Christian Palmer: Demystifying Sales Enablement

About Christian Palmer: Christian Palmer is the Senior Manager of Sales Enablement at Justt, the only company fighting chargeback disputes for merchants and winning. Christian's background includes working as an L&D Consultant/Sales Trainer at Phaidon International, where they provided foundational academy training to new consultants and coached and mentored them on both team and individual levels. Christian also worked as a Clinical Consultant at ProClinical, a global recruitment company specializing in the life sciences industry. Earlier in their career, Christian worked as an Associate Consultant at Real Staffing, an international pharmaceutical recruitment agency, and as a Corporate Recruiter/HR Associate at Dutch-X. Christian began their professional journey at Apple, where they served as an Expert. Christian Palmer, M.S.Ed., has diverse experience in sales enablement, recruitment, learning and development, and leadership roles. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Christian.

In this episode, Nancy and Christian discuss the following:

• Definition of sales enablement 
• Importance of sales enablement within a company 
• Necessary tools for enablement 
• Role of sales playbook in enablement 
• Enablement in one-person teams vs. global departments

Key Takeaways: 

• It's of tremendous value to businesses to bring somebody who can identify the gaps first, then fill them in and be the main voice for the salespeople.
• I've only seen playbooks succeed at larger organizations with more structure and infrastructure.
• Everything you say will not be listened to if you don't have it.

"Sales enablement can be defined in a number of different ways. Because it is such a newer field, it tends to get mis-defined if that's a phrase all the time. And the best way for me to describe it is essentially twofold. I'll probably start with the more form formal definition of it. That is to provide the tools, resources, skills, processes, and infrastructure for sellers to enable them to be more efficient, skilled, and proficient with their actual product offering to sell more effectively over time. That is the more formal side, but I would say maybe something a little bit softer that I guess you could say is more layperson's terms for folks is going to be that I am more or less bridge or support system or the voice of the salespeople. And that can stretch across different cross-functional teams to senior leadership and stakeholders and be able to bridge that gap between what's going on in the ground with sellers and what's happening strategically in the organization." – CHRISTIAN

"In probably an ideal world is that you have your LMS, your learning management system, that you're able to create content with and a CMS, a content management system, of which you're able to organize that content of what you made in the LMS into a digestible format for sellers and anybody else looking at it. Both of those tools, more so the CMS, should be able to help you measure success rates of reps over time. That could be done in a number of ways, through their behaviors, actions, and results, corresponding those specific results to maybe some items that they had done during the onboarding within that CMS. But those are probably the main tools. You could throw in another authoring tool or whatnot if you wanted to facilitate making even more differentiated content, like maybe an articulate or something along those lines. Any place that doesn't have either of those. It will be a bit more of a lift for an enabler to assemble something. Those tools make it a lot easier. But there's a ton of them out there. It's hard to know what's going to be best." - CHRISTIAN

"I think the easiest way, or the standard way you'll see amongst most enablers, especially those with sales experience, is leveraging that you've been there before. Of course, this gets harder the longer you're not in a sales role. The harder it's going to be to align. However, I think the main foundational selling parts don't change. So, those aspects are what you can align with a rep. Whether it's somebody going on a performance improvement plan, I've been on it several times in my career. One time, it didn't work out too great; the other time, it worked out for me. Using that as leverage and explaining to a seller, like, hey, look, this isn't the end; it's just the beginning, shows vulnerability on my part and shows them that I can relate to what this is—the vulnerability aspect I bring up because that's how you build relationships with anybody. So, whether or not they're actual sellers doesn't matter as much to me. But the fact that they are, and I go in and let them know maybe areas that I'm weak in upfront, maybe areas that I know I'm strong in or where I think I can help them, and start adding value to them without them even asking for it.

An example of this would be if you come into an organization where you don't have industry knowledge. This is very much how it was at Riskified for me. I knew nothing about chargebacks or the fraud or policy abuse space. But I did know all the different selling skills I've accumulated and enabled over the years. So, I was able to come in and create sessions and content and additional resources around some of these skills that were agnostic to what Riskified is and what industry it's in." – CHRISTIAN

Connect with Christian Palmer:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-palmer/
• Justt: https://justt.ai/

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