Podcasts about Enablement

Behind The Veil Podcast - The Real Weddings Study from The KnotThis week we welcome Tom Chelednik - The Associate Director of Vendor Engagement of North America to talk about the recently released "Real Weddings Study" from The Knot. In The Knot 2025 Real Weddings Study, we discover how couples are bringing this exciting day to life through the entire planning process. The wedding report includes insights from nearly 17,000 US couples who got married in 2024 as well as data from couples getting married in 2025 to help you understand how to plan a wedding. For the first time, it also includes user behavior trends from The Knot Vendor Marketplace, The Knot Registry and The Knot Invitations.And we are going to talk about all of it!Tom Chelednik is the Associate Director of Vendor Engagement of North America. He has over 25 years of experience in sales and marketing, with 16 specifically in the wedding industry. From 2008 - 2020, Tom held several sales positions at The Knot, including Regional Director of Sales and Director of Training and Enablement. He led teams instrumental in growing and retaining new business across 20 states and Canada, ultimately helping wedding professional book more weddings and grow their businesses. During his time at The Knot, Tom traveled the country 70% of each year to speak with and learn from wedding professionals. Tom is passionate about sharing the knowledge he has gained over the years and continues to coach pros, specifically to help them increase their leads and bookings. In addition to The Knot, Tom was the COO of The Treasury Venue Collection in St. Augustine, Florida, where he learned firsthand what it was like to operate a wedding venue. During that time, he also helped build an online learning platform called Venue Profit Pro, designed for wedding venues nationwide to improve their marketing and sales results. Tom rejoined The Knot Worldwide in the summer of 2022Support the showBehind The Veil Crew:Host: Keith Willard www.keithwillardevents.com www.instagram.com/keithwillard Co- Host: Marci Guttenberg www.anaffairtorememberbymarci.com www.instagram.com/anaffairtorememberbymarci

System statt Bauchgefühl? In vielen Vertriebsorganisationen fehlt es an Struktur, klaren Rollen und strategischer Planung. Ich bin Christopher Funk, und in dieser Folge zeige ich dir, warum dein Vertrieb mehr Organisation braucht - und wie du ihn mit wenigen, gezielten Schritten deutlich effizienter und erfolgreicher machst. Wie definierst du eigentlich die Rollen in deinem Vertriebsteam? Arbeiten alle nach dem One-size-fits-all-Prinzip oder hast du bereits spezialisierte Funktionen wie Hunter für die Neukundenakquise und Farmer für die Bestandskundenbetreuung? Ich erkläre dir, warum diese Trennung so wichtig ist und welche Rolle ein gut geplantes Organigramm für deine langfristige Vertriebsstrategie spielt. Außerdem: welche Supportfunktionen brauchst du, um deinen Vertrieb zu entlasten? Ob Sales Support, Enablement, Operations oder Pre-Sales: In dieser Folge erfährst du, wie du mit den richtigen Unterstützungsrollen dafür sorgst, dass deine Vertriebsmitarbeiter sich voll auf ihre Kernaufgaben konzentrieren können - nämlich den Kundenkontakt, die Akquise und den Abschluss. Du bekommst praxisnahe Beispiele, wie du deine Organisation weiterentwickeln kannst, wie du weiße Flecken erkennst und wie du deine Teamstruktur an deine Wachstumsziele anpasst. Auch das Thema Customer Success und warum du den Service als Teil deiner Vertriebsstrategie denken solltest, kommt nicht zu kurz. Egal, ob du Vertriebsleiter, Geschäftsführer oder Unternehmer bist: Diese Folge hilft dir, deinen Vertrieb vom Bauchgefühl zur Systematik zu bringen. Hör rein und erfahre, welche Fragen du dir heute stellen solltest, um morgen erfolgreicher zu sein.    

According to the State of Sales Enablement Report 2024, organizations that use one unified enablement platform are 80% more likely to increase their win rate. So, how can you optimize your tech stack to improve adoption and drive results? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Jacob Dinsdale, the sales enablement leader at Molina Healthcare. Thank you for joining us. Jacob. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Jacob Dinsdale: Thanks. Happy to be here. My background, I’ve been in sales for a long time, a couple of decades now. My sales career started in financial services, working for one of the largest global investment managers. Everything from the trading floor to wealth management moved on the technology side there. Ended up moving into the tech side of sales in general during the.com boom. I was the first sales hire for a European company moving into the United States. Built that into a large company. So I’ve worked in pretty much all areas of the sales process. Whether it’s carrying a quota as an individual rep, running a team, or running a sales organization full of lots of teams and lots of sales channels. SS: Well, Jacob, we’re lucky to have you here. Given your extensive sales experience as well as the experience that you have with Molina Healthcare, I’d love to understand from your perspective, what are some of the unique challenges that sales reps in the healthcare industry face, and how can enablement help overcome these? JD: That’s a great question, and I think that’s one of the things that makes us unique. For those who aren’t familiar, Molina is one of the largest healthcare organizations in the United States. I think at the last ranking, we are number 1 76 in the Fortune 500. But unless you live in a particular state, you may not be familiar with who they are. Specifically, we handle healthcare for people that are in some sort of a government-sponsored healthcare situation, whether that’s Medicare, Medicaid, or they bought their own individual plan through the Affordable Care Act in the marketplace. So that’s one of the things that makes us unique and in healthcare as a regulated industry, especially when we’re engaging in government-sponsored sales operations, having. The right and trustworthy material is very important to us. So, you know, all of our agents are, you know, fully licensed in the state and federally. And then as an organization we have responsibilities there. So making sure that we are only giving correct and timely information in the approved methods, and all of our methodology and communication is compliant with our customers. So with those constraints. We’re somewhat unique and we realized that also created bottlenecks for us. SS: I see. And you also recently implemented an enablement platform for the first time. What were some of the challenges that your team faced that led you to invest in a solution and, and how have you overcome some of those since implementing an enablement platform? JD: One of the things that we realized is we had a lot of problems that we solved individually, and that created a lot of different and disparate systems that we use to solve those individual problems. Whether it’s using SharePoint to manage documents, using Salesforce to communicate, using whatever random tool or individual sales organizations might be using to communicate with potential new members. So, from our standpoint, having one kind of unified location that we can have confidence in the governance of what we’re doing, knowledge about the processes of what we’re doing, control over what can and can’t happen, and that creates confidence for us as an organization. But I think also that lets us move that confidence back to our salespeople who don’t want to really. Focus on a lot of the details they’d like to be sewing. So if they know that the sandbox that they’re playing in is fully compliant, fully usable for them, then they can take that sandbox and really be free to do what they do best as a salesperson. So, you know, that was kind of our goals, is to try and come up with a unified message in that and having unified tools that all of our organization can use. SS: I love that. And you played a key role in the implementation of Highspot, so I’d love to learn from you, and I’m sure our audience would as well. What are some of your best practices for driving adoption from the start and really engaging the teams you support in your enablement programs? JD: You know, and this might come from my background, working in sales to begin with, but one of the things that I always believe is. Having a destination in mind and working backwards. So when you’re talking about driving revenue and driving sales at a company, ultimately you wanna have that dotted line. You wanna complete a transaction from us as a process, knowing where we want to be, knowing that we want to have strong, rich content that empowers our different sales channels to do really well in what they want. That lets us. We’re backward to have that and build what we need along the way so we don’t end up building a road to nowhere. We’re building the road to our destination, and I think that was important for us to make sure that defining the route, defining the map, working backwards to where we want to go, helped us get all the stakeholders aligned because anytime there was a disagreement, we could always work backwards to that north star, right? That guiding privilege that we have as an idea we want to get to. SS: I love that. I always think that it is a fantastic philosophy to start with the end in mind. Now, I know that you guys have seen success in a lot of areas, but I know one of the areas that you’ve seen success in is through the use of digital rooms. I’d love to learn from you. Could you share more about how you’re using digital rooms to optimize workflows for your teams? JD: Digital Rooms are a great compliment for us in one of our sales channels. So we sell directly. We have our own licensed insurance agents that bring in new members into Molina Healthcare, but in some markets that doesn’t make sense. And this also exists in the insurance industry in general. There’s a lot of independent brokers, so we have a broker channel sales. Department around the country that works with these independent brokers who are then working with members. They generally work with many different companies, but what we want to be able to do is to make it easy for them to do business with us and to make it easy for them to do business with us is, is having quality content and information on their fingertips. So if a customer says, hey, is this medication gonna be covered under this new plan? I live in the Bay Area and I practice traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Is that something that’ll be covered under this plan? To be an expert on all of that with the different companies isn’t something an independent broker can do, but we’re able to use these digital rooms as a microsite to have this information that these external brokers can use, but also for us to make sure. We know that we have the most timely information and we’re seeing some changes in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid with CMS right now and new leadership. That required us having new, updated documentation, what we have there. So we’re always using the current and most approved documentation, but we can also be dynamic in our communication to our sales channels. SS: I love that. Can you walk me through that a little bit? The strategy in particular for the Digital Rooms, for your broker channel sales partners. How are they structured and delivered and what impact have you seen so far? JD: They’re structured by our market. So in any particular market, we’re working with various, uh, levels of different health plans and the health plan, we’re going to be providing basic information. So they’ll have access to, you know, enrollment forms, basic government documentation, but they’ll also have important things like, hey, is my transportation to see the doctor covered? You know, do I get a OTC benefit spent at CVS every quarter, little bits of information and have that in the same location is important. I think, again, this is something that we’ve seen both with our internal sales channels and our external sales channels, having the buy-in and confidence from the users that know, oh, I don’t know where to find it everywhere, but I know that I can probably find it in Highspot. That gives us a really good ability to get that stickiness from the user base that we wanna see. SS: I love that. I think that’s fantastic. To pivot a little bit, I know you also plan to utilize AI features in Highspot to elevate your enablement efforts. How do you envision leveraging AI capabilities to improve productivity across the teams you support? JD: Well, as a mature long-term industry, you know, using AI is something that I think a lot of organizations find scary in including us as well, and knowing where we can or can’t do that. So from our standpoint, it’s going to be very, very subdued in what we do. But where we’re going to use AI is the ability to generate summary content, to generate ideas about. Hey, you might want to try and look to this, either look to this as an option that you’ll be able to use that might be successful in this particular type of interaction. So from our standpoint, I think our first implementation of AI is going to be to help support the efficiency of our sales channels and our sales teams rather than two. Have anything externally facing. SS: That makes a ton of sense, and I’m excited to see what you guys are able to do within Molina Healthcare on that front. Now, since launching Highspot, what results have you seen? Are there any key wins or notable business outcomes you can share? JD: Well, I think key wins that we’ve seen, and you know, one of the things that I appreciated with our relationship with Highspot is that we do have customer health check-ins. We’re looking at where we’re growing and we’re seeing a lot of interaction and usage with what we do. So external shares, quality content, number of digital rooms, number of plays, active users, those are all going up. On a quarter by quarter basis. I think some of our bigger wins have been since we realized the reliability of our content that we have hosted. We’re having other divisions within our company that want to use Highspot again, is that it’s a term that’s used a lot, but in sales, that single source of truth, right? We’re getting to a point where we’re seeing our sales and marketing departments that normally want to have a communication that they’re hosting internally. They’re now saying, hey, HighSpot is a great tool for us to use that internally as well. And so I think our biggest win has been. The adoption of using it again, it’s almost to the point that we’re selling and providing information to all of our internal customers as well. So having these other departments come in and want to utilize the features that they see that kind of surpass what they’re currently doing, and that’s made us busy, but it’s, again, that’s building a reliability for us as a tool. SS: That is phenomenal. Last question for you, Jacob, to close. If you could give one piece of advice to someone who’s looking to drive adoption and engagement of their en enablement programs, what would it be? JD: One of the things, you know, I mentioned this at the beginning, begin with an end in mind. I have that goal, have that target, talk to all the stakeholders that are involved. So some stakeholders only want to look at KPIs and engagement and look at the metrics. Some people really only want to care about revenue. Some people want to care about training and all the details that we have along the way. So there’s a lot of stakeholders along the way. And what I would say is, find out the goals that each of these departments and stakeholders in the company have, articulate those goals with the tools that you’re developing, and really kind of have a strong point of view. So whenever anyone asks, you can say, this is why we’re doing this. We’re doing this to overcome these struggles that we’ve had already. This will let us do this, this, and this. And this also puts us on a launching pad, which for us is, uh, expansion of our capabilities and how we’re using this that we see happening later on this year and in 2026 as well. So I think having that strong point of view. That you begin with, right? It might be a charter that a company or a vision statement, whatever that might be. But have that with your implementation as well. So whenever you, again, have a question, you can always refer back to why are we doing this? What is our end goal and how are we gonna measure success? And do these decisions align with doing that as well? SS: I love that advice. Jacob, thank you again so much for joining us today. I appreciate it. JD: I’m happy to be on the podcast and thank you so much for the interview. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win-Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

In this episode of Troubleshooting Enablement, Devon McDermott sits down with Felix Krueger—former consultant, startup founder, and longtime enabler—to explore what it really takes to go from in-house to independent.From his early days in enterprise enablement to building and selling his own company, Felix has worn nearly every hat in go-to-market. Today, he's back in-house at CarSales while continuing to advise enablers looking to branch out on their own.If you've ever considered becoming a consultant, questioned how to package your skills, or wondered how to find clients without selling your soul… this episode is for you.Here's what we cover:✅ Where to start – Why defining your niche, auditing your past wins, and leveraging your network are non-negotiables.✅ What to offer – The three consulting models enablers should consider: diagnostic projects, structured implementations, and retainers.✅ Who to sell to – Why CROs and founders are more likely buyers than enablement leads (and how to navigate both worlds).✅ How to set your rate – Why you should charge more than you think—and how to scope and price engagements to avoid burnout.✅ What to avoid – Common mistakes new consultants make—from getting lost in branding to underestimating the power of execution.Whether you're enablement-curious, actively exploring your next move, or simply want to better understand what makes a successful consultant tick, this episode is packed with practical insight.

According to the State of Sales Enablement Report 2024, organizations are 80% more likely to increase their win rate when using a unified platform for all of their enablement needs. So how can you leverage a unified platform to drive sales productivity?Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Karl-Philippe Clement, the VP of Sales and customer experience at RIB software. Thank you for joining us KP. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Karl-Philippe Clement: Yeah, well the pleasure is all mine. I’m responsible for everything which is sales operations. We very often call it, or sales excellence related to software company RIB software. We do sell software for the construction industry. We were acquired by Schneider Electric. It was a lot of smaller company, and now we are consolidating our approach, working much closer with the software. Of Schneider Electric, and we have possibility also to improve our sales enablement, but also our sales approach and sales operation for our market. So I’ve been hired two years ago by this company specifically for this approach for sales operation. Previously I worked for Bosch Rexroth and Siemens, and I was there 6 and 16 years respectively. I was able to really focus on growing sales operation and sales improvement along the way. SS: Wonderful. Well, we’re excited to have you here, KP Now you have a lot of experience in both sales, marketing, as well as customer experience. How does this experience across go to market teams really helped to influence your approach to sales enablement at RIB? KC: Well, the experience has a lot to do because when we talk with sales very often, it’s uh, you have multiple age group. What I’ve been seeing, and you have people which are much more familiar with new technology and some are less familiar with technology, some are less ready to go with new technology while the. Looking back at the experience that I was faced with a different job, it was really about not only the customer experience, but the user experience of our salespeople in order to bring sales enablement to the next level. If we cannot tackle our users, our people enablement, I’ll have a big problem to reach our objectives with sales enablement. That’s definitely one of the biggest experiences I gathered in the last years. SS: Absolutely. And RIB actually recently implemented Highspot as its enablement platform. What were the main challenges that led to this decision to invest in enablement and, um, how do you see a unified platform helping to overcome those challenges? KC: There was multiple challenge, right? The user challenge was definitely one, right? Fortunately, with HighSpot, I must really be honest. It helped us a lot because it’s really user friendly. It’s also part of our approach to roll out our new CRM, where HighSpot will be able to help us getting a better user experience within Salesforce. That said, there were also multiple objections to getting another tool. Why I say another tool? Because we are submerged with quantities of tool and different company coming to us, hey, my tool is better than the other tool. Which tool should I use? And there’s so many different tools and we come to an IT stack, which. Unsustainable. So it’s really about how we approach to rationalize what do we really need and what will be the output. So this was a challenge to bring IT organization and make sure that we have the money to fund a new approach, because this is definitely one of the challenge. What do you get? And everybody has their own answers – hey, you can make a lot of money with the tool. So it was one of the challenge we were able to, with the help of Highspot supporting us there for the use case, we were able to resolve those challenge and a much nicer way I would say, which facts very clearly that we could put in front of our. SS: I’d love to learn a little bit more about that, especially as a leader in the evaluation process. How did you go about building the business case for enablement and, and securing that stakeholder buy-in? KC: If I can be honest, Highspot helped us a lot. That’s what I mentioned a little bit prior, they took the time and, and I must say that working with Burak, who work with us from Highspot, really taking a deep dive on looking at our process and really taking the time to analyze and build a pilot and get the right data out. And then we are able to go forward. It’s not rocket science in a way, but the support made it a reality, and that’s mainly how we took the problem to fix it. SS: I love that. I’m curious, as you go about implementing this new platform for the first time, how do you plan to drive adoption and, and really build excitement amongst your sellers? KC: It’s all about the value they can get. It’s quite simple. It’s all about the value they can get. So far from what we’ve been doing during the pilot, the value that the sellers could get out of Highspot was quite high. It was pretty good user journey and they got a lot of value. They were able to tackle, uh, lease much faster. They were able to focus on the leads that are interested in what we sent, and see directly activities in the Digital Rooms and everything. So it’s really about what values the users get so they sell more, they get more incentive. Everybody’s happy. And that’s really to the basic, how can I sell more and faster? Everybody’s focused on efficiency, so it’s as simple as that. SS: I love that. And I know RIB has a diverse set of products and use cases. How can enablement help sellers effectively navigate that complexity at RIB? KC: Well, having the right documentation in the right place. And this was one of the reasons we selected to go with a sales enablement tool. This was one of our challenge, finding the right documentation, making sure it’s adapted in the right way. This was one of the main thing. We have a lot of a portfolio, not everybody is an expert of everything. Onboarding new sellers is definitely one of the challenge. So in this way, we’re able to navigate and help reduce complexity on this aspect. The other aspect is to focus where we need to focus. We need to focus on all these, or do we need to focus on the one that has a real interest. So that was mainly the two main aspects in it. SS: Amazing. And one of your current initiatives is transitioning to a new subscription-based business model. How do you plan to leverage your enablement tech stack to help drive this transition? KC: Well, like I said earlier, a seller is about efficiency and it’s about how much money can you make based on an incentive, right? So from a strategic perspective, we can say from a company, this is where we wanna focus, but it’s really to put the means at the right place. So the enablement will help our seller to be more effective to follow up on the right leads. The incentive, I must say, is a big portion on how will we get more into subscription, or how do we wanna focus of getting the maximum outta subscription. So whether we use annual contract value, a CV, or conditionable a CV to help our people focus on the. More focus. More focus on those needs. The proper needs. SS: I love that. So, shifting gears a little bit, ’cause you just mentioned the importance of, you know, that agility and speed as well as the results in your enablement approach. How do you bring this philosophy to life in your enablement efforts using data and insights? KC: Well, there’s always two sides, right? There’s the side that we have. Data needs to be perfect, needs to be exact, and we need to use the data. And there’s the the other side to say, let’s look at the big picture and not necessarily too much on the details of every single data point. If you’re in sales, it’s about speed. It’s about making the right decision and looking at the data will be perfect. So on speed and on right? From this big, it’s really about speed. SS: Absolutely. I could not agree more. And one of the ways that seems to be creating a lot of expediency these days is AI. So I’d love to understand KP, I know you plan on leveraging AI to enhance seller performance. Can you share more about how you envision using AI to elevate your enablement effort? KC: Well, I can share more a little bit on my expectations. We have not used AI yet since we’re, we need to roll it out on our new CRM platform. We just had the pilot project. Again, it’s about speed. How can AI help us have the right insight, make the right decisions? Increase speed to grab the right customer or grab the right leads and make the most out of it. For me, that’s really where AI is. It’s not gonna replace anybody. I don’t believe it’s gonna replace sellers. I believe it’ll be kind of a co-pilot, don’t want to use this word, but it’s. Being beside our sellers and supporting his approach to really, maybe he’s missing a few points, he’s missing some comments, coming outta discussion. He’s missing some different views to help him make him the right decision. That’s how I see that AI will help a lot. SS: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I’m excited for you to get started on that front. What do you think is the potential long-term value of embracing innovations in technology like AI to both help the seller and improve the customer experience? KC: It’s about trying right? Try and error to a certain point. Better try and find out as fast as possible. Competition will do, try and if it works well, well much faster than in. So for me, trial error and always keeping up to date and keeping the speed and trying to make it faster because nobody sleeping and definitely not the competition. SS: Absolutely KP. Last question for you. What is one piece of advice you would give to other companies that are considering investing in enablement for the first time? KC: Do your homework. Look, but also be very clear on what you’re trying to achieve and where do you want to go. Keep the end in mind of where you wanna go. Speed is a key essence of any implementation and rollout to make this a reality supported by the user experience, your user experience, your sellers to embrace and make the most out of it, because there’s a lot of technology there that even looks great on paper if the users are not using it. It’s not gonna make the best. A fool with the tool is still a fool. So make sure that you get the right tool to make sure that the people will use it properly and will get the most out of it. SS: Thank you KP. Appreciate the advice and thank you for joining the podcast. I’ve greatly appreciated your insight. KC: It was my pleasure. Thank you very much. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win-Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Audio recording of the Sunday morning Bible Teaching given by Andrew Burt at Enniscorthy Christian Fellowship, Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland on 30th March 2025

Audio recording of the Sunday morning Bible Teaching given by Andrew Burt at Enniscorthy Christian Fellowship, Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland on 30th March 2025

What if the key to unlocking more profitable and efficient building automation projects was already at your fingertips? In Episode 488, you're invited into a detailed conversation tailored specifically for building automation professionals. This episode explores how OEMs like Johnson Controls are equipping their contractor channels with advanced tools - not just to sell, but to successfully deliver full BAS solutions from estimation to final commissioning. This episode is about helping you rethink the way you approach your BAS projects. Whether you're estimating, designing, installing, or managing the handoff to operations, there are resources out there that can make you faster, more accurate, and more profitable. You won't just hear about features - you'll hear how these tools and processes can be applied to your business and your daily operations. Key topics explored include: The underestimated power of estimation tools and how they impact risk, labor, and material accuracy. How engineering efforts in the sales phase can translate into operational success and earlier cash flow. What to consider when transitioning to IP controls and how OEM partnerships are shaping the network infrastructure conversation. How to strategically manage materials to drive revenue and reduce risk before a project even breaks ground. How automation and evolving software tools are reducing human error and accelerating project timelines. If you're a contractor, estimator, engineer, or project manager in the BAS space, this episode will give you insight into what's possible with the right toolset and the right approach. You'll walk away with new perspectives on how to enhance your current workflows and set your projects up for greater success. Listen in to discover how the strategies discussed can impact your business.

According to the State of Sales Enablement Report, an estimated 90% of organizations now have enablement functions, representing a 20% year-over-year increase. So with this growth in mind, how can organizations successfully implement an enablement platform that ensures long-term success? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Shara Simms, the Director of Global Revenue Enablement at Cloudinary. Thank you for joining us Shara. I’d love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Shara Simms: Thanks for having me. My name’s Shara. I am from the San Francisco Bay area originally moved down to San Diego and never left, married. Two beautiful little girls. I’m the director of Global Revenue Enablement at Cloudinary. The scope of my role is not just the sales teams, but also our customer support teams as well as our partners. So the revenue enablement kind of umbrella hits all of those different teams. And I think something probably really important to call out around the role is when people hear the term enablement, a lot of times they hear or focus on just the training aspect of it. But I think it’s, it’s so much more than that. It’s strategic partnership, it’s sales process, efficiency. It’s the connector between everything going on in the product world and the go-to-market motion and how that information gets filtered down to sales or again, partners or customer support. So that’s a little bit about me and my role. Shawnna Sumaoang: Thank you Shara! We’re glad that you’re here with us. And I couldn’t agree more. I’ve seen the evolution of the enablement profession just absolutely change from kind of being focused on content or focused on training to really taking a strategic seat at the table to help lead the strategy for the organization and how we bring kind of all the go to market motions together. So I love to hear that you’re kind of overseeing that for Cloudinary today, and you have a ton of experience in both sales enablement and leadership roles. I would love for you to talk to us a little bit more about that journey into enablement and how has your approach to sales enablement evolved over the years? Shara Simms: So I actually started out in the finance world working really closely with financial advisors in a customer support manager role. Just supporting day-to-day operations internal systems processes. I was in my, my young twenties, still trying to figure out, you know, what direction I really wanted to take my career. And there was a part of me that had considered going into teaching. I had realized this, this passion that I had for just taking complex situations or overwhelming scenarios and breaking them down into digestible information. And so with that in mind, and while I was working in this support role, an opportunity came up at the same financial company to do some internal training, onboarding for financial advisors, industry best practices, that type of thing. And I think that that was really the first turning point in my career where I realized I can take my business degree and this learned, you know, financial and business literacy and combine it with adult learning. Yeah. So adult learning quickly became not just a job, but really a passion and spent a good amount of my career at this. Finance company going beyond operations and into more marketing and sales type training. From there, I eventually made a jump into tech. I was with ServiceNow for a couple of years, doing a variety of roles from strategy to learning design, and then leading a team of instructional designers and trainers. And then I eventually made the move to Cloudinary and I would say after what has been my career so far that the background of adult learning mixed with the operational and business fluency is really what has served me well. And I think even though I don’t have a background as a seller per se, that’s really the background. The adult learning background and operational and business is what I’ve been able to effectively apply into the world of tech sales and enablement. Shawnna Sumaoang: I love that. I love that operational background that you have. I think it will apply to a lot of what I’d like to talk to you about today. As I mentioned in the introduction,sales enablement is becoming more and more mainstream for a lot of organizations, and those same organizations are trying to figure out, you know, what are the right people, processes, and tools that I need to have in place. Place in order to really do enablement. Right. You know, to your point at that sort of strategic level, and I know that you guys at Cloudinary had been on a previous enablement platform, and moved over to Highspot. I’d love to understand what motivated you to reevaluate and change your enablement tech stack. Shara Simms: So yes, we did move to Highspot a few months ago. I would say there were two really big motivators there for us. The first one, one of the largest ones would be the G Suite interability. There are a lot of platforms out there that have G Suite integration, but Highspot was able to support more of an advanced use case that we had, and the specific example, the previous platform we were on, so they did integrate with Google Drive in the sense that you could make updates to your master Google documents and then those updates would flow through to the version that the sales reps accessed on the platform. I think most platforms can do that, but beyond that basic integration, we had to jump through some hoops to achieve kind of what we really wanted, which was ultimately to take our internal customer data, have that flow through the platform, and then automatically transpose onto our templated customer facing slides for things like account reviews, which saves our CSMs and our account managers just hours of time Highspot can support this, which was really important for us. Whereas the previous platform, we would’ve needed to get virtual machines like parallels, for example, which came at an incremental cost. But more than that, our security team just they weren’t thrilled with that, and it was just extra workaround. So that G Suite Interability was huge in being able to apply our internal data to the slides. And then the, the second big motivator was the administration piece of it. We are a very small team, but a mighty team. But we spent a lot of hours trying to maintain and effectively administrate our previous platform. So the ease of use on Highspot, specifically ease of use with Salesforce integration, that and G Suite was the two big motivators. Shawnna Sumaoang: m. Well I’m glad that you are now a Highspot customer and I think when you make an investment in the right tools for your teams, you wanna make sure that it’s getting adopted and, and they’re able to take full advantage of it. And I know there can be challenges sometimes when rolling out a new enablement platform in driving that adoption, along with maybe, you know, a few other challenges that come along with kind of that change management, what are some of the biggest challenges that you think enablement practitioners might face when they’re rolling out a new enablement platform, and how have you overcome some of those challenges as you prepare to launch? Shara Simms: Yeah. I think first and foremost, the challenge of having a really good and realistic strategy for the rollout and the adoption. I’ll circle back to that thought in just a moment, and the other would be, again, the hurdle of maintenance and administration. It really is time consuming and if you’re a small team without a dedicated resource, it can be challenging. So with that in mind, circling back to my original thought, which was that realistic strategy for rollout and adoption, what we did was recognize, okay, we don’t have a lot of resources here. What is going to be the most impactful thing to our teams and drive, I wouldn’t say drive adoption right out the gate, but drive that initial buy-in and the excitement from our sales teams. We all love our salespeople, but we also know that behavior change and new system adoption can definitely be a challenge. So what’s going to get them excited to where they want to use this platform? For us, we determined it was seeing that Salesforce integration before even getting into building out landing pages and navigation and fancy training curriculums. Just having that Salesforce or whatever, CRM, you may use integration with Highspot so that. The sales individuals can see the recommended content to use right there within their opportunity page. Rolling that out. Got them really excited and bought in and, and it got them asking me on a weekly basis, when are we getting this whole platform? So we took a phased approach, realistic expectations of what we could do within our given resources. Phase one, Salesforce and Highspot integration Phase two, which is where we are right now, Digital Sales Rooms customizing content and sales facing landing pages. We purposely did not want to rush this portion of it because having a really well thought out organization of content on the various landing pages or HighSpot calls ’em spots, we use the term landing page internally. I think that’s probably a really important piece. So that went into our phase two. Then lastly, phase three will be the second half of the year, all of our learning and training curriculums. Shawnna Sumaoang: I love that. I know building strong professional relationships is another key focus of yours. As you implement a new enablement platform, how do you plan to drive adoption and build excitement? As you mentioned, how critical that is just a moment ago for your programs amongst the sales teams that you support. Shara Simms: Yeah, retouching on, you know, the strategy of our phased approach, but beyond that, I think maintaining really close relationships with our sales leaders is very important. It’s something that I do, you know, ensuring that they’re bought in and that we have a measurement of success that the teams will be held to as well is critical. So for example, we’re currently tracking our sales collateral usage. Are the teams using it effectively at the right stages, what’s working, what’s not? And as part of this tracking, we have an agreement with our sales leaders going into phase two of our Highspot rollout. And the agreement is we will be tracking that the teams are using certain pieces of collateral that have been deemed. Essentially a required piece of content to share for all deals. And we’re tracking that. They share it via Highspot. So if they have their own version or own copy of the material that they send directly, we aren’t tracking that. If they didn’t send it through to Highspot, it didn’t happen. And again, the sales leaders are partnering with us to hold their teams accountable. So that kind of strategic relationship at the sales leadership level I think is really important and it’s what’s helped driving our success with adoption of the platform. Shawnna Sumaoang: I love that. As you mentioned in your introduction, shara, you have a lot of experience in training. What are some of your best practices for designing and implementing effective training, and how do you see a new enablement platform optimizing these efforts? Shara Simms: Yeah, so first and foremost, always having clearly defined and stated objectives. This is your North Star. It’s gonna help you define if the. Expectation is a behavior change if it’s truly just knowledge retention, if it’s more so a communication versus training. So without a doubt, I want to call that out as probably the most important thing, and not only stating the objective, but also having really clear alignment and agreement of those objectives with your stakeholders. Beyond that, which was maybe stating the obvious. I think a blended learning approach is always the best tactic to use as well, which is one thing I’m really excited about to build enablement on Highspot with this kind of mixed learning. We’re gonna have the ability to pull in my live webinar schedules combined with any on-demand training courses, then technical product documentation that I need the team to read as part of the overarching curriculum. And it’s all going to be on one platform and one curriculum. We also use a tool called Second Nature, which is like an AI simulation tool for sales. It’s pretty cool. And we can also integrate those AI role plays into the same high spot curriculums. So just the ease of pulling in all of those different types of learning elements into one place. It’s gonna be a really exciting second half of the year for us. I’m also really excited to build out curriculums that are role-based or skill-based. So tying in not only the learning component, but then any collateral or resources from the platform into one place based on the specific role or the specific skill gap that I am ultimately trying to solve for. I think lastly, of course, the measurement component is also key. Being able to get insights that I can actively move against and identify, you know, where do I need to spend more of my time? By rep, by individual rep scorecards. So really, really excited for all of those kind of components and pulling in the best practices of learning. Shawnna Sumaoang: On the topic of insights, as you move forward with the implementation, how do you plan to use data and insights to continue to refine your strategy and really ensure a successful launch? Shara Simms: So I mentioned before that we are tracking collateral usage. Obviously we want to know what reps are using, not using how that correlates back to one or lost deals, but also from a behavioral change perspective. We want to also use that data to help us see how well our reps are following the sales process and where we might need to double down on either reviewing the content because it’s not working or reviewing our actual process because there’s some hurdle in the way for them that we need to solve. There’s also the customer engagement cracking that we’re hoping will help move the needle. So for example, as our reps start using the digital sales rooms, if they share a proposal there and the customer views it, great, there’s an indicator for the rep to follow up, see what questions they may have if the customer doesn’t view a case study that was shared. Okay, follow up with an email, highlight the key points from that case study to ensure the customer sees it. The customer engagement tracking is going to be a really big one that we’re going to to build off of. And then the last thing I’ll say in regards to data is. Specifically sales leaders or the manager’s insights, it’s going to be really important that my team actively works with the sales managers so that they understand, you know, how to read their teams. Data and their team’s insights. Again, I keep talking about behavior change, but really putting a focus on helping the manager turn into an effective coach for their team versus just a manager, right? Manager versus coaching, and really being able to use that data to help their teams get better. So I think those are the three big points. Shawnna Sumaoang: I love that. And, and while we’re on the topic of data, and as you mentioned earlier, you’ve been working on making sure that you have the integration set up between Salesforce. And Highspot, what value do you see in this integration and what outcomes are you hoping to achieve? Shara Simms: Yeah, the Salesforce integration is wonderful. I absolutely love it. We are definitely trying to drive better use of our internal collateral. Not only just using the content, but using the right content at the right stage, and being able to easily track that. Right now it’s very manual for us. Another big piece of this is. Time efficiency. You know, no more searching around to find the piece of collateral that, that a salesperson might need. It’s gonna appear right there in the opportunity for them. And then lastly, selfishly, from an administrative perspective, gaining a lot of time back in maintaining the Salesforce integration already. The integration works seamlessly. I’ve not had. Any trouble versus our, our last platform, we really just never got it to work correctly. Anytime we would update a field name on Salesforce, we would need to manually update the field, you know, in the platform. And that’s just not the case with Highspot. It’s just all in automatic flow. It’s saved us a ton of time. Shawnna Sumaoang: I’m glad to hear that. And as we look ahead, as you look to post-launch, what are some of the key go-to-market initiatives that you’ll be focused on driving? And how will your enablement programs help support these? Shara Simms: Yeah. Our biggest initiative right now that I think is we’re gonna support is the sales process. Adherence the right collateral. Right messaging, right process, all at the right, you know, time and the right stage. This is a mix of the SFDC integration and the landing pages we’re creating in Highspot, which are going to follow more of a sales process versus product-led theme. And what I mean by that is basically being guided by the opportunity situation versus having a seller go in and say, Hey, I just need information on this product. Well, do you really? Or are you jumping straight to solutioning? Where are you right now? Are you in discovery? And you need to pull in this material and have this type of conversation? So it’s really the entire go to market. Sales process that we’re trying to refine and ensure that our sales team is again, following the actions that should be taken versus jumping straight to product or solution material. Shawnna Sumaoang: I love that. This has been fantastic. Shara, last question for you, for our audience, for folks that are looking to roll out a new enablement platform, what’s maybe one piece of advice that you would give them to set them up for success as they get started? Shara Simms: Before you start organizing your content, have a solidified agreement behind the scenes on the methodology for how you want that content to be served up to reps and what content you want to be served up for your reps. It can be really easy to fall into a bottomless pit of content. On a platform, all of the internal resources, all of the FAQs, everything that product or product marketing has ever created, and it contend to get out of hand for reps really quickly. I think it’s fine if you want all of that internal material available, but just have a really smart way that you’re organizing and serving up the content. And I’ll give you our example. So I’m sure there’s, you know, a hundred different ways to do this as a best practice and the way that I do it might not be the best way for you, but again, that’s why we did the SFDC integration first, so that just the key content. Was rolling into the opportunity while we gave ourselves extra time to really think about content organization on our backend and align with product marketing on how we were gonna organize it to be fed out to the teams. Shawnna Sumaoang: I love that. I do think that’s a fantastic tip for our audience. So Shara, thank you again so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win-Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

In this episode of The State of Sales Enablement, Coach K sits down with Dr. Tom Tonkin—sales enablement OG, academic, and data whisperer—to explore what truly makes enablement work.From his early days as a sales leader at Oracle to earning a PhD in Organizational Leadership, Tom's unique journey has equipped him with rare insight into what actually moves the needle in sales performance. Today, he's on a mission to bring statistical rigor to the world of enablement—and help practitioners avoid chasing shiny objects.If you've ever relied on vendor reports, built programs based on industry surveys, or wondered why your initiatives aren't getting the results you expected… this episode is for you.Here's what we cover:✅ Why most industry surveys are statistically useless – The difference between descriptive and predictive data—and how to spot flawed claims.✅ Charters, methodologies, and other myths – The surprising things that don't actually move the revenue needle.✅ The 4 levels of insight – Descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive—what they are and why most enablement teams are stuck at level one.✅ What enablers need to learn next – Why basic statistical literacy might be the most underrated skill in enablement today.Whether you're an enabler, sales leader, or data-curious professional, this episode will change the way you think about metrics, measurement, and what it truly means to be "data-driven."Episode LinksConnect with Dr. Tom Tonkin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drtomtonkin/Connect with Coach K on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmkmba/Mentioned in this episode:

Travis Scholes, Commercial Director at LMS, joins Today's Conveyancer Podcast host David Opie to discuss the National Property Transaction Network (NPTN); an enablement platform where all those involved in the property transaction can interact in a way that creates greater efficiencies in the process.Discussing the evolution of the concept Travis explains how the last 5 years has seen the level of digitisation within each of the property silos develop astronomically; what's missing is a place where all those different elements of digitisation can work best together and and make the best use of that digital maturity that has taken place. We've got to make that burden to change easier, says Travis. We see NPTN as a way to knock down some of the roadblocks by creating a really open system into which anybody can plug; decoupling the LMS products and services from the network so they're not mandated and any one can plug their supply chain into it. The more people use a single platform to leverage the efficiencies the more powerful the data becomes, the more efficient the process becomes. We can also reduce the administrative burden by de-duplicating data entry points and creating more transparencyChange will be evolutionary, not revolutionary. The big bang approach where everyone has to stop what they're doing and adopt a completely new way of working is impossible. And we're still going through a process of helping the profession understand what this change looks like. In addition we've got to overcome some of the "technology fatigue" that has crept in; the idea that people become tired of hearing about the next big thing. In an entertaining, informative, and typically honest, discussion Travis explains how and why LMS are keen to play their part int he next iteration of the property market. The Today's Conveyancer podcast can be found on your preferred podcast provider and also at www.todaysconveyancer.co.uk. Subscribe and listen in for all the latest conveyancing industry news and views. Thank you to our podcast sponsors PEXA and VacantC Legal Recruitment.

According to a study from Gallup, training can improve a company’s productivity by 17% and profitability by 21% when offered to engaged employees. So how can you train and coach your reps to keep them engaged and help them hit their quotas? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this is James Petkovski, the director of enablement technology at MetLife. Thank you for joining us, James. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. James Petkovski: Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here. And a little bit of a background on me and my role, so I was born and raised in New Jersey, entire family is there, I ended up venturing off to Arizona for college, trying to really experience life on my own, met my beautiful wife there, and then after about 10 years, we relocated back to New Jersey for a little where we had our daughter and I ultimately got my start at MetLife and started my career. At MetLife, I’m providing support for our sales teams in regards to their state licensing and FINRA registration. And I was in that role for a little over a year before I transitioned into sales enablement. Progressed through the enablement role from a consultant to a manager, and now to a director where I currently oversee the technology for our market enablement organization and can’t be happier. Enablement was one of those things I attended an ATD conference and was like, wow, so much sales enablement. And it just struck a chord. And I was like, I’m home. This is exactly what I want to be in. SS: It really is a career calling, I think, for the right folks, so I’m glad that it pulled you in, James. And, you know, as you mentioned, you have a wealth of experience as a sales enablement leader and as a technical analyst at MetLife. You walked us through your journey a bit into enablement. I’d love to understand how does your analytical background influence your enablement strategy? JP: So, always had a passion for the creative arts and One of the awesome parts of enablement is being able to blend both of those from that business analytical side with the creative side. And that really helped me excel in my role in enablement as I was able to solve the business needs with creativity, whether that was developing a learning path, creating videos, podcasts, e-learnings, like really thinking outside the box when it came to how are we going to deliver this in a fun and interesting way. And pulling into my analytical nature, some say I’m crazy, right? But my enjoyment in looking at data really helped me to think through and deliver the best strategy based on, you know, what were we needing? How can we take advantage from data from past learnings, like looking at trends on how our, you know, sales and service reps were engaging with, you know, that format that we provided? Did it, was it effective? So data really helped me tell the story and direct where we needed to go to make sure we’re putting that best learning forward. SS: I love that. I love that you’re applying both that creativity and that analytical component to it as well. It’s both art and science, I guess you could say. Now at MetLife, you’re responsible for developing and managing the training programs. What did training look like at your organization before you started to leverage Highspot and how has it evolved since then? JP: I think some aspects are similar, right? Before and after, we still do e-learnings. We still do videos, webinars, podcasts, the whole kind of learning gamut. I think the real difference came from, previously was a lot of manual work, from pulling reports from various platforms to derive. How effective was the learning? Was it attended? Excel trackers to guide a user through their quote on quote learning pathway. There was just a lot that was done manually, which took time, right? It took resources, and capacity. And this applied to the reps taking those programs as well, having to email their weekly trackers and take all their activities in different systems. So they were bouncing around. I just thought really put that experience together in providing that one-stop shop area for everything. So all those learning activities were all done and access right from the Highspot platform. So it really made that training journey truly about learning and not about how do I need to complete this and what system was I doing it in and kind of the nuances of that. And not only did it simplify the journey for the learner, but also like on the admin side, allowed us to capture that needed data, to be able to quickly look at completion statuses and see, Hey, where were opportunities, right? Like how I think having that quick insight allowed us to adapt quicker. SS: I love that. I love that. I want to circle back to that, but you had mentioned something earlier about all of the variety of learning content, including videos, simulations, and I should have known you had podcasts in there because you were a pro and you hopped on this podcast line already. But in your view, what are some of the key building blocks for effective training content? I JP: I think the biggest key is understanding each training is unique and you really need to come at it from that angle. What are you trying to get across to the audience? Like how quickly do you need to get that message across? And is it more in-the-moment learning or is it a big announcement that was changing the way people were? I think videos really allowed us to get information across quickly. It made things a little bit more bite-sized where we could also include best practices with it, which best practices really resonated. Podcasts allowed for that more conversational, to dive a little bit more into some of the nuances that just sometimes don’t come across in like maybe a direct webinar. And then e-learning and simulations allowed that. You know, hands-on experience and gave a little more interactivity and engagement to some longer form training. And I think the nice thing with the e-learnings and simulations is when you have systems that you’re training on, like being able to have a user get in there, click through some things like, hey, here’s what this area does. Those simulations help in that fail proof environment. And one thing I’ll share is. I don’t feel like a training needs to be one or another, right? Like I think series played a big part in what we do. And that could be starting with a quick introduction video, getting people grounded in a topic, then a webinar to really talk about the meat and potatoes. And then, you know, finally a podcast to wrap it up with some of those conversational nuances. So I would say like just each training come at it from a fresh angle. Thinking through what needs to be done and don’t be afraid to experiment and take that longer form, maybe like shorter tidbits, as opposed to just kind of, Hey, we’re just doing this, right? I think we have a lot of technology at our fingertips. SS: I love that. So going back to what you were saying, you really are at MetLife fostering a culture of continuous learning amongst your sales teams. I’d Love to understand how you, you foster that and you motivate them to enhance their skills and knowledge over time. JP: So I think having Highspot be that one stop shop really allows us to blend in with that continuous learning, right? Like having the resources all on the Highspot platform allows reps once they’re out of, say for example, like a new hire program or an academy program. They know that that content is still there in Highspot and they know how to locate that. So they’re getting accustomed to that being able to leverage the managed content feature within various other content in Highspot allows us to continue that training when needed mindset where for rep pulls up a certain marketing content, it’s, hey, have you taken this training or, hey, have you reviewed these speaking points? So being able to meet the reps where they are, whether they know they need it or not, I think is really how you kind of foster that continuing education is getting them set up with that structured program, having an area where they have access to continuing education on bite-sized topics. And then, Lastly, make sure that you’re kind of connecting that content with the past trainings that have been done. SS: I love that, that continuous learning journey for the folks that are in there. And you have achieved an amazing adoption of active learners and Highspot. I think you guys saw a 38 percent increase in active learners recently. How do you ensure reps consistently engage with and adopt your training programs? JP: So I attribute that to really the amazing work our training team do in our market enablement organization and by giving them a stellar, concise pathway, the reps that are, you know, that they know will walk them through the journey and get them to the finish line, building that rapport with not only the learners, but managers as well, like giving them that confidence that we got you, right? We got, we got them, right? Like for managers, we’re going to make sure they’re prepared with the knowledge. That’s part of those learning pathways is that managers also get that insight into how their reps are performing through it all as well. So they can keep in touch and really align with those opportunity areas that I was speaking a little bit about how on an admin backend side, like being able to quickly look at those analytics, it really allows you to tailor, hey, how do I focus my energy and efforts? SS: I love that. Now, going back to your analytics background, when you’re evaluating the success of your training initiatives and the overall sales readiness of the team, how do you leverage data to optimize these programs? JP: So we look at a lot of items and I would say it’s kind of a never-ending review on effectiveness. It’s taken us a while and we continue to this day, to grow in our understanding of what to do and how do we change and make things better. You know, from the time that rep starts to well after how have they been performing months, years after a training program, after taking it, looking only data and analytics, but gathering feedback too, is there anything we could have changed to prepare you better? Feedback is king, good or bad, I think, never be afraid of it. SS: I love that. And since implementing Highspot, what are maybe some of the business results that you’ve achieved and do you have any wins you can share? JP: Yeah, so I think from an admin side, the time to build pathways, courses, lessons has drastically decreased, you know, we have saved days with this as everything is really simple to create and previously where, you know, my team would have a large hand in building out the courses throughout the year after we set up the initial framework and templates. We have really been able to pass that down to some of our other devoted training teams within our market enablement to continue that process. And the process is straightforward that, you know, we just provide that guidance, but they’re the ones adding in that new content for the program. So this saves them time as well. Saves us time really allows us to really put our efforts toward guiding the reps. And then also thinking, hey, how do we innovate and push the boundary next time. And then from a ramp up timeframe, we’ve been really able to give reps not only a quicker timeframe to get ready for their role, but also get them familiar with the platform that they will be using day in and day out with Highspot. This helps with that easy transition, right? When they go to their full-time role, the dedicated courses and pathways with everything captured in one spot really allow them to get their learning done. And focus on the day to day work and shadowing afterwards. SS: I love that. And I have to say another win I saw was that you shared on LinkedIn that MetLife was named to Fortune’s world best workplaces list. And from an enablement leadership perspective, how do your training programs help cultivate a strong and healthy sales culture? JP: Yeah, so we have amazing onboarding and continuing education training teams and programs. I think having a great team definitely helps. I think the best part that we do is really setting up a rep with a fresh start. It’s not muddy. It’s direct. It gives not only reps what they need, but managers too. Becoming a leader, knowing that from the leadership side that my reps are being taken care of, and I don’t have to do all this work myself. And I have, you know, this amazing team around me. It really makes the process of preparing reps to do what they’ve been really brought here to do, and that is to achieve their best. So being able to get everyone on that same starting ground, just set them up for success and drives us to that healthy culture. I recently just had a new hire come on board my team and. Just the way we onboard them and get them all set up. It was nice because I didn’t have that much pressure on me. So it really allowed me to know that they were in that trusted hand. So that is one of the things that I think sets in a healthy culture of the manager has that confidence. And then that rep also has that confidence as well, getting started. SS: Amazing. Last question, James. To close, if you could give one piece of advice to someone looking to enhance training within their teams, what would it be? JP: I would say don’t be afraid. Whether it’s of feedback, of change, of data. Use that to cultivate and adapt the world of training and technology is ever evolving and the beauty of the connection we have nowadays from forums and conferences and you know, the works we have so much education out there that don’t be afraid of it. Take it one at a time. Don’t know how something will come across to your team? Implement a series, like have that be a portion of the learning. Maybe have a pilot group — pilot the idea with a certain team, see how it does, ask for feedback. Don’t be afraid and be bold. SS: Fantastic advice. Thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate your time. JP: Thank you. Have a great day. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Our guest for Episode 72 is Karan Singh, VP GTM Strategy, Revenue Operations & Enablement, LaunchDarkly. Before joining LaunchDarkly, Karan held senior leadership positions at Sapphire Ventures, Procore Technologies, and SalesSource, where he spearheaded major product rollouts and guided organizational growth. In this episode, Ross and Karan discuss the importance of establishing consistent rituals and cadences, break down how to set and track SMART goals, and examine how technology can act as a force multiplier.

Explore our Business Central on-demand training courses at https://www.learndynamics.com/    Microsoft Fabric is transforming how businesses handle data in Dynamics 365 Business Central. By offering an end-to-end solution for data analytics, Fabric simplifies complex processes and opens the door to real-time insights   In this episode, Belinda Allen, Director of Enablement at iLink Digital and a Microsoft Certified Trainer, shares insights into the key benefits of integrating Fabric with Business Central.    Learn how Fabric enhances data management, separates compute from storage, and streamlines data modeling with tools like Azure Data Factory and Power BI. As Belinda Allen explains, “Fabric consolidates tools and eliminates the need to move data around, making workflows far more efficient.”    Explore how Fabric is reshaping data management and analytics in Business Central.    Listen now and see how to bring simplicity and power to your data workflows!

Christina Brady is a sales leader, entrepreneur, and the CEO of Luster.ai, a company dedicated to measuring and improving sales proficiency through AI. With 18 years of experience in sales, she is passionate about fixing broken hiring and onboarding processes and enabling professionals to succeed. Christina is also the Chicago Chapter Head of Pavilion and serves on the executive team at Women in Sales. Three Key Quotes from Christina Brady “If you don't measure proficiency, you don't know who you're hiring, how to up-level them, or why they struggle.” “AI isn't here to replace you—it's here to make you better at what you do.” “Founders have ‘magic' because they know the mistakes that have been made and the risks they're willing to take. You can't expect a new hire to replicate that.” In this insightful conversation, Christina Brady discusses why hiring and onboarding in sales are fundamentally broken and how AI can transform proficiency measurement. She also breaks down the “founder magic” that makes transitioning from founder-led to AE-led sales so difficult. This episode is a must-listen for leaders looking to scale effectively. 5 Key Takeaways on Finding Your Catalyst 1. The Hiring Process is Fundamentally Broken Companies often hire without a clear understanding of what makes a candidate successful. The interview process is subjective, leading to mismatches between candidates and roles. Relying on past success (e.g., quota attainment at another company) does not predict future success. 2. Onboarding Needs to Be Personalized and Continuous Most onboarding programs are generic and fail to address individual deficiencies. Employees are often left confused after onboarding, with no clear roadmap for success. The best organizations move from "onboarding" to "everboarding," offering continuous training and development. 3. Measuring Proficiency is the Key to Success Companies struggle because they don't objectively measure proficiency at the skill level. AI tools can now map skills, identify deficiencies, and predict performance gaps before they become issues. Without measurement, companies rely on subjective “gut feelings,” leading to inefficiencies and lost talent. 4. AI is a Tool for Enablement, Not Replacement AI should be used to enhance human capability, not replace it. The right AI tools help sales teams avoid revenue-impacting mistakes before they happen. Leaders must shift their mindset from fear to experimentation when adopting AI. 5. Founder-Led Sales is a Different Game Founders have “magic” because they understand the product deeply and can flexibly adjust deals. Expecting an AE to replicate a founder's selling process is unrealistic. The transition from founder-led to AE-led sales requires a structured process, proper tooling, and realistic expectations. Final Thought Learn. Think. and Act. with us every Sunday. Our Sunday email is filled with sections dedicated to helping leaders Learn. Think. and Act. These short weekly emails will help you make a difference and accelerate speed to impact at work, with self, and within your family. Subscribe here: https://www.findmycatalyst.com/learn-think-act-opt-in

In this special episode of The State of Sales Enablement, Felix Krueger flips the script and welcomes the show's own co-host, Jonathan Kvarfordt (Coach K), to the other side of the mic. Known for his deep insights into AI, sales enablement, and go-to-market strategies, Coach K shares his vision for AI in sales, the evolution of AI agents, and the intersection of human connection and automation.We dive into his latest role as Head of GTM Growth at Momentum, the launch of the AI Business Network, and how AI is reshaping everything from customer interactions to sales enablement workflows.Here's what we'll cover:✅ The role of AI in sales—how AI is shifting from a tool to a co-pilot for sales teams.✅ GPTs vs. AI Agents—the key differences and why agents are the next big leap.✅ AI automation in sales enablement—how enablers can amplify their impact using AI.✅ The future of AI in customer interactions—can AI replace sales teams, or does human connection still reign?✅ Momentum's approach to AI-driven sales workflows—why real-time conversation intelligence is a game-changer.✅ The risks of AI over-reliance—how to maintain critical thinking in an AI-first world.✅ Why authenticity will become a premium experience—how live interactions and in-person events will stand out in an AI-saturated world.Tune in to hear Coach K's unique perspective on where AI is headed, how it's already impacting sales and enablement, and what the future holds for human-AI collaboration.Connect with Coach K:

According to research from Forrester, organizations that align their go-to-market teams grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable. So how can you foster effective cross-functional communication to break down silos and secure leadership buy-in for your enablement strategies? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Sonal Patel, the director of GTM enablement at Rakuten. Thank you for joining us, Sonal. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background and your role. Sonal Patel: Thank you for having me. So my name is Sonal Patel. I’m born in the fantastic city that is London, UK. Shout out to any fellow Londoners listening in. That was my base until about two years ago where I got an opportunity to relocate to US. I’m now living in a much warmer climate based out of Frisco, Dallas. So a little bit about my background. I started my career in digital marketing affiliates client side, which led me to join Rakuten Advertising, managing clients and leading the UK client services team. From there, I moved into a strategy and sales engineering role, supporting sales teams this time with deal analysis, pricing profitability, which was a great transition into sales enablement where I now support commercial teams globally. SS: We’re so excited to have you here now at Rakuten. You have held roles across the go-to-market organization from account management to client services and operations. Talk to us about your journey into your current role and how this experience influences your approach to go to market enablement. SP: Yeah, sure. How much time do we have for this one? Okay. So as I said, I started my career in client services and account management, and this gave me a deep understanding of client, needs and the challenges of building strong relationships and really driving that customer satisfaction. Managing complex accounts, leading high performing teams taught me what it takes to really deliver results. This experience, I would say shaped my approach to enablement. I focus on supporting commercial teams today with the right tools, a clear messaging, and content that really aligns with client expectations and business goals. I also, in this role, work very closely with our delivery teams to help our commercial groups really navigate that internal noise, ensuring that we’ve got alignment. So this spans across teams like product, product marketing, marketing, sales solutions, and more. SS: I love that journey. On LinkedIn, you also mentioned that you specialize in helping leaders overcome challenges to drive success. Can you share an example of a challenge that you’ve been able to help overcome for your business through enablement? SP: Yeah, a big challenge I came to understand is for our sellers really tailoring the experience to buyer needs while navigating really lengthy sales processes to stand out in the market. We really needed to streamline our messaging and make that experience more impactful. So one way I tackled this was by implementing digital showrooms, taking you back a bit. It started when a seller ran out of time during a pitch process to demo our dashboards. So we created short bite-sized demo videos showcasing our features. That prospects really cared about the most. And from there, I developed custom digital room templates that basically allows our sales teams to share our full product suite, as well as RFP documents and all of those documents that is needed within that sales process in less than five clicks. So this has been an absolute game changer. It’s helping us deliver tailored, engaging experiences, while really most importantly, simplifying that process for our sales teams. SS: Another common challenge I hear a lot about, I know a lot of enablement teams face, is gaining leadership buy-in, and this is an area where you have had a lot of success. I’d love to understand, what are some of your best practices for securing support for your programs from your executive leaders? SP: Yeah, sure. Great question. Securing leadership buy-in is tough. It’s not just about getting your foot in the door, it’s about keeping it there. It’s taken me years to figure out, if I’m honest. For me, it comes down to three things. Identifying the right stakeholders. Understanding their pain points and keeping the relationship ongoing and fluid. One aspect I’ll talk about here is early in my career, I thought I was a good listener, but I was really just waiting for my turn to talk. I’d latch onto a keyword and start crafting my response instead of actually processing what was being said. But when I started truly listening, things started changing. Leadership tells you exactly what they care about. And problem solving becomes a two-way conversation by focusing on their needs. And showcasing how my programs address their priorities. I’ve been able to build that trust and secure their support. But like I said, it’s taken years to really figure that out. It’s not a one-time effort. It’s really about maintaining that dialogue, staying adaptable and really continuing to deliver that value over time. So a lot of perseverance, I’d say it doesn’t come overnight. But yeah, I would go back to those kind of three things that I really identified to really help secure a leadership buy-in. SS: And what would you say is the impact of having strong executive support for enablement? SP: Strong executive support, I’d say is critical for enablement because it really drives that credibility, the prioritization and the adoption across the organization. It also ensures enablement is seen as that strategic function that it really is that impacts business outcomes and it’s not just a nice to have. I’m a pretty lean team here at Rakuten Advertising. So that again has taken. A good few years to really establish when leaders champion enablement, it really helps break down those silos. It aligns teams towards shared goals, secures the resources. I really need within enablement to really scale programs. And most importantly, I’d say, it fosters a culture of continuous learning, really empowering those teams to perform at their best and deliver better results for the business, ultimately, is our shared outcome. SS: Now, beyond executive leaders, how do you build and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders at all levels of the organization, like cross-functional partners and frontline reps? SP: Yeah, great question. Another one that could probably spend a long time talking about. Building strong relationships with key stakeholders, especially reps. It’s all about the three pillars, if you like, which is consistency, collaboration, and trust. I focus on building rep relationships first, since they’re the ones using the tools and programs we create. One way I’ve done this is by launching a champions program. So partnering with our early adopters to test use cases, gather their feedback and then refine programs. So these champions also provide testimonials that have really helped me drive adoption across the various projects and deliverables that I’ve set out. It does take time and perseverance to build that trust and credibility, but it’s incredibly worth it. I also lean on my support system. What I mean by support system, this is my mentors at work, external enablement resources and events, coffee chats with other enablement professionals to really stay sharp and learn from their experiences. And I bring that into the activity that I’m running as well. So I’d say staying connected and open to feedback has really helped me build those kind of strong and lasting relationships. SS: And how have these strong stakeholder relationships helped you optimize and innovate your enablement programs? SP: Great question. The stakeholder relationships are really key for any enablement leader, in my opinion, because enablement is a partnership with sales leaders. We’re not the stick when enforcing things. We need sales leaders to really drive that accountability and frontline managers as well have to get behind the programs that we create for them to really succeed. My role, or an enablement role if you like, is to execute, really protect our sellers. And keep that chaos down by streamlining their experience. So when you have that trust and buy-in from stakeholders, from frontline managers, it’s easier to get that honest feedback to make improvements and create programs that actually work and are embraced by the team. So you’ve got that buy-in across all levels. SS: I love that. Shifting a little bit, one area where you’ve started to see a lot of traction with your reps is in the use of Digital Rooms. Can you tell us about your strategy for leveraging Digital Rooms and some of the results you’re seeing so far? SP: Yeah, so Digital Rooms have been a game changer for our reps. I spoke about this a little bit earlier. I’m going to go into a bit more detail. It all started when we couldn’t do a live demo during an RFP pitch. So working closely with sales reps and sales solutions, I created our first digital showroom tailored to our client’s needs, including 25 plus custom videos, centralizing resources, such as RFP decks, commercial proposals, and case studies. From there, I worked with sales leaders to get their buy-in. And what I mean by that is I took this one room that we created. Showcased it to sales leaders, and that led to the creating of regional and then vertical-specific rooms. After a lot of, I’d say, initial hand-holding and training, reps can now create a bespoke room in just under five clicks. We’ve scaled to over ten global templates, and these rooms are really helping reps deliver more tailored, impactful experiences, while making the process so much easier for them. A recent win for the business. That we secured in our sales or prospect actually called out the digital showroom as a standout feature versus competitors. They were speaking to it’s building that kind of trust, building those testimonials, going back to having your champions on the field. That’s really helped us kind of elevate digital showrooms and get the adoption that we have today. SS: Fantastic results. And on that note, how do you measure the impact of your enablement strategy and demonstrate that impact to your stakeholders? Are there any key wins you can share with us? SP: One way I measure the impact of enablement strategy at Rakuten is using heat maps to track activity on playbooks and initiatives. So we have a number of different plays that we push out to the business using high spot as well as digital room and pitch activity. So I share this with leaders to really show that engagement. I also work very closely in conjunction with sales leaders, as well as. Working closely with our content SMEs. So all of our subject matter experts that are producing a lot of this content to review the success of it. So the metrics that I focus on here are internal usage, as well as external engagement, especially through digital rooms by setting shared goals with all of these stakeholders quarterly. It helps my efforts stay aligned and focused on delivering business outcomes that we’ve set out. So it is a shared best practice there. SS: Last question. For enablement leaders looking to gain leadership buy- in within their organization, what is the biggest takeaway you’d leave them with? SP: I’ll share three takeaways with you that have really resonated with me. First is listen first, then act. And what I mean by that is take your time to truly understand leadership pain points and priorities. This took me years. Build trust by showing you’re solving their specific challenges and you’re not just pushing your own agenda. Second, I would say align enablement to business goals. Really clearly connect your programs to measurable outcomes that matter to leadership. So things like revenue growth, pipeline acceleration, or improved rep performance. Show them the why behind your initiatives. And then finally, the last thought I’d leave you with is around building those ongoing relationships. It’s really key. Leadership buy-in isn’t a one- time effort. Keep that relationship fluid by regularly sharing progress, results, and feedback, and really make them feel like partners in the process, not just stakeholders. SS: Thank you so much, Sonal, for joining us. I really appreciate it. SP: Thank you. Closing remarks, if I may, I would like to give a quick shout-out to some of my enablement coffee chat mentors that I talked about. The impact that a lot of the individuals I’m about to share with you have been really pivotal to my enablement journey and where I am today, my coffee trap mentors include Sheevaun Thatcher, Del Nakhi, Kate Jack, they’re all pretty big influences in the enablement space and they were fantastic to take some time out to speak to me about. They started their career in enablement and I was able to take a lot of those learnings and apply them to my day-to-day. Highspot leaders. We’ve got some fantastic mentors that I leaned in a lot and I continue to lean in. Raksha, Lisa, Laura in EMEA, and Matthew. And then finally my manager, mentor friend who gives me the space to really grow, test and learn and has been and is instrumental in contributing to my enablement success in recent years. And that’s Eric Nakano. SS: To our audience. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Faith Believes In Divine Enablement by Chicago Tabernacle

In this episode of The State of Sales Enablement, Felix sits down with Carolyn Breeze (CEO) and Lauren Calautti (Chief Revenue Rocketeer) from Scalare Partners, an ASX-listed investment firm operating in Australia and USA. Unlike traditional VC firms, Scolari Partners takes a hands-on approach—providing commercial services that help startup founders and scale-ups build and refine their sales motions for sustainable revenue growth.Carolyn and Lauren share their unique perspectives on sales enablement in the startup world, emphasizing why sales is just as critical as product development. Whether you're a founder, enabler, or sales leader, this episode is packed with insights on how to build scalable sales strategies from day one and how corporates can learn from startup agility.Here's what we'll cover:✅ The biggest sales challenges for startup founders—why sales is often an afterthought and how to correct that.✅ Building scalable sales functions—the process VC firms use to diagnose sales issues and implement effective strategies.✅ Sales acceleration in startups vs. enterprises—why corporate sales teams often lack the scrappy, high-impact approach of startups.✅ Technology for sales enablement—which tools are transforming sales efficiency and effectiveness.✅ VC firms as sales enablers—how VC firms can embed commercial success into their investment strategy.

2 Corinthians 10:7-18

02/16/2025At Covenant Word Church in Key West FL.

According to the State of Sales Enablement Report 2024, 20% of organizations see sales process as a key strategic priority. So how can you streamline your sales process and equip reps to win more and win faster? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Scott McNabb, the chief sales officer at Verisk Marketing Solutions. Thank you for joining us, Scott. I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Scott McNabb: Yeah, I'm thrilled to death to be here. Thank you so much. As mentioned, I'm the Chief Sales Officer for Verisk Marketing Solutions. I have been in and around the world, solving problems for major brands, major carriers, major tech companies, et cetera, for the better part of the last 20 years, so since I was nine years old, that's a joke, and have been leading sales teams, both in the data world and also in the SaaS software world over the course of my career. SS: Amazing. Well, Scott, we are honored to have you here. Given your extensive experience as a sales leader, you have seen the landscape evolve. I'm sure throughout that journey, but especially in recent years. What are some of the top challenges that you would say sales teams face today? SM: You know, I would say as relates to my use of different tools in the sales cycle, what I continue to evolve and learn from is the notion that sellers may not understand analytically where a Buyer stands in their buyer's journey. And it's evidenced by the fact that, again, going back to the conversational topic, they don't know the right material to provide to the right buyer at the right time that might resonate with them at the proper deal stage, more importantly, at the proper. Sort of category of ICP, right? The ideal customer profile. So sending the wrong material to the wrong buyer at the wrong time in the stage, and before you know it, you get lost in the deal cycle. And it is the number one challenge that sellers face, both in my current role and in previous companies that I've worked with is understanding where they are from a situational awareness perspective in the deal sort of cycle. I've got a military aviation background, and one of the things that we teach in fighter pilot school is helping the aviator understand where they are in the fight at any given moment, right? Where's the nearest, you know, fuel stop? Where's the enemy line versus the friendly line? You know, where do you stand three-dimensionally in relation to the buyer? In this particular example, but in relation to the enemy, you know, am I positioned properly to either fight and win or escape and save myself for another day? So to use the vernacular, that situational awareness is something that we teach in, you know, in our aviation community. And it's a construct situational awareness is a construct that we try. To guide, teach, coach, and sort of replicate for the sellers so that when they're in the deal cycle, that they understand where they are in relation to the challenge that the buyer faces. Does that make sense? SS: Absolutely. And I have to say, Scott, also very cool that you are in the aviation space. That is amazing. SM: It's 15 years of my life, lots and lots of time doing it, and it's amazing the corollaries between that situational awareness, the thing that you have to teach, and oftentimes young up-and-coming aviators, they get that they're flying the plane, and they get that it's moving in a forward direction, and they get what they have to do to get from here to there, do the thing you have to do, and return safely. But, you know, sort of advanced instruction is understanding three dimensionally where you fit in the fight. SS: I can see how that is a great analogy to sales. Now, from your perspective, how can enablement help sales teams overcome some of these challenges to achieve more success? SM: Well, let's be clear. So there's training and there's enablement. I think we get these two things confused. Training is what you do when you're trying to show somebody how to lift in the gym, right? Enablement is when they're thinking from a, again, three-dimensional perspective when we're guiding them to have critical thinking skills and understand if I'm here, then my next move is there, and we call it in our world, next best action. We built our entire sales enablement model around MBAs and the most often reasons why sales reps won't put deals and commit is because of the fear that if I asked you to commit, or if you're willing to stick your neck out and commit to a deal, Then somebody is going to ask you to have a plan for how you're going to execute on the mission. Right? And so it is the number one challenge. They say that I learned this from an amazing sales leader. Light is the world's best disinfectant, right? So enablement is about bringing deals into the light and via example, leading from the front, guiding, coaching. Enablement is not something that lives exclusively in an enablement department. It is something that is truly something that is to be led by the leaders. They have to exhibit and exemplify these skill sets so that the seller will feel as though we're all in the same set of airplanes after the same mission. And so enablement. Is that guidance tool, but again, it's not the enablement department exclusively. It is the seller, the sales leaders function. This is what, uh, I've got a sales leadership summit next week in Chicago with all my leaders and a big part of what I'm coaching on is how do you coach and enable your sellers? You can't just depend upon the enablement department to solve for the challenge. SS: I love that. You've essentially made enablement a cultural priority across your organization. And I know that you're passionate about developing high performance cultures. What are some of your best practices for building that culture within a sales team? SM: They say that culture eats strategy for breakfast. It's an old school book that's been around for 30 years and it's still never more true. And so culturally we have to guide the sellers from a culture perspective. Around the notion of franchise ownership, right? They have to own, understand the mission, be clear on the goals, be clear on the steps, and then accountability comes with culture. So again, a big part of what we're teaching next week is really just sort of an agreement between the sales leader and the sales rep on what is accountability and what does that mean, and then finally, Culture, whereby our one on ones are designed around four key concepts. Revenue first, right? Where you stand in the revenue picture, people, right? What people are you struggling with process? What processes are kicking your butt? And then finally innovation, right? Where we make it the responsibility of everybody culturally in the sales team to constantly be looking for ways to improve and innovate our process, right? So it's just not do it because I say that you do it. They have to be bought into that concept. And more importantly, they have to be challengers who look at the process and go, all right, well, look, that's kicking my butt. That's stupid. Why are we doing it that way? I got an idea. Why don't we do it this way, because we can shave three days off of the opposing cycle, or we can accelerate our deals because finally, culturally, it's all about velocity of deals. Culture has to be sort of digging in on the notion of increasing the velocity at which we move deals through the cycle. Because, you know, they say an army travels on its stomach, a sales team travels on velocity. SS: I could not agree more. So we talked in the intro and you mentioned it just now about the importance of a solid sales process. How can the sales process influence a high-performance culture? And what have you done to streamline the sales process to help kind of boost sales performance? SM: I love the question. Look, I think first and foremost, there's a massive change around this notion of servant leadership. So it's important that we start backwards from the challenge, which is a high-performing sales organization. It's funny. 10 years ago, servant leadership was not in vogue and as our sales teams have grown up, and we have Gen Z and we have Gen X and, and et cetera, all of a sudden they come from worlds where maybe they were not guided and coached the proper way. So weirdly enough, serving our teams, serving to the people that we were responsible for is back in vogue all of a sudden. So I think that step one is let's make sure that we start with the servant leadership methodology. Two, I think it's remarkably important that we pivot our sales model from a sales-led model to a customer-driven model, right? Our sales processes historically have been, where do you think you are in the deal? I'm at stage three, which means that I'm going to push them to do a thing. And then stage four, I'm going to hand them, these are the things that we do to manage our process. Whereas switching to a buyer-centric methodology, which is if I call the customer and ask them questions about where they are in their buying cycle, stage four, stage three, stage five, would the customer say that's where I am in my process for acquiring the thing that you sell, right? So switching to a customer centric model away from a sales centric model, this still exists and pervades. All over the industry, when it comes to sales organizations, we're tracking where you think you are in the deal. I want to know, where do you think the customer thinks they are in the buying cycle? If that resonates with you. SS: Oh, it absolutely does. And from your perspective, what would you then say is the strategic advantage that an enablement platform provides for improving the sales process? SM: All right, I'm going to go back to situational awareness. Sorry. At the end of the day, it helps the seller know more about where the customer is in their buyer's journey. Whereas in the old days, we would just, you know, enablement wise, we'd send out stuff and, you know, I wouldn't even know necessarily what they're looking at or what they're engaging with or what of my content resonates with them. But with an enablement platform, and I've used your platform in. Now, this is my third company and purchased it in two previous companies. You know, I find that it's a game changer because you're competing in a world whereby many don't have this thing and therefore the seller is blind. Again, going back to the military flying example, there's a notion called no joy, which means when I'm looking for the enemy and I can't find them. On the radio, you click off no joy, which means I don't have sight of where this guy is. This human that is my adversary. These kinds of tools provide the seller with that no joy moment where they go. All right. I do know exactly where they are. They're 300 feet below me. They're there at this speed and this course. And the enablement tool is a, for lack of a better term, it's a game changer for knowing where The customer is and where I as a seller can make better decisions about where they are in their buyer's journey down to the point of this materials not resonating. I sent the wrong stuff at the right time. In my current company, we use our enablement tool for both sales and CSMs and our solutions consultants and our marketing team, obviously to replace SharePoint so that we not only I can see as a leader. What's working? What's not? Where are they using? What pieces of content and what stage of the buyers journey? Wrong time, wrong content, wrong message, et cetera. So now I've got analytical knowledge on why is the deal stalling in stage, right? So I can run analytics out of salesforce that goes, all right, you're in stage four. We've shipped over a raft of content, but why is the deal, why is it not resonating with the buyer at this stage in the journey? Let's go backwards a step and figure out what did we miss and let the data then tell us and analytically help us understand where are we stalling in deals. And what's causing a velocity change? You get what I'm saying? SS: I do. I love that data-driven approach. How do you leverage data? If you have a few examples to refine and optimize the sales process? SM: Well, look, I think it comes down to and sorry, I'm going to go off track just two seconds, but know that I feel like that present company excepted. I have led sales leadership teams before where they were managing using analytics as a crutch. Instead of trying to understand what's going on, we're managing to the metrics. Activity wise, instead of managing to the metrics again around velocity around understanding what pieces of content resonates best, we're using analytics the wrong way. In my opinion, accountability. Yes, but activity for activity sake. No, right? Can't work that way anymore. So the less mature sales leaders are the ones that are basically sitting behind the steering wheel, looking at analytics to give them a false sense of security. Right. We got to take the analytical information and help us understand and make better decisions about what's working in the deal cycle. Why are things not progressing? Where are things stalling? Let's get a better picture about the deal cycle and not just lean on old school metrics. You know, email open rates and click through rates - they don't tell me anything. It's a vanity metric, right? Understanding how many sales meetings that they had this week, while that is a core metric for activity, it doesn't really tell me the quality of the meetings that you're having, right? That's what I care about. Yes, I certainly want you making the dials and I want you making the connections, but what I care most about is that Those amazing interactions with the buyers are turning into a valuable velocity change in the deal cycle. SS: I love that. And I know that all of that data is helping to inform a lot of the innovation that's coming out of AI. And I know that AI sales tactics are an area of interest to you. I'd love to hear directly from you. How do you plan to leverage innovation like AI to improve the sales process and the performance of your teams? SM: Again, great question. Timely topic. Obviously, at the beginning of that journey is where I would say that we are, but just getting sellers to use AI to even sort of have it guide them on what conversation would resonate with the buyer at this stage. With this problem, it's really not about AI. If you think about it, it's about building a library of AI prompts, because I find that the reason why sellers don't use AI is not because they can't figure out how to ask a question they're asking the wrong. Questions of the AI engine, and then they're surprised when they get a really, you know, stupid or flat line answer from the AI tool. It's not the AI tool's fault. It's we're asking the wrong question. So what I've asked my enablement team to do is build and load into my enablement platform a library of AI prompts that will provide the proper response. SS: I love that. I think that's phenomenal. Scott, last question for you. If you could give other sales leaders who are looking to improve their sales process one piece of advice for the year ahead, what would it be? SM: You know, I think it's impossible for me to give one piece of advice, but I think the predominant one is be a servant leader first, right? Have the team that you support. Accountability comes with servitude, right? So if we're serving the teams that we're supporting, then they will feel supported and guided and coached. If you've ever worked for a company that does not espouse the notion of servant leadership and is the opposite of that, which is often known as top-down leadership, then you don't feel very supported and you're not pulled Up, right? Servant leadership, I think, is back in vogue because people weren't feeling guided and coached and pulled, right? It's, I'm going to stand on you for what you're not doing, but not guide you on what you could be, what's possible to be done. And so that's, if anybody asked me, that's my number one thought is start backwards from servant leadership and Okay. Get really amazing at guiding, coaching, teaching, leading from the front. You know, it's the old-school model. I never am going to ask anybody to do something that I wouldn't do myself. That's an old school military term, but at the end of the day, it still works. Still works like a dream. SS: Absolutely. Scott, thank you so much for sharing your advice with our listeners today. I greatly appreciate the time. SM: It's my pleasure. Good luck, everybody. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

According to the State of Sales Enablement Report 2024, 20% of organizations see sales process as a key strategic priority. So how can you streamline your sales process and equip reps to win more and win faster? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Scott McNabb, the chief sales officer at Verisk Marketing Solutions. Thank you for joining us, Scott. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Scott McNabb: Yeah, I’m thrilled to death to be here. Thank you so much. As mentioned, I’m the Chief Sales Officer for Verisk Marketing Solutions. I have been in and around the world, solving problems for major brands, major carriers, major tech companies, et cetera, for the better part of the last 20 years, so since I was nine years old, that’s a joke, and have been leading sales teams, both in the data world and also in the SaaS software world over the course of my career. SS: Amazing. Well, Scott, we are honored to have you here. Given your extensive experience as a sales leader, you have seen the landscape evolve. I’m sure throughout that journey, but especially in recent years. What are some of the top challenges that you would say sales teams face today? SM: You know, I would say as relates to my use of different tools in the sales cycle, what I continue to evolve and learn from is the notion that sellers may not understand analytically where a Buyer stands in their buyer’s journey. And it’s evidenced by the fact that, again, going back to the conversational topic, they don’t know the right material to provide to the right buyer at the right time that might resonate with them at the proper deal stage, more importantly, at the proper. Sort of category of ICP, right? The ideal customer profile. So sending the wrong material to the wrong buyer at the wrong time in the stage, and before you know it, you get lost in the deal cycle. And it is the number one challenge that sellers face, both in my current role and in previous companies that I’ve worked with is understanding where they are from a situational awareness perspective in the deal sort of cycle. I’ve got a military aviation background, and one of the things that we teach in fighter pilot school is helping the aviator understand where they are in the fight at any given moment, right? Where’s the nearest, you know, fuel stop? Where’s the enemy line versus the friendly line? You know, where do you stand three-dimensionally in relation to the buyer? In this particular example, but in relation to the enemy, you know, am I positioned properly to either fight and win or escape and save myself for another day? So to use the vernacular, that situational awareness is something that we teach in, you know, in our aviation community. And it’s a construct situational awareness is a construct that we try. To guide, teach, coach, and sort of replicate for the sellers so that when they’re in the deal cycle, that they understand where they are in relation to the challenge that the buyer faces. Does that make sense? SS: Absolutely. And I have to say, Scott, also very cool that you are in the aviation space. That is amazing. SM: It’s 15 years of my life, lots and lots of time doing it, and it’s amazing the corollaries between that situational awareness, the thing that you have to teach, and oftentimes young up-and-coming aviators, they get that they’re flying the plane, and they get that it’s moving in a forward direction, and they get what they have to do to get from here to there, do the thing you have to do, and return safely. But, you know, sort of advanced instruction is understanding three dimensionally where you fit in the fight. SS: I can see how that is a great analogy to sales. Now, from your perspective, how can enablement help sales teams overcome some of these challenges to achieve more success? SM: Well, let’s be clear. So there’s training and there’s enablement. I think we get these two things confused. Training is what you do when you’re trying to show somebody how to lift in the gym, right? Enablement is when they’re thinking from a, again, three-dimensional perspective when we’re guiding them to have critical thinking skills and understand if I’m here, then my next move is there, and we call it in our world, next best action. We built our entire sales enablement model around MBAs and the most often reasons why sales reps won’t put deals and commit is because of the fear that if I asked you to commit, or if you’re willing to stick your neck out and commit to a deal, Then somebody is going to ask you to have a plan for how you’re going to execute on the mission. Right? And so it is the number one challenge. They say that I learned this from an amazing sales leader. Light is the world’s best disinfectant, right? So enablement is about bringing deals into the light and via example, leading from the front, guiding, coaching. Enablement is not something that lives exclusively in an enablement department. It is something that is truly something that is to be led by the leaders. They have to exhibit and exemplify these skill sets so that the seller will feel as though we’re all in the same set of airplanes after the same mission. And so enablement. Is that guidance tool, but again, it’s not the enablement department exclusively. It is the seller, the sales leaders function. This is what, uh, I’ve got a sales leadership summit next week in Chicago with all my leaders and a big part of what I’m coaching on is how do you coach and enable your sellers? You can’t just depend upon the enablement department to solve for the challenge. SS: I love that. You’ve essentially made enablement a cultural priority across your organization. And I know that you’re passionate about developing high performance cultures. What are some of your best practices for building that culture within a sales team? SM: They say that culture eats strategy for breakfast. It’s an old school book that’s been around for 30 years and it’s still never more true. And so culturally we have to guide the sellers from a culture perspective. Around the notion of franchise ownership, right? They have to own, understand the mission, be clear on the goals, be clear on the steps, and then accountability comes with culture. So again, a big part of what we’re teaching next week is really just sort of an agreement between the sales leader and the sales rep on what is accountability and what does that mean, and then finally, Culture, whereby our one on ones are designed around four key concepts. Revenue first, right? Where you stand in the revenue picture, people, right? What people are you struggling with process? What processes are kicking your butt? And then finally innovation, right? Where we make it the responsibility of everybody culturally in the sales team to constantly be looking for ways to improve and innovate our process, right? So it’s just not do it because I say that you do it. They have to be bought into that concept. And more importantly, they have to be challengers who look at the process and go, all right, well, look, that’s kicking my butt. That’s stupid. Why are we doing it that way? I got an idea. Why don’t we do it this way, because we can shave three days off of the opposing cycle, or we can accelerate our deals because finally, culturally, it’s all about velocity of deals. Culture has to be sort of digging in on the notion of increasing the velocity at which we move deals through the cycle. Because, you know, they say an army travels on its stomach, a sales team travels on velocity. SS: I could not agree more. So we talked in the intro and you mentioned it just now about the importance of a solid sales process. How can the sales process influence a high-performance culture? And what have you done to streamline the sales process to help kind of boost sales performance? SM: I love the question. Look, I think first and foremost, there’s a massive change around this notion of servant leadership. So it’s important that we start backwards from the challenge, which is a high-performing sales organization. It’s funny. 10 years ago, servant leadership was not in vogue and as our sales teams have grown up, and we have Gen Z and we have Gen X and, and et cetera, all of a sudden they come from worlds where maybe they were not guided and coached the proper way. So weirdly enough, serving our teams, serving to the people that we were responsible for is back in vogue all of a sudden. So I think that step one is let’s make sure that we start with the servant leadership methodology. Two, I think it’s remarkably important that we pivot our sales model from a sales-led model to a customer-driven model, right? Our sales processes historically have been, where do you think you are in the deal? I’m at stage three, which means that I’m going to push them to do a thing. And then stage four, I’m going to hand them, these are the things that we do to manage our process. Whereas switching to a buyer-centric methodology, which is if I call the customer and ask them questions about where they are in their buying cycle, stage four, stage three, stage five, would the customer say that’s where I am in my process for acquiring the thing that you sell, right? So switching to a customer centric model away from a sales centric model, this still exists and pervades. All over the industry, when it comes to sales organizations, we’re tracking where you think you are in the deal. I want to know, where do you think the customer thinks they are in the buying cycle? If that resonates with you. SS: Oh, it absolutely does. And from your perspective, what would you then say is the strategic advantage that an enablement platform provides for improving the sales process? SM: All right, I’m going to go back to situational awareness. Sorry. At the end of the day, it helps the seller know more about where the customer is in their buyer’s journey. Whereas in the old days, we would just, you know, enablement wise, we’d send out stuff and, you know, I wouldn’t even know necessarily what they’re looking at or what they’re engaging with or what of my content resonates with them. But with an enablement platform, and I’ve used your platform in. Now, this is my third company and purchased it in two previous companies. You know, I find that it’s a game changer because you’re competing in a world whereby many don’t have this thing and therefore the seller is blind. Again, going back to the military flying example, there’s a notion called no joy, which means when I’m looking for the enemy and I can’t find them. On the radio, you click off no joy, which means I don’t have sight of where this guy is. This human that is my adversary. These kinds of tools provide the seller with that no joy moment where they go. All right. I do know exactly where they are. They’re 300 feet below me. They’re there at this speed and this course. And the enablement tool is a, for lack of a better term, it’s a game changer for knowing where The customer is and where I as a seller can make better decisions about where they are in their buyer’s journey down to the point of this materials not resonating. I sent the wrong stuff at the right time. In my current company, we use our enablement tool for both sales and CSMs and our solutions consultants and our marketing team, obviously to replace SharePoint so that we not only I can see as a leader. What’s working? What’s not? Where are they using? What pieces of content and what stage of the buyers journey? Wrong time, wrong content, wrong message, et cetera. So now I’ve got analytical knowledge on why is the deal stalling in stage, right? So I can run analytics out of salesforce that goes, all right, you’re in stage four. We’ve shipped over a raft of content, but why is the deal, why is it not resonating with the buyer at this stage in the journey? Let’s go backwards a step and figure out what did we miss and let the data then tell us and analytically help us understand where are we stalling in deals. And what’s causing a velocity change? You get what I’m saying? SS: I do. I love that data-driven approach. How do you leverage data? If you have a few examples to refine and optimize the sales process? SM: Well, look, I think it comes down to and sorry, I’m going to go off track just two seconds, but know that I feel like that present company excepted. I have led sales leadership teams before where they were managing using analytics as a crutch. Instead of trying to understand what’s going on, we’re managing to the metrics. Activity wise, instead of managing to the metrics again around velocity around understanding what pieces of content resonates best, we’re using analytics the wrong way. In my opinion, accountability. Yes, but activity for activity sake. No, right? Can’t work that way anymore. So the less mature sales leaders are the ones that are basically sitting behind the steering wheel, looking at analytics to give them a false sense of security. Right. We got to take the analytical information and help us understand and make better decisions about what’s working in the deal cycle. Why are things not progressing? Where are things stalling? Let’s get a better picture about the deal cycle and not just lean on old school metrics. You know, email open rates and click through rates – they don’t tell me anything. It’s a vanity metric, right? Understanding how many sales meetings that they had this week, while that is a core metric for activity, it doesn’t really tell me the quality of the meetings that you’re having, right? That’s what I care about. Yes, I certainly want you making the dials and I want you making the connections, but what I care most about is that Those amazing interactions with the buyers are turning into a valuable velocity change in the deal cycle. SS: I love that. And I know that all of that data is helping to inform a lot of the innovation that’s coming out of AI. And I know that AI sales tactics are an area of interest to you. I’d love to hear directly from you. How do you plan to leverage innovation like AI to improve the sales process and the performance of your teams? SM: Again, great question. Timely topic. Obviously, at the beginning of that journey is where I would say that we are, but just getting sellers to use AI to even sort of have it guide them on what conversation would resonate with the buyer at this stage. With this problem, it’s really not about AI. If you think about it, it’s about building a library of AI prompts, because I find that the reason why sellers don’t use AI is not because they can’t figure out how to ask a question they’re asking the wrong. Questions of the AI engine, and then they’re surprised when they get a really, you know, stupid or flat line answer from the AI tool. It’s not the AI tool’s fault. It’s we’re asking the wrong question. So what I’ve asked my enablement team to do is build and load into my enablement platform a library of AI prompts that will provide the proper response. SS: I love that. I think that’s phenomenal. Scott, last question for you. If you could give other sales leaders who are looking to improve their sales process one piece of advice for the year ahead, what would it be? SM: You know, I think it’s impossible for me to give one piece of advice, but I think the predominant one is be a servant leader first, right? Have the team that you support. Accountability comes with servitude, right? So if we’re serving the teams that we’re supporting, then they will feel supported and guided and coached. If you’ve ever worked for a company that does not espouse the notion of servant leadership and is the opposite of that, which is often known as top-down leadership, then you don’t feel very supported and you’re not pulled Up, right? Servant leadership, I think, is back in vogue because people weren’t feeling guided and coached and pulled, right? It’s, I’m going to stand on you for what you’re not doing, but not guide you on what you could be, what’s possible to be done. And so that’s, if anybody asked me, that’s my number one thought is start backwards from servant leadership and Okay. Get really amazing at guiding, coaching, teaching, leading from the front. You know, it’s the old-school model. I never am going to ask anybody to do something that I wouldn’t do myself. That’s an old school military term, but at the end of the day, it still works. Still works like a dream. SS: Absolutely. Scott, thank you so much for sharing your advice with our listeners today. I greatly appreciate the time. SM: It’s my pleasure. Good luck, everybody. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

In this episode of The State of Sales Enablement, Coach K welcomes Alex Matyushenko, a seasoned enablement leader with experience at AWS, Google, and Microsoft. From driving sales excellence to leveraging AI for scalable impact, Alex shares his expertise on influencing at scale, enabling leaders, and building high-performing teams—even when those teams don't report directly to you.Here's what we'll cover:Enablement in 2025: What modern enablement really is and why it's more critical than ever.AI as an Enablement Superpower: How AI can enhance onboarding, sales readiness, and skill-building at scale.Influencing Without Authority: How to drive meaningful change even when you don't manage the sales team directly.The Power of Research: How Alex prepares for leadership conversations, identifies performance gaps, and builds enablement strategies that work.Execution Over Advice: Why enablement fails when it stays in “consulting mode” and how to ensure you deliver tangible business impact.The 3 Leadership Principles: Alex's framework for inspiring and leading teams effectively.Tune in for an insightful conversation packed with practical enablement strategies, leadership lessons, and AI-driven innovations that can help any enabler increase their influence and impact in 2025 and beyond.Connect with Alexander Matyushenko:

 People managers have a hard job. They have to set goals, manage resources, support real humans who are not always easy to support, and keep everything moving on time and within budget so the organization can meet its goals.That's why I've invited  Kamaria Scott, an I/O psychologist focused on people manager development and enablement, to join me on this episode. She's sharing how you can improve the health of your organization by investing in your people managers. ▶️ Improving the Health of Your Nonprofit through People Manager Development and Enablement with Kamaria Scott ▶️ Key Points:00:58 The role of a people manager04:18 Kamaria Scott's background and career journey 11:04 Defining people manager development and enablement15:24 Challenges nonprofits face with their people managers19:51 Solutions for effective nonprofit people manager support23:42 Evidence-based leadership28:21 The first step to investing in your nonprofit's people leadersResources from this episode:Join the Nonprofit Learning and Development Collective: https://www.skillmastersmarket.com/nonprofit-learning-and-development-collectiveWas this episode helpful? If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, follow and leave a review!

SummaryLuis Baez, a sales and revenue enablement leader. Luis shares his journey from growing up in poverty in Puerto Rico and the Bronx to achieving success in the corporate world. He discusses the importance of cultural identity, empathy, and effective communication in both personal and professional settings. Luis emphasizes the significance of understanding different perspectives and the common human experiences that connect us all. He also delves into his transition into sales and leadership, highlighting the confidence he gained and the impact he aims to have on others through his work in sales enablement.Learn More about Sam KnickerbockerFuel Your Legacy: 9-Pillars to Build a Meaningful LegacyLearnFromLuis.comTakeawaysLuis Baez emphasizes the importance of cultural identity in shaping one's perspective.Empathy is a crucial skill developed through diverse life experiences.Direct communication can be misinterpreted in different cultural contexts.Sales enablement is about connecting sales, marketing, and operations for success.Imposter syndrome is a common experience among successful individuals.The confidence gained in sales can lead to broader opportunities in leadership.Understanding the DNA of a team is essential for fostering a positive work environment.Celebrating success is vital for team morale and motivation.Luis's journey reflects the power of resilience and adaptability.Helping others achieve their goals is a core part of Luis's mission. Chapters00:00 Introduction to Luis Baez and His Journey01:32 Luis's Early Life and Background11:46 Cultural Identity and Empathy20:14 Navigating Communication Styles27:28 Transitioning into Sales and Leadership39:12 Sales Enablement and Business Success

In this special episode of "Stepping into your Leadership," host Christine Courtney invites a distinguished guest who's not only an inspiring CEO but also her partner in life— Phillip Courtney. Phillip Courtney shares invaluable insights into how the Six Types of Working Genius can transform any workplace, drawing from his own experience as the CEO of Urban Arts.Urban Arts, under Phillip's leadership, revolutionizes education through arts and technology across the country. Phillip discusses the three pillars of their mission— game development, college access, and connecting alumni to the workforce, all while emphasizing that a child's education shouldn't depend on their zip code. The episode provides a compelling behind-the-scenes look at how the Six Types of Working Genius have positively influenced his organization.Episode Highlights:Introduction to the Six Types of Working Genius: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity.Real-life examples of how implementing the Six Types of Working Genius has improved team dynamics and productivity at Urban Arts.How understanding and utilizing these working geniuses can help place staff in roles where they find the most joy and satisfaction.Tips on using the Six Types of Working Genius for better meetings, teamwork, and identifying the right roles for team members.Phillip mentions the utility of the model in everyday work, from running meetings to goal-setting.Christine and Phillip discuss how they apply the principles of the Six Types of Working Genius in both their personal and professional lives.The importance of not "gaming" the test and answering authentically to get the most accurate insights.Practical tips for CEOs and leaders on using the Working Genius framework to boost morale and efficiency.Use the Working Genius results to build well-rounded teams.Plan meetings and projects with individual geniuses in mind to ensure the best outcomes.Join us as we dive deep into this dynamic framework and discover how you can start applying these principles immediately to see positive changes in your work environment.Listen now and step into your leadership with the wisdom of the Six Types of Working Genius! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the season finale of The Enablement Edge, hosts Steve and Amber chat with Stephanie Middaugh, Founder & CEO of Phoenix GTM Consulting, about where to succeed in enablement in 2025.Together, they tackle the industry's current challenges, including burnout and exhaustion among professionals, while highlighting the need to sustain passion and empathy in these roles. Stephanie shares actionable strategies for navigating market uncertainties and organizational obstacles, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing skill-building over task-focused activities and looking to what is actually within your control.The discussion also explores Stephanie's book, Elevate and Optimize: Your Enablement Maturity Journey, which provides practical guidance on advancing enablement functions and setting achievable goals. Stephanie shares her insights into effective maturity models, the current and future impact of AI on enablement, and the transformative potential of a well-aligned enablement strategy. Her advice inspires listeners to stay focused on their enablement objectives and drive meaningful change within their organizations.—Guest BioStephanie Middaugh is a seasoned expert in revenue enablement and sales operations, known for her innovative approach to training and process improvement. She is currently a CSM with Luster, a cutting-edge AI sales practice and upskilling solution that is revolutionizing how go-to-market teams learn and practice. However, Stephanie is also the Founder & CEO of her own business, Phoenix GTM Consulting.Most recently, Stephanie was the Head of Global GTM at Pinecone. With a career spanning leadership roles at Zoom, Divvy Inc., DataStax, Alteryx, and Sage, she has consistently built scalable enablement frameworks supporting global sales teams. Passionate about fostering community and delivering impactful programs, Stephanie continues to be a thought leader in the enablement space.—Guest Quote“People are tired, exhausted, and burnt out. But that passion is still burning. We want to help. So we're still going to be there. Enablement as a profession is still going to get these initiatives, trainings, and everything [else] through. We're still going to be bought into helping our reps succeed and seeing the business move forward. Even though it kind of goes through these ups and downs and ebbs and flows, enablement is going to be here for a while, and it's the companies that know how to properly leverage it that are going to see the results at the end of the day.” —Time Stamps 00:00 Episode Start4:45  How Stephanie defines enablement6:38 Facing burnout in 20259:56  Where is all this pressure coming from?12:50  Moving foward despite uncertainty16:13 Focus in on what you can control18:20 Elevate and Optimize: Your Enablement Maturity Journey24:37 Does your enablement team have to be large to be mature?28:11 Transformational enablement31:40 On the Edge—LinksConnect with Stephanie Middaugh on LinkedInRead “Elevate and Optimize: Your Enablement Maturity Journey”Check out Phoenix GTM ConsultingCheck out LusterConnect with Steve Watt on LinkedInConnect with Amber Mellano on LinkedInCheck out Seismic

In this episode of The State of Sales Enablement, Jonathan Kvarfordt (Coach K) welcomes Aaron Evans, co-founder of Flow State, a B2B sales performance and transformation consultancy. Aaron has spent 15 years in enablement, working across multinational corporations and fast-moving startups, and today he shares his insights on sales transformation, methodology adoption, and why enablement must be laser-focused on pipeline impact.Here's what Jonathan and Aaron discussed:

Timothy Nobles, Chief Commercial Officer at Integral, is passionate about empowering organizations to explore the full potential of their data while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and compliance. With over 20 years of experience in data and analytics, he has held leadership roles at innovative companies across multiple industries. In this episode… Balancing data enablement with privacy compliance is vital for organizations aiming to use data effectively while maintaining trust and meeting regulatory requirements. Data enablement focuses on making data accessible, usable, and valuable to users across an organization while ensuring it remains secure and compliant. Regulated industries, such as healthcare, face significant challenges, including evolving privacy laws and managing re-identification risks tied to sensitive data. Without a strong privacy framework, businesses risk regulatory penalties, reputational damage, and missed opportunities for data-driven decision-making.  Effective data enablement relies on more than just technology — it requires governance and a thoughtful approach to privacy and compliance. By adopting privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), such as tokenization, homomorphic encryption, data masking, and differential privacy, organizations can minimize risks and protect personal information while making data usable. However, these tools alone are not enough. Organizations need to implement data governance frameworks, assess re-identification risks, and balance data utility with regulatory requirements. By aligning compliance efforts with strategic business goals, organizations can unlock data potential without compromising privacy. In this episode of She Said Privacy/He Said Security, Jodi and Justin Daniels speak with Timothy Nobles, Chief Commercial Officer at Integral, about how organizations can embrace data enablement in regulated industries. Timothy discusses practical applications of privacy-enhancing technologies, strategies to mitigate re-identification risks, and the importance of starting with governance to guide data use. The conversation also highlights how companies can approach AI responsibly by focusing on understanding data inputs to ensure ethical and compliant outcomes.

Dr. Josh Prieur was a former Vice Principal, and now works for Prodigy Education as the Director of Education Enablement. In this episode, we discuss how he made the switch from the classroom to the EdTech industry, how to make game-based learning impactful in classrooms—as well as fun, and more! Join us to learn more about Josh, Prodigy, and his EdTech journey! Find Josh on Linkedin.  Free Quiz: What career outside of the classroom is right for you? Explore the course that has helped thousands of teachers successfully transition out of the classroom and into new careers: The Teacher Career Coach Course Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of The Tech Trek, Amir Bormand sits down with Scott Peachey, Director of Data Governance and Oversight at Bread Financial, to explore the evolving world of data enablement. Together, they unpack how rebranding data governance can shift perceptions, make data accessible across organizations, and foster a culture of collaboration. Scott shares his insights on tackling the challenges of data literacy, meeting business stakeholders where they are, and the importance of tailoring governance approaches to align with organizational goals. The conversation also delves into the intersection of advanced technologies like generative AI and governance, examining how businesses can adopt AI strategically without blindly following trends. Key Takeaways Data Enablement Redefined: Rebranding "data governance" to "data enablement" highlights its role in empowering organizations to use data effectively, not just managing compliance. Meeting Stakeholders Where They Are: Effective data governance requires understanding the unique needs of each business line and tailoring solutions to fit their objectives. Shifting Left: Engaging governance professionals early in the decision-making process helps prevent costly, reactive fixes and ensures alignment with business goals. AI: A Hammer Searching for a Nail?: Many companies adopt AI without clear goals, risking wasted resources. Scott advocates for purposeful, strategic AI integration. Governance as a Value Driver: Data governance should go beyond risk mitigation, enabling other teams to focus on their core work while maintaining efficiency and compliance. Timestamped Highlights [00:01:00] What is Data Enablement? Redefining governance for a modern era. [00:03:00] Origins of Governance: From Enron to privacy-driven modern policies. [00:06:00] Data Literacy Challenges: Bridging the gap with tailored governance approaches. [00:08:52] Adapting Governance for Business Needs: Customizing solutions for different teams. [00:11:00] The Future of Data Governance: Moving from reactive to proactive. [00:21:41] AI Governance and Ethics: Why "keeping up with the Joneses" is not enough. [00:27:00] Is AI Investment Worth It? Balancing ROI with ethical considerations. Notable Quote "Data governance professionals enable other data professionals to focus on their craft. Governance isn't about saying 'no'; it's about building the right framework to help businesses thrive."– Scott Peachey Resources and Follow-Up Connect with Scott Peachey on LinkedIn Check out his podcast: Data with Peachey Follow him on social media: Twitter/Instagram @TheScottPeachey Join the Conversation If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to The Tech Trek, leave a review, and share your thoughts on how data governance impacts your organization.

Christine Boremeester, Senior Director of Strategy & Enablement at Deltek, joins Kristi Faltorusso, CCO at ClientSuccess, and Josh Schachter, Co-Founder & CEO of UpdateAI, to share invaluable insights into how Deltek continues to innovate and serve its global customer base. Tune in to explore Deltek's ambitious initiatives, including the creation of specialized customer success roles and the challenges of standardizing processes across a diverse range of products and customers. Christine also highlights her team's excitement and anticipation as they prepare to launch these transformative changes, aimed at elevating customer relationships and driving business growth. Timestamps 0:00 - Preview & Intros 3:00 - Christine's Career Evolution 4:15 - Formation of the Strategy and Enablement Group 11:00 - Team Structure & Implementation 12: 19 - Hiring Plans & Profiles 13:40 - Expectations from CSMs 17:40 - Diverse challenges due to multiple products and systems 20:51 - Team Sentiment and Engagement ___________________________

In this TACoS Tuesday episode, we answer over 20 of your top Amazon PPC questions with the help of our first-time expert guest who brings a wealth of knowledge to our show. ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos How can you elevate your Amazon advertising game and maximize your e-commerce success? Join us as we welcome Anne Harrell, Head of Product Evangelism & Enablement from Pacvue, to answer over 20 of the most pressing PPC questions from our listeners. Bradley and Anne's deep expertise offers a fresh perspective on how Helium 10 and Pacvue can complement each other, helping brands at various stages of their Amazon-selling journey. She dives into the latest innovations Amazon has lined up for 2024, like AMC and expanded sponsored ads, which aim to give sellers unprecedented insights into customer behavior. Throughout the episode, Anne shares actionable strategies for mastering Amazon ad campaigns. Bradley and Anne also break down the complexities of setting up effective campaigns, sharing how tech tools like Helium 10's Keyword Tracker can fine-tune your bids beyond basic estimates. We also touch on the power of automation with tools inside Pacvue, which can alleviate the burdens of manual campaign management and enhance overall efficiency. Anne emphasizes the role of external traffic and audience maximization within Amazon's ecosystem, offering a balanced approach to boost organic sales alongside advertising efforts. Finally, we explore the nuances of Amazon PPC strategy, from mitigating rising ACoS to the strategic use of AI in campaign management. Anne shares her fascinating journey from the advertising world to her pivotal role at Pacvue, along with resources like TACoS Tuesday for those keen on deepening their PPC knowledge. Whether you're working to optimize your PPC campaigns or looking to learn effective strategies, this episode is packed with insights to fuel your Amazon success story. In episode 633 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Anne discuss: 00:00 - Amazon Advertising Solutions 02:57 - Helium 10 and Pacvue 06:32 - Amazon Ads, CES Announcement 08:30 - PPC Campaign Optimization Strategies 09:25 - Optimizing Keyword Bids for Product Launch 12:42 - Optimizing Amazon Campaigns for Keywords 16:05 - Optimizing Campaign Management Frequency 22:56 - Effective Ad vs. Organic Sales Ratio 23:34 - Driving Sales Through Advertising and Optimization 28:34 - Finding Trending Keywords for Sponsored Products 32:22 - Product Display Ads Optimization & Competitor Avoidance

According to the State of Sales Enablement Report, sales managers who coach reps to reinforce desired behaviors deliver a 14 percentage point increase in win rates. So, how can you design and implement coaching programs to boost rep confidence and improve the customer experience? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Paige Scott, the Vice President of Customer Success and Revenue Enablement at Reliance Matrix. Thanks for joining us, Paige. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Paige Scott: Terrific. I’m delighted to be with you today and happy to share anything I can. We’re all in this program together. I am 30 plus years in employee benefits, which are insurance products for employers who provide those benefit options to their employees. And I’m on the insurance carrier side. It’s been a terrific career in the past. I’ve served in operational roles, account management roles where we’re focused on retaining and growing the business. I was a process engineer, Six Sigma Black Belt, that is really focused on continuous improvement. And at one point, the chief customer officer focused on the customer experience strategies for our company. And now in my current role, I’m applying a lot of learnings from those experiences. So as you said, our role today at Reliance Matrix is head of customer success team. That’s our account management and service teams, as well as the revenue enablement team, where our objective is all about equipping the distribution organization with the tools, resources, training, and strategies that they need to retain business and sell more of it effectively. So I love this role because it really balances the accountability for customer focus, the customer’s experience, along with retention and growth of those relationships, but serves the critical needs of the organization and alignment with other departments that drive revenue growth as well. So I live with my family and my dog Maggie here in Nashville, Tennessee, and I love country music and line dancing. SS: We’re really excited to have you with us Paige. And as you mentioned, one of your key responsibilities is really growing and retaining the customer base. In your opinion, how can enablement help improve the customer experience? PS: You know, that’s actually there’s a myriad of ways that enablement enhances the customer experience. I’ll give you a simple example on how we’re focusing on it here in our current experience. state, and it’s really around the tools and training. And I think about this, not only with regard to how we’re internally supplying the tools and training and coaching, but also externally. So our account management teams can better understand their customer needs and preferences, leading to more personalized or relevant interactions. That’s what we’re encouraging. For example, in our business. We’re often working with human resource benefit teams that are outsourcing their work that they used to do themselves to us, the insurance carrier, many of them for the first time. And these first-time outsourcers of really complicated processes, they need to feel confident in trusting us to take on that work and doing it well on behalf of their employees. So there’s a lot of research and our experience shows that the first time outsourcers They need more education and communication to feel comfortable handing that work off to us. So our enablement team, we’ve built tools and resources and training to teach our teams how to work best with first time outsourcers. We actually give them a little bit different path. And their experience that is really focused on education and gaining their confidence and providing them with the tools they need to feel empowered. So in this past year, we implemented the use of the digital room capability to really establish the go-to resource for the clients. And first time outsourcers so that they feel empowered. They know where to go to look for information and find articles literature and research and best practices that we’ve collected and made available to them. So we are demonstrating our listening and expertise because we’ve provided the support and strategies that ensure that. They continue to receive the assistance and resources that they need to maximize their use of our products and our services for their employees. So it’s kind of a win win both internally and externally. SS: I couldn’t agree more. And I know rep confidence plays a huge role in delivering great customer experiences. And this is an area that you are really passionate about. What are some of the challenges reps face today that can impact their confidence? PS: Yeah, sure. Well, this is a complicated business that we’re in. And the biggest challenge that we face really is keeping up with the pace of change with all the complexities. So not to get you schooled on insurance stuff, but Reliance Matrix, we’re the number one insurer with the most lives that are managed through our absence programs. So in your day-to-day life, you’ve probably hear about things like paid family, medical leaves, FML, et cetera. These are all like state level programs that provide employees with paid time off for family or medical reasons. And I’ll tell you, this is a huge source of focus and attention across the states. A lot of compliance issues around this. States are making their own policies and practices with regard to how they want. This to be administered inside in their states where the employees live. And so the pace of change in these state programs is incredible and it’s very complex and difficult to understand and difficult to keep up with, not just for our customers, but even internally for our folks to build and maintain the expertise that they have around these programs. So we honestly have relied on Highspot, our platform heavily as our go-to resource for knowledge, training, communication internally, as well as pitching that relevant information externally. It’s enabled us to move quicker. Enable people not to have to memorize current rules, regulations, et cetera. They can just go to the resource and find the most up-to-date information in order to answer questions and put that information in the hands of their customers. And then on top of it, then of course we can. Move quicker and measure our engagement, both internally and externally. So it really has helped us to solve this challenge of trying to keep people up to date. We’re encouraging our reps not to try to memorize everything. They just go consult the tool, go to the resource. We’re keeping it up to date. SS: We see those too. What are some of your best practices for helping reps overcome these challenges to really boost their confidence and improve the customer experience? PS: So you know, it’s really important that we straight stay true to our word in terms of consistently, regularly reviewing our content and developing best practices to share to our reps. I mean, if they come to ou platform, our content and find that it’s out of date or not accurate, I’m going to lose them. They’re not going to be happy that they’re not providing the right information to their clients and So we have really prioritized the keeping our content up to date, making it, you know, consumable, small pieces, small bits. And then we put out best practice videos that if I’m responding to an inquiry, I can go see how someone who’s really good at responding to that inquiry, how they say it, how they answer it. And I can use that to hone in on my own ability to answer to my customers. And then of course. You know, whenever we have content or we’re rolling out something new, it’s not a once and done, we’re planning for putting the content out. How do we bring people to it? How do we get them practicing it? How can we test on the knowledge? It is something they really need to know. And then You know, focusing in on the coaching elements that are available as well. In the past couple of years, since we implemented the platform, I would say that we’ve spent a lot of time putting content out there, keeping it fresh, learning how people learn and how best to organize it. But in 2025, one of the things that the team is going to focus on is more around adding a little more gamification. And competition to our approach, because after all, we are working with salespeople and they do like to compete. So we’re going to build some of that competition in to continue to enhance engagement and learning. SS: Those are some great tips and tricks. Now, I know coaching can be a key lever for improving rep performance, and your coaching programs have evolved a lot recently. Can you tell us what your coaching strategy looks like now and how you leverage Highspot to help support it? PS: Yeah, sure. Actually, I’ll tell you the good, bad and the ugly, but this was an area of challenging for us a couple of years ago. I’ll use the example in our sales model. Before we got more focused on this in our model, the sales managers are also. Sellers, they have their own individual sales goals in addition to the goals of their team. So didn’t really set us up for success in terms of motivating or encouraging the sales managers to spend the time with their teams developing because they were so busy, you know, trying to meet their own performance goals. And while we haven’t changed that model. Entirely, we have changed it a bit so that we have built in approach where we’re recognizing the importance of coaching and the importance of the manager and that role. So we have built an approach where we’re utilizing the capabilities and analytics and high spot to practice. So we call these our stand and delivers, meaning I need to learn, let’s say a product nuance or something about the way the service is done or administration. And I need to be able to repeat that or inform a customer or potential customer with confidence. You know, I need to know what I’m talking about so I can answer those questions on the spot. We have picked areas that are most important for our sales reps to be able to exude that confidence and we ask them to practice it. and they practice it. They will film a video and they will do their stand and deliver on the video and the rep will create and submit the video to their manager and the managers are accountable to review and coach and we can see their coaching notes. We can see who’s doing it and doing it with regularity. So the fun thing is the head of our sales organization, she has So committed to this. This is how she learned as she was growing up as a sales rep. They stand and delivers on demand. People would stop her in the hallway and say, tell me about, you know, X, Y, Z. This is how she got really good at it. So she really believes in this practice and this approach. And she really appreciates the capability and high spot because it makes it pretty easy to do. So we are constantly reviewing the engagement analytics. It’s to understand the performance of our reps, but also the performance of our managers as coaches. We’ve upped the game that way. SS: Very cool. How do you go about partnering with frontline managers to get them bought into coaching their teams? PS: Sure. Again, it was a journey. Uh, some managers were adept. They were already kind of managing their own production and balancing that with the development of their teams. But many were not. And so we went to work. And we focused on the ROI of Using real life examples and data where certain sales managers had best practices with their teams and they were really producing results. Cause not only was the manager producing results, but they were taking in new individuals, onboarding them and, you know, doing the ride alongs, providing the coaching and we could see in terms of goal attainment. Which managers were very successful and we actually built those into stories in case studies and we use the real data to bring back to the rest of the organization to prove the value of the role of the coach and the importance of the development of the team. I mean, there was a lot of other best practices that we learned and shared throughout the period too, but the story tells itself in terms of the numbers, honestly, and given how competitive. Most of the sales folks are, they accepted the invitation to do better, kind of turns into a competition. So it was an easy carrot to dangle because it proved that production increased with a greater focus on practice and coaching for development for the teams. SS: How are you now with the platform in place, leveraging analytics to understand how managers are coaching and optimizing their effectiveness? PS: Yep, sure. So there’s a number of things that we look at. We got grounded in the metrics that were most relevant to our goals. So in this area, it was things like employee engagement scores, turnover rates, productivity levels, goal achievement. And we look at adoption metrics and the use of high spot, et cetera. So it was really getting grounded in what were those key metrics that we should be looking at on a regular basis that helps tell the bigger story. And we’re collecting data from different sources, such as. You know, performance reviews or even employee feedback, the coaching sessions and records that are in the system and that data can provide insights into how managers are performing and how their coaching is impacting their teams or not. And, you know, it is a source of performance review for the manager themselves that when we’re evaluating our managers performance, it’s not just based on hitting your goals. A lot of those other key metrics are a large part of that. And then finally, I guess we are looking at or listening to the employees to understand their perceptions. It’s important to understand how they experience our onboarding, whether they’re brand new to selling. Or they’re a very experienced rep coming over. We have different learning paths and we are listening to that and understanding, you know, their feedback about their manager and the level of support that they’re feeling or the training that they’re experiencing in that onboarding program. And we’re using that feedback regularly for continuous improvement. It’s the constant job, it’s continuously reviewing our content, understanding what works well, what doesn’t, and using those best practices to make our programs better and better. SS: And you all are also leveraging the integration between Highspot and Salesforce to really help unlock meaningful data and tie your programs to revenue. Can you share more about how you leverage this integration and some of the impact that you’ve been able to uncover? PS: Yeah, sure. Well, again, this has been a journey in the very beginning. I remember interviewing, you know, some of the folks in the sales organization and the head of sales and they’re like, Oh my God, no, not another system to log into. I’m like, well, yeah, but there’s a lot that you’re going to learn from the system and how it’s going to add value to the organization. So in the very beginning, it was So important that we integrated with Salesforce. So we had an easy toggle, I should say, between Highspot and Salesforce. And then as we continued building, the centralized content access was a heavy hitter for us because of the integration. It allows our reps. To access relevant content and materials and sales plays within their workflows. So it’s much more seamless, uh, than having to toggle and go find and search and seek, et cetera. Now we have a long way to go. We still are working on how we make that information more predictive. And, but we’re proud of the work that we’ve done here. And then honestly, this integration has enhanced the customer. Engagement as well, because it ties our engagements, meetings, et cetera, to business outcomes. It helps surface our best practices and shared knowledge that can improve sales performance. So we’re still in the early stages of tying these analytics together and building out the push and the predictive nature of it. But we really see the opportunity. So we’re investing full force as enablement team and making that happen. SS: Paige, as your enablement strategy continues to evolve, how are you incorporating AI into your programs to continue to improve productivity? PS: Yeah, well, this is something I’m really excited about. We had introduced in 2024, the co-pilot tool AI as a productivity tool to parts of our teams, and now are really rolling out across, but our use in 2024 was. Probably more limited to just like meeting summaries, to-do lists, assignment of duties afterwards, creation of presentations, improving content, etc. Kind of like your own admin assistant as you’re prepping in your relationships and for your meetings. But in 2025, we are, I’m going to go a lot further with it. We’re exploring AI and machine learning between Highspot and Salesforce to make recommendations on content. Like I said, pushing and predicting and, you know, really driving at the sales plays and training that’s. Going to enhance our productivity. So I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of what AI is going to be capable of helping us to achieve, but it is a major strategy for the enablement team in 2025. So I’m totally stoked about learning what we’re going to. Be able to do their SS: Last question. If you could give one piece of advice to someone looking to enhance the business impact of enablement at their organization, what would it be? PS: Yeah, honestly, it’s don’t try to boil the ocean, start small. Know the business goals, align with the business goals and use the data analytics to measure the effectiveness of the programs and then kind of spread that grow for impact. Gather feedback from the teams to understand what’s working and how effective it is. Again, underscoring all the time, data-driven decisions, adjustments, improvements continuously. I’ll share an example, and this is so simplistic, but I tell this story all the time. My initial proof point or business case, a really simple one. I joined the organization a couple of years ago and I was out in one of our sales offices. I was literally walking down the hallway in the sales office. Two sales reps standing in the hallway and I overheard what they were talking about. One of them was trying to find a. presentation that another rep used for a finalist presentation. So they wanted the deck and they’d been going through files and searching for, I think she said like 30 minutes. Maybe even more. Then she picked up the phone, because she got frustrated, and she finally called that other rep, and lo and behold, incidentally, the rep had stored that deck on their laptop, meaning no one else really had access to it anyway. So, I was marveled by the fact that one of our top reps spent more than 30 minutes Looking for a piece of content and I asked for the deck reviewed it and I laughed because when I was looking at the deck I realized some of the data elements and even the brand that was on the deck was outdated. It wasn’t even up to date or in compliance. So, bing, lightbulb goes off. I’m like, oh, Paige could be a hero here because what I need to do is find a good way to manage content and partner with a marketing organization, et cetera, to tell this story. And lo and behold, again, such a simple example. It’s all proven by the metrics. So I sold it by showing the ROI of saving a hundred sales reps in our organizations, 30 minutes a month or more searching for content. And that’s a heck of a lot of savings that can be put towards production activities. And so again, the platform was easy to sell. Enablement is easy to continuously show the impact, but it’s using the data and telling the stories, but keep it small. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Keep telling measurable stories and everyone catches on and they feel it. And we are all the heroes when we are able to help reps and the organization to be more effective. efficient in growing a business SS: Thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate all of your insights and advice. To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Coach K (Jonathan) is an AI and Enablement expert and business consultant, deeply engaged in how emerging technology reshapes industries. Known for his sharp insights into leveraging AI for efficiency, scalability, and innovation, Jonathan shares transformative ideas about staying ahead in a rapidly evolving tech landscape. Key Quotes: "AI isn't just a tool; it's an amplifier for human potential. It's about taking what makes you unique and multiplying it by ten." "Are you willing to think and do things differently from what you've done before?" "The moat of the future will be humans and what one person can do with a fleet of AI agents." Jonathan (Coach K) explores the transformative power of AI agents, challenging listeners to rethink their approaches to business and technology. From automation to amplifying human skills, he unpacks the mindset shifts needed to thrive in a future where innovation is constant, and adaptability determines success. Find your Catalyst at https://www.findmycatalyst.com/ 5 Key Takeaways: The Role of AI as a Catalyst: AI amplifies individual capabilities, turning a person's expertise into scalable results. Effective prompting and expertise produce exponentially better AI outputs. Companies leveraging AI for automation experience dramatic efficiency gains. Thinking Differently in the AI Era: Adopting a beginner's mindset allows exploration and continuous learning. Old strategies may not apply—AI opens doors for innovative solutions. Success requires being uncomfortable and testing boundaries. The Power of Agents in Automation: Agents go beyond chatbots by making decisions and executing tasks autonomously. They can create workflows, analyze results, and iterate without constant input. Businesses must learn to trust and train AI for complex operations. AI as a Revenue Plumber: AI can identify inefficiencies and leaks in business processes. Outcome-based approaches ensure technology is aligned with measurable results. Thinking of AI as a partner, not just a tool, maximizes its potential. Bridging the Comfort Gap: Start small but aim for large-scale innovation by testing AI in safe areas. Challenge limiting mindsets, such as seeing AI as an "intern." Encourage teams to view AI as an extension of expertise, not a replacement. Connect with Coach K: Find Jonathan (Coach K) on LinkedIn for updates, insights, and resources. Stay tuned for his upcoming projects on leveraging AI agents to create transformational change. Connect with Coach K at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmkmba/ 

In this episode of The State of Sales Enablement, Jonathan Kvarfordt (Coach K) welcomes Kieran Smith, Senior Director of Enablement at TechnologyAdvice. With years of experience transitioning from sales leadership to a data-driven enablement leader, Kieran dives into the strategies that transformed his organization's enablement approach. From streamlining SDR onboarding to launching high-impact product enablement programs, Kieran shares the insights and frameworks that every enabler can use to drive measurable outcomes.Here's what Jonathan and Kieran discussed:Transitioning from sales leadership to enablement: How Kieran made the intentional pivot to enablement, bringing a data-driven mindset and hands-on approach to the role.Transforming SDR onboarding: The step-by-step overhaul that reduced ramp time by 63.75% and time-to-first-meeting by 80%, focusing on intentional training and skill-building.Launching a successful product enablement program: Kieran's framework for implementing a program that increased relevant conversations by 473% and drove nearly $1M in product revenue within a quarter.Data analytics in enablement: Why data ownership is critical for identifying problems, setting realistic goals, and earning leadership buy-in.The Enablement Effectiveness Equation: Kieran's innovative framework for measuring program impact through teaching, training, coaching, and metric improvements.Overcoming organizational challenges: Tips for gaining credibility, aligning with strategic business goals, and navigating resistance from stakeholders.Advice for enablement professionals: Where to start if you're new to enablement or looking to optimize your impact, with a focus on curiosity, collaboration, and metrics.Tune in to hear Kieran's proven strategies for turning enablement into a high-impact, data-driven function that drives measurable business results.Connect with Kieran Smith:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kieransmithvp/Connect with Jonathan Kvarfordt (Coach K):LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmkmba/Mentioned in this episode:The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning ExperienceThe Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning Experience is the ultimate sales enablement learning experience based on the best-selling book by Mike Kunkle. This self-paced learning experience will provide you with the knowledge and guidance required to fast-track the sales enablement maturity levels of your organization and your career. - Gain the knowledge required to fast-track your sales enablement career - Create the impact associated with advanced enablement maturity levels - Certifications showcasing your ability to create business impact To find out more and to register for exclusive relaunch offers visit goffwd.com/blocks.

In this episode of the Professional Services Pursuit, Banoo is joined by Meredith Brake, VP and Head of Service Ops and Enablement at Altus Group, to kick off a new series simplifying the complex process of purchasing technology or software solutions. This series breaks down each step, making it easier to navigate. Meredith shares actionable insights on evaluating workflows, addressing pain points, and setting clear goals for implementing new software solutions. The discussion highlights the selection and implementation of a platform, offering best practices for success.Core topics covered:Defining business requirements: Separating must-haves from nice-to-havesImplementation best practices and successful change managementUsing data to improve decision-making and track engagement marginsStrategies for effective training and ongoing support Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Abbe Smith is a Senior Talent Enablement Manager at Legend.In this episode of our podcast, we had an enlightening discussion with Abbe about the evolving role of talent enablement, its objectives, and the skills required to thrive in this domain.We discussed:A (non-agency) career journey into talent acquisition and enablementDefining talent enablementHow to make processes more efficient and enjoyable for candidates and interviewersEngaging with stakeholdersChallenges and career highlightsIf you like the pod then do hit follow or subscribe to our email newsletter for regular updates and insights. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of The State of Sales Enablement, Felix Krueger, your host, welcomes Alex Bedford, a seasoned enablement leader with extensive experience in scaling enablement functions globally. From managing regional enablement teams to leading global initiatives, Alex shares his unique insights on scaling impact, navigating organizational politics, and thriving as a team of one in a startup environment.Here's what Felix and Alex discussed:Scaling enablement globally: How Alex approached scaling enablement across regions while balancing global consistency and local needs.Building trusted enablement teams: The importance of hiring leaders who can engage senior stakeholders and deliver tangible results.Overcoming regional challenges: Strategies for managing local resistance and aligning regional enablement with global goals.Transitioning from a large enterprise to a startup: How Alex adapted to being a team of one and leveraged agility to drive faster impact.Leveraging AI for enablement: Practical ways AI can help scale enablement efforts, including virtual role-playing with AI avatars and account planning automation.Finding your champion: Alex's top tip for enablers—why finding and partnering with a senior champion is crucial for scaling your impact.Tune in to hear Alex's invaluable lessons on leadership, scaling enablement, and adapting to change in dynamic organizations.Connect with Alex Bedford:LinkedIn: Alex BedfordConnect with Felix Krueger:LinkedIn: Felix Krueger

In this episode of Troubleshooting Enablement, Devon McDermott, your host and EnableNerd, welcomes Federico Presicci, enablement strategist, leader of GetAccept's enablement team, and creator of the Enablement Insight blog. With extensive experience in building enablement functions and sharing best practices across the community, Federico dives deep into maximizing the value of enablement technology and AI-driven strategies.Here is what Devon and Federico discussed:Clarifying outcomes and aligning with GTM strategy: Why starting with clearly defined, measurable outcomes is critical for long-term success.Integrating tech into enablement strategy: How to connect sales technology, such as Gong and Seismic, to ensure scalable impact and behavior change.Prioritizing processes over tools: Before implementing any tech, understand the key processes that impact business outcomes and design your tech stack accordingly.Leveraging AI co-pilots and conversational intelligence: Insights into how AI-driven tools can automate workflows, improve data quality, and enhance GTM collaboration.Digital Sales Rooms vs. Traditional CMS: Federico shares why digital sales rooms offer a more effective, buyer-centric approach to engagement than legacy content management systems.Using generative AI as a thinking partner: Federico's unique take on using AI tools like ChatGPT for brainstorming, performance management, and skill-building.Adapting enablement strategies based on organizational readiness: How to assess the maturity level of your organization to create realistic enablement roadmaps.Tune in to hear Federico's invaluable insights on aligning enablement with business priorities, selecting the right tools, and building a future-ready enablement function.Connect with Federico Presicci:LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/federico-presicci/Blog: federicopresicci.comNewsletter: federicopresicci.com/newsletter/Connect with Devon:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devonmcdermott/Do you have a complex enablement challenge you want to troubleshoot? Submit your questions to Devon at devon@troubleshootingenablement.com.

According to research from Salesforce, 94% of sales organizations plan to consolidate their tech stacks to boost productivity. So how can you build an efficient tech stack to support sellers and drive success for your team? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Harmony Johnston-Grant, the principal strategy and program lead at Medtronic. Thank you for joining us, Harmony. I’d love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Harmony Johnston-Grant: Thanks for having me today on the podcast. So yes, I’m Harmony. I’ve been at Medtronic within the diabetes organization for about six and a half years now. It’s gone very quickly. My main responsibilities are really how we drive strategy through to execution by using Enablement systems and frameworks, such as Highspot, Salesforce, and really driving that collaboration between all of our cross functions so we can quickly translate the needs of our field force and our marketing strategy into our wider programs. SS: We’re excited to have you here, Harmony. Given your experience in the life sciences industry, what are some of the unique challenges that reps in the industry face and how can enablement help overcome these? HJ: Definitely. So we need to demonstrate proven clinical outcomes of how technology can improve the standard of care. And the med-tech landscape is changing and advancing quite quickly, as well as being highly regulated. So there are a lot of differing factors by country, could be due to product availability, healthcare models, regulatory requirements. So all of these can kind of affect how we go to market. So it’s really crucial as a team that we’re agile and able to adapt to bring strategy through to execution quickly. And this is really where enablement comes in to support our teams throughout their whole journey. So looking at things like their onboarding, um, keeping up to speed with market trends, skills they need. How we enable and support them to go to market. So bringing kind of cross functional teams together to ensure the alignment and then also ensuring that our competencies and key results and metrics are really aligned to our wider strategic goals and objectives. SS: I think that is phenomenal. And you actually take a consultative approach to understanding and addressing what your reps need. I’d love to understand, how do you go about kind of gathering and incorporating rep feedback into your enablement programs? HJ: Definitely. So I’m a very big advocate for continuous improvement and I think feedback is really a crucial part of enablement. So we use a few different models and mechanisms to capture feedback. So one kind of being that we have a field advisory board. So this is where we’ve got representatives from each of our countries and regions that we consult with for any new strategies or programs. So it may be that we run pilots with them, for example, and this is a really great way to validate our insights and get that field feedback. Another couple of methods are kind of surveys to capture the wider organizational feedback. So they’re really great. For pre and post-program surveys to so you can kind of quantify how things are progressing and then also any new programs that we launch, we make sure that we’ve got that really key foundational support and feedback model in place. So we have like local champions, for example, who keep us in that close contact. So we know how things are going. And as we’ve got a lot of countries and markets, it’s really good to have that local knowledge and that well-structured cadence of feedback because what may work in one market may not work in another. I’ll actually share with you later a story about how we use kind of that consultative approach that led us to actually implement Highspot. SS: Amazing. I think that’s phenomenal advice. Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of organizations are really thinking about how to drive efficiency and effectiveness by looking at kind of the consolidation of their tech stack. And I know one of your key focus areas is the creation and management of the sales tech stack. What are some of your best practices for building an efficient tech stack that still meets the needs of your sellers? . HJ: So there’s a lot of tech on the market. It can be quite hard to keep up, but I think it kind of comes down to a few things that you really need to kind of consider. So I think one is how you can keep things as simple as possible for your team. So I’m sure many other enablement professionals have heard this. We’ve got too many feeds, too many tools, too many systems. So how can you really drive that simplicity for your end users? I think that’s really as simple as listening to the barriers, their needs. How can you bring all those features and insights into one place and embed them into their workflow or an existing system so they don’t have to swivel chair between multiple platforms. Really drive those insights into action and bring value. I think another aspect is really what’s the strategic direction of your tech stack and what are your business goals and how can you align the two. So that’s where it’s really important that you have that internal alignment and vision with all of your customers. Functional teams and IT to understand really, okay, how can we embed our business goals into our tech stack and how our systems can integrate together. And then lastly, I would say, how are you going to actually operationally support the tech stack and what does success look like? So you can have a great system, but if it’s not implemented and supported correctly, you’re going to lose a buy-in. So thinking about things like how are you going to train your teams?What doess the support model look like? And tech is constantly evolving, so how are you going to ensure that any new developments with your tech are also cascaded to those teams and everyone’s kind of kept up to date? And then how you align your success metrics with your business goals to really drive that strategy through? SS: What would you say is the unique value of having an enablement platform to support your go-to-market initiatives? HJ: Yeah, definitely. So I’ll share the story I mentioned earlier. So previously we were using two separate tools. So one was our content tool and then our CRM. And what we noticed was the adoption wasn’t really kind of trending where we expected it to be. So we initiated a deep dive process into this. And so we really use that consultative approach to look into the key trends and understand why. So for example, we ran a survey, and we really had kind of one conversation with our field boss and local marketing to really get that contextualization as to what was happening. And what we found was that conceptually, the idea of the tools was there, but the value wasn’t being realized due to certain barriers. So for example, the content tool wasn’t embedded into their workflow and their CRM. Certain countries hadn’t seen certain pieces of content and local marketing couldn’t see the visibility of what content was being used and how it was landing. So we kind of took this We took all this feedback and we worked together cross-functionally to really evaluate the tools that we were using. And we identified that we really needed a unified and integrated platform. Use across all devices, really kind of structured the cadence of content and guidance, giving us those insights back as to how things are working. So this is where Highspot came into play. So we investigated a few different tools, and validated Highspot on the pilot, again, using that kind of feedback approach. And then. So this enabled a more streamlined cadence between all of our teams, making sure we’re speaking the same language, delivering the same message consistently, and that the field force really has everything in one place within their workflow. So I’d say definitely the unique value for us being such a large organization is really having that collaboration within one unified embedded platform. SS: I love that. What are, I know one of the key GTM initiatives your team has been focusing on is also supporting the rollout of new technology. Can you tell us more about this initiative and some of the ways that you’re helping reps better execute? HJ: So earlier this year, we launched a new product across multiple countries, which packs us in multiple different things. So timings, languages, we even have free languages in certain countries. So there’s a lot to consider and a lot of different teams involved. So product, clinical, education, marketing, sales, the list goes on. So as an enablement team, we really brought everyone together and worked with all of those internal stakeholders to bring in those assets. Build a sales play. So this covered everything from strategic objectives to messaging for our external stakeholders in line with our sales methodology, bringing in together the content that the teams needed to use and how they should go to market for their respective countries. So what they needed to really do to be successful with that launch? And then I think an additional benefit of having this consolidated into really one place is that local teams were able to quickly and efficiently then adjust into the local language and add in those local dynamics as well. SS: Amazing. I love that approach. What are some of the results that you’ve seen from these efforts and do you have any early wins you can share? HJ: Yeah, definitely. So I would say actually just having everything in one place for our field force has been really beneficial. And then I would say our speed as to how we cadence information in a much more streamlined way. So for example, with that product launch sales play, that would have been multiple pieces of guidance and content from multiple teams. And now we’ve got one aligned message to support our field force and enable them to go to market. And then lastly, it’s really having that visibility on how our content and guidance is landing. So utilizing those insights to make improvements and that feedback to have that continuous, I guess, virtual cycle of insights into actions. So it’s definitely a team effort and change management but it can bring a lot of insights and value. SS: I love that. I love that. Now, on that note, we talked about how rep feedback plays a huge role in the development of your programs. On the other side, how do you leverage data to evaluate and optimize the impact of your programs? HJ: Utilizing insights for informed decision making is really embedded into our company culture and I think this really goes hand in hand with feedback because you need that contextualization to make sense of it. So, for example, we use the OKR and A3 methodology across our diabetes organization. So this ensures that we’ve got key results and success metrics for each of our strategic objectives. So we’re able to see if something isn’t progressing exactly how we expect it to. We have those regular check-ins, but then we can also deep dive into the why. So like that example I shared with you earlier. We use that data, we use those insights to understand and deep dive into why as to things that aren’t working and then adapt our approach. And I think it’s really important to have and instill this mindset of data-driven insights across your organization as measures should be designed to pull people towards your overall vision. SS: Last question for you, Harmony. As you’re looking ahead, how do you envision leveraging innovations like AI to enhance your enablement program and continue to optimize your tech stack? HJ: The potential with AI and technology is very exciting, but I think it’s also easy to get lost in all the possibilities or jump straight into solution mode. There was a Gartner podcast and they said 72 percent of sellers are overwhelmed by the number of skills required for their job. And 50 percent are overwhelmed by the amount of technology that is needed. So I think this is where it’s really key that our role as enablement is to ensure that our teams are supported and upskilled to use technology and AI. So the way that we’ve been approaching AI within our team is Really looking into those kind of specific use cases, doing some proof of concepts within our programs and using that consultative approach with our field advisory board. So we can really validate those use cases and realize the value of them. So for example, lately we’ve been looking into kind of AI sales coaching and adaptive learning, and we’ve run that by our field advisory board to really understand with them, is this going to add value. Is this going to drive that simplification? And then using those insights to shape which direction we’ll go. I think the last aspect as well is being in such a regulated industry, what’s really crucial is that AI and technology are really underpinned by trust. So using that data in an ethical and compliant way. So it’s also really important to look into those nontechnical considerations with your AI strategy as well. SS: Phenomenal advice, Harmony. And I’m excited to see what you guys do on that front. Thank you again so much for joining us on this podcast. I really appreciate the time. HJ: Thanks so much for having me. It’s been lovely. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

In this episode of The State of Sales Enablement, Jonathan Kvarfordt, a.k.a. Coach K, sits down with Krystina Moustakis, an organizational psychologist and enablement expert, to dive into how enablement can drive performance through a unique people-centric approach.Krystina shares her journey from teaching to organizational psychology and how her background shapes her refreshing perspective on enablement and business performance. They explore how to define and align enablement metrics to business outcomes, change organizational mindsets, and create sustainable, high-impact initiatives.Here is what Jonathan and Krystina discussed:Krystina's journey: from high school teacher to organizational psychologist and sales enablement consultant.Why understanding behavior change is critical to improving performance.How to align enablement programs with strategic business metrics for executive buy-in.The importance of defining outcomes versus simply delivering skills.Building enablement as a "game maker" function: how to influence systems, processes, and behaviors.How sales principles and user-experience design can transform enablement's impact.Tips for driving long-term organizational change and value through enablement.Tune in to learn how Krystina's insights can help you elevate your enablement function to become a strategic driver of business success.Connect with Krystina Moustakis:Website: https://krystinam.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmost/Connect with Jonathan Kvarfordt (Coach K):LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmkmba/

Christina Brady, CEO of Luster AI and former Chief Strategy Officer at Sales Assembly, brings a unique blend of artistry and strategy to this episode. Growing up immersed in the arts—learning piano at age two and majoring in theater—Christina shares how her creative foundation shaped her problem-solving, communication, and leadership skills. Tune in as we explore her career journey, insights on AI's role in sales enablement, empathy in training, navigating career transitions, and strategies for personal and professional growth.Are you interested in leveling up your sales skills and staying relevant in today's AI-driven landscape? Visit www.jbarrows.com and let's Make It Happen together!Connect with John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarrows/Connect with John on IG: https://www.instagram.com/johnmbarrows/Check out John's Membership: https://go.jbarrows.com/pages/individual-membership?ref=3edab1 Join John's Newsletter: https://www.jbarrows.com/newsletterConnect with Christina on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinapbrady/Check out her website: https://luster.ai/

#updateai #customersuccess #saas #business Tatiana Ferreira (CCO, Launchmetrics) joins the hosts ⁠⁠Kristi Faltorusso (CCO, Client Success)⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jon Johnson (Principal CSM, User Testing)⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠Josh Schachter⁠⁠ (Founder & CEO, UpdateAI). They discuss the complexities of mergers and acquisitions, the shift towards proactive customer outreach, the challenges of communication in multi-CSM models, the emerging role of AI in predicting risk within customer success, the balance between specialized and generalized customer support, and the imperative of clear communication during organizational changes. Timestamps 0:00 - Preview, BS, Intros 3:50 - Overview of Launchmetrics 9:20 - Aligning motivations & communicating post-merger integration 13:26 - OKRs and employee engagement 15:50 - Mixed roles in CS and professional services 18:27 - Challenges in customer interaction and communication clarity 25:00 - Automation and tech stack 27:35 - Enablement and evolving skill sets for CSMs 30:00 - Need for understanding data and being proactive ___________________________

In this episode of The State of Sales Enablement, Coach K is joined by Federico Presicci, a prominent sales enablement leader and creator of insightful practitioner-led content in the enablement space. Federico shares his unique journey from arriving in the UK without speaking English to becoming a recognized voice in sales enablement. Together, they discuss the critical components of effective enablement, the importance of strategy, and how to leverage data to drive measurable outcomes.Here's what Coach K and Federico discussed:Federico's journey from mechanical engineering to sales and eventually to sales enablement, highlighting the transformative power of embracing challenges and personal growth.Why enablement is more than just training, content, and tools—and how strategic thinking and cross-functional collaboration drive scalable impact.The role of cultural shifts and mindset changes in embedding enablement into organizational structures and leadership approaches.Federico's blog and collaborative projects, including his focus on gathering insights from practitioners and creating practical, unbiased resources for the enablement community.How advanced tracking, conversational intelligence, and AI-driven role-playing tools can provide actionable insights and leading indicators for enablement success.The balance between short-term execution and long-term scalability in enablement strategy and program design.Connect with Federico Presicci:LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/federico-presicci/Blog: federicopresicci.comNewsletter: federicopresicci.com/newsletter/Connect with Coach K:LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jmkmba/Tune in to hear Federico's actionable insights and how his holistic approach to enablement can help organizations align strategy, culture, and execution for sustainable success.

Are you ready to revolutionize how hiring managers and recruiters collaborate? This episode, we're thrilled to host David Nason and Master Burnett from HireBrain, where they share their innovative approach to reimagining how jobs and requirements are both defined and filled. Fresh off a win at HR Tech's Pitchfest in October 2024, they are ready to break down the pillars of hiring and talk about what it takes to build a solid foundation for talent that aligns hiring managers, recruiters, candidates, and most importantly, the business. Tune in to explore how you can remove blindspots and bias from hiring while creating a better hiring experience for everyone involved.

In this episode of Alter Everything, host Megan Bowers speaks with Emil Kos and Bart Smuga, co-founders of Data Pal, about the importance of building centers of enablement for Alteryx users. They discuss the differences between centers of enablement and centers of excellence, addressing challenges in Alteryx adoption, the significance of onboarding new users, and fostering internal communities. They also share strategies for tracking the value of Alteryx projects and offer advice on creating successful user enablement initiatives, including the role of leadership support, promoting successes, and the use of dashboards.Panelists: Emil Kos, Co-Founder of Data Pal – Emil_Kos, LinkedInBart Smuga, Co-Founder of Data Pal – smugabart, LinkedInMegan Bowers, Sr. Content Manager @ Alteryx - @MeganBowers, LinkedInShow notes: Onboarding lessonsValue Realization Tracker in Mission ControlAlteryx Getting Started Learning PathDefining the Value of Alteryx Projects Interested in sharing your feedback with the Alter Everything team? Take our feedback survey here!This episode was produced by Megan Bowers, Mike Cusic, and Matt Rotundo. Special thanks to Andy Uttley for the theme music and Mike Cusic for the for our album artwork.

Welcome to Build where we talk about the lessons I have learned in scaling big businesses, gaining millions in sales, and helping our portfolio companies do the same. Buckle up, because we're creating an unshakeable business.Want to scale your business? Click here. Follow Leila Hormozi's Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition