Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 50Theres a huge difference between analysis and synthesis. Analysis requires you to break things down, measure them, and understand what happened. The very nature of "analysis" is rooted in the past, and the assumption that understanding what happened helps you figure out what to do. But, what happens when a pandemic hits, your company is going through digital transformation, and what worked in the past is no longer working?That's where synthesis becomes critically important. Why? Synthesis provides you the interconnection of seemingly unrelated components and the ability to project what to do to help "skate to the puck" and add immense value as an orchestrator.In this episode, we're joined by Brooke Spatz, a Sales Enablement Orchestrator in the middle of a transformation to help her company move from selling products to selling a platform. Tapping into her background as an actor, the guys explore the difference between success in the past vs. success today by exploring what it means to analyze vs. synthesize to create value for the organization. Improvisation seems like it's free-flowing and the like, but really to make that art form, there is a whole slew of rules that you need to learn. Brooke helps us explore so you can Orchestrate in the flow of business.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:36  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 Behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Scott Santucci 01:07  I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 01:09  I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders.Scott Santucci 01:12  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 enable initiatives as analysts, consultants, or practitioners. We've learned the hard way we just did in our pre free work here. Because this is a recording of a previous one. We've learned the hard way what works and what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:43  Yeah, ask us about it sometime. I it was interesting, warm up to this call. And I think you guys are in for a real treat, because we're gonna be talking about analysis versus synthesis. As a sales enablement leader, you're an orchestrator and perspectives matter. And one of the things we're focused on here in season two is Understanding different perspectives, and more importantly, bringing people together to move forward to help clarify measures of success, provide examples of what it means to blend strategy and execution together to drive results and really gain the confidence to have more meaningful conversations in and among those people responsible for helping sales be successful. And as you guys know, we usually start with a centering story to Scott, take it away. What kind of story do you have for us today?Scott Santucci 02:27  What we're gonna have to do is go way back normally we start our stories in the 1800s or something like that. So we're going to go way back and we're going to go way back to his early as 391 BC. That's 391 BC. That's where we're starting our story fromBrian Lambert 02:45  All right, great. Well,Scott Santucci 02:47  and what we're talking about is something called the attilan farce. The atone forBrian Lambert 02:55  it the what attilanScott Santucci 02:58  for Exelon farce and Basically what the Italian farce is, it's, it's a style of theater that the Romans invented and if you kind of gotta go way back and you know, think about Greek mythology, and all those weird Greek plays that they did with their Lyle's, and, you know, all the stabbings and the, you know, the Greek tragedy that always end up so depressed. The Romans, of course, rip that off, because a lot of Romans ripped off Greek culture. And they were doing those Greek tragedies too. But the Romans, you know, it just, it was too heavy. A crowd, how many? How many plays Can you watch where everybody dies at the end? So what happened is, if you kind of can picture this, if you if you know, like acting and they have those masks, and they have a frowny mask and the big smiley mask with the heavy accentuated facial expressions, those come from the Greek model, so you would act with these masks onBrian Lambert 03:58  you put them in front of your face. Good, happy now.Scott Santucci 04:01  Exactly right? Remember that that's what acting was, I guess they didn't trust the craft and they had to have tools. You know, acting enablement Greek style one on one. Okay, so now we're fast forward to it, you do that. But what happened is in this town of a tiller, not to tell the Huns that's different in the Roman Empire, that what they really started doing is something different. And after the heavy, heavy, heavy main event, the actors would get on and sort of riff they would play on redoing that whole, that whole play, but they'd redo it, comedic and set hence, hence the idea of a farce. In no time. That became wildly popular. So it spread. And what that really is, is it's really the genesis of something called improvisation. So let's fast forward to the 50s. That guy improvisation got a renewed interest in the in the United States, particularly in Chicago. And in 1959, the second city formed and you might be aware of the Second City, a lot of famous actors that that we know about that are really funny like john candy, people like that. Jim Belushi came out of the Second City. And the second city really experimented with a lot of rules around how to do improvisation, which seems really interesting, right? improvisation seems like it's free flowing and the like, but really to make that form work. There's a whole slew of rules that you need to learn. And what's what's been very interesting now is that that form is moving into movies and TV. So if you've ever seen a show like Seinfeld, orBrian Lambert 05:57  Saturday Night Live,Scott Santucci 05:58  Curb Your Enthusiasm Saturday Night Live is more scripted than than that. But what? what Larry David is inside sometimes is they would etch out like scenes, and then they would ask the actors to sort of play off on each other. Right? Yep. So that's, that's what makes those shows about nothing, something about something. So what's interesting is it's really disruptive. It's disruptive to a lot of people. It's disruptive to the actors that you bring in. And that's really what our what our centering story here is going all the way back to ancient Roman to ancient Roman times of pivoting from just doing a play a certain way to doing a farce.Unknown Speaker 06:45  So whatBrian Lambert 06:48  does this have to do with sales enablement?Scott Santucci 06:50  So what let's so let's break it down for for everybody listening. So one thing that's changed, is that the playbook that we've all run You know, here's the product, train the salespeople on the product, go sell the product, sort of the same classic, the analogy being the same as the great play, doesn't work anymore. And so we're all learning, a form of improvisation as we're trying to work backwards from customers. So that's that's one thing. Second thing, though, is is really difficult to learn how to do that, when we know only the rules of being very specific actors. I have studied my lines of classically trained, right, and there are certain rules of stage rules to go through. And when you start changing the rules to do something different, it causes a lot of people to go batshit crazy. And then another variable that's relevant here is, I hope our listeners have heard of design thinking. Design Thinking is a technique that's being that's gaining more and more traction, and it's an approach to tackling complex human based systems to come up with some innovative solutions for it. And in order to do design thinking, the number one rule is to move away from analysis and concentrate more on synthesis. So the reason that we're having this conversation here is that the nucleolus many of us are really, really, really wired to analyze things a ways to Sunday. If you want to understand that just ask us about what our take. Our first take was on this on this podcast, but it's just very easy to get caught up until we have to know everything there is to know with everything before we start doing, but unfortunately today, we don't have the time to do that. So Joining us today is is Brooke Spats and Brooke Spats is, you know best known she's involved in the sales enablement society. She's best known for her work at omnitrax Brooke and I have worked a lot in employment The Ross devalue program at at omnitrax. So we've got a we have a lot of sweat equity. Don't Don't we broke about how it is to introduce something new. That may sound simple, but sometimes simple isn't easy. So Brooke, would you want to introduce yourself to the to insider nation?Unknown Speaker 09:21  Oh, yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Brian, for having me on. We're talking about one of the topics that are near and dear to my heart. And in addition to Scott's intro just to add a little color, I've been in the sales enablement space for about 20 years or so now in some capacity of sales, marketing, Product Marketing roles, but always leaning toward more of an enablement focus. And one of the biggest things to me and what I'm really really passionate about are the we've been talking a lot about these words, the four words that are are always overarching for me are collaboration, problem solving, empathy and awareness. And so, this topic of of, of improv and I love the grounding story, Scott, it just it got me so excited thinking about, you know, I have so many thoughts about what, what happened. You know why they decided we don't like this anymore. We want to change was it influenced from just what they thought? Or was it the audience or both?Scott Santucci 10:31  Okay, have you ever seen a GreekUnknown Speaker 10:33  tragedy? Have I ever seen a Greek tragedy? I thinkScott Santucci 10:36  it all would take was one yellowing of that and say, I'm done.Unknown Speaker 10:41  Yeah. Yeah, they're miserable. And you know, the masks that the we see that iconic image of the two masks together, I think for your listeners, the the comedy and drama, and the, the antithesis between the two, if you will, I mean, there's so opposite and That, you know that spawn somewhere and and I actually did not know the full story like you just told it I find it so interesting that what they were doing was taking what they had just done and almost replaying and replaying it in a different way. And, and we love doing that don't make Scott through these engagements we,Brian Lambert 11:22  we love it. So, so yeah, you're you're an actress too. You have an acting background.Unknown Speaker 11:27  I do have an acting background. Yes. And, and how's that helped youBrian Lambert 11:33  and sales enablement? Yes.Unknown Speaker 11:34  But, but it certainly doesn't leave you right. Oh, it's all the light ball. The world's a stage if you will.Scott Santucci 11:40  Well, here's what we did. So Brian asked you, how's that help you in sales? Now? I'm gonna ask everybody to go search her on IMDB. Oh, that video because it is hysterical.Brian Lambert 11:53  Gonna do that, but uh, Scott did.Unknown Speaker 11:56  Yeah. You know, did you I if you want I can speak to that for another moment. And as far as where I think it really translates in Yeah, absolutely love to hear that for me and in the roles that I've held, you know, I listed those those words you know, especially, especially empathy and awareness, and with you know, some of the formal and just experiential training I had in acting and you know, from a very young age it very quickly you realize these, the need to have empathy, empathy that is, is putting yourself in your audience's shoes and knowing your audience. And also being able to almost, you know, see yourself in through someone else's eyes while you're doing all these other things. So it definitely, you know, helped with with, you know, the l&d background that I have with with train i'd love being up in front of folks and getting you know, facilitating, etc. But you could do that and not be really effective with it because you're not necessarily Engaging the audience. And so, you know, the, that training helped helps me tremendously with with the empathy aspect and knowing your art and being able to walk in someone else's shoes very, very quickly. And, you know, I continue to apply a lot of those concepts with, with everything that we do today. You know, always trying to empathize with clients always, you know, when we're in workshops, trying to develop things, trying to have empathy both for, you know, for really everyone involved and, and, and I just think acting helps with that.Brian Lambert 13:32  Absolutely. That's a great story. And it really relates to our centering story. So that's awesome. And we'll keep bringing it back. Figuring out if we have a Greek tragedy here now. I'm trying to get that out of my head right now. But so the but this is great. See, the reason why you're on this call with us. This podcast, Brooke is we've been talking about analysis and synthesis for a while, but also the recent episode that we had with klauer, which was Episode 45 The modern day Marco Polo or Scott was Marco Polo. And we and you'd reached out to me and I just would love to have our listeners hear from you. What What struck you about that episode and perhaps how it relates a little bit analysis versus synthesis or improv?Unknown Speaker 14:18  Gosh, yeah. So I reached out to to you almost immediately after I listened to that particular podcast, and there were several things that stood out to me. Of course, if you listen to it again, I forget exactly where the timestamp was. But the topic of walking in another shoes was brought up by Doug and, and Scott and yourself and, you know, throughout that podcast started, you started talking about, you know, some ideas toward the end, you know, and Doug told the story about having, I believe it was either CFO or somebody in the financial Type role in the company he was with at the time to put together a presentation about how the company made money. And that just hit me so hard. I thought it was just awesome. Because we think so much about the things that, you know, kind of at this top level of, of what we have to roll out and how we check that box. And a lot of times we we forget that there are there's a fundamental baseline of knowledge that as simple as it may seem, we may be missing translating that or communicating that to the audience. And I just thought that was so neat. And one of the other things that really stood out to me was the point made about the merging of two things, which is strategy and tactics. And that sounds cool. Sounds like something you should be able to do. Yeah, we should, we should do that. But but the actual execution of trying to do that is a completely different story. And so I found myself asking Wow, that's a really cool idea. How do we do that? You know, how do you do that effectively? And of course, with everything that we're circling around today, between synthesis and analysis, it all, it all links together, right? In order to to sort of marry those two concepts of strategy and tactics. What do you guys call it? Stratecution? Yeah, yeah. There has to be a blend of these types of thinking and approaching problem solving.Brian Lambert 16:30  Yeah, that's great. And that episode with Doug and what you're bringing up here, I'm gonna, I'm going to kind of play off of a did some improv and play off of you with what go in here. You know, the interesting thing about where that discussion came from was this Venn diagram that Scott is shown is one of his webinars in the state of sales enablement. And the overlapping Venn diagram was with a circle of strategy in the circle of tactics, and where those overlap was Stratecution. As you just mentioned, that creates creates a space in between or an overlapping space. And the more I've worked in sales enablement, I realized that those two circles are very, very overlap not just a little bit overlapped but overlapped a lot in the more successful enablement professionals and understand that we call them orchestrators. And that's who's listening to our show. They operate in that space. And one of the things here that I'm building off of is the concept of improv the concept of creating space for the farce to happen in the first place to try something new. The idea of creating space when you walk in somebody else's shoes, the idea of creating space to understand both strategy and tactics, right, though that idea of space is something that I think Doug resonated with, that I resonate with, and I would just love to hear what your take is, with regard to being creative or improvising in the concept of space. What do you think about that? Yeah.Unknown Speaker 18:00  You know, I think one of one of the most challenging or one of the things we sort of have to ask ourselves when we think about that space, as you're describing it is, am I comfortable or uncomfortable in a place of almost ambiguity? If you have this, I don't know what the end picture looks like, Am I comfortable? And if I'm not, how can I get comfortable? Because that is what what we're talking about when you feel like you need to know what the end looks like. You tend to block the creativity that can come out of this. We're saying improv right now or the design thinking aspect of, you know, creatively solving problems and working together to do that.Brian Lambert 18:47  So it's great. I mean, you could have space in a in a meeting, right, where you have a bunch of different perspectives. You could have overlapping space there of thoughts and ideas and in design thinking techniques, but you can also Have some space on a blank sheet of paper. And I've seen people actually struggle with, I call it you know, blank, blank sheet itis it's a blank sheet of paper. I know I need to produce something I'm gonnaUnknown Speaker 19:13  deal with this. Yeah,Brian...

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 49It's a given that the sales and marketing engine is full of waste and inefficiency. Despite the best intentions of very smart people, something is still not quite right. How do we know? The Commercial Ratio tells us that most companies get .15 cents of growth for every dollar they spend on sales and marketing.Scott and Brian are joined by Kunal Mehta from the Private Equity firm TCV. Kunal shares a behind the scene view of rolling out the commercial ratio to all TCV portfolio companies. What were those discussions? What was the focus? What happened?Find out why the commercial ratio is such a great starting point for addressing sales and marketing challenges and how you can use the metric to engage more strategically with your executive team.You can find out more about the commercial ratio at www.commercialratio.comLet us know what 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 Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Scott Santucci 00:33  I'm Scotty NTG.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 enablement and issues as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works and perhaps what's more Important, what doesn't?Brian Lambert 01:02  This podcast is focused on you and being a great orchestrator. We've had a lot of episodes on orchestration and being orchestrated elevate your role. And on this particular episode, we're going to talk more about the commercial ratio. But before we do that, Scott, do you have a centering story for us?Scott Santucci 01:18  I do. I've got a I've got a little short one up. Actually, a lot of us are going to be familiar with this. The story it's a children's tale from the mid 1800s, from yawns, Christian Anderson. And really, it's about the Emperor's New Clothes. And if we remember that, if we remember that story, some swindlers go into this into this village, and they say we've got this amazing new fabric, and it's the most amazing, comfortable, glorious new fabric. And here's the deal. What's makes it super amazing is only smart people can see it. The dumb people can't see or appreciate how valuable this fabric is. And the emperors like wow, I want to do that. And all the Emperor's aides would look at this, look at the progress that these guys were doing after they set up their loom and make the Emperor's New Clothes, his new outfit his new wardrobe. And they watch his progress because of course, the Emperor wants to see his advisors. And none of them wanted to admit that they didn't see anything at play. because keep in mind, these guys are scam artists, right? But no one wanted to admit that they couldn't see it because by admitting it that they couldn't see it. Guess what was happening? They were saying that I'm stupid, right? Because only stupid people can't can't see it. So Wow, that's fabulous. And then the other a would be Oh, you're right. I see how fabulous it is to It'sBrian Lambert 02:43  amazing. That's looking great.Scott Santucci 02:45  That's looking great. So everybody sort of kicks the can down the road and the Emperor does. He puts the clothes on and the the charlatans mind mine out putting it on as close to the Emperor doesn't want to admit He can't see it too. So he just assumes everybody else's. And he walks out and parades out. And of course, no one wants to say anything to the Emperor until the little kid says, Hey, he's got no clothes. So that's that's the moral of that story. And that's our centering story.Unknown Speaker 03:20  All right.Unknown Speaker 03:21  So.Unknown Speaker 03:23  So what does that have to do with sales enablement?Scott Santucci 03:26  we're actually talking about really the the premise of that fable and sometimes simple. The simple things i'm not i'm not available to us. And what we're talking about is really the commercial ratio. And really what we're, what the commercial ratio is, is more or less the kids saying, hey, there's no close here. In sales and marketing. We spend tons and tons and tons and tons of money and tons and tons of energy and throw tons of headcount at trying to drive more sales. But is it productive and whole idea of the commercial ratio is a simple view to say, does the sum of the parts or do the sum of the parts? Are they greater than the whole. So it's a simple idea. But unfortunately, a lot of us don't want to bring it up, we want to be the ades because we don't want to upset the Emperor. So is that as a frame of reference, I'm delighted to introduce canol Mehta, and he's been really sort of advocating and developing this, this this commercial ratio concept. And what we're going to do is learn from him, what some of the experience experiences he's had, as his company, TCB private equity firm has rolled out the commercial ratio to their portfolio companies. So can all please introduce yourself and sort of set the tone a little bit what is commercial ratio and why is TCV so interested in it? And how are you guys rolling out some of your portfolio members?Unknown Speaker 04:56  Thanks Scott, and Brian, and again, my name is Ken Math I head up the Center of Excellence for sales and marketing at TCV. And the commercial ratio is is really a it's it's a center of gravity for internally how we talk at TCV about driving efficiency across sales and marketing. And it comes naturally inside of TCV. But but there's certainly more work to do when we introduce it inside the portfolio company and, and and I love the story you tell Scott I, I was watching a YouTube video this morning and I have no idea how their algorithm works for serving up videos to me, but there was one that came up on hand gliding, and I've never clicked on anything hand gliding, related or have any interest whatsoever in hand gliding but this guy, I clicked on this one and Chris Goertz, he was the guy who was in the video, and he had signed up for this class in Switzerland and that the the instructor for that to strap him in. And he took off. And the video was about this guy holding on for dear life for about two minutes and 14 seconds. And that's all he could think about. And I feel like when we roll this out into a portfolio company, if they just trust the system and hold on for a brief moment, I think they'll see the value in the commercial ratio really quickly. But there is that moment or they just gotta, they got to overcome that and see how it's worked at other companies and kind of get get rooted in the process. There's, there's it's something that every company Ultimately though, though, comes to to talk about more naturally over time with TCP.Scott Santucci 06:50  So that's awesome. One of the things that I'm thinking here is I love using stories and I know you do too, to introduce a brand new idea. And I know that a lot of our members and our listeners just say, Yeah, like just get to the point you just get to the point. I think the point here is that I think what you're saying canol is that commercial ratio, it's like flying. And it's something different. If you never hang glide before, the first step is stepping off that cliff and just hanging on for dear life. That fear factor, let that last for a few minutes before you go, Hey, I'm flying. You got to be willing to take that first step off the cliff in the first place. Is that more or less what you what you're trying to introduce to us? That's correct. Yeah. So that I think then what I'd like us to do is let's, let's review. What is the commercial ratio commercial ratio is a is a metric. And it's a metric that simply is it's a, I can't keep stressing how simple the calculation is, and how complex most people want to make it most most non finance people But it's taking it's basically its revenue growth, which is calculated by, say the annual revenue growth that you've got this year subtracted from the revenue growth from last year at your revenue growth. And it's subtracted by, well, that's the top, that's the numerator. And the denominator is the total spending that you've had for sales and marketing for that period during that period of time. That's it. And that's what the ratio is. That's what it is. So cool. Why is that so important? And why is that such a revealing metric for say, investors and CEOs and CFOs? What does that tell us?Unknown Speaker 08:41  Yeah, so it's, it's it tells us about the efficiency of sales and marketing. You know, from a private equity perspective, we use we view that as as a single function of driving revenue. What you often see though, is those two functions don't operate very well. cohesively together. And that shows up in the ratio and shows up in a much lower ratio the more kind of divorce from each other that they are the the the ratio itself if you if you've ever watched the movie Moneyball it's it's the number that they came up with his on base percentage and how, you know, how do we drive that number up to generate more wins? Who are the what are the type of people we need to bring on to the team that are going to drive that number up and ultimately generate runs which generates wins. We've the commercial ratio is very, very similar in that regard. We want to look at the company through the eyes of that ratio, and what they're doing to drive more efficiency on that ratio. And any private equity company that you look at certainly will also want to look at efficiency overall, it's so funny when we could be making peanut butter and jelly and jelly sandwiches and we weren't Do it as efficiently as possible, even against their own kids. So they the way the the ratio works, it just gives us a real quick sense of how that revenue engine is working inside the company now, and then where we can we can, you know, looking through that lens, we can look for opportunities then to introduce projects that help improve that ratio. And it certainly drive companies to work closer together inside of sales and marketing.Scott Santucci 10:28  That's awesome. So let's keep it this top down view from an investor standpoint, and let me share with you so we you know, as you know, we've been we've had a webinar on the commercial ratio, we've got commercial ratio, comm as a site to share this information. So we're getting a lot of feedback. And some of the questions really arrive at Well, why would you just focus on sales and marketing to focus on growth, really sales is involved in driving all Revenue. Why would you just track it that way? That seems like a stupid metric, which is these are exact quotes I've heard. So why would Why are we not factoring in all looking at all of the revenue growth and assigning the sales and marketing in there because if you look at sales barking through that lens, the return on investments tremendousUnknown Speaker 11:20  the way we've calculated it, and the way the way you guys are talking about it, we've used sales and marketing primarily as the the biggest lever to driving growth. I don't think it's any surprise to any of your listeners, that the relationships between those two functions just just are often poor. So what's the fastest way to move the needle is to build a metric that combines the two two groups together and focuses them on projects that if they don't work on together, they'll they'll never move the needle on efficient So, you know, an example of that might be if we've chosen and we know, the companies that have the highest likelihood to buy, why wouldn't we focus sales on those named accounts, but also marketing on on providing air cover and ground cover specifically to those accounts? As simple as that sounds, you know, the majority of companies don't don't actually have a systematic way about going, going and doing that.Scott Santucci 12:30  So, you know, you and I had had the great opportunity to introduce the commercial ratio, even before we did the did the webinar to a handful of some of your leading portfolio companies. Can you give our audience a flavor of some of their questions, and, you know, you have a huge advantage being the owners of businesses, you get to sort of say this is a metric that we want you to do. The rest of us are going to have to bubble that up and do it. So How How would you describe, though the introduction of the commercial ratio? And how Yeah, about doing it? And, youUnknown Speaker 13:10  know, it's a, it's such a good question, I think I think one of the big lessons learned is, is um, with, with folks at TC, the finance and metrics come very naturally to them. And and we potentially get ahead of ourselves and how we used to communicate that to companies and and, and they may be might not have been ready for the message because it you know, while something so naturally comes to a finance person, it might not come that naturally to a sales leader or marketing leader. So we've had to really sit down and kind of explain the ratio in the meeting that you're talking about with kind of the sales ops leaders, I think there is a combination of a little bit of fear, a little bit of vulnerability and and then ultimately, it's like Ha, I get it. I get it. I think what TCP is doing as we onboard, certainly new companies now, it's we're spending much more time walking through how we think about efficiency, how we measure this metric and kind of what can move in needle on value creation. And certainly this metric and the number.Scott Santucci 14:21  Yeah, so I want to add some add some color to this, because I can tell you and I have been working on this concept for eight, nine months, right. I mean, it's been a while. One of the things that, that I'd like to highlight is how do we arrive at the the metric we were interviewing general partners in your company, and what do they look for? And I remember one in particular, where we asked I love starting out asking open ended questions. We asked that one open ended question and one of your general partners to started listing out I think I lost track. I couldn't keep track enough.Unknown Speaker 14:57  exactly what you're talking about. Yeah,Scott Santucci 14:58  I know. Right? I know. You do. Right, cuz I remember us talking about it. It was like, could you keep track of all them? Like 3037 different very specific metrics that he was just rattling off in his head? Yeah, he's able to connect the dots in his head. Remember that? Could you cut? IUnknown Speaker 15:14  totally remember I took him like a minute, like even a minute to and he just kept going.Scott Santucci 15:18  Yeah, exactly. We had to sort of Whoa. And then what we have to recognize is that everybody has their own unconscious competence. And to be able to get all of those metrics down into one thing is really empowering because I know a lot of us are going to want to focus on all the individual details. But then when he when we asked so while those numbers, he got to one looking at productivity, I'm looking at I want to figure out the levers of how we get. So really, you're looking at this thing is it well, that's how I'd explained it to other people. You just ask me how I do it, right. And it's really funny and it's natural. Because that's the way human beings are. But I think if what what is very hard to realize is, that's what he does for a living. He helps you see the future and say this is where your business is going to be the most valuable in the future. But where you are today is your companies, the client companies, the portfolio companies are dealing in the present in most cases, the past because the data that they're looking at, so it's a big shift. And I think that's one of the things that we need to be more understanding of, so that we can appreciate what our investors are looking at. So can all we've talked then and so as this as we've gotten simplicity around the the ratio with inside your your portfolio, your general partners, now the question becomes, how do we get the portfolio companies CEO CFO, so why is it that your leaders believe the CFO is the person to introduced this metric to,Unknown Speaker 17:02  you know, I it's, there is a, if you look at the leader that the leader inside a TCV, I think he became frustrated with over the years of saying, looking at, like, we've made these gigantic investments in sales and marketing and it often falls short of what was originally promised. And it led to it led to really him as the leader kind of declaring war, which is why this magic number two Ruta TCP, declaring war on efficiency effectively and how do we, how do we drive these two teams to work together? And this was the metric that every general partner was already using in a slightly different way, but it was what they were using to, you know, try to drive the teams to work together. Other what they didn't have and where we're portfolio ops at TC v kind of starting to move the needle overall, is building these these sets of projects that that more scientifically move that needle. But But you know, if you look at the evolution of why this matter to TCP, it really came down to a lot of companies were made promises early on in terms of sales and marketing and how, how much it's going to deliver. And, and they just got really, the leaders inside of TCV just got super frustrated that they never saw that. And they easily saw both teams weren't working together. In some cases, the way we asked for the metrics, often propagated that because we asked for marketing metrics and sales metrics. So now we've even taken a step back and we look at the numbers specifically. And then how are we moving the needle on the overall commercial ratio?Scott Santucci 18:55  So I think so let me translate this to our audience of why I think this is so Powerful. And so it's simple, but it's transformative. What is the highlight? Is it for all my years in b2b sales and marketing? I've heard about sales and marketing alignment. Right? We've heard about that. And guess what? those departments haven't aligned on their own. So what's powerful about this metric is we the investors aren't going to ask you about sales and marketing anymore. We're interested in your commercial process of which we've used sales and marketing is...

The value of Sales Enablement continues to elevate for those who orchestrate across the company to bring together the right solutions at the right time while addressing seller burden.In this packed episode, Scott and Brian are joined by Joe, a VP of Sales for a Mid-Sized services company that works with some of the largest media companies on the planet. Joe talks about the evolution of selling over the past 20 years and what's happening the sales right now. Especially, with the impact of COVID, and the complexity his team is dealing with.Against this backdrop, Scott, Joe, and Brian discuss the perceived value and impact of Sales Enablement.The discussion includes:Peeling back the layers of VP of Sales challenges and situations, so you can gain more empathyThe perceived impact of Sales Enablement OrchestrationTips and ideas on how to role-play sales enablement valueJoin us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation, and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Unknown Speaker 00:34  I'm Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:48  Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives as analysts, consultants, or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works And maybe what's most importantly, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:02  Our focus is on you the sales enablement orchestrator. As you know, sales enablement, leaders really need to develop a core skill and competency in the area that blends strategy and tactics to stay mission and goal focused, to prioritize the right action at the right moments, to guide the narrative by confronting reality, to take more of a design approach, not just when, through effort to unlock energy, create momentum, and catalyze change. To help us out on this episode, we're going to bring in a head of sales. It's Scott's going to talk through some of the attributes of recent sales enablement initiatives. And this is an important lesson for you guys in a kind of a way to go into the lab and I really want you to listen for the space that Scott creates with this VP of sales, and how he goes about talking through some of the real issues. And as part of that at the end of the discussion, well, we'll kind of roleplay a little bit of how we might position things Some of these more comprehensive solutions to VPS sales and win together. So with that, I'm gonna hand it off to Scott. And Scott, can you introduce our guest?Scott Santucci 02:10  Absolutely.Scott Santucci 02:12  We have two goals that were happening here. Goal number one is, how do we start talking about one of the terms that we brought up as stratification? How do we actually bring to life, that gap between strategy and execution for our criticals stakeholders, and in this case of VP of sales, that's the one thing that's part one. And that's what I'm going to cover. Part Number two, what we're going to get at is, okay, now that you have ideas of what might resonate and not, you're not in the order, taking business for sales leaders, you're in the partnership business, Brian's gonna walk through with you, how he might roleplay out and introduce some of these ideas, and the way that we're going to bring it to bear hopefully you been tracking along and entire nations been tracking along that you're aware that Brian and I have been hosting a series of webcasts, webinars, whatever you want to talk about it around a variety of different topics. And all comes from the COVID research that we've launched for you, insider nation for our podcasts. We've done the most research around sales enablement, sales, execution, sales, productivity, whatever you want to call it, post research than anybody so far on the planet. And we've been carrying that forward by having lots and lots and lots of conversations. One of the conversation starters definitely are these webcasts. What's fantastic is we're getting great feedback that they're very engaging. If you haven't participated in the one we're going to talk about which is called up routes devalue in enabling your customers to buy you are, you can go visit inside se comm and get a link to the download recording to hear the same thing. Joe heard. So now we're at the Joe Joe was one of the participants in that Rouse devalue webinar. Joe is a VP of sales. He's been a VP of sales for many large, large companies, we'll have Joe, introduce himself and get us more of that color. But what we're going to do now we're in part one, and we're going to talk about what his reactions are to the content that's in that in that session around routes to value. Obviously, we're doing it away that you don't have to watch the webinar, it'll probably be valuable to go back and listen to it. And again, the re re enforce what we're trying to do here, please listen and try to gain empathy first, for how a sales and sales leader may take this content. And then we'll get into step step number two, what might you do about it with Brian? Now, having said all that, I bet that's the longest preamble to an introduction you've ever had before job, radio. Yeah,Brian Lambert 04:58  no, I think that's the A story from the early 1600s may have taken longer, but I'm not sure. Right.Scott Santucci 05:05  taxing them with with that and Other Stories there. And I think you weren't implying that Joe's been in sales in hundreds, right? It seems like, right. So with that I'd like I'd like to I'd like Joe, if you would mind to introduce yourself as Joe Hayes. Yeah. The sales leader for quite some time. Please introduce yourself and what your background is and how you got connected with these webinars.Joe 05:33  Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Thank you, Scott. And thank you, Brian, for having me on your podcast today. Yeah, the My background is I've been in media for basically my entire career, which is now 30 years. So I started actually on the auditing side, working at one of the one of the audit bureaus on the media side of the business and then from there, I think the company felt that do less damage in sales than it actually auditing itself. So they moved me into sales. And then from there, I took a job, I was able to get a job as a sales just a regular salesperson within a company called srts, which is 100 year old business that basically connects buyers and sellers of media within an online planning platform. So I work for a company called srts. I've been working here for 20 years, worked my way up in the quickly within the ranks to head up the sales. And so my clients are both on the agency side, the largest us advertising agencies, and then also the largest some of the largest media companies that exists within the United States. So, for example, my clients are like Comcast, NBC, Viacom, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, all the way down to a large b2b publications like electrical contractor and so it really runs the gambit. But I have a sales team. I've had sales teams both on the agency side and the sell side, within the company that run into the, you know, 2030 people. And then within Nielsen it was even larger. And then once we came over to cantar, which is owned by WP pay, it's the same amount. So I've, I've had all the challenges of sales of running a sales organization. But I will say, I started carrying a bag and carrying a territory and worked my way up to managing a team. And to this day, I'm still very hands on when it comes to sales. So Scott asked, How did I come engage with these webinars? It's because I'm always on the lookout for for good information. And so when I first started hearing what Scott what Brian Brian was doing with growth enablement. I this was this was of interest to me. So I started listening to a lot of the things Scott was posting. And then I was a lucky enough to join a couple of these webinars, which, which I found, given COVID. And what we're living through right now, at least on my side of the business on the sales side, to media and agencies, I have found made it my, my, my goal to find the time to join these webinars and I found them very interesting. I've sent notes off to Scott telling him and Brian how valuable they are to me. And Scott reached out and said, Hey, Joe, would you mind joining just a quick podcast to talk about the last one we did, which was routes to value. So I hope that helps Scott.Scott Santucci 08:34  Yeah, that's a great lot of great context. And it's grounding for our listeners and what what we're trying to do is move to have conversations. It's one thing for you as an individual person to listen to a podcast or listen to, or participate in a webinar. It's something completely different to start piecing together how other people see it. And that's really what we're trying to do is bring that perspective. So Joe Don't want to do a lot of framing for it just for our listeners, the the scope of routes devalue is essentially, hey, look, there's a lot of content that we make available for salespeople. And because we don't organize it in a cohesive way, it creates burden for our sellers. All the while, we should be working backwards from our customers to do it. What is working backwards from our customers to do it? Well, we got a lot of stakeholders to manage, and how do we visualize all of that. So we've developed an approach that we call routes devalue, which basically we start about mapping out or modeling out the customer and their agreement network. Then it goes over to mapping and building a map of your product palette in a way that is more configurable for sales for customers to digest. And then the third part then is to create a value map to help salespeople connect the dots and it's really that simple. Wherever simple is sales is simple but simple isUnknown Speaker 10:03  hard. Yes.Unknown Speaker 10:06  And no, I think what you just touched on, Scott, I think even you'd be surprised at how many companies do not operate this way. And I would say later in the webinar, when you really kind of draw this out about working back from the customer, it's just not done. It's not. And that's where I think the real opportunity lies, especially now, given what COVID has done to pipelines, it's basically decimated them. And a lot of companies I know cantar, in particular, with their new owners, which are paying and just using them as an example, as well as other companies that I call on are all going through the same thing. They're looking what's happened to these pipelines and and that they're, they're they're suffering and not a lot of the information being put in there just it wasn't accurate. And some of it is on the rep but not all of it's on the route. Yeah, so So you're, well, it's easy for you to talk about Scott and build these slides working back from the customerScott Santucci 11:09  is when did you say it's easy to build slides?Unknown Speaker 11:13  I know. Well, it may be easy for you to talk to those slides. Because the experience that you've had, um, it definitely resonates with me. Because it's an issue that I've had for a number of years. But it's not easy when you're working back from the customer to many companies feel that great. You work back from the customer, you work back from one person. The fact of the matter is you're not working back from one person. You got to work back from a group a network of people and you got to know where those noes are. And not only that, you got to work internally within your own organization and companies refused to look at that.Scott Santucci 11:53  You said yeah, let's let's do that. So I don't mean any disrespect when I say this, I suppose I say this to a lot of people. As leaders all the time, but I think when we're going through a major period of change, like we are with cut digital, the digital revolution was here before COVID COVID has exasperated and accelerated it and exposed a lot of pain. What really is happening is that sales, the sales function is kind of like canaries in a coal mine. And they're seeing all this poisonous gas, but don't have the words or vocabulary to describe it. So part of what I'm going to, what I'm trying to do here is connect the dots of we have some slides that you can go and listen to, and some reactions, but how do we give some texture to this environment that is so inefficient, and so painful, but most of management doesn't see. And the sales force doesn't necessarily have the right vocabulary or ways to eliminate it. And we want to highlight these things because we want you as the audience to be able to recognize how do I actually extract out or understand what's really going on, rather than reading reports what everybody else thinks is going on. So Joe, can you elaborate a little bit on that? Is that fair to call your canary in a coal miner? Is that insulting? I don't know.Unknown Speaker 13:12  No, I mean sales for at we're always the frontline troops. So canary in the coalmine, I think that's very true. But I will say, Yeah, you're you're right with that. And I don't take that as an insult, at least. But where the problem becomes is when you're not communicating the gases in the mind back to your organization, and in some cases, when you do communicate that it falls on deaf ears, so um, so that's part of the issue as well.Scott Santucci 13:43  So let's walk through what are some what are three highlights that you got from? From this from the conversation around rasa value, what were some three short key takeaways, the cat,Unknown Speaker 13:55  the first one, which you brought up on a couple of them now? Product Titus. I love that. I thought you nailed that the first time you talked about it, you continue to talk about it. I now use it when I'm on sales calls to media companies, and now they've taken it. So I've got to start giving you credit for that we got to start trademarking that. But the fact of the matter is, we all suffer from it. My team in particular suffers from it. I work for an organization that feels that they know better than their clients. So marketing teams feel that they know better. The executives within the company feel the same thing. And all we're doing is pushing out product. And then it's left to the sales team to go out and really be carry that load of trying to go into companies, huge companies like Comcast and try and sell a list of 1000 products that that none of them meet what they're looking for. The needs of what they're looking for. And, and that that's part of the problem. It's a major problem right now.Scott Santucci 15:07  What is proctitis?Unknown Speaker 15:08  What is it? Well, for me, it's a, I guess it's an explosion of confusing and misaligned activities. It's, it's marketing, coming to us in a sales team, with the next new shiny fish. And with the instructions of drop everything you're doing, this is what we need to be focusing on. We've had an acquisition, we want to be pushing this out. It's another division within the corporate umbrella of cantar. And we want to be focusing and getting our clients at least looking at this and buying it. The fact of the matter is, though, is the people that my team is talking to, aren't even involved in that type of decision making. So we missed the mark continuously. That's, that's to me is the product. That's the definition of product itis.Scott Santucci 16:04  So the reason that for our audience The reason that we worked on creating that an identity is because it's really hard to talk about the poisonous gas that we're running into. So product Titus becomes that poisonous gas. And it becomes a great talking point, with very little setup you can get get traction, I doubt very seriously, Joe, I mean, I don't know, I don't wanna speak for heads of sales. But I just think it's really unlikely that a head of sales that we're going to run into in any industry is going to say, Oh, no, we don't have product Titus at all.Unknown Speaker 16:37  Um, I yeah, I don't think you want I think most of them will say that. Or at least agree to it in some in some, in some degree. I will tell you that on in my case. And in other cases of most of the time that I've been in sales, this has been going on for quite some time. And here's the other thing, how many times can you Keep going back to the same client with a new shiny fish. I mean, after a while, they just say no what they just turned it off. So every time we go back and now with the new shiny fish, to keep pushing it, we're losing more and more credibility with the few people, the stakeholders within the organizations that we have large, large pieces of business. So think about that too. Because how many times can someone say I'm not the right person for that?Scott Santucci 17:29  Right, and then keep meeting it the next time?Unknown Speaker 17:32  Correct. I mean, I Scott, I've actually had a story where a the largest single piece of business that ever came through the channel at srts was my client. It was it was ESPN at the time. And like anything once people get whiff of there's large money and there's a big deal. Everyone wants to own it. Everyone wants a piece of it. So an executive wanted to join me on a call with ESPN. They wanted Go in there, they didn't care. And I was kind of forced to do this, which would upset me. But that's the way it is. So being a new guy, I kind of went in there and brought that person along. And the person launch into a new product launch that had nothing to do with the decision making or the budgets that sat with the person across the desk that we were meeting with. We'd left the meeting by the time I got back to my office, there was an email in my inbox, from now an account that had just signed up within the last six months and said, if you ever bring that person back into my office, we will cancel our program.Unknown Speaker 18:37  Now, that's a true story.Scott Santucci 18:38  And I, I empathize because I've had similar situations myself from my sales world. Look at what bads position you're in. How do you bring that up to your boss, you know, that executive? And why did they think that they that they're what made them think that they can go on add value in the first...

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 47In this episode, the guys are joined by Tom Pisello, the ROI Guy who shares his thoughts on the commercial ratio.To calculate the commercial ratio of your organization (www.commercialratio.com):Take your current annual revenue Subtract it from the annual revenue of the previous year Divide it by the total sales and marketing spending The guys talk about :Why value is so important to understand in salesWhy value is critical to sales enablement programsHow sales and marketing are viewed as "growth programs" by investorsThe relationship between strategy and tactics in creating ongoing programs to improve value communication with a portfolio of sales teamsThe fundamentals of calculating the commercial ratioHow the commercial ratio is used by investors and executivesThe role of Sales Enablement in moving the needle on the commercial ratioJoin us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott 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 and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, issues as analysts, consultants or practitioners, we've learned the hard way, what works, and maybe what's even more important, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:01  And our focus on this podcast is we are in season two is on sales enablement, leaders and orchestrators. And as you know, companies are often structured in hierarchical silos. And the topics that we're covering affect not only sales enablement, leaders in talent or pipeline or Message Enablement, but also in commercial enablement. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Because when you look at operating in the space between strategy and execution, and having to bring those together, and that's a big challenge that you're facing, because it involves the concept and the discussion with the executive leaders around, Hey, you know what, give me give me more, give me more remit, I'm going to give you more impact. You're going to spend less money and get more from it. And that's a tough concept to land as an Orchestrator. So Scott, why don't you set us up here on the podcast and share who our special guest is?Scott Santucci 01:55  Sure. Look forward to a Brian and insider nation. Let me just sort of summarize a couple things of where we've been. We've done probably the most research about post COVID, around sales enablement, then anybody, whether it be Gartner Forrest or anybody else. And we've been expressing that in terms of a series of webinars that we're doing through my company growth enablement. So the first one that we had was about sales and a was at a crossroads, where we first introduced this Orchestrator concept. Brian's really seized the reins on that. So we've had a lot of webinars around Orchestrator. Well, part of the difficulty then is how do we communicate the business value of Orchestration. And the last webinar that we had was around Commercial Ratio. And knowing the Commercial Ratio is so challenging knowing that it's really difficult to put your head arms around this, this fuzzy notion of the value proposition to a CEO saying, hey, you should invest in a sales enablement department. And the more investment that you give me, I'll give you less stuff. And in return, I'll get you'll get more. So how do we make that come to life. So that's really where Commercial Ratio comes in. So as if you've been participating in the webinar, if you didn't participate in the webinar, Brian will make it available. We have a micro site called Commercial ratio.com is we need to make these concepts more accessible. And as we were leading up to it, I reached out to my friend, Tom, the ROI guy, because I thought, you know, this is this is a person who's going to really resonate with it. So by by introduction, Tom, you and I have known each other for a long time, I'll let you give you some context about how much we've known each other. One of the things that Tom's done, so we started, I was the ROI guy, he built a business that was focused on visualization and simplifying ROI for salespeople. So he's been doing this for lots of companies for a long time. So much so he wrote a book on it. And he wrote a book on it called frugal nomics. And I don't know what I don't know if you've ever heard this before, Tom, but for whatever reason, I just associated with Fraggle Rock. I don't know why that pops into my head. I'm excited. Little Muppet scones. Yeah, exactly. Right. Little Muppets, and maybe we need to do that because the little Muppets will help us make talking about this stuff. simpler, right. Maybe we need to maybe do that. So I'm really excited to have Tom on here. And we've asked Tom, hey, you wrote this frugal nomics book or I asked Tom, you wrote this frugal anomic books, you know, based on the last great recession. We're in a completely new world here. What if we update it? So as part of that part of that process, I've invited him to be an ambassador around Commercial Ratio. So we're, we're having Tom join us. So Tom, would you give us a little bit, give our audience a little more background and color about yourself and you know, your involvement and the history of ROI and metrics and all that good stuff.Tom 04:55  Yeah. Scott and Brian, thank you so much for inviting me to the Join the nation and to be an ambassador for the Commercial Ratio. I've been in the value measurement business for a long time for about 25 years. And why the Commercial Ratio and I've had I've got such an affinity for it back in the day when I was working at Gartner. And just after I left Gartner, I partnered with a gentleman called Paul strassman. And Paul had done just some incredible articles and books and had dedicated his life to finding what he called it productivity. And it was something called the it productivity paradox that he had discovered through his research. And in this research, he crunched the numbers for hundreds and hundreds of commercial organizations, these were all public companies, and what he was trying to do, being a research scientist, and he had been basically the CIO for the Pentagon. So incredible credentials, and he was the data guy at heart and analyst at heart. And he was looking for that productivity, where was the productivity and all of these it benefits manifesting themselves in organizations. And what he found founded was, most organizations were investing a lot of money in information technology, substantial amounts of their revenue was being invested in it. And most organizations, it was not showing up in the corporate financials, it was not showing up in the income statement, it was not showing up in stock value, any and it was being squandered, somehow, along the way. And this led to a book by Nicholas Carr. And it featured Paul and myself our research and our findings in that book. And for those who remember, that was the book that really started the cloud and software as a service revolution. What was the book, it was called, it doesn't matter. And it came from an article he wrote in Harvard Business Review. And then he wrote a book about it. And it was really a changing point in the whole it landscape. It was with that book that folks began to realize, look, we're squandering a lot of these it benefits. And we can't find them in where we'd expect to find it's not creating additional shareholder value, which is what most companies are beholden to, from their value standpoint, it wasn't showing up in massive amounts of cost savings, because what they were saving and productivity or saving and cost avoidance in one area was somehow being spent on it and development it. What it turned out to be was that companies shouldn't be spending as much on this, because it's probably isn't their core competency. And they should be outsourcing it to the cloud, and software as a service. But there was a productivity paradox there that I thought was really profound. And it led to that revolution to where it today doesn't look anything like it looked 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, right. And when you Scott and Brian introduced the Commercial Ratio to me for the first time and I saw it, I wrote down and I'm looking at the piece of paper because I kept it on my desk, and I wrote down sales and marketing productivity paradox. I wrote that down right away, because once I saw what you were doing, where you were looking at sales growth, as the output, and sales and marketing investment as the input, and the ratio of those those things, it reminded me so much of that work with Paul, and with Nick Carr. And where we looked at, you know, here's the it spending as the denominator. And then we were hunting for what what was that numeral, what was the numerator, and that there was a paradox there. And what your ratio was showing is that when most companies take a look at the input, the investment in sales and marketing investment versus the output, the growth in the company that's being experienced, that there are ratios that are really not sustainable. And I'm like, yeah, this is really hitting on something very similar. The better thing about the Commercial Ratio, then what we struggled with was the numerator and the denominator, I think, are very well understood for the Commercial Ratio. You know, you could look at sales growth, and it's measurable. It's measurable in the corporate financials, you can look at the sales and marketing investment. It's in the corporate financials, your CFO has access to both of these metrics, whereas in the IT world, it was a little bit harder. But similarly, and why I use the word paradox is, I do think that we're at this time where we're spending so much in sales and marketing, and how much of that is being squandered? How much of that is being wasted? How much is not sustainable? And that's what really hit me was, when I started to, all of a sudden I saw the ratio, I'm like, Okay, let me run this company through it. And I'm working with let me run this company that I'm advising on, let me run this. All of a sudden, I'm looking at These ratios, Scott, and they were not good. Yeah, exactly. You know, and I'm looking at it like, Oh, now I know why technology crossover ventures why TCV is using this now with their portfolio companies. I'm going to talk about that a lot more, I'm sure. But it became obvious to me that, that they need this because they're creating businesses that are not sustainable. And we, when we hit a crisis, like what we're hitting right now, you need that sustainability. It's not billions or bust, right? It's not billions or broke, it's, you know, we've got to have growth, right, because all of these companies that TCP and some of the companies I advise are more earlier stage companies are are involved with, they've got to grow. So you know, you're going to be spending not completely efficiently or effectively, but the amount of inefficiency and the amount of effectiveness. That's the paradox. And I love that that's what the Commercial Ratio is trying to get at.Scott Santucci 10:58  So I love your story. Well, I want to go back to the it part. So I want to connect the dots for our listeners. So the IT organization over the history of, you know, over its history, it used to report into finance, right as today's a controlled cost center, somewhere between, you know, the late 90s, maybe after the post y2k debacle right in the post y2k stuff, it started shifting to where it was no longer a technical person running him but a business leader. Mm hmm. Because executives were so frustrated that people would show up and I want to give that paradox some color. When I was a salesperson at Mehta group, so you say Gartner group, I think great Satan. That's the way we were we had a chip on our shoulder at Mehta group about you guys competing against the Gartner budget was difficult. So you learn, let's not make it about the Gartner budget. That's that thing, go. And so you try to find new budget sources. So one of the things that we would do, or I would do, I remember specifically working with the CIO of Hearst. So hertz is a German chemical company, they had moved their headquarters to New Jersey, which was my territory. And the CIO, was very frustrated, because all of these business unit heads, which we're now located, whom he added to support, we're just pounding on it, like so frustrated, and he wanted to show he kept showing me Look at all this benchmark data, he he had hired IBM, or any of the other people, you know, go through the laundry list. And he said, Look at all these nines, look at all these nines of performance. Look at, you know, any key he wanted to do, he wanted to ask me about, maybe we could do a benchmark study. And I said, I said that his name was Frank, I said, Frank, we could keep doing the same thing over and over again, but they don't understand these nines, what these nines of availability mean, because this is a metric that's important to you. It's not a metric important to that. And for us to solve this, we'd have to have a completely different conversation, which is more like a customer experience study. And let's figure out what the what those measures are. Well, he just couldn't get his head around that. So I said, Okay, well, I'm not going to sell you a benchmark, because that's only going to make it worse. And you know, lo and behold, six months later, he was fired, replaced with a business person who loved the whole idea of a customer's right appearance. And, you know, I sold a lot of business from that. Now, the reason I bring that up is because that's a paradox. Hmm. You know, I think, very well stated, I think all these individual metrics are really, really, really important because I have to do it to run my technical department. And if we're not running our technical department correctly, we have to be able to, you know, and we want to show how efficient we are. But that's not what the business cared about at all. So the more he was digging down on these secondary metrics, the more he was alien himself from the business people. Now, let's fast forward to where we are in 2020. And then I'll like, yeah, andUnknown Speaker 14:18  Scott, let me just chime in on that real quick. So the the downtime figures of the availability figures are important to deliver the customer experience, but it's the customer experience that the board cared about. And I think there's an important, you know, emphasis there that you're making. You know, you do have to measure that availability. And you do have to make sure that you're you know, that you have that measure, but ultimately, that's there to drive that experience. And you could, it's not like we're saying don't measure the nines, but go in measure the thing that's important at the board level. Yeah, the other metric that weScott Santucci 14:56  don't, I don't share all the nines with the practical Maybe they don't care, maybe you find out because what you know, here's an example, when we went and talked to some of the business leaders, particularly the guy responsible for sales, he was super frustrated with email. So basically what this guy did is he set a massive standard for email, because he was trying to control cost storage, and then lock down the email. But guess what, when the documents that these guys are sending, the salespeople are sending, at the end of the quarter, by the way, at the end of the quarter, there's a massive amount of these documents that they're sending, they're getting email it, they're getting alerts to the sales organization, this is shut off their set saving, what five cents, versus the risk of salespeople. So these are the examples thatUnknown Speaker 15:44  and that was the other thing at Gartner. And how I got to Gartner was with total cost of ownership, right and, and you know, you're measuring the, the input figure, which is the investment in it. But if you just did that, and you didn't focus at all on the output, you were also making a mistake. So it's not just about the cost. And it's not about these detailed metrics that are giving you the direction of where you're going, you gotta elevate up to something that's going to be meaningful to your stakeholders and your leadership, that's going to kind of get you a place at the big table.Scott Santucci 16:23  Yep. So to highlight this, let me kind of just transition here to our next phase. So the hopefully, you can see the connection point, the connection point being, hey, look, the IT department was in a state of immaturity, you know, back in, you know, the early part of this, this century, and it's evolved a lot. And where are we in sales and marketing? Well, we're treating them as two different things. And you know, for if you look backwards, from an investor standpoint, there's a line item on any income statement, depending on which income state you can look at it, it's either gonna say s GMA, or increasingly sales and marketing. So on that line item, all that spending is is all lumped together as one thing. Now, whether or not you choose to decide sales and marketing are different things to investors, and to your CFO, they are not different. And that's what we want to transition to is that that's the goal, the Commercial Ratio. So obviously, Tom and I can geek out about these metrics and the history of metrics at ways to Sunday, what we heard a lot of feedback from the Commercial Ratio pitch, or webinar is, hey, next time you do something like that, give me a heads up so I can bring a calculator. So what we're going to do is we're going to have a way to sort of make it more relatable. So we're have Brian, lead you through and just walk you through and say what are your reactions to the Commercial Ratio? What were the key parts and sort of get your your get your take on what the conversation was like to make it more relatable to our listeners? So Brian, would you like to eat, you know, introduce that and lead us through that discussion?Brian Lambert 18:03  Yeah, absolutely. And I think a great segue is this, this paradigm paradox you guys are talking about? And, and also the, if you think about it back then versus it now that's, that's really good. And I want to hook into that. And, Scott, one of the things that you said in the webinar when you when he talked...

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 46There is a whole class of leader working in the gap between strategy and tactics, to blend together the right programs, actions, and processes to achieve outcomes -- often with people who don't report directly into them.In this episode, we're joined by Cathy - a sales enablement leader working in her company to bring together groups of people to drive outcomes.In this engaging discussion, we discuss:The value of orchestration to the sales organizationWorking with line managers who have the resourcesEnrolling people to achieve an outcomeThe difference between orchestrating teams and individualsThe blend of strategy, process, technology, and informationExamples of orchestrating people and groupsThe differences between project management and orchestrationJoin us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott 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 00:48  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, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:02  Thanks, Scott. And on this show today, what we're going to do is we're actually going to go back a couple months and we're going to talk through the state of sales, Nyland research but more importantly, the the findings presentation.Scott Santucci 01:13  Wait only a couple months last podcast, we went back to 1217. Oh, no.Brian Lambert 01:18  I know, I shouldn't say we're going back at all, because Dallas is nothing for you. That's right, it feels like forever ago in a way because we've been actually producing a lot of content podcasts panels, we had our one year anniversary celebration, we're now in season two. And but what I wanted to do Scott is actually bring a listener on we have Kathy that's going to join us here. And what I wanted to do is just talk through the findings presentation, because not all of our listeners were on that. And the reason why I want to do that is it's it's the executive summary of what's happening in the sales enablement space, and more importantly, where it's going. So we're not going to recap all the panel discussions in all that listeners can listen to that. But more importantly, how does this land from a sales enablement leader perspective, like we have on the show here today? And how is this being internalized in action? If at all, right, because the findings in and of themselves are great, but how do people process it? And what do they do with it? So I've got Kathy joiningScott Santucci 02:22  me here. Before we do that, let's just remind our listeners. So what is Brian talking about? What the research. So in March, we had a panel COVID panel where we had Dr. Howard over could all meta, meta and Lindsey Gore. And from that, we launched a survey. We did a survey and we had over 100 hundred people 100 sales enablement practitioners respond to that survey we recruited and by the way, you can go to our site to look at what the research process was. We had 43 we deputize 43 analysts, so to speak, to help us out, we ran six panels, and then produced the first of a series of webinars that we're doing to unpack all the things that we learned. And that was a that was the first one, which was the findings of all of these things, I guess partial the findings, because we've had, we're getting ready to do our fourth webcast. So Brian, go ahead and take it away and go ahead and introduce Kathy.Brian Lambert 03:24  Yeah, absolutely. So I've got Kathy on. And Kathy has been somebody that I learned from a lot via LinkedIn. And she's chiming in a lot around the inside sales enablement, content in the state of sales enablement research that Scott just alluded to. Her name's Kathy rollin. She's with nectar. Hi, Kathy, how you doing?Unknown Speaker 03:44  Hi, Brian, I'm good. How are you?Brian Lambert 03:46  Good. And for the last two months, we've been going back and forth on LinkedIn in a variety different ways. And I thought it'd be good to just have the public conversation. So I appreciate you jumping on the call with us here and processing together. What you learned.Unknown Speaker 04:02  Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.Brian Lambert 04:05  Sure. So um, let's go back a couple months ago, we had our inside state of sales enablement research. So Scott presented that. I just like to open it up with you. What did you take away from that? And what kind of resonated with you as you were processing that content?Unknown Speaker 04:24  So I'll be honest with you that the webinar happened at a time when I was buried, missing that happens right to all of us in our day to day jobs. So I didn't have a chance right away to kind of absorb everything from the webinar. And I went back Scott posted something on the sales enablement society. Board discussion board and, and I was like, Oh, yeah, I should go in. I should go back and look at that. So I actually went back and looked at all the materials that that Scott had and you had pulled together The big thing all of a sudden, I had an aha moment. And it was around that you all have finally put a title to something I've been doing or felt like I've been doing for a really long time. And that was the Orchestrator title. Like, that's, that's brilliant. Because this is something I feel like I've been kind of doing for a long time he both here at nectar, and in a previous role, right in, in previous life at different sales enablement roles, where it's not always about the tactics and, and getting everything, doing things and just sitting around and getting that right, but also about the whole strategy and, and marrying the two together. So all of a sudden, it was like, Wow, you guys finally like let me know what I did. I literally that day, went on to my LinkedIn profile and changed my headline to include Orchestrator.Brian Lambert 05:56  Wow. That's, that's amazing. And that's great to hear. Actually humbling to hear. So I appreciate that. And it's it's one of those things where you go through it, you just, you do the findings, you publish it, you don't know quite what the impact is. And one of the things that's interesting here is, you said your sales enablement, professional and you've been in this sounds like you've been in the space for a while. Why didn't it? Why don't you compare and contrast a little bit the sales enablement, title role versus the Orchestrator title and role? Why? Why does one resonate perhaps a little bit more than another? Or give me some insight into the difference between the two to you?Unknown Speaker 06:36  Yeah, so I think, sales enablement, right, has kind of gone on this growth path. And we've all tried to figure out what is it? What is in it? How do we define it? Scott, and you and others have done a great job of saying what sales enablement is. But if you went out and at one point, if you went out and talked to 10, different sales enablement, professionals, you'd get 10 different answers about what it was. And, and not any of them were wrong if they were just different. And so I think you having a title of sales enablement, depending on your perspective was a question about what it is that you actually were responsible for. And so I've always been kind of a broad strategy person and been able to kind of see a bigger picture. And so to me, when I someone said, oh, we're going to do sales enablement, I said, well, it's not just training. It's not just content. It's not just this, we have to look at the whole, right, what what from the whole makes a salesperson successful. And it's much broader. And there's many more things than just those things that make it the whole, and then it kind of morphed from there. And I started growing back, because then it wasn't just the salesperson because there's other people responsible for the success of the company. And the revenue generation. That's your channel, where I have a particular focus today is on our channel partners. And then there's the channel and then it's like, Well, yeah, but it doesn't really stop when the order comes in from the customer. So there's this whole holistic thing. So I think, I feel like sales enablement might have pigeonholed a little bit for me, and Orchestrator was a much better way I actually moved away from my sales enablement title a little while ago, I went to strict enablement, because I have responsibility across the revenue chain. So I took sales completely out. And then I changed it again last year. And I said, Well, that's not exactly even what I'm doing. Because I'm really responsible for the efficiency of our channel and our sales, to get the customer to success. So it just it resonated. The other thing that resonated a lot was it's about being able to work across different functions, and work with people who don't report to you and make them all successful, right to be successful together. And to be able to work across that and, and meet a common goal. So there was a lot of it that really kind of stuck in my head.Brian Lambert 09:21  Yeah, so I'm hearing the, the sales enablement, title and role felt a little bit restrictive in a way and probably because of how people communicated or how the market was receiving as a training role.Unknown Speaker 09:35  I think it was a perception, right?Brian Lambert 09:38  Yeah. And then it sounds like your charter or your remit was broader than that pigeon holing if you will, or that step boxed in, right. So you thought about dropping sales and just being enablement and just enablement was something that you did actually, it's, he said, and then from that perspective, it's it became about this broader picture. which we've dubbed the the ecosystem view. And we're actually going to have a podcast soon around that. And then And then the final piece that you're talking about, which is obviously really intriguing to me. And actually what we've been chatting back and forth around on LinkedIn is this idea of working together with people to achieve an outcome and a goal together. Whether or not they report into you or not, I'll throw that in there, right? Because that's implied that you don't have to have the headcount reporting MTU to be an orchestrator. In fact, it's part of the role of orchestrators to not have the headcount actually reporting into you. Right. So what what, what do you think about that as a part of the role, this idea of working with others to achieve that outcome? And goal? And and then what have you, what have you seen or taken away from the last couple of months, that's perhaps struck a chord with you around this idea of I'm an orchestrator.Unknown Speaker 11:09  So, you know, I have lots of experience working with a cross functional teams that don't report to me. And, and it's, it's an interesting thing, and I think we've had this conversation on a little bit on LinkedIn, right? So you have the people with a bigger challenge, when you have that is you have your tree huggers, people who are like, Oh, no, this, this piece right over here, this is my piece, and you can't touch it. That's the way it's going to be. So try and and, you know, get those people to see what the broader picture is, and, and come to a consensus. And it's it, when you put it in the context of the benefit not only to them to their departments, and more broadly to the revenue and the company, then they'll start to see and take ownership around that. And it's, it's when they start to see that piece of it that's really enlightening, and they become much less of a tree hugger, and they want to participate more.Brian Lambert 12:11  So what's it What's a tree hugger? A tree hugger? In Kathy land? A little bit?Unknown Speaker 12:18  Yeah, the tree hugger in my world is the someone who's on a team and is like, just holding on to the way things have always been, or they don't they just want to do their little piece. They put their blinders on, they're hugging the tree, like, nope, this is the way it is. When you can't take it, you can't touch it. Right? Touch it. Leave my tree alone. Yeah, exactly. Don't touch my tree. I'm lucky where I'm at now that I don't have a lot of tree huggers, I have a few. I don't have a lot. So that's really good. It's really nice, right? So if you think about a channel, and you you try to orchestrate around that you don't just have your training team and the channel account manager, you also have to think about, okay, who are the support, people are going to take those calls, who are the professional services, people who are going to be involved, who's the marketing person who's going to work with the channel partner to co market and get all of that marketing strategy pulled together to come to market together. So that's one of the things that I actually built into our onboarding program for our channel is to have this cross functional team assigned to every channel partner that we have a contract with. So they all understand who is this partner? What are they trying to do? What's our partnership about? What are our joint objectives? How are we going to get there? What's my role in supporting that? To get us to success? So I'm lucky here, I haven't always been that lucky. I've had some pretty hard tree huggers in the past.Brian Lambert 13:52  So do you get do you actually call them that in the group?Unknown Speaker 13:55  And they have not? I actually, it actually came to you or chatting on LinkedIn. I was like, Ah,Unknown Speaker 14:00  yeah. I don't know if they would likeUnknown Speaker 14:03  they would not. definitely would not.Brian Lambert 14:07  So I don't want to encourage our listeners to start using thatUnknown Speaker 14:10  know it. But it's a characteristic, right. And I term it as, as a not great characteristic. We want those people to be more open and to participate in that team. AndBrian Lambert 14:19  yeah, and the reason why I say that is I've made the mistake more than once to come across a bit judgmental to others that don't report to me. And it's not fun to deal with the aftermath of those things. So with with the Orchestration angle on this, it's really an interesting space to operate within. Because you would think that saying, we have a goal, we have an outcome, let's go let's roll together would be fairly straightforward. But what you're alluding to is when we say that there's a certain cognitive bias perspective, and in some ways, hard wiring around way things have always been done. So that's where, to me what we also talked about on LinkedIn, the idea of influence and relationship building. You said, Look, this has to be factored in as part of an orchestrator, the ability to persuade and negotiate and influence and build relationships to drive outcomes together. Why do you think that that's so prevalent and required? And why is it a bit difficult to have folks that are really smart, and they all want the same, the same goal, they all want to achieve it. But it requires a skill set, like what you have to get folks to row together.Unknown Speaker 15:44  So I'm not sure why it's so hard, I think inherently people all want to do the right thing. And I have, I have trouble with people not feeling empowered, that when I go into these situations, and you know, we have a cross functional team, I want them to be empowered to, to go and do the right things. And a lot of people don't know what to do with. So, so that's when you need to kind of take a step back, and you just sit with them and say, Okay, so what, how can we make this work? What listening to those team members is really critical, just like it's critical to listen to your customers and to listen to the salespeople you're trying to enable and to listen to your channel partners. It's just as critical to listen to those team members to find out, you know, why are they not feeling empowered? Why do they want to can choose to do things the way they've always been? And how do we move past that? How do we work together? So it's really an important thing for an orchestrator to be able to have those conversations, like we were just talking about, build those relationships to get them pointed, so that we are all rowing in the same direction so that we can get to the desired outcome? You know, I don't know, I don't understand the psychology of why everyone or not everyone, but a lot of people don't feel empowered when they come on to those teams. But some of them are there, because they've been told to be there. So that's part of it. They didn't choose to be part of that team. They're being told to be part of that team. So I think that's definitely a part of it.Brian Lambert 17:26  Yeah, there's a lot to unpack in this, this space, right. So you're by the nature of this discussion, we're not in strategy only. And we're not in tactics only we're in a translation of or combination of strategy and tactics together, which is what orchestrators live in and what they do. And when you're engaged in the work of pursuing an outcome together, what you're talking about is a bit of the phenomenon that exists that I've seen as well, which is this. Look, we can be super creative as we, as we tackle this outcome, what ideas do you have? And sometimes, I don't know, people might say, I don't know what to do, or I don't know how to go about it. Or why don't you just tell me what you need me to do? So I can go do it? Is that what you're talking about?Unknown Speaker 18:19  Yeah, if that's, that's absolutely right. And then the other thing you have to be prepared for as an orchestrator is that if you ask them, how we get there, and what they think and how we may be more creative and innovative, you...

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 45A Sales Enablement Orchestrator and Sales Enablement Insider joins our show to talk about blending strategy and tactics. Doug Clower is a 20 year Sales Enablement veteran with orchestration experience in companies like MicroFocus.Doug joins the podcast to talk about the changing sales landscape and how Orchestrating success with sales, marketing, and operations leaders requires bridging the gap between their company’s business strategy, and the way customers need to buy.This creates space:Between your company and your customersBetween your growth plans and activities to drive quarterly resultsBetween accomplishing goals and driving daily prioritiesBetween the sophistication of know-how and the simplicity of actionBetween managing individual contribution and customer experiencesAmong specialized functional departmentsCompanies are structured in hierarchical functional silos making them unable to react quickly to the business landscape.Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Brian Lambert 00:33  I'm Scott cantucci, Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:49  Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales and a one end initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way What works? And maybe what's more important, what doesn't?Unknown Speaker 01:04  That's great. I guess it's been really hard lately.Brian Lambert 01:08  That's got to take us up with a centering story. We're bringing back our centering story, a couple of podcasts and panel discussions and our listeners are clamoring for a story, Scott, I think it's time to go back in history. I can feel it. What do you got for us?Scott Santucci 01:24  Well, this time, we're gonna have to go way back the Wayback Machine. And I'd like us to imagine what the year 1271 was like.Brian Lambert 01:35  Wow, yeah.Scott Santucci 01:37  Good times, right. This is pre pleg. Europe, by the way. So good, you know, good stuff. In 1271, a 17 year old left Venice, with his father to go off to China. And who was that person? Well, that's what people today know as Marco Polo, and Marco Polo is not famous for that pool game. Follow. That's, that's not what he's about. That's not what he's famous for. He's actually famous for his time spent in China. So we remind ourselves that in Europe during 12, you know, 1271 right when when our when our story is that the largest cities in Europe had about 20,000 to 40,000 people that was considered a huge city and European standards. And the big thing that was emerging here was the mercantile system. So trade, and the Venetians were probably the biggest innovators of that. So they, if you know about Venice, it's this little island. They have great shipbuilding. So they sail all over to establish trade routes. And one of the things of course, you want to always stop washes trade with China because China has has silk between 1271 and 1295. He spent a lot of time in China and what makes him particularly important is that he caught the attention of kubla Khan and Quba Khan was basically the Emperor of China at that time. And Koopa Khan somehow got impressed by young Marco Polo. so impressed he was impressed by he was he thought he was witty. He was impressed by his humility and his curiosity. And what's so fascinating about this is Quba Khan basically gave Marco Polo this Emperor's pass into all at all China, he could go anywhere. And with a with a military support bond, I mean, he could do what ever he wanted. guba Khan was so impressed by Marco Polo Khan and he represented China. As an ambassador to India, and Burma, so what? because of who he was because of his intellect. And because of his curiosity, he captured a lot of stories. When he got back in 1295, he got back to eventually got back to Venice. And Venice was at a war with Genoa. So we've got to keep in mind during this period of time, these were city states, right? So, Genoa is where Christopher Columbus is from, by the way, is a city just, you know, on the other side of the peninsula of Italy, and they were at war. And within a year of coming back home after being gone for 25 years, he gets captured by the Geneses. And so while he was in prison, he wrote about his his stories. And his stories were so impactful. Because they tell they told they told stories about an accounts of how Chinese cities were had running water and sanitation. They had over a million people in many, many of the cities, which was incomprehensible for anybody in, in western civilization to understand but the accuracy and the depictions made people become curious. They're the economy that China had they were the first people to go to a paper currency or a fiat currency is that kind of economics called it and a lot of those principles. The event the mediation use behind their form of currency, which is the Duckett, which became the standard for many many years before was replaced for the foreign. And another interesting thing about that is Marco Polo influences. A lot of us associate pasta with Italian cuisine, but they actually got that from the Chinese. So that's, that's my, that's my centering story is a go off to foreign lands, get some, get some different information, put things together, come back, and if you You're really curious and positioning a different way. You can start laying the seeds for, say, maybe a resin Renaissance.Brian Lambert 06:10  Nice. So this is very exciting. Not only have I learned where pasta really came from, we're also going to get to use our new sound effect that we recorded with our panel, Scott and that's the So what does this have to do with sales enablement?Scott Santucci 06:26  Well, that's a good question Brian's and taking a big step back, we can focus in sales enablement, professionals on the daily tactics and what we do and what our jobs are. Or we can take a step back and look at the overall patterns and one of the overall patterns is we're responsible for change. We're responsible for finding new ways of doing things we're responsible for getting a lot of other people together we're responsible for orchestrating a lot of people in the reason I like the story is it highlights how big some of the gaps are between different worlds. So let me elaborate on that a little bit. So we talked a little bit about Cuba Khan. And I don't expect everybody to know, middle age Chinese history, but could what's how you might recognize that name guba Khan. He's the grandson of somebody called jingis Khan. And Ganga is Khan just two generations ahead, lead a massive slaughterhouse. So one of the most ruthless and effective leaders of of all time, and he threatened much of Europe as a matter of fact, he threatened a lot of elements of the of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine side and it created a lot a lot a lot of problems. So you have this overall fear or belief that these Mongols all all in Western Europe, have a shared view that the Mongols are this horde is barbaric horde of people ride on horseback without, you know, holding their meat together between their legs to and that that and they ate that raw meat, but they were seasoning it so repulsive. And that's what the Western culture thought. Here Marco comes back, Marco Polo comes back, and he's telling all these stories about Cuba Khan, who everybody knows is the grandson of Genghis Khan, and this massive civilization that he's got going on in this thriving economy. So it's, it's this huge shift of it, you know, not only is the idea of a million of a city with a population of a million people, hard to understand, or paying things with paper, just completely hard to understand.Brian Lambert 08:47  So this was he saw people actually people actually knew that Asia existed, or they've heard of him,Scott Santucci 08:55  but they like maybe earth was round two, right?Brian Lambert 09:01  They just said never been there. So when he starts bringing back details, that's theScott Santucci 09:06  well Pete they knew a lot, right? So they knew about, you know, the riches, the spices, the silk, they knew all of those things. What happened is during Quba Khan's reign, he modernized a lot of things so he built a whole new dynasty. And it's the modernization of all of these things and the thrive you know, the the period of Thrive ness and prosperity that was happening in China is just really hard to comprehend. Not only are the results card to comprehend but the fact that this is the grandson of of Guinness Khan remember in Europe at that time you were born in and your last name was Miller because that's what you did. You were a Miller or Hooper, you you made. You made barrels. Your name was what you did and what you did was who You are. And here you've got what was the name con means conquer. Right? So you think he's a conquer and it just you can't imagine something different. So it's this this, this creating the space to be able to comprehend it. It was so the resistance to Marco Polo story were so hard. You can even go into Venice today. And they have a section I don't know the exact Italian, but they called him a bragger. And the priest at the time, when he was on his deathbed, they were still trying to get him to confess. Come on, Marco. Good minute, you were making stuff up to be famous. And he wouldn't admit he's like it frankly. I left half the stories of the things I saw out of here because I didn't think youBrian Lambert 10:46  would believe them. You guys are making up words. Yeah, making up words man making up concepts. SoScott Santucci 10:52  why does this matter? Why is framing this matter so much? Well, it matters because where we are today in our business is we're going through a similar revolution. We want to, we want to apply digital. And we think we know what digital means just like the western civilization thought they knew who kangaskhan was. But digital is much more like kubla Khan, it's it's a completely different viewpoint than what we think it is. And all of this stuff creates so much friction, how how our businesses are changing. So create space, just like there was massive distance. There's geographic distance between Western Europe and China. There was cultural space. There's philosophical space, there's all standing pace cultural space. So let's look at where we are today. We have a growing space between your company and your customers. We have space between the the growth plans coming from management, and all of the activities that people know for sure of what needs to be done to drive quarter results. We have space between accomp people who think about accomplishing goals. And then people who think about driving daily activities and doing tasks and getting stuff done. So we even have space between how how we actually go about working, we have space between the sophistication of know how subject matter experts, and then space between other people say, Hey, we have to simplify this for action, and take a little bit of all of these different parts and string them together. We can't even agree on that. We have space between managing individual contribution and saying, Hey, I as an employee, and then valued because of these earned by contributions, yet at the other end, customers don't really care about individual contributions. They care about their experience, and what does that look like? So we have space between that and then we have space among all of the specialized functional departments. So that's how we tie it all together. And because The way that we're structured, just like the way Western civilization was structured in terms of their thinking, their culture, etc, made it very difficult for, for Europe to buy in, it took really a plague to get people in a more coachable moment. We're in a very, very similar spot today. So that's that's why that story is relevant.Brian Lambert 13:21  Yeah, it's amazing. And it's interesting, because the more you dwell in the space there, the more the space becomes real. And so Marco Polo dwelled in the space and he came back with stories and people thought he was crazy. And he was bragging. And the space though actually has definition people occupy space activities that occupy space thinking, structures, processes, there's a lot of stuff in the space. So it's a paradox between, there's nothing there, nothing to see here. Move on. And boy, there's a lot of things happening there. And I love this concept for the podcast. Cast today, let's let's dwell on the space, right? And to help with that I'm bringing in and we're bringing in Doug clower, who's one of our orchestrator, friends. And he's also been a listener of the inside sales enablement podcast. So he's a, he's a member of the insider nation. I, Doug, how you doing?Unknown Speaker 14:20  I'm doing well. Thanks, Brian. And Thanks, Scott. Thanks for having me on today.Brian Lambert 14:25  Absolutely. And what do you think? I'd love to hear your reaction to the Marco Polo framing story, and then how that relates to your thinking and then just tell us a little bit about yourself?Unknown Speaker 14:41  Well, you know, right, right up front, the Marco Polo story is so compelling because it talks about us living in a world that we perceive, but then looking at a different role and seeing it's so much different and understanding what the the differences are Between the two sides, it's just wow, the exploration that he went through the the mind blowing experience that he had to have had at the time, it was certainly eye opening and something he was able to bring back to the Western civilization, even though, as you described Scott, they didn't believe it. And he didn't tell him everything because he didn't think they would. So it's important for us to remember that we sometimes have to put ourselves in the other person's shoes, think about what they see, etc. So it's kind of an important thing. These webcasts, these have been so helpful for me in terms of evolving some of the things I think about helping me put my feet in the other person's shoes, putting my my feet in the shoes of say, the canals of the world who, from a private equity standpoint, what do they see? What are they looking for, thinking about other things that have been happening? So it's really important. My background is is in a consulting type of side of the house, I started off as an architect, which is sort of a consultative selling kind of thing. I transitioned in it and was managing the sales of products for small business small partner, and then evolved over the time into an enablement role, which was so exciting because it was a new territory, a new venture. And so my background is really in, in sales excellence. And that's really what I'm passionate about. I, I sort of tag myself these days as an enablement guru. I have now started tagging myself as an orchestrator. And I continue to expect to do that. SoBrian Lambert 16:50  awesome. Yeah. And this idea of orchestrator let's let's talk about with Scott and it's really have a conversation here. In The space that orchestrator comes from. So this space that that exists, I'd love to explore it a little bit. And let's have a conversation. Doug, I'll start with you. When you went through, as you alluded to the webinars, and I know you've listened to the show, let's let's go back a little bit into the first webinar, our second webinar that Scott did, which was the state of sales enablement. And in that that webinar was the landscape of sales enablement and how it's evolving. And it was really grounded in the research that was happening in that in that time. It was about, I guess, two months ago now and what what can you share with regard to, you know, your story and how its unfolded over the last couple of months, and let's use that, that webinars and also these other touch points that you've had as a way to get our listeners up to speed on what's been happening.Unknown Speaker 17:58  You know what, I'll tell you what Most enlightening about this and another example of me putting my shoes and somebody else's my feet in somebody else's shoes. I don't want to put my shoes on, I wouldn't like them. Anyway, the important thing is when I first went through the research and started looking at things I, I think my my visceral reaction initially was that our sales enablement resources, the people that were responding are way too tactically oriented. And I just, in my mind, I felt like sales enablement as a practice needed to be more strategic, etc. So I, I immediately just sort of pulled back from that. But as I started to think through that and started listening to things and being challenged by different stories and different points of view about this, I started recognizing how strategy and tactics have to be married in a way You know, I always said that tactics. Yeah, we have to do that. There's no doubt about it. But oftentimes, just like a recent book that I'm not a recent book, but a book that I've recently been reviewing or re reading, it really talks about the fact that there's got to be marriage, there's got to be an execution toward the strategy can't just say I've got a strategy and make it happen. So this concept of stratification, which is a term that first came up back then was so important and especially how it applies to thinking about enablement as a practice and evolving and moving forward toward the business within a business concept that Scott and you have have all begun to share with the rest of us. So it's really insightful and helpful. It's helped me transition to think you know, I have to think of it in total, I can't I can't break the two apart. Dismiss one side or the other.Brian Lambert 20:02  Yeah, that's great. So let's use our Marco Polo analogy here. Let's say you're in the year in Europe, and Scott's Marco Polo, and he's went out, he went over there. And he, he, he taught he went through Asia. And he's bringing back all these stories about, in this case, in the modern era, the digital transformation, the impact of digital the impact of COVID the gaps that exists between...

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 44At the end of our anniversary show the guys talked with Sarah Fricke who is passionate about laying a path for other women to join us in the enablement field while also while promoting the fact that there are many paths into enablement.Sarah joins the show to host a panel with:Amy Benoit - Renaissance Woman Catalyzing Change, consultant Lindsay Gore - MicrosoftHang Black - JuniperSarah Fricke - RingCentralAlicia Leach - SalesforceSteph Bell - SalesforceStephanie Middaugh - DivvyThe show topics include:Share how great women forged a path in sales enablement and whyShare strategies of navigating career conversations within a male dominated organization that doesn’t have a definition for enablementTo help improve businesses by creating an environment where everyone benefits by the ‘melting pot’ concept of bringing people together.The business case for diverse mindsets and cognitive diversityThe importance of allies in the workplaceJoin us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now. I'm Scott, Brian LambertGreg 00:36  and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:49  Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales and Avon initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners, we learned the hard way. What works Maybe what's more important, what doesn't?Greg 01:02  That's awesome in Yep. And we know what works because we know conversations work. And we're going to have a conversation today in a very special episode with a great panel discussion with women in sales enablement. gotten I are super excited to host this panel because as orchestrators, we need to work with people who have different perspectives than us. And we need to be inclusive of those perspectives. And so what we're going to do is make this fun and informal and informational. And if you guys remember in our last podcast, which was our anniversary show, it was Episode 43. And in that particular episode, Sarah Frick from ringcentral was with us. And after we were done shooting that episode and recording it. We were talking to Sarah and the rest of the panelists about ideas for this year. And as we move into season two, what could we talk about? and Sara chimed in and said, hey, let's you know it'd be great if we brought together and created some space to have conversations with women and salespeople. And so we said, That's great idea and help us Can you help us do that. And so that's what we're going to do. We're going to I'm going to pass this over to Sarah Frick, who's going to be our guest host. And she's going to talk through and introduce the panelists. And she's going to talk about and ask them questions, like, you know, what's happening when women in leadership for enablement? What does it look like when they're working well, and when it works well, and what are some specific challenges that women in enablement face today and many, many others, and then Scott and I are going to chime in along the way. And as usual, we'll recap it at the end. So Sarah, thanks so much for volunteering to do this. Really appreciate it. I'm gonna pass it over to you. And you can kick it off how you want to.Unknown Speaker 02:41  That sounds great. Brian Scott, thank you so much for providing the space to do this. Part of part of part of any raid group is how can I continue to get additional perspective, one of the things that you know, I started with my colleagues that bring Central is something called the ladies room. So today I like to think that we're kind of broadening that concept and bringing in a few more folks to the conversation. So,Greg 03:10  there we go. Like, as a guy, I'm not sure if I want to be in the ladies room. I don't know.Scott Santucci 03:18  I don't I definitely want to be in the ladies room.Unknown Speaker 03:21  Just want to make sure.Unknown Speaker 03:23  Well, Brian,Unknown Speaker 03:25  you're getting a reallyUnknown Speaker 03:26  good invite. We're having this conversation between.Unknown Speaker 03:31  Ryan I have to say as a woman in technology, welcome to our lives every day. There you go.Unknown Speaker 03:38  Men can have their locker rooms ladies are getting the ladies room here. So I really appreciate the great panel that we've got here. We have some phenomenal, strong, great enablement leaders. So I don't even think I could do justice of introducing everyone. We've got folks from the south To the west to not across the pond quite yet. Let's do that next round and tons of voices that have been highlighted by folks like LinkedIn and others of, hey, these are the people that you really should be listening to. So thank you, ladies for joining us. And I'm just going to start by asking you to introduce yourself to the crew. So Amy, would you like to kick us off?Amy Benoit 04:24  Sure. Can you hear me? I can. Awesome. Thank you for having me. It's very nice to be in such good company with a lot of estrogen. And not generally surrounded by as much and we'll get into that. I've been in the enablement learning development space throughout my career started off at EMC, about 15 years ago, and in 2018, I started my own consulting business. What I love to be able to do is help executives make decision and influence up and down their chain to create efficiencies. I also love to make sure that we're getting all the perspectives from the different folks in the organization. I believe that that lens is not often seen by most leaders because they, their point of view is it's focused and so I widen the focus so that we get more diverse spot.Unknown Speaker 05:32  That's awesome. Thanks, Amy, for sharing that and look forward to diving into that commentary deeper.Unknown Speaker 05:39  Lindsay, can you introduce yourself, please?Unknown Speaker 05:43  Yeah, hi, it's, um, I'm excited to be here today as well. So great group of women and I think this should be an excellent conversation. My name is Lindsey Gore. I've been in technology sales for about the last 12 years or so. Both in sales and sales leadership. roles and currently I'm at Microsoft today and in their cloud business, so selling data and AI solutions.Unknown Speaker 06:10  Thank you, Lindsay. Really appreciate that. Let's say you want to give go next. Yes, thank you very much for having me. My name is Alicia Leach. I come from Salesforce. I am a field enablement director at Salesforce. Prior to being in enablement, I was in sales for quite some time. I'd say I've had I have about a 20 year, technology sales career. And like a me who likes to help leaders in decision making. I like to help sales leaders in getting deals off the table and helping them make money. So we're all here for make that money. I like that you you come from it's like you've, you've come down from space. into sales bars, which totally makes sense knowing Salesforce. That's awesome. Thank you so much. And Steph, I know you're on the same team. Can you introduce yourself?Unknown Speaker 07:10  Yes. Hi Sara. This is Stephanie bell. I am also a Salesforce. I've been here the last five years and have been in sales the last decade, just recently moving into the enablement side of the house actually under Alicia. So I'm also a manager of field enablement. And one of my passion projects is the Women's Network at Salesforce. So I'm the president of the Salesforce Women's Network for the southeast out of our Atlanta home. We have about 350 members. So that is my passion project and helping get more women into leadership.Unknown Speaker 07:48  That is phenomenal. And being in the southeast, you've got a part of my heart. I'm actually in South Carolina, soUnknown Speaker 07:59  hey, Yeah. Can you introduce yourself, please?Unknown Speaker 08:02  Hi there. My name is Hank black. I'm the Vice President of global sales enablement. At Juniper Networks. I've been here about 18 months, my route has been a little bit circuitous. I spent almost a decade in engineering, a decade in marketing, and almost now a decade in sales. And I've loved all of it, but I feel like enablement is my home because it is the convergence of all three and I to hail from Louisiana. So I'm feeling the SE vibe.Unknown Speaker 08:30  Yeah, everyone should have moved to this alfea. Everyone should be in sales. We've all at least experienced that a little bit. But it sounds like with this core group, I think we could build a product we could market a product we can enable a product in the market, right? So we got it all covered. No, no.Unknown Speaker 08:48  Selling. How could I do that?Unknown Speaker 08:52  It sells itself.Unknown Speaker 08:53  Yeah, we're going to create such a great product Scott that that it will just we'll just put it out there and people will buy it.Unknown Speaker 09:01  Well, thank you again for joining us ladies in such great backgrounds to have and give experience to others. As just to open it up quickly. I know staff you had shared the women's group in Atlanta that you, you run, as anyone else started a group like that within your organization or doing anything within your particular teams to help create that environment for other women in the workplace.Amy Benoit 09:29  Yeah, this is Amy. I've, when I was working at EMC, I was leaving the West Coast women's organization. So we had a west and east of the Americas. And it was something that we ran quarterly events, had newsletters and just drove a lot of conversation and awareness around women in the industry.Unknown Speaker 09:55  Awesome in a quarterly newsletter. It's a fun way to capture it and Get it out there.Amy Benoit 10:01  Oh, yes, this is back when newsletters were a hit right. But yes, we did have it was just a great way for folks to get the information and we found that a lot of our audience actually enjoyed reading the newsletters. SoUnknown Speaker 10:18  that's great. Yeah, I remember the, from the desk of x days, whenever you get the highest readership and you're like, yeah, now it's like doesn't have a hashtag nobody's listening.Unknown Speaker 10:31  Anyone else.Unknown Speaker 10:33  This is happening. I am a few years ago created a leading group called marketing mavens of the Bay Area. But since I've exited marketing, I've actually tended to be more involved in not intercompany, but intra company women's functions as sponsoring that from my company as part of engagement other companies examples would be networking with a purpose that connects some of the largest 14 companies in the Bay Area, and women Unlimited, those sorts of connections and I'm now kicking off a new group where we want to focus on actually creating action.Unknown Speaker 11:13  That's a good one.Unknown Speaker 11:15  There's a lot to talk and create an inclusive environment stock, but there's a whole nother part of actually taking the action and making it happen. Steph, tell us a little bit more about your group in Atlanta.Unknown Speaker 11:28  Sure, so I can't take all of the credit for launching. So I want to be clear, there's a lot of people that helped. We are lucky at Salesforce to have a lot of er G's. And a few years ago, four years ago, they started thinking about things like wit that exists on a national level and how we bring things like that is Salesforce. So a group of women started to think through what that would look like as an ER G and the sales worse. Women's Network was born. And we decided to launch a version of that in Atlanta. So you were lucky enough to have some executive sponsors who helped us get it off the ground and say, Hey, whatever you need, we're here, both male and female, we find that it's really important to have male allies, because they tend to be the majority of leadership. So we were lucky that we had a great male ally and lots of female executives that helped us stand it up. And then basically what we do is we try and grow our membership. And every year at the global level, Women's Network, that's a v2 mom. So if you're not familiar with the v2 mom framework, it's your vision, your values, your methods, your measurements and your obstacles. So we work from that framework, work as a company and we also work with that framework as the Women's Network. So every year we set that out and this year, our major goal is to see 50% of women in leadership. So we structured Are events in our engagement with all of our members around? How do we get them exposure to leaders? How do we focus on the intersectionality of women and other groups? And how do we build diverse teams, and offer people networking, mentorship, sponsorship opportunities. So we try and really stick closely to that one big goal and center everything we do with our members around that. So it's really interesting that we sort of have a global lead, but we get to run it how best works for our members in and around Atlanta.Unknown Speaker 13:35  I am floored and impressed with the model that you both use right as a company and then you've put that into your ear. Geez. One of the things that I've really noticed as folks are creating them and crafting them is we don't always remember that we should use all the core business practices that we already have in place, as we're starting essentially a new team and Just for clarification for everyone er DS or employee research groups, hang Good call out there. And it really, obviously right diversity and inclusion as as part of a company have now become an actual division and typically they're running the RGS at a high level and then of course right like staffs point of view it's you can't have any RG in just headquarter say out in San Francisco like our organizations are based and expect that to apply everywhere. There's got to be these offshoots of organizations. How Tell me kind of a little bit guys, as you think about er G's that you've gotten placed within your company. How, at UNICEF, you mentioned male and female. Does everyone agree with having both parties included in the conversation? fill out a heads nodding for Harlan. No early listeners. What about you know, if you Have that diversity around the table. And you've had women that have spoken up and said I'd actually rather have a, you know, a forum. That's just women only as that happens anyone?Unknown Speaker 15:14  Well, I think there are two types of conversations. There are conversations that are kind of, you know, Vegas rules and their conversations where you bring in allies and I don't think it's just men. I think inclusion and diversity. There's a little bit of a misnomer around. It's just around race is just around gender is just around this, that or the other. It's a non exclusion of all parties. It's it's bringing in voices and cognitive diversity to the table. And there's no social movement ever. I repeat ever in history, who that has been one without the Allies at the table.Unknown Speaker 15:52  really true. I think. I couldn't agree with you more hang at Salesforce. We have this tagline that says is the greatest platform for change. And at first, I thought that that was branding maybe 10 to 10 years ago when we first started with that. And it's not it's actually a living breathing mantra at our, at our workplace. And if you don't diversity, inclusion is just that is diversity. It's the diversity of men, women, race, cultural background, sexual Association, all of it. And so if you don't have, if you create a group that is a vacuum of all like one person, then you're missing the diversity and inclusion part.Unknown Speaker 16:42  It's interesting, though, on the flip side of that, I'll just sort of throw this out there it for folks that maybe haven't had as much of a voice or have had a hard time finding their voice being in a group of like folks with shared experiences, give something of that context to actually develop that voice. So then When you're in a mixed audience, I think you can show up in a different way and feel supported. So, you know, I think the allies are certainly very, very important. But I think, you know, sort of the group connection as well, is also important. So I think there's probably value on both sides, I would say from, from my own experience, and this hasn't been intentional at all. But I've never worked in an organization with as many women as I do now. And women leaders, so I've, I've never actually had a female boss until you know, the last two years of my career. And you're her boss's boss as a woman and there's a quite a chain. But my networking within the within Microsoft has been very female focused, and that hasn't really been intentional, but I found that those connections have been easier to make in terms of building up my own network versus in other places where the organization was very heavily male, and it was a lot harder. to approach executives to build out my network that way, and I don't know that that has anything here there in terms of saying one way is better than the other. But I think you've got to be able to span both directions. And, and maybe there's value in both types of conversations one with with your group and then the other, with your allies and inclusive.Unknown Speaker 18:21  As Lindsey, I've found that, definitely to be the case, right? I think we're all in agreement. We want our allies around the table, but they're also, you know, creating space to have this more the smaller conversations and like we continue

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 43.Let's Celebrate!Join 5 Sales Enablement Insiders and to talk through the past 12 months. In the last 12 months, 14,600 listens from 46 countries. instead of going back and reviewing all our shows again and creating some sort of review, we crowd sourced it. And you're invited to the party!Hear their top episodes, and how they action the podcast in their organization. Also, get the "inside scoop" on what we did behind the scenes!Here are some other stats from the podcast thus far:Listeners from 46 Countries. USA represents 72% of listensWhen people listen: Mon – Thurs around 1pmMonday is our biggest listening dayJoining us to celebrate on the Anniversary Show:Erich Starrett, CRO / Director of Business Development @ETA and President of the Atlanta SE SocietySarah Fricke Senior Manager, Global Sales Enablement @ RingCentralMeagan Davis, Sales Enablement Manager at CyberArkAmy Benoit , Founder and Chief Consultant at AllPropos specializing in organizational design and strategy consultingBill Ball, Director of Learning and Development at Disys and SE Society Exec Board MemberTo view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:06  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 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 00:38  I'm Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, and we are the sales enablement insiders.Scott Santucci 00:44  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 more important, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:10  Welcome to our first anniversary show. It's the Year in Review everybody.Unknown Speaker 01:15  Yeah.Brian Lambert 01:19  So thanks for joining us. And I wanted to start the show by saying thank you so much insider nation for being listeners of our show. We started this exactly a year ago, this week, when this episode drops, it will be one year, and it's been quite a ride. We started out like trying to figure out how many of these we could do. So I've listened to this show a lot. And I said, Okay, well, Scott, how do we do an anniversary episode. And I wanted to really take it through here and say, I can go back and listen to everything or crowdsource it. So I am going to crowdsource it, you guys heard a little bit of an audience a little bit of a crowd. And I'm excited to introduce these folks that have joined us, for our insider nation. And it's our open mic podcast. And we're going to have them chime in. So I know you guys like stats, and I know Scott love stats. So let me let me give you the download here on what's been downloaded. I think you're gonna appreciate it in the last 12 months, we've had 14,600 listens of our podcast, people from 46 countries, the 770 2% of that come from the US. That's about 1200 a month. Also, interestingly enough, Monday through Thursday, around 1pm, or our peak hours. So I don't know if folks are out taking a walk at that time, or maybe working out around that time, or what but that was interesting. Also, Monday is our biggest listening day. We appreciate you guys starting the week off with a little dose of of Scott and Brian, that's cool. Apple podcasts 40% of our listens. And that means a lot of you folks are on mobile 60% are on mobile and iOS is the biggest operating system, the largest operating system. 60% of folks are on iOS devices. In the past year, we feel the two surveys. One was on the COVID response that that gave it gave us actually five episodes, we're trying to do one, but it kept just yielding great information and in detail. The second survey and research project was on the state of sales enablement, that groundbreaking research really set the tone here for coming out of COVID. And it's really the only one I've seen the only research I've seen post COVID, especially in the sales enablement space, which hasn't had a lot of coverage from a qualitative perspective, which means not using, you know, circle number one to five. So that was rich data, we pulled that in did a webinar, and we have about 2500 people on our newsletter list. And about 400 total people have listened to almost 500 have listened to the webinar. So that's great. From our listeners from insider nation, you're going to hear about that. But before I go further, I also have another set of statistics and I I'm doing this on purpose because Scott's such a numbers person. But Nick is our sound guy. And you guys have heard us talk about Nick before. He's the awesome voice over talent at the beginning of the show. Yes, we made him pick the music. He's also introducing the show. And he's also our engineer who edits the show and does all of our cleanup to make it sound good. So he's been tracking our stats, and we're gonna we're gonna give you guys some of those numbers now. So over the last 41 episodes, he's taken out 157 arms. So that's good. 257 double taps on Scott desk. That's that He does that a lot and actually does that when he said something really super important. So there's 257 of those 70 broken words due to it, it would. That's super annoying because it, see what I did there. That was just me, that was not a bad connection. But that's what he fixes so that you don't get annoyed. But Nick, leave that one in. Just for a fact, I thought that was cool. I'm being creative. 340 3045 squeaky chairs like this.I have a squeaky chair. So he's always on me for squeaking my chair while I'm talking. So he can't edit it out when I'm doing that. So that's probably pretty annoying. And then, about 40 times he's inserted our famous Whoa. And that's almost one per show. So we're on track for that. And five times he's he said, he said to fix it majorly. Because I've said like, hey, Nick, go back and edit that out. We can't say those cuss words, things like that. So that's pretty cool. And thanks, Nick for doing that. Nick wrote us a quick little note. He said he's enjoyed engineering this. And he's sorry, he hasn't found this. So what noise yet? And we're gonna actually he's asking us, Scott, if we can record this. So what noise? What do you think about that? Oh, sweet. You know, that's so what you've been looking for for nine months? Yeah. We're gonna get it right now. By theScott Santucci 06:23  way, thank you guys so much for doing this is awesome. I'm so excited. This is Brian's pure directorial debut. at it. I'm loving it.Brian Lambert 06:32  Yeah, we're gonna record this. So what but you are the, I guess the the director or the producer, whatever. So we have to do this. So what until you're happy?Scott Santucci 06:42  Okay,Brian Lambert 06:42  what do I need to do? count us down? And then we're going to do so what until we can get it for Nick.Scott Santucci 06:48  Okay. Awesome. Okay. 321.Unknown Speaker 06:56  SoScott Santucci 06:59  you guys don't sound angry andBrian Lambert 07:01  we got to be faster.Scott Santucci 07:02  And you got to be angry. Like, what are the hell you talking about? Man?Brian Lambert 07:07  Get us into the mood. Why are we so important?Scott Santucci 07:10  I need to I need to do it the mood?Brian Lambert 07:12  Yeah. Set the context.Scott Santucci 07:14  A good director. Yeah, direct direct. I need director. Okay,Unknown Speaker 07:22  what's my motivation?Scott Santucci 07:23  Right? Well, whose motivation so what's your motivation? So you guys your motivation is this. You just heard me pontificate about something that whether it be World War One trenches, a Brooklyn Bridge, Dimitri medoff. Metal, metal often is a periodic table, something like that. And you're impatient wanting to know what the hell does this have to do with insert something you care about? sales, pipeline coaching, whatever. That's your motivation. She kind of annoyed. I get to the chase. What are you talking about, man?Brian Lambert 07:58  All right. Okay, what needs to be fast, not a so what it needs to do what? It needs to be a jab.Erich Starrett 08:07  So it's 123. So what?Unknown Speaker 08:10  Like that we need we need the rhythm. And we need an example of this. So what you're looking for so so what first I'm serious. Yeah, call this up. demonstrate this. So what and then we need to count off and not a random rhythm and a 123 word,Erich Starrett 08:28  right? And then again, we're five. So what's four or five? I'm Maxi directing.Unknown Speaker 08:31  Sorry.Brian Lambert 08:33  Okay. So Scott, do you want to give us your best so what is you envision it?Erich Starrett 08:40  Scorsese? He's reflecting right?Unknown Speaker 08:42  Is this what we've come to?Scott Santucci 08:44  Well, I think there's a each pick your own. Oh, God. One of these. Okay.Unknown Speaker 08:51  So what?Scott Santucci 08:54  You can do one of those or So what? Either of those? And we have a mix of those. That'd be better.Unknown Speaker 09:03  exasperated to irate. Yes. Got it.Brian Lambert 09:07  Yep. You Bill. Bill, you want to count us down in a very specific rhythm.Unknown Speaker 09:11  I got you. 123.Unknown Speaker 09:16  SoScott Santucci 09:18  that was perfect. Directors. So thatBrian Lambert 09:23  isScott Santucci 09:24  wow. Is our producer now for the next year for your next bill.Unknown Speaker 09:28  Do you want to do one more so you guys can compare and pick which one you like better? Can we can get on with the damn show?Brian Lambert 09:34  Yeah. All right, dude.Unknown Speaker 09:36  Oh, what?Unknown Speaker 09:39  123 soScott Santucci 09:45  nice.Brian Lambert 09:47  So none of our listeners know who's actually joined us. So this is perfect.Scott Santucci 09:50  Are you recording now? Yeah,Brian Lambert 09:52  well, no, we've recorded a whole bunch and that they don't even know these folks are. It's awesome. And you're here in the studio with us live via Jim so let me introduce the five insiders that we have on this show, helping us celebrate our anniversary. I'm going to introduce them now that I'm going to explain after they introduce them a bit about themselves and after I introduce them, I'll explain how this show is going to work. So to help us on the show, First up, we have Erich Starrett. Eric is the Director of Business Development at eta creative event producers and he's based in Atlanta. Hey, Eric, tell us a little bit about yourself.Erich Starrett 10:30  Hey, thanks, Brian. Yeah, working for at a creative event producers here where I'm focused on high tech fortune 3000 ish sales, kickoffs, and user conferences, which are more of my sales and marketing field marketing folks. And I'm also the president of the Atlanta Sales Enablement Society's Atlanta chapter, focus there, as you probably know, working with fellow practitioners to elevate the profession, and empowering orchestrators.Brian Lambert 10:59  Thanks for joining us and appreciate that and thanks for being a big supporter of insider nation. And actually, you're our first back to back guest not only be on this episode, which is Episode 43, your episode that you helped her record on the research project is going to be 42. So you're honorary back to back first ever honoree back to back person. So thanks for doing that. Erich Starrett 11:23  Thanks, it's an honor Brian, thank you. My favorite episode would have to be because of what I shared earlier, the rethink on sales kickoff, what is what are executives getting from the investment? And actually fanboy insider geek fat Scott in episode talks about it as Episode Five, but it is actually Episode 11 insider nation if you're looking to look it up, and the why of it is that it's a veritable buffet of multiple reasons. One, it was the first episode I believe that was recorded after you had released an episode and we're actually starting to get listener feedback. And I loved hearing that my fellow Platipi also loved the whole approach of the revisit, rethink reframe, you address the critical question of if we're going virtual, how am I going to have tequila shots with my peers? absolutely critical. And in fact, it's kind of funny, y'all were ahead of your time now that the whole sky Oh, going virtual is such a big topic. So the couple of things you covered off on that I loved how early and how often do you start planning your SKO's? Can you quantify the economic value of those SKO's? And do you have a post kickoff and pre kickoff plan and those are critical questions that I rarely hear asked and rarely effectively addressed?Brian Lambert 12:38  That's cool. Are you gonna Are you gonna start the official insider nation wiki page with all the facts? You're loving walking library?Scott Santucci 12:48  I love the fact that I'm getting called out of. So I would I would love to say that was an Easter egg Eric, it wasn't now. Well,Erich Starrett 12:56  I feel like it's Easter every day with y'all. So thank you.Brian Lambert 13:00  Yeah, he called me out. What did you call me out about over text? You're like, Hey, you said Oh, you said in the webinar. It's the heroic framework. No holistic frame. But he wrote you said it was the holistic framework. Did you really? Yeah. He wrote I'm like, Oh, my Yes, I did. I missScott Santucci 13:17  being heroic framework. Got to say the beam in front of it.Brian Lambert 13:21  Right. Thank you for catching and calling me out as well. Erich in the lab. My pleasure. I appreciate it. All right, cool. Second Person up is Sarah Frick, and she's the senior manager of global sales enablement at ringcentral. I met Sarah when I moved to Charlotte and a little known fact my daughter, who just graduated from Virginia Tech go Hokies. Right, Scott. She's actually been an intern in ringcentral last summer and met Sarah there. So Sarah, and I've talked a lot on LinkedIn. We did some of the Charlotte sex together. And so Sara, thank you so much for joining and tell us a little bit about yourself.Unknown Speaker 14:00  Absolutely. Brian, thank you for having me. So, as Brian mentioned, I'm Sarah Frick, I actually recently got married so I do to change that last name.Scott Santucci 14:10  A lot here.Unknown Speaker 14:12  But my last name is Sarah gross now. And so I'm really excited to obviously be going through the time of life, right. It's been cool first year marriage and our family. We just have a kind of puppy named sir. I work for ringcentral day to day along with that fun family life. And my goal there is to take ringcentral from a billion dollars we are today to attend billion dollar company through helping folks right both communicate within their organizations and outside of their organizations. What I love most about what you're doing here, Brian and Scott is it's eight we're all able to relate to it my favorite episode, because of that is busy, active versus productive. So it's Episode 25. The reason Then I bring that one up is something I constantly struggle with, right? You're there. It's six or seven o'clock at night. Are you actually being productive with your time? Or is it something you should set aside and come back to it at another point I am and realize, right, what are your priorities constantly ranked? So thanks again for having me on.Brian Lambert 15:20  Yeah, you bet. Thank you. Thanks for sharing your favorite episode. All right, so let's go to our third person. Three out of five. This is awesome. I'm so excited about this. We've got Megan, who's the sales enablement manager at cyber Ark. I met Megan, when she posted her picture about the show, I think I think that was the one of the coolest moments for me was I had to show my wife I was like, Look, somebody posted our show. And there was the guy running through the brick wall and his big 60 inch TV. I was like, This is so cool. She's also been talking with Scott and I about the idea of the podcast and how to learn now that we're in COVID. She's been involved with SEO as the sales enablement society. And in 2018, she was actually featured on the the coverage desk. And one of the little known facts here is Megan is had had a successful Kickstarter back in 2015. And Amy, just a heads up you guys should talk after the show you guys have a lot in common. But Megan, tell us a little bit about yourself. And also what was your favorite episode?Unknown Speaker 16:22  Sure. So a little bit about me, like you said, I lead sales enablement at cyber. Cyber ARKS a global cybersecurity company, we provide privileged access management solutions to enterprises. And from the sales enablement perspective, I like you...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 42In this episode, we're joined by Erich Starrett, President of the Atlanta Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society.We engage in a lively, candid discussion introducing "the five flavors" of Enablement #Orchestrator: Talent Enablement, Message Enablement, Pipeline Enablement, Organizational Enablement, and Commercial Enablement. We also discuss the differences between generating data and creating insights. These factors have massive implications for Sales Enablement Leaders looking to Orchestrate across functional groups.Why? Because:Gathering multiple perspectives by "shaking and sorting" each person's perspective into patterns that others can agree on is absolutely critical to orchestrating.Confirming those patterns while gaining commitment to act, and factoring in the current "mental maps" of others and how they see the challenge is required to enrolling others.Unifying action through clarifying where people "Get to yes" and then synthesizing the information into 2-3 executable insights are required to gain traction with important initiatives.Scott and Brian followed this process for the State of Sales Enablement Research. That's why listening to this episode is an important ingredient to your future success. Data just doesn't provide this level of current state reality -- Data is simply too far in the rear-view mirror.To view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.Mentioned in this episode:ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!GTM AI Academy. The only AI curriculum curated by Enablement for Enablement ...and the entire cross-functional GTM team. Don't get tangled up in all of the random vendor driven offerings in your feed. Learn AI from a globally trusted source - Coach K - Jonathan Kvarfordt Their bundle "Enablement AI Mastery" includes BOTH the core "Generative AI Foundations" course AND "Enablement AI Mastery" specifically. Each course has a value of $599 individually, but Coach K is offering them as a bundle with reduced pricing. AND as a listener of the Inside Sales Enablement podcast, if you "ACT NOW" you can use code "ISE30" to get an ADDITIONAL 30% off of the entire thing. You will also receive FREE access to the GTM AI Tools Demo Library. Coach K has done the demos so you don't have to and offers his straight shooting opinion through an Enablement lens. Go to www.gtmaiacademy.com and enter code ISE30 TODAY and elevate your AI Enablement game!Brought To You By GTM AI Academy - 30% Off for ISE!

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 41In this episode Scott King joins the show to help "dissect" the revenue engine and discuss the wins he's accomplished in partnership with product, marketing and sales teams to drive profitable growth at his company.We tap into their shared experiences to discuss the revenue and profitable growth "anatomy" that exists within companies and how sales enablement leaders can help decrease seller burden and elevate sales conversations at scale in partnership with sales leadership.Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession. Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Brian Lambert 00:34  I'm Brian Lambert. And I'm Scott King. And we're the sales enablement insiders. This podcast is focused on helping you be successful overcoming sales complexity, so that your salespeople can be more effective in the market. If you're an enablement leader, looking to elevate your function, expand your sphere of influence, and increase your impact with customers. You're in the right spot. Thanks, Scott. Those of you who are longtime listeners, you heard that right. That was Scott King, not Scott Santucci. So Scott King, are you ready to take the guest host spot today? Yeah, man. I'm excited. I'm jumping into the co host seat so we can put Scott Santucci on the hot seat. I want to talk to him about engineering sales conversations. That's cool. Yeah, we've got to Scott's on here so we're gonna have fun and Santucci. Are you ready for this? We're all friendlies here.Scott Santucci 01:24  I love the I love the script. It says say something witty.Scott King 01:29  Say something.Scott King 01:31  I watch God Scott.Scott Santucci 01:33  That's a lot of pressure. Uh, are you excited? I'm excited. Yes.Brian Lambert 01:36  All right, cool. Simmer down. Alright, so the reason why I've got this scripted is because I want to brag on Scott King. And usually what we do with leaders is where we first met them with their origin story is so Scott King and I go back a little bit, but he actually goes back to Scott Santucci even further and that was when Scott Santucci was at Forrester. And there was a conference in Phoenix, where Santucci was talking about sales as an ecosystem. And he had a keynote around the selling system. And for those of you at that event, he had this interactive exercise to map out your company's selling engine using like stickers on a on a board. And it was a big risk because people loved it or they hated it. And it was pretty cool. Since I had gone through this process of moving through and to a different company. I actually didn't meet Scott King at that event when he met Scott Santucci. I was actually in North Carolina. I had reached out to Scott King. He's at a company called progress in Raleigh, and him and I started having conversations and I told him about podcast and he I said, Hey, do you know, Scott Santucci? And he said, Oh, yeah, I remember him from Phoenix and, and so as I got to know Scott King, I realized that these guys are kindred spirits. Scott Kane's been in sales management. He's been a seller. He's actually done cradle to grave sales enablement for seven different businesses. And those businesses event 20 million to 600 million in revenue. He's really at the forefront of digital transformation, coordinated content strategy, elevating productivity, and the product marketing and product management teams by 60%. And decreasing sales support needs and how they work to streamline and simplify the support that they're giving to sales. He's also got a competency based approach to hiring and sales success. And that's helped his organization exceed revenue goals by 100% year over year with an a team that had just seen substantial turnover. He's currently at 90% track record of new hires achieving quota within their first year. And I was really impressed with his approach because he showed me in that meeting, we had a bit of a whiteboard discussion around his frameworks and tools and how he was thinking about sales enablement. So I said to myself, here are two guys that have been on parallel paths. they've they've met each other once in Phoenix, they know of each other. And they've built their own sales enablement approaches. And I thought it would be good to come together on the podcast today to talk about what that looks like. So Scott King has has a copy of engineering valuable sales conversations. That's a report that Scott had written over 10 years ago when he was at Forrester, that's our centering document. It's 10 years old. So we're going back in time a little bit and now here we are, so Santucci this is not not a trial, like our listeners might be familiar with the the trial of the decade. This is not a trial. You guys are both colleagues and I got to ask you, Scott Santucci, we usually start with a centering story. So I have to take you back to 1827Scott Santucci 04:46  I love it.Brian Lambert 04:49  1827 do you know Henry grayScott Santucci 04:53  in 1827? Yeah. Henry Clay Henry gray like the South Carolina senatorBrian Lambert 05:01  Oh, no, no, that's not the one I'm thinking about.Scott Santucci 05:05  Is it clay? See Ray?Unknown Speaker 05:07  A Why? Or like the color gray? Oh, Henry gray.Unknown Speaker 05:11  I've no idea who that is.Brian Lambert 05:12  Okay. Well, he was born in 1827. And he studied the human body. And he studied the development of endocrine glands in the spleen. He was an expert in spleen science. He was appointed a lecture on anatomy at St. George's Hospital in London. In 1855, he approached his colleague, Henry Van Dyck Carter with this idea to produce an inexpensive and very accessible textbook for medical students. You know what that textbook was? It was the Grey's Anatomy book, The Grey's Anatomy book in 1853. So how would he do it? Well, following the laws that were passed in London, which was called the workhorse and hospital mortuaries act, in 1832, he could actually collect bodies from the morgue and dissect them. Yes. So he did that. And he worked 18 months on this book to make the human body accessible. And that name of the book was called the Grey's Anatomy book. There you go.Unknown Speaker 06:18  So not the TV show. Turns out,Unknown Speaker 06:20  not the TV show, right?Scott Santucci 06:22  So this is the part where we're supposed to say so what, like, What in the world are you talking about here with this book, and I love being on the other end to get really, really channeled? So what so what what are you talking about? Was that anything to do with me and Scott King?Brian Lambert 06:38  And or sales enablement?Scott Santucci 06:40  Well, right, now, we got a guest on the show, right?Brian Lambert 06:44  Yeah, I think, from my perspective, I think this is a it's a, it's a great starting point, I'm a little bit embarrassed to, you know, kind of admit my, you know, kind of entree into sales enablement, kind of rolling out of the field was that that event there in Scottsdale, so, you know, for me, kind of, I guess, the world started the day I was born that way, I didn't kind of look back at the, at the research that was available. So, um, you know, up until very recently, I wasn't aware that this engineering, the conversations kind of structure existed. So as I was going through it, you know, for me, there's a lot of lessons that I could have learned by not running through brick walls. And that's why I'm excited to kind of talk about this report. I know that it has been around for a while. For me, it was new, and seems still very, very relevant. So I appreciate you guys kind of even you kind of sharing this with me, because, you know, from my perspective, it started with those stickers, and I'm a sucker for stickers and colors. Right. But I think from from my standpoint, what I'd like to do, Scott is is kind of dig in on on kind of maybe four buckets as it relates to this report and kind of how that applies to today, and what changes might be made or kind of some of the different ways that that maybe I've approached it, but the way I'm looking at it is, what is the scope? So if we've, if we've defined it, as, you know, profitable revenue growth, as it relates to this report, and as it relates to kind of the research that you guys had done a number of years ago, how did you define the scope? What do you see the scope is being? And then kind of digging down from there into? What are the components of, let's say, the anatomy? What are the components? What are the big, you know, the big organs that we're going to be concerned about, and then kind of dig down from there into the critical integration points, and then kind of taking a look at the critical parts that we could potentially dig into. I don't know if you think that sounds like a fair approach. But that was kind of the way I was, I was thinking about having the conversation.Scott Santucci 08:42  No, it sounds great. Happy to follow your lead here. Doctor, IBrian Lambert 08:49  think it should be scary for all of us, actually. Um, well. So yeah, as I was going through your report, and maybe it does make sense. And I'm sorry, Brian, maybe it does make sense to kind of just if you wouldn't mind kind of give us that that high level view. And the in the initial report that you did is you defined what the goals were of the CEO and the different kind of business structures that you saw, how did you come to that kind of gauge, if you can give us kind of a high level view of what those things are for those people that don't have the report sitting in front of them? To me, it was it was really insightful as a as a starting point for how revenue is impacted by organizations and how they have to align to it to achieve that goal.Scott Santucci 09:33  Sure thing, so having had a bad carrying sales role before and then also having been a VP of sales. As the bad carrying salesperson, you think the VP of Sales has a lot of control over your destiny, and then when you're a VP of Sales and Marketing, you realize, oh my gosh, the board here really has a lot of sec or has a lot of We'll call it input. The CEO has a lot of input. So there's a lot of expectations that as a newly crafted VP of sales, sales and marketing, I was honestly dumbfounded and shocked at how little the board and the CEO really understood about sales. So what you learn is, Oh, my gosh, this is a community wide thing, it's a team sport, I can carve out my turf. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to sign up for 100% of the number, and then the products and everything like that the things the rest of the organizations doing that impact, our team's ability to hit the numbers isn't working. So that illuminated a holistic problem. And, you know, I carried that around with me, and I thought that was my own insanity. You know, like, there must be something wrong, there's got to be a way to do it better and alike. And then I joined Forrester, and we had a variety of working sessions with VPS of sales and VPS of marketing. And sure enough, they have the same problem that they call the different things, you know, because these situations that we run into, are going to be symptomatic by by the lens that we see it. So for example, sales might say, well, we don't have we don't have the right products. Or they might say our marketing is bad. Marketing might say, well, salespeople don't know how to how to bring it up, or they don't know our customers well enough. And when you frame problems, that way, you don't get really you don't get really curious. So what we did is we brought a variety of we brought 10 VPS of sales and 10 CMOS together and said, you know, figure this out, let's let's figure out where these gaps are and put some texture around it. So that's, that's really the driving force. And then you know, sort of to do that is knowing full well that both of those parties, even if they do come together, you're going to have to have something to connect back to the CEO, because the CEO is definitely going to be involved in anything that's dealt with cross functionally, how do we go do that? So you know, the answer there was to read, I don't know, 50 annual reports. And then specifically, the q&a section and the earnings calls, and just highlight the areas, we printed all those out and highlighted all the areas where questions from the investors, we're about sales and marketing execution, and then try to put all those things together, you know, while highlighting this theme of Mad scientist's this Frankenstein, Frankenstein picture of all these pieces together. That's that's how we scoped it out.Brian Lambert 13:00  Yeah, what I liked what I liked about the scope when I when I was reading this, and is this is absolutely not where I kind of began my journey with with enablement, I think, you know, for me, instead of looking at the whole body, maybe I articulated it, that I thought I was looking at the whole body, but in reality, I was looking at, you know, something specific, the respiratory system. And, you know, you go about trying to kind of fix that component thinking it's going to, you know, fix the body, and it doesn't, I think you brought up a couple of good points, especially in this report. And then again, which is, you know, kind of the, the creating an overarching go to market strategy is a cross functional, you know, kind of process. And, and sales really is the cap end, and from my perspective, or the execution arm of that go to strategy or go to market strategy. And I think a lot of times, because we don't necessarily look at it as a whole, we take each individual and then ask if they're playing well together. I think there's a lot of opportunity, where, you know, the the marketing executives speak with a different language than the sales executives, right. And we kind of have to look at what those translations mean, as you're trying to drive to a, you know, kind of a larger goal. What I yeah, I just, I really felt like it was important. And it took me a long time. And once again, I'm embarrassed, I didn't I didn't get to this information earlier. But I really wasn't framing. I wasn't framing the problem, I was trying to solve at a high enough level, to I think, at least for the first couple of years, to really be able to dig in and actually start to solve, you know, kind of real problems that that, that we're going to actually help the revenue versus kind of just digging into exactly what you're talking about, which is the name calling. Well, our leads are terrible. And then you dig into the leads or you know, and at the end of the day, if I've got somebody with a heart condition, why am I Why am I fixing a sprained ankle, and I think that we have a tendency to want to do that. Mm hmm. What I really liked was then kind of how you broke that into The different styles of companies as it related to sales kind of describing the way that people kind of looked at their go to market process and what that what that motion looked like through through sales. Do you have a second? Maybe you can kind of describe what that looked like the the product base versus solution based kind of conversation?Scott Santucci 15:21  Is that the coping with complexity part?Brian Lambert 15:24  Yeah, I just, I really, I really feel like it says a lot if you're, if you're a sales leader, or a sales enablement leader, to me, taking a look at what the expectation is that the, of the sales team, given what they've been handed by product marketing by human capital, you know, by the sales management team, or sales operations, the structure that's put in place, I really liked the way that you did the engagement model around, you know, the commodity perception, I think we all sort of falling.Scott Santucci 15:54  Okay, I gotcha. I like you. So one of the things that's really difficult is, for those of us that are a little bit older, and you remember the 70s, if anybody had cancer, your your grandparents or parents would whisper it be like, Brian Lambert, did you hear what happened to him. And here we are in 2020. And the diagnostic of cancer is so good, the survivability rate is so high, when you when you capture it in pretty much all forms, like pancreatic cancer used to be a death sentence. And it's got a survivability rate of 90% if they catch it early. And that phenomenon of medical science and being much more informed by just saying, look, half of the battle is we just have to talk about the problem. And the reason I that the reason I bring that up and frame that out that way is the problem that we've got is mismanaged complexity. And how many organizations do you know or people want to talk about complexity, I don't have time for that is the fingers in your ears with that. So what we wanted to do is say, look, this complexity, and by complexity, we mean the information, the valuable information that's being transferred between your buyer and your seller. That's really the root of why you have so much inefficiency at the point of sale, your customers world has gotten has gotten more complex, your world has gotten more complex. So let's call a spade a spade. And the thing that we need to address is complexity. So that's, that's part one. So then the issue is whether you are addressing the complexity, or you're choosing to not address the complexity, like treat the symptoms, you still have a strategy, a default strategy strategy is being is happening, you are dealing with it. So if you are dealing with it by not confronting it, well guess what happens? The product, the people who are producing the messaging, maybe product marketers, product, people are producing lots of product based stuff. They're throwing it over the wall to sales, people who don't know how to discern it. And then they push that product based information onto customers. So basically, we're forcing our customers to deal with our complexity. And what do they do? Scott, you and I both know, Brian knows this too, as salespeople, if you give customers a whole bunch of stuff, when you leave, they throw all that stuff in the trash can.Brian Lambert 18:32  That's Yeah, I agree with you. Right. And I also think there's an...