Welcome to Inside: Sales Enablement Episode 60We'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 experienceSES EXPERIENCE 2020 - Forward Momentum for a New Decade October 26 - 29 VirtualJoin the members of the Sales Enablement society at their annual conference 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.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 00:34 I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:36 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. 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 most important, but doesn't. Our focus is on you as sales enablement leaders and orchestrators in that role that you have in your company, you've got to develop specific characteristics that we call orchestration. That means blending strategy and tactics together to achieve results to help sales sell and simplify the selling ecosystem. And as usual, we have a centering story, bill, bill, what do you got for us?Bill Ball 01:29 Thanks, guys. I want to take us way back to the year of 2016. I know that's not quite as far as you gentlemen generally travel back in your centering stories, but it's important.Brian Lambert 01:45 It's important,Scott Santucci 01:46 you know why? It's so it might as well be that Fargo. Right,Bill Ball 01:50 right, right. I mean, cuz who can tell at this point anymore? It seems like 1000 years ago is my relationship with you guys go what's happened this year, and how far the sales name one society has come. So um, the reason I'm going to talk about 2016 is that's the year all the wheels started to turn in the sales enablement society. Now, I wasn't involved right at the very beginning. Because I didn't know Scott and Scott didn't know me and I didn't know what sales enablement was. That's right. I'm saying I didn't know what sales enablement was in 2016, until I found a LinkedIn group called the sales enablement society. And so I joined it. I was like, that sounds like some of the things that I do. You know, I'm helping grow sales people. I'm helping train sales people, I'm helping them with their messaging. But you know, that that sounds a little bit like what I'm doing. It sounds a lot cooler than trainer. Yeah. Or, you know, that kind of thing, right? Because Because, my, my students or, you know, the, my colleagues aren't dogs. So, so I can get behind this. And so I joined the group, you know, and I was like, okay, you know, maybe I'll get a digest or something, if people actually talk in this thing, because like, back back, then you subscribed to a lot of LinkedIn groups and hope, you know, one out of 15 was good. And within that same week, I got a phone call. And it was Brian. And it was like, Okay, this is weird, because I feel a little stocked, I joined a LinkedIn group. And, and Dude, you're breaking the fourth wall, like what's going on right now? And, and he proceeded to vet me, you know, but like, in a really nice and thoughtful way, like, Hey, I see you're, you're in DC, and I'm in DC. And that's where the sales enablement society was, you know, originally had a chapter. And we talked about my role a little bit and he was super complimentary. You know, I taught it and now knowing all the things that Brian's done, like it was really nice for him to say that, right? Because I was just beginning my journey as well not beginning but like, this is my first role in what anybody would classify as sales enablement. And he was like, so you're kind of like the Yoda for SDRs and and I thought like, Yoda, I would never say that. But But yes, I have to be sometimes and definitely my age versus the SDRs I'm easily Yoda that way so so so we'll keep that so so we talked again after that, I was like, Wow, that was really weird at first and then super nice. And like now I'm more curious about this thing. And so we talked again, and he was like, Hey, we're actually having a meeting. And I found out it was like way out in Leesburg at some Country Club. Yeah, like I was like, do I have banjo to get inBrian Lambert 04:46 his city slicker he's out cuzBill Ball 04:49 Yeah, cuz I'm in Arlington, Virginia and for those on the podcast like Leesburg and DC traffic like that's a haul from from from where I am and you know, that's just part of living in a big City. So, so yes, I know, I know. And I know it's hard Down on the Farm, Scott. So So I went out to the country club. And you know, I didn't have to have a banjo and I saw Brian and and I saw, I got to meet Scott. And I saw other people who, around that same time, Terry was doing that podcast on sales enablement, which was like, super groundbreaking at the time, and he was interviewing people in the sales, manual society. So I was like, you know, I know a little bit about Scott, I know a little bit about Nicola, Brian, because she talked about all the Van Halen shows that she went to like in the 70s, or the 80s, or whatever that happened. And I was kind of jealous. So I have heard him talk about that with but, you know, so I thought I was gonna have these, like, you know, one off personal discussions, and we got serious really fast in that meeting. So we laid out a few things about business within a business and a lot of the things that we're trying to establish at that time. But then we had an exercise, and I was like, I have never been to, you know, I've been to all kinds of sales meetups and all those kinds of things. I've never been to one where we actually had to do an exercise. And I was like, Okay, this is this is for real. And this was the exercise. So there was a marketing business plan, you know, given with a scope and an amount of time and an ROI. And, and Scott was leading this exercise, and he said, Okay, I'm going to split you up into two groups. So he divided the two groups into one group, which was, you need to make the business case for this, your sales enablement, you need to come up with reasons to support this. And then the second group, you're the CEO, you need to find reasons to shoot this down. Because part of being in sales enablement, little did I know at that point was selling your initiatives and making a business case your initiatives upstream, even at the CEO level. So to my delight, I worked at a small business at that time, and I reported to the CEO. So to my delight, I got to play the CEO groups, I was in a group with Brian and Rao Gupta and a couple of other folks. And I knew exactly what my boss would say about this. And so when we came back as a group, like we like, wrote on notepads, and we came up with talking points, and we came back as a group and debated, I did not hold back, I totally went CEO, and I rip that plan to shreds. And it was an amazing plan, but I just played the CEO, and I ripped it to shreds, and I could just, you know, Scott was facilitating, but I could also see his face kind of contort a few times when I was when I was kind of going at the plan. And did I know at the end of the meeting, that it was a plan that Scott had submitted. So I felt like a huge ass, but I also felt like, you know, dude, you put that out there, and you gave me permission to take some swings. And this is awesome. And I cannot wait to come back to this thing. That's awesome.Brian Lambert 07:59 Yeah, remember that? there? Yeah. Yeah. So let me ask bill, I always ask asked after our centering story, so what?Insider Nation 08:08 So what?Scott Santucci 08:09 Well, wait, let me help you out, Bill. So okay. So first of all, who the heck are you? Who's this person talking? And who's taken my space for my centering story? That's like my, my value contribution. That's what I do. So for those of you who don't know, Bill ball joining us, Bill ball, it gave us his story about his first experience within the sales enablement society. And now you're on the board of directors, right?Bill Ball 08:36 Yep. So I practice sales enablement. For an IT staffing and managed services firm. I'm in the process of transforming my practice from a traditional learning and development practice, because it's a traditional business into field enablement practice. And so, so I'm super excited about that. But yes, I have the pleasure and the privilege of being not only a founding member, and a past Board of advisor for the sales enablement society, but now I'm on the board of directors with four other awesome hard working volunteers.Scott Santucci 09:14 So the reason that this is this centering story is important in the so what Brian so now, that way they know who the heck this bill guy is in the first place. He just starts talking about getting calls and making fun of us rednecks out and media. And he's making history again, the first ever centering story. That's not Scott. That's right.Scott Santucci 09:34 That's right. But I think the bigger issue is, where is sales enablement as a profession today and how much influence has the sales enabled society had with it? There's been a huge explosion since 2016. And funding for companies like seismic highspot, etc. A lot of that is because of the visibility in sales and a warrant that was created to make investors feel more comfortable with it. There's way more research out there. So those businesses are converting some of that research that money that investment money. So high spots, got the sales enablement, sell the name or Pro, because of that traction, you've got other conferences now that are, you know, squatting on the sales enablement society, timeframe, but that's a different issue. All of this has been done and built. So let's kind of review what's all been built by volunteers serving and it says Key Point bill, how much money you get every year for your your efforts as being a board member?Bill Ball 10:36 I have two answers to that question. One, the overwhelming amount of zero dollars, infinite and, and a lot of pride. And then and then also I pay to go to every single conference, I've paid for my travel, and this year won't be paying for my travel. But I've paid for the conference as well as as a board member and as a practitioner.Scott Santucci 10:58 So not only are you going out of pocket, so you're paying for your part, but you're not getting any money either. And I think that's really important for you, as our audience to really pay attention to understand what the society is all about. The cells in a one society is driven by volunteers who care about the profession. And the volunteers are people like Bill, who are practitioners who believe in this role. And I think that's really, really important. Because as you think about all the different things that you could attend, and all the stuff that you could do, having insight of how things really work matters. And you should be participating in the things of where people are putting their money where their mouth is, there's a lot of other resources out there that are quote unquote, sales enablement, where people aren't putting their money where their mouth is. But what we're going to talk about here is the remarkable thing of Orchestration. So you guys all know that since COVID, we're shifting our podcast to be much more about Orchestration. As Orchestration really happened, how two volunteers who've never worked together, don't work in the same company aren't getting paid? How do they put together a conference? Oh, and by the way, even when there is a template for a conference to follow, guess what COVID hits. Now you have to do a virtual conference as well. How does that actually happen? So we've we've asked bill over here for two reasons. One is to get you motivated, so that you will join the conference. The entity is a nonprofit organization, they need the money. But more importantly, you should be supporting an organization done by your peers. But I think more importantly, to for our listeners of our show, how does this stuff actually really happened? So don't? Where does it start? Where does it begin from? How do you decide that? What what topics you're going to cover?Bill Ball 12:53 A couple of ways. So so we we think about the theme. And there were a lot of foundational themes, when we all met together for the first time at the end of 2016. In, in Palm Beach. And then there were greater themes in that when we had our actual first conference in Dallas, where we were trying to just build foundations for this thing and talk about what happened, you know, with technology companies in 2008. Scott, you did a presentation on that. Howard, Dr. Howard over talked about the Dust Bowl, and how hiring more salespeople wasn't the answer. So there was all of this build and momentum of the need for sales enablement, in that first conference. So since we built on that, two conferences after one in Denver, and then one last year in San Antonio, this year, we had originally planned to talk about the forward momentum, meaning a lot of our practitioners are growing up, we talked to our members, that's how we find out we don't start with the technology and say this is how you do sales and eight, when we talk to our managers, we see what are our practitioners, we see what's happening in our chapters. And what a lot of us, a lot of them were telling us was, you know what, I'm starting to expand beyond my army of one, you know, I'm starting to build out my team. What does that look like? What does forward momentum look like for me, and then there's some people at a at an even greater level that, that that are that are still looking for ways to scale. And you know, there's conversations of different types of enablement at this point, you know, I don't want to get into that too much. But But we, we have a huge audience. And so to do something memorable and experiential for them, we have to talk to them.Scott Santucci 14:43 Yeah, and I think part of the difficulty, at least from my experience, with regards to society, it's really hard to share what that experience is to other people. And that's what that's what that's the cause. If you will make makes all this work is it's not so much you don't go to the sales enablement society conference. For the speakers, even though the speakers are great, you go there to build the connections that you need, and to be able to have honest conversations with other people so you can do your job better. Was that? Is that what you're what you're after bill? So how do we give more insight of what happens behind the closed doors?Bill Ball 15:29 It's, it's, it's exactly what I'm after. And that's something that nobody told me. You know, nobody gets told that. I mean, maybe I'm saying it and you're saying it now, Scott, but nobody says that. I'm in the sales enablement society. You find that out, you figure that out, you discover it. When I went to our first founding meeting, back in 2016, started to take us back there again, but it was a big year. I got to meet people that I'd heard on podcast before like Daniel West, right. So like, Who's elevated to a huge role in Australia now? I'm sure mon batcher. Officer. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's massive, right? So So Siobhan Satcher, who she you know, a lot of people know shavon. But when I met her guys, she was an army of one. Yeah. Now she is a major Orchestrator Vp at ringcentral. With with lots of successful sales named leaders underneath her.Scott Santucci 16:27 So Palm Beach meeting that people will recognize. So Mario was there, right?Bill Ball 16:33 Mario was there. Bob Britton was there? Giuliana Stan can pianos there? You me and Brian were there. We hadBrian Lambert 16:44 to think Who was there? Niccolo BrianBill Ball 16:46 Cole O'Brien was there Raul Gupta was there. A lot of all of our original founding castle there Michael Abadi. It was one who was um, who also just took took a new role. He's heading up a region, I believe doctors,Brian Lambert 16:59 the doctors were there. Peterson,Scott Santucci 17:02 Michael avani. That was his first experience. Yes. He's a board member as well. He was at this he was at meeting the doctors, right. Yeah. So that one of the doctors. So Dr. Dover, a lot of you guys know, actually the sales name was society donated a large sum of money in that first conference to pay his foundation because they were doing the most work. And were offered to host the first conference, then we have been also, Dr. Peterson. Peterson is leading one of the roundtables.Bill Ball 17:43 Yeah, it's so tying that back to what you're talking about Scott. I don't just hear Daniel west on a podcast anymore. I reach out to him. You know, my 5050 and call a friend right now is pretty awesome. Um, and and it is 100% of the sales success, do the sales enablement society. And and why that's important is not just okay, I have awesome connections. It's because we're navigating an evolving profession together. And who wants to be Sisyphus and push a rock up a hill by themselves, you know, so but by being a part of these experiences, and it's one thing to be a member, right, and join and be on our message board and that kind of thing. But by being a part of these experiences, you get to know these people. And if you get to know...

Laying the foundation is critical to Sales Enablement Orchestrators. Laying the foundation is a foundational step to create the survival kit for an enablement leader. It's absolutely mandatory for the enablement leader.In this episode, we're joined by Tamara Schenk. Tamara talks with us about the blueprint Sales Enablement Orchestrators need to create with all teams and roles that are involved. Laying the foundation requires approval by senior executives so that this is your blueprint you're going to achieve.Laying a foundation is not an exercise you do for somebody else, it's not something you you do for finance or controlling. And it's definitely not filling out a form. That's the absolute the last step, when you put all the pieces together. It's a creative process of creating the blueprint you need in your organization, in your context, where you're currently at to achieve your goals. You You have to achieve an enablement to meet your company's sales objectives.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 00:35  Brian Lambert, 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 companiesScott 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 more important, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:01  Our focus is on you as sales enablement leaders and orchestrators as an orchestrator, you need to be able to blend both strategy and tactics in order to execute. Our goal on this show is to help clarify the metrics of success, provide examples of what that looks like, and give you confidence to engage up down and across the organization. As always, we start with a centering story, Scott, what do you have for us today?Scott Santucci 01:25  Okay, so today's centering story, the timeframe on this is 1400 1400. Okay, got it. It was it was it was imagine that a little imagine that in 1400. And Florence, the Republic of Florence commissioned a whole bunch of sculptors, because to celebrate, hey, you know, we're done with the plague. I thought this was a little time, like, given where we are today. Maybe some wishful thinking with maybe, maybe co it would be over. Yeah. And one of the people who was commissioned one of the sculptors that was commissioned is someone we've talked about on the show before Brian, who mightBrian Lambert 02:05  have a, I don't know, we've talked about so many Italians for some reason.Unknown Speaker 02:12  I know a lot of times, um,Brian Lambert 02:16  my favorite though, was vilfredo Pareto.Scott Santucci 02:19  So his tamaraws that's a little foreshadowing. Okay. Uh, well, it's one that you brought upBrian Lambert 02:27  to Vinci. Oh, Which one is that? Oh, um, I don't know. I can't remember. Man. You stuck in me. I love it. So it's 55 shows in man,Scott Santucci 02:37  the lipo Bruna.Unknown Speaker 02:41  Rinna leschi. There you go.Scott Santucci 02:43  That's right. So he actually started out as an engineer, and you brought it up in your podcast about perspective, right back divx. But, so he didn't have perspective at this time in 1400. Well, he didn't. concept of perspective, obviously, we all have a perspective,Brian Lambert 03:00  right? I think he just didn't put it on paper and make machines around it yet.Scott Santucci 03:03  So in 1400, he was just a sculptor, and the sculpting. He wanted to make it more and more real. So we developed the concept of, of a perspective. But I think one of the things that people don't realize about him is he's considered the father of modern architecture. And if you go back and think about the Duomo, if you know anything about Florence, there's this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Duomo. And it's the largest dome that had been built since the antiquity since the senate says the largest dome ever built. And it's a big, big, big, significant event, in terms of architecture construction. And one of his biggest innovations that hadn't been done before, was the creation of drawings, or what are now called what are called technical technical diagrams, which a lot of us today refer to as blueprints. So if he hadn't have done that, it would have been very impossible to break down the work to describe the machines required to build this innovation to help get everybody coordinated, dare I say, orchestrated? In order to do that. So there's a whole bunch of things that we have. And Bruno lasky is considered the father of modern engineering, of planning, construction, super construction, supervision, all of these things he did. And he started out as a sculptor, he had to develop the concept of perspective in order to create this, this amazing masterpiece, which a lot of people call is, you know, sort of the birthplace of you know, the the Renaissance. You can't really put a pinpoint on it, but from an architectural standpoint is a big difference between the dark ages and where we are today. It's a very pivotal moment.Brian Lambert 04:59  All right, there you go. So what? So whatScott Santucci 05:05  does that have to do with sales enablement? Well, the reason it has something to do with sales enablement is in today in today's modern world, have you ever wondered, how is it that a company can assemble a whole bunch of laborers together, that many of them aren't even college educated, can pull all those people together. And they can build a building or build a house really, really quickly, with a lot of changes that are being made to beat to the spec of different people, and everybody has their own lens and their own perspective, and this thing gets built, right hva see works, the electricity works, the laborers know what to do, because things are coded and diagrammed out. You can hire individual contractors to do to do that work, all of it, is because it's orchestrated to be to these, these construction designs. And the reason that this is important. And one of the things that we're going to talk about on this show today is how important it is to have a charter and really envision what your charter really is, what your mission is, what's your what's your focus, what foundations are you laying, because ultimately, we have to move out of the dark ages with how we're doing with sales in a way and have a Renaissance period of where we think differently. And that's really what we want to talk about today.Brian Lambert 06:28  Awesome. That's great. Well, I'm excited to talk about this. And I know we have a very special guest on the show today. Scott, why don't you introduce her?Scott Santucci 06:37  So I'm very excited. So our guest today is Tamra shank, and Tamra and I go but way back also with with with you, Brian Tamra was one of the members of the sales enablement Leadership Council that we had put together at Forrester. And when I met Tamra, she was the she was in charge of the energy vertical at at t systems. And she was so frustrated with the amount of materials provided for provided for for sales, she got she developed this concept that she called spot on, which was a content based way to to address some of these challenges. And she actually moved from being in the business unit into running sales enablement. So what I love about Tamra story is that she's got a different entry point than a lot of us a lot of us a lot of our sales enablement members come from training or come from the field, a few of them come from marketing, not too many come from come from business unit background. So tamaraws perspective is so interesting and fascinating. And one of the things that I talk to her a lot about is we got to get more, we have to do a lot better job of making sure people realize where you came from, and why you advocate the things that you do. The other thing that I'm really excited about, Tamra Joyner show a lot of people know or a lot of people have read her blogs, and many of many of the people have read her book, and her book is a great way to have a foundation. So, Tamra, how did you how did you arrive here on the show to give us a little bit of background about our relationship? And you know what, why are you here today?Unknown Speaker 08:19  Yeah, so what a great story. Opening story from yours. Scott, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I mean, you're basically in touch over the last 10 years. And yeah, I'm following the podcast is for me, it's always hard to make the time to really sit down and listen to an hour podcast or so. So whenever I am in the car, and I'm going to see my mother it is two hours one way and two hours back, then I take the time to catch up with the inside on a podcast. And I have to say what I love a lot about it is that podcast provides different perspectives looks at the same issue from different perspectives, different roles, discusses different concepts and principles people can apply. And I think this is especially in our fast moving world rarely where change in volatility is, is the normal thing, the normal state of doing things, it's very important to understand basic principles so that we can apply them in every situation. I think this is especially important for any person who is in any kind of enablement role. So this is why I reached out to you what, what we frequently do and so this is I think how I got here today.Scott Santucci 09:45  Yes. So one thing that you'll know as an insider nation, we want you to come up with with ideas. So Tamra sent us an email about I think was the the one that we did and Systems Thinking recently and and, you know, then it triggered a lot of past conversations that we had is thatUnknown Speaker 10:06  vilfredo Pareto. That's right, my favorite.Scott Santucci 10:10  So there's always going to be something. So it's interesting, whether it's the centering story that gets us like, oh, or whether it's what what the conversation was. But what we want to do is encourage you to just shout out like, Hey, here's what's resonating with me, here's what you think, then I'm going to contact you. And then we're going to put together when we say, hey, let's do a show. And the show that we're going to talk about here is laying foundations. And one of the things that I know about Tamra that is near and dear to her heart, is the idea of a charter. So talk to me about why a charter is so important. And then hold on. Before we do that. Audience, I'm going to ask you to do something here. Don't roll your eyes. Stop it. Just listen for a second. Because a charter is not a shopping list of a bunch of tasks to go do. Oh, it's not that. What is it, Tamra?Unknown Speaker 11:05  To me, it's a survival kit for an enablement leader. So it's absolutely mandatory for the enablement leader. So if you're in that role, you want to have that blueprint for yourself, that has been created with all teams and roles that are involved, that's approved by senior executives so that this is you, blueprint, you're going for it. So it's it's not an exercise you do for somebody else, it's not something you you do for finance or controlling. And it's definitely not filling out a form. That's the absolute the last step, when you put all the pieces together. It's a creative process of creating the blueprint you need in your organization, in your context, where you're currently at to achieve your goals. You You have to achieve an enablement to meet your company's sales objectives.Scott Santucci 12:11  So let's unpack this a little bit together. So if I'm listening, I might think a blueprint. Wow, that sounds really heavy technical diagram and everything like that. What I just heard you say earlier on tamaraws, we got to be principles and dealing with a rapidly changing world. How does a document do that I think about a charter is just a document. what actually is, what what does that mean? What is the charter? And how does that help me lay a foundation for being successful.Unknown Speaker 12:42  I mean, it's first of all, a really a living document, I would call it a living asset. So I would look at it this way, for everything you do in life, if you don't take the time, and get into an acceptance mode, and assess where you currently are, and are really honest on where you currently are, then you cannot map out where you want to go. And only if you have this point A in this point B you can say okay, this is where we're at, this is what we need to do, in order to achieve a certain goal and all the journey in between, that's a journey, you can't win alone, you can't walk it alone, you have to do it in an enablement role, always with other team members. And to map this out, so that actually everyone knows at the end of the day, what to do and how to do it is the creative process and laying out the steps and then also the principles how you want to work together. So this is how I would look at this. So it really helps you because you will always run into situations that I had. This was a couple of clients this year. You know what we we've had a charter and some really had done great Berg and great efforts and beginning of the year, then coverted and everyone was getting into panic mode. And then all the great ideas and strategies for set apart. And then how should I call it? You call about Productitis is this action tonight is how should we call this? You know, it's just audit in it when stuff to do stuff sake? Yeah, it is exactly it's so we just want to show that we do things that we take action, whatever it is, but we have taken action. And then the strategies the way we do maybe before back into patterns we we've had in the past we know they're actually not not working very well. But we showed Hey guys, we showed that we have taken action. And this is rather difficult. I'm currently working with clients to help them to work with their senior executives to get back on You know what the crisis mode was actually not so very successful, we still have done the same basic challenges. So let's map out how we could actually get back on track and really tackle them in in a more effective way.Scott Santucci 15:14  Yeah, I think one of the things that comes to mind and i'd love your reaction to this, what comes to mind is that quote by Einstein is what's the definition of insanity, doing the same things over again and expecting a different result? And I think what, what what you're talking about here, and the way that this is relating to me, is a charter is really the opportunity that you have to talk through or write down or codify some way. So it doesn't need to be just a Word document. It could be PowerPoint, shoot, it can be hieroglyphics and pictures, whatever works for you. Yes, but really, the idea is, we need to write down here is our problem. Let's make sure people understand what our real problem is, we're not chasing symptoms, here is the nucleolus, or the the enabling capability we have to develop. And then here's the sequence of events that we need to lay it out so that we get forward momentum, and we can fix the plane while it's flying. That's that's what I'm hearing from you. And that if you don't have that documented, or clarity of thought, clarity, I'm using that word on purpose for you, I'm setting you up.Unknown Speaker 16:24  I see that.Scott Santucci 16:27  But that that clarity of purpose, then it's almost impossible to galvanize and really orchestrate all the resources around you. That's that's what I'm taking from that. Is that right? Is that what you're laying down? Or how would you add to that?Unknown Speaker 16:42  Yeah, so it did, the clarity is really very, very important, especially in the beginning. So if I don't know where I'm at, I have a hard time, you know, to to even define a departure point for all my team members and collaboration partners, I want to start on this journey. So I really need to know where I'm at. So if I can map this out where I'm at, we will all start at different at different stages and rollout will come together. So we want to make sure that we can take everyone on the hike on that journey together. That is why clarity on where you're at right now is really key to success. And then the clarity on the point of the project. What does it really mean, as you said, Scott, it's about or what is the real problem you're having. And I think this is for enablement. Teams dealing with different business units, different senior executives, that all have different agendas really challenging, which is why I'm saying this is your survival kit throughout the year. Because in that role, I mean, Scott, you know that I mean, there is not a single week, when somebody will come into your office now call you or zoom you and tell you, you know, I need this. And I need that. And what you've done here is great, but we need it differently because we are so special. So if you don't have this survival kit, your child or business plan, whatever you call it, this blueprint, this structure, then you can say, Oh great, by the way this is on this is on our agenda, maybe in a month from now on or no, sorry, but this has not been prioritized, you're not going to do it right now. Or we map it to the current situation, maybe there were changes we reflected. But then you have a foundation from where you can actually do it. Otherwise you will be moved around from left to right and back to the left and and so on. And you will do a ton of stuff you will be extremely busy without without achieving anything. That's the danger Roman enablement is run into. And then they have a hard time to actually show it. This was the business to sell we were impacting. And then you have a crisis like COVID or whatnot. And then a finance guy comes around the corner and says, do we need these guys?Scott Santucci 19:06  Right? Yes. So let me there was so much there that I went on, unpack a lot of these things to help you our listener relate to them. So one thing, that pattern. So one of the challenges that's difficult for a lot of us to think about is more or less like a story arc. And then when we're in sales enablement, we have to be thinking about the end in mind. And...

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 programsCreating Routes to ValueOrchestration across the organizationDefining what "good" looks like with SalesEPISODE 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'tBrian 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 youBrian 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...

Are you embracing real-world reality? What is the impact of change on your customer’s conversations right now?Think about it: Are best practices really going to help you move forward when those practices were built and defined before COVID? Who really KNOWS the customer today and what are you going to do about it?Join Louis Jonckheere - President and Co-Founder of Showpad, a leading sales enablement messaging platform - as he talks about the ingredients of successful message enablement initiatives, the buy-in required to get results, and what it takes to gain a broader perspective – to elevate and improve messaging. He also talks about what it means to be customer-centric in a COVID-impacted world.Topics include:Why perspective mattersThe evolution of the sales enablement marketUsing technology to improve the quality of sales conversationsBeing a leader with the courage to act and engageThe impact of COVID on “Best practice”What it means to be customer-centricAdditional Resources:The Commercial RatioWatch the Sales Enablement Is at a Cross Road Webinar ON DEMANDJoin us at Showpad's Transform2020 Virtual Conference Oct. 1-2 to learn more about the future framework of sales enablement EPISODE TRANSCRIPTIntro 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 00:34  I'm Scott Santucci,Brian Lambert 00:36  I'm Brian Lambert, we're 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, issues as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way, what works and maybe what's more important, what doesn'tBrian Lambert 01:00  Right now our focus is on you as a sales enablement leader and orchestrator who operates in the in the gap between strategy and tactics and was blend those together to drive outcomes. Our goal is to help you clarify what works and also clarify the measures of success so you can engage up down and across your organization. As always, we start with a centering story, Scott, what do you have for us?Scott Santucci 01:24  Okay, well, here's our centering story. Have you ever heard of Gregor Johann Mendel?Brian Lambert 01:31  No.Scott Santucci 01:33  Well, if you were in the genetics business, you would definitely would know who this is. Gregor Johann Mendel was actually a friar, a church friar,Brian Lambert 01:45  Like Robin Hood,Scott Santucci 01:47  from the Augustinian sect. And between 1856 and 1863. He did a lot of experiments with pea plants, pea plants and what he would do is he would observe these pea plants, I guess when you're, I guess when you're a friar, you have to do a lot of soul searching and maybe you're not allowed to talk. So you occupy yourself with making good observations and the like. But what he would do is he would watch his pea plants grow, and he would chart make lots of very detailed observations on plant height, their shape and their color, the shape of the seed and the color of the seeds, their flowering positions in color. And I bet an 1856 a lot of people thought this guy was crazy what the heck are you doing, that's a lot of data to be collecting about stuff that's growing. But the major, the major aha that happened here was towards the end, he made this observation that when he would pair or mate, bring together pea plants that had yellow seeds, versus ones that had green seeds 100% of the time. The ones with the Yellow seeds would be the ones that were dominant. So they would produce more and more yellow seeded pea plants. So that was pretty interesting. He came up with this idea of recessive and dominant traits of based of an observation. And that work didn't get picked up for 30 years later. And then what happened then is that became the boom of what we now know is genetics. And today that's gone so far is that a pharmaceutical company can take can extract an enzyme from you, Brian, and they own the intellectual property of that because they've done the extraction even though you're you biologically produced it. That's how far we've come with genetics in a relatively short, short timespan. And we have this guy, Gregor Johann Mendel, who made lots and lots and lots of observations to help us through that.Brian Lambert 03:52  There you go. That's awesome. And I think friars are also the ones that came up with beer but I'm not sure maybe they came through the same process of Lots and lots and lots of trial and error. But I got to ask you, so what?Unknown Speaker 04:06  So what!?!!Brian Lambert 04:09  So what does that have to do with sales enablement?Scott Santucci 04:12  So so why would that has to do with today's theme and today's Today's topic is really where is sales enablement heading. And we have this belief inside businesses to follow best practices, and we rarely question where those best practices come from. So we have a tendency to repeat the same things over and over and over again and there's a quote that I love from Mark Twain. It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. So with that, what we want to highlight and I'm interested, I'm really excited to share with our special guest is, as most of our listeners know, we've taken on the biggest amount and the most in depth post COVID research about where sales where sales enablment is going, as you know, we did over 100 surveys, we interviewed 43 people. We've done six panel conversations, all of which you can go back and listen to today and watch those observations from the plants and how things are growing. And we've done four high quality webinars. And what I'm what I had the luxury to do is I got the chance to interview several of the CEOs of the leading technology companies and joining us is Louie, I'm not even going to try to pronounce your last your last name you can do it for us who's the president and founder of Showpad, Louis, would you care to introduce yourself?Louis Jonckheere 05:36  Absolutely, Scott and thanks for inviting me for this podcast so it's Louis Jonckheere, but it's it's I mean, it's impossible to pronounce in English. It's "john care" is fine. But But yeah, I mean, I have a running joke in the company with our with our team in the US that if they pronounce my name correctly, they get access to president's Club by default and so far, that never happened. So, but great to be here. So Founder and President of Showpad started the company a bit over nine years ago. I mean, we've been in the market have seen sales enablement evolve from very small tactical program in a sales or marketing organization to becoming a real platform for change in revenue and the market today so super excited to be here.Scott Santucci 06:20  I'm excited toBrian Lambert 06:21  have Sorry to interrupt but I got it as is so as Louis is he a pea plant or what is he on this analogy that you've brought in?Scott Santucci 06:29  He's a fellow friar,Brian Lambert 06:31  He's a fellow friar. Okay, awesome.Scott Santucci 06:34  I'd never call a guest but as a fellow friar, what we wanted to connect the dots to is having been a participant in that research. What was really great about Louis is just how engaged he got in the process, and how fun our conversations have been and it's so rare for any, any market to get the perspective Have a seat have a executive leader, president of a company. And what we have to keep in mind is think of the things that that Louie has to keep in mind. He's got investors, he's has to make happy, which of course want more money from you. He's got customers that he needs to make happy. And he needs to think about what what the products and services, the combinations of products and services are that are needed. And we really connected a lot in terms of the research process and really identified that there's a really fantastic opportunity for a sales enablement to lead some some big transformations. And that's that's really the conversation or the connection point that that I wanted to share. So with that, as a segue, we have a few talking points to get into. Louis. So what did you think of the post COVID research that we did? Why were you so engaged with it?Louis Jonckheere 07:56  Yeah, I mean, because I think there's some first of all I like I think any any industry needs solid research to understand what's happening and where trends are going. So So research is super important. I think, given the current times anything, there's like two big events that are coming together. I think on the one hand, you obviously have the pandemic, who really changed drastically how businesses think about engaging their customers about how they go to market about their value proposition. So I think on the one hand that is really shaking up the world and businesses as we know it, so it's a perfect timing, to understand or to research, what what changes is triggering and because there's definitely change out there in the market, but like, what is it exactly, and I think measuring that researching that is super important. And then secondly, I think specifically to sales enablement. Like we already we're at the point where like sales enablement is undergoing a drastic transformation and I think what a COVID definitely showed is our strengths, the weaknesses and the opportunities For sales enablement as we know, and so taking that perspective, your research is extremely important for discovery.Scott Santucci 09:07  So one of the things then is to put some context around that. Do you think that COVID was in upon itself, an event to respond to, or did this highlight and exasperate fundamental changes that were already occurring and it just exposed them?Louis Jonckheere 09:26  It exposed, for example, it exposed how badly organized revenue organizations are in companies and exposed how board messaging is of many companies out there it exposed how bore alignment there is between sales and marketing service and customer success organization. So I think it highlighted what many of us already were seeing. And I think it's overall a really good thing for this industry. But yes, it exposed what sales enablement is trying to or will eventually change.Scott Santucci 09:57  So I think that's really important because What Louis has the luxury of being able to do is to look at a market in its, in its totality, like in a wholeism standpoint. And most of our listeners work inside companies. So we work in individual departments. So we see maybe different colored glass of the stained glass window, and Louis has the opportunity to see the entire stained glass window. And he's got, you know, individual customers to highlight to. So if if the sales enablement market is going through a shape shake up or transformation, or whatever you want to call it, what do you see? Let's give some descriptors to that. Let's make it more tangible.Louis Jonckheere 10:42  Absolutely. I mean, if you look at sales enablement, in the last I would say like, like 10 years, I think that about 10 years ago, that's when the term sales enablement practice started to become a thing. I would say like like to just simplify it either started from a marketing team or Content team saying like, Hey, we need to have a better way to deliver content to a sales team to make them more productive. Or it came from a training department that said, like, Look, we need to make our sales training much more tailored. It's much more micro much more effective. And, and lots of companies out there if you ask them what sales enablement is, and most of the scenarios, you will either hear a golden story, or you will hear a training story. And that is, how it how it evolved, or how it started studying. And in the last 10 years, I think we're now seeing a change happening. And I think like that is exactly what COVID highlights. I mean, for a customer, there's no sales per customer. There's no marketing team. There's no services team. There's the company they're doing business with. And I think we're going to see with sales enablement that it is not going to start from "hey, I want to solve a content problem" or "I want to solve a training problem." No, it's about making sure that you can have as many qualitative engagements orchestrated with your customer as possible that really drive growth that drive success and I think the big change we're going to see is that sales enablement will start from the customer. And I have a strong belief that that sales enablement platform that sales enablement technology should start with listen to what the customer is saying. And a lot of the engagement we have today is virtual and virtual meetings, email, virtual collaboration. And I think if marketing, if sales enabled the screening messaging, if they're creating content, that it all starts with building that message, building that content based on real customer conversations, I think there's a lot of opportunity for organizations to start to craft their value propositions, their messaging their content, in a very strong way on what they hear from customers. And then in the past, I mean, this has been a huge challenge and a lot of companies talked about this right. Like you asked me the question in one of our first conversations, like, who really knows the customer? Yeah, yeah, very little executives out there own the customer and like not many companies truly understand what their customers is saying. So, remember that was a great discussion we had Scott.Scott Santucci 13:03  Yeah, I and I wish that this were a video so that we could show the whiteboarding that we definitely get into but let me help paint a picture a mental picture if you're listening. Yes. So I love let's, let's start start with the origin. So 10 years ago, so the origin story of our hero's journey, right? A sales enablement, professional starts off as, hey, you've been tapped on the back to go fix something broken. These are my words. This is the way that I describe it. It's very similar to the way Louis depicted it, which is, Hey, I'm tapping on the shoulder, something's broken. And we're going to fix a misalignment between say sales and human resources that typically deals around with training, probably onboarding, or learning how to sell the value, something like that. Another top on the shoulder is it's in marketing, and, boy, we're really frustrated that no salespeople aren't using our wonderful content, let's create a mechanism, sort of a cable set box, if you will, for programming to distribute all that content. So it evolved in a very tactical way. Now we fast forward to 2020. And COVID has exposed a lot of synapse problems that we've been glossing over, because our organizations are so siloed. And our customers that we're selling to, particularly with b2b and broad product portfolios, don't really care about our silos. They don't care about marketing, they don't care about sales, they don't care about they want results. And they want Wait, they want you to combine the various capabilities that you've got into something that's more valuable. So that's, that's something that we see. And I think we really, we really bonded a lot on that. So that's sort of the history part.Are we on the same page there I want to get to the next part, which is, what is customer centric centered, really mean? Louis Jonckheere 15:00  I mean, we're definitely on the same page. And I mean, I think good customer centricity for me means that I think, first of all, I starting to understand like, like high level how the customer has changed, right? Like in general, what are their expectations when they're engaging with the company. And I think one of the the keywords that I mean, we've been talking about, which show that over the last eight, nine years, like customers are looking for convenience, it needs to be easy to do business with you, it needs to be valuable to engage you need to learn something, I think, and that's interesting when it didn't, and we're going to highlight this in our transform customer conference, in October is empathy is going to be something customers are also increasingly going to demand from the companies they engage with. And I think like that is definitely something that COVID that definitely surfaced, so convenience, value, empathy, and you need to enable your commercial organization to deliver that at scale. And that's really where where sales enablement Revenue enablement growth enablement, wherever you want to call it as well.Scott Santucci 16:03  So this is where I want us to start walking really slow together. So I agree with everything that that Louis shared. I think the difficulty that we have is step number one, and this is what Louis is going to do a great job of focusing on for us is, let's make sure that we have the right technical platform that can pull many of these content assets together, that can be mass configured based on the need that the salesperson identifies to match with a scenario of a customer. Right, that's sort of like a technical design that somebody needs to have instead of just buying piecemeal, individual parts. Is that fair, Louis? Because I want to get into some of the other parts, but I'll just make sure that I'm speaking for you correctly.Louis Jonckheere 16:50  Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I would say like one of the key pillars of sales enablement is really that as an organization, you have the technology that allows sellers to access extremely easily find the stuff they need to engage with the customer gives them the tools to personalize and ultimately deliver value to the customer. So like that is one of the firmaments of sales enablement. Absolutely.Scott Santucci 17:12  Yeah. So one of the things that we've got to...

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 56The close of the 19th century found Samuel Pierpoint Langley and Orville and Wilbur Wright in a competition to create a powered and controllable flight. Langley worked with a lot of government support and enormous public exposure, while the Wright brothers worked quietly using their own resources.Langley built a monolithic 54-foot-long flying machine had two 48-foot wings -- one in front and one in back. It was launched from a catapult on the Potomac River in October of 1903 and it fell like a sack of potatoes into the water.Just nine days later, the Wright brothers flew a trim little biplane, with almost no fanfare, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their advantage? They'd mastered the problem of controlling the movement of their plane by focusing on the environment in which they operated. Windy, uncontrolled, volatile, requiring the plan to harness those conditions.The results were remarkable, and as they say, the rest is history.In this episode, we're joined by Amy Benoit. An Orchestrator who is also focused on harnessing the often volatile, uncertain, and complex environment that salespeople operate within. While many (most?) organizations build out their monolithic sales engines with overlays, technology, and management support, Amy focuses on working "light and lean" to get moving and get results.There's a lesson in this episode for all of us, what do you think?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 00:34  I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:35  I'm Brian Lambert. We're 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 companiesScott Santucci 00:48  together, Brian and I've worked in 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 important What doesn't,Brian Lambert 01:01  and our focus is on you as a sales enablement leader and orchestrator, as you know, sales enablement, leaders need to really operate in the gap between strategy and execution. And blend those tactics and strategies together to be mission and goal focused. prioritizing the right goals at the right moments, guiding the narrative by confronting reality, to drive results by design and not effort, so that you can unlock energy and create momentum by catalyzing change through collaboration. That's our list of what it takes to be a great orchestrator. And you heard about that on an earlier episode. On this podcast, we're gonna start with a centering story, just like we usually do, and I'm gonna hand it over to Scott and then we'll introduce our guests. Scott, what do you have for us?Scott Santucci 01:46  Okay, I love this, this centering story. So if you don't like it, or if people don't like it, so what i love it and you know, it's partially my podcast too. So I'm gonna start out with this. So First of all to give everybody a little bit of hint we're starting. We're starting out our story in the late 1860s. And have you ever heard Brian or Amy have someone named Samuel Pierpont Langley? Samuel PierpontBrian Lambert 02:15  Langley Air Force Base? Yeah.Scott Santucci 02:17  So what does that? Tell me more about it. What is Langley sound like?Brian Lambert 02:24  The Air Force Base? Yes. There's an Air Force Base named after him.Scott Santucci 02:28  That's right. And also there's Langley Virginia where the CIA's headquarters.Brian Lambert 02:34  Yeah, that's right.Scott Santucci 02:35  So there's a lot actually named after Langley. That's That's because of Samuel Pierpont Langley. And Samuel Pierpont Langley, Langley. He his story. We'll get to how this how this matters here in a minute because it's pretty interesting. In the 1860s, he took over the Allegheny observe Observatory in Pittsburgh, they were completely broke. It pretty much didn't have any working materials and by 1868 He'd raised funding together, he'd done a lot of analysis and came up with the Allegheny time system. Around this time as you guys, as everybody knows, the railroad industry is exploding. And one of the things that was really difficult is how do you tell time. So he devised a really hyper accurate timing system that he would use the telegraph to dispatch at the morning and at night, the exact timetables that were used to run all the trains. And that became a profit center for the Allegheny observatory between 1868 and 1883, when the US government took that over and had taxpayers funded, so that's pretty smart. Then he went on to do to keep doing that, that research and then he won the top astrophysics awards in the US and in France in 1886 and 1889, respectively. And here's where the story becomes very interesting. And then we're going to hear hear about some people everybody knows about In 1896, he created the first steam powered glider over the Potomac. He had a steam engine, it was the first sort of unmanned propulsion unit. And the government. He had friends like by this time Alexander Graham Bell took a picture of this you can go find this on the on the internet took a picture of this photo in 1896. Andrew Carnegie was also his friend by this time in 1896. He was the head of the Smithsonian Institute, which a lot of people heard about. And the opportunity of creating manned flight was really a big deal. So he got he raised $70,000. And if this is before 1900, so if you adjust for inflation, that's basically a $2 million Seed Fund, you know, if you will, to get flight. He hired a bunch of teams of other people who are similarly well represented. In what well respected to him, but was he the first person to fly? No, no. the Wright brothers were and In contrast, the Wright brothers are two guys out of Dayton, Ohio. Neither of them have a college education. None of the people worked on it were college education, and they had zero dollars, yet. They were the first people to fly to create a man play a flat plane and fly it successfully. And one of the kinter interesting things about this and where this pertains heavily to our Stuart's story. What Langley did is do all these flights on the Potomac River, he created a launching device actually like a sort of like a mini aircraft carrier. And the reason he was doing on the in the Potomac is that the the woods and everything around it, he could control the environment as best he could. Whereas the Wright brothers used the design point of having a lot of wind and One of the things that was really important to them is making sure that they could have the gears to adjust and make the flight adapt to the to the weather. And that turned out to be the critical success factor because aerodynamics are so unpredictable that you need to be able to create tools for it. And that's not something that Samuel Langley factored in. So basically, with $2 million, a star studded cast, a guy who's got a incredible success track record behind them, with a lot of great science behind it and great minds, was beaten out by a bunch of guys who were bike mechanics, who really just worked on confronting the complexity and repeating it, repeating it and repeating it. That's our story.Brian Lambert 06:46  Great story. I love that. And also just a little tidbit on that that I remember is, the Wright brothers actually figured out how to operate on three axes. And that's why because there's little adjustments you're talking about, not just two up and down. Left and Right, they had to figure out the third axis. And that's what one of the one of the little things that made it work. But that's a great story that I remember I got to ask so. So what what the heck does that have to do with sales enablement?Scott Santucci 07:15  So what? Well, here's what we're getting. Here's how it ties together. One of the things that we're talking about is Stratecution. And we've been talking about this concept of Stratecution for some time. And one of the things when we think about strategy is we think about, hey, let's hire in a Bain and McKenzie or people like that to go do the studying. And certainly on a sheet of paper, if we were betting people, most of us if we were forced to bet, we would probably would have bet on Lange Lee's team instead of the Wright brothers team. The issue is what the Wright brothers did, that the Langley team didn't do was lean in on the complexity and Tinker and Tinker and constantly widdle and change And make rapid adjustments in day to day, based on specific observations by leaning into the complexity. And that's really what we're talking about here is that's really the role of orchestration is being able to think strategically. So in other words, have a vision of what you want to do. At this point in time, no one in the world had created manned flight flight apparatus. However, in order to make it work, you have to be on the ground doing the work, and balancing between both of those different points. So that's really what our what our goal is of how do we make this idea of Stratecution come to life? What is it Orchestrator do and how do you activate success?Brian Lambert 08:43  That's great. And to help us with that topic. We've got a special guest somebody who's living in that that space of Stratecution Orchestration and making it work. It's Amy Ben, wha How you doing Amy?Amy Benoit 08:55  Hey guys, I'm well, thank you for having me.Brian Lambert 08:57  Great. Thanks for being here. So let me interrupt. Do you see a little bit you and I go back to the CES conference in 2019, where you and I first met and we actually broke bread together at the sales hood meeting with Eli Cohen. And you and I talked there, we had Erich Starrett, with us and actually Scott was there as well. And he had his simpletest, jacket off, lab coat. And you and I chatted a little bit. And we've been in touch ever since. And we've been talking about the concept of activating a team, enrolling the strategic view with the executive team, and then cascading that down through the organization and across the organization to get the right people involved. So I'm glad you're here on the podcast with us to unpack these concepts. And can you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself?Amy Benoit 09:49  Sure, can. Thank you a couple of things just from your story. Langley is from just outside of Boston, Massachusetts, as my mind I am now Living in San Diego but born and raised natively to the Boston area. And similar to the Wright brothers, I would say one of my approaches to my work is leveraging experimentation. And I'm always trying to, as you said, Tinker, to make sure that we are doing things to create value. I'm, I'm a consultant I started a business a couple years ago and helping executives make decisions. And once we have those priorities, making them into reality as fast as possible. I've learned over the years that if you state the obvious and create some action oriented plans and you get the buy in from the right people, you really can create the energy to move and make momentum for those plans that you need in place. I help organizations operate to scale and more smoothly. And it's really fun to do. I always say that I'm a persistent person who believes in ambitious goals. And if, if you hire me, I provide you with this impetus, if you're a dreamer to kind of stop dreaming and just do it, and I think that oftentimes is, is the difference between getting things done and not just starting.Brian Lambert 11:29  That's certainly one of the things that I appreciate about you is that idea of engaging and getting things done. And so back to the centering story, when you think about flight, it's interesting, it seems simple. You get up in the air and you fly. But when you look at what it takes to figure that out, and I love the word tinkering, the Wright brothers did a lot of that tinkering. And they had to figure out things like how much you know, how do you provide the thrust? How do you provide the lift How do you, you know, make it light enough to get off the ground? And then as I mentioned, you know, this idea of how do you control three dimensions or three axes. So let's start with that centering story and the concept of tinkering. I'd love to hear from you, Amy. Just what are you tinkering with right now? And do you have any examples of of how you're you're in that space trying to figure it out to tackle that complexity and operate on multiple axes.Amy Benoit 12:25  Side note, I have flown in 1947 Cessna, which is completely off topic. But now that we're talking about planes, I feel like I need to sayBrian Lambert 12:34  that's the thing about planes if they, if you if you maintain them, they last a long, long time.Amy Benoit 12:40  That was a cool story. We can get back to that at the end. But my client right now I have a client that I'm working with, and I'm working to build continuous learning and sustain effectiveness in this organization. That's a big goal to take on. And something that is in need of a lot of advising and continual work. And if I, if I give you some background to this, I think it might help just from the terms of what I'm working with, particularly with this client, and we're get a little hairy. Sure. Um, at the beginning of this year, this particular business unit, and the whole company merged into a very public software company. And it wasn't determined until the end of q1 which ended in April for this fiscal year that they were going to actually remain within this larger organization and the business unit then at the beginning of May started to be able to create their go to market strategy and get financial metrics, goals and everything like this. And they brought me into partner with them to develop their go to market strategy and actually just build this culture of effectiveness. They wouldn't call it that we're calling it that. They just want their folks to hit their goals, a huge plan for me. And typically, you will have an annual kickoff or something with companies. There wasn't one this year because they passed the threshold of kickoff, and then there was the pandemic. So, we created a business unit kickoff, or what I'll call an off site, virtually, of course, we needed to, to figure out why we were doing this and the goals for the entire organization. First and foremost. And I think that's oftentimes where business leaders and people in general lose focus. You know, they're trying to kind of just tackle everything and anything that comes their way. And an enablement. And in life, a lot of folks lose traction because of this because they're just like, Alright, here's an open area, I hope something resonates, whatever it does, we're gonna, you know, lean on that and make it work. I had to pare back with the Vice President and really focus more on helping them see what the plan of attack was going to be. And focus in on that like laser sharp.Brian Lambert 15:48  So let me let me unpack this a little bit, right. So yeah, this situation where a lot of variables right so leaning into the reason this story is a bit of a proxy here. Going out and tinkering with, you know, we've got our, our leather helmets on the right, right brother style. And we're trying to figure this out. So we know what are the things that are known and a bit unknown. So we know that there's this need to either communicate or drive change with the sales team. Because the merger is happening. We know that there needs to be some sort of cascade of the strategy. It sounds like because of that, and then there's this idea of driving the the results and the y that you're you're alluding to, right, but then there's these variables like COVID, we're not going to be in person, we're going to have to figure out something else. And I can, I can imagine that there's a lot of questions in that, right. Is this a huge event where we strap everybody to chairs for three days is this, you know, a couple hours a day, you know, how do we adjust for these conditions and make this land right? So let's stay at that level. Tell us a little bit about How'd you guys go about figuring this out? And what did some of those conversations look like? Because I would imagine there's some tension there between. I've seen, you know, this idea of let's keep doing what we've always done and just moving all virtual, versus, to your point, driving the why,Amy Benoit 17:16  yeah. So if we go a layer above, and we figure out that the team has now set priorities, and one of the priorities is of course, hitting quota. However, we have a new business, we're in a whole new organization. So perhaps our life is staying the same, but the context around our life changes. And for this team, what that meant was the fear of the unknown and really, a need to understand does my messaging change part Understanding that and unpacking that, in this continuous learning effectiveness was to create a team off site. And that would do two things improve employee engagement. And I say that and I do also mean talent retention and also help you to as a sales organization hit your numbers because the messaging aligns the concept of going virtual we abdun flowed in and out of throughout the, the few weeks that we were planning this. Originally it was perhaps the leadership team will get together and everyone else will be virtual. We ended up doing a full complete virtual based off of the environment. And focused on just the content that we were delivering.Brian Lambert 19:06  Yeah, that makes sense. And if you want what I'm seeing in my mind's eye, you know, as we're thinking about this, it's there's balancing acts, or there's trade offs here, trading off or balancing the long term with the short term. In one, one situation, as you think about this, there's a need to move fast, at the same time be programmatic and not random, right? And then you're also really, there's this juxtaposition or this trade off between what the executives want to tackle versus what the reality of the reps are, where their heads are at, for example, and then you've got the time challenge, right? There's, we have we have a certain amount of time, how are we going to use that wisely. So those are, those are some of the things that you're alluding to here and this gap between strategy and tactics, because what I'm not Hearing is, hey, we need to do some sort off site. Let's go. Is it...

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 55Our focus is on you a sales enablement leader and orchestrator. In your role, you've got to be mission and goal-focused to drive results by design, not effort, unlocking energy, and creating momentum and catalyzing change through collaboration. In this episode, the guys are talking about utilizing social media to gather information and insight. Not with the purpose of amplifying what's already known, but rather, for the purpose of understanding different perspectives. A key concept of Orchestration.'In this episode, we're joined by Greg Smith, a long-time listener. He joins the show to talk about one of his most recent posts on "SDR bashing" and what happened when he posted, what he learned, and why the subsequent discussions were valuable.That's really what we want to talk about here is we have a great opportunity for an awesome topic that requires a good healthy exchange and conversation. When we think about digital, why are we treating it as a separate medium? Why are people using it to share information, instead of understanding different points of view?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 00:35  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, I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, issues as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way, what works and maybe what's more importantly, what doesn'tBrian Lambert 01:00  And our focus is on you the sales enablement leader and orchestrator, as you know, you've got to be mission and goal focused to drive results by design, not effort, unlocking energy and creating momentum and catalyzing change through collaboration. Those are just some of the attributes of being a great orchestrator. And as we continue to advance through COVID-19, we're having to do that a lot more digitally. It's a digital driven need for orchestrators. And that's what we're going to talk about today, the idea of digital environments and leveraging them to help us orchestrate success. And Scott, why don't you kick us off with the story and introduce our guest?Scott Santucci 01:42  Thanks, Brian. And we're not going to go back very far in history, because how far back in history can we go when we talk about digital environments, but we're going to do is maybe it's more of an anecdote. So in 2017, I started the sales enablement society. One of the things that was really interesting about that is it was all run on my cell phone and through LinkedIn. So the ways of engaging what I learned about how people engage, what the techniques are, etc, if you just sort of look at LinkedIn as a big collection, sort of like a conference, or you know, you go to a basketball game, and you want to talk to people in the stands, if you look at it that way, then use the rules of how you engage others. And that's really what we want to talk about here is we have a great opportunity for a awesome topic that requires a good healthy exchange and conversation. But I think one of the things is when we think about digital, why are we treating it as a separate medium? Why don't we look at it as just yet another way that we can have conversations with people. So that's our centering story.Brian Lambert 02:54  So, so what so so what does that have to Do the sales enablement.Scott Santucci 03:01  what it has to do with being an Orchestrator sales enablement and thriving in this, in this rapidly changing world is to find the sources of insight. The idea of taking quote unquote best practices and rolling out inside your company is almost silly right now. And this is why conversations are more important. And I think one of the things that's really fascinating is when you look at somebody posting something, or even somebody who's done a presentation, or a keynote presentation or like a webinar, there's always stuff to learn after the fact. And that's really what we want to do here is we've got Greg Smith joining us. And actually, what we've what we've got is a we're really picking up a conversation on LinkedIn, Brian, once you once you frame that out a little bit of knowledge, and then I'll introduce Greg more specifically.Brian Lambert 03:56  Yeah, that's great. So you guys were having a conversation and Greg started it and the title of his post was something like bashing SDRs is cheapening, LinkedIn and your own brand. And then he goes through and says, here's what I'm saying, here's what I'm seeing and basically wraps up the post with, hey, hashtag COVID coaching. We're all we're all new at one point, let's have some empathy for those starting out during tough times. And then, you know, my favorite part was the last line he had, which is SDRs need coaching, not humiliating. And I thought that was great. And this this was early on in the in the back and forth and Scott chimed in and said, hey, I've tried to do what you suggest. And basically, he gets many scathing curse word laden diatribes about what, uh, what a jerk. He is, and this is literally, you know, publicly in on LinkedIn. And so that now, here we are, I think about two weeks later in that and Greg has about 33,000 views on it and many, many likes and shares. So in that discussion, we said, hey, let's carry this forward over to the podcast. And to your point, Scott, this is a a medium in which a conversation is happening. What we want to do is use this as a bit of a case study for how to engage, how to enroll different perspectives. And then also, what's the value add here, because as many would agree, arguing back and forth adds little value. However, when you look at what's happening here on this post, there's something valuable going on and what is it so we're gonna bring in Greg, on this. And Greg, thanks so much for joining us here on the show. And also, you know, thanks for being transparent and just putting that out there. I would love for you to just share your background and and then why did you post what you did? And then what was your What was your angle on posting that?Unknown Speaker 05:53  Yeah, thanks for thanks for the intro. And thanks for having me today. It's good to join with you both. So my current role is Is to head up digital offerings for sales performance improvement company in partner based here in London with a well known virtual presence all around the world. Whereas we've had offices in the past. I've spent my whole career kind of why started out as an SDR at IBM. And I think that's kind of where the origin is my feelings game for that particular post. But since then, I've very much been at the intersection of sales, training and sales technology. And so for whatever reason, and that's just become Yeah, my forte, and I don't know, I think, you know, having worked from home all year and probably spent more time on LinkedIn because of that. And you know, a lot of people having a rough time, I just kept seeing people kind of just bashing on young salespeople or sharing screenshots of what they deemed to be a poor prospecting attempt and, and sharing that around. I just thought that that's really not helping, like right now. More than ever, I think people just need to kind of put all their ego and pride aside and just kind of help each other and get on with the job. Because, you know, we're kind of all in this together, I see our GDP in our recovery as sort of a joint quota for us all to be trying to attain, and I think we'd be better served helping each other.Brian Lambert 07:17  Yeah, that's great. Greg, and I, you know, let's not forget that there's actually buyers and potential prospects on LinkedIn, as well. So when the when the the sales community starts turning on its own and eating their young, so to speak, what does that say for the profession as a whole? Because, you know, LinkedIn is a huge platform. I mean, I'm not everybody knows that, I believe, right? If you do, so. This is an interesting, so you didn't, he didn't come back and call people out with your own screenshots. What was the angle on your post? You know, you're talking a little bit about something a little bit more aspirational or maybe just your point of view and you put it out there. Tell us a little about that. And then what happened?Unknown Speaker 07:59  You Yes, it was. I mean first, firstly, disclaimer, I don't purport to be some sort of expert on on these things. I just know whatBrian Lambert 08:07  isn't what an expert to post on LinkedIn though?Unknown Speaker 08:11  No, I don't know, I don't think so I think it should be for everyone. And I think you can learn something from everyone. So, yeah, I mean, I just posted I didn't expect such You're such a response to be honest. There was something like, as a well over 100 comments on there. So I've had to go through all of that. And it was all very positive. And if someone was challenging it was in the way Scott was in a really constructive manner, versus like, you know, what the hell's your problem now, all this kind of stuff. So I found it being really constructive. And whereas I probably sounded really down on LinkedIn just now I think that's, it served a really strong purpose there to kick off conversations and so yes, it was a little cheeky dig at some of the sort of self appointed, you know, quote unquote, gurus and all of that because, you know, I don't rebind to that, I think I think everyone has The right to, to chip in and help but um, yeah, yeah, it was a little cheeky dig but also just a friendly suggestion from my inexperience. Again, I'm just a 33 year old who spent, you know, a number of years in this space and just wanted to share a different perspective.Brian Lambert 09:14  Well, let me break this, this post down and then I'll get Scott's reaction because he posts a lot too. But you said you start with, hey, I've noticed an increase in gurus railing against STI. So you start with a personal observation. And then you in your next paragraph, you you kind of say look, you know, SDRs are working hard then then you say in a third paragraph, I was one. It's a hard job, it's a beating. And then you you subtly call for something, you know, a little bit more aspirational, which is I would be made way more impressed if if they shared a screenshot and then responding with some coaching points. Yeah, right, something a bit more positive and constructed and and then and then a challenge. Let's take LinkedIn from a shaming, like baiting dumping ground. Yes, you wrote that, yes. And then into a place of peer. So this is the, you know, hey, go forward and then and then you gave three suggestions, try this instead declined politely for some feedback, and then maybe even follow up with them and see how they're doing 30 days later, right. So that's the post in and of itself. Scott, what's your reaction to that? And then how would you How would you categorize what Greg did here?Scott Santucci 10:33  Well, I think it for me, it's more the reaction. So first of all, I know Greg, and, and I like Greg so it's, it's, I always have the mentality of how can I get somebody back? However, there was a you know, a lot of what it was saying, I mean, I definitely an anti shaming. Let's let's get that really clear. However, the idea that knee is a buyer should follow up 30 days later to see whether or not they're they're doing it or evolving, just isn't didn't really resonate with that because I actually tried that having been a salesperson, myself. Heck, I personally called the back in the day, the personally called the CIO of Campbell's soups, 80 days in a row, getting less and less various, various voicemails, I know what it's like. And I wish that somebody would have told me what's valuable or not valuable. However, when I've tried to do that with, you know, I can't distinguish whether it's a BDR, SDR, digital salesperson or all these labels that we give to it. It's just somebody trying to connect to me. And when I've tried to give advice or suggestions of what would resonate with me, I've been aggressively with curse laden responses back given feedback, something like man, you know, it kind of goes two ways, right? You have to be the individual on the other end needs to be coachable, and recognize that they want my time and my money. And if I'm going out of my way to give them some tips on how to be more valuable to me, to call me in a hole for doing it is, seems to be very extreme. So I just wanted to I thought Greg's what I liked about Greg's posts or what resonated with me, was, it's it came off as very authentic. And when I see somebody comment on us, often in an authentic way, I can't help but want to engage. So that I just found myself starting to engage and then I'm trying to accomplish it, you know, make sure that I'm being polite and respectful to Greg, knowing full well that other people are going to read it, but also offer a different perspective so that we could have a conversation about how we had This issue, which would be the effectiveness of salespeople, making contacts with with folks. So that's, yeah, that was the the dialogue, the difficulty is words get into can can get interpreted in a variety of different ways. How do you have a conversation about it? So it was happy to see more and more people chime in and engage with, with Greg with respect. I'm curious, before we get into the conversation that I want to have. I'm curious what Greg learned from putting it out there. Because I think that's another thing that we're not doing enough of is learning from the people who put the stuff out there in the first place. Because they have an idea. They're making themselves vulnerable. They're putting themselves out there. What did you learn by putting that post out there, Greg?Unknown Speaker 13:46  Yeah, good question. Um, well, firstly, firstly, it was clear that a lot of people agreed. Secondly, it was it was nice hearing that you have responded and others said similar things, but how You know, I've tried coaching. And and I think it is unrealistic to do that with everyone, right? You couldn't possibly nobody would have the time with the amount of prospecting that's going on to get back to all of them. SoUnknown Speaker 14:15  yeah, I definitely appreciate that.Unknown Speaker 14:18  But it kind of learned that, you know, perhaps there's a failure somewhere and in some cases, it's going to be on the individual str or BDR. Right. So in your case, they just didn't want to get better. I don't know if that's the exception or the rule. I would lean towards it being an exception. I actually did a not a follow up post but one this week about SDR as being mostly Gen Z and I used to coach some Gen Z university students through different sales programs around the US and I think they're gonna be brilliant, because they're curious and they're tough. And I think they do want to improve and get better So, so yes, I, I completely agree that Yeah, you're going to try and help some of them and they're just going to burn you think what the hell's the point? You know that they don't seem you know that they can the gift horse in the mouth right so yeah, yeah so yeah, I think there's probably somewhere along the line this is where I think we're exposed that there's some something's broken justBrian Lambert 15:23  yeah so let me offer a bit of a Let me ask you guys so you're on LinkedIn Do you guys get pinged by SDRs in your roles? Yes, obviously obviously Scott you have I have to. So you know, for the last two years because in prep for this podcast I was going back and thinking the number of people that have reached out to me to fill the top of the funnel with some sort of funnel system, marketing lead gen system to get me leads, etc. It's probably 100 times greater than anything that I could actually relate to, like, for example, I'm not into filling my funnel. I'm, you know, trying to be more sales driven, etc. I've had zero reach outs around things that I care about, and 100 hundred people reaching out around pretty much the exact same can message. I mean, it's fascinating to me that 100 people can reach out with the exact same thing, selling the exact same thing. So, um, that's what's happened to me. And I tend to agree with you, Greg, if that's happening, this is a somebody there's something going on where that's expected. Like, that's normal. I would prefer to have somebody engage with me around what what I would consider a bigger challenge of messaging, for example. So this is what's happened to me. Do you guys have any stories about trends about how you've been reached out to and are you seeing the same thing where it's a bitScott Santucci 17:00  Well, I didn't give her perspective on that, Brian, I don't necessarily think it's an issue of trends. This isn't new. Social media allows us to scale behavior. So putting myself in the BDR shoes. So what I liked about Greg's post is and here's another key point, I think it's incredibly important to engage. If you're not engaging with people having conversations. There's no way you're going to learn what's going on. So that's a tip to our, to our audience, engage with us get on the podcast, put yourself out there like Greg is doing right now and having a conversation without any script or any any forewarning. But what I think is happening is I myself as a rep, once email came, so I'm much older than you Greg, when email came into place, and like wow, this is a great, much more effective way I can cut and paste a rap and send it off to 30 people for the time. It takes me, you know, that will take me one minute. And in this case 30 people, it would take me, you know, 10 minutes time.Brian Lambert 18:08  In this case the wrap is a scripted email, right? Actually around that m&mScott Santucci 18:14  practice that was before, before midnight, so a story or some hook or something, right. And I would cut and paste and you know, blast those away before there was email rules and everything like that. Or, you know, I got into sending faxes because I didn't think people were checking faxes anymore, anything to get to get attention. I think what's different today is that we've gone to LinkedIn and we think LinkedIn is sort of the safe, the safe environment to engage yet people are using the the end credits to bombard bombard people. And I think what's happening is that a bit Is...

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 54System thinking is a disciplined way of understanding dynamic relationships. It's an approach that enables you to make better choices and avoid unintended consequences. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Jerry Brightman, who teaches courses on systems thinking at Harvard University.The guys talk with Jerry to unpack a real-world example to understand the components and repeatable approaches to viewing the commercial system as an integrated system of people, processes, technology, and capabilities.In this episode:The definition of systems thinkingThe difference between managing and leadershipThe pros and cons of systems thinkingThe importance of short-term wins in service of the broader solutionThe best way to prioritize action in the day-to-dayEPISODE 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 00:35  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 00:48  Together, Brian, I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales and they were knishes analysts, consultants or practitioners. We learned the hard day our way not hard day saved. This is all part of the process. We have a hard way what works and perhaps what's most importantly, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:08  And our focus here on this podcast inside sales enablement is on you as a sales enablement leader and orchestrator, as you know, sales enablement orchestrators has very specific characteristics, and I'm going to share those with you. Now, first of all, your mission and goal focused, you've prioritize the right goals at the right moments. You guide the narrative by confronting reality to get the right stuff done. You drive results by design, not by effort, you unlock energy to create momentum and catalyze change through collaboration. Those are the six attributes of an orchestrator. And you can find out more about that on an earlier episode on orchestrators as we usually do, we're going to start with a centering story on this particular episode. So Scott, what kind of centering story do you have for our audience today?Scott Santucci 01:56  Well, I've got a great one. So I first want us to dwell on how cool This name is okay. And how awesome the Italians are at naming people.Brian Lambert 02:07  Go figure says the ItalianScott Santucci 02:09  is well, I don't have to Scott isn't an Italian name like I just have to laugh. I'm half right. But listen to this name vilfredo Pareto. Oh, nice Hellenic in it.Brian Lambert 02:24  Yeah, it's very nice to have properly dwelled on that so let's move on. It's very elegant.Scott Santucci 02:30  So who is this person? And why are we talking about about him. But as you as you many of you may know, you might know this idea of the 8020 rule. And the 8020 rule is also called peredo analysis or peredo distribution or he's got a lot of other other things and as many people call him, the father of micro economics. So if you look at economic theory, like Adam Smith, and you've Read it, it sounds like oh, this is a like a sociology book. And then when you look at our Philip philosophic, philosophical book, when you look at parados works, it looks more modern. He's got tons and tons of tables and statistics and things in there. And one of the things that he really observed is, in trying to figure out distribution of power and distribute, you know, where power really resides. He was caught up in a lot of the revolutions in in Europe during the during time, so let's let's frame it out. He was born in 1848 and died in 1923. As you can imagine, there's a lot of turmoil and he's Italian. So if you know about Italian history, they didn't. They started the process of revolutions after the Civil War, the United States so the 1860s and and on, and making these observations about getting in big problems and arguments with With the governments, the local governments about what things need to do, because he was a very, very much a laissez faire or classic liberal in those senses, not not what we would call today a liberal. Definitely, if we call them today, he probably be very conservative or probably a libertarian. But the key observation that he made that was so groundbreaking was that he found that 80% of the wealth or not so much the wealth, but 80% of the land owned in Italy, was owned by 20% of the population. And he had to keep double checking that and what he found is that pattern, that pattern is a reoccurring pattern. And you've heard us talk about that pattern before in some of the other podcasts that we've done, because we found that pattern exists with salespeople, about 20% of salespeople are generating 80% of the new growth, about 20% of your customers are generating 80% of your profits. All of these things work and that we Have vilfredo Pareto, again, the poetic name to Frank. Thank you mentoring story.Brian Lambert 05:09  Thank you. vilfredo Pareto, I just wanted to say that I'm onScott Santucci 05:14  peredo fan club.Brian Lambert 05:17  So I got to ask that and our listeners do too. So what? So this has to do with sales enablement.Scott Santucci 05:27  So what this has to do with sales enablement, and our topic today is that there's a one of the things that we tend to do, and drive a lot of cost is we do a lot of activity. We do lots and lots and lots of stuff, but a lot of stuff. Are we doing the right things? And how do we figure out there's a there's always a mathematical element, if we embrace it, most of us don't embrace these things because they you know, it's just far too easy to say, well, let's go fix the sales force. Instead of saying let's find the 20% of the sales force to improve What can we do? And really what we're talking about here is the introduction of systems thinking. And when we talk about that, as you all on our on our show have have adopted that you want to be orchestrators, part of what we're trying to do is highlight the business value of being an orchestrator the business problems that we're looking to solve. So that's why this matters so much the centering story and the topic that we're going to do is so what is systems thinking? Is it some new age idea that we have to have a crystal and you know, hug trees over? Or is it something real and something tangible?Brian Lambert 06:37  Yeah, I love that. And to help us with this today, we've got a, an expert in the space joining us. His name is Jerry Brightman. He is a bright man, so we're gonna help us on this topic. Yeah, you've got him. I do too. And Jerry is a great guy. I've learned I've learned a lot from him over the last 20 years. I met him when I was first coming out of the military and he was in program project management. He's done some great fascinating work in industry. All over the world. He's been to 100 different countries. But right now in his phase of what he's doing, he's he's a professor at Tufts and at Harvard. And Jerry, one of the things that I was reconnecting with year round was I saw on LinkedIn, you had posted this really cool post about teaching this really interesting class, to folks at Harvard. And that class was on systems thinking. So I reached out and I said, Hey, our listeners are asking about this. They're also you know, quite frankly, pushing back on Scott and I a little bit around some of the topics and wrestling with them. So let's get Jerry on. And let's ask him some questions that perhaps our listeners might have, and explore this topic of, of systems thinking. So Jerry Brightman, thanks so much for joining us here on insider nation.Unknown Speaker 07:50  My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.Brian Lambert 07:52  You bet. Can you share a little bit about your background that maybe I've missed?Unknown Speaker 07:57  Well, it's um, it's a it's a very diverse background but it does. It does have a way of connecting dots. I started out as a very young guy went to school seemingly forever getting an undergraduate, an MBA, and then even a DBA doctor Business Administration. And then guess what? teaching at a university, and out in Western Michigan University in the wilds of Kalamazoo, Michigan. And I was asked to teach an off campus course in Grand Rapids to a real live working business people in that area. And it was very quickly known to me and the moment that I was a fake. The only advantage I had over these people who were working all day and going from an MBA an evening was they were actually doing business and I had an advantage of being one chapter ahead in the book. And I realized that I love the teaching. I really loved being in front of students, graduate students, real practitioners of business every day. But if I was going to be helpful to them, I had to quit teaching and get into the business world. And I was very, very fortunate to join a global chemical company for about a dozen years, that wound up being the very first company ever to do business in the People's Republic of China. And during that period of time, I was very lucky along with my CEO to be pioneers in the trade with China being the very first to go to China. And without any knowledge of the of the country, of its history of its culture of its ways of negotiating even its currency and contracts. we wind up doing a billion dollars worth of two way trade with China, a country we didn't know at all. And so what were the tools of our trade? And one of one big one was was thinking more systemically about the work we were doing.Scott Santucci 09:45  Excellent. So to kick us off what I'm going to ask you two pretty basic straightforward questions. And I'd like some, you know, basic, straightforward answers from Jerry. So the first question I want to ask is to systems thinking, is that a thing?Unknown Speaker 10:03  I wish it were more of a thing. I think that real leaders around the world would would benefit systems thinking as an addition to their toolkit, especially in the areas of decision making and seeing the the broader interrelationships. And interconnections have their, their own work staff, and their own people, and the people that they try to do business with. So it's very real. It's just not seen by many people quite honestly.Scott Santucci 10:30  interested. So what I'm hearing you say is that it's a very real thing. Just a lot of it a lot of people aren't taking advantage of it.Unknown Speaker 10:39  And frankly speaking, it's not unlike the quality movement years ago, which was a real thing and and However, people pick the low hanging fruit expected great results, and didn't do the work behind it to make it real soScott Santucci 10:53  well. And also to wasn't that wasn't that true that it was a real thing in Japan, and it wasn't a real thing in the United States and Our car, our automatic fractured covers got slaughtered, and then they adopted it.Unknown Speaker 11:05  Well, Dr. Deming was was preaching loud and clearly in the United States and people didn't listen to him. So he said, bear with you guys, I'm off to Japan. And those folks loved it, embrace it. And that's why the Japanese carmakers for over a decade was such a fierce competitor to the United States. And, but we expect quick results. We're a country that wants quick results. And I think systems thinking similar to the quality movement is somewhat counterintuitive. It takes time to implement, it takes time to understand it. And it does work miracles, in our sense of we ignorant people going to China for the first time knowing nothing, doing a billion dollars were the two way trade in a wide range of areas, and even even developing our own consulting firm that helped American and European firms understand what the China business was all about. I'd love that. So that gives me my second sort of blunt instrument question. My second question is,Scott Santucci 12:05  so if systems thinking is a thing, what is that? What is it? What is this stuff? What is systems thinking?Unknown Speaker 12:14  Yeah, there's a very great quote by Albert Einstein. So I want to bring in Einstein to prove that I'm a professor, right? You can't do better than quoting Albert Einstein, right? And I assigned says that the problems we face today cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that existed when the problem began. Time is time is gone very quickly from the start of that problem, to the present time. So what he's what Einstein is saying pretty simple and down to earth, is we've got to change the level of thinking that we have today to deal with that older chronic issue. And systems thinking is a wonderful, wonderful way to do that. The big thing that executives have to do is they have to change their thinking. That's To change where they're coming from changes the level of thinking, just like they had to do with the quality boom. And, you know, let's face it, habits are hard to break. I've got young kids who still have habits that they started when they were four years old, three years old. So habits are tough to break, if they can break the habits and open up their minds and new ways of thinking systems thinking will be a valuable tool to build leadership, guaranteed.Scott Santucci 13:24  So are you saying systems thinking is like a mindset thing? What Why don't I do yoga? or Why don't I do meditation? What do you what do you mean, man?Unknown Speaker 13:33  Here's what I know. I'm not going to quote Einstein anymore. But my buddies at a corporation that I worked for, for a number of years had a very interesting word called metanoia. Which, which is the definition of metanoia is shift of mind. So yeah, I they don't necessarily have to do yoga, but I you know, you won't believe this, but I start all my Harvard classes. With the required reading, called the miracle of mindfulness by teknon, hot, who was a Vietnamese monk nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, then by Martin Luther King. And mindfulness is just understanding the world around you and being truly present. It's not a way out. It's just a consciousness of what's happening around you. And for some reason, and I usually get classes of 30 people from 18 to 20 countries, ranging from Europe and the former Eastern Europe, to China and Asia, to Latin America. And it seems to be a common thread, it attracts them to the idea of systems thinking, they have to be present in which they are both in the class and when they leave me. I keep in touch with them for many years. It connects the diversity of people to a common way of thinking which is systems thinking that we do in our class.Scott Santucci 14:53  So I'm gonna ask or challenge a little bit here. I'm trying to change Some of our maybe more traditional thinkers, thinkers in our audience, and putting myself in the situation advocating for systems thinking. I would get say, it's just crystals and healing. That's what all Yoga is. How would we describe it to be more concrete? And what maybe what do you teach? teach your students in your class like in your class that you go through? I love that you're starting out with, Hey, you got to be more open minded to be able to embrace some of these concepts. And I like that you brought up counterintuitive, but what's the meat on the other side of all the counter intuition, a lot of people just don't like all that anxiety or ambiguity of getting getting to the point.Unknown Speaker 15:45  But what they don't like more than that are the chronic issues that they face in their everyday business world. And when I say chronic problems, I mean problems that they thought they had solutions for that six months later, come back And rear their ugly head. And the reason for that is the busy pace of business today. And it's going to be even busier tomorrow is executives think like managers, they have to do lists. And the greatest achievement of their day is knocking off their to do list, right and go to tomorrow. So quick fix becomes a very valuable rep a tool in their repertoire. However, and actually quick fix has a good place in systems thinking. However, it doesn't get to the root of the problems and that's why six months later, these chronic problems, come back and bite them in the leg and they're stuck why we had a great solution for it. Well, you didn't have a great solution you had a quick fix that knocked it off your to do list. And now you got to come back to it. So take it down the can't kick the can down the road. Again down the road. So the so the attraction to not only my students but my clients is. So you're going to tell me you're going to send me a bill of goods maybe Alright, let's be setting Next year, you're going to sell me a bill of goods that's going to get my chronic problems off. So it stays sold. And I look him straight in the eye. Maybe from the back of a snake oilScott Santucci 17:11  wagon. I don't know. You got it? Yeah, I think we should adopt, like at the yoga studio, you're in the back of a yoga studio teaching me howUnknown Speaker 17:19  to, like, know exactly. Who Kumbaya, you're gonna make me stretch. It ain't but but, but it's gonna make your problem chronic problem go away. And so here's, here's the deal. here's, here's the way your audience is working today around the world, no matter who your clients are. They're working at three levels. One is at an event level. And so if you picture a an iceberg, okay, so picture an iceberg in your mind. the very tip of the iceberg is working in an event level. So I asked my clients and my students, how many of you are problem solvers or put out fires and 90% Have a hit 90% of the hands go up. And they say 90% of their time is occupied, putting out fires and solving problems. So I, of course, play a jerk in the room, right? And I say, so let me get this straight. You're sitting in your office, twiddling your thumbs, waiting for the phone to ring with a problem. And then you can jump in and be that problem solved. Or you have your fire extinguisher ready to go and put out the fire. And by the way, one of my friends once said, beware of

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 53Nine 4x2 Lego blocks have over 9 Billion unique combinations. How many "legos" does your product, solution, or service have? No matter how you define a "lego" at your company, the permutations are astounding, and yet this is the challenge salespeople navigate daily.On top of this, your company is changing -- rapidly. Moving from one form or the other. This journey represents another challenge salespeople must navigate.In this podcast, Brian and Scott are joined by Chad Quinn, the CEO & Co-Founder, Ecosystems and Jason Cunliffe, Group VP Content Marketing Services at IDC. Chad and Jason have created a partnership. How did it form? By a shared client's definition of value and the blending of capabilities to help sellers navigate a complex buyer-seller relationship.In this podcast, you'll hear:The definition of valueWays company's evolve their value communication approachIdeas to make value clearWays to relieve seller burden in the sales processEPISODE 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 00:34  I'm Scott Santucci,Brian Lambert 00:36  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, 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 more Important, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:02  Our focus is on you as a sales enablement leader and orchestrator. As an orchestrator, you need to develop specific characteristics to operate in the blended domain of strategy and tactics where you do both together well to help your company win. Our goal on the podcast to help you clarify the measures of success, gave you confidence to engage up and down and across the organization, and provide real examples of what it looks like to execute strategy and execute tech. As always, we start with a centering story. So I'm gonna pass it over to Scott Scott, what do you have for us?Scott Santucci 01:36  So today's centering story is about a glass of water.Unknown Speaker 01:43  There we go.Brian Lambert 01:44  So well, that's gonna be hard to date.Scott Santucci 01:47  No day Exactly. Well, it's timeless, right? So water is a is timeless with with regards to humanity's concerned. But when you think about water, it's its chemical composition is it's a bunch of molecules. those molecules are bouncing around. And what's interesting about water isn't the only substance on earth that exists in three different states. It's a, it exists in a gaseous state, so we breathe it in all the time. It exists in the liquid state. So Jason has a bottle of it right now. So it can deal with the heat down in Miami. And it also exists in a solid state. And that's really what we're going to zoom into is, is that the difference between the liquid state and the solid state? So did you know Brian, that ice actually is considered a mineral?Brian Lambert 02:40  I did not know that. I might have known that, but I probably forgot it.Scott Santucci 02:44  And so what's interesting about that is at at at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, zero degrees for our international listeners, something amazing happens is those molecules START STOP bouncing around so fast. They go really, really slow, and literally stop or freeze. And when they freeze, a lot of things happen. So one thing that happens is that the volume of this what was a liquid that now is now a solid is 9% larger. So if you've, if you've ever frozen a glass of water in your in your freezer, why does the glass break? It's because it's bigger. The other thing that's interesting about that is that in an in a solid state or a mineral state, it's less dense, so it floats on top of water. So there's a lot of interesting things about it. And what's even more interesting about that is when you just add something as simple as salt to the equation at a certain, you know, at a certain ratio. We're not really here to do a chemistry experiment, but that freezing point can drip down to negative six degrees Fahrenheit, and I didn't do the calculation for our international community. Sorry, I'm American. I know No matter,Brian Lambert 04:00  the only international sometimesScott Santucci 04:02  Yeah, exactly. So somebody can go calculate it and post that out. But that's a 38 degree difference between a freezing point by just adding salt, salt to the equation. So those are some interesting facts about water. The last point that I want to make before I get the dreaded question from you hear, Brian, is that what's also interesting is, when you think about the people who study scientists who study water in its liquid form, they're very different than the people who study water in its frozen form. So think about glaciers. glaciers are just ice, they're studied by geologists. They're not studied by any other people. So and also the, when water gets transformed to water vapor, it's studied by meteorologists. So there's a whole bunch of different dynamics going on here with this simple liquid that we take for granted. I don'tBrian Lambert 04:58  know if you know this, Scott. But I think he said The word interesting seven times. And I'd have to ask our listeners, how many were interested that much in water ice. And I do have to ask you, though, because I'm really curious about this. So what?Unknown Speaker 05:13  So?Brian Lambert 05:15  So what is this?Scott Santucci 05:17  What does this have to do with anything? Right? Yeah. Well, I, I love this quote from Mark Twain. It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure. That just ain't so. And what we're talking about here is that, let's really think about the difference. So as us as human beings, literally outside it's one degree if we're in London, or it's to me in DC, it's 33 degrees. Can we really tell the difference between one degree and zero degrees? Or one degree or 3033 degrees and 32 degrees? Can you tell that difference? None have us can observe that difference or tell that difference. We can't feel it. But it has a major transformative effect of going of converting ice from a liquid to a frickin mineral. Think about that. So the reason that that that's, that's so important for our theme here today is that in the state of change as we're in this digital world, where we're we have all these different social capabilities, we've got digital capabilities, we've got new ways of rearranging content. We've got different ways to combine different different capabilities and an entirely new things like look at Uber, for example. They don't own a single cab, but yet they're the biggest transportation fleet on the planet. What's going on here? So the reason that I think water is a great metaphor to talk about our theme here, which is what what makes something valuable in a rapidly changing in a rapidly changing environment. That we do have something to base against, which is water. It's something that all of us take for granted. But it's the only substance that exists in three different states that that, that we all can relate to.Brian Lambert 07:12  I love it makes sense. And, you know, we're in a very transformative state. And some of us are boiling and some of us might be frozen and locked up. And we need to transition states. I love that analogy.Scott Santucci 07:24  And the reason that we're bringing that and the reason I'm excited for our special guests here today, is that sometimes going back to that quote, it ain't what we don't know. That gets you into trouble. AKA be curious. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so. It's not freezing out. It's just cold. Well, the ice around you will tell you differently. So I'm really excited to introduce Jason and Chad to join our show, and they'll introduce themselves a little bit here. Jason works with With ITC, and he's, he's responsible for their sales enablement and content and contact practice. And Chad is the CEO of ecosystems. And these two people have mixed their water and salt together or they're, you know, in our prep, we were calling a chocolate and peanut butter. They've got some new ingredients together. So I've known Jason for quite a bit bit of time, he was very helpful in helping us launch the sales enablement society. So Jason, welcome to the show. Would you like to introduce yourself a little bit to our audience?Unknown Speaker 08:36  Scott, thanks very much. Yeah, it's name is Jason Cunliffe group VP of our content marketing services team at IDC responsibility for sales enablement practice as well. And, you know, I am a also a former bag carrying quota carrying sales representative prior to my career at IDC and One of my, you know, personal objectives that I'm constantly trying to solve for is being that icebreaker if you will, between attended, right between the marketing and the sales function, right is it sometimes you know where we're stuck in the ice up in the frozen tundra in the Bay of Fundy if you will. And we need to we need to see movement between these two functions. So happy to be on the on the show today and have a good conversation.Scott Santucci 09:36  Excellent. And Also joining us is is Chad. So I mentioned Chad, Chad. I know I've known Chad mostly by following what he what he posts. Chad's been way out on the vanguard way, way, way, way out on the vanguard about advocating outcome selling and if you've been following on our on our podcast, Episode 51, we had a deep dive into it. Come sound with Bob Apollo. Well, Chad's been advocating this kind of approach for just eons of value and value selling approach. So Chad, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and your company and what you're doing.Unknown Speaker 10:13  Thank you, Scott. Great to be here. great pleasure. Also, thank you, Brian. And great to have some time with Jason Chad Quinn, CEO of ecosystems, really, our passion and purpose and ecosystems is to make value clear. And we have a sales excellence platform that does that. To kind of riff a little bit off of Scott's centering story, if you think of that glass of water, and you think about value value is always subjective. It's always in the context or relative to the situation you're in. So having gold you would say arguably, a gold bar has a lot of intrinsic and extrinsic value. But if you're in the desert, a glass of water is much more valuable. And so that's the fun excitement we can have in our discussion is the relativity and the subjectivity around values. And how to best convey to our customers.Scott Santucci 11:03  I was so hoping you were gonna go there. The reason I picked a glass of water is because of that exact analogy about intrinsic versus objective value. And you you will work perfectly. Oh, that's fantastic. I'm so excited. This is unrehearsed by the way. So this is how great our our guests are. So what we're what we're doing is what I'm really fascinated with is in the state of change, as our listeners have. We've done more post COVID research than anybody we've published. Over 20 different podcasts of accessible content. We've had four keynote quality deep deep dive webinars, we've got another one coming up. And what we're seeing is a lot a lot of change around and what's what sparked me was there was this announcement maybe a month ago, where ecosystems and IDC announced a partnership and I want to unpack that but What I want to first start off with is, let's get to know our our guests a little bit and figure out the origin story of how the heck these two ingredients got got together. And let's figure figure out how we mix the mix the water together, so to speak. So Chad, you've been on the soapbox for a long, long time, as I alluded to earlier about selling to value. What trends are you seeing that that are happening that b2b companies are missing?Unknown Speaker 12:30  I think Scott, let's do it as a visual for our listeners. So let's visualize together that there's a door between you and your customer. And that door represents access into how they see value. Today, regrettably, I think sellers are looking through the keyhole. And that's the challenge. They're looking through the keyhole of that door, and only within this very small sliver of what I would call functional value. And we want to work with them to open that door with the customer and look at all the dimensions of value, so that they're not having this very narrow lens into what that word means.Scott Santucci 13:11  Awesome. That's great. It's very illuminating. So Jason, can you comment on on that? What are you from an IDC perspective? What are you seeing in terms of gaps in value? And what kind of research are you illuminating to highlight that gap? How do we make it better to where b2b companies can get customers to open that door?Unknown Speaker 13:34  Right. So certainly the buying landscape has changed dramatically, right? In the past few months, companies reinventing themselves in the context of the next normal. Many, in many cases face an existential threat to survival. And I see this every day in calls in terms of, you know, the sales and marketing function, the leaders are still wrapping their heads around On what normal is supposed to look like today, right. And of course, the the selling communities is boxed into the virtual world and have an entirely new value script and buyer landscape that they're dealing with. And, you know, I think these are themes that we've, I've been working on personally, but I think, you know, recent events, economic crises, and so forth, it's just really put all of this under the microscope and force factoring it to, you know, to be solved for in a more meaningful, full way. So we, you know, at IDC, we've put out some research as well on the five stages to recovery. We've worked with Chad on that as well, in terms of helping our own customers figure out how to flatten their own curve, and move you know, through from, you know, cost optimization, the business resiliency to targeted investments through to you know, what the future and future enterprise is supposed to look like. So we've got we've got a lot of talk, a lot of times to want to talk about today in terms of business value and the research that IDC produces to help solve for those challengesScott Santucci 15:08  on it. So in other words, the the overall economic climate is not unlike changing the temperature around a glass of water. All right, we were accustomed to one, maybe a lukewarm environment or the maybe the molecules were moving around, not as fast as the molecules when it's super, super hot. And, you know, now things are freezing, or maybe they're freezing, maybe they're heating up. But whatever the case is the the current state or status quo, our current glass of water, it's going to change and it's going to change into something out and that's, that's what both of you guys are observing. Is that fair?Unknown Speaker 15:51  Yeah. Yeah, I would say that the cost of doing nothing is really high.Scott Santucci 15:57  Right, right. And so that's been one Have those points? Well, you know, to quote rush if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice, right? Right. status quo is probably the worst thing that you can do. Awesome. So let's go into, you know, the next thing. So, okay. That was an interesting conversation about value and concepts of value. I'm still trying to figure out, Okay, we've got ecosystems has a software platform to help people do that. And IDC have always known. Aren't you guys that the people that write reports on stuff? So Jason, you're in the content business, right? So how would people go about using IDC content to help with sales? Isn't that for analyst relations people or marketing people? I don't, I don't get it. I'm just trying to be like, you know, put some red meat on the table to get us thought acting good acting, Scott.Unknown Speaker 16:53  Thank you. That's Yeah, that'sScott Santucci 16:56  it. Thank you. I was gonna go there.Unknown Speaker 16:58  So So we've You know, we've known for a long time that in the in the content marketing world that that, you know, salespeople will use pretty much any piece of content at their disposal to carry a conversation forward. Right. And some of that content is limited in its value to do that, and some of it is extremely valuable. And over the years, we've found that, of course, our ROI and business value practice that produces a lot of this custom content fits that that latter bill, right, which is, which is business value studies, ROI studies, but these are things that have traditionally been used or what we would call marketing purposes. Right. And, you know, over time, we you know, through discussions with our customers and speaking with sales leaders within those organizations, you know, we really keyed in on the fact that you know, the all of these engagement activities that that the market function typically tees up, it really has to be aligned and put forth in a way that the sales function can carry forward not only in an intelligent manner, but in a measurable way. Right. And so solving for that dynamic sort of been the key to solving for that dynamic has really been a key focus of mine for for many years now because to me that unlocks the whole value of the marketing function where you can tie that back to the impact it's having on sales pipeline, so forth.Scott Santucci 18:35  Got it. So my reaction to that and I'm putting words in your mouth, please feel free to spit out what doesn't fit in but my my reaction to that is okay, having myself been in a research business. Well we want to do is we want to figure out what do our customers the end customers care about? And want one thing that I think we can all agree on is a lot of the times the things that Customers care about is so different from the agenda of the b2b sales and marketing company, that there's a big rift there. So we can do...

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 52What happens when you get people together remotely or in-person to build something to "help sales sell?". Take an Insider's look at what it takes to navigate internal perspectives, challenges, and vision to co-create value together.Imogen and Doug join the guys to discuss their work. They provide real-world examples that illuminate and provide structure to the challenges they overcome while working with marketing, sales, and product groups. You'll hear a lively discussion about what it means to orchestrate by blending together both strategy and tactics to simplify sales while achieving business objectives.Take a listen to learn more about:Why orchestration is valuable to executivesWhat orchestration "looks like" to the leaders involvedWays to overcome internal bias and people who want to "steamroll" the solutionOvercoming siloed thinking by creating clarity through the workEPISODE 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 00:34  I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:35  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, issues as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works and maybe most Importantly, what doesn't?Brian Lambert 01:01  That's right Scott. And our focus is on you. The sales enablement orchestrator. As you know, as leaders in your business, you need to develop specific characteristics that we've been calling Orchestration, we want you to understand what it means to help clarify the measures of success. We want to give you examples, Orchestration looks like as you you operate in the gap between strategy and execution to do both at the same time. And we want to give you confidence to engage up down and across your organization to help with that and breathe life into this concept of Orchestration. We actually have two guests with us today, and they've been on the show before, but they're also helping and they're very passionately involved in clarifying the role of sales enablement, as orchestrating role and what it means to be an orchestrator. So we've got Imogen McCourt and Doug Clower joining us today. Hey guys, how you doing? Can you introduce yourself?Unknown Speaker 01:54  Certainly, Brian and Scott. Thanks for having us on again. I guess we didn't do too badly Last time, so we get to come back and do a little bit more. Anyway, my name is Doug clower. I'm a, I'm a global enablement director and and I'm an orchestrator to I guess that's the best way to describe it. I'm passionate about this. It makes so much sense. And it does give so much value to the companies that we work with. So thanks.Unknown Speaker 02:19  Yeah. And I'm imaging McCourt, and it's lovely to be back, spending some more time with you chaps, I co founded an organization called and grow.io. And we focus on helping companies with the business of sales, helping the senior executive team understand exactly how they should be orchestrating things like that. So I'm really delighted to be part of this today, and also the other work that we're doing at the side.Brian Lambert 02:39  That's awesome. Yes, very excited to have you guys on and thank you so much for the time that you continue to invest in sales enablement and sharing with our listeners. And what we had is a bit of a shared experience this week, all all four of us. So me, Doug, image in and also Scott. He did a webinar this week, and he did the webinar on the concept of routes to value. And this was a great discussion you can find out more about it if you go to Commercial Ratio comm you can get the recordings and I definitely encourage everybody in insider nation to listen to that recording is a really important concept about linking your your company's capabilities to your customers challenges and outcomes, and the role of salespeople and the selling ecosystem and closing that gap in a route to value. This particular podcast. What I wanted to do is really slow down and talk about the concept of orchestrating what seems to be a simple concept of, of helping salespeople connect the dots and, and sell to customers. And I wanted to ask you imagine, you know, how did the webinar relate to you and what takeaways Did you have from it?Unknown Speaker 03:49  Well, I mean, it's a fantastic the whole series has been really powerful to listen and learn and be part of and, and the webinar yesterday, I'm going to have to pronounce it root value. I'm sorry, when you listen to the webinar, you'll know that there's English to English translation thing. I'm just, I'm sorry, I'm protecting the global political audience. But yeah, it was really interesting. I, you know, there's such complexity in keeping focused on the strategic work that we need to do is orchestrators, but also understanding some of the practical and tactical things too. And so much of it resonated. But there's one slide, which was a panoramic view of a workshop very, lots going on lots on the walls. And I'll be honest, it was like, it was like flashbacks to a workshop that Brian and Scott You helped me design and run when I really just started as head of sales namens at Forrester. So I don't know how much you guys remember about that. But we were trying just to simply think about the new go to market strategy that they were they were pivoting around, and how what value that might mean to our clients, but actually, what we were trying to do and what we ended up Doing was just trying to get a pick list of priority for the sales enablement group for my small and immaculately formed team. And I'll be honest, it escalated out of all control. So we started with a pick list of heads of department, head of marketing, things like that, to try and do this to try and get us all on the same page about how we work together. And then I think there was 30 plus people in the room, and all hell broke loose. And we were just trying to get everybody to come together around the story of why we had decided to move to this and what value it brought to the marketplace. And it was everybody had an opinion, everybody brought their agenda into the room. So you know, seeing this workshop sort of slide put out in front of me with all of these incredibly important and valuable things to do that it just took me straight back there, right. That's the beginning of running sales name of departments. And I'll be interested what you thought of that session and whether you have any memories from it.Brian Lambert 05:55  Yeah, well, I'm gonna ask, you know, Scott, actually to help our listeners out To make sure that our listeners Scott are aware a little bit around why workshop and kind of what was happening in the workshop that that slide generated from the webinar. Because it's a it's a panoramic his his image and said there's a lot of things that happened in the room I was in the room and there was a lot of things like value map or stakeholders and, you know, here's a space to think out loud, or here's a different space to show some tools or progress. And there's a lot of things on the wall. And but really, what was the purpose of the workshop? Scott and what why workshop and how does that relate to what imaging was talking about everybody coming together? Yeah. SoScott Santucci 06:38  let's distinguish a few things. So Imogen talked about routes to value and her past experience with that, and it took her back to a time I don't know maybe 810 years ago at Forrester. Yeah, yeah. Trying to get a whole bunch People together. So one of the one of the concepts that we had talked about earlier in this, in this webinar was the concept of Productitis. And I think what, we didn't have that term 10 years ago, and again, but we were seeing absolute symptoms of Productitis. Individual marketers who just didn't really care necessarily about the value proposition, but Okay, so what leads do we no need to go generate for who individual are it's tough to come p&l groups, but different businesses, like Forrester had, at the time had a leadership conference counsel product, then there's the general research product, then there's the consulting group, and all we were trying to do is say, what's the what's the simple one value proposition that we give to each of these different customers, and to images point, everybody was showing up with their own ideas. I was I, you know, if I'm in consulting, I really don't care what the research value proposition is, or the Leadership Council group sort of proposition is I care of making sure the consulting value propositions delivered. And so what is this balance? What is our actual business strategy so that the business strategy images was mentioning was a pivot to be role focused. So instead of having research around topics, the research and the delivery mechanism was going to be around individual roles. So that's a tough pivot and upon itself as well, so it's a strategic pivot. So you have all of these different variables going on at the same time. So that was then. So kind of the Wayback Machine 10 years ago, what what Imogen was referring to is a slide, which is part of the process. So at the end of our Rouse devalue presentation, we talked about, hey, here are the problems and in the middle section we talked about, let's illuminate What an outcome is from a customer's point of view. Now the second part, then the third part then would be, what methodology Do you follow to put it all in action, because you can't just have one group go and build a playbook or another group build a value map and another group do something else, because nothing's going to tie it all together. So what we were doing is introducing a series of workshops or techniques that follow design thinking principles to get everybody together. So what when Brian was saying he was in the room, Brian was in the room of the picture that was described or the panoramic view image and says it way better than I do. And what we're trying to eliminate here is let's let's plot out all of the different Verrier variables of why you people just, you know, go get people involved. So going back to the images point of view at the beginning, which was, Hey, this is simple. All we were trying to do is simply get Ba ba ba ba well Sales is simple but simple is hard. And I think that's what we're what we're experiencing. We're experiencing in this story, real life examples of Stratecution coming to life, real life examples of the need for Orchestration, what happens when you don't have it? Things disintegrate into into utter chaos that's unbelievably frustrating for everybody involved. And what's the value moving forward? Because the situation that Forrester was trying to address is exactly the situation most companies are in today.Brian Lambert 10:36  Yeah, that's great. And you're mentioning and this is highlighting to to phenomenon I love you know, dog or image you need to chime in on this, but one is this phenomenon of, Hey, you know what, I talked to you perhaps individually, and everybody's focused on customers and everybody wants to do the right thing. Yet, however, when you get in a room full of 30 other people what what is Turn into and what happens there? So there's this phenomenon of individually doing it versus doing it in a group that that can happen. And then the second piece is, Scott, you said very specifically, well, you can't have one person do a playbook you can't have one person, maybe building a message. And then you know, I would add, you can't have one person, you know, aligning it in the in the platform or of enablement platform or whatever. But yeah, that's, that's what that's what people do. So of course, of course, they can do that, but you added the qualifier of, or else it won't be integrated, and it won't be integrated for sales. So those two phenomenon this idea of what happens individually versus a group and then the other phenomenon of how the work gets done where you parse it up out and you get it done you check it off versus integrating it from the for sales or the lifeblood of sales. What do you guys think of that? That's what strikes My mind is what what the challenges of orchestration are and a picture like this? A dog or imaging Do you have any thoughts? on that,Unknown Speaker 12:01  I think what is so illustrative of that particular image or that picture, that panorama of it's in there. It's really about all the different elements or people that have a role or some sort of outcome that they're chasing. And in most cases, everybody says, I have the customer in mind, but a lot of times they come with their own conceived agenda is like, the customer needs this feature, or the customer wants this executable or this guarantee, or they want this price or whatever it happens to be. And the idea is, you have to collectively bring those together and bring them into alignment. That's one of the bigger challenges. I think, augmentation to this particular picture that that we're referring to, for me was the outcomes slide. The one words it's the building and there's like six different outcomes and those outcomes you have to understand what level you're talking to. So the idea of orchestration, it's hard because you got to get get everybody to begin to understand what are we targeting? What is it we're looking for? What is the customer expect? What's the outcome we're trying to get to, which I think was at the heart of the webcast. It was this beautiful discussion, it goes back to that, that one diagram, Scott, that you put together, where outcome was in the middle, and the six elements were around the outside. That was the power of that. And that's where the the challenges and at least that's the way it resonated for me. That's, that's one of the challenges I've, I've dealt with on a number of occasions.Unknown Speaker 13:36  And then if I may, I'm going to add to that to Doug, I think you're actually right to bring it to the outcome piece as well. You know, we the last time we did our podcast, actually, we talked about how important their conversation the actual conversation between the salesperson and the client is and the value is added when you can discuss what great outcomes you can work with them, what they eat, what they can change towards them and why. But to me, I also think there's this piece about walking riches, there are so many moving parts, you know, there are so many people who passionately care about, do we understand who the wallet owner is or where the budget holders are, and that will help our sales organization and, and then that suddenly internal again that suddenly about the company structure or how we company and sell to them. But what's really hard is actually taking this, this idea of an outcome that we could deliver, and turning that into something that we can actually add value with and not complicate our clients lives. You know, the forester workshop, everybody came in, really believing that they had and having out the clients best interests in heart, but not fully understanding how you turn that translate that into something that can be sold. That is empathetic that drives and delivers value that can be understood in the marketplace. And I think that's the really smart bit about Orchestration here is simplifying enough. Without dumbing down and providing enough of the environment and facilitation to make people look at each other and see how they can come collectively together to drive more value, not look at each other and think, well, they're just going to take sales resource that I really should have because my products really powerful for our clients or, but now marketing are going to focus on something else. I want them to focus on something else. And I think the Orchestrator has to be both incredibly strong leader as Scott, you've said over and over again, but also this really powerful, quiet person who's sitting behind the scenes making sure that everybody understands. And the bigger picture the whole that the outcome that Doug's talking about, which is always client side is always client side outcome.Brian Lambert 15:44  Yeah, these are great. I mean, you're outlining image and and this concept of many moving parts, and I think everybody would agree with that. So for example, if you have a room full of 30 people representing product and marketing and sales enablement and sales, and Maybe the Commercial Officer, they're all in the room, they're probably gonna say, you know what, there is a lot of moving parts here. There is a lot of individual perspective that we need to bring in. You know, everybody has a point of view on what's worked before perhaps, or, you know, what, we all should have the same. And we probably all Do you have a definition of value. Is it the same? I don't know. But we probably all think we know what's valuable. And we probably all believe that we should be working together to figure this figure this out. That's why we're in the meeting. So this idea of, you know, we we're going to be in an environment, and an environment is going to be created for us to to work together. And then yeah, somebody's probably going to lead this and I'm going to participate. these are these are knowable things. And yet something happens in the room that might get in the way. And, you know, what is that? And then, you know, to your point image in this idea of how do you lead through that lead a group of people who are all smart that really do want to do the right thing, however, might Not necessarily see, the bigger, I don't know, synthesis of the bigger components or the large components that need to come together in a customer conversation, right? Well,Unknown Speaker 17:11  at least in a case like that, don't doesn't that individual or that group, that department that silo whatever you want to call them? Don't they sort of have their blinders on? They can't see the bigger picture. They're still focused on the on the customer, but they're not necessarily saying, well, they're focused on the customer too. So how can I work with them to deliver a more powerful outcome for the customer from us as the company? That's, that's one of the key things. It's it's a blinder syndrome. And, and I've seen that before imaging, you seen that analogy? Does that make sense to you?Unknown Speaker 17:48  Yeah, absolutely. It's like and the harder it gets, the more entrenched people get, the more they focus on what they know. They're good at what they know they're particularly gold at rather than having the...

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 51Our focus on this podcast is for you sales enablement leaders and orchestrators. As an orchestrator. You need to develop skills to be mission and goal focused. prioritize the right goals and the right moments, guide the narrative by confronting reality, drive results by design, not effort and unlock energy to create momentum. To do that, today, we've got a special guest is going to join us to talk about a very important topic, and that is selling outcomes.If you're a devout listener, and insider nation member, you will already know this illustrious guest. He was in our panel or on our sales leader COVID panel. And I'm delighted to have Bob Apollo just himself. So if you don't know about Bob, one of the things that he's doing that's really exciting, is he's launched an outcome centric Academy.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.Brian Lambert 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 00:49  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 more important, what doesn't?Brian Lambert 01:02  Our focus on this podcast is for you sales enablement leaders and orchestrators. As an orchestrator. You need to develop skills to be mission and goal focused. prioritize the right goals and the right moments, guide the narrative by confronting reality, drive results by design, not effort and unlock energy to create momentum. To do that, today, we've got a special guest is going to join us to talk about a very important topic, and that is selling outcomes. Scott, can you introduce our guests?Scott Santucci 01:31  Absolutely. So if you're a devout listener, and insider nation member, you will already know this illustrious guest. He was in our panel or on our sales leader COVID panel. And I'm delighted to have Bob Apollo just himself. So if you don't know about Bob, one of the things that he's doing that's really exciting, is he's launched an outcome centric Academy. So before I get into more details about that, let's Bob Tell us a little bit about yourself in specific What is this outcome centric Academy in first place?Bob Apollo 02:06  Yeah, thanks, Scott, and really happy to be back with the program again. So my career really has been one of spanning sales and marketing for a variety of organizations over the years. But most recently, I've been spending my time working with, I suppose what you're characterized as scale up b2b tech based businesses, for whom sales enablement, sales effectiveness, and all of the things that go with that absolutely essential foundations for building a growing business and delivering predictable outcomes.Scott Santucci 02:46  Awesome. So what we're going to do here is one of the things that we're doing on our show is we're trying to create more opportunities to learn. And as you've been, as you know, we've had several webinars that are all predicated on post COVID research. And the last webinar that we did is was around routes to value enable customers, enabling customers to buy. So what we're going to do is just like we did with Joe Hayes, is we're going to get a sales leaders perspective on it. And then I expect we're going to spend a lot of time Bob talking about outcomes and what exactly they mean. So what we're first going to do is ask Bob to highlight for him, what are three things that most resonated with him about what we shared, and then we're going to get into a conversation there of who knows where we're going to go with Bob and his rapier wit. And then what we're going to do is we're going to wrap up with Brian putting together what what he heard and what's important for you as a sales enablement orchestrator. So Bob, what are what are three things that you got from the from the webinar?Bob Apollo 03:53  What you know, the first one is, you've given a name to a date Disease the organization's have been suffering from for years.And you call it proper eye test. And it's from my observation.It's the sort of a reflection of an inside out perspective on the part of typically technology companies, but not exclusively, who are obsessed about, you know, the products they create the features that they've developed, you know, competitive knockoffs and so on. And all the while they're thinking about that, they're not thinking about what the customer is actually trying to achieve, or why the customer might be motivated to buy anything, let alone their product in the first place. So that's the sort of first thing you've named something that I suspect people will recognize that they've been suffering from, whether it's sales enablement people, whether it's sales People, other members of the organization, you know, I think we've all been blighted by product itis in our time.Scott Santucci 05:08  ie blighted. That's a great word, what I think would be really fun. So if you haven't watched the webinar, you can go to inside sales enablement comm and download it and watch it. But I think will be really fun. And thinking you think hearing your response to it, I think it'd be really, really fun to walk through and go through the product, outcome view back and forth, sort of like a he said, she said with you. So what was your second second takeaway?Bob Apollo 05:36  Well, the second one, which again resonates very much with my perspective on how people make buying decisions, is customers start on a path towards change because they've got issues. And the best thing that a salesperson could do in their early engagement with a customer is to really ask Cover and develop those issues and their implications. And, you know, we're back to what's the role that sales enablement can play in that. It's equipping the salespeople to have those issue lead conversations. And don't just stop when you've uncovered an issue and then revert to type and pitch your product, stick with the problems, stick with the issues stick with the reason to change and really explore the implications with the customer of what would happen if they just carried on their current path. So that was the second thing, you know, highlighting. I think you sort of quoted in the maybe a couple of places in that webinar, why, why and how our customers so value, a conversation about it business issues, rather than product features.Scott Santucci 06:54  So what's interesting about that, and if you're if you're joining, there were lots of quotes They were dense quotes, and they were hard to read properly during the webinar. And I even got some feedback they shouldn't read rate them out. But the reason that I put a lot in there is that I want people to have them on their decks. Yeah, and quote them a lot because nothing helps bring to life these problems than hearing the voices of executive level buyers of what's not happening. And it's it's a ubiquitous problem. And I think we have to all do a much better job. sales enablement. People talk about buyers journey and being but buyer centered and you know, cut buying enablement we're talking about. We've been hearing a lot of these things for a long time, but we're not really addressing the challenges. So bringing these quotes to bear I think, I think help a lot. And IBob Apollo 07:49  think sometimes we can think that content by itself will sell but, but really, I think the purpose of content is to stimulate conversation. Yes. And you know, it's In those conversations, those one to one or small group conversations between the salesperson and the representatives of the customer, where the real traction happens.Scott Santucci 08:10  And I think that's a, that's a great point. Because one of the things that's been very fascinating, and this is why we're trying to do this on our show, is I learn as much if not more from the feedback after these, these webinars, and we don't have a way to share it. And bataya the whole idea, the whole section that we had in there about mapping out the customers and the agreement network and everything like that resonates so strongly with sales leaders. It's unbelievable how much it resonates because they know in their heart of heart, I'm sparking a conversation so I can co create value with my customer. What's interesting, though, Bob is the people who work in the rest of the company. They tend to not see that because they want the salesperson to prescribe the product that they have, instead of the CO create whatever the outcome is,Bob Apollo 09:08  yeah, even heaven forbid, they want the salesperson to para word for word, their company presentation not realizing that they're not just presenting into the ether. They're presenting to one or a number of people. And if that presentation doesn't stimulate a conversation that might go off piste because you learn something about the customer and you react to it. I mean, that whole idea of prescribing, coaching training people to give Word Perfect presentations almost always reinforces product itis.Scott Santucci 09:47  That's right, inevitably. What's fascinating about that is these are things that if you talk with people who have a lot of sales experience, you're like, Well, duh, of course that's what you have to do. And then it's like, well, I'm not learning anything new. But the issue isn't about you. The issue is how do you get the rest of the organization to get aligned behind you? And that's challenged. And you have to recognize that not everybody has the same degree of client empathy that maybe you have, and maybe not all of your salespeople have, which I think gets us into what's your third takeaway?Bob Apollo 10:26  Well, that might well be your illumination of the power of outcomes as part of successfully engaging with the customer. You know, we need to avoid product itis. We need to equip and coach our salespeople to have really powerful conversations about issues and bring insights to bear against those issues. And the third element is so I don't think a customer starts a buying process, at least in a complex search. Well, you know, it's a discretionary purchase, they won't initiate the buying process seriously, unless there's something that looks like an issue that needs to be dealt with. And I'd also suggest they won't conclude the buying process, unless they're confident in the outcomes, that the change that's being proposed to them is going to deliver.Scott Santucci 11:21  Yeah. And I think that's so well stated. And I think what, what I'm very curious to get your feedback, so we haven't had a chance to rehearse this, that. So one of the things that we've created is an outcome wheel. And the reason that we create that outcome wheel is to provide a checklist of all the things that an executive is probably going to ask in their head, before they're willing to move forward with something. And we want to we tend to think about step one, I do this step two, I do this step two, three, I do this, but that's not the reality of human beings. We tend to operate holistically. So the outcome wheel has a, you know, a couple parts starting with what's the achieved end state. But I think some people start with that's all an outcome is. So I guess what I want to do is have a conversation with you, Bob about what actually is an outcome?Bob Apollo 12:16  Okay. Well, you know, I think actually outcomes apply to a number of phases in the relationship between a salesperson and a prospective customer. That is an ultimate outcome, which is really what the customer seeks to achieve as a result of engaging in a change program. But I think we also have incremental outcomes, which are things which demonstrate progress towards achieving that ultimate goal and to the point you make with your wheel, some of those outcomes tap into strategic perspectives, some into operational perspective. Some into a variety of other perspectives, and you've identified half a dozen in that in that wheel. And again, this is really part of the art of conversation as to how we set up an engage conversation with the customer around these different manifestations of outcome and how we seek to move forward progressively with the customer. With many or incremental outcomes or advances however you choose to characterize them, that when they are strung together, result in the customer achieving what they need to and, and, and contrasting that with the situation they're in at the moment. And I'll make a brief reference about the importance of contrast. Because I think if there's only a narrow a perceived narrow difference between the current trajectory the customer is following and the difference An outcome they might achieve. If they accepted your change programming proposal. If there's a narrow gap, it's not unlikely that they'll stick with what they've got right there isn't sufficient meeting it. So we need to be creating a stretching a perceived gap between where they're heading today, and where they could actually get to. If we work with them, help them collaborate with them, deliver capabilities, help them adopt an approach that maximizes their chances of getting that desired outcome.Scott Santucci 14:37  That's spot on and I what I want to do is, I want to unpack what we're talking about here for our listeners. Everything that Bob's talking about, are very specific details that you have to do on a one to one basis. The reason that we created the outcome wheel however, is that you can't prescribe For Bob, it was a let's take the role that I'm the sales enablement person, I'm enabling Bob, there's no way I can prescribe for Bob, what's going to happen because Bob can't prescribe what's going to happen with the customer because the customer is going to have their own conversation. So we have to equip Bob has to be trained and knowledgeable enough to know what value is, how to handle it, etc. And I have to be able to organize content here. So let's talk about what that outcome wheel is and what its elements are. element number one is to be able to paint or what's an achieved in state. So what I have to do is I have to be able to say, hey, Bob, here are some end results of where customer where we've helped customers be successful with other this identity. And Bob needs to understand it well enough to where he can present that in front of a customer and make it their ownBob Apollo 15:54  because it has to be their own. And just to an observation on that. Again, thinking about how we equip salespeople To accomplish this, the power of anecdote and story exactly conveying that vision is if I struggled to think you can properly articulate an outcome without having some ability, custom stories, experiences, anecdotes, and so on.Scott Santucci 16:22  That is so well stated. And really what we have to do is we have to blend, Bob has to have the skill of telling a story. And I have to give them the script more or less, I don't mean script, like, I need to give them the outline of the telling the story. Right. So there's the both of those parts. The second thing, the second attribute is framed through the lens of an executive owner. There's somebody who's going to who's going to get fired if that outcome doesn't achieve or is going to get promoted, if that achieved and we have to message it to that person. Speaking in the abstract doesn't work. Speaking minion level work doesn't work. It has to be in The language of that targeted stakeholder.Unknown Speaker 17:02  Right?Scott Santucci 17:04  And so you can imagine how much training goes into learning how to speak that language. But also we have to make sure if we're preparing content that we've done the homework that we've interviewed, enough CIOs, if we're trying to talk to CIOs are enough CFOs. And we've role played out that content because writing stuff down and talking to stuff is very, very different. And we want Bob talking with them, because we want them having conversations.Bob Apollo 17:31  And just to the point of the executive stakeholders, I think we also need to judge because sometimes it can be a bit deceptive content. People can carry titles, but not necessarily either the authority or the desire for change, that we've got to make an assessment whether the person we're depending on not to champion our solution, but to champion the project. That's really distinction is somebody who's a change agent and respected change agent. within their organization is somebody who understands how to get things done.Scott Santucci 18:07  That's right, and what So basically, what I would need to do is I would need to go and find other change agents in our customer base, come up with some sort of criteria to inform Bob of what that criteria is. But Bob has to know, to determine whether that person that he's talking to is, so Bob has to have the skill, but if I'm not providing him the things to look for, based on research, or based on what we're doing, we're putting all the burden on Bob, and that's not fair. How can Bob know how many people have Bob has Bob worried about or talk to,Bob Apollo 18:43  to bring this back to the sales enablement agenda? You know, there'll be a handful of salespeople in any organization who are just naturally gifted at this and they might actually be the source for some of the insights we want to share with their peers. But the greatest impact on absolutely convinced this is by elevating otherwise, you know, good enough core competence salespeople to be that much more polished and effective.In in having these conversations.Scott Santucci 19:12  Yes, yes. And the Polish matters a lot. So that's why we want to have good training that's in sync. It also has to have the right structure as well. So the third, the third attribute is framed as an initiative. And what does that mean? executives fund initiatives. They don't fund your products. There is nobody out there who's going to say we're going to do project by product from you. That doesn't have it's not how it works. They come up with an initiative. They give it some sort of internal identity. They know where they're going, and they're after their business result, not your software or...