Inside: Sales Enablement

Welcome to Inside: Sales Enablement Episode 63How do we make sales today and one of the things that we need to concentrate on is selling the value of what is actually value mean in the first place? No human being on the planet can live without water. But water is cheap, and prevalent, and inexpensive in most places. Whereas none of us need diamonds to survive. But diamonds are expensive. So what actually is value?In this episode, the guys are joined by Jen Burns who runs sales enablement globally for IQVIA. The reason the concept is so important today is as we move into a digital into the digital economy where customer experience becomes so vital.The key questions you must be able to help your sellers answer are: What actually is valuable? Is the product and service that you have, is that what is valuable? Or is it the outcome the customer achieves? Is that what's valuable. That's what we're talking about today.AUDIO 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.Scott Santucci 00:49  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 01:03  And our focus is on you, as a sales enablement leader and Orchestrator, sales enablement, leaders need to develop specific characteristics that we call Orchestration, operate in the blended domain of strategy and tactics, where you do both. Our goal on this podcast is to help you clarify what that looks like, provide examples that you can then take an action in your own company and give you confidence to engage up down and across the organization. And as usual, we have a centering story. So Scott, what do you have for us today?Scott Santucci 01:34  So I'm going to lead with a quote, and I'm going to ask you to see if you can think place the quote and the time period.Brian Lambert 01:42  Okay.Scott Santucci 01:44  Here's the quote. Why is water that is vital for all life. cheap. And diamonds are so expensive.Brian Lambert 01:56  Isn't this say? Something tells me that this is like the 1980s or something that a technology reference like a Steve Jobs keynote or something?Scott Santucci 02:06  Close?Brian Lambert 02:06  It isScott Santucci 02:07  very close. Yes. It's Aristotle. And it's about 300 BC. You were right. Close. My hopesBrian Lambert 02:17  only to bash it upside that. Okay. Well, fine. Aristotle's a smart dude. I can get go for that.Scott Santucci 02:22  I guess he's Steve Jobs. Yes. And essentially, he's got, you know, big thoughts.Brian Lambert 02:27  And they probably are more like sandals.Scott Santucci 02:29  There's the close part. So why are we talking about this and diamonds, around the time of Aristotle, many of the people many of the Greeks actually believe diamonds were literally tears of the gods. And between, then, and in the dark ages, many kings wore diamonds on their armor because it was a great, it was a great sign of health and virility and safety. And then in 1477, I guess that's the Renaissance time. maximillian, who at the time that this happened was the Archduke of the Habsburg Empire, babe later became the Holy Roman Emperor. So there's your Italian Kwazii connection there for you. Thanks. You're welcome. Nice pay out there. But this, this is pretty interesting. And 1477, he became the first person to actually propose to a woman using it using a diamond ring.Brian Lambert 03:32  So it's his fault. I see.Scott Santucci 03:34  It is his fault. So set so that then so we fast forward to 1938. And the reason 1938 is a is a good is a very important time is because at this point in time, that De Beers organization we all know about the beers cornered the diamond industry. And they commissioned a study because most of the diamond sales were happening in the United States at the time. And what's significant about 1938 Yes, it's during the Great Depression. And there was a big dip in diamond sales. They commissioned a study figured out that before 1938 you know, who they were trying to sell diamonds to directly to women. And what they found out is that they needed to sell diamonds to men, and specifically around this whole engagement ring phenomenon. So a woman named Dorothy diam did did a bunch of this research and when it first came out, they came out with a she's the one who came up with the Diamonds Are Forever program.Brian Lambert 04:37  What's her name?Scott Santucci 04:38  Dorothy was Dorothy Diane.Brian Lambert 04:40  I thought I thought you said Dorothy diamond. I'm like what that did she changed her name. Okay.Scott Santucci 04:46  Great. Yeah, actually credited as being one of the first people to do product placement so thatBrian Lambert 04:52  diamonds are forever. That's right.Scott Santucci 04:55  So that's that became a slogan and wrote by By the 1950s diamond sales that drunk jumped at the time they were promoting one, one month salary for what you should pay for a ring that went so well they doubled it to two months. So those things are all going on. Now what's interesting then, and at the same time, in 1954, so think about alchemy, we've talked about alchemy, before people trying to make gold, and people have been trying to make diamonds or synthesize diamonds. And it wasn't it wasn't until 1954 that synthetic diamonds could be produced today, synthetic diamonds are its own industry and upon itself. So you have the regular mined diamonds that are used mostly or for gems. But then the synthetic diamonds are used for machine and cutting tools. They're used as thermal conductors, they're used as optical materials, electronics, and increasingly as gemstones and to bring this full circle. Part of the reason gemstones are becoming an option is because of environmental reasons and be poked, people are becoming more concerned with it. So for example, it takes about 250 tons of earth to produce one carat of diamonds, or also some of the poor working conditions are like, so what you have is, you know, coming back full step full circle to Aristotle. Why is water? vital? And why are diamonds so expensive? Well, there's a whole bunch of reasons for for diamonds, and a whole bunch of people have different value for it. So that's our centering story, full circle from Aristotle, the Aristotle between 300 some odd BC to 2020. And we've covered a lot of ground here.Brian Lambert 06:56  Yeah, thanks. Great, great lesson, I guess. But I got to ask. So what? So what does this have to do with sales enablement?Scott Santucci 07:05  So this has to do with sales enablement is the first part of that word is sales. How do we make sales today and one of the things that we need to concentrate on is selling the value of what is actually value mean in the first place? No human being on the planet can live without water. But water is cheap, and prevalent, and inexpensive in most places. Whereas none of us need diamonds to survive. But diamonds are expensive. So what actually is value. And the reason that that's so important today is as we move into a digital into the digital economy where customer experience becomes so important. What actually is valuable? Is the product and service that you have, is that what is valuable? Or is it the outcome the customer achieves? Is that what's valuable. So that's what we're talking about today.Brian Lambert 08:02  Great. Well, we have with us to help us unpack this. And actually, we're using this and it this podcast in a in an interesting way. I think our listeners are gonna love to hear about this. We've got Jen burns with us, Scott, why don't you tell us a little bit about Jen and have her introduce herself. And then I'll come back at the end and recap what all this means to orchestrators.Scott Santucci 08:22  Well, I'm super excited to introduce Jen for a variety reasons. So Jen and I go back aways. Jen actually was one of the participants, Brian, if you remember, the sales enablement society didn't start as a sales day was sorry, started as the washington dc local sales enablement. networking group, which I titled that was my baby.Brian Lambert 08:47  That's why you're not in marketing.Scott Santucci 08:48  That's true. I'm not in marketing. So Jen, Jen, join us there. Jen has been the been on the board of directors of the sale today and once it along the way. And now she runs sales enablement globally for a company called a cavia. So when they The third thing there for actually The fourth thing that I'm excited about is I'm really interested to see how Jen reacts to our centering story and connects the dots of what we're going to talk about. Jen, would you care to add some color about who you are and introduce yourself to inside our nation?Jen Burns 09:23  Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm kind of nervous about the pivot to the centering story, but we'll see what we can do. From that perspective. It was a great one. So see, I'm Jen burns, and Senior Director of Sales, global sales strategy, enablement training at IQ vs. Scott mentioned. And and I'm really excited to be part of this podcast and it I think it's been quite a number of years actually, since Scott, you and I have been on a webinar or podcast together and Brian similar to that, so. So it's great and a lot of has happened since then. Particularly since our early days. It days for sure. But um, you know, but I'm very excited to kind of get into this topic today, particularly because we're preparing for a keynote, this coming week at our global sales conference, which Scott is, is going to be leading, and I will be joining him in the discussion. So really important that we start to flesh this topic out and wanted to use this platform to really kind of think through some of the key issues to ensure that when we put it in front of the sales team, you know, it makes sense, and they can start leveraging some of these techniques. So it's really important, you know, for me, and for my organization to ensure that we continue to drive, you know, value to our customers, and very, very excited to discuss what that actually means today. So yeah, really great to be here, guys. Thanks for having me.Scott Santucci 10:46  Oh, no problem. So in case you're wondering. And following along, let's make sure we're paying attention really clear, crystal clear, Jen is doing this podcast, because she's practicing. And she's practicing for a keynote presentation, that, well, we're gonna do, we're gonna do, we're gonna do together. So we're gonna do a keynote presentation for the sales kickoff that she's got in a few days. And we're practicing landing some of the concepts. So I just want to make sure that everybody recognizes that we all have to practice we all have to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations, we're asking our sales people to do it don't get outside of their comfort zone. I think this is a great opportunity to highlight that Jen's doing exactly that. So with that, having said that, let's talk about value. And why is this topic so important? Don't doesn't everybody know what value means? Gen y's, why is talking about values such a central theme for sales organizations in 2020?Jen Burns 11:52  Yeah, so I think, you know, it reminds me back to the days when we were trying to put a definition behind sales enablement, right? It kind of means something different to every person. And, you know, I think for every sales enablement practitioner that's listening to this, or even a salesperson or marketing professional, it's the word value is a very nebulous term. And I think, you know, frankly, we throw it around, you know, in a way that it doesn't really clearly provide value. Right? So when we say we're value selling, or we're driving value to our customers, I think we really need to be careful about how we use that term, because what ends up happening is it doesn't carry meaning. And, you know, one of the reasons you know why Scott, I'm so excited to, you know, to be working with you, and growth enablement and trying to, you know, work through what, what the definition of value really means to to our sales, sales organization, so we can continue can continue to drive growth, it's really thinking about, you know, what it means to the customer, because I think we all want to define it from our lens. But really, you know, the value is what the customer thinks it is not what we think it is. And so there's a lot of, you know, ways that I think we can get to that answer. And so really excited to, you know, to start working through, you know, one, how we do that, and to how we communicate it to sales so that they can articulate it in a much stronger way to our customers,Scott Santucci 13:22  right. And one of the things that where this problems begins, or starts, really comes down to as businesses, we tend to go to market. And when we go to market, we think, let's make a list of all the different products that we've got our capabilities that we've got. Now let's compare those capabilities, and how do we compare those capabilities, either by the speeds and feeds that we can prove and demonstrate or what we can demo, or by how we compare against our competitors. And I think the observation that we're on Jen and love, you get some add some more clarity about that, is, as we build more and more capabilities, one, we can't communicate all that stuff to people, it becomes overwhelming. And to from a customer standpoint, one of the challenges is how are we going to get everybody who is who's involved in that on the same page? And how are we going to turn those capabilities into value for us? So are you seeing similar similar situations? And how do you go about preparing the right kinds of materials to have a value driven conversation?Jen Burns 14:32  Yeah, so let's, let's unpack this a little bit, because I'll give you my perspective. And then actually, I'd like to get yours right on, you know, potentially a different direction. so well done in a very, in a very simple way, right? The way that that you know, and I and I will come out and be transparent and say that this is how I typically view value right and i think others do as well is that when we're trying Trying to prepare our sales organization to sell more effectively and have better deeper conversations with buyers, we often anchor that conversation to what our solutions are going to drive. Right? So, you know, what can we increase or decrease? Can we drive revenue growth rate, all of the key buzzwords that everybody uses in their marketing materials or sales conversations. And you know, of course, that's all talking about product. And while we absolutely want to share those things, and they're very meaningful at different parts of the conversation, and conversations that we have with buyers and other key stakeholders, I don't think they're the things that really set us up for a good consultative relationship so that we can help our buyers understand, you know, what is that value that that they're looking for? Right, because we think myopically that it's directly, you know, related to our product and what it can do versus what actually is going on with an organization that directly impacts that definition to them. So I would actually turn it back to you, Scott, and just get your thoughts on, you know, one is, is the pattern kind of that you see, directly correlating value to product versus, you know, people actually digging into the value that the customer believes that they're trying to drive, which may be influenced by things going on in their environment? And then how do we actually think differently about that? As we're crafting, you know, our resources and tools for sales? Because it's a very difficult thing for me to kind of get my hands around? Yes.Scott Santucci 16:35  So Jen is leading with all of you guys. She has a more refined view than what she's what she's sharing. The Jen, you and I both have had experience talking about this concept of prototypes. And it's been really the width inside your company. I think that's really where where things start, is that we've just got so much muscle memory, about wanting to talk about what we've got, that we're losing sight of what's valuable for customers. That's one point. The second point is, I think it's really difficult when we so let's say that Brian, were a real estate agent and genuine I had a business partnership where we're looking to buy some real estate. Brian referred to us as buyers, we're going to be put off because we haven't bought anything yet. So I think another another challenge is let's, let's move off of thinking about the people that we're trying to sell to as buyers because it desensitizes it, we treat them like there's some formulaic thing out there just waiting. They have all this demand for whatever our product and services, but the reality is they don't. The reality is to create demand with them. And maybe we don't treat them as buyers, we treat them actually as customers and human beings.Jen Burns 18:06  Yeah, no, that's that's a fair point, honestly, and, and frankly, if we were doing our jobs well, as salespeople, you know, we want them to recognize, you know, in many cases, problems they may not realize exists. So if there's no problems in their mind, they're not buyers. That's right. So it actually makes sense to say it that way, I agree with you.Scott Santucci 18:26  So when we when we when we unpack that, then what makes it be makes it very difficult is we're in the b2b world. So in your case, Janet acuvue, you sell to pharmaceutical companies. So pharmaceutical companies are multinational, large, complex entities and word that's what we're technically selling to. However, we're also selling to human beings as well. And I think this is where things become challenging is to not confront the complexities that exist in a b2b organization to start off with. So one of the things that we have developed is a, what we call a value equation. And there's three simple parts to it, there is the impact that we can bring to bear to the company that you have to co create or agree on. There...

In this episode , we're joined by Brian King. Sales Enablement leader who brought a cross-functional team together to develop and clarify the value of his team at Intercontinental Hotels. In this podcast, we talk through bringing together cross-functional leaders (all who have a myopic lens of "value") as well as understanding the commercial ratio and how to leverage to elevate the strategic conversation and strategies.And our focus is on you, as a sales enablement leader and Orchestrator, sales enablement, leaders need to develop specific characteristics that we call Orchestration, operate in the blended domain of strategy and tactics, where you do both. Our goal on this podcast is to help you clarify what that looks like, provide examples that you can then take an action in your own company and give you confidence to engage up down and across the organization.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 companiesScott 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 sales enablement leaders and orchestrators as a sales enablement orchestrator, you need to develop specific skills to blend both strategy and tactics together to help your company succeed. As you work across the sales and marketing, you're also bringing together a lot of different inputs, and you're turning those inputs into value for your company. As usual, we have a centering story, Scott, what do you have for us today?Scott Santucci 01:27  So our centering story goes way, way, way, way back.Brian Lambert 01:31  usually say that it doesn't isn't that far. Either way.Scott Santucci 01:35  With that.Brian Lambert 01:36  When you add all the emphasis you blow it that it's not that far back.Scott Santucci 01:41  We have the benefit of actually knowing what the story is because I'm including you on this one. So that's a little unfair. I'm usingBrian Lambert 01:47  the fact that I'm not in the dark this time.Unknown Speaker 01:50  Exactly.Scott Santucci 01:52  But so we've we've had stories that go way back as I remember around BC period, BC when we talked about the invention of improv.Brian Lambert 02:05  That's right.Scott Santucci 02:06  That's how far back we've gone. So this time, we're going all the way back to episode six gaven, episode six of our actual podcast. So how modern are we getting here? So if you haven't, if you haven't listened to Episode Six, you probably shouldn't do it. It's we published this in in June of 2019. And there's actually a funny story about that. What prompted us to do this episode was a call that I made to you, Brian Lambert, of when I was in Atlanta, what was that call? Like?Brian Lambert 02:42  That's right, you called me and you're like, guess where I'm just leaving this meeting. And first you had some sort of travel disaster you went through, because there was some sort of major issue in the meeting had to start without you or something. And then youScott Santucci 02:54  think our guests might have some comments on that.Brian Lambert 02:59  And then, you went to you told me about this guy who was like, you're not going to believe this. Brian, he got Lambert, you have this guy who brings who brings us all in when we're going through this idea of his charter. And then he actually at the end of this meeting, get this he briefs and brings in his executive team to do the readout. And that's what this two day meeting was about. How awesome is that? That this guy would put his, you know, team through this. And this is a group of people that actually was coming together for the Conference Board. It wasn't even his team. That's right, we're just super jazzed up about it.Scott Santucci 03:34  I am always so if anybody if any of our listeners has a idea to tackle something different out of the box, call me and I'll get in the foxhole with him because I just love anybody who does that. And our special guest, this is the guy or we'll talk about who he is in a second. I was the program director, whatever you call it for the for the Conference Board. And for those who don't know, the conference board's 100 and x 160 year old organization. It's actually the organization that came up with the 40 day 40 Hour Workweek that's that's true story, got labor and management together. And then during the Industrial Revolution, and ever since then, has been creating these councils. And that's how I met our guests. This guy, his name's Brian King, and he was one of the members. And we were having a meeting. I think it was at Tiffany's. We literally had breakfast. Two days at Tiffany's. Brian and I right. That's right, Brian,Unknown Speaker 04:35  right. Yeah. Ray would have breakfast. Every everyone's dream.Scott Santucci 04:40  Yes, exactly. So we were at we're having our meeting at Tiffany's. And we we had the situation where had everybody present out what their, what their sales enablement. Charter would be if we were on CNBC and it didn't go well. So we realized we needed to work on our messaging instead. We've got to adopt this idea of a business with our business. So Brian King goes while do that, that makes sense. I'll do that. So we decided on the spot. You know, little did we know, why don't we have our next meeting, our next Conference Board meeting at in Atlanta at international, intercontinental hotels group in Atlanta, so they have a big hospitality company. And what we're going to do is we're going to put all of us on the spot and create an agenda, where we're going to provide a readout for as executives. Now how cool is that?Brian Lambert 05:38  I that's amazing. That's,Scott Santucci 05:39  I think it's I think it's the coolest thing. So anybody who's got the stones to be able to pull that off is immediately going to be somebody that I idolize. And we have that person now with us, Brian King. So Brian, tell us a little bit about that story. And, you know, pick us up and what we're going to be talking about today.Unknown Speaker 05:58  Yeah, well, thanks. It's great to join. Both you gentlemen today, always have a great time chatting with you With you both. And talking about sales and commercial enablement, that that meeting was so interesting, because we had pulled together a considerable number of corporate executive board members, they all came to Atlanta, we sat in our boardroom. And for two days, we talked through challenges around value propositions for sales for sellers, about our product, and our product ID, intercontinental hotels, at that point in time was our brands. So everything from a Kimpton to a Holiday Inn to, to an intercontinental across our brand categories, and why our sellers who sell to them in the b2b space, so they would sell to the IBM's, the Cisco, the Coca Cola has, etc, in order to get their business travel, as well as their groups and their meetings and titles. And so we spent a lot of time really kind of focused on value propositions as well as loyalty. And we, as a sales organization, had a kind of working knowledge of what, what our ideas were, but we wanted to have loyalty and brands Come and join us in the room and listen to what other corporate executive board members like. Like Ernst, and young and Tiffany and Microsoft and anhand are really exceptional group of sales leaders. And listen to what they think about these value propositions and where we were going with with loyalty. Anyway, long story short, that room represented over half a billion dollars worth of business travel. So a great opportunity for our executives to get in front of the those groups who travel most predominantly salespeople, these are all sales leaders, and really kind of worked through the the output of that session. And it was was a phenomenal session. I think everyone participated. Great. But it shows something it should cast the light on this idea that you guys have been talking about with the insider nation around Productitis. You know, that real belief that the features and the functions of the product, which in this case is a hotel, really have more meaning or more value for our customers for our customers experience than than what the sales relationship is really providing. And so I'm really saying that those executives kind of came in and they nodded their heads, they listened. And then they exited stage left. AndScott Santucci 09:00  it was those executives You mean the executives within IHG? Correct?Unknown Speaker 09:05  Right? That's correct. Yeah. I think it was the guy who ran loyalty to the brand leaders ran upscale brands. And it was a it was a an eye opening experience. For me. It was an eye opening experience for the team of people that I had brought in on my team, whether we're speaking marketing or sales enablement teams, and then we actually had sellers come in as well, and sellers who are actually aligned to the accounts that are representative. So a great a great experience and a great learning for me. A lot of differentScott Santucci 09:42  levels. to Brian, I'm getting fired up. Because you're making me remember and I know you're holding me at gunpoint making me remember right like it's Yeah, but I am remembering that situation. We should probably do a whole podcast just on that but go through each part.Unknown Speaker 10:00  HowScott Santucci 10:02  people in loyalty just kept asking questions about loyalty and how it didn't connect at all withUnknown Speaker 10:08  like, yeah, yeah, they want to have a points conversation,Scott Santucci 10:12  right? What are you talking about? What do you mean? WhatUnknown Speaker 10:14  are you talking about here?Brian Lambert 10:16  And there's a couple of things on this. Like, there's the whole idea of just bringing these folks together, which I think a lot of our listeners would be intrigued by, like, how did you actually pull that off? And then there's the what happened in the room? Yeah,Unknown Speaker 10:28  yeah. Yeah, there's, and there's also it would probably be great to have one of the other attendees come to it too. Because I think there were two perspectives of the folks that came into the room, there was, Hey, I'm, I'm coming. I'm going to help Brian. But I actually have the same challenges that Brian's got with value propositions or with, let's call it loyalty or retention of our clients or, or what have you. And so I can wrap my head around me helping Brian is actually helping myself. And then there were other folks in the room who were like, no one sent me the memo on this, or I didn't understand what's happening. I'm just here helping Brian, like, I really would prefer to maybe engage in a different way. And in this, so I think there are there are so many different perspectives and layers of how that meeting down that Yeah, we could totally do an entire.Scott Santucci 11:18  So Alright, well, let's do this. We're gonna call out so we're gonna, we're gonna I'll reach out to Greg and Samir. Yeah. And let's try to recreate that that magic a year later. Let's see what happens. But the purpose of this is, is your reactions to the last of our commercial, commercial enablement seminar series. Before we get into that, can you introduce and tell folks about how you ran or runs, run sales in a month, a little bit about your department, your your game plan and how you did it?Unknown Speaker 11:55  Yeah. So I, in my last position, which is with hp, which I left about a year ago, I ran global sales operations enablement,Scott Santucci 12:07  I want to hold off on Wait, before we do that, when I mention a qualifier, there is no correlation between Brian leaving in this meeting that we had, I just want to make sure that correlation doesn't exist, there's other factors go on.Unknown Speaker 12:21  That's true. That's very true. And so I came into the organization and I was winning strategic accounts, and I had some other aspects to my role. And, you know, the system was broken. The, the dots were not being connected on the inside of, from everything, from analytics, to operations, to process, to engagement with legal and other business partners. The technology that was there was fragmented, we had over 29 different product technology products that we used in the world of sales, which was bizarre to me. And ultimately, what I did is I ended up taking an internal position, because I wanted to kind of start to sort all of that out. And in doing that, we had to centralized specific parts of the team of teams where maybe analytics have been regionalized, for, you know, Greater China and for the Americas or Europe. It was really bringing all of those together as centers of excellence, which I'm not really a fan of that term. But who says you're Excellent. So I am, I would giveScott Santucci 13:38  myself labeling. Yeah, I mean, I could bring my own exercise, right.Unknown Speaker 13:43  Yeah. So but but really centralizing a lot of these functions that we're having pregnant for a long time. So the team grew to about 200 people across eight different countries. That really was set to enable the global sales organization. And we developed a really a vision statement with the leaders as I brought everyone together. I said, Well, what is our purpose was our mission here. And we we said, you know, it's really to unlock the value of sales. So when you guys talk about value, and without clear clarifying value, and how that's really not rocket science is you're right, it doesn't have to be. And what we did is we make sure everyone can see themselves in that mantra every single day, that regardless of whether they were working in the technology area, or if they were working operations or effectiveness or training or you name it, they were they were all contributing to unlocking that value so that our sales people could do what they needed to do best. So and help simplify and make things seller ready for the sales teams because we had so many different parts of the organization. burdening them with their own agendas and we kind of became The stock app to prevent that from happening. And with design and simplify, in order to help release that burden from salespeople reduce the workflow or just the number of approvals reduce the produce all of the internal stuff that our customers don't care about. Because they, they don't need to hear from the salesperson, it's gonna take another week and a half to get the contract, when they're waiting for it. The holdup is on our and we should be able to move in a much more agile pace. So anyway, so we had that organization out. And I'm really aligned each of my direct reports to their to their most relevant business partner in the organization, whether it was finance or it or HR, HR for training and effectiveness and talent. For for, for all of our technology with it was our product management teams, etc. So, um, and as we've created those partnerships, a lot of the, the business partners were like, Well, wait a minute, why are you doing training and sales when we have a training learning department, we, we feel like you're kind of getting in our space. And we spend a lot of time saying, actually, we can do this together. And this was really, when orchestrating things really started for us, we can actually bring this together, you can still have a role in all of this. But we're the subject matter experts in sales, you're the subject matter experts and adult learning, let's actually combine those two things, and figure out how we do this together and weave our agendas or priorities together, when we did that across a number of fronts. So when I met Scott, it was through that corporate executive board. And I thought, I thought organization was kind of like the last to the party on this. And so when I first met Scott, I was very kind of quiet in terms of what we would have been able to accomplish that he and, and this concept of orchestration, and really come to the forefront of my mind on Well, that's what we were doing. And Scott would talk about this was you call your unconscious, your unconscious,Scott Santucci 17:15  unconscious competence?Unknown Speaker 17:17  Yes. And every time I would talk about something that you'd say, well, there's that unconscious competence. And so it became more and more evident that what we were doing was really starting to orchestrate the enterprise around how to more effectively enable salespeople at every step of the buying journey. And, and that's kind of that's just a little bit about what I was doing. And he, um, and so I guess, I have to say, um, you know, thinking about this goes to customer webinar that, that we justScott Santucci 17:56  let me let me go produce that that topic gives some space. So okay, as a list or sort of digest that I want you to sort of imagine this is what Brian's doing. This is how he's running in his organization help you level set about the scope and scale of what he's working on. So I asked, I asked Brian, hey, you want to do a podcast and react to our go to customer? webinar? So as you know, we've we've asked other people to do that. So I don't know anything? He may hate it. I have no idea. So um, hopefully he does. He doesn't hate it. But I asked him to come up with three thoughts. But I think it's important that you, as a listener, have a frame of reference of where he's where he's coming from. Yeah, thank you.Unknown Speaker 18:44  So...

Welcome to Inside: Sales Enablement Episode 61In this episode we're joined by long-time listener Erik Host-Steen who appreciates getting into the meat of some issues. Since we like introducing ideas and inviting people to participate and push back, Erik reached out to discuss business outcomes and business impact of Sales Enablement.Erik finds that sales, marketing, and product leaders are often working at cross-purposes. One way to get alignment is through business impact measures. What are the goals of the organization? And certainly, growth is usually a part of that. And that growth is for some purpose, value creation, profitability, etc. And then if it's a venture capital backed, firm, there's an exit. So then we have to have an eye toward valuation. And the top typical valuation models have many other factors involved rather than the Commercial Ratio we discussed on the show.What does the Commerical Ratio really add to the toolkit in terms of being able to solve growth problems being able to drive toward a particular valuation or profitability? Find out as we walk through the top-down view of business impact measures so you can quantify your business impact of the sales enablement function.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 00:33  I'm Scott Santucci. 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 enablement issues. As analysts, consultants, we're practitioners, we've learned the hard way, what works, and maybe was more importantly, what doesn't. AndBrian Lambert 01:01  our focus is on you as sales enablement, leaders and orchestrators. In that role as an orchestrator, you have to blend both tactics and strategy to execute. Our goal is to help you clarify the measures of success, provide an example of what that looks like to execute, and work together across your function across your organization. And then give you confidence to engage up down and across so you can drive results. And on this podcast today, we're just really excited. And it's really awesome to have another insider join us. We've got Eric hosting with us. Hi, Eric, how you doing?Erik Host-Steen 01:37  Great, thanks. Thanks for having me.Brian Lambert 01:39  Absolutely. And I was, I wanted to bring you in, because you and I had both had a conversation on the heels of the Commercial Ratio webinar. And I learned a little bit about you, you've got you fixed sales and marketing and product problems. You've been with Rogers Corporation, and hoche and Red Mountain, and you're very process driven and quality focused, and have a product marketing background in business development. And, you know, one of the things that I learned about you as you really are focused on having a dialogue, to understand but also where things maybe don't necessarily come together for you, you want to have a discussion. And that's what we're doing here today. I thought, Well, you know what, instead of having the conversation between us, between you and Scott, let's have you on the show. And you can ask Scott yourself. So thanks for joining in, tell us tell us a little bit more about yourself, Eric will do.Erik Host-Steen 02:31  Yep, longtime listener or I've been listening here for for quite a while. And if the podcast is made the cut into my the ones that I always listened to. What I appreciate about it is not just sort of soft, fluffy interviews, but get into the meat of some issues and introduce some new ideas and you invite people to participate and push back. And that's what I'm why I'm here. My practice what I do I explain it in a fun way I fix or prevent a condition that most sales enablement people have experienced, I call it round canoe syndrome. And round canoe syndrome happens when we have sales leaders, Marketing Leaders and product leaders all in around boat, each with a paddle rowing in the direction they think they need to go.Brian Lambert 03:18  Awesome. That's a great setup for this conversation. So tell us and tell our listeners and tell us why you're here. And what your questions about the Commercial Ratio.Erik Host-Steen 03:30  Yeah, I you know, so I listened to the prior podcasts that talked about Commercial Ratio and watch the webinar also. And, you know, I appreciate this idea of how do we try to drive sales and marketing efficiency and alignment. But what I've thinking about it, I come up with two words, incomplete and unnecessary. And that's what I would like to explore a little bit today and try and find out from a question standpoint, what, what really is this Commercial Ratio trying to accomplish? And what does it do that other tools and methods that already are in place don't accomplish?Scott Santucci 04:11  Excellent. So I think let's start with to our listeners know, we so we've published a podcast on the Commercial Ratio or two podcasts, we have Commercial ratio.com microsite and then we also have done a whole webinar on it. So we've shared a lot about that. Let's talk about let's let's break down incomplete and unnecessary. Let's first talk about incomplete what what about from from your lens? What, what is your perspective of it? What's incomplete and what is the purpose of the ratio from from your understanding?Erik Host-Steen 04:51  Sure. So when I think about the things that drive revenue, it's it's more than marketing and sales and Something that I always think about is is left out in the sort of sales and marketing alignment piece is what about the product. And that's not captured in here. So if we're if we're looking at it trying to drive growth, and neglecting whether or not the product portfolio is keeping up whether product quality is where it needs to be, whether customer support is what it needs, what needs to happen. You know, one of the stories I like to add observations from my past experiences, we do a great job bringing customers in, but the rest of the organization would run them out back to our faster than we could bring them in the front.Scott Santucci 05:39  Excellent. Okay, so then what? So you're saying, What would be your alternative for what's, what would make it more complete?Erik Host-Steen 05:50  Well, I think that the bigger question is, what are the goals of the organization? Right? And certainly, growth is usually a part of that. And sometimes not, you know, sometimes you think of a lifestyle business. And growth really isn't all that important. But the sense of the types of organizations that were usually involved with growth is usually a component. And that growth is for some purpose, value creation, right profitability. And then if it's a venture capital backed, firm, there's an exit, right? So then we have to have an eye toward valuation. And the top typical valuation models have many other factors involved rather than a Commercial Ratio. So you know, that's, that's the it gets to Well, what what does it really what does it really add to the toolkit in terms of being able to solve growth problems being able to drive toward a particular valuation or particular profitability?Unknown Speaker 06:53  outcome?Unknown Speaker 06:55  That's, that's part of it. Mm hmm.Scott Santucci 07:00  So let's, um, let me provide some responses back in a in an ordered way, and not overwhelming way. So first and foremost, having conversations about these things are awesome. So this is what we want to have what we want to have happen. So step number one would I did? Do I disagree? That there are many factors that go into revenue? No, of course, not. As a matter of fact, the entire company's revenue engine, everything it does, should be driving to revenue. Totally agree with there's no disagreement there. So the question then becomes the role of the Commercial Ratio, and what what its intent is to drive balance across not, it's not just about driving balance across sales and marketing, it's a lens to look at the driving balance between how finance is accounting, and what investors see. So the difficulty is from an investor's standpoint. So just as a reminder, we co created this Commercial Ratio in partnership with TCV, which is a very large, well known private equity firm. And in talking with, after having published that publish that work, we've now been in contact with other leading private equity firms who are all seeing a similar problem. So from their perspective, what they see again, their investors so that they'll look at things more like the income statement. And to your point, and I'm glad you brought this up, Eric, the kinds of things that go into making the company valuable, versus the kinds of things that investors see as valuable. So we'll cover the the valuation metrics later, are two different things. So I'm gonna pause there. Are we in alignment so far?Erik Host-Steen 08:56  Yes, yes. And this, this accounting thing is, I think important.Scott Santucci 09:03  Yes. And I think this, it's really important. It's where we, where we can get where we can get lost. So I'm going to share with you some really interesting things, I was anticipating about the incomplete part, because how exactly do you account for marketing investments that aren't earmarked for growth, for example, or there's all these little nuances, unfortunately, there about accounting rules. And, and, and when you're looking at metrics from a financial standpoint, from the investors, we have to worry about the ways that things are accounted for, and also the rules of what goes into what bucket. So unfortunately, unfortunately, we can't be theoretical at all there because there are laws that people follow. And if you look at the revenue recognition laws and rules that people follow. Each company can make different choices amongst themselves. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done to figure out which being goes into what bucket. Right? Okay. So that's one of the things that's been so challenging from the investor to the company view, about how to get clarity of what's happening. I will tell you that over the past five years, the degree of frustration, of the return of investment that investors are seeing and sales and marketing has grown increasingly more frustrated. And maybe we have a negative consequence that a lot of these random acts of sales enablement, are coming from frustrated investors who are just telling them to go do different things. So I will definitely say that investors are part of the problem. And I think part of what we need to do is better understand where they're coming from, and what what metrics that they're looking at. So I'll let you I'll let you respond to that. Because and by the way, Eric, I'm I'm trying to do is be very step by step approach, so that we can find out where we agree, where we disagree, and then how might we amend this analysis so that we can make it more complete? And then hopefully, if we make it more complete, then we'll see why it's valuable or necessary, instead of being unnecessary. That's, that's my goal.Erik Host-Steen 11:25  Right? So from a gap standpoint, gap standpoint, yeah. Sales and Marketing belong in SGA. And I think I picked up one of the things that creates some some of the trouble which is there are very few people on the commercial side that have a deep enough understanding of accounting. And then they hear the term cost of sales, which is just an out just a nother term for cost of goods sold. Even though it says cost of sales, it gets lost in the translation of accounting English into normal person's EnglishScott Santucci 12:05  spot on right.Erik Host-Steen 12:08  And so, you know, they're in and of itself creates a lot of confusion.Scott Santucci 12:12  Whoa, glad we're having this conversation. Keep going.Erik Host-Steen 12:15  Yeah, we call it costs of sales. But we don't put costs of sales in that bucket. Well, one of the phrases I have in my in my in my in my toolkit is that the beginning of alignment starts with the definition of terms. And cost of sales might be one of these great examples that causes confusion, because when you deconstruct it from an English standpoint, anyone except for an accountant would say, Well, of course, sales goes in there.Scott Santucci 12:44  So that's, so what we're talking about for those of those of you who need a visual because I need a visual when I think about an income statement. Eric and I right now are talking about the definitions of an income statement. So you've joined this podcast, and yes, we're actually talking about gap financial standards, and we're talking for sales and marketing. So yes, it's super exciting stuff that we're getting into.Brian Lambert 13:10  We're just I'll say, also, for our listeners, because sometimes I take the voice of our listeners, and I interrupt people at awkward moments. But if, if you're wondering if you should go switch to something else, I would say do not do that. Hang in there. And if you're not sure what's happening, reach out to us because, as Eric just said, there are very few people in sales and marketing who actually understand this. And, and this is part of the challenge. So hang in there,Scott Santucci 13:37  no huge part of the challenge. It's it's. So let's first talk about cost of sales. So Part of , and then let's talk about sales and marketing expense or SG&A. Right? What what they're saying, in plain speak language is that there's money that you spend in order to get the revenue. That's what's cost to sales. Sometimes it's referred to cost a revenue. You can you can call it either one, then there's sales and marketing expense that we would think of that is OP x or operating expense. And what the investors are looking for is, and this is where some of our sales leaders are where we've gotten some challenge on Commercial Ratio, Eric, from from people from the sales perspective, right? their view is 100% of the revenue coming in is related to the sales effort. If you're looking at it from an investor's standpoint, they're saying even if we got rid of the Salesforce, we would still be generating 80% of our revenue anyway, and the Salesforce is very expensive. So to talk like that is an invitation to get a practical exam on what your expenses are. Right? So that's one challenge. So to your point, Eric, this is all about the accounting. Now the other angle, It is, what do investors think the purpose of the sales and marketing expense are. And they think it's to drive revenue growth, not revenue, revenue growth. So that calculation is the difference between what you saw last year, what you sold this year, whatever that delta is, that's what your contribution was. And then that's what they want to do is hold that line item that's on the OP x expense accountable for it. Now, the other key aha moment for me talking to these investors, so we talked to when we were working on it, we talked to so how how investors work is they put one of their portfolio people, one of their operating partners, they sit on these boards. So we talked to six of them. So basically, six people who are on boards of directors, each of three different companies. And universally, they all said that when they look at the retain revenue bucket, they expect most of that money to be paid for out of cost of revenue. So for example, your your customer support, people are going to be allocated or accounted for in that cost of revenue bucket. So just having that clarity was illuminating for me, because I was thinking, How much money do you spend to retain your customers? I thought that was a sales and marketing expense. And yes, there's some gray area, there's no absolutes, I'm just trying to give the rationale of where, where they're coming from with this ratio. And part of what they're trying to do is, of course, the investors think the only two people in the company that know anything are the CEO and CFO. Right. So that's, that's their bias. And the difficulty that the CFO has is how do I connect the dots between these budget expenses and these levers that our investors are driving pressure for, to the activities that sales and marketing keeps asking for more and more budget? And that's really where the tension point rests from the top down perspective?Erik Host-Steen 17:09  Yes, right. And there are none of these. And within the frameworks of gap, or whatever financial standards of private equity VC firm is going to use. There are there are guardrails. And there's the cliff where you go to jail because you break the rules. Yeah, right. And there's a lot in between, yep. And to correct. And when we start thinking about getting into the publicly traded realm, and let's say, your portfolio manager for Goldman Sachs, or someone like that, being able to do apples to apples comparison, when there are no standards within gap on, you know, does Customer Success belong to sales, marketing? Or does Customer Success belong to cost of sales, because their job is to retain customers, using a ratio based on publicly traded publicly available information to draw broad based conclusions, I think is dangerousScott Santucci 18:14  to what makes that dangerous versus empowering. So I would argue, literally, for everything that you just said, I would argue the opposite perspective, and it's actually empowering. So tell us why you think is dangerous,Erik Host-Steen 18:27  because we don't know what's included in different numbers. And at the end, we have some, you know, the mathematics is very straightforward, right? I mean, revenue at the end of the period minus the revenue of the previous period divided by marketing and sales expense, like that's pretty straightforward. And we get some number, and what's it mean? And what's good enough. And if you're at, you know, 1.5 today, and you're given a, you know, you're not going to get your bonus next year, unless this gets up to 2.0. Is that really the right thing to start measuring and incenting on versus we want to see top line growth and top line and bottom line growth, customer retention, customer satisfaction, other other metrics that are more direct to what it is that we're trying to achieve, which is to build and grow a valuable...

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