Podcasts about lm it

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I’m excited to have Lauren Metheney from Blend join us. Lauren, I would love to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Lauren Metheney: Hi Shawnna, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. I’m Lauren Metheney and I’m located in Chicago, Illinois. My background is primarily in tech sales. I started my career as an account executive selling for about three years and then I was a sales manager for almost six years before coming over to my current company, Blend. At Blend, I’ve been here for about 4.5 years now doing sales enablement and operations. Just to give some background on Blend, we are part of the financial technology industry or a lot of folks refer to it as FinTech for short. We are a cloud-based banking platform used by banks, credit unions, and independent mortgage brokers and we streamline their workflows as well as transform the experiences for their customers. SS: Fantastic. Well, Lauren, I’m excited to have you here with us because on LinkedIn, you talked about your passion for coaching and how that was really a key factor for your career pivot, which you just talked us through a little bit from sales to enablement. So how did you develop your passion for coaching? LM: I’ve always enjoyed helping others both personally and professionally. It’s very rewarding for me to see individuals learn, grow and succeed as a result of my mentoring them along the way. After a couple of years as a seller, I had the opportunity to start mentoring other sellers as a team lead. It was like a player-coach type role where I still had my own book of the individual business, but I was also responsible for managing and mentoring a small team. It was that particular experience where I really discovered that I truly enjoy coaching other sellers and as a result helping them achieve their goals as well as mine too since I had my own personal goals. Actually, for the next five years after that I spent managing sales teams and it was a great challenge, I learned a lot and there were some great team memories of course along the way, but after a while, I was looking for a change and took a step back to think more about what I wanted to do and what I enjoy most about what I’m currently doing. So I was wondering how I can do more of that, so coaching, mentoring, and helping others, that’s what really got me excited about work each day. That was interesting because sales enablement at the time as a career was fairly new or at least the role itself was fairly new, and the definition of sales enablement definitely varies between companies, and it actually still kind of does today. With that, I started networking with some folks that I knew in the sales training space or ones that I knew that had recently moved over into a sales enablement type role. I just wanted to learn a bit more and so just speaking with them, I quickly realized that’s what I wanted to do. Fast forward a little bit, I landed over at Blend, which is obviously where I’m at today as their first enablement hire and of course, the rest is history from there. SS: I love that. Now, in your opinion, why is coaching so important in sales today? LM: Yes, so to me it’s important because whether you’re brand new to sales or have been doing it for 20 years you can always be better. A great example is back when I started selling, people still made a ton of cold calls, which I know is almost archaic these days, which sounds crazy, but folks would still make a ton of cold calls and prospects would actually pick up the phone or even on a very rare occasion return a voicemail. There was no such thing as networking tools online where you could message a prospect or other emailing tools that you could send out your prospecting emails to try and schedule calls. There was no real automation type of thing back in the day and so today it’s just much different than it was 10 years ago and even it was more different 20 years ago, so that’s one thing. While that’s just one example of why it’s important, it’s always good to get feedback from your peers, managers, outside sales coaches, etc to get those different perspectives and so I encourage all sales folks to have some sort of regular cadence scheduled to get that feedback. It’s funny, I have to mention because my husband is actually in tech sales as well, and he’s been doing sales for 10 years but he’s always soliciting my feedback so I’m even coaching him at home each day, that’s what it seems. LM: Oh goodness, you can never leave work behind when it comes to coaching. Now, what is enablement's role in coaching within your organization and how do you partner today with sales managers to effectively coach reps? SS: We have a few different what I like to call coaching phases within Blend. The first of course is the onboarding which is for new hires within the sales organization. There’s not a lot of true coaching going on here, however, it’s more training on how to use the various tools and such. Sales enablement also likes to be a part of the new hires and provide mentorship and make them feel like they can come to us as resources and we want them to be able to give us feedback, not just on the onboarding process, but also just how their first few months at Blend are going and we just want to make sure they’re comfortable and thriving in their new roles. So the next phase I’ll call structured sales coaching. So we use the specific sales methodology at Blend and while a lot of folks have used something similar in other organizations, we want to make sure that everyone uses it the same way we do within our sales organization. There are specific trainings on the methodology which involve role plays, feedback, and all that good stuff, and then as part of that we practice it in our day-to-day, and we provide additional coaching and feedback. So the sales managers actually play a huge role in reinforcing the methodologies and their conversations with their sellers throughout the deal cycles. Then, the last phase which I would say is ongoing, just like the sales methodology is, is the training phase. So whether it’s training on a new product, brushing up on existing products etcetera, we have many different formats in which we can train. Some are structured sessions led by saying a product manager for example or even modules within our learning management tool. SS: I love that. I’d love to dig in because you have again as we talked about a background in sales, both as a rep and as a manager and how has that informed your approach to coaching as an enablement practitioner? LM: It’s interesting because one of the reasons I wanted to pivot into enablement is at the time I noticed a lot of enablement folks did not actually come from a sales or sales management background as I have. A couple of my mentors and former sales trainers came from a sales background and I was able to connect with them on a deeper level at work than others because they understood what it was like to be in sales. They’ve carried the bag, they’ve done it themselves, right? So that’s why I love what I do because I know what it’s like to be in the position of the people I’m coaching and they know I understand where they’re coming from. In addition to that, I help create operational efficiencies for our sales org so I’m working with folks that don’t have that sales point of view and it’s really cool to take lead in creating those different processes that I know in the end will benefit our sales org, so they can do their jobs better while giving the internal stakeholders what they need as well. SS: I want to shift gears a little bit, what are some of the key metrics that you track today to understand the impact of coaching and to help optimize your programs? LM: From a coaching and training perspective as it relates to sales methodology and such, we look at are the reps constantly following the methodology for each deal and for the deals where the methodology is used, how long was the deal cycle, and what are the win rates for those. Then, on the other side of things, for the deals where there was no methodology or the methodology was inconsistently used, what do those cycles and win rates look like? Also, another huge factor that informs who we coach and what specifically is why we lose deals. So there are all different types of factors, but in some cases, there may be trends with a certain rep where we identify there are areas where they can be coached to increase win rates, whether it’s product knowledge, methodology, engagement with the prospect etcetera. We also, of course, have insights where we can coach reps on their calls as well. We can learn if they’re talking too much, what kind of questions they’re asking, and also how they are asking those questions, how they handle objections, and so on. We work with the managers to leverage these insights so they can track progress as we coach the sellers. I could go on and on about different metrics, but one more that stands out is the quality of the deals. There are all kinds of sellers out there as we know and every deal is different, but you may have some sellers who close a ton of deals but maybe have a high churn rate, or on the other hand, there may be a seller who doesn’t close as many deals but has a very low churn rate and high growth of those customers over time. These are all things that we look at to determine what that sweet spot kind of looks like and try to coach our sellers accordingly. SS: I love that. So the last question then for you Lauren, how has technology changed how reps engage with coaching just over the last few years, I’d say especially with the rise of virtual and hybrid teams and environments, and how we think coaching will continue to evolve in the near future? LM: Yeah, I love this question. I just think about how fortunate to have all the tech that we have these days, it definitely makes my life at work a lot easier. I can’t imagine what it would have been like 10 years ago even in a non-virtual world, but even in the 4.5 years that I’ve been in this role at Blend, technology has blown up in the sales enablement community. So whether it’s tools to help sellers become more efficient in their day-to-day while also giving insights to sales, enablement managers on productivity, or coaching tools to help sellers become better or learn faster. It’s all amazing. I love it. I literally feel like there’s a tool for everything these days which is maybe a good and a bad thing because it can be overwhelming, but especially now that we are a remote-first company at Blend, I can’t imagine life without some of these tools, they are life savers. To answer your second question as far as the future goes, I feel like as new ways to sell evolve, the technology will also adapt as well as how we are coaching sellers. I think some foundational things will still exist, so for example, coaching methodology I think those are going to stay pretty consistent. Those haven’t changed too much over the last 20 or 30 years but the way and how we sell may change and of course, there are going to be more tools that exist that I couldn’t even think of today, I would be remiss if I didn’t include the tools. SS: Of course. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for joining us today, I really appreciate the time and the insights from you on coaching. LM: Thanks so much Shawnna, I really appreciate you having me, it’s been a pleasure. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you'd like to share or a topic you'd like to learn more about, please let us know we'd love to hear from you.

Transcript Lori Morimoto: Hi and welcome to “It’s a Thing!”, the podcast where we talk about fan studies and how it’s a thing.  [music] LM: It’s a thing is the result of enthusiastic response to a tweet I made a couple of months ago, wherein I said I wanted to start a fan studies podcast. […]

Brad Post - Welcome to Create the Movement Podcast My name is Brad Post and I’m here with Liz Montgomery. Liz Montgomery - Hello BP - Liz, how are you doing? LM - I’m excellent. BP - Today, it’s kind of early in our podcasting but we are going to be talking about websites. For instance why would a small business or a law firm need a website? LM - Why would they need a website, Brad? That is a good question. Well, first of all nowadays, and maybe this wasn’t true five to ten years ago before we had smart phones and ipads so many electronics devices available to access information. But, now when you want to find a new service or a new product or if someone needs an attorney the first thing they are going to do is pick up their phone or go to their computer and google, find the best person, right. So this is why SEO is so important on a site. But a small business needs a website because they need to be found. If someone says I’m opening a bakery downtown how is anyone going to know about it except for the people who live on that street. It’s important to have a presence online. BP- I kind of feel too that traditional advertising, which is expensive, like radio ads, billboards, television can be expensive. Websites can be less expensive than traditional marketing. LM - That is true. If you are on a budget as a new business starting out it could be a more cost effective way to get your name out there. If you do it right. And you can do it right for not a billion dollars. Then you can create a lot of engagement online and that will attract people to your business and will put the word out about you. BP- You mentioned the SEO. It is important. Would you say an optimized website is important? You kind of touched on when you google something. LM - What is an optimized website, some would ask. What is SEO and what does that mean. So, search engine optimization is what SEO stands for. The reason it is important that your website is optimized is because you want to show up in search engine results. What you have are hundreds of thousands of other businesses competing for those keywords. And depending on what market you’re in or maybe what city you are in, you will have different levels of competition for different keywords. BP- Keywords are what people are searching for, right? LM- Exactly, so if I just got into a car accident and i don’t know, do I need an attorney? I might google “car accident attorney Tulsa” or where ever I am. So you will start going down the list and the first folks on that page that showed up on your search list. Also, it’s really cool that google tells you the way to optimize you website so you show up in their search results. It’s almost like having a healthy website that google responds well too. BP - Google gives you certain guidelines such as meta-descriptions and title tags, right? And how you should follow their rules in order to show up well. LM- It is definitely down the  rabbit hole of information because it is very complex and there are a lot of terms that could get confusing. Even saying that meta-description and title tags for someone that doesn’t know anything about the website industry could be easily confused by that. Having somebody who knows all those standards and is familiar with those best practices from google and is setting up your website according to that, it’s like night and day in terms of how you are going to show up in search engine results. BP- It’s not just about having an amazingly pretty website, you also have to make sure it is optimized. LM- Right, you need both things. Because we also come across websites that are not beautiful but they are really well optimized and the problem with that is that they may show up really well in search engine results and then you go to the website and then you leave it really quickly. Like, this isn’t giving me the information that I need or it’s just not nice to look at. Or that it doesn’t look updated so it doesn’t look ...

Heyang: A British study says a quarter of English men believe that they experience a monthly &`&man period&`&. Meanwhile, a more shocking statistic show that 58% of their female partners believe in them. Really? 英国一项调查显示，四分之一的男性认为自己每个月都会有特定的“大姨夫”时期，在这段时间内他们会觉得非常疲劳、烦躁、嗜吃和容易烦恼，症状类似于女性的“经前综合征”。男士们真的会有大姨夫吗？This is a bit of delicate subject to discuss with two gentlemen. And I suppose as the lady here I will take the liberty of explaining the term 大姨妈 or “periods”. So basically in Chinese it’s quite funny. Translated into English it literally means “big aunty”. Laiming: I think they have the same description in English for period. HY: “Big aunty”? LM: Yes. I’ve seen it in a TV series. Michael: Have you? All right, I haven’t. HY: Maybe you are not paying attention to such delicate matters. Michael: Maybe we are watching different shows. HY: It makes all sense in Chinese to translate this “man period” into 大姨夫, the husband of “big aunty”. So now you know what it is. And it’s super inconvenient, can be really painful and women hate it. Oh, and also it’s sort of like a privilege for ladies you go through that difficult period. LM: It’s just unfair. It’s your privilege? HY: In a way yes. And now men are actually competing with women and saying that they have this problem too. Physically do you? Do you? Do you?（重要的事情说三遍） No! So what’s the point here? Do you guys have this problem? Michael: I even haven’t come across the expression or indeed the notion of a “man period” before, no, Heyang. This is new to me. HY: This is new to you, all right. LM: Physically bleeding, it will never happen to you, but how about the mentality that psychological stuff? HY: Oh, guys, guys! Let’s not get so graphic about it. LM: Do you get cranky or irritable sometimes? Michael: Well, yes but I don’t think that has to do with any sort of menstrual cycle or otherwise. HY: Ok, I think maybe this is pointing at a hormone fluctuation that maybe men experience more or less similar to what women feel. So we are not talking about the physical side of things but more of the psychological side of things. So guys, do you feel that every month there’s a few days you feel cranky, you feel grumpy, you feel unhappy, unsatisfied, you wanna eat a lot and you just hate people around you. Do you feel that? Michael: I feel that all the time Heyang. That’s my default setting. HY: What about you Laiming? LM: So you are always on大姨夫. Well it seems I have a better control of my emotion. And since I’ve got married, my wife has offered me this valuable lesson about this other dimension about this world that is emotional dimension. So I began to realize that our emotions fluctuate through time. And I came to pay attention to these small changes in the state of mind especially. The way I realize that I have this kind of problem is when I get on public transport, for example a bus, when sometimes people don’t queue up, I from time to time will feel irritated. But I don’t always feel irritated. Michael: Now I feel irritated all the time when I see that. But because I’m British, I don’t do, I just sort of stand there and maybe tut and shake my head to myself. But I won’t do anything more than that. But I wonder if maybe men are sort of cashing in on this a little bit. HY: Aren’t you guys doing that? Michael: This happens obviously every four weeks or so with women and as you explained Heyang, it’s very uncomfortable and unpleasant. As a result, you might feel a bit irritable and cranky. And maybe in some cases men have seeing that every four weeks or so, women almost have this of a free pass to be as irritable and cranky as they like. Maybe men are just thinking actually well maybe... LM: I can be cranky and irritable every time every day! Michael: Yeah. LM: It doesn’t have to be during period. HY: Oh, guys, guys! Now you are wondering why women turn into 女汉子. So women become a little bit more… LM: Masculine? HY: No, it’s like masculine in behavior as if women feel that we need to shoulder more responsibility, you cannot rely on men, you have to just do it yourself. Michael: I’m a strong independent woman. HY: Because look at the guys! The guys are demanding privilege from men period! No wonder we are being push to the other end of, I don’t even know what this is, but just pushing us to the opposite end. LM: Don’t you just sympathize with people who don’t pay attention to their emotional wellbeing? I remember talking with one of our colleagues who is from Sri Lanka, who pays a lot of attention to her psychological wellbeing. She said a very famous quote I would like to say on this show. She said like our mind is kind of like our body. If we don’t wash our bodies every two days or every day, your body will stink. So is the same case with your mind. If you don’t pay attention to your mind, to your psychological wellbeing, your mind gets dirty. Michael: So how do you wash your mind Laiming? What sort of mental exercises or whatever can you do? LM: First person shooting games! Michael: OK. HY: And also getting married. See Laiming has said earlier a wonderful point of view that after getting married he’s matured. He’s learned how to manage his emotions a bit better. Michael: I think call of duty probably helps with that. LM: Yes, it helped a lot. HY: See you need to have different avenues to like balance it out. LM: But you need to recognize that there’s this alternate reality around you with this emotional dimension. Michael: I’m not sure if I really buy into all this, to be quite honest with you? If you think too much about this because you don’t have enough else going on. I think if you keep yourself busy, you don’t occupy yourself with thoughts like this. I think it’s very easy to overthink when you are a bit bored or you are at a loose end. I think maybe that’s contributing to this sort of phenomenon. LM: You mean we are self-pitying? Michael: Exactly. Self-pity, self- loathing, whatever you want call it. HY: I think it’s a constructive advice what Michael has just said. We’ve got a whole bunch of messages coming in, regard this topic. There’s “yszdd” saying that 大姨妈是生理需求，而男人的大姨夫则是心理的需求。I think that is a good point and I do sympathize with guys. Yes, you don’t always have to be strong. You can let your feelings out too. But don’t call it 大姨夫. You know, don’t make it bigger as what it actually is. That’s just whiny.

To begin at the beginning: It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. [Under Milk Wood] 2014 is the centenary of the birth of the poet Dylan Thomas. Scarlett MccGwire went to talk to Dr. Leo Mellor who writes and teaches about 20th century literature, particularly Anglo Welsh Literature and modernism, at Murray Edwards college Cambridge, where he is the Roma Gill Fellow in English. She started by asking him what’s so special about Dylan Thomas that the centenary of his birth is being celebrated around the world? Dr.Leo Mellor: I think it is to do with the way he brings a particular intensity to language. To the way he writes poems, that force or push language into moments of unexpected power and beauty and strangeness. He makes us see everyday things as strange again and he helps us see a beauty in things one would not normally consider beautiful.     Scarlett MccGwire: Like? LM: I suppose you could think of his most famous radio play ‘Under Milk Wood’ and how he takes the average life of people in a little town there. Petty jealousy, their loves, their desires, and transforms them into something that is funny, beautiful and terribly moving -  it’s just one night, in one little bible-black town. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now. SM: Do you think he captures Wales? LM: He captures a certain part of Wales but he also turns Wales into a place that is shaped by Dylan Thomas’s way of looking, thinking and feeling about things. This is not reportage, this is not the lives of people as lived in the 1930’s and 40’s in his formulation of 'South Wets Wales' and Swansea. He takes things from an area and he transforms them. SM: Under Milk Wood is celebrated around the English-speaking world, so it’s much bigger than Wales isn’t it? LM: Yes, because it’s a way of using radio, using a medium, where you don’t get to see anything. You get to see, in your mind’s eye, the characters who are constructed through how they speak and how they describe other people, and sound effects. So, it’s a play that is apparently about a small seaside town in west Wales, but uses a medium to do something quite incredible. SM: He is most famous for Under Milk Wood, but also there are poems. LM: It is important for us to remember how long his career was. He died age 39, but he was writing poems as a teenager, and these are not adolescent works, these are published in the Volume 18 Poems and they are amazingly good. I will read the first stanza of the first poem from the 18 poems I see the boys of summer I see the boys of summer in their ruin Lay the gold tithings barren, Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils; There in their heat the winter floods Of frozen loves they fetch their girls, And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.   These boys of light are curdlers in their folly, Sour the boiling honey; The jacks of frost they finger in the hives; There in the sun the frigid threads Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves; the signal moon is zero in their voids.   I see the summer children in their mothers Split up the brawned womb’s weathers, Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs; There in the deep with quartered shades Of sun and moon they paint their dams As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.   I see that from these boys shall men of nothing Stature by seedy shifting, Or lame the air with leaping from its heats; There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse