Ep48 Strategy, Execution, Orchestration with Joe

The value of Sales Enablement continues to elevate for those who orchestrate across the company to bring together the right solutions at the right time while addressing seller burden.

In this packed episode, Scott and Brian are joined by Joe, a VP of Sales for a Mid-Sized services company that works with some of the largest media companies on the planet. Joe talks about the evolution of selling over the past 20 years and what's happening the sales right now. Especially, with the impact of COVID, and the complexity his team is dealing with.

Against this backdrop, Scott, Joe, and Brian discuss the perceived value and impact of Sales Enablement.

The discussion includes:

• Peeling back the layers of VP of Sales challenges and situations, so you can gain more empathy
• The perceived impact of Sales Enablement Orchestration
• Tips and ideas on how to role-play sales enablement value

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation, and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

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 Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Unknown Speaker 00:34  

I'm Scott Santucci, 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 00:48  

Together, Brian and I've 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 most importantly, what doesn't.

Brian Lambert 01:02  

Our focus is on you the sales enablement orchestrator. As you know, sales enablement, leaders really need to develop a core skill and competency in the area that blends strategy and tactics to stay mission and goal focused, to prioritize the right action at the right moments, to guide the narrative by confronting reality, to take more of a design approach, not just when, through effort to unlock energy, create momentum, and catalyze change. To help us out on this episode, we're going to bring in a head of sales. It's Scott's going to talk through some of the attributes of recent sales enablement initiatives. And this is an important lesson for you guys in a kind of a way to go into the lab and I really want you to listen for the space that Scott creates with this VP of sales, and how he goes about talking through some of the real issues. And as part of that at the end of the discussion, well, we'll kind of roleplay a little bit of how we might position things Some of these more comprehensive solutions to VPS sales and win together. So with that, I'm gonna hand it off to Scott. And Scott, can you introduce our guest?

Scott Santucci 02:10  

Absolutely.

Scott Santucci 02:12  

We have two goals that were happening here. Goal number one is, how do we start talking about one of the terms that we brought up as stratification? How do we actually bring to life, that gap between strategy and execution for our criticals stakeholders, and in this case of VP of sales, that's the one thing that's part one. And that's what I'm going to cover. Part Number two, what we're going to get at is, okay, now that you have ideas of what might resonate and not, you're not in the order, taking business for sales leaders, you're in the partnership business, Brian's gonna walk through with you, how he might roleplay out and introduce some of these ideas, and the way that we're going to bring it to bear hopefully you been tracking along and entire nations been tracking along that you're aware that Brian and I have been hosting a series of webcasts, webinars, whatever you want to talk about it around a variety of different topics. And all comes from the COVID research that we've launched for you, insider nation for our podcasts. We've done the most research around sales enablement, sales, execution, sales, productivity, whatever you want to call it, post research than anybody so far on the planet. And we've been carrying that forward by having lots and lots and lots of conversations.

One of the conversation starters definitely are these webcasts. What's fantastic is we're getting great feedback that they're very engaging. If you haven't participated in the one we're going to talk about which is called up routes devalue in enabling your customers to buy you are, you can go visit inside se comm and get a link to the download recording to hear the same thing. Joe heard. So now we're at the Joe Joe was one of the participants in that Rouse devalue webinar. Joe is a VP of sales. He's been a VP of sales for many large, large companies, we'll have Joe, introduce himself and get us more of that color. But what we're going to do now we're in part one, and we're going to talk about what his reactions are to the content that's in that in that session around routes to value. Obviously, we're doing it away that you don't have to watch the webinar, it'll probably be valuable to go back and listen to it. And again, the re re enforce what we're trying to do here, please listen and try to gain empathy first, for how a sales and sales leader may take this content. And then we'll get into step step number two, what might you do about it with Brian? Now, having said all that, I bet that's the longest preamble to an introduction you've ever had before job, radio. Yeah,

Brian Lambert 04:58  

no, I think that's the A story from the early 1600s may have taken longer, but I'm not sure. Right.

Scott Santucci 05:05  

taxing them with with that and Other Stories there. And I think you weren't implying that Joe's been in sales in hundreds, right? It seems like, right. So with that I'd like I'd like to I'd like Joe, if you would mind to introduce yourself as Joe Hayes. Yeah. The sales leader for quite some time. Please introduce yourself and what your background is and how you got connected with these webinars.

Joe 05:33  

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Thank you, Scott. And thank you, Brian, for having me on your podcast today. Yeah, the My background is I've been in media for basically my entire career, which is now 30 years. So I started actually on the auditing side, working at one of the one of the audit bureaus on the media side of the business and then from there, I think the company felt that do less damage in sales than it actually auditing itself. So they moved me into sales. And then from there, I took a job, I was able to get a job as a sales just a regular salesperson within a company called srts, which is 100 year old business that basically connects buyers and sellers of media within an online planning platform. So I work for a company called srts. I've been working here for 20 years, worked my way up in the quickly within the ranks to head up the sales. And so my clients are both on the agency side, the largest us advertising agencies, and then also the largest some of the largest media companies that exists within the United States. So, for example, my clients are like Comcast, NBC, Viacom, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, all the way down to a large b2b publications like electrical contractor and so it really runs the gambit. But I have a sales team. I've had sales teams both on the agency side and the sell side, within the company that run into the, you know, 2030 people. And then within Nielsen it was even larger. And then once we came over to cantar, which is owned by WP pay, it's the same amount. So I've, I've had all the challenges of sales of running a sales organization. But I will say, I started carrying a bag and carrying a territory and worked my way up to managing a team. And to this day, I'm still very hands on when it comes to sales.

So Scott asked, How did I come engage with these webinars? It's because I'm always on the lookout for for good information. And so when I first started hearing what Scott what Brian Brian was doing with growth enablement. I this was this was of interest to me. So I started listening to a lot of the things Scott was posting. And then I was a lucky enough to join a couple of these webinars, which, which I found, given COVID. And what we're living through right now, at least on my side of the business on the sales side, to media and agencies, I have found made it my, my, my goal to find the time to join these webinars and I found them very interesting. I've sent notes off to Scott telling him and Brian how valuable they are to me. And Scott reached out and said, Hey, Joe, would you mind joining just a quick podcast to talk about the last one we did, which was routes to value. So I hope that helps Scott.

Scott Santucci 08:34  

Yeah, that's a great lot of great context. And it's grounding for our listeners and what what we're trying to do is move to have conversations. It's one thing for you as an individual person to listen to a podcast or listen to, or participate in a webinar. It's something completely different to start piecing together how other people see it. And that's really what we're trying to do is bring that perspective. So Joe Don't want to do a lot of framing for it just for our listeners, the the scope of routes devalue is essentially, hey, look, there's a lot of content that we make available for salespeople. And because we don't organize it in a cohesive way, it creates burden for our sellers. All the while, we should be working backwards from our customers to do it. What is working backwards from our customers to do it? Well, we got a lot of stakeholders to manage, and how do we visualize all of that. So we've developed an approach that we call routes devalue, which basically we start about mapping out or modeling out the customer and their agreement network. Then it goes over to mapping and building a map of your product palette in a way that is more configurable for sales for customers to digest. And then the third part then is to create a value map to help salespeople connect the dots and it's really that simple. Wherever simple is sales is simple but simple is

Unknown Speaker 10:03  

hard. Yes.

Unknown Speaker 10:06  

And no, I think what you just touched on, Scott, I think even you'd be surprised at how many companies do not operate this way. And I would say later in the webinar, when you really kind of draw this out about working back from the customer, it's just not done. It's not. And that's where I think the real opportunity lies, especially now, given what COVID has done to pipelines, it's basically decimated them. And a lot of companies I know cantar, in particular, with their new owners, which are paying and just using them as an example, as well as other companies that I call on are all going through the same thing. They're looking what's happened to these pipelines and and that they're, they're they're suffering and not a lot of the information being put in there just it wasn't accurate. And some of it is on the rep but not all of it's on the route. Yeah, so So you're, well, it's easy for you to talk about Scott and build these slides working back from the customer

Scott Santucci 11:09  

is when did you say it's easy to build slides?

Unknown Speaker 11:13  

I know. Well, it may be easy for you to talk to those slides. Because the experience that you've had, um, it definitely resonates with me. Because it's an issue that I've had for a number of years. But it's not easy when you're working back from the customer to many companies feel that great. You work back from the customer, you work back from one person. The fact of the matter is you're not working back from one person. You got to work back from a group a network of people and you got to know where those noes are. And not only that, you got to work internally within your own organization and companies refused to look at that.

Scott Santucci 11:53  

You said yeah, let's let's do that. So I don't mean any disrespect when I say this, I suppose I say this to a lot of people. As leaders all the time, but I think when we're going through a major period of change, like we are with cut digital, the digital revolution was here before COVID COVID has exasperated and accelerated it and exposed a lot of pain. What really is happening is that sales, the sales function is kind of like canaries in a coal mine. And they're seeing all this poisonous gas, but don't have the words or vocabulary to describe it. So part of what I'm going to, what I'm trying to do here is connect the dots of we have some slides that you can go and listen to, and some reactions, but how do we give some texture to this environment that is so inefficient, and so painful, but most of management doesn't see. And the sales force doesn't necessarily have the right vocabulary or ways to eliminate it. And we want to highlight these things because we want you as the audience to be able to recognize how do I actually extract out or understand what's really going on, rather than reading reports what everybody else thinks is going on. So Joe, can you elaborate a little bit on that? Is that fair to call your canary in a coal miner? Is that insulting? I don't know.

Unknown Speaker 13:12  

No, I mean sales for at we're always the frontline troops. So canary in the coalmine, I think that's very true. But I will say, Yeah, you're you're right with that. And I don't take that as an insult, at least. But where the problem becomes is when you're not communicating the gases in the mind back to your organization, and in some cases, when you do communicate that it falls on deaf ears, so um, so that's part of the issue as well.

Scott Santucci 13:43  

So let's walk through what are some what are three highlights that you got from? From this from the conversation around rasa value, what were some three short key takeaways, the cat,

Unknown Speaker 13:55  

the first one, which you brought up on a couple of them now? Product Titus. I love that. I thought you nailed that the first time you talked about it, you continue to talk about it. I now use it when I'm on sales calls to media companies, and now they've taken it. So I've got to start giving you credit for that we got to start trademarking that. But the fact of the matter is, we all suffer from it. My team in particular suffers from it. I work for an organization that feels that they know better than their clients. So marketing teams feel that they know better. The executives within the company feel the same thing. And all we're doing is pushing out product. And then it's left to the sales team to go out and really be carry that load of trying to go into companies, huge companies like Comcast and try and sell a list of 1000 products that that none of them meet what they're looking for. The needs of what they're looking for. And, and that that's part of the problem. It's a major problem right now.

Scott Santucci 15:07  

What is proctitis?

Unknown Speaker 15:08  

What is it? Well, for me, it's a, I guess it's an explosion of confusing and misaligned activities. It's, it's marketing, coming to us in a sales team, with the next new shiny fish. And with the instructions of drop everything you're doing, this is what we need to be focusing on. We've had an acquisition, we want to be pushing this out. It's another division within the corporate umbrella of cantar. And we want to be focusing and getting our clients at least looking at this and buying it. The fact of the matter is, though, is the people that my team is talking to, aren't even involved in that type of decision making. So we missed the mark continuously. That's, that's to me is the product. That's the definition of product itis.

Scott Santucci 16:04  

So the reason that for our audience The reason that we worked on creating that an identity is because it's really hard to talk about the poisonous gas that we're running into. So product Titus becomes that poisonous gas. And it becomes a great talking point, with very little setup you can get get traction, I doubt very seriously, Joe, I mean, I don't know, I don't wanna speak for heads of sales. But I just think it's really unlikely that a head of sales that we're going to run into in any industry is going to say, Oh, no, we don't have product Titus at all.

Unknown Speaker 16:37  

Um, I yeah, I don't think you want I think most of them will say that. Or at least agree to it in some in some, in some degree. I will tell you that on in my case. And in other cases of most of the time that I've been in sales, this has been going on for quite some time. And here's the other thing, how many times can you Keep going back to the same client with a new shiny fish. I mean, after a while, they just say no what they just turned it off. So every time we go back and now with the new shiny fish, to keep pushing it, we're losing more and more credibility with the few people, the stakeholders within the organizations that we have large, large pieces of business. So think about that too. Because how many times can someone say I'm not the right person for that?

Scott Santucci 17:29  

Right, and then keep meeting it the next time?

Unknown Speaker 17:32  

Correct. I mean, I Scott, I've actually had a story where a the largest single piece of business that ever came through the channel at srts was my client. It was it was ESPN at the time. And like anything once people get whiff of there's large money and there's a big deal. Everyone wants to own it. Everyone wants a piece of it. So an executive wanted to join me on a call with ESPN. They wanted Go in there, they didn't care. And I was kind of forced to do this, which would upset me. But that's the way it is. So being a new guy, I kind of went in there and brought that person along. And the person launch into a new product launch that had nothing to do with the decision making or the budgets that sat with the person across the desk that we were meeting with. We'd left the meeting by the time I got back to my office, there was an email in my inbox, from now an account that had just signed up within the last six months and said, if you ever bring that person back into my office, we will cancel our program.

Unknown Speaker 18:37  

Now, that's a true story.

Scott Santucci 18:38  

And I, I empathize because I've had similar situations myself from my sales world. Look at what bads position you're in. How do you bring that up to your boss, you know, that executive? And why did they think that they that they're what made them think that they can go on add value in the first...