I said, Hey, we need we need to go and he said, are you kidding me? We don't have expense accounts, we can't go to the breakers. And I said, just just go figure out I'm going to be there you need to go and the two of us showed up. And I remember Scott was saying, you know, something many of you know Scott, so Scott was talking, and he was trying to get the group to discuss and, and he was sitting kind of right next to me. And and I just looked at him I finally said, we were acting like this whole thing's gonna stay the way it is. So, it's we UT Dallas we obviously right to have we were part of hosting your first conference here in Dallas to allow the first sales enablement society event and so that's enough about me I'm sure we'll get into other details in a little bit.

Scott Santucci 05:12

Yeah. So let me add a little bit of color to that. That moment what was actually happening as Scott wasn't talking, Scott was facilitating a lot of dialogue with a lot of people. Mr. Dover degraded a doctor there on that on that point, but really what what happened is, we gotten to this point of a lot of people are talking about things the existing way. And Howard asked the question, Well, why are we assuming we're going to be organized the same way that we've always been organized? And that's a great question. And to me, that's the value of having lots of perspectives. Nobody in a corporate world would think to ask that question. And having the courage to put it out there allows us to think and this is the kind of value of having multiple perspective There's and bringing it together. So, the next panelist I'd like to introduce is Kunaal, Kunaal Metha and Kunaal and I've worked together consistently since 2008. He's helped many sales enablement and operational roles and companies like HP, VMware, Informatica and implement infoblox. He was actually a regular attendee of the thing before the sales enablement society. The official title was the local area, the DC local area sales and marketing networking group, which of course, our members turned to the sales enablement society, which is way better, but he was very much participative and knows he's a systems thinker, and a design thinking advocate. He's actually been to a lot of that training. It's very interesting to hear him talk about design thinking and me being in the role to actually translate from translate and say, well, I can speak Kunaal, he means this. Today he works for TCP, which is a leading private equity firm. That's that if you don't know TCP, they are the money behind Netflix and Airbnb is a business that really, really knows what they're doing. In his role he works with CEO Sales and Marketing Leaders. So, his focus is on the commercial process. And he sits on boards of directors, board meetings, and is constantly working with portfolio companies around sales and marketing. So welcome Kunall would you give us a little color about about your background?

Kunaal 07:34

Thank you, Scott. Thank you for that really wonderful introduction. I remember when we met it was it was around my birthday, actually, my daughter had just given me a pen which wrote underwater and and I remember thinking like, man, if I'm underwater, I got bigger problems than thinking about what I'm going to write. But I felt that way about My onboarding program at HP and I remember being past your presentation that you had just given, and I was like, wow, somebody gets me and gets my problems. And I got to meet Scott and we we arranged for an analyst day with you in, in your in your office in in McLean.

Scott Santucci 08:18

That's right.

Kunaal 08:20

It's it's, we've been continuing to work with each other since then.

Scott Santucci 08:24

That's right. Excellent. I want to tell a lot of other stories. We've got a lot of war stories to share, but we got a, you know, we have a bigger agenda here. So finally, I want to share Lindsey Gore. So first of all, Lindsay's role in this isn't necessarily a panelist, but she's here to keep us honest. So, I want to make sure that we're very, very clear Lindsay's role in this podcast, but I actually met Lindsay during a client engagement I've been when I was working at Forrester, I've been hired by NetApp to run a sales boot camp. I don't I don't want to say teach, but to help introduce concepts to help the Salesforce sell to cloud. And I always run in so I'm a huge, huge fan of a reps. And you can tell them immediately, because they're the ones that ask you the hard questions. And Lindsay was one of those people during the breakout sessions like, What's this for? Will this really work? And ever since then we became good friends. We've, what we do is over over that period of time, she's been enrolled at nimble, and now she's at Microsoft. And we've had a lot of opportunities to talk about what's really going on in the trenches. And one of the things that we're really focused on is really trying to raise awareness and grow understanding around this English English translation problem, which I'm hopeful she'll join us for a podcast exclusively than that. But I want to just frame out what our perspective is because ultimately, if dots don't connected, none of these ideas work. He's one of the top reps at Microsoft earlier this year, or actually, at the end of last year, he was one of the keynote speakers at their global kickoff for some of the innovative strategies she's executing to sell cloud based and consumption, consumption products for Microsoft. Thank you so much for joining us. Lindsay. Could you tell us a little bit of background on yourself?

Lindsey Gore 10:22

Yeah, thanks so much, Scott. I appreciate the introduction. I I will say that, you know, our relationship over the years has started at net up and I've been at EMC, nimble and Microsoft since then, it's been incredibly helpful to be to try to understand, you know, a lot of times my customers are saying things to me, but but my commercial process internally, and it doesn't necessarily align with what my customers are asking for across multiple different companies that I've worked at. So really trying to figure out you know, how to align the messaging, why is so much of that translation sitting with me in the field and how to think about that stuff. So, you you've been incredibly helpful in terms of just sort of understanding that there's a much bigger picture context. So really excited to hear this panel today and and think about what you guys are talking about seeing from a broader level than just my view from the field.

Scott Santucci 11:15

Excellent. So, with that, what does this have to do with responding to the events around, so we've assembled this session, and what we're doing is we're tackling what's going on. And what should sales enablement do about it. So, before we do that, we typically in our show frame things out, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a memo in 1990, written in the Pentagon, that has become what we now know is vuca. And really, what it was is a prediction of goodness, we were all focused all of our attention on one thing, one big bad thing, the Soviet Union. Now we have lots and lots and lots and lots, and lots and lots and lots of unpredictable factors that we have to be aware of. So vuca stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. And the difficulty that we run into is none of us really have a strategy for handling it. And what happens when human beings in general, get overloaded or have to deal with unknown, we have one of three responses, we fight it, we run from it, or we freeze. And neither of those are good strategies in a downturn. So, what we're going to do is we're going to apply some, some thoughtfulness here to provide some some structure. And the way that we're going to go tackle this is we're going to say, first, let's talk about what's really going on. So, with volatility, instead of always reacting to events. Let's just pause, slow down to go fast. with uncertainty. It's to factor in you know what, maybe we don't know for sure exactly what's going to happen. But you know, we could probably figure out common patterns that have happened in the past and predict what's likely to occur. With complexity, it's really two variables, the number of interconnected parts and today, human beings are so interconnected with each other, we have to factor that in. And then also how many moving parts there are. And then finally, with ambiguity, this is one of the things that Lindsay and I talk a lot about, is that human to human connection, there are so many different people involved, all of us look at it through a different lens. How do you make things clear? And in order to do that, that's what the valuable about having different insights. So, the first thing that we're going to tackle is what's really going on. So, let's timestamp this as of March 19. Here's where we are. The stock market has lost all gains during the Trump entire administration. So basically, we're back to where we were four years ago, in terms of stock market, $4 trillion in market capital has been eliminated. Another thing that's that that's going on is the Fed. So, if you know what the Fed does, the Fed is one of the drivers of the economy and they they have a lot to do with banking. The fed on Sunday dropped the basis points or dropped the lending rate 100 basis points. So, what does that mean? It's just a measure of of significance, let's put it into context. At no point in time during the last recession, did the did the Fed drop basis points that much. Another thing that that the Fed has done is that they have authorized the printing of $1 trillion of of money to give you frame of reference during the last great recession. They only printed $2 trillion over that period of time. So, the point is the Fed is taking very aggressive stances to what's happening. Now the question is what is happening? We have two events happening at the same time. So, Dr. Dover called me out on one of the LinkedIn post trying to share, you know, some of these facts was, hey, you only highlighted responses to COVID. We also have this gas crisis or, or looming gas uncertainty. And markets hate uncertainty. They hate it more than anything which we're going to hear which we're going to hear from canola. So, as a lot of the attention happens to what to do with COVID, how to wash your hands, how to beat treat people with empathy. What we want to do is figure out what's going to happen with business and what what responses we should be taking, so that we are more productive or proactive and what what actions we take so that we find the tactics that work. The last key fact to share is if you look at analysis across Wall Street, they are producing acting as an 8% decline in GDP this quarter, many people think that's a conservative estimate about what's happening. We have completed the SMB space is pretty much shut down. There is a whole bunch of things going on and we're pushing work into into virtual experiences of which a lot of people don't really know how to do. So, we have a lot of uncertainty and factors there. So, these are the facts. What I'd like to do is ask Dr. Dover to share his perspective and then also get from from his perspective about what what they're seeing in each of their perspective, lenses. So, Kunaal, you are in the best position to comment on these things you work for more or less a micro economy, if you will. You guys are the lead investor and a group of 60 or 70 Companies tell us what your point of view is and what's happening within your company.

Kunaal 17:06

Well, Scott, certainly, you know, surreal, scary panic are all things that I think that are going on right now. You know, we, I certainly echo any company in the comments around staying safe and sound as we go through this. I'll start with a quick story. And then we'll kind of rotate it to, you know, the three areas where we see most of our conversations, but I actually live on a horse farm. And my favorite horse ever was was this midnight loop around the spectacular race in 2007. And he started dead last, but he ended up smoking the field and they were going to originally scratch him because of bad, bad weather conditions. And I think it's a good analogy because we start work, we our response overall, has been slow that you see Like a stronger and stronger sense of response and more organized, a more organized response. And I think we'll come out much stronger out of it. The three areas of focus where most of our conversations are one, you know, the health and safety of folks and making sure when they're comfortable working and can get to work from home and in an efficient way. There's, if you look at just the basic, there's actually no monitors left to order. If you go and try to order one, some of these basics just don't exist. There's a lot of questions around how do you how do we get transparency? How do we ensure effectiveness? How do we ensure teams are motivated? One really interesting fact that we're seeing from kind of a shared sales development perspective is that connect rates on calls have never been higher, they're like orders of magnitude higher. So, so people are answering the phones right then and uhm ou do see people taking calls and scheduling meetings. So those things are still working. But But you know, that's just health and safety and getting people to work remotely are...

Ep26 From Training to Talent Enablement

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 14:31:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 26

What type of sales talent does your leadership team need, and what's your role in helping them acquire, develop, and improve those people?

Respond to demand
Generate demand

What do customers think?

In this podcast, Scott Santucci and Brian Lambert provide a foundation helps you answer questions like:

How do you on-board salespeople when they all come from so many different perspectives
How do you get agreement from sales managers on what they are supposed to do
What’s the turnover rate of the sales force and are you using your top talent instead of bottom performers and how would you know
When designing a development strategy, who do you listen to? Product, product marketing, sales leaders? Sales reps? Who gives inputs on the curriculum?
How would you measure the impact of on-boarding programs across so many different teams?

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

Hi, I'm Scott Santucci

Brian Lambert 00:36

And I'm Brian Lambert, we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement. Leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives as analysts, consultants, or practitioners. We've learned the hard way of what works and maybe what's most important, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:03

That's right, Scott. And we've had a lot of feedback since our last podcast, which was on the flavors of sales enablement. So much so that we've actually decided to deep dive. And today we're going to talk about one of those flavors in the talent flavor. So, Scott, let's walk through what we've been talking about what we've been seeing as we've engaged with our our customers and clients.

Scott Santucci 01:26

Sure. So, to frame this out as if, if you're joining us, fresh and new on our podcast, welcome to insider nation, by the way that we frame this out is that sales enablement as it is a really giant topic, especially depending upon how you look at it. If you look at sales being the revenue of your company, and enablement is how you get more of it. Obviously, the scope can be very, very huge. And that's what we're seeing is we're seeing a lot of these different pockets and a lot of you know the most successful Strategic functions are emerging at intersection points between the sales organization and other organizations. So, for example, we I, we talked about the message, the message flavor, which is at the intersection point between marketing and sales, or the engagement, flavor, which is the intersection between marketing sales, business units and finance. It's a huge quagmire. And we also talked about the administrative or administer flavor, which is really at the intersection point between sales and, you know, the administration support team. So that might be if you have one administrative function that would that would include your legal it might include some sales operations, particularly revenue recognition parts and your IT department. But that would be that what that would focus on but what we're zooming in on is that intersection point between the human resource functions, which are typically responsible for training, culture learning and development, hiring, and the sales organization, which is starting to also pick up its own version of training and onboarding and participates in hiring. And as you could probably imagine, there's a lot of friction points between those two groups. And that's what we're going to be concentrating on.

Brian Lambert 03:24

Yeah, especially with all the digital transformation that's happening, the scope and change that's happening within the talent space, as it evolves, you know, skills need to become higher. The conversations that people need to be having need to be different. And I think this is a great topic for today. Because of those, those challenges that we're seeing.

Scott Santucci 03:47

Yeah, and to pick that back up, to pick up on that thread. One of the things that we're asking people to do is take a step back, and sometimes you can't See the forest through the trees if you're actually looking at the boss, right? And that's really where where we think a lot of people are today is that they're so focused on very specific details about it maybe do we have the exactly the right training curriculum? How many fields can we put in, in terms of our hiring specs? That maybe we've lost sight about where things are going. So, if you boil this back up and just use this podcast as an option to take a step back, one of the ways that we like to look at this as talent, why do you have a Salesforce in the first place?

Brian Lambert 04:41

Oh, that's way back. But I love that question. And, you know, when you and I started talking years ago, you would ask me questions like that, and I would laugh them off. But the more the more I thought about, I'm like, dang, that's a really good question. So why do we have a Salesforce, Scott, what's your thought on that?

Scott Santucci 05:00

Well, the simple answer is because customers still demand it. But I think where we are today is to have this idea that you have a one size fits all monolithic, Salesforce is just, it's just barbaric as barbaric thinking.

Brian Lambert 05:15

Well, but aren't 58% of all decisions made before before anybody ever talked to a customer?

Scott Santucci 05:21

Yeah, just like 58% of the decisions that I make when I go to a grocery store already made for me, right? Uhm it that those those metrics are good sort of talking points, but you can't ever know for sure. And it's kind of ridiculous to think that way. But let's talk a little bit more simply. Right? If if we have a Salesforce because customers demand it. Well, what kinds of customers are there? We don't, we don't want to make this about how do you segment your customers that would be a completely different topic. But let's just talk very specifically here. You have a Salesforce to Respond to demand, aka your markets blowing up, you have a lot of competitors, what you're doing and what you're selling is maybe not that differentiated from everybody else, and you're in a highly competitive landscape. That's scenario one. Or Scenario number two, is you're bringing differentiation or you're bringing innovation to your customers. And you have to go actually create demand. And this podcast is for the businesses who are investing in a Salesforce in the ladder. How do we create demand? And it's very difficult because, you know, let's say in the last 10 years, we've had a massive expansion, you know, since the, you know, the deep dark economic burden that we've had, we've had a pretty good recovery. And over that recovery, recovery period, we've had a lot of, you know, growth, but now where we're at today is that growth is it's a lot harder to want to Talking about the sales forces better designed to create demand with our customers.

Brian Lambert 07:07

Yeah, especially, as you're pointing out, you know, innovation is just exploded, you know, moving into platforms, cloud, Ai, automation, you know, every industry is transforming and salespeople, much like they had to do in the 1890s have to bring those innovate individual innovations to customers. And I like that concept for those that are generating demand. So, let's talk about that. What are we seeing? What are you seeing?

Scott Santucci 07:38

Yeah, so I think that's a really great way to think of it right. So, you have, you know, all those different trends. And you have businesses that, you know, is GE now a digital company, they certainly have tried to advertise that a lot. So, a lot of a lot of businesses are trying to shift and what what that requires Is your salespeople to go and actually educate your customers? So, when we think about education, that means you're selling ahead of a RFP, or you're selling ahead of a budgeting cycle. So, who is it that we're actually Who are those customers? So, let's zoom in a little bit more and talk about why you have a Salesforce. We have had the opportunity to either to survey and then interview hundreds of buying executives. So, the first thing is, who actually is the customer that we're designing our Salesforce by? Because the sales force exists to support customers. We've already isolated that the type of sales force that we're talking about other sales forces designed to create demand. So, who are those customers that we're after? And then if they're there to support customers, what is it that they expect? What do customers think makes a great salesperson?

Brian Lambert 08:58

Yeah, because that answer should determine the type of talent that you're bringing on and how you're supporting them. Right? That's the, that's the punch line is, if we understand that, then we could talk about the talent pillar.

Scott Santucci 09:14

Yes. It was like, what is the design point for all of the talent, not just who you're hiring, it's, how you're training them how they're developing, etc. So, here's the spec, right? The spec is we asked those executive buyers to tell us what makes a good Rep. And here is their definition. This is not our definition. This is not, you know, your definition from other sales forces. This is the definition of executive level buyers. All right.

Brian Lambert 09:45

I'm going to give the drumroll Yep. There you go. big reveal.

Scott Santucci 09:49

Okay. The salesperson shows they understand my business issues and can clearly articulate to me how to solve them.

Brian Lambert 10:01

That's the definition of executive buyers of what a good rep looks like they guess right? Those reps understand my business issues. And they, they articulate to me how to solve those issues.

Scott Santucci 10:12

Now, what's interesting is if you talk to a lot of people who are students of sales and said, they're gonna say, Well, no, bleep, right? No kidding. What's new about this? And really the issue is not a lot to know about that. If you're going to help somebody, think differently and drive change, you must understand their business, you must understand their challenges. And you must be able to articulate those or else there's no basis to change. What makes this difficult and unique is how complex those business issues are, and how hard it is to articulate them because they cut across multiple silos. So, the next question, we asked those executive buyers, is how often does your interaction with a typical salesperson lead to that criteria? So, in other words, how often do say do the conversations that they have with different reps meet that spec? What do you think that, that I'm gonna ask you, the leaders Brian knows what the number is gonna ask him?

Brian Lambert 11:28

Do the drumroll though.

Scott Santucci 11:28

Right. But before I share what the what the date is, think to yourself, what percentage of executive buyers find their interactions with sellers valuable? Is it 80%? Is it 50%? What's the number? Well, the number we have is it's 11%. So said differently, 90% of the interactions that they have with sellers is not valuable.

Brian Lambert 11:59

Yeah, this I've got a bit of a story on this. I've since 2002. I've traveled all over the world. And I asked a simple question. When I'm on the mainstage. I asked, I say, Hey, you know, I've got, I've got 500 US dollars right here, who can come up here and talk about their customer. And I always get a ton of people that want to come up when I bring up the salesperson who volunteers, which is great. I say okay, the only caveat to that is you cannot talk about your company, your product or yourself, you have to talk to minutes about your customer go. And to date since 2002, I have not been able to find a single salesperson who can do that yet. I haven't found a representation of of the 11%. And and I would challenge you as listeners, I would challenge you to try that same same thing. Go ask your salespeople to do that. And also, you tried to the world of the buyer has definitely evolved.

Scott Santucci 12:59

So, I think that's a great segue into we, here are some exact quotes. These are exact quotes from executive buyers, executive executive decision makers about why is it that so few of the reps add value. Here are some direct quotes five direct quotes because they don't do their homework. They can't think outside of their product. They're unable to provide any knowledgeable answers to queries raised. They don't understand how they fit into our company. They're focused totally on closing a sale. They don't understand the issues or problems I'm trying to solve. These are all direct quotes of executive buyers to describe why so few add value. Brandon comments on that

Brian Lambert 14:00

Yeah, it's been interesting. I've actually been on the buyer side as in a fortune 500 company and this exact challenge came across my desk. I had, you know, probably 100 salespeople reach out to me, I took one, I took one call because of those those issues. If somebody and it's interesting, right, as, as somebody on the buy side, I didn't need them to articulate my challenges fully and become a, you know, Zen master at them. I was just looking for somebody to kind of meet me, not even in the middle. I mean, I guess at the 11% mark, if somebody can do just 11% did it, I would have taken a call. That's actually who I took the call with. So, they didn't have to be perfect either.

Scott Santucci 14:44

So, to add more color on that, so what we're what we're making a case is how case of what is the current state if the all of the talent investments that we're making across the company, whether it be in human resources or in the Salesforce All these things are happening, what type of rep are we producing out there in the industry? So, the next question is, how prepared are the reps? So, through the lens of an executive level buyer, here's some real data. These executive buyers believe that 62% of the sellers are knowledgeable about their company and products. 24% said, the salespeople were knowledgeable about my specific business. 23% said that those salespeople can relate to my role and responsibility in the organization. 22% said those salespeople can understand my issues and where they can help. 21% said those salespeople had relevant examples or case studies to share with me.

Brian Lambert 15:58

Yeah, that's interesting. So, in the 20% is knowledge about my business, my role responsibilities, my issues where they can help. And then and then this idea of providing examples or case studies, those are all 20%, which is a big, you know, big F, the highest is 62%. That's still a B, in most, most organizations. And that's an idea they're knowledgeable about their company and their products. And that's the, that's the most prepared that they are. That's so interesting.

Scott Santucci 16:25

And what's also interesting about that is if you were to break down and look abstractly, or you know, very high level, but force through cheese, and categorized content, or specifications, of what you're hiring people to onboarding people to do, coaching them to do, or developing them to do train them to do. The overwhelming majority of the amount of information that we're asking our salespeople to do behave is about us. It's about our products, it's about our products and services, etc. which is great if demand already exists. But it doesn't help to create demand. In order to create demand, you have to understand a company's business. Simple as that. You have to understand how that company makes money, or loses money, or what risks it factors in yet 24%. Only 24% of sellers can do that. If you're going to persuade somebody, a company in upon itself doesn't buy things a human being does. Somebody has to have the intestinal fortitude to drive change in a complex environment. So, if you can't relate to that individual's role and responsibility in the organization, how in the world are you going to empathize with them about all the risk factors? The next point then would be understand their issues of where to help if you can't understand their business challenges? How is it possible that salesperson could add any value and then if you don't have any examples of how you've helped solve that problem, specifically, what are you going to talk about? Right?

Brian Lambert 18:08

In that, you know, just to tie it back again, we're unpacking the spec here of which to drive the talent pillar. And I think it's really good to pause. And we've really spent 10 minutes on this. But you know, look at the contrast that we're painting here about, remember, I remember that one time, Scott, you and I worked on that project, and we audited the new hire training, and it was like 5% of new hire was about customers, and the company couldn't believe it. And then they looked at it. They're like, Oh, you know what, holy cow. You're right. Wow.

Scott Santucci 18:43

Exactly. The whole point was, there were so many different people involved in that onboarding program, that everybody assumed that somebody was doing the basics and it took an audit of the content to say, oh my gosh, we're not even all of the material that we're providing is all about us all about our products, because that's the muscle memory that we've gotten into. So, here's some good news. So, some good news is we also asked those executives, because in this interview process and this discovery process, you start to learn Hmm, this is painting a pretty bleak picture. But these executives didn't see it that way. Because the salespeople that actually do meet the criteria, add a lot of value. And as as a matter of fact, they offer so much value that they differentiate their vendor from all the competition. So, here's some here's some proof on that. We asked those executives to tell us what an open-ended question what most differentiates a vendor or supplier from their competition and the specific question asked to those executives. The top two answers were number one, the ability to match relevant capabilities to specific problems and to being prepared on my business, my role, and what is...

Ep25 The Four Flavors / Functions of Sales Enablement

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 18:59:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 25

In this episode, we look at Sales Enablement strategically. The sales enablement profession has reached an important pivot point -- and it's likely you need to make some decisions.

While the hype of the role continues to drive more and more hires, many executive leaders are still waiting to see the transformative benefits they expect by making continued investments into enablement.

Most enablement functions start out as the fixer of broken things. Eventually, there is only so much value that can be created that way. You will have to expand your scope and focus on identifying core root problems.

We've been working with leading sales enablement functions for over 10 years. In this podcast, we identify the emerging flavors of sales enablement excellence.

TALENT - Recruit, retain, and develop the right people to help sales leaders be successful with better, more skilled salespeople

MESSAGE - Customer stakeholder specific value-based messages to help sales leaders be successful by helping their salespeople have better and more relevant sales conversations

ENGAGEMENT - Integrated programs to drive pipeline milestones to help sales leaders be successful with more targeted and focused pipeline stimulation programs

ADMINISTRATE - Simplification programs to reduce seller burden by helping sellers spend less time with data entry and more time selling

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement. Leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives, ranging from analysts, consultants or even practitioners. We've learned the hard way. What works and most importantly, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:03

And on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the flavors of sales enablement, not how tasty they are Scott, but how they're organized and the scope of sales enablement, as we're out and about and talking to folks. So why don't you frame this out for us.

Scott Santucci 01:21

So normally we have a framing story, but basically ever since October, you and I have been talking to lots of sales enablement, professionals, and sales leaders. And we're developing a kind of two things. One is sort of a clear pocket of where observation about where sales enablement is as a profession. And some of that is frankly very concerning to us. So, what we'd like to do is share with you an observation about sort of tensions and provide some texture about where the role is and then get into the topic of flavors after that, so that people have some context of why we're talking about that. So, Brian, you've recently been, you're just coming back from a trip where you visit a lot of enablement professionals. Let's sort of do the composite of all the different interactions that we've had. Describe for us, what are the characteristics of a sales enablement leader today?

Brian Lambert 02:25

Yeah, sure. And like, like you said, let's look at you know, the last three months so, you know, the end of the year quarter here, and then the beginning of a new year is really the, the timeline that we're looking at. And as you can imagine, Scott, you know, the end of year and start a new year can be pretty busy for sales teams. And, and that's obviously reflecting in the folks that I'm talking to and sales enablement. I don't know if that's also what you're saying, but everybody's busy. So, we'll use the phrase, everybody's busy. And there's there's really two types of busy that I'm seeing There's the busy with activity. And then there's the busy being productive. And that's, that's what I want to talk to our listeners about those are two different things to me. And Scott, I'd love your your take on this. But the idea of being, you know, actively busy is stuff like, Hey, I'm on a plane, I'm responding to requests, I'm running events, people are walking by, and I'm talking to them. I've got a bunch of emails I need to respond to, you know, I'm moving, you know, from meeting to meeting to meeting. I'm attending those, and I'm gathering inputs, and I'm president these, but I'm not necessarily running the meetings. And, you know, I'm thinking about who I need to talk to next, who's coming at me with a request and it's, it's very busy in that stance and a definitely, definitely seeing that on one one continuum on the other continuum. I had some conversations with folks who were also busy, their calendars are pretty, pretty full. But they're setting aside time to talk about, you know, here's what I'm seeing for the 2020 strategy. Here's the focus of the sales team. As as the sales leadership is meeting, this is what I'm, I'm hearing in the meetings across the different sales segments that I support the different sales channels. And you know, what I'm obsessed about and I'm worried about the talk track of my function, and how valuable it is and what its perceived like by these executives. And, you know, I'm not so much that Brian concerned about if I'm, like, I'm concerned about am I considered valuable to the go to market strategy, and I need more numbers, I need more analytics, I need to be able to tell this story better and that's what's keeping me busy in finding the right talent is a secondary, but it's more about, you know, quality of impact, not quantity. So those are the two continuum, everybody's busy but it's like two different types of busy and I've had both of those conversations and they, they couldn't be any more different to bee honest with you. That's what I'm seeing, what about you?

Scott Santucci 05:11

Yeah. So, the way that I would characterize it is it is twofold. I think that there is, on the one hand, there is the I have I have gotten into the role of sales enablement as the head of broken things, right. I'm a powerful person. I have made my name of fixing broken things, the thing that I look for things that are broken, I go to try to fix them. There's so many broken things, I have to go fix it. And you sort of get that mindset of, you know, my team really can't do it. No one else really can do it. I have to just do it. And there's just never enough cycles. There's never enough time in a day. And really, the way I would characterize it is that's being busy because that's what you think you're valuing proposition is the head of broken things. Whereas the flip side is in a role like sales enablement, which is, you know, frankly funnily defined, in even well chartered groups of which we see maybe less than 25%. Brian, I would consider a well chartered function, even those don't nearly have enough time to do all the internal selling required just because the amount of change that's happening in the selling environment and the multitude of different very strong perspectives about what's required to improve sales is it is overwhelming. So, there's the other side of busy which is how do we keep up with all of the demand and all the expectations? That's that would be more how I how I would characterize it sort of bucket number one. I'm busy Most of that's a self-fulfilling prophecy because I believe that my value is because I'm the head of I fix things, I need to be valued, because that's why people value me. That's why we have this department. So, you're always going to be busy. Because that's what you're looking for, you're looking for symptoms to treat, and put them out, put those fires out quickly. Whereas there's the other form of busy, which is maybe you've made maybe you've accomplished something like really standardized on the CPQ price quote system, or maybe you've simplified Salesforce or something like that. There's a lot of maintenance that goes with fixing that. But then what do you do next? But that would be how I could characterize it. Does that map to what you're seeing? Yeah,

Brian Lambert 07:45

yeah. And then to make this, you know, tangible for folks there's, you know, in the busy of attending the meetings versus the busy of heading the meetings and calling the meetings and organizing the cross functional team to fix something. You know, I think that's a good litmus test on how many meetings are you really running? What are you really controlling in that type of busy is completely different just to bring that home at a individual level? And then Scott, you know, as we lead into our topic for today, you know, we've talked about this. And we're seeing these these patterns develop of where sales enablement teams and are spending their time and what types of initiatives they're running, for example, some might be focused on messaging are where I spent a lot of time on the people and performance and training side of sales enablement. And you've developed over time, a lot of understanding of this type of scope. And, you know, we've been talking about these areas, which we were calling flavors of sales enablement. They'd be great to walk through that can you can you share the framework?

Scott Santucci 09:01

Sure. So, what it is it's it's a observational framework backed by a lot of practical, practical experience. And what it really comes down to is, if you are we delineated the two types, right? type number one is, hey, I am valuable because I get stuff done. And that's, that's the premise of my department. What I'm about to talk to you, you're probably going to reject everything, you're going to say this sounds too theoretical. What's my action? And, you know, frankly, what am I going to ask you to do is think about is it is fixing symptoms really valuable? Or is creating is elevating your function and create and actually proactively addressing the source of the symptoms is that's what's valuable. Yeah, that's really the second bucket. Right.

Brian Lambert 09:55

And I just wanted to quickly that's great point. There's there's what How everybody shows up to you as a sales enablement leader, let's park that and what people are asking for and what they're bombarding you with. And well, what are the inputs? I let's just, let's just talk about you and your role. And what is what is your value? What do you what do you think you should be? What do you need to be as a functional leader? And, you know, I like that dichotomy, Scott of are you fixing the broken things? Or are you doing something different? And that's regardless of how people are showing up to you right now in this conversation.

Scott Santucci 10:30

Yeah. And I think that the best way to, you know, park that right to create the space of it. I love this quote from Henry Ford. If I would ask customers what they want. They want a faster horse. It you have so much inbound demand about what you should be doing. If you just take that all on. You're just making faster horses instead of cars, right. So, let's make that pivot. And let's recognize that the full scope of all of this Things that sales enablement could touch is so galactically huge. We could look at this and say, sales is about driving revenue or bookings. And enablement is about doing anything to make that make that easier. So, with that scope with that huge, gigantic scope, we're basically talking about a function that is the connective tissue of all of the different silos inside the company. Obviously, that scope is too gigantic for any one group to really tackle. But you have to be able to move outside of, hey, our sales kickoff stinks. We need to have somebody just had better sales, kickoffs, let's tap you on the shoulder to go fix it. So, there's a balance between the two. So, what we've identified is there's four big chunks that you can fix that really go around fixing friction that exists among the sales organization and different functional groups. And that's really where a lot of these problems exist in the first place. Because customers don't really care about your organizational politics and you know, who reports to who they care about getting the answers. So, what we're going to do is we're going to walk through these four, we're going to do it one at a time. All right. Does that make sense?

Brian Lambert 12:30

Yeah, I like it.

Scott Santucci 12:31

Okay. So, the first function, the first chunk, of that big giant area is the chunk around talent. That talent you can look at and a lot of different ways. But let's just first talk about all of the different activities, or things that are involved in talent. Talent starts with hiring. So, the whole process of figuring out what kind of stuff Sales Rep do we need in the first place? To how do we go and recruit them or pay for them? All of that stuff all the way through to evaluating and, you know, improving reps. There's a whole lot that goes into talent. And then when you think about all the stuff that goes into talent, let's talk about all the functions involved. Finances involved because they have to improve approve the headcount in the first place. Different groups within HR involved from from the jeez every HR group is organized differently, but you have some basic functions like leadership development, you're gonna have sort of performance, HR performance people, you're gonna have recruiters and your l&d department might work in your your human resources group. Each one of those departments may or may not interact with each other. Then when you go to the sales organization Who's the primary interface point? Who's the primary interface point from the on taking? The, you know, how are we going to make requests of new hires? Is that an individual sales manager that does that get funneled through through sales operations? What role does sales enablement play in terms of, hey, we've got this amount of inbound calls, do you have foresight into onboarding? And when does onboarding begin and end? There's a whole slew of things under talent. So, the way that we like to look at talent is it's the process of recruiting, retaining, and developing the right people. That's sort of the scope of it. There are many different departments involved, the benefit to salespeople are better and more skilled reps and improvement. And we look at that as a business process from hire to retire. So that's, that's really the first bucket.

Brian Lambert 14:56

Yeah, like that. And you know, you talked about functions. And some of the titles that I've seen in there are, indeed, you know, l&d. I've seen sales enablement, have that title of sales enablement, but the scope is around the talent piece. And in the talent piece, they're really focused on, for example, just the onboarding slice. And so, there's an opportunity there to expand if you are in the talent piece, or flavor to think about, you know, how do you branch into recruiting and then also the ongoing development area to really improve the the, you know, the rep experience from hired through retire?

Scott Santucci 15:38

Yeah, so I think what we can do is we can zoom in and have a show on each one of the flavors to provide more context. But really, what we want to highlight would be the scope of what you're looking for, and who are the departments or the stakeholders whom you need to work with. What is the business process that this this would entail so that you can manufacture something and Produce sustainable results? And then what is the measurable impact on the sales organization?

Brian Lambert 16:06

Great. Let's go to the next flavor.

Scott Santucci 16:09

Okay, so the next flavor is really about the friction that exists between marketing and sales. And I personally do not like marketing and sales alignment that sounds like we're going to get a bunch of guitars together hold hands and sing Kumbaya. It is beyond alignment, it must be integrated. And so, what we're what we're looking at is let's think about it this way. If we get our talent, right, let's say that we develop the best course ever. We've got the most skilled reps in the entire industry. When they show up, they still have to talk about something. Right, that message of what they talk about, doesn't come from training. It comes from the synthesis of information from individual product Marketers. You might have solution experts, you might have vertical overlays. Think about all of the people in different departments that have a variety of subject matter expertise, and strong opinions about how to take your company's messaging and positioning and making it relevant to the individual human beings that salespeople engage with. So, we call this bucket or flavor message. And in message, it's about translating all of the stuff about your company into conversational specific things. And the business process that we look at it is concept to contact. And what that means really is when you go when we go and talk to a lot of customers, one of the things that are people like you, I really like to ask so you know, what do we sell? Who do we sell to? And why do they buy? And to me, those are the elements everybody should know those answers, but very few companies can give me consistent answers. And where they stumble the most is the who they give me personas. But personas aren't good enough. We need to be a salesperson must find somebody with an altitude level and a leadership position to drive a new thing forward. They have to have the right access to budgets or, you know, the ability to assemble budgets. And they have to have the right you know, sort of confidence level to be able to do this because let's face it, we're introducing something new into these into these clients. And there's a big change management component that is risky to most to most people. So really, what we're talking about here is how do you orchestrate all that messaging and move it away from being product focused, and to be make it more success or outcome I have major major transformation.

Brian Lambert 19:02

Absolutely. And that you get, you know, when you do that the fuel for customer conversations. And, you know, there there are multiple roles in the organization that benefit from that not, you know, there's sales and there's also customer service and solution architects, etc. So, there's a lot of stakeholders involved in that. And if you are in the talent space as a listener, and you're like, Well, you know, that's outside my scope, that's fine. The question I would also then ask or just think about is, are we still talking

Ep24 Shift from Reactive to Proactive Sales Enablement

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 16:29:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 24

Right now, growth is anyone's turf. Growth can be aligned to the sales department, the marketing department, business operations or the strategy team. Everyone "owns" the customer, and very few people have the answer when it comes to creating sustainable impact and success.

Today, only a few organizations have more strategic sales enablement capability aligned to the growth. The ones that do fold them into commercial operations or report directly to the CEO. While many Sales Enablement leaders aspire to become the Go-to-Market partner of the CEO, the reality on social media is quite different.

The key question: Why are you here? Why does Sales Enablement even Exist?

Looking at the blogs, content, and discussions, there is certainly a big gap between the aspiration of Sales Enablement and the reality faced by many in the role. Transformation is happening in many sales organizations, but sales enablement is often a tactical "get stuff done" aspect of tactical decision making.

In this episode, the guys as a great question: "Are You Providing Strategic Sales Enablement or Are You the Land of Misfit Toys?"

The answer to this question will determine your impact and success including:

allocating resources to projects you believe are most important.
defining who you report into
balancing the completion "fast tasks" with "strategic ongoing business impact"

That current state “island” of sales enablement is chaotic... it’s reactive. It’s where all the misfit initiatives are inherited by the VP of "broken things" end up.

In this podcast, you'll hear actionable approaches and real-world examples on how to balance the short-term with the long-term impact required to support transformations. Using examples such as onboarding and training, the guys talk about the strategies you need to help sellers get what they need to be successful.

They will also share the discomfort many people have in being strategic (hang in there when you're listening!). The reward: Throughout the podcast, you'll learn how to do WITH sales, and stop doing TO sales.

As Jack Welch once said; "Control your own destiny or someone else will."

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions, the market? Find out here joined the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:49

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants, or practitioners. We learned the hard way what works and maybe Maybe what most important, what doesn't?

Brian Lambert 01:03

In a previous episode, we talked about who the customer is of sales enablement. And we answered that as the person who decided on your role and invested in it. Your department often exists based on a challenge as someone in your organization wants to address and how you scope it matters. And today we're going to talk about why you're in this specific situation that you're in. And we're going to compare and contrast the different situations in order to help you move forward in next year's 2020. And also take action in a way that makes most sense for your organization. So as usual, we start with a centering story to give our episode a scene. So, Scott, take it away from here.

Scott Santucci 01:46

So, we're recording after Thanksgiving, so we thought maybe a holiday theme would be would be very appropriate. And what holiday what Christmas holiday story wouldn't be great without a whole conversation about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Brian Lambert 02:02

That's right, lay it on them.

Scott Santucci 02:04

Here. Here we are at the sales a day wood insiders podcast and we've talked about things like mendeleev and his periodic table. We recently talked about the Edsel. We're talking about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. And you know the story about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. He's tired of just being viewed as a as a parlor trick. So, him and Henry the elf, the elf, or if you remember, he's the elf that doesn't want to help. He wants to be a dentist. So, they go off to just on their own journey. And they run into, they land on an island, and that island is the island of what? Ah, it's the actually the land of Misfit Toys. The land, that's right, the land of Misfit Toys. Yep, thanks. And they run into that line. His name's King Moonracer.

Brian Lambert 03:02

I didn't know that.

Scott Santucci 03:03

You didn't know it was King Moonracer?

Brian Lambert 03:07

Is that the point of the story? Not just kidding.

Scott Santucci 03:09

Thats the point right to educate you on on Christmas tales. Actually Bob Britton. I wouldn't be surprised if he would send you send me a note. Because he, he likes the king King moon racer reference. But really, what is he the king of he's this land of Misfit Toys. And there's all of these toys that aren't good enough that were rejected by Santa to get to give toys to kids. And one of them. Like one of one of these toys that's particularly funny to me as a kite. And it's Miss fitness, is it, is afraid of heights.

Brian Lambert 03:45

That's right. And you know, when I first watched this, you know, I was not creeped out at all of this children's tale.

Scott Santucci 03:54

Right so there's all these different methods and King moon racer unites them and you know brings them together and makes them find meaning and the like. So that's, that's our story.

Brian Lambert 04:06

Wow, that's interesting. So, what effect does that have to do with sales enablement? Are you saying that we're misfits or we inherited misfit toys?

Scott Santucci 04:16

Well, it's a story that that resonates. So, this is how does it relate? There's two reasons. So, for those of you who don't who don't know, Brian and I, were, were involved at at Forrester, way back in as early as 2008 started my sales at a one research carcass. And back then, um, you know, there was a whole bunch of what is sales enablement? There were a lot of definition for it. Now, we probably have way too many definitions that were probably at the same. I think we were probably more clear about what it was back then. But a metaphor we use this metaphor a lot to describe the role. And really the role is, you know, the head of broken things. You are King moon racer of your own organization, you've been inherited, you might have inherited her a little less, a lot of those early sales enablement professionals would inherit things that maybe the marketing department wanted to touch. Things that sales managers didn't want to touch, things that sales VP didn't want to touch, and things that sales operations didn't want to touch. So wonderful things like simplifying the CRM system, or selecting new technologies to use, because vendors will come in and make, you know, make make briefings or, you know, fixing you know, various other broken things like the price configuration management system, things like that. So that's, that's really the Nicholas and the second reason that that, that maps is many of the people in the sales enablement side of which, you know, Brian and I were very instrumental and started actually, you know, Nico and Brian, up in February or in January of 2016, saying, hey, maybe we should start our local area networking group, and a lot of people who are really some of the first members of the sales enablement society really looked at that as a, that is also a metaphor. And we're a collection of people who are trying to get together to figure this stuff out. So those are what those are ways that uh why why it matches.

Brian Lambert 06:23

Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, since that time, it continues. And maybe they're not broken things, but they're the land of maybe cool and cutting-edge things such as, you know, ai driven coaching or role-based applications for learning, right? So, not only have sales enablement, leaders, maybe inherited broken things, but they're, they're piloting some cool stuff too. Right? So, I don't know what what island that is, but I like the metaphor because in both both situations these are items that that are maybe one off or a little bit outside the norm. Business as usual in both Yeah.

Scott Santucci 07:07

Yeah, maybe it's sort of it's the island of broken things are you exist to fix problems and Island shiny things is your your job is to help us figure out how to take advantage of it, you know, enable it, right? activate it. Either way, you're outside of the mainstream. And as we all know, the mainstream, the standard operating procedure is pretty aggressive. You know, pretty pretty. There's a lot of culture that goes around that and being outside of those those two windows is can put you in a tough spot.

Brian Lambert 07:38

Yeah, exactly. And it's also a tough spot because of the nature of the transformation that many companies are going under. I think when you look at growth today, and what companies are doing to drive new business models, new revenue streams, evolve their platforms. Become become more of a, you know, all inclusive, one stop shop for technology and bring new capabilities to market growth, it really becomes the mandate and it's it's almost anybody's turf. It could be products turf, marketing's turf sales, obviously and the CEOs really trying to drive and pull these different level levers and one of the levers that he or she is pulling is this idea of sales enablement, as as a growth driver, however, you know, Scott, you and I have both talked about this. We don't see that an awful lot. But where are those folks are doing it and becoming the other side of the go to market, you know, the execution side of go to market. They're pretty busy, and they're not hanging out at these conferences that many people are going to, and they don't necessarily want to hear from vendors about the strategies that they should be engaging in to drive the go to market forward. And there's a big gap between what I would say the aspiration is and what they're tackling versus the reality that's unfolding out on the internet or the web or even in job boards or sales enablement society postings, etc. And I think that gap, I would say is really around, you know, why are we here? And I like the misfit toy analogy because it really gets to the question of why are we here? What do you what do you think about that?

Scott Santucci 09:23

So, I think that's great. I think what you've done is have provided a great landscape. So first of all, in the overall market, we all know, sales transformation is happening in the overall landscape. Then within your company, these things are happening, whether they're being actively discussed to where you can see it is a different story. But if you're a sales enablement professional, you're probably stuck in the Hey, I'm in the I've got the bright shiny toys and I've got the broken toys and I am really struggling, struggling or trying to make carve out a niche or add value in the audience. Operating rhythm that our Salesforce is in right now. So, the challenge that that creates is it creates a situation where, if you're a sales enablement professional are probably thinking, hey, a lot of the stuff that you talked about Brian is interesting, but I can't afford to think about that stuff that sounds too theoretical to strategic. I got a I got to keep my nose to the grindstone and just execute. That's a gut reaction that we typically hear another reaction that you might be feeling sort of like when you go home from work and wonder, you know, did I add value today? At am I being valued? Go home and think about, you know, talk with your talk with your spouse about whether you should get a raise or not, or you know, whether or not you can go ask for next round of funding next, next next year. All of these different questions that you got going on in yourself and you just don't know. Why don't you know, why are those things clear? You don't know, because you don't really have control of managing expectations of what your department is. And maybe you think you do, because you think it's really, really, really, really, really clear my clarity my wall is very specific. It's clear on my mbo's, and all I have to do is execute those mbo's every quarter. And I show that I'm hitting those mbos every quarter, I'm valuable because somebody else has defined what that value is. But the reality is, is that many, many sales enablement leaders talk to us. Is this a common theme? I wonder if you you run into this to Brian, is that many sales leaders I talked to say I'm really frustrated. The company just thinks that I'm just a trainer. And sales enablement is so much more. Yeah, that's right. Just like a trainer. Yeah,

Brian Lambert 11:51

I've seen I've heard that. But I've also heard you know, if the executive team would find us more, we could do more. And I think you're spot on between this this area of, you know, super tactical, I get stuff done, versus the handful that are, you know, helping figure out what to do, you know, figure stuff out strategically, what are we going to do here. And then there's the get stuff done crowd in the middle is this gray area and you get kind of buffeted around by the forces, you know, it feels like you're maybe on a, you know, on on a ride there, and it's in that ride of your life. You know, things start coming up, like you're pointing out, Scott, and, you know, how do you get control of that? How do you enter into the rhythm of the business and drive as a valuable partner?

Scott Santucci 12:40

Yeah. So, you have, we're going to use a case study here. And Brian and I are going to solve two different ways, but there's really only three choices that you have. So, this is the good news, right? The good news is in the world of complexity and all the swirling dervish that we've just talked about, you really only have three choices. Right, so here they are choice number one, you can decide or believe, whichever it is you can decide that the way that you personally are going to add value to the company is say yes to as many as many people as possible. I am enabling your success, they're coming to me because they're asking me for, I gotta say, yes. Completing the tasks at a high quality. You know, we make sure that they're done well, they have the right polish. We get them on on getting them done on deadline and maybe your internal brand as I get shit done. That's choice number one. Choice number two, you can do the things and then wait with choice number one, really, the whole idea is if I keep doing more of that if I keep working hard, obviously somebody's gonna value our department, expand our scope and you know, give me a raise, and give me the resources that I need to do more. The second scenario is, well, I want to I want to take more than that and control my hand, so I want to plant the seed. So, I'm going to do everything that I'm doing in number one, you know, concentrating on getting stuff done. But I'm going to take some of these reports that I'm seeing, and I'm going to start sending them off to people, I'm going to start positioning my department, and I'm hopeful that these reports will allow a VP of sales to go wow, this sales man was way more than than training or, wow, I had no idea how complicated your, your, your function is, I should give you a promotion or what will you know, whatever, whatever your goal is. That's scenario number two. And scenario scenario number three is to campaign more proactively go and start talking to the individual department leaders. Talk to them and give them insights about challenges that they're running into and help them see what the real problems are let them let them dwell on it and then let wait to ask for your you know, how you can help, and you know really illuminate and elevate the elevate the function.

Brian Lambert 15:14

So those are those are three areas so number one if you're following along as the gets to get stuff done. Two would be sending up reports and data to help in you know, drive or

Scott Santucci 15:25

Well, I wouldn't say data, I would say external reports. So, number three is you're providing insights, that's your own data, your own analysis.

Brian Lambert 15:33

Okay. And number two is maybe external thought leadership reports, etc. Yeah. Okay, gotcha. So, and then there's pros and cons to each of these and but what we're going to do before we get into that is tell a little bit of a have a situation that our listeners can participate in. So, we're going to use onboarding and the reason why we're gonna use onboarding is a lot of people are engaged in that in some form or fashion. And then one and then and then number two is if they're not engaged in it now, they probably will be at some point. So, we're going to use that as a way to have a shared experience here. And what I'm going to do is, I'll be I'll be, you know, in camp one to get stuff done crowd in basically talking about tasks, etc. And the Scott will be talking about, you know, area three about being more proactively managing and defining the value contribution to the function. So, from an onboarding perspective, you know, let's just say we we have a program already, and that program is a two-week boot camp, we have regularly scheduled classes, and the ask is, by by the management team, sales managers as well as our bosses to look at how we shorten it and then also have We add different skills to it. So that's the, that's the simple scenario. Is that good with you, Scott?

Scott Santucci 17:07

Sure. Okay.

Brian Lambert 17:09

So, I'll be reactive guy, my reactive guy, what I'll do, and how I might action is, I would do a bit of research, I would figure out trends, figure out through my own experience, what, what I might want to do to provide some, some topics through elearning because everybody else is doing it. I would build a bulleted list of what we're going to do. And then I give it to my boss and ask for permission to go and once I got it, I would go do that. And then then I would communicate what we're doing to sales. And I would make sure...

Ep23 Who Is the Customer of Sales Enablement & the Ford Edsel

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 23

Sales enablement leaders work at the intersection of sales leadership, marketing, product, and operations to help engineer and elevate sales conversations.

As Sales Enablement pros work across these stakeholder groups they often experience very high expectations, leading to challenges and friction if not handled well.

If you are a sales enablement professional, you know there are a lot of people to serve. You also know that they aren't all your customers, and you can't treat everyone who wants something the same. So, the question is, how do you parse people out? Who do you listen to?

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:49

Together Brian, I've worked in over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives as analyst, consultants, or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works and maybe more importantly, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:03

That's right, Scott. And today on this show, what we're going to discuss everybody is, who is the customer of sales enablement? That's right. It's a kind of a Zen question, but who is our customer? And as usual, we're going to start with a centering story. Give our episode of scene. So, Scott, what do you have for us?

Scott Santucci 01:22

Well, I feel like I'm going in a way, way, way forward machine here with a story that starts in 1958, not 1858, if you've been listening to our our show. In 1958, the executives at Ford got pretty much religion on this, this new thing about market research. So, if you've been following maybe watch madman and you realize that, you know, the advertising industry was really starting to evolve in the late 50s and early 60s, and that's actually a true thing. And they started doing market research. And the executives at Ford got this great idea. What if we did market research to design a car? Makes sense, right? So, they surveyed lots of users or lots of cuts or users, that's a modern term, lots of customers about what they want to see in a car. And they design this car based on this feedback of all these people, they're going to get massive market share because they made sure that they got every type of person involved from older people, people with families, single single people, people want to have people who wanted to, you know, a family environment, took all that information. And they designed a car for everybody. And they roll it out expecting marriage is going to clean house and dominate market share. You know what the name of that product was?

Brian Lambert 02:57

Was it the Edsel?

Scott Santucci 02:59

It was the Edsel yeah, and the Edsel claim by 1960. By 1960 they pulled it from the shelf. So, it's just a two-year life cycle, which is not a long time for any kind of car. And they invested so much money that in 1960, they reported a loss of $250 million on that initiative. $250 million. That's a lot of money isn't it, Brian.

Brian Lambert 03:29

Well, I'm sure in 1960, it was.

Scott Santucci 03:32

Well, it made a lot of money for today, I mean, losing $250 million. No one's gonna write that one, write that in a statement. That's what they'll give you. Let's put it in the frame. Let's frame it out, though. In if that were today, the scope of that failure would have been $2.2 billion dollars, without the headlines that would have on msnbc or what we'd be here to talk about the huge catastrophic failure before?

Brian Lambert 04:02

Hmm. Well, gee, that's, that's interesting because they did the research and they probably saw the huge market opportunity, built the car that hit all the customer feedback and had a colossal failure. So that's interesting. And what do you what do you think? What what why that story with regard to who is our customer?

Scott Santucci 04:28

Yeah, so what is so white right? What does that have to do with anything? The reason it has anything to do with why we're talking about it and the theme for today sales enablement? Who is your customer? is because when Ford the Ford executives designed the Edsel for everybody, they actually made it for nobody. And that's really what we're finding a lot of is a lot of people. There's a bunch of definitions about what sales enablement is or isn't. There's a lot of terminology that people keep debating at the end of the day, if you're not really clear on who your customers are, and servicing, it doesn't really matter.

Brian Lambert 05:11

Yeah. So, let me let me pop quiz are our nation, insider nation? Pop quiz. I'll give you three seconds to answer this question, Who who's the customer of sales enablement? Let's answer that question Who is the customer sales enablement? And I'm willing to guess if you're like most people, you're probably saying sales, or you're running down a huge list of people that you talk to or work with. So, you know, Scott, what do you think is that the right way to think about it is the first group that comes to mind are the people you're working with on a day-to-day basis?

Scott Santucci 05:51

Right, so the words the functions called sales enablement, of course sales is our customer, right?

Brian Lambert 05:57

That's right

Scott Santucci 06:00

I would beg to differ. Your customer is the person who gives you money.

Brian Lambert 06:05

Period. Yeah, you're a second. So, okay, so are you so a customer in business is somebody who definitely gives you money, I'll give you that. Take your wallet out by your ice cream, you're a customer of that ice cream place. Um, in this case and sales enablement, you're saying the same thing literally, that's not that's not a analog. That's a, that's a literal statement.

Scott Santucci 06:31

Your customer is the the person who's who's the department or whoever is giving who's funding your department or funding you if you're a one man show. If you're a one-man band, your customer is whoever's paying your check. Who you serve, may be salespeople. But a salesperson isn't going to write you a check. They're not your customers. Your customer is the person who's giving you the check. So, you have two variables here you have what your customer wants. And then you have the way that you're going to give them what they want. You service, the Salesforce. So right there you have you might have, you might be at odds with different people. And it's important to think about why my customer is the person who's giving me the money, who I serve is people in Salesforce.

Brian Lambert 07:30

Yeah. So, this is good. So, let's, let's, let's kind of pull this out. Right. So, you've got two buckets. And let's just say the whole entire group is, you know, people, and we broke the people into two groups. One is our customer, and that's who gives us the money. And I think that would be good to understand that because sometimes that money is centralized, and you just given a budget. So, we were probably let's, let's make sure we talked about how do we know who that customer is and then the second bucket I'll just call it stakeholders, you know, CFC stakeholders and customers. And the stakeholder bucket is the folks that we work with marketing, product sales, salespeople, our stakeholders, even, you know, the impacted groups. And I think there's a lot of impacted groups, it puts us in sales enablement. In a rock between a rock and a hard place. Basically, you have all these, you know, competing inputs, different priorities, different asks from from both groups, stakeholders and customers. And I, I can see where you're going with this. Because if you lose sight of who's in what bucket, you may take different types of action. And then sometimes, and I've seen this, in the folks that I've talked to, sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the most service because they're the loudest, is that really want to be serving is the person who's got the loudest opinion?

Scott Santucci 08:52

Does that put you in a spot or where you add the most value?

Brian Lambert 08:55

That's right. That's right. So, what do you think about that cost? buckets. stakeholder bucket?

Scott Santucci 09:02

Yeah, let's go yeah, let's go through some scenarios. There are, I think we identified three or four classic places where a sales enablement department can report into. Yeah. And let's, let's talk through, like, if you report into who you report into is your customer.

Brian Lambert 09:25

Okay, okay. Yeah, so what about, let's say, marketing, if you report into marketing, that senior VP CMOS, your customer, that who would be the people we serve are the stakeholders that we're working with?

Scott Santucci 09:44

Right, so if if you are reporting to the CMO, and you're the head of sales enablement, why do you report there? What is it that he or she wants? He or she wants to be able to improve how the company is delivering messages through the sales channel to be able to be differentiated. So, who do you serve? You serve one, the people who have messaging inside the marketing department to make it more sales accessible. That's one person you serve. You may even serve the product people to make it more translate translatable. You might be serving product launches and how to get the word out to sales. You also are servicing salespeople. Since your remit in that area probably won't include training. So, you are servicing information about your products and services and about differentiation. So, you are servicing salespeople by helping them with the information required for a launch where the information to differentiate or some some messaging that's who you're servicing and how you're servicing them.

Brian Lambert 11:04

So, if I'm a sales leader, and I come to you and your reporting in the marketing, I say, you know, hey, you should really take over that sales kickoff, you know, you're better at it. What would be your answer?

Scott Santucci 11:17

Well, I would say, are you going to give us funding for that?

Brian Lambert 11:22

Right, because it's out of your scope. Right now.

Scott Santucci 11:24

It well, it's, it's that is not a service that my customer is offering that's outside of the marketing span of control. So, I'd say let's go talk to our boss. So, I would go talk to my boss, the CMO. And I'd say, look, this is a great opportunity it's a great platform for us to provide a foundation to deliver lots of messages, we should do this. And they would say that makes a lot of sense that's great because it's part of your mission. You're right. It does give us a better platform. We should do it. Then we got we negotiate and say what do we want for in exchange? So, what are you going to give us? Are you going to give us the budget for it because we're not going to pay for the whole budget for it? You You already have a budget for sales kickoffs. So, let's use your budget, let's use your resources.

Brian Lambert 12:18

Right. So, send us the money plus two people or whatever. Yeah, right.

Scott Santucci 12:22

Yeah. And we'll, we'll happily do it.

Brian Lambert 12:25

Okay, let's go to the next one.

Scott Santucci 12:26

Yep.

Brian Lambert 12:28

Let's see a sales op. So, if I'm reporting it Ops, I'm a sales leader, a sales enablement leader reporting to ops and I'm probably, you know, working on the kickoff or sales process work, maybe even, you know, forecasting, pipeline reporting, stuff like that.

Scott Santucci 12:48

Okay, so these are again, each of these scenarios by the way, a disclaimer, each of these scenarios are going to be different. We need to make sure you're clear on what it is that each each one of your customers want. But let's, let's say a classic VP of or head of sales operations, if you're reporting there, they're probably looking at a bunch of functional capabilities that they need to have they need to possess. So, for example, it is very common that a sales Operations Group is going to look at the functionality of the sales force and what the capabilities are, whether we have the right skills and the right talent to be able to execute the sales model. Okay, so what they'll say is, you know, what, we need a talent pillar or talent component of that. We call that sales enablement. And I expect you as the sale, they probably won't say that. They'll just describe, you know, you know, what we're looking for, but this is what your job is to do is to make sure it's clear what's expected of you. What is the service, what does the customer want, but really what what they're looking for is probably adoption of the sales methodology that they've that they've worked on with the VP of sales. So, who am I servicing, I am servicing the I am servicing the sales managers and the sales leadership on first educating them on that sales methodology, how it works, how they can, how they can make it work, and then providing training for that? I might also own very specific tasks, like new hire training, but maybe even managing kickoffs, and we talked about the sales kickoff before I might manage those. So, I could I am servicing the sales force through that lens.

Brian Lambert 14:46

Yeah, and all that is to be to be determined discussions would happen then obviously, that would get documented in the charter and socialized so everybody understands. who your customer is of sales enablement? And then to who you're servicing and who you're working with and the stakeholders impacted, including dependencies, I would say like, what are you dependent upon? What do you need from people to pull off your, your services? And what's that working relationship?

Scott Santucci 15:19

And let me reiterate why this is so important. why it's so important is because let's take the sales kickoff, for example. If you are in this role in your report in a sales operation, you're going to feel obligated to make sure that all the content, all the kickoff stuff is all organized, all well done, etc. So, you're going to take on a lot more extra work. If you say my job is managing the kickoffs, and you can delineate roles and responsibilities and say, Hey, marketing, you need to get us this material a week before and it needs to be in this format, and we're going to roleplay how we present it then you spend less work and you're putting the work on to the people who are plugging into it. Obviously, you can't say that to your CEO who's going to show up at the last moment, you know, with their content. But that's how you manage that by saying this is what my remit is, and this is what my focus is, and my focus is on the head of sales operations.

Brian Lambert 16:20

Cause they're my primary customer.

Scott Santucci 16:22

They are they are my customer period. Yeah. Now, you'd have to be conscious about who their customers are. Right? Those are yours, they're secondary, so you know how your services fitting into an overall plan. But especially if you talk to stakeholders that are outside of your, you know, daily remit, they're going to want to know how it all fits together, so you should be aware of it. But it's just this intentionality and focus is really important in terms of establishing roles and responsibilities and more importantly, your workload, the quality of work that you provide, and the resources that you get

Brian Lambert 17:00

So where does the VP of Sales fit in these scenarios? If you're working under marketing and Ops, and those are your customers, what's the what's the role of the VP of sales, then the sales leadership?

Scott Santucci 17:13

Well, then the VPS in terms of the CMO, the CMO is the one who should pair up with a relationship with this VP of sales. I might be an account, we might work it out to where I clear the account manager role, you know, a liaison, but I should always have meetings with both of those together. Always. And sort of facilitate it is not my responsibility to build the relationship there. It's my responsibility to help the VP of Sales beat VP of Marketing have a better relationship there. My job is to make my customer, the hero. If the VP of Marketing is going engaged with the sales leaders, then that's what needs to be done. If he or she does doesn't want to work with it with the sales leaders, we didn't make that clear. It's our job to make sure that our customers are successful. So that means we might say we you need to participate, let me get you prepared let me give you you know, some of that feedback. You don't want to be in unnatural spots. Same thing with a with a with the head of sales operations. Here's the feedback that I'm going to give you. Let's rehearse beforehand what our messaging is. How are we going to tackle it? What's my role? What's your role?

Brian Lambert 18:30

Yeah. So that VP of sales is then what is that a the the beneficiary of the work that you're doing as a stakeholder it's not it's not a customer. Because you're if you're the CMO is the customer is the VP of sales, you're the benefit beneficiary.

Scott Santucci 18:48

I am in service of right so the value that the VP of Sales gets from New Hire training. He's a that's the benefit that he gets out of it. Everybody in our organization gets the benefit of the new hire training that I'm doing, say and if I'm reporting to have a sales op, sales ops, the customer is likely the VP of sales. So, we got a different, a different, a different situation to sort out, though I am responsible for providing capabilities that my boss, the VP of operations provides back. Gotcha. It's important, you know, you know that, so you don't start thinking that you're like, the king of everything, and then you get out of alignment with your with your boss. It's not good.

Brian Lambert 19:39

Right so what

Scott Santucci 19:42

What's another scenario,...

Ep22 Operating Model Clarity to Elevate the Strategic Impact of SE with Sandra

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 22

What happens when you go through a major organizational change and need to redefine your sales enablement operating model, vision, mission? During times of change, how do you frame out your sales enablement "moon shots" in order to engage strategically and tactically to overcome the internal complexity that bogs sellers down?

On this podcast, Brian and Scott talk to Sandra about her stakeholders within the business how she might re-frame the relationships she has in her company in order to get closer to the business while also elevating her role to a strategic function.

Topics on this podcast include:

Sales Enablement operating model
Stakeholder management
Defining your sales enablement domain / sandbox
Communicating with clarity
Breaking through internal perceptions
Focusing on what matters to sellers and sales managers

Key questions the guys talk through with Sandra include:

- How do you evolve from a department of tactical projects to a strategic function?

- What relationships does she leverage to gain more influence?

- How might she define and clarify her sales enablement operating model

- How do you become a truly cross-functional role to support sales team conversations?

- How do you devote attention to building a team that propels sales effectiveness forward

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, issues as analysts, consultants, or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works and maybe most importantly, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 00:59

That's right. Our podcast is a bit different. We use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people who've been there and done that can provide, as we've been pushing the envelope in the profession for over a decade. And today, Scott, we've got a very special guest. We've got Sandra, from a large company, who's joining us in response to our podcasts. And as you know, we talked about in Episode 20, that conversation on the Securities Exchange Exchange Act and how CEOs look at sales enablement, and we outlined the strategic definition of sales enablement that we published in 2010. And in response to that, podcast, Sandra reached out and wanted to talk to us about some of the things that we were sharing. And so here she is, she's gonna put us on the spot.

Scott Santucci 01:47

That's excellent. And I'm really looking forward to that. I'm Look, I love as you know, I love getting challenged. And I also think that that's the best way for us to advance advance the role by challenging each other and and pushing ourselves but I love. I love the distinction about making making insiders. So good job on putting that together Brian.

Brian Lambert 02:08

Yeah, absolutely. And by the time she's done here, she'll be an official member of insider nation. So that'll be awesome. I did want to say also, um, you know, welcome Sandra to the show, appreciate you joining.

Sandra 02:23

Thank You.

Brian Lambert 02:24

Absolutely, and uhm when you and I were talking you brought up a lot of great points in our conversation and you shared a personal story in relation to understanding sales enablement, how to define the roll, and also you know when you're engaging inside your company sometimes it's hard to pivot to be something else to be more strategic. Can you share a little bit more about that and what you liked about episode 20?

Sandra 02:49

Absolutely, and thanks for having me on. I'm definitely getting a lot out of these podcasts and I hope others are as well. It sounds like oh, in order to become an official inside I have to explain what I liked about an episode.

Brian Lambert 03:02

That's right.

Sandra 03:04

So here goes, here's what I liked about Episode 20. And it did really resonate with me. You know, it's focused on grounding, any sales enablement function and a solid and consistent definition. And clarity helps everyone, and I love clarity. So that really resonated with me. And I like this idea of strategically consulting business problems. That really resonated with me as well. Instead of becoming tactical in nature, you want to solve the big problem and be more strategic. So, when I listened to that I reached out to brand because I started out that way. When I joined my company two years ago, you know, I started out very strategic, you know, I solve some big enablement problems that had been plaguing this company for years. It was very exciting, a lot of good change, and it created some consistency and clarity across the entire network. I did some things that actually changed the culture of the bank, but over time, i got caught up in being a door and a go to person for activities and less around strategy. And I wish I had stuck with that definition or had a definition that I could have stuck with that may have helped me get out of sort of this tactical space that I'm finding myself in. That said, I'm thinking about moving into another role at a different company, because it may be too late for me to get back into sort of that strategic space. So really, the main goal of me joining today is, you know, I want to find a way to engage with my company differently and redefine my role get back to that strategic space. Even though the ship may have sailed on that, you know, I'm a fighter, I want to go down swinging before I move on, and that way I've know I've tried everything before I move to another company. And in this conversation today, I think I can learn a lot from you on how to engage differently so that can help me in any future role.

Brian Lambert 04:58

Well, that's awesome. So, we've changed your name. So, you're not really Sandra. But that's the name we're using. And there's a lot of transparency there, right, you're in a bit of a change in position flux there. And I really, really appreciate you put yourself out there on the podcast to not only learn but to help others. I love that, that comment you made about helping others. And I know from my own background, that there are other people in this position that you're in. And it's really cool to see that you've come on. So, Scott, you know, we're in another one of our reality podcasts. So, you know, I'd love for you to jump in and share a little bit how this will work. And then you guys can get off and running. And I'll take, I'll take some notes.

Scott Santucci 05:43

Excellent. So, the way that this works is it's sort of like speed day consulting. What we're going to do is we're going to lead with some, some principles. So, let's talk about where Sandra and almost said the real name there. Where Sandra's situation is actually very, very common. So first of all, it's very, very common for somebody to run into the situation of where they thought they were being strategic, and now their environment not being strategic and wondering how is it them or what what's happening? So, on that point, what I like to share is in 1969, is what 50 years ago, right 5050 years ago this year, we actually put human beings put other human beings on the moon, and then we brought them back again. I mean, by all accounts is the most amazing achievement, right? What I think we don't recognize is that in 1972, we stopped doing it because Americans got bored. We got bored with putting people on the moon.

Brian Lambert 06:56

Yeah, we're done with that let's try something else.

Scott Santucci 06:59

Yeah. What are the Yankees gonna do this week? So, it's just really remarkable that when we go and do something amazing, and then we, you know, we have a culture of taking it for granted. So, the first thing is just because you've gotten to that point, Sandra doesn't necessarily mean that it's, it's with you. It's, it's, it's the fact that we have to resell that next, that next lunar mission. The other thing that I think is very common is if Brian and I have sort of a shorthand to think about the evolution of the role, we tend to believe that people go overboard on maturity models and make them too specific. We just want to provide some trajectory. So, what we see is that the evolution of the role if you can get in your mind's eye if you're driving to work right now, and and kind of can picture that evolution chart that I think we've all seen, that starts with monkeys and then then we get the caveman. And then we get the modern man that sort of picture. And think about evolution, one, sales enablement, people start out by being tapped on the shoulder to fix broken things, those broken things might be a fix our onboarding program or fix our fix our training program or whatever. Then what happens is the one of the departments that evolve actually start taking on many of those things. So, we'll take on the, you know, maybe be responsible for the sales training, the sales kickoff, and then maybe some frontline sales coaching or different things like that. And it becomes it becomes a department. And by getting coordination among those three parts, you get economies of scale. And then the third level of evolution is, hey, we need to start doing these things outside functions like we need to be coordinating between finance and sales. It'd be coordinating between human resources and sales and marketing and sales, and at that stage that, you know that highest level of evolution, the function is is very different. And each one of those three areas, it's very different. The reason I share that as a frame of reference, just hearing Sandra talk it, it really triggered those two things. So one is, I'd want to remind her and then we're going to talk a little bit about creating more fanfare and getting buy in and what it takes to do a lunar lunar type approach. And then the second thing would be, how can we use the maturity models as a way to think about what are other areas to tackle. So those are the things that if you're listening along what we're going to be following on and these are very, very common situations. And I'll say this last point. Before we get into the speed date part, the last point is, most people who've elevated their roles, leave their organizations, and go pursue a different company. And I'm going to talk about pros and cons with doing that on this call as well. So as that as a transition point, Sandra, how do you react to sort of the high-level observations I shared? And then I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions about where you are right now.

Sandra 10:23

Scott, it resonated really well. And I think what you said about space before, I mean, that's where I'm stuck in stage two, I want to find a way to get to stage three at my current company without having to leave and go somewhere else. You know, I built some strong connections where I am now, I'd really like to leverage all that I build to get into that stage three, without having to make a leap. But if that's what I need to do, given your advice today, then then that's what I'll do.

Scott Santucci 10:56

Well, no pressure on me on that one, huh? Right. Right. So, um, so let's talk about, uh, you know, stage to describe for me, what was the situation you inherited inside your existing company. And then you know what you've built up right now as sort of give me a from what to where you are right now.

Sandra 11:19

So, when I joined the company, there wasn't really a sales enablement function. So, I was brought in to create a sales enablement function. So before I built out a team, what I did is I met with all the stakeholders to identify what priorities they had, like what they thought we needed to do to best enable sales, I did a survey and we level set on four priorities because one of the things I realized is everybody had a different perspective on what success would look like and I was gonna make nobody happy without aligning to these, you know, sort of four common things that we needed to do and it was really around sales process, sales coaching, tools and resources and sort of this connection into the CRM. So, I set those priorities forward and then I i aligned with and I built a team of research trainers and I partnered with an outside vendor around the the enabling the coaching and the process. And then we did some real heavy communications. And we built sort of this cross functional team that also sort of started to manage, you know, the intake and triage of things that were coming into the organization because that was another challenge they had, which was they needed an air traffic controller person, because so much was hitting the front line and there was distraction there and we needed to focus on a consistent process. So, all of that was built out and we branded it internally and it's just part of the culture now in terms of process and how we have conversations, how we coach and our sales management practices. So that's sort of out there now and there's not sort of this next, ask around what the strategic priorities are. So, I'm left sort of executing on those things while I get requests for, you know, sales, kickoffs, and meetings and, you know, meeting cadence. So, there's just, yeah, it's just that the next big thing is coming my way. So how do I sort of get to that level three and and sort of get the next big assignment?

Scott Santucci 13:29

Right. Tell me more about this, the stakeholders that you currently worked with, and what their points of view where and the reason I'm asking this is twofold. One is, I'm trying to determine what departments are the stakeholders are who is it that you're working with? Maybe what wallets so sources? What budgets are you working with? Who might your internal customers be? And then also, I'm doing that because we Brian, and I've been really harping on a lot on the importance of stakeholder management. Who who are those stakeholders? Like what what are their roles?

Sandra 14:05

So, you know, the primary one is the head of the business. And you know, I have a really strong relationship with that individual. I've worked with him at a previous company. So, you know, fully engaged with him, also work very closely with our HR team. And you know, because they're the sort of the people, folks and there was some training involved in this. So, I really feel like I was at a solid level from an HR perspective, not so much the head of HR, but the business partner for that executive. You know, I worked with the head of marketing, I worked with the head of customer experience, because customer experience feeds what we train our folks on. And then, interestingly, somehow, I ended up with a really good relationship with a head of finance and in any role I've ever been in, you need the head of HR and the head of finance, right? You need those two things. If you're going to enable a sales team, and and nobody believed I could get the funding I got for the project. You know, I came in with a zero budget and was able to navigate, you know, a significant budget of people and expense in order to partner with an external vendor to bring in the right level of training. And somehow, I got the finance guy to trust me and and I don't know if it was my background or engaged the right stakeholders, but I was able to get a significant budget to execute on what I just talked about.

Scott Santucci 15:38

Perfect.

Brian Lambert 15:39

Can I chime in real quick? So, one of the things Sandra that you had shared and there's a timing thing around this that has to do it's a bit of an organizational shift. These these stakeholder relationships, were these when you first initially started and then you either went through a merger in order to change and did those those relationships stay intact?

Sandra 16:03

So, the head of the business has stayed intact, which is great for me, there's been some shift on the HR side, the finance side is unknown. The person I built the relationship with is still there, but we're still sort of navigating org structures. So, to your point, there's quite a bit of uncertainty across the organization right now and and we all know that, you know, those stakeholder relationships are really important. You go through a merger, nobody knows what's going on. So, you know, you're on rocky ground for a while until there's some clarity.

Scott Santucci 16:39

So, I'm glad you shared that. I'm a strong advocate. I repeat, I'm a broken record about you have a friend and finance so the difficulty is very few people in our in our profession, Sandra, actually build those relationships with the head of Finance. Describe for me the situation to where you're in now. You mentioned earlier on that you're spending most of your time caring feeding the things that you've already built. Is that right?

Sandra 17:08

Right. That's exactly it. And with the mer, and part of it is this merger, because there's not an appetite for new and exciting, there's an appetite for alignment, right? So, there's going to be system conversions. And we're going to have to enable team members as we convert systems. So that's really just sort of core system training, right? There's nothing new or transformational in that although it will transform the organization from a sales enablement perspective. It's really seen as you know, the the system's conversions are becoming our businesses usual stuff, and there's really not an opportunity to expand so I'm sort of stagnant right now. And I don't know what the other end of this if I'll sort of stay in this place and how I can get into that strategic space.

Scott Santucci 17:57

Got it. So, I think that we have two areas to talk about. So, area number one would be what are the new moonshots, you could think about tackling. Mm hmm. And then area number two, how do you build an operating model so that you can have you can hire other people to do a lot of the caring feeding. So, I think I think they go hand in hand, and this is where maturity levels really kick in. And this is where what what separates folks like you who are strategic, involve lots of stakeholders, creative problem solvers, things...

Ep21 What’s the $%@# Problem? Moneyball and The Focus of SE

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 12:36:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 21

If you are a sales enablement practitioner, you are likely pulled in a lot of different directions. You might:

Be frustrated you are called a "training" function inside your company
Struggle to get the right resources
Have a hard time balancing your inbox (and your team's workload)
Experience conflict with other departments

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives, as analysts, consultants, or practitioners, we've learned the hard way what works and what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:01

On this podcast we use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people who've been there and done that can provide, as we've been pushing the envelope in the profession for over a decade. And today on this show, we're going to discuss if you want to be clear what sales enablement is, stop trying to ask what the definition is, and focus on the problem that you're trying to solve for your company. Scott, you usually start us out with a centering story. What do you have for us?

Scott Santucci 01:31

So, Brian, this one is just for you. For those of our listeners earlier, we did a chicken Hawk episode where we actually used to multimedia, and I've got a movie clip, another movie clip. You've been asking for it. Maybe the rest of insider nation has been asking for it. Here it goes. Tell me the movie. Tell me the scene and tell me why it's relevant. Okay, Brian.

Brian Lambert 01:55

I'll try.

Scott Santucci 01:57

You have no idea what it is, right?

Brian Lambert 01:59

Right.

Scott Santucci 02:01

I guarantee you, here's my bet. I guarantee you, you're gonna love this clip. I guarantee it. Ready?

Brian Lambert 02:10

All right.

Moneyball 02:12

Trying to solve problems like this. You're not even looking at the problem. very aware of the problem. Okay, good. What's the problem? Look, Billy we all understand what the problem we have. Good. What's the problem? The problem is we have to replace three key players. Nope what's the problem? Same as it's ever ever been we've got to replace these guys with what we have now. What's the problem Berry. We need 48 home runs 120 RBI. The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's 50 feet of crap. And then there's us. It's an unfair game. Now we've been gutted, organ donors for the rich are Boston's taking our kidneys Yankees taking our heart and you guys are sitting around talking the same Oh, good body nonsense. Like we're selling jeans. Like we're looking for Fabio. We are the last dog at the bowl. Se what happens to the runt of the litter? He dies. Really, that's a very touching story and everything but I think we're all verymuch aware of what we're facing here. We have a lot of experience and wisdom in this room. Now you need to have a little bit of faith to let us do the job of replacing Giambi. Is there another first baseman like Giambi? Oh, not really? No. And if there was, could we afford him? Then what the f are you talking about man? If we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there. That sounds like fortune cookie wisdom to me Billy. No, that's just logic. Who is Fabio? He's a short stop. All right.

Brian Lambert 04:05

Who is Fabio?

Scott Santucci 04:07

So, what's the quote? Mr. Lambert?

Brian Lambert 04:10

What's the problem? What's the effing problem? It's Moneyball the scout scene. I love that scene.

Scott Santucci 04:18

I told you, I know, my podcast partner. So why why do you think that this is relevant to our topic today about focusing, making sure that if you want clarity about sales enablement, and your department and your function, you got to first focus on what problem we're solving. Why do you think it's relevant?

Brian Lambert 04:40

Much like the Oakland A's baseball team, in that scene, the world has changed and applying legacy approaches, using gut feel and applying what's worked in the past isn't gonna work anymore today.

Scott Santucci 04:58

I love it. So, you're going to take over my job here as the setup guy.

Brian Lambert 05:04

What's in it for me? What the heck are you talking about?

Scott Santucci 05:06

Right? What am I talking about? So, what does this have to do with anything and everybody else? And you're exactly right. Every business that we're in, where we have to face the reality, and the reality is that we're in a digital economy. And in a digital economy, every single one of our companies has a new business strategy that we're rolling out, which requires massive, massive, massive coordination between product marketing, and sales. And the way that I like to think about this is the people who are going to win in this new economy, in this new digital economy, they're the ones who are the digi-tellers. The losers are going to be the ones who are told. Who is a digi-teller? Netflix is a digi-teller. They have had a vision about how people are going to use mobile and streaming media and were able to convey that message to their customers. And they told blockbuster and blockbuster wasn't able to wasn't able to catch up or compete and went out of business. Lots of people are doing the digitelling. More people are being digitold, we don't want our listeners to be -- we want our listeners to be the digi-tellers, not the digi-told. And that's really what we're here about is that we think the sales enablement can be a critical role to help companies do that. But to manage that process, however, you got to make sure you're focusing on the right problem. Yeah, that's really what we're talking about.

Brian Lambert 06:42

Yeah, love it. And, you know, if we're going to be digitold, you know, we're sitting around the scout room table and we know these things to be true, Scott that all salespeople are short attention span and coin operated, so we know what problem to solve. You know we need to give them more bite sized chunks faster, and flood them with as much information as possible as fast as possible. So, they'll be successful. I don't know what you're talking about.

Scott Santucci 07:09

Well, Brian, if that's your mindset, then you are on the digitold heap. Really what it comes down to. So, let's, let's break this down and what's driving this? So, what's driving this is an observation that Brian made back at the sales enablement summit. So, Brian did this really cool exercise with the audience, and I want to make sure we don't lose it. So, Brian, the exercise that I'm referring to was the one where basically you got the insight between individual contributors, department leaders or transformative could you could you walk us through what that exercise was and what you were trying to accomplish with it.

Brian Lambert 07:51

Right. Yeah. So, during my talk, I asked I said, based on the discussions you just had, we had two-minute discussions with partners there in the in the audience, you know, how many of you are building things out? How many of you are running programs and how many of you are leading a strategic function 65% or so were individual contributors building out is kind of solopreneurs, if you will, about 30% we're running a department or a program, like new hire training. So, they were the new hire training team, or they were the playbook team. They, they had a program and that's how their department was defined was, you know, that those are the folks that have, you know, the portal, the platform or the or the playbook, etc. And about 5% were leading a strategic function. And that's, that's the rundown. How does that jibe Scott with who you've been talking to, by the way?

Scott Santucci 08:48

Well, so that jives I have a slightly different lens, but it definitely fits fits yours. I think the I think there's a lot of room in the middle and that middle definition but what I have seen from my experience in the sales enablement society and participation at the at the Conference Board, I basically say that the overwhelming majority of current sales enablement practitioners are sole individual contributors. No doubt. And most of those are new to that role. However, what's interesting and what prompted this segmentation discussion was there, there has been a lot of people talking about different definitions. So, as we did in our last podcast, Episode Number 20. We talked about our position why the why the debt what what was the rationale behind the definition of sales enablement that I published and Brian peer reviewed in and other people contributed to why we wrote that lengthy of a bit of a definition and what was it for. And it's really the purpose was to provide a platform for a role. And what's been interesting is we're hearing a lot, maybe it's because we're doing the podcast, and we're targeting more of a strategic view of sales enablement, and I don't know what the reason is. But both Brian and I are getting a lot of people talking to us about how valuable that old definition was. And we think it's kind of interesting that the Forrester had the first definition of it. And they have since published another new definition and now they also have a serious, serious decisions definition of what sales enablement is. So, we have lots and lots and lots and lots of definitions. What we're here is to not really debate the definitions. We're here to help provide you clarity. So, we wanted to we want to talk about what those problems are, but the connecting point and I want to see if you see that too Brian the connecting point was the people who resonate very positively with the definition that we published, all fit either into the transformative or department level category. Yeah. And the people who are in the individual contributor role. Do not like it a lot. Does that jive with with your experience?

Brian Lambert 11:25

Yeah, definitely. You know, I've heard everything from that definitions too long. And, and, you know, you can't achieve the definition that you're talking about where it's a strategic ongoing function until those executives and invest more

Scott Santucci 11:40

"Those executives."

Brian Lambert 11:41

Yeah. And I think I'm interesting. I'm cracking open my email because today, about four hours ago, it says, Hey, Brian, this is an email from somebody that's listened to the podcast that just dropped yesterday, so less than 24 hours later. Hey, Brian, I listened to the podcast on The Securities Act and the foundation elevate the profession. It really got me thinking about my approach to sales enablement. And where I currently am now, and how I should tackle sales enablement, if I get a new role, so she's thinking about a new role. And she's actually interviewing, and I really wanted to talk to things. I want a fresh start. And given that there's a merger and reinvention in my current company to be successful, it may be too late to do that here. But I would love your thoughts on if I move. So, in other words, this, I believe I read between the lines, that podcast kind of struck a chord with, you know, the ship is set sail a little bit where she's currently at, but boy, wouldn't it be cool to apply that in a future organization? I didn't share that with you before Scott. But I think that's relevant to the conversation, you have two ways to approach it. Oh, that conversation that that definition that Brian and Scott are talking about, it's too long, or holy crap. I can really think about it as a strategic execution function that executes the business strategy. And I can, I could set it up that way if I lead.

Scott Santucci 13:10

So first of all, number one, I really appreciate that because you threw me threw me a surprise. So, one of the things that we're trying to do in the podcast, I'm going to get you the next one that we record. But we try to throw each other some things that we're not, we're not anticipating. So that was that was fantastic. And I think you're right. I think that the purpose of what we want to get into right now is, let's, let's be realistic here. No matter what definition you use, first of all, there isn't consensus within the market that there is a common definition. You agree with that, Brian?

Brian Lambert 13:50

I agree. Yeah.

Scott Santucci 13:51

So, if there is no common definition, using other people's definitions as the be with all in with all is a fool’s errand just just come come to the point right now. Okay, so then what does that mean? What it means is that you as an as a sales enablement professional have to own what the definition is inside your company.

Brian Lambert 14:17

Yeah. I get it.

Scott Santucci 14:18

So, let's talk about strategies that way.

Brian Lambert 14:21

Yeah, like it. So, in other words, let's stop worrying about the 14 definitions or however many there are, I don't even know I just made that up. And whatever one you pick, the importance of that in the language you use and how you approach your role and your function. And then how that might, you know, show that my enact inside your own organization. That's a great idea. Yeah, I think I got some stories we can, I can tell there too.

Scott Santucci 14:49

That's great. We'll choose a framework to follow first, right? So, the first point is, no matter what definition you have, and no matter what, even if it's, you know, published, you know, desk of God, people are still going to disagree with it because you put the word sales and enablement together and very few people are going to agree. So, the issue that is pick a definition Do you like that matches to your vision, but then you have to socialize it. And the first thing that you have to be able to socialize, shouldn't be, hey, here's the role, you should make sure you socialize. Hey, do we agree on a problem?

Brian Lambert 15:27

Hmm, yeah.

Scott Santucci 15:28

And the reason that that's so important is that most sales enablement roles start as VPS of broken things, you inherit you inherit a mess. And in order to articulate those things, not everybody, there are so many different little messes around that are that exist all over the organization, you'd probably want to be able to organize a bunch of them. So, depending on how you frame the business problem that you're trying to solve is going to attract the altitude level you know that that people pay attention to it, it's going to determine who your executive sponsor is, it's going to determine what budget you're going to get. It's going to determine how much teeth you can ask for and compliance. And it's gonna, it's going to set the tone of whether you're viewed as a strategic function, or a tactical one. So, in order to do that, we're going to concentrate on that first step, which is a problem. And everybody can say, oh, here's a problem. But inside a company, there's a big difference between what you see as a problem. What other people see as a problem. And also, are you really treating a symptom of a much larger problem? Not through problem solving.

Brian Lambert 16:43

Yeah, I like a lot because much like a ship that leaves the port and set sail, you know, if it's one or two degrees off from that initial launch, you could miss the whole country. Right? And I think That's what's coming to my mind. Scott is depending on how you think about your role or define it, and come out of the gate with it, and how you think about framing it out, could determine where you end up. And that's logical, right? So, if you ended up somewhere you didn't intend or perhaps didn't end up where you want it to be. It might be because you started off with the wrong trajectory. Yeah, which is the importance of a definition from the concept of what problem you're going to solve.

Scott Santucci 17:31

And also, what Northstar What's our Northstar. Yeah, how do we set our bearings? So, here's, here's a scenario I'm going to give a scenario to start off with that I hear from a lot of the listeners, so a lot of our listeners who go and are looking for jobs. Tell me that, number one first, the job descriptions that they run into are all over the place. Mm hmm. And then the second thing is that when they go and interview for those jobs, often I'm told well, they don't know what sales enablement is? Hmm. So, what's your take on on those observations? So first first take is that situation?

Brian Lambert 18:09

Oh yeah, it's it's funny because I'm laughing because that's exactly where I wanted to go his job descriptions and how people are hiring. So, I think we're having a mind meld or something. That's why I'm laughing. But yeah, the so Yeah, totally. And actually, I reviewed about 50 of them, I found about 10 of them were copied and pasted across four different industries. So that's, that's interesting to think about is, yeah, like this, this definition sounds cool so let me copy and paste it there you go that's who we're hiring for. So, I totally agree and one of the things that pops into my mind is, you know, in that interview process, that might be a good time to actually educate folks and have this definitional conversation.

Scott Santucci 18:49

Well, so yeah, there's two parts right. Let's start first with the job description itself. So, for our listeners, if you're looking at a job description, we tend to think of these things as ironclad. But let me give you more insight about where they come up where they come from. job descriptions also need a body of evidence and a foundation to work from. If we accept that there's no common definition of sales enablement, then these job descriptions are either being written by consultants, or by human resource analysts who are...

Ep20 The Purpose of Sales Enablement & The US Securities Act

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 13:10:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 20

Since starting the podcast, the guys have received a lot of feedback from listeners who've built more advanced functions. These listeners have one thing in common... they all are using the "old Forrester sales enablement" definition Scott authored in 2008 and peer-reviewed by Brian and published for Forrester clients in 2010.

In 2017, acting as the President of the Sales Enablement Society, Scott sponsored work by enablement professionals to bring together: analysts, academics, practitioners, and vendors to create a common definition that was published and shared at the first annual sales enablement society conference.

Yet, here we are in 2019 and Forrester has not only a new definition of what sales enablement is - but also Sirius Decisions' definition to rationalize. Gartner is talking about "buyer enablement" and "sense-making" while CSO insights have narrowed the focus to be about enabling the sales force. Meanwhile, marketing has moved into their own versions of helping "sales" by advocating: content marketing, account-based marketing, and growth marketing.

The guys think this has gotten out of hand and have decided to become far more definitive. In this episode the guys:

1) Highlight the key enabler that propelled accounting into the finance department and the rise of the CFO

2) Contrast the similarities between finance and the sales enablement space

3) Outline the drivers that exist in the economy that point to a huge gap between strategy and execution

4) Discuss the purpose of sales enablement is to bridge that gap

5) Observe the only way to solve that problem is to do it cross-functionally

6) Review the basic pillars of what should be in the scope of a department tackling the strategy/execution gap

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to let us know what you think, collaborate with peers and sign up to be notified of new releases, updates, and news.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

I'm Brian Lambert and we are our sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement. Leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:47

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way, underlined the hard way, what works and what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:01

Our podcast is different. We use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people who've been there and done that can provide, as we've been pushing the envelope on the profession for over a decade. And today on this show, we're going to discuss sales enablement defined. And as usual, we're going to start with a centering story to give our episode a theme. Scott, take it away.

Scott Santucci 01:27

Thank you, Brian. And I think you're gonna like this, Brian. This is a very, very modern story for some of the stories that we've been talking about.

Brian Lambert 01:34

Oh, really? Yeah. Move up. Do we move up a different century yet?

Scott Santucci 01:40

This story starts in 1933. Oh, wow. Yes.

Brian Lambert 01:46

We moved out of the 18 hundreds nice.

Scott Santucci 01:48

Yes, how about that for modernization in 1933. The United States Congress passed the Securities Act. And what I'd like you to do is go back in the wave wayback machine and have some context. This is the time of the Great Depression. If you remember what happened, one of the starting points of the Great Depression was the stock market decline of 1929. And one of the things that was happening is that those stocks that people were buying weren't really regulated. So, you didn't really know whether the information was accurate or not. So, the 1933 Securities Act put down a an established the SEC, the securities exchange commission, which also empowered them to audit and oversee and even send people to jail for fraud on the stock market. So that's what led to it. The next thing that happened in 1939 General Accounting Principles started so basically we're generally accounting principles are is that the rules of which you organize or store finance data that gets logged into your business report, the business reporting, the financial reports, the the balance sheet, the income statement, all of those things started back in 19 standard got standardized back in 1933, with this sec act, but then the rules to make sure that you follow them and standardize all that that started in 1939. So, to bring that all to fruition today, in were 1939. The idea of a chief financial officer was not very common. Today, the idea of a chief financial officer is almost it's it's almost, you can't even separate the idea of not having them. So, one of the things that has led to the powerful rise of a CFO, is they actually have this, this construct this these rules to follow more or less like a lingua franca, and if it weren't for that, it'd be hard to say that The CFO wouldn't have evolved, because that role was just a bookkeeping function.

Brian Lambert 04:06

Yeah, that's a good point on the history of that evolution to think from bookkeeper to CFO, but, again, oh, what the heck does that have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 04:20

So, insider nation, I hope we hope you're getting the gist that we always have some sort of weird or interesting plugin. And the reason that this matters, is because you've heard Brian and I talk a lot about a charter. You've heard us talking about that. But you don't have a core foundation to stand on. It's really hard to elevate your role. And that's really what we're what we're talking about here is we there are a lot of discussions about definitions and wire defining things. Our lens when we set out to defining sales enablement was really more foundational. It's not does it sound the right way because I get it, I can guarantee you if you go and read the SEC definition of what revenue is, it's not a good read. It's not simple or elegant or beautiful or accessible or explains what an accountants job does. It's a very utility or utilitarian definition, to set a foundation to provide standards.

Brian Lambert 05:25

It's hard to blog that I'm sure to that deposition.

Scott Santucci 05:29

It is a tough blog, began it because it's an incredibly tough read. But the reason that that exists that way is because it must be precise. So that's really the the essence of how we started about defining sales enablement, when we when we were at Forrester, and the foundation for everything that we worked on, was that definition and it has a lot of principles behind it with the idea of building as a foundation to build a function of up on top of it.

Brian Lambert 05:57

Yeah, and I remember you know, you can say that the key here is to get it right. And we're going to talk about how we did it. And yes, we're going to go over that definition on here. But, you know, I need to, I feel like right now, this is a bit of a, let me challenge you on this, right? Like one, we said we weren't gonna necessarily redefine it. And on the show, and two, we've said, Listen, it's not about a definitional debate. We're not going to engage in that. And now now here we are, right. So, um, and the reason why I wanted to bring that up is it's interesting to me that over the course of the last two conferences that I was at that that's the definition that we put together in 2008 has shown up on you know, the mainstage screen and you know, even even your name is enforced or have been used as this is the definition that I like, etc. But why why are we on this podcast doing this? Why do you think it's important to restate when we've already stated 10 years ago?

Scott Santucci 07:01

Well, I think there's a bunch of reasons why there are many definitions out there. It's very confusing. And the reason that we're doing it for insider nation it's it's actually kind of interesting. Brian, you and I started this podcast because we saw a big giant hole in sales enablement conversations for more so from a more strategic lens, and as we started this, more people have been reaching out and a lot of people have been reaching out saying, Hey, you know, I'm glad you guys are doing this. I've been really leveraging that old sales enablement definition. And I was actually in Chicago at a meeting and the executive team had this definition and they had it had it written up. We haven't built on this thing in a long time. And the company that owned it had owned this intellectual property has now quote, discarded it and replacement of another one that's made to be more better sounding or, you know, more well written, Uh huh. But really the goal here is it's not an issue to debate definitions. And it's it's a, it's a conversation to say, we tried to lay foundations with this. And we want to talk about those foundations, because those foundations are what separate most of the people who are running sales enablement as units of one. And the sales enablement leaders who have strategic departments. So, what we thought we would do is say it just as if you are interested in promoting and elevating your role. Let's follow the game plan that accounting went through to become CFOs. They had a foundation that they built from, so we wanted to talk we wanted to lay that foundation. We think that's relevant here for inside sales enablement and insider nation.

Brian Lambert 08:57

Yeah, and let me let me stay obvious You know, we're sticking to the definition that we wrote in 2008. You know, we're not changing it, we're not redefining it, we're sticking with it. And we think it's even more relevant today than it was back then. And we're going to state it again. And here we go. You know, let's talk about why we did it, how we went about it, what the actual definition is and who it's for. So, let's start with why why we defined it.

Scott Santucci 09:24

Alright, so why do we Why do we find it? So, the first the first lens is, we made an observation that there is a gap between the go to market strategy or even the business strategy of a company and how it executes. So that was the observation that we laid. Then when we looked at that when we looked at an examine that business problem, what did we do is based on that, based on that gap, we tried to define what should be in the middle there to bridge that gap. And that's really where we came up with the idea of sales enablement. The idea being go to market is about interacting with customers. We were thinking about sales, aka meaning revenue or bookings, not sales, the Salesforce and enablement is to make sure we're enabling the execution of that strategy and profitable growth. That was the lens that we had. So that's why we created it and we didn't see any work in that space. And we, you know, frankly, Brian, and I still haven't been seen any work in that space.

Brian Lambert 10:33

Yeah. And also, to piggyback on that with the why drill drill a little bit deeper on that I actually think the gap is getting bigger, that the gap between go to market and the expectations that customers have continues to widen.

Scott Santucci 10:51

I agree with you. And I think the reason that it's widening is really because of the whole digital economy that we're in what you know, you've got business we've talked about some of this before, but we've got businesses who were office furniture companies, and they are now becoming space optimization businesses, because of this whole digital world. But I think that that is one of the driving forces that is illuminating or accelerating that gap between strategy and execution. And most companies don't have what Brian and I like to call an execution fabric to tie all those those pieces together.

Brian Lambert 11:27

And, and to that end, execution is extremely problematic, right? So, we're not going to get into that. But, you know, what I would say is, we can't let the idea of product marketing or messaging or demand Gen, or even sales enablement, trumped the idea of execution. Right, you know, executions, the most important thing here, that's when let's figure out back then we have this debate what means to fill that gap because silos are not getting us there. And sales conversations are suffering, what might that look like? How might we go about defining that? So, let's let's pivot there, you know how explain explain how we went about defining that? Did we lock ourselves in a conference room and write it?

Scott Santucci 12:13

So, the sequence of events were, and this is where the, you know, sort of the discipline of research and why I would recommend all of you before you pick a definition that you use, go and find out what's behind it. Just because it sounds good, doesn't mean it is good. So, the way that we went about doing it is we first shot this observation, right? So, I'm sorry if I'm going to sound like dusting off past memories of high school, but if the scientific method is you start with an observation, so we had the observation of a gap between strategy and execution. And then what you do before you develop a hypothesis is you get some reviews. So, we interviewed executives based on that observation from company like Accenture BMC computer associates or CA, Citrix, CSC Dell, HP, IBM NetApp, Oracle, SIP and Semantic. And what we did there is say is this is this phenomenon that we're observing something that you're observing too? So, we went and confirmed that hypothesis. So, the, the the confirmation was yes, that occurred. Then we went and looked at financial reports and pulled out some trends of other businesses that were happening. So, we pulled out examples of CEOs and from annual reports that highlight that provide proof points of this gap. So, we saw that executives are focusing on pragmatic, profitable growth, continuing to retool the sales engine, eliminating waste, trying to drive differentiated support at the point of sale, transforming rep seller behavior outside of their comfort zone. Were all trends that we saw way back in 2008. Do they sound familiar today? Brian?

Brian Lambert 14:06

Yes, they definitely do sound the same, they're actually getting more heightened, and new business models are actually emerging to tackle those things. And then to when you rattled off the list those companies, those companies have evolved, and they're still around, and some have been on the ropes, you know, but but they've all gone through some sort of evolution. And I think that was a good sample set there. To to use, right, you 10 years later, these companies are still still respected, and they've gone through their own evolutionary change.

Scott Santucci 14:39

So, the second thing that we did to confirm the observation was, maybe it makes sense to get a buyer's viewpoint of the gaps between execution. This is all before defining it. This is the work that we did before that. So, what we did is because we're Forrester, well, geez, we already have access to buyers. So, I just interviewed some actually many and here's some of the trends that we observed. Buyers are stratifying their suppliers into a caste system. We saw many, many, many efforts underway. Actually, there were many people forced her to do vendor analysis and the like, and saw a lot of vendor consolidations, actually real strategic programs to move people into procurement. Another one is that buyers are differentiating among vendors based largely on their engagement strategy. In other words, what we found is that buyers prefer to work with work with the companies based on the way that the sellers engage with them, not what their products and services are. That's a myth. That was we found that to be a myth that the branding is the preference, or the price point was the preference. Another thing that the third observation that we found in engaging with those buyers is that they rarely find value from conversations that they have with vendor salespeople, as a matter of fact, the data that we have at the time was less than 15% of executives found that their inner interactions with sellers was valuable. So, what that held us to to make ask the question is if these are if these things are going on, that buyers aren't really valuing it, companies are spending a tremendous amount of money something's something's gotta give.

Brian Lambert 16:23

So when you and when you look at that, on the buyer side that you mentioned the caste system that we're going to differentiate based on how people engage with us and this idea of relevant conversations and what that looks like, I think there's been fuel put on that that fire on the buyer side, you know, you hear you've got challenger sale now challenger buyer, but, you know, more importantly you have this idea that buyers and the people involved are really having a hard time making decisions, you know, 6.2 people are involved. This idea of a caste system is becoming You know, bipolar, if you will, or or, you know, two groups now instead of multiple groups, you there's either that you're in a transactional sales pattern or buying pattern and you're, or you're in a highly consultative one and in the middle ground is hard to occupy.

Scott Santucci 17:15

So, I think you're right. So, you know, going back to the scientific method of where we were right, it was, we have this observation about a gap between strategy and execution. Then we did the did the research to see whether it's true. So, we talked to people if that was a valid thing, then we looked at financial reports and, and earnings calls to get some data there. We collected data from buyers, and then we went back into into inside the resident companies and made observations there. And those observations really came up with this observation of random acts of sales support underlying the underlying the ability to execute. So, we found that companies are spending 15.9% of their SGA on stuff to enable sales conversations, we found that the fragmentation of these efforts confused customers. We found that because of that, because that information is all over the place, it creates an organizational drag. I'm wondering if all of the different definitions of sales enablement that haven't been thoughtful, are those that are is that's what's driving a lot of this activity that we're being so focused on getting something out the door and not worrying about...

Ep19 Inside the First Sales Enablement Summit

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 19

The first Sales Enablement Summit was held in September 2019 and Inside Sales Enablement was there. Held in San Francisco, it attracted Sales Enablement leaders from the world’s largest companies and exciting startups to share success stories, experiences and challenges of the people actually doing the role.

Companies presenting included Yelp, Salesforce, Workfront, Oracle, Lyft, Sage, Progress Software, Pluralsight, and Zendesk.

Brian was one of those keynote presenters and blew away the audience with his talk that included: interactive exercises, findings from you - insider nation, some frameworks from Scott, mixed in with his own personal experiences.

In this episode, Scott unpacks the lessons learned and the overall experience so if you didn't get to go to the conference, you will be able to get something out of it.

Some observations the guys discuss

1) Three of the keynote presenters are still using the original Forrester definition of sales enablement

2) Individual contributors, program managers, or department builders: What type of sale enabler are you?

3) The state of sales enablement

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence and increase span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives, analysts, consultants who are practitioners, we've learned the hard way what works and maybe what's most important, what doesn't Yeah, and I podcast is different. We actually are spending a lot of time talking to our listeners. And what they're telling us is they appreciate our conversational format and how we're talking real issues. We're sharing the insights that we're learning from what's happening right now. And on this podcast today, we're going to talk about the sales enablement summit, which is the first ever sales enablement summit in San Francisco and that was here in September of 2019. And I Brian, were able to actually give a presentation and a keynote at that event, and I thought it would be good to debrief with that live with Scott because we haven't talked about it much. Thank you, Brian. So, the what we'd like to do here at insider nation for you our insiders is give you up to keep you up to speed on the things that are going on in the conversations but also the events to says I wasn't there. I have a bunch of friend’s questions that I want to know from Brian, and I'm sure you do, too. So, the first thing that I'd love to do is, you know, at a high level, I'd like to know, tell me about the event, Brian, you know, so what was this function? Who were the type of people there? What was the mood? Describe for me, you know what it was like? Because I want to know. All right, cool. Yeah. So, this is San Francisco. It was event was on like, Wednesday, Thursday, it's actually being run by an event management company. So, this is the first summit or event that was non us, you know, vendor sponsored, and also not run by the sales enablement society. So here you have basically a startup of a what it what they believe will be a global summit to bring together sales enablement practitioners, with others in the field, and in this case, they ran the sales enablement summit alongside the product. Marketing summit. So, in the sales enablement space, there are about 250 folks from a variety of different companies, small, medium, large startups, you know, even large international companies, and there were a couple of people there from overseas, but they were companies like Amazon, hired Pluralsight, etc. And the other conference, which was Product Marketing, at about, I'd say about 450 or so, um, so almost double the audience size there. There was one mainstage and we would have our networking events together with the product marketers, so from a content perspective, a lot of different topics, but Scott, I think it'd be great for me to share this little nugget. we haven't talked about the the Forrester definition before Oh the new one, right. Yeah, the new one. And, you know, as we shared with with our listeners in 2008, you know, we we actually defined sales enablement as Forrester came out in 2019 and redefined it. But interestingly enough, two presenters at this conference used your definition, our definition from foresters 2008 definition not the new one, to talk about sales enablement and frame it out. And both of them said that definition was their favorite. And there were two different lenses. One was, hey, this strategic view of sales enablement is what I liked. And the other person that shared it talked about how it was an ongoing initiative that it was a strategic function, yes, but it was also this idea of ongoing value add to the sales. So, what's interesting about that, Brian is literally just this week. I was I was in Chicago, working with an executive, an executive group about you know, transforming from one business to the cloud business. And you know, what they had as our as a as a reference material, the old sales enablement define report from back in 2008. Also, and they call that one.

Brian Lambert 05:08

So, the actual physical report?

Scott Santucci 05:11

Right, the outline and everything

Brian Lambert 05:14

Printed out? Yeah, like laying around. Right, right. Well, that's good. They still print things. That's good.

Scott Santucci 05:21

Well, I think the point is, they're using that as a foundation to move forward towards the future, and some of the newer ones. And

Brian Lambert 05:31

Yeah, that is cool, because I liked how that report broke on the definition, but it also broke down all the different ways that you could tackle sales enablement. And it was it was it was broad at the time, and people actually gave feedback that this was a pretty broad definition. But when you look at what's going on today, and I know you've done a lot of work around the digital transformation and how that drives strategies forward, that definition that that there were seeing pop up here in the course of, you know, two presenters and actually a company, a vendor company, a SaaS company, that definition is perfect for, you know, helping enable go to market. You know, that's pretty cool. So that's that's a, that's a, an interesting data point, I think, because when I looked at the presentation that I gave, that definition was obviously the definition that I use as well. So, there you go.

Scott Santucci 06:29

So that's what we should probably do a whole report on that, or a whole podcast on that, but it's so thanks for that update. So, you threw me for a loop in our report from when you were in Boston by telling me right by jumping on me live that boom, guess what? Forrester has a new definition that that was surprising. And now you're telling me Hey, we had a had a presentation of sales enablement practitioners that isn't vendor sponsored more is it sales enablement society and three the people use the old definition. So that's really weird. But guess what?

Brian Lambert 07:05

Yeah. And you should start going to these events and you can hear it yourself. There you go. Yeah, exactly.

Scott Santucci 07:09

I should start out that's funny. So, alright, that's now what I want to do is I want to know what did your What was your presentation? So, no, this is more for our vendors, Brian and I walked through some of it beforehand. So, you know, he got he got my eyes on it, we roleplay it out parts of it. But I didn't hear the exciting conclusion, right? Because we, we changed the ending a bit. So, I'm gonna get to hear exactly what goes through us the storyboard of what your presentation was. And then we'll unpack it later.

Brian Lambert 07:45

Yeah. And you said it's for our vendors. But I think you meant for insider nation.

Scott Santucci 07:49

Yes, insider nation. That's true. You're right. I met you I'm actually reading on the screen. So, in case you in case, you know, sometimes we actually have notes. And we're sharing them on on zoom. And I was actually talking and looking at that. So, I think a better without the notes, Brian.

Brian Lambert 08:11

That's right. And because one of the things that I did want to call out as, as I was sharing this with you is the idea that this was, again, as we saw in Boston vendor supported and again, I want to call out that this is great, it's great to have, you know, highspot seismic and others, they're supporting this because they made it possible. And they also injected a lot of case studies and examples that I could actually reference in throughout my presentation. But the timeline here are the story art, if you will, of mine was a, you know, businesses are evolving. We know that but industries are evolving, and I use the you know, the the news or print industry in the news industry and talked about how it's evolved from print all the way through to the vices and, and what's really driving that is customers. So, we all know these things. But then I asked, right, right after that, you know, what are you guys enabling? And they gave the ad two minutes, and they were able to kind of read out and I basically used, you know, Scott, the, the domains, the flavors of sales enablement, as a way to debrief that exercise. So, they were able to bucketize their work in either sales, talent development, sales messaging, demand generation or sales administration, as this is that the domains and the flavors. So, I would say at this conference that 250 people, let's say over over 50 to 60%, were in the talent development, sales, talent development 15 were in sales messaging, smaller than about, you know, small group or in demand Gen, and only like one or two are in sales administration. So then, so the bulk were in sales, talent development, and then I asked, okay, well, what are you guys working on and we bucketized that discuss into, there are those who are building something, there are those who are running ongoing programs. And then there are those who are leading a strategic business unit. And so, 250 I'd say 80% are in a build and deliver cadence or effort. 10 to 10 to 15% are in a running program, like for example, onboarding. And then three, three or four people were raise their hand if they let us strategic business unit. So, the story arch continues with Okay, well, what's common across all of these domains and lenses is you have to be able to generate demand, position yourself, get funding and have an operation. And what we did Scott is, you know, bar your idea of this concept that you've been working on and you and I both actually been working on for quite some time around thinking about sales enablement, as a business within a business. So, we walked through things like who are your investors, you know, do you get the finance to actually, you know, run your business? And what kind of business are you in? If you're going to build and deliver business, what does that look like? If you're running a program business, what does that look like? And if you are leading a business unit, what does that look like? And I use my past experiences of, I've started up now five sales enablement functions. I started one up with you and for others, and I use my example here of my recent work to set up a pivot and l&d organization to an enablement function. So that was that's the, the big, the big story arch. And that was what we covered. And I appreciate your help and landing this concept and around business led business because that really resonated with folks. They're really, really chomping at the bit to discuss this idea of running the function of enablement as a business within a business.

Scott Santucci 11:58

So let me before we talk more about that. Let me summarize what I heard. So, I heard what you did is you framed the conversation by saying, Hey, here's an example. And not I think I know, I know you use you yourself as an example, as an old paper boy, and how much that that whole industry is changed to frame it out. And then given this, all of our businesses are going through this kind of transformation. So, then you said, Okay, so given this transformation, we all work within companies that are that are transforming. So, what we're going to do is we're going to ask, what is it that you're enabling? So, the first question that you asked was, what type? And we should we should probably do a whole podcast on how we came up with the flavors or you call them the domains. But the overwhelming majority of your audience is focusing on training and development type activities, right?

Brian Lambert 12:59

Yep. That's correct.

Scott Santucci 13:00

So, then the next thing is of those the next lens that you do. So that's my lens. Brian's lens, in order to sort this out that I think is great, is looking at it is are you an individual contributor? Are you building programs? Or what we what Brian, I like to call services? Are you running a strategic department? And the overwhelming majority of your audience? Were individual contributors? that right?

Brian Lambert 13:28

Yeah, that's right. And they were in a, you know, startup mode, basically getting the function or their role off the ground.

Scott Santucci 13:34

Right. So, what I would imagine then is that people, those people would be ideal because most of your audience is training and development or the sales, talent development. And then the second part is individual contributors. They're probably their orientation before hearing your talk is probably, Hey, I got you know, building playbooks or I'm building training programs or or the like.

Brian Lambert 13:57

Yeah, that's right. How to drive change, how to get a seat at the table, things like that.

Scott Santucci 14:03

So that's it, that's where I'm at, then you drop the the bomb of business within a business on them. And you said that went over really weIl. I gotta tell you, I'm having a hard time understanding how that went really well, when somebody's thinking about the world through an individual playbook. Walk me through that, like, what was some of the reaction? Why did that resonate so much? Why did you get what kind of feedback did you get afterwards?

Brian Lambert 14:29

Yeah, that's a good question. Timing wise, I was towards the end of day one. And I sat in the audience and I had a lot of empathy for what I was hearing all the speakers. But but the challenge that I was having as a previous practitioner was, wow, everybody's talk is very laser beamed on things like a playbook on change management, on how to get a seat at the table on how to learn from past failures. These are, it's rapid fire, you know, and we just got kind a fire hose with a topic, topic, topic, topic topic, and there's no overarching structure for any of it. And you know, they're all individually passionate and well delivered. But the person that really struck me the most is this this lady that was a product marketer. And she came in and said, I treated sales as a customer. And she went through a method in approach this approach to talk. Like I said, you got to talk to Scott. And her her whole thing was, let me tell you about the approach I took to treat sales as a customer. Yeah. And she was the first to do that, as opposed to, this is what I did and unleashed. And I say, you know, two, I did this is what I did two sales was everybody's talk. This is what I did to sales. She was the first one that says, here's what I did with my sales leadership, which was a massive breath of fresh air for me personally, and then I came up.

Scott Santucci 15:54

Brian, let me pause on you that because I think you bury the lead on on those those kind of things. It sounds subtle what you're saying, doing things to sales versus doing things for sales. The or with sales. Talk to me a little bit more about what you mean by that, because I think that that idea is really powerful. But I think you gloss over it and bury the lead a little bit.

Brian Lambert 16:21

Yeah, sure, um, when you look at and I'm, I'm gonna, you know, me, just let me just tell you what, what the topics were, you know, if I, if I'm pulling up the agenda, you know, right now, and I look at it, it is, and I'll just, I'll just hit you with it. Um, it's it's playbooks. It's new hire training. It's playbooks. Again, it's sales kickoff. It's here's one on content, how to build content. here's here's why. on, you know, getting a seat at the table. So, in the thing about all of those is that I struggled with was nobody really ever talked about sales by hand. And you and I both know through the podcast is we've talked a lot about making sure you're managing stakeholders and that you're managing up down the cross, but also that you're serving sales leadership. Yep. So, I just call that out as a red flag to the audience to say, listen, you know, here's my approach to this talk. I'm at the end of the day, and I've asked them, I said, who here hat is now leaving with all the answers? And everybody laughed, literally, the whole room laughed. And I said, well, who here is actually leaving? And right now, in your moment in time, a little bit more confused about what you should be doing? Pretty much everybody raised. So, everybody agree that it was great topics, but with these inputs, it led to a little bit more confusion. Yes, this this is what I'm gonna talk to you about today. I'm going to attempt in this time that I Have to frame up everything you heard today. And also give you a launching pad for tomorrow in a way that organizes this stuff so that you can drive your business forward. And that's what we're doing. That's how I started my talk.

Scott Santucci 18:11

Wow, that sounds powerful. That's great. So will tell me how people reacted to it then. So, you've done your presentation you've done, you've done your mic drop, you know, you walk out of there, people are carrying you off the stage. Oh, tell me, tell me what the bar conversations were like. Yeah.

Brian Lambert 18:33

So, there were there were three buckets I'll say bucket. One was for folks that were new in their career, and they didn't...

Ep18 Manage Up & Across: Deploying SE Technology with Amy Benoit

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 19:01:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 18

In this episode, a listener (Amy) calls into the show to discuss managing disparate workgroups globally. The great thing about Amy is she has a marketing operations background -- and considers herself a sales enablement practitioner. Because she has a marketing operations background, she has a broad, yet practical view of what sales enablement deployments look like.

Her biggest challenge? Managing up.

As someone who helps sales sell, the experiences Amy has experience in

• “Connecting dots” across a variety of stakeholders including business units, marketing ops, sales ops, sales enablement, and sales leadership

• The idea of “governance” and what it means to ensure the various stakeholders have a say and protect the brand

• The feedback loops using analytics and voice of sales data

• Participation in the governance conversation

• The idea of “taxonomy” and what it can mean to a variety of different stakeholders

• The regional/global view of enrolling others in country

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I'm Brian Lambert is a sales enablement insider. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:47

Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way of what works and maybe what's more importantly, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 00:59

We like to think our podcast is different, and our listeners are telling us that it's different. And we use a conversational format to help share the experiences and only people who've been there and done that can provide, as we've been pushing the envelope in the profession for over a decade. And today, everybody, I'm pretty excited about this episode because we have a very special guest. We have Amy from a large matrix organization. She's actually in marketing operations. And she's joining us today in response to our podcasts that we've been having on stakeholder management. So hi, Amy, how are you?

Amy Benoit 01:35

I'm well, how are you?

Brian Lambert 01:37

Great. Thanks so much for joining us. I know we had one quick conversation and we're throwing you on here. But we've done two episodes, we did an episode 13 we did a chicken Hawk episode and that, that got quite a lot of buzz on LinkedIn. And then as a follow up to that four episodes later in Episode 17. Scott and I walked through a story that I had around Managing stakeholders and a large fortune 50 company. And you reached out to us based on those two podcasts. And Scott, you know what? I'm bringing her on here today. You haven't even talked to her. And we're gonna put you on the spot.

Scott Santucci 02:14

I love it. That's great. So, you and Amy go way back then, huh?

Brian Lambert 02:20

That's right. But But she's part of the insider nation. And we should consider family but she's coming after you. And I say Here we go. So

Amy Benoit 02:31

nicely.

Brian Lambert 02:32

That's right here from Pennsylvania here. So so, um, I really appreciate Amy, your background and how you've been involved in sales enablement. And one of the things that that was cool to hear from you is how you're passionate about helping salespeople be successful. But I'd love to hear from you. Why do you want to join us on the on the podcast today?

Amy Benoit 02:56

Well, you know, I listened to that fantastic podcast episode about humble chicken Hawk, and I thought, oh my goodness, this is part of my world, I am tasked with just executing something that is very large and trying to figure out how to collaborate and get that buy in from all of these different stakeholder groups because as chicken Hawk found out, you know, everybody wanted something. And so, I, you know, my heart went pitter patter a little bit because I could totally relate. And then I was so excited that you however many out it was like three or four episodes later, you kind of, you know, you broke it down a little bit more and went into that whole stakeholder management piece because it resonated with me, it's critically, you know, important in our organization. And I like could really appreciate how the level of effort that went into putting together the plan. And then of course, you have to operate the plan. And some of the trailing points there, as you were leading the discussion was, you know, how do you really more effectively manage up? And I think for me, I was like, Huh, that's a great question. Because while we and our you know, in our organization are charged with the same, you know, managing down, across and up, I would love to hear your expertise on how do you more effectively manage up.

Scott Santucci 04:35

Excellent. So, what we're going to do now is we're going to move into a section of our podcasts. So, if you followed along, this is very much like the conversation, Brian, that we had with Beth, but air quotes, but we're going to do some speed date consulting. And this is just a conversation between Amy and myself. Brian's going to pick it up and say what does this mean for Less than or so, Amy, when you talk when we talk about what expertise we have, I need a little bit of information about what it is that you're trying to manage in the first place. Right. So, what if you could give me a scope of the business problem that and what your remit is? I'd really love to get some context on that.

Amy Benoit 05:20

Sure. So, I am tasked with essentially leading the strategy for our sales enablement portal. And we are a unique organization and that that portal actually sits in our marketing office, you know, our Mar tech stack. So, I'm engaging oh my goodness, every day with sales. You know, that's, that's Sales Users, sales leaders, marketing stakeholders, Product Management, legal sales, support and so on. And one of the things that I find challenging is as well I get a lot of people who kind of understand what we have to say in See the value. I also want to, like get to a point where I have more aligned conversations with some of the leadership team. So how can I make sure that we're embedding some of those valuable metrics and learning points that tie back to our corporate imperative with our leadership team, so that they then you know, it's never a good point to say, you know, that they're gonna put a management down style, right? We always want that groundswell of users and people adopting our portal. But I really want to pick your brain and understand how it is best to engage with senior leadership. What are the things that resonate with them and how can they then cascade that information back down to their teams, so there's a circular loop?

Scott Santucci 07:00

Yeah. So, let's start there. So, you said something that you're responsible for the sales enablement portal that's part of the MAR tech stack. So, I assume you've made an investment already.

Amy Benoit 07:13

Absolutely. Yeah. So, we've had an investment. We've been operating our sales enablement portal for about five years now. And that's been funded on the marketing side.

Scott Santucci 07:25

So, let's go back to one of the things that's really vitally important. So, in terms of in terms of story arc, and I feel at I feel a bit handcuffs since I don't have a whiteboard. But if whiteboard, what I do is sort of imagine a story arc, right? And the story arc starts with why and then now, so why did the did this investment happen? And that's really where I want to start off with Because if I understand why, then I get get to now. And then we can start figuring out the different messaging. So, if you can give me what was the business driver that made the investment? And, you know, you don't need to tell us how much the investment was, but it was it was it significant? Was it little? How many people were involved? How, how much went into that?

Amy Benoit 08:23

Sure. That's a great question. So, it was a significant investment. And, but I will say, you know, we started more with a proof of concept, and then grew adoption from there. But really, you know, one of our driving factors as to why was, you know, twofold. We really wanted to have a place that was the source of truth for content. And we also really wanted to streamline and kind of shave off that time it takes for sellers to get those resources, kind of you know, get their business. airings and facilitate those conversations with their prospects and clients. So, looking to, you know, reduce the amount of time in process that it would take, you know, for a seller to get that kind of competency and, and direct conversation and also provide a place that people thought of as the source of truth. I will say, you know, we have driven he continued to drive towards, you know, those goals and, and have had success for sure. I think sometimes, you know, where we're headed now is, you know, other technologies come into play. And we want to continue to kind of point out the value and point out the connectivity between our platforms, that how can we ensure, you know, leadership is really continuing to connect those dots? Yes. So, what I would also imagine to just what you my last context question, before we get into it, I would assume that, so the audience doesn't know what company you're in, I know what company are in. So that's a little unfair. But I would assume that the amount, you have lots of products, you have different sales teams. So, part of the benefit of using an outside provider to provide a technical platform is to help provide, you know, connecting across all of that information. Is that true? So, part of the difficulty or not the difficulty, part of the complexity is that you'll have each one of your sellers can configure different different products and services together, they can configure different conversations together based on the complexity of the accounts that they're selling, too. Is that is that accurate? That is accurate. I mean, we do have them very expansive product portfolio. And, you know, being a part of a matrix organization and operating in 17 countries, we do follow some internal structure where we have sales teams obviously aligned by channel but also, you know, teams aligned to industries and capabilities. So, we have a lot of information to manage, and being able to have that central location that not only allows me access but allows us to see what's being used and allows those who are producing the content to ensure that the most current on brand legal compliant piece of content is accessible, that's how you know of high importance to us. So there, you know, by nature of where I fit, you know, interacting with all of these things. Different groups, and we're kind of like sitting at the hub of it, you know, there's a lot of importance placed on being able to not only streamline the processes, but you know, facilitate best practices as it relates to content. And, you know, provide a through our platform, that level of governance and kind of, you know, taxonomy in the sense of how that content is served up and aligned based on different regions and different industries and capabilities.

Scott Santucci 12:36

Yeah. So let me give a really simple framework here that will help drive our, our conversation. We have a challenge of communicating up, across and below. You're asking us about up right so we're going to just concentrate on. So, if you're following along in the bouncing ball. One of the challenges in order to do that, however, is you can't Only skewed adjust up. So, what I'm going to talk about here is apparently I am very much focused on on children's children's stories. But think about this as the Goldilocks condition, right? We have all the lights goes in the dad's bed is too big. kid's head is too small. You know, the middle one is just right. So how do we find the Goldilocks condition about managing information? And how we arrive at that is sometimes we start out too abstract. Because what we want to do is we want to find the simple, but the most basic, simplest design point. And then we can get to detail because we have so many different people who want their thing right now at this moment, and how do you balance between the two? So, what I've learned is that when talking with executives, I start with the abstract, the or what might seem too abstract. Which is too simple. So, one way to think about this is a platform like you've invested simple or too abstract, is I like to think about this as sort of like cable, a cable set box for sales. This is getting dated, right, I'm gonna have to come up with a different analogy as everybody moves to most digital, the cable set box for sales, where we can provide lots of programming, and that each individual seller can tune into the network programming that's available for them. And then you can work with all the other content suppliers who have their own shows, or have their own channels, different product, marketers might have their own channels. And of course, like any network, there's going to be FCC rules associated with things for standards in the like, you have compliance, that chapter factor too, because what, what what decencies in so is that in terms of that model, does that work as a starting point?

Amy Benoit 14:56

Yes, that works. And I'd like where you're headed. With that, because you know that that's kind of, you know, what we have driven towards. So, I'm, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how that can be more effective.

Scott Santucci 15:14

Right. So the reason that I share that is typically what happens and this is a story in general, I'm not saying this is the story that's happening inside your company, but story in general is there's a lot of momentum to get something like this going, and and each person who funds this because I doubt, maybe the funding got picked up by marketing, but I doubt very seriously marketing was going to advance forward unless they had support from sales, different sales, sales leaders, and I'm sure there was other people that had to chime in on it as well. Maybe it had to get bought in so there's a lot of cooks in that kitchen, and everybody's got very specific expectations. And so, you go through that process, and that helps get it started. And then you know, as it goes, On, what happens is people give feedback on maybe the design of the tool. So, if we use our cable set box analogy, we're going to get feedback on, hey, you're scrolling bar of how you communicate what what programming is available. Why don't you modernize it? Or this particular show sucks? fix that. Or I want reporting, I want analytics on how many people are using this or what their clicks are. And can you tell us about you start imagining if you're a network business, like a cable provider, start imagining all of the different information that you can have. And soon you are just spent time talking about all these deliverables and we're offside of managing the expectations. Why did we find this uh, this network in the first place? So, what I like to do is kind of go back and always make sure that for the key stakeholders and the way that I like to envision this is that you're Running a business within a business and the business that you're running, you're operating is this network, right? The cable set box, you are the cable provider for your company company x. And as that cable provider, you have a as a business within a business, you have investors. So, who are those investors? And what is it they want? So, I think we need to get back to what what is it that you're doing that can always add value to say the CMO. And maybe we can identify where the CMO is, are there issues about where we can bring branding in the trenches? Or is it an issue of where we can start communicating differentiation, or we can start seeing better connection points of all the sum total of all marketing, Product Marketing, for example, and the value there not just clicking into each individual click point. So, I'm going to I'm going to pause there. And then let's think through what are the ongoing value drivers that the CMO wants to provide to the rest of the company? And how does your business within a business help make him or her successful? Because I think if we start there and get really discipline and think about five things, then we can move on to a different stakeholder like a sales leader of a particular, I'm sure you're organizing verticals, or geographies, or things like that. So yeah, so let's just concentrate on the CMO since that's where the budgets happening.

Amy Benoit 18:35

Sure, so definitely, you know, on brand on brand content, compliance content, you know, so so ensuring that content is reviewed and updated within a specified cadence. Being able to support new Product initiatives, that's another important area. So that we have a way to bring in that information and communicate that out to our users. So, a little bit of a, you know, internal columns perspective. And really, you know, and I guess the other thing that I haven't mentioned, you know, were under a, some different technology transformations. But you know, our end goal is to eventually connect our sales enablement portal to our Salesforce instance and serve up that content to our seller so that they don't even have to look for it, you know, in essence, kind of shaving off more of that process time for them to be prepared. So, we we also, you know, carry that on the side of the marketing house. So, you know, that is very important to us from a measuring what works, what's getting used, what works. That these teams can go back and refine their budget. Yeah, and produce content that resonates.

Scott Santucci 20:08

So, let's, this is great just to start off with, right. So, you've mentioned a variety of different value drivers. We don't have the time to go into that. But here's how I'd like you to think about it. So, the CMO, you hit you have two ways to give updates to him or her, right? One way is, hey, I'm getting a lot of complaining about X, Y or Z and we can just start imagining all start rolling our eyes about all the complaints uhm product marketers think that oh my god, I got to do all this tagging. Why can't I get my beautiful material out directly to the...

Ep17 Set and Manage Executive Expectations: A Case Study

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 13:55:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 17

In an earlier episode (#13), Brian and Scott discussed the very important concept of Stakeholder Management. When we published that episode, we received a lot of feedback from the Insider Nation. One of those feedback items was a person asking us for a more in-depth discussion on stakeholder management moving beyond the Chicken Hawk concept and asking us to breathe life into the idea.

In this episode #17, Scott interviews Brian and his recent work internally at a large company. As a Sales Enablement leader, Brian shares his learning and experiences in managing across the organization and managing up the organization. The guys walk through this important concept and dive into the operational challenges. They also talk about expectation setting approaches, and they explore the importance of managing the message to multiple altitude levels.

Listen to the episode, and you'll hear what Brian and his team did to work up, down, and across the organization to:

Communicate
Manage the message
Declare victories
Handle push back and feedback from sales

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci

Brian Lambert 00:35

Scott Santucci 00:48

Together, Brian, I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives, as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way What works, and maybe more importantly, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:04

Our podcast is different. We use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people who've been there and done that can provide, as we have been pushing the envelope in the profession for over a decade. In this show, we're going to hear from one of our listeners and pick a topic and talk about it. What did you get Scott?

Scott Santucci 01:24

So, one of the things that's fantastic is that our listeners are becoming more and more engaged, and we're getting some, some emails and this one's particularly great. So hopefully you can tell that we're trying to include you all as as, as our audiences inside our nation. And I love this topic because what he did is share and I'm always protecting the names to protect the innocent, some points of view about what's important to him. Great. What he says is lastly my big my big big challenges as enablement practitioner are number one. stakeholder management and a pas and parental you started this and if you know what we're talking about, that's Episode 13. Or better yet our chicken Hawk chicken Hawk episode, but I think it's much bigger than any practitioner realizes we couldn't agree with you more. Number two prioritization process. I think it's different than stakeholder management. And this is often and then this and off of this is almost model a business case to justify investment enablement process. Number three is capacity planning, what it actually takes to do one facet of enablement properly. I think we all underestimate the resources, so be great to have some kind of strategy or formula for before taking on a project. That's very, very true.

Brian Lambert 02:54

That might take five or six.

Scott Santucci 02:56

Yeah, exactly. Oh, each of these topics might take five or six, right? Yeah. Number four, a strategy for general continued green reinvest in your function and selling to your CFO, your value. That's the business within a business strategy that we've talked to we're still trying to figure out how to introduce that one so, any ideas on how we can just get that topic going, we'd love to hear. Number five, how to say no without losing trust. And number six, it could be us here at insert company name here to protect the innocent. Innocence, but enablement practitioners to me are seemingly awful at reinforcement strategies.

Brian Lambert 03:36

That's a good one too.

Scott Santucci 03:38

Yep. So those are those are the topics and in the spirit of trying to give you what we want. This is this topic. We're going to go into stake holder management, or aka chicken Hawk. And with me we have we have Brian Lambert, who recently was with a he's under nondisclosure, so we can't say exactly what the company is. So just imagine I'm beeping it. I'm kidding. I'm not gonna say the name of the company was recently had a large fortune 500 company where he ran enablement function. And we're going to talk about the importance of stakeholder management. So, first question to you, Brian. On a scale of one to 10. How important do you think stakeholder management is as a sales enablement practitioner?

Brian Lambert 04:25

Well, 11. Right to 11

Scott Santucci 04:30

He's gone to 11

Brian Lambert 04:33

Yeah, how good how good am I? A Two. Yeah

Scott Santucci 04:38

it's a difficult it's a very, very difficult thing to master. But let's talk about a little bit why it's so important. Why would you say it is a 10? And why do we not hear about stakeholder management outside in the community of sales enablement? Why are we only hear about onboarding or coaching, or you know, tactics? How come sales outcome stakeholder management if you think it's 11 why isn't it getting a lot of talk out there.

Brian Lambert 05:03

I'm not 100% sure, maybe because nobody's got an approach to it. Because a lot of times, I think people inherit remit or the department and they just execute what has been going on. In this case, I think it's important to think about the transformational nature or where the function is going, and how disruptive it can be in a positive way to the success of salespeople. And when you think about that, it impacts a lot of people. And you have to do what salespeople do, and you have to map it all out. So maybe it's a quote unquote, a lot of work for folks to figure out but it has to be done.

Scott Santucci 05:44

Yeah, so I want to add comment a little bit there. Brian, you mentioned transformational. I think we would you agree that within the sales enablement world there are some people who like who believe sales enablement is transformative, but they're not doing it. Companies, there are some who believe sales enablement is tactical and it should be just tactical. And Aren't we all over the place in the community in terms of the flavors of sales enablement?

Brian Lambert 06:10

Yeah, absolutely. The flavors or domains of sales enablement, and then, you know, is it here to execute well, and optimize what we've been doing in the past? Or is it a transformative role that requires new ways of working or new processes and deliverables, if you will? Or outputs to help salespeople be successful to close some sort of gap? Yeah, you know, improve efficiencies, etc.

Scott Santucci 06:38

So, let's do this to help the listeners or help our audience or help inside our nation. I'm hoping guys that we can, you know, get behind that. So let us know like,

Brian Lambert 06:47

We might need a sound effect from Nick every time you say insider nation, right? Audio engineer, think about that one.

Scott Santucci 06:55

And I'm also thinking about if he does our listeners, just Hashtag insider nation out there and let us know that you like the term and let us know that you're out there. But back-to-back to this topic to help inside our nation known being able to identify with Brian's story. Brian, tell us a little bit about the scope of what your enablement function was. What was the impetus for what you were doing? What was the scope of role at a high level, just real lightweight with the business problem? Was this the size of your team? Where did you what what function Did you report into give us some of those demographics before we start talking about stakeholder management so that way somebody can engage in your organization and why stakeholder management be so important?

Brian Lambert 07:43

So ultimately, we reported into a shared service function. It was designed the Shared Services function was designed to support and enable the call center so the call centers or sales and service call centers. So, in that view, the group that I worked in had traditionally been an L&D group. However, the VP that came in was very transformational. We basically work together to sell a vision for evolving the function and from traditional l&d function into an enablement function, which means it had primarily two groups, technically three. So, I'll go with the three-legged stool, because these are important concepts. I think that we can work on later Scott with this business, a little bit business idea that you have, but the the first function was a solution in group, the group that would intake you know, tens of thousands of initiatives, we had quite a lot of feedback coming from the field, and also a lot of initiatives that we had to run so they would intake we would scope it we would architect with solution architects or in this case learning experience architects, as we call them. That was the group that I ran is about 35 people. That group broke into architecture and program project management or business relationship management and project management. So that was that was the one group. The second group was a Build Team, a build function writers, production folks, curriculum designers, creative specialists, etc. This was a group of about 80 people, they put finger on keyboards very technically skilled, very good at what they do to produce these types of outputs that reps would use in the field. And then the third groups analytics business analytics function to measure all that as we evolved our services over time. So that was my group was on the I ran the solutioning group, about 35 people. And this idea of stakeholder management is huge, because we were the group responsible for

Scott Santucci 09:55

Great hold on let me let me ask, I want to just make sure I'm clear here, Brian. So, the sales enablement function had three stools, a solutioning. Stool, a build stool, and a analytics tool.

Brian Lambert 10:11

That's right. Three legs of the stool, same stool. Right.

Scott Santucci 10:14

So, and they all report into a shared services function. Where did the Shared Services function report to?

Brian Lambert 10:19

Into the business units.

Scott Santucci 10:21

Okay, directly into the business units. So yeah, funding from multiple different business units?

Brian Lambert 10:27

Yeah, in a way it was. It was a fixed investment that they figured out at the top, and then we had our, our funding was headcount plus, get consulting dollars, if you will, professional services that we would go get, and we'll get an annual drop, if you will. And then we had, we actually increased that over year over year, but that's that's how we were funded. Gotcha.

Scott Santucci 10:50

So, what I'd like everybody to do before we start talking about stakeholder management imagine in your head, you know, just a box that's the sandbox that the organization is in It's a shared services function of which there are multiple business units with which, whom are more or less contributing to pay for this function. There are three components within that within that masterbox, three smaller boxes within it. So, a solutioning box, a bill box and an advisor, a advisor analytics box, our hero, Brian, our hero is in the solution inbox. And so, within the solution box, let's talk about why stakeholder management is so important. What I try to do is do might do the job of laying the land Tell me why stakeholder management is so important.

Brian Lambert 11:41

It is really sets and manages expectations when you have an enablement function that is evolving. And, you know, we made a lot of promises. We we had to sell it internally. It had to be stood up internally, it got carved out from existing groups, we took some headcount over in the process. We Just come through a merger environment. And it was one of those things where we had to release that and manage expectations. And I think that's ultimately what stakeholder management it's about on both sides, ourselves and what our people can do what we can deliver in the context of an evolution or a transformation, but also the impact business impact we can get over time. That was critical.

Scott Santucci 12:23

Okay, so the, to be simple about it because we started off talking about stakeholder management, using a Looney Tunes cartoon. Right to go back to go back to centering, centering principles and simplicity. The simple answer to stakeholder management is about setting and managing expectations. Right, right. That's right art is that then you said you said it was a two on how well you are? Because it seems so hard.

Brian Lambert 12:52

Yeah, I learned a lot. We broke it into three groups. So just to keep it you know, actionable here. You have to manage up, you have to manage across, and you have to manage down the managing down. I think we should park that maybe for another podcast and just talk about the up and across piece. Because I had to learn a lot there. There's there are a lot of landmines. There are a lot of expectations, as we talked about, and quite frankly, some politics right there. And that's something that even though I'd come from a sales background, is important to make sure that that we stay on top of proactively to build the right kind of relationships across because that's ultimately where your your power and your funding comes from. And then also above because of the pressure that they're getting from the executive team to transform the customer conversation.

Scott Santucci 13:46

Right. So so, let's let's Park this here for a second. So, we have stakeholder management is about setting and managing expectations, not rocket science. Well, now that now that you've broken that down one, one level further You have three different groups, you have up, across and down. Let's talk about up right now. Just point number one, what is managing up me? Who is the up?

Brian Lambert 14:12

In this case, shared services leadership, who really cares about, you know, business impact the number of customers we're serving internally, the volume of initiatives, the quality of initiatives, and, you know, the feedback that they're getting, to make sure that they're adding the right kind of value. And then our business unit leaders who really care about business impact of, for example, new hires, or knowledge management articles with processes in them to make sure that they're right and they want to make sure that they are ultimately serving customers the right way. And in this business environment, compliance driven, making sure that it's done legally correct, etc. So, there's a lot of inspection by the business units to make sure that we're equipping the right reps with the right content, message, processes, etc.

Scott Santucci 14:59

So Let me ask it this way. So, I'm being purposely challenging here. Because Brian and I both know that bringing up a topic like stakeholder management can be difficult and people can tend to assume that's too theoretical or too big or whatnot. You just say you said that you are we're in the solutions team. How is messaging, why isn't messaging up? just deliver to the VP of the Shared Services function? I don't understand. Isn't, aren’t you just managing expectations of one person? Is that a pen or a woman who's managing all the other relationships of all the other groups? Why are you involved in that?

Brian Lambert 15:42

Yeah, that's, that's a good question. But it's, yeah, I guess it's easy to miss. But it's one of those things where if you don't do that, you are pigeonholing yourself, with assumptions So in other words, people will assume and by people, I mean, leaders and sister organizations, for example, shared services in this organization, let's pretend there's eight groups. And we were, you know, one of eight. So, seven eighths of the sister organization wouldn't really necessarily know what we're up to other than the interactions that they have with our people. And that's I don't think it's a good expectation to expect that one leader would be able to handle all that. And we really had to be proactive and actually plan out how we would stakeholder manage these, you know, seven other groups, if you will, from a communication perspective, messaging, declaring victory, even for some wins, which is important. And also, being clear on when we screwed up and doing that proactively so that things didn't fester bubble up or turn into an issue.

Scott Santucci 16:53

All right, so let me I think I need some stakeholder management to manage talking about This. So, I, here's where I got a little bit lost. And maybe you can help provide clarity for me in my head, as I'm following along with you. And I'm actually, if you're listening, I'm actually using a sheet of paper to draw out these things so I can make it more concrete. I have in my head that there's a variety of different business units with whom are contracting or have expectations with your VP. Mm hmm. You said seven other sister organizations. What's going on in my head is I'm confused because I thought you only had two other sister organizations, the ops group or sorry, not the ops group.

Brian Lambert 17:45

Oh, the analytics. Yeah. So, enablement had three three legs of the stool, huh? That is one function of eight.

Scott Santucci 17:55

Got it. So, there are eight total functions, what were the other functions?

Brian Lambert 18:00

Things like policy procedures, a group that would translate the product and technology into what our what our sites needed to be doing. That was a second group of third group was quality QA. A fourth group was tools technology. Our group was pretty much specifically aligned to equipping sellers with content. So, messaging and training content knowledge management content, but we didn't do the...

Ep16 Elevate Your Sales Management Role & Dimitri Mendelev

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 16:23:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 16

The more things change, the more they stay the same. For example, there was an old classification system the early Greeks came up with to classify the basic elements. In 1869, Dimitri Mendelev evolved that concept and began to classify the elements by their atomic mass. The idea of classification is critical to how you understand something. While sales managers have been critical to sales productivity for 100+ years, it's an often misunderstood role. The same applies here. Classification matters.

Let's face it. Buyers have evolved, marketers have evolved, IT teams have evolved, leaders have evolved. And that leads to an important question -- What about sales managers? How have they evolved? Companies expect a LOT out of their sales management team. How they view (categorize) their sales management team at the organization matters. Do they expect forecasts on time? That means managers have to spend time in spreadsheets and opportunity reviews.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:00

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Saantucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:00

I'm Scott Sachi.

Brian Lambert 00:00

Scott Santucci 00:00

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives, as analysts, consultants or practitioners, we've learned the hard way, what works, and maybe what's more important. What doesn't.

Brian Lambert 00:00

Our podcast is different. We use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people who've been there and done that can provide, as we have been pushing the envelope in the profession for over a decade. And in today's show, we're going to discuss what changes in the marketplace that's causing you to re examine the role of sales managers. What is this idea or concept of role ambiguity? And why is it so destructive? And what are the five traits, timeless traits, sales managers should have to be successful in today's modern selling landscape? As usual, we start with a centering story to give our episode a theme. Scott take it away from here.

Scott Santucci 00:00

Thank you, Brian. And thank you all our listeners actually want to share a little bit an idea actually shared by one of our listeners. And I was talking with one of our listeners and he said, you know what we were doing. We're actually having a podcast listening club. And what they're doing is they're listening, they're sharing with their team.

Brian Lambert 02:15

That's cool,

Scott Santucci 02:16

a podcast, and then they're all talking about it the next day to come up with ideas and what inspired them was one of our earlier podcasts, it was the first one or the second one talking about how difficult it is to do all the internal selling. And this particular director like Geez, that's a big problem that we've got. And he shared shared that point of view with other with his other teammates and and they all said yeah, we have a hard time selling, whether it be the coaching program to the frontline sales managers or selling what's required with the, with the marketers, so they got this idea to do this pilot Cast listening club, and we'd like to share that with the rest of you. Maybe that's a way that you can, you can take advantage of our podcast.

Brian Lambert 03:07

That's great

Scott Santucci 03:08

with that. That's pretty cool story, right? Yeah. Speaking of cool stories, for a very forced segue, Plato, Plato. Plato was one of the first people to write about elements. And there was a classification system that the ancient Greeks use to describe the world around them. And if you know,

Brian Lambert 03:31

I know this, I know this, okay. Is it is it fire Earth, Wind and water,

Scott Santucci 03:37

close fire, earth, but air is what they call it, and then they added another one

Brian Lambert 03:44

melancholy or whatever.

Scott Santucci 03:46

Nether. Yeah, sort of space. Right. Yeah. Right. And that those, those categories became the foundation for everything. And really, that's where alchemy, you know, it was a big deal, and we No alchemy has to be kind of silly. But if it weren't for alchemists, we wouldn't have modern chemistry. Along came back to 1869. And yes, that's the same year is when we have the Brooklyn Bridge story. So, a lot of great stuff happened in sales enablement.

Brian Lambert 04:18

Yeah, I'm sure somebody's driving down the roads. Like that's the same year as the Brooklyn Bridge story.

Scott Santucci 04:23

Yeah. All of them are doing that. Right. Right. My gosh, how uncanny?

Brian Lambert 04:29

I'm pretty sure you're the only person on the planet that

Scott Santucci 04:33

Well, then anyway, continue, or listeners doing engaging in 1869, same year as the Brooklyn Bridge story, but elsewhere in the world in Russia, a guy named Dmitri mendeleev was coming up with an idea and he made an observation that said, what if we classified elements not by Earth, Wind and Fire? Haha. That's a band but not by the classic Greek one, but by their atomic mass. And at the time in 1869, they only had the ability to measure a few of the atomic atomic mass. So really, basically, he had a different lens, on how to categorize things, which is really all all it is. And using the atomic lens, what happened is he created what is now we now know is the periodic table, and you learn about this in chemistry, or maybe you've forgotten that you've learned about chemistry. And when he first produced it, there were only maybe six or seven elements in there. And he predicted slots that ultimately were discovered because of of how we thought about this stuff.

Brian Lambert 05:46

There you go. So, what a great piece of history as usual, but what does that have to do with sales enablement, and I framed out a theme around sales managers. So, what's up with that? What does that have to do a sales manager?

Scott Santucci 06:01

Well, there's a couple ways that this has something to deal with it. One is categorization. So, one of the things that we're going to talk about here would be the categories of the attributes of what what makes a sales manager, a sales manager. And one of the things that the elements in the periodic table are is really is just a classification system. It's just categories. That's it. The second thing, the second reason that this is important is it's a from what to what, though whole universe, the whole idea of chemistry didn't start until after dimitrie metal of the periodic table because without it, it's not really a science. It's just a bunch of experimentations. It's alchemy. So, if it weren't for Dimitri, there wouldn't be chemistry so you can blame him. And then the third thing that makes this so important is modernization though World in 1969 was very, very, very different than the sandal, this handle clad pontificators of Plato and Aristotle. But yet somehow people kept doing the same thing over and over and over again, it took somebody different to look at it differently. And that's what we're talking about here is that the environment that we're selling in now is a different environment altogether. Maybe it's time to revisit what we're thinking about with sales managers.

Brian Lambert 07:32

Yeah, like that. And this is an interesting one because I often tell a story of hey, you know, raise your hand if you believe buyers have have drastically evolved, you know, roomful of people. Oh, absolutely. Everybody shakes their head. Okay. What if you What about marketing? they evolved? Absolutely. Everybody shakes their head. Oh, my God, I got so much stuff. complexity, oh, digitization, you know, everybody talks mumble Yeah. What about what about IT? Oh, absolutely. You know, we're all in the cloud. Okay, what about products? And how those products and platforms? Oh, yeah, you know, everything's in the cloud. It's subscription now. Yep. Okay, what about sellers? Oh my gosh, they need to change but the boy haven't they, they they're stuck in the 1800s. Everything's the same, you know, they need to elevate, they need to be different. But yeah, their worlds change too. But yes, it's still the same. That debate rages. And I say, Well, okay, cool. What about what about leadership? Oh, yeah. Everybody needs to be a better leader. build those cultures, we need to focus on inclusion and diversity and leadership and Okay, great. What about sales managers? Uhh good question. The often-forgotten sales manager, and that's the reaction I get. It's just crickets. They thought about that.

Scott Santucci 08:52

I think that's a great setup. Brian, you know, sort of going around the horn about how much things have changed. And I think also it's in my experience, and I'd love to know what you think about this is so what actually is the job of a sales manager? What what are they? What do they do?

Brian Lambert 09:10

Right? Well, it's a little bit tongue in cheek, right? People can be a little defensive when you walk up to them say, so what do you do here? Right? It's like the office episode office space. I have the obscure movie reference now. But, you know, but that is a great question. Because it's, it's a, you know, something that I think every role has to go through. Certainly, in my career, I've had to ask myself, what am I doing? What is my my role? And what's my value add? And when you do that, you end up a little bit out of the realm of your classic job description. I don't know about you, but if I'll ask the listeners here, you know, how many guys are doing exactly what your job description says. And most people would admit that what they're hired to do is is not the same thing that they're being asked to do on a day-to-day basis. And so is the same thing with sales management. And so, when you ask that question, what do they do? I think a better question is, you know, we talked about this a couple weeks ago is what's their what's their value? And what what, what are they asked to do? And what's their role value contribution in the company? And I think there's at least two camps. I don't know what you think about this, there's the compliance driven, drive your forecast, you know, look at the spreadsheets and do the reporting side. And then you have this you know, a little bit air quotes, the coach, and and these are presented as to, you know, bipolar by polar opposites, you know, not bipolar, just polar opposites of the spreadsheet jockey versus the coach. And those are your only two choices. And I think there's way more to that. And I wanted to explore that here on the podcast. But before we go on with that, what do you think of those two bifurcations either

Scott Santucci 11:00

I think in our world that we're in now with a lot of certainty, we like to put things into buckets. I think the reality is, at least when I've talked about this, sales managers are human beings. And not unlike most of us if you've ever been in a situation where in your that catch 22 spot where you're being told to do one thing, and the other thing that you're being told to do, you're gonna leave something on the table. I think most sales managers want to do right for their salespeople. Yet, they also not yet they also want to do right and they want to look be looked at the eyes of all the things that are being asked of them to perform all the tasks. I think the challenge is that the number of tasks that they're being asked to like I've heard a lot of people say sales managers, your spreadsheet jockeys, well, I think the people who say that don't really have empathy or really understand all that pressures that the sales managers are under. So, I think what I think your characterization is very fair it would be it's pretty easy to say, the company wants me to enforce the forecast. So, I'm going to live in the spreadsheet and manage, manage my sellers and ask them constantly, you know, where's your forecast and you know, the weekly practice exams begin? That's an easy thing to do, because that is a request many companies have on their sales managers. But then it's it's definitely a request. Most sales managers, particularly the ones that came through the field don't like to do because they want to do what they they think and that's being client facing. So, you have this conflict, that's, that's rife. So, I think your your your contrast, we're in the business of imposing compliance and making sure our sales managers are following but you know, the road and then the other one is, we want to help develop our people. I think those people characterizations are right? But I don't think we're going to find a pure sales manager that fits neatly into either box because they're pulled in so many different directions.

Brian Lambert 13:09

Yeah. And then, so I agree. And maybe on this podcast, we'll we'll explore a characterization. I certainly have some traits that we're going to share here at the end. But before we get there, I think if you look at and pause in this gap, you know, this, from what-to-what gap that you mentioned, with your story, and you say, Okay, well, what is that? What are the categorizations? Right, and I could, I think their listeners could probably help us come up with 100 different things that are coming at sales managers right now. But the, the, you know, three or four that come to mind, which are massively, you know, sucking the time out of the day of sales managers to me, are, you know, marketing and sales aren't aligned to buyers. You know, there's a there's a disconnect, not between my marketing and sales. It's not about sales and marketing alignment. It's about marketing aligning the buyers and sales teams aligned to buyers and managers see that and they have to work through that. Um, another one is how they're organized. And you and I have talked a lot about this. And this is becoming more and more prevalent in the digital transformation literature that's out there and the trends that you're seeing in TED Talks, the organizational structures of yesterday, can't meet the needs of buyers today. And you see all kinds of new operating models and, you know, organizational structures popping up and its managers see that that their siloed views aren't helpful. Another one is that these random acts of all the stuff that they're asked to do from attending a focus group on you know, initiative 127 of the week, to, you know, the forecasting to the new messaging, the new sales, you know, methodology, the new product, push the new CEO and date, whatever, are actually putting more burden on salespeople than helping them. And you know, unfortunately, and we've talked about this on three or four episodes, the ideas or the initiatives in the program to the projects that sellers need to participate in are actually helpful to sales, they create more complexity. And he had a sales manager seeing all this, but what are they supposed to do? And that is where I wanted to put the put the pause in here, because that's the role of sales manager in that type of complexity. And in that type of pressure, from above, from from below, customers from internal groups, I just listed three or four, there's at least, you know, another 10 or 15 that I could easily come up with, but my point is, that's the role of sales manager to go in there and help sellers be successful. When I think

Scott Santucci 15:52

I think that what you're talking about that all makes a lot of sense. And I think the the question that I'm going to answer myself here is, you know, kind of so what was so what, what what what business problems that that create? And I think that this is the challenge of the difference between executing and operating. So, this is one of those areas of what's the difference between sales enablement and sales operations. When you go through an operations standpoint and you think about things like span of control, and you say we have this number of salespeople, and is it eight is it six is it 12 whatever that number is that somebody computes in a management consulting world that span of control number then we assign a sales manager for it and for the most part, the roles forgotten after that. And so, you have this issue if you if you have sales managers who are smart people, they want to be successful. And they're they're mapped to a span of control number. And there's all this all these different variables, you get a lot of confusion about who's responsible for what. So, is the sales manager actually really responsible for enabling the rep? Or is it the responsibility of the sales enablement? department? We talked about that in one of our podcasts earlier, you should go listen, listen.

Brian Lambert 17:27

Yeah, and I totally agree because that I mean, we're obviously we're outside the realm of approving vacations or conducting performance reviews like every other line manager. This is uniquely sales.

Scott Santucci 17:40

Exactly and I think that's that that is the the lack of clarity that human resources so let's also talk about all the all the cooks in the kitchen. Like all span of control conversations, that's as a consultant you go through and think through the those different you know, what are the rules of the road and then you have all the HR requirements dealing with policies, you know trading, trading people, their jobs, every every every function in the whole company has that. What makes sales managers unique is somebody is responsible for developing a group of people that report to them. Some people believe that responsibility should be the frontline sales managers. Other people believe that responsibility should exist elsewhere. Right there we have conflict. Another challenge would be who's actually really responsible for developing the culture of the company, the culture of your individual team, you as a sales manager might want to be more aggressive or think that or the sales team might want to be more aggressive, and that might that might conflict with the overall culture of the company. Another example would be there's lots of policies about using I'll give you a quick Perfect example of that. The the storage restraint.

Brian Lambert 19:08

Hundred meg laptop storage constraint is right on the 10 meg 20 meg email

Ep15 Simplify the Sales Eco-System: A Story of PIP to Performance

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 16:35:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 15

Brian and Scott bring key issues to life, through the lens of a seller:

The burden on Salespeople
Customer buying journey and buyer enablement
What sellers must do to sell more

Scott shares real-life situations of his journey (very openly and honestly — you likely will not hear this kind of stuff from your sellers unless you have deep personal relationships with them). He talks about his journey from selling products to selling solutions to executives.

The story starts off with a lot of excitement and thrill about doing something new but, by doing what he was told and taught - Scott found himself on a PIP (performance improvement plan).

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Scott Santucci 00:50

Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives, as analysts, consultants or practitioners, we've learned the hard way, what works? And maybe more importantly, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:06

Our podcast is different. We use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people have been there done that can provide, as we have been pushing the envelope on the profession for over a decade. And today, in this show, we will discuss what does the seller's experience really look like? Is your system set up to help sellers be successful? And what does an integrated enabling program look like? As usual, we start with a centering story to give our episode a theme. So, Scott, take it away from here.

Scott Santucci 01:41

Thank you, Brian. And Hello, everybody. One of the things that we get the opportunity to do and as more and more of you users, we're calling you inside our nation, keep listening. We get more and more feedback and I had had the opportunity to have a conversation with one of our If one of our listeners, I'm going to try not to out too much about her, because I'm sure this is embarrassing. And we were talking and one of the things that she was saying is that sometimes some of the things that I say, you know, make her feel stupid. And you know, are you an academic person? And Brian, you know, full well, boy, I hate being called academic, but maybe sometimes the way that I think about things and talk about them in that way. Yeah, you deserve it. Thanks. Thanks. I appreciate solidarity there, Brian. Just kidding.

Brian Lambert 02:35

It's an interesting thing.

Scott Santucci 02:37

One of the things is, uh, this topic is such a hard thing. It's it's both simple and easy as as we like to talk about sales. It's both fit sales is simple, but simple and easy. And one of the things that I'd like to share this time is to talk about what makes me so passionate about sales enablement. And actually, one of the things that I'd like to share is a story from when I was in the field. So, we're going to go back in the way, way way back machine, the company at the time I was working at at Mehta group. And in our third episode, we actually talked about how I built a sales enablement function there. But this is before even that, and I'm

Brian Lambert 03:20

actually, because you you actually came out of the field you were a seller before that. That's right, that's created in that episode. So, this is actually is that going to be the story when you were a seller?

Scott Santucci 03:30

Exactly. It's pretty cool. So the this story isn't, isn't really that great. It doesn't put me in the in the greatest light, but as a seller, we've just gone through sales training, and specifically it was solution selling training. And if you've seen the movie, Jerry Maguire, where Jerry wrote that letter, that memo out, everybody was really really excited. I was really, really excited at the time. We were selling the subscription services. So meta group is been acquired by Gartner group. So, if you could imagine buying reports, and we would sit there and be trying to talk about what the deliverables are, here's our service. Here's our ssms service or GNS service, here are the five things that you do here, deliverables about it, you get these deliverables, and you get this teleconferencing. You get these conference tickets, and blah, blah, blah. So, if that's what we were talking about, who do you think that I was selling to? I was selling people up like a guy named Mark fleischman, who actually was at bellcore. And his job was more or less a librarian. He would meet me in the cafeteria with me. He wouldn't even bring me in I would even get the code to get in. Right. That's That's how low level and we debate about how many license fees and what the what the the usage was, and we would haggle between $15,000 For $16,000 about what the renewal was for that particular service. That was a rough and it sure as heck wasn't what I thought was was selling. I walked out of this solution selling training, and I'm excited. I'm gonna go and learn to go talk to executives. That's, that's what I was gonna do. So, my primary focus was, I'm gonna go talk to executives. So, think about it going all in how you drank the Kool Aid, you're excited. I really drank the Kool Aid. I, I was a process zealot. At the time. I thought the solution selling thing was fantastic. I drank the Kool Aid, I went all in. That's good. Yes, it is good. So, the first thing that I did, at the time, my territory was the state of New Jersey. And the very first opportunity that I got, I decided you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go call on the CIO at Merck. And literally This is no joke the the CIO at Merck's name was Dr. Popper.

Brian Lambert 06:02

So, you're gonna go from the library and eating a salad with a librarian to calling Dr. popper, the CIO at Merck.

Scott Santucci 06:10

Well, yeah, of course, right. That's what they wanted us to do in the training, right.

Brian Lambert 06:14

That's a transformative experience right there.

Scott Santucci 06:16

Well, we'll talk about that. So, I called up and I left a voicemail message. I can't remember exactly what it was. I went to lunch. I'm feeling pretty good. I come back, I see that I have a couple voicemails on my machine. I'm excited. Because Dr. popper is obviously gonna invite me back in so I can give him my pitch and all the solution selling stuff is great. Well, actually, on my voicemail, there were three voicemails, all of them were from Merck. None of them were from Dr. popper. And they were progressively more agitated, threatening, almost. And this is no lie, saying that I'm just a vendor. I'm not to talk to you. Good call on Dr. Dr. popper. I was gonna say Dr. Pepper doctor. And if you ever do this again, we're going to make sure that you don't sell anything to Merck ever again.

Brian Lambert 07:12

Dang. So that when only did you get one call? You got three calls back there just a little threatening.

Scott Santucci 07:18

That's right. So, I'd love to be able to tell you what awesome heroic thing that I did to be able to recover from that situation. But that wouldn't be the truth. The truth is, I said, screw it. I'm packed up my things. I went home. I shut the shades of my apartment at the time.

Brian Lambert 07:39

getting weird

Scott Santucci 07:41

I put on Free Willy and I just watched Free Will because I wanted to feel happy because I felt so small. I didn't call on a on a CIO again for a while. I went back to the RA Fleischmanns again, Michael fleischman again until finally, I Got my courage up again. So, my next time was, I said, all right, dust that off, you know, shake it off scotch shake it off, Scott, you still believe in that solution selling stuff. So, the next bat the next time I went after this was before Campbell soups moved their headquarters and their headquarters was in was in New Jersey. So, I called on the CIO of, of, of Campbell's soups and honest I can't even remember his name. And Brian had he did you see the movie Wall Street? Uh,

Brian Lambert 08:30

yeah, a long time ago, though, ya know, so, the Wayback Machine.

Scott Santucci 08:34

All my references are so David, I'm clearly not a millennial. But in Wall Street, there's this scene where bud Fox, the main character, Charlie Sheen, gets his meeting with Gordon Gekko. And how did he get his meeting with Gordon Gekko? Do you remember?

Brian Lambert 08:53

No, I don't tell us.

Scott Santucci 08:54

He called Gordon Gekko every day for like 80 days. in a row and showed up it is showed up the day of Gordon Gekko his birthday with a box of cigars. Oh, that's right. Gordon Gekko finally let him in. Well, you know, I'd seen that movie and I swear to God, I literally called this guy for 60 days straight till finally I got him on the phone. And every single time I left a voicemail so he you know, he kind of knew me. I would highlight research where I thought our research was better than Gartner's because I knew he was a big Gartner shop. And I just call kept calling kept calling. And lo and behold, one of those days he actually answered the phone. What did I do? What happened?

Brian Lambert 09:43

You froze up

Scott Santucci 09:44

That Yeah, exactly. I would love to tell you an awesome story about I had this great rap and I you know, got a meeting with them. Nope. I kind of went uhh and he was nice about it. Scott, you've been pretty persistent. Can you Please tell me how you're different than gardener? And then I fumbled through some words. You know, it was sort of like a word salad of a bunch of things that I had heard or that we've been talking about. And he said, Well, I gave you my ear time. Will you please stop calling me now? And I went yep. So, opportunity number two. I do, I went back down to sell into the sound of the cubicle people.

Brian Lambert 10:31

All right. No, Free Willy. No Free Willy tune.

Scott Santucci 10:34

Okay, so fast forward now. Now, you know, maybe two, two months later, I had worked on an opportunity and I built a I was able to get access to this guy named Keith Kebel. Keith Kebel, at the time, was the VP of shared services at Bristol Myers Squibb. I knew that he had he had responsibility for a budget It was $50 million. So good access right, access to adult money. And at the time they were, they were implementing SAP. And they had the Cooper's the Cooper's team in there, and we were talking about how now I'm getting more into a rap about what our products do, and our products are you should be thinking about our products like an insurance policy because who knows what the risk of a bad decision could be? And I had told them about like, what would happen if Hershey if you know you've heard about the Hershey incident where they had an SAP challenge, and they weren't able to ship candy? What would happen to you if you did that? So, all you have to do is buy our you know, our particular service or X number of dollars is like a decision-making insurance policies that all sounded great, invited us in. And really what what the goal was, I didn't really know what the goal was. And I didn't ask I said, Oh, yeah, awesome, like as excited. Sure. So, I brought my brought my subject matter expert, Barry wildermann and with me, and the two of us show up and there were 20 of them. Because this is such a big deal. And they started using a lot of language that I had no idea what these people were talking about, honestly, there was like words like, release and instance and things like that. I had no idea what they were. And I just wrote the keywords down when we were leaving in the parking lot to get back in the car. So, what happened in that meeting? Barry, how did it go? He said it went great. And he listed off three or four problems that they they were going to have. So, I was like, super great. So, I called Keith back the next day. Hey, Keith Baba had a great relationship. How did it go? He's like, it was great. You know, that was a great meeting. Thank you very much. And I said, see you're ready to do business with us. I'm getting ready to close on my solution sale. Brian. How did that go? He said, Well, Scott, you kind of confirm that we're on the right track. Well, Barry says you're gonna have problems. What are they?

Brian Lambert 13:08

Barry says you got problems.

Scott Santucci 13:13

And I said, Uh, I don't know, you want to get them back on the phone. And at that point in time, I lost all my credibility. Yeah, you're never able to get Keith Kebel on the phone ever again. So here I'm here I'm at six months into my solution selling experience. How do you think I was performing? What would my overall numbers like?

Brian Lambert 13:40

Zero?

Scott Santucci 13:41

Yeah. Dude, I was on a pip. Yeah, so.

Brian Lambert 13:48

So, you had these at bats. You're trying to do what the company says. And your manager puts you on a pip.

Scott Santucci 13:55

Yeah, yeah, I was gonna talk about that later. So, I was on a pip, and we could talk about what our plan was. I was on a pip. So now I'm like, oh my goodness, I'm worried about losing my job. I certainly wasn't, you know, killing it. As a rep I was about at Target about it plan, maybe 80% when I was selling to the selling products to the Fleischmanns, but my, my, my cubicle pipeline was all gone because as you know, it takes a lot of energy and a lot of effort to try to build relationships with with the executives. But thank goodness. And I sort of had this come to Jesus moment with myself saying what the heck just just be you. So, thank goodness I've been building a relationship with with one of the CIOs. So, the way j&j is organized was is around these sectors, and I built a relationship with one of the with one of the CIOs and one of the sectors and I've been talking with him about the idea of an insurance policy but About one product, but across all of our all of our products. I talked a lot about decision making. I said why don't we facilitate a meeting of your direct reports and one thing led to another and suddenly, things started clicking in and with a with a company, so large and so many different, so many different IT leaders. I, at the end of the year, I had done $3 million, a business with with Johnson and Johnson. So, I'd done basically, three x what what my quota was, and that's one of the reasons that I became one of the top reps. Let's try it from writing all the business of the story that we talked about in the second part.

Brian Lambert 15:44

So, solution selling did work.

Scott Santucci 15:46

Well see, I don't know whether it did or didn't because I didn't really follow the solution selling script. I use some of the elements of it. Yeah, basically what I did was just get back to, you know, what problems do you have? Mr. CIO, well, we're worried about making the wrong decisions. There's a lot of choices with technology. Well, we have a lot of experts. Would you like to have experts on hand? That sounds great. How does that work? Well, let's simulate how that works. Let's let's put it to use. And you know, because I kept working on helping them use it, they actually gave me a desk there. I actually had a badge that I will go in and my desk and when you're there and you hear all the challenges, it's kind of easy, right to sell, but it took building that relationship. It took forgetting a lot of the stuff that I that I learned in solution selling and focus more on the people. And that's a that's, that's my story.

Brian Lambert 16:47

Cool. So, it started out with Dr. popper, then Free Willy, then Charlie Sheen and cigars. Then Bristol Myers Squibb with the insurance policy pitch. And then six months in you're on a pip on a pip.

Scott Santucci 17:06

Yep, on a pip about ready to get fired.

Brian Lambert 17:09

Then you had your soul-searching moment you're like screw it, I'm just going to be myself if I'm gonna get fired, I might as well go down just being true to myself. I can relate and then you know j&j conference meetings. And then that's that's how we ended up at that other podcast can't remember the exact number but

Scott Santucci 17:27

Number three right yeah

Brian Lambert 17:29

yeah. So, they I mean and the cool thing about that is, um, it sounds like one you figured out how to get access to executives right?

Scott Santucci 17:40

Well, the hard way. Yeah. I mean, let's let's let's, let's be honest it would we want other people to learn that way?

Brian Lambert 17:49

No. Well, I mean, kudos to you a lot of people probably wouldn't have been as committed. I mean, that's what's cool about that story is you were all in you know, you came out of that experience you hit the outlaw you know the I believe button.

Scott Santucci 18:04

Oh, you have no idea how many of my friends told me to not they would say that stuff is BS, you know look at look at that and look at our pipelines you know at least you know we're not killing it either, but you know, at least money right like dude in my friends were what they thought they were watching out for me. So, I had that I had the internal talk track of not doing well. I had the my managers but my but and of course, when you're on a pip, it's not just your manager, right? You have a review with the VP of sales to

Brian Lambert 18:38

Because that's when that's when the help starts

Scott Santucci 18:40

The quote unquote, help.

Brian Lambert 18:43

Yeah. And you know, remember, remember in Episode 10, I'm looking at the list here. We talked about the five sales objectives. Let's use that for our listeners here to structure this out a little bit. You know, in the first objective If you have to have, you know, a perspective, you have to bring a perspective to the buyer. Right. And you've got different...

Ep14 Improve Sales Coaching Adoption & Joe Gibbs

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode #14

One of our listeners, Rachel, shared her companies view about sales management and the difficulty managers have in transitioning from being a top-performing rep to sales management.

Sales managers have to live in two worlds, traditional "management skills" and also sales productivity contribution. Sales Enablement leaders looking to implement sales coaching need to be clear about their focus and intent. What can sales enablement leaders do to add value?

Joe Gibbs won Super Bowls 3 different quarterbacks. How? He coached to a system, encouraging people to be themselves, and focusing on outcomes.

There are a lot of people talking about front-line sales managers and having them "go coach more." As much as that's been discussed, sales coaching hasn't really taken off.

The guys talk about:

- What is sales coaching - the difference between sales coaching activities and sales coaching programs

- Unleashing the value of coaching, by embracing the sales leadership perspective

- What are the attributes of successful coaching programs?

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Scott Santucci 00:01

Hi, team, this is a What is that? So, what is a What is what is that? So, what I'm trying to do is create some structure and curiosity around some servers, certain things and some concepts and explain them and help make them relatable, explain why and whatnot and provide some texture around what's going on, what are some of the things we've got? They are super simple. The difficulty is there's a learning curve to get to simple, and then a comfort factor about applying. And a lot of this has to do with ambiguity, and why we need to produce lots of things to make things accessible. So, I'm trying to what is that? What do you think about what is that? Is that the right title? What should I call this series? You tell me because this is for you, you got to give me feedback. Okay, so one of the things that I think we all understand and can appreciate is that there are many silos involved inside of business. And they create lots of friction, which cancel each other out. And there is a need for Orchestration. I'm hopeful that casting you guys and in specific roles, what's fascinating is behaving in silos instead of operating and roles. What is that? What that is, is a massive amount of muscle memory that we have to create tools out visualize, that holds us in silos, we are prisoners of silos. And we think that we think we say, examples or symptoms of thinking in a silo. I don't know what marketing's doing. You don't need to know what marketing is doing if you're doing your role in our operating model. Or if you need to know column but ask them. There's nothing preventing anybody from doing that. Other examples of being in silos, I mean topics, you can generate your own topics, you you have your own, your job is to figure out how to make your role or the span of things that you can contribute to fit. And what we're all experiencing is this, either a lack of an operating model, or let you know, lack of clarity. And what we need to be able to recognize is all these things are VOCA related. We were clearly not prepared for the speed of V. We continue to use words like business outcomes, yet we haven't defined what makes business language versus nonbusiness language. So, we haven't made that tangible for other people. So, we're going to continue to struggle in uncertainty. So, we have uncertainty. Complexity is what's interesting is what makes something simple for one person is complex for something else. It feels complex learning something simple. So, there's a lot of paradox. If you look at the if you study complex systems theory, one of the things that is associated with complexity is paradoxes. Don't assume things are conflicting. Question it because it's probably complexity. And then finally, of course, ambiguity. Why do we have to have lots of slides because ambiguity is the thing that people hate the most, particularly in business, they can't stand it, they can accept the speed. People have recognized the complexity, that's something that people have tools over. It's the total fuzziness, and fog of ambiguity. And unfortunately, ambiguity is why there are so many friction points on the left. And, you know, the only way to overcome ambiguity is to create things to make things less and less foggy and to have patience as as we bring it along. But that's ultimately a key element of Orchestration. Now, one of the things around Orchestration is that Orchestration to Orchestrate across many departments requires an operating model. So not only do you need to be able to orchestrate yourself, but you have to orchestrate orchestrators. So, each of the different cogs have to be orchestration engines and upon themselves that have to tie together to overall orchestration. That's the role of being a catalyst. And that means there are rules that the other cogs have to follow. When those cogs don't follow those rules, they spin off out of control. Now, some of the cogs want to know how they fit into everything else. And what happens is too much time gets spent talking about the operating model and the philosophy of things and not doing so there's this balancing act that we need to learn how to establish and that clients are going to need you'd have to just establish the phenomenon that we are experiencing happens inside our clients. There is a reason we're organized. I'm going to repeat this. Stay in your roles and question your roles and why you're organized. Don't try to keep coming up with reasons to not be in your roles. The reason why is we have to simulate our clients’ experiences, it's the experience stupid to be able to appreciate what an operating model is. So, we can at least have the bedside manner to talk them through it. While we create the space to create the actual physical artifacts, we can't say things like muscle memory, that's not a tangible, concrete thing. And just because we've all experienced, and we use words, that means stuff to us, they don't have meaning to other people. So here are some examples of operating models. This is from IBM. I'm not going to talk to it. I'm just going to make observations. Here's one around the it operating model. Hint, notice the word capabilities over here, capability service, rigid service management on activities across functions. What its capabilities mean, here. Over here, let's zoom in on here. This is from Bain McKinsey. Look, what they're saying is the operating model is the gap between strategy and execution. Hopefully, you have seen often that we've talked about the blend between strategy and execution, what is the organizational thing that makes it happen? It's an operating model. But operating models are too new for people, or too conceptual, too theoretical, they're architecture driven. So, I've learned that particularly in the sales and marketing space, where the muscle memory that we have, there is too much activity. So, we have the balancing act, right? It seems contradictory. On the one hand, we're not doing enough, but yet we're criticizing people for doing activity without thinking. But we're thinking too much that we've got analysis, paralysis and not producing, then when we produce, it's not the right thing. So, all these different seemingly conflicting variables are experienced, even when you go try to introduce an operating model. Operating models are the key to success for any digital transformation, because what operating models do is cut between strategy and execution. And one of the things that we're going to talk about is, operating models have had their heyday in shared services organizations that are very functional, oriented, like legal, but they are introducing them breaks down because you don't have the vocabulary of only legal or the vocabulary of only human resources. What you're doing is you're cross pollinating across the vocabulary between sales, marketing, human resources, finance, and this English-to-English translation problem kicks in that English-to-English translation problem is huge, and colossally huge, and we need to do a whole lot more work of written bringing it to fruition and making it concrete. Now, that's not the purpose of this video, it's just sort of set up things, criteria for success, if you will.

Scott Santucci 08:14

But what is a business within a business? Why did I share all those other things? What I've learned is the easiest way to get people to think about a business within a business is to get them to think about their their function, as a company within a company, and what company are you? We use that metaphor in the, in the research, we have a lot of material to make this really, really concrete, I mean a ton of material, all we need to do is force ourselves to apply it, all that material and make it more concrete and connect the dots with what we're actually experiencing ourselves. What are we experiencing ourselves? It requires a lot of discipline just to stay super focused and say so what are we? What kind of entity is a sales enablement function? What kind of entity? What kind of service are we providing is growth enablement? What kind of slide am I producing? What is my role? How do I add value? The basic questions have to get answered. And that clarity allows you to operate. So, the business within a business construct is very simple. It's been developed over years and years and years. And it's very simple, but it's basically saying, who are your investors? Just like any other business, a business has investors, right? Then a company has its infrastructure. So, if your ups part of your infrastructure, your trucks, your fleets, the computing infrastructure, the buildings, physical infrastructure, all of that is infrastructure. And then in between, they have business processes a business has processes, where they convert inputs into outputs. And in between is where value is created. That's where value is created. That is how it works at its most simplistic way. So, the, the arrow represents a business process, which you can define at any altitude level that you want the conversion of inputs to outputs this conversion process. The more you do this, the more valuable you are. And it rests on top of infrastructure of which investors are paying for. So, investors are paying for this infrastructure. And what they really want are people who convert inputs to outputs valuable and add value. Okay, so now let's frame this out through the lens of Jen. So, Jen, is trying to figure out how she's adding value we can comment with, with subjectivity that she's adding value, but we don't have any objective measures to communicate if she's adding value or not. And that creates ambiguity. And any kind of ambiguity creates anxiety. What we have to do is police that place that out, so the way that we help that we're helping guide her on the organizational part. The other thing that she's got is I've got she's got a lot of people working for her, how are they contributing value? I hopefully, hopefully we all are experiencing probably the same dilemma, at least can experience on the on the hand of her own team. What how do we contribute? Everybody wants to add value. But do we know how all the piece parts fit together? Are we just blurting in and not understanding the situation, what the operating model or the business within a business construct does is allows us to lay out all the variables to start thinking through how the dots get connected? And in any business, that process there's going to be that group that converts the supply? You know, the suppliers are the input sources of input in a business. So, the suppliers have a manufacturing process might be the chemicals and all that other stuff, how it gets mixed together into something valuable, like maybe, maybe paint, and then it gets out to customers, it gets distributed customers. So, these that those are all clear processes in the digital world, what this process looks like we need to map out, it just isn't mapped out in a knowledge worker way. But we have the ability to say, Okay, let's put a box. And every one of these boxes represents a scope. And so, for Jen to continue to add value. So that's, that's her right here. She's gonna need investors, she gets funding from something, there is an expectation associated with the money that she gets, we're giving you money to do what in return, we get what.

Scott Santucci 13:07

So, think about the value proposition that we're trying to work on. Hi, I'm Jan, I want you to give me more money, that's investors. In return, I'm going to give you less stuff, you're not paying for a whole bunch of punchless things. As a result, you get better return. That's a really hard business proposition. Where inside the world, have you experienced somebody selling you that? Wherever you bought that before? So, it's hard to empathize. It's easy to conceptualize. It's hard to empathize. And this is why we have to do a lot better job of making things tangible. And the way we make things tangible is through slides, but the slides must be situationally aware, which means empathetic, we have to walk in the shoes. In your case, you need to walk in the shoes of me. Are you asking questions about what I'm experiencing? Your client isn't Jen, I am your client. Look how hard it is to get your head around anybody's head around who customers are. I'm going to flesh this out more. And there are many podcasts that we've got Brian and I have done to help flesh this out. But here's, here's the scope. Okay, so this is Jen in the middle. She's got her enablement operations team, we have to figure out what needs to go in scope to be able to deliver the most value. So, like any business, what what's the first thing you think about as any business while the business is what services that you offer? So, what services does Jen offer? Well, before we start thinking about the services, we could say, well, she does kickoff that's an activity. She has sales training. Is that a service? Is sales training a service, or is it an activity? How wired are people to just doing activities? And how immediately do we want to blurt that out? So, if we want to, if we want to go through the service part, like any business, you want to be able to establish the expectations with your investors. And the most basic form that businesses do is step number one, they write a mission and charter statement, you know, why do you exist? You need to write that out and flesh that out in order to get investors. Right. So, what does that look like? Well, then the next thing is you need to establish an executive committee, or a board of directors or some group of people in Jen's case, so the mission and charter statement is something that we need to work on, and we're going to fine tune. But she but it's pretty easy to identify who's paying, what budgets are, who are paying for her services. So, what that does is allows her to start connecting the dots between services versus expectations of people who aren't paying for something. This gets it this kind of decision making or discipline, as a word, again, helps create the foundation so that she can push back, it provides the foundation. So, who where are all of the sources of money? And then maybe there's other departments that she wants to include that she can stitch together to provide other services? Well, who would be those wallet owners? And how do you make the argument to move some budget resources to your budget resources? Okay, so then what you would need to be able to do is say, Okay, well, the quid pro quo, if this is the budget that I've got, and this is the things that I want to do, and these are the people involved, how will you evaluate my success? What does success look like? What are my success indicators? Are they measurable or not? Are they subjective? Or not? How do you create that kind of construct? So as a frame of reference, the value equation is a success indicator of a valuable conversation. In other words, a service that a customer that a salesperson gives to a customer, okay, now, given that, given that basic, hopefully, these these building blocks are in place, and by the way, hopefully, you guys are following here, there's a ton of detail on each one, and we establish or build up the details from there. Okay, so then what you would need to do is, if you want to run this overall department of services with success indicators, mission charter, you're gonna have to have a vision of what you're doing. And this is a big gap that a lot of people have coming up with a vision. So, for example, if you are an architect, what's your vision of how what services you're providing? To me, your executive committee of one, your suppliers would be detangler, clarity, etc. Every what success indicators have you co created to create? Alright.

Scott Santucci 18:16

So, these are the this is sort of structure. And this is where things start, you get to start really thinking and being thoughtful, how am I going to connect the dots? What is my responsibility? What is my accountability? accountability is a huge factor in making an operating model work. And in businesses where we're so associated with my value is on what I produce, rather than my value is what I enable, then it gets it gets really fuzzy. This is why it's incredibly important to have a consistent cadence, about establishing what your success indicators are. and managing expectations, talking through expectations. The only way that you're going to do it is just talking it through. So that's why you create a a feedback loop based on these indicators. Okay, now, it's likely that you're not going to have a one services company, you're going to have to have a portfolio. So, we have a portfolio of services that we offer, we offer clarity services, detangling, services, architect services, capability, services, concept or services. So, we're, my ability to manage the expectations of the whole part, if I'm Gen is dictated by the service portfolio and the vision that my of how well people are orchestrating in those in those groups. We have to be able to empathize with that, because we're going to have to be able to guide you through that because for Jen to be able to execute on some of the things that we're doing. She's gonna have to do this too. So, this is why things become self fulfilling prophecies if we don't produce them. We don't, aren't able to capitalize on the opportunities, we don't have to solve the problems, we just have to make slides and make things more and more clear. And make sure that what we're doing is we're interacting and engaging, engaging, engaging, engaging, not just doing and assuming. So, these are all things that are common challenges associated with an operating model. But using a business within a business model helps illuminate this stuff and gives guidance of what we should be doing. And what should be expected of somebody who's running a service portfolio, for example, okay. I did this wrong. Shoot, I did this in order, or so. Here's the service portfolio. The next thing that you're going to need to be able to do, or Jen's gonna need to do is, how does she steward How is she a good steward of her company's...

Ep13 Get Stakeholder Management Under Control & the Chicken Hawk

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 15:18:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 13

Sales enablement is a cross-functional role.

You have to work positively with: salespeople, sales managers, sales leaders, sales operations, various HR functions, IT professionals, finance professionals, product marketers, field marketers, customer success professionals, sales engineers, product leaders, and manage expectations from the c-suite.

How do you do it?

It can be manageable when the breadth of your remit is focused solely on onboarding. However, if you don't have a framework and toolset - you can submarine yourself quickly without a stakeholder management strategy.

In this episode, Scott Santucci and Brian Lambert introduce the idea of a cartoon to introduce the simplicity of the core idea around stakeholder management and we connect it to a famous quote from Zig Ziglar "you can get anything you want in life if you help enough people get what they want"

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

Hello, I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I'm Brian Lambert. And we're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to helping sales enablement leaders understand the big questions they should consider in order to be successful with sales enablement. In this podcast, we reframe, revisit, rethink and confront reality in sales enablement. And on this podcast episode today, we've got something pretty special, but I'm I'm not sure what it is Scott, frame it out for me. What do you got?

Scott Santucci 01:04

Thank you, Brian. And thank you everybody for joining our show. As you know, this is the part of our show where we frame out the topic or the theme today, this theme that that we're using, actually, we're going to go a little multimedia and try something different that we've never done before. I'm going to play you a clip. It's runs about a minute and 10 seconds. I'm going to comment a little bit along the way and see what you think. So, five bucks if you know who this is, or you know, buy a beer when I see you sometime. That is a little chicken Hawk. And that is one of the main characters and Foghorn Leghorn. So, the person talking now that's the dog. The dog is the arch nemesis of Foghorn Leghorn. So, he's just run in to another character in this little, tiny story. It's a cat. This character is a mouse. He's come out of the barn. All right, that's it.

Brian Lambert 03:14

That's a good question. So, so what will the cheese want? Got? No, just kidding. First of all, I don't know if the listeners can hear that. But it's pretty cool story. So, you may have to turn that up and you have my permission to hit the rewind button for a minute and listen to that again. The second of all, I don't know how you have time for all this to come up with this stuff. Are you watching chicken bog and Foghorn Leghorn for hours on end looking for clips there What?

Scott Santucci 03:42

Actually, when I was a kid, watching that, for whatever reason, I just remember some of the cartoons and this one stuck in me, because when I was getting sales trained, and I was listening to my Zig Ziglar tapes, Zig Ziglar has this quote. That just resonates with me at my core is quote, and I think anybody who knows what Zig Ziglar is, if not Google and learn all about it. He says, you can get anything in life that you want as long as you help enough people get what they want. And for whatever reason, I needed to have a way to connect the dots between those two. And so that's really how I get the this Foghorn Leghorn cartoon to me, epitomizes all of the challenges that we're dealing with sales enablement.

Brian Lambert 04:34

Yeah, everybody wants something different. Actually, I would add another component to that, you know, that the chain there, right, I need a bone, I need some cheese. Everybody's got a different need. But on the sales enablement side, you have to kind of orchestrate that all together into one outcome or one solution, right.

Scott Santucci 04:53

So, the way that I the way that I think about it into you know, put some, I feel like now we're in English class and trying to determine the meaning of Walt Whitman or some poem. For me, the chicken Hawk represents all of us sales enablement people and going from just a super eager Yay, I can get the dog a bone. But what is it that we want? And ultimately the end of this cartoon it's, you know, seven minutes it's way too long to play a clip like that is he ends up getting the plan from the dog because he gets that he gets the cheese to the mouse the mouse gives the bone or gives the fish that he caught with the cheese to the to the cat a cat gives get get it tells him how to get the bone and it gives the bone to the dog, who ultimately gives him the plan on how to get Foghorn Leghorn. So little chicken, chicken Hawk can eat that big, big, big, ridiculous Foghorn Leghorn. So, the point of this is, we sales enablement professionals. Like the little chicken Hawk, in the sense that we start off with, what is it that we want, we want to have a measurable impact. Now what our impact is, is different for each of us. But depending upon our company's scope and appetite, how strategic that we want to be, but at the end of the day, what is it that we want, you can get anything in life that you want, when we want big chickens for dinner?

Brian Lambert 06:26

And we want to help people, right? I mean, the mouse needed help the cat needed help the dog needed help, right? We want to be able to help people. So that's part of that to the chicken Hawk story to me was, not only did he want to get his own outcome, he actually was considering the needs of others. I'm not sure if that's what you meant as well. But I think I see that and sales enablement people all the time was is trying to be helpful.

Scott Santucci 06:49

That's right. And that's the second part. The way that you get what you want, is helping others get what they want. And the part that I like the best that resonate with me the most in this cartoon is when it goes, everybody wants something,

Brian Lambert 07:05

And they want something that they want something I think that was Zig Ziglar himself.

Scott Santucci 07:10

That's true. He also says that maybe Zig Ziglar his famous quote was inspired by watching, because Looney Tunes came out before Zig Ziglar. So yeah, who knows? Whatever it is, it's a universal truth. The user universal truth is that you are better you can get more of the things that you want, by supporting others what they want. Now to make this business focused, he because we don't want you to, quote, Foghorn Leghorn inside your company. This is just meant to make, make some of these big ideas, simple, but there's a term that maybe you should embrace. It's called stakeholder management. And really, that's one of the one of the critical success factors that all sales enablement leaders must master. If you're going to to keep your job and also continuously add value. So that's really the key. The key point that we're talking about here is stakeholder management, the importance of it, how stakeholder management helps you sell the value or the function of sales in a more and internally, and how challenging it is.

Brian Lambert 08:19

Yeah, like it. And, you know, little known fact, though the word cell is Icelandic. It's spelled like SJ e Ll, so our global audience could tell me how to pronounce that, like Val, or something like that. But a lot of our listeners may not know this, but the word sell actually means to serve. So, to your point, Scott enablement, who are you serving? Who are you helping, and this is a profession built on serving others and providing some sort of outcome to a group of people who are also serving others to provide some sort of outcome and it's an important profession, but yet from a stakeholder management perspective. Everybody wants to bow not only today, they wanted it yesterday, and everybody has their own needs. And you get into this I, you know, I've seen it before. And I've been in been in a role where this happen every day is a new request. And it's hard to serve people in that. What do you what do you think about that?

Scott Santucci 09:17

I think you're right. And I think that's one of the things we had a we had an episode. I think it was episode number seven, we're back on and we brought up this issue. But let's start to make this more real before we start making act academic. So, we're starting out with a cartoon. The nothing is less academic than that. But now then we bubbled it up to stakeholder management. Oh my god, the academic alert is way high. Let's talk about why you need these. It's why you need these things and why you need these tools. So, insert any Chickenhawk, any sales enablement practitioner like any of us, you've heard the stories from earlier podcasts. Our first two podcasts were about selling sales enablement, internally. The third podcast was how I set up a sales enablement function was heavy on on selling internally. Let's just break this down very simply, who are our constituents? To whom is it that we're enabling? And it's a very difficult topic topic. The sales members within the sales enablement society don't agree on what the definition of sales enablement is. We've commented before Brian for when we were at Forrester, we produced the first version for CERN upon itself has come up with a different version, elapsed time frame 10 years still debating about the definition of sales enablement. That's a circular wheel that doesn't add any value. Let's talk about your company inside your company. Who is it that you're trying to enable? Are they individual salespeople? If so, what's the bone they want? Is it the sales managers? If so, what's the fish? They want it? Is it the VP of Sales So what's the cheat that they want? And then in order to give them those things, we have to go into what is the CFO want? Because ultimately, we're going to need resources, right? We're going to ask for headcount or ask for for money. So, what is the CFO or finance organization want?

Brian Lambert 11:20

Yeah, like this, because visually, you can categorize by these big, big items, you know, then you can say, what kind of what kind of cheese, you know, cheddar, Colby cheese, what kind of fish is it? Right. And these are questions that you can ask your stakeholders without assuming and I think that's, that's important. Being a chicken Hawk and all

Scott Santucci 11:41

that's right. And it becomes more complex as our businesses get more complex because we're trying to solve, solve universal problems for our clients, or bring them commercial insights or whatever we want to call them, rather than just selling a product. Okay.

Brian Lambert 11:56

Yeah, so before you go on to that, sorry to interrupt but by Are we making this? What would you say if somebody said okay, now now you guys are getting crazy? You're making this too complex. You went from a cartoon. We're one click into this and this is this is getting too complicated. What would you say to that?

Scott Santucci 12:13

That's the reason you got a job. The reason the role sales enablement has emerged is because somebody got tapped on the shoulder and said, Brian, this thing's broken, fix it. The things that are broken, are really the sales system, the sales engine, however you want to put it, your sales machine coming apart at the seams, because you don't have a execution fabric to connect the dots because your your company is organized in a bunch of different silos. With a ton of specialists. They're really smart in their own own areas. But none of your customers care about any of that stuff.

Brian Lambert 12:51

And you're getting handed broken things. It's not like they're all put together. I don't know if you've ever had to build something for kids and it exploded upon opening into A bunch of little piece parts, like Legos. Yeah, that can get kind of complicated.

Scott Santucci 13:05

And it can get very complicated to when when you open the package Christmas Eve night and you're putting together the kit putting together those those toys when you lose the instructions. Yeah, that's the thing. You don't have instructions. Yep. Others have instructions. This is a brand new, this is a relatively new role. There isn't an instruction manual. So unfortunately, this is you. The good news is you have a job, and you have a job in a function, that there's a lot of upside to if you can get it right. The con of that opportunity is guess what? You've got to confront the complexity of putting the jigsaw pieces pieces together. It's just it just goes with the territory. Sorry. If you know if you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Brian Lambert 13:52

Yeah, and I think that's why we're seeing that more and more roles in sales enablement. And then to the evolution of the role to be more, more strategic, in other words to take a purview of broader set of pieces. And, you know, that's a whole separate show. We'll talk about that. But back to the topic of being the chip Chickenhawk here. Remember that story from Elizabeth when when that one podcast who confronted reality where she was talking about what the sales managers wanted, and there was this, this friction, and we kind of coached her up on you know, you can't have that friction. What would you say about that? Productive friction and, and the the bringing together of people and where they're rubbing the wrong rubbing elbows and how how that relates to, you know, stakeholder management because to me, it's not all gonna be happy, you know, cartoon, it's gonna get messy.

Scott Santucci 14:48

Well, I think if you watch this cartoon, the little chicken isn't happy, right? Everybody wants something. Yeah. That's your dilemma. So that even that that that premise, isn't isn't true. But really the key point is, it's really getting at the heart of what enabled means. Enable doesn't enable could mean I give you what you want, and just give everybody what they want but then there's no quid pro quo. In order for me to do something for you I need something in return.

Brian Lambert 15:21

Yeah, that's a foreign, but that's that. Okay, first of all, you might be the first person that I've heard talk about that in a public setting about what are we getting back as enablement leaders? Because I've been to a lot of meetings, I've been to a lot of events. I've talked to hundreds of sales enablement people, nobody's nobody's asked, you know, what should I be asking for? What's my quid pro quo, they all they, although, however, have a challenge with resources, getting a seat at the table, you know, having a strategic partnership with sales, you know, they tend to talk in terms of the outcomes that they want. So, are you talking about that are you talking about something more tactical, a meeting cadence with others is a quid pro quo? are you what are you talking about with the ask for sales enablement can be more.

Scott Santucci 16:09

So really, I'm going to be simple about that. I know you know, we want to go in to start talking about what we're doing. But let's just make sure we're really clear on what it is I'm talking about. You only have a limited amount of budget, you can keep asking for more budget, you can keep asking for more resources. We both know that the way that you get it, that's probably you're never going to get enough resources that you asked for. You're going to want to own more things, but you're competing with other departments that want to own things. None of that's a winning strategy. The winning strategy is to look look at the deck of cards that you've got, and say based on what we've got, here's what I can do for you. The quid pro quo comes from other people granting you things take to get get having them give you or agree to give up ownership. things. So, for example, we can start that the scenario with Beth was she's, she's viewing the sales managers and the sales managers are viewing her as competitive. Well, the first thing is, let's make clear, how do I help you? Me a beat meal as a bit? How do I help you as a sales manager? What is it that you want? If I can give you x? What are you going to do in return for that? And they can say, well, that's just what I expect. But that's not who Beth who pays Beth's checks? Who writes Beth checks? The VP of sales, or the director of sales in this case is the one who writes the checks. That's the that's the one she has to make happy. So, in other words, she has to get permission, gain permission. So, I'll do this for you. You'll do this for me. And because we've done that together, both of us win at sales 101.

Brian Lambert 17:53

Yeah, and I know for a fact that that approach works, we actually in my enablement role took over additional headcount and even had a new function for a while we took over function based on that, because, you know, our leadership was complaining about a lack of service, we said we can provide it. But to do that, we need the headcount of those, those people cut over to us. And it was simple. Okay, make sense.

Scott Santucci 18:19

So, let's put this into more concrete terms, right, so some of our listeners, so we're gonna, we basically Brian, and I think think of the world of enable in three stages of maturity. stage number one is a highly reactive world, which unfortunately, most of us are in right now. Stage number two is a managed world. And stage number three is an adaptive world. And you have to be able to accumulate enough of these favors and be able to accumulate enough of the another of the piece parts in order to, you know, move up that value ladder. But let's talk about something a lot of us are doing right now, which is onboarding. Now we can take the point of view that says onboarding as I develop the program and then you can say, Well, I trained all the reps and throw your hands up and say, you know, it's up to them now look at all our scores that we add. But if at the end of the day, the time from New Hire to productivity, if that metric is small, you haven't really enabled sales, you haven't given anybody anything except made a bunch of deliverables. So, one way to think about that would be, hey, in terms of onboarding, what do sales managers want? And you can ask them, but you know, you can get really clear, one of the things that sales managers want are some sort of predictable performance,...

Ep12 The Case for Sales Coaching & The Hubble Telescope

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 13:29:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 12

Sales Coaching -- the definition matters. Especially with regard to enablement and Sales Management

There is A LOT of noise in the market today about "sales coaching"

The question is, does it help sales managers become force multipliers, or is it a source of conflict?

In the episode, the guys use a role-play (Scott based on feedback he's heard from many different sales enablement leaders and Brain-based on research he's currently doing on front-line sales managers).

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

Hi, this is Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to helping leaders understand the big questions they should consider to be successful in sales enablement. On this podcast, we like to reframe, revisit, rethink and tackle reality in the sales enablement role. Scott, why don't you frame it out for us today.

Scott Santucci 00:57

Sure thing, Brian. And thank you very much for everybody listening, that's a great introduction, Brian. One of the things that we're going to be talking about here today is the fuzzy world, the gray area of sales coaching, and the difference between frontline sales managers and sales enablement and to give that some color, the the way that we're going to frame it out is I'm tell a little bit of story about the Hubble Space Telescope. And if you are a science nerd like myself, you're appreciating the wonderful images that we have shoot, they even took a photo a couple months ago of actual real life black hole. It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. But the story that of starting out wasn't so great. When the Hubble Space Telescope was first released and brought out of the space shuttle had a problem. It actually couldn't focus on, on anything really. And the problem that had is like most complex machinery, there were different teams. One team was focused on doing calculations using the metric system. Another team was focused on using the standard system. And you can think, oh, what a bunch of idiots. But I think no one in their right mind would call somebody who works at NASA literally a rocket scientist, stupid. The issue is when things get complicated, it's very, very, very, very, very, very easy for people to lose sight of, of clarity, particularly lack of communications and the like. So that's, that's what we're talking about. And, Brian, your thoughts?

Brian Lambert 02:41

Well, I would say we don't have the standard coaching system and the metric coaching system or maybe we do but when you look at that, Scott, what's what's your point as it relates to sales coaching?

Scott Santucci 02:56

My point on that is very simple sales. People are smart. Sales Managers are smart, sales enablement. People are smart, and VPS of sales are smart. Let's assume everybody in their roles are smart. It is very easy for us to sit there and call and think other people are not able to do one thing or the other. But maybe we have a bigger problem, which is a lack of clarity. And that's really the keystone of this. So, what we're going to do in this conversation is like most sales enablement, professionals, every single one of us has our own lens, our own perspective. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint that a little bit. And we're going to, we're going to roleplay this out and say for the sales enablement people who are saying, hmm, I've read a lot about frontline sales coaching. It's a great force multiplier for us to do. I'm going to provide coaching services coaching for our reps. And the reason that I'm going to do that is because we have to demonstrate value, right? I mean, let's let's let's cut to the chase, we have a fuzzy role. Most of the organization doesn't most of the rest of the organization doesn't really understand what we do. But I have so much out of humanity communicated so much expertise and talent around sales, training and sales coaching, that I'm going to get in that game because I'm not seeing frontline sales managers.

Brian Lambert 04:32

So doesn't know. I would say, don't do that.

Scott Santucci 04:37

What How can I not do that? Brian, I've got all this talent. I've I've done all this training. Look at the feedback scores I get when I actually do courses, my feedback scores are through the roof. Why are you telling me not to do it?

Brian Lambert 04:49

So, I didn't know you're gonna go there. So, this is totally, you know, unscripted, but I would say I'm having a visceral reaction to you taking on the frontline manager role. So, in other words to be more clear, if you're in a sales enablement function and you want to provide coaching services, you should be providing that to from my managers and helping them coach not doing their job for them. Because in today's world, in my opinion, the role of a frontline manager is to drive productivity of their team. And that's their job to coach their people, not yours.

Scott Santucci 05:22

Wait, what are you talking about? Brian? That sounds semantics coaching the frontline sales managers versus their people at the end of the day, the the salespeople aren't able, without reinforcement of the training that we've provided on let's say, we're rolling out challenger. Companies made a huge investment in that we don't have reinforcement in it. It's gonna it's it's gonna die on the vine. I know it, you know it, no one's really concentrating on reinforcement, so I need to do it.

Brian Lambert 05:54

So, I'm laughing because you must have been on the receiving end of a lot of this type of discussion because for people that know, Scott, there's no way he would just say, he does what you just said. So, I'm glad. I'm glad you clarified this as roleplay. So, I'm a listener. Yeah. listener. So, um, but I would say, Okay, um, in that view, then what's the purpose of the manager? Specifically, right? So, I framed about the admin side. And, you know, the role of a manager is just like any other frontline manager, the approving vacations, admin time, expenses, etc. On the productivity side, though, that's the challenge, you know, because their sales managers, they're responsible for, you know, pipeline forecasts, you know, closing deals, etc. And so, when you look at the role of the first line manager, there's not a lot of clarity there. And I think there's a lot of assumptions is what,

Scott Santucci 06:46

Well wait a second, Brian. I don't need to read their job descriptions. I know that their number one job is to help drive performance to their reps, and they're not providing performance coaching to their reps. I sit on all those the court the qbrs. I hear I hear it, they miss the qualifying opportunities left and right. They need help I need to provide a forum.

Brian Lambert 07:11

Well, have you asked them what help they need? To me unleashed

Scott Santucci 07:17

I've been doing this for 20 years. I don't mean to ask to help. When I see when I see in a cube er, and I hear the conversations happening. And I see the holes in the in the pipeline. I gotta act. Yeah, we don't have time.

Brian Lambert 07:31

Yeah, I would agree that you have to act. But one of the things that I would ask you to act on is understanding the role specifically, and, more importantly, driving that clarity across the organization. Because you're making a lot of assumptions by acting to fill a gap that you may want, you may not need to to somebody else, maybe

Scott Santucci 07:52

I was a frontline sales manager before.

Brian Lambert 07:56

Well, that was before not not today where customers have evolved. Solutions are a lot more sophisticated. And quite frankly, the demands on a sales managers time are exponentially higher than when you did it before. And also, I believe that the role has as more from individual manager driving individual deals, to creating team outcomes with an entire team of people. And to think that you can waltz right in there and start telling people how to close more deals. Not only are you going to perhaps undermine the authority of the frontline manager, right, you're also perhaps going to set back sales numbers, because you're not involved in it every day. It's a little naive to think you can walk into a sales process today and drive better results than somebody who's involved with five eight people on a daily basis. I mean, what are you talking about? Why would you even want to do that? Doesn't matter.

Scott Santucci 08:56

Wait a second. I'm the one who trained them all on our newest Sales methodology. So, I'm the I know everything there is to know about challenger, everything there is our reps aren't following the methodology. And I am in a unique position because I trained everybody on this. I'm in a unique position. How do I What do you mean? I don't know. I know because I know challenger.

Brian Lambert 09:22

Yeah. And you you can line up behind the 47 other people that know their widget that I want the sales manager to help roll it out from marketing from product from the CRM team, from the analytics team, from HR from talent acquisition, from product number 37. From the finance people to the operations, people that want to talk about quarterly read forecasts, etc. And to think that you know, you can come in as a sales training bias and say, you know, I taught your people I know better than than you do, on how to manage perhaps sales cycle, how to handle a sales call, how to prioritize time, and and coach people how to prioritize time, how to renegotiate the trade offs on a daily basis on on these demands is not right to me, I would say redirecting that energy to go do something into the, you know, broader team view or the system view is way more valuable. For example, you know, sales managers have the hardest job of anybody in the in the business world today, because of a lot of the pressures that they're under, who's helping simplify what's coming at them. And then with regard to coaching, and talent in general, for example, I think he could spend a lot more time understanding what type of talent you know, sales managers need to get from the recruiting team, for example, there's a lot of frustration there. You know, if you want to teach somebody challenge or go teach the talent acquisition folks, what salespeople are trying to do. You know, I think that would be a great use of your skills as a trainer. But to take over the sales managers job and coach their people on behalf of them is is to me insulting. I wouldn't appreciate it if if my team

Scott Santucci 11:17

Okay, so we're going to end roleplay So Brian, how'd I do?

Brian Lambert 11:22

Well, I'm pissed off right now. Yeah. So that was great. You know, I think

Scott Santucci 11:33

Why pissed off?

Brian Lambert 11:34

Well, it's what is well, I have a visceral reaction because it's real, right? I had a sales manager call me I think a week and a half ago going, Oh, I just unleashed, you know, a whole a whole tirade on my town acquisition team. And I told him, they were screwing up. He didn't use that word. Because it was expletive laden. You know, my whole sales team because they need to get their stuff together. Right and you know, it’s frustrating to be a sales manager today. And nope, if you look at it the reason why I'm having a an emotive reaction to this kind of you should you as a manager should go do XYZ. I one was never asked by you, will it be helpful to when I started actually sharing what I believe should happen, you kept, you know, arguing with me. And that that I think is is frustrating for sales managers to be in that position.

Scott Santucci 12:33

And that was, that was that was pretty heightened. And, you know, the purpose of that is we hear a lot of these kinds of feedback. And the purpose of this show is or this particular episode is to understand the situation more holistically. So, taking a step back, let's let's break down this problem. The frontline, what actually is the role and responsibility of a frontline sales manager If you were to look at this like a Venn diagram, you have two Venn diagrams coming together, you have one, they are a cog, for lack of a better word in the sales machine. So, when you think about the sales leader working with human resources and finance, they have to put together a structure their department, and in that structure, their department, there's a there's a term called span of control. And they set a metric of how many reps report to whom. And it's a very mechanical viewpoint and lost in that shuffle. The job description of a frontline sales manager gets overlooked. So, it is not uncommon for many variations of a frontline job description to exist inside a company and somehow that gets baked into somebody's job performance and what that was, so that's one side of it. The second side of it is I have not I have yet to meet and I'm going to ask you, Brian, a frontline sales manager that doesn't feel a heck of a lot of responsibility. Heck, they're paid their most of their salary is variable, and it's based on their team's performance. I have yet to meet a frontline sales manager that isn't interested in helping their salespeople be better. Yeah, that's right. Have you ever met a frontline sales manager that isn't interested in that?

Brian Lambert 14:25

They wouldn't be in the job.

Scott Santucci 14:27

Not for long, right. Right. So, the question that then is, you have two competing forces. You have one force, which says this job description what we're asking of you as a frontline sales manager is unclear. And then secondly, you've learned how if you're probably if you're a frontline sales manager, you're at least a year or two away removed from the field, maybe even longer. So, you probably don't know everything that's going on. In terms of techniques, the techniques that got you here to where you were may be different than the techniques that work today. And you probably aren't as empathetic as you could be about the change that, you know, last year, two years ago, you're asking your sellers to sell a whole bunch of volume to minion level buyers. Now you're rolling out challenger or whatever, sales methodology. And now you want your sellers to go call sell commercial insights for God's sakes to business executives.

Brian Lambert 15:33

Yeah and 12 to an 8.4 to 13.1 by buyers, right?

Scott Santucci 15:40

Yeah. So, it's something has to give. And if we, if we in sales enablement want to partner and leverage and be a part of the frontline sales manager, we have to realize that they're under so much pressure. They don't have a lot of vocabulary like what you said before with that. They don't have A lot of our vocabulary describe these things. And these are the these are some challenges. So, let's get into some prescriptions now for what kind of sales enablement leader do to navigate? So do Brian, do you and I, what is it? What is our position on coaching as a thing, a business within business a service that sales enablement provides? What's our position on that?

Brian Lambert 16:27

Well one, I would say do not provide that service to reps. If you're going to provide coaching services provided to managers, and start with to your point, having clarity on the first line manager role, and ensuring if you do the interviews, do the needs analysis, whatever your name is for it, that there's clarity across not only the sales management team, but the HR team as well. That that'll be the first thing.

Scott Santucci 16:54

Yeah, so let me piggyback on that. So, I'm speaking to you directly as a listener. If You believe that your greatest contribution to your company is to provide frontline to provide coaching directly to reps. You are not a sales enablement professional. You are a sales coach. Call yourself a sales coach and be a sales coach and recognize that's what you are. For the rest of us doing sales enablement, we're doing broader things than that

Brian Lambert 17:27

Well, isn't coaching underneath the enablement umbrella Scott? I'm gonna flip it back on you.

Scott Santucci 17:32

Well, sure. That's what I'm saying. If that's how you're defining what you're what you're adding the most value in, then you're not a force multiplier. Yeah, that multiplier would say, Okay. I'm so confident in my ability to coach individual reps. I'm going to teach frontline sales managers how to coach their reps. So, the service that I can get the best multiple out of my time is if I can get let's say, we have 100 reps out of out of my time I can coach maybe 10-20 reps, you know, let's say, or I can coach 20 sales managers who can coach their eight reps. Where am I going to have a greater return on my investment? I can build the same kind of similar kind of curriculum that I know how to do. And I can create a common language that currently doesn't exist, just like we say, with sales. The benefit of a great sales methodology is that we have a common language amongst our sales force. We don't have a common language across our sales managers. Without that common language, it's going to be very difficult for me to get feedback on other programs that I could do.

Brian Lambert 18:43

Yeah, that's a good point. I think less than 5% of organizations. I can't remember who put that research out. But they said that less than 5% have actual standardized, if you will, sales methodology and even to me coaching methodology coaching, right? Yeah. And I would even say if you take sales coaching to some sort of one, one page picture, that would be helpful. What is sales coaching? Because it's a conversation or is it a philosophy? Is it a task? Is it a process? Is it a methodology? What is it? And I think there's just a lack of clarity, not only on the manager role, which we both talked about, but the second point I would make to be successful in enablement. Here is, is what is sales coaching? And how would you define it so that it can scale? If you're not able to define it, so to speak, if you're not able to give it an identity, delineate it from a methodology versus a philosophy? Because the first perspective, pushback you're going to hear is from sales management, oh, I'm constantly coaching. It's...

Ep11 Sales Kickoffs - What’s the Return?

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 13:06:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 11

Many sales enablement leaders are responsible for some (or all) of their company's sales kickoff. When it comes to adding the right value and ensuring a return on investment, it's important to view the kickoff from the lens of your customer -- the sales leadership team.

In this episode, Brian and Scott revisit some research Brian did while he was at Forrester, and shed color on what we've learned since then about the good, bad, and ugly of sales kickoffs and what executives are getting for their investment. The key finding of the research?

There are 3 reasons why sales kickoffs exist. To launch, improve rep skills, or evolve the sales team. Find out more by listening to this edition of Inside Sales Enablement.

This podcast will help you rethink sales kickoffs.

Does your company create an overall plan with a planning cycle starting in August, or do you do most of the work in December or January?
Can you quantify the economic value of the sales kickoff?
Do you have a 30-60-90 plan post kickoff?

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here joined the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions that you may be wondering about, especially if you thought something might be wrong or something might not be quite right. And I got to ask, you know, are you getting the value out of sales enablement? And are other people seeing the value of sales enablement that you would expect? In this podcast, we're going to into a specific time tangible activity that many organizations are involved in. And that's the sales kickoff. Scott, what do you have for us?

Scott Santucci 01:09

We're actually recording this. This episode. This is our episode number five. We're recording it after our first episode has been released. So, I wanted to share a little bit of feedback that we've gotten from some of the people who've listened to our first episode. And then of course, I'll let you let you share some of it too. So, one of one of the elements of feedback that I've gotten is that folks really like the color the way that we're describing it in the banter that Brian and I have and and the format. One of the requests that I got was, Hey, you know, the background and the history is really important. It's always great to know where we're coming. Can we talk about some more tangible, not tangible, that's not the way that was phrased more things that I'm dealing with in the trenches right now that will help me be successful? So those are those were two of the feedbacks, what we'd love for you to do is keep sharing feedback with us. Do you agree with that feedback? What feedback would you add to it? How can we improve to make this a better experience for you? Share your thoughts with us on LinkedIn, call Brian or I, or better Email us at engage at insidese.com. Brian, what what are some of the feedback that you've received?

Brian Lambert 02:31

Yeah, I shared this on one of our drives, drives home, we tend to call each other at the end of the day when we're driving. And one of the things that I was hearing was this idea of, you know, rethinking, and hey, I hadn't quite thought about that before. So, I had somebody shoot me up, you know, shoot me a message on LinkedIn and be like, Hey, that was a great way to think about it. These stories, you know, Galileo, really interesting and made me think differently. So, there was this rethinking piece What we're going to do today, you and I talked about when you got that feedback with something that that folks might be more involved in, it's this idea of, of revisiting. So that's the second thing that that I took away. And the third one is, both of you and I have developed the technique. And I was at a thought leadership conference last week at Stanford. And it has to do with this idea of reframing the problem. And somebody came up to me after the events and said, Hey, you know, the way you're framing this out, is completely different because you're actually focused on the customer. So that's the three Scott rethinking revisiting reframing, and those are basically going forward here guys, the the three that we're going to go with, so we'll have different episodes where we either reframe something today we're going to revisit sales, kickoffs and some research that we did a while back, and then the rethinking piece which we are helping folks move forward in a new way of working and the new reality that they're facing. So, let's talk a little bit about Scott moving forward here, how to revisit and let's revisit sales kickoffs.

Scott Santucci 04:05

Yes. So, to put this into perspective, when we're reframing something that's giving background or asking you to take a step back, when we're revisiting something, what we're going to do is first we're going to hold ourselves accountable and break down and critique some of our past reports, to eventually critique other people's reports and other people's information and revisit some of the research that's been out there. And then the last one here is let's rethink, and today we're rethinking sales kickoffs. So, to frame this out, what was interesting is why would why would you even tackle sales kickoffs? You guys are the knock or the pro depending on how you look at it. You guys at Forrester were really strategic. Why in the world were you covering sales kickoffs? And what I want to do is let you understand a little bit of perspective, again, more than inside baseball. When you're an analyst and at at the time, it really depends, you might want to ask other analysts how many inquiries that they get ask them questions about inquiries, because that's really the one of the big driving forces of the research agenda. And at the time, when we were at Forrester, our department, our group was maxed out on inquiries. We had inquiries, when we were we had some of the highest inquiry loads of the entire company. And one of the one of the trends that that emerged was a lot of questions around sales kickoffs, interestingly enough, and I was very curious about it, because the questions that we were getting asked, were all over the place. So here we have same rolls from similar sized companies, asking about the same topic from completely different ends of the spectrum. And for me, the one that Character characterize this, make it to a research one of our research meetings to discuss what we're going to talk about was one of the inquiries we got from Novell. And that particular individual had shared with me that they had done an audit and analysis of return on investment and that they got a negative return on investment of their sales kickoffs, when they factored in all the travel time, the opportunity cost of lost sales time expense of all the glitz and glamour. And what they've decided what they decided to do is to go to a completely virtual experience. And as a researcher, I try to resist my initial reaction having been a salesperson my whole life, how in the world am I going to go and have tequila shots with my peers?

Brian Lambert 06:48

I was wondering the same thing or go karting or

Scott Santucci 06:51

Right, it, where am I going to get those interactions to build the culture, but then I just thought about it and what we what we did is we introduced this, that this topic and we assigned this topic to Brian to, to carry out. So, what we're going to do is we're going to ask Brian Tte first question, which is, how did you go about doing the research to figure out what our position might be on sales kickoffs?

Brian Lambert 07:17

So, we because we have such a high volume back then I had a, I was keeping records and, you know, as any good salesperson, you want to be able to tailor what you're doing and what you're saying and also build relationships with folks over time. So, I basically went through my records and found that indeed, I had actually talked about sales kickoffs, and, and how, brainstorm sales kickoffs and come up with ideas, etc. So, to move forward on Okay, what is perhaps the challenge that folks are facing? Or, you know, to the big question of how much of a return are we getting? What I did was I engaged through my relationships as an analyst with at least 10 companies, you know, companies like Cisco Or HP, Informatica Symantec etc. and asked about, you know, found found that the folks that were involved in planning a sales kickoff and or executing the sales kickoff, so kind of on the supply chain side, if you will. And then I also talked to the individuals that were recipients of that, that service, so sales managers and salespeople to try to get a 360-degree view of this experiences that was being created.

Scott Santucci 08:30

And to add to that experience, one of the one of the traits is as a Forrester analysts, you're often at least I was often, and I know, Brian, you, you went to several yourself, asked to participate and hired to speak at at sales kickoff. So, we have the experience of being immersed in the situation as well. Now, just so you're following, I still have a little bit about the researcher in me. I hope you notice that there's a bias at the point in time at Forrester, our research group was focused specifically on the tech industry. So, we didn't do a lot of research in other industries and other groups. So, this is information that has a bias to the tech industry. But Brian, what were some of the things? What were some three level? One of the one of the findings in that analysis that you had is there's really basically three types of goals of what a sales kickoff is about, is that right?

Brian Lambert 09:31

Yeah, that's right. And to get to those three goals, you know, wading through at all, you know, different expectations, different needs, different objectives for sales kickoff, there's different time horizons. Some folks would plan for a year other people would plan for 30 days. And but where all came together was basically three outcomes or three key objectives. The first one was as a sales organization or in support at a sales organization. We're going to help our sales team take a different tack or go in a different direction. That was one big area of focus. The second key outcome or objective of a sales kickoff was, we need to get started. So, we're going to initiate something new, such as a new product, the new focus from the executive team, etc. And then the third area was we need to fine tune, we were doing well. But there's some things that we want to tweak things that we need to adjust as we get in tune with our customers. So, we're going to go in a completely different direction we're going to work is one. The second one was we're going to take it first step and get people started on a path. And then the third one is we need to elevate or transform or fine tune, either the skills, the processes, the models, approaches, etc, of our existing team.

Scott Santucci 10:46

But let me add some color to that because I got after this report, I was I started paying very attention, very close attention to the sales kickoffs that I was involved at and what my role was as a keynote speaker, so let me add some stuff. Learn what Brian said. So, the first example was what Brian?

Brian Lambert 11:05

The first one is, hey, we're calling an audible, we're making a hard right turn, we're going in a different direction.

Scott Santucci 11:13

So, the way that I've interpreted that is basically the business has a new strategy. So, take for example, net app. In, you know, the 2013 timeframe is, oh my gosh, we got to move to cloud, or a lot of a lot of tech companies move into to a cloud-based business. So, CEO comes in talks about their business strategy, aligns it etc. And that's one element. Brian, what's number two?

Brian Lambert 11:46

The second one is we're going to help our sales team kind of get started on something. So, in other words, we're going to ask them to start doing something new.

Scott Santucci 11:56

So, the way that I've interpreted that I think a lot of us can appreciate reshape this that's introducing challenger sale or some new new sales technique or based on some of my experiences at the Alexander group in management consulting, rolling out a new coverage plan or source or something like that. So, we're going to go about getting started. So, you can kind of imagine what the flavor is there. And what questions and the attitude of the Salesforce is in both of those buckets. Brian, what was number three?

Brian Lambert 12:29

The third one was this idea of a sales team. You guys are doing some great things. However, comma, pause, we need to fine tune. So, we need you to start doing some things specifically. We need you to stop doing some things specifically, and we need you to fill these gaps.

Scott Santucci 12:49

What resonates with me there is having participated in a few sales kickoffs on that one. Immediately, I'm drawn to the readout the head of sales, who is sharing data about pipeline and forecasting, and talking about how many, how much of the multiple do we have in the forecast and how much of how much behind we are and what we need to do to accomplish that, etc. So, it's basically a call to arms, we're behind on missing a number, or we're behind on some of our clarity, or we're not doing these particular things pretty well. And it's a rallying of the troops and a very clear message is delivered about what we want to do to improve those, that would be my color of those three buckets. So, Brian, my next question to you is if we think about the goal for each one of those three things, what is the structure of a sales kickoff? So how do people structure these things? Are they all going to wear Novell did and Experiment with delivering this all online? Or how do they use their time and, you know, are their breakout sessions curriculum? What's the what's your what does it look like?

Brian Lambert 14:12

Well, what I've what I found back then, and I, and I believe it's still true today, given the conversations that I've had recently is, first, there's this choice of how much in person time do we want to have with the salespeople? So, in other words, when are the tequila shots at hand? When do we need to have everybody show up? And how much you know, team building and how much quote unquote fun Are we going to have? And how much time will that be allocated? If the question comes back that we don't need to get together and we're not going to do that fun stuff. It tends to go pretty quickly into something that's a little bit more remote because I think the bias has been that these kickoffs are about knowledge transfer, or quote, unquote, you know, telling the troops and so that's the first thing is how much face to face. Do we really think needs to happen if it goes on the other side where we need to have the face to face, we want to look people in the eye, we want them to pause their activities for a minute, take a step back and get re engaged, then it comes down to what's the best way to manage that in person experience? And there's some there's some, I think some cookie cutters there which has to do with you know, a group session at first and then some breakouts either by region or product, some knowledge transfer that needs to happen along the way and then you know, that kind of a lining up of different internal groups who want to you don't have access to the sales team.

Scott Santucci 15:38

So, to add color to that, so my involvement in sales, kickoffs has been, you know, sort of all over the place. In some cases, I've been asked to be the whole facilitator of the whole thing to keep everything together. other cases just show up and be pretty and deliver the message

Brian Lambert 15:57

Thats hard for you I know

Scott Santucci 15:59

Yeah, very hard, requires a lot of makeup and in some props deliver the message that we want you to do in this box and go away and shut up. So, air, it tends to be all over the place. What I what I do notice is that the composition of a, I asked a lot of questions about the agenda. Maybe it's because of the background of a researcher. But I see a, you know, a lot of breakouts that don't necessarily make sense. They don't, they don't map to the flow. So, give you an example. I was doing one kickoff, and I'm going to not name the names of the companies because I don't want to embarrass anybody. But the CEO was very insistent, and very, very clear that we're entering into a brand-new business model. We're selling to completely different buyers. And what was interesting was after the CEO left and everybody said, Yep, we understand it. The conversations were all about how do you get better at targeting the existing people that they're selling to More or less the whole agenda from from Eric ranging from, how do we have better? How do we prospect better to our current patch? How do we let's roll out new playbooks that we're going to do and let's certify the salespeople on what those playbooks are? Let's introduce the new analytic program that we're rolling out. Let's have it let's hear from marketing about the new lead generation process and how we're going to go and fill those things. And I'm listening, and I'm participating in each one of those and taking notes. And at no point in time, did any of those acknowledge the fact that the CEO is asking them to sell to a completely new buyer completely new. And so essentially, what the result of that sales training program was, people thought they were doing the right thing, you know, checking the box, but all of it was in direct opposition of what the CEOs goals were. And I see that time and time and time again, because how our sales how our sales agenda is put together. So, Brian, what based on your research, how did you find sales agendas were put together? Is there structure to it? Is there one person who has say in it? How do they get set up to be focused on a business objective?

Brian Lambert 18:17

Yes, that's a great question. And in the two-tier story, Scott, this is interesting, right? Because it pans out or plays out almost every single time. You know, if you believe a sales kickoff is for communication purposes, that's going to set up a whole bias for the whole entire experience. However, if you look at a sales kickoff as a way in which to equip sellers to be successful against...

Ep10 Accelerate the Sales Process & The NYPD

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 10

Are you:

overloaded by your inbox?
concerned with the myriad of things being asked of the salesforce?
Worried you might be contributing to the chaos?

How would you like to move from being highly reactive to how you are enabling revenue growth, to being more proactive?

In this episode, Brian Lambert & Scott Santucci discuss practical applications of using five (5) sales objectives to help diagnose root cause problems and then prescribe more integrated programs that move the needle.

Highlights in this podcast

1) How do you apply the 80/20 rule to sales enablement?

2) What are the five (5) universal sales objectives (and how are they NOT a sales methodology)

3) How companies who follow this disciplined approach have win rates as high as 70%

4) Understand then for yourself first, and then figure out how to socialize them internally

5) Good conversations about strategies on socializing the ideas inside your company.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

Hi, I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions that you should be asking if you want to be successful in sales enablement. You know, Scott, we're surrounded by lots of information. There's a lot of ideas on what we can be doing on a daily basis. And quite frankly, there are a lot of choices that we can be making in sales enablement to be successful. One of the things that I wanted to do on this podcast is this idea of focusing on what matters. And when it comes to what matters. It's often the little things that can get us the most traction. Scott, can you frame that out for us?

Scott Santucci 01:16

Sure, Brian, Malcolm Gladwell published a book, and I think it was 1999 or 2000, called the tipping point. And in that book, he talks about a lot of stories about how change happens. And one in particular that I think's relevant is one about the New York City Police Department. And specifically, back in the early 80s, New York City, believe it or not had a lot of crime. And the crime was out of control. There was a whole bunch of strategies to do that. But the New York Police Department followed a strategy that seemed pretty strange. And the idea was any little thing. Stop it. So, for example, and they saw somebody drunk on the street, they didn't give them a warning. They put them up and they detained them when any graffiti went up on the on the subways, they cleaned it off immediately. And just by doing these very little things, guess what happened? crime in New York City declined 60 some odd percent. And that's a dramatic change. And that strategy became adopted throughout the country as we saw a massive decrease in crime across the United States.

Brian Lambert 02:28

As usual, Scott, that's a great story. But what does that have to do with sales enablement? Obviously, we're not going to be arresting people. What are you talking about?

Scott Santucci 02:37

Well, I like these framing, framing conversations to help us think a little bit differently, but really what it matters, and what we're talking about here is how little things make a big difference. And that where many of us are as sales enablement professionals, is the inbox seems like it's killing us. We're overloaded by all these different activities. And is it really moving the needle? And how do we actually start figuring out where to focus on the small and a few?

Brian Lambert 03:11

Yeah, that's a great point. There's so much stuff, right. So not only the inbox, but meetings. I don't know about some of our listeners, but it feels like I'm strapped to my chair all day long every single day. And the idea of any whitespace or the you know, working through anything, is just tough because I'm always responding or fighting a fire or handling some sort of issue or, you know, if you have a staff, you've got people write vacations, somebody else sick, somebody got hurt, etc. So, you know, there's so many things that we can be doing the question that you're posing, which I love is, you know, what should we be doing? You know, Yeah, great question. And

Scott Santucci 03:51

if you don't know me, I'm a big fan of using math. I'm very mathematical and the way I think, and this is really what we're leveraging here is the 8020 role. And you know, since this is inside sales enablement, the 8020 rule is a is a principle developed by an Italian mathematician, really observing that 20% of the choices lead to 80% of the outcomes. And this phenomenon has come up over and over and over again. So, it's studying that mathematical principle or the statistical principle. And while we're at Forrester, when we had a whole bunch of different data points, one of the things that I did is applied back and I tried to look for look for different patterns, and for simplicity, and really what we ended up coming up with or reduced down sales, no matter what kind of sales that you're doing, whether you're inside sales, whether you're strategic account sales, whether you're a geographic salesperson, a vertical salesperson, no matter what no matter what it is that you're selling. There are only five universal objectives objectives, you must meet only five

Brian Lambert 05:01

Yeah, that's great. So, I'm sure we're gonna go through these five. But let's, let's, let's pause before we do it. What's the difference between objectives as you're defining here? And the concept of activities or actions or quote unquote, priorities?

Scott Santucci 05:17

That's a great question. For me, it's pretty simple. I can accomplish a task or a goal by doing a million things, or one thing. So, what happens is that in a lot of cases, we over prescribed sellers, a whole bunch of things to do. And then they feel obligated to do all those things when they can get creative and just accomplish that objective one way or another. What mat- you know what matters is, if you if we were to use a different analogy here, before we get into the details about sales, it matters that you score the touchdown. Doesn't really matter how you score the touchdown. It matters that you get the first down it doesn't really matter how you get the first down. Now, obviously in those sports, you have to do plays and make sure your blocking assignments are achieved, etc. But at the end of the day, you hit the first down, you make the first down, you keep the drive alive, you score the touchdown, you score points, end of story, black and zero, are black and white one and zero, it's binary. And that's really the the idea here is what are the five binary things that are ones or zeros that we can know we either did or we didn't do so that we can communicate to everybody else that sales is actually an awesome game. There's no such thing as an expected value or a weighted a weighted goal or a distributed outcome or any of the other math that that we tend to be applying to this, this pipeline game. It comes down to ones and zeros. So, what are the ones and zeros that we need to we need to check off in engineering or manufacturing sales pipeline?

Brian Lambert 07:02

Yeah, I love it. And I've certainly used at 20. I've used these five objectives. And they do they do netted out and I love, and this is important, I think for the listeners, as it was for me this binary nature ones and zeros and what pops into my head? Scott, I know we've talked a lot about this movie but it's Moneyball, right? So, you know, we can we have batting averages, we've got, you know, all you look at all of the score sheets on a player, you've got all this all these numbers, and Billy Beane and Moneyball said, you know what our job is to get on base and getting on base and getting a base hit as binary, you either do or you don't. And you built the whole team around that. That's the same thing here is the binary nature of these five objectives. You either help sellers do it, or you don't. So that's awesome. Let's, let's hear what they are. Why don't you walk us through those?

Scott Santucci 07:53

Sure. Before I walk you through those. What I'm going to do is, Brian, you're throwing me for a curveball. You didn't bring up money. balling our prep call, but I'm going to roll with it. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to toggle back and forth between Moneyball and and these five sales objectives. So, I'm going to go through the five sales objectives really, really quick first, and then we'll talk about each one, there are only five things, five things, that's it five things that any salesperson needs to do. The first one is know who your target audience is. The second one is to be able to have at get access to that particular person. The third thing is to have a successful meeting with that person. The fourth one is to create a shared vision or a buying vision or whatever you want to call it a shared vision of success with the client. And the last one is to present to them a business case that they accept and frame this out the target and at the end of the first one, knowing your target is your on deck, you're getting ready for hitting the gaining access is getting on first base, having a successful meaning is getting on second base, create a shared vision is third base and creating a business cases home, you've scored a run.

Brian Lambert 09:15

Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, obviously, if you don't do them in that order, you know, it's not gonna work. And also, you either did it or you didn't. That's binary, like we talked about. And another thing that this does, Scott, you know, in my role I deal a lot with, for example, l&d professionals or trainers. And I'm thinking that this helps with is, you know, not dealing with the outliers. So, we've talked at 20 these are the 20 that we want to focus on this is the these are the principles or the objectives that cut through a lot of the noise. But if we're if we're losing sight of that, or perhaps, you know, not as disciplined as we as we need to be on the on the base, running and getting on base, and then the first second third You know, and then home. And we focus on other things like the weather conditions or, you know, whether the suns in our eyes or what we're eating for lunch. Just kidding. You know, but but there's a lot of distractions through the inbox, etc, right, so you can lose sight of the game and the objectives and in the l&d space, I've spent a lot of time, you know, saying, okay, those are things that we could be doing we Yes, we could spend time on making sure that the elearning is better, or Yes, we could be spending a lot more time on the assessments or whatever. There's a lot of things we could be doing, but what should we be doing to help sellers, in this case, get on first base, and does that really matter? And I think that's a critical piece of this whole concept.

Scott Santucci 10:47

And let's let me go through let's go through each of them with a little bit of color. So as basic and as simple as that sounds, and this is one of the phenomenon that I've encountered. When you bring something Simple to people they rejected. But what they want is something simple. It's this whole, what simple is a very paradoxical conversation. But let's talk with just target audience. Who are you selling to? Who do you want to sell to? In most cases, I get an answer like, well, we want to sell it a large enterprise companies or to the mid market. And when I asked more specifically, like, who is the wallet owner, that you're targeting? Who is your primary stakeholder? Very few companies can actually answer that question. And so right from the get-go, we're not really focused on people. We're focused on sort of generalities.

Brian Lambert 11:49

Yeah, and then also because, you know, this is our on-deck piece, right. So, you know, I oftentimes get well, you know, at first, we try to go to this All, but then we need to over you know, be in a different role and they start talking about, you know, a bunch of people instead of the specific entry point into the account or the specific wallet owner, that should maybe talk to you first.

Scott Santucci 12:13

Right and, and it's, the entry point would be the gaining access point, right. And the goal here is really to say, who is our ideal stakeholder that we want to be communicating to, it's unlikely that every seller all the time is going to get access to that person. But the reason going through this exercise is so important. If we just apply a little simple math here, a CIO, if that's who we're trying to target, their budget and access to funding might be 100 x more than an individual user. So, the reason that this is very important, is because we want to make sure that the efforts that we're doing is targeting individual people who have buying authority. And that buying authority tends to be higher level people. Obviously, we don't want to try to think everything that we need to do, we need to call them a CEO. That's ridiculous. But that's why I've actually really spending the time to figure out who your target is, is incredibly important. In most cases, companies that I've worked with very large, well known smart individuals don't have that information, or they don't have that agreement on who they're who they're targeting. So that creates a lot of problems for Problem number two, which is okay, now that we're at bat, we want to get access to somebody. So, in the game, getting access to that somebody let's think about the workflow of a regular salesperson. They have a whole key of different leads that they're that they're given. In many cases, we've always heard that salespeople don't fall but leads I myself when I was a salesperson, chose to not follow up on the leads. I was given for marketing, because the level that they were at were so far low level a I'd be restricted to people who maybe had a $20,000 budget and I was trying to sell with people with lots you know, with with adult money, or, or b it was gonna make me start a campaign way low and then the work that I'd have to do to navigate all the different stakeholders up to the person who can make a decision was making the job of me selling much more difficult. So, the goal of the of the gain access is how do we actually gain access? And then if you can imagine all of this stuff, do we have the right call scripts for doing that? as a salesperson, I'd love to roleplay out with other sellers like techniques done on press day for it. How do we do that if we're not clear on who it is that we're targeting, in terms of the demand generation or the handoffs or the content or the collateral or all of the different activities, by the way, it's exploding now with email and social media and outreach or Reference programs, all of the different things just to get a meeting is great, but I need to get a meeting with somebody. So that's, that. That's all of the activities. And to your point about being distracted, there's a lot of distractions just getting on first base.

Brian Lambert 15:15

Yeah. And also, in today's world, you know, there's, there's so many there are so many platforms, but there are also a lot of, you know, point solutions. So, you know, what's your thoughts, Scott, on what we're selling, you know, the solutions that we're selling, or the product that we're selling as it relates to getting access, right? Because, depending on where and who the specific who the sellers are going after, you know, for example, CIOs may not care to engage in a conversation about something that's super tactical. So, you know, they're gonna ignore you

Scott Santucci 15:50

The way that I think about this simply 8020 rule, so this will happen at you know, a percent of time. Of course, somebody listening here is going to be able to find an exception but Let's concentrate on the rule not not the not the outlier. If you think about it this way, if you're prospecting, you should probably never talk about your products. If you have inbound stuff going on and they they're bringing up products, well, then it's okay to talk about products. It's kind of that easy.

Brian Lambert 16:19

Yeah. Makes sense. So, when it becomes what, you know, that challenge that the that you're talking to up to that person about needs to be about the challenges that they're having, not necessarily your products. That's right. How does that help get a successful meeting?

Scott Santucci 16:34

Well, we have to have access first, so that they will agree to meet with us. Now, obviously, on a phone call, if you get them at the right time, you might be able to move into that first meeting. But realistically, you're probably going to want to set that up and schedule it out. So, in the first in the first access, you framed out a particular issue. Now we're having our first meeting. And I don't know about you, I remember myself as the seller, I don't know if anybody else is listening to this is carrying a bag or have heard this from any anybody who's is carried a bag. You go into a meeting and you walk out, and you think, dang it, I wish I would have just brought up x y&z and that goes into the preparation. So really the goal of base to get back to your Moneyball analogy, Brian, in a successful meeting, it's, let's pre let's already have an idea of the common business objectives that they've got, and map different ways that we can initiate or help them explore it. That's very knowable, especially if we already know who the stakeholder is. We shouldn't put all that burden on our reps. And we sure as heck shouldn't try to do that all in a pitch deck. Because a pitch deck is the biggest red flag to an a to adult money wallet owner, they say I'm not gonna spend time with this particular individual Because they are not going to be able to help me solve my problem, they're just going to be able to regurgitate some really slick, slick materials.

Brian Lambert 18:09

Right. And and in the idea of a successful meeting, sellers today can probably make the assumption that there are more people involved than, than this one buyer that there's there's probably a network of folks. So, you know, if you're if you're in a PowerPoint mode, you won't be able to tailor because when you walk into the meeting, you actually may have multiple, as a seller, you may have multiple people in there, or you need to have a sequence of meetings to string it all...

Ep9 Infuse Customer Empathy Across Sales & the Movie Beaches

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 10:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 9

What can you do to help unclog the sales funnel?

Most companies focus either at the top of the funnel (leads and prospecting) or the bottom (negotiating) but the real opportunity is to break down the sales pipeline into five (5) customer-verifiable objectives and then focus on what can be done to make it easier for sellers to accomplish them.

In this episode, Brian Lambert & Scott Santucci zoom into challenges of losing to no decision. In their typical, tell it like it is style, unscripted style - the go from a scene in the movie Beaches, connect that to buyer research, and then go deep into tackling a big problem inside MOST companies - losing to no decision.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement professionals Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

Oh, I'm Scott Santucci

Brian Lambert 00:36

And I'm Brian Lambert, and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions you should be asking if you want to be successful with sales enablement. In our podcasts, we help you rethink, reframe, and sometimes even revisit how you're going about your sales enablement role and function. In today's podcast, we're going to rethink specifically, we're going to rethink pipeline acceleration strategies. And we're going to take a double click on the buyer side of the sales conversation. In our last podcast, we talked about the five sales objectives. So that means today we're going to talk about something very specific to buyers with regard to those objectives. And Scott, why don't you frame it out for us?

Scott Santucci 01:24

Sure thing, Brian. I don't know if you know this, and I probably might lose my man card by sharing this but no boy. I know. I had the level set it that way. Actually, literally lost some credibility, but I've learned earned it back again when I've shared the story. But have you seen the movie beaches?

Brian Lambert 01:47

No. I think my mom might have tried to get me to see it. I never saw it. So why don't you tell us all about it.

Scott Santucci 01:54

Okay, well, in beaches, and for all the women out there. This is for you. In the movie beaches, Bette Midler's character is a self-absorbed actress. And she has a scene with the with the male love interest, where she's going on and on and talking about how great she is. And she says, Oh, look at me. Enough about me. Tell me what you think of me.

Brian Lambert 02:24

I love it. And I, you know, if ever if anybody wonders how scripted we are, there you go, because I had no idea what he's gonna say. And then I have to legitimately say, what the heck are you talking about? What does it have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 02:38

Authenticity. Right, Brian?

Brian Lambert 02:40

That's right. So, talk about it

Scott Santucci 02:43

What am I talking about is if we look at so one of the things that Brian and I had access to we put together this survey, and actually a bunch of interviews of executive buyers? And we did this every year for four consecutive years, when we were at Forrester, we asked executive level buyers, we had a big survey, the entire survey was mapped to all the five sales objectives that we talked about. So, we know exactly what are the techniques for each one. And the data about how well buyers thought sellers were performing is just off the charts, plural, 11% found their sales, there's their interactions with sellers valuable when they asked about sellers being prepared for calls. And maybe 67% felt that they were prepared about their products and services and then down in the 20s for about their role understood their company, things like that. But one of my favorite, my favorite question was, what's the agenda? What do you think? As a buyer, the agenda of the seller is for your first meeting.

Brian Lambert 02:48

right. I remember that.

Scott Santucci 03:56

Yeah. And the agenda is more or less 86% about the company and only 14% about the buyer.

Brian Lambert 04:07

And that in this case, it's the the seller’s company. It's all about the salesperson’s company or the seller, not the buyer.

Scott Santucci 04:16

So, for me to sum up where we are in the state of sales and buyer alignment, that beaches quote just resonates with me big time. And what we're going to do here is really zoom in on one of the biggest challenges is how would we use this information and the five sales objective information to manufacture and unclog or pipelines?

Brian Lambert 04:42

Okay, that's great. And, you know, one thing's for sure. We don't want to show up and say, you know, that's, that's it. That's enough about me, tell me how awesome I am. Right? So, we can guarantee you that's not going to be the approach here. So, when you look at the objectives, then we're This is a so let's frame this out a little bit, Scott. You know, we're not talking about specifically getting access, then this is this is a little bit more in the middle, perhaps the first meeting, creating shared vision, you know, in the center of the, the objectives here, right?

Scott Santucci 05:14

Well, what I'd like you to do, and what I'd like everybody to do is or if you're, you know, on the treadmill or in a car, something like that, I want you to have a mental picture of a funnel. Right, got that in your head a funnel? Yep. So, if we take those five sales objectives, we probably think, Oh, you know, Target, we have actual contact names of the specific people that we want to do. Oh, access, that's people that we've, you know, we've got first beginnings with and then we have successful meetings and then we have shared vision and then we have close, and it looks like nice and neat, like a nice little funnel, right? Right. That's probably what we think. Well, guess what, when you actually do the analysis and breakdown and do the four Except you will. Most b2b sales organizations pipelines do not look like funnels, they more look like bowl constrictors that've eaten a pig. And when you have when you're a salesperson, you have so many opportunities in this in those middle stages that you're talking about stuck. Throwing more opportunities at you or more leads at you just isn't going to cut it, the issue is you have to find the work to be able to do it. And in that middle zone that that pig, if you will, but the boa constrictors eaten really, what's what's happening here is a large portion of those deals are going to be lost or gonna be lost to India. I notice Asian Incorporated, that the customers just sort of timeout and it's a tremendous amount of burden. It's a trend mess, amount of waste a tremendous amount of effort on it. And that's really what we're gonna be talking about right now.

Brian Lambert 06:53

Yeah, this is great. So, you know, listeners, this is one of those things, especially today that I think Especially if you're not in a bag carrying or sales management role, you may hear this cliche sounds like a cliche Oh, we lost to no decision or, you know, no decisions a problem. But so yes, but there's a lot more to it than that I like the the analogy here of the boa constrictor. So, on this podcast, we're going to double click into that and and talk about some variables and some factors as to why this happens, what it looks like and things we can do to be successful and unclogging the boa constrictor, right. So that's that's the, we're gonna dive deep on that here and not gloss over it. So, Scott, what do you think some of the reasons are? companies are losing to MDI, no decision Incorporated.

Scott Santucci 07:48

Sure. Well, we're going to talk about is why it happens, how to prevent it, and we're going to close with some steps to fix it. But so, let's talk about why it happens at three, four, actually, for reasons or main reasons that this happens. The first part is if you think about that journey song separate ways world worlds apart, values in the eye of the beholder. We don't get to decide what a value proposition is our customers do. And when we're losing a no decision, what it is, is that we haven't really thought through all the different variables for all the different buying executives involved. Second reason is maybe keeping with the song, the song theme a little bit, you've lost that loving feeling. After that first meeting, after that first meeting, and you know, it just went really well. You were really on point delivering your your commercial insight. Your stakeholder is going to go home and they're going to start feeling uncomfortable. And the reason that they're going to start feeling uncomfortable for actually they probably don't really know why it's just in their gut. But what they're doing is they're perceiving personal risk. If you haven't given given your client a path of how this is going to go, they're starting to think through. Do I have the right political capital to do do with this? Am I really going to do it so that it starts to get fuzzy? And as it starts get fuzzy and you're not you don't have an engagement plan is saying, here's how we're going to lay it out to your different stakeholders. What happens is over time, that person just sort of fizzles out if you can't get the momentum going, the political risk and the capital that that particular executive has, has too much time. So now you're in this going dark phase. In the going dark phase, if you do the if your sales reps are doing, hey, I'm just calling to touch base. You're making the problem worse, not better. And the difficulty is those sellers know doggone well they shouldn't be doing that. They just don't have any other alternative because the company hasn't researched it or given them a mechanism to talk with other sellers for the last part then is the client can't really envision the outcome. And when I say the client, what I mean is a sponsor that you've talked with, or also the people involved in that buying decision. They just can't get their head around. How are they going to get started? What do they need to do? How are they going to get their get done? What's your role going to be? What's their role to be? So those are the four most common reasons why this unravels. And the thing that's so unfortunate is these are such easily addressable problems if you just talk about and get people to talk about it, but they just don't!

Brian Lambert 10:42

Okay yeah, I agree. So and, and I want to, I want to double click into these and, you know, spend some time here but let's, can you net out the four real quick I was I was taking mental notes here and I came up with about 20 things that we could talk about in this because there's a lot in so I want to make sure our listeners you know, who might be going through this going holy crap and thought about it this before, give us the four netted out again, just a summary and then go into

Scott Santucci 11:12

Separate ways worlds apart. Our sellers or our sales teams don't have enough empathy to understand what's going on inside our client’s business. Number two were not proactively bringing up to the, to the sponsor what their personal risk factors might be. So, when they think about it the next day and they have that pit in their stomach, and they don't know why they're feeling that way. Just seems too risky. Yep. Three, what happens when you start to go dark? Either you haven't laid out a good game plan which by the way should be done for all reps to be able to leverage not put off on the backs of salespeople to come up with what those game plans are, but they just don't have that game plan and and the only thing that they have to do is, Hey, I'm just calling to touch base. And the last one is, you have packaged up your solution in a way that's about you. Not in a way that is about your clients. So, they can't envision how they're going to be successful. You haven't packaged up their outcome for success. You passionate about what products and services you want them to buy. So yeah, difficult for them to figure out what they're going to do next.

Brian Lambert 12:33

Yep, this is great, because, you know, let me let me add some color to this because, you know, Scott, we've talked with our with our listeners about my background, and where I'm at one of the things that I want to throw in on this discussion is me being a, you know, in a fortune 50 company, I get a lot of sales calls. And I was actually running the numbers last week and I think I think because I like to take sales calls over the last four or five years I probably have done, you know, been on the the buy side or being been pitched 250 times or so. And that's not those are those are just me trying to be you know, researcher, because half the time I would have just said no or ignore them. But this idea of so number one values in the eye of the beholder. I'm in a sales enablement role, and I'm in a very specific one, my LinkedIn profile is very specific. Right now, I have no idea how anybody's hit me up with this idea of you know, lead gen and SEO website design, I don't get it. Right. So, they're completely wrong zip code. Number two, when they do talk to me, I swear it's all about them, which is your number four, but it just they slapped me in the face with my number two, they don't understand how risky would be to even bring somebody in nor the amount of paperwork it would take and the amount of political capital it would take to actually have a conversation with people, it's massive. I mean, it's, it is it is incredibly difficult for my for me to bring vendors into my company without taking political arrows, but more importantly, you know, I got a call in favors half the time to get stuff done. So that's number two. Number three is when I go dark, this idea of Hey, I'm just checking base, can you afford this email office? so and so? It's just like, you know who I'm not your secretary, I don't work for you, you know, like, help me help you, guy, and come on, man. Seriously, and no, I'm not gonna do that. So, I'm not gonna respond, because I don't want to be a jerk. And then I already talked a little bit about it, but I actually had a person last three weeks ago, and I said, you know what, I think we can probably figure this out. So, I think I could help you on your value. I think I will probably be, you know, be able to take some political risk on by having two steps because on another podcast earlier, we talked about this idea. Just what's the Next step, I said, Okay, fine, I can help them get to the next step, but I'm gonna have to work with them probably over the series of six meetings or so. And then, you know, let me engage with them proactively and, and do this. And so, I start this, let me help you process and the very first thing they hit me on is, you know how this thing integrates with Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook. I'm like, I'm not what the hell I'm not even in that zip code, either implementation. Do you guys not realize what we're doing? So, on the buy side, this is just like, they're trying to do the tango. I'm trying to do the waltz. I don't know. Right? And I'm like, I actually had to say, well, you guys just do what I say. And go read my LinkedIn profile. I'm going to shut this call down. We're going to talk again, let's set it up right now. But you got to go read about my company and LinkedIn before we continue, this is a waste of my time. And so lucky, you know, they did that but it's this is a real thing. And the disconnect is massive. And I have a lot of empathy for salespeople are trying to close that gap by themselves. So, when you look at those four things Scott, what do you think, from your perspective, are some critical items that we should be considering as sales enablement, professionals?

Scott Santucci 16:13

Let's piggyback on that last element that you said about empathy for sellers and just can't Can you just do what we say? Let's talk about reducing your risk. So, the first thing that you can do, right, here's a, here's a prescription that you can do is actually organized out and anticipate that your stakeholders So going back to our five sales objectives, why is it so important that you're really clear on who you're targeting? So, Brian only cares about himself specifically, but guess what, there are other people like Brian who have similar roles. So, you can model out that and know, here are five common risk factors that he's got. One is the ability to execute and the ability to execute isn't necessarily just you it's whether he's gonna he's got enough internal Byron or or his team can can follow this through. The next one is how much political capital is he willing to spend it he actually already said that already. It can you envision the benefit realization and when when will happen? What will they be Kenny articulated to all the other people about what you know what you're going to do? What's the opportunity cost in play here? In other words, he's going to spend time with you. Or is he going to spend time doing something else? And then, you know, ultimately, what's the cultural fit, you're going to have to work with inside his company and work with a lot of different people. If you don't have that fit? It's going to be very challenging. So those are that's really the summary of reducing his personal risk. Brian, you have any comments on that?

Brian Lambert 17:50

Yeah, totally makes sense. And what I ended up having to do in this specific scenario is say, Listen, I will agree to get to the next step with you. And then that Step is actually internal to my team with this other function. That's my peer. That's all I can commit to. But we're so far apart, even me bringing you that next step is going to take a lot of work. I'm probably looking at three or four hours with you guys. And I'm willing to do that, are you? And, of course, they said yes. But I'm like, No, you guys literally have to work your asses off to get the next step. And there's not gonna be a close there. I'm just literally talking about the next step. And I don't even know what's going to happen after that. Are you sure you want to do this? But I don't know many buyers that would say that right with you.

Scott Santucci 18:36

Exactly. And they don't know because they don't know they're probably not even going to take them up on that offer so that the seller doesn't even get that chance. So that gives us the right point number two, prescription number two, help your seller communicate what's in it for him to specific groups. So, Brian, you and I both know it remember Zig Ziglar right....

Ep8 Sales Team Productivity Strategies & Building the Brooklyn Bridge

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 16:43:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 8

Scott Santucci and Brian Lambert tackle decision-making in times of rapid change. Unintended consequences are a common variable when some humans make decisions where other humans are a big element in the success of that plan. In hindsight, its easy to say "why didn't they just...." but human nature prevents people from asking some of the right questions at the right time.

They guys use an interesting story about problems the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge encountered. When they built the bridge back then, the followed "what they always knew". And their beliefs actually made the problem worse. Their view of the challenge actually made the cure take longer. How did they figure it out? Well, It took looking at the problem from a different perspective to finally come to a simple solution.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

Hi, I'm Scott Tucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions you should be asking if you want to be successful in sales enablement. Specifically, we rethink reframe and revisit specific sales enablement, principles, topics and trends. And today, we're going to reframe specifically we're going to reframe the approach to enabling headcount versus enabling productivity. In other words, saying it again, enabling the headcount versus enabling to productivity. And I know that may seem a bit intellectual. So, Scott, why don't you get us centered here with a story?

Scott Santucci 01:14

Sure. So, I don't know the story is really going to help with the contrast between enabling to headcount or enabling to productivity, but we'll get there. But in in terms of, you know how to think about this stuff, what I'd like to do is go back to 1869. And in 1869, George Roebling, had this idea of building a suspension bridge across the East River. It's now known as the Brooklyn Bridge. That was the first steel wire suspension bridge of its kind. And in this day, this Gilded Age this era of almost anything is possible building you know, trains, cross cross country, telegraph. All these explosion of innovations and in the huge explosion of innovation and value during this peak of the Industrial Revolution, everybody was doing something new. And they went out to build this. This Brooklyn Bridge. Now, unfortunately, during the construction of this bridge, they ran into unforeseen problems. And specifically, when they were laying down the base at the bottom of the Hudson River, there, their first group of workers started to get sick. And at that point in time, they couldn't figure out what it was. They just assumed it was the drinking habits at this point in time, the Irish this is these are all true stories. So, I'm not I'm not being racist. These guys were super racist at the time, so because they kept getting sick and stalling production. What did they do? They went and got another group of people, Germans, they got didn't work out. So, they got another batch of people recently freed slaves. That didn't work out. They got sick, too. They said, Hey, you know, the Chinese did a great job of building out, building out the railways, let's bring them in. They brought them in. It didn't work either. So, throwing all of this effort, all of this energy, time and time again, they just couldn't figure out what happened, what was happening, what was going on. And really, what what, what they ended up doing is doing some medical analysis to figure out what's going on. I mean, we've got to get this fixed so that we can get this bridge built. There's a lot there's a lot on the line. We said we're going to build the first steel suspension bridge in the world and dadgummit we need to figure it out. So that's it. My 1869

Brian Lambert 03:54

I like it. transported.

Scott Santucci 03:56

Exactly. So really what happened? What What What was going on? What was preventing all these people perpetually to get sick? Well, it turns out, what was happening is the people were being submerged to such depth in the Hudson River, that they were getting decompression sickness. What we now know is the bends. And anybody who's seen any any movie with scuba diving knows about the bends. It's it's ubiquitous everywhere. Well, they didn't know what it was, because they've never had an experience where they had to put people under that under the water at that depth before to where they could run into decompression sickness. So, the the moral of the story here is they thought it was one problem. They threw bodies and activity over and over and over again getting more and more people sick and many, many dying from this condition. When in reality, there was a much simpler approach that was safe. That was wouldn't hurt anybody and to build these decompression tanks? Oh, you know, along the way. So that's, that's my framing story.

Brian Lambert 05:07

There you go. And so, you know, this is interesting, because in that story, you know, like you said, throwing bodies at it. One that's a bit, obviously inhumane. So that's obviously part of the challenge, but it's also pretty expensive to constantly do that. And, you know, you basically at some point, it sounds like in that construction process, realize that doing the same old thing over and over again, that isn't changing anything. And now, okay, at some point, there's a tipping point to say, maybe there's a root cause. Right. So, is that your point in telling that story with regard to sales enablement? Scott, what do you say?

Scott Santucci 05:50

Yes, so the reason that I'm the reason I'm sharing that framing story, for where we are today and the topic that we're going to get into further point number one, this when did that story take place? It took place during the Industrial Revolution when you're resetting and trying incredibly new bold things. Where are we today? We're doing the same thing where we're actually in the midst of a digital transformation where we're going through the same kind of big changes that were going on in the 1860s 1860s. The 1890s as insane changes they went through today. One contrast.

Brian Lambert 06:35

Yes, so stay in there real quick. So, I don't like that. I don't like that level of life and death change here, Scott. What would you say to that? I want to keep doing what I've always done.

Scott Santucci 06:48

No, he could do that. Or you could look at when adjusted for inflation. Every single one of the robber barons are, are more valuable than any of the super rich people that we know of today, every single one of them. So, the amount of explosive wealth and they explosive standard of living and the huge amount of lifting people out of poverty, all of the benefits that happened all were a result of these massive changes. And really it comes back to you could look at it as the future is bleak. AKA the, you know, industrial revolution that's bad. It's sort of the Frankenstein view of the road.

Brian Lambert 07:33

Going to work and nasty factories and get dirty

Scott Santucci 07:35

Right, or we still people in New York still revere that brooklyn bridge that was started in 1869. It's it's that contrast it's it's really depends on on how you look at it. Where would we be as Americans or where would we be as Western cultures without railroads, ourelectricity. Some of the basic things that we for without gas without combustion engines. So that's that's where we are today. Where would we be without the internet? Where would we be without mobile phones? Where would we be without what we're being able to do right now record a podcast this podcast would not be available. It's a it's a

Brian Lambert 08:17

Just think of all the millions of people listening right now.

Scott Santucci 08:19

Yeah millions, right.

Brian Lambert 08:22

All right. So, what's your second point? So, I wanted to.

Scott Santucci 08:25

So, the second point is when you go off into that Brave New World, sometimes the way that you think about solving problems isn't you're gonna run into unforeseen challenges. And sometimes you need to take a step back instead of just throwing activity and bodies at it. Maybe you need to take a step back and rethink it.

Brian Lambert 08:43

Like that. And that's an important analog for today. It because when you take that story, and you look at sales teams, you know, in the last 15 years, 10 years, somebody even say five years organizations sales leaders executives have been attempting to throw salespeople at their customer experience strategies or throw money at their digital strategies to look for skilled workers. I don't I don't have the number in front of me. But I read you know, a couple weeks ago that there are still 10s of thousands of jobs left unfilled, that are considered new economy jobs, digital transformational type of jobs. So there there is a gap in the ability to execute on these and when you throw bodies at it, the symptoms are going to rear their head. And I think when you frame out the the beginning of this podcast, when I said this idea of enabling to headcount versus enabling to productivity is what you're saying here through the opening story, Scott that that we've been throwing salespeople as headcount to, to the strategy

Scott Santucci 09:59

Yes. There's some, you know, there's a macro trend that's actually disturbing about our overall economy. And for the past 10 years, we've actually seen a decline, not an increase a decline in worker productivity. So why is that? And then you can factor in, let's, let's investigate the, you know, the overall work the workforce and all that other stuff. That's sounds like a political discussion. But when you zoom in, and start asking the question, how productive are our sales forces today? Are they more productive than they were 10 years ago? And there's a lot of ways that we can answer it. Uh, what I wanted to do is really talk about one specific company for which I have lots and lots and lots of data. I think we could shed I think we could shed light on that instead of going macro or instead of going back into history, we know talking about one specific

Brian Lambert 10:55

company. Yeah, let's do that. So, we've got as a proxy for this idea of tackling this issue, one specific organization, so maybe, you know, we'll start with, tell us a little bit about the sales team, the organization, and then what what transposed. And then I assume, through this discussion that we're going to be able to provide our listeners with some action items as well. I'll come up with three, you'd come up with three and we'll, we'll be able to provide a path forward to tackle this same type of discussion in our own organizations. Yeah, so let's do that. And then so tell us frame it out a little bit for us around this one specific organization and their sales team.

Scott Santucci 11:35

Okay, so let's let's go through the case study. So first, what is the company the company I'm gonna take the names out to protect the protect the innocent, but it's a $300 million company that is moving from selling a variety of security products in a you know, in hardware form to move into providing cloud-based subscription services. So that's that's basically what they were. So that's that.

Brian Lambert 12:07

So, let's do our first check. Is that indicative of a, in a shift in the revolution? Right, from industrial to knowledge work? Is that a massive shift?

Scott Santucci 12:16

Well, it is a, it's a massive shift in terms of saying we're selling physical products, old economy, to new economy, digital economy to a subscription based, you know, cloud based, cloud-based business model. Yeah, a lot of companies are going through this shift, some have gone through it earlier, rather than later. So, you know, everybody goes through it through a different way. But it's a common factor. And it's something that, oh, yeah, duh, of course, we need to make it but when you sold a physical thing, and now you're selling, moving to selling a subscription, there's a lot of changes associated with that.

Brian Lambert 12:50

Yeah, not only the business strategy, but the business model and how revenues recognized the way teams you know have to work together the actual solutions themselves, and how in Obviously, in what we're going to get to hear how those how those are sold,

Scott Santucci 13:03

Yes, how sellers actually behave and what they think they're selling and to whom they think they are and to whom they are actually selling to. So, the situation was the year before I was involved, the company had done some analysis and business analysis that pretty much every but every company does, and I'm oversimplifying it, it's way more way more detailed than that. But like most companies, in order to come up with a compensation plan, you build a low end and a high end in terms of target, and you set a threshold level of your bookings per rep target. And the reason that you do that is you do that to calculate different, you know, obviously, to define the role of a seller but you also do it to set the compensation thresholds. And what they recognized was in their, in their opinion, too many of their reps were below 80% threshold. So, what is 80% threshold? In this case, it's 80% of hitting quota. Okay, so far too few reps, how many we're not hitting what we're not hitting the 80% threshold is not important, what's important, but it was a lot, it was more than more than 60%. What's more important was how they were looking at it. So, in order to improve the performance of the average rep, you know, to get more of those reps up to the 80% threshold, which they were comfortable with. What did they do? Well, they looked at two things number one was the turnover and the overall turnover the Salesforce with 25%. And that checks with about industry averages or whatnot. So, it's not it's not a problem and they didn't investigate that. Then what they did is they did did you know sort of the classic let's survey the sellers and see what they need. Let's talk the salesman. And see what they need. They came up with a whole boatload of activities that they needed to do. And they spent over 500,000 out of pocket and then a whole bunch of other energy and resource to build that set of activities. They rolled it out in the kickoff. And you know, what happened throughout that year? Well, throughout that year, not one single new rep hit the 80% target threshold that you might as well have not spent that money, because literally, nothing changed nothing. So obviously, we're going were they This is where I enter the story and the conversation is, what more activities should we prescribe to the sellers? And my point was, all right, look, if you did all that work, there should be a relationship between activity and performance, right. So, we should probably figure out why that performance didn't happen. In other words, Let's not throw more bodies at you know, in the case ons, let's actually investigate what happened. So, you know, that takes some doing but by framing it out this way that I was able to, you know, persuade them to, you know, go through with our engagement. And what we did is that let's do a baseline, I call it a baseline analysis and simply put, what we're going to do is we're going to put in, we're going to examine, first we're going to categorize sellers into tiers of performance. And by performance, what we mean is their overall total bookings not not revenue per rep, but but but by booking bookings per individual. So of course, you know, we had some HR rules, and you know, that we had to follow to make sure it was blind and not and not that. And I think the biggest problem that we ran into Brian is this company was so comfortable tracking sales performance by quota and by product that we actually had to do a lot of data reengineering, we'll call it to actually get out the contract value. And part of the difficulty through this exercise was guys that I only care about the level of activity the seller does in order to get a contract. Because the contract is ultimately what all this effort is for. And this the customer chooses to put in that contract what the terms are.

Brian Lambert 17:36

So, this is one of those things, right? sales is simple. And then you'd like to say you know, simple as hard. Yep. And I like to say hard is doable, but you have to, you have to do the work. This is an interesting so if i if i at the risk, and I'm just going to give this an example here to breathe some life into it. I had a call with like a sales enablement intern like two weeks ago. And she was saying, Hey, you know, when, when people go online and they, you know, you know, want to attend our events, they put in their information, and we can't even cross reference that into our accounts. And that's, that's an example of a disconnect in from lead gen into, you know, an existing account via. And those types of disconnects are all over the place. And what you're bringing up here is an interesting, you know, potential disconnect that you're tackling on the front end, which is sales drives, bookings. And there's activities related to bookings. So, what type of questions Did you get on that? And why was that hard? Who is that hard for?

Scott Santucci 18:38

What was hard for the sales operations team because the sales operations team has worked out how to report to the CFO, and the CFO was interested in product sales, because the company is interested in driving product sales, not services sales. So, what you know, since we that's all we care about why would you look at things differently? And I said, I don't know, I just want to figure out whatever is required to sell a contract, who knows, maybe some salespeople are selling services along with the products, because they think the selling those services help sell those products. So, if they, if he took that away, maybe they'd have a harder time selling it. I don't know, I just know that there's a level of effort required to get a contract. And I want to start with measuring that which means I'd like to have this kind of data please. And back and forth,

Brian Lambert 19:35

That doesn't cross-reference into products at all

Scott Santucci 19:38

Right. So basically, what it ended up having to do is I took I said give me the you know, I went and got went...

Ep7 Establish & Startup a Sales Enablement Function with a Listener

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Sun, 30 Jun 2019 18:08:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 7

Want to learn from others in the Sales Enablement Space?

One of our listeners, "Elizabeth" connected with Scott via LinkedIn. A few messages over LinkedIn later and we decided to do a special podcast to see to us (Scott and Brian) on the spot.

This is a live, unrehearsed conversation reviewing Elizabeth's situation and talking through some ideas for how to address it. We summarize action items, define the next steps, and get Elizabeth's feedback.

Some of the topics discussed include:

How Elizabeth got into sales enablement in the first place
working with sales managers
determining the difference between sales managers and sales enablement
how to use the 'business within a business" framework to help bring clarity
how to bring marketing into the conversations
how to move from a reactive to a proactive state

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Scott Santucci 00:33

Hello, I'm Scott Santucci.

Elizabeth Connor 00:35

Hey, I'm Elizabeth Connor.

Brian Lambert 00:37

And I'm Brian Lambert. And we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to helping leaders ask the big questions they should consider in order to be successful with sales enablement. In this podcast, we're going to rethink, reframe, and revisit the sales enablement function and role to clarify so you can take action, lead others and ensure success. And today, we actually have a special format. We're calling it tackling reality. And I'm super excited about it. Scott, why don't you frame it out for us?

Scott Santucci 01:07

Sure thing, Brian. Remember the episode that we had when we were doing the debrief of the Conference Board meeting? When I was in Atlanta?

Brian Lambert 01:17

Yeah, Yes, I do. And I remember I called you and you didn't answer.

Scott Santucci 01:21

Yes. I didn't answer not because I was ignoring you're being a jerk. I think that you implied a little bit in the last. I didn't answer because I actually was engaged in a LinkedIn discussion, a God's honest truth, who links a LinkedIn back and forth with Elizabeth at the time, and I just didn't pick up because I was really engrossed by it. So, Elizabeth, who's joining us today, had reached out and connected to me on LinkedIn and said, Hey, listen to your podcast, I wanted to connect. I shot back. Thanks. You know, what do you like about it? Baba, bah, we got to talking. And the idea came up, why don't we confront reality, and address her issues live on the show? So, we've changed her name, her name isn't really Elizabeth. Her company will, you know will change we're going to protect the innocent. So, she's going to be able to talk to us and we've never met before. So, we're doing this live for the first time. Isn't that right, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Connor 02:17

Absolutely. Yeah.

Scott Santucci 02:19

So why don't you tell us a little bit about how you came to our podcast, and you know, what you liked about it? What was the impetus to to reach out and then share was this why the heck are you here? Why are you doing this? This seems kind of crazy.

Elizabeth Connor 02:34

Well, what I actually loved about your podcast is there was nothing that sugar coated, any of the experiences that anyone goes through. So, what I've come across a lot is that a lot of the sales enablement, blogs and things like that are just the old positives, but there's nothing about the real day to day, and the challenges that you do face when starting in this role.

Scott Santucci 02:58

Excellent. And then what made you decide, like, who actually decides to do this? I mean, just if you're listening, this is a total stranger who's agreed to get on a podcast to talk about the challenges that you run into. So, I want to know a little bit about like, you like, why are you doing this?

Elizabeth Connor 03:16

So, I mean, I've been in sales for a long time, more more years than I care to admit. I absolutely love just speaking to people and shaving those experiences. And moving into the enablement away from the actual sales rep role. That is a very big main shift. And you're not speaking to as many people you don't have the same support around you as a team of 10 sales reps to be on one sales enablement. So, I'm sitting going you know someone speak to me.

Scott Santucci 03:50

Great, well, well, well, we'll talk and basically your voice is going to be heard, and maybe there's somebody else or hopefully, there's more people out there that are just like you. So, what we're going to do now is we're going to do the way that we set this up in our in our email is, what we're going to do right now is what we're calling speed date consulting. So, we're gonna go through rapid fire. We're going to learn a little bit about Elizabeth world, what some of her challenges are, and some of the reality issues. I'll I'll interject with questions. We'll go back and forth really quickly. And Brian will wrap us up.

Brian Lambert 04:23

Yeah. Just one quick thing, Scott, if I could add Elizabeth to, I would say, we want you to challenge us. And you know, you're not in the spotlight. Here we are. Right. So, if you know through the course of this, you want to push back, you want to ask why we're asking it. Or if you you know want to redirect that's that's your prerogative, right. So, Scott and I are the ones here that are on the witness stand, if you will, or working through this, not you this is a safe place for you. And let's just you know, have a real conversation like you said.

Elizabeth Connor 04:57

Cool, absolutely.

Scott Santucci 04:59

So, with that Elizabeth, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? What kind of company you've got, just give us the basics, please. So

Elizabeth Connor 05:08

So, since I went into sales of kinda, sold most things, and including what they were classes, the difficult ones, advertising, office supplies, and then into it and no working in the SAS market. So, I've kind of done face to face on the phone, demos, I've done all the sales jobs. And I had experience doing training, I thought, no, that's great, I want to go. And in establishing that training enroll, we actually discovered it was more of a full-on enablement role we needed within the company.

Scott Santucci 05:43

Gotcha. So, tell me a little bit about the business problem that you thought you were addressing with the training role.

Elizabeth Connor 05:48

So, we grew very, very quickly. And I know that's a positive challenge that a lot of companies face. But what happened was, we grew so quickly that we had all these people in place, and nothing to actually onboard them or train them in our products to do ongoing coaching. We had no one working on marketing on collateral. We had no sales training, collateral nothing. And it became over cutting issue with the rep saying we need training, we need training, we need training.

Scott Santucci 06:21

Got it? And then when you say it became a full-on enablement role. I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily say there's a huge consensus about exactly what the scope of enablement is. And where does it start and stop? From your viewpoint? What does that full enablement role look like? And when you say, Wait, who's wait.

Elizabeth Connor 06:40

And so, when I say we was the whole sales team, because I'm still a rep at the time, but for me, there's the whole there's the process, there's a documentation, there's, as you're communicating that properly to the team, there's tracking that the content we're giving is actually working. And it's not just going out there to float about in the ether. It's actually good customers, it's helping with the conversations, it's helping with a value proposition. And we had none of that we were everybody battling against the sales team. And by moving into a training capacity, I started going, whoa, we actually need that. I mean, he thought from marketing when he thought from support, we need that from our success team. And that's how we ended up more of an enablement role, because it was agreed you can speak to everybody in other departments. Here you go.

Scott Santucci 07:35

Gotcha. So, to put words in your mouth, spit out what doesn't fit. What you start out training, because the belief is, our reps really don't know what they're doing. I'm oversimplifying. So, we go in and get them to look at what we're doing. And oh, by the way, we need information from product, we need information from marketing, we need information from customer success, and we don't need it the way that you're giving it us. We needed it in a different kind of way.

Elizabeth Connor 08:03

Exactly, we discovered it was a much bigger challenge than we thought it was when we started drilling down, and I was trying to find the content and find the collateral to train the team in. So that was kind of grew from there.

Scott Santucci 08:17

Gotcha. So, I think most people in a SAS environment can relate to that. So, tell me where you are today. And in our speed day consulting, what what can you challenge us with to see whether we can help you or not?

Elizabeth Connor 08:29

So, here's the biggest challenge we've had. So, we've got all the sales team hoppy, they've got their quarterly training plans, they've got me they can come to for collateral requests, and they know all that's going to be done for campaigns and stuff. The issue I have is not with them. It's actually with the management of those teams. So, the they're, they're younger, they're less experienced in the work environment. And they keep trying to take parts of my job. And you start feeling quite territorial, and it becomes quite a conflict. And then as the more experienced one, I keep thinking, I've got to take a step back and go, No, we can deal with this. And it actually ends up making me more wind up. So, the whole dealing with the managers who I'm in the same team meetings with is the real challenge.

Scott Santucci 09:29

So let me speculate a little bit here to see if this is if this is common. I have run into situations where managers might say, look, the reps that work for me are my responsibility. I'm in charge of developing them. You are not. And you're and I'm kind of very, very much paraphrasing what you're doing is getting in the turf in space that I'm responsible for. And I wouldn't do it the way that you're doing it. I want him to do it this way. Is that about right?

Elizabeth Connor 10:09

Yeah. So, they'll sit there and go, you need to train my reps. Okay, great. What training? Do you feel your reps need to put training or coaching? And do your reps want? I don't know. You just have to shame them. Yeah. All right. Okay, well, we'll come up with a plan, great, then it comes to onboarding. And you've got manager going, I'm having nothing to do with onboarding. And then the manager comes in and says, No, I want to do the onboarding. Mm. You know, you've got that you've got another manager, if he's going ahead and schedule in training, away from what you've planned, then your reps going to spend a lot of times in training here. And it's not me, but I'm the one that gets the negative feedback.

Scott Santucci 10:56

Right.Gotcha. Okay, so too, you know, in the speed day consulting, boom, I've clicked in on a couple things. So, number one, let's talk about expectation management, in a role like yours, and I go back to the first time that I created a crater role. Managing everybody's expectation is really difficult. When I first started, I actually had four different sales regions, one of the sales VPS of the sales region hated me. It's like, Okay, well, I just won't do anything. I want delivery services for him. Step number one is, let's think about our, our function as a business within a business, right? You're the president of that business, and you can choose who to service or not service, you just have to make sure that the people, your investors that people were paying for your salary, and your and your department are happy with the overall results. So, let's start there. Let's talk about what overall results to whom do you report to? And what is their expectation?

Elizabeth Connor 12:02

So, I report to our sales director, nine, he's very much of the opinion, he has said to me so many times, your role was critical. You need to push back on the managers. But then, and the other word that on the other side of that he'll see, you know, but you do have to accept you do have more experience than them. And you're sitting kind of going, I don't know what to do here. Yeah. Because obviously, he's gonna look after all of us. We're all his direct reports. But you're sitting looking at monitors and can let me do my job, and you won't have to do my job.

Scott Santucci 12:43

Yes. So, I think the first thing is, if we go level up to managing expectations, we need to we need to something clear that says, here’s where sales enablement starts and stops. And here's where frontline sales management starts and stops. And I think so for example, if our frontline sales manager, I might be really high on development. And I'm going to call the things that I'm doing developmental training or training, because what the hell is just the word, right, we all use the word. But it might be different, like you might be providing performance or capability training. So, I think if we could get really clear and say, all right, let's, let's delineate roles and responsibilities. The scope of what we're doing for sales enablement is to equip it is to raise the aggregate ability of all the individual reps, so that they are conversant to talk to the customers that we're that we're dealing with. They're able to speak at the right altitude level, they're able to position our capabilities in a business, business-oriented way. And they're able to navigate all the internal stakeholders required and be able to work with the internal resources that they need to like, that's my job. And where I started where I stopped. The individual sales manager is responsible for the actual performance of the team. I'm sales enablement is evaluated on the aggregate like the overall salesforce, not anyone in particular individual. And that way you make it clear that the sales the sales manager is responsible for the individual seller, but you are responsible for the overall environment of which selling operates in that might be one way to make it to make it clear. That's that's step one in terms of scope. Does that make sense?

Elizabeth Connor 14:41

It does but once you've set those expectations, if there is then someone who does go ahead and schedule something that should be in an in the enablement space. Do you let that go on and send the message to the team of oh, well, it's okay? We can go to our managers or do you actually say to that manager? No, you need to counsel that and that has to come through me.

Scott Santucci 15:04

I think the way that I prefer to handle that is if you click on the business within a business service, you escalate that to the sales director, and and ask and then that way they can ask, is the quality of the service that you're providing to that manager? Who does that? Is the quality of the service that's being provided? Not to your standard? Is that why you're duplicating this effort?

Elizabeth Connor 15:31

Makes sense.

Scott Santucci 15:32

And then that way, you're not in the position of yes or no, it's, if you're providing a service, and that sales manager doesn't think that they're getting the right service, they should have the they should have the ability, because they're responsible for performance, also, they should be able to go around that. And then that way, you have a more or less, it's like a contract, just like you would want with your with your customers to be able to have a good get, it's the same thing. And that way, you can escalate in a positive way. And it shows that you are an assert your your service oriented. So, if if the thing that I'm providing isn't adding value, and that's great. What that's probably going to do is put more of the burden on the sales manager to ask, hmm, am I really duplicating effort, because this is time out of calling, this is time out of the field. And the other thing is, maybe you quantify a thing that I'm a big fan of doing that is to or Elizabeth, I need to sound European that way, is quantifying time, it is using time as a metric. In other words, we have our reps, each seller generates X number of dollars of bookings per hour. And that you will use that as a metric for meetings, we use that as a metric for anything that's timeout, if it's $500 per hour, is this is taking them at an hour out worth $500 or can we solve this problem somewhat something different, use that as your form of currency, because then you can or dollars, sorry, pounds, pounds, euros, whatever to form a currency. But you use that and that way you can work the other way too, if the sales manager is is requesting those resources, well, that's timeout, and that those resources, you know, also belong to the sales director, they're not only the responsibility of the sales manager, they belong to everybody. So, if they're making a decision to take people out of the field to duplicate time and material, and there are five other managers who aren't doing it, then that manager is going to get the level of scrutiny and just ask the question, why. And if they have a good reason, then great, you should incorporate their feedback and make your your training program better. If not, then they're going to they're not going to be able to defend their action.

Elizabeth Connor 17:55

And from the training point of view, that makes complete sense. What happens more on the whole working with the other teams, though? Where, you, you're working on some thought you're working on certain collateral for one of the teams. And you know,...

Ep6 Inside the Conference Board Sales Enablement Council Meeting

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 13:16:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 6

What's going on in the Sales Enablement space -- specially with companies looking to evolve their sales strategy?

In this special edition, Brian Lambert catches up with Scott Santucci after a two-day Council Meeting of Sales Enablement Executives.

At the beginning of 2018, the Conference Board received requests from its members (large businesses) to form a council to explore the emerging role of sales enablement in order to establish the foundations for developing and running this new function. The group is invitation-only and works to create insights based on the practical experiences of its members. Members include leaders from large companies representing diverse industries including financial services,high technology, business services, hospitality and manufacturing.

Scott Santucci serves as the program director of the group (on a contract basis). Through the process of norming, storming, and forming - the group is developing new ways to gain insights from different industries. When you look at the forest from the trees, new patterns begin to emerge. What we are learning is that for B2B sales, the sales execution problems that Intercontinental Hotels Group and Microsoft are far more similar than they are different. Regardless of your industry, the practice of B2B selling is similar.

You need an overarching "one company" value proposition that is more detailed than your brand, but less specific than products
Your company is organized into product-based silos, but you need to bring a different, integrated, and more consistent experience to customers
You have many different stakeholders involved in a sale - there are "buyers" who give you a hunting license and then "buyers" who drive usage
The challenges sellers have navigated the 'agreement networks' within large companies is easy to explain through experiences (in the readout to executives we performed a 10 min skit to illuminate the challenge) but hard to conceptualize is traditional management consulting readouts, metrics, and charts.
The solutions to fix these problems are actually simple when you follow design thinking concepts, work collaboratively across organizational silos and focus on the actual experience of customers. However, explaining the approach sounds excessively complicated and far too risky based on managements comfort level with traditional projects. In addition, because the solution required cutting across so many different organizational functions, identifying an executive sponsor and gaining the funding to even start a pilot program can be challenging.

The council is still forming and deciding what concepts to share, how to test insights and ideas the group comes up with, and how to publish its findings. Here are things it's agreed to so far.

The emerging role of sales enablement is a by-product of the digital transformation of our economy
The value of the function is unique compared to other functions - it creates value by eliminating things
The council believes that for sales enablement roles to add value to their businesses, they must be organized as cross-functional groups
The council has embraced a "business within a business" framework to provide the foundation for this new role
The council has also developed a review process to develop insights and then methodically test those ideas within the member organizations

To this end, the membership as adopted the midwest mindset of "show me" when reviewing the various claims, reported data, and various "best practices" advanced by industry experts and management consultants. Our members have engaged virtually all of the management consulting firms, read reports from industry analysts, and are evaluating most of the technologies provided. The group has decided to focus on sharing its experiences with these groups and what results (or problems) they create.

The #1 thing our members have learned is they learn from each other through actual experiences (working on team exercises or case studies) and in the meeting June 17-18 in Atlanta, the council was hosted by Intercontentinal Hotels. In this meeting, IHG openly shared its business challenges (all council members are under NDA) and other council members broke into groups to provide a readout of findings and recommendations to IHG business leaders.

In this session the guys cover:

How the Conference Board was founded 106 years ago during a changing economy and how that relates to today's digital economy
What exactly IS a council - who is it comprised of, why, how does it work?
How is the idea of 'sales enablement' forming and taking root in large enterprise organizations?
How do you set up a working case study and what was the agenda and format of the meeting?
What were some of the lessons learned

Topics include:

- The concept of "stratecution" - how important it is to blend strategy and execution

- Using a "letter to shareholders" format to sell the vision and promise of sales enablement internally

- Why creating b2b value propositions is so much more challenging than you think it is

- How do the concepts of customer loyalty and experience blend with a value proposition

- Why creating a new tool kit for how to drive programs is so important and what industries can learn from each other

- The importance of getting many groups together and why overcoming "English to English" translation is such a key to success

We realize this is a long episode, but it is jam-packed with the collective insights of companies who are driving sales transformation and innovations from within their companies. It will be a while before these ideas crystallize into 'best practices' or programs you can buy off the shelf so this will give you the opportunity to hear what's on the mind of other executives seeking more proactive ways to address the revenue generation challenges facing their businesses.

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode #5

Everyone Agrees Sales Training is Important- So why the friction between sales and L&D?

In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss the role of people. Sales Enablement is a people profession and sales enablement leaders are focused on human behavior and skills of sellers (or as CEOs often say "manufacture their reps." The challenge for many "classically trained" L&D professionals lies in balancing the hyper-specialization and needs of the seller with the desired by executives to run as a shared service function. Sometimes the L&D function and people within it aren't often set up to support Sales.

This creates a fundamental question: Why is so much sales training outsourced? Why are sales processes off-limits to the training function? And when sales enablement equals training, why is it considered tactical delivery?

If training organizations aren't comfortable engaging strategically on developing talent, or aren't deemed "valuable" by executives that's a problem. Brian & Scott talks about his journey to tackle this gap and enable the trainers to close the gap to sales teams through research, processes, and outputs. Why terms like ADDIE and rigid L&D approaches don't resonate with other groups including the CEOs view of "training."

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

SPEAKERS

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Nick Merinkers

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Brian Lambert 00:34

Hi, this is Brian Lambert.

Scott Santucci 00:35

And this is Scott Sam teaching and where the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to helping leaders ask the big questions they should consider in order to be successful with sales enablement. In this podcast, we rethink reframe, revisit the sales enablement function and past ideas and best practices. Around the role to clarify so that you can take action, lead others and ensure success for your company. Today we have another special edition on previous episode our previous episode was well received that was the episode where we did a trip report where Brian was at the sales enablement soiree in Boston. Before I before I asked Brian to frame out our trip report and how we're going to do this, I do want to mention one exciting, exciting input. And I'm gonna ask our listeners to share. So first and foremost, if you haven't reached out to Brian and I send us a send us a note and connect to us on LinkedIn. And I had a great I had a great correspondence with someone from from our show, and she reached out and said, Hey, I love your show. I love how raw it is and I, I said, well, what's going on in your organization, we got to change guiding, and we're exploring an idea of doing a show to put Brian and I on the hook to see whether or not she can give. We can give live feedback on the show, without ever really meeting her to help navigate some of the challenges that she's gotten her SaaS company. So, I'm looking forward to that. What do you think of that, Brian?

Brian Lambert 02:21

I think it's great. And we might want to change the names to protect the innocent sounds. All right.

Scott Santucci 02:26

That's right. That's why I didn't say her name or anything like that. In this episode, normally, I'm the one who frames out frames out the podcast, but this one since I'm the one doing the trip report, and I'm holding back on Brian about what what to share. Brian, why don't you frame us out?

Brian Lambert 02:45

Yeah, sure. So everybody, I left Scott a message and he had shared that he was going to Atlanta to have a big meeting around sales enablement strategy with with some executives, so I called him and said, Hey, you know, I'd like to hear about it. He didn't call me back. So that I finally got him on the phone later that evening. And I said, I'd love to hear about it. And he said, Well, why don't we do it on the show? So I'm just as in the dark as you all are, and we're gonna kind of take a look at what you did. Scott, I'm really intrigued by it. So let me first ask you, it makes sure I understand what it was. And then I'd love to dive into what happened and what the outcomes were.

Scott Santucci 03:24

Does that sound that makes that makes perfect sense and always a good, good level set to start off with what you know.

Brian Lambert 03:31

So you had said, In preparation for this meeting that it was with the Conference Board, and you were, in your role, leading a council of sorts, and you had had success throughout a series of meetings with the Conference Board members and this one was an interesting one, because you're pretty excited about it got me excited about it, because it was doing a deep dive on a specific challenge that one of the members is faced including working together through a day and a half session culminating in some sort of, I believe, executive readout to his executives that would be coming in cold to get the readout. Is that right? Do I have that? Right?

Scott Santucci 04:16

You do have it right. And I think I think what's helpful, at least this, this would be helpful for me is ask a few, you know, get a few questions answered and level set. So, question number one, what is the Conference Board? Question number two, is was the meeting with the Conference Board? Or was the meeting with the council and set this question number three is what the heck is the council anyway? What the heck are they doing? So let me let me go through those three questions. Question number one, what is the Conference Board? So, I'm sharing this with you, I needed to know this information myself. I was recruited by the by the competition. To the Conference Board to start up a sales enablement Council. So, what does that mean? What's the council all that stuff I didn't really know. And this is how I've processed that information. The Conference Board started 106 years ago 106. And how it got got its start was back in the industrial revolution. If you kind of remember your history, their labor and management didn't really get along. And if you're familiar with your European history, it led to lots of revolutions. And the industrialists here didn't think that was good for business. So, what they decided to do was get some labor and some leaders from at&t, and Ge, and you know, some other you know, big companies like that, and they worked out labor challenges, and in this in this meeting in this council that they formed, they created the eight-hour workday, no kidding, the eight-hour workday really engine. It started out with the Conference Board. It's an American invention. You're welcome France. And eight-hour workday was the birth product, the very first result of the Conference Board. So since then, it's gotten companies together. multinational companies together, so it focuses exclusively on big companies to solve complex problems and they form these councils, and these councils are run in a very open way. We follow certain rules that we have but each program director runs this. We are not paid well. It's it's very it's very it's a very part-time part-time job. But that's that's basically what it is. So, you the Conference Board recruits the council's the conference that the member the the program director, in this case, myself sets criteria for what it is that we're looking for, like what kind of type or diversity or you know, things like that. They gather the gather the members together and they start having meetings, and the members are responsible for it. So, in a lot of ways, it's like a homeowner's association. The builder starts it, but then turns it over to the members. And really, my job is to facilitate or set the structure for it. So that's so far what the sales eight what is the Conference Board? And what is the council? Is that clear so far?

Brian Lambert 07:31

Yeah, the only thing I would want you to clarify is, you know, you're talking 106 years old, you know, industrial revolution stuff, and it feels a little stodgy to me, but then we're talking sales enablement. Right. So, tell me a little bit about why they went into it. And, and then as you said, in one of your questions to frame it out, who are some of these people that you're meeting with?

Scott Santucci 07:52

Yeah, so that's a good question. So, the stodgy part is actually really interesting. So, as you probably can imagine, I forgot another element of the Conference Board. The Conference Board also produces a lot of consumer index data. So, if you go if you were to listen on Wall Street and when earnings calls come out, and I talk about consumer confidence and things like that, the Conference Board does all that data also. So, they have a huge amount of economists etc. And it's a nonprofit organization to us. So, it's a very unique, interesting thing. So back to the hundred years. Episode, what the reason that I like that story is 100 years ago, we were going from a we were transforming from an agricultural based way of thinking about how to run business to an industrial revolution. And we had a lot of we had a lot to work out about Management Science and, you know, span of control responsibilities and all those other things. And what's interesting is here we are at the cusp of the digital economy, and we're running into the same kinds of things. So, there are, you know, 80 other councils that focus on things ranging from librarian tactics, literally, to CFO councils

Brian Lambert 09:16

in the Conference Board,

Scott Santucci 09:18

In the Conference Board, right. All of these different little, little councils. And what happened was they started getting demand for, hey, what's the sales enablement stuff? We don't we as big companies hear about it a lot. We're really unclear what that looks like. Let's set up a council for it. So, what we did is, uh, you know, I, I was recruited for it, you know, that I'm pretty well known and guess in the space. And I said, I'd love to do that. That's right up my alley, and we recruited people for it. So basically, I used a maturity model at that time. Assume three different phases like Phase One is, are you in a reactive state? phase two, are you in a manage state? And phase three? Are you in adaptive state? And I had other criteria for it. We can talk about maturity models later, we recruited people in stage two that wanted to get to stage three.

Brian Lambert 10:17

Okay, so you targeted that specific Lee. And so, one, that implies that there are people in a managed state, which I'm glad to hear, without a counsel and you wouldn't have a meeting. So that's a win. Yep, the profession. But before we go too much further, Scott, you know, some of our loyal listeners that have known this a long time might say something like, Hey, you guys, you know, at Forrester, you had a council too. So, are you are you just retreading the old Council and well, you know, redoing everything over again? And you know, are you guys going to advance this or what? What would you say to that?

Scott Santucci 10:54

Well, I would say that the economics is just everything. This is different. So, Forester, I think the fee to participate in the council was, you know, between 50 and $75,000 a year. And with that, you know, myself, you our team, we are we produced research also and had these had these council meetings and had, you know, had outputs. At the Conference Board. There are very lightweight deliverables. The fee is much, much, much less between $10,000 and $15,000, depending upon you know how many services the company has under

Brian Lambert 11:42

If people mention your name, do they get a discount?

Scott Santucci 11:47

I had to get invited first.

Brian Lambert 11:49

Oh, it's invitation only

Scott Santucci 11:50

it is invitation only? That's correct. So, you have to you have to invite and you got to go to the you can go to the website and apply and you know, the app application process happens and I'm not part of that. I just get on the phone after they go through the...

Ep5 The Evolution of Sales Training & The USA School System

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 21:20:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 5

Everyone agrees sales training is important, so why the friction between Sales and L&D?

The challenge for many "classically trained" L&D professionals lies in balancing the hyper-specialization and needs of the seller with the desired by executives to run as a shared service function. Sometimes the L&D function and people within it aren't often set up to support Sales.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

Hello, I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Hey, and I'm Brian Lambert. And we're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions that you may be wondering about sales enablement. Are you frustrated that maybe something's not quite right? Do you believe that sales enablement should be adding more value than it really is? In this podcast? We're going to talk about today, something that's very near and dear to my heart and that's training and learning. So, Scott, what do you have for us?

Scott Santucci 01:01

Thank you, Brian. And as always, we try to frame out the topic that we're discussing by bringing other examples to the table so that we have better insights and better perspective to discuss it. I have the great fortune, or if I were a 12-year-old, rewriting many, many, many reports over and over and over again, the misfortune of having an educator for a mother, and my mom has worked in developing curriculum and learning for many years and has all kinds of masters and in training, and she's an educator, through and through and through. Well, one of the things that's interesting is we all know, the curriculum for students, and the curriculum for adult learning has gone off into different different branches. And one thing that's being exposed to all of that information, you know, you hear a lot of things. And one of the things that I'm particularly attuned to, is this whole idea of the K through 12. state of educating our children. In the United States, we spend the most more than any other industrialized country in the entire world on spending per student. Yet if you look at Test Scores and results, we're down towards the bottom. So, the question is, what are we getting for all that money? And where is it going? And that tends to be a hot topic and a lot of different reformers and perspectives about how we improve education.

Brian Lambert 02:38

So, Scott, that's great, as usual, great facts. Great story. But, you know, in the corporate world, I don't have very many high schoolers that that work here. So, what does that have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 02:51

What is that? Right? So I love that question. And what does that have to do with anything? Why are we talking about that? Well, the reason that we're talking about that is often get the opportunity to have one on one conversations with CEOs. And the reason that I'm they're having that conversation is, of course, they're concerned with the productivity of their Salesforce. So, my first question is, well, how sure are you that it's the effectiveness or it's the quality of the reps? Have you looked at, say your products and services? CEO answer is always Well, we've done a lot of research into that. That's a good question. We've gotten Bain McKinsey or some external person to validate their their corporate strategy. We've got great feedback about our products and services. We feel we feel fantastic about it. It's not our products and services. like okay, well, maybe it's have you thought about that. It's your messaging and marketing. Well, we actually did a brand audit, the branding that we came out with is it brand new and we really like we really like where we are with our branding and positioning. Our marketing department is generating tremendous amount of leads and those leads aren't getting followed up by the Salesforce. And it's very frustrating. We've got a lot of metrics and indicators from our marketing department about what what kind of messaging is, is involved. So, we're pretty certain it's the Salesforce. So, then my next question is, okay, well, if it's the Salesforce, then Have you been hiring the right people? Maybe maybe what you've been doing is been hiring the wrong people all along. So, the answer is, well, of course we hire the right people. We always, were really good about hiring best in breed, we hire with competitive salaries, we've got a great hiring process in place. And then I asked for sort of a follow up question around that which is, are the people who are still involved there two years ago. So, in other words, all of the new recruits that you have that comprise them the bulk of your Salesforce, are they all the same people? Yes. They're the all, they're the same people. So basically, my summary of that Brian is, and I say this to CEOs as well, let me summarize what I've heard. Your products are great. Your branding and positioning is great. You're hiring all the right people, yet somehow you have the wrong Salesforce today. Is that correct? And the CEO says yes. And then my question back to him is, are you looking at what you're doing? Because it seems like you're manufacturing the wrong reps? And then I'd be quiet. And then when, when that happens, it's always Uh huh. I never really thought about that. And we have a completely different question. Rather than launching into what kind of sales training program Do we need to put in place or how do we hold salespeople accountable, etc.

Brian Lambert 05:59

Yeah, that makes sense. And it's an interesting way that you put it here. Are you manufacturing the right reps? So, I have a, I have a people background and that concept of manufacturing reps is is something that the traditional l&d folks might rail against, but what do you, what do you mean by that? And what, what kind of dialogue do you have about this concept of manufacturing reps?

Scott Santucci 06:25

Well, really what I mean by that is just like, there are people who are really looking at how do we improve the overall school system? Maybe the system that we have for sellers is is antiquated. And that's really the point. And what I don't mean to say, what I want to make sure is really clear to everybody listening. I'm not anti-sales training. I'm extremely pro sales training. I'm extremely pro skill development. I'm extremely pro seller. I think the question that I'm that I'm trying to ask is, is the sum of the parts Working, and what does it look like? And I think in order for us to really examine that question, I think nobody would be better to help us explore that, then then you Brian, if you don't know, Brian, one of the things that you may notice is when you look at his email it says Dr. Brian Lambert. So, what are you a doctor in and how do you go about getting a doctorate?

Brian Lambert 07:24

Well, to answer that, specifically, on the transcript, it says, PhD in organization and management. And when I started that, what that was was organizational design, organizational teaming, operating models, etc. But I was a practitioner at the time, and I looked for a degree program where I could study sales. So, I wanted the context to be sales. So, as I went through the entire five-year process, as you know, when I had my my ethics class, I did sales ethics. When I did marketing, I did marketing plus Sales when I did my management content, it was about sales management. So, I studied sales the whole time. And as you may know, Scott, there really are no PhDs and sales. So, I tend to think that I'm probably one of the few that's actually studied at the PhD level this thing called professional selling.

Scott Santucci 08:18

Excellent. And for those of you who don't know, what I want to do is also put this in context. I've had myself a tremendously huge learning curve on all of the sales, training and learning and development, vernacular and terminology. I myself have been a consumer of sales training courses, some of which I've hated, and some of which I've liked as a salesperson. I've been a purchaser of sales training, to sales training programs as the VP of Sales and Marketing, some of which I've liked, and some of which I've hated. And now I'm in the business of actually designing some sales, sales training programs of which I don't really follow the tradition. No playbook. But what's important is let's start to understand a lot of these terms and where do they come from these disciplines, how they're being applied today in this in this in this modern world. And I think a great setup for that is before Brian joined the team at Forrester. So past podcasts we've talked about that. Brian actually was in a role at at the time it was called, I think it's ASTD. And now it's ATD. What is ATD? What is that?

Brian Lambert 09:32

Yep. It's a great organization. It's the world's largest professional society for training development professionals. So, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, they have an annual conference where they routinely get 10 to 15,000 people. It's the the Association for for trainers.

Scott Santucci 09:51

And that was started with like in the 40s. Right?

Brian Lambert 09:53

That's correct in the 40s. And as you know, Scott in the 40s, there was a lot of work to industrialize. Training and Development. And so, it is born out of that industrialization, standardized testing, etc., and moved in through a series of steps through, you know, skill development competencies testing, etc. and then into workforce planning, workforce development, workplace education, and now what they're calling talent development.

Scott Santucci 10:20

So, when you worked at ATD, what was your role? What did you do?

Brian Lambert 10:25

I had two primary roles. The first one was looking at the strategic direction of the organization, how could it better serve? What was becoming more of a segmented view of the quote unquote, trainer? So, what did that look like? What type of communities would be established etc.? And then with my background, I was a seller I've been in sales management, sales training, I stood up what is now the sales enablement community of practice, which was the first one of its kind in the organization,

Scott Santucci 10:57

So, I need to understand this a little bit more that's a that's a that seems like a lot of inside baseball for me at least. Maybe the rest of you who are listening can really understand it. So first you said as somebody who only really cares about sales training, I gather that there are other kinds of trainers in in ATD helped me understand that a little bit.

Brian Lambert 11:22

Right. So, this is this is a it's a great question. First, when you look at the umbrella of training, it's this idea of helping individuals get the right skills and knowledge to be successful. When you work, look at that. And juxtapose that against today's workplace. There are many different specialties and at the time, you know, this is 15-20 years ago, workforces and workplaces were becoming more and more specialized. So, what I was doing, in essence was looking at the different types of audiences that different types of quote unquote learners and looking at There's specialized needs from a, you know, job skill perspective. Traditionally, l&d people trainers tend to not engage sales teams. And in fact, one of the things that I had begun prior to that was this idea of I want to be the the trainer to the sales trainers. I don't want to necessarily be a sales trainer. I want to help those who do it because why is it that internal to most organizations, the sales training organization was outsourced to vendors. Why wasn't training supported by these folks called trainers that tend to work on leadership development, for example, or customer service, or soft skills or all these other things, but selling and that's, that's where I went to,

Scott Santucci 12:48

let me break this up a little bit, because I'm trying to track so for our audience members for myself, trying to learn about where all these different sales enablement functions report to sometimes they report him to l&d functions. Sometimes they don't, sometimes they're in competition, finally competition with the learning and development organization. So, part of the first thing that I want to understand is Brian, are you saying, am I understanding you correctly by saying that where the learning and development space started out sort of the legacy was there's a central learning and development function that provided adult learning to all functions like a, like a service, the shared service group, that the learning and development function would provide it to manufacturing, to marketing to sales or what have you? Is that correct?

Brian Lambert 13:42

Yeah, that's correct. And it's ebb and flowed and became a from a centralized to federated model and then back and forth. Sometimes it gets distributed into the operations. Sometimes there's a centralized leadership development function and organizations since the 1940s. have been trying to crack that code on how do they make their learning development teams more relevant to their-

Scott Santucci 14:04

The second thing that I heard you say, was as a representative for an entity that's focused on learning and development professionals, you were curious as to why so much of the sales, sales training was being outsourced and by being outsourced, I'm assuming you're meaning it's companies or contracting firms like Sandler or Miller, Heiman or Richardson, or whomever to come in and do the sales training for the Salesforce. Is that correct?

Brian Lambert 14:42

Yeah, that's correct. And because of that, they the the trainers that I was working with the l&d professionals seem to want to abdicate that responsibility to to these vendors. And I couldn't quite understand why that was.

Scott Santucci 14:56

Gotcha. So, at that point in time, what I understand that your your telling me is that what you did was started to say, Hey guys, let's start to build some competencies around what it would take to bring in house more of this sales training. So as a result of that you did a lot of surveys, you got a lot of research, you collected it because you wanted to be more or less the trainer of sales trainers. Is that correct?

Brian Lambert 15:24

That's right. And the fundamental problem I was trying to solve was to, to bring more relevance and impact of this this thing called Learning development slash training to the customer focused revenue generating employees of an organization. In other words, I had heard, and I believed in that, that trainers and l&d professionals could have a strategic seat at the table. But the only way to me that they would be able to do that would be to drive revenue and not be so much of a cost center but an investment in where the organization needs to go there by linking people, salespeople to the business strategy. And if we didn't go there as a profession, I don't know what we were doing.

Scott Santucci 16:09

But this is pretty insightful. For me. One of the things that I have been exposed to is prior to prior to join Forrester and some of the work that I've done in the past would be you know, working with a big company like Unisys, and Unisys having a university function of which underneath it had a dean of a sales University. And what they would do is offer ASTD. This was at the time ASTD certified people to work with us on training programs. And the difficulty was, they had very rigid approaches of how to go about building those training programs that didn't map to the business requirements that we were we were trying to do. That was my my personal experience. What experience? Where does that come from? What what's what's really the goal here? And where did these tools I think the I think one of the methods they were referring to is ADIE, what's ADIE? And why was why was that being discussed with me in the sales leaders at at Unisys.

Brian Lambert 17:19

So ADIE is an acronym for a traditional fundamental workflow, that corporate l&d professionals would go through to build custom training. So, it stands for basically, an analysis, you analyze the job and skills, you just find something, you develop something you implement, and you evaluate. So, it's kind of a, you know, continuous improvement model. And a lot of, you know, trainers are taught that there are also other versions of it, but the point is, is that there's a, basically a challenge that needs to be addressed and you would go through and build stuff to support it. So that's, that's ADIE. So, to add answer that question specifically, the the challenge is that ADIE and all of the models for l&d are kind of predicated on two fundamental principles of adults. One is that the jobs are clear. Right? So, if you have a clear job, you can go out and build skills to it. So that's the one fundamental thing. The second fundamental thing is that because the jobs are clear, the the scope of those jobs are well known to everybody else. So, you can build skills, and everybody knows what these people are supposed to be doing, whoever they are customer service, whatever. And so, what I was really perplexed by in my own work was, well, the sales role, it appears to be clearly defined, but boy, it's not the more you understand it. And also, we are going through a transition in business and in the broader landscape, that roles are...

Ep4 Inside the Boston Sales Enablement Soiree

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 02:49:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 4

SPECIAL EDITION: Inside the Sales Enablement Soiree Boston June 2019

The Sales Enablement Soiree is a series of events, hosted by Shawnna Sumaoang and the team as Salesenablement.pro. The first event, which premiered in 2015, was held alongside SalesForce.com Dreamforce and brought together 200 attendees. The next year, the number grew to 600. By 2018, attendance soared to 1,200, highlighting the booming appetite for advice, expertise, and collaborative ideation on the topic of sales enablement. This year, the event came to the east coast as well, and 250+ attendees attended the inaugural east coast event in Boston.

Didn't make it? Don't worry! Brian attended to gather insights, learn from, and engage with practitioners, thought leaders, consultants, and solution providers in the space. He was able to gather information and conduct a special assignment to collect key insights to share with our podcast listeners. Listen now to hear Brian's debrief with Scott as he shares his takeaways and insights from this very special event.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

SPEAKERS

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

Hello, I'm Scott.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I'm Brian Lambert. And we're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions that you should be asking if you want to be successful with sales enablement. On this podcast, we rethink, reframe and revisit sales enablement topics. And in this podcast, it's a special edition.

Scott Santucci 00:54

So what is this special edition and how do we frame it out? So, this is the part where we normally frame things and the idea We had is, as Brian and I go to events, what would be wonderful is for the people who weren't at the event to have a deeper, so we're going to do a debrief. And last week actually yesterday, Brian was at the sales enablement saw Ray in Boston. And one of the things that Brian did is participate in a panel. So, my first question is, Brian, what was your panel? What was the topic and what was who else was on it? And what was the discussion?

Brian Lambert 01:26

Yeah, so great event. Picture 250 or so people in a room in Boston, at the Ritz Carlton. What we what we covered Scott was the idea of a charter and why is a charter important on the panel, but myself with the sales enablement society kind of moderating is, you know, non-biased etc. And then, with the folks on the stage, there were six of us. One was a sales enablement director from Mike Keeley was his name. We had Jill Guardia from the director of sales enablement from tri net.

Scott Santucci 02:06

We had Joe.

Brian Lambert 02:08

Yeah, Joe. She was great. Everybody was great. It's a super awesome. I think from from a flow perspective, we really built off each other and it was great. We had Susan Seminoff from monster. She's a VP of global sales enablement. Alex McKenzie. He was great because he's a sales director. So, he's a recipient of the charter and you know, somebody who would benefit from it. So, he brought that, that sales leader perspective. And then from lucid chart we had Brandon is the Director of Sales operations from one of the vendors there. It's a great mix.

Scott Santucci 02:41

Excellent. So, what did you guys talk about and what were some of the, some of the takeaways?

Brian Lambert 02:46

So, the topic of a charter is interesting, because if you search on Google, everybody's got a, you know, uptake on a charter and actually, Scott, you and I are the first ones to say you know, 2010 or so that having a charter is important. So, for Eight or nine years, this idea of a charter has been floating around in the sales enablement space. And it's interesting because there's no, you know, one structured format or specific template. And I think I get asked that a lot, you know, what's the template for this? And what we did on the panel was not necessarily focused on the contents of said, charter, but the the results that you would drive with a charter, so why charter? What's the purpose of it? What are the things, some of the things you do with it, etc. And the key takeaways from the discussion that we had was, you have to have a charter, no matter the size of your remit, you either need to have a specific set of tasks, activities or specific scope, or a specific set of outcomes to drive. So that was the first finding the second finding Scott was it. Everybody's at a different stage in their evolution of gaming.

Scott Santucci 03:55

Can I interrupt you real quick?

Brian Lambert 03:57

Yeah, sure.

Scott Santucci 03:58

Let's go back to the issue. About the charter. So, I'm trying to imagine, imagine our listeners and knowing full well that boy have been a pretty big advocate about talking about charter. It is a boring topic for most people. How in tuned was the audience to talk about a charter?

Brian Lambert 04:22

Well, lucky for us, we were in a great time slot, which was the first panel of the day. But what we did was we framed out across the six of us, the lifecycle of a charter. So, picture, six, six people that have either benefited from or built charters. And, you know, the idea of going from, hey, you know, what should we put in it all the way through to adoption that unfolded in front of the eyes of the people in the audience. So, we had very specific questions that basically build a charter in front of the audience and the key that's one of the first comments from the audience. It was, wow, this sounds like this sounds like professional selling, you know, you guys identified an outcome, you identified a need, you had a point of view, as this, you know, unfolded across the stage, then you had to get buy in, there's multiple stakeholders and you had to sell the sizzle, etc. Right. So, it's, you know, it was really striking to the first audience member that the having a charter is much like, you know, being a salesperson and selling the value of your function. Mm hmm.

Scott Santucci 05:25

The reason that I'm going to advocate here, so I've tried to play a little bit of devil's advocate and going, Oh, god, what do we want to talk about a charter, but in the maybe the fourth or fifth sales enablement society meeting that was actually before was the sales enablement society meeting was just the local Washington DC meetup group way back in 2016. We actually had a meeting around a charter. Remember that?

Brian Lambert 05:53

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Scott Santucci 05:54

And basically, for those of you who weren't there, they are audience broke into two different camps. Some were saying, why are we doing this is ridiculous. I'm just gonna follow the form and template that's given to my company, what a waste of time. And the other half are saying, Are you ridiculous? The charter is the most important thing to be there. And Brian Murphy, remember what Brian Murphy did, he took the computer away from me. And he got on Google. And he searched, he pulled up the Magna Carta. And he said, Guys, this is what a charter is. Nothing could be more important. And he, you know, being a historic historical buff, it was a way to delineate the power away from the king, to, to the servants, and it was the foundation of actually the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and all these other wonderful things. So that is somebody who had a very strong, passionate plea. And did you hearken any of that any of that story on the group?

Brian Lambert 06:57

Well, we didn't because when we only had 30 minute It's and there are six of us. And the goal that, you know, from the design and experience was to go through the process and the importance of it. But you know, people had a choice to make around. It's important, certainly through that discussion. And I think it definitely landed in the space of, it's critical. And there are critical components that need to be covered such as delineation of power, such as you know, who were the kings, and who are the, who are the constituents, such as, you know, what's our specific set of activities and actions, what do we stand for? And then the idea of who do we socialize it to when how and build it? You know, one of the things that did come out at the end of it was this idea of kind of the coalition of the willing folks to actually enable or activate the charter.

Scott Santucci 07:51

So, what's one reason somebody who's living should build a charter?

Brian Lambert 07:56

Well, I started the group off with anybody, anybody a boy scout out there. And I know that puts a, you know, 40% of our audience in that group or so, because a lot of sales enablement are women. But when you look at the idea of the lifesaving merit badge, if you go with me for a second, in the life saving merit badge, they teach you something counterintuitive. And that is when you're going out to a drowning person, and you're swimming out there, you don't go anywhere near them. And the reason for that is in a state of panic, they will grab onto you and he'll both go to the bottom. Mm hmm. So, there was this aspect of certainly, you know, tongue in cheek a bit of survival. But more importantly, it was this idea of sometimes he right in his sales enablement. And as you coined a long time ago, Scott become the VP of broken things and he goes straight to the bottom. And so, you need to be able to delineate what are the critical items, what are the must have actions, and where are you going to draw the line based on your Current resources etc. So that was highly, you know, visceral to people they empathize with that. Certainly, the audience members that I talked to, on the break, some couple of them have been, you know, overwhelmed with the amount of assets and expectations that they have from various stakeholder groups.

Scott Santucci 09:19

Gotcha. So, let's do some rapid fire here. So, give me three things. I'd love to know three takeaways that you got from all the other sessions. So, we got a good wrap up or a good understanding about the panel that you were on and what you were talking about with a charter. So, you know, you were there. What were some, what three, three, Brian, thoughts that you got from that?

Brian Lambert 09:45

Well, I'll give you one that that is maybe not as super positive, but it's this idea of, we're still a bit in redefining, unfortunately instead of moving forward and also So, because of that, there's a lot of, I think, this idea of declaring things on people. So, you know, from the stage or from the groups, you know, saying things that are certainly maybe levied with an expectation that everybody understands. And like, for an example, we're going to, we're going to talk about, you know, scaling, readiness. somebody in the audience said, what do you guys mean by scaling? And what do you mean by right readiness? You know, and I high fived him because that's a great question. So, you know, instead of declaring, here's what scaling is, and here's a readiness is being being more curious. So, this idea of let's not, you know, declare things on people let's let's be curious and make sure we're talking the same thing was a big, big theme for me as I walk through. The second is this idea of everybody's working on something and that sound might sound You know, Brian your genius. But when you look at all the somethings, and you put them all out there is it is overwhelming when you have 250 people are working on something different, yet they're all interrelated. And boy, there are a lot of choices that you can be making. So, the sheer volume of stuff being worked on is is incredible to me. So that was the second. The third one was, you know, I just I just love sales enablement people were down to earth, we tell it like it is we walk up to each other like we've been lifelong friends. We didn't even know each other in the past. I met Evelyn, you know, through one of the people that sat at the table with me and she's like, Oh, I bumped into Evelyn and she brought her over and Evelyn, I both live in Charlotte. And we actually ended up on the same plane home. So, you know, this the connections that are built through putting yourself out there? A lot. I'm curious, tell me about you. I have a question for you. Yeah, it was awesome.

Scott Santucci 12:03

Excellent. So those were some three, three great takeaways. Let me tell you what I inferred from it. So that you can correct me if I didn't get a different got a different understanding. So, your first point about we're still redefining what I what I talk about that is, we still don't have enough of a clarity that people feel like they've got, you know, keep redefining and keep redefining and keep redefining the definition isn't good enough. Right. Do I understand that correctly?

Brian Lambert 12:36

Right. And Forrester actually eat me might not know this guy, but Forrester actually got up and said, you know, here's our, here's our new and updated definition of sales enablement. Little did she know that person in the audience was sitting there, they put out the definition, you know, 10 or 11 years ago with you set out for us to redefine it. 10 years apart was a bit surreal, but yeah, so that's exactly what I'm saying.

Scott Santucci 12:59

Jeez, that's interesting. Well, we can have a whole different thing about talking about that definition. I really wasn't prepared for that. The second topic that you brought up is people doing stuff. Um, is when you talk to folks and all the different activities that they're doing, are they clustering in any pockets or anything that you can see any prioritization? Because I think, at least from my perspective, it's very difficult to, for profession to move forward. If every tactic everything out there is sales enablement, we don't put any kind of categories how do we how do we how do we how do we as a profession share information with each other?

Brian Lambert 13:45

Right. So, I didn't see any of that. I think if you took everybody individually, they they probably have some sort of individual prioritization and bucketization. There there, there are likely to be some defaults there. For example, this is what my sales VP wants me to work on, right? So, kind of that level of prioritization. The other the other piece of it is that there is an assumption that everybody's working on the same thing, like one of our sessions was playbooks. So, with no real setup or context of what playbooks are it launched into, here's how you do them, etc. And I guess thinking back on it, same thing with a charter. You know, I spent a lot of time explaining why we should at least explore that, though, when it came to playbooks it was, you know, we should we should all be doing this. And here's why. And I think there's an interesting juxtaposition there of what must haves versus nice to haves, and then who's determining the path forward? And I think there's it resonates with individuals, leaders, sales enablement, leaders, that they're kind of in control of their own their own destiny in that regard.

Scott Santucci 14:57

Interesting. So, in Then the third, the third topic was sales enable people. And, boy, we don't really need to talk about that if you are listening to us passively, and you don't go to your local chapter meetings and in sales enablement or you don't engage with folks online, you're really missing out, because one of the best things to do is to talk to folks, you might not agree a lot. But when you actually talk to another human being, and try to understand where they're coming from, you're going to learn a lot more than trying to peruse the web and look at definitions and all of the people's outcries of specificity. So, I think that that point is great. And I think it's fantastic that it's my understanding Brian, that's at the event, the soiree that's a free event right and it's spot it's sponsored by vendors is that's that's correct?

Brian Lambert 15:55

That's right. And you know, a hearty thanks to them. It's it was free. And the food was good. They were they were, there was food at the breakouts. And I know the story is happening after dreamforce this year and, and they talking about having 1000 people or more at that event. So yeah, yeah, great, great job by the vendors that supported that and appreciated talking to them as well.

Scott Santucci 16:20

That's another thing as a sales enablement professional, it's definitely be grateful for the resources that people are paying Sure. The vendors that are providing that, that information definitely would like you to think of them. But they don't need to do it the way that they're doing it. They could just be pounding you through LinkedIn bombardment, like every other supplier. So, keep that in mind for the vendors that are engaging you the right way, and be thankful for it. So now we have this one last section. It's a special assignment. So, one of the things that Brian and I did was before going to the set session, we try to come up with a set up a little bit of fun thing, a special assignment, let me frame out the special assignment. So, the question that that we came up with was, how do we get clarity around sales enablement? So, it is a guess a little bit related to defining it. But it's, it's this way, if, if sales enablement, when you put those two words together, they mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. So one way to think about that is when somebody says sales, what do they mean? Do they mean an individual sales transaction transaction, sales managers, the Salesforce revenue? So how you answer that question is one area just scoped? And the second question is, enable sales to do what based on your definition of that? So, it's always interesting question that I get, because I find people are all over the place. I'm really curious. So, we had we sent Brian out there to Boston asked that same question. How many people did you get a chance to talk to you and what did you learn by asking that question?

Brian Lambert 18:00

Asked 10 people, what do you think of sales? What What comes to mind? And what does enablement mean? So on the question of what do you think of...

Ep3 Setting Up a Strategic Sales Enablement Function & Charles Dickens

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Sun, 16 Jun 2019 16:15:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 3

Do you believe Sales Enablement is a function and profession? In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss the challenges they've encountered in living and driving transformations. In today's evolving business landscape, Sales Enablement leaders are often asked to transform from within. Whether it's new programs, new tactics, or even new organizational structures, Sales Enablement leaders and their teams are often "first through the wall." Being in that position, means you're trusted. The strategy is entrusted to you. People and resources are entrusted to you. Your credibility matters.

We talk about the evolution of bookkeeper to CFO and what that meant to finance -- and its implication to sales enablement leaders. While many believe that sales enablement is a task or technology, we know that sales enablement is a function that translates strategy to execution. To tackle strategic and tactical at the same time, you have to be purposeful. To be purposeful, you have to be thoughtful. Listen to Scott's story about how he got into Sales Enablement and how structures and outcomes are critical to success with the C-Suite.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:03

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

Hi, this is Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Hey everybody, Brian Lambert here and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions you should be asking if you want to be successful with sales enablement. And in this podcast, we're going to talk about trying something new and more importantly about being transformative. You know, sales enablement is a transformative role and a lot of us get hired to Do transformational work. And there are a lot of people talking about the transformative benefits of sales enablement. But what is transformation really mean? What does it mean to be a leader in these transformations? And to me, it all boils down to Are you a person that executives can trust to take the company or take the department or take the vision and make it a reality. And we talk about doing something new like that, you've got to be credible in how you go about it. In other words, people have to put their futures, their direction, their ideas, their processes, even their products in your hands. And to me that credibility has to be earned. And not just given because you have a title. And Scott, that's what I want to talk about today is this idea of credibility, and where that comes from in this role.

Scott Santucci 01:50

So as always, we'd like to frame things out with with a story. I'm going to tell I'm going to leverage a little bit a little bit of the ideas from Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens, as you probably know, is an author at the turn of the century, really talking about issues dealing with the cutover from an agricultural to an industrial revolution. There's really two ideas that he's, he's famous for. Everybody knows the tale of two cities, and specifically that wonderful quote, it was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was an age of wisdom. It was an age of foolishness. So, we have that have that one. The second thing that I want to bring up and we'll promise we'll tie these these ideas together is Charles Dickens also wrote A Christmas Carol. And if you remember A Christmas Carol, and you remember Tiny Tim, tiny Tim's dad is the job of tiny Tim's dad was a bookkeeper. And that bookkeeper was the one that Ebenezer Scrooge treated so so roughly. And I think that the big idea here is could you imagine today a CEO treating their equivalent of their bookkeeper, their CFO, the same way they treated tiny Tim's Dad? And the answer is, of course not. So, what's changed since then? That's really sort of the framing the framing key idea.

Brian Lambert 03:21

Yeah, and I like that because certainly if you look at the CFO view, there's they're deemed as credible. But then that took some time right to go from tiny Tim's dad, bookkeeper to CFO, but there's there was a journey there that unfolded as that role evolved. And I think there are absolute correlations here to the sales enablement function. Sure, it might take some time, but the role can be elevated it can be seen as a strategic partner to the to the C suite, and it can drive you know, a more professional relationship with a lot of various groups inside the organization. And, and with customers. And Scott, one of the things that I know, we've talked a lot about, and, you know, we go way back is this idea of sales enablement, you know, and what it means. And no, we're not going to define it here. But what we're going to do is I want to outline this idea of, you know, sales enablement can be a process, it can be a platform, it can be technology, it could be jobs, etc. And one of the things that I know you have a visceral reaction to is, you know, your approach when you talk about this as a system, and its interrelated parts, it's holistic, there are a lot of moving parts, and people call you academic. So, why why why does that bother you so much? To be called academic.

Scott Santucci 04:49

Well, I didn't know I was going on the couch. But if

Brian Lambert 04:55

If we're going to go on a TinyTim journey to, you know, can't just wave our magic wand and I'll be strategic

Scott Santucci 05:01

Right.The process of getting there is actually way quicker. But I think the reason that the I react so strongly to people call me theoretical or academic, is really the story about how I got into sales enable in the first place. And this isn't a pretty story, by any way straight way, shape or form. But it's a real story. And it started out when I was a sales rep at a company called Mehta group that's now part of Gartner group. And that way, even way back then our biggest competitor at the time was Gartner. And as a sales force

Brian Lambert 05:40

This is in the 90s. Right?

Scott Santucci 05:42

Late 90s, early 2000s. Right, so I was a sales rep in the late 90s. And, you know, really what we would have to do is we literally competed for the Gartner budget. And that's no winning proposition if you're competing for the Gartner budget against Gartner. That's a tough, tough, that's a tough sell. So what we learned, the more successful reps and at the time I was the top, the top rep in the company. We learned that you didn't talk about Gartner, you didn't talk about syndicated Research Services or anything like that you position yourself as differently. And one of the one of the ways that we worked on that was to develop a concentrated on building really value added relationships with with CIOs. And the idea really was I was selling you insurance, decision making advice, and you're gonna make a lot of decisions. And I have access to a lot of people who have lots of different conversations to help you hedge that hedge those bets. And as simple as that sounds, that's a lot easier than talking about all your deliverables. So, in order to sell this, you actually have to have conversations with the right right folks. And I was brainstorming with the one of the CIOs that I had a relationship at Johnson and Johnson Pretty big company. And I had he and I had to come up with an idea. Wouldn't it be great to hear what's on the mind of other CIOs in the area? So, I said, well tell you what I'll do. I will invite a lot of a lot of CIOs get a nucleus of folks here. And we'll have an event I'll bring in some of our analysts, we won't charge anything for for it. What I need you to do is host it and help me out because I don't have any budget. Just the Mirror, mirror salesperson. I don't have any budget. They said, hey, that's great. We actually have this amazing conference centers probably could imagine what a conference center Johnson Johnson look like. And I've got a good relationship with the marketing department. Let's get them to help help create flyers. So, who wouldn't want Johnson and Johnson's marketing department to work on your on your own flyer? So, I talked to

Brian Lambert 07:55

Your sales rep at the time you're like, this is gonna be awesome.

Scott Santucci 07:58

Yeah, exactly. That Johnson and Johnson work on my marketing materials. So, I was excited. And I'm thinking what a great prospecting event this is going to be, I'm going to be able to invite my prospective customers that weren't giving me the time of day to a exclusive Johnson and Johnson event that's powered by, you know, my company. And the only thing that I needed to do was get a high rez copy of our logo. So, I called up our VP of Marketing at the time, she answered, and I said, Hey, this is what I'm looking for. This is what I'd like. And she said, Well, I'm not going to send it to you. And I said, What? I laughed because I thought she was kidding. She said, No, I need to know what the what the material is because I need to decide whether or not our brand should be associated with it or not. I said it's a Johnson and Johnson event. How do we not want our brand associated with Johnson and Johnson? See, I don't know what the subjact matter is. And it was just such a pain in the butt. All I needed was the logo. So, I said, keep in mind I was in my late 20s. At the time, I probably said some things that my older self was embarrassed by, so we'll edit those out here in this story, but it was a bunch of not nice things. And I hung up on her. I said, as I was hanging up on her said, I'm gonna make sure you get fired. So, it was sort of

Brian Lambert 09:25

Also not recommended

Scott Santucci 09:28

sort of pettiness of how how I got into

Brian Lambert 09:31

This is a a young young Scot Sam Tucci in the 90s. Everybody,

Scott Santucci 09:34

right, thank you for reminding that but it'll help it'll help say how unpragmatic OR, or NOT pragmatic, how unacademic getting into this was.

Brian Lambert 09:48

That's good point. Yeah.There you have it all started with a logo

Scott Santucci 09:54

And a friction with marketing and we ended up having this event. And the event was incredibly successful as part of my master plan to get the VP of Marketing fired. I made sure to invite some of our some of the leaders who were on our executive committee to attend this event.

Brian Lambert 10:15

So, when you say successful, what do you mean the event was successful?

Scott Santucci 10:19

Well, because first and foremost, number one, my CIO client at Johnson Johnson was elated, because we were able to bring 120 different executives, VP and sea level from throughout New Jersey, there and he was expecting maybe 10. So, to get that diversity to build that, build that footprint, he was just blown away. And then as far as how it was successful for for me personally, I wrote the equivalent of my entire quota for the year there on the spot during little breaks in here and there because people are just so blown away by the connections and the value I was able to create as as a salesperson. So, fast forward, the executive committee members were all talking about it and how come more or more the reps don't do this. So, I used that buzz, and you're, you know the way that you have as a as a top rep, you don't really realize it until you try to start using it. So, I called Bernard up and Bernard was our CFO. And I said, Bernard, I've got some time as at what 300% of my quota. I've got some time. I think we're wasting a lot of money in our marketing budget. And I'd like you to help find it out. And of course, he took me up on that, because most CFOs think that they're wasting money on marketing or sales and marketing in general. So, we spent a day whiteboarding out, whiteboarding that out and he said, I want you to present this today. The Executive Committee next month.

Brian Lambert 12:01

So, before you go there, now I'm going to I wasn't there, but I'm going to project here, you can correct me if I'm wrong. But for you to take that action, I don't think because I've known you for a while. I don't think you were you were you were being vindictive, so to speak. I think there's a piece of you being competitive here. But you know, I think I want to explore the flip side of this is, you probably saw a huge market opportunity. And you probably also knowing you kind of put the whole event on your back and did a lot of the work yourself. And all you asked for was a little bit of help, and you didn't get it. And so that really probably pissed you off. So so are those two things true here? Or, you know, what was the what was the impetus for wanting to take the marketing actions that you did?

Scott Santucci 12:49

Well, I I took the actions with the CFO, and I'd be I'd be lying if I didn't say I was mostly vindictive. So angry that I just asked for a little bit of help. And my feeling was he just

Brian Lambert 13:07

You just asked for a logo, right?

Scott Santucci 13:08

Right. I just asked for a logo well, yeah, I just asked for a logo. And it just was the straw that broke my back of all the sales prevention that I felt we were running into a you know, there's there's other stories too, like having a having some of having policies created because I sold went over list too much. It so one of the services that I sold our average deal size or average subscription price was 17,000. I started selling these things for $30,000. And I was told by it. Yeah, and then you put together 120 person conference as a sales call. Right. So, the you know, I just wanted a little bit of help, right and just constant self-prevention drug. Not so I think I think if I were really honest, it was mostly vindictiveness. Was it all? at that one individual, the VP of marketing? No, unfortunately, as the leader of, of all of that stuff, it's a it's a figurehead. And the meeting with the CFO was really how do I create a business case? To get the executive committee to look into this stuff?

Brian Lambert 14:30

Sure.

Scott Santucci 14:33

However, hindsight being 2020 and having a lot of space behind that, it was, I think a little bit of it was the CFO taking some advantage of me because I made he had an axe to grind with the marketing department too. You know, it's it's sort of like a political slash business case. The CFO has a great way of Just talking about the numbers. So, when I presented to the executive committee, we presented all these numbers about, you know, the cost and productivity, you know, problems and like, and after presenting it, he verified all the numbers for me,

Brian Lambert 15:15

Was it basically saying that there was a lot of money being spent without a lot of, you know, impact or what was the big sound?

Scott Santucci 15:23

Yeah, I think we can get to get into more about metrics later. I mean, a moment was part of our plan will be to go through some of the reports and one of the reports we'll cover is the hidden cost of sales enablement. But it really was, look, we're spending a tremendous amount of money that has literally no utility to sales, literally none. And it's, it's not an issue of budgets. And, you know, we spent this amount of money on events or this amount of money on collateral, etc. It just has no utility whatsoever. And on top of that, because it has no utility, and it's the information out there, it actually detracts from my ability to do my job. So, for example, I shut off in my in my CRM system, access to the corporate marketing department to my key accounts because I didn't want the information they were sending out to get to him. Because all of it all that did was compare us to Gartner. And going back to the original story, I didn't want to be compared to the Gartner budget, because once somebody says that, then you get delegated to the lower-level minions and my access to the CIOs who had all the money was squashed. So those were those were the cases that were made at the executive committee. in that meeting, they asked me to leave. And 10/15 minutes later, they asked me to come back and I was looking forward to hearing what they had to say and they said, You've got a new role. Here, your job now is the VP of product marketing and management, and you're going to, you're going to fix all these things that you brought up to us. Go Go figure that out. So it's like, oh, geez

Brian Lambert 17:11

So, is that what you? Was that what you were expecting?

Scott Santucci 17:13

No, no, no, no, at all. It wasn't what I was expecting or what I what I was looking for. It was, um, I just wanted. I just wanted action to be taken so that this could be fixed for me.

Brian Lambert 17:29

Yeah.

Scott Santucci 17:31

So that's what I was told I was I was doing the first thing that I did. I said, I, Bernard, you know, let's, I need to build a baseline. And then the, so we built a baseline first and I built the relationship that said, moving forward, you're going to present out all of my metrics moving forward, just so they're credible. So, this is the help that I need. And I think this is really where I learned to build great relationships with the finance department they want to help, actually a lot. And so that that was helpful. But the first thing that I did was for the first three months, all I did was collect information. So, there's a lot of pressure, go do this, go do this, go to this, go to that. And I said, I'm not going to do any of that until I have a strategy. And you guys all see the magnitude of the problem that we're dealing with. So, I interviewed that we had six different sales regions. Each of the sales regions had their own view of what's and their own sales processes. We had 17 different business units, all of who said, selling is easy, you only need to know these five things, you know, multiply that by 17, and it gets over gets overwhelming. We had a massive amount of collateral there was a belief by our CEO that any monkey could sell this stuff. So, you know, because the product was so good. that those were the things that we're dealing with. And I presented that as a readout. And

Brian Lambert 19:06

How long was that process, by the way?

Scott Santucci 19:08

just doing that analysis, I'd say about three months. Okay. And it was really...

Ep2 Selling the Impact of Sales Enablement & World War 1

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 15:04:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 2

Are you using new tactics, but everyone around is "do it as usual"? You're not alone in the desire to change from within. In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss the challenges they've encountered in positioning and selling sales enablement in organizations. While this may seem easy, the value is the eye of your internal customers. Therefore, translating the impact and promise of the function is critical not only to their buy-in but also to the successful pursuit of the business impact your company expects from your role. Much of what we have encountered in explaining the "features and benefits" of the role come down to how our communications are received by those around us.

We use a highly disruptive and somewhat somber analog for what it feels like to share the future path forward. The analog? WWI warfighting tactics and how "hard-wired" everyone was to continue to pursue them, even to their own detriment. The generals, the people, the communication, the processes, and yes, even the measures all called for a new approach to warfare, but they just weren't embraced. Why? Because human muscle memory is hard to overcome. Even if drastic and disruptive times, where NEW is required. Luckily for us, we're not in a life-or-death situation, but we are in a time of drastic change where muscle memory is required to change by confronting reality.

Join us athttps://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/to let us know what you think, collaborate with peers and sign up to be notified of new releases, updates, and news.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

Hello, I'm Scott Tucci.

Brian Lambert 00:34

Hey, it's Brian Lambert here and we're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking those big questions you should be asking if you want to be successful with sales enablement. Do you have an idea of the value of sales enablement for your company? And are you frustrated that others might not see it? Oh, man, holy cow, am I live in that right now? I was actually listening to our last podcast, Scott and I thought Before he plays on to the next one, or to another one, I think we should pause and reflect a little bit around. What happened. One of the things that he said, in that discussion on our first podcast was, Oh, you know, I went around, and I got buy in from everybody. And then we, you know, we did it. And I said, that's easier said than done. I've found in my own role, that's incredibly difficult. And I think that's the topic of this podcast, you know, how do you go about getting others to buy in to a more strategic view sales enablement? And I want to explore that here in the podcast today. What do you think?

Scott Santucci 01:38

I think it's great. And Brian, as as you know, we like to try to have a leveling story. To really frame this issue out and to me the leveling story here goes back to World War One if you can kind of picture in your head and your mind, a whole bunch of say British or French troops down They're in the trenches with the rifle and the bayonets armed, just waiting for that dreaded whistle to blow to go over the top. And when they go over the top, they have to cut through a whole bunch of barbed wire over no man's land. And then they would just get machine gunned down by Germans in a pillbox. And when you think about that, the strategies there what why did they do that? And one of the battles actually, actually, over a million people died in a battle. It's just amazing. Yeah. And what happened really is that these generals all learned the tactics, and what beat what running a military was using Napoleonic tactics. So, they learned everything about what how to run a military, how to organize a military, what motivation was, what strategies were all based on what Napoleon did in the early 1800s. What they didn't account for was the Industrial Revolution during that Industrial Revolution, a huge amount of things happen. Number one, troops could be brought to the brought to the frontline and trains. Number two, you actually had mass produced foods, you could have much, much larger armies. Number three, the weapons that you had available, you had machine guns rather than at muskets that you had to front load. The altar artillery could shoot miles in advance, poisonous gas, had airplanes, and all of these different innovations but they didn't change their tactics. That's a framing.

Brian Lambert 03:38

Yeah, that's a great story. Thanks. Now hopefully, hopefully we're not eating lunch, but I that's a bit of a morbid story. And you know, I said this in the first one, you know, what does this What the heck does this have to do? with sales enablement. Now I feel like I need to get my my flak jacket on and and wonder what I'm doing in the trench. But I think there's something more to it than and has to do with this idea of the changing times that we're in? And are we equipping ourselves to take the the new battle?

Scott Santucci 04:08

That's right. The reason I like that story is it's not that the generals of the French force or the English force, it's not like they didn't care is that they didn't have the concept of a completely different way. And the reason I think this is a this is a great story is we have to be able to articulate to our leaders the fact that sales enablement is actually a different role, just as pursuing a strategy that's different than what the Napoleonic tactics are. As foreign as that is we have the advantage of having 100 years of hindsight, they didn't have that option then. And this is where we are today. sales enablement, might as well be as new as the idea offering the idea of why don't we not dig in and trenches and why do we Why do we not do For the over the route to a frontal assault, yeah, that's really that's really the point here of, of that story and what the relationship is, that's the big the magnitude of the challenge of the internal selling that a lot of us have.

Brian Lambert 05:16

Yeah, and this is super important for me, because, you know, my background in learning and development, you know, I kind of grew up in there in that field, I grew up in the sales field. And, you know, from a sales perspective, I was a top performer and, you know, any tweaks or improvements that I wanted to make to the system I was, I was met with a, you know, the equivalent of why don't you just shut up and sell more, because you're a top performer, we don't need any ideas. And then on the l&d side, when it became time to not lead with, you know, training speak or frameworks or a bunch of theoretical stuff, it became No, we can't do that because that's all we have. We have to show them that stuff. Because, you know, that's our needs analysis checklist. And if you were to take both of those fields and say, I'm not going to do that anymore, and you take those away, what are you going to replace it with? And that's a bit of a risky feeling it was for me back then. And I think that's the big you know why here is, when you want to make a pivot or make a change like that, and replace it with something else, you're going to feel a little uncomfortable, and a little at risk and a little exposed, and especially if there's a mechanism and machinery around you, or, or ways of working processes, you know, chains of command, etc. And that's why I wanted to double click into this, Scott, because when you look at this idea of selling sales enablement as a role at Forrester, you know, that's a research company, it's been around for a long time, it didn't have brand new roles cropping up, you know, to go out and sell to, and you were able to do that and I think I want to, I want to explore that with you here today. And understand how that how that comes together. So, can you take us back to that time and this idea of Getting buy in Who did you get buy in from? What type of discussions did you have? etc?

Scott Santucci 07:06

Yeah, so first bit of nomenclature. So, when you talk about for certain roles at the time, the idea was a role was more or less like a product. So, it would be you do research, okay dedicated to a role. That's right. For example, one role that's pretty easily identifiable as the CIO, Forrester would do research targeted directly to the CIO and build a variety of different capabilities, subscription research capabilities, even consulting capabilities, and other things to sell to that dedicated role. So, the challenge is the way Forrester was organized at the time. The company was organized into three different business units. There was the IT business unit, of which CIO was one of those but then they had other roles like security officer infrastructure and operations. Then you had the marketing business unit. And that business unit was very focused on b2c foresters excellence, just phenomenal excellence around marketing is very, very, very, very heavy into the customer experience, b2c world. And then the third business unit, the business unit that I was in was a business unit called the tech industry. And at the time, people who wanted to buy people wanted to influence the it buyers, the vendors etc., would buy Research Services for their analysts analyst relations. So, the tech industry group was the least understood the three different groups, it was just called tech industry. At the time, there was no such they weren't thinking about b2b marketing or anything like like they did today. And one of the, the, the roles that they had already defined is ones to explain where analyst relations, marketing strategy, product, product management and product marketing. So, here we come, I'd join those selling, they'll sit and there'll be to be selling etc. There we go. Keep in mind, right. This is tech industry only. So, there was no there were no sales roles. Any kind of sales role there were write wants, there wasn't demand Gen or anything like that. Those were the roles at that.

Brian Lambert 09:50

And I think this is important because you're going to come waltzing in here with this. Hey, guys, I've got an idea. And I think a lot of our sales enablement listeners probably have the same Have idea or vision? Right? So I think there's parallels here.

Scott Santucci 10:04

Right? So just as the generals in World War One had a view of how things should work, that's where what I was entering into. So, the first thing is, the overwhelming majority of focus is on market and marketing. So, the first bias that you have to overcome is sales. People just do what they're told. And, you know, that's a, that's a bias shared by a by a lot of marketers. So, you, you have to build that case, right. The way that way it really worked is I basically made a vision document and an outline. And in that, in that vision document, I was able to get the person who I reported at the time, you know, Brad, and he really liked that. It was a great way to to go about, but we had to sell that vision, just to really, really hard just to explore open up the space to explore the idea of the possibility of maybe potentially creating a new role. And since the company hadn't really created any new roles, there was no protocol for how you create a new role.

Brian Lambert 11:21

So on that, was that one of those things where you do it as a project, if you will, and you invest time and you, you know, hunker down with your PowerPoint deck and build slides, or Oh, god, what was your idea of building this vision?

Scott Santucci 11:35

Well, the first part was just having a vision and then talking about it with somebody who's friendly, well, you're not really pitching an idea or anything. So, the role playing that with with Brad would be, well, you know, what about this or what about that scenario? Or why would we be any different than anything else? You really had to come up with a thesis if you will,

Brian Lambert 11:59

Using the company as construct, right? So yes, yeah. How's that different than marketing? Or here's what they're gonna say here. When you bring that back. Why is it called sales enablement? That's weird.

Scott Santucci 12:10

At Well, yeah. And then there's a lot of other things too. Like, how come no one else is doing this?

Brian Lambert 12:16

Oh, right. Nobody else is doing it.

Scott Santucci 12:18

You know? Yeah, that's right. We have no other competitors who are doing a sales enablement.

Brian Lambert 12:22

There must be a reason

Scott Santucci 12:23

Right. So why would we do that? And isn't sales enablement? Just what the people in Product Marketing do? Hmm. Yeah. So then you have to go Oh, my gosh, we have to we have to educate how would we educate that but then you got you can't use the word educate?

Brian Lambert 12:43

Right because this is a research company with a lot of people from a great great pedigrees, if you will, you know, and you don't you can't run around telling everybody you're gonna educate them and insult their intelligence. Right, right. It's actually I've tried that before and it doesn't work.

Scott Santucci 12:57

Now. backfires So you have to, you have to create curiosity around it. So, then you have to, you have to develop your idea. You have to create curiosity around it. And then one way to create curiosity around it. Now keep in mind at this point in time I, my role where I worked, I was a analyst in the marketing strip market Strategy Group. For market strategy and things like that, I said, I think I'm better served in this sales enablement piece. And I would try to define the sales enablement coverage area, it would be in conflict with market strategy group as well, how would we create a space for me to actually publish this kind of this kind of content? So, in order to prove that there actually was a market because the first response is, well, we don't see these kinds of roles, how many of them out there are there? What could we sell to them? them, and no one else is doing it. So why would we do it? So, in order to create that initial demand, I said, Well, I have a country club here in Virginia. I will go and recruit people to participate in a meeting. And you guys come and watch these, these people participate. Well, who are you going to get? What level are you going to get? I'm going to get VP level people, like, Oh, come on VP level, people aren't going to come for a full day meeting, etc. And sure enough,

Brian Lambert 14:34

This is part of the vision right? You're not trying to sell them research. You're trying to get this figured out. So, you're gonna invite these folks

Scott Santucci 14:41

I'm trying to buy the space to have them not have them. Be more curious about the potential of what sales enable could be. Not say we need a role when you do it right now, because that was too It was too far ahead of where Where they were?

Brian Lambert 15:01

Yeah, that's another thing I want to call out this idea of, it would have been really easy to say, Well, here's our first report, let's put it out and start selling it. You know, but that's not what you did here, because you wanted to make sure that there was a market that these folks were going to actually participate. And also, you know, hate to say sound cliche, but you're trying to be customer centric. You're trying to be outside in.

Scott Santucci 15:26

Yes. And it's very hard to be outside in, in any kind of company. Right. So, I would say that it wouldn't have been easy to just write a report on on sales enablement, because you have an editing process that you have to go through. And in that editing process, the questions are going to be Why will the role care, which is a actually a great thing that Forrester does for a quality control check. But if your audience is different than how do you nuance it, so so that was, that was really the challenge. We had this meeting, the engagement level was tremendous. We had 50% of the audience were marketers, and 50%, or sales leaders. What I wanted to highlight was, look, the reason that other functions other companies aren't covering the sales enablement space is because there's a huge gap. And if we only look at covering the roles that exist today, not maybe skate where the puck might be, might be going, we're going to be just rehashing the same old, same old.

Brian Lambert 16:35

So, when you said there's a gap, what kind of things did you hear back?

Scott Santucci 16:39

Like, yeah, I think that's definitely a topic for a whole nother whole nother podcast. But the way that the way that we did it in a way that I like to facilitate is instead of putting the burden on the audience to come up with a draft and have them react to it. So, things like the future Friction points would be what messaging for example, what what is what is messaging? And it didn't come up that way. But the point of view from marketing was that we build fantastic content. And the salespeople don't use it. How are you as a sales leader, we're going to make sure that the salespeople use that content.

Brian Lambert 17:22

So what as an example is two different perspectives. Right?

Scott Santucci 17:26

Well, that's that's the perspective of the marketing lens, right. And since we, since Forrester at the time, and so many people from the marketing background, they're like, yeah, of course, that's the answer. But since they're not getting feedback from the sales organization, the sales leaders, feedback was, well, the content that you provide us is completely off the mark. It is it's not conversational. You're not targeting specific stakeholders. It it doesn't fit with how we work. And basically, our sales engineers are other subject matter experts have to spend so much time redoing it all that we're pretty much creating custom content. And the marketing point of view was, yeah, that custom content off brand. The feedback from sales is Where'd you come up with a brand anyway, the brand positioning has nothing to do with the customers that we're engaging with. He said, wrote this back and forth until you start to illuminate. Look, we're actually talking about two different sides of the same communications coin. marketers are looking at things from an aggregated standpoint and sellers are looking at things through a very micro standpoint. How do you how do you bridge the gap between those and asking it that way? Change the complete tone of both the sales leaders and the Marketing Leaders. And the...

Ep1 Selling the Sales Enablement Role Internally & Galileo

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert — Sun, 02 Jun 2019 11:25:00 -0500

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 1

Do you feel like a modern-day heretic inside your own company? You're not alone. In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss their advice and point of view about the critical nature of selling the sales enablement role internally. Scott shares his exciting experiences in a well-known research company and what it was like to create a shared vision for the role, what those many conversations looked like, and how the process unfolded.

Much of what he encountered was the same thing that you -- a modern-day Galileo -- will likely encounter. Learn from his experiences in talking about a new way of thinking about the value-add of the sales enablement role to better support sales leaders and their teams.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

00:02 intro

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

00:34

Hello, this is Scott Santucci.

00:36

And I'm Brian Lambert. And we're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions you should be asking if you want to be successful with sales enablement. Are you frustrated that no one seems to know what sales enablement does? Or what it is? Do you sometimes feel that something's not quite right? And do you believe that sales enablement should be offering your company a lot more impact? But you just don't have permission to tackle it. In this podcast, we're going to explore how challenging it is to do something different in business today.

Scott Santucci 01:09

You know, Brian, in 1633, Galileo was condemned and convicted by the Catholic Church for technically vehement suspicion of heresy. And was sentenced to basically life imprisonment till he died nine years later. What was his big crime? The big crime Galileo had was he made the observation that the earth actually revolved around the sun and not the other way around. And that challenged a lot of conventional theology at the time, and there was a strong, strong, strong negative reaction. And the reason I bring up that story is its human nature to stamp out something new or a new idea that buys it conventional wisdom.

Brian Lambert 01:56

So, what are you talking about Scott? Right, you just hit us with the Galileo story. Which is awesome, by the way, a great piece of history. But what what are you trying to say? Are you trying to say that we're Galileo's and sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 02:08

What I'm saying is in a lot, and a lot of cases, the information and the evidence dictate a different way than what you're doing with. And many people within the sales enablement space feel like they're heretics inside their company. They're told that, oh, you're just a sales trainer, or sales enablement. We've been doing that for 20 years or 30 years or whatnot. Yet, the role keeps growing and growing and growing. So, this idea of being a heretic really ties into human nature, those in power when confronted with a lot of complexity and change, hold firm to the things that they do know, which puts those of us who are in a role that's expanding and growing, to have to sell those people in a completely different way like Galileo dead in order to be avoid being labeled a heretic.

Brian Lambert 03:03

Yeah, that's a good point. Because much like Galileo did, he had to Kitt, you know, convince people share ideas with them, tell them something new. And you know, there's a lot of friction there. And he had a choice to make. And if you go, if you fast forward to today, you know, we both talk to a lot of sales enablement, professionals that are new to the role, trying to stand up the role, etc. And when you look at what's going on, there's a lot of turnover and churn in the role. There. I've certainly seen a lot of friction between sales and training, between marketing and sales, and even trying to get funding where people say things like, well, that's just an overhead roll. Why do I want to do that? And, you know, I feel a little bit like Galileo, sometimes trying to explain the value out of the promise that I see in sales enablement.

Scott Santucci 03:52

So, you're right and to really unpack how difficult it is to actually sell in an entirely new role. Let's think about a lot of the different friction points. There's friction points between sales and finance, for example, whose number is it? Is it the product number to the product? and business units number? Or is it the address geographic sales team is is they're the one with the number. What's the role of marketing? What's the role of sales when it comes to sales, messaging and the like? What's the job of a product marketer? In a world where we're moving away from products? What do we do with with with sales, training and sales leaders in the role of sales, management, all of these different variables, they're all happening today? And it creates a lot of friction to what we're looking at. Looking at today in terms of roles, so what we're going to cover in this second section is really how do we understand what those friction points are? How entrenched are they, and what does it What does it look like?

Brian Lambert 04:54

That's great, and I think I want to take our listeners back a little bit in history here. Since we're on the Gale Galileo theme, let's go back in nine or 10 years, you know, you were instrumental in creating, or at least starting the definition of the role at Forrester Research, which is one of the most prestigious research companies in business today. And I'd love to unpack that with you. Can we go there we talk a little bit about what you did at Forrester?

Scott Santucci 05:22

Sure, I think one thing to do is we got to go back 11 years ago, 2008. Everybody can go back into their wayback machine and remember what the world was like in 2008. We were in a very, very dire time in our economy and a lot of confusion was happening and a lot of scared people, myself included, were happening but the time what was going on within Forrester is like every business is organized and foresters was at the time organized around research around roles. So, the idea of, Hey, we have this subject matter around sales enablement, what does it look like? I certainly felt strongly that sales enablement needed to be its own role. The reason I felt strongly for that is I built a role before. In my past, I've been a VP of sales and marketing. And I saw a lot of a lot of conflict prior to me joining Forrester and I had that strong opinion. The difficulty was when you bring up sales enablement, the way that Forrester was organized, first with a heavy bias towards marketing, no coverage, even to this day, no coverage really around around sales, not not at all, not a role level. There's a little strong bias. So more or less the point of view was with sales enablement. That's really just Product Marketing, which there was a role for. I pushed back on that and said, No, it has it includes these element elements of go to market. And I said, Well, that's really market strategy then and let's stick it there. And I said, No, that that doesn't fit there. And we had a lot of conflict. So, what I want to do do his first put in a box, how difficult it was to really get forced or to do that. And of course, there's a market leading company. And at the time, there was no other sales enablement coverage. I think at the time IDC had some content that they were repurposing from their own research to buy as training materials that they call it sale and I have one, but there was no role or no dedicated research function around the role. So that started out.

Brian Lambert 07:31

Yeah, let's unpack that a little bit. Right. So, you have you know, this idea of, you know, your vision, your past experiences saying, we should have a role around this. There's a dedicated scope that you see in your mind. There's a there's some functional attributes that people in this role should be executing, they should have certain skills etc. There should be a roll. But what you're bumping into is, well, let's put it here. Let's let's put it there. Or isn't it Just as an adjust or is this what you're talking about kind of, uh, you know, people trying to make sense of what you're saying. Is that is that how that came across to you? or?

Scott Santucci 08:10

Yeah, very much. So, I think in terms of hindsight, hindsight is always 2020. Right? The, the vision that I had in my head was really the evolution of a bookkeeper. All the way to a CFO roles change and evolve over time. And if you think about the Charles Darwin, Christmas Carol, the tiny Tim's dad was actually a bookkeeper. Could you imagine in 2019, a CEO trading their CFO that way, but times change, roles evolve based on changing market needs. So, I always had that in the back of my head, but I don't think I did a very good job of communicating.

Brian Lambert 08:47

That's, that's interesting, right? You take that as a given. You know that that roles are going to change, and roles are going to evolve, and it's happened in every space. If I think back to it's not just in you know, the bookkeeping stuff. Marketing's gone through the same transition and other functions have to what why? Why do you think it was so hard? Or what? What did you hear about? Or what questions Did you get with regard to this idea of sales enablement against the context of the changing business landscape? But do people get it?

Scott Santucci 09:15

Well, I think I definitely I don't think people get it. So, the first step that we did when I started socializing it socializing this idea, and I was, frankly, dumbfounded by, by the feedback that I got from all these very, very well accomplished experts who have lots and lots and lots of data points, as you could probably imagine. But the first the first thing was I was surprised about the pushback. So, I suggested Why don't we get some executives, CEOs, or not CEOs, VPS of sales and CMOS together and write out a definition of what they think sales enablement is and get them to discuss it. So no one really wanted to sponsor that idea. So, I said, you know what, I'll recruit it myself. Well have it at my country club in Virginia so I can pay for it. So, I had to I had to offer all these things while while I was a forester employee. And I thought that was going to prove the case. We got a variety executives together. This is where

Brian Lambert 10:14

Why do you think that was important, though? Well, it wasn't, why not just write a definition and publish it?

Scott Santucci 10:20

Well, the reason that I didn't write a definition at all was because no matter what I wrote, was going to be counter minded counter measured by somebody else saying, No, that's not true. And I have data that says sales enablement is really this because why? Because it's always been this way. It's always been part of the product marketing. List. Look, here are all the deliverables that product marketers must do. That material is sales enablement.

Brian Lambert 10:49

Yeah, I remember from my research it was it's part of the four P's you know, as its placement, they just talk.

Scott Santucci 10:56

Yeah. Then you go to the training people and say well sales in a month. There's always been these kinds of things. And people getting more and more sophisticated on it. And that really was never my experience. When I was a VP of sales and marketing. I thought all of that was way too tense and, and not focused on where we're going. So, what I wanted to do is instead of projecting my viewpoint, get a variety of executives together, because we wanted to say should this be a role and really highlight the tension? The other side.

Brian Lambert 11:28

What were some of the companies that you got, like, you know, are you talking fortune 500?

Scott Santucci 11:33

Oh, yes. Right. So, they were all fortune 500 companies. So, some some at the top of my head, who were at the table. IBM was at the table Siemens, Sun Microsystems that you know, this is before they got acquired CSC a variety of Xerox companies like that, so we had about 20 of those companies and 10 of them 10 of the members 10 of the participants in In this meeting where sales leaders, Chief sales officers, and then the other half were CMOS, so we had this conversation. And I thought that the outcome that we arrived at which was what the definition of sales enablement was for Forrester, which I'm sure we're talking about in another podcast. And I had executives from Forrester participate that they would see the see the engagement, and I thought game over right. You know, here we had real market validation highlighted a need, but really what companies Yeah, fantastic companies a lot of debate a lot of conflict between between it, which to me is that highlights that I need to research this more. But really what happened was, all that did was create some sponsors. So apparently, what I didn't know at the time, Forrester has this process, this strategic process that they go through a deep dive process to assess the health of an individual role, and they need to make sure that that as an economic market cap associated with it, or opportunity associated with it. So, what we had to do is we had to actually survey on interview and collect data, primary data, statistical data, not what I would call wisdom, type data through a conversation, that we just had some stats to show how many seats we could sell, what kind of research agenda we would need to have. yada yada, yada.

Brian Lambert 13:30

So, so this is interesting. So, you saw a vision, I'm gonna pull everybody together, you figured out how to do that, by the way, which I think is great, you know, you funded it. But these folks off traveled on their dime to come out all this buzz and excitement. You guys leave there you think, okay, I can start researching it, but instead it turns into now we have to figure out how this is going to link to our strategy, right. So how do we what type of products how are we got to sell these guys, etc. And they may have changed their process. Now. This was 11 years ago, but at the time You know, it needed to be linked to the strategy. And I think, you know, from what I'm hearing is, here, there's this is this is important because it sounds like you had to constantly get what, you know, the proverbial buy in along the way every step of the way.

Scott Santucci 14:16

I think and this is kind of fast forward now to 2019. I think this is what all sales enablement leaders are struggling with, which is there's always another hoop. So Oh, yeah, it's like first, number one, let's get our customer feedback. So we collected a lot of customer feedback about the trends, you know, getting the chief sales Officer of HP, for example, in the same room with the Chief Marketing Officer of Xerox and then arguing out about where it is, and then flipping that argument around, and then illuminating the fact that they're really talking about a gray area that nobody owns.

Brian Lambert 14:55

Yeah, when so when you say arguing as a researcher, you don't mean fixed Cops you mean to be crane? passion, passion? It sounds like right, right? I just want to make sure that people understand that you're not fostering, you know, this the hostile work environment, work environment. It's putting people in the hexagon. But, um, but this is this is important as well, the second piece of this to me is this idea of a debate. And it's going to be an intelligent debate, because you're talking about Lincoln a roll of business strategy. And I think if you fast forward to today, in 2019, sales enablement, professionals are going to get into those types of debates, right?

Scott Santucci 15:34

Well, they should or else what's going to happen is somebody else's preexisting idea of what sales enabling is, is going to shape it and your opportunity to impact the rest of the company is diminished from from that reason, so, Okay, got it. So basically, just within Forrester though, think of it this way. So, I want to prevent the circular looping that goes on with some of the stuff, but we had very senior level people who are our customers speaking on their behalf of what they were looking for. Some of the executives saw but how do you collect that sort of subjective feedback? And then how do you communicate it up to actual decision makers because there's so many people involved in deciding that we're going to add a new role at Forrester, for example, that we got enough sponsorship to say, Okay will allow you to go through this deep dive process. So, the frustrating part is, as a former salesperson, all of those executives who are willing to buy right then in there a service that we wanted to wanted to offer. We had to wait another nine months to go through this deep dive process. And in this deep dive process, we interview, and we had the people who weren't us, the Strategy Team within, Forrester interviewed a segment of folks. we plotted it out, we took feedback that we had, we created a framework, an organizational framework, we identified different stakeholder roles that we would target our research for all of those other things, that was the groundwork that we had to do. And in order to do that, to launch, actually a sales enablement role, so that was all the work that we had to do before we could even hire you to join our team back then.

Brian Lambert 17:33

Yeah, I was gonna say I appreciate all that work, because that's what got the funding for my role in this idea of an analyst joining you, right? That's right. Yeah. So that so if we stay there on the the precursor of that nine-month period, what other kind of friction Did you run into?

Scott Santucci 17:51

Well, the the friction really gets into. A lot of people don't want to spend time to talk about the definition of a term particular When people have strong opinions that they know what that term means. So, for example, if you have folks who don't want resources diverted away from say the role of product marketing, or away from the role of strategic marketing, those people are going to argue a lot to prevent those resources from getting diverted. The same problem that would be inside your company, or anybody's company, is the second you bring up a new role. The argument the pushback that you feel you feel like Galileo, you feel like you're being heretic, but really, the core functional problem that you're dealing with is one of resource. And no one's going to say, oh,...

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ISEs3 Ep10: Dr. Brian Lambert Pt 2 – Co-Founder, Orchestrator, and Value Architect

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ISEs3 Ep3: Paul Butterfield - President, Revenue Enablement Society (2023)

ISEs3 Ep2: Scott Santucci Pt2 - The Birth of the Sales Enablement Society

ISEs3 Ep1: Scott Santucci Pt1 - Before the Sales Enablement Society

Ep63 Helping Salespeople Communicate Value with Jen Burns

Ep62 Leading the SE Function To Achieve Impact with Brian King

Ep61 Quantifying SE Contribution with Erik Host-Steen

Ep60 Creating Shared Experience for the SES with Bill Ball

EP59 Gaining Executive Buy-in to your SE Charter with Tamara Schenk

Ep58 Orchestrating Message Enablement to Co-Create Value with Steve Goas

Ep57 Message Enablement in a Post-COVID World with Louis Jonckheere

Ep56 Embracing the Complex Conditions that Lead to Breakthrough Results with Amy Benoit

Ep55 Unpacking Social Media Interactions To Find Insight with Greg Smith

Ep54 Applying Systems Thinking to Solve Complex Problems with Dr. Jerry Brightman

Ep53 Overcoming the "Go Sell Value" Challenge with Chad Quinn and Jason Cunliffe

Ep52 Orchestrating Relevant Sales Conversations with Imogen McCourt and Doug Clower

Ep51 A Sales Leader’s View of Selling Business Outcomes with Bob Apollo

Ep50 Synthesis vs. Analysis and the Power of Improv with Brooke Spatz

Ep49 The Commercial Ratio: Declaring War on Inefficiency with Kunal Mehta

Ep48 Strategy, Execution, Orchestration with Joe

Ep47 Commercial Ratio to Unlock Value with ROI Guy Tom Pisello

Ep46 Orchestrating Cross-Functional Enablement with Cathy Rowell

Ep45 Blending Strategy & Tactics with Doug Clower

Ep44 Women In Sales Enablement with An All Star Panel

Ep43 ISE Season Finalé Anniversary Show with 5 Listeners

Ep42 The Five Flavors of Enablement #Orchestrator with Erich Starrett

Ep41 Engineering Valuable Sales Conversations with Scott King

Ep40 What Being HEROIC Looks Like with Hang Black

Ep39 Santucci on TRIAL re: the Definition of Sales Enablement with John Thackston

Ep38 State of SE Panel 6: Executive Sponsors

Ep37 State of SE Panel 5: Sales Academics

Ep36 State of SE Panel 4: Sales Enablement L&D Training

Ep35 State of SE Panel 3: Sales Enablement Leaders

Ep34 State of SE Panel 2: Sales Experts

Ep33 State of SE Panel 1: Sales Enablement Experts

Ep32 Leadership in a world of VUCA

Ep31 Part 5: COVID-19 Response Series: How do I lead through crisis and change?

Ep30 Part 4: COVID-19 Response Series: Questions About the Path Forward

Ep29 Part 3: COVID-19 Response Series: What can Sales Enablement leaders do?

Ep28 Part 2: COVID-19 Response Series: Anticipate how your company will react

Ep27 Part 1: COVID-19 Response Series: Making Sense of What is Happening

Ep26 From Training to Talent Enablement

Ep25 The Four Flavors / Functions of Sales Enablement

Ep24 Shift from Reactive to Proactive Sales Enablement

Ep23 Who Is the Customer of Sales Enablement & the Ford Edsel

Ep22 Operating Model Clarity to Elevate the Strategic Impact of SE with Sandra

Ep21 What’s the $%@# Problem? Moneyball and The Focus of SE

Ep20 The Purpose of Sales Enablement & The US Securities Act

Ep19 Inside the First Sales Enablement Summit

Ep18 Manage Up & Across: Deploying SE Technology with Amy Benoit

Ep17 Set and Manage Executive Expectations: A Case Study

Ep16 Elevate Your Sales Management Role & Dimitri Mendelev

Ep15 Simplify the Sales Eco-System: A Story of PIP to Performance

Ep14 Improve Sales Coaching Adoption & Joe Gibbs

Ep13 Get Stakeholder Management Under Control & the Chicken Hawk

Ep12 The Case for Sales Coaching & The Hubble Telescope

Ep11 Sales Kickoffs - What’s the Return?

Ep10 Accelerate the Sales Process & The NYPD

Ep9 Infuse Customer Empathy Across Sales & the Movie Beaches

ISEs3 Ep6: Christopher Kingman - SES Fore-founder, RES + Emblaze Exec Board Member

ISEs3 Ep5: Craig Nelson - SES Fore-founder and Entrepreneur