Sales Enablement Shift Podcast

Seismic's Sam Theodosopoulos and Monarch Consulting's Brian Dapelo discuss the evolution of digital transformation in management consulting.

In this episode, we chat with Jill Guardia who is the Director of Global Sales Enablement and Programs at Rapid 7 as well as the President of the Boston Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society. We recap the SE Society's first-ever national meeting, discuss the evolution of sales enablement from Jill's own experience, and get some advice about how to effectively run sales enablement on a global scale.

While there is a major difference between sales training and sales enablement, training should always remain a part of the overarching enablement strategy. But oftentimes training isn't aligned with enablement, which keeps it from reaching the executive level and meeting executive goals. Brian Lambert, a Founding Director of the Sales Enablement Society, and Managing Director of Oxygen Learning, shares with us best practices for strategically executing training programs as part of the ongoing enablement process.

What if sales enablement stopped being perceived as a cost center? What if, instead of thinking of it as training, or onboarding, or the resting place for an organization’s broken things, we thought of sales enablement as a strategic investment—a proactive function that actually enables sales to sell more, sell higher and sell faster? According to Roderick Jefferson, we may already be there.

According to the Sales Enablement Society, sales enablement must be operated as a business within a business in order to succeed. No one knows this better than Jen Marie Jacober, Co-founder of the Society and sales enablement consultant. In this episode, Jen Marie talks us through what it means to operate enablement as a business within a business, and how to measure the success of enablement with sales as your internal customer.

One of the major reasons sales enablement fails is due to misalignment among departments, especially when it comes to sales enablement ownership. In this episode, we speak with Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing, to discuss Marketing's pivotal role in sales enablement.

Practitioners that have successfully executed a strategic sales enablement function stress the necessity of executive buy-in through building an internal business case for sales enablement, and no one has more experience with this than Tamara Schenk. In this episode, we talk with Tamara about the steps necessary for crafting an internal business case for enablement, including using a maturity model and aligning enablement goals with the overarching business strategy.

Maybe you have a winning strategy built out. You might even have the best technology and processes available to support the strategy. But without the right individuals, roles and team in place, sales enablement success is flat out impossible. Daniel West, VP of Sales Strategy and Operations at Infoblox, shares his best practices for building an unstoppable sales enablement team.

When you hear the name Jill Rowley, “social selling” probably comes to mind. But as a self-proclaimed “sales professional trapped in a marketer’s body,” Jill is someone that any sales, enablement or marketing leader should know. In this episode, Jill explains the importance of understanding your buyer, how sales enablement and social selling intersect strategically, and why forming genuine, meaningful relationships with prospects through social can be the difference between a won and lost deal.

In this episode of the Sales Enablement Shift podcast, we sit down with Thierry van Herwijnen to nail down a definition of sales enablement that reflects today’s industry standards and, most importantly, organizational needs. Thierry also shares his opinions about the evolution of sales enablement, how to get executive buy-in for enablement initiatives, and the greatest challenges facing enablement practitioners today. To hear more from Thierry, check out his blog and podcast at www.salesenablementlab.com!

In this edition of the Sales Enablement Shift podcast, Nicole O'Brien from the Tiferet Group joins Daniel Rodriguez to discuss sales enablement's four areas of brokenness, and how Marketing can help client-facing teams interact more effectively with buyers.

In the first episode of the Sales Enablement Shift podcast, Seismic VP of Marketing Daniel Rodriguez speaks with Scott Santucci, Director of the Alexander Group. Scott and Daniel discuss the major issues affecting sales enablement today, what this means for individuals in enablement roles, and how they can get executive buy-in from the C-Suite for sales enablement.