Inside: Sales Enablement

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 43.Let's Celebrate!Join 5 Sales Enablement Insiders and to talk through the past 12 months. In the last 12 months, 14,600 listens from 46 countries. instead of going back and reviewing all our shows again and creating some sort of review, we crowd sourced it. And you're invited to the party!Hear their top episodes, and how they action the podcast in their organization. Also, get the "inside scoop" on what we did behind the scenes!Here are some other stats from the podcast thus far:Listeners from 46 Countries. USA represents 72% of listensWhen people listen: Mon – Thurs around 1pmMonday is our biggest listening dayJoining us to celebrate on the Anniversary Show:Erich Starrett, CRO / Director of Business Development @ETA and President of the Atlanta SE SocietySarah Fricke Senior Manager, Global Sales Enablement @ RingCentralMeagan Davis, Sales Enablement Manager at CyberArkAmy Benoit , Founder and Chief Consultant at AllPropos specializing in organizational design and strategy consultingBill Ball, Director of Learning and Development at Disys and SE Society Exec Board MemberTo view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:06  Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to your company? other functions, the market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Brian Lambert 00:38  I'm Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, and we are the sales enablement insiders.Scott Santucci 00:44  Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence and increase the span of control within their companies. Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives, as analysts, consultants, or practitioners, we've learned the hard way, what works? And maybe what's more important, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:10  Welcome to our first anniversary show. It's the Year in Review everybody.Unknown Speaker 01:15  Yeah.Brian Lambert 01:19  So thanks for joining us. And I wanted to start the show by saying thank you so much insider nation for being listeners of our show. We started this exactly a year ago, this week, when this episode drops, it will be one year, and it's been quite a ride. We started out like trying to figure out how many of these we could do. So I've listened to this show a lot. And I said, Okay, well, Scott, how do we do an anniversary episode. And I wanted to really take it through here and say, I can go back and listen to everything or crowdsource it. So I am going to crowdsource it, you guys heard a little bit of an audience a little bit of a crowd. And I'm excited to introduce these folks that have joined us, for our insider nation. And it's our open mic podcast. And we're going to have them chime in. So I know you guys like stats, and I know Scott love stats. So let me let me give you the download here on what's been downloaded. I think you're gonna appreciate it in the last 12 months, we've had 14,600 listens of our podcast, people from 46 countries, the 770 2% of that come from the US. That's about 1200 a month. Also, interestingly enough, Monday through Thursday, around 1pm, or our peak hours. So I don't know if folks are out taking a walk at that time, or maybe working out around that time, or what but that was interesting. Also, Monday is our biggest listening day. We appreciate you guys starting the week off with a little dose of of Scott and Brian, that's cool. Apple podcasts 40% of our listens. And that means a lot of you folks are on mobile 60% are on mobile and iOS is the biggest operating system, the largest operating system. 60% of folks are on iOS devices. In the past year, we feel the two surveys. One was on the COVID response that that gave it gave us actually five episodes, we're trying to do one, but it kept just yielding great information and in detail. The second survey and research project was on the state of sales enablement, that groundbreaking research really set the tone here for coming out of COVID. And it's really the only one I've seen the only research I've seen post COVID, especially in the sales enablement space, which hasn't had a lot of coverage from a qualitative perspective, which means not using, you know, circle number one to five. So that was rich data, we pulled that in did a webinar, and we have about 2500 people on our newsletter list. And about 400 total people have listened to almost 500 have listened to the webinar. So that's great. From our listeners from insider nation, you're going to hear about that. But before I go further, I also have another set of statistics and I I'm doing this on purpose because Scott's such a numbers person. But Nick is our sound guy. And you guys have heard us talk about Nick before. He's the awesome voice over talent at the beginning of the show. Yes, we made him pick the music. He's also introducing the show. And he's also our engineer who edits the show and does all of our cleanup to make it sound good. So he's been tracking our stats, and we're gonna we're gonna give you guys some of those numbers now. So over the last 41 episodes, he's taken out 157 arms. So that's good. 257 double taps on Scott desk. That's that He does that a lot and actually does that when he said something really super important. So there's 257 of those 70 broken words due to it, it would. That's super annoying because it, see what I did there. That was just me, that was not a bad connection. But that's what he fixes so that you don't get annoyed. But Nick, leave that one in. Just for a fact, I thought that was cool. I'm being creative. 340 3045 squeaky chairs like this.I have a squeaky chair. So he's always on me for squeaking my chair while I'm talking. So he can't edit it out when I'm doing that. So that's probably pretty annoying. And then, about 40 times he's inserted our famous Whoa. And that's almost one per show. So we're on track for that. And five times he's he said, he said to fix it majorly. Because I've said like, hey, Nick, go back and edit that out. We can't say those cuss words, things like that. So that's pretty cool. And thanks, Nick for doing that. Nick wrote us a quick little note. He said he's enjoyed engineering this. And he's sorry, he hasn't found this. So what noise yet? And we're gonna actually he's asking us, Scott, if we can record this. So what noise? What do you think about that? Oh, sweet. You know, that's so what you've been looking for for nine months? Yeah. We're gonna get it right now. By theScott Santucci 06:23  way, thank you guys so much for doing this is awesome. I'm so excited. This is Brian's pure directorial debut. at it. I'm loving it.Brian Lambert 06:32  Yeah, we're gonna record this. So what but you are the, I guess the the director or the producer, whatever. So we have to do this. So what until you're happy?Scott Santucci 06:42  Okay,Brian Lambert 06:42  what do I need to do? count us down? And then we're going to do so what until we can get it for Nick.Scott Santucci 06:48  Okay. Awesome. Okay. 321.Unknown Speaker 06:56  SoScott Santucci 06:59  you guys don't sound angry andBrian Lambert 07:01  we got to be faster.Scott Santucci 07:02  And you got to be angry. Like, what are the hell you talking about? Man?Brian Lambert 07:07  Get us into the mood. Why are we so important?Scott Santucci 07:10  I need to I need to do it the mood?Brian Lambert 07:12  Yeah. Set the context.Scott Santucci 07:14  A good director. Yeah, direct direct. I need director. Okay,Unknown Speaker 07:22  what's my motivation?Scott Santucci 07:23  Right? Well, whose motivation so what's your motivation? So you guys your motivation is this. You just heard me pontificate about something that whether it be World War One trenches, a Brooklyn Bridge, Dimitri medoff. Metal, metal often is a periodic table, something like that. And you're impatient wanting to know what the hell does this have to do with insert something you care about? sales, pipeline coaching, whatever. That's your motivation. She kind of annoyed. I get to the chase. What are you talking about, man?Brian Lambert 07:58  All right. Okay, what needs to be fast, not a so what it needs to do what? It needs to be a jab.Erich Starrett 08:07  So it's 123. So what?Unknown Speaker 08:10  Like that we need we need the rhythm. And we need an example of this. So what you're looking for so so what first I'm serious. Yeah, call this up. demonstrate this. So what and then we need to count off and not a random rhythm and a 123 word,Erich Starrett 08:28  right? And then again, we're five. So what's four or five? I'm Maxi directing.Unknown Speaker 08:31  Sorry.Brian Lambert 08:33  Okay. So Scott, do you want to give us your best so what is you envision it?Erich Starrett 08:40  Scorsese? He's reflecting right?Unknown Speaker 08:42  Is this what we've come to?Scott Santucci 08:44  Well, I think there's a each pick your own. Oh, God. One of these. Okay.Unknown Speaker 08:51  So what?Scott Santucci 08:54  You can do one of those or So what? Either of those? And we have a mix of those. That'd be better.Unknown Speaker 09:03  exasperated to irate. Yes. Got it.Brian Lambert 09:07  Yep. You Bill. Bill, you want to count us down in a very specific rhythm.Unknown Speaker 09:11  I got you. 123.Unknown Speaker 09:16  SoScott Santucci 09:18  that was perfect. Directors. So thatBrian Lambert 09:23  isScott Santucci 09:24  wow. Is our producer now for the next year for your next bill.Unknown Speaker 09:28  Do you want to do one more so you guys can compare and pick which one you like better? Can we can get on with the damn show?Brian Lambert 09:34  Yeah. All right, dude.Unknown Speaker 09:36  Oh, what?Unknown Speaker 09:39  123 soScott Santucci 09:45  nice.Brian Lambert 09:47  So none of our listeners know who's actually joined us. So this is perfect.Scott Santucci 09:50  Are you recording now? Yeah,Brian Lambert 09:52  well, no, we've recorded a whole bunch and that they don't even know these folks are. It's awesome. And you're here in the studio with us live via Jim so let me introduce the five insiders that we have on this show, helping us celebrate our anniversary. I'm going to introduce them now that I'm going to explain after they introduce them a bit about themselves and after I introduce them, I'll explain how this show is going to work. So to help us on the show, First up, we have Erich Starrett. Eric is the Director of Business Development at eta creative event producers and he's based in Atlanta. Hey, Eric, tell us a little bit about yourself.Erich Starrett 10:30  Hey, thanks, Brian. Yeah, working for at a creative event producers here where I'm focused on high tech fortune 3000 ish sales, kickoffs, and user conferences, which are more of my sales and marketing field marketing folks. And I'm also the president of the Atlanta Sales Enablement Society's Atlanta chapter, focus there, as you probably know, working with fellow practitioners to elevate the profession, and empowering orchestrators.Brian Lambert 10:59  Thanks for joining us and appreciate that and thanks for being a big supporter of insider nation. And actually, you're our first back to back guest not only be on this episode, which is Episode 43, your episode that you helped her record on the research project is going to be 42. So you're honorary back to back first ever honoree back to back person. So thanks for doing that. Erich Starrett 11:23  Thanks, it's an honor Brian, thank you. My favorite episode would have to be because of what I shared earlier, the rethink on sales kickoff, what is what are executives getting from the investment? And actually fanboy insider geek fat Scott in episode talks about it as Episode Five, but it is actually Episode 11 insider nation if you're looking to look it up, and the why of it is that it's a veritable buffet of multiple reasons. One, it was the first episode I believe that was recorded after you had released an episode and we're actually starting to get listener feedback. And I loved hearing that my fellow Platipi also loved the whole approach of the revisit, rethink reframe, you address the critical question of if we're going virtual, how am I going to have tequila shots with my peers? absolutely critical. And in fact, it's kind of funny, y'all were ahead of your time now that the whole sky Oh, going virtual is such a big topic. So the couple of things you covered off on that I loved how early and how often do you start planning your SKO's? Can you quantify the economic value of those SKO's? And do you have a post kickoff and pre kickoff plan and those are critical questions that I rarely hear asked and rarely effectively addressed?Brian Lambert 12:38  That's cool. Are you gonna Are you gonna start the official insider nation wiki page with all the facts? You're loving walking library?Scott Santucci 12:48  I love the fact that I'm getting called out of. So I would I would love to say that was an Easter egg Eric, it wasn't now. Well,Erich Starrett 12:56  I feel like it's Easter every day with y'all. So thank you.Brian Lambert 13:00  Yeah, he called me out. What did you call me out about over text? You're like, Hey, you said Oh, you said in the webinar. It's the heroic framework. No holistic frame. But he wrote you said it was the holistic framework. Did you really? Yeah. He wrote I'm like, Oh, my Yes, I did. I missScott Santucci 13:17  being heroic framework. Got to say the beam in front of it.Brian Lambert 13:21  Right. Thank you for catching and calling me out as well. Erich in the lab. My pleasure. I appreciate it. All right, cool. Second Person up is Sarah Frick, and she's the senior manager of global sales enablement at ringcentral. I met Sarah when I moved to Charlotte and a little known fact my daughter, who just graduated from Virginia Tech go Hokies. Right, Scott. She's actually been an intern in ringcentral last summer and met Sarah there. So Sarah, and I've talked a lot on LinkedIn. We did some of the Charlotte sex together. And so Sara, thank you so much for joining and tell us a little bit about yourself.Unknown Speaker 14:00  Absolutely. Brian, thank you for having me. So, as Brian mentioned, I'm Sarah Frick, I actually recently got married so I do to change that last name.Scott Santucci 14:10  A lot here.Unknown Speaker 14:12  But my last name is Sarah gross now. And so I'm really excited to obviously be going through the time of life, right. It's been cool first year marriage and our family. We just have a kind of puppy named sir. I work for ringcentral day to day along with that fun family life. And my goal there is to take ringcentral from a billion dollars we are today to attend billion dollar company through helping folks right both communicate within their organizations and outside of their organizations. What I love most about what you're doing here, Brian and Scott is it's eight we're all able to relate to it my favorite episode, because of that is busy, active versus productive. So it's Episode 25. The reason Then I bring that one up is something I constantly struggle with, right? You're there. It's six or seven o'clock at night. Are you actually being productive with your time? Or is it something you should set aside and come back to it at another point I am and realize, right, what are your priorities constantly ranked? So thanks again for having me on.Brian Lambert 15:20  Yeah, you bet. Thank you. Thanks for sharing your favorite episode. All right, so let's go to our third person. Three out of five. This is awesome. I'm so excited about this. We've got Megan, who's the sales enablement manager at cyber Ark. I met Megan, when she posted her picture about the show, I think I think that was the one of the coolest moments for me was I had to show my wife I was like, Look, somebody posted our show. And there was the guy running through the brick wall and his big 60 inch TV. I was like, This is so cool. She's also been talking with Scott and I about the idea of the podcast and how to learn now that we're in COVID. She's been involved with SEO as the sales enablement society. And in 2018, she was actually featured on the the coverage desk. And one of the little known facts here is Megan is had had a successful Kickstarter back in 2015. And Amy, just a heads up you guys should talk after the show you guys have a lot in common. But Megan, tell us a little bit about yourself. And also what was your favorite episode?Unknown Speaker 16:22  Sure. So a little bit about me, like you said, I lead sales enablement at cyber. Cyber ARKS a global cybersecurity company, we provide privileged access management solutions to enterprises. And from the sales enablement perspective, I like you...

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

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

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 40In this episode, the guys interview Hang Black, Head of Global Sales Enablement at Juniper Networks and Insider Nation Member. Her mantra Earn It. Own It. Evolve It. As applied during COVID: Embrace the hard of this ....”She talks about her application and use of the HEROIC Leadership Framework and her journey to establish her charter.On this podcast you will learn how she is using the elements of HEROIC to blend her passion for engineering and sales to find her purpose with a modern approach to sales enablement. Her mantra: Embrace the hard of this. You are out on leading the edge. You must be relevant to sales. Learn what it means to be relentlessly relevant by applying the HEROIC leadership framework.Holistic: The whole is greater than the sum of the partsEngineered: How the parts best fit togetherReality: How the parts behaveOngoing Operations: Continuous and sustained improvementImpactive: How you message to your community of stakeholders to drive actionCollaborative: Process to factor in multiple perspectives required to drive cohesion.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 to 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 00:32  I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:35  I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. This podcast is focused on helping you be successful overcoming the complexities that you find in your own company, so that your salespeople can have more valuable and relevant sales conversations, and your company wins in the market. If you're an enablement, leader, looking to elevate your function, expand your sphere of influence, or increase your impact. You're in the right spot. And today on this episode, we've got a special guest, we've got Hank black, and this is in response to the heroic framework that we published in an earlier episode.Scott Santucci 01:14  Welcome to the show.Hank 01:16  Thanks so much for having me. I want you to know how much it means to me to have thought leaders like yourself, introducing me to frameworks and thought processes and I particularly resonated with your heroic framework.Brian Lambert 01:29  That's awesome. How did you guys meet?Scott Santucci 01:32  Geez, I think it was at a sales enablement society meeting in San Francisco, on a panel hang asked a tough question about metrics. I think, I think we've gotten along swimmingly ever since. And I think that's really how we got here. We got introduced and connected.Hank 01:48  Yes, I did ask you about metrics. Specifically, how much of a portion GMA did companies spend on sales enablement? I think I got a funny look from you.Brian Lambert 01:56  I bet. Scott, love that question.Scott Santucci 01:59  Oh, that was about a funny luck. The answer was 15.9%.Hank 02:04  I think it was more than you were surprised that somebody would pick up on that particular metric. Yes,Scott Santucci 02:09  exactly. That's the right question to ask. Anyway, so what we're going to do here is hang mentioned to being her own framework. So we introduce that as our part five of our COVID series, we had a follow on conversation with Brian applying it. And then what we want is to put more color on it, because it's a very impactful framework, just to remind everybody a little bit level set. It started out I think, maybe 1011 years ago, when we were at Forrester, we had a hero conference. We got experts, some Mitch Liddell represented the age. And we'll go through what these things mean, later, we, we had Ken Powell, representing the he, Carol Stella, the reality based, we had Oh, for operations, operation, ongoing operations by Daniel West, who's who's at Oracle now, all these different parts, and we added two other elements to it. So AI is impactive. And then C is collaboration. So that's our framework. Now, like every hero story, there's an origin story. So let's get to know a little bit about hey,Brian Lambert 03:16  yeah, I love that setup. so far. I'm wondering if she got bit by a spider or something in a secret lab or something?Unknown Speaker 03:24  Well, to start, I have to start from the beginning. I have a chemical engineering degree. And I had asked my parents if I could go into business. And they said, Absolutely not. You're Asian, pick one engineering lawyer or doctor, subject engineering, which I happen to love. I started work at 19. As an engineer, I did that for nine years. And then I went over to marketing for about 10 years, and then I went over to sales. So it is interesting how you will still gravitate towards what you love. I found that at some point in my career, I was very, very broad, because I was just exceptionally curious. And I wanted to learn everything there was about product marketing, I wanted to learn everything there was about product management. And so I went through product management, Product Marketing, and then over into central marketing and then over into sales. The interesting thing about each of those roles, engineering, marketing and sales is none of them has the deep respect for each of them that they should. And it wasn't until I landed into sales that I really understood how all three of those combined. It was sort of magical, having been in corporate, though at that point only for been in the business 15 years and I'd only been with two companies. I ventured on my own had my own company. I then consulted for about 30 different companies doing everything in sales and marketing consulting, sales, Ops, marketing, Ops, field marketing, sales enablement. And then I just learned that tilted towards enablement, because if you think of traditional enablement as training, there's the teacher side of you. And then if you look at where modern enablement is going, there's a revenue operation side. So I like to think of sales enablement as business minded teaching. And it was magical. I got connected to the sales enablement society where we met Scott in San Francisco at Autodesk. And the questions that you were asking really connected me to the business within a business. And that began my journey. And I then focus my consulting company mostly on enablement. and ended up taking a job, I went back to technology, which is my love. And I stood up a program from scratch at a at a company called gigamon. And I got recruited out of there went to the larger company called eight by eight. And then that's where I had a global team that did everything sales, SC channels, and then I got recruited out into Juniper Networks where I am now where I've got sales and technical enablement for sales and services, which is collectively about 4000 people. And it's been the biggest challenge that I've had, but the most gratifying because it is extremely complex. So I always say I went into engineering because I like solving complex problems I and I like numbers. It turns out, I went into sales, because I liked numbers of dollar signs in front of them.Scott Santucci 06:29  Awesome. And now you're in sales enablement, fixing complex problems that impact a lot of people's dollar signs.Unknown Speaker 06:36  That's right. And it's not just sales anymore. It's above and beyond, which is an absolutely exciting time to be in enablement.Scott Santucci 06:43  Excellent. So that's the backstory, the origin story. So now what we're going to do a setting, so bring us up to where you are Juniper, right, but before COVID.Unknown Speaker 06:52  So we have been humming along. When I came in there, there are certain things about enablement, that is just critical in core, make sure you have a good onboarding program, make sure you have a good ongoing program, and then you build the excellence around it, which is industry best practices, learn what you can from the industry, from the analyst from your peers, and move forward. With COVID, what I found was any resistance that there was to change melted away, immediately, all the all the red tape, and all the all the I would call it speed bumps to evolution disappear because everyone had to pivot. And that's sort of my jam. That's what I love, which is change management in times of crises. So at this point in COVID, we're actually hiring more people in, we're innovating much more quickly, we're activating projects that have been on the back burner for months, we're taking this pause, and to do what I would say, Lindsay had mentioned it before, which was to evaluate, are we doing the right things? And are we doing the right things, right? My CRL has given me a lot of bandwidth to go after I tell him 25% of my job is running in front of chains and tell him to stop. So let's make sure that we're doing the right things effectively and doing less better.Scott Santucci 08:23  So that's pretty courageous to run out in front of a train. And that's one of the things that we're talking about a lot. With the being heroic framework. We like that model, because you have to be courageous, and it's a way to help help you think it through.Brian Lambert 08:37  Yeah, and this is Brian, I think it would be really great to hear how you're applying it that Jennifer thing?Scott Santucci 08:46  Well, first of all, being heroic, how does that resonate with you? as an individual? What does it mean? Because some people are telling us us kind of corny or cartoonish?Unknown Speaker 08:55  Well, it's both it is corny, and it is awesome. So they're not mutually exclusive. It's easy to remember, but it's very, it resonates very well. So, ah, as you said, was holistic. It's a sum of all parts. And I think you have to start with a mission. I think that was something that I learned very early on in enablement, especially through this society. And each of us can have a different mission that is developed within the context of the company that we're in. So my particular mission is we've heard it for years people processes and tools, but what are the enablement words that we build around that for myself, I developed an elite sales team to accelerate revenue growth by equipping sellers with relevant content, consistent process and effective technology. That's a little bit of a mouthful, but if content isn't relevant, then we're just throwing stuff out into the ether. If we add technology, it should be meant to accelerate revenue growth and not be additional time. So, so one of the things that I do is I'm a big fan of the medic framework as well. And I make sure that I have a champion in every single group, whether it's Product Marketing, Product Management, field marketing, in my organization, my sales organization in my services organization, I make sure I have a champion in each organization. And it's a continuous delivery and feedback loop so that I'm making sure that every person has a voice, and we're all collaborating together.So one of the things that came up in the panel that we had of sales enablement, practitioners, which Yvonne dug, and imaging was this idea of learning from each other that that's, that's a key part. It's hard to be holistic, if you're just dictating to different groups, it sounds like that's something similar to what you're doing here is building relationships of representatives of different organizational functions that touch the sales organization. Truthfully, enablement is the can be kind of scary. When I came in to Juniper a little over 16 months ago, I was a powerful force of one person. And in order to bring people along, initially, you're inserting yourself and there's this fear of Oh, my gosh, she's gonna take over my job, who is she this brand new person. And the way I have positioned the conversation is, look, I'm here to help you do you better? Let me do what I do well, and we'll figure out how we can work collaboratively together. I don't actually need to own any or all of the process. But let's build the framework together. And what happens when you have that conversation is then you start peeling off a racy, you know, no one can do it all. So then you peel off a racf. You do this, you do that let's all specialize in the things that we do well individually, and put it together as a program.Scott Santucci 11:59  So how do you handle the the feedback? We've often heard pushback, as I certainly advocate exactly what you're talking about, when you talk about races? That takes too long, we have to go now, how do you how do you rationalize that with a holistic perspective?Unknown Speaker 12:15  Well, you can't do it without executive sponsorship. And I believe every single person that you've had on the show is that executive sponsorship. So when you have that backing, but then at least you can come in with voice. And again, it has taken me a long time to learn to speak in a way that I can resonate with the other organizations, I'm here with you, for you. And our goal is to help sales, everyone has the best intentions in place. But what is it that we can if we outline everything that needs to be done, when you look at it, I tell them, I don't need to own any or all of it. And then you look at the massive work that's in place. And then you say, but you know, I'm happy to help you take some of it on, people are happy to. And then at some point, when when there are people who are unwilling to move forward, what you'll find is 98% of the companies will willing to evolve, and there are 2% of antibodies. And what I found has worked well has been just make sure you build a great product. This is the formal train, if you want to do informal things on the side, fine. But if you can prove adoption of what is in the programmatic framework where everyone has a voice, everyone's building together, the adoption engine is 60%. To begin with 70%. And one of the metrics that I personally love is, over time I look at my programs that deliver six months later, they're increasing in adoption. So meaning the same content that I delivered six months ago, where it had 60% adoption in the first three weeks. I look at it six months later has 82% adoption. Why is that? It's because it's its content of value, it resonates and people go back to it and reference it when it becomes relevant in that moment of time in their sales cycle.Scott Santucci 14:06  Excellent. So then let's go into E engineers. So as you react to the E part of being Iraq,Unknown Speaker 14:15  so engineered, I love that with my background, and I know that you and Kunal have talked about being design thinkers, systems, thinkers, it's about how all the parts fit together. I love the Ford making enablement leaders take an approach to their craft. It's not about just taking orders and doing what other people say they need, but building with them. What do you need Shivani in your last podcast talked about being Mission Control, you're accepting flight plans, you're evaluating flight plans, and then you're accepting them. So those are those are programs that are in flight, you're also landing planes sunsetting programs that don't work and then taking off planes make designing and designing products and service. services that are going to be the evolution of enablement. So a very thoughtful process end to end, where you are adding strategic value with your stakeholders versus just creating what you think is good for people or even worse, taking what other people have dictated for sales and producing it.Scott Santucci 15:18  So how would you respond when somebody if somebody were say, he engineered? Oh, gosh, you're gonna over engineer this? or How would you react react to that?Unknown Speaker 15:27  Well, I think it flows very nicely into your reality base, there's only so much time to engineer. And you also have to be productive. So you've got to, you've got to build a plane while you're flying it and the plane actually never lands, you're you're designing for capacity, you're designing for rerouting. So you think of a plane that's always flying? Where's it going? It goes to where it needs to go at that moment of crisis of COVID is actually a wonderful time for for for enablement leaders, to flex their muscle to show their innovation and creativity, to show their ability to skate to where the puck is, as he like to mention with a Wayne Gretzky.Scott Santucci 16:13  Awesome. And so you you went right into the reality based, what does that mean to you?Unknown Speaker 16:19  So, reality mate base means you have to start with where you're from, you can't start with an ideal state, you can't start with Well, if these are the conditions that I have, if if only the rest of the world will tilt to me, this is the awesome product I can create. You have to start from where you are sellers know all the time that they have to start the conversation with where their customers are. So for us, our customers are our salespeople, our sales organization, the C suite, where are we today? And where do we need to go. And if you're impatient, like me, that's actually very, very hard to do. That is probably the worst, that's probably my Achilles heel is operating within the reality that I'm in because I think that I expect that everyone should be able to innovate and move at a at a pace that is probably not sustainable for a very large organization or for an organization is simply not ready for it. reality based is starting where your customers are. And for us, it's sales.Scott Santucci 17:23  So what's interesting about this, starting where you're at, where you talked about holistic and having a strategy, how do you morph those two together? It's interesting, a lot of people have difficulty that they think it's either one or the other. If they either start where you are today, or start with a with a big plan. It sounds like you're doing both. How do you rationalize those two?Unknown Speaker 17:48  So I can recall the last few jobs that I've interviewed for, and people would ask me, what's your 30 6090 day plan? And I would say, Well, I don't know. But here's what I would do. First of all, I need to lay the patient on the table. And I need to triage I need to fix what is absolutely, I need to remove the any cancers. And then I need to look at the patient and say, Okay, what do we need to triage? What do we need to fix? What do we need to replace what in what what has to stay in flight while we're...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 39In this episode, the definition goes on trial and so does Scott Santucci. Scott gets temporarily removed from the co-host seat by John Thackston, VP of SOAR performance group.Perhaps no case in Sales Enablement history deserves the oft-used description "Trial of the Century" more than the case of Scott Santucci's Definition of Sales Enablement vs. the People.In this podcast, the prosecutor's arguments are presented in a trial fashion. The defendant is Scott Santucci and he's waived his right to an attorney.More than 10 years ago, the definition of Sales Enablement has existed in the market. The definition has created unprecedented international scrutiny and media attention, captivating the sales enablement profession. In one camp, the best definition = "whoever has the most organic search hits." On the side, the best definition is "created by VP's of Sales and CMOs and executives over the course of 2 working sessions as agreed upon by a team of practitioners."You're the juror. You decide.By the way, the first definition of Sales Enablement was written by Scott Santucci and published by Forrester in 2010.That Definition:Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.Since that time, he's received a lot of feedback on this definition, and many many many other definitions have sought to take it's place.Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession. Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Brian Lambert 00:34  I'm Brian Lambert.John Paxton 00:35  I'm Jackson 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.Brian Lambert 00:49  Thanks, john. And for those of you longtime listeners, you heard that right. That was john Paxton and not Scott Santucci. Actually Scott's on this podcast with us. But, john, are you ready to do this? So you ready to go, man?John Paxton 01:04  I am. I am. Absolutely. I'm absolutely ready to Yeah,Brian Lambert 01:07  yeah. Scotty excited.Scott Santucci 01:12  You know, I love being surprised, but not really sure what's going on here?John Paxton 01:17  Well, you know, it's, it's pretty funny Scott. Bryan actually reached out to me earlier in the week. And he said, You know, I am really, really just kind of tired of hearing about how Scott defines sales enablement, and there's so much debate about it. And it's really just time to put, you know, Scott's original work, sales enablement defined, it's time to put it on trial. And he said, john, I want you to come on the show we're going to do today, Scott is put you on the spot, you really wrote the original definition around sales enablement, we're 10 years in and we're gonna put it on trial and see, Hey, does this stand up? Or were some things that were off? That's what we're gonna do today.Brian Lambert 01:58  Right, man, you're on trial. Scott, you ready for it?Scott Santucci 02:00  Was this lightning evolution or creationism?Brian Lambert 02:03  That's right. Or people are People's Court. Okay. Well, let our listeners decide. Yeah,Scott Santucci 02:10  the first Actually, I'm not giving that $400 to john, no way.Brian Lambert 02:15  So first, let meScott Santucci 02:15  let me do fulfill his his duties on filling back my my lawnmower when I lent it to them.Brian Lambert 02:23  Right. So So with this, this is for our listeners. First let me introduce john Thaxton to you guys, as our listeners of insider nation, oh, john is with soar performance group. He's one of the co founders of it. soar performance groups, a client focused sales consulting and training company that concentrates on sales transformation and enablement. JOHN is based out of Atlanta. And let me tell you something cool about him was when Scott first had this idea for the DC area, networking group of sales enablement, professionals, or whatever it was called, he put out this call, he gave me a call and said, I'm going to do this. Make sure you make sure you're all over LinkedIn. And we're going to do this networking group. I'm like, Yeah, man I'm in. So we put it out, Scott put it out. You know, we did our liking and sharing and we started getting people in and all of a sudden, this guy, john pings me on LinkedIn, I have no idea who john is didn't meet him before in my life. And he's like, Hey, can I come to this networking group? And I was like, yeah, sure, man, whatever. Of course, well, a few days before, I don't know, four or five days before he pings me on LinkedIn again, hey, I'm coming. I'm coming in from Atlanta. I'm flying in. I had to come in and leave on the same day. And my flights have me coming in. I might be a few minutes late to the start. So I'm on LinkedIn, my mobile app, you know, I'm like, okay, cool, whatever. But then, like, three hours later, it dawns on me. I'm like, Wait, what? This guy's flying from Atlanta. That's like, holy cow. This guy's flying from Atlanta. So I called Scott up. I'm like, hey, Scott, we got this guy come into the DC area networking group from Atlanta. Scott, do you remember that? That was john. And in that now, he's got you. He's booted you out of your seat, from sales enablement, insider inside sales enablement. So,Scott Santucci 04:13  well, I love that. And I think there's, there's a whole bunch of things going on. So if you're listening to this, a couple things to remember. We were trying to just form a local, a local networking group. In order to get that going. One of our podcasts, I think it's, I don't know we can get the episode around that was following up the being heroic framework, where I highlight being heroic takes little baby steps of courage. to, to just come to help out is exactly the kind of mindset of people that I want to be around with. It takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of determination. To me, it says a lot about john human being to come in and say hey, there's a group of people here looking to do something that I personally believe in. I'm going to Lion from Atlanta to help out. So immediately there is the world according to Scott, john stock is through the roof for me. So I'm really grateful. And I'm assuming this is going to be a great experience of getting fired from my co host job. So, you know, I'm gonna have to, you know, I'm still looking in the mirror and tell him, you know, doing my affirmations, you know, I'm a good guy, people like me, my story is,Brian Lambert 05:24  gosh, darn it fire like you.Scott Santucci 05:26  Yeah, exactly, exactly. I'm interested in seeing how this goes. But I just wanted to stress to everybody. The way that the society grew, were little tiny baby step acts like john, john demonstrated. And if you're like that, please join inside our nation and find the little tiny baby steps to get engaged.Brian Lambert 05:49  There you go. Great words, and well spoken. And that's how that's how you grew. And that's how you started the society. And that's what got me involved. And that's what got john involved. And, and so what we're doing now, is, we're gonna put Scott on trial, as we alluded to. So here's the roles. So Scott, you're, you're the defense. Right? You're just the defendant. Alright, and our listeners are the jury. So you're the defendant, john is the prosecutor. So he's going to prosecute you about the report hero that I was helping you with at Forrester a long, long time ago called sales enablement define. So since I'm partially biased, because I'm a big believer in the report, and, you know, help you with the peer review, etc, I'm going to just be a proxy of the of our listeners, representing insider nation. So I might chime in, I might ask clarifying questions of either of you, through this activity. And this interaction, I'll be also summarizing what we're taking away. And I'll provide a bit of a recap at the end as well. Okay. So is everybody clear on their role?Scott Santucci 06:55  Well, yeah, I'm, I'm, I love this idea, guys. I don't know if anybody's ever done a podcast to do something like this. So I'm all in.Unknown Speaker 07:03  I do want to make one quick disclaimer that none of us are lawyers. And you should not take any legal advice from this podcast. for any reason. If we need to legal qualifier,Unknown Speaker 07:12  I want to make sure that no one listening for any reason believes, and you should take any of this and act on it in any legal capacity whatsoever. Please do not do that.Brian Lambert 07:22  That's right. That's how that's how that that's awesome. This is how totally unscripted This is. All right, cool. So I feel like we should have some sort of music, but you know, we'd probably get sued for copyright infringement. So we're just going to jump into it. We're going to go with opening statements. And we're gonna start with you, john.John Paxton 07:41  Well, Scott, I'm gonna, I'm gonna open up with this my high level summary, which is your report, I read it, I've read it several times. And the bottom line that I got to come come back around to is that definition is smoke and mirrors. It's great in theory, but there's no real examples where we can see it in practice. And on top of that, it's really let down all the stakeholder groups that it was intended to help. What I'd like to do is go through and really dig in stakeholder by stakeholder to understand, hey, based on the past 10 years, based on what happened, was the original idea valid, and where did it fall down? If we're not seeing it happening in real life? So that's, that's my point of view.Scott Santucci 08:28  Okay, so I had no time to prepare. So this is just going to be, you know, part of me wants to say, Who the hell are you to make that kind of statement, but I'll refrain from that. What I'm going to say is what I'm going to say is this. There are companies out there that are doing this. Well, if there weren't, why would we have listeners today? The the and then also letting down the stakeholder groups. Maybe you miss read this, this is targeted at the C suite. The core of the core business problem is that the sum of the parts of sales and marketing are wasteful, and they need to be coordinated. So does that mean each of the individual stakeholder groups whom it seems like you're trying to protect sounds like you're trying to defend a hierarchical siloed based organizational structure? So we can put that on trial too.John Paxton 09:30  And before before we dive into that, Scott, I do have one question for you. Before I really dive in to some of the you know, the deeper dive is when you wrote the report originally. So I think it's important to always start with a frame of time if we think back to 2010. You know, if we think back to the year 2010. I think I knew like one person that had an iPhone. So that's been a while. What was it that led you to write that report at that point in time. So the driver goes back toScott Santucci 10:01  We at Forrester held a meeting in 2008. So the report that you're referring to is titled, August 3 2010. And 2008, we came up with a definition that we wrote, I wrote a statement. And I had that we had 10 VPS of sales and 10 CMOS in the room from Blue Chip companies. And the purpose was, let's admit that there's friction between sales and marketing. Let's talk about where they're at where the gaps are in responsibilities between the two. And then let's let's leave the room all agreeing on what a role could look like. So that was that was done in 2000 2008. The definition was published in a in a report called engineering valuable sales conversations, we learned was that that definition needed to be unpacked. So the purpose of this report was to do two things. One is to provide the business drivers behind why this is happening. And then to break down each of the different attributes of the definition to provide more context.Brian Lambert 11:17  Can I have Can I ask a clarifying question on behalf of our listeners? Scott? Yes. When you say when you clarify, this is happening, right? So what is this to what you're referringScott Santucci 11:29  friction business business problems, okay. Lack of execution. So this, by the way, this report wasn't written by me per se. It was based on interviews with companies from Accenture, BMC associates Citrix systems SC, Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp, Oracle, SAP and semantic. And it also include cluded, full day discussions, both in Europe and in the US with 30 sales and marketing executive executives representing Alcatel Lucent, areeba BMC, software brocade, bt, Capgemini, Cisco, Fujitsu, Jen, Jen says HP, IBM, orange Business Services SAP semantic tea systems and VMware. So I am a messenger, not the message.Brian Lambert 12:22  So just the last clarifying question then just so I have the timeline, right. For our listeners, you Scott held these meetings with executives and CMOS, see had marketing and sales in a room. And that created a engineering valuable sales conversations view, which is not necessarily not on trial right now. Maybe it will be in the future. Anyway. So but the second piece of that that outcome was this need to clarify and to embrace and really confront the execution challenge. And that's the impetus for this report, which was a separate meeting of all those companies that you just named to which you are a mouthpiece for with this definition. Is that right?Scott Santucci 13:05  Yes. Okay.John 13:09  So with that with that, Scott, and I probably wasn't clear when I was talking about stakeholder views, because the stakeholders that I'm going to refer to are really the business stakeholders. And one of the things you brought up is, it was intended to knock down cross functional silos. I think you even quoted, you know, in one of your recent podcasts, that somebody who's an operating partner that looks over a large number of portfolio companies, they are noticing that their sales and marketing spend is not consolidating, is not, you know, becoming more efficient. I would imagine the average CEO, if you ask them today, are you getting a good return on your investment in sales and marketing? They would either scratch their head or they would say, No. So the thesis in the paper or one of the key thesis is there are too many people doing too many things. We need a way to consolidate all this and spend money smarter. How What do you say to that CEO or to that private equity investor that says, You know what, we have put sales enablement in place, we have a sales enablement department, our companies, but guess what? Our spend on sales and marketing, it's not going down, it's actually going up and we're being less effective. What do you say to those people?Scott Santucci 14:22  Well, there's two things. So I'm still reacting. I wrote down your bottom line and your, your opening statement, john. So in being a lawyer, let's stick the word you said was smoking mirrors. I just don't understand how somebody can say a report is smoke and mirrors, reports a report. This is based on evidence from these different groups. I've challenged, it's the lack of execution inside companies. And the lack of execution involves number one, a failure to do a full inventory or audit of all the spending. One of the things is very common inside Inside organizations is to skip the analysis, step four in sales and marketing, for some reason, just skip it. But if you go and do an audit, and follow up a hidden cost analysis, a hidden cost, a sales support, analysis, and inventory, all of the different all the different spins that are going to, quote unquote, help sales. And it's not just in sales and marketing, it's in product groups training, you name it, and you put all of that money together. And then you divide it by the number of sales people that you actually do have the quota carrying sales people you do have, what you have is a totally incredibly inefficient system. The bulk of companies aren't doing that work. Once, when you do do that work, and there are companies who've done that work, because I've worked with companies who've done that work. When you do do that work, you actually get to see how big the waste is. The bottom line that I'll tell you, john, is that if you've hired a sales enablement group, and you're not seeing a better return on an investment, you probably didn't do a good enough job of figuring out what the root problems are, and you're treating symptoms.John 16:10  I'm gonna concede the point on that one, let me ask the next level question down, which is, why don't people do that. I mean, if you just look at if you just look at the chart in your report, plays out so clearly, and so compellingly, hey, here's all these different money, I there's all these different money flows. And here's how much you're spending per Rep. And anybody with with any sort of financial argument would go, oh, my goodness, this is just, you know, this is just not not good. You know? So in spite of that, how is it possible if the evidence is so compelling, that people are willing to do that exercise?Scott Santucci 16:46  So, like, literally, this is, um, I'm breaking character a little bit, because this is super interesting. JOHN, your opening statement with the smoke and mirrors is so pissed me off. And so now I'm like, I'm here to fight. But then when you can see to the point, now, you're asking a question that I have to concede a point on. So it's interesting, like how things happen in real life. So this is all like in in real real life here. So this is really interesting. But I think that I think that is such a phenomenal question....

Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 38Ever wonder what executive sponsors talk to about to Senior Leaders? Wonder why Sales Enablement gets funding in some organizations and doesn't in others? What about the skills and competencies of sales enablement leaders?In this last panel of our State of Sales Enablement Research, Scott and Brian pull together an amazing panel of the executive sponsors chartering sales enablement functions to hear their take.On this panel, we have:Brian King, Managing Director King Consulting prior VP of Sales Enablement at Intercontinental Hotel GroupSameer Rupani, SVP Sales & Marketing at SolvayGreg Peelman, VP Operations at EcoLabTo view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  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 Lambert 00:35  I'm Brian Lambert and we're the sales enablement insiders.Scott Santucci 00:39  Hello insider nation. We have the last and maybe the most impactful panel of our series studying the future of sales enablement. Just as a brief reminder on May 19, we're having our executive briefing presenting all of our findings, visit www dot Inside se calm to register for it again inside sc.com register may 19, for our executive briefing of our findings, so the findings of what, as many of you know, we've conducted a survey of sales enablement practitioners, we were hoping to get 25 responses. We got 70. We now have 99 responses actually we got 70 within a week, there is no way one person can process it all that information or even two so we've created a guest analyst program and asked a leading experts have been doing this for quite some time to chime in on it. We have been doing several panels so just as a review, our first panel with with sales enablement experts. The second panel that we ran was with sales leaders. The third panel that we ran was with sales practitioners who do not have it at learning and development background. Our fourth panel was with sales enablement leaders who Do have a learning and development background, then we follow that up with our its academic series or with our professors. And now finally, executive sponsors. So the people that we have here, I met and are all part of the Conference Board. And what that is, is you can go listen to one of our earlier podcasts, we just we talked about that before. What we've got here is an amazing panel of tremendous people. It's hard to describe our all of our relationships when you're in a group or a leadership council, where you're blending a lot of expertise. It's really it's a kind of hard to describe, so maybe we'll let we'll let them do it, but I'm gonna introduce them in order. So the first person that I'd like to introduce is Brian King. Brian King, most recently was the SVP of sales and operations at intercontinental hotels. One of the amazing things that we were able to do as affiliated to the Conference Board is we brought in a whole bunch of people More business travelers to help simulate for the people at IHG. What business travelers think of with the goal of making Brian look really good while testing out his sales enablement plan. I've been really excited to work with Brian. Brian is one of the most courageous people that I know. And I know a lot of courageous people. So if you get a chance to meet Brian or work with them or hire him or something, do it because not only not only is he courageous and smart, but he's a great guy as well. Brian, would you like to introduce yourself to inside our nation?Brian King 03:33  Yeah, thank you, Scott. It's great to be with you and Hello, insider nation. I look forward to the time we're gonna spend together one of my favorite topics, sales enablement, and with a great group of guys on this podcast, soScott Santucci 03:47  great to be here. Excellent. So up next, we have Samir Pani, who is the SVP of sales and marketing as Solvay, over here in in North America. This is one of the smartest guys in sales. I know he's a chemical engineer. And it's really fascinating to watch this man brain work is definitely what you see is what you get kind of guy. I really enjoy how authentic is and I really love how he publishes how he's thinking. It is for me easy to follow along. He has tremendous amount of energy. I can't wait for everybody to get to know him, Samir, introduce yourself to insider nation. Hey, insider nation.Samir Pani 04:31  This is Samir. What's the most exciting Of course for me is to reconnect with that when you stop. And of course a great group of guys that served on the sales executive council alongside myself and for us to learn and share experiences together. So here's one more goal at the same and looking forward to it.Scott Santucci 04:48  Yeah, and hopefully we can keep this going. This is a fantastic team. And then finally bringing up the rear is Greg Gilman. Greg pillans, Vice President of Operations at eco labs. I gotta tell you, I'm a huge fan of Greg style. One of the things that he has this great ability to do is to process a lot of information. And there's a lot of different ways to talk about it. And he just says it for what it is in the most plain spoken executable way and it activates things moving forward. I think it's fantastic. I always get energized. I also love the kinds of pictures he shares with you at dinner. I got to make sure we qualify it they're not. Well let him say what, Greg, what are the kinds of pictures that you share with us at dinner? Why am I making this comment?Greg Gilman 05:35  Okay, Scott, this couldn't be with you today. AndGreg Gilman 05:38  I do work for Ecolab. I'm the VP of operations for North American our pest elimination division. So it's an exciting business. I know the call that a long time across a lot of international geographies with international policies and of course here in North America, so great to be with you today and look forward to the discussion.Scott Santucci 05:56  So what about those pictures now? What kind of pictures will you share with us Dinner?Greg Gilman 06:02  Well, let's just say there may be a few photos of different scenarios that, you know, maybe you don't want to look at while you're eating dinner. And I happen to be a pest elimination. Of course, they're all anonymous. But you can imagine I can find myself in some pretty precarious positions occasionally.Scott Santucci 06:18  Yes. And as the benefactor of some of those pictures while I'm trying to eat if they're interesting, I'll tell you that, that's for sure. So starting off with we do the same format for our panels, we asked the open ended question. So I'm going to go through the same kind of order. I'm going to first ask you, Brian, having looked at the survey findings, what are a few things that stood out for you?Brian King 06:41  So for me after going through the initial set of findings and reading through some of the feedback from the survey, what I found interesting was really that the data is starting to lean more toward, I'd say an evolved understanding of what sales enablement is as a practice as it Discipline than where it was about 567 years ago when I first started to get involved with with sales. At the same time, you know, kind of counterpoint to that point, you can still see that there are folks who, you know, kind of believe, hey, sales enablement is really just sales training, or it's just onboarding or it's only about sales transformation. While it's graduating, and it's understanding, and probably the understanding of company's value of, of the sales enablement practice, there's still a lot of work to be done in terms of getting that value and that understanding kind of broadly accepted and understood.Scott Santucci 07:39  Excellent. Thank you, Brian. Samir, how about you? What were takeaways that stood out for you in looking at the survey findings?Samir 07:46  So the first one and that's just literally just scanning through the data is the fact that wherever you had two or more options are if you had two options, you had a bi modal distribution. If you had more options you had at least a tri modal So, what that tells me is, there's still a fundamental lack of clarity around what sales enablement is, and how it's supposed to actually operate. Is it supposed to be innovation? Or is it supposed to be operational excellence or, or commercial excellence? And I think when you want to look at the the popular media today around the whole concept of sales development in any form, you know, you don't have customer excellence in sales ops and sales enablement. And so I think there's been so much slicing and dicing of the sales onion that I'm not surprised that survey broad cross section of even commercial professionals, you get their particular tape. And then of course, what I thought was particularly humorous was there was actually one person who agreed with the fact that sales enablement was a fancy word for sale string, it sort of had me laughing out loud because it just kind of goes to show you the again, the breadth of understanding or even misunderstanding about what it is So hopefully, you're feeling a real need here with with a chance to kind of make clear what it is and how to best deploy it.Scott Santucci 09:07  Excellent. Thank you, Samir. Greg, how about you? IGreg 09:11  think what I noticed in the data, first of all, if you look at the distribution of people, everyone is more or less in sales enablement. So the answers you're gonna get from that is, is from a group that envisions it to be a certain way, not necessarily the people that are employing that group, which may give you a very, very different opinion. So, you know, if there's overwhelming response from the group saying, it's not on the decline, it hasn't peaked, yet. It's on the rise. That's 80%. Well, of course, if you're asking a bunch of people in charge of sales enablement, they're gonna say they're on the rise, right? And they're gonna say, we buy it right, not hold it or sell it. So I think a lot of the data probably led to where I thought it would end up given, given the set of people get as we kind of go through the discussion here today. I you know, I do think there would be a divergent opinion If we looked at your what what is it those individuals that are again employing them, the managers of those those people? What is it they're getting? What do they believe they should be getting?Scott Santucci 10:09  I think you get a very different picture here. Excellent. So that's perfect. So Brian, you get to comment. What are you? What are your thoughts on what your colleagues said?Brian 10:19  Yeah, I think well, just to piggyback off of what Greg has just said, when you think about who your customers are in sales enablement, it should always first and foremost be the sales organization. And in that organization, you'll have different types of customers, you'll have your actual field sales people, and you'll have your sales managers, then you've got your sales leadership team. And in each one of those, you'll have a different set of value drivers and enablers that you're going to need to deploy. And if you're doing that and an orchestrator way, it'd be great to see what their purview or what their perspective of whether or not sales enablement was a stock would you buy it, hold it, sell it short it you know, better off? Because I think in some instances, you may have sales leaders say, Yeah, absolutely, you're helping deploy new coaching opportunities for my managers growing their leadership skills on how to truly coach them be transactional with their sales teams, team members may say, I don't really need all that training, or I don't need a new planning tool to help me figure out what my goals are going to be. I just can do things the way that I want to do them. So depending on what audience you're talking to, I think you're going to get a wide variety different responses to questions like this in a survey. If you're looking at your core customer set as the sales organization, if you turn the other direction, and you look back at the rest of the company of the enterprise, it'd be interesting to see what how they would respond to some of these questions. It's true, you're going to get when you're when you're pulling an audience of people who are quote, unquote, in the same field and discipline, you're going to get a very biased point of view.Scott Santucci 11:55  So both Greg and you brought up the same thing. What do you think the answers were If you went around the horn and asked the sales leaders, what they think marketing, what they think other groups what they think, what would those answers be?Unknown Speaker 12:10  From my point of view, I think initially, it was like who is this group of people who think that they need to get involved in my area. And what I mean by that is sales enablement from ihcs point of view in the organization we created there was this inner connective tissue and, and muscular component that kind of connected sales to the rest of the organization. So we would work with it with the data teams, we would work with comp and Ben and on sales incentives, we would work with HR and learning and development on sales training. Previously, those groups had just said we're doing the things that we do the way we do them. And then sales enablement came along and said, We need your help and doing this very specifically in this way for sales. And you don't have necessarily the sales side subject matter expertise. So let's help you understand that. And then together, let's create a joint approach to doing something different and better for sales, which ultimately means for our customers, and then hope and then hopefully hopefully means for, for the organization and the company. That's a hard proposition in the beginning. But ultimately, I think if you were to go and survey those in those different functions now, three, four years after we started that push, you would have, say, 75% of them on hold it or buy it from a from a stock point of view. Excellent.Scott Santucci 13:41  So Samir, what was your reaction to your to your peers?Unknown Speaker 13:46  No, I mean, they, my expectation that we would we would look at it completely differently was completely met. Yeah. I mean, you know, and again, it speaks to the variety of the responses you got, as you know, Greg pointed out the fact that the majority of the respondents Word sales enablement professionals. But despite that, you had quite a variety of responses, meaning even even the folks within sales enablement, don't look at it the same way. And I think that reflects the difference in maturity and or the way in which it's deployed in every single organization. And so, I mean, really, perhaps one of the things you can get us to do through the course of this discussion, Scott is to unify, you got three very different takes on the on the subject right here at a sponsor level. And you know, if you could help us unify and rather healthy for the benefit of the audience, and I'd say that's value add right there.Scott Santucci 14:40  Well, thanks for escalating the expectations of my audience. Man. I appreciate that. That's helpful. All right, tough crowd. I thought that was funny. Greg, how about you what was your reaction to hearing from Brian and Samir about their take and how you processing it?Unknown Speaker 14:56  For the most part, I'm in agreement. I think what's interesting to me As I look into the data itself is where we are and where we want to be based on the questions are very different things. So I think one of the choices we could make about what a sales enablement to you was, you know, how we simplify our commercial system for salespeople and customers? Right? Well, the overwhelming response was actually people believe it to be the linchpin to helping us execute our sales transformation. So I absolutely agree with the second but I think most organizations find themselves in the first right so now the question to me becomes how do you What's that journey look like and how do you flatten the learning curve if you will to get there I you know, I really I really liked the way that this was put together and I would encourage you and your team as you continue to do this to solicit from again that next level up you know, as you talk about who should sales enablement report to I asked him pretty strong feelings on that one. But I would reach out to that group and marry the data together and see what it is. Because if you've got a group of sales enablers, however, you know, however that title finds itself to be constructed, I think it's one direction. And then this other group comes back and says, No, that's absolutely not what I think it needs to be, you know, the position can quickly devolve into one of the others was, which was a fancy word for sales training, right? In the absence of value or true enabling people are going to think it's worth a couple of decades behind where we are now and where we're trying to go. I think a lot of people get hung up today. And it's important, but in data and information and thinking technology, while again, it is very important that we we transform ourselves into digital, it's not everything, right? It is a data point or a series of data points, but then we have to figure in the humanity behind what it is that we're trying to do. And how do we then enable professional salespeople across an organization are very different. You have the 10% or whatever number you want. Pick, we can argue if it's 20, there are always going to be top performers. You got 60 or 70. In the middle, right, you got the lower end. So who is it you want to reach? And what's the best way to do that? And I think getting those two groups together, and marrying that data up would make a lot of sense.Scott Santucci 17:15  Awesome. Great. It sounds like, let's focus on where we agree. It sounds like we agree that if we were to look at this data set five years ago, it's a lot more congealed, but yet not congealed enough. To really get behind as a as a true profession. Is that a statement that we can agree with?Unknown Speaker 17:37  Like, that's...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 37Hello insider nation we're excited to bring you yet another star-studded panel. This time it's a dedicated panel of academics covering the Sales Enablement space from Universities such as Johns Hopkins, University of Texas - Dallas, and Northern Illinois.For many, the COVID Crisis of 2020 was a wake up call. The guys leaned into the Insider Nation to discover and learn their thoughts in response to the global crisis. Make sure you listen to episodes 27-31.We continue our groundbreaking research on the state of sales enablement research project this panel.In this episode, our guest panelists include:Dr. Robert Peterson, Editor Journal of Professional Selling and Professor of Sales at Northern Illinois University Dr. Joel Le bon, Johns Hopkins University Digital Business Development InitiativeDr. Howard Dover, Director, Center for Professional Sales at University of Texas DallasTo view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  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 00:35  I'm Scott Santucci. I'mBrian Lambert 00:36  Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. So helloScott Santucci 00:41  insider nation, we have another special edition podcast. We're gonna get academic, we'll talk about that what that means in a minute. But what we'd like to do is recap on what we've been doing. So far. As you probably know, as a regular listener, we've been doing a variety of special podcasts around COVID COVID response, how to be a hero and leadership frameworks. What we've also done what you also knows that we've done a survey of many of you, and we're in the process of getting those findings, make sure you visit WWW dot inside sec.com and register for our executive briefing. We already have joined some of your peers, VP and director level people and companies like Verizon, Comcast, Microsoft, Amazon, boy, the list goes on and on comm vault, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, we have a we're really, really delighted with the response that we're getting so far in that upcoming webinar, and of course, puts a lot of pressure on Brian I to make sure we deliver on that. Moving forward to what we're talking about here today. What we're trying to do is, as part of our research process, share or be very transparent of how we're going about doing it. So we've mentioned that we did a survey, we've mentioned the idea about guest analysts. I mean, this is the kind of help that we're getting seismic TCV private equity, sales benchmark index, show pad, high spot, sales hood, or Ely, soar consulting, these are all businesses that are working to help us get the information to shape out where we're going. And that's really incredible. No one's putting any money to this. This is all just figuring out where this research takes us. So with that, we've already had a few panels, a few cohorts. As I learned from our from our distinguished panelists here, we've had a cohort around sales enablement experts, we've had a cohort around sales and eight sales leaders. We've had one around sales enablement, practitioners, sales enablement, practitioners with more of a training background. And now finally, let's hear from the academics. So let's get let's get academic. So I'm going to introduce our panel. I'm incredibly excited. One of the things that's really fascinating for me, is I've gotten to know all three of these panelists pretty well, I consider them, I consider them my friends, where they really challenged me is looking at the world through through that different lens. So a lot of us can say, Oh, that's too academic. But you know what, if somebody doesn't look at it through that lens, maybe we get stuck in all of our thinking. So I'm going to ask you guys to pay attention and really put your be open minded and hear where they come from hat. We don't need to agree with them. What we need to do is we need to listen to them because they stretch our thinking. So I'm going to tell some stories about each one. So for I'm going to first start off and introduce Joelle Oban. Joelle is a professor and he's covering digital transformation. pretty relevant topic for the times, I'd say. I bet he's pretty busy right now at Johns Hopkins. Now Joelle I think I met you actually virtually from a maybe a moment where Dr. Dover was doing a video cast and I was maybe a little bit more liberal in my in my speech than I than I normally AM. And we've we've gotten connected and have had a variety of opportunities since he's been heavily involved in helping support the sales of a once society. You've probably seen around Joelle interest, introduce yourself and let insider nation know whoJoelle  04:34  you are. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Brian, for putting this podcast together in May, you know, academics talk and think because you know, talk and think is, is also very important for for us to understand what's going on, especially right now. You're right, actually, Scott, we met virtually, where you weren't a panel at Harvard numbers. I think there was a panel at UT Dallas, you were on or maybe a conference and you said pardon my French. And yes, that's right. Right. I like that. And I immediately put on your French, because I am partly French. So I'm a marketing and sales professor, Johns Hopkins University. And I'm also the executive director of the science of digital business development, which is an initiative and program dedicated to digital business development and by digital business development, I mean, combination of strategy, marketing and sales to facilitate companies organization go to market strategies, because obviously marketing strategy and sales, they have to work together, maybe just like for sales enablement. So this is why I'm I teach marketing, I teach sales, I do research in marketing and sales. And this is very much related to sales enablement. So glad to be on the panel. Thank you for the invitation.Scott Santucci 06:02  Excellent. We are looking forward to hearing from you. Next up is Dr. Robert Peterson. So I met Dr. Robert Peterson, I'd like you to imagine a little bit. There's a conference room that's on the on a Friday, at the meeting started at about one o'clock, the Friday before Thanksgiving in November 2016. There's a whole bunch of people in there most of I would say mostly VP and VP level executives from pretty large, competent companies and sitting together our doctor, Dr. Robert Peterson, and Dr. Howard Dover. And Robert Peterson, was one of the people who was at that initial founding meeting to decide whether or not we need to do the sales, the name was society in the first place. So I'm really grateful that he found a way to get there, I still still think that's interesting. One of my favorite stories about Dr. Robert Peterson is that we had a we had a really awesome conversation over a couple of drinks in San Francisco that one time and it's really awesome when you respect somebody and get a chance to get to know them too. And that's always always delightful. So Mr. Peterson, please introduce yourself, introduce yourself to inside our nation. Put a little bit of color behind your name.Robert Peterson 07:26   I've nothing but color. Let me tell you, thank you, Scott, and Brian for inviting me to the panel, the esteemed panel. Yeah, you know how we got to that place in the breakers. Um, that was beautiful. Thank you guys for inviting me to a six hour meeting that took three days because you couldn't get to west palm on a flight you couldn't get out of West Palm. So we were there for three days. So I got to meet a lot of people. But really what put that on the map for me that initial gathering of the sales enablement minded people was, um, you know, I saw Brian on LinkedIn talking about it. And I was like, Well, what is this? What is this mean? So I looked it up in the academic world. Now one thing was said about sales enablement. In any journal. It's like, Alright, well, maybe I asked, you know, I did a search term of the topic. In the title, nothing, sorry. Well, maybe I'll put that search term in the abstract, nothing, nothing, nothing. I'm like, Alright, I want to be part of nothing. So I, you know, Howard, I talked, we made it happen. The fact that Brian, essentially because I knew him from years ago when he was a young PhD guy. I said, Well, he's involved and this has to be legit. So yeah, that's how I showed up and haven't turned back since. A little on me as I you know, I worked in sales. I was 100%. commission sales guy on the phone, financial industry. So income paper in Washington, DC, my first sales job. I'm the editor of the Journal of selling, which is an academic journal. I get I use improv in the classroom to get people thinking, get them engaged. And just don't assume that you know, some Pat answer, it's going to work you need to be thinking, so I'm just out here doing some having some fun. Howard and I have been doing some research that the academics have fought us tooth and nail, and told us we don't know what we're talking about in this whole customer journey thing. It's just terms we're making up and so it's been a good it's been a good fight, trying to talk to people about sales enablement, its role and its you know, how vital it can be for a company that embraces it correctly.Scott Santucci 09:32  So inserted nation, one of the things that I found so fascinating is in getting to know getting to know these guys a little bit. How the world of academia actually works is interesting. I think we need to do a whole podcast on the feedback that you get about what doesn't exist when we have a whole profession of 10,000 people doing things that don't supposedly exist in the academic world. I think that would be very, very fun. Fascinating of how we don't exist because we haven't been peer reviewed or anything like that. So inside our nation, that's going to be an interesting topic. Maybe if, if you guys want to hear more about it, I've got to tell it's a very interesting and fascinating story as we delve into that. So with that, I'm going to introduce our last panelist, Dr. Howard, over whom you've already met. Dr. Dover was on our COVID panel with Kunal and Lindsey earlier. And it's, it's always great to have Dr. Pan on Dr. Howard on our show. He's the director for the Center of professional sales and sales coaching at the University of Texas, Dallas. Howard, tell us more about about yourself or add some color to conversation, please.Howard 10:44  Well, I think, you know, it's fun to kind of connect the dots I remember. So to kind of connect, have people understand the relationship between Rob and Joelle and myself is that when we go out together, Rob and I are known as dwells bodyguards. So we and we literally will will say we're his bodyguards, if you if you run into us, so you see it as a conference come up to us and, and you know, Joel will be looking like the guy that could kill you. But Robin, I would have to take you out.Scott Santucci 11:16  So see Joseph, the smart one, he orders the hit pan. That's right, he does.Unknown Speaker 11:23  He has a boss like presence. And Robin, I look like the muscle. So that's an inside joke, but it gives relevance that we know each other. Rob and I have co authored several papers together. In fact, Rob didn't say it. But we we did manage to get the first paper of sales enablement, actually published in the last two months in the Journal of selling so and Rob really kind of drove that forward. But I met Rob, I met Scott at the breakers with, with Rob and Brian at the same time. And so my my job at the University of Texas, Dallas is too I'm the director of the Center, I founded the center. We also do some work around research in the area of sales enablement, and also the area of the core issue of efficiency and effectiveness in sales, specifically around sales tech stack technology, trying to see how technology is improving the performance of sales people including that's actually bled deeply into our curriculum as making pretty big impact out there in the world. As a fun note, I've picked up cycling over the last year and planned to do a 100 kilometer the hotter than hell 100 this summer unless it gets cancelled from COVID. SoScott Santucci 12:57  awesome. And you're a Pisces, and you like swimming and golf. I'm just kidding. Anyway, all right. So with that is, obviously we were all comfortable with each other. One of the things that I'd like you guys and at insider nation to point out, innovation doesn't just happen in business, these guys are all trying to innovate within the academic community. So whenever you see them, please link them, please give them our support, it is incredibly hard. And I want to stress it's incredibly hard to get coverage on new things in the academic community. So anything that we can do, to give them evidence that we exist as a role as a profession, would be incredibly valuable to them to help help raise the cost. So that having said Having said that, all of our panelists have been given the the survey findings, and we're going to follow the same format. We're going to go and ask breakdown in sections, we're going to have their feedback on each of each opening question. I'm going to direct questions to individuals in order, they're going to say their answer, and then they're going to respond to their peers. So getting into the meat of the meat of the question, we're going to start with you, Joelle or Dr. lavonne. Question number one, having looked at the survey findings, what are a few things that stood out for you?Unknown Speaker 14:30  Yeah, some very, very nice question, because there were very, very interesting questions in this survey. So of course, you know, when we look at our survey, we always look at the respondents, you know, who responded, what do they do, because, you know, somehow their response are influenced by the response. So of course, I look at that and we have 67% of sales enablement leaders in there. survey 47 out of 70 responded, you mentioned? And and of course, they're gonna they're gonna support the field because they also study women leaders. So it's good. First that, you know, they are engaged to participate into, you know, an initiative to understand what what's the feeling the function is about. Having said that, when I look at the survey and the response responses, I think. And I think what really was interesting for me is to admit somehow that the function, I don't even know if I should call that the function, but sales enablement, as not found its sweet spot yet, in terms of purpose and definition. And there are a lot of people are in fact talking about that, it is interesting to see that in our survey, we do have some people saying that it is in decline, and to look at the reasons why they think it is in decline, the rationale behind there, you know, they're rational. And, and one of the respondents said, we have not clearly defined what sales enablement is in b2b industry. So, um, so I think I think that was interesting to see that even for those who are in sales enablement, of thinking that sales enablement needs to define better its purpose. And I really like also, some of the answers around it's something which is in transition. Even from those who say it was on the rise, it's still transitioning, which is very interesting for us in academia, because we can participate into the thought process of understanding what the function and the discipline is about. It is also interesting to see that a lot of people mentioned that the function is being influenced by technology, and hypergraph of technical innovation, if I remember one of the response. So so then if technology is driving a function and a discipline, you know, what's next, because technology is, you know, changing fast. And and I think that was, you know, the main the main takeaways from that the last one is, and I have to say, this is coming from an executive who actually said that even sales enablement departments, and he also say that it is on the rise. And he said that, his view is, we need to stop calling it a sales enablement. And for that person, it's more commercial enablement. And I thought that this this thought was was interesting as a way to envision what sales enablement is about or could be aboutUnknown Speaker 18:05  for the future. So that's, that's the takeaway I took away from, from from the survey.Scott Santucci 18:11  Awesome, deep thoughts already. I love it. So let's get Dr. Peterson's perspective. You had a chance to look at the survey results? What jumped out at you?Unknown Speaker 18:22  I would say that I totally disagree with Joelle awesome. No, no. Well, as a PhD, we have to disagree right about everything. Um, there was a bunch of stuff that that that as I as I look through, it's like, Hmm, that's interesting. So I'll get into my best, or at least the one that definitely rose my eyebrow the most, which was, who is the customer of sales enablement. And it kind of dovetails on what Joelle just mentioned about, you know, the purpose and the definition. And that was the article that Howard and I just published on, on, on sales enablement in the Journal of selling, which is free, if you want, you can, you can grab it. And we had baker's dozen, we had 13 definitions, starting obviously with your sky because you're kind of the grandfather of of the initial drive into initiative into sales enablement.Scott Santucci 19:14  With your 2010 definition. And by the way, I have some comments on Oh, I'm sure we're talking. Okay. I'm going to critique it.Unknown Speaker 19:23  So did the reviewers trust me?Unknown Speaker 19:26  Um, but it went from, you know, your 2010 to start it out, and it's obviously easy for me and Howard to take a retrospective and look 10 years after that and make some observations. You know, maybe you could have been more parsimonious But either way, you've got everybody in there, brother, I'm just looking at right now at the at the table. Everybody in their brother is trying to define it in some more sales, Ops, some more marketing, some definitely training, and then there was something a little bit more, you know, strategic in their, in their, in their, in their thinking. So what what what I find when I, you know, surprise, surprise, when we look at the survey results is,...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 36We here at inside sales enablement are dedicated to making sure listeners are successful overcoming the complexities in their own companies so that they can keep more effective in the market.  there are many names used to describe what that, and we've been calling it sales enablement for the last 12 yearsAs a continuation of our State of Sales Enablement panel series, we created a “guest analyst” program. These panelists are super engaged. They are really spending time on the data, and they're here to share their thoughts on the data.In this episode, our guest panelists include:Barry Shields, Director, Customer Experience Training & Enablement, AvalaraGarth McKinney, L&D Sales Consultant Red HatDavid Somers, Director Field Enablement GitLabTo view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  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.Scott Santucci 00:39  Hello insider nation Welcome to Insidesalesenablement.com the only destination that is designed specifically for veteran sales enablement practitioners. Brian and I are doing our part to combat all of the fake news and Saikal snake oil peddlers and the deafening hype noise out there in the marketplace. We're excited to share with you yet another special edition episode as part of our state of enablement study. Before turning it over to Brian to introduce our great panelists. Let's review how we got here so far. In mid-March, we had an amazing COVID-19 response panel. That included that included Dr. Howard Dover from the University of Texas, Dallas, Kunaal metho, an executive at private equity firm TCV and Lindsey Gore, who is a rep salesperson at Microsoft, in the strategic accounts area. And her job was really to keep us all honest. I love that. Any rate, if you'd like to listen to what motivated to our state of sales enablement study, go into our archives and listen to episode number 28. And pay particular attention, particular attention to the part where kunaal is talking about the need for sales enablement leaders to stitch together programs, how it's not happening in pretty much any company. And what kind of friction it creates, from the point of view of investors, you're going to hear what inspired this whole study the state of sales enablement. So how do we get here, what we get is coming off of that insight, we decided, boy, we really need to investigate what's going on here. So we crafted a survey. And the survey was really designed to capture the voice of sales enablement, leaders. We had a 12 question surveys, and most of them were open into questions. So if you know anything about building surveys, it's generally really, really, really, really, really, I could go on but I think you get the point hard to get people to respond to open-ended questions, let alone a survey that's mostly subjective to start off with. So when we when we feel that this and we feel it through my LinkedIn network, and Brian's LinkedIn, Brian's awesome, LinkedIn network, we thought this would be success if we got 25 responses. So of course, in typical sales manager fashion, I decided, I'm going to double the quota on myself and said, We need to get 50 responses out in a week. So that first the end of March, the first the first few days of April, we fielded this study, so we wanted to get 25. I set the goal at 50. How many responses to this? Did we get? What did you insider nation do? Did we get the 25? That are that was our target? Did we get 35? Like, you know, wow, that was good. We exceeded our target. Did we get the whole 50 that our goal is no none of those, you insider nation gave us 70 responses within a week. Think about that. That's amazing. And it's all open ended feedback, subjective feedback. Today, we've got 99 responses. Yes, some of us are the fashionably late crowd to parties. So that creates a high quality problem. How do you analyze 70 responses when you were planning on 25? Is it almost a 300% volume increase? How do you analyze all that? So we recruited or deputized, however you want to think of it, a guest analyst program. And what we're after and interested in are people who are veterans in the space, or practitioners from all different walks of life or angles. So we've got CEOs from companies like highspot, seismic, and show pad looking at looking at these responses and giving us input. We've got authors like Tamar shank, and Eli Cohen who are giving us their perspective. We've interviewed so far as of this recording. I've personally interviewed over 20 leaders, including executives who run incredibly large departments and major multinational company which which we'll hear about. Then what we wanted to do is, boy, these interviews are so rich, and the perspectives are so great. We wanted to create a model to synthesize that information. So we created this idea of these panelists is these panels. So we get a group of, you know, basically you've heard that saying of birds of a feather flock together. So wanted to get people who are like-minded together and find areas where they agree. So the reason that we do these panels is one, we want to be transparent with our research process, too. We want to get information out to you inside our nation as quickly as possible so you can follow along with with the information as we get it. And three, we want to tease out common themes across the entire community of sales a day went so that when we're prepared, we have a really effective findings presentation on May 19. Please mark your calendars may 19, 11 o'clock am Eastern time, please visit www dot inside se comm to register. You won't want to miss this event. I'm not as of today, I'm not planning on sharing my slides or making a recording available, so please make sure you attend that. Okay, so what have we done so far in the terms of panels? So far, we've already published out our enablement experts panel with Tamra shank, Mike Kunkel and Josie mashburn. We've also published our sales experts panel of skip Miller, Bob Apollo and Steve crepeau. We will be publishing so by the time this goes out, we will also have published our practitioners, practitioners panel with Shivam fetcher imaging McCourt and Doug Kleiner clower. One of the themes that's been emerging that's very fascinating is that sales enablement has a different texture, flavor perspective based on your background. So what was interesting is the last panel, not a single one of them had a learning development or any kind of formal training experience expertise whatsoever. And that tracks to my background, I have no l&d or professional training background whatsoever yet, I was pulled into the sales, sales enablement arena. So what's interesting is we want to provide the lens, the perspective of people who do have a strong lnd perspective. And with that, we asked Brian who has much more of an l&d credentials in l&d than than I do, to pull together this panel that we've got. So to give you guys all introduction about Brian. There's a reason I call him Dr. Brian Lambert. And the reason that I call him Dr. Brian Lambert is he's earned a PhD. I haven't most of you haven't. And what is this PhD is it's an organizational Buffett behavior. He's written three books on sales process and actually ran the, at the time it was called astd. Most of us now know it is a TD sales training practice. Those are the things that he did before we before he joined our team at Forrester. And the rest is, as you know, I guess history. So Brian's pulled together a great, fantastic panel of people definitely have an l&d background. Brian, could you introduce the people that you pulled together for our experts for this panel, please?Brian Lambert 08:29  Yeah, sure. Thanks, Scott. I'm really excited about our panel today. I've known these guys for quite a long time. And they're all interestingly enough, based out of Raleigh, North Carolina, and I'm in Charlotte. So I guess we have the North Carolina crowd today, which was a bit of an interesting piece of trivia for us. They're also members of and participating in the sales enablement society. So that's, that's cool to me as well. The first person I'm going to introduce is Barry shields. I've known Barry since 2006. Actually, when I was with at the senior staff, when I launched that community of practice, which is now the sales enablement practice, I was doing global research for a sales competency framework. And one of the folks that I reached out to was Barry, and since that time, he's been great to really have discussions around everything from brain science to how people learn and also when I was actually new in my my new gig and a fortune 50 company, actually brought Barry in to run the the experience team on my team. So Barry, Barry shields, can you introduce yourself, please? Barry Shields 09:39  Hey there, Brian. Thanks for having me. I'm Barry shields. I'm now with avalara avalara is a company that computes sales tax in the cloud for retailers both online and brick some mortar and so I currently lead the the Indian learning function, three things a few things I haven't led before Both the learning architecture and design and development, but also this time around leading the delivery side of the house also. But I do that for our go live team or implementation consultants, if you will, for account managers, folks who manage the account after the initial sale, and also for our customer support organization. Brian Lambert 10:21  Thanks Barry. The next person is David summers. And David and I have known each other for a couple years now, I actually reached out to him as part of my, my networking when I moved to North Carolina. And he was actually just starting his global enablement role at GitHub. And GitHub had made an investment and they brought in David to stand up sales enablement from scratch. So that was a really cool position for him. And he's done a lot of work since then. And we've stayed in touch, especially around building out sales enablement, building out a team, new hire, training, etc. So, David, so glad you're on the panel today. Can you introduce yourself?David Summers 11:00  Yeah. Thanks, Brian. I just quick clarification. I'm with Git lab. And when we get it, we get GitHub all the time. And it's funny, because that's actually part of our sales onboarding program of yeah, helping the sales team. How do they respond when somebody you know, mistaken that they're from GitHub, which was purchased from by Microsoft, and the tune of 6 billion plus a little while ago. So Git lab is a private company looking to go public later this year, or we'll see what the market conditions allow. But yeah, I lead our global field enablement team, which includes looking at how we help our pre sales and post sales field roles, be more productive faster, and accelerate their time to productivity and help reach the desired outcomes from the sales organization. So that includes both from lead gen reps to the sales team, to solution architects, and to our technical account managers as well.Brian Lambert 11:57  Thanks, David, I appreciate that. And I guess I need to go through new hire training.Scott Santucci 12:01  I think you just did.Brian Lambert 12:02  I think. Thanks so much for that. Sorry about that. The next next awesome person is is Garth McKinney, and Garth is at Red Hat. And we met through my company. We actually had some folks on his sales team go through our sales management development program, interestingly enough in South Africa. So one of those attendees introduced us to Garth here in the headquarters at Red Hat and him and I have done some great whiteboarding sessions around the sales manager role, how to partner with sales, the performance and expectations that are, you know, coming in, and also they're going through the IBM merger. So that's been great to get to know Garth and Garth, can you share a little bit about your background? And welcome to the panel?Garth McKinney 12:49  Yeah, thanks, Brian. I do work at Red Hat. We're an enterprise open source software company. And we were recently acquired by IBM. And so that's been really interesting, as we've been trying to, you know, integrating in but staying separate, right, because we are keeping our roots as an open source company, while also working with IBM that has a lot of proprietary software. So it's this, it's been an interesting connection, as we try to drive our culture forward and try to drive what made us famous, while we're merging with this larger company, and that's really my role is a sales and services learning consultant for Red Hat. So I work with the sales leadership, to kind of understand what can we do from a behavior and from a skills learning and kind of mindset perspective in order to drive the performance of their teams. And this is at the leadership level for their teams, as well as down to the sales teams, and everywhere in between. So that's what I do.Brian Lambert 13:54  Thanks so much, Garth. Appreciate it. And thanks. Thanks, everybody, for joining. So my role on this is I'll, I'll be synthesizing at the end. I'm going to turn this over to Scott and Scott. There you go all from the tech industry, members of scfs of the l&d background, and they're all in the space of developing their sales teams.Scott Santucci 14:13  That's fantastic. And I can't help but resist the vibe that I'm hearing. It sounds like the Raleigh chapter is calling out everybody else to say get, you know, get in gear and in terms of sales enablement society to get in gear, get active, get engaged. So maybe that's what's going on. But that's fantastic. I love competition. What we're going to do right now, is each of our responses have been or each of our panelists have been given the responses. So the 70, spreadsheet organized of of the information, and we're going to ask each of them very open ended questions. So the first question so that we're gonna break this down into segments, and then each respondent or each panelist is going to get a chance to cancel To talk, and I'm going to do it in order. So the first question is to you, Barry. And then we'll get Dave's feedback and then Garth feedback. And then we'll allow you guys to respond to each other. But I'm interested in just sharing your perspective of this question. Having looked at the survey findings, what are a few things that stood out for you?Barry Shields 15:21  Yeah, I think one of the big things that stands out as folks are saying, you know, what kind of business should sales enablement be? And a lot of the responses are saying that it's either a consulting, business, it's a service business, or it's a coaching business. One of the things that weighs on my mind is I look even avalara and a lot of other companies have been part of is that it seems like the manager that isn't showing up, right, the sales manager is focused on reports that sales managers may be selling themself, or they're focused on things and not focused on outcomes. I think the sales enablement survey that you put together especially aligned to the question, What business would sales enablement P is the sales enablement team saying they're finding themselves doing a lot of coaching? When I came in, I didn't know that I was actually going to own a lot of the sales enablement piece, at least for account managers. But there's a counterpart who owns building things for the the sellers, the folks who make the initial sale. And he's a single point of failure. It is a small company, but I asked him about what he was doing. And what I what I realized was he was a person without llmd background. But but but a person who was a top performer who knew this the complexity of sales tax, and it is really, really confusing and complex. And so he was spending all his time coaching, he has office hours, he he has sessions that are meant on specific topics or products every Thursday and Friday. But beyond the office hours, he teaches those products, but then, and then the people show up and he finds himself really more coaching in terms of how to sell or how to overcome depression, if you're not meeting your quota, or how to have a conversation with your leader, all of the things that we would have expected, the sellers manager to have been doing. And so when you look at these results, it seems like that's what people are saying sales enablement should be consulting and services. It should be coaching, it should be, you know, like a design firm and an agency etc. So, you know, I'm thankful to be in the enablement space folks allow me to play there because of my learning and development background. But it seems like we're we're saying, maybe the issue is not with the sellers. But it's really with the managers and how they might enable their team. Wouldn't it be true that these teams could do a lot more sell a lot more if the manager stepped up for what we need them to step up to?Scott Santucci 18:11  Gotcha. Thank you, Barry. David, how about you? What was your having? What are the studies? What was your reaction? What stood out to you?David Summers 18:20  One of the things that even with, you know, the macroeconomic context with everything happening with COVID-19. You know, I still, I left feeling really good about the percentage of the respondents that said, for example, is about 90% of the audience said that he would you know, if sales enablement were a stock, would you they would either buy or hold things over half would buy, over a third would hold. So I wondered, going into it. My hypothesis was perhaps there would be more cynicism. And there were some comments that talked about that have a first thing to go when you're looking to cut and trim on given environments like this, then it is potentially perceived as redundant, right or unnecessary. But I was I felt reassured that others see it the same way I do it if no, this is a strategic importance to the organization. And it talked about I think over half of the respondents did consider sales enablement to be really a linchpin to help execute transformational efforts in the sales organization. So I the cynic in me went to some of the information about well, who were the folks that were saying that you know, that it's not that. And...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 35Continuing the ground-breaking series on the State of Sales Enablement, the guys bring industry trailblazers together to discuss the survey data and open-ended responses from over 100+ respondents.This is the 3rd panel discussion, and it's incredibly insightful. The panel discusses three critical questions:Having looked at the survey findings, what are a few things that stood out for you?What was your favorite question, and why?  What do you see as the future of sales enablement from here?The panel podcasts guests are:Sheevaun Thatcher, CPC, Head of Sales and Global Enablement, RingCentralImogen McCourt, Sales Enablement Leader & Advocate Doug Clower, Head of Enablement, MicroFocusTo view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to let us know what you think, collaborate with peers and sign up to be notified of new releases, updates, and news.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Intro 00:02  Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions, the market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Scott Santucci 00:34  I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:36  I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders.Scott Santucci 00:40  Hello insider nation, we're excited to bring you yet another star-studded panel. This time it's of your peers and part of our continuing state of sales enablement project. We hear it inside sales enablement are dedicated to making sure our listeners are successful. Overcoming the complexities in their own companies so that they compete more effectively in the market. There are many names used to describe what I just said. We've been calling it sales enablement for the last 12 years COVID was a wake up call for Brian and I and hopefully it was for all of the rest of you and inside our nation. And we answered that call first by launching an amazing, absolutely amazing if you haven't had a chance to listen to you need to listen to it, our covert panel which we broke down into five parts because it was so rich on that we had Dr. Howard Dover from the University of Texas Dallas, we had Kanaan metha, who was a partner at TCP private equity, and Lindsey Gore, one of the top reps at at Microsoft and we had her on to keep us honest. So you know, so we won't go veer off into theoretical land. Something can all share with us in part two, you should go listen to that episode really caught our attention. He was talking about the growing gap between What investors want to see and how poorly the sum of the parts in the commercial process sales and marketing are, and that this alignment or this connective tissue isn't happening, cannot mention that that was the responsibility of sales enablement. And they don't see it anywhere happening in any of their portfolio companies. So that was a big wake up call. And I thought, geez, we need to investigate that further. So we launched a survey to get the feedback from sales enablement practitioners, and we challenged you inside our nation to help us out. We thought, Hey, we're going to ask open ended questions, we're going to get a lot of subjective feedback, so that we can piece together what's really happening. We thought that if we got 25 responses that would be enough or suitable to give us a really good perspective. So we challenged you guys, and we said, Hey, if we want to get 25 we need to set our quota. Like I guess, your companies do two years, your salespeople at 50. So, okay, we're going to go out and get 50 How did you respond insider nation? Did you give us 30? Did you give us 50? No, in one week time you gave the 70 responses. 70. That's incredible. So thank you so much. We're very grateful for your participation. But that creates a different kind of problem. It's a high quality problem, but a problem nonetheless. How do you analyze open ended feedback from 70 people who all are incredibly thoughtful the responses were really, really thoughtful. So the other thing too is when you look at that information, I don't want to insert my bias. So all of us have bias. We have a fake news problem in business too. So please side note, if you if you take any study and use the quote, statistics, please, please, please read the methodology that they followed, please. There is so much fake news out there. It's it's really distracting. But I digress. One of the things that we wanted to do is make sure that we don't have enough bias that we put onto it. So we've highlighted and recruited over 30 thought leader experts like the people that we have here to help us figure it out. As part of that program, we want to be able to give you insights or, or a glimpse at how this information is being combined. So we're running these panels, our first panel, we had sales enablement experts, so I'm sure you're know if you've been in the space, Tamra shank, Mike conkel and Josie mashburn. We had a fantastic panel there. We just put out our second one was with sales leaders. So if you know skip Miller, so it's great that you know cheban mentioned that skip Miller's a client is fantastic. At skip Miller, Steve Kaprow, and we also had Bob Apollo. So we just completed that and now we're pulling up and having perspective from practitioners, practitioners. All of this is leading forward, Mark your calendar. For may 19, go visit inside se calm to register, because on May 19, we're producing a findings presentation for where all of this sits. So now let's kick off our panel. I'm really excited. So this is a panel of people that I've known for quite a long time. We have, I'm going to introduce, I'm going to introduce them first and have them introduce themselves to you. The first person is Doug Clower. Doug, as Doug, I met through inquiries, I think our first time that we actually met was at when you were at net IQ, and we were doing a briefing of the executive buyer research that we've done. When we were at Forrester, he's worked at Novell net IQ, and most recently at at microfocus. Doug has been pretty heavily involved in I would say a little bit more focus on the content side of things rather than the rest. In the training side of things, and I'm very excited to have Doug participating with us, Doug, would you care to introduce yourself to inside our nation?Doug Clower 06:07  Yes, thanks. Thanks for that Scott, Doug Clower, obviously, I've been around sales enablement for a long time, I have a rather unique background, I did not come to sales enablement in high tech, through what some people might think is the normal business channel I grew up or my degrees in architecture. So I practice architecture for 15 years before I moved over to technology. I'm passionate really about enabling a Salesforce to make a difference with customers because ultimately, what we're trying to do in the sales enablement field is help our sales people solve problems that our customers have. That's really the approach I take.Scott Santucci 06:44  Excellent. So that's Doug. Next up is Shivan Thatcher. So Shivan and I met I don't even know exactly when maybe it was at, maybe it was at that first conference Shivan but we met at Forrester and I think Just had many, many interactions in sessions, whether whether it be through an analyst or the like, she also was at the very first, the founding meetings. So when the sales enablement society was forming, Jim nanavati, and I did a I don't know what it was right, a workshop, I guess a group therapy session, whatever that was, we had a meeting of about 80,000 plus in, in some hotel, in out in California, and Shivam was there, you know, right then and there. That was when the the chapter the San Francisco chapter was born. So Shivan has been very heavily involved in helping get this profession off the ground for quite some time. As you know, she's a she's a leader out there in the sales enablement society and in the community. So I'm incredibly incredibly honored to have Shivan join us, Shivan. Introduce yourself to the few people who don't know you yet.Sheevaun Thatcher 07:58  Hi, Shivan Thatcher yeah, I do definitely have a passion and a purpose around sales enablement. I did come up the more traditional business way I came up through sales than pre sales, then over to the enablement side of it. And so it was, it was a, it was a great path for me. And it was the right way to go. Scott, you and I met at the very first forester conference, and you asked how many people in the room have the title of enablement. And there are about 100 people in the room and four of us stood up. I mean, and that's how long ago that was. And then yeah, in out in Palm Desert, Palm Beach, Palm Beach, wherever we were, and then here in the Bay Area, so it's been, I've seen the growth like you from virtually nothing to now there are 10,000 15,000 people that can really, really say that their true sales enablement folks.Scott Santucci 08:51  Yeah, it's been a long journey, huh? Yeah. Great one though. Great, very exciting. And then, last but not least, we have Imogen McCourt. Imogen McCourt and I met while at Forrester so bear with me this can be a little bit complicated. But this is all true. This is how things work out in real life, right? It's not, it's not that linear. So Imogen had this gigantic and I'm being sarcastic department at Forrester helping the Forrester sales reps with sales enablement. At the same time we'd launched the sales enablement practice for Forrester to provide research to to clients.So I guess it's almost like we didn't want to be the cobblers son that had no shoes right imagine and so image and work with I mentioned skip Miller so skip Miller was somebody that Imogen and Greg hired to help help our help the Salesforce. And so this is sort of the weird triangle of skip, and Imogen and Scott. So and then we also invited image into participate, and she was a client of our sales enablement Leadership Council that was for clients. Okay, did that make any sense image and introduce yourself inside our nation? Oh I forgot oh my gosh, I forgot another thing. imaging also was at that founding meeting to kick off that was a great meeting by the way it for London side note the London meeting started out at the wrong address remember that people had to go find the right address but still 45 people showed up it was incredible imaging did I get anything right can you help me make make me not sound insane?Imogen McCourt 10:32  Yeah, so I think he's got an image in the court and it was complicated. And I been forced to for some time, and they were sort of broad an interesting history a bit of that the best bit was obviously getting himself open at the same time as you were there building the practice out. And just to add extra complexity. Fourth also decided to do global sales transformation and different go to market approach at the same time. So I landed this global role, skeleton skull skeleton skull skeleton skull off. And of course, Scott Miller coming in to support us and then have to support sales organization to that transformation and try and be the best I could possibly be Scott to live up to the very high standards that even the team were were giving. So thank goodness you were all around to support me through that process. And you know that pedaling in the deep end piece really helps, right? You really learn at speed when you go through that sort of process quickly. And, and it's been fantastic to be able to continue to do that. And, and to do that in Europe. And I know we're going to talk about this later. But I think the the environment in Europe is different to the will not experience. It's working in it for Forrester leading things from the US.Scott Santucci 11:42  Yeah, so I like that pedaling in the deep end. And I think that's why you have to have people getting your back, right because a lot of this stuff is you just have to have people that are supported that you can talk through it. And also it doesn't help or doesn't hurt to have to kill it. Right. Imagine Okay, so with that, having said that, we're now going to go to the meat of our show. So the meat of our show if you've been following along, this is our third panel. And we have three standard questions. So the first question, and again, just to set our audience's expectations, every single one of these analysts has had the opportunity to look at the 70 responses, open ended responses. And by the way, that's not a not an easy task. It's not just data. It's a lot of open ended feedback. So it takes some work to do the analysis. I've interviewed each of them too. So we've had a chance to talk about it. So question number one, and I'm going to ask you, Doug, having looked at the survey findings, what are a few things that stood out for you?Doug Clower 12:49  Well, Scott, I thought it was really interesting. The paradox between strategy that different individuals were taking and their titles. So I saw a lot of titles associated with what we would consider a sales enablement leader, you know, the those people that were leading the department doing their thing. And they were approaching sales enablement as an operational excellence kind of approach, which seems and and it's sort of an inference on my part, it seems a little bit more like it's a tactical execution as opposed to the innovation answer to that particular question, the business strategy question. Because what I think in sales enablement we have to do especially as you underline the idea of COVID-19. We have really got to be more innovative, we have to be thinking on our feet more what I would call startup or, you know, a very nimble organization being able to respond to the circumstances that our Salesforce is facing on a daily basis, and the environment that we're working in whatever it happens to be. So I guess if I looked at it, those were, there was a bit of a discussion. between what I thought a sales enablement leader should be thinking about what their priorities were, or their strategy was and what their actual strategy was.Scott Santucci 14:09  Excellent. Thank you, Doug shavon. How about you? What were some some of your reactions?Sheevaun Thatcher 14:16  I would echo what Doug said. But I think the other thing that I did find gratifying was that the majority of the folks do in fact believe in are bullish on sales enablement and believe it's on the rise. There's been a lot of buzz going around that I've heard a lot of negative around enablement for the last few months. It's It's interesting, I haven't heard it before then that enablement is not working. And I get a sense, especially looking at some of the answers of the folks that don't think it's working, that a lot of that just has to do with tactical versus strategy, the same thing Doug said that if you take much more of a strategic corporate view of it, and how do you actually help move the business forward, as opposed to how do I make sure I've got these courses running? It's just I think It's just a vision that folks have on what, what enablement can be that they've restricted themselves. And when you restrict themselves, then you don't give yourself the you don't give yourself the runway to do what needs to be done.Scott Santucci 15:12  Awesome. Imogen. Imogen McCourt 15:15  Yeah, I mean, as you might suspect, I echo what both Doug and Sharon say. But I also think that, for me, it was always gratifying to see people talking about the fact that they see sales movement on the rise because of the complexity of doing business nowadays. It's like we've always been, you know, I think you coined the phrase, the VP of broken things we've always been that person brought in to fix things that weren't aligned to what working. And it really seemed to echo in the people who thought we were on the rise. It sounds like it was really getting more focus that it was because there's so much out there that needs to be sorted out. And we can't do that tactically one bit at a time because it's too complex. We have to go simple and we have to think strategically so people can see the big picture of how sales movement really impacts a company's ability. To drive and grow profitably.Scott Santucci 16:03  So, Doug, how do you respond? What What did you What are your takeaways from what you heard from Shivan and Imogen?Doug Clower 16:10  Well, you know, the the one thing that Shivan talked about was, you know, enablement is broken. And I think what happens is we get these little courses, things aren't quite working the way they should be. Sales isn't quite hitting a number or something's happening here. Or in some respects, maybe it's marketing that is, is failing to see that what their message is, is a little different than what the salespersons messages because it's a broad story as opposed to a focused story to the customer. And so when I echo the fact that we hear a lot of sales enablement is broken when it's not really sales enablement, it's a matter of somebody thinks what they have to say is more important than what sales enablement is doing. To that to that extent. Now, that's just a little bit of a, you know, takeaway on that. But it's really important for us to make sure that everybody understands it's a collaborative effort. nobody's saying marketing's doing the wrong thing or sales doing the wrong thing. It's here's the things we should be doing differently because of what our message happens to be. So I would echo what Siobhan said.Scott Santucci 17:24  On would you get away from a get from dugin imaging.Sheevaun Thatcher 17:30  We're all we're all pretty much saying the same thing, I think is that, you know, enablement does work when everybody is looking in the same direction. I think the the dis the disconnect between marketing and sales is the fact that each believes that they're doing a better job than the other to get the customers attention where in fact, we're all trying to do the same thing, which is to help our customers buy from us and it's getting folks to put to put that That that silo ism, newer silo ism aside and say that together if you work together on this sales and marketing, in fact, I see enablement, doing that a lot is bringing those two sides together to say there is a quid pro quo, right marketing, you give sales content in the way that they can use it and sales, you make sure as marketing and good marketing back adoption, and rock and roll. Right. So it's it's everybody's trying to do the right thing. And it's giving them the opportunity to do the right thing through conversation and training. Right, you can teach each other.Scott Santucci 18:34  I like that image at all. Yeah,Doug Clower 18:35  I like that to that. That's really good. We teach each other. That's the collaborative nature of what we're trying to do with sales...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 34This is the second panel discussion where leaders dissect the research data points from the State of Sales Enablement study being led by Scott Santucci.Fielded in March 2020, the study data-set ended up with over 100 responses! There were so many open-ended responses that a "guest analyst" program was created to help sort through the massive amount of data.In this episode, we enroll the help of sales leadership. Question: What if your sales leadership called you in for an "Account Review" of your sales enablement efforts? How would you answer, and how would you explain your teams ongoing value to the organization, the specific initiatives adding the most value, and the upside potential (forecast) of your sales enablement efforts?Well, buckle your seat-belt, our special guest analysts cull through 100+ responses and provide their take on the Future of Sales Enablement.Our guests are:Skip Miller, CEO of M3 LearningBob Apollo, CEO of Inflexion Point Strategy PartnersSteve Crepeau, CEO of True Sales ResultsTo view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.Episode Transcript:Intro 00:02  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.Scott Santucci 00:40  So hello inside our nation. As you know, our mission here on inside sales enablement is to give you the information you need to be successful in your role. Having been in the space for a long time, we've identified where big gaps are and resources for you and we're bringing them to you As part of this process, we have started doing a variety of COVID response activities. One of them is we had a five part series, leveraging the insights from Dr. Howard Dover, Kuunal Metha, who's a principal at private equity firm TCD. And then Lindsay Gore, a top sales executive at Microsoft, and her role was to keep us all honest. So that was a great, that was a great series. And coming from that we had a very interesting conversation about what private equity firms are seeing and their frustrations with sales and marketing in general. And then really what the role of sales enablement is that of course, cause Brian and I get to get concerned or curious about what the state of sales enablement is, and we launched a study. The study has a variety of different parts. The first part was doing a survey. So we conducted a survey, our goal was to get 25 responses because our survey was very q&a oriented, open ended text, we wanted to get the words from you of what you're seeing in your own words. Rather than having you react to what we think the words that you should be reacting to. We wanted to get 24 Films completed forms completed in a week. So of course, we set the goal at 50. And what did you do inside our nation? What did you do? Well, you got to 70 responses in one week. Today, we have over 100 responses. And that wasn't an easy survey if you took it. And if you're listening, you're probably one of the people who did. So that creates a high quality problem. The high quality problem with so much of that information is how the heck are we going to analyze it? And I'll tell you, there's a being a former Research Director, one of the things that you want to look for is where you put bias in. And when you have, when you have data, one of the things to look out for is where is the researcher or the analyst bias coming in, and I didn't want to do that. So I reached out to People who are experts in their fields and ask them for their input. So we've gotten a great response from from members of our panelists that we'll talk about here. But great response from over 25 people who are participating in our guest analyst program. That includes the CEO of seismic and the CEO of sales hood, if you know Eli, and includes SBI. As you know, salesbenchmarkindex is helping us out and given us an input. We're getting feedback from a variety of different sources that maybe you wouldn't think would would provide it and it's amazing how are communities coming together? In order all of this is leading up to if you can go to our website, inside se comm and log in. You can register for our findings meeting that's going to be on May 19. Do I know what the findings are going to be yet? No, we're still we're still analyzing. So I'm feeling a little bit nervous about that. But I think if you guys hype it more and make it more pressure point it'll be better quality for all of us. So having said that we're in the stage now where we're doing panels. And we're bringing some of the interviews together and we're looking for common trends in these conversations. Last week, we had we released our panel with sales enablement experts. If you know, Tamra shank, Mike Kunkel and Josie Mashburn. That was a fantastic one. And I'm delighted, just super excited for for this one right here. Now a little bit of a qualifier. One of the things that I've learned as a researcher is when you do interviews, you want to make sure that you don't share your opinions. And these three individuals will say I had more color and the email to send out to them, these three individuals because they're so skilled at sales pulled me into the conversation and got me model about what I think too. So I'm going to work really, really hard to make sure I don't put too much of my finger on the scale, but I'm publishing out that these guys are super expert at what they do they have conversations for a living and teach other people how to have valuable conversations. So this is going to be a Trump a Will's, am I a better researcher? Or are they better conversationalist? We'll see. So the competition is afoot. Now what I'd love to do right now, we're going to introduce our panel. So just to remind everybody of our format. I'm going to go through an introductions part, then we have three sections of conversations to go through. And then Brian is going to take over and wrap up and summarize where we found agreement on. So to start off with Skip Miller, Skip is the person that I know the most. So Skip has his own sales, training and productivity consultants, and he's had it for many, many years. I'll let him tell you who it is and what they do. But what was interesting is how did I meet Skip? So Skip and I met each other when he was hired at Forrester, while we were building the sales enablement practice to basically provide sales Enabling training to our Salesforce. So that's a tough spot to be into when you've got published research and we don't really do any things that scripted. And then he's got his own point of view. And then there's a lot of questions. Well, should we be listening to skip? And you know, why? What about our research, and it was really great because immediately we aligned on some key points and there was really no problem at all. So that's one of those things where I don't know whether it's more credible for me or more credible for him or we're both equally insane whatever the case is, that's how I met skip and I'm super delighted to work on this because I've been trying to find a way to work with skip ever since and this is this was a good way to get started. So skip, would you like to introduce yourself to our insider nation? Skip Miller 06:45  I'm happy to, and it was a pleasure to work at Forrester. We there was record growth and record opportunities there. They were hiring a bunch of great people and, and the organization had some great leaders. So it was it was kind of fun to slip in there and work with you as you were develop. in that system enablement, sales enablement and stuff. So, I mean, that was, you know, 6789 years ago, you know, we still both keep in contact with a number of people from back there. And so if we do this for a living I live in the West Coast Southern California. So a lot of sass companies we do business with, you know, people, you know, small startups like Tableau and zoom and ringcentral and stuff all the way up to big companies like Google and stuff, but we try to do small and medium sized companies and get them when they're at that point where they're too big to be small but not big enough to be big and try to get them over that that hundred million dollar hump. So that's what we do and we have a good time there.Scott Santucci 07:38  Awesome. So introducing our next panelist is Bob Apollo. Bob Apollo has a also a sales consultant improvement organization called inflection point. And I got to tell you, the first time I saw that name, I always love that maybe it's because I've got a little bit of an engineering me and I just love that concept. But, Bob, I've known about for a long time. I've seen him post and every time he posts on LinkedIn, it shocks me a bit because like, man, he's saying it in the exact same language that I'd say it, how does he know the same language that I've got? So I was always curious, but I never really had a chance to to engage with them. So finally, we got we got this. And I was like, maybe this is my opportunity to reach out with Bob. And we had our we had our interview, and it was just so delightful to just be so aligned and not even know each other and have different backgrounds. That was I was really engaged and enlightened by that. And I think that that's something about the power of social media and how you can build connections if you listen and pay attention to people. So with that, Bob wants to share a little bit about yourself and introduce yourself to insider nation.Bob Apollo 08:47  Sure, and I very much appreciate the insight or the the invite. Thank you, Scott. I equally have followed you for some time. You know, I think you have reputation for being the Godfather or one of the godfathers of the sales enablement movement, although it's always been a bit of a puzzle to me as to whether that refers to parental or mafia practice anyway.Scott Santucci 09:14  I think I like the mafia part because that's cooler.Bob Apollo 09:17  There we go. So I also run sales effectiveness consultancy. It's b2b focused. It, uh, I think our sweet spot is typically scale ups, you know, post startup pre corporate, who we're trying to build something repeatable and truly scalable. And, yeah, I chose the name inflection point because there is probably a bit of the engineer in me, because if I look back at the work we do, it's probably as much focused on creating systems as it is developing skills. Of course, they're both important, but systems that guide Practice rather than impose, rigid and inflexible process. Scott Santucci 10:06  Excellent so then our last one, and the person that I know the least, is Steve Crepeau. So here's how I got to know Steve. I can't remember what the post was, or what it what it what it was about. I don't even remember the topic. But I posted something. And Steve blasted me, just blasted me. And I love people who have strong opinions and can back it up. So I engaged him, and he wasn't. The other thing that I love are people who have the power of convention to backup if they're going to bless somebody to tell them why. I think that's all you can ask for today. And frankly, I take that as a sign of respect, not as something that's, that's a jerk. So I love that kind of that kind of dialogue. And it turns out, we actually agree to some hot words I guess or hot terms that that we disagree with or had different ways of saying the same thing. So obviously, I thought this was a great opportunity to highlight how diverse of opinions that we're looking to bring in. And frankly, I have no idea what Steve's gonna say on this. And that's another thing I'm excited about. So Steve, take it away, introduce, introduce yourself, and who you are. Sounds great.Steve Crepeau 11:24  Brian and Scott, first and foremost, thanks for the invitation to participate in this panel. Let me echo the sentiments of skipping Bob super excited to kind of debate and brainstorm here with with this elite pedal, and perhaps on the Simon cowl of the pedal. I don't know that I blasted you, Scott, I would refer to it as an animated healthy debate. And you earned a tremendous amount of respect because you defended with great conviction and with facts, your perspective and opinion and I think that's why we've gotten along fabulously for the last four years, but it did start off in under rather auspicious beginnings. I will admit to that. So I don't know, right? I think it's great. It's, by the way, just just just for the record, since this is gonna go out to millions and millions, maybe 10s of millions of people. I never subscribe to the theory of disagreeing with someone or trolling publicly, it's always I'll challenge a thought in a private exchange. That's the only way I do that. So if you remember was through LinkedIn messenger. I think we don't I think we've melted down LinkedIn messenger that Friday night. So in short, I'm Steve crepeau. I've been in technology sales the enterprise for 30 plus years as a sales leader, leading sales teams selling technology solutions. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called True sales results. We're a management consultancy, we focus exclusively much like Bob and Skip we have very similar ideal customer profiles based on what they heard fast growing b2b sales organizations that are looking for ways to improve their performance. So we work with our customers and help help them learn how to engage, influence and sell more effectively to their customers.Scott Santucci 13:00  Thank you, Steve. So we're now into our into the body of our show. So we have three questions and their segments. So set the first segment question is, having looked at the survey findings, were a few things that stood out for you. And I'm going to ask skip to answer this question first.Skip Miller 13:20  Interesting the nature of the survey and having a market research background, I spent years working at data quest and Gartner it was it was interesting on the subjectivity part of it because I'm used to, you know, zero to zero to 10, or a B to really being more objective. So reading through the subjective part was was quite interesting for me, actually seeing what people had to say, not just you know, ranges, which was really, really interesting to see, especially the stock market question and the US sales enablement people if it's on a rise if it's on a hold of It's a decline the different variables of this. So that was interesting.Scott Santucci 14:04  At some, what did you take away from that?Skip Miller 14:06  That life is a bell curve, and the top performing sales today, but organizations are doing really well. Most are the middle trying to figure it out and there's some that suck.Scott Santucci 14:16  Gotcha okay, Bob, how about you, having looked at the survey findings? What are a few things that stood out for you?Bob Apollo 14:24  Yeah, very interesting. I think one of the questions that struck me straight away was the sort of variety of responses to the question. If sales enablement, were to write a letter to shareholders, describing how you performed and what you're going to do next year, what would you say? And there was a tremendous, I think, range of different responses, including some who simply responded. That's a tough question. You know, I think it's a question that needs to be answered. I think when I look across the questions generally and the responses, you know, we heard about this idea of being somewhat of a bell curve. I think at least parts of the community are not yet performing as they and others would wish. I think the sort of elements of immaturity, maybe even schizophrenia, in that in the community, almost implying that, you know, they're still on a bit of the quest for a purpose, and yearning for respect. And that certainly fits in with some of the observations I've made of members of the community. There is this bell curve, but many of them are still, I think, struggling to earn the respect that they wish they had.Scott Santucci 15:51  Steve, how about you? What are the highlights of what you took away from looking at the survey findings?Steve Crepeau 15:56  So a few things that stood out to me was the coalescence In the freeform comment response around why sales enablement is on the rise, there seem to be a strong consensus that sales is complex and hard and only getting harder, which dictates the need for more effective sales enablement. But what I found interesting is if you compare and contrast the freeform comments around why sales enablement is on the decline, for the most part, those responses are quite diverse and all over the map. I was surprised that not one person said that a target their target customer should be an investor. If sales enablement was a business. I was really surprised that only one person replied that the product function was a competitor to sales enable because in my experience, often Product Marketing and or the Product Management Group metals and interferes with sales enablement. Frequently there's there's this inherent power struggle over who who kind of owns enablement, field enablement, and unfortunately, Too often the sales enablement group loses and kind of is relegated to a kind of a junior role. I loved the shareholder question absolutely loved it. It seems that a lot of people really struggled with that question there were there a number of individuals said, I don't understand this question. I would have to like write a dissertation. So catch up with you later Scott on it. And, but it didn't surprise me because in my experience, sales enablement, quite frankly, tends to struggle with developing a clear and compelling strategy for the business in the first place. And that results in them committing what I refer to as random acts of enablement. I think a lot of us do, and really being viewed as a tactical strategic function. I would say in closing, my favorite response was a proc was the reply to what question Should we have asked, which was the last question, and the single response that really stood out to me was this question was a shitty interview question. Now, that was my favorite response for two questions for two reasons. One The person actually went on to answer with a question they would have liked to see next that wasn't. So they contradicted themselves. And the second reason that I love that response is I asked that exact question at the end of every discovery conversation I have. So it's at least there's one dissenter a month out there in the audience that those are kind of my key...