Podcasts about sales enablement

Vous formez vos commerciaux.Ils découvrent de nouvelles méthodes, testent de nouvelles techniques et sortent de la formation motivés.Quelques semaines plus tard… ils sont revenus à leurs anciennes habitudes.Pourquoi ?Pascal Marne a été directeur commercial pendant plusieurs années avant de devenir consultant et formateur.Comme beaucoup, il a longtemps pensé que l'efficacité d'une formation dépendait avant tout de sa qualité. Avec l'expérience, il a compris que le véritable enjeu se jouait surtout après la formation.Aujourd'hui, il croise son expérience du terrain avec les sciences cognitives pour comprendre comment transformer durablement les comportements commerciaux.Dans cet épisode, on parle de :pourquoi les commerciaux reviennent naturellement à leurs anciennes habitudesce que les sciences cognitives nous apprennent sur l'apprentissage et l'oublipourquoi une bonne formation ne suffit pas à provoquer un changement durableles erreurs commises par les entreprises lorsqu'elles évaluent leurs formationsquels indicateurs regarder pour savoir si les comportements ont réellement changépourquoi le manager joue un rôle déterminant après la formationcomment ancrer progressivement de nouvelles pratiques dans le quotidien des commerciauxles principes permettant de transformer une formation ponctuelle en changement durableUn épisode pour les dirigeants et managers commerciaux qui investissent dans la formation de leurs équipes et se demandent parfois :« Pourquoi quelques semaines plus tard, rien n'a vraiment changé ? »Les Héros de la Vente : le podcast des dirigeants et commerciaux B2B

Strategic marketing for AEC firms starts with a simple discipline: understanding the business before producing the deliverable. Katie sits down with Kevin Johnson, Senior Director of Marketing and Sales Enablement at H.J. Russell & Company, to talk about what it actually takes to build a marketing function that operations leaders trust enough to bring in early. Kevin shares the mindset shift that changed how his team operates, moving from "make this for us" requests to a real seat at the table, and why that shift only happens through relationships, not mandates.Kevin sees marketing and sales as working toward the same goal. Marketing helps build awareness and gives seller-doers the tools and messaging they need to have stronger conversations with clients. But that connection also has to happen internally. Kevin talks about the importance of understanding what operations and technical leaders are dealing with every day, from managing risk and protecting margins to handling urgent job site issues. When marketing understands those pressures, it becomes much easier to get their attention, earn their trust, and work together more effectively. Kevin shares a firsthand look at what it takes to introduce a CRM into an established AEC firm that had never used one before. Instead of rolling it out across the company all at once, his team started small, built the system behind the scenes, and introduced it gradually. As people began to see the value, adoption grew naturally, eventually reaching about 70 percent utilization in a year and a half. He describes the process as “crawl, walk, run” and connects it to another leadership principle he follows: fire bullets, then cannonballs. Start small, test what works, prove the value, and then make the bigger investment once you know you are headed in the right direction.Marketing as a growth partner is the vision Kevin closes on, urging AEC firms to stop treating marketing as a production shop that simply executes requests and start treating it as a genuine growth partner that helps generate leads, strengthen client relationships, and hit the firm's financial goals. For any marketing or business development leader working to build trust between departments, this conversation offers a clear, tested path forward.Key TakeawaysStrategic marketing starts with understanding the business first. Learn the firm's goals and pipeline before producing deliverables, so requests shift from "make this for us" to "here's what we're trying to do."Marketing and sales enablement function best as one growth strategy. Marketing builds the content and positioning; seller-doers put it directly into clients' hands.Introducing a CRM, or any new system, works better as a crawl, walk, run process. Build quietly, prove value in small wins, then scale adoption once trust is established.Understanding an internal client's day-to-day world, their deadlines, risk, and pressure, leads to more collaborative requests and faster responses than transactional asks.The goal is for AEC firms to see marketing as a growth partner that helps generate leads and grow the business, not just a production shop that fulfills ordersConnect with Kevin JohnsonSr. Director Marketing & Sales Enablement, H. J. Russell & Companyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-johnson-91046814/ https://www.hjrussell.com/Connect with Katie Cash:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/kacash/https://smartegies.com/ Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts:We hope you're finding value in our AEC Marketing For Principals.  Your feedback is important to us, and we'd love to hear from you. Here's how you can help.  Scroll to the bottom, rate our podcast with five stars, and select “Write a Review.”  Let us know what you found most helpful from this episode!  And if you haven't done so already, give the podcast a follow, and you'll be notified when new episodes come out.

According to Gartner, sales organizations undergo an average of four transformations every two years. Of those, only 11% manage to drive commercial success. For the go-to-market organization, and especially for the enablement function within it, that statistic says a lot. Every single one of those transformations lands on their desk, and the ask is pretty much always the same: move quickly, keep the field informed, and make sure what they’re armed with is 100% accurate. So how do you build an enablement function that can keep up, especially as AI increases the pace of these transformations? Riley Rogers: And welcome to the Win/Win Podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Rebecca Sharbono, Senior Manager of Sales Enablement at Tanium. Thanks so much for joining us, Rebecca. I’m super excited to hear your take on this one. I know it’s very top of mind for you and the team. Before we jump right into the deep end, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role? Rebecca Sharbono: Riley, thank you so much for having me. As you mentioned, I’m an enablement leader at Tanium, a cybersecurity company. I spend a lot of my time training and enabling people across the go-to-market org and supporting business initiatives that scale across all those go-to-market teams. I have spent years developing people across nonprofits and startups and large corporations. That moment when you see the light bulb go on for someone who’s learning something new or learning a different way to do something, watching them go from unsure to confident, and realizing that I got to play a small part of that, is huge, and that feeling never gets old. Across all of my career, my rule is really simple: leave people better than you found them. And these days, what that means is figuring out how to help teams move at speed without losing trust and craft that makes people really good at their jobs. RR: Let’s dig into it. As so many organizations, yours, mine, are grappling with AI innovation that is truly ceaseless, every day there’s something new, how are you seeing that affect Tanium’s go-to-market priorities? RS: Wow, the struggle is real. What it comes down to is looking at it a couple different ways. Part of me looks at it through a product shift, and then part of me looks at it through a people shift. There’s a shift that’s happening with AI models and with products, and I know specifically with Highspot and with Tanium, there’s a lot of AI that’s in our products. And at the same time, it’s happening in how we build our people. So we’re moving from this idea of we need to train experts to use a complex tool or process, such as Tanium or Highspot, to enable anyone to run at an expert level. When I tie it back to product, our AI platform lets one operator do what used to take a team. My job is making sure that our people, our field, can do the same thing, where they can walk in and perform like a team of experts faster than ever before. When I think about how AI plays into that, it isn’t just in how we sell anymore, it’s the mirror that we’re holding up in how we’re developing talent. RR: I like that. It kind of drives home the point that, yes, it’s changing the way that we can do things, but it’s not changing necessarily what we’re doing. We’re still going to market with relatively similar products. We’re developing our people in similar ways. We just have some different mechanisms, and not only do we have different mechanisms, there’s different kind of priorities and pushes, by which I mean, as you’ve mentioned, we’re moving with greater precision, greater urgency. Where is that pressure kind of coming from for you? RS: This is coming from all over, much like the AI that’s being thrown out there. But I think at its core, there are three places where I can distill it down. Again, I go back to the product. AI-driven tools move faster than training cycles used to. And then I think about the market as a whole. Customers now expect proof of value in weeks, not quarters, not months. They want to see that impact right away. And then the people. Today’s talent doesn’t want a six-month onboarding. They don’t want a two-month onboarding. They want to be useful in week one. And I think what’s interesting is that enablement really sits at the center of all three of these things. RR: I would like to think about this through the lens of a recent example, and maybe slightly less recent now, because again, to the point of new things every day. But given the industry that you’re in, monumental change in the models that are available can send shockwaves through your workforce and your customers, a good example being the release of Claude’s Mythos model. So can you walk us through what it looks like on the enablement side when something so significant drops in your industry? RS: Tanium is a cybersecurity company. We sit within the IT industry, and what we do is help businesses connect their endpoints and have full visibility in real time. Taking a step back a moment, the release of industry disruptors like Mythos, whatever the next thing is, really shows us that the tool capability jumps are now arriving so much faster than most organizations can absorb them, and this is a pressure point. Every time a Mythos level model drops, the ceiling on what’s possible jumps overnight. With that, people’s readiness to speak to it doesn’t jump with it. So what the field needs isn’t necessarily training on the new model, it’s judgment training. They need to know what it means, what it’s capable of, and what it’s not, because the gap changes every few months. So specifically with Mythos, what we identified the field as needing in that moment were a few different things, but they needed them really fast. That goes back to that speed we talked about earlier. They needed to know the capability as a foundation, “Hey, what is this? What does it mean,” so that we can position ourselves as a trusted advisor when we’re talking with prospects and customers. They needed to know the impact, because if they’re talking to a CISO and a SOC analyst, they’re gonna have very different questions, different fears, different requirements for that conversation, and we needed to make sure our field was armed with those right conversations based on the persona they were gonna be speaking with. When we got word that this was released, we stood up an enablement package within, I think it was, a 48-hour timeframe. It was all hands on deck. We had analyst themes to start building the foundation off of, and their insights to work from. Teams across the company, product, enablement, sales, pre-sales, you name it, jumped in to provide the right talk tracks and help us build FAQs. And then we launched everything with a field activation brief just a few days later. RR: As we talked about, you need to move fast, but up until recently, you didn’t necessarily have all of the tools in the toolkit to move quite as quickly as you needed. So what resources and support were the field working with, and what did you see kind of not working? RS: We didn’t have a way to ensure that the field had the most up-to-date information. While we were housing stuff on SharePoint, sometimes if a seller would go in and try to search for a piece of information, it may have pulled something up that was from two years ago, and things change at lightning speed, as we know and as we’ve been talking about. So that was a huge gap. We had ways to create content and measure some activity, but the speed and the impact together, we didn’t have that in real time. And as you can imagine, there were decisions that were being made on instinct or lagging data because the feedback loop just didn’t exist yet. RR: As you were tackling that beast and started building a new way forward focused on speed, what were your early priorities, and how did you get started breaking that down into manageable bits and pieces? RS: It truly is, hey, what’s the endpoint that we’re trying to get to, and then what does that mean for us and how do we prioritize how to get there? When speed becomes a priority, many times I see people creating more stuff. You don’t start with more content. What you need to do is start with clarity. So looking at where the pain was loudest at that time was really important. We’re hearing from sellers that they don’t have what they need. They can’t find the information at the speed they need it. Those were pretty loud pain points right out the get-go. So the first priority is figuring out how we actually move the needle and identify what’s mission critical versus nice to have. Secondly, building the fastest possible feedback loop so that we know within days, not quarters or weeks, if something is working or not. That was really important too, to figure out we need to identify a test group, a beta group, once we’ve looked at some different solutions to get feedback. And thirdly, we have to make it usable by one person without hand-holding, because if it needs an expert to drive it, to understand it, to use it, it’s not actually fast. Those were some of the things that were rattling through my brain as we figured out how to build that foundation, prioritize what we needed, and how we got started. RR: You did the work to figure out what the path forward was. You spoke with people to understand what they needed. You essentially built the vision. Once you started to understand what the North Star was, what were those first few components that you needed to tackle once you had landed on a solution? What is the go-forward plan there? RS: It was basically how fast can we get this thing implemented. The field needed it. The enablement team needed it, especially when we were thinking about how we’re running training at scale. We’re a global company, so how do we make sure that there’s consistency and standardization across all of the team, not just sections or segments of the team? We were looking at what tools could help us solve for these things, and we landed with Highspot. It came down to that usability piece and how easy it was for anyone to be able to use the tool, and it’s been awesome to work with the team. We had a very quick turnaround. We started implementation late October, early November, and then we did a soft launch in December, ’cause we had some initiatives coming out that we wanted to make sure we got into Highspot and started pointing people to the platform. And then we are gonna do a full hard launch at our sales kickoff event in February. We saw some really amazing results early, right away after that launch. RR: I would be curious too, knowing that it’s relatively recently stood up, but you’ve also encountered big moments like that launch of Mythos since it was stood up. So without that work to get it out at an accelerated pace to launch Highspot early, what would it have looked like to tackle that moment? RS: Oh man, I don’t even want to think about that. No, I’m just kidding. It would’ve looked very different, because one of the initial things we did with Mythos was stand up a Highspot page where we could house all the information, the talk tracks, whatever, the FAQs. That response time is huge, and honestly, if we didn’t have Highspot in place at that time, it probably would’ve felt a little bit disjointed. We would’ve had to figure out, okay, where are we sending the field to look for these things? What’s the instruction there? What are we telling them to do? And one thing that’s really easy with the Highspot Sales Play is the what to know, what to say, what to show, what to do, and that makes it so easy for, if I’m a seller, to go in and know exactly those steps, and where I can walk away feeling equipped and empowered to go and have that conversation. Tying back to your original question, I just don’t think we could’ve stood something up fast enough. RR: Well, I’m glad you had that on deck when straits were dire and things were tough. I want to loop back to something that you shared early on that I thought was a really interesting point, which is that it’s not necessarily that the way that things were done before was wrong, bad, not strategic. It just was built for a different kind of working. So what does it look like to you now when you’re bringing AI into your workflows so you can match the speed that the business is asking you for? RS: When I talk about the different pace of the business, it looks like moving from batch to real time. If you’re not familiar with batch, it’s like, okay, we’re gonna build this thing. We’re going to take time to do this, to get it built out. We’ll get the feedback at the QBRs that are happening, and then we’ll launch this thing a few weeks before that. It’s very much build the whole thing out and then deploy it at one time, versus real time. So traditional enablement was built in sort of that batch cycle. AI collapses that entire cycle. Think about it as we can build training faster, we can personalize it to the seller in the moment they need it, and then we almost instantly know whether it’s landing instead of waiting a few months till our next offsite or something. So the workflow doesn’t just get faster, it almost gets a new nervous system, something it’s never had before. And I think that’s the real unlock when I think about it. Not AI writing content for you, it’s AI closing the loop between what you built and what worked. RR: Okay. So knowing that AI has, again, created a new nervous system, to your point, for the work that you do and the way that you deploy it, I’d be curious to hear about some of the capabilities that you’re leveraging with Highspot that fall into that AI camp. Things like Role Play, things like lesson generation. What do you see these capabilities unlocking for you and the team? RS: Couple of things come to mind. The ability to get more reps. Reps get more reps, and I think about things like AI Role Play, where they can go in and practice, build confidence, and feel super equipped before they even have a conversation out in the wild, and that is such a game changer. This means they don’t have to schedule time with their manager to run something. They’re not waiting for a coaching slot. Whatever it is, they can literally go into the platform, and as many times as they need, get those reps in. The lesson generation definitely accelerates the build, and it’s a competitive shift, I think, in the market when it comes to building training. That’s been super helpful because now you can stand up training within hours, sometimes minutes, at least the initial lesson, and not weeks. When I started, we were building online trainings, and we would have these cycles that would last up to 10 weeks. You think about that, you get the scope of the project. You start the project, you’re working on it, you have all these feedback touchpoints, and then 10 weeks later you have the package, and by that time, stuff could completely be different because it’s now taken you over two months to produce something. With AI, and using things like the lesson builder and the AI Role Play, we have poured accelerant on how we build and develop training. RR: With the lesson generation, have you used that to build any recent training experiences, courses, et cetera? What have you used it for? RS: I’ve used it for things like SKO pre-work, but we’ve also used it for our onboarding. We just redesigned our sales onboarding this past quarter. We redesigned our SDR onboarding, and we redesigned our pre-sales onboarding. Right now, it’s all built in Highspot, so that lesson generator came in super handy for some of those lessons. RR: Yeah, especially going back to thinking, 10 weeks to build a learning experience, and you just listed off three key ones there. It would’ve been a lot of building. Looking at how much has been built in a few months, we’re still in the under-a-year phase. What is the biggest impact you’ve seen from all of the work we’ve talked about? RS: We now have a centralized hub that we can send all of our go-to-market teams to, and we have that real-time visibility and those analytics to help us make better-informed, data-driven decisions going forward. I think one of the clearest proof points, and this is a really simple one, it’s very basic, but our findability ratio of 18.2 to one, which means every minute an individual spends searching for content, they’ll spend over 18 minutes actually using it, means that they are able to find what they need in real time. Sellers aren’t gonna waste time hunting for the right piece of content. They’re actually gonna be able to spend time selling, which is what they’re supposed to be doing. In addition to that, some of the impact we’re seeing downstream: over 5,000 pitches sent, nearly 300 Digital Rooms built for customers and prospects, and more than 400 hours of external dwell time across over 8,000 shared items. Those are all huge things. Just the fact that we even have those numbers and can speak to them is mind-boggling because we had nothing like that prior, where we could literally say, “Hey, here’s how many pieces of content our prospects and customers are engaging with.” We had nothing close to that level of data. It’s proof that our buyers are engaging with what we’re putting in front of them. It’s proof that our sellers are engaging with what we’re putting in front of them. And honestly, Highspot has been the backbone of all of that. RR: It’s amazing the granularity that you can get now. And beyond that, with those numbers in play, you can then start to think a little bit differently about what to do next, because you have those guiding numbers to say, “People are taking the actions that we want them to.” But as we’re coming to our close, I would love if you could leave us with one takeaway for any other enablement leader that’s struggling to keep up. What would you want them to hear? RS: Yeah. First of all, you don’t have to have it all figured out. Let’s just ground in that. It’s a learning process. Sometimes we’ll fail, and sometimes we’ll knock it out of the park. So I would just start with that. Also, I think what’s really important is just building the loop that tells you what’s working, ’cause speed without that visibility is just chaos with good intentions. Let that sink in just a little bit. But start small, prove it fast, and let the data build your confidence instead of your guesswork. Honestly, for me, it just ties back to why, why are you doing this? Never lose sight of why you’re doing this. And for me, it’s simple, that leaving people better than how I found them is so huge. And while the tools keep changing, the why you’re doing it, that’s not gonna change. RR: What a perfect full circle, and we brought it all the way back to the beginning. All we’re doing is building people up, building them better, and I think that has really come through in everything you shared. I’m sure your sellers appreciate you, and I know I appreciate you for taking the time to come and share what you’ve been working on. It’s been really great to hear what your world looks like. RS: Thank you so much, Riley. RR: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win/Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize go-to-market success with Highspot.

Faut-il être prêt à tout pour signer un client ? Accepter ses exigences, éviter les questions qui dérangent, promettre ce qu'il veut entendre ou encore courir après un prospect pendant des semaines… Pour Maëlle ROBERT, bien vendre commence au contraire par une posture simple : nous sommes l'égal de notre client. Ni au-dessus, ni en dessous. Cela implique d'oser poser les questions difficiles, de savoir dire non, de respecter son temps et celui de son prospect… mais aussi de ne jamais sacrifier son intégrité pour signer un deal. Dans cet épisode, on parle de : comment adopter une véritable posture d'égal à égal avec son prospect pourquoi il faut oser poser les questions difficiles en rendez-vous comment mettre des limites et savoir dire non à un client où se situe la frontière entre valoriser son offre et survendre pourquoi reconnaître les limites de son produit peut renforcer la confiance comment appliquer le principe « undersell and overdeliver » comment respecter son temps et celui de son prospect comment cadencer une vente pour éviter les cycles commerciaux qui n'en finissent plus pourquoi intégrité et performance commerciale ne sont pas incompatibles Un épisode pour tous les commerciaux et entrepreneurs qui veulent mieux vendre sans manipuler, mentir ou se mettre en position d'infériorité face à leurs clients. Les Héros de la Vente : le podcast des dirigeants et commerciaux B2B Mon livre Prospecter comme un Héros est disponible : https://link.amazon/B08P4Y1y9 35 méthodes de prospection tirées de 200 interviews de ce podcast.Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Il n'était pas vendeur. Il était militaire. Et pourtant, quelques années plus tard, il a réussi à développer une entreprise jusqu'à 23 millions d'euros de chiffre d'affaires annuel, avant de la céder. Alors comment apprend-on à prospecter, vendre, recruter des commerciaux et développer une entreprise quand on n'est pas vendeur de métier ? Dans cet épisode, Cyril Marcer revient sur son parcours de militaire à entrepreneur et surtout sur les enseignements très concrets qu'il en a tirés. Discipline, préparation, résilience, leadership : l'armée lui a donné certaines armes pour entreprendre. Mais pour trouver ses premiers clients, convaincre de grandes entreprises et faire grandir son activité, il a aussi dû apprendre la vente sur le terrain.Dans cet épisode, on parle de :comment trouver ses premiers clients quand on n'est pas commercialles méthodes de prospection qui ont réellement fonctionné pour développer son entreprisecomment vendre par l'expertise et la confiance plutôt que par les techniques de closingcomment passer de « je sais vendre » à « mon entreprise sait vendre »pourquoi le réseau peut devenir un véritable accélérateur de croissanceles leçons de leadership qu'il a conservées de son expérience militaireles différents paliers et erreurs qui jalonnent une croissance de 0 à 23 M€comment préparer son entreprise pour pouvoir un jour la vendrece qu'il ferait différemment s'il devait repartir de zéro aujourd'huiUn épisode pour tous les entrepreneurs et dirigeants qui doivent vendre, recruter et structurer leur croissance… sans forcément se considérer comme des vendeurs.Les Héros de la Vente, le podcast des dirigeants et commerciaux B2BMon livre, Prospecter comme un Héros est disponible : https://link.amazon/B008sOSy7 35 méthodes de prospection tirées de 200 interviews de ce podcast.Site : lesherosdelavente.comHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Live from the 2026 Southern Economic Development Council Annual Conference in Bonita Springs, Florida, host Ray Methvin sits down with two key leaders shaping economic development across the region.First, Ray speaks with Kevin Johnson, Senior Director of Marketing and Sales Enablement at H.J. Russell & Company and Chairman of the SEDC Communications Committee. Kevin shares how H.J. Russell approaches affordable housing, aviation infrastructure, and community-centered building across the country. He also dives into the creative strategy behind SEDC's quarterly newsletter and why active committee involvement is the single best path for professional networking in the organization.Later, Ray is joined by Mike Mullis, President of J.M. Mullis, Inc. and the longest-serving member of SEDC. Drawing on decades of global site selection experience, Mike offers candid perspectives on the current data center moratoriums, the rise of community college and technical training programs to rebuild the manufacturing pipeline, and why economic developers must bring total flexibility and local leadership to the table to win major capital investment projects.The SEDC Podcast is sponsored by Insyteful.

Most companies spend September and October planning for 2027, but they skip the part that actually matters: figuring out how their teams will execute on it. That's why we're revisiting this episode with Dr. Chuck Bamford, who walks through how to align strategy from the boardroom all the way down to compensation plans, daily activities, and the conversations your reps have with customers. He covers what separates strategy that gets executed from strategy that sits on a shelf, and why most execution failures have nothing to do with the strategy itself. If you're mapping out your revenue goals for next year, this episode is a must-listen before you finalize your plan. Dr. Chuck Bamford is the Managing Partner at Bamford Associates and an adjunct professor of strategy at both Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. He's worked with more than 170 organizations to design and implement strategy that actually drives behavior, and he's the author of many books, including The Strategy Mindset 2.0. Connect with Chuck: LinkedIn Website Resources mentioned: The Strategy Mindset 2.0: A Practical Guide to the Design and Implementation of Strategy Key takeaways from this episode: 00:00 – What it really takes to build strategy that doesn't fall apart the moment it hits the sales floor. 05:01 – Why most CROs treat strategy like a one-time event instead of the ongoing discipline it needs to be. 16:02 – What leaders often overlook when converting corporate KPIs into the specific daily activities their people actually execute. 18:40 – The mistake many CROs make when compensation plans quietly undermine everything their strategy is designed to accomplish. 54:43 – Why narrowing your competitive set to 3-5 competitors dramatically changes how your teams sell. 01:00:52 – A look inside how differentiation dies in strategy decks but comes alive in the three-foot conversation between your rep and a customer. Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

Un client dit qu'il est intéressé. Il ne signe pas. On se raconte que c'était le prix, le budget, le timing. La vérité est ailleurs : le besoin exprimé n'est que la partie visible du problème. En dessous, il y a ce que

B2B Sales is changing fast, but NVIDIA's Ari Capogeannis believes sellers don't need more AI tools. They need AI to work quietly in the background. Originally published in September 2025, we're revisiting this conversation from the B2B Sales Trends archive because the question Ari raises remains highly relevant: what should AI actually do for sellers? So what happens when you stop asking sellers to interpret more data and instead use AI to surface who matters, when to act, and why? Harry Kendlbacher sits down with Ari Capogeannis, Sr. Director, Enterprise Revenue Marketing at NVIDIA, to unpack a different approach to Sales Enablement, Sales Data, and Go to Market Strategy. Ari challenges the traditional funnel mentality and explains why enterprise B2B selling increasingly needs to focus on Buying Groups rather than individual leads. He also shares why adding another AI interface to a seller's workflow may be solving the wrong problem. And there is a deeper question underneath it all: if AI can automate the machine, what still needs to come from the seller? ⏱️ Timestamps: 00:00 – From data to deals: what sellers actually need 02:59 – Why sellers should not have to learn another tool 04:53 – From the old funnel to Buying Groups 09:55 – Why the best AI may be invisible to sales 12:25 – The enterprise buying group and the missing context 20:38 – The 3 qualities of an elite B2B seller The conversation explores: • Why having 500 accounts changes what sellers actually need from data • Why Buying Groups can reveal what the traditional funnel misses • How AI can become more powerful when the seller barely notices it is there • Why more Sales Data does not automatically lead to better decisions • Why the seller's conversation may be the most important feedback mechanism in the system About Ari Capogeannis Ari Capogeannis is Sr. Director, Enterprise Revenue Marketing at NVIDIA, where he leads data-driven strategies that connect marketing, sales, and buying groups to accelerate pipeline and revenue growth. With 20+ years in strategic marketing, Ari specializes in go-to-market strategy, Sales Enablement, demand generation, revenue operations, AI, and advanced analytics, helping enterprise organizations create more aligned and measurable paths from account engagement to revenue. Connect with Ari Capogeannis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aricapo/

Dans cet épisode, Sabrina Boisson, alias Captain'Vente, explique comment vendre sans chercher à convaincre ni mettre de pression. Nous verrons ensemble : Pourquoi vouloir convaincre crée de la résistance. Comment l'écoute et les bonnes questions aident le prospect à prendre une décision claire. La posture à adopter pour présenter son offre et parler du prix sans se justifier. Comment identifier les freins avant qu'ils ne deviennent des objections. Pourquoi un bon appel ne se termine pas forcément par un « oui », mais par une décision assumée.Mon livre Prospecter comme un Héros est disponible :https://link.amazon/B0blmfzK835 méthodes de prospection tirées de 200 interviews de ce podcast.Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

"Healthcare becomes more affordable when we make the better choice the easy choice." In this episode of Bright Spots in Healthcare, Eric Glazer sits down with Beth Keyser, President of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield's West Region Commercial Health Benefits business, to explore why healthcare affordability isn't just about lowering prices, it's about helping people make better decisions earlier. Throughout the conversation, Beth shares how Anthem is redesigning the member journey by combining data, navigation, provider collaboration, and whole-person care to guide members toward the right care at the right time and in the right setting. Rather than focusing on healthcare after the bill arrives, Beth explains why the greatest opportunity to improve affordability happens long before treatment begins. In this episode: Why healthcare affordability starts before anyone receives a medical bill Helping members choose the right site of care without sacrificing quality Moving beyond price transparency to true care navigation How Sydney Health and HealthOS are helping members and providers make better decisions together Why whole-person care is also an affordability strategy What the industry's strongest payer-provider partnerships are doing differently Why healthcare leaders should focus less on protecting data, and more on using it The opportunity healthcare may still be underestimating over the next five years If you're leading a health plan, provider organization, employer health strategy, or healthcare company, this conversation offers practical ideas for improving affordability by making healthcare easier to navigate, not simply cheaper. Resource: Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and USA TODAY Network's in-house branded content studio launched a new five-part video series designed to help Americans better understand their health plan benefits, make informed care decisions and manage costs with greater confidence. https://www.usatoday.com/interactives/sponsor-story/anthem-blue-cross-blue-shield/5-key-health-insurance-terms-made-simple/ About Beth Keyser: Beth Keyser is a 30-year healthcare industry veteran with a passion for leading organizations that are on a mission to make people healthier.  Beth was named president of the Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield West Region for the Commercial Health Benefits division in 2025, which includes Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin. She is also responsible for Sales Enablement and Centralized Sales Support within the Commercial Health Benefits division. Previously, Beth served as president of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Indiana from 2020 to 2025. The Anthem health plan in Indiana is the largest in the state with nearly 5,000 Indiana-based associates, serving more than four million members. Before joining Anthem, Beth focused on improving doctor-patient relationships as the president of Create® health plans in New York City. Prior to her time at Create®, Beth held several leadership roles at Healthways where she was accountable for domestic and international revenue growth, customer experience, call center operations and establishing partnerships with health plans, employers, physician organizations and hospitals. Early in her career she helped stand up Gordian Health Solutions, a Nashville start-up, that was eventually sold to Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee. Beth currently serves on the Board of Directors of Women in Health Care Leadership at University of Alabama at Birmingham, which provides mentoring and training programs to develop tomorrow's leaders. She also serves on the board of directors of the Indiana Sports Corp, Neuraxis and the WellPoint Holding Corporation. Beth is also a proud member of the Red Cross Tiffany Circle. Keyser is a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi and earned a master's degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Connect with Beth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beth-keyser-589a184/     About Bright Spots Ventures Bright Spots Ventures helps healthcare leaders discover what's working—and how to scale it. Through our podcast, executive councils, private events, and strategic advisory work, we bring together health plan, provider, and healthcare innovation leaders to exchange practical ideas that improve care, lower costs, and accelerate innovation. Learn more: https://www.brightspotsinhealthcare.com      

A stuffed content library can still leave a salesperson empty-handed.  Somewhere along the way, sales enablement got mistaken for asset production. Sales asks, marketing makes, the asset goes somewhere, and the next thing you know, a seller is five minutes from a call wondering which deck, battle card, proof point, or customer story actually helps. If the seller has to stop selling to find the enablement, the enablement has not enabled.  In this Drew-on-Drew solo episode, Drew plays both host and guest to take on the request-fulfillment loop. Drawing on conversations in the CMO Huddles community, he helps marketing leaders rethink sales enablement around one better question: Did it make sales more effective?  The mandate is clear. Pick one selling outcome, build trusted answers where sellers work, and measure whether buyers move, deals advance, and sales wins faster, more often, or bigger.  What You'll Learn:  How AI can turn approved content into timely answers without creating more content chaos  Why adoption depends on workflow, peer stories, and help at the moment of need  How recorded sales calls can strengthen messaging, coaching, content, and product decisions  Listen in for Drew's take on what sales enablement needs to become and how CMOs can replace the content maze with a system that helps sellers show up smarter and move buyers forward. For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcasts/ To learn more about CMO Huddles, visit https://cmohuddles.com/

According to research by Gartner, by 2029, sales organizations with AI-driven enablement functions will achieve 40% faster sales stage velocity than those using more traditional approaches. But getting there means building the kind of workflows that tell you what actually works, which is only possible when you can see inside the conversations that selling actually happens in. If you can’t, you might just find yourself scaling an AI-powered program that’s completely misaligned with how your sellers sell and how your buyers buy. So how do you understand what your teams need, and then build an innovative, mature, AI-powered enablement program to match? Riley Rogers: Welcome to the Win/Win Podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Jill Sawyer, Director of Sales Enablement at RL Datix. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jill. I’m really excited to have you here. I think we’ve got a very fun conversation ahead. Could you give us a little bit of an overview of who you are, what your background is, and your work today? Jill Sawyer: Yeah, absolutely. First, thanks so much for having me. I’m super excited to be here. Currently, I sit as the Director of Sales Enablement for North America at RL Datix. I’ve been here for a little over seven and a half years. JS: My background is a bit non-traditional for sales enablement. I started more on the marketing and product marketing side. I moved into the enablement role a few years ago, a little bit over two and a half years ago, but I was really stepping into a function that needed to be built from the ground up. That meant figuring out not just what sellers needed to know, but how to help them actually use it in moments that matter. I’ve also recently gone back to school. I’m currently pursuing my Master’s of Jurisprudence in Health Law at Loyola University Chicago, which has been really valuable in this role. Our customers operate in a highly regulated healthcare environment, so understanding more about compliance, patient safety, risk, and legal frameworks helps me think differently about what our sellers need to understand and how we support them. RR: And you wear so many hats through it all. I’m really excited to see how all of this comes into play in your work today. But before we jump into what you’re working on now, could you give us a little bit of an overview of your sales environment? JS: Yeah. So the way I usually describe RL Datix is that we sit at an intersection of healthcare safety, risk compliance, and operational reliability. Our customers are health systems and hospitals that are trying to solve problems with very real stakes. They’re trying to either prevent harm, respond appropriately when something does go wrong, or maintain regulatory readiness. So it makes our sales environment really complex because those problems rarely belong to one department or one singular buyer. The buying committee can be really broad, and each stakeholder is looking at the problem through a different lens. So for our sellers, the challenge is being able to zoom in and zoom out. They need to understand specific workflows, not only within our product, but within the landscape. But they also need to connect that workflow to the larger operational and strategic priorities of our customers. This is where enablement for us becomes really important. I’m helping translate complex healthcare problems into clear, relevant conversations about value and outcomes and how RL Datix helps raise the standard of care. RR: So a lot for sellers to juggle, and a lot for you to help them juggle, especially because you built the enablement function largely from scratch. While doing so, you were learning what sales enablement as a concept is, what the function should look like, and how you should tailor it to your specific environment. So how did coming in without a more traditional enablement background change the way you thought about what to build, and was that kind of an advantage? JS: Yeah, so I think coming in without a traditional enablement background shaped our function in a really positive way. Since I’ve come from marketing and product marketing, I was always really thinking about our audience, message, positioning, and customer value. But when I moved over into enablement, I quickly realized that having the right message or right content was only part of the equation. I needed to help our field know how to use it in real customer conversations. I really came in thinking about what my sales reps actually need to be more confident, more consistent, and ultimately more effective. Of course, sellers needed content, but they also needed guidance, learning, reinforcement. Our leaders needed coaching and better visibility into what was working and what wasn’t. So in some ways, I approached enablement like building a product. My sellers were the users, the sales process was our workflow, and it was my job to understand their friction points and build them something that made it easier to have stronger customer conversations. RR: I love that. It’s enablement, but make it product marketing. You listed out some things that were important for sellers and things that were important for your leaders, and all of this you had to build from scratch. So as you were looking across what needed to happen, what your first few check boxes on the to-do list were, a key first step was assessing what you had and what you needed. How had RL Datix been supporting its sellers, and where did you start to see those first few gaps? JS: Yeah. When I first stepped into the role, we had a lot of strong subject matter expertise and a ton of people supporting the field in a variety of different ways. The issue wasn’t that our support structure didn’t exist, it was that it wasn’t really connected or, quite frankly, easy to scale. I had a lot of content, but it lived in a variety of different places. We had trainings, but much of it was event-based or dependent on live sessions and then going back and watching re-recordings. I needed to make sure my sellers were hearing the same message and had access to the same guidance on how we wanted our customers to hear about RL Datix and our offerings. And I needed visibility, not only for enablement, but for collaborative teams like product marketing and product, into what was actually being used, what was resonating with our customers, and where we still needed to support the field. So my final assessment really shaped the foundation that we built. It was truly creating what I call that connected enablement environment that could support sellers in the flow of their day-to-day work. RR: Yeah, and I think a recurring theme through all of this is that there were levers to pull, content to create, training to centralize, all of these things, but that wasn’t the end goal. The end goal was that when a seller hits the field, when a seller is on a Zoom call, they’re saying the right things, and they’re not just reading off bullets, they’re tailoring it because they know it and they know it well. So you’re looking at what you need to do. You have your content, you’re beginning to get it centralized and organized, your training is in place, you have data on what reps are using, you’re building. But you still can’t see inside the conversations that sellers are having to understand whether all of that work is, for lack of a better word, working. So what challenges did that lack of visibility create, and why did you start thinking that maybe a conversational intelligence tool was that next step forward? JS: Yeah. So when we brought Highspot in, we truly started with a baseline foundation. Before I could do anything more advanced, I needed to, step one, make it easier for sellers to just find what they needed and understand how to use it. It may sound really basic, but it was a huge step forward because it helped us connect content to the way sellers were actually selling. It also gave us a huge level of visibility. I could start to see what reps were using and what they were not using, to identify those true gaps. But the missing piece was actually our customer conversations. I could easily know if a rep opened a deck or completed a course, but I still didn’t know how that translated when they were in front of a customer. Were they asking strong discovery questions? Were they connecting the message to the customer’s priorities? How were we handling objections? What were we hearing? Without that level of visibility, there was still a lot of guesswork. Enablement, product marketing, product, and sales leaders were all trying to support the field, but a lot of times we were relying on anecdotal feedback or even secondhand information. Conversational intelligence really helped close that gap, and that foundation is really what made the next phase possible. Once we had the content, the training, and guidance all in one spot, I could start to think about how to layer other pieces in, like coaching, conversational intelligence, and eventually deal-level insights on top of it. RR: When you first had that line of sight into the field and what they were actually coming up against, was there anything that you didn’t expect that came through? Things that sellers were either saying that you were like, “Oh my gosh, have you been saying this for the last umpteen months?” Or that you had no idea they were running into that was a problem. You were like, “Oh, we should’ve been helping with this,” or, “We could be enabling differently.” JS: Yeah. I think for us, what it really helped open up was just the level of content that I needed. We had really great high-level intro, top-of-funnel materials, and then I would jump very quickly into technical documents. So I needed to be able to, like you said earlier, customize, and that was a gap that became pretty quickly consistent, that I needed to bring a middle-of-the-road option to help ultimately fast-track opportunities to close. It’s something that we’re still actively working through today. RR: Once you had that line of sight, not only into real-world conversations, but the analytics into usage that we’re talking about, what difference did that make for you and other cross-functional teams? We have this example of middle-of-the-funnel content, realizing this is a necessity and maybe we aren’t serving it. But were there any other moments that made it very clear this was helpful? JS: Yeah. It just gives me, and our whole company honestly, a much better shared understanding of what actually is happening in the field. From an enablement standpoint, it helps us see where reps were confident and where they needed support. Were they asking discovery questions? Were they connecting the message to customer priorities? It helped us figure out if there were gaps and ultimately skills I needed to help upskill. For our leaders, it gives them more specific coaching moments. So instead of coaching from memory or only from a pipeline update, they have the ability to coach from real customer interactions without having to sit in live on 50 calls a week. It also helped open up a level of visibility across cross-functional teams. Product marketing can come in and review whether messaging is landing, whether the decking is being used. They also get a great depth of understanding around customer questions, objections, and needs, more directly. So I’m not relying only on select feedback or the loudest feedback in the room. I use real customer conversation to keep improving our full enablement environment. RR: And as you alluded to, you’re beginning to use Deal Agent to capture deal-level insights and start to act on them. So how do you see it adding value to the environment you’ve already built and the environment you’ve already got your sellers comfortable using? JS: Yeah, Deal Agent is something we’re really excited about. We just launched it and had a full all-sales meeting with our Highspot customer success team, and it’s really that next layer of a foundation we’ve already built. We started with getting content and training all in one place. Now we’re layering in conversational intelligence, but Deal Agent is going to take that a step further for us by connecting the conversations and insights we’re gathering back to the opportunity level. This is really important for us because our sellers and our leaders don’t just need to know what happened on a call, they need to understand what that ultimately means for the deal, for them to close business. Are they talking to the right stakeholders? Are priorities clear? Do we have risks we need to address? For our sales reps, I think the value is that it can reduce some of the manual work and help them stay focused on the right actions. For leaders, it gives clear visibility into deal health and where they may need to coach. For the rest of the organization, it gives us another level of insight, so I can look to see what patterns are building across opportunities. The AI agents built into it are amazing too, because they’re helping eliminate some admin burden by building Digital Rooms faster, with the content needed at that moment for that deal. RR: And I think what’s kind of interesting is that this is a vision you see, and you’re like, “I see so much value in this. I see what the potential is.” But it’s so new, and it’s such a new way of working for literally everybody. You’re not trying to roll out a program you’ve seen elsewhere, you’re on the cutting edge. So how have you been tackling things like the rollout, the behavior change, getting folks accustomed to this very new way of working? JS: Yeah. So for us, it was big. We didn’t really have any tools like this in place already. The biggest thing we’ve learned is that you cannot roll it out as just another tool. Sellers already have a lot of tools, and if something feels disconnected from their day-to-day workflow, adoption is going to be really difficult. So we tried to anchor the rollout in practical use cases. How does it help a rep prepare for a meeting? Does it help them follow up faster, remember what the customer actually said? For our sales leaders, we’re focusing now on that next phase of coaching and visibility, helping them find a better way to understand what’s happening in their field and coach their teams appropriately. But in all honesty, there is a bit of change management. It’s a different way of working for some reps. Some reps were super excited and dove in headfirst, and others really needed to see the value a few times before it clicked and became muscle memory. So I try to keep that adoption path clear and practical. I’m not asking people to change everything overnight. We’re helping them build small habits: review call summaries, look at action items, use that deal-level information to pressure test next steps, use Digital Rooms or Pitches to send content and see what customers are engaging with. The key for us was making it feel useful before making it feel mandatory. Once people saw that it could save them time and improve their follow-up, it became less intimidating, and after a certain period of time, I was actually able to pull down any old resources they may have had a habit of going back to. RR: And since you’ve gone live with both Highspot and Deal Agent, what have you heard from the field on how they’re responding to it? JS: Yeah, so anecdotally we’ve heard that being able to get those next action items and the call takeaway was a really big piece. Being able to more easily share back the call recording also saved some steps from how they used to do it before. Deal Agent is still relatively new for us, but I think where we’re honing in is the ability to slice data in different ways, by our sales forecasting, by our sales stages, and then really pairing that with a lot of the intelligence and reporting we already have in Salesforce. That gives us and our leadership a much deeper understanding of what’s truly happening and where leaders need to step in. RR: So to your point of don’t boil the ocean, there are a handful of use cases that your sellers like, that you like, that your leaders like, that are slowly building the muscle. And over time, things might change, new use cases might emerge, but as of right now, there are a few recurring things that it sounds like people really are finding useful. Super cool, I love that. And you touched on this a little bit, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about how this is helping you solve for some of the guesswork you were feeling. We talked about building without knowing what was being used by the field and what was landing. So now that you have that combination of conversation, deal data, and usage data, how does that change what you and other teams are building and providing to your reps? JS: Yeah. It really helped us move from a state of assumption to being evidence-backed. Before, I had a lot of smart people supporting the field, but we would build materials based on individual feedback or something needed for one deal, and assume it was scalable across all deals. It’s not necessarily a wrong way to do it, but it’s an incomplete way to do it. Now that I’ve got conversations and deal data all in one spot, I can start to pull out patterns. Where can I look to see what customers are actually asking? Where can I look to see what customers are actually engaging with? Is it the same consistent objection that keeps coming up, and are we answering it in the right way? For my team, it means we’re much more targeted. Maybe the answer is a new training. Maybe it’s a better talk track or coaching around certain areas of the sales process. It could be working with product marketing to create a new Sales Play, or a clearer way to help position our value. The biggest change is that we’re actively, every day, listening, learning, and adjusting based on what’s actually happening out in the field. RR: I love that. And I think that middle-of-the-funnel example is such a good example of how you can stitch all that information together and recognize that there’s a component of your strategy you can really pull on that might be particularly valuable. So I love that we have that, not only the high level of what it’s doing, but how it comes into play in the actual work happening. Okay, so looking back, a year ago now, a few months ago now with Deal Agent, from where you started to where you are now, what’s the biggest impact you’ve achieved, or the proudest moment that sticks with you? JS: I think the thing I’m most proud of is that we built something literally from the ground up, and it changed how enablement shows up for our business. The biggest impact has been moving from a fragmented environment to a connected foundation that can be structured, measured, and embedded into how our go-to-market teams work. I can actually see that in a shift in our numbers. When we first brought Highspot on board, it was specifically a sales-only tool. I didn’t have any other broader teams in the tooling, and now we’ve doubled our Highspot user base. I’ve expanded from supporting just sales to supporting the broader go-to-market team. Training has been one of our largest wins. We’ve moved from one-off live training to structured onboarding paths and ongoing learning. We’re actually in the midst of a current go-to-market training refresh, taking everyone through our RL Datix 360, as we call it, and I went from maybe a 4% completion rate in the early days to now seeing nearly 100% completion. Last time I looked, we were at around 97 or 98%. That’s a huge shift in the consistency and accountability I have with my field. For content, 91% of our internal audiences are viewing our content in Highspot, and I’ve got close to 500 opportunities actively engaging with our content. So it’s telling me this isn’t just a repository where things sit. It’s becoming embedded in their daily workflows, in how they prepare, sell, and engage our customers. There’s also a time-savings piece. It’s a little harder to quantify, but I feel it every day. I’m still working toward maturing how we connect this directly to revenue outcomes like win rate and pipeline movement, but now I’ve got a solid foundation, a high level of adoption, and the visibility to keep building toward that. RR: Jill, the volume of work that happened in one year, when we talk about building the foundation, that’s the year. But you took 365 days, built out the foundation, drove the behavior change, and now you’re already in the midst of that next phase of evolution and getting people on board. So bravo, I don’t know how you did that. Hope you’re sleeping. I’d love to get a little bit of perspective on how you did it, for other leaders who are in that phase of building a strategy from the ground up. How would you recommend they get started, especially in an AI-first world? JS: Yeah. We went live with the product really, really fast. I had a great team behind me, and we worked hard every single day to get things built. But my advice would be actually not to start with AI. It’s probably going to be a little controversial, but I think you should start with the problem you’re trying to solve. It can be really tempting to jump straight into the newest tool or capability, but if your foundation isn’t there, AI can just make the mess faster. I would start by understanding where the friction is for your sellers and go-to-market teams. Can they find what they need? Do they understand the message in training? Do they know what good looks like? Are managers coaching consistently? Do you have visibility into what’s happening in customer conversations? Can you tell what’s helping deals move forward or stall? Once you understand those gaps, you can be more intentional about where AI fits. Can it help a rep prepare faster, summarize conversations, surface deal risk, build up Digital Rooms? It should really be tied to a true, real workflow and a business need. This is when AI becomes much more powerful, because it’s got the right context. It’s not just another tool. It’s a way to scale insight, reduce manual work, and help the team make better decisions faster. So for an enablement leader starting from scratch, I’d say: listen first, build your foundation, solve the real frictions in your sales force, and then use AI to scale what’s already working. RR: I really liked the question framework you threw out there. Because I think especially when people are starting to build, you have this insane arena of potential work to be done. And when you can start to ask the right questions that build toward the right purpose, you can get to the exciting work down the line. Well, Jill, thank you so much for chatting with us today. It’s been really wonderful to hear a little bit about what you’re building, how you’re thinking about building, and I’m so curious to see what’s next down the line. We’ll have to stay in touch. JS: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This was great. RR: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win/Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize go-to-market success with Highspot.

Discover the unmistakable warning signs that your sales team needs a dedicated enablement manager, from burnout and misalignment to stalled deals and revenue concentration. Learn how fractional sales leadership delivers measurable growth without the full-time cost. Evergreen Sales Group City: Atlanta Address: 3333 Peachtree Road Northeast Website: https://evergreensales.group

In this clip, Alex Bilmes, CEO of Endgame, joins Revenue Builders to share what his team learned from analyzing more than 30,000 real AI workflows across go-to-market teams. The data shows AI gaining traction in account intelligence, conversation readiness, deal acceleration, pipeline inspection, and team enablement. But the larger lesson is that the strongest teams are not just using AI to generate decks, briefs, or follow-ups faster. They are using it to create shared understanding across reps, managers, executives, RevOps, and cross-functional teams. For revenue leaders, the opportunity is not simply more automation. It is connecting the organization around the same account context, methodology, and customer truth. Alex Bilmes is the CEO and founder of Endgame, a revenue intelligence platform built for go-to-market teams. His work focuses on helping revenue organizations centralize customer, methodology, and account knowledge so both humans and AI agents can operate from a consistent foundation. Connect with Alex: LinkedIn Listen to the full episode: Revenue per Employee Is the New Endgame with Alex Bilmes Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

Dans cet épisode, Laurie Giacobi, cofondatrice de My Marketing Xperience, nous explique pourquoi la connaissance de ses concurrents est un levier essentiel de positionnement et de performance commerciale. Nous allons aborder : Comment une entreprise peut perdre du terrain sans voir ses concurrents progresser. Pourquoi la hausse des leads ne garantit pas celle des ventes. Pourquoi le marketing joue désormais une grande partie de la vente avant même le premier échange avec un commercial. Comment construire un positionnement qui répond clairement à la question : « Pourquoi nous choisir plutôt qu'un autre ? » Les bonnes pratiques pour transformer la veille concurrentielle en arguments de vente concrets.Retrouvez la newsletter des Chroniques de la vente ici : https://herosdelavente.substack.com/Et la chaîne Youtube Les Héros de la vente : https://www.youtube.com/@lesherosdelaventeHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

In this episode, Temitope Adelanwa, a Product Marketing Manager at VentureEd Solutions, joins Louise Liu to discuss the realities of sales enablement as a solo product marketer. She shares how she balances multiple products, prioritizes requests from across the business, and helps sales teams gain confidence with complex solutions. Temitope offers practical advice for PMMs who need to maximize their impact without a large team behind them.For more information, please check out Temitope's article: The PMM Operating System: Building Frameworks That Scale.

Sales organizations stall when knowledge stays trapped in the heads of a few experienced people. In this Revenue Builders replay, Frederik Maris explains how leaders turn field experience into repeatable execution through sharper qualification, stronger frontline management, and deliberate coaching. He shares how conscious competence helps managers teach what top performers do instinctively, why early wins matter for new reps, and where leaders must take accountability when talent fails to develop. The conversation gives CROs a practical view of the systems, behaviors, and management discipline required to build a team that can scale. Frederik Maris is the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of EliteGTM, where he helps founders and revenue leaders build more predictable go-to-market organizations through advisory, recruiting, and enablement. His career includes senior leadership roles at Splunk, Zoom, DataRobot, BMC, Veritas, and PTC, giving him firsthand experience building and transforming complex enterprise sales teams. Connect with Frederik: LinkedIn Resources mentioned: The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor Key takeaways from this episode:  08:44 – What it really takes to uncover the customer pain and internal support that move complex deals forward. 04:51 – Why sales leaders need a clear understanding of the methods behind their own success. 26:16 – What CROs often overlook about the frontline manager's role in seller ramp and retention. 28:13 – Why a new rep's first deal can shape confidence, momentum, and long-term performance. 40:36 – Frederik Maris's perspective on the traits that matter most when hiring for growth. 45:06 – A look inside the interview signals that reveal self-awareness and emotional intelligence. 01:01:07 – The leadership question that creates accountability when performance falls short. Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

Neste episódio do Vamos de Vendas, Gustavo Pagotto recebe Anderson Munhoz, Diretor de Vendas Enterprise na Meu Copo Eco, para uma conversa sobre Revenue Operations, Sales Enablement e os desafios de criar uma operação comercial escalável, previsível e orientada por dados.Ao longo do episódio, Anderson explica por que RevOps e Enablement devem caminhar juntos desde os primeiros dias da empresa, mostrando como processos bem estruturados impactam diretamente a produtividade, a adoção de CRM e o crescimento da receita. Ele compartilha experiências práticas sobre onboarding de vendedores, construção de playbooks, monitoramento de performance e os erros mais comuns que impedem equipes comerciais de escalar.

If your top reps are stuck training new hires instead of closing deals, this AI sales enablement playbook will help. Enterprise seller Vernon Ross joins Mike Allton to show how to scale your best performers' knowledge without stealing their selling time, and why that "teaching jail" is quietly costing you around $30K a month per rep. Vernon has carried quota, closed enterprise deals, and built the AI training tools that make other sellers faster. Inside, he shares the one diagnostic question that finds your highest-ROI automation, why AI pilots die the moment they add friction instead of removing it, and how he uses NotebookLM, private podcasts, and voice cloning to cut top-rep onboarding from 30 hours down to 10. He and Mike also get tactical on where AI belongs inside a MEDDPICC deal, how to tie content consumption to real revenue, and the one automation any team can build this quarter without a six-figure budget. Vernon Ross drove 75 to 85% increases in new client acquisition at a 32% conversion rate, closed deals with Procter & Gamble, GE, and AT&T, and has generated over $500,000 in enterprise SaaS sales. As president of Vernon Ross Consulting and an enterprise podcaster, he now advises Fortune 1000 companies on AI-driven learning. The hard truth: you cannot clone your top performers. So you stay stuck in an endless loop of manual knowledge transfer while your competitors build AI-powered learning engines that run around the clock. This episode is how you break the loop. Still letting shadow AI run unmanaged on your sales floor? Download the free Executive Guide to Shadow AI at theaihat.com/shadow-ai. Chapters: 00:00 Top Rep Pain Points 00:59 Podcast Theme Intro 02:08 Show Mission Setup 03:15 Guest Vernon Ross 05:11 Sales Enablement Gap 07:34 AI Adoption That Sticks 10:58 AI Hosted Training Podcasts 13:46 NotebookLM And Voice Clones 16:28 MEDDPICC With AI 18:52 Onboarding Without Teaching Jail 21:25 Shadow AI Sponsor Break 22:33 Measuring Podcast ROI 28:38 Fast Time To Value 30:37 Compliance And Risk 33:48 First Automation To Build 36:34 Where To Find Vernon 37:18 Final Wrap Up Resources: Vernon Ross: linkedin.com/in/vernonross | vernonross.com | enterprisepodcaster.com | aiplanner.com Mentioned in this episode: Wondercraft.ai, Google NotebookLM, Wispr Flow, ZoomInfo, Apollo, HubSpot, Otter.ai, Claude Code, Gemini, Supporting Cast, MEDDPICC Connect with Mike Allton: linkedin.com/in/mikeallton | Newsletter theaihat.com/newsletter | Podcast theaihat.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sales sits on the frontier, and they cut all of our paychecks, which is not provocative, it is just math. That is the line Andrey Zevakhin uses to make a bigger point: enablement was never meant to be a small team pushing content and running training, it is a company-wide responsibility and a culture. In this episode of Content Amplified, Andrey, Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Zywave, explains how enablement works as a funnel that captures signals from sales and pulls in the right partners, why he refuses to be a Swiss Army knife that slices everything but does nothing well, and how he prioritizes by what directly impacts the top line (unique meetings, win rates, deal size, bookings) over vanity indicators like content usage and certification completion. He reframes content overload as a self-inflicted content strategy problem, and lays out the Legos model: one well-maintained 200-slide master library where the rep's job is to build a story, not pick a deck, and no two presentations should ever look the same. He closes with two shifts: enablement should own revenue culture, not training, and enablement is a company responsibility, not a team.About AndreyAndrey Zevakhin is a seasoned enablement leader with 20 years of experience across revenue enablement, learning and development, sales training, and technology evangelism at both global and nationwide software companies. He has built enablement functions from scratch and evolved existing ones, spanning onboarding, continuous learning, coaching, skills verification, and professional development for customer-facing revenue roles. He currently leads enablement at Zywave, an insurance technology provider serving insurance brokers and carriers. He describes enablement as his vocation, motivated by seeing the people he enables succeed in closing deals and driving revenue.Show Notes- Connect with Andrey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreyzevakhin/Text us what you think about this episode!

Sales kickoffs can become expensive calendar events if leaders are not clear on what the gathering is meant to accomplish. In this Revenue Builders replay, John McMahon shares his perspective on how CEOs and CROs should think about SKOs, from motivating the sales force and aligning teams around company goals to delivering training that actually prepares reps to execute. He also explains why peer-to-peer knowledge transfer is often the hidden value of bringing the sales organization together, why product presentations should only happen when the value proposition is clear, and how leaders can motivate reps by speaking directly to their daily challenges, career aspirations, and earning potential. John McMahon is a five-time CRO who has led revenue organizations at PTC, GeoTel, Ariba, BladeLogic, and BMC. He is the author of The Qualified Sales Leader and co-host of Revenue Builders, where he brings operator-level perspective on building and scaling enterprise sales teams.  Connect with John: LinkedIn Book Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

Enterprise sales breaks down when teams confuse activity with progress, champions with coaches, or product interest with business urgency. Stuart Gwynn, a top-performing enterprise seller at MongoDB, joins John Kaplan and John McMahon to unpack what separates disciplined enterprise execution from deal chasing. Drawing from his path from SDR at Pure Storage to closing the largest deal in MongoDB history, Stuart explains why discovery is the foundation of value-based selling, how to test whether a champion will actually sell internally, and why large deals require multiple stakeholders, rigorous qualification, and a team operating around a shared account vision. He also shares how elite individual contributors lead without formal management titles, where AI is already changing buyer expectations, and why process only works when it is paired with judgment. Stuart Gwynn is an enterprise sales leader at MongoDB who has exceeded goal every year since joining the company in 2019. Before MongoDB, he spent seven years at Pure Storage, rising from SDR to named account rep and finishing as one of the company's top performers before moving into strategic enterprise selling. Connect with Stuart: LinkedIn Episodes mentioned: The Discipline Behind Scaling from PLG to Enterprise with Sahir Azam Why Sales Execution Wins in an AI-First World with Brian McCarthy, President of Global Revenue and Field Operations at Cursor Key takeaways from this episode: 00:00 – What it really takes to combine a rigorous value framework with the human judgment required to scale enterprise selling. 02:42 – Why discovery becomes the moment where real pain, executive relevance, and budget-worthy outcomes either surface or disappear. 07:59 – What leaders often overlook about the trust required before customers will quantify the true cost of a problem. 11:28 – Why champion identification quietly determines whether a deal has internal momentum or only surface-level support. 21:35 – The mistake many sellers make when pipeline pressure pushes them toward activity instead of disciplined qualification. 18:50 – A look inside the preparation habits that help enterprise teams align before high-stakes customer conversations. 56:25 – Why many leaders get top-talent management wrong by applying the same operating rhythm to every rep. Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

Today's episode features Sahir Azam, Partner at Index Ventures and former Chief Product Officer at MongoDB, where he helped scale Atlas into a multi-billion-dollar platform. This conversation breaks down what actually separates top enterprise sellers, from intellectual curiosity to resource orchestration, and why those traits alone aren't enough without leadership building the right operating model around them. Sahir also explains how sales leaders create scale through enablement, accountability, and structured engagement, not just hiring more talent. For leaders trying to build repeatability in complex sales, this is a clear look at what it takes. Sahir Azam is a Partner at Index Ventures investing in AI infrastructure, and former Chief Product Officer at MongoDB where he led the Atlas transformation into a multi-billion-dollar platform. He brings a rare operator's perspective on building go-to-market discipline, scaling sales culture, and navigating the product-distribution balance that separates winners from founders who fail. Connect with Sahir: Index Ventures LinkedIn Get the Force Management framework for navigating product-go-to-market fit and building the sales discipline that separates scaling companies from those that fail: The Predictable Revenue Framework: Guide for Leaders Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

Revenue leaders are under increasing pressure to grow without adding headcount at the same rate, and AI is forcing a deeper conversation about productivity, consistency, governance, and organizational design. Alex Bilmes, CEO of Endgame, joins John Kaplan and John McMahon to discuss what his team learned from analyzing more than 30,000 real AI workflows across go-to-market teams. The conversation moves beyond tool adoption and into the harder leadership questions: how to create a centralized intelligence layer, how to prevent inconsistent messaging at scale, how RevOps must evolve, where AI can accelerate ramp and account coverage, and why human judgment becomes more important as automation gets better. Alex Bilmes is the CEO and founder of Endgame, a revenue intelligence platform built for go-to-market teams. His work focuses on helping revenue organizations centralize customer, methodology, and account knowledge so both humans and AI agents can operate from a consistent foundation. Connect with Alex: LinkedIn Key takeaways from this episode:  00:00 - A look inside what happens when AI agents move from task automation to managing real revenue workflows. 06:02 - Why agent sprawl quietly creates new execution risks for CROs trying to scale AI across the revenue organization. 09:09 - What leaders often overlook about the knowledge foundation required to keep humans and AI working from the same truth. 29:29 - Why RevOps has to evolve from fulfilling requests to building systems that change how revenue teams operate. 35:04 - What it really takes for AI to improve productivity beyond simple headcount reduction. 48:28 - The governance risk many revenue leaders underestimate when AI adoption moves faster than controls. 51:26 - Why human judgment becomes more important, not less, as AI takes on more of the sales workflow. Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

What you'll learn in this episode: Why being “60% right and 40% wrong” can still destroy a business The biggest mistake founders make during customer development Why product-market fit exists on a spectrum—not as a yes/no answer The customer development funnel that creates referrals naturally How to know when your product is ready to scale The danger of building based on your own assumptions instead of customer pain Why entrepreneurs struggle to balance confidence with humility The exact questions to ask customers before investing in growth How Uber Eats generated 33x stronger sales results than average clients Why slowing down can actually help you grow faster About Collin Stewart Founder, CEO, podcast host & failed musician How can he help you? Bootstrapped PR to millions in revenue Built a revenue team to 11 Grew 3 companies from $0–$1M as the only sales hire Hosts a podcast with 120+ episodes Nailed product-market fit but whiffed on building it (and learned a tonne from it) Connect with Collin Stewart: Predictable Revenue Founder's Edition The Terrifying Art Collin Stewart LinkedIn Predictable Revenue Podcast

High-stakes sales puts pressure on the mind before it tests the deal strategy. Reps and leaders have to stay present through judgment, rejection, complex stakeholders, and the weight of the number. Dr. Michael Gervais joins John Kaplan and John McMahon to unpack FOPO, the fear of other people's opinions, and its impact on executive presence, listening, trust, and decision-making. Drawing from his work with Olympians, world champions, Fortune 100 leaders, and elite teams, Dr. Gervais explains how mental skills like awareness, breathing, self-talk, imagery, and honest team dynamics help people operate with more clarity under pressure. The conversation brings performance psychology into the realities of enterprise sales, where long cycles, executive buyers, and high-consequence conversations demand discipline before the moment arrives. Dr. Michael Gervais is a performance psychologist, the founder of Finding Mastery, host of the Finding Mastery podcast, co-creator of the Performance Science Institute at the University of Southern California, and author of The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What People Think of You. He has worked with Olympians, world champions, MMA fighters, Fortune 100 CEOs, and elite teams to help them train their minds for high-pressure performance. Connect with Dr. Gervais: Website Podcast IG Facebook LinkedIn Resources mentioned: Dr. Michael Gervais' Morning Mindset Routine The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You by Michael Gervais, PhD Rethinking Success: Eight Essential Practices for Finding Meaning in Work and Life by J. Douglas Holladay Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella Key takeaways from this episode: 00:00 – Why FOPO quietly turns high-stakes sales conversations into moments of self-protection. 06:32 – A look inside the brain pattern that pulls leaders away from listening when presence matters most. 19:47 – What it really takes to tell the difference between useful pressure and activation that disrupts execution. 25:42 – Why elite performers treat mental training as a discipline, not a reaction to pressure. 41:18 – How rehearsing adversity helps leaders stay composed when the moment starts to break pattern. 48:20 – What leaders often overlook about the trust required for honest challenge on high-performing teams. 56:34 – Why psychological skill development is becoming part of how serious organizations prepare their people. Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

Strategic accounts expose where most sales approaches break down, especially when technical capability fails to connect to enterprise-wide value. In this replay segment, Jane Thompson unpacks what it actually takes to navigate complex, multi-division organizations, from building aligned champions to translating solutions into outcomes that matter at the board level. The conversation highlights why intellectual curiosity, multi-threaded engagement, and disciplined account mapping remain non-negotiable for sellers operating at the highest level. Jane Thompson is a sales leader at BigPanda with deep experience selling into complex, multi-division enterprise accounts and building high-impact strategic sales motions. Connect with Jane: LinkedIn Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

AI is shifting from model development to real-world usage, exposing a new bottleneck that most sales teams are not prepared to understand or sell against. As inference speed, memory bandwidth, and infrastructure become the true differentiators, traditional software playbooks begin to break down. Alex Varel joins John Kaplan and John McMahon to unpack what it takes to sell in this new environment, where technical depth, curiosity, and adaptability are no longer optional. The conversation explores how AI is reshaping productivity, why ICPs must evolve weekly, and how elite sellers distinguish themselves by orchestrating value across increasingly complex buying groups. Alex Varel is EVP of Worldwide Sales at Cerebras Systems, where he leads global go-to-market efforts at the forefront of AI infrastructure. He has built and scaled high-performing teams across MongoDB, Zscaler, and Multiverse, driving growth through IPO, hyper-scale expansion, and emerging technology shifts. Connect with Alex: LinkedIn Resources mentioned: "The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell "AI Superpowers" by Kai-Fu Lee “Leonardo da Vinci” by Walter Isaacson "No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy “The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley” by Jimmy Soni Key takeaways from this episode: 00:00 – A look inside what it really takes to rethink computing architecture when speed, not scale, becomes the constraint 13:09 – Why many leaders underestimate how the shift from training to inference is redefining where competitive advantage actually lives 25:27 – The mistake many CROs make when applying legacy software playbooks to markets that require constant recalibration 21:33 – What it really takes to turn AI from a concept into a daily productivity multiplier inside a revenue organization 31:34 – Why most sales organizations quietly accept a broken productivity model and what changes when that assumption is challenged 34:26 – A look inside the evolving role of the AE as a multi-dimensional operator across technical, business, and interpersonal domains 49:41 – Why treating ICP as a static exercise leads to missed growth opportunities in markets that are shifting in real time Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

When enablement gets treated like a help desk, sales requests training, enablement delivers it, everyone feels good, and the revenue needle never moves. In this episode of Content Amplified, Christa Fisher, Head of Sales Training and Development with two decades in sales, enablement, and L&D, explains how to break out of that reactive cycle and turn enablement into an actual growth driver. Christa walks through her race car driver analogy for separating training from enablement, the one diagnostic question that changes everything ("what has to change in live deals to drive more revenue?"), and why sticky training beats feel-good training every time. She gets tactical on observable deal behaviors, the difference between rep activity and rep execution, why reps revert to old habits under pressure, and the late-stage surprises (procurement stalls, missing multi-threading, weak discovery) that signal enablement is measuring the wrong things. If you have ever measured your team on completions and attendance and wondered why pipeline still looks the same, this conversation gives you a better starting point.About ChristaChrista Fisher is Head of Sales Training and Development with more than 20 years of experience across sales, enablement, and L&D. She has built enablement functions both as a standalone team and with training reporting underneath, and has lived through the "school of hard knocks" version of figuring out how the two should work together. Christa is passionate about treating enablement as the strategic intersection of content, messaging, tools, people, and process, and about partnering with sales ops, sales leaders, marketing, and product to map training to actual deal behavior. She believes the best enablement leaders listen to live calls before they look at metrics.Show Notes- Connect with Christa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christa-patton-fisher-9614378b/Text us what you think about this episode!

SEASON: 6 EPISODE: 24Episode Overview:Welcome back to Becoming Preferred. The podcast to help you level up your game and become the best version of you. Today, we are joined by a returning guest who has reached the literal summits of the corporate world.He's been a senior leader at Salesforce, PayPal, and Oracle, and he literally wrote the book on Sales Enablement. But today, we're talking about a different kind of mastery. Imagine reaching the peak of your career, only to wake up surviving a stroke with a 2% chance of survival.Roderick Jefferson is back with us to discuss his powerful new book and movement, Stroke of Success™. This isn't just a survival story; it's a strategic roadmap for every entrepreneur and executive who has ever traded their health for a headline or their peace for a paycheck. We're going to talk about how to redefine resilience, why 'wholeness' is the ultimate KPI, and how to build a life that is as successful on the inside as it looks on the outside. Join me for my conversation with Roderick Jefferson.Guest Bio: Roderick Jefferson is a senior executive with over 25 years of experience in sales enablement leadership. He is also an acknowledged practitioner and a global keynote speaker. He understands how to create bridges between internal organizations to empower sales to exceed expectations.Recognized for his expertise, Roderick has earned numerous accolades, including being named among America's Best Speakers by Selling Power Magazine, receiving the Sales Enablement Lifetime Achievement Award, and recognition as a Top Black Executive Leader. He is also a founding member of the Sales Enablement Society.He frequently presents at industry events and is the author of the Amazon #1 new release and bestselling books, Sales Enablement 3.0: The Blueprint to Sales Enablement Excellence™, The Sales Enablement 3.0 Companion Workbook™, and Stroke of Success™.Roderick has served on several Advisory Boards, including Autobound, Capella University, DemandFarm, Koridor, Leadoff.ai, National Speakers Association (NorCal), Sales for the Culture, Selleration Inc., and Walli Hr.Roderick has held roles in executive leadership, sales, sales enablement, operations, and customer service at 3PAR, AT&T, BusinessObjects, Magnit, Marketo, Oracle Marketing Cloud, NetApp, Netskope, PayPal, Roderick Jefferson & Associates, Salesforce, Siebel Systems, and Siteimprove.When he's not working on consulting projects or onstage delivering a keynote, he can be found perfecting the art of barbecuing or playing bocce in his backyard with his family.Regarding my signature topic, keynote, and bestselling book, they have shifted from AI, sales, and the current state of selling to something I call “Stroke of Success™.” You can learn more here.Resource Links:Website: https://roderickjefferson.com/Stroke of Success Book: https://www.roderickjefferson.com/stroke-of-successSales 3.0 Book Link: https://roderickjefferson.com/bookSales 3.0 Companion Workbook: https://roderickjefferson.com/companion-workbookKeynote Speaker Highlight Reel: https://bit.ly/3zRVNJaSocial Media Channels: https://linktr.ee/roderickjeffersonInsight Gold Timestamps:06:52 I was at 22% heart function that gave me 2% chance to live10:22 From the American Stroke Association, that one out of every four people, not just Americans, but people over the age of 25 in the world, will incur a stroke and you many not even know it11:43 What was the first corporate habit you realized you had to permanently delete to protect your new life?14:14 Literally I'm recharging my batteries every day rather than waiting until the weekend to recharge17:30 Money just buys independence18:25 Stop thinking that you're irreplaceable at work because you're not, and start acting like you're irreplaceable at home20:17 I believe selfishness, if you do it right, it becomes self-care22:35 If it's not something that you're putting out that's going to help others, then it's just marketing26:35 I had to learn how to be present29:48 Can you look in the mirror and say you like yourself, the person that's looking back at you?34:19 Was I productive or was I just busy?35:44 In your book you talk about relationships as being critical as achievement is38:19 How well can you say you really knew the hopes, dreams, and experiences of your grandparents?40:50 That's what I want my legacy to be, how I made people feel41:27 Send folks to roderickjefferson.com because then you'll get a signed book and I can get that out to youConnect Socially:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roderickjefferson/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_Npxk-Ws48Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roderick_j_associates/Roderick's Sales Enablement Spotify Podcast Playlist: https://tr.ee/tywJiGJxdgSales Enablement Online Course: https://www.udemy.com/course/applying-the-art-and-science-of-sales-enablement/?referralCode=6CF22D97C842CCC0E07CSocial Media Channels: https://linktr.ee/roderickjeffersonEmail: roderick@roderickjefferson.comSponsors: Rainmaker LeadGen Platform Demo: https://calendar.summit-learning.com/widget/booking/JKItVP7WErmCBjU2cCIxRainmaker Digital Solutions: https://www.rainmakerdigitalsolutions.com/

Most sales enablement teams are stuck running training programs when they should be running a revenue execution system. In this episode of Content to Close, Robin Schweitzer, a Revenue & Sales Enablement Executive with a background that spans carrying a bag, running marketing, and leading enablement, makes the case for pulling enablement out of the classroom and into live deals. Robin lays out the pillars she installs when she walks into a new role (rep readiness, pipeline management, deal execution), explains why SKO momentum dies a month later without micro-trainings tied to real deals, and shares the signal that helped her team lift close-won rate by 12 percent: a discovery-to-proposal ratio so lopsided it exposed a three-part discovery problem hiding in plain sight. She also walks through the data points she watches (threading, stage duration, talk-to-listen ratio, stall clusters), the four-quadrant stakeholder mapping exercise she uses to build credibility across C-suite, sales leadership, and reps, and when to carry a product or market problem back upstream on behalf of the team. If you own enablement and want to stop being treated as a cost center, start here.About RobinRobin Schweitzer is a Revenue & Sales Enablement Executive whose career has moved through sales, marketing, and enablement, giving her what she calls a triple-threat view of the business. She leads enablement as a cross-functional discipline built around deal strategy, buyer alignment, and next-step clarity rather than training throughput. Robin believes enablement's job is to change behavior so teams stop having to chase the number, and she's equally comfortable presenting data to the C-suite and riding shotgun on a live deal with a rep.Show Notes- Connect with Robin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marketing-sales-enablement/Text us what you think about this episode!

Yega Kumarappan explores how sales enablement has evolved from simple content distribution into an AI-driven discipline focused on helping sellers close deals. He explains how Paperflite has grown into an agentic platform that supports sales teams across the entire deal lifecycle, spanning prospect intelligence, content intelligence, conversation intelligence, deal intelligence, and AI-powered coaching. These capabilities help sellers access the right information at the right time, track buyer engagement, and predict deal outcomes with greater confidence. The conversation also highlights a broader shift in the market: ownership of sales enablement is moving from marketing to sales as AI makes its impact on revenue more measurable. Yega emphasizes that while content creation has become easier, distribution and ROI measurement are now the biggest challenges. Finally, he reflects on the growing importance of “knowledge sovereignty”—the need for organisations to capture and leverage their unique expertise—arguing that this will be critical for standing out in a world of increasingly generic AI tools.   About Paperflite Paperflite is a content experience and intelligence platform designed to help businesses maximise the impact of their content and drive stronger audience engagement. It enables teams to easily discover the most relevant content across the organisation, share it seamlessly across multiple channels, and track how audiences interact with it. With a strong focus on user experience, Paperflite delivers a visually engaging way for prospects, customers, and partners to consume content. Its built-in analytics engine provides deep insights into buyer behaviour, helping teams understand what resonates and take the right actions to improve conversations and conversions.   About Yega Kumarappan Yega Kumarappan is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Paperflite. Former Head of Technology Prototyping at Cognizant, Yega spent over a decade building and prototyping innovative solutions for global enterprises before founding Paperflite in 2016. Known for his futurist perspective, Yega focuses on shaping how modern sales and marketing teams use content, data, and AI to drive better customer engagement and outcomes.   Time Stamps 00:00 - Introduction to Yega Kumarappan and His Career Journey 02:42 - Why Paper Flight Exists 11:23 - Who Buys Enablement 13:14 - Distribution and ROI 16:04 - Inbound Marketing Strategy 19:15 - Knowledge Sovereignty in AI 22:30 - Marketing Advice and Mindset 27:23 - Where to Learn More   Quotes “Sales enablement has moved from distributing content to actively helping sellers close deals.” Yega Kumarappan, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Paperflite “The real value is delivering the right knowledge at the exact moment it's needed.” Yega Kumarappan, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Paperflite “Creating great content is no longer the hardest problem—distribution is.” Yega Kumarappan, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Paperflite “Whoever masters distribution wins.” Yega Kumarappan, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Paperflite “It's not just about content anymore—it's about proving its impact on revenue.” Yega Kumarappan, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Paperflite   Follow Yega: Yega Kumarappan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yegakumarappan/ Paperflite website: https://www.paperflite.com/ Paperflite on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/paperflite   Follow Mike: Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/ Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/ Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/   If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform. Want more? Check out Napier's other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547

Send us Fan MailWe're celebrating our 100th episode of Get Amplified by bringing in Troy Stoll from Dynatrace (APAC), an energising leader who's lived what it really takes to make alignment stick. If you've seen strong teams slowed by silos, mixed metrics, or underlying friction, this is a clearer way forward. By aligning on a shared North Star and working back to remove friction between marketing, sales, services, and customer success, the APAC team is now executing with real pace and consistency. We get into why over-communication is a leadership responsibility, especially as teams evolve, new leaders join, and priorities shift. It's less about telling people what to do, and more about helping them understand why it matters and where they fit into the bigger picture.A big part of the story is the Switch change framework and why shared language matters more than most leaders realise. We break down its three core ideas: finding the bright spots (what's already working), shaping the path (making the right behaviours easier to follow), and motivating the elephant (tapping into what actually drives people to act). The shift here is simple but powerful: stop trying to fix everything, and start amplifying what already works. That's what shrinks change and helps it land faster across teams, cultures, and geographies.Troy also connects this to the Team Speed Check as a practical way to surface purpose, trust, clarity, and simplicity, so leaders aren't guessing what's going on, they're responding to reality.If you're looking for actionable ideas on cross-functional leadership, communication, and building trust that shows up in pipeline, renewals, and better customer outcomes, this one's worth your time.Subscribe to Get Amplified, share this milestone episode with a colleague.We would love you to follow us on LinkedIn! https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplified-group/

Most companies don't fail because of product, they fail because they never build a clear, repeatable sales system around a problem that actually matters. That shows up early when founders delegate sales too soon, chase broad markets without focus, and struggle to translate technical insight into customer urgency. In this conversation, Lou Shipley brings a career spanning door-to-door selling to leading and teaching at Harvard to break down what separates companies that scale from those that stall. He introduces frameworks like the “problem with the problem” and the “murder board,” while reinforcing a consistent theme: sales is not a downstream function, it is the organizing discipline of the business. For leaders trying to build a high-performance culture or evaluate their next move, this conversation clarifies what to look for and what to avoid. Lou Shipley is a three-time CEO, Harvard Business School professor, and author of Unlikely Entrepreneurs. He has led multiple startups and previously taught sales at MIT. Connect with Lou:  LinkedIn Website Resources mentioned: Unlikely Entrepreneurs: Wins, Losses, and Crucial Lessons on Building Great Companies by N. Louis Shipley and Patricia Favreau Key takeaways from this episode: 00:00 – How Lou Shipley built his sales foundation on 100% commission 06:00 – The 30-second mistake sellers keep making and how it kills deals early 10:33 – Why Lou Shipley believes emotional connection to the problem changes everything 25:55 – Why founders who delegate sales too early almost always get it wrong 33:33 – A behind-the-scenes look at how great teams pressure-test their strategy before the market does 40:22 – The three questions that instantly expose whether a company is worth joining 44:25 – Why narrowing your ICP is the fastest path to real revenue growth, not a limitation 58:33 – The real reason most companies fail before they ever scale Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

Designing for Excellence: How AI is Transforming Sales Enablement—Insights from Laura FuIn the rapidly evolving world of sales, the integration of artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept—it is a present-day imperative for staying competitive. In a recent episode of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Podcast, host Josh Elledge sat down with Laura Fu, Head of Revenue Operations and Strategy at DevRev, to discuss the intersection of mechanical engineering, culinary precision, and modern sales strategy. Laura, the author of Designing for Excellence: Sales Enablement in the AI Native World, shares how high-growth organizations can leverage AI to automate the mundane while doubling down on the human elements that actually close complex deals. This episode serves as a strategic roadmap for leaders who want to move beyond the hype and implement AI in a way that truly augments the expertise of their sales professionals.Systems Thinking: Balancing Michelin-Star Rigor with AI VelocitySales enablement is often mischaracterized as a series of disconnected training programs, but true excellence requires treating it as a holistic system that integrates every department from product to marketing. Laura Fu explains that much like a Michelin-star kitchen, a successful sales organization relies on absolute consistency and predictability; every customer interaction must meet a specific brand standard, regardless of which representative is leading the call. By applying "systems thinking," leadership can build repeatable workflows where AI handles the high-velocity, routine tasks—such as call summarization, prospect research, and note-taking—freeing up the human reps to focus on high-value activities like deal qualification and nuanced relationship building. This balance ensures that technology serves as a lever for productivity rather than a crutch that replaces foundational sales skills.The shift toward an AI-native sales environment also demands a fundamental change in leadership engagement and coaching ratios. Effective change management is as much about people as it is about technology, requiring transparent communication to address fears of job displacement while clearly defining where human judgment must remain the final arbiter. Organizations that thrive in this era maintain low rep-to-manager ratios—ideally six or seven to one—to ensure that managers can provide the personalized coaching necessary to interpret the nuances AI might miss, such as tone, context, and unspoken buyer cues. By focusing on leading indicators like the quality of meaningful conversations rather than just lagging revenue metrics, leaders can guide their teams through the discomfort of AI adoption and build a culture of continuous experimentation.Ultimately, future-proofing a sales organization involves establishing strong foundational processes before layering on complex technology. AI moves at the speed of human adoption, meaning that the most advanced tools in the world are useless without a team that is trained to validate AI outputs and prioritize authentic, empathy-based relationships. Leaders must champion this integration by piloting new solutions with small groups, soliciting frontline feedback, and celebrating early wins to build momentum. When AI is used to accelerate research and eliminate administrative debt, it allows the sales force to return to what they do best: building the deep, credible rapport that serves as the bedrock of trust in every high-stakes transaction.About Laura FuLaura Fu is the Head of Revenue Operations and Strategy at DevRev and a seasoned tech leader with an unconventional background in mechanical engineering and culinary arts. Her diverse career path has instilled a unique appreciation for discipline, structure, and creativity in business operations. She is the author of Designing for Excellence: Sales Enablement in the AI Native World and the host of the State of the AI Union podcast, where she explores the impact of artificial intelligence on buyers, sellers, and investors.About DevRevDevRev is an AI-native platform designed to bridge the gap between product development and customer growth. By connecting developers with end-users and sales teams, DevRev helps organizations build more customer-centric products and streamline their revenue operations. The platform leverages advanced AI to provide real-time insights and automate workflows, allowing businesses to scale their excellence while maintaining a deep focus on the customer experience.Links Mentioned in This EpisodeDevRev Official Website: laurafu.aiLaura Fu on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/laurazfu/Key Episode HighlightsCulinary Discipline in Sales: Applying the rigor of Michelin-star kitchens to create repeatable, high-quality sales processes.Enablement as a System: Why sales success requires breaking down silos between product, marketing, and sales leadership.Augmenting vs. Replacing: Using AI for research and summarization while keeping human judgment at the center of deal qualification.The Manager's Role in the AI Era: The importance of maintaining a low rep-to-manager ratio for high-impact coaching and nuanced deal oversight.Change Management Strategies: Leading teams through technology adoption by prioritizing transparent communication and experimentation.ConclusionThe conversation with Laura Fu highlights that while AI is fundamentally changing the sales landscape, the core tenets of discipline, consistency, and human empathy remain the primary drivers of success. By treating sales enablement as an integrated system rather than a one-off program, organizations can harness AI to eliminate "busy work" and empower their teams to focus on strategic, high-impact engagement.More from The Thoughtful Entrepreneur

Most companies still treat sales enablement like a training department. Jason Gwilliam thinks that's exactly why their reps take too long to close. With 25 years in healthcare and med-tech, Jason has built enablement programs from the ground up at companies like Abbott, and he's seen firsthand what happens when enablement is treated as a true revenue system. In this episode, he breaks down how to measure enablement's ROI through time-to-competency and sales cycle compression, why marketing alignment is critically undervalued, and how AI coaching tools should help reps improve without being punitive. He also shares why fractional enablement roles are emerging as the next big trend.Jason Gwilliam is a sales enablement practitioner with over 25 years of experience in the healthcare and medical device industry. He began his career in the cardiac cath lab before moving into territory sales, where he earned President's Club recognition. Since 2008, Jason has built and led enablement programs at companies including Abbott, transforming traditional sales training into cross-functional revenue systems aligned with marketing, sales operations, and executive leadership. He is a vocal advocate for coaching over managing and for positioning enablement as a strategic business function. Connect with Jason on LinkedIn.Text us what you think about this episode!

Is AI creating advantage—or exposing inefficiency at scale? Kortney Harmon breaks down why 2026 won't be defined by better tools, but by better operations.As growth slows and teams shrink, firms can't outwork broken systems. Fragmented data, bloated tech stacks, and unclear workflows are quietly draining productivity—and AI is only accelerating the problem. The firms pulling ahead are doing less, better: integrating systems, tightening workflows, and turning scattered data into operational clarity.Discover why operational discipline—not more technology—is what will separate scalable firms from stagnant ones in 2026.______________________Follow Crelate on LinkedIn: CrelateWant to learn more about Crelate? Book a demo hereSubscribe to our newsletter: https://www.crelate.com/blog/full-desk-experience

High-growth companies demand constant reinvention, yet most leaders underestimate how deeply roles, go-to-market models, and buyer behavior evolve over time. This episode explores what it actually takes to adapt at that level, from navigating internal resistance to aligning product and sales with how customers truly buy. Sahir Azam brings a rare operator-to-investor perspective, unpacking the realities of PLG to enterprise transitions, the cultural discipline required to scale sales, and how AI is reshaping both software and the sales function itself. The conversation also challenges common assumptions around SaaS models, tooling, and where value will accrue as AI infrastructure matures. Sahir Azam is a Partner at Index Ventures investing in AI infrastructure, and former Chief Product Officer at MongoDB where he led the Atlas transformation into a multi-billion-dollar platform. He brings a rare operator's perspective on building go-to-market discipline, scaling sales culture, and navigating the product-distribution balance that separates winners from founders who fail. Connect with Sahir: Index Ventures LinkedIn Get the Force Management framework for navigating product-go-to-market fit and building the sales discipline that separates scaling companies from those that fail: The Predictable Revenue Framework: Guide for Leaders Key takeaways from this episode:  00:00 – How Sahir Azam went from building MongoDB Atlas into a multi-billion-dollar platform to investing in the infrastructure shaping AI's next wave 06:24 – The secret to driving change inside a company before trying to win in the market 10:10 – What PLG and enterprise sales actually have in common when you design around the buyer 12:18 – What it's really like to move upmarket and why most companies underestimate the cultural shift required 23:50 – Sahir Azam's unexpected perspective on technical founders who struggle to scale 41:12 – A peek into where real value in AI is being built and why infrastructure is the leverage point 01:02:00 – What you can do right now to stay relevant as AI reshapes how top sellers operate Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

Let us know how you're enjoying the show or ideas for any future topics!In honor of Women's History Month, Shawn Deane, Legal Counsel at Ametros, sits down with three accomplished leaders at Ametros: Allison Kelly, Chief Revenue Officer; Melissa Coleman, Senior Vice President of Marketing; and Tina Chirichiello, Vice President of Sales Enablement and Support. Together, they share their personal journeys into the insurance industry and to Ametros, reflecting on the moments that shaped their careers and inspired them to step into leadership. The conversation also explores the evolution of the insurance injury space as a traditionally male‑dominated industry and how progress and representation have continued to grow over time.The discussion goes deeper into leadership through the lens of motherhood, highlighting how parenting has influenced their leadership styles, perspectives on work‑life balance, and strategies for staying organized while managing demanding roles. In recognition of Women's History Month, the leaders emphasize the importance of mentorship, supporting and uplifting other women in the industry, and building strong personal and professional support systems. They close the episode by sharing thoughtful, empowering advice for young women entering their careers, offering encouragement on confidence, balance, and long‑term success.Ametros is changing the way injured individuals navigate healthcare by providing them with post-settlement medical management tools for their settlement funds. Ametros helps drive more simplified, secured, and supported settlements and saves money by working closely with injured workers, insurers, employers, attorneys, and Medicare to create a seamless experience.Learn how Ametros can support you.

Start by asking yourself: What am I good at? What do I love doing? And ultimately, what will I get paid for?In this episode, John is joined by Roderick Jefferson to have a real conversation about ambition, ego, and the true cost of success across our lives, relationships, and leadership. Together, they unpack the importance of slowing down, why constant hustle can come at a price, and the powerful lessons Roderick learned after experiencing a stroke.If you're at the stage where you're focused on building a legacy and discovering your deeper “why,” this episode will challenge and expand your perspective on what it really means to be successful.Want to equip yourself for success before it's too late? Visit www.jbarrows.com and learn how you can Make It Happen.What You'll LearnWhy work-life balance is a lieThe impact of taking a breakHow to use AI to your advantageUnderstanding ambition vs egoBuilding your own legacyRoderick Jefferson is an internationally recognized speaker, author, and thought leader who lives and breathes enablement. With more than 25 years of experience, he has held senior executive positions at companies such as Siebel, NetApp, Salesforce, Oracle, and others. He had delivered keynotes, guest lectures, webinars, and podcasts in fourteen countries at prominent events and conferences, sharing his vibrant and engaging insights with a worldwide audience. Roderick is an acknowledged thought leader in the enablement space and the author of Sales Enablement 3.0: The Blueprint to Sales Enablement Excellence™, an Amazon #1 New Release and best-selling book, and the Sales Enablement 3.0 Companion Workbook™, which guides organizations aiming to enhance their sales strategies through effective enablement practices.Connect with Roderick Jefferson:Website: https://www.roderickjefferson.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roderickjefferson/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ThevoiceofRod/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roderick_j_associates/?hl=en YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCShK1i36e1AY1yVHHPh93wQ X: https://x.com/thevoiceofrod?lang=en Grab a copy of “Sales Enablement 3.0: The Blueprint to Sales Enablement Excellence” on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Enablement-3-0-Blueprint-Excellence/dp/1736190903 John Barrows is a sales trainer, speaker, and founder of JB Sales with over 25 years of experience in the industry. He has made hundreds of cold calls a week, led startups to acquisition, and trained high-performing teams at companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Okta. Through JB Sales, John focuses on practical sales execution—helping reps fill pipeline, close deals, and build trust with buyers in today's AI-driven sales environment.Connect with John Barrows:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarrows/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnmbarrows/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@johnmbarrows Check out John's Membership: https://go.jbarrows.com/ Join John's Newsletter: https://www.jbarrows.com/newsletter

If you treat AI as just tech or a tool, you're likely missing out on the true strategic benefit to your organization. Many leaders are waiting on IT, governance, or the “right stack” while competitors are already compounding gains through faster execution, better preparation, and tighter alignment. Marcy Stoudt returns to unpack why AI adoption starts with mindset, how productivity gains break without cross-functional integration, and why the next competitive edge will come from leaders who drive curiosity, coaching, and clarity in how their teams actually sell and hire. Marcy Stoudt is Founder of Revel Companies, where she advises revenue leaders on AI adoption, talent strategy, and organizational alignment. With deep experience in executive recruiting and sales leadership, she helps organizations shift from treating AI as a technology decision to embedding it into how work gets done across teams. Connect with Marcy:  LinkedIn Website Get the Force Management framework for building AI-native revenue systems that drive repeatable execution and growth:  The Predictable Revenue Framework: Guide for Leaders Key takeaways from this episode: 04:00 – Why AI adoption breaks when leaders treat it like a tech stack decision instead of changing how work actually gets done 14:17 – What CROs get wrong when they wait on IT to lead AI strategy while competitors move faster 23:00 – The daily discipline that separates leaders who are compounding AI advantage from those falling behind 30:00 – What it really looks like to use AI to create space, reduce noise, and improve how you think 39:40 – Where your real inefficiencies actually live and why your frontline already knows the answer 49:30 – What hiring looks like when every resume sounds perfect and signal gets harder to find 59:15 – Why AI is increasing the value of leadership fundamentals like alignment, coaching, and culture Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

In this episode, Jason, Clara Johnson, and Nate Vogel dive into a high-energy sales enablement masterclass, unpacking how to build world-class programs that drive performance at scale using data, coaching, and customer-focused frameworks. Check out more free content and get coaching at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://outboundsquad.com.⁠

In this episode of Talk Commerce, Tim Johnson discusses the evolving role of AI in workplace automation, the importance of effective prompting, and the need for tailored sales playbooks. He emphasizes the significance of subject matter experts in leveraging AI tools and the changing expectations of clients in terms of personalization. Tim also shares insights on the future of e-commerce and the rapid development of products in the market.AI is transforming workflows and automating processes.Effective prompting is crucial for maximizing AI tools.Sales playbooks need to be tailored to specific industries.Subject matter experts are essential for guiding AI use.Clients expect personalized interactions based on research.Personalization must be balanced with trust and accuracy.Rapid product development is becoming the norm in e-commerce.Companies must navigate the risks of quick market entry.Staying updated on AI advancements is vital for success.Engaging with clients on a personal level enhances relationships.Chapters00:00Introduction to Tim Johnson and His Role01:38The Evolution of AI in Workflows04:36Educating Teams on Effective Prompting08:16Tailoring Sales Playbooks with AI10:52The Importance of Subject Matter Experts13:39Understanding Client Expectations16:28Navigating Personalization and Trust18:24The Future of E-commerce and Rapid Development22:16Closing Thoughts and Shameless Plug

Points of Interest 00:00 – 03:21 – From UGURUS to E2M: Brent Weaver shares how he went from coaching thousands of agencies at UGURUS to becoming CEO of E2M Solutions after the DigitalOcean chapter ended. 03:35 – 04:51 – What makes E2M different: Marcel frames E2M as a standout white-label partner, and Brent explains why serving only agencies creates sharper focus on partner success. 04:51 – 08:16 – Process flexibility as a moat: Brent contrasts “one standardized process” versus adapting to each agency partner's SOPs and tools and why fitting into the partner's workflow improves outcomes. 08:27 – 10:08 – Why anti-fragility matters right now: Marcel connects E2M's adaptability to the broader need for agencies to stay resilient through another major disruption cycle. 10:08 – 12:01 – Defining anti-fragility in business terms: Brent explains anti-fragility as building a business that can withstand shocks by avoiding fragility drivers like thin margins and operational vulnerabilities. 12:01 – 15:53 – Practical fragility reducers: Brent outlines concrete levers, higher margins as a buffer, less debt, fewer single points of failure, and building teams and systems that scale. 13:29 – 15:53 – Perennial value drivers: Brent argues agencies should anchor decisions to what clients always want, faster delivery, lower cost, and higher quality and certainty, regardless of the economy. 15:53 – 18:01 – Investing under uncertainty: Marcel reframes strategy as betting on what will not change and asks how agencies can choose investments that will keep paying dividends. 18:01 – 22:44 – AI audits, not shiny tools: Brent describes E2M's AI assessment approach as constraint-hunting, then using automation and process optimization to reduce friction and accelerate results. 23:08 – 25:02 – High-impact AI use cases: Brent lists repeatable agency wins, lead research and sales prep, proposal and scope automation, and workflow-friendly tooling like Slack-based automations. 25:02 – 26:45 – Client reporting as a force multiplier: Brent highlights AI-driven reporting and analysis, using chat interfaces connected to analytics data to produce consistent client insights faster. 39:51 – 41:13 – Where to learn more: Brent shares where to find E2M Solutions and the Vistara AI event, including the May 11–13 Austin dates and the waitlist link. Show Notes List Agentic workflows - AI workflows E2M actively run for 50+ agencies - ready to plug into your delivery, sales, and operations E2Msolutions.com Vistara AI Event @ Austin, Texas on May 11-13, 2026 Brent's LinkedIn Love the Podcast Leave us a review here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Jason talks about why sales leaders must partner with enablement to drive real culture change and shares three lessons from top teams—becoming a trusted advisor, sharing the stage with reps, and prioritizing manager enablement over rep-only training. Check out more free content and get coaching at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://outboundsquad.com.

In this episode, Jason Bay sits down with Rippling's VP of Sales Enablement, Jonas Master to explore how effective sales training, paired with clear priorities, measurement, and reinforcement, drives real behavior change and consistent performance gains. Check out more free content and get coaching at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://outboundsquad.com.⁠