Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 53Nine 4x2 Lego blocks have over 9 Billion unique combinations. How many "legos" does your product, solution, or service have? No matter how you define a "lego" at your company, the permutations are astounding, and yet this is the challenge salespeople navigate daily.On top of this, your company is changing -- rapidly. Moving from one form or the other. This journey represents another challenge salespeople must navigate.In this podcast, Brian and Scott are joined by Chad Quinn, the CEO & Co-Founder, Ecosystems and Jason Cunliffe, Group VP Content Marketing Services at IDC. Chad and Jason have created a partnership. How did it form? By a shared client's definition of value and the blending of capabilities to help sellers navigate a complex buyer-seller relationship.In this podcast, you'll hear:The definition of valueWays company's evolve their value communication approachIdeas to make value clearWays to relieve seller burden in the sales processEPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Scott Santucci 00:34  I'm Scott Santucci,Brian Lambert 00:36  Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:48  Together, Brian, I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives, as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way. What works and maybe what's more Important, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:02  Our focus is on you as a sales enablement leader and orchestrator. As an orchestrator, you need to develop specific characteristics to operate in the blended domain of strategy and tactics where you do both together well to help your company win. Our goal on the podcast to help you clarify the measures of success, gave you confidence to engage up and down and across the organization, and provide real examples of what it looks like to execute strategy and execute tech. As always, we start with a centering story. So I'm gonna pass it over to Scott Scott, what do you have for us?Scott Santucci 01:36  So today's centering story is about a glass of water.Unknown Speaker 01:43  There we go.Brian Lambert 01:44  So well, that's gonna be hard to date.Scott Santucci 01:47  No day Exactly. Well, it's timeless, right? So water is a is timeless with with regards to humanity's concerned. But when you think about water, it's its chemical composition is it's a bunch of molecules. those molecules are bouncing around. And what's interesting about water isn't the only substance on earth that exists in three different states. It's a, it exists in a gaseous state, so we breathe it in all the time. It exists in the liquid state. So Jason has a bottle of it right now. So it can deal with the heat down in Miami. And it also exists in a solid state. And that's really what we're going to zoom into is, is that the difference between the liquid state and the solid state? So did you know Brian, that ice actually is considered a mineral?Brian Lambert 02:40  I did not know that. I might have known that, but I probably forgot it.Scott Santucci 02:44  And so what's interesting about that is at at at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, zero degrees for our international listeners, something amazing happens is those molecules START STOP bouncing around so fast. They go really, really slow, and literally stop or freeze. And when they freeze, a lot of things happen. So one thing that happens is that the volume of this what was a liquid that now is now a solid is 9% larger. So if you've, if you've ever frozen a glass of water in your in your freezer, why does the glass break? It's because it's bigger. The other thing that's interesting about that is that in an in a solid state or a mineral state, it's less dense, so it floats on top of water. So there's a lot of interesting things about it. And what's even more interesting about that is when you just add something as simple as salt to the equation at a certain, you know, at a certain ratio. We're not really here to do a chemistry experiment, but that freezing point can drip down to negative six degrees Fahrenheit, and I didn't do the calculation for our international community. Sorry, I'm American. I know No matter,Brian Lambert 04:00  the only international sometimesScott Santucci 04:02  Yeah, exactly. So somebody can go calculate it and post that out. But that's a 38 degree difference between a freezing point by just adding salt, salt to the equation. So those are some interesting facts about water. The last point that I want to make before I get the dreaded question from you hear, Brian, is that what's also interesting is, when you think about the people who study scientists who study water in its liquid form, they're very different than the people who study water in its frozen form. So think about glaciers. glaciers are just ice, they're studied by geologists. They're not studied by any other people. So and also the, when water gets transformed to water vapor, it's studied by meteorologists. So there's a whole bunch of different dynamics going on here with this simple liquid that we take for granted. I don'tBrian Lambert 04:58  know if you know this, Scott. But I think he said The word interesting seven times. And I'd have to ask our listeners, how many were interested that much in water ice. And I do have to ask you, though, because I'm really curious about this. So what?Unknown Speaker 05:13  So?Brian Lambert 05:15  So what is this?Scott Santucci 05:17  What does this have to do with anything? Right? Yeah. Well, I, I love this quote from Mark Twain. It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure. That just ain't so. And what we're talking about here is that, let's really think about the difference. So as us as human beings, literally outside it's one degree if we're in London, or it's to me in DC, it's 33 degrees. Can we really tell the difference between one degree and zero degrees? Or one degree or 3033 degrees and 32 degrees? Can you tell that difference? None have us can observe that difference or tell that difference. We can't feel it. But it has a major transformative effect of going of converting ice from a liquid to a frickin mineral. Think about that. So the reason that that that's, that's so important for our theme here today is that in the state of change as we're in this digital world, where we're we have all these different social capabilities, we've got digital capabilities, we've got new ways of rearranging content. We've got different ways to combine different different capabilities and an entirely new things like look at Uber, for example. They don't own a single cab, but yet they're the biggest transportation fleet on the planet. What's going on here? So the reason that I think water is a great metaphor to talk about our theme here, which is what what makes something valuable in a rapidly changing in a rapidly changing environment. That we do have something to base against, which is water. It's something that all of us take for granted. But it's the only substance that exists in three different states that that, that we all can relate to.Brian Lambert 07:12  I love it makes sense. And, you know, we're in a very transformative state. And some of us are boiling and some of us might be frozen and locked up. And we need to transition states. I love that analogy.Scott Santucci 07:24  And the reason that we're bringing that and the reason I'm excited for our special guests here today, is that sometimes going back to that quote, it ain't what we don't know. That gets you into trouble. AKA be curious. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so. It's not freezing out. It's just cold. Well, the ice around you will tell you differently. So I'm really excited to introduce Jason and Chad to join our show, and they'll introduce themselves a little bit here. Jason works with With ITC, and he's, he's responsible for their sales enablement and content and contact practice. And Chad is the CEO of ecosystems. And these two people have mixed their water and salt together or they're, you know, in our prep, we were calling a chocolate and peanut butter. They've got some new ingredients together. So I've known Jason for quite a bit bit of time, he was very helpful in helping us launch the sales enablement society. So Jason, welcome to the show. Would you like to introduce yourself a little bit to our audience?Unknown Speaker 08:36  Scott, thanks very much. Yeah, it's name is Jason Cunliffe group VP of our content marketing services team at IDC responsibility for sales enablement practice as well. And, you know, I am a also a former bag carrying quota carrying sales representative prior to my career at IDC and One of my, you know, personal objectives that I'm constantly trying to solve for is being that icebreaker if you will, between attended, right between the marketing and the sales function, right is it sometimes you know where we're stuck in the ice up in the frozen tundra in the Bay of Fundy if you will. And we need to we need to see movement between these two functions. So happy to be on the on the show today and have a good conversation.Scott Santucci 09:36  Excellent. And Also joining us is is Chad. So I mentioned Chad, Chad. I know I've known Chad mostly by following what he what he posts. Chad's been way out on the vanguard way, way, way, way out on the vanguard about advocating outcome selling and if you've been following on our on our podcast, Episode 51, we had a deep dive into it. Come sound with Bob Apollo. Well, Chad's been advocating this kind of approach for just eons of value and value selling approach. So Chad, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and your company and what you're doing.Unknown Speaker 10:13  Thank you, Scott. Great to be here. great pleasure. Also, thank you, Brian. And great to have some time with Jason Chad Quinn, CEO of ecosystems, really, our passion and purpose and ecosystems is to make value clear. And we have a sales excellence platform that does that. To kind of riff a little bit off of Scott's centering story, if you think of that glass of water, and you think about value value is always subjective. It's always in the context or relative to the situation you're in. So having gold you would say arguably, a gold bar has a lot of intrinsic and extrinsic value. But if you're in the desert, a glass of water is much more valuable. And so that's the fun excitement we can have in our discussion is the relativity and the subjectivity around values. And how to best convey to our customers.Scott Santucci 11:03  I was so hoping you were gonna go there. The reason I picked a glass of water is because of that exact analogy about intrinsic versus objective value. And you you will work perfectly. Oh, that's fantastic. I'm so excited. This is unrehearsed by the way. So this is how great our our guests are. So what we're what we're doing is what I'm really fascinated with is in the state of change, as our listeners have. We've done more post COVID research than anybody we've published. Over 20 different podcasts of accessible content. We've had four keynote quality deep deep dive webinars, we've got another one coming up. And what we're seeing is a lot a lot of change around and what's what sparked me was there was this announcement maybe a month ago, where ecosystems and IDC announced a partnership and I want to unpack that but What I want to first start off with is, let's get to know our our guests a little bit and figure out the origin story of how the heck these two ingredients got got together. And let's figure figure out how we mix the mix the water together, so to speak. So Chad, you've been on the soapbox for a long, long time, as I alluded to earlier about selling to value. What trends are you seeing that that are happening that b2b companies are missing?Unknown Speaker 12:30  I think Scott, let's do it as a visual for our listeners. So let's visualize together that there's a door between you and your customer. And that door represents access into how they see value. Today, regrettably, I think sellers are looking through the keyhole. And that's the challenge. They're looking through the keyhole of that door, and only within this very small sliver of what I would call functional value. And we want to work with them to open that door with the customer and look at all the dimensions of value, so that they're not having this very narrow lens into what that word means.Scott Santucci 13:11  Awesome. That's great. It's very illuminating. So Jason, can you comment on on that? What are you from an IDC perspective? What are you seeing in terms of gaps in value? And what kind of research are you illuminating to highlight that gap? How do we make it better to where b2b companies can get customers to open that door?Unknown Speaker 13:34  Right. So certainly the buying landscape has changed dramatically, right? In the past few months, companies reinventing themselves in the context of the next normal. Many, in many cases face an existential threat to survival. And I see this every day in calls in terms of, you know, the sales and marketing function, the leaders are still wrapping their heads around On what normal is supposed to look like today, right. And of course, the the selling communities is boxed into the virtual world and have an entirely new value script and buyer landscape that they're dealing with. And, you know, I think these are themes that we've, I've been working on personally, but I think, you know, recent events, economic crises, and so forth, it's just really put all of this under the microscope and force factoring it to, you know, to be solved for in a more meaningful, full way. So we, you know, at IDC, we've put out some research as well on the five stages to recovery. We've worked with Chad on that as well, in terms of helping our own customers figure out how to flatten their own curve, and move you know, through from, you know, cost optimization, the business resiliency to targeted investments through to you know, what the future and future enterprise is supposed to look like. So we've got we've got a lot of talk, a lot of times to want to talk about today in terms of business value and the research that IDC produces to help solve for those challengesScott Santucci 15:08  on it. So in other words, the the overall economic climate is not unlike changing the temperature around a glass of water. All right, we were accustomed to one, maybe a lukewarm environment or the maybe the molecules were moving around, not as fast as the molecules when it's super, super hot. And, you know, now things are freezing, or maybe they're freezing, maybe they're heating up. But whatever the case is the the current state or status quo, our current glass of water, it's going to change and it's going to change into something out and that's, that's what both of you guys are observing. Is that fair?Unknown Speaker 15:51  Yeah. Yeah, I would say that the cost of doing nothing is really high.Scott Santucci 15:57  Right, right. And so that's been one Have those points? Well, you know, to quote rush if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice, right? Right. status quo is probably the worst thing that you can do. Awesome. So let's go into, you know, the next thing. So, okay. That was an interesting conversation about value and concepts of value. I'm still trying to figure out, Okay, we've got ecosystems has a software platform to help people do that. And IDC have always known. Aren't you guys that the people that write reports on stuff? So Jason, you're in the content business, right? So how would people go about using IDC content to help with sales? Isn't that for analyst relations people or marketing people? I don't, I don't get it. I'm just trying to be like, you know, put some red meat on the table to get us thought acting good acting, Scott.Unknown Speaker 16:53  Thank you. That's Yeah, that'sScott Santucci 16:56  it. Thank you. I was gonna go there.Unknown Speaker 16:58  So So we've You know, we've known for a long time that in the in the content marketing world that that, you know, salespeople will use pretty much any piece of content at their disposal to carry a conversation forward. Right. And some of that content is limited in its value to do that, and some of it is extremely valuable. And over the years, we've found that, of course, our ROI and business value practice that produces a lot of this custom content fits that that latter bill, right, which is, which is business value studies, ROI studies, but these are things that have traditionally been used or what we would call marketing purposes. Right. And, you know, over time, we you know, through discussions with our customers and speaking with sales leaders within those organizations, you know, we really keyed in on the fact that you know, the all of these engagement activities that that the market function typically tees up, it really has to be aligned and put forth in a way that the sales function can carry forward not only in an intelligent manner, but in a measurable way. Right. And so solving for that dynamic sort of been the key to solving for that dynamic has really been a key focus of mine for for many years now because to me that unlocks the whole value of the marketing function where you can tie that back to the impact it's having on sales pipeline, so forth.Scott Santucci 18:35  Got it. So my reaction to that and I'm putting words in your mouth, please feel free to spit out what doesn't fit in but my my reaction to that is okay, having myself been in a research business. Well we want to do is we want to figure out what do our customers the end customers care about? And want one thing that I think we can all agree on is a lot of the times the things that Customers care about is so different from the agenda of the b2b sales and marketing company, that there's a big rift there. So we can do...

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 52What happens when you get people together remotely or in-person to build something to "help sales sell?". Take an Insider's look at what it takes to navigate internal perspectives, challenges, and vision to co-create value together.Imogen and Doug join the guys to discuss their work. They provide real-world examples that illuminate and provide structure to the challenges they overcome while working with marketing, sales, and product groups. You'll hear a lively discussion about what it means to orchestrate by blending together both strategy and tactics to simplify sales while achieving business objectives.Take a listen to learn more about:Why orchestration is valuable to executivesWhat orchestration "looks like" to the leaders involvedWays to overcome internal bias and people who want to "steamroll" the solutionOvercoming siloed thinking by creating clarity through the workEPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Scott Santucci 00:34  I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:35  I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:47  Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, issues as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works and maybe most Importantly, what doesn't?Brian Lambert 01:01  That's right Scott. And our focus is on you. The sales enablement orchestrator. As you know, as leaders in your business, you need to develop specific characteristics that we've been calling Orchestration, we want you to understand what it means to help clarify the measures of success. We want to give you examples, Orchestration looks like as you you operate in the gap between strategy and execution to do both at the same time. And we want to give you confidence to engage up down and across your organization to help with that and breathe life into this concept of Orchestration. We actually have two guests with us today, and they've been on the show before, but they're also helping and they're very passionately involved in clarifying the role of sales enablement, as orchestrating role and what it means to be an orchestrator. So we've got Imogen McCourt and Doug Clower joining us today. Hey guys, how you doing? Can you introduce yourself?Unknown Speaker 01:54  Certainly, Brian and Scott. Thanks for having us on again. I guess we didn't do too badly Last time, so we get to come back and do a little bit more. Anyway, my name is Doug clower. I'm a, I'm a global enablement director and and I'm an orchestrator to I guess that's the best way to describe it. I'm passionate about this. It makes so much sense. And it does give so much value to the companies that we work with. So thanks.Unknown Speaker 02:19  Yeah. And I'm imaging McCourt, and it's lovely to be back, spending some more time with you chaps, I co founded an organization called and grow.io. And we focus on helping companies with the business of sales, helping the senior executive team understand exactly how they should be orchestrating things like that. So I'm really delighted to be part of this today, and also the other work that we're doing at the side.Brian Lambert 02:39  That's awesome. Yes, very excited to have you guys on and thank you so much for the time that you continue to invest in sales enablement and sharing with our listeners. And what we had is a bit of a shared experience this week, all all four of us. So me, Doug, image in and also Scott. He did a webinar this week, and he did the webinar on the concept of routes to value. And this was a great discussion you can find out more about it if you go to Commercial Ratio comm you can get the recordings and I definitely encourage everybody in insider nation to listen to that recording is a really important concept about linking your your company's capabilities to your customers challenges and outcomes, and the role of salespeople and the selling ecosystem and closing that gap in a route to value. This particular podcast. What I wanted to do is really slow down and talk about the concept of orchestrating what seems to be a simple concept of, of helping salespeople connect the dots and, and sell to customers. And I wanted to ask you imagine, you know, how did the webinar relate to you and what takeaways Did you have from it?Unknown Speaker 03:49  Well, I mean, it's a fantastic the whole series has been really powerful to listen and learn and be part of and, and the webinar yesterday, I'm going to have to pronounce it root value. I'm sorry, when you listen to the webinar, you'll know that there's English to English translation thing. I'm just, I'm sorry, I'm protecting the global political audience. But yeah, it was really interesting. I, you know, there's such complexity in keeping focused on the strategic work that we need to do is orchestrators, but also understanding some of the practical and tactical things too. And so much of it resonated. But there's one slide, which was a panoramic view of a workshop very, lots going on lots on the walls. And I'll be honest, it was like, it was like flashbacks to a workshop that Brian and Scott You helped me design and run when I really just started as head of sales namens at Forrester. So I don't know how much you guys remember about that. But we were trying just to simply think about the new go to market strategy that they were they were pivoting around, and how what value that might mean to our clients, but actually, what we were trying to do and what we ended up Doing was just trying to get a pick list of priority for the sales enablement group for my small and immaculately formed team. And I'll be honest, it escalated out of all control. So we started with a pick list of heads of department, head of marketing, things like that, to try and do this to try and get us all on the same page about how we work together. And then I think there was 30 plus people in the room, and all hell broke loose. And we were just trying to get everybody to come together around the story of why we had decided to move to this and what value it brought to the marketplace. And it was everybody had an opinion, everybody brought their agenda into the room. So you know, seeing this workshop sort of slide put out in front of me with all of these incredibly important and valuable things to do that it just took me straight back there, right. That's the beginning of running sales name of departments. And I'll be interested what you thought of that session and whether you have any memories from it.Brian Lambert 05:55  Yeah, well, I'm gonna ask, you know, Scott, actually to help our listeners out To make sure that our listeners Scott are aware a little bit around why workshop and kind of what was happening in the workshop that that slide generated from the webinar. Because it's a it's a panoramic his his image and said there's a lot of things that happened in the room I was in the room and there was a lot of things like value map or stakeholders and, you know, here's a space to think out loud, or here's a different space to show some tools or progress. And there's a lot of things on the wall. And but really, what was the purpose of the workshop? Scott and what why workshop and how does that relate to what imaging was talking about everybody coming together? Yeah. SoScott Santucci 06:38  let's distinguish a few things. So Imogen talked about routes to value and her past experience with that, and it took her back to a time I don't know maybe 810 years ago at Forrester. Yeah, yeah. Trying to get a whole bunch People together. So one of the one of the concepts that we had talked about earlier in this, in this webinar was the concept of Productitis. And I think what, we didn't have that term 10 years ago, and again, but we were seeing absolute symptoms of Productitis. Individual marketers who just didn't really care necessarily about the value proposition, but Okay, so what leads do we no need to go generate for who individual are it's tough to come p&l groups, but different businesses, like Forrester had, at the time had a leadership conference counsel product, then there's the general research product, then there's the consulting group, and all we were trying to do is say, what's the what's the simple one value proposition that we give to each of these different customers, and to images point, everybody was showing up with their own ideas. I was I, you know, if I'm in consulting, I really don't care what the research value proposition is, or the Leadership Council group sort of proposition is I care of making sure the consulting value propositions delivered. And so what is this balance? What is our actual business strategy so that the business strategy images was mentioning was a pivot to be role focused. So instead of having research around topics, the research and the delivery mechanism was going to be around individual roles. So that's a tough pivot and upon itself as well, so it's a strategic pivot. So you have all of these different variables going on at the same time. So that was then. So kind of the Wayback Machine 10 years ago, what what Imogen was referring to is a slide, which is part of the process. So at the end of our Rouse devalue presentation, we talked about, hey, here are the problems and in the middle section we talked about, let's illuminate What an outcome is from a customer's point of view. Now the second part, then the third part then would be, what methodology Do you follow to put it all in action, because you can't just have one group go and build a playbook or another group build a value map and another group do something else, because nothing's going to tie it all together. So what we were doing is introducing a series of workshops or techniques that follow design thinking principles to get everybody together. So what when Brian was saying he was in the room, Brian was in the room of the picture that was described or the panoramic view image and says it way better than I do. And what we're trying to eliminate here is let's let's plot out all of the different Verrier variables of why you people just, you know, go get people involved. So going back to the images point of view at the beginning, which was, Hey, this is simple. All we were trying to do is simply get Ba ba ba ba well Sales is simple but simple is hard. And I think that's what we're what we're experiencing. We're experiencing in this story, real life examples of Stratecution coming to life, real life examples of the need for Orchestration, what happens when you don't have it? Things disintegrate into into utter chaos that's unbelievably frustrating for everybody involved. And what's the value moving forward? Because the situation that Forrester was trying to address is exactly the situation most companies are in today.Brian Lambert 10:36  Yeah, that's great. And you're mentioning and this is highlighting to to phenomenon I love you know, dog or image you need to chime in on this, but one is this phenomenon of, Hey, you know what, I talked to you perhaps individually, and everybody's focused on customers and everybody wants to do the right thing. Yet, however, when you get in a room full of 30 other people what what is Turn into and what happens there? So there's this phenomenon of individually doing it versus doing it in a group that that can happen. And then the second piece is, Scott, you said very specifically, well, you can't have one person do a playbook you can't have one person, maybe building a message. And then you know, I would add, you can't have one person, you know, aligning it in the in the platform or of enablement platform or whatever. But yeah, that's, that's what that's what people do. So of course, of course, they can do that, but you added the qualifier of, or else it won't be integrated, and it won't be integrated for sales. So those two phenomenon this idea of what happens individually versus a group and then the other phenomenon of how the work gets done where you parse it up out and you get it done you check it off versus integrating it from the for sales or the lifeblood of sales. What do you guys think of that? That's what strikes My mind is what what the challenges of orchestration are and a picture like this? A dog or imaging Do you have any thoughts? on that,Unknown Speaker 12:01  I think what is so illustrative of that particular image or that picture, that panorama of it's in there. It's really about all the different elements or people that have a role or some sort of outcome that they're chasing. And in most cases, everybody says, I have the customer in mind, but a lot of times they come with their own conceived agenda is like, the customer needs this feature, or the customer wants this executable or this guarantee, or they want this price or whatever it happens to be. And the idea is, you have to collectively bring those together and bring them into alignment. That's one of the bigger challenges. I think, augmentation to this particular picture that that we're referring to, for me was the outcomes slide. The one words it's the building and there's like six different outcomes and those outcomes you have to understand what level you're talking to. So the idea of orchestration, it's hard because you got to get get everybody to begin to understand what are we targeting? What is it we're looking for? What is the customer expect? What's the outcome we're trying to get to, which I think was at the heart of the webcast. It was this beautiful discussion, it goes back to that, that one diagram, Scott, that you put together, where outcome was in the middle, and the six elements were around the outside. That was the power of that. And that's where the the challenges and at least that's the way it resonated for me. That's, that's one of the challenges I've, I've dealt with on a number of occasions.Unknown Speaker 13:36  And then if I may, I'm going to add to that to Doug, I think you're actually right to bring it to the outcome piece as well. You know, we the last time we did our podcast, actually, we talked about how important their conversation the actual conversation between the salesperson and the client is and the value is added when you can discuss what great outcomes you can work with them, what they eat, what they can change towards them and why. But to me, I also think there's this piece about walking riches, there are so many moving parts, you know, there are so many people who passionately care about, do we understand who the wallet owner is or where the budget holders are, and that will help our sales organization and, and then that suddenly internal again that suddenly about the company structure or how we company and sell to them. But what's really hard is actually taking this, this idea of an outcome that we could deliver, and turning that into something that we can actually add value with and not complicate our clients lives. You know, the forester workshop, everybody came in, really believing that they had and having out the clients best interests in heart, but not fully understanding how you turn that translate that into something that can be sold. That is empathetic that drives and delivers value that can be understood in the marketplace. And I think that's the really smart bit about Orchestration here is simplifying enough. Without dumbing down and providing enough of the environment and facilitation to make people look at each other and see how they can come collectively together to drive more value, not look at each other and think, well, they're just going to take sales resource that I really should have because my products really powerful for our clients or, but now marketing are going to focus on something else. I want them to focus on something else. And I think the Orchestrator has to be both incredibly strong leader as Scott, you've said over and over again, but also this really powerful, quiet person who's sitting behind the scenes making sure that everybody understands. And the bigger picture the whole that the outcome that Doug's talking about, which is always client side is always client side outcome.Brian Lambert 15:44  Yeah, these are great. I mean, you're outlining image and and this concept of many moving parts, and I think everybody would agree with that. So for example, if you have a room full of 30 people representing product and marketing and sales enablement and sales, and Maybe the Commercial Officer, they're all in the room, they're probably gonna say, you know what, there is a lot of moving parts here. There is a lot of individual perspective that we need to bring in. You know, everybody has a point of view on what's worked before perhaps, or, you know, what, we all should have the same. And we probably all Do you have a definition of value. Is it the same? I don't know. But we probably all think we know what's valuable. And we probably all believe that we should be working together to figure this figure this out. That's why we're in the meeting. So this idea of, you know, we we're going to be in an environment, and an environment is going to be created for us to to work together. And then yeah, somebody's probably going to lead this and I'm going to participate. these are these are knowable things. And yet something happens in the room that might get in the way. And, you know, what is that? And then, you know, to your point image in this idea of how do you lead through that lead a group of people who are all smart that really do want to do the right thing, however, might Not necessarily see, the bigger, I don't know, synthesis of the bigger components or the large components that need to come together in a customer conversation, right? Well,Unknown Speaker 17:11  at least in a case like that, don't doesn't that individual or that group, that department that silo whatever you want to call them? Don't they sort of have their blinders on? They can't see the bigger picture. They're still focused on the on the customer, but they're not necessarily saying, well, they're focused on the customer too. So how can I work with them to deliver a more powerful outcome for the customer from us as the company? That's, that's one of the key things. It's it's a blinder syndrome. And, and I've seen that before imaging, you seen that analogy? Does that make sense to you?Unknown Speaker 17:48  Yeah, absolutely. It's like and the harder it gets, the more entrenched people get, the more they focus on what they know. They're good at what they know they're particularly gold at rather than having the...

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 51Our focus on this podcast is for you sales enablement leaders and orchestrators. As an orchestrator. You need to develop skills to be mission and goal focused. prioritize the right goals and the right moments, guide the narrative by confronting reality, drive results by design, not effort and unlock energy to create momentum. To do that, today, we've got a special guest is going to join us to talk about a very important topic, and that is selling outcomes.If you're a devout listener, and insider nation member, you will already know this illustrious guest. He was in our panel or on our sales leader COVID panel. And I'm delighted to have Bob Apollo just himself. So if you don't know about Bob, one of the things that he's doing that's really exciting, is he's launched an outcome centric Academy.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Brian Lambert 00:34  I'm Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:49  Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We've learned the hard way, what works and maybe What's more important, what doesn't?Brian Lambert 01:02  Our focus on this podcast is for you sales enablement leaders and orchestrators. As an orchestrator. You need to develop skills to be mission and goal focused. prioritize the right goals and the right moments, guide the narrative by confronting reality, drive results by design, not effort and unlock energy to create momentum. To do that, today, we've got a special guest is going to join us to talk about a very important topic, and that is selling outcomes. Scott, can you introduce our guests?Scott Santucci 01:31  Absolutely. So if you're a devout listener, and insider nation member, you will already know this illustrious guest. He was in our panel or on our sales leader COVID panel. And I'm delighted to have Bob Apollo just himself. So if you don't know about Bob, one of the things that he's doing that's really exciting, is he's launched an outcome centric Academy. So before I get into more details about that, let's Bob Tell us a little bit about yourself in specific What is this outcome centric Academy in first place?Bob Apollo 02:06  Yeah, thanks, Scott, and really happy to be back with the program again. So my career really has been one of spanning sales and marketing for a variety of organizations over the years. But most recently, I've been spending my time working with, I suppose what you're characterized as scale up b2b tech based businesses, for whom sales enablement, sales effectiveness, and all of the things that go with that absolutely essential foundations for building a growing business and delivering predictable outcomes.Scott Santucci 02:46  Awesome. So what we're going to do here is one of the things that we're doing on our show is we're trying to create more opportunities to learn. And as you've been, as you know, we've had several webinars that are all predicated on post COVID research. And the last webinar that we did is was around routes to value enable customers, enabling customers to buy. So what we're going to do is just like we did with Joe Hayes, is we're going to get a sales leaders perspective on it. And then I expect we're going to spend a lot of time Bob talking about outcomes and what exactly they mean. So what we're first going to do is ask Bob to highlight for him, what are three things that most resonated with him about what we shared, and then we're going to get into a conversation there of who knows where we're going to go with Bob and his rapier wit. And then what we're going to do is we're going to wrap up with Brian putting together what what he heard and what's important for you as a sales enablement orchestrator. So Bob, what are what are three things that you got from the from the webinar?Bob Apollo 03:53  What you know, the first one is, you've given a name to a date Disease the organization's have been suffering from for years.And you call it proper eye test. And it's from my observation.It's the sort of a reflection of an inside out perspective on the part of typically technology companies, but not exclusively, who are obsessed about, you know, the products they create the features that they've developed, you know, competitive knockoffs and so on. And all the while they're thinking about that, they're not thinking about what the customer is actually trying to achieve, or why the customer might be motivated to buy anything, let alone their product in the first place. So that's the sort of first thing you've named something that I suspect people will recognize that they've been suffering from, whether it's sales enablement people, whether it's sales People, other members of the organization, you know, I think we've all been blighted by product itis in our time.Scott Santucci 05:08  ie blighted. That's a great word, what I think would be really fun. So if you haven't watched the webinar, you can go to inside sales enablement comm and download it and watch it. But I think will be really fun. And thinking you think hearing your response to it, I think it'd be really, really fun to walk through and go through the product, outcome view back and forth, sort of like a he said, she said with you. So what was your second second takeaway?Bob Apollo 05:36  Well, the second one, which again resonates very much with my perspective on how people make buying decisions, is customers start on a path towards change because they've got issues. And the best thing that a salesperson could do in their early engagement with a customer is to really ask Cover and develop those issues and their implications. And, you know, we're back to what's the role that sales enablement can play in that. It's equipping the salespeople to have those issue lead conversations. And don't just stop when you've uncovered an issue and then revert to type and pitch your product, stick with the problems, stick with the issues stick with the reason to change and really explore the implications with the customer of what would happen if they just carried on their current path. So that was the second thing, you know, highlighting. I think you sort of quoted in the maybe a couple of places in that webinar, why, why and how our customers so value, a conversation about it business issues, rather than product features.Scott Santucci 06:54  So what's interesting about that, and if you're if you're joining, there were lots of quotes They were dense quotes, and they were hard to read properly during the webinar. And I even got some feedback they shouldn't read rate them out. But the reason that I put a lot in there is that I want people to have them on their decks. Yeah, and quote them a lot because nothing helps bring to life these problems than hearing the voices of executive level buyers of what's not happening. And it's it's a ubiquitous problem. And I think we have to all do a much better job. sales enablement. People talk about buyers journey and being but buyer centered and you know, cut buying enablement we're talking about. We've been hearing a lot of these things for a long time, but we're not really addressing the challenges. So bringing these quotes to bear I think, I think help a lot. And IBob Apollo 07:49  think sometimes we can think that content by itself will sell but, but really, I think the purpose of content is to stimulate conversation. Yes. And you know, it's In those conversations, those one to one or small group conversations between the salesperson and the representatives of the customer, where the real traction happens.Scott Santucci 08:10  And I think that's a, that's a great point. Because one of the things that's been very fascinating, and this is why we're trying to do this on our show, is I learn as much if not more from the feedback after these, these webinars, and we don't have a way to share it. And bataya the whole idea, the whole section that we had in there about mapping out the customers and the agreement network and everything like that resonates so strongly with sales leaders. It's unbelievable how much it resonates because they know in their heart of heart, I'm sparking a conversation so I can co create value with my customer. What's interesting, though, Bob is the people who work in the rest of the company. They tend to not see that because they want the salesperson to prescribe the product that they have, instead of the CO create whatever the outcome is,Bob Apollo 09:08  yeah, even heaven forbid, they want the salesperson to para word for word, their company presentation not realizing that they're not just presenting into the ether. They're presenting to one or a number of people. And if that presentation doesn't stimulate a conversation that might go off piste because you learn something about the customer and you react to it. I mean, that whole idea of prescribing, coaching training people to give Word Perfect presentations almost always reinforces product itis.Scott Santucci 09:47  That's right, inevitably. What's fascinating about that is these are things that if you talk with people who have a lot of sales experience, you're like, Well, duh, of course that's what you have to do. And then it's like, well, I'm not learning anything new. But the issue isn't about you. The issue is how do you get the rest of the organization to get aligned behind you? And that's challenged. And you have to recognize that not everybody has the same degree of client empathy that maybe you have, and maybe not all of your salespeople have, which I think gets us into what's your third takeaway?Bob Apollo 10:26  Well, that might well be your illumination of the power of outcomes as part of successfully engaging with the customer. You know, we need to avoid product itis. We need to equip and coach our salespeople to have really powerful conversations about issues and bring insights to bear against those issues. And the third element is so I don't think a customer starts a buying process, at least in a complex search. Well, you know, it's a discretionary purchase, they won't initiate the buying process seriously, unless there's something that looks like an issue that needs to be dealt with. And I'd also suggest they won't conclude the buying process, unless they're confident in the outcomes, that the change that's being proposed to them is going to deliver.Scott Santucci 11:21  Yeah. And I think that's so well stated. And I think what, what I'm very curious to get your feedback, so we haven't had a chance to rehearse this, that. So one of the things that we've created is an outcome wheel. And the reason that we create that outcome wheel is to provide a checklist of all the things that an executive is probably going to ask in their head, before they're willing to move forward with something. And we want to we tend to think about step one, I do this step two, I do this step two, three, I do this, but that's not the reality of human beings. We tend to operate holistically. So the outcome wheel has a, you know, a couple parts starting with what's the achieved end state. But I think some people start with that's all an outcome is. So I guess what I want to do is have a conversation with you, Bob about what actually is an outcome?Bob Apollo 12:16  Okay. Well, you know, I think actually outcomes apply to a number of phases in the relationship between a salesperson and a prospective customer. That is an ultimate outcome, which is really what the customer seeks to achieve as a result of engaging in a change program. But I think we also have incremental outcomes, which are things which demonstrate progress towards achieving that ultimate goal and to the point you make with your wheel, some of those outcomes tap into strategic perspectives, some into operational perspective. Some into a variety of other perspectives, and you've identified half a dozen in that in that wheel. And again, this is really part of the art of conversation as to how we set up an engage conversation with the customer around these different manifestations of outcome and how we seek to move forward progressively with the customer. With many or incremental outcomes or advances however you choose to characterize them, that when they are strung together, result in the customer achieving what they need to and, and, and contrasting that with the situation they're in at the moment. And I'll make a brief reference about the importance of contrast. Because I think if there's only a narrow a perceived narrow difference between the current trajectory the customer is following and the difference An outcome they might achieve. If they accepted your change programming proposal. If there's a narrow gap, it's not unlikely that they'll stick with what they've got right there isn't sufficient meeting it. So we need to be creating a stretching a perceived gap between where they're heading today, and where they could actually get to. If we work with them, help them collaborate with them, deliver capabilities, help them adopt an approach that maximizes their chances of getting that desired outcome.Scott Santucci 14:37  That's spot on and I what I want to do is, I want to unpack what we're talking about here for our listeners. Everything that Bob's talking about, are very specific details that you have to do on a one to one basis. The reason that we created the outcome wheel however, is that you can't prescribe For Bob, it was a let's take the role that I'm the sales enablement person, I'm enabling Bob, there's no way I can prescribe for Bob, what's going to happen because Bob can't prescribe what's going to happen with the customer because the customer is going to have their own conversation. So we have to equip Bob has to be trained and knowledgeable enough to know what value is, how to handle it, etc. And I have to be able to organize content here. So let's talk about what that outcome wheel is and what its elements are. element number one is to be able to paint or what's an achieved in state. So what I have to do is I have to be able to say, hey, Bob, here are some end results of where customer where we've helped customers be successful with other this identity. And Bob needs to understand it well enough to where he can present that in front of a customer and make it their ownBob Apollo 15:54  because it has to be their own. And just to an observation on that. Again, thinking about how we equip salespeople To accomplish this, the power of anecdote and story exactly conveying that vision is if I struggled to think you can properly articulate an outcome without having some ability, custom stories, experiences, anecdotes, and so on.Scott Santucci 16:22  That is so well stated. And really what we have to do is we have to blend, Bob has to have the skill of telling a story. And I have to give them the script more or less, I don't mean script, like, I need to give them the outline of the telling the story. Right. So there's the both of those parts. The second thing, the second attribute is framed through the lens of an executive owner. There's somebody who's going to who's going to get fired if that outcome doesn't achieve or is going to get promoted, if that achieved and we have to message it to that person. Speaking in the abstract doesn't work. Speaking minion level work doesn't work. It has to be in The language of that targeted stakeholder.Unknown Speaker 17:02  Right?Scott Santucci 17:04  And so you can imagine how much training goes into learning how to speak that language. But also we have to make sure if we're preparing content that we've done the homework that we've interviewed, enough CIOs, if we're trying to talk to CIOs are enough CFOs. And we've role played out that content because writing stuff down and talking to stuff is very, very different. And we want Bob talking with them, because we want them having conversations.Bob Apollo 17:31  And just to the point of the executive stakeholders, I think we also need to judge because sometimes it can be a bit deceptive content. People can carry titles, but not necessarily either the authority or the desire for change, that we've got to make an assessment whether the person we're depending on not to champion our solution, but to champion the project. That's really distinction is somebody who's a change agent and respected change agent. within their organization is somebody who understands how to get things done.Scott Santucci 18:07  That's right, and what So basically, what I would need to do is I would need to go and find other change agents in our customer base, come up with some sort of criteria to inform Bob of what that criteria is. But Bob has to know, to determine whether that person that he's talking to is, so Bob has to have the skill, but if I'm not providing him the things to look for, based on research, or based on what we're doing, we're putting all the burden on Bob, and that's not fair. How can Bob know how many people have Bob has Bob worried about or talk to,Bob Apollo 18:43  to bring this back to the sales enablement agenda? You know, there'll be a handful of salespeople in any organization who are just naturally gifted at this and they might actually be the source for some of the insights we want to share with their peers. But the greatest impact on absolutely convinced this is by elevating otherwise, you know, good enough core competence salespeople to be that much more polished and effective.In in having these conversations.Scott Santucci 19:12  Yes, yes. And the Polish matters a lot. So that's why we want to have good training that's in sync. It also has to have the right structure as well. So the third, the third attribute is framed as an initiative. And what does that mean? executives fund initiatives. They don't fund your products. There is nobody out there who's going to say we're going to do project by product from you. That doesn't have it's not how it works. They come up with an initiative. They give it some sort of internal identity. They know where they're going, and they're after their business result, not your software or...

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