One thing that we like to do on our podcast is to make this very conversational. And the reason that we want to make it conversational, as we go through a structured format, it can get overwhelming. The things that we're all talking about are very, very complex. In this episode, the guys are joined by Steve Goas who is passionate about co-creating value in Message Enablement.

Topics:

The vision of Message Enablement programs
Creating Routes to Value
Orchestration across the organization
Defining what "good" looks like with Sales

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:34

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies

Scott Santucci 00:47

together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works and maybe what's more important, what doesn't

Brian Lambert 01:00

Our focus is on you the sales enablement leader and Orchestrator, as a Orchestrator in sales enablement. You have specific characteristics and skills that you need to leverage in order to blend both strategy and tactics to execute. Our goal is to help you clarify what that looks like, provide examples that you can reference as you're engaging across the organization, and give you the confidence to gauge up down and across the organization. So you can drive the simplification that salespeople need to be successful with their customers.

And on this podcast, we have a special guest. His name, Steve, Steve Goss. And Steve is with a very large financial services company. He's got a very strong background in b2b content and b2b messaging enablement or Message Enablement. He's very passionate about sales enablement, as an enabler of the content and the message that salespeople need to have as they engage with their clients and their customers.

And when you think About the sales enablement landscape that Scott shared in early 2020. We obviously we had Talent Enablement, we had Pipeline Enablement, Organizational Enablement and commercial enablement. Steve, one of our listeners here is in the Message Enablement space.

Steve and I met at the sales enablement soiree, actually in 2019. We actually hit it off really well. That event is great to walk the hallways with him and just talk about sales enablement and what he was seeing, as he was helping his large sales teams. And he's been texting and emailing Scott and I ever since he's been a big listener of our show, and actually since COVID, we've had the largest body of post COVID sales enablement research with over 25 episodes and obviously all the state of sales enablement research we did. And Steve's been involved and digesting all that and he reached out to Scott and I said So that's how this started. And Steve so much. I just want to thank you so much for being on the show today. And can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and anything I missed in that setup?

Steve Goas 03:10

Yeah. So thanks for having me. And actually, I just want to tell real quick story about meeting Brian up at the soiree in Boston. So pretty big event, I want to say at least 100 people were in that room, Brian and I were both parts of panels. And at the end of the soiree, when things were winding down, everybody kind of like went into their own groups and went off to dinner. And I really didn't know who to go to dinner with or what to do. I didn't really show up knowing people. So everybody had kind of gone off in their own groups. And then there's this group of like five or six people at the end. And Brian is one of them. So we just kind of get together and say, you want to go to dinner, just us. And I looked at Brian and said, You look like a trustworthy, dude. Let's do this. And the rest is history.

Brian Lambert 03:51

That's cool. That's great. So did that. Did I meet you first, or did you meet Scott first?

Steve Goas 03:56

I met Scott would have been a little bit earlier than that as a salesman. Have them in society special event in New York City where he and another founding member were presenting.

Brian Lambert 04:06

Ah, dang it. I thought I met Steve first, but nope, Scott. Scott knows everybody. It's amazing. That's awesome. So anything else you want to share on your background? Steve is awesome. We talk a lot about your role.

Steve Goas 04:20

Yep. So b2b sales enablement and a large financial services company. We mostly do content strategy, you know, when we think about the world of enablement, how it comes together, you've got content coaching, and training, all coming together to help sales sell more quickly. I believe that what we've done has bled into all three. But our entry point is going to be content or you know, Message Enablement content strategy. So that's gonna be a lot of what we're going to hopefully get into today.

Brian Lambert 04:50

Great, thanks so much for that. Scott. Bunch of kick us off with real organic conversation here. Bringing the listener on, I love it. When the members of Saturn nation attend and jump on a call with us. So you guys take it away. And what I'll do is I'll summarize the Orchestrator attributes at the end. As a recap for our listeners.

Steve Goas 05:10

Well, actually, Brian, before you hand it over to Scott, do you mind if I just ask you a couple quick questions just as kind of like a way to kind of break the ice here?

Brian Lambert 05:18

Yeah, sure.

Scott Santucci 05:19

So one is, are you guys ready to co create some value? Because that's what I'm here to do with you guys.

Brian Lambert 05:27

Going for the hard close? Yeah, that's a given. Yep. Absolutely.

Steve Goas 05:31

And to now that I am on inside sales enablement the podcast, does that mean I'm now in the big leagues? Can I tell people I'm a big time enablement person yet?

Scott Santucci 05:42

We'll see how the call goes.

Brian Lambert 05:46

You'll always, you'll always be an Insider and that that means you get you do get to hear about things a little bit earlier than others and we invite you to help us out with things and keep the conversation going after the show. That's definitely part of it. And because one of the things we find on this is we build common experience. And that's really critical when you're co creating value.

Scott Santucci 06:09

Yeah, so I think we can pose that question to Insider Nation and and have them judge themselves and then we'll give you

Brian Lambert 06:18

That's right.

Scott Santucci 06:20

So that's awesome. So first and foremost, one thing that we like to do on our on our podcast is as hopefully, you know, we're trying to make this very conversational. And the reason that we want to make it conversational is if we go through in an analyst format, it can get overwhelming. The things that we're all talking about are very, very complex. And I love that. Steve's talking about co creating value because that's something that we've talked about in other podcasts before. So I think somewhere in Chad, Chad's inner heart is palpitating, so if you know Chad Quinn, he was on one of our other ones. other episodes. But what we're doing here normally we have a framing story. But let's let's frame this out a little bit.

As Brian alluded to, we've done a tremendous amount of post COVID research. And what we're trying to do is to help our audience make sense out of everything that's going on with the assumption that when this is when the dust settles, everything's going to look very differently. So what we've done is we've done a variety of panels and interviews and several webinars. One of the webinars that we're going to zoom in right now on is the webinar called routes to value, enable customers and enable customers to buy. And that's what we're going to concentrate on and to connect some dots. We've already had two sales leaders comment on it. And what I'm excited about is Steve's been in this spot of working on the marketing side of supporting sales. So it's very rare that We get this opportunity to have this conversation. So what we're going to ask them our format is going to be essentially this. I'm going to ask Steve, what are three things that you got away or took away from this so you can compare what his his insights were to Bob Apollo's insights, or Joe, Joe Hayes's insights. And what we want you to do is sort of mix them all together and come up with your own plan. Then what we're going to have is a conversation about what his observations are, how he's connecting the dots, and then we're going to wrap it up together. Brian's gonna wrap it up together to see how he's exhibiting as a as a Orchestrator. So, how does that sound for you, Steve, you're ready to get going?

Steve Goas 08:45

Yeah, of course. Let's do it.

Brian Lambert 08:47

And I like that too. And real quick just for our listeners. These episodes are on our website so you can get the episodes that Scott's talking about. Also, the webinar recordings are on the website too the route to value recordings.

Scott Santucci 09:00

And what's that website, Brian?

Brian Lambert 09:01

It's at OrchestrateSales.com.

Scott Santucci 09:04

OrchestrateSales.com. So please go and visit that now. Okay, so the first question that I have would be so Steve, what would be three things that you took away from that webinar?

Steve Goas 09:19

So I don't know that it's three things per se. It's more like one big thing with lots of little sub components. It's, it's Productitis, and the role of customer centricity in selling and in business strategy. So what why don't we go ahead and start with Productitis? I'll start by saying maybe a little bit of a historical perspective here.

So product centric selling was really the dominant sales strategy of 20th century. You know, we all know the narrative that goes back to Henry Ford, the assembly line, you know, you manufacture more products, you do it more cheaply as sell more at the virtuous cycle.

Scott Santucci 09:59

You can have anything any color you want, as long as it's black,

Steve Goas 10:01

any color you want, as long as it's black. Yep. But there are cracks in the foundation. And I think that we would all agree on most of inside our nation would agree that product centric selling is not particularly well suited to the 21st century. That being the case, there's always going to be exceptions.

So I hate to be the guy that uses Apple as an example. But in this case, I have to. So I'll start by saying, I don't consider them a customer centric company. I believe that they try. I believe that that they create really innovative products really, you know, shiny stuff, they they promote it really well. They have really cool slick commercials with music and celebrities and all that. And they usually kick things off in press conferences that are around this time of year like around September. Um, I'll give you an example of something that they did that's not particularly customer centric, which is they didn't decommission iTunes until 2019. You know, to me that years too late. You know, it was clunky. It was outdated. Just think that that was the wrong approach for that. But look, that having been said their market cap is 2 trillion. That's amazing. that's larger than the GDP of a lot of countries.

Scott Santucci 11:10

Right cue Dr. Evil pinky.

Steve Goas 11:13

Yeah, yeah. So so it with them, I believe that they're going to have to start making changes as we get, you know, further down the road. But if I'm them, if it's not broken, do we really want to go fixing it. And then the other example that I want to use and then Scott, I'll kind of throw it back to you is BMW. So my father-in-law is a lifelong BMW owner. He has been buying them like one to the next for four decades now since then, since the 1970s. And I've talked to him about it. And he has basically said, it is not through my experience in the showroom in the dealerships, with the sales people. You know, with like the virtual tours on the website, it's really not through the experience. It's because when I get in there and when I get behind the wheel, it is thrilling. It's kind of like the perfect blend between a luxury vehicle and something that could also have racing harnesses and could go 170 miles an hour on a race track. So with that, I kind of see the two of them as competing on the basis of product innovation. And our last CEO here at TD Ameritrade kind of said that I believe that there are generally three ways to compete and our CEO before him had the same point of view. So you've got product, which is innovation, you've got price, which I mean, that could be just a race to the bottom, and then you've got the customer experience. That's where customer centricity comes into where we need to overcome Productitis. So I'll kind of stop right there and wait for you guys to chime in.

Scott Santucci 12:43

Sure. So let me let me share some thoughts here. So one thing is, I think what what is challenging for those of us who are b2b which is everybody in insider nation, is we have a lot of these examples of working backwards from cost From a b2c companies, right, so you're talking about mass market BMW is a mass market, Apple's a mass market. How do we blend a whole bunch of different individual capabilities into something unique that somebody wants to buy what that outcome is? So part of what we're what we're talking about here is I like what you're where you're going and sort of challenging who's actually really customer centered or not. I think what we need to do is we need to bring that conversation into a b2b frame of reference. Me personally, I don't think we have nearly enough examples that we talk about you, for example, in the b2b space, we've used the word persona a lot. Persona is a great valuable tool and label and concept for b2c marketing. I question whether it's really valuable for b2b marketing when we're targeting individual roles and stakeholders. I think that what I want us to do is challenge ourselves to use these examples to talk more on the b2b side. And before we get into that, for those who haven't listened to the webinar, what exactly is Productitis? And why does it resonate so much with you?

Steve Goas 14:15

So to me, Productitis is basically an inward focus. So you're focused inwardly on your company, your products and services, less on the customer and their problems and their business issues. And the way that it manifests itself at the conversation level as you just get bogged down in features and benefits, a lot of which is not going to be relevant and it undermines your own credibility, and is going to, you know, hamper your ability to win deals and you know, be successful in a business development role. But the simplest way to put it for me would be inward focus versus focused on the customer, their issues, their problems, their initiatives. One of my favorite quotes from from the last couple of podcasts is "budgets don't get from funded to buy products. They get funded to, you know, fuel initiatives.

Scott Santucci 15:03

Amen.

Steve Goas 15:04

Yep, so there we go that that says just about at all.

Scott Santucci 15:08

Perfect. So let's, let's unpack this a little bit. One of the things that I appreciate so much about you, Steve, is you're really pushing the envelope. You've got a marketing background, you're a customer content advocate. What are some of the, what does being customer centered really mean for you in the lens of a b2b organization? Well, first of all, what does it mean? And then second of all, who has the authority to say, this is the voice of the customer Says who?

Steve Goas 15:40

So to me, being customer centered from an enablement standpoint, means really having what I call your design points in place, it's really going to be fundamental to customer centricity. So you mentioned personas before. Um, I do think that personas in the b2b world are important.

So personas is going to be one The pains and the problems that they're having is going to be two. And where they are in the buyers path is going to be three. And these are kind of like our anchor points that ensure all enablement services that we come out with our customer centered. Let me actually pivot back to personas here. Because I agree that they're valuable, but they are hard to get right. So there's a difference between doing them and doing them right. I believe having a loose sense as to the role that you're selling to like, let's say a, you know, an IT director, Chief Marketing Officer or CEO, whoever, if you just have a loose idea of you know, who they are, what they do, etc, it's not going to be helpful.

What is helpful is what's called the JTBD. So the job to be done. Clayton Christensen talks about this in his book, innovative solution came out about 15 years ago, but you really got to know how do they go about their day, who's holding them accountable, who do they report to? What resources that they have available, it really goes much deeper and it is very difficult. To create effective personas in the b2b space, and when you do create them, they have to be continuously updated. And that's done, you know, with the sales folks that work with these types of people. So I don't disagree that that it's hard to get it right. But I do believe that there's value in doing it in the b2b world, as well as the b2c world.

Scott Santucci 17:20

Well, let's pause on that.and discuss it. So one of the things that's difficult is we use terms often like persona. And there, we you'd agree, there is not a standard set of what a persona is. So if we were to pull and look at the...

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