Podcasts about sales enablement society

How has the role of sales enablement transformed since its early days, and what does this mean for the future? Join me for my final episode of "Stories from the Trenches" as I sit down with Juliana Stancampiano, CEO of Oxygen and former board president of the Revenue Enablement Society (RES). We trace Sales/Revenue Enablement's transition from traditional sales training to the more holistic approach of modern sales enablement, emphasizing the diverse backgrounds of professionals in the field.  We dive into the critical role of organized processes, clear metrics, and continuous learning in driving sales performance and discuss the importance of educating senior executives about effective enablement and the impact of new technology on the field.  Be sure to subscribe and follow the Revenue Enablement Society on LinkedIn for exciting announcements about what's next for the podcast!As this is my final episode as producer and host, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all my guests and listeners. Thank you all for being integral to this incredible journey with "Stories from the Trenches."Juliana Stancampiano is an author, entrepreneur, and leader helping businesses prepare their people for what happens next. For more than 15 years, she has helped leaders translate their company's strategy into tangible achievements for their people, creating experiences that help people succeed. As CEO of Oxygen, Juliana has developed a unique perspective around the enablement, skilling and ways of educating the workforce of today. Juliana also held the Board Presidency for the Sales Enablement Society from 2019-2022.Please subscibe on Apple, Spotify or Google.

In Episode 10 Dr. Brian Lambert is back in the Orchestrate Sales Studios with Erich Starrett, for part two of a two-part interview. Dr. Lambert is a Digital Value Architect at Elastic, co-founder of OSC, SES, and co-host of Inside Sales Enablement seasons one and two.In this segment we pivot from past to present and future, with an emphasis on the impact of AI and the new data = fuel paradigm. Highlights from the second part of our interview:PAST⌛️ What is Brian's take on the recent move by primary research companies to shift from "Sales" to "Revenue" and the Sales Enablement Society following suit to Revenue Enablement Society?PRESENT⌛️ Now that Brian has moved into the Marketing organization, what is his experience like compared to the Sales or Ops or Talent Enablement functions?⌛️ How does data collection compare among the functions?⌛️ What would it mean to truly be Revenue Enablement?⌛️ In line with recent interactions with @Hilary Headlee, Erich suggests the best first step towards true Revenue Enablement may be for Enablement leaders to engage with #RevOps and Brian reacts to the suggestion.FUTURE⌛️ Brian talks about the shift in focus from company to employee to customer ...and now we are shifting towards a data focus. A data centric view. One for which individuals, functions, and entire companies are ill prepared to pivot towards and fully embrace and benefit.⌛️ A potential new paradigm of looking at data less as a byproduct of doing work and more as a fuel for the digital economy. ⌛️ The promise and potential hurdles of AI for Enablement. >>> Understanding, embracing, and tapping into a hybrid human + artificial "collective intelligence." >>> Using AI to generate structured inputs that we as humans synthesize vs. outputs that leave the creativity to an unknown artificial third party. ⌛️ A "future of work" vision where we understand how data becomes information, how that information becomes knowledge, how that knowledge becomes insight, how that insight gets leveraged to make decisions and then how to effectively put AI on top of that to fully leverage what makes the company unique. ⌛️ There are a series of continuums:>>> Data awareness: From data aware to data led.>>> Organizational: From data "laying everywhere" to organized digital mastery.>>> Enablement: From being an Analyzer to an Orchestrator removing silos and creating the organizational structure of tomorrow"You have to be a synthesizer of all this information and AI can help you, but if you cannot synthesize this stuff across marketing operations, training, sales, customers, let's not forget, then you're not going to be an Orchestrator."Please click

Get ready to accelerate your revenue enablement success with insights from Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, Peter Ostrow. Recently Peter joined me to unpack the potential of AI to transform Revenue Enablement efficiencies and results. If your Sales Enablement budget is like most the team is understaffed and underfunded while juggling competing priorities.Listen now to hear how you can use AI tools you already own to maximize their impact on every facet of your enablement programs, from RFP analysis to tailoring pitch-perfect emails.Peter Ostrow is currently VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester B2B Sales. Peter capitalizes on 20+ years of revenue growth leadership in sales enablement, sales talent management, and operational expertise. Prior to joining SiriusDecisions and Forrester, Peter was a VP/Research Group Director for the Aberdeen Group, where he founded and was Principal Analyst for the Sales Effectiveness Practice, as well as overseeing research in marketing, customer success, field service and human capital management disciplines.  Prior to his analyst work, he was a long-time B2B sales rep, manager, and enabler.Since 2020, Peter has served on the board of directors of the Sales Enablement Society, the largest and only nonprofit organization dedicated to the sales enablement profession.Please subscibe on Apple, Spotify or Google.

Hello and welcome to OrchestrateSales.com's Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession. On Episode 6, Erich Starrett hosts Christopher Kingman M.S., Global Head of Digital Sales Enablement at TransUnion, in the OSC Studios. And - SPOLER ALERT - this Ep is COMPLETE with a first of its kind opportunity to meet our guest IRL and face-to-face! Along with some of the best-of-the-best who have made (and continue to make) Enablement and Digital Sales history. And with not one but two ISE Insider benefits to make it easy on the travel budget.Chris has a captivating Enablement past as the youngest SES Fore-founder in "the room where it happened" ...just up the street from his Florida home. He is also well known for standing up in that very room as the voice of the next generation. He shares his unique perspective on the past, while concurrently holding executive board roles with both the Revenue Enablement Society and Emblaze. Don't miss insights from this consistent practitioner, leader and volunteer on the Enablement front lines about the past, present and future of the function and profession. Highlights include: PAST: > Participating in the founding meeting of the Sales Enablement Society with people who came from as far away as the Netherlands like Thierry van Herwijnen and big names like Gerhard Gschwandtner and Jill Rowley invested their time, talent, and travel generously. Dr. Robert M. Peterson, who never lets Chris forget that he was the "youngster" there. PRESENT: > Chris' board role with Emblaze (fka AAISP) is informed by years of involvement including at the F2F events. > RES and Emblaze have partnered around the concept that your enablement person and your CRO/CSO are two sides of the same coin.FUTURE: > Developing the first standards-based Enablement Executive Education program. > The 2024 Emblaze #digitalnow Revenue Growth Summit in which the RES is cultivating the Enablement track, and Chris and RES President Gail Behun will be hosting a "How to speak CRO" session. We also announce an ISE Season Three exclusive. In affiliation with the 2024 digitalnow Revenue Growth Summit in Chicagoland April 2nd to 4th. THE must-attend event for digital-first revenue leaders. Hosted by Emblaze. Powered by Corporate Visions. (Check out the "mentioned in this episode" section

On Episode 4 of OrchestrateSales.com's ISE Season 3 - Enablement History - we hop into the present with Gail Behun who was announced just last week as the new President of the Revenue Enablement Society! In this episode, Gail shares insights gained from many milestones on her personal Enablement journey including...> Her PASSION for the elevation of the Enablement profession, including many companies (and namely those who laid off entire Enablement teams) coming to embrace the reality... "What was happening to our community wasn't about enablers not showing value. It wasn't about us not doing a good enough job at our job. It was very reactionary. It was our CROs and CEOs not understanding the value of Enablement.Going from mentality of growth at all costs to a mentality of profitability at all costs." And that meant they had to cut anything that didn't directly lead to profitability, which meant cutting Enablement because Enablement adds to the cost of sale....this crash was not just because of our performance and that we had to be able to own the parts of it that we didn't do well enough. We needed to understand how to better build a bridge to our CROs, and then we needed to understand how do we go forward from here.""We really need to bring this function back and bring it back strategically. "> The Sales Enablement Society's decision to rebrand in 4Q23 to the Revenue Enablement Society..."This is a real recognition that our profession is evolving dramatically...that we have a much bigger footprint that we're empowering, not just sellers, but customer success, solution consultants, marketing, working across product marketing. We really are that connective tissue to the sales organization.""The title is how people are seeing us. But for me and my passion is how are we seeing ourselves? How do we define what we're doing so that whatever our title is, we know we're having the biggest impact, whether you are, a support level, whether you're just coming in, whether you're a VP level and everything in between, really having a clear understanding of how you can have an impact on those bottom line revenue metrics. How what you're doing ties back to revenue.> How her love of the live conference community experience led her to lead the annual global SES/RES event..."It lets me really bring my passion for face to face marketing and the power of conferences and the power of connecting into an organization that I feel so strongly brings so much value to members. One of the things I love about sales enablement is it's still a niche profession. There's not a lot of us, we're still figuring a lot of stuff out. And so you have this community of people who are. Incredibly brave, incredibly creative, incredibly scrappy, and perfectly happy to show you what they're doing." > Her take on the future of Enablement, and elevating the profession..."The evolution for me is to continue to make sure that people have outlets to have good discussions with their community on a regional level, on a national level, on a slack level, that they have those conversations, and that those conversations can focus on 'What makes our strategy impactful?' Yeah, we've got to talk about the tactics, like how are we actually going to pull this thing off? But the more conversations we have about the strategy, the more that we speak that CRO / CEO language, the more likely we are to elevate our entire profession."Please take a listen (and subscribe to!) the podcast to hear about all of the above, and so so much more.Let's Elevate Enablement TOGETHER!Join the rise at OrchestrateSales.comMentioned in this episode:Intro bumper - https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/Outro Bumper -...

ISE Season 3 is focused on the past, present and future of Enablement History. And timed perfectly as we just celebrated the seventh anniversary of the official signing of the Sales Enablement Society into reality by the ~100 SES Fore-founders in Palm Beach, November of 2016.For Episode 3, Paul Butterfield, President of the Executive Board of the (as of recently) Revenue Enablement Society joins us on the Orchestrate Sales Property and shares his take on Enablement History:⏪ BEFORE the Sales Enablement Society: ❇️ Building out the enablement function for multiple companies including Vonage, Instructure, and General Electric's CoE. ❇️ Googling "Sales Enablement" and being introduced to the research of Scott Santucci⏯️ Paul's introduction to the SES via Jill Rowley and ultimately getting involved locally. ❇️ A review of the three founding positions and how they, in part, solidified Paul's findings from having built Enablement programs organically ❇️ A peek "behind the scenes" at the catalysts, current events, and decision making process that informed the executive board's transition from the SES to the RES⏩️ Paul's take on the present and future of Enablement and his personal mission to empower enablement through the lens of Customer Journey ❇️ Enablement has yet to fully embrace and apply "business within a business" ❇️ The impact and opportunity of A.I. ❇️ A challenge for all to embrace becoming Enablement Challengers vs. Waiters ❇️ Drop the "ROI calculator" and rather focus on reasonable correlation to resultsThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Welcome to Inside Sales Enablement, Season three, where we take a leap into the enablement time machine and...> Take a look back with those who played a part in enablement history. > Pause in the present and hit on a few modern themes> And then shift our focus to the future and what it may bring for enablement teams. Hello and welcome! I'm Erich Starrett. I started out as an ISE "Insider Nation" devotee of Sales Enablement Society founding father Scott, Santucci, and trailblazer Dr. Brian Lambert. I then collaborated with them to build OrchestrateSales.com, the global home for the podcast and related resources for Enablement Orchestrators and sales enablement history. Why? Well as a sales enablement history nerd with a passion for the continued elevation of the profession. I see it as the Sales Enablement Smithsonian and, more specifically, an opportunity to serve you - the global enablement community. Together, we will revisit the wisdom of the treasures therein as well as uncover some new ones with a series of special guests, which may even include you.The foundation of cross-functional and enablement orchestration was established in the three founding principles signed into existence by the hundred-ish fore-founders of the SES back in Palm beach in 2016, for which this week in the studio is the seven year anniversary. So in celebration after a year of hiatus, we're knocking the dust off the orchestrate sales.com property. In the first episode we had Sales Enablement Society founding father Scott Santucci as our special guest, focusing on before the SES and how it almost didn't even exist.Today, Scott rejoins me in the orchestrate sales studios, as we land alongside the a hundred-ish, fore-founders in Palm beach, back in November of 2016, where, and when the Sales Enablement Society officially began.  This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Many of the people I talk to in enablement land in a position where the infrastructure of a company is already in place. But what do you do if you need to build a function from the ground up? This week I'm chatting with Matt Cohen, Senior Sales Enablement Manager at Dotmatics. Matt's passion for alignment is why he is in Enablement. He focus on proactively identifying gaps in the buyer journey and prioritizing solutions that optimize people, processes, and technology. To advance the Enablement community, Matt sits on the board of the Sales Enablement Society's Boston Chapter and co-founded the San Diego Chapter. He frequently shares thought leadership in various forms, including articles, podcasts, and webinars. In 2023 Matt was recognized by SalesHood as an Enablement Leader Making It Happen.   Tune in today and you'll learn the following, plus MUCH MORE: What enablement should and shouldn't be responsible for How you can build a function from scratch How you can align to existing priorities when a function already exists or enablement is being done ad hoc   As Matt says: “I think it's really important to keep in mind that you have to align to the priorities of your organisation. Even if that function doesn't exist, even if you are building it from scratch. There needs to be a bit of give and take, and a willingness to expand the function to your vision of what it should and could be.” Tune in to the full episode today and subscribe to get more episodes like this!

On today's episode, Andy welcomes yet another roundtable of seasoned sales enablement professionals in a lively discussion about a multitude of issues impacting the sales industry. Panelists include Roderick Jefferson, CEO of Roderick Jefferson and Associates, Crystal Nikosey, VP of Sales Transformation at the Sales Collective, and Amy Hrehovcik, a seasoned sales professional, coach, trainer and podcast host. Topics include the CEO's views on the importance of in-person work, the role of sales management vs sales leadership, the need to incorporate EQ into the selling process, and evaluating the efficiency of the BDR/SDR role in the sales process. They also highlight the significance of detaching from a focus on outcomes, encouraging a mindset of helping rather than selling, and the necessity of centering the buyer in the sales process.Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!Thank you to our sponsors:AllegoClozdCognism

Episode 64: ISE Season 3 #1: BSESWelcome to "season three" of Inside Sales Enablement ...ISE - focused on Enablement History. I'm Erich Starrett. I started out in the ISE audience listening to SES Founding Father Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Dr. Brian Lambert', and then collaborated with them to build OrchestrateSales.com to be the global home for the ISE Podcast and related resources for Sales Enablement #Orchestrators, including Sales Enablement Society history.It is the week of the seventh anniversary of the official signing of the SES into reality by the ~100 Fore-founders in Palm Beach, November of 2016. We begin ISE Season 3 with a focus on "Before the SES ...and how it almost didn't exist" with SPECIAL GUEST Sales Enablement Society Founding Father Scott Santucci himself.Was Sales *Enablement* the first choice, or were there a few left marked through on the Forrester whiteboard?What HEROic role did the four days of Scott and Brian Lambert's Forrester Sales Enablement Conferences play?Would the Sales Enablement Society have even become a thing if Jill Rowley didn't engage a cynical Scott in a Social Media challenge centered around Tiffani Bova, with a few extra nudges from across the pond thanks to Tamara Schenk?The significance of Lisa Pintner not just letting Scott sulk in a corner at the happy hour?How do you create a forum that fosters creative conflict and to challenge each other in a positive way?What was the role of vendors including Corporate Visions (@Jody Kavanaugh and Tim Riesterer,) SAVO Group (now part of Seismic) and @iCentera (Craig Nelson)?What came into reality of the intersections of Sheevaun Thatcher, CPC, Jill Guardia (she/her), and Daniel West introducing Scott to @Jim Ninivaggi?...with involvement of key players like Walter Pollard, Carol Sustala, Mike Kunkle, Lee Levitt)How long did it take Rahul Gupta to come up with the SES Lion brand marketing package...

Join host John Golden and guest Paul Butterfield as they delve into the transition from Sales Enablement Society to Revenue Enablement Society. In this insightful podcast episode, you will discover: Why focusing on the entire customer journey is crucial for success The importance of collaboration between different departments to achieve customer success Effective communication strategies for post-sales engagement How to create a buying experience centered on business needs The essential skills of active listening and curiosity for a seamless sales process Listen now and navigate the shift from Sales Enablement to Revenue Enablement.

I recently sat down with the 4 newest members of the Sales Enablement Society Board of Directors to talk about the evolution of Sales Enablement and the Sales Enablement Society itself. Del Nakhi, Gail Behun, Mary Beth Hanifer, and Chris Kingman share their experiences, passions, and talk about the SES initiatives they're each leading. You'll hear Del talk about engaging members with compelling content while Gail is on a mission to strengthen our community. Mary Beth is leveraging her extensive experience in sales and enablement serving as our secretary, and Chris is working on a thrilling project with Johns Hopkins that you won't want to miss hearing about!Please subscibe on Apple, Spotify or Google.

Shahin chats with Georgia Watson, Sales Enablement Leader (ASEANSK region) at IBM, to discuss how you can leverage your sales enablement game in the market. The episode covers the following: Defining sales enablementHow to align with your company's sales objectivesThe impact of Generative AI on sales enablementWhere to start with sales enablement Georgia Watson is an enablement and learning leader, passionate about innovation, growth, and inclusion. With experience spanning the technology and education sectors, she has garnered accolades for creating impactful learning experiences across Australia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.  Leading sales enablement programs for IBM across ASEANZK region, Georgia is dedicated to transforming skills and culture to maximise growth and revenue.  Georgia volunteers as the Co-Global Chapter Director for the Sales Enablement Society, connecting enablers through local chapters and elevating the enablement community. When she is not working, Georgia enjoys playing superheroes with her sons or hiding from them trying to sneak in some yoga. Resources mentioned in this episode: Mel RobbinsSeth Godin _________________ Hosted & Produced by Shahin Hoda, Allysa Maywald & Alexander Hipwell, from xGrowth. We would love to get your questions, ideas and feedback about Growth Colony, email podcast@xgrowth.com.au

In this Redefining Sales podcast, we sit down with the incredible Phil Cleary, the driving force behind Salesforce's sales leader coaching function in APAC.  With over 18 years of experience at Salesforce, Phil has mastered the art of selling, enabling, and coaching. He's on a mission to guide leaders to unlock their full potential and excel in their multi-faceted roles as customer partners, business managers, and talent multipliers.  Not only that, Phil is a trailblazer in the sales enablement community. As a founding member of the Sales Enablement Society in 2016, he's dedicated to elevating and evolving the sales profession. He proudly co-chairs the Sydney chapter, whose mission is to drive growth, establish standards, and develop thriving enablement careers.  In this episode of the Redefining Sales podcast, you'll get the following:  Discover the critical sales skills essential for success in the coming year. Explore the role of AI in supporting sales at Salesforce. Uncover the key traits that define high-performance salespeople. Learn strategies for seamless integration and accelerating their productivity. Discover how to invest your time effectively in learning initiatives while managing the demands of your day job. And many more This episode is jam-packed with valuable insights, practical strategies, and personal stories. Join us as we redefine sales and empower you to reach new heights of success. Get ready to take your sales career to the next level with Phil Cleary as your guide!  Check out Phil:  ► LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clearyphil/  Join Rev Up now:  ►https://salesredefined.com.au/rev-up/  Follow Sales Redefined on:  ► LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/salesredefined/  ► Subscribe to SMarketing Lowdown  ► Download the whitepaper here: https://whitepaper.salesredefined.com.au  Enjoyed this episode and want more?  Redefining Sales Podcast Playlist: https://tinyurl.com/Redefining-Sales-Podcast 

In the fast-moving SaaS space, mergers and acquisitions are business as usual. Our guest in today's episode has led teams through nine acquisitions over the years and will share his insights on how enablement leaders can effectively navigate the challenges and capitalize on the opportunities that come with M&As. Please welcome the Executive Board President of the Sales Enablement Society and the Host of the "Stories From The Trenches" podcast, Paul Butterfield.These are some of the questions we cover:On a high level, what is the role of enablement in the context of M&As?What are the key challenges and opportunities for the sales enablement function during an acquisition?How do you make sure the acquired company's sales effectiveness doesn't suffer during the integration process?What role does communication play in sales enablement during acquisitions, both internally and with external customers and partners?Can you share a success story or case study where sales enablement played a critical role in the successful integration of an acquired company?What advice would you give to sales enablement professionals who are navigating the complex landscape of acquisitions and mergers, and what are the top factors that contribute to success?Here are some of the resources referenced in this episode:Connect with Paul Butterfield on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulrbutterfield/The SES Stories From The Trenches Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sales-enablement-society-stories-from-the-trenches/id1510380341Connect with Felix Krueger on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfkrueger/Where to find The State of Sales Enablement:Website - http://thestateofsalesenablement.com/LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-state-of-sales-enablement-podcast/Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-state-of-sales-enablement/id1558307853Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/4ceCJYJLuCbTNbRTriOFpe?si=avn_E9EGSNu3gmHfoqJ_6gMentioned in this episode:The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning ExperienceIf you want to stop reinventing the wheel, maximize business impact, and fast-track your career, consider joining a growing community of Enablers at The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning Experience. To learn more visit goffwd.com/blocks.Webinar: 7 Steps to Maximizing Enablement's Business ImpactSome of the topics Mike Kunkle and Felix Krueger cover include: - Understand the maturity level of your sales enablement team - A simple framework that will help you identify current shortfalls - How to get more done with less by effectively managing stakeholders - An overview of the sales performance levers you should consider - How to formalize a plan that delivers results and helps you gain momentum fast If making a business impact with enablement is your priority going into 2023,...

True revenue enablement is a strategic approach that aligns sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams to improve customer experiences, drive revenue growth, and increase profitability. In this episode Matt Cohen, Sr. Sales Enablement Manager at Dotmatics and I discuss the foundational elements of creating strategic enablement that he's used successfully. Listen and catch valuable insights into:Determining  if an organization is ready for strategic EnablementDefining Enablement as a critical first stepSelecting a sales methodologyCreating Enablement aligned to your buyers' experienceMatt Cohen has been in go-to-market roles for the past 7 years since earning his MBA, building enablement for sales tech leaders like Seismic and Clari through hyper-growth. Throughout his career, he has leveraged his ability to strategically align resources in a way that fosters adaptability and scale. That passion for alignment is why his career is in Enablement, which he views to be the proactive identification of gaps in the buyer journey and shaping priorities to fill them through the optimization of people, process, and technology in service of revenue. Matt co-founded the San Diego Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society, served on the Board of the Boston Chapter and is currently working on starting a new chapter in Nashville. He regularly contributes thought leadership in the form of articles, podcasts, and webinars, and was recognized this year as a 2023 Enablement Leader Making It Happen by SalesHood.Please subscibe on Apple, Spotify or Google.

Roderick Jefferson is the Founder and CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates. Roderick has been leading Sales Training and Sales Enablement for companies since the mid 2000s and has operated at scale several times with companies like PayPal, Salesforce, Oracle and Marketo.In addition to helping companies with Sales Enablement, Roderick is also one of the founding members of the Sales Enablement Society and is an Advisory Board Member for two (2) companies in the sales acceleration space: Autobound.ai and Selleration.In this episode, we learn about all things Sales Enablement but most importantly how to set it up correctly.#salesconsultantpodcast #?Time Stamps:The Definition of Sales Enablement[1:00] Roderick walks us through his impressive background and how he transitioned his career from Sales to Sales Training. Defines Sales Enablement and talks about its evolution. “You train animals, you enable people.” -Roderick JeffersonSales Enablement At Scale vs At a Startup[8:23] Talks about the differences between running Sales Enablement at a large enterprise company and a smaller startup.His Sales Enablement Consulting Practice[11:22] Roderick shares his transition into consulting + when, how and why he started Roderick & Associates[15:00] His advice to someone who wants to transition their career into an independent consultant.[18:00] How Roderick grappled with the messaging he uses in his GTM strategy as a consultant.AI Meets Sales Enablement[23:00 I ask if we're at a point with AI where we can focus more of our enablement time and money on just in time support or should we still be focusing 100% on preparing reps for scenarios (vs enabling them during the live situation).[29:00]”AI is going to give me more time to spend time with humans.” -Roderick Jefferson[31:11] Covers how Sales Enablement is measured and type of KPIs the department should be held to.Do A-Players Really Make Bad Managers?[35:80] We tackled the issue of A-Players being promoted into management and I challenge the notion that this is a bad approach.Partnering With Product Marketing[41:40] Explains what the relationship between Product Marketing and Sales Enablement should look like.Mapping a Sales Process to The Buyer Journey[45:35] Roderrick's 5 step approach to mapping your sales process to the buyer journey.Mentions:The Blueprint To Sales Enablement Excellence: Sales Enablement 3.0 - https://roderickjefferson.comAutobound.ai - https://www.autobound.aiConnect with us:Roderick's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/roderickjefferson/Roderick's Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/roderick_j_associates/Roderick's YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@roderickjeffersonassociate5012The Sales Consultant LinkedIn Page - https://the-sales-consultant-podcast.captivate.fm/Derrick's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/derricklwilliamsjr/Derrick's Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/derrickis3linksales/Derrick's Twitter - https://twitter.com/derrickis3link

Paul Butterfield is the Executive Board President of the Sales Enablement Society. Today he joins Hilmon on The Winning Zone to discuss how to create a long-term, ROI-driven coaching system.In this episode, you will learn the positive effects that impactful coaching can have on one's career journey. You will also walk away knowing the most effective strategies for engaging managers in the coaching process, as well as the best, proven tools and processes to track progress and measure success.Connect with Paul on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/paulrbutterfieldFollow him on Twitter: PRButterfieldFor more information about CoachCRM: www.coachcrm.comFor more information about ClozeLoop: www.clozeloop.comConnect with Hilmon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hilmonsorey/Follow Hilmon on IG: @hilmonsorey

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. Sales enablement teams are maturing and becoming more established each year, especially as more organizations are realizing enablement's strategic impact on business. Research from Sales Enablement PRO found that organizations are 48% more likely to have high buyer engagement if their sales enablement processes have been in place for more than two years. So how can you mature your practices as enablement becomes more established in your organization? Here to discuss this with us is Nav Nicholson, the principal sales enablement program manager at Redis. Thanks for joining Nav! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Nav Nicholson: Thanks for having me, Shawnna. As you introduced me already, I am the principal sales enablement program manager here at Redis. I own all of the sales tech stacks that we use internally, which include Highspot Outreach, Zoom Info, Linkedin Sales Navigator, and more. Not only do I own it, but I also run the workflows associated with those platforms, I own the ROI that we get from it. In addition to that, I’m also responsible to ensure that folks are using them in a consistent manner and the prescribed workflows. As far as my background goes, I come from a success world. Before I jumped into enablement I was a customer success manager and my now boss actually stole me from the last place that I was at. He decided to poach me and he brought me on as an enablement person I think it’s actually a pretty good transition, especially for somebody that was in success to join an enablement team and run with the specific focus that I have. As a success person, you’re constantly trying to train and tell people what are prescribed flow, how you should do certain things and so I’m doing exactly that but more from an enablement perspective. SS: Fantastic. Well, we’re excited to have you join us today. I’d love to start off by just understanding what enablement maturity means for enablement success within your organization. NN: I feel like this is one of those things that every team is going to define totally different and it depends on who you’re talking to and what their typical focus looks like. My response might be a little different than what other people might say, but how we look at enablement maturity, we have some key components. The key components that we personally look at Redis are basically sales effectiveness, performance, and readiness. In addition to that, we also look at some buyer engagement, and another one that I’m responsible for is content management. All of those play a very critical part in our day-to-day that allows us to determine what our sales enablement maturity looks like. SS: I think you’re spot on in your experience, how has your enablement strategy may be changed or evolved as it’s matured? NN: When I joined our team there were only two people. We had a VP and a director, so I was one of the very first actual practitioner enablement higher that owned enablement from the day-to-day perspective, even though our director was super involved in the teams that we support. With me coming on board we started having more hands-on conversations with leadership and management. In addition to that, we started to have more one on one with reps too. Now we have nine people by the way. We started from two to nine and so it all happened because of the need and also the integrated approach that we’re starting to follow for our enablement team. The way that we’re structured at the moment is we have a person that’s dedicated to account planning, we have head counts that are more focused on team-specific readiness, and then we have an onboarding person and a content writer and you already know that I own the tech stack and then we have a person that’s responsible for just sales performance. We also have charters that help us outline what our focus needs to look like for any given quarter or year. In addition to that, we do follow a lot of different workflows and frameworks that help us define our goals in the long run. I know that’s a long-winded response to your question but our maturity kind of depends on the need for the business, so where does the business want to be, and we kind of align our expectations to that. SS: Awesome. That does tee us up nicely for the next question. What does your process look like for auditing and optimizing your current workflows? NN: We’re very data-driven and when I say we’re very data-driven like we have multiple folks on our team that are actually really good at creating reports and putting together dashboards. I know most enablement teams typically work with their ops team, and so do we, we actually have a very strong relationship with our internal sales ops team, but our team also does a very fantastic job. I’m one of the people that create reports and dashboards for us that helps us understand the workflows that we’re creating landing. Like are folks actually following the suggested structure that we’ve given to them to achieve the goals that they have? We are very much so involved in their day-to-day function. Say for prospecting, as an example, our team is actually telling them where to go, what to do, and at what time. Our flow starts with identifying your accounts and finding your prospects, adding them to the sequence, but what flow do you need to follow to get to that, we prescribe that to them. In addition to that, we also track who’s really performing well with the flow that we’ve suggested. It’s actually pretty easy to see if people are following the prescriptive workflows. The way we can track that is by using some of the reporting and metrics that we’ve rolled out to folks and ensuring that people are hitting those. If they’re not, it’s quite simple for us to know who are the folks that are actually not doing what we’re suggesting that they do. The way we’re auditing that is using the reporting, but in addition to that our hands-on approach is more with the folks that are owning those teams. We work very closely with managers to kind of have a conversation where they let us know, okay, because these folks are not following the process that you’ve rolled out, here’s the potential reason that they might not be, or here’s the reason why we need to have a direct conversation with them to steer them in the right direction. We have one on ones with our reps that may not be following the workflow that we’re suggesting and we work very closely with the leaders and managers to ensure that we have buy-in from them. At the end of the day, enablement can do so much, but if we don’t have the necessary buy-in from the leadership, the stuff that we’re rolling out is not going to get picked up. SS: Absolutely, you’re spot on. How do you go about tying your enablement processes and programs to specific business goals that as you said, your leaders care deeply about that will help you get that buy-in? NN: That’s actually a great question. We have recently started focusing on this and because of how ingrained we are in our seller’s day-to-day, our team is tied to the revenue that our sales teams are generating. Not only do we come into play towards the end of the sale cycle, were involved from the start to the beginning, from prospecting to discovery to evaluation and purchase. All of that. We are very much so involved in the entire process. We’re fully integrated into their day-to-day. The way that we determine how our processes are really helping the teams is based on the pipeline that they’re generating. In addition to that, we’re also tied to the revenue that they’re generating. If the teams are not producing enough pipeline, it comes down to us identifying, okay, is it because of the workflows that we’ve rolled out and those are not landing? Or is it because folks are actually not following those workflows which are leading to the gap in the pipeline that we were generating? SS: I’m so excited to hear that you guys are starting to do that within your organization. I think that’s a huge step forward in helping enablement position itself strategically within the organization. What goals do you have for the next year in regard to maybe helping to evolve enablement maturity within your organization? NN: I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to the maturity models and kind of identifying where we fall in that category. Obviously, I know there are so many different maturity models that are out there and so some of the ones that I’ve looked at recently are like the one from demand metrics and the one from Highspot and there are so many of them. I would say that as far as where we fall today we’re kind of like a good mix between data-driven and partially mature. No one’s ever going to tell you that their enablement team is like fully at a level where they’re optimized and their entire flows are fully integrated with everything. I think we do always have room for improvement. As far as our organization goes or how our team is functioning as I said, we’re a key player in pipeline tracking and management. In addition to that, we are quite involved with ops and marketing. We also play a very critical factor in driving revenue and growth and we are supported by execs and leadership as I said. We also track usage and adoption, which I mentioned. Our team is extremely data-driven and we try to focus our initiatives based on what we’re really looking for as a team or as a company or as an organization. Our VP of enablement is very close to our CRO. Depending on what our chief revenue officer is looking for, our charters change and our initiatives also change. We always align our expectations with what the company needs and desires. As far as our future, in the direction that we’re heading, I mean we all know that the economy is kind of experiencing ebbs and flows, so with that comes the revenue that your company is generating is also going to have ebbs and flows. On top of that, pipeline creation becomes quite important because nowadays folks are only going to have conversations with you if the product that you’re selling is necessary for their day-to-day and if it’s going to become a part of their mission-critical approach. Our focus for the rest of this year and going into next fiscal year is to ensure that our teams understand the requirements around, hey, you need to have conversations that are more pain based, you need to follow the workflows that we’re suggesting because those are actually going to help you win the deals that you might have staggered. In addition to that, if you’re wanting to create a pipeline, it’s important that you follow the structure and the KPI metrics that we’ve rolled out because consistency is going to get you across the board. Being all over the place is not going to help you in any way. Again, long-winded response, but I think the direction that we’re going is going to be very much so just ensuring that we’re understanding their internal data, understanding how our teams perform and aligning our goals, and prioritizing our expectations with that. SS: Now I’d love to get your perspective. What do you think other enablement practitioners should know about enablement maturity and what can you share to help them prepare their own journeys? NN: I think the very first thing that they need to look at is how would you define your enablement maturity. How do you define your team’s primary focus? From there build that towards how you’re going to achieve that maturity and look at the primary criteria that are going to enable yourself and also the teams that you’re supporting and the part that leadership that’s supporting you is going to play in that. One of the things that I noticed last week when I was at Sales Enablement Society is folks are hungry to understand how other sales enablement teams are running the function. There’s a lot that goes into an enablement team and the way they function, but as far as the maturity goes for the enablement team, it’s very much so dependent on the desires and the requirements that your company has. We’re lucky that our CRO understands the importance that an enablement team has in their day-to-day. Not every company does. For a lot of folks, you are going to have to do some internal selling in order for the teams to understand the critical part that the enablement team plays in the actual revenue-generating goals. Long story short, I think the things that enablement needs to consider as they’re going to mature is looking at what’s on the charter, obviously creating that charter on the front end, aligning that with the company goals and the desires that your leadership has, and ensure that you have buy-in from the team’s. Not only from the leadership and executive level but also from the front-line managers. Those front-line managers are the ones that are going to reinforce anything that you’re rolling out. Any framework that you’re rolling out or any workflows that you’re rolling out. If you don’t have to buy in from the front-line managers, whatever you’re sharing is not going to land and it’s not going to show any success. In addition to that, once you do roll out those frameworks and once you do roll out workflows that you’re rolling out, make sure you have the plan to track the success. Make sure you’ve identified the metrics that are going to help you understand if the work you’re doing is making an impact. We’re at a place where nobody wants to just roll something out just because you think it’s the right thing, they want to see an actual impact that we’re making. SS: Absolutely last question for you. To close, how has your organization leveraged Highspot to help achieve some of the business outcomes that you guys have seen through enablement? NN: We rolled out Highspot almost 2.5 years ago at this point, and we actually replaced another competitor of yours. Folks didn’t really believe in a content management system prior to us rolling out Highspot, and here’s why. No one really owned that platform at the time and things were a complete mess. Once we rolled out Highspot, we started to organize our content in a way that it’s easier for people to find it. Now, I’m not going to say that we’re pro at it, one of the projects that I’m focusing on in the coming months is actually restructuring our Highspot content and how we’re presenting that to our sales team. To do that, I’ll be working very closely with our teams and kind of going through the format that we’ve put together and seeing if it will help them in identifying the content. As far as using Highspot, it has played a very critical part in our seller’s day today. Not only are we using Highspot as a CMS, but we also use Highspot's Training and Coaching capability and we use Highspot capabilities for our onboarding and so our boot camp sessions and our onboarding sessions, which is set up in a way where folks can just go into a Highspot and kind of complete this, so it’s self-paced. Not only are we just using this for onboarding purposes, but we also use that whenever we purchase a new product. We rolled out 6sense late last year, so I created an actual course. These were two separate courses, one for SDRs and one for AEs that outline the workflow that’s recommended as far as the usage of 6sense goes. That’s how we rolled that out. When we onboard 6sense folks actually had to go through that training, and so whenever a new hire starts, they all go through that training. That’s just one example. We have many other examples where we’re using Highspot capabilities to ensure that folks understand from the front end instead of just going into some of those other platforms to kind of do whatever they want. Highspot has played a very critical role in our onboarding needs in addition to that also ensuring that our content is up to date. We track buyer engagement with our content, so how engaged are our buyers with some of the content that we’re creating? We have analytics and reporting on all of that too. I’m a big fan and love Highspot and excited to see the way we plan on evolving it in the coming months. SS: I love to hear that. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. NN: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. SS: 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.

While practice doesn't always promise perfection in sales, it's the type of preparation that is necessary for success as a beginner in sales. Through practice and repetition, you can increase your confidence, overcome your fear of failure, and begin to close those crucial deals.  In this episode of Tech Sales is for Hustlers, Campus Series, Rob Peterson, Dean's Distinguished Professor of Sales at Northern Illinois University; Editor of Journal of Selling; and Founding Member of the Sales Enablement Society describes his classes, how he works with students, and how he prepares them for sales jobs with various exercises and improvisations. 

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 Daniel West from MYOB join us. Daniel, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role and your organization to our audience. Daniel West: Hello, it’s great to be here with you today. I am the chief sales and support officer for MYOB and we’re a SAAS provider of business management solutions to almost a million small and medium-sized businesses across Australia and New Zealand. We are an organization of about 2000 people and I have the pleasure of leading our teams across marketing, sales, solution consulting, partners, customer success services, and support along with the operations and enablement teams who support those functions. I actually returned to Australia about 18 months ago after spending 17 years living and working in Palo Alto in California for Oracle, Salesforce, Informatica, Infoblox, and HP in a number of different Go-To-Market operations and enablement leadership roles. I was actually one of the founding members and chapter president of the Bay Area chapter of the Sales Enablement Society. Enablement as a discipline is certainly something that I’m very passionate about and something that’s been part of my career for more than 20 years now. SS: Well, Daniel, I’m very excited to have you on the podcast given your deep involvement in the enablement space. I have to say I am jealous, Australia is on my list of must-visit places in my lifetime so I’m jealous that you are back there. It is a beautiful, beautiful country, On LinkedIn, you mentioned that you are responsible for leading efforts to improve go-to-market effectiveness. In your opinion, what role does enablement play in driving GTM effectiveness? DW: So I’ve always believed that fundamentally the role of enablement is to drive change and transform the way that an organization’s, what I call the value delivery system, so these are all the parts of the organization that deliver value to customers, so sales, pre-sales services, customer success, those parts of the organization that they number one are aligned and that they have the level of readiness that’s needed to deliver those customer outcomes. As an example, if a company is making the shift from a product selling to a value selling motion, enablement is responsible for ensuring that sales and the other frontline teams are equipped not only with the right skills and assets but also the right processes so that they can drive those value-based conversations with those target customers and really connect with their business challenges and demonstrate how that particular organization can help those customers solve those challenges and ultimately drive better outcomes for the customer but also better outcomes from bookings and revenue perspective for that sales organization. SS: Now you actually spoke at a recent event and you were talking about the importance of customer-focused, go-to-market initiatives to drive sales transformation, I think in today’s business environment, why is it especially important to make sure that you align the go-to-market strategy with the needs of your customers? DW: The more relevant you can be to your customers the better off you will be. Just to give you an example, MYOB is currently going through a transformation of our own, we’re moving from a SaaS and on-premise products to a SaaS platform solution focused around this idea of business management and as part of that transformation journey, we have aligned our go-to-market function around customer segments. These are specific cohorts or groups of customers that share a set of common attributes and this structure helps to ensure that our go-to-market initiatives defined, orchestrated, and executed by the teams that are as close to the customer as possible and therefore as informed about that customer’s specific needs and requirements as possible, which increases our relevancy and our ability to serve a particular customer segment as effectively as we can. SS: I love that. To dig into that a little bit more, what are some of your best practices for gaining the customer insights that you need to inform some of your initiatives? DW: Yes, so I think there’s a couple but talking to them is always good, just to state the obvious. Talking to your customers either formally through a research effort or customer focus groups and so on or even just informally through check-ins and and things like that is always good. I think more formally, we have established some structures internally within MYOB so that we can gather input and feedback from the people who spend the most time with our customers, which unsurprisingly are our frontline teams. So we’ve established what we call an advisory council that’s made up from representatives across sales, support, success, and services and they play a role in bringing the voice of the customer to the table when we’re reviewing the types of go-to-market initiatives and programs that we’re looking to run as part of our 90-day planning and execution cadence. Every 90 days as we look at our go-to-market initiatives for three or six months out, we bring this group of people together and they provide us with the input and feedback on those go-to-market opportunities that can then inform how effective they are going to be, what changes we need to make again to drive that customer relevance that I talked about earlier and also how we can ensure that they’re going to be executed well when they get into the field or into those frontline teams. On top of that, we also use data. We use Gong data, we use usage complaints, calls, data, website visits, reviews, etcetera and kind of gather all of that information together to extract insights about how our customers are reacting to what we’re putting into the market and so that we can make adjustments as necessary. SS: That’s fantastic. Now, another thing that you had mentioned, Daniel, was you talked about the role specialization that helps align to the buyer’s journey. What does that look like in terms of enablement and how can this help improve the customer experience? DW: Yes, I think there are two elements of that. One is making sure that you have specialists, and most organizations have this today in the SaaS world, but you have people who are specialists at different parts of the buyer’s journey. What I mean by that is you have market development and sales development reps who are focused on driving that initial interaction and discovery qualification with the customer, you have a sales specialist who is responsible for ensuring that they’re working with that customer to guide them through that buying journey, you have customer success, who is then responsible for ensuring that customer get once they’ve made that purchase decision that they are getting on-boarded as effectively as possible and they are starting to adopt and use whatever the key capabilities are in the given solution that’s going to help that customer extract value as quickly as possible. So number one, there’s having the right specialized roles as opposed to kind of a general account management role that tries to do all of those things and usually doesn’t do them particularly well, but then there’s also the enablement element which is what I would call role-based enablement. Role-based enablement is the opposite of one size fits all enablement and it’s really making sure that you have an enablement program, enablement content that is tailor-made for those specialist roles that I just mentioned. So you have an enablement program for those business development roles that are predominantly focused on the front end of that customer journey. You have enablement that is tailored for sales, for solution, consulting, for customer success so that the individuals in those roles have the specific content and assets and knowledge that align to their role in that customer journey and then allows in the case of sellers for example, to provide that customer or prospect with compelling insights that demonstrate why change, why now, why MYOB, or why your company. Just maybe to build on that a little bit we have built out sales playbooks by sales specialization. Even within our sales organization, we have acquisition-focused sales specialists and we have expansion-focused sales specialists. We also have within our business sales teams who are focused on very small customers that tend to have very high velocity, high volume transactions and then more enterprise type buying processes without ERP solutions and so on. So again, we haven’t taken a one size fits all approach to enabling those sales roles because they are quite different. So we’ve built out sales playbooks against those different types of sales specialists, so that even though our sales methodology has a common foundation, the customers have different needs and types of conversations and talk tracks that they’re going to respond to that address their specific needs and challenges, so that tailoring is quite critical. From a customer experience perspective, obviously, again, the more relevant those conversations that your sales specialists are having with particular types of customers is going to improve that customer experience, demonstrate to that customer that you really understand their business and their pain and ultimately going to predispose them to working with your company and your solution and ultimately getting value from that offering. SS: I love that. Now, Daniel, you’ve been in enablement for quite some time and now your role has really expanded quite a bit. As a GTM leader how do you foster collaboration across the business to ensure progress against a lot of the company’s core objectives? DW: So, I think ultimately communication and stakeholder alignment are the secret sauce to effective transformation and change. Making sure that you are establishing clear priorities with your stakeholders, providing regular updates on those priorities and managing resources and capacity constraints against those priorities is critical to managing and meeting expectations and then to secure the support and participation that you need from other parts of the business, you have to again be able to connect those initiatives that you’re working on back to those broader business objectives or OKRs that your company is putting front and center and really use those as the way to drive alignment against those initiatives that you need to move forward but that you need other parts of the organization to work with you on to move those forward. Communication and stakeholder alignment, the more senior you go, the more time you spend in those areas. SS: Absolutely. That could be said across a lot of different roles for sure. Now, last question for you, Daniel, because I realized we’re almost at time, what are some of the key metrics that you prioritize to really understand the effectiveness of these GTM efforts and how can enablement teams better correlate their efforts to impact on these key metrics? DW: So I think the ultimate metrics for go-to-market effectiveness, did we hit the revenue target? And did we hit the EBITDA targets? In terms of the type, the leading indicators that that would that would roll up to those are the ones that I really focus on bookings attainment against the target, bookings per sales head, which is a key measure of sales effectiveness because if you can over time see an improving trend in the output from a bookings perspective per sales head that you have in the organization, then that means you’re getting more out of the investments that you’ve made in sales from a headcount perspective. I think there’s also bookings per dollar invested in sales or what I would call a bookings to cost yield metric from an onboarding and a productivity perspective there is time to first deal, so when you have a new rep, once they’ve completed the onboarding program, how quickly are they actually closing their first deal. From a customer success perspective, obviously reducing turn. CAC to LTV I think is one that is becoming increasingly more important as we need to both manage customer acquisition costs against the lifetime value of a SaaS customer. Then for go-to-market specifically the two things that I look at is one, what is the absolute value of the pipeline and of created by a particular go-to-market initiative and did it hit the targets and how well is it converting to bookings, and for go-to-market overall, what percentage of those of your total bookings and pipeline targets are those go-to-market initiatives delivering to the company because ultimately the role of go-to-market is to make sure that as an organization you are focused on the most important opportunities in the market and that you were aligning all of your resources to execute effectively against those opportunities. If you’re not driving 60% of your pipeline and bookings from those go-to-market initiatives, then you’re probably focusing potentially in the wrong area. I think those would be the key ones that I would call out. SS: I think those are fantastic. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. I learned a lot from you and I really appreciate the time. DW: My pleasure, Shawnna and lovely to speak to you. 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.

The amazingness of my guests and the insight they bring keeps astounding me. You are in for another fantastic show today with Roderick Jefferson. The first conversation he and I had, I was scribbling notes like a madwoman. Today, you'll hear us talking about the importance of making someone else's day a little bit better. The first wake up call that woke him up temporarily and the adjustments he made after that. The other piece of the equation to ROI. How to be a better leader. And so much more. Roderick Jefferson's list of titles and experience is extensive and impressive. He's a rock star in the sales enablement world. And we didn't focus on any of that in this show. For the record tho, he's the Vice President, Field Enablement at Netskope with 20+ years of field enablement leadership experience. He's also a keynote speaker in that space and the author of the Amazon bestselling book, Sales Enablement 3.0: The Blueprint to Sales Enablement Excellence. He is currently an Executive-in-Residence with VentureScale and one of the founding members of the Sales Enablement Society. Roderick is also a member of several Advisory Boards. When he's not working – which he is much better at doing now – you'll find him perfecting the art of barbecuing or playing on his bocce court with his family. Today's episode is sponsored by Zen Rabbit. The question many people are facing lately is – are you in a really bad place? Or a less bad place? Either way, it's bad. The Great Resignation isn't happening because people simply want more money. Studies show it's because they want to work in a culture that values them and thinks holistically about their happiness and well-being. This is where the F*ck Being Fine program for companies comes in. It's time to stop saying everything's fine when, clearly, everyone's hair is on fire. The program teaches business leaders and their teams how to stay calm and grounded no matter what's going on around them. So they can focus better, respond thoughtfully instead of react impulsively, work more efficiently. And ultimately increase profitability. If this sounds like something that would be valuable in your work environment, message me at Lori@ZenRabbit.com or text me at 571.317.1463. Roderick's walkout song is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fneGMgyMSE ("Brush Your Shoulders Off" by Jay-Z) Website: https://roderickjefferson.com/ (https://roderickjefferson.com/ ) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roderickjefferson/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/roderickjefferson/ ) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ThevoiceofRod/ (https://www.facebook.com/ThevoiceofRod/ ) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roderick_j_associates/ (https://www.instagram.com/roderick_j_associates/) Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThevoiceofRod (https://twitter.com/ThevoiceofRod)

In this episode I am joined by Paul Butterfield  to talk about how to measure and attribute success to enablement.  You'll Learn:1. How to correlate enablement to revenue growth.2. Building out your internal NPS score.3. What specific initiatives drive enablement success forward.About Paul:Paul Butterfield is the Vice President of Global Revenue Enablement at Instructure, and one of the founders of the Sales Enablement Society. Leveraging  his 20 years in sales and sales enablement to help sales and customer success organizations transform into truly customer-centric organizations that differentiate through they sell rather than with price or product features. Expert in analyzing sales organizations and implementing sales process and messaging. These transformations have resulted in significant uplift such as an increase in competitive win rates from 50% to 67%-75% inContact experienced.Paul's Specialities: Sales enablement, sales effectiveness, sales methodology, CustomerCentric Selling® and Selling Through Curiosity® customization and implantation, account management, cloud sales, SaaS sales, customer success, customer retention, software sales, direct sales, channel sales, channel management

Over the last 17 years, our guest has played a key role in enabling astronomical growth for his business across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and India. In this episode, we catch up with https://www.linkedin.com/in/clearyphil/ (Phil Cleary), Senior Director for Sales Enablement at one of the world's most iconic technology brands, Salesforce. These are some of the questions we're discussing: What are the key insights that came out from the Sales Enablement Society conference? Difference of high-performing organisations vs low-performing sales organisations Sales enablement evolving to revenue enablement and specialisation of the sales enablement role Competencies and common trends in sales enablement Local appetite for virtual communities and events How do you make sure that you stay strategically focused and shift the needle for Salesforce across all markets and product areas? Using the Customer 360 methodology in aligning to the customers What did you see happening during the pandemic that has affected the way your sales team works? How do business leaders ensure that they can successfully introduce a tech stack that supports a hybrid buyer journey? Here are some of the resources referenced in this episode. Sales enablement resources brought to you by Krueger Marketing: https://www.kruegermarketing.com/learn (https://www.kruegermarketing.com/learn) Connect with Phil Cleary online: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clearyphil/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/clearyphil/) Connect with Felix Krueger online:https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfkrueger/ ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfkrueger/) Where to find The State of Sales Enablement: Website (subscriber exclusives can be found here) -http://thestateofsalesenablement.com/ ( http://thestateofsalesenablement.com/) LinkedIn -https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-state-of-sales-enablement-podcast/ ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-state-of-sales-enablement-podcast/) Apple Podcasts -https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-state-of-sales-enablement/id1558307853 ( https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-state-of-sales-enablement/id1558307853) Spotify -https://open.spotify.com/show/4ceCJYJLuCbTNbRTriOFpe?si=avn_E9EGSNu3gmHfoqJ_6g ( https://open.spotify.com/show/4ceCJYJLuCbTNbRTriOFpe?si=avn_E9EGSNu3gmHfoqJ_6g)

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast, I’m 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 really excited to have a return guest to our podcast, one of our original podcast members, Chris Kingman from TransUnion. Chris, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Christopher Kingman: Thanks, Shawnna. My name is Chris Kingman. I’m the Global Head of Digital Enablement for TransUnion, founding member and current member of the Board of Advisors for the Sales Enablement Society, and now a member of the Board of Evangelists for Sales Enablement PRO. I’ve been at TransUnion for 10.5 years in various roles in enablement in the U.S. for seven years. Just wrapped up international support for three and a half years and now in a global role supporting both. SS: I’m excited to have you back with us, Chris, and representing our Evangelist program, thank you so much. As you mentioned in your intro, you’ve been an established leader in enablement for several years, and you and I go back several years as well. You’ve personally experienced how the sales enablement function has grown and evolved over the years, so I’d love to hear from you, what drew you to sales enablement originally? What would you say keeps you motivated and passionate about enablement? CK: Well, I don’t think I was drawn to enablement. I think like most people, I got pushed into it or I fell into the role. I was working at a tech startup and for anybody who’s ever come from the tech startup background knows there is more work than people. Over a really short period of I think about three years, I just amassed all of the responsibilities that we today lump under enablement. That’s how I got my start, I was doing a lot of the necessities. I’m motivated by the idea that sales enablement can immensely impact or affect our organizations in a positive manner. Firstly, it’s the immediate seller. I was in sales once and I did absolutely horribly, I failed at it so bad. I know what it’s like to feel unsupported and have no resources or help. I don’t ever want my sellers to feel that way. A lot of the programs I design or any of the strategies I lay out are grounded in that idea. Second, as you scale, and as I have over the years gone from supporting a localized team to a global organization, you begin to have positive effects on other areas. The biggest one being revenue, you get to actually see how your programs and initiatives are impacting the bottom line. You also get to impact things like morale, you get to reduce turnover, and you get to help individuals. You get to know them, and you get to help them. I think all of those things are some of the things that always keep me motivated, interested. The great thing about enablement and the thing I also really enjoy is connecting with my fellow leaders and practitioners. I’ve been very fortunate over the last few years between all of the organizations and the seminars to meet so many amazing, great people. I always keep coming back for that. SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. I love our sales enablement space, but I think a lot of practitioners that are listening could understand and align with how you fell into enablement back in the day. Now, you are actually, as I mentioned, one of our first guests that we ever had on this podcast. In that episode, I want to say almost three years ago now, we asked you where you saw the momentum for sales enablement leading in the future. Now that we’re a ways into that future, what has the evolution of sales enablement looked like in the past couple of years from your perspective? CK: The first thing I’m happy to see happen over the last few years is the gradual dropping of the word sales from enablement. Certainly, we refer to it here as sales enablement, but the farther you go out into organizations, and especially if you look into a lot of the information on hiring, a lot of the information on jobs, or if you scour the job boards, you’re going to find more results searching for enablement than sales. When you dig into the quality of those JDs and those postings, they’re grounded in sales enablement roles. I said that a long time ago that one of our biggest limiters was just that term, it confuses a lot of people. I believe this has helped the discipline become more approachable. It’s been interesting to watch the discipline evolve, especially as there’s been increasingly more studies on the function and its impact, including the one Sales Enablement PRO does. I’ve noticed a few things I think are important over the last few years. Anecdotally, I’ve seen more jobs for SE roles in general, but as you read through them, there’s a better description of how that role exists in the organization. A while back it was a single discipline or a single role. Now, I see more and more leader roles or SE manager roles with the prospect of building teams within defined hierarchies and structures. This is good because some of the earlier research indicated there was a real hesitancy to hire and build enablement functions because organizations didn’t quite know where to start. I think this is on the decline now as more understanding of enablement is being established. This may not sound like a big achievement, but if you looked at all the data, three, four years ago, a lot of the stuff really indicated that people were aware of it, they understood the need, but they didn’t know really where to start. Now I think we’re seeing some of that ambiguity die off and we’re seeing people investing where they think enablement should be in their organization. I think those are really big changes that have been great to see over the last few years. Of course, the second one is the move to digital. That was always coming. A lot of thought leaders and things like that have always said the move to digital is where people are looking to go, but it was certainly accelerated due to the pandemic. It’s been interesting to see the initial reaction to the move to digital and what we thought what was important, like changing digital engagements for structures, access, and modalities of learning and the emergence of the dreaded zoom fatigue. Today, we’re looking to balance impactful meetings without burning our sellers out. A very different approach compared to a few years ago, where face-to-face was how you sold, and less attention was paid in certain areas in certain organizations. I think the acceleration of the adoption of digital and how we’ve progressed through it, at first everybody went double down on video cons and having virtual happy hours and every training was a face-to-face video call to where we are now where there’s a little bit less hands-on. There are dedicated days when you leave people alone or you go back to older ways of training or developing sellers through links to content or watch this video. It’s all been very interesting to see the reaction of practitioners and leadership. SS: I couldn’t agree more. Now, you also shared with us some of the skills and expertise needed to succeed in enablement, and at the time it included listening and staying close to the front lines and thinking about the big picture. How would you say that’s evolved recently? Would you say that things that things like the shift to digital has impacted the traits that organizations look for in enablement candidates? CK: Certainly. I still believe listening and staying close to the frontline are key. I would argue those will never go away, even now sellers need a defined outlet if you will, to voice their needs and concerns. I still believe that those sellers' anecdotal feedback and the leader anecdotal feedback leads to larger issues. That’s always how I’ve approached finding out my own business needs and critical business issues. Even in this digital space, sellers, leaders, they don’t feel as connected, so that connection to them, listening to them and offering them outlets and stuff and staying on top of the sellers and constantly engaging and saying, what’s going on? What support do you need? I think it's more critical now that we don’t have the benefit of maybe sitting in a call center or having a meeting every Friday in the office, things like that. It’s those little moments that are missing that you now have to artificially recreate in order to maintain some of the benefits. Given the recent changes, if I was hiring or staffing teams, I would look for someone with proven abilities in digital selling or supporting digital or inside sales organizations. Not necessarily from the skills perspective, but the discipline and the technology perspective. Right now, CRM is probably your second most important tool behind maybe telephone and email. Somebody that can drive effective adoption of those things is key. If you weren’t technologically inclined, I feel now is the time to get educated on the tools that organizations are using past things like zoom or your video con platform and past the CRM. Especially if you’re in a discipline like training, maybe like support or comp, what are the other avenues? What are the other tools that you might be able to adopt in this new environment? I would also look for practitioners with demonstrated communication skills and change management skills. I’m pretty sure everyone will agree, the number of emails they’ve gotten has gone up, the number of meetings they attend has gone up, so you need somebody who has that conscientious mind. They are mindful in how they approach change or introduce new concepts or initiatives in all digital organizations. We don’t have the luxury of in-person meetings, most of us don’t, or on-demand resources where you can walk to someone’s desk for support. Right now, to me, one of the most critical things that we look at is how well we navigate and communicate these changes or what we’re attempting to do from a strategic and tactical perspective. Those are some of the skills I would look for in a practitioner role to join my organization. SS: Those are fantastic traits to be looking for. Now, you recently wrote an article on spring cleaning, which I loved. Talking about your sales enablement practices, how often would you say you’re re-evaluating your processes to keep pace with the evolution of the sales enablement function, and what is the impact of doing so? CK: As I’ve scaled my remit at TransUnion, if you will, I’ve had to approach the spring cleaning in two different ways. In about a quarterly fashion, I go and review what programs and what initiatives and what things we’re doing to support sellers, and then align those to the sales and go-to-market strategies that our teams are employing to make sure that from a tactical perspective they’re supported. That’s very quick and iterative. Do they have the assets? The campaigns? Is the technology lined up? Is the training lined up? Is the certification lined up? Do they understand what they need to do in this three-to-six-month window? Those are always iterative and we’re always sitting down and aligning and making sure that the processes and the things that we do are set to support these people. Then strategically, I reevaluate the priorities every six months. Now, this is for larger-scale initiatives around development programs, leadership identified needs, technology investments, and the scaling of those technologies. Because of the longer build and lead times, never mind securing funding, I try to maximize the design time when we go to launch or execute these programs so there’s little deviation or modification once they’re launched. This short cycle iterative review and then long cycle review helps me stay on top of the tactical actions to make sure our sellers have everything they need to do in the short term, but also make sure that long-term strategically my technology investments, my programs are all aligned to the three-year plans, the organizational goals, the management identified gaps or needs or things like that. We can make sure that wherever the organization wants to go, we have a strategic all the way down to a tactical plan to cover that. I don’t like guessing games, I certainly hate surprises. Anytime we get the opportunity to sit down with the leadership and say, tell us what you want us to go do and we will tell you how we’re going to support it, never pass those. SS: Those are golden opportunities. Now, just for the sake of staying in alignment to how we get started in our first podcast, in the next couple of years, how do you see the sales enablement function evolving and what are a few focus areas that organizations should be paying attention to as they’re moving into the year ahead? CK: I think we can agree that digital selling is here to stay in some capacity. I believe all major consulting firms have published some data to attest to that. How much time your sellers will spend in that channel will remain to be seen. I feel that there are a few things to consider when looking forward at the future of enablement. First, practitioners and leaders should reevaluate their tech stacks, especially given the dominance of digital selling and the assumed prevalence here moving forward. Are you using platforms to their fullest potential? Those are some of the things that I would look at. Are you duplicating functionalities? This could be a key exercise as the cost of maintaining multiple platforms will become unscalable at a certain point. Certainly, something I look to do constantly is making sure that adoption of a platform is there and then understanding the capabilities of it, similar to an iPhone. You can make a phone call with an iPhone, but that isn’t necessarily all it can’t do, so why not explore the full breadth and depth of a platform. I’d recommend getting most of your tools aligned and making sure that you’re using them to the fullest ability, and then leveraging things like AI or machine learning where possible to further pair down how much software you actually have to pay for. If you have three applications when in reality two of them can suffice, save the money, get rid of the third application and reinvest that into something that’s going to drive efficiency or drive effectiveness. Over the next three years, I think you’ll see a lot of consolidation of tech platforms. We’ve certainly seen it this year with a couple of the bigger ones acquiring smaller entities. I think there should always be a review of the technology compared to where do we want to go as an organization. If we want to grow to a certain amount of money or a certain size, or you want to emerge into a certain market, are we technologically enabled to do that. I think for a practitioner, especially those in the tech space, it’s something you’re going to be spending a lot of time on. The other thing I would look at is up-skilling sellers. That is an endless process in my opinion. You should always be preparing them for the next way to sell or preparing them for the way that buyers want to buy. It may not seem obvious, but how we sell and how customers want to buy is evolving due to this digital environment. A lot of great work has been put out over the last few years about the size of buying committees or what I think is pretty notable is the Sense Maker work done by Gartner, which talks about how customers want to be engaged with from a sales rep and the perspective that they want. I think all of those things are key in understanding in what market that you sell and what space is your product or your solution and the people that you sell to. How do they want to buy it? What are they like? Deeper dives into what works, how are you winning, and more importantly, how are you losing, are all things that are going to feed into how you’re preparing your sellers. One of the key areas to focus on is developing the skills to maximize the value for a client, providing the right information, and addressing their critical business issues all while minimizing the time on calls. Customers are more educated than ever, and you combine that with a very real digital fatigue, and you now have a new buying dynamic that I don’t feel we’ve really dug into as a discipline or a practice. I think over the next few years, you’ll see a lot of thought leadership and sales development or coaching around how to drive the utmost value in the smallest amount of time. Whether that’s pitch templates, whether that’s how to address certain customers, whether that’s allowing customers better resources to enable themselves through digital sales rooms or a better website. Those are all things I think practitioners need to consider and partner with their internal partners through marketing, through technology, things like that to enable. I think things are going to only get more complex, unfortunately, as we navigate the next three years. The last thing I challenge practitioners and leaders to consider is how to prepare for the return to field selling. At some point we may go back to a semblance of normal. I think an emerging key differentiator in the next three years is the willingness to go see clients in person. I think developing a safe strategy that brings the benefits of digital engagement combined with the effectiveness of an in-person interaction will be a winning formula in the next few years, SS: Chris, as always, I learn a ton every time I talk to you. Thank you so much for joining us today, I really appreciate you making the time. CK: Absolutely, thank you. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesnablement.pro. If there’s 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.

Sales Enablement 3.0: The Blueprint to Sales Enablement Excellence by Roderick Jefferson About the Book: Sales enablement is both an art and science. There are no magical silver bullets or single approach that will guarantee that you will be successful. There is, however, a formula just like any other success process, program, or tool that requires a combination of practical application, trial and error, mixed with a lot of conversations with sales leaders to understand their wants, needs, and expectations. At its core Sales Enablement 3.0 is an innovative approach focused on increasing sales productivity through a systematic, personalized, and collaborative approach designed to support buyers that will fuel the conversation economy and impact revenue. This book will provide you with a blueprint that will help you to navigate the twists and turns that will ultimately lead you to designing, deploying, measuring, and iterating a world-class sales enablement organization.  About the Author: Roderick Jefferson is an award-winning senior executive with 20+ years of sales leadership and is an acknowledged practitioner and keynote speaker in the sales enablement space. He is currently an Executive-in-Residence with VentureScale and one of the founding members of the Sales Enablement Society. Prior to his current position at Netskope, he held a variety of executive leadership, sales, sales enablement, operations, and customer experience roles for various companies including Oracle Marketing Cloud, Salesforce.com, PayPal, Siebel Systems, & AT&T. And, interesting fact - as a child growing up, his favorite cartoon was The Jetsons! Click here for this episode's website page with the links mentioned during the interview... https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/sales-enablement-roderick-jefferson

In this episode of Talk of the Trade, Michael McNary discusses sales methodology with Paul Butterfield, Vice President of Global Revenue Enablement at Instructure and host of the Sales Enablement Society podcast, “Stories From the Trenches.” Tune in to find out:The difference between sales process and sales methodologyHow to select the right select the right methodology for your organizationHow to get sales buy-in to implement the methodologyWhy the right sales methodology inevitably leads to a higher win rate

On the show this week we talk with the CEO and Chief Sales Strategist for Regarding Sales, Liz Heiman. Liz helps B2B companies grow by developing strategies and processes that connect a company's vision to sales success. She is also a panelist on the Sales Expert Channel and an active member of both the Women Sales Pros and the Sales Enablement Society.Sales isn't magic, it can be predictable and manageable. For those dealing with the problem of too many ups and downs in sales, there is a solution and Liz has it! The sales operating systems that she builds for her client's companies, work to clarify sales messaging from leadership, prioritize targets, and identify value propositions and market positions. In our conversation she covers the key considerations when building a system for the first time, including: How long it takes to build out a sales operating system Who needs to be involved in order for it to be successful How often to revisit and revise the system And more Oftentimes companies don't begin to think about their sales strategies and systems until their sales team has grown to 20 or 50 people. By then, inefficiencies have crept in. It's necessary to have a sales operating system in place from the beginning, even if you are simply an entrepreneur who sells. Have a system and make it accountable. Listen now!

In this episode of Small Business Connections, Ann talks with Alexander Low, Head of Enterprise Strategy and Operations of Lately. Prior to joining the team at Lately, Alexander launched multiple global social selling initiatives (one of which LinkedIn themselves point to as the success case), leading the development, training and execution for tens of thousands of employees on LinkedIn and other social channels. Alex is also a LinkedIn Sales Navigator master, a member of the Sales Enablement Society and hosts the star podcast (ironically) named Death of a Salesman. We discuss: - What is social selling? - Where do people go wrong when it comes to social selling? - Can social selling be for everyone? - How does AI and data relate to social selling? - What is the future of sales and marketing? Alexander's Favorite Books for Business- Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty by Patrick Lencioni Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie and Die by Eric Siegel Follow Alexander Low, Head of Enterprise Strategy and Operations at Lately:  Twitter I Facebook I Instagram I Linkedin I YouTube  The host of ASMM Small Business Connection is Ann Brennan. She is the owner of ASMM Digital Marketing and started the podcast to help her clients get in front of more people. Since its inception, it has grown to include guests from around the world. If you would like to be on the show, please message Ann directly through LinkedIn. Learn More About ASMM Digital Marketing Follow ASMM: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn Subscribe to our podcast: ASMM Small Business Connections 

Join us in the Krueger Marketing podcast studio this week for another episode of The State of Sales Enablement. It is not coincident that https://m.kruegermarketing.com/r/a0325bcf20cd9c189f2e3da70?ct=YTo1OntzOjY6InNvdXJjZSI7YToyOntpOjA7czoxNDoiY2FtcGFpZ24uZXZlbnQiO2k6MTtpOjY0O31zOjU6ImVtYWlsIjtpOjU2O3M6NDoic3RhdCI7czoyMjoiNjA2Y2VmZjEyNmM2ZTE4MDI1MDE5NiI7czo0OiJsZWFkIjtzOjM6IjY5OCI7czo3OiJjaGFubmVsIjthOjE6e3M6NToiZW1haWwiO2k6NTY7fX0%3D& (Iris Chan) has been appointed the Australian chapter president of the Sales Enablement Society, a global network of sales enablement professionals. Iris has mastered the craft of sales enablement over two decades working for iconic B2B technology brands such as Cisco and IBM. Today she leads the marketing efforts of sales enablement technology juggernaut Seismic, working with the who is who of the Australian sales enablement landscape. I caught up with her in this episode to discuss the evolution of sales enablement, the impact it has on organisations committing to the practice, and the key trends she expects to see this year. Here are some of the resources referenced in this episode. Sales Enablement Society (SES) -https://www.sesociety.org/ ( https://www.sesociety.org/) Brought to you by Krueger Marketing: Free Content-Enabled Sales training -https://my.captivate.fm/thestateofenablement.com/content ( thestateofenablement.com/content) Connect with Iris Chan online: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ichankl/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ichankl/) Connect with Felix Krueger online:https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfkrueger/ ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfkrueger/) Where to find The State of Sales Enablement: Website (subscriber exclusives can be found here) -http://thestateofsalesenablement.com/ ( http://thestateofsalesenablement.com/) LinkedIn -https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-state-of-sales-enablement-podcast/ ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-state-of-sales-enablement-podcast/) Apple Podcasts -https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-state-of-sales-enablement/id1558307853 ( https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-state-of-sales-enablement/id1558307853) Spotify -https://open.spotify.com/show/4ceCJYJLuCbTNbRTriOFpe?si=avn_E9EGSNu3gmHfoqJ_6g ( https://open.spotify.com/show/4ceCJYJLuCbTNbRTriOFpe?si=avn_E9EGSNu3gmHfoqJ_6g) Cheers, Felix

Paul Butterfield is the Vice President of Global Revenue Enablement at Instructure, and one of the founders of the Sales Enablement Society. Today we're talking about all things enablement. Paul is one of the pioneers in the field and he shares his perspective about how far sales enablement has evolved since it started and where it's headed in the future. Plus, we dig into the primary challenges facing sales and how enablement is helping to solve them. We also explore how sales enablement should be supporting sales managers, and who generally get the short end of the stick when it comes to receiving training and development. Finally, we talk about developing career paths for those who want a career in sales enablement. And what sort of skills and talents Paul looks for in hiring for his team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I’m really excited to have Shannon join us from Personify Corp. Shannon, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Shannon Hempel: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I’m Shannon Hempel and I’m the director of revenue enablement at Personify. I have been there a year and a half and started out working with sales specifically to build up their program from onboarding continuous training, put down processes, document them as needed for everybody and it has grown to include from the business development rep all the way to the account manager and moving into the customer success side soon. SS: I am so excited to have you join us today. You are one of the founders of a group that Sales Enablement PRO absolutely respects, a group called Women in Sales Enablement, or WISE for short, which has focused on bringing together women in this profession, across the globe to network and learn from each other. I’d love to get your perspective, what was behind the mission and starting that group? SH: Great question. It’s what we still hold true to today. When we formed this group, I guess we started talking a little over two years ago and we were just four women who had the enablement role and had no one to talk to, on just a small connection basis on what do you do? What are your real problems? We found that when you go to typical networking events, everybody is trying to look their best and be knowledgeable. We were looking for, I just want someone to tell me they’re facing the same problem, and we found that there. We decided let’s meet next month, and then the month after that, and then once somebody just really threw out haphazardly, we’re women in sales enablement, we’re WISE. None of this happened preplanned. It was completely organic from the get-go and we invited friends in the industry to a monthly dinner where we would sit and just be in shock that this big well-known company is having the exact same enablement challenges this startup over here that no one’s heard of. We just talked and talked and talked about it. Our mission that we developed, I have a friend in Chicago, and she wanted to do the same thing. So, we thought, okay, who are we, what are we, and what do we stand for? It all came back down to that initial dinner where we are wanting to bring professional enablement, specifically women together, so that we can form connection first of all, and that authentic connection that you often just don’t really get in a typical networking and be able to truly collaborate and improve our knowledge and skills. Knowing that it doesn’t matter what your title is at that table, everybody’s an equal because there can be a VP of enablement that has got a different challenge than a content specialist who is still very involved in enablement. They can learn from each other. That is the mission we started with and it’s what drives us still today. SS: I love that. How has your passion for supporting women in their careers evolved with regard to sales enablement? SH: Oh my goodness. My background is in education. So, I spent much of my career in a classroom where the majority of employees in a school district are women. It really never occurred to me the challenge that women have and so when I left teaching and went to my first sales role and then went to my first enablement role, I was just astonished at what do you mean I can’t get in front of this person? What do you mean that there’s politics? What is all that about? As I got my feet wet and doing all of that and then sitting in the WISE meetings, I thought here is a perfect opportunity. There is not a single reason that if a woman is empowered and this is not just for women, I will equally go help a young male in his leadership because there are some universal truths, no matter if you’re a man or woman, but if they feel empowered and confident, they’re not going to have to learn the hard way like I did how you play the game or how you even get yourself prepared before you go and present something to the president of sales because you want to drive this initiative and it’s really fueled. So, I see the opportunities when I am meeting new women that come into our Austin group, or when I see women at work who have that drive for just something more. Enablement specifically, I have developed friendships globally through the women in sales enablement where I may visit with one and they talk about how do I build a program. When I’m talking to them about how you build a program, I’m also talking about how you might carry yourself in a way that may not be something taught in a sales enablement course, or that the way that you get up in front of sales leaders and you have to earn the credibility. Here is how you do that when you are driving enablement and you have to have influence with little authority over those you are enabling how are you using, I know we’ll get to this later, emotional intelligence skills that you have to raise your credibility to garner that influence that you need. SS: I think that’s fantastic. I’d love some advice for our audience. How can women support each other in professional development and career growth with their own teams or within their own organizations? SH: That is a really great question and something that I have found typically when women are wanting to support each other, they are giving each other advice and not necessarily on a personal level, but maybe you could do A, B or C when you’re working on this project. That is great. However, I think one of the most empowering ways a woman can support other women is to be a champion for them in meetings. No matter who is in the meeting, it could just be a small group of people that is your team. Maybe you’re on a team of people and you want to speak up for somebody and just highlight that was a great idea. Something as small as that, just being a champion in a room. If you are a leader and you have people that are your direct reports, start championing them and leading in meetings that you have with people that are two levels above them in a way that is meaningful. Not just because they’re a woman, but because the work is really good. The other thing that I would suggest is just sitting and listening to others and digging in and asking them questions. I say that because the more you listen to somebody, women specifically in this case, the more you’re going to hear what is it that they really want to do with their career, how they want to drive enablement in their company and grow the position. It’s more visible depending on the kind of company that you’re in. And if something that they say is something that you have a strength in, talk to them and volunteer to say I will do this particular thing for you. I know of a great book that I just read that is super empowering. Let me send you the link to it. Start small because people are going to start coming to you because they see that you are empowering if you build trust. Whatever you do, follow through with it. If you say you’re going to help somebody with any particular task, do it. If you are asking them questions to explain things so that you can learn more about them, really listen and show that you heard them. It really is all just a bunch of small acts that I think are the big drivers. SS: I love how those are things that you can weave into every day. I’d love to understand, Shannon, what role has mentorship or having kind of this peer-to-peer network. What role has that played in your own professional development? SH: That was one that I probably would not have been able to answer until about a year ago, because when I came into enablement, I guess I got my first enablement job I think it was probably seven years ago. The job title was enablement, but I spent all my time trying to explain to people in the company, what it was I did. There was zero other people in this company with this title, I knew of no one in any industry, LinkedIn didn’t really have enablement. You might have sales trainers, but that wasn’t really what my role was. I had no mentors. I had to learn it all by myself, all along the way. The peer-to-peer networking, honestly, I think I got my first taste of that was at a happy hour that the Sales Enablement Society put on in Austin. And I sat across from a couple of people that we discovered; you have my job. And so that is when the peer-to-peer connections really started. I would talk, but now talk to them about different issues or things in common. It was probably about a year ago when I was in some pretty deep driving initiatives at my current company that I was pulling so much information from specific people that I had networked with. That really made a difference, and I wasn’t having to reinvent the wheel and I wasn’t having to learn the hard way. I remember what they said, and I wasn’t going to do it that way. That has been huge in my career and I just am so thankful for the peer-to-peer. SS: Absolutely. There’s tremendous value in that. Now, you mentioned this earlier in the conversation around the whole topic of emotional intelligence and how critical it is to success in sales enablement. I would love to understand from you, how does emotional intelligence also play a role in peer mentorship and professional development? SH: When you think of emotional intelligence, oftentimes people just think you feel emotions, or you can empathize. Empathy is definitely a very large part of it. But you also have traits of assertiveness, coachability, perseverance. Are you able to handle or manage your emotions is really a better word where you don’t let intimidation factor into whatever development you were trying to get for yourself? I encourage women, all people, but women especially as you’re trying to gain that credibility is to be assertive. I spend time actually, not just using emotional intelligence on my end, but helping them to also hone in on which pieces of emotional intelligence do you think you need help on and asking them certain questions to see how they handle interactions with senior leaders at whatever level. Then we talk about how are you going to be assertive? How can you take a baby step here and develop that? I have one specific person in mind as I’m talking about this, and the reason that she has grown so much, and her confidence is because she was also self-aware. That’s important and coachable. If you are self-aware and coachable and you are working with someone who is mentoring you, who is trying to develop you, you’re going to succeed so much more. If you are someone on the other end who is trying to develop somebody, then really hone in on those aspects that they can take with any conversation with anyone and not just in the specific job role they have. SS: I think that’s fantastic advice. On that note, I would love to just close out this conversation with advice actually for young women entering the sales enablement industry. What would be some of the advice that you would give to them? SH: The overall umbrella over it is be a mentor, find a mentor, and to remember a mentor doesn’t have to be someone you know well. It can be somebody you’ve had a certain acquaintance with. It can be somebody who you just see that in your industry on LinkedIn or whatever forums that you’re following, that you have a lot of respect for and schedule a meeting with them to just say, I want to talk to you about how I can move forward in whatever area. But be assertive. When I know for myself that if I get a note from a young person in their enablement career and they are truly asking for help, I am all over it. I’m going to make the time because finding people who reach out and ask for that help honestly is not often found. In my opinion, in my experience, definitely the obvious is find networks, reach out to them, but to really engage yourself because that’s where the learning is going to take place. That’s going to be where you see it grow your career and your enablement career much faster. SS: I love that. That’s fantastic advice, Shannon. Thank you so much again for taking the time to talk to us today. I enjoyed the conversation. SH: I did too. Thank you. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s 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.

Roderick Jefferson, one of the founding members of the Sales Enablement Society and a top sales leadership guru joins the podcast to teach us how to focus on the buyer experiences rather than the goals and intentions of the seller. Problems get prioritized, while products do not. Roderick shows us how to create experiences that are shared by both the buyer and the seller, creating more wins and more satisfied customers. To order the book, “Sales Enablement 3.0: The Blueprint to Sales Enablement” please send an email to: info@roderickjefferson.com. If you’d like to learn more, Roderick is offering $35 off of his Udemy “Best Seller” course, “Applying The Art & Science Of Sales Enablement” until 12th December 2020 by using the code: ENABLEMENT

Sheevaun Thatcher is an outspoken leader in the practice of Sales Enablement worldwide - as a frequent speaker and as a Founding Member & Member of the Board of Advisors with the Sales Enablement Society.  She is the Global Learning and Enablement Leader at RingCentral and oversees a worldwide remote team. Sheevaun has a way with words - which makes her an amazing storyteller. 

Welcome to Inside: Sales Enablement Episode 60 We're in the experience economy and Sales Enablement Orchestrators are working to bring together the valuable contributions of multiple departments in their organization to improve the customer experience. How are they doing that? By pulling together people, processes, technology, and information to benefit sellers and address the gaps in the selling eco-system. Curiosity is the new competitive advantage, as savvy leaders are taking a "how do we figure it out" approach and learn by doing. Forgoing the big-bang efforts for laser beam experience "labs" to figure out what works. In this episode, we’re joined by Bill Ball, a founding member, and one of the members of the Sales Enablement Board of Directors. As sales enablement society founders and members Scott, Brian, and Bill share their examples of creating an all-digital organization of volunteers through a shared and common experience to elevate the role. As Bill shares in the podcast; "We're navigating an evolving profession together. We have to get to know people and to help people, to figure it out together." Listen in as the guys share what they're seeing, and more importantly, what they have learned to help your own organization orchestrate and bring together people through a common and shared experience SES EXPERIENCE 2020 - Forward Momentum for a New Decade October 26 - 29 Virtual Join the members of the Sales Enablement society at their annual conference http://ses2020.sesociety.org/ (http://ses2020.sesociety.org/) Make sure you join Scott Santucci (SES Founder) in the Founders Room on Wednesday, October 28, 2020 at 4:15pm Eastern. >>>>>>> TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I’m Olivia Fuller. 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 they can be more effective in their jobs. A rather hot topic in sales enablement lately is that of sales coaching. And that’s because organizations are realizing that when it comes to behavior change, coaching can really move the needle and unlock the potential of reps at all levels. But in order for coaching to be effective, sales managers need to know what good coaching looks like. Today, I’m so excited to have Dave Brock, the author of “Sales Manager Survival Guide”, join us to talk about some of the strategies that he lays out in his book. Dave, I’d love it if you could just take a moment and introduce yourself to our audience. Dave Brock: Well, first of all, thanks so much for inviting me to participate, Olivia. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. As Olivia mentioned, I’m the author of “Sales Manager Survival Guide”, and the upcoming “Sales Executive Survival Guide”. In addition to that, I run a consulting company called Partners in Excellence. There are about 15 of us. We focus on really business strategy and sales and marketing strategies with kind of a global customer base. OF: So, in your book, you include coaching as one of the core areas of responsibility for sales managers. Why is coaching such a critical part of the sales manager role? DB: Yeah, let me back up a little bit to provide some context. You know, you think of what the sales manager's job is and oftentimes when I talk to people and ask them, “what’s your job,” they say it’s making the numbers. And that really isn’t the sales manager’s job. That’s your people’s job. The job of the sales manager is to maximize the performance of every person on the sales manager’s team. And one of the most powerful tools to maximize that performance is coaching. So, then you see that coaching and finding every opportunity you can to help the person recognize what they’re doing, learn about how they might improve, and how they might do it better. And in enabling them then to try new things and to improve that performance. Coaching plays such a vital role in driving performance improvement. OF: That’s fantastic. So, we talked about why coaching is so important, but in your opinion, what is it that makes a good sales coach? So, what are some of the key skills that managers actually need to be able to conduct effective coaching sessions? DB: So, I think there are a few things. One is you have to genuinely care. You have to care about the individual that you’re coaching. You have to care about her success and her ability to grow. Not only in what she’s doing today in the job, but what she can do in the future in terms of her future developments here, coaching both for the short-term kind of tactical execution and their long-term development as a sales professional. So, one, you got to care. Two, you got to really listen, and not listen for the things that you want to hear but really listen and hear what they’re saying and really be curious about engaging them about how to improve. And I think the final thing, there are a whole bunch of things, but I think the final thing is you got to get your ego out of it. Too much of the time it’s about demonstrating about how smart we are, where that doesn’t really make any difference. You’re trying to make the person, the salesperson you’re coaching, as smart and as capable as possible. If we don’t get our egos out of it, we stand in the way of effective coaching. OF: Definitely. So, you mentioned that there are different styles of coaching, but in your book, you also talk about some different ways to coach and some different types of coaching. So specifically, you differentiate between directive and non-directive coaching. So, can you explain to our audience what the difference is between those two and when each of these approaches should be used? DB: Yeah. And I think that’s a good point because too often, I think when we learn how to coach with some people, the way they teach you how to coach is they teach you a certain style. And really to become a better coach by adopting and integrating a number of styles. And if you kind of peel back all the different things people teach you, there is kind of two fundamental ways of coaching, which is directive, which is basically as the word implies. It’s telling somebody what to do. You know, go out and see Olivia and talk to her about those issues, then come back and tell me what happened. That’s directive coaching. Non-directive coaching is one that’s more question-based. It’s more things about asking the person to the salesperson to think about and reflect on what’s happened. So, it may be, I just made a sales call on Olivia. What were the results? What happened as a result of the sales call? What are the next steps? What are the next actions? Is there anything you might’ve done differently that could have enabled you to accomplish more? Is there anything, did you set reasonable objectives for the call, and did you accomplish all of them? Or, what could you have done better? Those kinds of things tend to be more examples of non-directive coaching where you’re trying to get the person to think about and figure things out themselves about, could I have accomplished more? What could I have accomplished? So, the way you recognize non-directive coaching is it’s a lot of question-based things. It’s a lot of how, why, who, what, those kinds of things. So, again, the person develops better themselves. And we all know it, when somebody tells us something, it doesn’t really sink in very well. When we figure it out ourselves, we own it, we internalize it and we’re more likely to do that the next time around. And so really good coaching helps people learn. It helps the salesperson learn and at the same time it helps the sales manager learn. So, it’s kind of a collaborative learning journey. OF: In terms of when to coach, you also wrote that coaching should really take place informally. In this virtual environment that we’re now in, how can sales managers take advantage of those opportunities to coach in the moment and informally when they might not be passing each other in the hallway or just be able to grab someone at their desk for a quick chat. DB: Let me give a step back and give a little bit of context. As a manager, we should find as many opportunities as we can to coach and develop our people. So, part of it is we do pipeline reviews, we do deal reviews and so on, and so forth, and those have a business management context to it, but we can use those as powerful coaching vehicles as well. We can, you know, doing a deal review, get them to think about how they might approach the deal differently and help them in developing more impactful strategy, but there’ a lot of in-between spaces. In the old days before COVID, and when we used to go out on sales calls and things like that, you know, there was a lot of what we used to call windshield time. Where I might go out with a salesperson, on a call, as we’re driving out to the customer, as we were in the elevator, or in New York City going up to the offices, I start saying, “well, what are your goals for this? What are you trying to accomplish?” And so, on and so forth. So, I’d use that as an opportunity to coach and help them think. After the call, I would say, “how did you do, what could you have done better? Might you approach some things differently?” And those kinds of things. So, you use those times. So, I basically try and find every opportunity I can to coach somebody, even if it’s for a minute or something. There’s the time we spend, we don’t see you have watercourse anymore, so there’s a time that you spend in the Starbucks line and you have the opportunity to look at something and get them to think about things differently. So, I’m kind of one of these where you always think about always be closing, from a manager’s point of view you should always be coaching. OF: So, I mentioned in the beginning that sales coaching is such a hot topic in sales enablement right now because it can have such an impact on behavior change. But in your opinion, what is sales enablement's role in coaching and how can enablement really be involved in helping to prepare sales managers to be more effective coaches? DB: So, I think there were about three or four key things that are really important that sales enablement does is one train managers in how to coach. Most managers have had no formal kind of training and even though they want to coach, they don’t know how to coach. So, sales enablement can train managers informally in how to coach. Two is, as sales enablement launches new programs for the salespeople, there’s the reinforcement, there’s kind of the activation and reinforcement phase. I mean, we’re all familiar with it, with the data that says the half-life of any sales training is less than 30 days unless there’s some sort of coaching and reinforcement. So, every new program, every new initiative that sales enablement launches should have an accompanying responsibility and coaching role for the managers. If we’re doing say a new account management program, sales enablement needs to sit down with the managers beforehand and say, after your people have completed this account management program, you have the responsibility for coaching and reinforcing what we introduced to them in that program over this period of time. You might put together a semiformal training program or advice about how they reinforce the account management concepts and so on and so forth. And if you have that then you’ll build those skills, people will come out of that program they’ll be coached by their manager in applying those skills in real life, and they’ll build those skills and they’re far more likely to sustain those. So, those couple of things, and there is a thing, you know, I’ve kind of gotten into debates with people in the Sales Enablement Society, and other sales enablement professionals, sometimes sales enablement gets into coaching roles. I’m working with a very large telecommunications right now where they have a small team of sales enablement professionals coaching, but what they’ve done and what I recommend is that they do it as a compliment to the sales manager, not to displace the responsibility from the sales manager. So, for instance, these coaches are spending a lot of time with new employees and helping them with the onboarding process. So, they’re doing a lot of coaching around products, around markets, around how the company works, and so on and so forth where they can do that very effectively but also in sync with what the sales manager is doing. I do believe that there is a role for sales enablement to do some very specific coaching, but always as a compliment in reinforcement to what the sales manager is doing, not to displace the sales manager or even to give the sales manager an excuse if sales enablement people are doing coaching so I don’t need to do that. It's a big key part of the manager’s responsibility to coach. OF: So, we've talked about coaching from kind of the individual side and developing sales managers, but let’s talk about developing a coaching culture. What do you think are some of the key challenges that organizations run into when trying to establish a really strong coaching culture and then maybe how could sales enablement help to overcome some of those barriers? DB: I think part of it is it’s hard for a sales manager to coach if that sales manager isn’t being coached herself. Managers all the way up the food chain have a responsibility for coaching. So even if I’m maybe the CRO or the CEO, I have a responsibility of coaching the people that report to me, they may be VP of sales, chief marketing officers, or so on and so forth. And the nature of that coaching and how you coach changes because they’re much more experienced, they’re much more mature and so on, but they still need coaching. And that needs to be cascaded down through the organization. So frontline sales managers should have an expectation and ask their managers to be coached, and that kind of thing. So, doing that starts to set up a coaching culture. Two is training and learning, and so on and so forth. I think sales enablement can provide a lot to really help them on how we train our people, train our managers in how to coach, how do we in fact coach them in coaching as well. Three, I think what sales enablement can do is provide the tools and make sure the managers are using the tools that facilitate the coaching. So, for instance, if I’m doing a deal review and all we bring up the deal in the CRM system, we look at the opportunity in the CRM system, we use that as the basis for a coaching discussion. You know, at the end of any coaching session, you want to agree on what are we going to do? What are the next steps? Who's going to do it? Do I have some things that I need to do? Do you as the salesperson have some things you need to do? What are we going to do and by when? And we need to leverage the CRM system to record those as actions or activities. As a manager, one of my favorite reports in Salesforce is the activity report. If we’ve sat down and agreed on some next steps and some next activities, and I pull up the report and say, Olivia hasn’t done any of those that sets up a coaching opportunity for me to say, you know, Olivia, what’s standing in the way of your ability to meet your commitments. So, helping the managers understand how they use the tools for coaching. The other thing I think that we get wrong about coaching is people think of, and I’ve already implied this already, people think of coaching as something I do separately from the day to day business. And the reason a lot of coaching doesn’t get done is we prioritize the day to day business, and then any leftover time we have, we do for coaching. But guess what? We had no leftover time. That’s why you have to integrate coaching into everything you do when you’re sitting doing pipeline reviews, when you’re sitting doing deal reviews, when you’re going out on a customer call, when you’re debriefing on a customer call. Every single opportunity that you have, there’s a way you can inject a little bit of a coaching conversation into it. OF: How can you really measure the impact of coaching? DB: The ultimate way is you expect to see improvements in performance. So, you expect to see when rates go up. You expect to see maybe if you’re coaching them to increase the average deal size, you expect to see average deal size go up. You expect to see performance of percentage of people making quota, you expect to see going up. What they do want to do is you want to look at what are the leading activities, what are the leading activities that tell you that the person is internalizing the coaching that you’re giving them. So, for instance, things like using the CRM system and saying, we’ve agreed on these next steps. I, Dave, need to do some things on this. You Olivia, you need to do some things on that. Monitoring that they’re actually executing those things is a measure that says, I know if we meet those commitments, you’re more likely to make quota than not. Quota may be a year away. So, you want to look at some of those leading things, you’ll want to start looking at, is the person, are they chasing better quality deals, more active deals, or hire a guy deal. You’re going to want to inspect them and see what’s that change over time is the quality of deals. I have a client that went through a massive change with all their people. They wanted to take their average deal size from 10,000 a person up to a 100,000 per person. And so, what we did is we went through some training and we went through some coaching and they have planned to do this over a two-year period, but with the coaching that they instituted, they did it in nine months. In over two years, they got the average deal size up to 500,000. So, there’s some real tangible business benefit to these things. I’d say the other thing too is to be very focused. An analogy I like to use is I attempt to play golf, I’m not sure I really play golf, but one time I got a good buddy of mine who was a really good golfer and I said, my drive just is terrible, can you help me. And he said, you know, here are the six or seven things, Dave, you need to fix. And I was getting so confused with all those six or seven things that my drive actually got worse. Then I decided to pay money to see a professional. And we started out slowly. He said, Dave, this is the one thing I want you to do right now. And then I mastered that, and he said, okay, Dave, this is the next thing you need to do. And over time, my drive started improving. It still sucks, but it started improving. And so, I think we as managers sometimes confuse our people because we try and coach them on too many things. And, so we have to look at, we’ve adopted kind of a methodology of how we identify the highest leverage coaching opportunity and focus just on that one thing, get the person to master that, then move to the next. Then move to the next and move to the next. Oftentimes what you find you get them performing better at that one thing. And a lot of the other things that they aren’t doing well, actually disappear because there’s a ripple through effect. OF: That's fantastic. Well, Dave, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. We really, really appreciated you providing some actionable tips for our audience. DB: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation. You guys do some really important stuff, so I appreciate participating. OF: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s 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.

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I’m Olivia Fuller. 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 they can be more effective in their jobs. A rather hot topic in sales enablement lately is that of sales coaching. And that’s because organizations are realizing that when it comes to behavior change, coaching can really move the needle and unlock the potential of reps at all levels. But in order for coaching to be effective, sales managers need to know what good coaching looks like. Today, I’m so excited to have Dave Brock, the author of “Sales Manager Survival Guide”, join us to talk about some of the strategies that he lays out in his book. Dave, I’d love it if you could just take a moment and introduce yourself to our audience. Dave Brock: Well, first of all, thanks so much for inviting me to participate, Olivia. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. As Olivia mentioned, I’m the author of “Sales Manager Survival Guide”, and the upcoming “Sales Executive Survival Guide”. In addition to that, I run a consulting company called Partners in Excellence. There are about 15 of us. We focus on really business strategy and sales and marketing strategies with kind of a global customer base. OF: So, in your book, you include coaching as one of the core areas of responsibility for sales managers. Why is coaching such a critical part of the sales manager role? DB: Yeah, let me back up a little bit to provide some context. You know, you think of what the sales manager’s job is and oftentimes when I talk to people and ask them, “what’s your job,” they say it’s making the numbers. And that really isn’t the sales manager’s job. That’s your people’s job. The job of the sales manager is to maximize the performance of every person on the sales manager’s team. And one of the most powerful tools to maximize that performance is coaching. So, then you see that coaching and finding every opportunity you can to help the person recognize what they’re doing, learn about how they might improve, and how they might do it better. And in enabling them then to try new things and to improve that performance. Coaching plays such a vital role in driving performance improvement. OF: That’s fantastic. So, we talked about why coaching is so important, but in your opinion, what is it that makes a good sales coach? So, what are some of the key skills that managers actually need to be able to conduct effective coaching sessions? DB: So, I think there are a few things. One is you have to genuinely care. You have to care about the individual that you’re coaching. You have to care about her success and her ability to grow. Not only in what she’s doing today in the job, but what she can do in the future in terms of her future developments here, coaching both for the short-term kind of tactical execution and their long-term development as a sales professional. So, one, you got to care. Two, you got to really listen, and not listen for the things that you want to hear but really listen and hear what they’re saying and really be curious about engaging them about how to improve. And I think the final thing, there are a whole bunch of things, but I think the final thing is you got to get your ego out of it. Too much of the time it’s about demonstrating about how smart we are, where that doesn’t really make any difference. You’re trying to make the person, the salesperson you’re coaching, as smart and as capable as possible. If we don’t get our egos out of it, we stand in the way of effective coaching. OF: Definitely. So, you mentioned that there are different styles of coaching, but in your book, you also talk about some different ways to coach and some different types of coaching. So specifically, you differentiate between directive and non-directive coaching. So, can you explain to our audience what the difference is between those two and when each of these approaches should be used? DB: Yeah. And I think that’s a good point because too often, I think when we learn how to coach with some people, the way they teach you how to coach is they teach you a certain style. And really to become a better coach by adopting and integrating a number of styles. And if you kind of peel back all the different things people teach you, there is kind of two fundamental ways of coaching, which is directive, which is basically as the word implies. It’s telling somebody what to do. You know, go out and see Olivia and talk to her about those issues, then come back and tell me what happened. That’s directive coaching. Non-directive coaching is one that’s more question-based. It’s more things about asking the person to the salesperson to think about and reflect on what’s happened. So, it may be, I just made a sales call on Olivia. What were the results? What happened as a result of the sales call? What are the next steps? What are the next actions? Is there anything you might’ve done differently that could have enabled you to accomplish more? Is there anything, did you set reasonable objectives for the call, and did you accomplish all of them? Or, what could you have done better? Those kinds of things tend to be more examples of non-directive coaching where you’re trying to get the person to think about and figure things out themselves about, could I have accomplished more? What could I have accomplished? So, the way you recognize non-directive coaching is it’s a lot of question-based things. It’s a lot of how, why, who, what, those kinds of things. So, again, the person develops better themselves. And we all know it, when somebody tells us something, it doesn’t really sink in very well. When we figure it out ourselves, we own it, we internalize it and we’re more likely to do that the next time around. And so really good coaching helps people learn. It helps the salesperson learn and at the same time it helps the sales manager learn. So, it’s kind of a collaborative learning journey. OF: In terms of when to coach, you also wrote that coaching should really take place informally. In this virtual environment that we’re now in, how can sales managers take advantage of those opportunities to coach in the moment and informally when they might not be passing each other in the hallway or just be able to grab someone at their desk for a quick chat. DB: Let me give a step back and give a little bit of context. As a manager, we should find as many opportunities as we can to coach and develop our people. So, part of it is we do pipeline reviews, we do deal reviews and so on, and so forth, and those have a business management context to it, but we can use those as powerful coaching vehicles as well. We can, you know, doing a deal review, get them to think about how they might approach the deal differently and help them in developing more impactful strategy, but there’ a lot of in-between spaces. In the old days before COVID, and when we used to go out on sales calls and things like that, you know, there was a lot of what we used to call windshield time. Where I might go out with a salesperson, on a call, as we’re driving out to the customer, as we were in the elevator, or in New York City going up to the offices, I start saying, “well, what are your goals for this? What are you trying to accomplish?” And so, on and so forth. So, I’d use that as an opportunity to coach and help them think. After the call, I would say, “how did you do, what could you have done better? Might you approach some things differently?” And those kinds of things. So, you use those times. So, I basically try and find every opportunity I can to coach somebody, even if it’s for a minute or something. There’s the time we spend, we don’t see you have watercourse anymore, so there’s a time that you spend in the Starbucks line and you have the opportunity to look at something and get them to think about things differently. So, I’m kind of one of these where you always think about always be closing, from a manager’s point of view you should always be coaching. OF: So, I mentioned in the beginning that sales coaching is such a hot topic in sales enablement right now because it can have such an impact on behavior change. But in your opinion, what is sales enablement’s role in coaching and how can enablement really be involved in helping to prepare sales managers to be more effective coaches? DB: So, I think there were about three or four key things that are really important that sales enablement does is one train managers in how to coach. Most managers have had no formal kind of training and even though they want to coach, they don’t know how to coach. So, sales enablement can train managers informally in how to coach. Two is, as sales enablement launches new programs for the salespeople, there’s the reinforcement, there’s kind of the activation and reinforcement phase. I mean, we’re all familiar with it, with the data that says the half-life of any sales training is less than 30 days unless there’s some sort of coaching and reinforcement. So, every new program, every new initiative that sales enablement launches should have an accompanying responsibility and coaching role for the managers. If we’re doing say a new account management program, sales enablement needs to sit down with the managers beforehand and say, after your people have completed this account management program, you have the responsibility for coaching and reinforcing what we introduced to them in that program over this period of time. You might put together a semiformal training program or advice about how they reinforce the account management concepts and so on and so forth. And if you have that then you’ll build those skills, people will come out of that program they’ll be coached by their manager in applying those skills in real life, and they’ll build those skills and they’re far more likely to sustain those. So, those couple of things, and there is a thing, you know, I’ve kind of gotten into debates with people in the Sales Enablement Society, and other sales enablement professionals, sometimes sales enablement gets into coaching roles. I’m working with a very large telecommunications right now where they have a small team of sales enablement professionals coaching, but what they’ve done and what I recommend is that they do it as a compliment to the sales manager, not to displace the responsibility from the sales manager. So, for instance, these coaches are spending a lot of time with new employees and helping them with the onboarding process. So, they’re doing a lot of coaching around products, around markets, around how the company works, and so on and so forth where they can do that very effectively but also in sync with what the sales manager is doing. I do believe that there is a role for sales enablement to do some very specific coaching, but always as a compliment in reinforcement to what the sales manager is doing, not to displace the sales manager or even to give the sales manager an excuse if sales enablement people are doing coaching so I don’t need to do that. It’s a big key part of the manager’s responsibility to coach. OF: So, we’ve talked about coaching from kind of the individual side and developing sales managers, but let’s talk about developing a coaching culture. What do you think are some of the key challenges that organizations run into when trying to establish a really strong coaching culture and then maybe how could sales enablement help to overcome some of those barriers? DB: I think part of it is it’s hard for a sales manager to coach if that sales manager isn’t being coached herself. Managers all the way up the food chain have a responsibility for coaching. So even if I’m maybe the CRO or the CEO, I have a responsibility of coaching the people that report to me, they may be VP of sales, chief marketing officers, or so on and so forth. And the nature of that coaching and how you coach changes because they’re much more experienced, they’re much more mature and so on, but they still need coaching. And that needs to be cascaded down through the organization. So frontline sales managers should have an expectation and ask their managers to be coached, and that kind of thing. So, doing that starts to set up a coaching culture. Two is training and learning, and so on and so forth. I think sales enablement can provide a lot to really help them on how we train our people, train our managers in how to coach, how do we in fact coach them in coaching as well. Three, I think what sales enablement can do is provide the tools and make sure the managers are using the tools that facilitate the coaching. So, for instance, if I’m doing a deal review and all we bring up the deal in the CRM system, we look at the opportunity in the CRM system, we use that as the basis for a coaching discussion. You know, at the end of any coaching session, you want to agree on what are we going to do? What are the next steps? Who’s going to do it? Do I have some things that I need to do? Do you as the salesperson have some things you need to do? What are we going to do and by when? And we need to leverage the CRM system to record those as actions or activities. As a manager, one of my favorite reports in Salesforce is the activity report. If we’ve sat down and agreed on some next steps and some next activities, and I pull up the report and say, Olivia hasn’t done any of those that sets up a coaching opportunity for me to say, you know, Olivia, what’s standing in the way of your ability to meet your commitments. So, helping the managers understand how they use the tools for coaching. The other thing I think that we get wrong about coaching is people think of, and I’ve already implied this already, people think of coaching as something I do separately from the day to day business. And the reason a lot of coaching doesn’t get done is we prioritize the day to day business, and then any leftover time we have, we do for coaching. But guess what? We had no leftover time. That’s why you have to integrate coaching into everything you do when you’re sitting doing pipeline reviews, when you’re sitting doing deal reviews, when you’re going out on a customer call, when you’re debriefing on a customer call. Every single opportunity that you have, there’s a way you can inject a little bit of a coaching conversation into it. OF: How can you really measure the impact of coaching? DB: The ultimate way is you expect to see improvements in performance. So, you expect to see when rates go up. You expect to see maybe if you’re coaching them to increase the average deal size, you expect to see average deal size go up. You expect to see performance of percentage of people making quota, you expect to see going up. What they do want to do is you want to look at what are the leading activities, what are the leading activities that tell you that the person is internalizing the coaching that you’re giving them. So, for instance, things like using the CRM system and saying, we’ve agreed on these next steps. I, Dave, need to do some things on this. You Olivia, you need to do some things on that. Monitoring that they’re actually executing those things is a measure that says, I know if we meet those commitments, you’re more likely to make quota than not. Quota may be a year away. So, you want to look at some of those leading things, you’ll want to start looking at, is the person, are they chasing better quality deals, more active deals, or hire a guy deal. You’re going to want to inspect them and see what’s that change over time is the quality of deals. I have a client that went through a massive change with all their people. They wanted to take their average deal size from 10,000 a person up to a 100,000 per person. And so, what we did is we went through some training and we went through some coaching and they have planned to do this over a two-year period, but with the coaching that they instituted, they did it in nine months. In over two years, they got the average deal size up to 500,000. So, there’s some real tangible business benefit to these things. I’d say the other thing too is to be very focused. An analogy I like to use is I attempt to play golf, I’m not sure I really play golf, but one time I got a good buddy of mine who was a really good golfer and I said, my drive just is terrible, can you help me. And he said, you know, here are the six or seven things, Dave, you need to fix. And I was getting so confused with all those six or seven things that my drive actually got worse. Then I decided to pay money to see a professional. And we started out slowly. He said, Dave, this is the one thing I want you to do right now. And then I mastered that, and he said, okay, Dave, this is the next thing you need to do. And over time, my drive started improving. It still sucks, but it started improving. And so, I think we as managers sometimes confuse our people because we try and coach them on too many things. And, so we have to look at, we’ve adopted kind of a methodology of how we identify the highest leverage coaching opportunity and focus just on that one thing, get the person to master that, then move to the next. Then move to the next and move to the next. Oftentimes what you find you get them performing better at that one thing. And a lot of the other things that they aren’t doing well, actually disappear because there’s a ripple through effect. OF: That’s fantastic. Well, Dave, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. We really, really appreciated you providing some actionable tips for our audience. DB: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation. You guys do some really important stuff, so I appreciate participating. OF: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s 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.

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 Nicole join us. Nicole, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Nicole O’Brien: Hi, my name is Nicole O’Brien. I am the head of marketing at a services firm in the legal space called Tycko & Zavareei. And we’ve got offices in DC and Silicon Valley, and I handle all of their sales enablement areas and I’ve set up all of demand generation for the firm and all of the digital marketing and everything from soup to nuts for them. SS: Fantastic. Well, we’re excited to have you, Nicole. You have an extensive background in the sales enablement industry and in marketing. So how has your background in marketing contributed to your success in sales enablement? NO: The marketing background, really for me, the pieces that have been the most in my success has been the ability to create content, the ability to write and be able to look at customer personas, you know, the buyer’s journey and identifying which messages would resonate and really developing those pieces of content. Now over the years, content is becoming much more important. The creation of content and the identification of messages were going to be so important. And now it’s really moving more in what you can deliver and how you deliver it, to the client across the journey. So that within sales enablement has become really, really critical. SS: Absolutely. What advice do you have for people looking to transition from other fields such as marketing to the sales enablement profession? NO: I know from marketing the skills that you really need if you’re going to transition to a purely sales enablement role is to understand that the sales enablement piece of this is what is the glue that connects marketing and sales. So the sales enablement that is like the necessary, important connection that makes that whole stream flow from marketing leads and marketing messages and all of that straight into sales, giving all that to sales, making sure that those touchpoints are made and that they are equipped to go to the next step with their customer. So, the skills there, you know, they’re varied for marketing, you need to really know the content creation piece of it. And hopefully, if you were successful in a marketing role you would have that skill already in place. Also, the technology around it. A lot of marketing people don’t pay too much attention, or the traditional marketing people don’t pay too much to the digital piece of this, as far as sales operations and marketing operations. Usually, those are sort of two distinct areas and you really need to know the technology that connects so that you can use that technology to work in that whole department. It’s very technology-centric. You need to know how training works. You need to know how upskilling works and you need to know how to create these pieces. But there’s a lot of overlap so it really isn’t a big lift. If you’re coming from nowhere that has anything to do with marketing or sales, it’s a bigger lift. You just need to go in and get some training and make sure that you are up to date on what’s going on in the enablement space and get those skills in order to get in the door. And then once you’re in the door, you need to focus on developing even further. SS: Absolutely. Absolutely. And now on that very point, from your perspective, what skills and expertise are needed to excel in sales enablement roles? NO: I think you need to have a lot of patience. I think that’s the number one thing. But I think you know, patience and perseverance, tenacity, of course. But you need to really understand the content piece of it, the creation of it, the strategy around, delivery of equipping the salesperson with the right tools at the right time at the correct point of the customer’s journey. Every message is going to be different depending on how they go through that flow. And, you really need to be technology savvy or be interested in really learning. And you need to be forward-looking and anticipate a lot of change that’s going to happen. And a lot of it’s really moving fast. So, I think you really need to have those skills, know the salesperson needs, know how the selling is done. Every organization is different. Every sales team is different. They do have similarities, but depending on the environment that you walk into, you’re going to need a different skill set, but the basic ones are really knowing the sales chain, knowing how marketing interfaces with sales, knowing what those touchpoints are, finding out within your organization what has friction and what doesn’t and focusing on the pieces to make that frictionless, focusing on making sure that all of the flow between marketing and sales is completely smooth. Those are, I think, the key areas. SS: Absolutely. Now, what advice do you have for how sales enablement practitioners can develop some of these critical skills or knowledge? NO: There are a ton of training opportunities out there. I know there’s a lot of training within an organization once you arrive. You should really be skilled in knowing what training platforms are out there, how sales training works within your organization, what the technology is, what the automation looks like between how the sale moves through the CRM system, you really need to know all of that. SS: Absolutely. And did you ever have a mentor in sales enablement or somebody that you felt you could go to for advice? NO: Yeah, I’ve always had mentor. I’ve been really fortunate. I’ve had several throughout my career. But I have a mentor now, so, I think that’s really important if you can get that relationship and have that person give you advice and be able to walk through problems with you or challenges that you might be having, learning how to navigate different areas. I’ve had several different mentors so if there’s a mentorship program somewhere that you can get involved with you definitely should. You should also not expect a whole lot from your mentor. I know there’s a lot of people that just go up and ask somebody to be their mentor, that’s probably not the way you do it. But, there are tons of programs out there that you can hook up with for mentorship. There’s also a lot of training programs that you can have for sales enablement, and some of them come from the actual sales CRM areas. And also, I want to mention even universities now have sales enablement training. Some of them are continuing education and some of them are part of an undergraduate degree related to sales. So, there’s a lot of new things out there and a lot more opportunity to really get plugged in. SS: That’s fantastic. Now on that pivot, I’d love to hear from you how you’ve seen the sales enablement profession evolve over the years. How do you think it will continue to evolve in the years to come? NO: Yeah. I was one of the five people that helped found the Sales Enablement Society. I should have mentioned that. I was in the marketing role. There’s a lot of people who were in the sales role or even the analyst role and there was no connection in our organizations between sales and marketing for me and those created the largest headaches. So, we used to joke about that we are in charge of all of the broken things in our organization. So, if it was broken, they would give it to us. That was how the Sales Enablement Society started. It started out as a meetup group in DC and we’ve grown now to 60 chapters in 30 countries and more than 8,000 members. So back then, that was four years ago, it was a very primitive atmosphere. There was not a lot going on in sales enablement. I don’t even think that the term was readily used. It was born. And then now, it’s just growing and it’s growing rapidly. And I think it’s because the pace of change is so great. There are so many gains in technology and how that’s moved the sales enablement profession forward that it’s mind-boggling. So that’s how you grow from five to 8,000 members is having that much growth and that much speed happening in four years. It’s insane. So, there has been a huge awareness that has happened over the past four years. And it will continue because it’s really a developing industry where marketing and sales are finally connected with something that we can name, and that thing is sales enablement. And that now is hopefully a department or a process or a very defined thing that happens in between one and the other and the whole of it all is completely a frictionless, wonderful microcosm of productivity and sales excellence. So, that’s what sales enablement does when it’s working well, it is the revenue driver of a company. And I think people are finally putting their finger on it, defining it, tweaking it, finding new ways to look for success, to develop success, to have all of that expand and be a revenue generator. We’ve managed to just as an industry, we’ve managed to uplift the sales enablement role, name it, make it a career, right? There’s VPs of sales enablement now, which was very few, four years ago. I don’t think I knew one four years ago. All of that has completely grown and we’ve elevated the conversation to not a series of like sales training exercises or CRM movements, or persona-driven content. You know, those were activities before and now it’s a program. Now, there are best practices emerging. The technology is flexing in order to meet what we need, what we find out, what will make it more frictionless. All of that has culminated into just a huge growth and great opportunity career-wise, you know, everybody wants to be part of that growth engine in a corporation, so that we’re really moving that needle forward. We’re not quite there yet. It’s still developing, the technology is going to take it a lot farther. It probably won’t look the same in four years as it does now, which is the good news. I mean, we’ll have so many different things happening in probably the next five to 10 years. SS: Oh, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Things are radically evolving in our space. Now as sales enablement continues to grow, I think you’re right, it started with people coming from definitely slightly different backgrounds or perspectives within the organization and it’s kind of, for a lot of organizations now, congealed around this notion of what sales enablement is, you’re right, it’s like a defined practice or department within an organization or even a discipline. Now as that happens though, I think that the next evolution is that there become more opportunities for, you know, practitioners to actually specialize in roles. So, what are some of the specializations in sales enablement that you’ve seen spin out over the last few years? NO: There’s specializing in just training, in just content management and development. There are content management systems now, you know, that are just as sophisticated as the CRM systems, you know, that we manage. Very specific roles in managing sort of sales ops positions that have also broaden their scope into digital performance. Social media has really had a huge effect on the whole chain. The rise of social media and digital marketing has completely changed the landscape of what we do. There are no more advertising departments really in large companies anymore. There are digital, you know, online management that we do in house now rather than go out. So those specialties, it really depends on and it’s still at the point where it really, really depends on your organization and where you enter because not every organization, unfortunately, is the same. There are some very developed sales enablement programs that are its own distinct department with its own sales enablement hierarchy of roles and responsibilities. And there are others that are sort of sales enablement positions that are within, you know, the sales or marketing area that might call it sales enablement, or it might be a department of like one or two or three people. It really depends. But the specific roles that have really emerged are sort of sales enablement training, and sales enablement content management and sort of persona development, but more than like persona delivery. Those are or emerging in anything that is a specialty in one particular sales enablement technology and is always a good place to be. So. SS: Absolutely. Now, Nicole, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. To close out for our audience, I’d love to hear from you what are some steps that you would recommend sales enablement practitioners take in order to advance their careers? NO: I would recommend that you look into which part of sales enablement, get smart on the sales enablement profession. You know, feel out where you think you belong and get trained in that area. If you don’t have that training, leverage what you have already learned and apply it in that way and get trained if you need it, but get yourself into a position where you are either within the sales enablement department and you can grow that way, but make sure that you know the technology, where it’s going and need to be, you know, a couple of steps ahead. So, make sure to network and figure out ways to elevate your role and focus on revenue and ROI and making sure that everything that you do can be measured. And that’s the advice that I have to somebody who is just coming in or even somebody who has been around or wants to move into an enablement role from a different area. There’s a lot of product managers now that are going into sales enablement and it’s very, similar but different. But there’s a lot of skills that cross, so it’s easy to, you know, to develop into a purely sales enablement role. SS: Absolutely. Nicole, thank you again so much for joining us today I really enjoyed our conversation. NO: Sure. Thank you, Shawnna. It was wonderful to be with you. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement experts visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s 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.

Vinaya Prakhala is the Founder & President of Sales Enablement Society, India Chapter. He is also the VP of Deskerra, which is a suite of various business enablement solutions. He comes with over two decades of experience in sales across the globe. He is a great speaker and mentor. Here, he shares a glimpse of what got him going in his 25 years of a long career. Through his experiences, he shares why individual startups fail to perform in sales and why certain startups perform exceptionally well in sales. He shares his six steps to building a sales strategy for any organization, either struggling with or trying to improve their sales. They are: 1. What is the product or service? Your primary offering, what is it? Have you clearly defined your product? Are you communicating with your customers? Do both of you and your customers have the same understanding of the product? How well have you packaged it? Is it logical? Does your packaging of products or services make sense to your customer? Take feedback from customers. What's the asking price? Pricing is crucial, assign value to your package. Is it free, or freemium, or premium? What are they willing to pay? Be clear, complete, concrete, concise, and correct. 2. Where is it being sold, and to whom is it being sold? Understand your target audience and define the target market, Outline your total addressable market (TAM), Potential addressable market (PAM), Serviceable addressable market (SAM), and Serviceable obtainable market (SOM). What is it? I wish to get out of the market? Set goals for the market. These goals help you define your SOM and find the right direction to approach that market. 3. How is it being sold? Find your GTM strategy, ideal customer vertical, and an ideal buyer persona. List all the individuals you are going to pitch (create an emotional story, not a product feature list). At this stage, you decide if you will base your marketing strategy on inbound or outbound, after which set up your sales process to reach your customers effectively. Based on the outcome of the tasks performed till now, decide if you would go the ABM way right out of the bat. 4. When are you going to sell the product? Timing is everything in sales. Define your call timing (When you will you call the customer), social selling (put the right message and content across in the right time), ABM timing (Time when you will upsell, cross-sell, down sell to specific account so that they keep buying from you), and Budget (Define what is the maximum time and resources you are going to spend after a lead till you choose to give up on pursuing the lead) 5. Why will anyone buy it? Find your niche and answer what differentiates you from your competitors. List down everything that separates you from logo and messaging to every inch of your product and brand. Don't hard sell; be kind to your customers. These customers will be your product evangelists. The other critical strategies for building your sales structure for a startup are: Objection handling Negotiation Lead qualification (BANT, ICPD) Lead to LOGO: MQL to SAL to SQL to LOGO Sales technology used Outsourcing Sales He later lays down the guide to increase your sales exponentially, the Dos and Don'ts of sales for startups, build a sales team, and various other vital questions.

As a seasoned executive, you know how to ask prospects effective questions and say the right things every point in the sales process. Sales conversations flow freely. You are confident in articulating your value proposition. Building trust and authority is second nature.  But, how do you get your entire sales team to use the best messaging through the sales process? That is exactly what I asked Walter Pollard of Brand Fuzion. I recently spoke with Walter about sales enablement and operationalizing sales messaging for the Modern Sales Management podcast. During this episode, we dove deep into how to develop and get your sales team to use more effective messaging, including: What is the Sales Enablement Society?How has sales enablement evolved and how is sales enablement defined today?What do senior executives need to understand about sales enablement?What are the biggest challenges facing Chief Revenue Officers and VPs of Sales today?How should sales teams balance a focus on products and delivering value?What is the role of messaging in a modern sales team?How do you structure your sales process so you are sitting on the same side of the table as your sales people?Where does sales messaging fit into your sales enablement strategy?How do you measure the effectiveness of your sales messaging?What steps can you take to develop better messaging?How to avoid competing on price?What do people get wrong the most about sales messaging (and how can they avoid it)?How can companies get all of their sales reps on the same page regarding messaging?How do you turn your sales messaging into a selling system that your entire sales team can use to win more?When messaging changes, how do you convey those changes to your sales team without confusing them?What is the role of your messaging strategy in the onboarding process to get sales reps ramped up faster?How can sales leaders monitor the use of messaging and reinforce messaging over time?How does sales reporting help optimize messages and tactics?How can marketers test marketing messages faster with better sales and marketing alignment?Why is feedback from sales reps about your messaging important?Does sales enablement look different for sales managers than it does for sales reps? Connect with Walter on LinkedIn and learn about his company, Brand Fuzion, at BrandFuzion.com.  You can subscribe and listen to all episodes of the Modern Sales Management podcast on your favorite podcast app or by visiting ModernSalesManagement.com.

Join Mary Grothe, CEO of Sales BQ as we welcome Roderick Jefferson, one of the founders of the Sales Enablement Society and a keynote speaker. We are grateful for his powerful contributions to sales. He started as a BDR years ago, achieved President's Club multiple times, and eventually transitioned into sales training and sales enablement.Roderick shares the 5P's of Sales - Purpose, People, Program, Performance, and Platform. For him, it all starts with people. Start making conversations. Listen. Ask the right questions.You deserve to learn fresh and relevant sales techniques that work with today's buyers, from prospecting through close. Access the Training Room now and start crushing those quotas! https://www.salesbq.com/access-the-training-room Connect with Mary Grothe: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marygrothe/Connect with Roderick Jefferson: https://www.linkedin.com/company/roderick-jefferson-associates

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 41 In this episode, we're joined by Erich Starrett, President of the Atlanta Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society. We engage in a lively, candid discussion on the differences between generating data and creating insights. These factors have massive implications for Sales Enablement Leaders looking to Orchestrate across functional groups. Why? Because: Gathering multiple perspectives by "shaking and sorting" each person's perspective into patterns that others can agree on is absolutely critical to orchestrating. Confirming those patterns while gaining commitment to act, and factoring in the current "mental maps" of others and how they see the challenge is required to enrolling others. Unifying action through clarifying where people "Get to yes" and then synthesizing the information into 2-3 executable insights are required to gain traction with important initiatives. _ Scott and Brian followed this process for the State of Sales Enablement Research. That's why listening to this episode is an important ingredient to your future success. Data just doesn't provide this level of current state reality -- Data is simply too far in the rear-view mirror. Support this podcast

Sales Enablement, Training, and Talent Leader Bill Ball talks his career story at DISYS and Vorsight and his newest endeavor as a founding member of the Sales Enablement Society.   Find Bill Ball on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-ball-se/ Find the Sales Enablement Society On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sesociety/ Online: https://www.sesociety.org/default.aspx

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I’m Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date in the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Kunal from HighRadius join us. Kunal, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Kunal Pandya: Sure. Firstly, thank you for inviting me to speak to you about a subject that is very close to me based on what I do and how I do it. In terms of what I do: I am the senior director for global sales enablement at HighRadius. And HighRadius provides innovative cloud AI-driven solutions that help companies to achieve their working capital and cash flow goals. And it does this through the automation of their accounts receivable processes. So, when times are tough, it’s very important for companies to be able to optimize their cash flow and working capital, and that’s exactly what we help them to do. SS: Fantastic. Well, I’m so excited that you were able to join us. You and I have worked closely together over the years and I know that you are deeply submersed in the sales enablement space. As part of that, you’ve done a lot of evaluation into the supporting tech stack that a lot of sales enablement practitioners need to drive really tangible business results within their organization. I’d love to hear from you kind of what are some of those essential elements of a sales enablement tech stack? KP: Sure. Firstly, I’ll assume that the company has a baseline CRM platform to manage the sales master data, right? So, things like leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities, and the associated reporting vets required based off of that. When they think about driving results specifically, we can categorize into various KPIs. What do we mean by results? Things related to sales performance or sales proficiency, or perhaps even sales productivity. Those are the three sort of key KPI categories that I drive my results based off of. What is deemed as an essential element of the sales enablement tech stack will obviously depend on the company’s challenges and perhaps what their priorities may be at that point in time. For example, for KPIs under sales performance where we’re talking about things like win rates, quota attainments, pipeline growth, and the ability to forecast as accurately as possible. Tools within the pipeline and analytics tech stack could be essential, and these are tools that allow your sales teams to obtain an accurate picture of the pipeline to forecast better using AI or predictive intelligence, as well as account-based planning. When it comes to pipeline solutions around database management, contact lists, relationship management, networking and account research and discovery, it could be key as well. You also mentioned sales proficiency. Here we fell into KPIs around things like time-to-ramp, coaching sessions delivered, sharpening the source sessions, best practice propagation across your sales force. And that’s essentially all about tools that enable your sales teams to develop into consistent high-performance. How do we bridge the gap in terms of performance? That technology is all about learning and development, sales coaching, and onboarding, right? Pretty straightforward things, so I would classify that as essential as well. And finally, I mentioned sales productivity and I guess this relates to KPIs such as time spent selling, adoption and measurement of processes, and content and playbooks. So, how can we ensure that our sales team is able to focus on those key activities that takes the most amount of effort and that actually can move the needle as opposed to tasks such as finding or creating content or struggling to understand processes, not knowing how to use the tools that they have, or perhaps even manual administrative tasks and so on? There will be other areas such as sales effectiveness, engagement and experience, as well as customer engagement and experience. But I guess what I’ve described here covers the most common elements. SS: I love that, and I think that that is a very good description of the sales enablement tech stack. Now for sales enablement professionals that may be a little newer to the profession or maybe are in the early stages of evaluating a sales enablement tool, what are some good resources that you’d recommend people look at to learn more about the sales enablement technology landscape? KP: Yeah, that’s a great, great question. It can often feel like a minefield and I remember a time when I was evaluating vendors for a certain type of software, I was receiving 10 to 15 emails a day on new technologies I’ve never heard of. So it can get a little bit convoluted and it can become a bit overwhelming, but I guess I can recommend the two key resources that I’ve used in the past. Firstly, if you’re out in the market evaluating sales enablement technology, make sure you’re a part of the Sales Enablement Society. This is a group of thousands of like-minded individuals around the world who are tackling the same challenges and requirements that you may have. So within the discussion forums on the society itself, you’re likely able to find the answers that you need. Well at least have the ability to ask the questions where people like myself and many of us can contribute towards answering them. So that’s the Sales Enablement Society. Secondly, resources such as G2 Crowd are very useful to help you narrow down what you’re looking for. If you have a long list and you want to narrow it down to a short list, it can provide you with some good insights into the tools and technology you’re evaluating. But ultimately, I feel that people are the greatest resource, so people with stories and experiences and even the battle scars, perhaps. So, having connections to other sales enablement practitioners is extremely valuable in my opinion. SS: Those are three really great resources. Now I want to shift and talk a little bit about key criteria. So, what are some of the key criteria that practitioners should consider when they’re assessing solutions to find the right fit for their organization? KP: That’s a great question. The first thing I’d say is base the criteria around the business challenges that you’re trying to solve. Let’s ensure that all of that criteria are focused on the task at hand and we’re not just listening to what we’re searching or what’s on a website or what vendors are telling us, but what are the business challenges you’re trying to solve? What are the KPIs that relate to those areas? That helps to boil it down to a company’s pure business requirements, and therefore the criteria you need. And that criteria may differ based on the type of solutions you’re assessing. Different software categories, solution categories may have different criteria, but I guess I can probably recommend some common themes across all solution categories. The first one I’d say is vendor credibility and that relates to things like the buying experience. What has been your buying experience so far and how would you evaluate that? Things like their response rates. Also, what does a customer base look like? Do you feel that they’re focused on perhaps the large customers or small to midsize customers, depending on who you are. Another important consideration for vendors is the ability to innovate and the frequency of innovation delivery to their customers. Is that vendor ultimately delivering innovation on a recurring and frequent basis, which will enable you as an organization to take full advantage of that innovation? New things, new functionality and new products, new features, and so on–keeping things fresh. That’s extremely key. A second aspect I would say is integration. Does the solution that you’re evaluating integrate with your existing sales technology stack, especially the CRM? This helps to drive adoption through things like a good user experience, as well as helps to provide a centralized data platform for the purposes of reporting analytics and all of the analysis that may need to happen. How do we keep things together, essentially? Another aspect I’d kind of just mentioned there was user experience, and this has to be key as well as a criteria. The questions to ask ourselves is: is the solution simple? Does it require minimal training? Is it intuitive? Is it overly complex? Does it require a lot of individuals to configure it, to customize it, to tailor it, to get you to maintain it? Those are some key questions as well. I think the last thing I’d mention is configurability. What do I mean by that? No two sales processes are exactly the same. Every business may do something slightly different from one another. Ensuring that the new solution is able to adapt to your business and maybe even how you want to be doing business going forward is vital as well. SS: I love that, and I want to come back to that topic of adoption for sure. But before we go there, you know, the procurement process for any new solution can be pretty rigorous depending on the organization, especially with the number of stakeholders that are now involved in any purchasing decision. What are some steps that practitioners should take to build a really solid business case and secure stakeholder buy-in for these new solutions? KP: Sure, that’s a great question. Securing stakeholder buy-in is probably one of the toughest things to weave into a purchase cycle that somebody may be running. As I mentioned previously, aligning the sales enablement function performance indicators (KPIs) and then building a business case based on how you will impact those KPIs is key. KPIs are something that everybody understands from the sales leadership all the way to company leadership. How does what you’re proposing impact those KPIs? But at the end of the day, we have to remember that the dollar signs speak volumes. So, ensure that you have compiled as comprehensive a return-on-investment study as you can, which clearly demonstrates how the solution will impact those KPIs that you’ve outlined and ultimately how that then translates into revenue. That’s what people would understand. That’s where the key stakeholders will clearly understand and be aligned to. The point is, when it comes to producing ROI studies or business cases, the vendor should be able to support you with this. If they’re not able to, if they’re reluctant to do so, then I would question that personally. Essentially, that’s what I would say is most important to building a solid business case. SS: I love that. As far as tech stack ownership, who within an organization actually owns the technology and the implementation from your perspective? KP: Yes. This depends on the structure of the organization, perhaps even the size of the organization and the complexity of the individuals in the organization hierarchy. Ultimately, I believe sales enablement should maintain a level of ownership on the tech stack that it has helped to select and implement and deliver. The delivery of the value will remain a close criteria for any sales enablement function. Sales enablement should stay close, but also IT and sales operations have a responsibility to ensure the maintenance and optimization of the stack. So, these processes and delegations need to be clearly defined in my opinion, and along with SLAs that align to vendor SLAs, key counterparts at your company and the vendor to make sure that they’re connected and aligned. And ultimately, if you are on the market for a new solution, these aspects need to be defined upfront and those individuals need to be part of the process and bought into the process as well. The other thing I’ll say in addition to that is it’s always healthy to have a level of ownership from the line of business. So if the end-user of the solution perhaps is within the sales team, then having a champion account executive or solution consultant, whoever the end-user may be, is something that I’d also recommend as part of this. SS: I think that’s a good round-up of folks that you need in that crew. Now, going back to that adoption conversation that you started just a few minutes ago, how can organizations drive adoption of sales enablement technology across the fields? I think our audience could really benefit from any actionable advice or tips that you have. KP: Absolutely, I completely agree. One of the key impacts to the return on any investment when it comes to technology and the purchase of that technology is adoption. I can give a few tips to help drive adoption based on my previous experiences. The first thing I would say is keep it simple, keep it absolutely simple. Be wary of the fact that the more complexity you introduce to a process or a workflow, the higher the resistance will be to actually adopt it. Keep it very simple. The second thing I would say is, make it engaging. To make sure you have a barometer on end-user engagement when it comes to the adoption of these solutions. Also, find ways to ensure your end-users not just have to use a solution but actually want to use a solution and enjoy using the solution. And that comes by then clearly seeing the benefits and the value that a solution brings, not just from a long-term perspective in terms of results or numbers, but also on a day-to-day basis. So yes, today this solution has helped me save an hour, two hours by automating this task or providing this information or doing this task or activity for me as opposed to me doing it manually, perhaps. Make sure that that is engaging as it can be but also make sure that those benefits are clearly visible and highlighted, right? As part of the implementation and ongoing maintenance of it. The third thing I would say is perhaps a little bit of a curveball, but I’ve seen a lot of companies doing it in the past and it’s something that I have done in the past as well–is gamification. Salespeople, as we know, are fierce competitors. They like to win, they don’t like to lose. Think of innovative ways to create a competitive environment that pitches a sales force against each other, perhaps, and obviously in a friendly way but in terms of adoption. An example I can give on this one is in the past I once created a league table of account executives who used a solution to deliver content to their prospects. And the more they sent, the higher the points they received. The more prospects that viewed their content, the higher the points; the more prospects that engaged with them, the more points they got. It got pretty competitive at one point. But the key question here is, what impact did this have? When we started this adoption and when we drove adoption, what we found was we were able to correlate adoption with actual performance of sales, and there was a clear correlation between those individuals who were showing the right behaviors in terms of adoption. They were also the same individuals who had created the most pipeline within that period of time we were measuring, so it can actually work. SS: I love that, and I love that example. In closing, this is the last question for you, Kunal. With so many sales tools available today, I think one of the valid concerns is just that there’s a challenge for organizations with the proliferation of tools. How can sales enablement professionals help reduce some of that complexity and help sellers get the most out of the technology that’s available to them? KP: Yes, another great question. Software is eating the world. Again, we can drown in software and especially as a sales enablement practitioner, we see new software innovations coming to market very frequently and we feel like, “yes, that’s great. I would love to have that, but I’ve already got six, seven, eight, nine, ten pieces of software in my test stack already. So, where does it actually fit in?” Going back to the points I made earlier, it’s very easy to buy into a new solution or tool and we can get very easily excited by something new that’s out there and want to buy it, but always keep your KPIs in mind. Always keep the KPIs in mind and ask yourself: How will this tool impact the key business or sales levers that I’m tracking and trying to pull? How will it add value to the business and what problems will it actually solve? What I found is by applying the first principles method to how you think you can peel back the onion and until you get to the core of the problem, sometimes that problem doesn’t really need a solution. Sometimes it just needs a new process. Sometimes it just needs maybe some training or perhaps it’s a change in behavior that’s required from your end-users. In addition to that, what I would say is don’t lose focus on why you implemented the software in the first place. If you define the KPIs upfront, as we talked about earlier, based on what it was supposed to impact, keep an eye on that and ensure that it’s delivering what it needs to and maybe that will uncover some process deficiencies, barriers to adoption, training requirements, and so on. Ultimately, that will help us to reduce complexity and make sure that sellers can get the most out of technology that is already there without overloading them with more. SS: Fantastic. Kunal, thank you so much for joining us today. I greatly appreciate your time. KP: You’re welcome. It’s been a great pleasure. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s 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.

Why is it so important to move from sales enablement practitioner to strategic leader? In this interview with Dr. Brian Lambert, author, co-founder of the Sales Enablement Society, and Inside Sales Enablement podcaster, we explore how important sales enablement is to growth success, why the practice hasn't advanced as quickly as anticipated, and what can be done to drive better success. https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianlambert/ #salesmanagement #salesleadership #salesreadiness #salesperformance #salesenablement #salesenablementsociety #SES #evolvedselling #valueselling #deathoftheB2Bsalesrep #Forrester #CSOinsights #InsideSalesEnablement #GrowthMatters

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we are here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Bill Parry from Redwood Software join us. Bill, I’d love for you to just introduce yourself, your role, and your organization. Bill Parry: Well, thank you very much. I would be happy to. I am here at Redwood as the director of enablement of an amazing company that specializes in process automation and robotic software and some really fantastic stuff in the financial world. For me, I am just a poor kid from Northern New Hampshire living in Texas. The first half of my career, I started in the U.S. Coast Guard. I spent the majority of my time studying training, training development, process improvement, human performance, instructional design. My last three and a half/four years in the Coast Guard, I was working at a training center, a giant think tank. So, I developed a real passion and love for training and teaching and coaching and understanding the process behind it all. And then when I left the Coast Guard, I jumped into the sales world and I realized that there’s a great disparity between training and what actually happens out in the street. My first sales job, I go off to sales training, I’m fired up. I’m excited. I come back and the first thing my sales manager says to me, he says, “Bill, don’t about what they told you, I’m going to show you the right way to do it.” So, from where I came from, that was a big red flag. Then he goes on to say, “what I want you to do is I want you to hang out with Bob next week.” Okay. So, you just told me that training’s wrong and now you’re passing the buck to Bob. So, I go home, I go to Bob. “Hey Bob, I’m going to hang out with you this week.” Guess what you think Bob said? “Why me?” And that was the beginning of my passion for connecting training with real-world application. That is something that I see all the time. You have so many sales managers out there that have been promoted into a role they really don’t know how to do, and their only way of coaching and teaching is just do what I did. Just do what I did. You’re going to do it. You’re going to crush it, and that really doesn’t work or doesn’t help. In my career, I’ve either been in sales or I’ve been training. And that really gives me a unique perspective when I’m coaching and teaching a seller. Because I know what it’s like to have that quota over your head. I know what it’s like to be at the end of the quarter, end of the year, and you’ve got nothing, and how to get out of that so that you can be productive and be a consistent performer. SS: Well, I love it, Bill. I think that scenario is one that a lot of sales professionals encounter when they go into a new organization. And I think specifically that the kind of first interaction with an organization is really critical to getting a sales rep off on the right foot. You co-led a session at the Sales Enablement Society event on great onboarding. And I would love to understand from your perspective, what makes an onboarding program great and what are kind of the core components of a successful onboarding program? BP: Onboarding really has to be personalized and specific to the role that you are trying to coach and teach. Too often, we have HR that gets involved and HR has got their onboarding that we’ve got to do here. We’ve got these people, “Oh wait, what is a sales onboarding?” And we don’t understand that a seller, yes, they’ve got to do HR onboarding because they’ve got to learn how to get a paycheck and how to get healthcare and all that other stuff. But the seller has to learn the specific things about their role and how they can be successful and what do they need to know or be able to do in order to be successful in their role. Many times, people create an onboarding program by assembling the kitchen sink and just throwing it at the person and saying, “okay, there it is. Just go learn it.” And one of two things happen. They figure it out painfully or they say, “forget this, I’m out of here”. And that can be very exhausting and costly. So for me, for a really good onboarding program, there are four key elements that you’ve got to really focus on. First and foremost is the industry. What is the industry that the seller is going into? Show them how to be a student of their industry, show them where to learn about their customers and their competitors, and where do their customers meet? What networking groups do they participate in, what user groups they participate in? Where did their customers go to find help so that this seller can immerse themselves into and understand that the industry that they’re selling into and the pains and the frustrations of their customers so that when they do engage with a customer, they’re having an intelligent, businesslike conversation that hopefully elevates them to the level of a trusted advisor. Somebody that the customer wants to talk to, not just some knucklehead who’s trying to sell them something. So, the first bucket is they’ve got to be a student of their industry. The second is they’ve got to understand and know the systems that they’re going to be using and what resources are available to them in their job. Systems like Salesforce, Outlook, how to input an order. Those systems need to be second nature to them. So many sellers hesitate calling somebody because they don’t know how to input a lead or how to finish an order or how to insert frustrating process that we have created and they don’t know how to do it right. You’ve got the industry, you’ve got the systems and resources. Then the next thing is selling skills or selling process or selling methodology. Whatever you want to do. What do your sellers, or what does your company subscribe to to help your sellers do their job? It could be customer-centric. It could be solution selling. It could be Challenger sale, it could be insert methodology, but we need to have an understanding of the process. And then the last thing that they need to know is the product and what are the product solutions? What are the pains that we solve? Who are the competitors? What are my success stories? And I like to put them in those orders. I share with sellers that, the product is the last thing that you need to know. And so often new hires want to, like, “I just got to know the product and I want to go out there and sell.” Okay, cool. But you need to know why people are buying our product. You’ve got to know what problem our product is solving. You’ve got to know why we even created this and why is the industry in need of this. If you can understand the need and the business needs and the industry, the product is secondary, because that same person that’s begging for information on the product, what are my features benefit? That’s the first seller that’s going to drop price in order to close a deal and we don’t want to drop price. We want to provide solutions and we want to help the customer solve a pain problem. SS: Absolutely. I love those four buckets. I think what I’d love to understand from you are maybe some of the challenges that you’ve encountered when trying to design or implement these onboarding programs within a new organization? BP: Sure. There are a lot. There are many challenges. The first challenge that you have to do is you have to clearly identify what does the seller need to know or be able to do to successfully do their job well. Just simply identifying those key elements can make the process that much better. For example, sales really is simple. Who do I call? What do I say? And what are the next steps? Who do I call? We want to spend a lot of time clearly identifying who is the target customer that we’re going after. Teach your sellers how to identify the proper target, the proper prospective buyer. Show them how to get that information. If you can clearly identify what they need to know or be able to do, you can now bake out, how do they learn that, what resources are available to them? Who’s my subject matter expert on this? Where can this learn the seller learn this information? Too often a lot of organizations just kind of create things without thinking of the end in mind, they just kind of say, “okay, you just need to know this.” Well, yeah, I know I need to know how to close a deal, but before I know how to close a deal, I’ve got to learn where the hell is the guy? How do I find the guy? Okay, great. Now what do I say to the guy? How do we overcome this objection? What is my conversation starter? How do I engage with this customer? What is my demand creation process and methodology? And there are baby steps that you’ve have got to develop these things. Now, to help you understand that, you’ve got to be engaged with the senior leadership. I can’t emphasize the importance of this. The enablement process needs to be a top-down function, a top-down, cross-functional, synergistic process. They’ve all got to work together. If you don’t have that mutual buy-in, you’re not going to have any level of success. I’ve done it the wrong way and it doesn’t work where you work with just the sellers. Because any teaching that you do, the seller is going to be useless unless the leadership supports it. If you can get the leaders in one room and talk about it and clearly identify it and help them clearly identify what are the top five things that a seller needs to know in the first week, what are the top five things that the seller needs to know in the second week? By the end of the first month, what’s a reasonable expectation of our sellers? And the skills that they need to know or be able to do that. Just engaging with senior leadership and getting them in the process is key. One of the things that I really like to do is when I start building an onboarding program, or I’m building a pipeline generation program, or I’m building anything that engages the sellers, I want the sales leadership involved. And I tell them, “this is your process. This is for your team. I’m really good at this. I kind of understand it. I know how it all works, but unless you help me build this, and unless you support it, we’re not going to get anywhere with this. So, let’s do this together so that collectively we’re building a program for you and your team. It’s not my quota, it’s your quota.” SS: I think that’s a great approach. And you mentioned obviously sales, leadership, and also cross-functional alignment. So, from your perspective, obviously cross-functional alignment is critical, but why specifically for onboarding? Then, who beyond the sales leadership within the organization should enablement partner with to deliver great onboarding? BP: That’s a great question. Let me tell you a story to explain this. My first job after I graduated college, I went to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and my first job was to drive a very large ship. My first duty station was in San Francisco. When I reported aboard, a young 24-year-old kid, do you think the captain said to me, “well, here you go, Mr. Parry. Take the keys. She’s all yours. Drive through the San Francisco Bay with all the traffic and work your way underneath the Harbor.” No, no, not at all. That would have been the stupidest thing for them to do. I was handed a binder and in that binder were specific skills and knowledge that I had to clearly demonstrate to subject matter experts that I knew how to do my job. For example, I had to go into the engine room and I had to trace oil lines and fuel lines and sewage lines, and I had to completely understand the insides of the engine so that when I was driving the ship and I said, “all ahead flank,” I knew what happened down below. I had to navigate the ship, I had to spend time with the cooks and the deckhands and I had to touch almost every single department on that ship. Why? Because on a cold January morning at one o’clock in the Alaskan ocean in a storm, our crew needed to know that I knew how to do my job so that they could sleep. I was engaged with everybody. Now, how does that apply to a sales world? How many sellers do you know that leave a wake of pissed off people because the seller just doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what happens? I’m just closing deals. We all know that person. They’re out there, and the reason why is because we don’t set up a system in their onboarding process and teach them what happens when you hit send. How long does it take to install your product? And when you do order the product, what is the process to get that? What is the implementation process? My onboarding is very similar to what I did with the ship. Granted, it’s not like a year and a half long, but I make sure that the sellers are engaged with sales operations, that they spend some time, even if it’s 10 minutes, here are the five things that I need you to go talk to finance about. I want you to go talk to Sue so that Sue knows that you know what you’re doing with your job. There’s an ecosystem, if you will, of everybody that that seller impacts. I want to make sure that that seller engages, shakes a hand, has a face-to-face and meets them. Not just the first week, because we all know the first week is pretty much a waste of time. In the first two weeks, nobody’s going to remember anything. So, I want my seller to engage with them in the first or second week and then come back in six weeks and reengage with them. Now that they have a better understanding of what the process is, when I hit send, when I do sell something, so that way there is cross-functional support. The people in finance no longer are thinking, “ah, those guys are just in sales. I don’t like them.” But it’s, “Hey, how can I help the sellers do more? I like John.” John knows what he’s doing so that when John picks up the phone and he calls Sue in finance, “Hey Sue, I need some help.” Sue wants to help because she knows that John knows how to do the job. Does that make sense? SS: Yes. I love that you are helping the sellers build out their ecosystem internally. that’s fantastic advice. I would actually, love to get some more advice from you, particularly around kind of being able to reinforce the knowledge learned during the onboarding program. As you mentioned, the first two weeks are kind of a wash. How do you ensure that what you’re teaching the sellers sticks long-term? BP: Years ago, I had a boss, wonderful human being, and he would always challenge us. “How do you know, Bill? How do you know?” Too often, managers send their sales guys off to a “sales training” or a certification program, and then when the seller gets back and they’re “certified”, we all hope and pray they can do their job because we don’t know. We’ve all heard the term inspect what you expect. So, with onboarding, I help the managers with a specific milestone checklist. This is the behavior that I want your sellers to demonstrate to you. And it’s usually taken from a QBR review, because every quarter you’re going to review these five things of your sellers. So, now with your new hires, I want you to inspect with them. And it literally is the manager. I’m going up to the guy or girl and saying, “Hey, demonstrate this to me. Show me how to do this”. Too often we can be very complacent. A manager will go up to the seller, “Hey, did you do that training that you’re supposed to do?” It’s like, “Oh yeah, yeah, I got it. I know how to do it. Yeah, it’s great. It’s easy.” Okay, cool. As opposed to, “Hey, show me what you learned. Walk me through this. Demonstrate to me that you know how to do this.” We don’t want to hurt their feelings. We don’t want to upset them. We don’t want to challenge them or embarrass them. Forget that dude. Show me that you know how to do your job. That key element is important. So, for a confirmation of learning, which is the technical demo, the technical term in instructional design, you can do a quiz, which really just means they just know how to take a quiz. They can demonstrate it to you. You can see them in action. What I like to do with onboarding is several levels of confirmation of learning. One, we’ll do a quiz. You went through this module, take this quiz, fantastic. But I’m also going to pair you up with a mentor, one of your teammates. Who you choose for a mentor is important. You want to make sure that you find young sellers that want to become leaders and want to become managers. You don’t want to just hand it off to somebody and say, “Hey, can you walk this guy through it?” You’re going to demonstrate to the mentor that you know how to do the job. But I also want to build the behavior and the comfort level that it’s okay to talk to your peers because I want a room full of sellers to coach each other. I want a seller to totally screw it up on the phone, hang up, and look to his peer go, “dude, what the hell did I just do wrong? Let’s walk through this. Can you look? Where did I blow it?” “Oh, Bob, I heard you, man. You really ran into that challenge. Why don’t we try this? We’ll do a quick role play.” If my onboarding is working correctly, you can walk through the sales floor and you can hear the sellers coaching each other. That allows the manager to go do other managerial things. So, I went on a couple of tangents here. For the confirmation, you want to do a quiz, you want a coach, a peer coach, you want a manager to do spot-checking. And then, another element that you can do, is you can have kind of like an informal session at the end of the onboarding. You can bring the new hire into a conference room and walk and go through their training, demonstrate and show it to us. Going back to my ship, when I had completed my entire program and I finished, I checked off all those boxes that I had to do and I spent all that time with subject matter experts. I still wasn’t qualified. I had to spend time, I had to sit in a room. With the captain of the ship and the second in command of the ship and my boss and the weapons officer and like two other people. It’s like this kind of magic. Imagine a conference room with VPs and the entire C-suite grilling you and asking you questions. If something happens, what do you do if this situation occurs? Walk me through it. If we’re in port, what happens here? So, you can do the same thing with a seller. You get a seller that goes through an onboarding and HR program. They’ve completed their eight weeks, whatever it is. Now, bring them into a room, bring the VP of sales in, bring a regional manager in, bring a sales manager in. Bring somebody from finance, bring somebody from sales operations, put them in a room and grill them. “Hey, demonstrate to me. How do you do your prospecting? Show me what your operating rhythm is, and demonstrate to me how you’re going to set up your weekly schedule. Walk me through what your quarterly reviews going to look like at the end of the quarter. Demonstrate to me where you find prospecting. Let’s do a quick role play.” That simple exercise can take 40 minutes, a half an hour, but imagine all the work and preparation that’s going into it. If you tell your sellers in week three, in four weeks, you’re going to be meeting with the VP of sales, these five people, and you’re going to demonstrate your clear understanding of this material. I’d be willing to bet their pucker factor goes up and they’re going to get really quick about learning it and being able to demonstrate it. SS: Absolutely, absolutely. I think sales can be a stressful role and that’s a situation they should be able to handle it, and it prepares them well for the field. So, we’ve talked a little bit about how you kind of measure, retention of the knowledge from onboarding within reps. How would you say you measure the success of onboarding as a whole back into your organization and particularly your stakeholders? BP: Yeah. In sales, it’s really easy. Are you selling? Are you closing deals? And in the past couple of years, I’ve really been thinking about this and I’m having some really fun and challenging conversations that usually involve alcohol and late nights. So often, I hear sales enablement people get all excited about time to the first deal. Let’s reduce the time to the first deal. Well, I’m going to throw the BS flag on that because I think that is a stupid marker. SS: Please do. BP: Because how many times do we hand things to new salespeople? How many times do we just say, “Oh, here, just try it. Close the deal. Let’s walk them through this.” That’s BS. Stop. I think the best marker of success is the time to pipeline. When you have reached X amount of quality pipeline, now you’ve got it, because the lifeblood of a seller’s process is not the deals that they close. It’s the pipeline that they generate. Quality pipeline. If you teach a seller how to get quality pipeline, they cannot fail, period. SS: I think that is an excellent metric to be tracking the success of an onboarding program. It sounds like you’re going to be very busy for the next year, Bill, so thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. BP: Absolutely, happy to. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, please visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you want to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

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 they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m joined by Jenn Haskell from Monotype. I would love for you, Jenn, to just introduce yourself, your title, and your organization. Jenn Haskell: Absolutely. Thank you, Shawnna, for having me. My name is Jenn Haskell. I am the global sales trainer and sales enablement person here at Monotype Imaging. Monotype is based out of Woburn, Massachusetts, so right outside of Boston. We’re a global organization and we’re actually known for two parts of our business. We have typography — selling fonts and types, that’s actually our business. We also have a technology that allows companies to collect and curate user-generated content, and then use that for different promotions, marketing mailers, advertising, and things of that nature that they may have on their website. So, at the end of the day, Monotype is a brand company. We’re here to ensure that companies are on-brand across the board. SS: Excellent. Well, Jenn, we’re very excited and honored that you’re able to join us today. You’ve done a lot of writing and speaking on sales enablement, particularly kind of around the training and coaching components. So, you’ve even said in the past that sales enablement leaders are part trainer and part psychologist. In your opinion, why is that the case and how can psychology skills help sales enablement professionals be more effective? JH: You can’t see me because it’s a podcast, but I’m kind of giggling on the inside. I have a big smile on my face. When I first said that Shawnna, I actually was at a Sales Enablement Society local holiday event that they had several years ago. Each vendor that was there got about five minutes that they could get up and say something. And I wanted to do something funny to lighten it up a little bit. So, I created this meme about sales enablers being the ultimate psychologist. And I don’t think I realized how real that was and how true that was, but I definitely realize it today. To get back to your question, why would it be important for a sales enabler to sort of understand the psychology? I look at it this way: sales is a tough business. You can be the top of the leaderboard one day and not closing a deal for multiple quarters in a row the next day. And one of the things that I hear a lot from sales leaders, and I get it, it’s their business to drive the revenue. But I do hear a lot, “it’s not personal, it’s business,” right? Well, I believe for an enabler, you have to make it personal because you have to gain credibility and you have to be perceived as a trusted advisor. You’re the person that’s going to be working with your sales reps to coach them and to mentor them and to provide them with foundational learning or continuous learning. I’m also aware of the fact that at the end of the day, there isn’t one salesperson that is exactly the same as the next. They all share a lot of the same characteristics. I bet if you put them on a DISC assessment or a predictive index, they would probably fall within the same category. But I know that they all learn differently. They all receive information differently. And so I think the psychology part comes in handy because it allows me to build programs that are going to resonate with everyone across the board and not just certain individuals. At the end of the day, people are motivated by different things. People learn differently, people accept information differently. They have different levels of emotional IQ, and those are the types of things that if I can tap into it for myself as an enabler, it actually benefits me one of two ways. I can have more effective sales enablement programs and I can make that personal connection. And I think it also allows me to demonstrate what my reps might be able to do when they’re having conversations with clients. SS: Absolutely. I think you are spot-on that one of the core values enablement brings is really humanizing the sales team and the culture within an organization. From your perspective, what are some of the other core competencies that you would say sales enablement leaders need to have to be successful and what skills have helped you most in your career? JH: Well, I would start with communication. And having strong communication skills, whether it’s in a one-on-one environment, whether it’s facilitating actual learning, we have to be able to be well-spoken and well-written, that’s the thing that allows me to connect with my reps and to be transparent about things like, “here’s why you’re doing this, this is the benefit for you.” But it’s also what allows me to connect with my senior sales leaders and my executive teams so that I continue to have that executive sponsorship. So, communication first, and a little bit of project management, because I don’t think there’s a sales enablement professional out there that wouldn’t tell you they’re under-resourced. We’re constantly trying to prioritize 15 different things at once. And I know for me, as obnoxious as it may seem, I actually have a calendar that I will create at least six months out in advance. It’s so OCD, it’s color-coded, but it’s a Google Doc and I share it with all of my sales managers and sales leaders, my marketing leaders, and they basically know from week to week, day to day, everything that a sales enablement team is working on and delivering. It actually helps to keep me in check as well. I think the ability to coach is one thing, but you need to be able to provide feedback that is constructive, thoughtful, and helpful. So, that kind of ties back into the second question around the psychology piece. Your reps are gonna expect that when you do provide feedback, you’re not just copy and pasting your answer from one rep to the next. They’re going to feel better when they know that it’s tailor-made just for them. And I also think having some basic soft skills around empathy and emotional intelligence and those types of things are really going to take you a long way in that enablement role. SS: Absolutely. I think empathy, communication, these are all things that I think are the soft skills that sales enablement leaders really need to help kind of motivate and inspire their sales teams. What are some of the ways in which you’ve done that kind of motivated and inspire the sales teams at Monotype? JH: The first thing that I do is I do my best to empower them on a regular basis. They are stakeholders in their own success. I personally don’t want to be viewed as the sales enablement person that comes in with a program that worked in another organization and was effective and successful and just say, “well, it worked there, so it’s going to work here.” I always have conversations with my leaders, my managers, my reps — I want to know what their daily activity looks like. I want to know what the conversations are that they’re having, the objections that they’re receiving. I want to know how they feel. One way that I motivate and inspire is I connect with them and I give them the time that they deserve, and I let them know that I take it personally if they leave the organization or if they’re not successful. To me, that’s my failure. It’s one of the first things that I say to reps, because that’s how important they are to me, and it’s motivating and inspiring. I know every single rep. I know not just about their accounts and the money and revenue generation side of things, I know about them personally. What keeps them up at night that I can hopefully help with? What process isn’t as efficient as it can be that I can hopefully streamline? What areas of the business are we just missing that I can advocate for them? I make them stakeholders in their own success. The second that you enroll them in having a say, right then and there, is inspiring to a sales rep. SS: I really love that approach, Jenn. I want to pivot a little bit because you had mentioned coaching and feedback being one of those critical skills, and you’ve also written in the past about the importance of coaching. From your perspective, why is coaching so important and what should enablement’s role be in coaching sales? JH: Yeah, I mean, I’m a former college athlete, right? So I have been coached since I was four years old. It’s been such a critical piece of my life that I think it’s just entwined in my DNA. But there is a connection there because a lot of people that end up in sales probably at some point in time had been coached, whether it was by a professor, or their parents, whether they played a sport. I just think coaching allows us to feel like we’re worth the investment. We’re not making an assumption that you’ve already got the skill-set. We’re acknowledging that the skill-set is there, but we’re going to tap into it. We’re going to hone your craft, and we’re going to take it to the next level. I know a lot of people, myself included, actually expect to be coached and they’re open to being coached. And I actually think as you see the generations change in the workforce, millennials want to be coached, the Gen Zs want to be coached. That is something to go back to the previous question that motivates and inspires them. Enablement’s role in that is a couple of things for me. I want to be able to do the coaching as well. I think I can offer a different point of view than a sales manager. I tend to be the one that plays a little bit of devil’s advocate. Let’s look at this from a lot of different directions. Let’s do a lot of roleplaying. And build up your confidence so that when you do have that call with a client, you’re ready to go. But on the flip side of that, I also want to make sure that my managers are better coaches as well. A lot of the time in sales, you’ll see sales managers be very successful sales reps in the past that had been promoted to that manager level. And we can’t make the assumption that the people management skills are there. So enablement really should own that manager enablement piece and showing them how to conduct effective coaching and how to give thoughtful feedback. SS: Absolutely. In that same article, you also mentioned two effective types of coaching, the manager-to-employee, which is why the frontline manager enablement is so important today, as well as peer-to-peer. So how do those two types differ in terms of the value that they deliver and from your perspective, is one more effective than the other? JH: I actually don’t think one is more effective than the other. I think they’re both absolutely required. And what I like about the peer-to-peer — so I’m going to start with the second one first — is one, you’re learning best practices from a rep that might have different experiences. They’re talking to different customers, they’ve been in different sales plays. So you’re really learning from that rep. I love peer-to-peer because it creates a sense of teamwork and collaboration, but there’s never any walls going into that, right? Not too many reps are nervous about talking to a fellow peer about a deal or a strategic approach to a conversation they’re about to have. So it’s very natural and you’re not feeling like you’re going to be put onto the microscope. If I have a program where there’s a certification piece involved, it’s a really great way for the reps to practice with each other so that by the time they do get to the manager or the sales enablement coaching piece, they already have so much more confidence going into that. So, I like peer-to-peer because I think it really promotes the practice. Then as far as the enablement-to-employee or the manager-to-employee at that point, hopefully there’s enough of a foundation where you’re basically just fine-tuning through the coaching and offering more of that strategic leadership point of view. SS: And beyond those two types, what else have you found effective by way of coaching strategies that you might recommend? JH: Yeah, so sometimes I’ll take a really informal approach to coaching. I’ll give you a perfect example. I have your standard BDR inside sales team that I actually sit with in the Monotype office. They are slightly junior reps, a couple of them are straight out of college. They’ve never sold before. They do call blocks on Thursdays. I’ll go over. There’s a little bookcase over there. I’ll go over, I’ll sit on the bookcase with my laptop while they’re doing their call blocks, and I’ll say to them, “guys, I’m here. I’m listening. I’m not judging. I’m just learning from you. But if you get off a call and you have a question, I’ll help you because I am listening. But I’m not going to force my coaching on you.” That team absolutely loves it because now what I’ve done is I’ve enrolled them and I’ve given them the opportunity to accept the coaching or not. There’s no right or wrong answer in that situation. Another technique that I think is wildly successful that every organization should have is some means of video-based coaching. A lot of us have sales readiness platforms or learning management systems, but to me, that’s only a check on a checklist, right? It’s great if you complete a module or a curriculum or an assessment, what I really want to know is out of what you learned, can you put this into practice? Can you be effective? And a video-based coaching assessment tool is going to allow you to do that. SS: I love those recommendations. So, I want to close with one question. I just want to kind of understand some of the upcoming sales enablement initiatives that you might have in the pipeline that you’re really excited about. JH: It’s the end of 2019, so I’m excited about end-of-year activities. I like to see the buzz. Going back to your question previously about motivating, I’m the one walking through the office and high-fiving and fist-bumping my sales reps and getting them excited as much as I can. I always love to see that end-of-year buzz. But right now, the biggest initiatives that I’m working on would be sales kickoff. I want sales kickoff to be something that my reps walk away from and they just feel ready to crush the next year. So, I want it to be really effective as well as motivating. And personally, here at Monotype, I’m excited about the fact that we did just recently get acquired by a private equity firm. Our company dynamic is about to change, and hopefully that’s going to work in the favor of the sales organization as far as just having better alignment, having some strategic initiatives and being able to support them through that change. SS: Well. Thank you so much, Jenn, for joining us today. I really appreciate your time. JH: Great. Thank you so much, I appreciate it. SS: And to our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, please visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you want to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

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 they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I’m excited to have Kristen McCrae with us from Intuit. Kristen, thanks so much for joining us. I would love for you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself, your role, and your organization. Kristen McCrae: Absolutely, thanks so much for having me today. I’m Kristen McCrae, and I work on the sales enablement and performance team here at Intuit. SS: So glad to have you. So, you and I met at the Sales Enablement Society’s annual conference recently, and you had a presentation where you talked about having a data-driven mindset for sales enablement. In your opinion, why is that so critical? KM: It’s such a great question and I think the answer is a little bit tricky, but when I was thinking about why data-driven enablement is so important, it really stems from these statistics that I’ve come across. So, CSO Insights estimates that about 60% of organizations have a sales enablement function, but of those, only 34% of respondents indicated that enablement was actually meeting a majority of their expectations. And I’ve heard similar statistics like this over the past few years, and I started thinking about, as enablement grows, how can we make sure that we have a seat at the table, that we’re respected, and that we’re adding value? I think that one of the reasons that enablement can be tricky is we wear a lot of hats. We can be the trainer, the go-to person when it comes to product marketing or content, but a lot of the things we work on don’t always impact success. There’s data everywhere, but you have to really find it and track it. And so, when it comes to that data-driven mindset, we have to find a way to quantify our impact – especially if one-third of our audience is feeling like they haven’t seen our impact yet. So, my challenge to every sales enablement practitioner is starting to think about what are you working on, how are you prioritizing it, and how are you measuring success to make sure that data-driven enablement has a seat at the table and is a highly respected field. SS: I couldn’t agree more, and I do think it is landing on the expectations of what success looks like. So, from your perspective, what are some of the core things sales enablement should track to really demonstrate the return that organizations are making on their investment in sales enablement? KM: I think it’s also a great question and I think it really comes down to understanding your business and how your business measures success. Every business is going to measure it a little bit differently. Like I said earlier, there is data everywhere, but sometimes it’s hard to find. So, you’ve got to make a commitment of how am I going to find this data, who can help me find it, and what story does it tell? And committing to the fact that with that data you are able to find, you are able to draw conclusions and you’re able to make sure that every single project that you work on has a before and after state when it comes to data. So, specific things that sales enablement should track I’m hesitant to answer. I think it’s more about uncovering what data is out there, what story does it tell, and what are you going to do about it, showing a before and after state of that data. SS: Absolutely. And you’ve said this a couple times, but with so many potential metrics to measure, how can sales enablement determine and prioritize the right metrics for their business? KM: Yes, there is so much data to track. And I know a really popular one is time to ramp, as an example. But there is so much more data out there, so you’ve really got to think about where can I start? What I would encourage folks to do is dig in, find metadata, and find how that metadata relates to a core KPI. This for me is what changed the game for me in enablement, when I was able to connect metadata to core KPIs. Those core KPIs for a business, for a sales leader, might be things like conversion rate, win rate, attach rate, average deal size, time to ramp. You want to look for things that your sales leaders are constantly pulling data about and that your executives with their board are constantly mentioning. Those are things that are top of mind for the business, so what can you do to impact that? You’ve got to drill into what metadata would correlate or cause here, and how can I find that metadata? What impact does that metadata have on that core KPI. I like to think of it as an onion. There are so many layers to the data. The biggest layer is that core KPI but peel those layers back and there are a lot of things that impact it. And that’s where you want to think about how I can impact that metadata to impact that core KPI. SS: Absolutely, and I think one other thing too, just because you mentioned it, I think defining certain terms within each organization is also important. You mentioned time to ramp, and I know I’ve had a lot of conversations with different sales enablement that all define even just the word “ramp” a little bit differently. So, I think that you are right, finding a way to ground it in the organization’s core KPIs is really critical. KM: Yes, it’s so true. There are so many different definitions of data and what it means, and then again, the metadata. So, be very specific in what you’re looking for, what type of data you’ve found, and again, it’s like an onion. If you’re measuring specific coaching data, you can start with coaching effectiveness. Well, how are you measuring that? How can you drill down deeper and deeper? The more you drill down deeper the more you are able to really identify the root cause, like what is causing this, positive or negative? And that’s where enablement gets really exciting, because you can start to build plans around creating results that ultimately impact that core KPI. SS: Absolutely. So, I know that you’ve done a lot of work on this. How can sales enablement use data strategically to truly quantify impact? Do you have an example of how you’ve used data to craft a compelling message? KM: So, in terms of how sales enablement can use data strategically to quantify your impact, it all starts with what’s happening now? Where’s the gap? And, how does data tell that story? Every enablement initiative should have a before and an after with a plan that drives that success. So, as an example of that, I always want to quantify current state, and what I did with one organization is I observed the time that managers were spending. There are so many amazing analytics out there that show correlation between sales coaching and performance. So, we know the more that managers are out there coaching, the more performance will come about. What I did was actually quantify how much sales managers were coaching, and what I found is that on average it was 5-10% of the time. I aligned with my sales leaders and showed that core KPI, that core conversion win rate that was being impacted, and said, what sales coaching percent do you want our managers to get up to and how do you see that impacting your core KPI of win rate? They got really excited and said we should really see managers coaching at least 30-40% of their time, and surely our win rate will increase. Through this initiative, again from that before and after state, I was able to say right now managers are coaching 5% of the time, through this initiative they are coaching 40% of the time. What we saw was not only an increase in conversion rate, that win rate, that core KPI, but we actually saw a 30% increase in RPC. So, for this specific organization that’s revenue per call, basically average deal size. So overall, we saw substantial increase in both core KPI metrics and what that led us to do was develop future enablement strategies around sales coaching and coaching effectiveness. Because I had that before state and that after state and how I was going to measure success, and that measurement was dictated by sales leadership, I had their buy-in, I had their endorsement, I had their excitement, and I was able to show how sales enablement strategically helped to drive that initiative forward. SS: That is a very impressive initiative, just kudos on that front. You mentioned alignment, right? So, who are some of the core stakeholders that enablement should partner with to both identify and track the right metrics? KM: I’ve learned that the more, the merrier with sales enablement. And that’s the tricky part about enablement, there are so many different people you can collaborate with. The more that really play a pivotal role, the better. When it comes to sales leaders, sales ops, marketing, I even try to work with product and engineering. Those folks in product can speak to the product in a way that no one else in the organization typically can. You can learn so much about the product, about the strategy, how it helps customers, and in return you can actually share it back and create that feedback loop with product and engineering about what you are actually seeing from the customers in the market. So, what I’ve learned with enablement is have as many seats at the table as you can, have one-on-one conversations with folks from every branch of the business, because everyone can offer something really unique, compelling and insightful to help develop your enablement strategy. I had the pleasure of sitting at a dinner after the Sales Enablement Society gathering, and we were talking about how teams measure success. So often in enablement, we think about sales leaders, sales ops, marketing, product, engineering, and customer success, and they are all these kind of separate silos in the organization, but what happens when those organizations actually share a KPI. And how can enablement be part of that? So, from this really insightful conversation, that’s what I’ve been really focused on lately is what are the shared KPIs across teams that can drive results that everyone is going to be excited about. Enablement really isn’t just sales enablement, it’s go-to-market enablement, it’s company enablement, it’s product enablement. So, what core KPIs can we drive together with a cohesive approach? And that’s just something that’s top of mind in partnering with other stakeholders in the organization. SS: Definitely. And on developing a sales enablement strategy, you shared in your presentation a 5-step process to execute sales enablement with a data-driven mindset. I’d love for you to disclose those five steps to this audience. KM: Yes. So, this five-step process is something that I’ve found to be very helpful in starting, building, and executing on a sales enablement initiative. Step one is observing and it’s my favorite spot. Basically, what you do when you observe is you become a sales rep. You ask questions. You want to relentlessly understand your customer and understand the current state. And not only that, but you want to understand what are the gaps and how can you fill them? Once you start to uncover common trends and gaps, you want to quantify that. Where are the gaps, what gaps being filled would drive the biggest change in output? And what can you do about it? Step two is all about aligning. Share these data-driven observations with your leaders and with your key stakeholders. Have an interactive discussion on why these gaps might be occurring, and bring a few plans, bring a few options to the table on how you might address it. Once you get their endorsement on “this is a gap that needs to be filled and this is how we can do it”, step 3 is development. Put together a really solid structured plan, and involve those executives, involve those leaders throughout the process. Also, involve key collaborative partners in the organization. The more people involved, excited, and bought in who really understand what their specific role is in driving this project’s success, the better. So, you develop out and you share. Step four is execution and this is where things can either go very well, or very poorly. The key to execution is make sure that those leaders who were bought in from the start have a key role in that execution. Whether that is sending out emails of enthusiasm, whether that is introducing you when you run a workshop, whether that is constantly reiterating the message you want to send across. Those key leaders need to be bought in and excited, and a key part of the execution. What I’ve found is that when you quantify and you are data-driven, and you say this gap is going to fill this core KPI, they are always involved and these are the things that they love to do and don’t have enough time to do in their day-to-day. So, it’s something that they are typically excited about being a part of, along with those other stakeholders. They all want to have a piece of the puzzle, and the more excited you get them, the more they understand clearly what their role is and how their success is measured, the more bought in they are going to be. Also, enablement can be tricky. Sometimes you are asking people to change or try something new or different. So, when you have leaders there, they are really able to help you navigate that change management process. If you get pushback, whatever might happen, the leaders have your back, and you can really to work together to continue forward. Step five is the really fun part, it’s quantifying. So, you’ve observed current state and you’ve quantified it – did those results happen? Why or why not? It is not a failure if you don’t have the results that you expected. That’s a compelling story in itself. So really dive deep, commit to understanding the metadata and the core KPI. What happened, what worked really well, and then build upon that as a foundation. Make sure that when you quantify, you don’t just put it out in an email, but you have time committed with those leaders who have been bought in from the start to give yourself credit. It’s okay to give yourself a pat on the back. I think the really exciting part about this is if you are really able to quantify your results and your learnings, then you are really able to justify your ROI. So, going back to an earlier point in the conversation, you’re able to say I brought value to the organization, here’s how I was a part of doing that – of course with many other folks involved. That’s where you get a seat at the table, that’s where you generate your ROI, and that’s where you’re able to build your team, become a highly respected business partner of the organization. I think that should be every sales enablement professional’s goal, to have that seat at the table through quantifying your impact. SS: I couldn’t agree more. And thanks so much for sharing your tips and tricks on how to get there. As my closing question to you, I would love – and I think I have a guess on how this will go – but as sales enablement continues to evolve, you do you envision the success metrics for sales enablement evolving? KM: It’s a fascinating question and one I love thinking about. I think that metrics are going to become a core responsibility and part of sales enablement. When a company is looking to hire a sales enablement professional, being stat-driven is going to be a must-have. And quantifying your impact is going to be an absolute ultimatum. I think it is so critical that we start to focus on those success metrics that tie to those core KPIs, and enablement is going to be part of that. When I talked about those shared KPIs earlier, enablement is going to get a seat at the table, but enablement is going to be responsible for showing here’s what I did that helped impact that core KPI. My advice would be, when you think about what you can work on tomorrow, how you can become more data-driven, stay-focused. Enablement can be tasked with so many different things in an organization, but just because those are the things you are tasked with now, doesn’t mean those are the things you’ll be tasked with tomorrow. Stay focused on just a few things you can deliver, really be methodical and strategic, develop that five-step process around an enablement initiative, and show your results. But focus, dive deep, and have more of a singular focus that wearing many hats. That allows you to really define enablement within your organization as a strategic function, and help drive future success, also help really impact the future things you are able to work on. So, when I think about success metrics, I think they are going to be tied to KPIs, but I think we’re going to have to stay really focused on what can enablement do, how can enablement be a strategic business partner, and what is the meta-data that we’re impacting that impacts those core KPIs. SS: Phenomenal advice. Thank you so much, Kristen. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today. KM: Of course, it was really fun. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s 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.

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 20 Since starting the podcast, the guys have received a lot of feedback from listeners who've built more advanced functions. These listeners have one thing in common... they all are using the "old Forrester sales enablement" definition Scott authored in 2008 and peer-reviewed by Brian and published for Forrester clients in 2010.   In 2017, acting as the President of the Sales Enablement Society, Scott sponsored work by enablement professionals to bring together: analysts, academics, practitioners, and vendors to create a common definition that was published and shared at the first annual sales enablement society conference.  Yet, here we are in 2019 and Forrester has not only a new definition of what sales enablement is - but also Sirius Decisions' definition to rationalize.  Gartner is talking about "buyer enablement" and "sense-making" while CSO insights have narrowed the focus to be about enabling the sales force.  Meanwhile, marketing has moved into their own versions of helping "sales" by advocating: content marketing, account-based marketing, and growth marketing. The guys think this has gotten out of hand and have decided to become far more definitive.  In this episode the guys: 1) Highlight the key enabler that propelled accounting into the finance department and the rise of the CFO  2) Contrast the similarities between finance and the sales enablement space  3) Outline the drivers that exist in the economy that point to a huge gap between strategy and execution  4) Discuss the purpose of sales enablement is to bridge that gap  5) Observe the only way to solve that problem is to do it cross-functionally  6) Review the basic pillars of what should be in the scope of a department tackling the strategy/execution gap   Let us know what you think, and make sure you subscribe at www.insideSE.com   Support this podcast

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we are here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, your company, and your background. Imogen McCourt: Yeah. So, my name is Imogen McCourt. I am the global head of sales enablement ops and training at Argus Media. Argus Media is a price reporting agency, so we supply the markets with data and insights to support trading and traders. SS: What are some of the ways that sales enablement can impact sales rep productivity? IM: Yes. It’s a good question and it’s important. It’s well understood. It’s a little bit like selling time. You know, are we making our reps as productive as possible? Are they doing the best things with their time when they have time in front of the client? I talked earlier about this route to rep concept, this idea of simplifying for our partners the way that they’re getting the right ideas, or the messages, or their tools to the rep, and I think that’s incredibly important because it stops them from being distracted by noise or pieces of content that aren’t really going to help them be super productive. I think you can look at it through the blunt instrument of how many reps, what’s the overall number they are closing? I think you can look at the next level down from that, which goes back to improved win rates, faster sales cycles, and really important for me is conversion rates from stage to stage through the sales process. Are they qualifying the bad deals out early? I just don’t want the sales organization to be focused on things that aren’t going to close. I want them to be thinking about the ones that really are showing true buyer signals and really going to go somewhere for us. I have another element to introduce to this as well. I sort of feel like I think about this both in a quantitative manner and a qualitative manner in all things. Very broadly, there’s this common perception that sales reps think about how they can earn their money. They’re money motivated. And I certainly wouldn’t disagree with that at all. But I think if you are really trying to drive world-class sales organizations and world-class sales rep productivity, you need to think very seriously about how your teams are motivated and how you can create a constantly curious approach to their attitude. That is for me is how you get to real productivity. So, engage with them, find their motivators, understand what underpins them, what strengthens their resilience, what gives them grit at the end of the quarter or the end of the year. And then provide them with what they need to be really, truly productive by hitting those motivators, by helping them be strong even when they’re tired at end of quarter, as I said. There is some context to this. Many years ago, I worked on a consulting project which was about benchmarking process costs. One of the things we looked at, and we looked at absolutely everything we could think of, was employee seconds. How productive per second can we get an employee to be who was running a process? And I still remember to this day that if you work a 40-hour week, then you have 7.5 million employee seconds per year per person. That’s a crazy number to remember but it will stick with me forever. So, honestly doing this project, we thought about hungover mornings, we thought about structured bathroom breaks, we thought about timed tea breaks, but it’s not about that. That is upside down or inside out. It’s about helping people know exactly what the next best thing to do is and where that information is, how to find it, and how to know whether it’s working. We can look at productivity ratios in dollars or pounds or per head, and it’s a strong steer, but if you’re really motivating people and you can see what’s working, you can also see what’s not working and you can back that out and you can try and fix it. SS: I love that. I love that. Have you found any consistencies on what are the components that do motivate most reps? IM: Well, yes. Interestingly, we have. Now, this isn’t rocket science. It is about helping the very executive leadership in an organization and even the most senior people in a selling organization realize that your commission structure takes you so far with your reps, but actually they all want to be developed and invested in and see what their future looks like. They want to know that they are loved and cared for in a place that’s going to actually drive some success for them. So, what we have done most recently is a huge piece of work to roll out competencies and to roll out objectives for our organization. Now, it was a hard piece of work to do. It took a long time and a lot of resources. We wanted to complement competencies with clarity on behaviors and skills, and we did this top to bottom. CSO to entry-level, we mapped out and we looked at with working groups and with external best practices what would make a fantastically successful Argus sales rep anywhere in the world, anywhere in their career. So, we rolled out objectives and competencies, as I said. At the end of one of the first working sessions we did when we were rolling this out to the sales teams, a salesperson came up to me and said, “Imogen, I finally understand not just what my company want me to do in terms of hitting target, but how they think I should be doing it, what will make me successful, and what I need to do to develop and advance my career at Argus. And I feel like I can own that success and I know where to go to develop myself, to get to the next stage.” So, that person is no longer sitting at their desk ticking the boxes and doing the administration and CRM to show that they are busy. They are now genuinely owning and thinking about what their next step could be and how to do something to make them productive and successful. That’s fantastic. If they feel empowered then we are a long way into making them really, truly productive as well. SS: Absolutely. And you alluded to executives and sales leaders as well, and how is it that you think sales enablement needs to work with those sales executives and sales leaders to both get their buy-in as well as help move them forward as well and get them to see the value of sales enablement? IM: Well, I sit at the table. I report to our chief sales officer and I meet weekly with our global COO, and I think that exposure is really important. I think making sure that you understand why your company is investing in sales enablement as a department and that your meeting or driving or steering those objectives and that you’re constantly revisiting them with your sponsors. So, I talked about the purpose statement or the vision or the charter and making sure that you’ve got your executive sponsors involved in that. I think if they feel bought in from the beginning and influential from the beginning, that really helps. And if you can lay out for them what you’re going to be focused on, whether that is short-term payback, whether that is lots of iterative changes over several years, or whether that’s a long-term return of investment, then if they get twitchy, if they start to ask, “well, what are we doing this quarter, what are we rolling out this quarter?” It doesn’t matter because we can take them back another level and say, “look, we are continuing to hit our numbers, we are driving productivity, we’ve brought in a bedrock for change and guess what, 12 months ago when we sat down, these were the core areas that you asked me to focus on.” So, that’s one element to it. We touched on the idea of making sure that you know your audience and you’re spinning your information – spinning seems a bit strong – but you are articulating and clearly talking about the metrics that matter to the audience members, depending on where they are in the organization. My CSO and my COO, they honestly don’t care how many people have been through training or how many hours or how many pieces of content we’ve developed for them. They do care that we have reps who are staying, that are onboarding quickly, and that know how to be successful fast, and they are the sorts of things I talk about with them. We have a quarterly sales leadership meeting. I’m part of designing that and I’m obviously in that as well. So, we talk about initiatives and we get people re-engaged and thinking about what they will do when they go back to their desk, when they go back to their regions, and how they are part of driving that success forward. I never talk about sales enablement success. I always talk about their success, how we can get them closer to the number and how the metrics that perhaps trip off the tongue very easily to us about win rates and conversion rates, why that’s important to every single rep that they have in their teams. SS: Excellent. It is important to have a seat at the table. You also alluded earlier that it’s important to make sure that that sales operations and training are components of enablement. Within a lot of organizations, there can often be a hierarchy struggle. Sometimes sales enablement reports into operations and sometimes vice versa, and it sounds like you’re making the recommendation for operations to fall under enablement. IM: I’m not somebody who cares particularly about hierarchy and perhaps that does me a disservice, so I think the recommendation is that these teams are core partners with each other. I know that my sales enablement programs wouldn’t work without the insights and the skills that our sales operations team bring to that. Of course, I built a department where enablement and ops and training are seen as equals and work together as equals. There’s been a lot of work to think about the value that we offer to each other and we think about something as end-to-end, and I had a blank sheet of paper basically so I could do that. I have a group of people, let’s call them sales operations, who bring deep analytical and strategic planning to the table and they’re very tactical, spotting snags in our process or managing or looking for leading and lagging indicators to opening up and viewing where the future opportunity might be. I add to them sales enablement people who tend to be more plugged into the day-to-day sort of selling environment. And we have the training, so we can bring this to life and execute on the things that sales ops might have spotted that need fixing. I think that end-to-end, we operate as one. A rising tide raises all ships, right? But it is amazing to have a group of people who can do that analysis, who can have a look at the metrics. You know, we have reporting on tap and we have the complementary skills from the enablement and the training team. I think as long as everybody understands the aim and the purpose, the name or the business title of the people you are working with isn’t necessarily the most important thing. It’s more about do we have the right team in place, bringing the right skills or competencies to what we’re trying to achieve, and can I get everything out of the way to make sure that they can deliver on it? Do I think enablement should report to ops or ops should report to enablement? I honestly don’t think it matters. I think what does matter is that you have a common understanding and it’s about mutual benefit, which is we’re all successful when our sellers are successful and when we’re growing as a company. SS: I love that. That was the perfect answer. IM: Well, it’s my perfect answer because that’s what I design. I’m sure there are companies that would need better, deeper process first, or operationalization first, but you can’t do one without the ability to bring that to life and the selling conversation is the design point here. Come together and think about how to make our sellers successful in front of our clients and differentiate in the client environment and we’re all successful ultimately. SS: How would you for other practitioners who are just getting started, where would you recommend they spend their first hundred days? IM: My god, learn from my mistakes I think is probably right, I would direct them. Everybody says when you join a company, spend a lot of time listening. I think sales enablement practitioners come from all sorts of backgrounds. Mine was clearly sort of process and engineering but also with a commercial background. You have people who come out of HR and training, people who come out of ops, people who come out of marketing. So, I would come up to speed on the areas that you’re less strong on first. I would spend time with the sales leadership team and listen for themes or issues or problems. Money is being spent if you are building a sales enablement practice, so you go back to the “why”. Why is that, where did it originate from, is it internal or external? Ours was external. It was a private company who said you’ve got to think about how to do sales enablement. You should invest in that. So, I had more time to spend selling the power and the outcome and the impact of having a sales enablement department. Then, if you possibly can and if it’s a new company to you, go out with your sellers. Use the newbie card, ask to go on the road with them, make sure there’s a good narrative for why you’re in a client meeting. Listen to calls if you can’t get out on the road but really understand how your clients engage. I actually own client success as well and so I spend a lot of time thinking about them, hearing what sort of questions we get through the client success team. That’s a great way to get to the reality of how your customers and your prospects are actually experiencing working with you as a company with your services, what sort of value they’re seeing because perception is truth there. So, whatever you’re being told by marketing or the product teams or your selling team, what the client says is really the truth. So proactive listening to all of those different groups of people and then think about the processes that are in play, are they well embedded, are they well understood, do you hear the language of that process outside of the sellers’ organization or not? Think about your tech landscape. Is it designed for selling or is it designed for fulfillment or finance, and what do you need to sort of clean that up or invest in? How are relationships with marketing? It is one of those friction areas in all companies. What can you do there to try and get some quick wins? And then, and only then, sit down and write your strategy paper and propose the charter. Honestly, genuinely, try and give yourself or buy yourself as much time as possible before committing to paper what you’re delivering over 12-18 months, two years. Align it to the go-to-market strategy, align it to the key company metrics and outcomes, and any advice you can get from anywhere, listen and take it. You know, I’ve been doing this for 12 years, longer probably for my sins. I will still come into a company humble and listen first and then believe that I have bought myself the right to speak aloud with my ideas and some of the things I think should be driving towards. SS: I love that. On the note of the sales enablement charter or purpose, given that you’ve been in this space since the very beginning in 2007, how would you define its evolution over the years? IM: Sales enablement generally. Gosh. So, I mean obviously people hadn’t even thought of enablement and there was definitely this, “well yes, I’ll give you some scraps from the table and let’s see what you can do.” But in my world, I had this gift of working with these great brains and these great leaders right from the beginning. I think that we are less apologetic and defensive. I hope people aren’t offended by me saying that. You know, other sales enablement professionals might have felt they’ve never had to be defensive or proving themselves. But I think in terms of us as a community, I think that a) we have a voice now and I think that’s really, really fantastic. You know, I think some of the things like the Soirée, the Sales Enablement Society, Sales Enablement PRO, it’s a really, really lovely way to show we’re starting to show some real change and some real impact. I think that we seem to care about each other. Everybody I’ve come across is very collaborative and there seems to be less focus on this idea of where do you report, or where do you come from. I touched on it. Did you come from HR, did you come from finance, did you come from ops? I think we’re starting to focus less on where we came from and more about what we are trying to achieve. I also think in my experience, sales enablement is less – well perhaps this is not fair – but it is moving away from just being the VP of broken things. We’re starting to be more about the VP of “can we get some stuff fixed”, or get it done, and we’re starting to have the right to say no to people within an organization. We’re defined enough to say, “no, that is not our remit now.” This is what and how we are delivering value, and this is why I’m saying no to, for now anyway. I think there are some really strong frameworks, there are fantastic proof points, and frankly, we’ve become a market. There is technology now designed to sell into us. That means that we have a budget in a way that we didn’t have before. As soon as you get interesting for vendors, you know that you’re an organization or a movement that is interesting beyond just what people are trying to do internally at their companies. SS: There are a lot of practitioners in the space that see the future of sales enablement as becoming a growth function. I would love to hear your thoughts on that. IM: Honestly, many of us are still trying to build a really slick present for sales enablement. But with that said, I do believe in the maturity curve. I do believe that we have become more than just a set of tactical executions, that there is discipline around sales enablement now, and I think we’re moving to it being considered more of a strategic approach. So, Tamara Schenk talks about it in her CSO Insights work, and eloquently as well. These are her thoughts, but I know that I have said to my last two employers, if I do this well, you’re not going to notice. You’re not going to be distracted, you’ll find yourself doing a new business as usual, and it will be better and you’ll be more successful and it will be repeatable. And when you have that experience as a sales enablement professional or as an internal customer of sales enablement, that’s when we’ve really moved it towards a strategic approach, and I think that we’ll continue to move in that direction. We won’t talk about big, flashy sales enablement rollouts or programs. We won’t find ourselves firefighting and tactically addressing things, or rather we will probably always be doing that. But this new normal. And don’t get me wrong, I’m thinking 10-15 years from now. It will be about programmatic output and it will be so well accepted across the company strategy and sales strategy that the frameworks and the approach will just be embedded in everything that we do. I don’t think the department or the idea of sales enablement will go away but ultimately, it’s about all departments in a company thinking about go-to-market and moving as one to make that as easy as possible to sell to and to maximize how the clients and our prospects hear about all the great things we’re doing, and that it’s resonating with what they’re worried about and thinking about. So, I hope that makes sense. I’m basically saying we are maturing, and we will move away from a set of functional, practical, tactical programs and become just a strategic approach, just embedded in the way companies think about their selling organization. SS: I think that’s a beautiful future for sales enablement. IM: Well, it puts me out of a job, but yes, I genuinely hope that’s something we can move towards in the next 10-15 years. If I may, I have one more thing to add. I think that one of the things that’s really powerful about what’s happening in sales enablement in the next stage in our maturity curve is the fact that there is technology that’s designed for us. We’re not having to accept tack-ons to CRM systems. We’re not having to think about vanilla content management platforms, that we’re genuinely empowering our selling organization and we can start to look at and track and manage and show them the leading indicators of using a particular piece of content or a particular approach. I think that’s a really lovely place to be. I can see huge acceleration in how we drive success going forward and I’m excited about that. SS: On that note, if you had to give advice to some of the vendors in the space around how to make sure their platform is really truly built for sales enablement, what would that advice be? IM: Well, we worry about making sure the client is truly represented and the clients can be so broad spectrum. I think that helping us keep the client first, helping us think about not who is our seller or how mature is our seller or how experienced is our seller, but actually who are our clients, what do they worry about, what are their buying roles, helping us get our content to our sellers based on that. That’s really powerful and that would be really, really helpful. SS: Thanks for listening! For more insights, tips and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you would like to share or a topic you want to know more about, let us know. We would love to hear from you.

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 they can be more effective in their jobs. In this episode, we’re chatting with Paul Butterfield, the head of global sales enablement at Vonage. Paul is a proven sales enablement leader who is passionate about helping sales teams differentiate the company they represent and themselves by how they sell. So, let’s dive in. Paul, we’re obviously seeing a lot of visibility and necessity for sales enablement, do you see that momentum continuing and where do you see things going in the future for the discipline of sales enablement? Paul Butterfield: I definitely see an increase in it from the standpoint that– well, I’ll give you an example. When I entered sales enablement, I had been running sales teams and selling software and hardware myself for the better part of 20 years. The company where I was at the time was a SaaS company in the contact center space. How I got into sales enablement was, frankly, we had a new head of global sales come in. He really liked how I was developing my team because every manager was on their own, there was no enablement, there was no onboarding, there was nothing. One morning, I went in for my one-on-one and he mapped out on his board this concept of sales enablement. I had to go Google it later, Shawnna. I didn’t tell him that, I just nodded like I knew exactly– this is like 2011, alright? And so, he mapped out what he was looking for, what he needed, and he challenged me to go home for the weekend and think about it. Was I willing to take the challenge to build this program out? We were getting ready to triple our sales force and that sort of thing. So here we are today. It turned out I really enjoyed it, I was good at it, and that sort of thing. From 2011 until now, I’ve been in it. It’s night and day. Now you’ve got organizations like Sales Enablement Society, you’ve got companies like Highspot, and all sorts of platforms that are built up to support and make sales enablement more efficient and that sort of thing. I mean, it’s just night and day. So, I definitely see it growing. And then what was the second part of your question? SS: How do you see the sales enablement profession itself evolving? So, I think we’ve all seen a lot of sales enablement practitioners kind of grow up through maybe the sales training side of the house or maybe even from the marketing side of the house. But as sales enablement becomes this concrete profession, how do you see it evolving? PB: You know, it’s interesting. If you go back to the early days of sales enablement, or maybe even pre-sales enablement, in my experience and having led sales teams for some time, it was really on the managers to figure it out. And I think that as sales enablement came on and got better and grew and people understood what it was, I’ve seen that there’s been almost a shift too much in that direction where frontline management now is stepping away and being too hands-off, and counting on the sales enablement teams to ramp up and develop their reps. I think that that pendulum is coming back in the middle. At least in my own personal experience, it’s now coming back to center a bit where frontline management realizes they ultimately have to own this. They own the number, right? We can’t do that for them. And we’re able to have more balanced partnerships. So, that’s one of the evolutions I’ve seen. And I love that because I learned very quickly in doing this, we have influence without authority, is probably the best way to say it, right? And so, if frontline management isn’t bought into what we’re doing, and they’re not reinforcing it in pipeline meetings and those kinds of daily conversations and sales meetings, then it’s not really going to go anywhere, no matter how good a job sales enablement does. So, that’s a big change I think I’ve seen. SS: No, absolutely, and actually on that, if you don’t mind us diving a little bit into that, another hot topic I think with a lot of sales enablement practitioners these days is to that exact point; figuring out how they enable frontline managers. Is that something that you’ve been working on over at Vonage? PB: It is, yeah. It’s one of our big initiatives for this year. So, last year was a lot of blocking and tackling for us. Sales enablement didn’t exist at Vonage, that’s what I was brought in to do. I spent a chunk of 2017 figuring out what we need, digging into the different divisions because we have multiple routes to market, a global sales team, etc. And by late in the year, I came to the sales executive team with my proposed framework and strategy with sales enablement across routes to market. You’ve got to have a consistent experience for each set of teams, but yet they have different needs. So, you needed that flexibility with consistency. We stood the sales enablement team up in January of last year. Some of them were already here as sales trainers in different pockets of the company, some folks they went and hired. But my point being, last year for us was all about blocking and tackling. We had a badly outdated sales academy. And it wasn’t relevant to many of the teams and that sort of thing. So now that we’ve done that, I feel really good about that blocking and tackling, and the ramping we’ve created and the development. This year, we get to start having fun with it. And I guess that’s, you know, the sales enablement geek in me. We start to do these next level things. For example, to support frontline management better, we are becoming more prescriptive working with them. They’re becoming more prescriptive on what sales reps are doing, I’m going to say for now in the first 60 days. I know this is not happening overnight, we’re creating this, but they’re almost dotted lining to the sales enablement team. And so, we’re supporting the managers because it’s a challenge for a frontline manager to spend the time and focus on someone new and still help drive the business. So, we’re working on some of that, we’re putting some software, some things, and some tech in place to help the team have the span of control so that we can start doing things like call coaching with these folks, even when they’re out in the field, and voice analysis, so we know how well they’re doing with their pitch. I don’t know if you’re aware, but right before we were at the Soiree a huge announcement came out that Vonage was acquiring New Voice Media, which is one of the darlings of Salesforce from a contact center standpoint. They were built in Salesforce for Salesforce. So, now that we have that capability in our portfolio, we can start recording reps, we can start doing an analysis of their pitches, voice analysis and that sort of thing. So, that’s the fun thing for us and that’s how we’re looking right now to better support managers. We’re firming up our certifications so that reps are having to do capstone projects in their first 60 days to prove that they’ve got their pitch down, they’ve got their demo ability down, they know how to run ABM, all that stuff. And then we start a transition from day 31. Around day 60, we’ll start more of a soft handoff. So now, these folks have got their Iron Man suit on, if you will. They’re going to start transitioning — and the way our quota ramps, this works– that they start transitioning more and more over to their manager. But think of the wealth of data, not just showing that we’ve been trained and certified, but also being able to show this is what they’ve done, here’s the feedback on their calls, all that kind of thing. I look at this kind of as a soft handoff, probably over the next 60 days, and then the manager really has that relationship 100% from there on. SS: That is very cool. That sounds like a really good place to start with frontline managers, so that’s awesome. I want to transition to the next question because I realize that you’re responsible for global sales enablement. I would love to understand what that looks like. I think there are definitely folks that predominantly focus on sales enablement on particular regions, but what is it like to have to do sales enablement at a global scale? PB: So, the challenges that you’d expect, I think, or at least won’t surprise anybody is that your sales methodology translates well culturally. A lot of the way we do business in America, I think most people would agree, feels like sharp elbows, throwing elbows, in other parts of the world. So, you need to make sure that’s going to work. Do the tools that you deploy work globally? We have some fantastic tools, I can name them if you want, that work great in the U.S., but despite the company’s claims, their databases are weak in EMEA and in Asia. So, you have to take that into consideration and in some cases source different vendors that are appropriate for the regions. Those are probably the biggest things that I’ve seen, because the things we’re focused on are having a methodology and having the right tool stack that’s going to work across all of those teams, and being able to customize and pivot when you need to. Now, we’ve been successful in finding a sales methodology that works that way. It has been practiced for the better part of 20 years all over the world. When I’ve conducted a workshop in Hong Kong, I can find local coaches from places like Taiwan, Indonesia, and India who’ve done business using that methodology in that region to come in. In fact, one of the cool things was that in one of my workshops, I had coaches from the region when we were in Hong Kong, and they were conducting the role plays in Chinese, which is fantastic, right? Because you know, everybody spoke English, that wasn’t the issue, but when you’re coaching someone at that one-to-few level, it’s being able to transition into the language that everybody shares and being able to talk business language. Because business language doesn’t always translate one-to-one, in one language to another, I should say. Those are probably the two biggest challenges that we’ve seen. The other one isn’t as big of a deal, but my team right now is U.S. and U.K. based, so there are the challenges of offering the equal support needed by folks as far away as Australia. Right now, sales teams we support and the sales offices we support are in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and mainland China. So, differentials and the hours can be a challenge sometimes. But unfortunately, that just means that you work weird hours when you need to. We haven’t quite solved that yet, and I’m not sure if we’ll be putting someone from the team in that region. It’s a possibility but not on the immediate plan. SS: Thanks for listening. For more insights, tips and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you want to know more about, let us know, we’d love to hear from you.

Read the complete transcription on The Sales Game Changers Podcast website. SCOTT'S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: "We really don't ask enough about what's valuable. Most of what we think about value we take for granted. Why should somebody care? Why is it valuable to them? How is it going to make their lives better? How are we going to help them think through even if they do want to buy it, how are they going to come up with all of the different hurdles that they're going to experience?." This is a special episode with Scott Santucci, the founder of the Sales Enablement Society. He's the Chief Growth Catalyst of Growth Enablement Ecosystems. He's a leader in the sales enablement world and is an expert on many things that relate to the sales process, compensation, and methodologies. He is a graduate of Virginia Tech. Find Scott on LinkedIn!

Tim Ohai, founder of Agility Selling and a founding member of the Sales Enablement Society, joins us for a powerful exploration of the power of problems. Authentic sales professionals bring both sincerity and substance. They ask their prospects about their business problems and go a level deeper to understand their core business goals. In the episode, we refer to Tim's book, The Power of Problems. You can get this free ebook here.

Tim Ohai, founder of Agility Selling and a founding member of the Sales Enablement Society, joins us for a powerful exploration of the power of problems. Authentic sales professionals bring both sincerity and substance. They ask their prospects about their business problems and go a level deeper to understand their core business goals.In the episode we refer to Tim's book, The Power of Problems. You can get this free ebook here.

Tim Ohai, founder of Agility Selling and a founding member of the Sales Enablement Society, joins us for a powerful exploration of the power of problems. Authentic sales professionals bring both sincerity and substance. They ask their prospects about their business problems and go a level deeper to understand their core business goals. In the episode we refer to Tim's book, The Power of Problems. You can get this free ebook here.

In the January SalesProChat podcast, we hear from Gayle Charach, Director at Intelex Technologies about ways to maximize the productivity of your sales team. Gayle is a sales enablement leader with a record of success and extensive experience driving cross-functional collaboration, customer loyalty, and market share by empowering sales teams with the right coaching and training to maximize productivity. She is also Toronto Chapter President at the Sales Enablement Society.

This episode I speak with Iris Chan, CMO of FusionGrove. She has had over 20 years of experience leading multi-national marketing and sales enablement functions at Fortune 50 vendors like Cisco and IBM. Iris is also a founding member of the Sales Enablement Society as well as its local chapter president in Australia. In our conversation we discuss: Effective strategies for aligning a multi-national sales and marketing team The concept of co-creation between Sales and Marketing A significant marketing insight that is missing from a lot of lead generation efforts How to know if an account-based strategy is appropriate for your business. Additional Links: ABM Growing Up Fast: 2017 Benchmark Report (article) Connect with Iris on LinkedIn or Twitter LIKE THE PODCAST? LEAVE A 5-STAR REVIEW ON ITUNES TO HELP IT GROW! Music/Production: Chris "KID" Robinson, Hitmakuzz Productions Subscribe to the podcast: Apple Podcast | Stitcher (Android) | RSS

Our guest on this episode is Lori Richardson. Lori is the Founder of Score More Sales and the President of WOMEN Sales Pros.     Lori and I start the conversation discussing how she got started in sales as a single Mom that was teaching at the time. We also discuss Lori’s involvement in WOMEN Sales Pros, the importance of diversity in sales and the Sales Enablement Society.    Enjoy!   Hey Best Sellers are you looking for a fun event to attend? Then check out the T-REX Summit. T-REX is the Southeast’s premier B2B sales and marketing growth conference. So if you own a number or are contributing to grow at your company then check out the Revenue Exchange to find out more about our T-REX summit. We already have a terrific lineup of speakers including Andy Paul, Sangram Vajre, Steve Richards, Donald Thompson and Coach Sylvia Hatchell from the UNC Women's Basketball team. 

We're winging it with our guest today, Kristy West, improvisation expert and business coach. She founded BraveSpace in order to use a skill she's been developing her entire life, improvisational performance, to help sales teams overcome the fears and stresses of rejection, quotas and networking. Improvisation is a skill that most sales people use unconsciously every day when they are talking on the phone, meeting with a prospect or discussing a renewal with a current client. Kristy believes that consciously developing this skill and balancing "knowing what to say" and having the confidence to "say what you know" can be a major difference maker in your sales process. You can watch how Kristy is changing lives and businesses through improv here. On today's podcast 4:00 - How did "the improv lady" get started in sales? 8:00 - What does "improv" really mean? 11:00 - Improv as an applied skill of "knowing" and "confidence" 16:20 - The techniques of applied improv facilitation in sales 20:25 - Feeling safe in the failure circle 31:12 - The Sales Enablement Society and how it can help you 39:20 - Kristy's "why" Have you heard about our Small Business Breakthrough program? If you own or want to own a small business but are struggling in certain areas, we want to help you. Email breakthrough@thewhyandthebuy.com for more information. Sign up for our book club! Don't forget to subscribe rate and review our podcast. It only takes a second and helps us make more podcasts for you. Want more from Jeff and Christie? We have a newsletter!

This episode I speak with Roderick Jefferson - CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates, LLC which is sales enablement company focused on driving growth in small/mid-size companies and Fortune 500 corporations. He is also a founding member of the Sales Enablement Society which has the goal to better define the sales enablement functions and roles that currently exist within organizations and ultimately solve the vast disparities that exist in the profession today What you'll learn from our conversation: >The relationship between Sales Enablement and the strategic alignment of Sales and Marketing >A phased approach to decreasing time to revenue >The importance of focusing on customer value throughout the entire customer journey Music/Production: Chris "KID" Robinson, Hitmakuzz Productions

Transitioning from Sales Enablement to Organization Enablement This week on the podcast we discuss sales enablement as a function and the different lenses that an organization may use to inform their approach.  We also discuss the idea of organization enablement and wonder if this will be the next evolution within organizations. Questions Asked Has your attitude about Sales Enablement changed? How does Sales Enablement gain a better understanding of the functional areas of the organization? How do we make the transition from where we are today, to Organization Enablement? Key Takeaways Start with considering the lens you are looking at enablement through Learning Operations Marketing Sales Operations Enablement Technologies we use at Catalyst Sale. HubSpot Pardot Funnelwise Slack Google When enabling sales, you should consider multiple functions within an organization.  Identify how these teams interact and cross paths with your sales team. Sales enablement created to address a gap - we needed someone/something to bridge the gap between Product & Sales, and Product & Marketing. The enabling function inside an organization can help to create consistency in communication The enablement function should meet with customers - they can connect the dots between what the customer is saying and what product/sales/marketing sees. Organization Enablement as a function - maybe we should consider learning as an enabling role inside an organization.  In order to perform at a high level, to be successful, I need everyone in the organization to perform well. Everybody sells, we are all part of the value chain  Get others engaged - leverage the expertise of your team - They can ask great questions, many times with better context. Show Links Catalyst Sale Twitter LinkedIn hello@catalystsale.com Jennifer McClure ep 60 Sales Enablement Society  Catalyst Sale Workshops & Training Thank you Thank you for rating and reviewing the podcast via iTunes, Google Play, or your favorite podcast platform.  Ratings & reviews help others discover the podcast - thank you for helping us get our message out to the community. Please send listener questions and feedback to hello@catalystsale.com or contact us directly on twitter, facebook or LinkedIn. Catalyst Sale Service Offerings Growth Acceleration - Plateau Breakthrough Product Market Fit ---------------------- Subscribe to the Catalyst Sale Podcast Subscribe via iTunes Subscribe via Google Play Catalyst Sale In every business, in every opportunity, there is someone who can help you navigate the internal challenges and close the deal.  There is a Catalyst.  We integrate process (Catalyst Sale Process), technology and people, with the purpose of accelerating revenue. Our thoughtful approach minimizes false starts that are common in emerging markets and high-growth environments. We continue to evolve our practice based on customer needs and emerging technology. We care about a thinking process that enables results versus a process that tells people what to do.  Sales is a Thinking Process.

The term “sales enablement,” is thrown around a lot and can mean different things to different sales professionals. We sat down with Paul Bickford, Denver Chapter President of the Sales Enablement Society, to discuss what sales enablement is, why it's effective and how it can be leveraged as a resource.

The term “sales enablement,” is thrown around a lot and can mean different things to different sales professionals. We sat down with Paul Bickford, Denver Chapter President of the Sales Enablement Society, to discuss what sales enablement is, why it's effective and how it can be leveraged as a resource.

Derek Wyszynski, Mentor at GrowthX Academy, Founding Member of Sales Enablement Society, and until recently, Chief Sales Hacker at ZynBit, joins me on this episode.

Read the complete transcript of this podcast and dozens of others on the Sales Game Changers Podcast website! Jen Burns is the Managing Director of Business Intelligence and Operations at Interfolio, a D.C.-based education technology firm serving the higher education market where she is helping to position the organization for scale and profitable growth. She has been in Sales, Sales & Revenue Enablement and Operations for the past seventeen years. Jen spent years in various sales and business development capacities, was in human capital consulting for a few years and then shifted into enablement and operations building out teams from the ground up to deliver efficiencies and business process improvements while driving innovation to the buyer and to the customer journey. She is the president of the DC Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society.

Throw away your 57-step sales guidebook and keep it simple, stupid. In the most recent episode of the podcast, Chad sits down to talk to Scott Santucci, Director of The Alexander Group and founder of The Sales Enablement Society. Scott sees countless inefficiencies in many sales orgs today, but he has developed a method of simplifying the whole approach through Sales Enablement.  This interview explores what the term “Sales Enablement” means, how to keep the sales process simple, how to implement these practical tips, and how the Sales Enablement Society came to be. Find a breakdown of this episode here.

Throw away your 57-step sales guidebook and keep it simple, stupid. In the most recent episode of the podcast, Chad sits down to talk to Scott Santucci, Director of The Alexander Group and founder of The Sales Enablement Society. Scott sees countless inefficiencies in many sales orgs today, but he has developed a method of simplifying the whole approach through Sales Enablement.  This interview explores what the term “Sales Enablement” means, how to keep the sales process simple, how to implement these practical tips, and how the Sales Enablement Society came to be. Find a breakdown of this episode here.

Brian Lambert, Senior Director, Sales & Service Enablement Solutions at Charter Communications, and Co-Founder of the Sales Enablement Society, joins me on this episode.

This week on DisrupTV, we interviewed Joanne Moretti, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer at Jabil and General Manager Radius Design, Henry Schuck, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at DiscoverOrg, and Scott Santucci, Director of The Alexander Group and Founder of Sales Enablement Society. DisrupTV is a weekly Web series with hosts R “Ray” Wang and Vala Afshar. The show airs live at 11:00 a.m. PT/ 2:00 p.m. ET every Friday. Brought to you by Constellation Executive Network: constellationr.com/CEN.

Join Stu as he explores the fit between Sales Enablement and Contact Marketing with Salesforce.com's VP of Cloud GTM Strategy and Operations, and Sales Enablement Society charter member, Daniel West.

Dionne Mischler is a sales expert. She is the CEO and Founder of Inside Sales by Design, which helps companies to be “deliberate, intentional, and successful”. Aside from that, she is also the Founder of Sales Enablement Society.   In this podcast episode, the main focus is on how you can hire the best people for your sales team and when you should scale it up as a startup selling company. Scott and Dionne tackled a wide range of topics:   How to hire and when to hire; How and when to scale up your sales team; All kinds of really specific practical tips and frameworks that you can use; Understanding and being clear about your view of time versus your customer’s view of time; How to map out a customer’s organization; The signals you can use to identify when you should be ramping up your sales team; and so many more   Podcast Notes:   5:37 – Why Dionne chose the appendage “…by Design”, why “Inside Sales by Design” 9:00 – Scalability of Inside Sales by Design 12:00 – The importance, process, and options in conducting market validation 18:45 – Why I do what I do at SalesQualia 20:53 – Dionne’s presentation “Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan”; Different views of and approaches to time 31:05 – Sales process; the importance of good customer experience; how we can keep our current customers 35:17 – How we can influence people’s perspective on time; our ideal customer 41:57 – Account-based Sales Development; what you should do in using the account-based approach; who’s who in the zoo 53:54 – Mistakes people commit in hiring more people for their sales team; Realistic revenue expectations, underestimating how hard it is to find good talent 58:50 – Signals that tell whether or not you are ready to ramp on your sales team   Websites mentioned:   Dionne Mischler’s LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/dionnemischler Inside Sales by Design: http://www.insidesalesbydesign.com/ Sales Enablement Society on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/15155218

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

I am thrilled to have Scott Santucci join us again on the Sales Enablement Lab podcast. We both just returned from Florida for the first global Sales Enablement Society meeting ever!. Scott and a handful of other passionate Sales Enablement practitioners launched the Society as a local initiative in Washington DC earlier this year. Since then the Sales Enablement Society has expanded exponentially and currently has 750+ members representing Sales Enablement practitioners, analysts, educators, and vendors! In Florida 100+ Sales Enablement enthusiasts got together under Scott's leadership to discuss topics like: What will be the strategic value of Sales Enablement in the future? How do we want to develop the role? What is the charter of the Sales Enablement Society? What questions would we like to answer as a community? Scott describes openly the roller coaster he went through in the last few months trying to pull this off the ground together with his team of volunteers. Want to learn more about the Sales Enablement Society or join? Go here, learn more and sign up! Did you enjoy listening to this podcast and don’t want to miss another episode? Subscribe to my podcast on iTunes!

Guest this week is Nicole O'Brien of the Tiferet Group and the Sales Enablement Society. Nicole talks with Fergal about The Sales Enablement Society, its formation, its goals, and the future of sales enablement.

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

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