Podcast appearances and mentions of scott santucci

Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com‘s Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.Mark Twain - the PIONEER of Sales Enablement who empowered a LITERAL customer facing frontline of 10,000!?!!!On ISEs3 Episode 14, Erich Starrett is out-history-nerded ENTIRELY when he is joined in the Orchestrate Sales studios by Sales Melon's Todd Caponi. Todd is not only an aficionado (and collector!) of SALES history, he is a man on a mission to further a movement towards sales TRANSPARENCY. This includes authoring a 3x award-winning book (

Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com's Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.On Episode 11, Erich Starrett hosts Bob Perkins, the Founder AAISP, the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (now Emblaze) in the Orchestrate Sales Studios on the eve of the #digitalnow conference in Chicagoland next week (including a special promo code if you have not yet RSVP'd!) We begin with his origins in telesales to Inside Sales to forming the AAISP. And from where he first crossed paths with #SalesEnablement in the journey to modern day where Emblaze is partnering with the Revenue Enablement Society for track next week. Highlights from the episode include...PAST:⌛️ Bob was on the first ever Inside sales implementation of Siebel. "We used to pull out a stopwatch and time how long it would take to pull up a customer record."⌛️ Bob and Larry Reeves held the first AAISP conference for 50 people in Minneapolis in 2009 using a sound system borrowed from Bob's church.⌛️ By year two they had 200 and started getting calls from places like Japan, Afghanistan, France begging to start a chapter in their location.⌛️ The explosion of Inside Sales created a need to scale the training of less experienced reps. Which created demand for Sales Enablement.⌛️ Bob reflects on how Jill Rowley "The EloQueen" ushered the social selling mix onto the sales scene.⌛️ In Bob's early experience the SES he talked with Scott Santucci about the similarities and differences between the two organizations. PRESENT

Erich Starrett hosts Dr. Brian Lambert - co-founder of OSC, SES, and co-host of Inside Sales Enablement seasons one and two, back in the Orchestrate Sales Studios, for part one of two. A treat to have the epitome of past, present, and future enablement back on the property.And yes, of course he was there at the original founding and one of the ~hundred four founders I'm on a mission to interview over time was right there with @Scott Santucci and the other 99-ish.And BOY has it grown! He did a Google search on Sales Enablement way back in 2008 and got a hundred hits. He just did it again in the pre show and ...how about six million!Brian architected an early "PhD in Sales" building on an organizational behavior degree with an emphasis on sales in his dissertation, and multiple publications in academic journals. Having also been cited over 200 times he may just be on Dr. Rob Peterson and Howard Dover's heels. He's been a salesperson with a quota. He's been a sales manager with a team. He's been a sales enablement manager with a team of ~20. And most recently he took on the role of Big Data Value Architect at Elastic, where he is in a marketing messaging role, messaging enablement.Highlights from the first part of our interviewPAST... ⌛️ Brian's reaction when he first heard the word "Enablement." (hint: it wasn't positive) ⌛️ Brian first crossed paths with @Scott Santucci at a conference an heard him speak about his blueprint. That's where he originally heard Scott share the vision of value architects, communicating value and being orchestrators.⌛️ When at Forrester, Scott had to do a lot of work to sell this idea that there were people doing "this thing called Enablement." That people where challenging the status quo siloed view and breaking down the walls among sales training, marketing, ops, and other functions.PRESENT⌛️ Since corporate silos were born of the industrial revolution, why are they still the status quo and such a massive challenge in a hyper connected digital world where technically silos shouldn't matter? ⌛️ What does it mean to be an #Orchestrator? Why is it important?⌛️ What if Enablement is not the right home for orchestration?⌛️ Of the "four flavors of Sales Enablement" set forth at the SES founding, what percentage of each flavor would most who identify as Sales / Revenue enablement be?

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

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

Sean Doyle [00:00:00] So this is the college 101 episode on sales enablement. If you really are ready and engaged with sales enablement, you've got a team, a structure, you know what this thing is - then just dive into one of the Scott Santucci podcasts. He's incredible. I think worth listening to and definitely can help the more sophisticated and advanced dive into deeper understanding of how to do sales enablement better.   Sean Doyle [00:00:27] So who is this episode for then? I think if you're a $10, 15, 20 million company (maybe even $50 million company) and you've heard the sales enablement noise and you think...I'm going to explore this. This is the one for you.    Sean Doyle [00:00:42] This conversation is going to be great for you thinking about the metaphor of your business and all these silos: sales, marketing, training. And those are the three that are primarily engaged with sales enablement. Those are sort of like little pockets of colored glass, you know, but your customers, your prospects, they're not looking at your company in these silos. They're looking at a stained glass window. They see one picture, one thing. So when you see a lot of this sales enablement dialog being driven by tech, that's just a piece of it, right? It's a tool. That's not what sales enablement is. What I want to see when a company is beginning to explore sales enablement is how do training, sales and marketing come together? In fact, I recently was in a meeting with a prospect and sales was asking for help. Training was interested. But marketing said we got it covered, don't need it. Well, that prospect was not ready to dive into sales enablement. All three parties have to understand that they want this thing or jointly acknowledge they're trying to solve a problem that they're facing. So I would start with that insight. Get those three groups together and explore that need.    Sean Doyle [00:02:00] Another thing we need to do is define sales enablement. So Forrester Research is where I tend to lean. And here's their definition. Sales Enablement is a strategic ongoing process that equips all client facing employees, marketing and sales with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of stakeholders at each stage of the problem solving, or buying lifecycle, in order to optimize the return of investment on the selling system.    Sean Doyle [00:02:37] Well, I wish I'd written that. We've actually been doing that as a firm and we discovered that in the mid-2000s we'd been helping our clients map out and plan and create marketing and sales alignment around the customer's needs through our total cognitive marketing, which is a behavioral science based model of understanding what prospects need as they go from unaware of a company or unaware of how that company might get the help they need from your product or service all the way through to being an advocate. It's really critical to see the world that way. So ultimately, sales enablement is not that complicated. But what's beautiful about it - it's sort of like an air traffic controller. And there's one role that's taking sales and marketing and training and focusing and coordinating its efforts. You can imagine, you wouldn't fly without an air traffic controller. But man, we go to market all the time with sales and marketing and training, all doing disparate things. We might have a common vision. You as an executive might have cast that vision, but you still need the day to day coordination. You need the metrics, need the measurement. That's what sales enablement about. And that's why you should start thinking about it.    Sean Doyle [00:04:00] Sales enablement efforts are not and they should not be on marketing's back to carry. It's also not the sales force that should drive it, nor the product team nor the H.R. team training. We do need executive buy in across the board, but it shouldn't be just an idea that one of those silos have. There's no common definition of sales enablement in the marketplace. There's at least 14 plus definitions. So if you look at the numbers, right, numbers don't lie. Let's look at how sales enablement typically gets built. The research is showing that 65 percent of sales enablement resources are in building the plan and then 30 percent of resources are assigned to running the plan on new hires, ongoing training and implementing the playbook. And then there's only 5 percent of the budget left for people to lead those strategic functions around sales enablement.    Sean Doyle [00:04:59] Our belief is that that might not be the right way to go. There's too much emphasis on the early budget in that sales enablement effort building it, but at least there's only an initial capital expenditure to build it. Then you've got to spend money and flip it, start putting more money and executing this playbook. So broadly speaking, as you look at how do you fund this, just understand that those are three factors. And then again, there's three groups. There's training, sales and marketing. All three of those groups need funding and need to understand what their roles are and how they should work together.    Sean Doyle [00:05:37] So where should sales enablement report? Sales enablement, if it's led by sales, has some advantages because it's aligned tightly with sales leaders. Sales tends to lead by example and gets things done. Sales tends to focus on things that close deals and they're typically good at getting resources and funding. Most executive teams respect the SVP of sales when they're asking for funding. Perhaps it's because of that direct connect, at least in their head of sales closes deals and that is true. Marketing typically doesn't close deals. However, marketing should be supporting deals all the way through the cycle. So what are the cons? Yeah, I think if sales enablement is led by sales, it tends to exclude training and it tends to exclude marketing. Maybe not its full extent, but at least to some development and sales enablement led by sales can tend to look like it's being done for sales. Therefore, it's just another sales program. But remember that definition of sales enablement? It's the integration of all three departments and areas. And each is equipped to do a different thing.    Sean Doyle [00:06:50] So what if marketing led it? Well, that would be great because it would align with content planning, content teams, marketing early stage to some. Perhaps a really good marketing team that's equipped late stage tools. The role might tend to be more agnostic.  Cons: However, marketing can tend to forget the skills that it takes to close deals. Marketing can create a lack of alignment because it's more focused on what it's doing and not necessarily aligned or understanding what sales does or how training might fit. So I think there's some pros and cons there, but it's just good for you to consider.    Sean Doyle [00:07:32] And then finally training. What if training leads? What if H.R. is in charge of this? We see a majority of sales enablement efforts coming out of training. I think it's because they have this view to see the universe and look at all the different areas and identify how we could train up and grow and improve. Every department and it's that view, that omni channel view of a business and the way it functions that allows them to initiate these ideas, these programs. So, you know, the pros of them running it is them doing the intake, them doing the higher for the sales enablement leader, for them doing the higher for marketing team sales team and even their own training staff and them understanding a sales enablement plan allows them to hire to it in a way that creates effectiveness and employee retention. They already are core to a common language and used to a role of training and getting everybody on one page. And typically training tends to be process driven. Sales and marketing often are not process driven.    Sean Doyle [00:08:46] I'd also say as a quick aside that sales tends to focus on short term objectives. We've got a cover plan for this quarter, for this year... Marketing should have a longer view (well done marketing should at least). Marketing, looking long term, looking at positioning, product development. They should be thinking four or five years out strategically. Not short term. So there's weaknesses and strengths in each of those roles. Training can take that all into consideration and be process driven. So the cons: training doesn't think like a sales team. Training doesn't think like a marketing team. Maybe the idea there is training could have a specialist who really takes time to learn sales and marketing.    Sean Doyle [00:09:33] So where for you? Where should you have this led? I'd say the executive, the owner, the principals to who we typically work with. They should look at all three of those roles. Consider the pros and cons. We'll be glad to interview to help you make that decision. But choose one of those three. And I tend to kind of like the idea of training leading it. Because of that process driven model and methodology.    Sean Doyle [00:10:00] If I can take one more quick second, I'll share with you what I think are some important metrics that you could start to measure, and this will give you an insight to why sales enablement is important. So if you don't have a great metric system, if you're this emerging company and it's time to finally identify what we're going to measure so that we can improve on it, we look at the following measurements in sales enablement.  Quote attainment, win loss ratio, win loss rates, sell cycle time, how long is the deal flow deal size, time to ramp, employee attrition, content effectiveness, employee engagement. And then we always look at sales barriers. We have a sales barrier analysis that identifies where there's barriers and then the following year we can identify if we've broken those barriers down. That's an ongoing process.    Sean Doyle [00:10:57] OK, so I had us wait a second. Because I wanted you to hear these ideas. This is what went through my head. You ever have that thing where after a conversation you think, "Oh, that's what I should have said?" Well, this is the way I got to do that. I want you to enjoy the conversation. Again, it's focused on a smaller emerging middle market company. Somebody who hasn't put their toes into the pool yet, but they need to get these ideas and explore them. So I guess from here, I'm going to go away and get back to the business here.    Will Riley [00:11:31] Sean, you are totally awesome.    Sean Doyle [00:11:35] Yeah. Thanks Will. You're welcome. Oh, that is Anna Svarney and Will Riley. They are guests today on Aligned, a podcast where the executives of middle-market companies looking to improve their sales and marketing align. You know, a highlight today of the conversation was the practical and actionable ideas Anna and Will shared about sales enablement. So let's dive in.    [00:12:01] So we really are rolling. We're speeding. Welcome to Aligned, I'm Sean Doyle, your host with Wil Riley, the Director of Sales Enablement at FitzMartin.  Anna Svarney is the Director of Client Services.    Sean Doyle [00:12:34] So today what we wanted to do was have a conversation about sales enablement and this is a follow up to a webinar on sales enablement, Will, that you and I did with one of our clients,  who has experienced sales enablement, seen the results from sales enablement, can put an ROI on it. And after that, the conversations and questions came about. Maybe we need to dive more deeply into this. So today I want to define what is sales enablement. Why is it important and then how is it practiced and maybe even who owns it? Like who are the responsible parties in the business? That or the organization that should be involved with this? This practice, this conversation. First question, who owns sales enablement? Who in the organization should be listening to today's conversation?    Will Riley [00:13:28] Yeah, I think it varies from client to client. We've seen it where depending on what the resources or staffing situation is within an organization, it actually is a sales enablement director, someone that focuses on that.    Will Riley [00:13:44] Sometimes its marketing led. So the director of marketing plays a bit of a role in sales enablement or someone from the sales force comes in and actually takes ownership of that. We've not had one client with a repeatable internal process in terms of who is the owner.    Anna Svarney [00:14:07] I also think it varies depending on how your organization is set up. So, you know, if it's a smaller organization that has maybe, say, a director of marketing and a vice president of sales, it's really going to depend on those personalities and what their role really looks like, who might own that relationship.    Anna Svarney [00:14:28] But I'd say it's going to be the person that's the leader in that area. There are organizations, bigger organizations that have a true CMO who that might be the person that is responsible.    Sean Doyle [00:14:39] So it seems like your answers are kind of on an as-is basis, sort of all over the map. There's no consistency. Which leads me to question, why is this even a new thing or is this just a new name on the way things used to get done? Why are we even having this conversation about sales enablement? What is it? Let's start with what it is and then answer the question, is it new and who was doing this role in the past?    Will Riley [00:15:03] Yeah, I think there's a little bit, just as we've seen with inbound marketing or lead generation, we pick on sales enablement as the new buzzword in marketing and sales. I don't think any sales rep ever has not tried to sell more fish effectively.    Sean Doyle [00:15:24] So here's a guy we'd be having this dialog about marketing automation technology. Really? Really. And then two years later, there's 400 options and we're worn out by it. Is this just going to be a flash in the pan like MAT? Marketing Automation isn't a flash in the pan, right? It's still around. It's just not a hot subject.    Will Riley [00:15:44] We're seeing it, as you know, in sales meetings that people are asking for this. And I know it's different. I don't think people have asked about this in years past.    Sean Doyle [00:15:54] What do you think? Salespeople are wanting it? Or Sales VPs? Who's asking for it?    Will Riley [00:16:00] It's usually a VP or CMO level. It's not someone, a director or at a coordinator, someone that's in charge of a department or leading the cause in an organization. When is the first time you heard of it? Gosh, it probably was.    Sean Doyle [00:16:16] I mean, within the last couple years that phrasing of sales enablement and it came out of your roots and expertise in marketing automation.    Will Riley [00:16:23] It did, absolutely. Because so much of marketing's role is helping sales and the sales department, salespeople. And I think we were short sighted as marketers to only say that it was lead gen or demand gen. You're even saying words like pipeline acceleration and things like that evolve from marketing, focusing on the technology piece of it, because if there's no infrastructure, then we can't really help sales sell more effectively.    Sean Doyle [00:16:52] Interesting. Okay. I love the word that you used: helping. I hate that you acknowledged that we didn't know about this two years ago. But that's reality. I think it has definitely come to a heightened awareness. Let me take a second to read the definition that I have in front of me at least. Sales enablement is the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content and tools to help salespeople sell more effectively.    Sean Doyle [00:17:23] So the foundation of it is sharing information. So as marketers, it makes sense that we're sitting in the middle of that because early stage, if we want to break things down into early and late stage, early stage, we're the first people as marketers to get information. Right. Some salespeople are going out and finding early stage leads. But most of them want marketing to provide a lead.    Sean Doyle [00:17:45] So out of marketing automation technology, this idea of and pressure on marketing to provide leads came about. But then and I know, Anna you've dealt with this, lead quality is the next problem, right?    Anna Svarney [00:17:58] Yes.    [00:17:58] So marketing automation maybe was insufficient in that.    Anna Svarney [00:18:03] Yeah. And I think that the people that jumped on the inbound and marketing automation craze a couple of years ago, it makes total sense to adopt that as part of your marketing strategy. But in some cases, it was a little bit shortsighted in that it did not take it to the next level of lead quality. What happens when that lead gets passed off to sales?    Anna Svarney [00:18:27] And are we closing the loop and seeing if anything come of these? So many companies, marketing departments, are just focused on a number of leads. And so I feel like the sales enablement is a buzz word and it's something we've been hearing a lot of and it's relatively new, but it's that next step in maturity for an organization. Sure, it's standard operating procedure. So I don't think it's going to go away, but it's something that you have to have the maturity of mastering inbound marketing and lead generation before you can really even get to that point.    Sean Doyle [00:19:03] So maybe it's one of those things when you're interviewing an agency or a marketing director or an SVP of sales, you're listening for this phrase, you're listening for this methodology. And if they're unaware of it, they probably don't have the foundation to lead.   Anna Svarney [00:19:17] Yes. Right. It indicates where they are in the spectrum.    Will Riley [00:19:22] I think that's interesting. Where it really works the best is when an organization is sophisticated, meaning that they have the right tools, technology in place. They have a marketing department. They have a sales force. And there's a regular cadence of meeting, sharing, ideas, collaborating.    Sean Doyle [00:19:41] So Will, I know you're working on this thing to be named later. But we've been dubbing it the Marketing Maturity Index, and you're building an algorithm of sorts to figure out where an institution is in its marketing already. So what I'm hearing you say is that there is a baseline of maturity, understanding that you need to have. I want people to go to look at themselves and say, you know what, I have A, B and C, maybe it's time for me to start thinking about sales enablement. What would be that foundation? Maybe it's even just technology.    Anna Svarney [00:20:13] Yes, I have a CRM system. I have a MAT system in place. My website is generating leads. If you're doing those things, then yes, because where do those leads go? Right?    Sean Doyle [00:20:25] Can sales enablement work, little rabbit trail here. Can sales enable network if marketing doesn't produce leads? I guess in essence it could be. Is it still providing information?    Anna Svarney [00:20:36] It is still providing information. So it's different. I think the most common way we see it is through lead generation. It certainly can exist without lead generation. It's just a different avenue. You know, we talk a lot about in our framework for sales enablement, having an SLA or service level agreement between sales and marketing. Marketing is going to produce this many leads and sales is going to close this many or whatever it looks like. So you'd have to just get a little creative and think about what that looks like, you know, at the very minimum. It's at least having a weekly, monthly touch base on things like: What are you hearing from your customers? Does this message resonate?    Will Riley [00:21:20] Yes, I think to your point Sean. Whatever channel is producing a lead: a service, the website, if it's a paid effort, because wherever we're coming into sales organizations, what do all of them go to? Trade shows. That's one of the number one provider of leads for them. And anyone that we've interacted with said, "I need feedback on these trade show leads, are they any good or not?" They're asking the same questions when it comes to digital or marketing efforts. So I do think that there is a role to play, even if you're just utilizing some of the traditional marketing channels like at a trade show and prevent something like that.    Sean Doyle [00:22:03] So marketing director and SVP of sales and the sales enablement officer walk into a bar...there's a joke here I think.   Sean Doyle [00:22:22] So what I'm hearing is a kind of an insider tip for the practice of sales enablement.    Sean Doyle [00:22:28] And that's the SLA. That's brilliant. I love it. The idea that both groups have to make a commitment, but they're doing it jointly because historically it's very siloed. Right. You've got marketing is doing its thing. Whatever they do in sales is doing its thing. And the CEO always pays attention to that because it's closer to revenue. And most companies have this last touch attribution model. So sales typically gets all the credit and marketing executives. And maybe this is an exaggeration, but they know they should be doing it, but maybe not. Why?    Sean Doyle [00:23:03] So earlier you said something about a closed loop attribution which technology has enabled. So what you have to have to do sales enablement, a technology platform that would allow you to follow an individual lead through to revenue and then to beginning a dialog between sales and marketing at the strategic level. We're going to agree to serve each other this way. I doubt of the people listening. Many people have a marketing team that knows exactly what sales is doing, where they are, or vice versa. A sales team that knows or even cares what marketing should do. That's probably an episode later for a dialog about what sales cares about why marketing and sales have been siloed. I have this belief system that marketers typically don't know how to help sales late stage well enough. And they have lost the credibility of sales. Sales enablement I think could face a barrier from most marketers. Not necessarily. The sales team wants more information, more business intelligence, but maybe marketers trying to step up to that bar. That SLA is great because it would tie you to a commitment. Marketing probably always gets attributed with "Oh you are all the guys with the earrings and the long hair and you just have fun and do whatever it is you do. We have to do the real work out there, selling and make making revenue happen." And so I love that idea, that SLA idea.    Will Riley [00:24:33] Yeah. And I think to your point, I mean, there are barriers from the marketing team because they don't know. They may not know how to sell or have never sold before. So one of the first things that in terms of an intake or onboarding is you've got to understand your sales cycle, your product offering. What's the LTV on a product? I mean, a lot of these foundational, SVP, high level of data. Well, now the market for us to understand that just as well as they do the different channels and technology on how to get the message out. So in some ways, it's a lot harder. To get that started, because there's just a learning curve there of internal structure, processes, systems.    Sean Doyle [00:25:22] Well, that's good. It takes effort to do this. Why? Why should somebody listening even start exploring this? What's gotten y'all the most excited? The results you've seen or maybe a way marketing has been able to impact in a way that it hasn't in the past or a way sales embraced marketing. What are some success stories?    Anna Svarney [00:25:41] I can think one recent success story we have with a client where for a long time marketing has been pretty siloed. The website was generating leads and sporadically we'd get feedback from sales or upper management: "Oh these leads are crap."   Anna Svarney [00:26:08] But that feedback wasn't helpful. It needed to be more instructive. But recently with that client, we've had a little bit of a breakthrough and are getting on the phone weekly with their number one sales are up and vice president of sales brainstorming ways we can target some late stage prospects that are on their short term sales horizon and getting the feedback and hearing - it's like a barrier has been broken down. And they are speaking to marketing as they would another salesperson. So it's like the perception has changed a little bit that now they do see value in what marketing can do. And because we have become so ingrained with them and we understand their sales process, they trust us, and they are going to work with us that way.    Sean Doyle [00:27:00] I remember one of the that client you also built a website designed specifically for late stage leads and Will, I think you built a way to communicate only with the executive officers of the target companies. Absolutely. And this is a website that if you Google it, you couldn't find it. It's just I mean, it's not that it's unpublished, but it's not designed for someone to explain who the company is or what the products are. It's designed to meet the needs of a late stage prospect.    Will Riley [00:27:29] There was one particular pain that we knew that prospect was dealing with. So that was information that we got through sales. We were sitting around during a monthly marketing report, and we were mentioning some of the benefits of cookie and IP based targeting and how we've done that with other clients and that we should implement that there. And it immediately became an ideation session. It immediately became an ideation session with the CEO. And that led to this whole campaign and effort.    Sean Doyle [00:28:09] And so sitting at the table, sales was their marketing was there, the executive leader was there. So you had this great powerful way to move into which is such a better plan than artists and writers kind of throw in some clever ideas or headlines. I mean, that just elevates us as a profession. I love that.    Sean Doyle [00:28:27] So rewinding briefly, Anna, you said something about understanding what we call cognitive marketing, a consumer decision journey. Now, in our philosophy, we believe a lot of people understand the consumer decision journey. They don't understand necessarily all the examples of when or where specific tactics and techniques powerful and when they're not. For example, creating awareness with a late stage prospect is meaningless. So that's wasted money. But creating a helping relationship or a pilot project to give a kind of a taste and see attitude or deep testimonials. Those are late-stage tools that are ineffective early stage. So not only do you need to have an agreement on the consumer decision journey, which at your company it's probably called a sales pipeline or somewhere along the path you've experienced the process of defining – here are the steps people go through when buying.    Sean Doyle [00:29:32] And anybody is welcome to use our model, the cognitive marketing model - we'll give it to you for free. And it's just a good basic tool that processes or that next level. And that's where that powerful marketing comes in. And that's with sales enablement comes in. And then we call them the nine arrows in the quiver of our toolkit. So those ideas are probably a little bit deeper. So I think we've done a great job of introducing sales enablement, but we've not done a lot to help somebody know what to do to do this at their office. Can you all stay in the studio for a few more minutes and we could continue this?    Sean Doyle [00:30:17] Okay. Join us again for the next episode. Anna and Will and I are going to continue our conversation of practical, interesting insights, stuff you can take back to work and apply to your sales enablement thinking today. I'm Sean Doyle and this the Aligned podcast. 

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

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 39 In this episode, the definition goes on trial and so does Scott Santucci. Scott gets temporarily removed from the co-host seat by John Thackston, VP of SOAR performance group. Perhaps no case in Sales Enablement history deserves the oft-used description "Trial of the Century" more than the case of Scott Santucci's Definition of Sales Enablement vs. the People. In this podcast, the prosecutor's arguments are presented in a trial fashion. The defendant is Scott Santucci and he's waived his right to an attorney. More than 10 years ago, the definition of Sales Enablement has existed in the market. The definition has created unprecedented international scrutiny and media attention, captivating the sales enablement profession. In one camp, the best definition = "whoever has the most organic search hits." On the side, the best definition is "created by VP's of Sales and CMOs and executives over the course of 2 working sessions as agreed upon by a team of practitioners." You're the juror. You decide. By the way, the first definition of Sales Enablement was written by Scott Santucci and published by Forrester in 2010. That Definition: Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system._ Since that time, he's received a lot of feedback on this definition, and many many many other definitions have sought to take it's place. Support this podcast

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 34 This is the second panel discussion where leaders dissect the research data points from the State of Sales Enablement study being led by Scott Santucci. Fielded in March 2020, the study data-set ended up with over 100 responses! There were so many open-ended responses that a "guest analyst" program was created to help sort through the massive amount of data. In this episode, we enroll the help of sales leadership. Question: What if your sales leadership called you in for an "Account Review" of your sales enablement efforts? How would you answer, and how would you explain your teams ongoing value to the organization, the specific initiatives adding the most value, and the upside potential (forecast) of your sales enablement efforts? Well, buckle your seat-belt, our special guest analysts cull through 100+ responses and provide their take on the Future of Sales Enablement. Our guests are: Skip Miller, CEO of M3 Learning Bob Apollo, CEO of Inflexion Point Strategy Partners Steve Crepeau, CEO of True Sales Results Support this podcast

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Sheevaun Thatcher from RingCentral join us. Sheevaun, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Sheevaun Thatcher: Sure. I’m Sheevaun Thatcher and I’m the head of global sales and growth enablement at RingCentral. I’ve been there about three years, created the enablement program from scratch, and now I have an amazing team that’s in support of all the enablement programs at RingCentral. And RingCentral is an application, a tool, if you will, that allows people to message, call, meet, engage – all in the cloud. It’s not on-premises. And it’s a wonderful application. We use it for everything we do in enablement. SS: Now, I’d love to shift gears a little bit if you don’t mind. You recently participated in a panel at our event at the Sales Enablement Soirée in San Francisco, and you said during the panel that sales enablement is responsible to sales rather than for sales. I would love for you to explain that distinction to our audience. ST: Sure. So, one of the traps that a lot of sales enablement people get into when they’re starting to create programs in companies is the sales leaders look at sales enablement as the trainers. They are just the trainers. And being just the trainers, it’s their responsibility to make sure that all the salespeople are doing what they need and closing deals and all of that. What happens with that is the sales leaders have a tendency to say, “enablement, you’re responsible for making sure that our salespeople close deals.” We don’t have the ability to go out there. Not saying that we couldn’t do it, all of us have a sales background. That’s where we came from, but we don’t have the ability to go out there and close the deal for the rep. So, we are not responsible for sales, but we are responsible to the sales team to ensure that they get what they need. There’s a story I tell that makes it very clear about what I mean by that. When I was doing my stand-and-deliver, coming to RingCentral, I finished my presentation, had talked about what my vision was and how I ran it and all that kind of good stuff. And the SVP of sales was down in LA and I was here. I heard the crackling on the conference line and they say, “well, this is all well and good, Sheevaun. I love what you’re saying. It’s great. What are you going to do if my people don’t do it?” And my answer was, “I’m not going to do anything. What are you going to do if your people don’t do it?” Because if we don’t have a partnership between sales leadership and sales management and the enablement team, none of this is going to work. You can have the most money invested in these programs. You can have the best team in the world. You can have the best programs in the world, but unless that partnership is there and the right people are responsible for and the right people are responsible to, then the programs will ultimately fail. And I see that all too often. So, it’s making sure that accountability and ownership of the sale stays where it should be. And accountability and ownership of the support programs in order to help our sellers help our customers buy is up to us. SS: Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, how do you work with the sales leaders to really establish that shared responsibility though, and gain their support for the enablement programs? ST: So, we involve them very heavily in the programs when we are initially talking about them. Right? I talk about initiatives, insights, and impact. So, when we have the insights, when we discover the gaps, because that’s what my team does, is we discover the gaps that are there and we come up with the initiatives to fill it. We spend a lot of time with our sales leaders to say, what should the initiative look like? What do you believe is the requirement? We ask a lot of questions. We do a lot of discovery because if the sales leadership don’t believe they have part ownership in these programs, then they don’t have accountability either. So, we make sure that they are part of that when we’re coming up with the initiatives and then we have a joint outcome. What is the outcome? If there is no definable outcome and you can’t measure it by time, resources, or money of some factor, then why are you doing it? So, we make sure that whatever it is that we do, there is the partnership in place. There is a mutual accountability, joint accountability, and then these programs are a lot more successful. SS: Yes, absolutely. I think sales leaders are definitely our strongest partners within the organization. I want to shift and talk a little bit about something that you also mentioned. You mentioned a culture of learning, which I love. You talked about the importance of creating that through sales enablement. What are some of the ways that you’ve fostered that kind of culture at RingCentral? ST: So, the first thing is we make the enablement and the training part of it fun. We have carnivals, online carnivals. We have things like the balloons and the beads and chess and whatever it is that we need in order to get people engaged. We do that already and it’s very much self-directed, so people can do it on their own schedule. When they need to get it done, we make sure that there’s not too much of it. Right? What we hear all too often is people are putting enablement programs in place, and then they want to run them on the last month of the quarter, or they want to run them on the last month of the fiscal year. And you can’t do that. So, we have a metaphorical contract with the sales leadership to say – and again, this goes to the responsible to not for – we will make sure that we keep the number of hours of enablement to a set number. In our case, it’s eight hours for sellers, and it’s 12 hours for managers per quarter. You make sure it gets done. So, we have that agreement, right? We are also the gatekeepers to salespeople. So, there are a lot of people, Scott Santucci used this term years ago, which was random acts of sales enablement. And they’re going on all over the place all the time. Everybody wants to do the right thing. Everybody wants to be invested in how the company does, and so everybody wants to put things in front of salespeople, which from a sales perspective can be absolutely overwhelming. There’s fatigue. There’s just too much coming in. So, our role in enablement as well as being the gatekeepers for this information is to make sure, number one, it’s consumable, it’s on message, and it fits within the hours that we have. And we also need to make sure whether or not it needs to be done live or whether or not it can be on our portal. And we simply highlight that it’s there. So, by being the gatekeepers, we allow the sellers and we encourage the sellers and support the sellers to sell, not to be caught in a lot of administrivia. Then, they do the learning because they all understand that what we’re putting in front of them is going to affect what they do in their jobs from a professional standpoint, right? Everybody wants to do better, sell more, have a bigger commission check. Right? So, we understand that. And part of our background too, as I said, almost everybody on my team has a sales background. We’ve been there. We know what it’s like. We understand that salespeople are not lazy. It just makes me nuts when I hear enablement people say that. They’re not lazy. There is just so much that has to be done that it’s not a matter of them not making time. It’s a matter of them not making it a priority. So, you have to figure out how to make learning a priority during their work and during their processes through the cycle. SS: I think there’s another benefit too. I’d love for you to elaborate to our audience on how a culture of learning can also help kind of improve the quality of relationships externally with customers and helping to really build customer confidence. ST: Oh yeah. It absolutely does. So, when we do our enablement, all the programs are based on something – STC, which is “selling to curiosity”. Our programs are based on the open-ended questioning. I already talked about this with the relationship with sales leaders, is making sure that we are in this together. So, our salespeople aren’t trying to sell to the customer. Our salespeople are trying to help the customers buy from us. We do the same thing when we are introducing our programs on the enablement side. We are not forcing the programs onto the sellers, we are helping the sellers understand why using the programs are going to help them, right? So, it’s not only what we do, but it’s also how we sell as an organization with our customers and putting our customers first. My own people ask a lot of questions. We teach the sellers how to ask a lot of questions. It puts the customers first, and it shows that RingCentral really cares about what their objectives are. What are they trying to accomplish? What are the business impacts that they’ve got? One of the questions I love to ask is, a year from now, you’re on stage receiving an award, Mr. Customer – what is it for? Because then you can figure out very clearly what is it that they are really concerned about, where they really want to get to, and what they consider success. And so again, it’s outcome-based. Then when you do that, and we show that we treat our employees very well, they’ll treat the customers well. I think it was Richard Branson who said, “you treat your employees well and they’ll treat your customers well.” We live that. The company does that, not just enablement. The whole company works that way. SS: Absolutely. On the same track, my last question for you – and thank you so much for your time today – but my last question for you really has to do with something that you said in a recent interview. But I also think it dovetails nicely from the conversation we’re having right now. You said that you envision enablement expanding beyond sales to focus on other teams. Why do you think enablement should expand its focus and how can enablement benefit those audiences? ST: So, think about the challenges that our sellers have, right? There are inconsistent processes. There is outdated content. There’s limited accountability. No fundamental knowledge, right? Why does the company exist? Why are we doing what we do? And typically, a lack of communication, not only vertically up and down the hierarchy, but sideways as well with cross-collaboration among the business units. That’s no different for the whole company. We focus on sales, but if you look in the company as a whole, the whole company has those issues. There’s yet to be a company or a peer of mine that I’ve spoken to that isn’t dealing with just that. So, from a corporate perspective, imagine that you can take all of the programs that you’ve done with enablement that are being effective and really helping your sellers and make everybody in the company an enabled seller. You’ll get unity. You get consistency. You build that culture of learning through the whole company. You can create raving promoters of not only the programs, but the company as well. Productivity goes up, attrition goes down. So, there’s no reason why the programs we run for sellers can’t be modified and use that same approach that we use for the whole organization. Because when your whole organization is a seller, then everybody says the same thing, and as you said, productivity goes up and attrition goes down. Single message: One RingCentral, something we talk about all the time. We work as one. SS: I love that lens. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. I loved all of the insights that you’ve provided to our audience. Thank you. ST: It was my pleasure. Thank you very much. And stay safe. SS: Oh, absolutely. You as well. And same to our audience. Thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

What is the state of Sales Enablement today? Is it thriving as a healthy practice, or faltering post hype-cycle? Ever the protagonist, this interview with Scott Santucci (former Forrester analyst, consultant and podcaster) will certainly cause debate and a rethinking of your sales enablement strategy and plans. https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsantucci/ #Forrester #research #salesenablement #evolveselling #insidese #valueselling #contentmanagement #contentmarketing #productmarketing #hypecycle #salesoptimization #salesperformance #salesautomation #salestechnology #salestech #salestools #sellingtools #ses #ROI #frugalnomics

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 27 This is part one of four of a special series of our Inside Sales Enablement podcast. We're bringing together a diverse set of perspectives to provide you actionable insights in response to the COVID-19 Virus gripping the global economy. Scott Santucci and Brian Lambert are joined by a group of leading experts to provide you with clarity about what's going on in a rapidly changing landscape.  Joining us are: Dr. Howard Dover, Professor from UT- Dallas  Kunal Metha, Operations Principal at TCV private equity  Lindsey Gore, Consumption Sales Executive, Microsoft  - Our agenda for this podcast series in response to the global pandemic has four parts: Episode one: Get clarity about what's happening in the environment  Episode two: Anticipate what actions companies will take  Episode three: Actions sales leaders and enablement professionals should take  Episode four: Answers to the questions from your peers    As always, chime in on www.insidese.com (www.insidese.com) and let us know what you think. Support this podcast

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 26 What type of sales talent does your leadership team need, and what's your role in helping them acquire, develop, and improve those people? Respond to demand Generate demand _ What do customers think? In this podcast, Scott Santucci and Brian Lambert provide the foundation for This foundation helps you answer questions like: How do you on-board salespeople when they all come from so many different perspectives How do you get agreement from sales managers on what they are supposed to do What’s the turnover rate of the sales force and are you using your top talent instead of bottom performers and how would you know When designing a development strategy, who do you listen to? Product, product marketing, sales leaders? Sales reps? Who gives inputs on the curriculum? How would you measure the impact of on-boarding programs across so many different teams?  _ Let us know what you think, and make sure you subscribe at www.insideSE.com (www.insideSE.com)   Support this podcast

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we are here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, your company, and your background. Imogen McCourt: Yeah. So, my name is Imogen McCourt. I am the global head of sales enablement ops and training at Argus Media. Argus Media is a price reporting agency, so we supply the markets with data and insights to support trading and traders. SS: Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us today. I would love to hear from you, some of the key components of a successful sales enablement function. In your opinion, what are sales enablement’s core responsibilities? IM: Okay, so I’ve been thinking about this and I’ll give a bit of context about how I got into sales enablement and I think that will help frame my answer. I started in sales enablement properly in about 2007 when the company I was working for, which was Forrester Research, asked me to think about and design a simple sales process to underpin the global selling approach. That went very well and that gave me a lot of exposure to the day-to-day world that our sales reps were living in and trying to be successful within. Forrester asked me to pick up the global sales enablement organization. Bear with me with this story and I promise I’ll answer your question at the end of that. There was already a great sales training team in place, so I picked them up and I had access to a small sales operations group that was in finance. This same time as I was doing that, we had Scott Santucci and Brad Holmes building and launching Forrester’s sales enablement practice selling research to our clients. So, as a company, Forrester really wanted to show that we believed in what we were telling our clients, that we were doing it right, and we would be putting those best practices into practice. So that was an incredibly supportive time, but it was very scary scrutiny to be under. The other thing that was playing out at that time, and remember that this was around 2008 or 2009, is that sales enablement was really coming into focus as a discipline, as a strategic approach. I think to some extent that was because of the global economic turmoil that we were operating in, our businesses were operating in, and particularly in tech, there was huge pain and complexity of selling and competing in a very crowded market, low barriers to entry and lots of companies that were starting to have restricted or no budgets to spend. So, companies needed to find a way to differentiate themselves and to stand out, and they couldn’t do that just through their products and services anymore because, frankly, they were constantly being updated and they were constantly new entrants into the market. So, we needed to think about how we could differentiate through the way we sold as well as what we were selling. And so, I believe that sales enablement really started to maximize on that, this idea of the routes to the rep to get the messages and the tools and the content out to the frontline sales teams quickly and easily, and to make sure they were designed around the client conversation. So, stopping random acts of sales enablement, making sure the reps weren’t distracted and ensuring the simple, professional, consistent way to selling. That is the thinking that for me drives the reality of who and what should be in a successful sales enablement function. It is perhaps a very longwinded way of saying that, in my experience, and I’ve built sales enablement structures from scratch a couple of times now, that very first structure plays out still. It still works. Sales enablement works well when you also have the training, the sales training organization, and you have sales operations. So preferably not just access to sales operations, but actually have that dedicated resource inside your group. Once you’ve got those elements or those key components in place, it is what you do with them and that sort of differentiation that makes the difference. We hear this a lot, but I will reiterate other people and add my own flavor to it, I think those groups of people really need to be operating to a clear and agreed vision. So you can call it a charter or a purpose statement, but that vision needs to be understood, it needs to be documented and by preference it needs to be made by the whole team and preferably, you’ll have your executive sponsors involved in crafting it as well. So, a very simple, clear vision or charter. Then I think to make sure there’s a high level, clear sales process in place, preferably aligned to the buying and buyer motivations that you work with, but fundamentally staged and articulated so you can build your framework and your metrics on the back of that. And of course, that leads to the clear and measurable outcomes that you are trying to achieve. Those measurable outcomes need to be linked to vision, to purpose, and they need to bring that charter to life. How does that charter, through the metrics, link directly to the bookings number? I probably should have started by saying that having the skill sets and competencies of enablement and operations and training is really important, but it is also that fantastic team, that team of people who are really commercially minded and proactive in their approach, that they may not have ever been sellers. To some extent, I don’t think that matters as long as they can understand how to build and drive toward a commercial target, and that they can think about how to orchestrate initiatives so that they come to life in the conversation with the client. So, yes: process, vision, charter, clear measurable outcomes, and simple high-level sales process. Then, the responsibilities are to ensure that the organization thinks about simple, clear, consistent, and I would even say repeatable, drivers for success for the commercial team. Stop the noise, think about the rep, the route to rep, and make it really easy for your other departments and the other initiatives and projects that are going on in the organization to be heard and to really manifest for the sellers. So, there you go. I know that’s a longwinded answer, but I hope that sort of clearly articulates my thoughts on this. SS: I love it. In fact, I want to tee off of something that you mentioned and that’s that sales enablement needs to be focused around those core key metrics for success. I would love to understand from you what you think those are. IM: Ah, the key metrics for success. Okay, so obviously ultimately, we are tied to our selling organization being successful. Have they hit their booking number or their growth number and can they get there? I think that there are multiple things within that, though. So, do you know who your audience is, do you know who you are trying to prove or sell your success to? And how can you prove or track that? So, let me unpack that a little bit. I work a lot with our C-suite. We’re a private equity-backed company so our C-suite care about e-bit DAR ratios, they care about making sure we are showing double-digit growth, and they care about high employee engagement. So, my job in leading this department is to make sure that our metrics ultimately can tie back to that, can be proved to show that we’re moving the needle at the company level. That is audience #1, if you like. My next audience is the CSO. That’s who I report to. She is accountable for cost of sales, for productivity in her organization and that’s sort of per capita per person. She looks at deal size and renewal rate as health factors. Now I do think that some of those things can be slightly blunt instruments. You know, take the number of salespeople and divide that by the number you hit; does that really prove productivity? But to some extent at a high level, that’s the first metric. Have we improved sales productivity year on year? At Argus, we can show that we’ve improved sales productivity by three percent every year even while adding on quota carriers to that group, so ultimately, we know we’re moving in the right direction. They are high-level ones. I think the next most important set of metrics are focused on the frontline sales leaders and ultimately the reps themselves. In order for me to move the needle and really make a difference here at Argus or in any company, I think, we really need the sales leaders to engage with us. I need their hearts and their minds. They’re the people who see whether we’ve affected change, see whether we can embed a behavioral change. So, what do they care about? Ultimately, they care about whether their reps are hitting their number and whether they can hit their number and providing them with sort of attention-grabbing metrics are really powerful. So as old school as conversion rates and win rates, but I think that really helps there. Some of the other metrics we look at, and I’m going with a fairly broad brush here because the metric will be specific to the project or the program of work that you are delivering on, but the other thing we look at, of course, is the people we work with outside of the sales organization, be that marketing or the product team, or subject matter expertise that we’re trying to use as the resource, I really want to make sure that they feel part of delivering on something. Again, we look at conversion rates there, we look at win rates, we really want to help them show that they’ve done something valuable in delivering a difference or having an impact on the selling conversation and the success that people are having within that. I do have one other element about metrics, and I know I’ve talked about how it will be dependent on the program work that you are focusing on. I think it is essential to own the narrative around the metrics as well. So always, always try to celebrate collective success, but – well, I’ll give you an example. At the moment, and I did touch upon this at our panel discussion as well, but we are doing a program of work to look at how we are selling consulting. And if we look at the CRM data and what we see there, it says that our consulting projects take 13 days to close and we get a 90%-win rate. Fantastic. That looks amazing. Nobody believes that. The work that my team are doing will probably look at the CRM metrics and look at how we can better expose deals earlier in the process, whether we can really reflect true pipeline management, whether we can ensure that resource is leveraged at the right time in the right place through doing that, and that, without question, will look like it’s slowing down the sales cycle time and look like it’s absolutely decimating the conversion rates. But because I’m going to own the narrative on that, from the absolute beginning and outset, I will tell the organization what we are going to do and what they will probably see as a result of that. It’s okay. It’s okay to take us to a place where the numbers look worse but actually the long term understanding of why we’re doing this is understood and is bought into. SS: At the Soirée you had mentioned how important it is for sales enablement professionals not to be afraid of the metrics, and I think that you’ve been talking through some really great ones and really kind of explaining what it means to own the narrative, and not always be so reliant on whether the initial onset numbers are showing positive results or not, that it is the long-term gains. Are there some key examples of that that you can provide to our audience, just some things that they should be thinking about? IM: So, I’ve been lucky enough to set up sales enablement departments from scratch and I said that at Soirée as well, and that’s given me the opportunity to get the clock running or start reporting running. It’s almost like drawing a line to say this is what it was like before sales enablement, and this is what it’s like since sales enablement. And I think those sorts of comparisons really help when you’re selling an impact or trying to explain to people what metrics for success should be. I look for external benchmarks too, so CSO Insights do fantastic work through their research on what other organizations are doing and how that has impacted conversion rates or renewal rates. So, thinking about how we are doing against external benchmarks is really good. I think that if you truly believe in what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and you can articulate that why, then you can very quickly get to the correct metric to track against it. And you know we’ve talked about looking like we’re failing when our numbers change, but if we really do fail, fail forward, learn something, and stop if you’re not having an impact. We talked about the audience metrics earlier on and we talked about the reason for doing some of these things. I think that we should talk about things like – well, I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you some examples. We did a piece of work on looking at the cost of sales for servicing our smaller clients or smaller spend clients, but people who are incredibly important to us anyway. I worked with our marketing department on that, in particular, and we created this automated client value program. Now ultimately, the problem we were trying to solve was that all salespeople at all levels in the organization had these low-value contract value clients and they were spending a lot of time and effort working on them, and the clients weren’t necessarily getting the service that they really wanted. So, we were trying to improve the value that these clients were receiving and also move our expensive selling resource off doing that all the time, so they were the metrics that we were looking to track to see if we could have impact on. The program of work has been running for about a year now. We can see that usage is up in those clients that have been brought into or opted into that program of work, so they are using us more, and that’s a key indicator of a new role for us. And even after a year, we can see that the open rates on those emails is holding steady over 50% and even more than that, we’re having a 17% clickthrough. We’ve had one unsubscribe and that was actually the guy testing the process internally for us. So, we have some really strong and clear metrics that we can show there in terms of we have changed the way that the seller’s portfolio is built. They don’t have to support these clients anymore. The renewal rates are staying up and, in fact, they are staying high because of increased usage. The emails are obviously of value and interest because you’ve got huge clickthrough and open rates, but there’s another element to it as well. Andrew came to me about six months into the process and he said this program of work is something that he had been trying to do and trying to think about for a really long time. He said he hadn’t known how to go about getting sales buy-in to thinking about it or to do it, but that this had given him the opportunity to try out some things that he believed would really make a difference and that he felt like a complete rock star because of the open rates. So, we could look at the impact that we had for the sellers, we could look at the impact we could have for the clients. But we could also, through that lovely statement, see that we were working collaboratively and well with our partners internally. I know for a fact he was telling his colleagues about that experience, that he was talking about the great experience of working with sales enablement and seeing it made an impact. And so, I know that we have an open door with our marketing team now to try some things with sales and try things that they might not have necessarily been open to. We can’t say up-front it definitely will work, but we have an open there, we have an in, and that’s a lovely other metric to think about when we’re putting these things together. SS: Thanks for listening. For more insights, tips and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you would like to share or a topic you want to know more about, let us know. We would love to hear from you.

Digital has rapidly transformed the economy, and it is no surprise that having a digital strategy has a profound impact on revenue growth. With so many definitions and ideas of what a digital strategy is and how to implement one, companies find it difficult to find clarity and achieve consensus. Today, Scott Santucci, CEO of Growth Enablement Ecosystems, shares his experience navigating the digital landscape.

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 13 Sales enablement is a cross-functional role. You have to work positively with: salespeople, sales managers, sales leaders, sales operations, various HR functions, IT professionals, finance professionals, product marketers, field marketers, customer success professionals, sales engineers, product leaders, and manage expectations from the c-suite.  How do you do it? It can be manageable when the breadth of your remit is focused solely on onboarding. However, if you don't have a framework and toolset - you can submarine yourself quickly without a stakeholder management strategy.  In this episode, Scott Santucci and Brian Lambert introduce the idea of a cartoon to introduce the simplicity of the core idea around stakeholder management and we connect it to a famous quote from Zig Ziglar "you can get anything you want in life if you help enough people get what they want"   Support this podcast

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 10 Are you:  overloaded by your inbox? concerned with the myriad of things being asked of the salesforce?  Worried you might be contributing to the chaos?  _ How would you like to move from being highly reactive to how you are enabling revenue growth, to being more proactive?  In this episode, Brian Lambert & Scott Santucci discuss practical applications of using five (5) sales objectives to help diagnose root cause problems and then prescribe more integrated programs that move the needle. Highlights in this podcast 1) How do you apply the 80/20 rule to sales enablement?  2) What are the five (5) universal sales objectives (and how are they NOT a sales methodology)  3) How companies who follow this disciplined approach have win rates as high as 70%  4) Understand then for yourself first, and then figure out how to socialize them internally  5) Good conversations about strategies on socializing the ideas inside your company.  Support this podcast

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 9 What can you do to help unclog the sales funnel?  Most companies focus either at the top of the funnel (leads and prospecting) or the bottom (negotiating) but the real opportunity is to break down the sales pipeline into five (5) customer-verifiable objectives and then focus on what can be done to make it easier for sellers to accomplish them. In this episode, Brian Lambert & Scott Santucci zoom into challenges of losing to no decision. In their typical, tell it like it is style, unscripted style - the go from a scene in the movie Beaches, connect that to buyer research, and then go deep into tackling a big problem inside MOST companies - losing to no decision.   Let us know what you think, and make sure you subscribe at www.insideSE.com Support this podcast

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 6 What's going on in the Sales Enablement space (specially with companies looking to evolve their sales strategy)? In this special edition, Brian Lambert catches up with Scott Santucci after a two-day Council Meeting of Sales Enablement Executives. At the beginning of 2018, the Conference Board received requests from its members (large businesses) to form a council to explore the emerging role of sales enablement in order to establish the foundations for developing and running this new function.  Members include leaders from large companies representing diverse industries such as: financial services, high technology, business services, hospitality, and manufacturing.   The group is invitation-only and works to create insights based on the practical experiences of its members.  Scott Santucci serves as the program director of the group (on a contract basis). Through the process of norming, storming, and forming - the group is developing new ways to gain insights from different industries.  When you look at the forest from the trees, new patterns begin to emerge.  What we are learning is that for B2B sales, the sales execution problems that Intercontinental Hotels Group and Microsoft are far more similar than they are different.  Regardless of your industry, the practice of B2B selling is similar. You need an overarching "one company" value proposition that is more detailed than your brand, but less specific than products  Your company is organized into product-based silos, but you need to bring a different, integrated, and more consistent experience to customers You have many different stakeholders involved in a sale - there are "buyers" who give you a hunting license and then "buyers" who drive usage The challenges sellers have navigated the 'agreement networks' within large companies is easy to explain through experiences (in the readout to executives we performed a 10 min skit to illuminate the challenge) but hard to conceptualize is traditional management consulting readouts, metrics, and charts.  The solutions to fix these problems are actually simple when you follow design thinking concepts, work collaboratively across organizational silos and focus on the actual experience of customers. However, explaining the approach sounds excessively complicated and far too risky based on managements comfort level with traditional projects.  In addition, because the solution required cutting across so many different organizational functions, identifying an executive sponsor and gaining the funding to even start a pilot program can be challenging.  _ The council is still forming and deciding what concepts to share, how to test insights and ideas the group comes up with, and how to publish its findings. Here are things it's agreed to so far. The emerging role of sales enablement is a by-product of the digital transformation of our economy The value of the function is unique compared to other functions - it creates value by eliminating things  The council believes that for sales enablement roles to add value to their businesses, they must be organized as cross-functional groups  The council has embraced a "business within a business" framework to provide the foundation for this new role  The council has also developed a review process to develop insights and then methodically test those ideas within the member organizations To this end, the membership as adopted the midwest mindset of "show me" when reviewing the various claims, reported data, and various "best practices" advanced by industry experts and management consultants. Our members have engaged virtually all of the management consulting firms, read reports from industry analysts, and are evaluating most of the... Support this podcast

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 5 Everyone Agrees Sales Training is Important- So why the friction between sales and L&D? In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss the role of people. Sales Enablement is a people profession and sales enablement leaders are focused on human behavior and skills of sellers (or as CEOs often say "manufacture their reps.)" The challenge for many "classically trained" L&D professionals lies in balancing the hyper-specialization and needs of the seller with the desired by executives to run as a shared service function. Sometimes the L&D function and people within it aren't often set up to support Sales. This creates a fundamental question: Why is so much sales training outsourced? Why are sales processes off-limits to the training function? And when sales enablement equals training, why is it considered tactical delivery? If training organizations aren't comfortable engaging strategically on developing talent, or aren't deemed "valuable" by executives that's a problem. Brian & Scott talks about his journey to tackle this gap and enable the trainers to close the gap to sales teams through research, processes, and outputs. Why terms like ADDIE and rigid L&D approaches don't resonate with other groups including the CEOs view of "training." Support this podcast

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 3 Do you believe Sales Enablement is a function and profession?  In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss the challenges they've encountered in living and driving transformations. In today's evolving business landscape, Sales Enablement leaders are often asked to transform from within. Whether it's new programs, new tactics, or even new organizational structures, Sales Enablement leaders and their teams are often "first through the wall." Being in that position, that means you're trusted. The strategy is entrusted to you. People and resources are entrusted to you. Your credibility matters. We talk about the evolution of bookkeeper to CFO and what that meant to finance -- and its implication to sales enablement leaders. While many believe that sales enablement is a task or technology, we know that sales enablement is a function that translates strategy to execution. To tackle strategic and tactical at the same time, you have to be purposeful. To be purposeful, you have to be thoughtful. Listen to Scott's story about how he got into Sales Enablement and how structures and outcomes are critical to success with the C-Suite.  Support this podcast

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 2 In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss the challenges they've encountered in positioning and selling sales enablement in organizations. While this may seem easy, the value is the eye of your internal customers. Therefore, translating the impact and promise of the function is critical not only to their buy-in but also to the successful pursuit of the business impact your company expects from your role. Much of what we have encountered in explaining the "features and benefits" of the role come down to how our communications are received by those around us.  In this podcast, we use a highly disruptive and somewhat somber analog for what it feels like to share the future path forward. The analog? WWI warfighting tactics and how "hard-wired" everyone was to continue to pursue them, even to their own detriment. The generals, the people, the communication, the processes, and yes, even the measures all called for a new approach to warfare, but they just weren't embraced. Why? Because human muscle memory is hard to overcome. Even if drastic and disruptive times, where NEW is required. Luckily for us, we're not in a life-or-death situation, but we are in a time of drastic change where muscle memory is required to change by confronting reality. Support this podcast

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 1 In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss their advice and point of view about the critical nature of selling the sales enablement role internally. Scott shares his exciting experiences in a well-known research company and what it was like to create a shared vision for the role, what those many conversations looked like, and how the process unfolded.  Much of what he encountered was the same thing that you -- a modern-day Galileo -- will likely encounter. Learn from his experiences in talking about a new way of thinking about the value-add of the sales enablement role to better support sales leaders and their teams.  Support this podcast

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

Sales enablement is here to stay but do you know enough about it. In this episode, two titans of sales enablement, Tamara Schenk @CSO Insights & Scott Santucci @Growth Enablement Ecosystems, discuss what sales enablement is and how companies can succeed with this emerging function in sales.

The buzz: “There are loads of studies which show that marketers struggle with measuring ROI from social media” (David Moth). If you're the designated social selling results “bean counter” for your company, the standardization of digital performance metrics will give you relief. How? You'll be able to measure the business impact of all digital selling performance across the organization and provide timely feedback to reinforce what's working vs what can be improved or eliminated. The experts speak. Mark Hunter, The Sales Hunter: “You don't have to be great at something to start, but you have to start to be great at something” (Zig Ziglar). Scott Santucci, Social Enablement Society: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” Sir (Winston Churchill). Marco Cai, SAP: “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things (Einstein). Join us for Social Sellers' Playbook: Making It Count – Part 2.

The buzz: “There are loads of studies which show that marketers struggle with measuring ROI from social media” (David Moth). If you're the designated social selling results “bean counter” for your company, the standardization of digital performance metrics will give you relief. How? You'll be able to measure the business impact of all digital selling performance across the organization and provide timely feedback to reinforce what's working vs what can be improved or eliminated. The experts speak. Mark Hunter, The Sales Hunter: “You don't have to be great at something to start, but you have to start to be great at something” (Zig Ziglar). Scott Santucci, Social Enablement Society: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” Sir (Winston Churchill). Marco Cai, SAP: “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things (Einstein). Join us for Social Sellers' Playbook: Making It Count – Part 2.

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Santucci was one of the first in the industry to recognise the strategic value of Sales Enablement, first as the director of research for Forrester and more recently for the Alexander Group. But why did Scott move to the Alexander Group and how does he think Sales Enablement will evolve as a strategic function? Listen to Scott and myself talk about this and a lot more. Don’t want to miss an episode? Subscribe to my podcast on iTunes by clicking here. Let me know your thought and feedback by using the comments section on the website. How do you see Sales Enablement evolve as a function? What would you like to ask to Scott or myself?