Inside: Sales Enablement

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 33In March 2020, the guys fielded a groundbreaking study on the Future of Sales Enablement. We wanted it to have more open ended answers to reduce the sampling error bias and to take different lenses and different tools that we could use as researchers to do our analysis. Our goal was to get 50 responses. You (Insider Nation) gave us 70 responses within a week! We ended up with over 100 responses to that start survey -- which is incredible.To help us analyze the raw data, we created our Insider Nation: Guest Analyst Program. Our first 3 guests analysts are:Tamara Schenk: Sales Enablement Leader | Advisor | Author | Speaker | Mentor | Empowering Human Potential in Sales Teams and LeadersJosie Marshburn: Founder of Sales Benchmark Index with previous leadership roles in Sales Enablement at Oracle and VM Ware.Mike Kunkle: VP of Sales Effectiveness Services at SPARXiQ 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.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome 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 00:34I'm Scott SantucciBrian Lambert 00:36I'm Brian Lambert, we are the sales enablement insiders.Scott Santucci 00:40Today we have a special edition podcast. It's actually part it's it's actually part of our overall study on the state of sales enablement. And the program that we're doing that we've been sharing with you as listeners. So, to remind everybody, our COVID-19 series started off with a panel and the panel conversation was with Dr. Howard Dover, from the University of Texas, Dallas, we had Kanaal Metha, who is a operations portfolio executive at TCP. And then we had Lindsey Gore, who's a enterprise sales executive to keep us honest. And in that, in that series, we ran into a pretty interesting conversation, which was around how are your companies going to react to all this COVID. And a discussion happened about Well, where's the state of sales enablement, going to lead to? Well, that definitely was concerning. So, what we did Brian and I talked about it, and we decided that what we needed to do is do a study. So, what we what we put together was a survey. And we wanted it to have more open-ended answers rather than asking, you know, direct questions that are, you know, yes or no, or things that you can measure, partially because we're trying to reduce the sampling error bias, we're trying to take different lenses and different tools. So, you know, as former researchers to do it, our goal was to get 50 responses, we thought that setting our target as having 25 would be rich, because this is much more qualitative than quantitative feedback. And that having 25 responses from sales enable professionals about where they think the world's heading is great. Well, what did you do as insider nation gave us 70 responses within a week? So, it's been difficult for those of us on our end, Brian, and eyes in formatting it. And then of course, on our our esteemed panelists, in which we're going to introduce here in a minute sorting through all your answers. And then as of today, so we had 77 responses in one week. As of today, there are 95 responses to that cert survey, which is incredible. So, thank you so much for insider nation, and also the sales enablement community. Now, as we've mentioned, this issue about bias, we're very interested in figuring out what's really, really going on. So, we started a guest analyst program. So, this is something that you can't do at Forest or or CSO insights or, or gardener. And really, what we're doing is we're tapping the expertise of our listeners and people in the community. And I've reached out to people who have been in the space for at least 10 years to be able to see that. So, I'm extremely excited with our with our first batch. So, what we did is with this guest analyst program, we've interviewed them, and really what I do is it's really hard for me, but I try as much as I can. And you know, our panelists, you can tell me whether I did a good job of that or not, I just try to listen to what is on the minds of others without sharing my, my perspective. Then what we wanted to do is so that the rest of the community, our insider nation, can hear about these dialogues, is pulled together a panel. And I'm incredibly honored and excited to introduce everyone, our first panel to share the findings of the findings or her I don't even know what we'll call them, maybe maybe we'll do that. So, joining me today is Josie mashburn. So, Josie has a background of running sales enablement at both Oracle and VMware among other things. I met her actually as a panelist for a learning and development summit maybe two or three years ago. And since then, I've tracked her progress and, and has been excited to see that she's joining joining the world of sales enablement, expert experts out there for hire. So welcome Josie, would you like to introduce yourself and give a little color to our audience?Josie Mashburn 04:45Hi Scott, thank you so much for having me on today. I really appreciate it. So, I run a consulting firm called sales enablement benchmark where we help leaders improve sales performance, and it's interesting whether you're a small startup or a very large organization There are always areas of improvement that we can make in sales and, and in including sales enablement. So, I'm very happy to have participated in the survey and have an opportunity to chat with you about it and the others today. Thank you for having me.Scott Santucci 05:16Excellent. Thank you. So next up is is Mike Kunkel. If you are on LinkedIn, and you don't know Mike Kunkel is I don't believe that you're on LinkedIn. Mike is very, very prolific in this space. He's been he's been involved in sales enablement, and sales training since since its inception. He's heavily involved in ATD and helping to build out that practice. He's developed his own methodology around sales and mail when he calls the building blocks, which I'm sure we'll hear hear about. And Mike and I met at least eight years ago, I remember it was at a conference at conference at Forrester. And Mike, take it away. Tell us a little bit more about yourself.Mike Kunkel 06:00Yeah. Hey, Scott, and Hi everyone else, really pleased to be here too appreciate the chance to talk about what's happening in the profession. Yeah, remember that 2013 Forrester conference with you in the white lab coat? Right being the the simplest that we possibly can be but not as not simpletons. Right. So that message stuck with me for many, many years. So I am, I'm the VP of Sales effectiveness services for sparks IQ. And we serve wholesale distribution and manufacturing companies, helping them with sales analytics, like strategic pricing, and territory optimization, knowing which accounts to focus on and then doing the diagnostics, around sales effectiveness, sales enablement to help them understand how to create a path forward to improve sales results. So that's a little about me.Scott Santucci 06:56Excellent. And then last, but definitely not least, is Tamra shank. Tamra and I go way back. Actually, she was a client of our of mine when I was at at Forster and was one of the leading members of that sales enablement Leadership Council that we had when she was working at t systems and running a big sales enablement transfer transformation effort. You might know her today as the sales enablement analyst with CSO insights. So, she's done a lot of work there. And she's written one of the most formative books around the space. I can go on and on and Tamra and I go off can go off and a lot of different tangents. So, I'm doing my best to keep it tight. Tamra, welcome. And tell us a little bit about yourself.Tamra Shank 07:44Hi, Scott, and everybody on the show. Very happy to be here. Yeah, so we go way back, I think a decade or so. I am now in a very interesting perspective of having done this in a leadership role for six years. And also, having looked at this for six years as an analyst, and are focusing on helping sales enablement leaders to to get this right to create impact and also helping organizations to get better than what I currently do for sure.Scott Santucci 08:13Excellent. So let me just walk you through it to our audience. Here's the format that we're going to walk through. I have three open ended questions that we're going to ask our panelists. My job is to, you know, to facilitate and get into answers. And then we're going to turn it over for Brian for a recap to close out. Brian, tell us about what what you're going to do. And when you chime in what's happening for our audience to follow along.Brian Lambert 08:36Yeah, thanks. Hey, everybody. Good. Good to be with you. I will be listening to everybody's comments. I may chime in seeking clarification. And at the end, I'll summarize what I'm hearing and make sure that our guests analysts agree with that. And from that, we'll be able to have clear takeaways from this discussion.Scott Santucci 08:58Excellent. So, let's get started with our panel. Question one I'm going to ask in order. So, the first, the first question is to Josie and of course, every panelist will will respond to it. Having looked at the survey findings, what are a few things that stood out for you?Josie Mashburn 09:18Scott, what really stood out for me as I was looking through the survey findings is the variation in answers. There are answers that people gave that are from a thought leadership position. And then there are answers that people gave that were concerning, they seem to be uncomfortable in their role. They seem to be uncomfortable with the questions in some cases. And and that's, that's concerning, especially in light of where we're at with the economy and the workforce right now.Scott Santucci 09:51Excellent. So, we're going to double back in this section and have you have a chance our panelists interact. Mike. What what You're having looked at the survey, what are a few things that stood out for you?Mike Kunkel 10:04Well, one was that it seemed to indicate that people felt as I do that sales enablement as phenomenal potential. The concerning piece for me, is how many people recognize that we need to morph toward more of some have somewhat of an internal consulting role and to be more results oriented, to move the numbers to do bottom line to not just run initiatives? Now, that's a double-edged sword, right? It's great that people are recognizing that. But it's a problem that that's where we are, largely and the results ranged from highly tactical whether the answers to the questions rather ranged from highly tactical, to pretty strategic stuff. So, you know, I think it came out a bit that organization leaders are tending to get in the way of those results, or maybe getting in the way of us doing more internal consulting. And it became clear to me that the that we in sales enablement need to be organization leaders ourselves, not not taking orders. You know, we're being whipping boys. So, you know, I saw some great potential in there, but some of those things really concerned to me as well.Scott Santucci 11:29Excellent thank you, and Tamra.Tamra Shank 11:32Um, so what concerned me as well is the very broad variation of answers to every single question. So, if you looked at the question from what is it yeah, we we had answers from very tactical up to an engine to drive transformation. When we look at the shareholder question Edwards forum, many people apparently uncomfortable to answer. And that means we basically don't know what to tell them what we have achieved. And also, when it comes to how to look at it, and what what could have been asked, in addition, so the very broad variety of very tactical steps to get things done to get things off the checklist, up to how do we basically drive transformation in a bigger picture. So that tells us we have a lot of ideas out there, we have not a lot of clarity out there. And that's where we have to get to.Scott Santucci 12:32So that's interesting. So, Josie, back to you since you were the first in this segment. What are your reactions to hearing from your peers?Josie Mashburn 12:42I loved Mike describing it as internal consulting, because in order for you to be effective in this role, there's so many partnerships that you have to create around the organization. There's so many partners that either help supply content and enablement strategies for you, there's partners that you need to work with to enable those teams as well. So, I thought the description around internal consulting was very interesting. Leaders getting in the way was the other comment that stood out to me because I think it is our best intentions to help. And that's why there's so many groups that jump in all over the place, once they understand what enablement is. And they want to be a Me too, and that the problem is, then we overload any of our customer facing team members, too, with too much information, too deep of content, not the right content for the right conversation, and we confuse them. So those are the two biggest things that stood out to me in the other conversations.Scott Santucci 13:49Excellent. Thank you. That's great. How about you, Mike, what did you hear from your peers?Mike Kunkel 13:53Well, what I heard, interestingly, since we're talking about how much variance there is, in the survey results, what I heard across the three of us, was alignment about some of the things that we liked and the concern. Yeah, that was the thing. That was the thing that really struck me is that we tried to say it in different ways. But we were pretty much all saying the same things.Scott Santucci 14:18Yeah, sorry to interject my I can't resist. That's exciting for me as well. What's really cool is each of you guys have different color, right? There's a texture, that's different, but you're not different in terms of your observations. And I think that's the richness that we want to bring out the rest of this call. Tamar, how about yourself?Tamra Shank 14:38Yeah, very interesting. To to compare this, we come from different perspectives, but at the core, we come overall to the same observations regarding the survey, and it is to me a mirror to what sales enablement seems to be right now it is a collaborative orchestrating element is what we need apparently leads to a lot of uncertainty and unclarity for many people in the space or have these roles. And what I heard across some of these answers is a lot of helping here and helping there but then not having the right position to do that. So, we can only help others with if you're in a position of strength. And and that's where we have to get to first to to really get a lot of clarity, and in a more strategic set of enablement to be actually to be able to to help others are Incheon and and customers and customers.Scott Santucci 15:39Excellent. So, I'm going to zoom in now we're going to go to our next question. Our next question, Mike, you're going to be our chair on this one? Um, what was your favorite question? And why?Mike Kunkel 15:53I think if I had to nail it down, right, because I thought about this are a couple of things that leapt out at me, but I would focus in on what business is sales enablement? Because, as we talked about the variants already have the answers. And I looked at the answers to that. It was everything from like, we're doordash delivering, which, right to, to we are, we are management consultants, right? And I saw a pattern of management consulting come out there, I saw things like maximizing human potential Mission Control for a space launch, I thought was a fascinating answer. Right, you see a ton of professional development, professional services, things came out, right. But it it again, it was all over the board, from you know, being a service business, to being someone who should report directly to the head of sales is sort of the right-hand person or right arm of the sales leader, you know, to analogies with with oil exploration and production, like to try to find out where there was opportunity and run some key tests. And some of those got really exciting for me, right? Because I'm a big believer in the consulting angle. I'm a big believer in diagnose first, then prescribe. And I'm a big believer in systems thinking. And I saw some of those themes come out there. But again, what concerned me is that it was so all over the board with some of those, you know, really cool thoughts about how I think sales enablement, can help take organizations forward in good times or difficult times, like we're going through now. And then there were some things that were just so tactical about things. I don't remember this one specifically, what I keep thinking every time I think sales enablement, I keep hearing people saying the simplest stuff like, you know, messaging tools, technology training, buy, as opposed to how do we really get into our organization, figure out where we are, where we need to go next? What's gonna close that gap and how we're going to structure and support the organization to make that journey. And I saw all of that type of difference in variants. In that one answer, we still can't really define really sales enablement, what we do and how we're going to make an impact.Scott Santucci 18:20There's so much there. If you follow our show, you're gonna hear this is Scott being incredibly restrained, and not because Mike gave some red meat for me to want to chime in. And I'm going to take a deep breath. And I'm going to ask Tamra. What was your favorite question? And why?Tamra Shank 18:40My favorite question was the shareholder question. So, what would we write in a letter to the shareholders? Because it's what I experienced in my own role, it is incredibly important to keep the senior executives and and stakeholders involved and to keep them engaged. And this can only happen if you're really aligned to what they care about, to their goals to the metrics they are measured on. And what I saw through the answers of the survey, many, many people wrote strangely uncomfortable to answer this question. Others could not even understand this question, which also tells us a lot about the big problem of how do we measure success in sales enablement. So, while people know the names of tons of hundreds

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 32Fresh off the COVID-19 Series, the guys take a deeper dive on Leadership in a world of VUCA.Volitility - Lack of consistencyUncertainty - Impossible to know fully. Complexity - A large number of interdependent factors.Ambiguity - Haziness of reality - impact of many interpretations.A new way of doing business is going to emerge. The old approach of sales responds to demand, marketing creates demand model isn’t going to work. Because we’re in an experience economy. We believe Sales Enablement leaders can usher in a new world by being heroic. They guys talk through the Being HEROIC Leadership Framework using a real-life case study example of a project in-flight.    H (Holistic): Leaders recognize the whole is greater than the sum of the parts    E (Engineered): Leaders understand how the parts best fit together    R (Reality): Leaders understand how the human element impacts how the parts behave    O (Ongoing Operations): Leaders build continuous and sustained improvement    I (Impactive): Leaders understand how they message to the community of stakeholders will ultimately drive action    C (Collaboration)Collaboration and inclusiveness are required to drive cohesion in the commercial processJoin 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:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome 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 00:34I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:36I'm Brian Lambert. And we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:49Together, 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 01:06That's right. Hey, Scott, we're coming off of our COVID series. And, you know, one of the things that we've been talking about is what have we learned inside our nation? Oh, thanks so much for all of your feedback on that. And there, there are four things that that we learned from the COVID series and all the interactions that we've had. One, there's a lot of things going on all at the same time, a lot of choices that need to be made, especially for sales teams. Two everybody seems to be adjusting to a new normal work from home video communication, the act of getting things done is different. The economy's taking a severe hit. Since we put out this the series. Today, 14 million people have lost their jobs, unfortunately. So, helping people take action and find their path forward has really become a top concern of our listeners. And because of these things, it's unreasonable to conclude that how we've worked in the past normal will work in the new normal. And that leads us to today, in this episode, leadership, what is leadership? Well, quite simply, it's what to do, what not to do, and then creating the environment to get it done. In our view, Scott, and I both believe that sales enablement has to take a leadership role right now, a new way of doing business is going to do emerge, the old approach of sales responding to demand, marketing, creating demand, that model isn't going to work anymore, because we're in an experience economy. And we believe sales enablement, leaders can usher in the new world by being heroic. And with that said, Scott, why don't you share us a story to help us get framed around this idea?Scott Santucci 03:02Excellent, Brian, and thanks. Thanks for the introduction. So, Brian, have you ever heard of a person by the name of Joseph Campbell?Brian Lambert 03:13No, that sounds familiar. But I don't think so because you always go to like, the 1600s or something. So, I don't know if I know that Joseph Campbell far back.Scott Santucci 03:24So, Joseph Campbell, was a professor. So, he's a he's no longer among us for Sarah Lawrence College. So, what the heck am I referring to a professor from Sarah Lawrence College. But in 1949, he published a book called the hero with 1000 faces. So, let's think about 1949. I'm gonna come back to this because it's really compelling. But really, what what he noticed, and I don't know if you notice this a lot, but all of us have been through English class, you know, in college, and you know, high school. Many of us have had to read that dag on Beowulf, and, or the Iliad, the Odyssey, things like that. So as an English professor, he's he's reading all these things, and he starts to realize, you know, what, there's a lot of common threads regardless of what period in time they are. In a Beowulf is written in 1200s. And the Iliad and the Odyssey was written or told thousands of years before that, there's got to be there's a common pattern to this so he's gonna figure it out. And really the book of a hero with 1000 faces, what he came up with are pardon the terms. The archetype archetypical hero based on world mythologies that a called the monomyth. And really what he figured out regardless of you know religions, mythologies etc, all cultures that exists on the planet have transferred their cultures and their their code through this narrative of a hero's journey. And that's really what's remarkable about it. And what's even more remarkable about this this is that I think a lot of us can relate to Star Wars as a perfect example of a hero's journey that's inherently relatable. George Lucas, who built that referenced Joseph Campbell's work, and actually hired him as a consultant as he was making the movies to make sure he was following this particular script.Brian Lambert 05:37Ah, makes sense. Now, now I remember. Yeah. So, what does that have to do with sales enablement?Scott Santucci 05:48Right. So what? Right? Yep. So, what's interesting about it is the reason these stories work, is that, you know, throughout all of humanity, we've always been tackled with confronting change that's come that's complex to us at that moment in time. So, think about Frankenstein as a hero story. And that's about navigating through the industrial, the Industrial Revolution, and all the all the weird things that are play there. We as humanity had to emerge from the cage, this the cave, the safety of the cave, and going out and exploring new worlds, somebody had to have the courage to say, no, we're not going to be chasing around all these, all these wild animals, I'm going to plant grass right here, and I sit and watch it grow. Like all of the things that we've done as a society have really evolved by people taking risks. And in every one of those situations, they've encountered what we now call vuca. The world around them has been ever changing, and it's uncertain. And the reason that these stories resonate for us so much these heroes stories as they help us deal with it. So let me just give you a little bit of concreteness, about what vuca means for us today, and relate it to what we're dealing with and what the topic is. So vuca is an acronym. And it's used to describe the general experience that either a group of people or a society or a team confront in a rapidly rapidly changing environment. So, volatility, it is the it's basically the environment that's liable to change rapidly and unpredictably. In complex systems, it can flip from one state to another very rapidly. So, we are definitely going through that right now. Yeah, definitely, certainty is the inability to know that whole thing fully, it is impossible for us to know. So, we don't even know exactly how COVID is transmitted, for example, it's uncertain. So, we have to make decisions every day, so we get new updates. We're dealing with that today. And uncertainty comes from the large number of elements, which are independent, that are interdependent interactions. So, all of these things happen and interact with each other in nonlinear ways. And therefore, the way that we want to process information in business is step one, step two, step three. And unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way. So that creates uncertainty. The next is the one is C is complexity refers to many parts being interconnected and interdependent. So, in other words, you can't get your job done unless somebody else does their job, right. And harnessing that complexity means that you have to give up traditional concepts of strategy and leadership. But if you give them up, you need a different concept of strategy and leadership and that's our being heroic framework. And then finally, ambiguity, ambiguity. What's ambiguity, it is the quality impact of people being open to one or more interpretation. So, in other words, what happens is, because all of us can see the world around us through different lenses, and we don't take the time to understand it, what happens is it creates a lot of conflict. And that conflict results in haziness of reality and potential misreading of situations or miscommunication. So those are the those are the various things that happen and ultimately in a vuca environment. simple linear cause and effect descriptions of what's happening. Those are the tools that we all know in business, they all break down, and you're left with having to confront reality in a different way.Brian Lambert 09:57Like baeuwolf and tie it back to the idea of a hero's journey, because of the current environment, you can think about Star Wars being dropped on another planet or Lord of the Rings and what that environment change was any epic story that has a hero, that environment change, and they had to adapt. And that story unfolded, because the decisions they made, and also who they were as a quote unquote leader in that story, and each found their own path. And that's that also is why the being heroic framework is so critical to me. How would you react to that?Scott Santucci 10:37In terms of a segue, let's redefine the being heroic framework, we have another episode that for this one, covered that in detail. But just as a recap, if you're listening, you actually have a story about applying it, we do practice what we preach here on the inside sales enablement podcast. But in that space, being heroic, first of all, the being part is you have to be living it every day, it's not like you put you take the little hammer, hit the glass, and then pull out your your leadership kit, you got to live it, love it, learn it every day. So, the H stands for holistic seeing things from a complete perspective. E stands for engineered finding, that's basically embracing the 8020 rule and finding the few measurable things that matter are as confronting reality, data says one thing, but people behave something else, you got to blend both of those two, together. Oh, is a focus on ongoing operations. Just because you did something doesn't mean it's activated, you got to make sure it gets activated and run on an ongoing basis is impacted how you communicate D are using passive words or active words? And are you creating the kind of vocabulary that allows people to join together and move forward? And then see is collaborative? have you built the right processes and procedures to to work together as a team? And are you being inclusive of other groups? Are you mandating it onto other people? Those are the elements of the being heroic framework. And I think this is a great segue now into you have a great application story in flight literally happening right now. Why don't you tell us about it, Brian?Brian Lambert 12:17Yeah, sure. So back up a month or so ago, and it started getting engaged on a large project, and we talk a lot Scott in the podcast is in it, you know, in the 30s, here with episodes, and, you know, we have a very distinct point of view. And, you know, I was really wrestling with this idea of what we were going to implement versus the outcomes we needed to drive. And because we're, we're positioning an outcome, and we're driving results. I was like, wow, you know, what, we've got to figure out here, how to frame out the result we're going to tackle. I mean, we're gonna we're in a vuca environment, we had discussions about that. And you know, what, there's this muscle memory of just going and doing stuff and a trillion questions. And I'm like, something in my gut was like, you know, what, we can't just start answering a trillion questions here. Because if we don't know where we're going, we're going to end up there. Like, that was Yogi Bear that said that. So, I, I was like, you know, we just did this podcast, we did this podcast on being heard framework, how am I going to apply that, because I know I want to be holistic, I know, I want to be engineered, I want to confront reality, I want to build out an ongoing in program, I need to practice this idea of impactive communication. And I want to make sure that I'm being being there for my, my client, in a way that is collaborative. So how am I going to do that? So, I, I took the concepts, the framework itself, and basically tried to position that with my customer. And it was almostScott Santucci 13:59What was the first thing that you did there, Brian?Brian Lambert 14:02Well, I listened to the podcast, I put it into like a series of tables. And then I said, hey, Scott, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give this to the client. And he's like, well, how you gonna position it? Yeah, he said that and we, we basically rolling that out,Scott Santucci 14:21Brian, hold on a second. For our audience. What I'm trying to do is get to step number one. What I'm trying to do here is for you, our listeners, trying to model out what steps to take that you can take what can you go do immediately after listening to this podcast to start embracing the being heroic framework? So, Brian described for us step number one, he listened to this, he listened to this podcast. He listened to our last broadcast, which was episode number 31. So, you can go back and and listen to that. It's called timeless leadership skills for modern times. He was inspired by that. And he said, how do I bring that stuff to my client? Mm hmm. What did you do specifically? You say write it up? What is write it up mean? specifically? What? What would you actually put pen to paper on? And why did you have to write it down?Brian Lambert 15:18Yeah, so specifically, it's a Word document with tables. But the guts of it is the open-ended questions that I felt that my client and I needed to answer to be successful in achieving our outcome? Not you know, how do I be holistic today. But for this program that we're implementing, for it to come out the other end, you know, whenever we're, we're considering this to be successful. People look back on it, say, you know what, that's a very holistic program. It was very engineered, you guys confronted reality? Right? So those is one of those, how do I do that type of approaches, and I wrote down questions like for holistic? How are we going to know that sales managers achieved results? How do stakeholders defined achieving results? You know, things like that I just sat and, and wrote that down in the tables, a series of five to seven open ended questions for each letter. And then I ran that by you.Scott Santucci 16:25Right. So, you and I both know that there's a lot of resistance, and why would I write it down? And then why would I share it with somebody else? So, the reason I'm bringing this up for you is the listening audience is taking action requires you to actually take action and doing something different requires you to actually do something different, and a lot of value in writing things down. And, Brian, for you, how did it help do that? Because you're more you tend to identify more as an operator than then then as a leader, right? So, what did you learn by actually having to write it down and talking about it with?Brian Lambert 17:06me? Yeah, I know, there, there's a perhaps a reaction to leader versus operator? Well, these are just to me, for our listeners, these are hats that that people wear. So, when you look at our being highroad framework, and your muscle memory is to implement, that can go a lot of different ways. And what what I was wrestling with was, I knew that a program like this is going to have multiple perspectives and multiple expectations. So, by listening and, you know, obviously, we spent a lot of time, and we help our listeners through this, practicing what we preach we we have to think about how things land, we have to think about the different perspectives that people have. We want to drive outcomes. We don't want to be random. I could go on and on and on of the things that we would say we don't want to do. But but the thing about being heroic framework was writing down these types of questions that I wanted to pursue helped me get unstuck, because it was overwhelming to say, look, I need to create a program that gets results, it needs to have measurable ROI, it's going to be highly inspected, because of the times that we're in. We're going to have so many so many people, I want to pile into this, how do I keep everybody focused? What's the one thing that we're going to be measured on? And if I would have just started doing activity, I wouldn't have a common thread, I would have no hero journey, really to, to help my client through. So, by writing that down, and getting over the hump on, let me put myself in his shoes and write this down and think about this. And let me just ask him what he thinks. I don't have to actually have the answers right now, I'm not at risk by putting this together and saying, you know what, I don't know the answers to some of these questions. We're just getting started. What do you think? And he goes, you know, see what he says.Scott Santucci 19:01Yep. So, there's a couple things right. So, if you're following along step number one, listen to Episode 31. Make, you know, write it down. You know, if you want to think about as a journal entry, if you want to think about as an exercise, however you want to think about it doesn't, it doesn't really matter. But putting words putting your ideas down on paper is a big step to actioning. that's step number one. Step number two is if you can find somebody to talk through it with talk through

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 31This is part 5 of 5 in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, specifically tailored to sales enablement. As sales enablement leaders, we have a huge role to play in helping sellers navigate these trying times.In our first four parts we covered a lot of critically important topics such as:Part 1 (Ep27): What is really happening in the market?Part 2: (Ep28): How are companies likely going to respond?Part 3 (Ep29): What can Sales Enablement leaders do?Part 4 (Ep30): What are your peers thinking and doing?In this episode (episode 31), the guys dive into the critical aspects of leadership and provide executable insights with a leadership framework you can use to1) assess your current leadership stance (i.e., how are you showing up)2) how are you going to lead through this crisis and change?To help make this topic come to life, Brian and Scott conduct a live role play in response to the COVID crisis. As you listen, you will think deeply about your leadership skills and approach based on their lively interactions.In this episode, they provide a walk through the HEROIC Leadership Framework. A framework 11 years in the making and followed by some of the most strategic and results-oriented sales enablement leaders in the technology industry.H (Holistic): Leaders recognize the whole is greater than the sum of the partsE (Engineered): Leaders understand how the parts best fit togetherR (Reality): Leaders understand how the human element impacts how the parts behaveO (Ongoing Operations): Leaders build continuous and sustained improvementI (Impactive): Leaders understand how they message to the community of stakeholders will ultimately drive actionC (Collaboration): Collaboration and inclusiveness are required to drive cohesion in the commercial processJoin 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:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome 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 00:34I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:36I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:49Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives, as analysts, consultants, or practitioners, we've learned the hard way, what works. And maybe what's more important, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:04Today, we're talking about leadership. And before we get into it, pop quiz, Scott, I'm going to hit you with a quiz, awesome, right off the bat, who's your favorite leader and why? And it can't be somebody from your family. Who's your favorite leader, and why from history? Mine? Mine happens to be Teddy Roosevelt. I'm going US president on that one. Because he's a he's definitely a man of action. And he, he was very courageous for his time. That's my that's my favorite definition of a leader. What about you?Scott Santucci 01:38So, here's what I love. I love that our prep, we didn't talk that we would be doing a pop quiz. This is I love that already gets the juices flowing. And so, I would say that, so I'm literally being put on the spot right now. And he, we do this, when we have the scrolling and just scrolled up this this thing here too. So, I did buy a little bit of time to think through what it is. And I'd said George Washington of all time.Brian Lambert 02:06Awesome. Cool. Like for that. And you know, we're talking leadership, because fifth episode in our COVID response. And this is interesting, because we plan on stopping that series, but we're getting so much feedback, and we're getting so many downloads, that we're continuing this series, and we're talking leadership because somebody from our team, the insider nation, actually brought up that leadership's critical in times like this. And you know, Scott, when we look at leadership to me, enablement, leaders really have an opportunity to apply timeless leadership skills to today's modern time. Anybody can be a leader, and everybody that I talked to believes they're a leader. From a sales perspective, leadership is blending to be more about consistency, and outcomes. And in 2020, here were a lot of sales teams that we're supporting, are driving change, they've got to bring change to bear salespeople have to be leaders, sales leaders have to be leaders. And you know what sales and delivery teams and marketing product teams have to be leaders too. And none of these changes are going to happen in our clients that we're supporting without aligning multiple decision makers. So, when you look at today's success in times of crisis, change management requires strong leadership. Crisis Response requires strong leadership, aligning processes, or incorporating multiple perspectives, all these things that we're talking about on the show, require strong leadership. And so, Scott, with that said, clearly, I'm passionate about the leadership topic. What metaphor are you going to use to frame out this topic?Scott Santucci 03:58To summarize what you said, in order to simplify the commercial system, that all of us are in that sales enablement is the biggest beneficiary of you need strong leadership? I think one of the things that we have to get into is what actually is leadership? How do we make it tangible? I think a lot of people point at leadership and think that they're a great leader, because they're empathetic or whatnot. But are they driving results? Or they point to people who they think should be leaders and can highlight what what isn't a great leader. Here's the best story of a leader that this is a true story. And I think it's very timely. We have to go back to so now we're going way back in time. Our centering story starts in 1777. That's right, 1777. And what I want you to do is sort of imagine it's it's the dead of winter, and the Continental Army, which if you can, you know, remember your history. Is this ragtag group of nonprofessional soldiers that have volunteered for this weekend romp because they were fired up about the British and what they were doing to their, to their friends in Massachusetts. And it's pretty easy to be gung ho. We've all seen that seen that happen. And by this point in time in the war, in 1777, the British Army, which was the by far and away the most powerful military, on the planet, had captured the Capitol, which was Philadelphia, things look bleak. At the beginning of 1777. The army was 40,000, strong. At this point in time in the war, there were 12,000 people, 12,000 troops, who had stayed on and the Army's barely keeping it together. If you don't have an army, you don't have an opposition. If you don't have an opposition, anybody who signed a declaration of independence is going to get hung. Let's just make sure we're clear the time period of what's going to happen and what a king does.Brian Lambert 06:08Seems pretty bleak.Scott Santucci 06:10Really super bleak. To add more bleakness to it. In this dead of winter, they were ill supplied. So, George Washington would write off notes to Congress at the time the Continental Congress, but each one of them were pointing fingers at each different state, what Virginia pay for it, let Philadelphia pay for it. I'm not gonna pay for it. We're just Delaware. So, he would write and write and write, and he wouldn't get any supplies. So, they didn't have shoes. They didn't have enough food. They lost 1500 horses during that winter, they lost 1000 people, 1000 people out of 12,000 people die. Put that into comparison about how many people are dying with with COVID across the world. And how many billions of people there are in a sample set of 12,000 people 1000 died because of disease diseases like typhoid, or smallpox. It's a side note. One of the things that came out of this is that they developed what are now called vaccines. So, they innovated to stop the smallpox to do that. During this bleak time desertion was a problem. How do you handle desertions in a volunteer army, you got to keep the army together, but their volunteers? So, George Washington did something that he didn't want to do. He had some he had some public executions to establish order. What else did they do? They brought in and they said, we need to get these guys formally trained. So, they brought in Baron Friedrich bronze student who was a prussian, and they started drilling. So they were drilling who wants to drill who definitely wants to drill when you have no shoes in the winter, and out of this when you're starving, and you're starving, and you got no horses, and you got no resources, and the British are there and Philadelphia having a great time, and super warm, and you're doing all this going up against the most well equipped, best army on the planet at the time. So, what happened as a result of this is they came out of that be a completely transformed unit, because of the because of the training stuben. They actually fought, they started fighting traditional way. So, the myth that all of the all of the Continental Congress was guerrilla warfare is just not true. It's not a it's not a true thing. They just used very innovative and radical tactics that the British thought was guerrilla. But it wasn't true. So, what they ended up doing is between after said between 1778 and 1781, they ended up defeating with the help of the French, the most powerful military in the planet. And it was this point in time, there was this pamphlet that that circulated, and a guy named Thomas Paine wrote it. And I want to just read a little passage because it's very relevant to today. In 1777, Thomas Paine wrote, these are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier in the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of their country that he that stands by it now deserves the love and thanks of men and women tyranny, like hell is not easily conquered. yet. We have this constellation with us that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.Brian Lambert 09:26Wow, that's really cool. That's a great history lesson. Again, and I obviously I am resonating with the timeliness of that especially the disease part and in the bleakness of it all. But I gotta ask, what's what's that have to do with sales enablement right now?Scott Santucci 09:45That's a great segue. There's so what right? Yeah, for Insider. What we're going to talk about is these are in the examples of leadership. Leadership isn't easy. Leadership requires courage. Leadership is never Cookie Cutter leadership is dealing with, with the events around us and trying to figure out how to make it better. Sometimes you have to go into deep dark places to find out what that looks like. So, what Brian and I are going to introduce is a framework that has been developed over an 11-year period of time to give sales enablement leaders the toolkit that they need to be leaders. We call it be a relic.Brian Lambert 10:27Yeah. And that's right. You heard that right. 11 years, and you're about to hear it right. The good thing about this is it is timeless. The second thing about this is it is evolving, the more clear, so we'd love your feedback on it, Scott, give them the framework.Scott Santucci 10:46Okay, so the framework is this being heroic. So why is that that highlight the highlight is you have to live breathe it, you don't just it's not an emergency, break glass, pull out, be a leader framework, you have to be a practice every day, so that when you're ready for crisis situations, you can actually just be it you have to just be it must be authentic. So, we call being heroic, why heroic, it takes a heck of a lot of courage. Imagine the courage, it took George Washington, if you imagine all the chips that are on his back, and the fact that he will be swinging from a tree, just like the other people sign a Declaration of Independence, the burden that it was on his back. No, that's it takes in a tremendous amount of courage to do something different. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to come up with the tactics and, and to have the discipline and try to say we're going to train instead of just suffer through this. All courageous moves. Yeah. So that's it, we're not trying to be you know, silly about it. But heroic also is an acronym. And our acronym stands for these are the attributes that you need to develop.Brian Lambert 11:56So, hang on a second before before we get into that, right. So, I know, we were gonna roll through this, but I just want to make sure you guys are tracking on this because this, this idea of heroic we're going to give you and it's not just a catchy catchphrase motivational type of thing. This is actually a clickable framework, and we're going to talk about it. So, Scott's going to give you what heroic stands for. It's an acronym. So, what is H what is E what is R what is O, I and C. So here we go, so first one is holistic.Scott Santucci 12:30And holistic, really is the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, what it means, is it's about being able to see the bigger picture. And we're just keep it simple right now. And then we're gonna unpack them move forward. E stands for engineered, basically, how do the parts fit together? And, you know, the practical application is, is how do you figure out the 8020 rule? What are the 20% of the things that matter the most? for George Washington, this time, the number one thing that will matter the most is keep the army together. And then when they get out of Valley Forge to actually be a fighting force, so they don't get the butts kicked, like they did up and down everywhere in 1777. R is confront reality or be reality focused. And that's really how do all of the parts involved in your system? How do they behave? This is also about looking at the data and then go and talking to people and see whether that data is really real or not. I like to think about this as confronting bias. The next one, O, is ongoing operations. How do we develop and continuous sustained improvement? Think about it, think of it this ways, oh, is the difference between throwing or rolling out a training program, and then having the reinforcement strategy to make sure that there's the adoption of that training program, big difference, it might sound subtle, but the difference in terms of business results is massive. I is impactive impact it really is the the message that you give because leaders have to have messages to address all the stakeholders in the community with which they're leading. So how you message and communicate is critically important. And we call that impact. And then finally, C is collaborative and inclusive. In order for you to succeed as a sales enablement leader, your role in order to simplify that commercial system that we that we referenced, you're not going to own all of the mechanisms. So, you're going to need to gain buy in and collaboration across many different cross functional groups. So, you don't have the muscles to do to do it collaboratively. And in an inclusive way, where they don't feel put out, you're not going to be able to get the buy in of all of the different, all different humans rolling in the right direction.Brian Lambert 14:58I want to make sure this is really resonating. And when I'm thinking about is okay, look, George Washington, was he holistic, that's the age, it's hard to argue that he wasn't holistic. And his approach was the engineer, you know, and how he was processing? What was going on in Valley Forge. R reality, and how is he confronting the reality? O, was he thinking about the ongoing operation? The outcome of the war? I was he impacted? Was he writing the letters to make sure that he was enrolling the right people and see, was he collaborative? In order to get this done? The answer to that would be a resounding yes. And if you thinking about it from your role, as you know, my my project, how am I being holistic in my project, my engineering and my project and my confronting reality, my project? What we're what we're talking about here, Scott, seems to be a little bit different than implementing a project, which I think a lot of people think in terms of leadership, what's your take on leadership at the this level of George Washington, and with regard to project based work?Scott Santucci 16:12So, let's let me answer this as if it's a decision tree. Step number one is sales enablement. Is it to you just training, and we do the things that are asked of us? Or is sales enablement, a strategic function, where you're activating or making the company better? If you're a, this podcast isn't for you, if you're B, what we need to really do is highlight what that means. So that's creating the simplification to create the commercial system sales and marketing to work together. And to in order to activate that you have to develop a skill that blends strategy and execution. So, Brian, and I call that Stratecution. So that means to the executive team, you need to be able to communicate executable insights. And that to you and to your team, you have to develop success methods to carry that out. Those two have to be blended together in order to drive the business results or the goals, the big goals that you're that you seek, rather than the activity that's easy to measure measure. Hmm.Brian Lambert 17:31Yep. Yeah, I know, we've talked a lot about that. And I thought it was really important to pause there and make sure that we're processing the heroic framework this way. And one of the things you're bringing up here is this commercial system and simplifying that you and I have had a history since 2008. Working on that, I think it'd be helpful to, you know, we talked about this as an 11-year journey. Let's give our listeners a bit of that overview of how we've gotten through this process and where this came from, because I really want them to have confidence to be able to apply something like this.Scott Santucci 18:04Okay, sure. So, one way to do that would be for our listeners to go back and listen to Episode 20, where we talk about the detailed, maybe minutia, detailed definition of what we see sale, the name of the opening line of the definition of sales enablement that we created at Forrester...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 30This is part 4 of 5 in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, specifically tailored to sales enablement. As sales enablement leaders, we have a huge role to play in helping sellers navigate these trying times.If you listened to our first three episodes (episodes 27, 28 & 29) we talked about what is going on in the global market, how companies are likely to respond, and what you can do about it.In this episode, the guys are fielding your questions. The questions are based on podcast feedback and also the responses we collected with a short questionnaire we sent to Insider Nation. Based on a rapid fire format, you’re bound to take away many actionable ideas on what you can do lead from the front. Our agenda for this podcast series in response to the global pandemic has five parts:Part 1 (Ep27): What is really happening in the market?Part 2: (Ep28): How are companies likely going to respond?Part 3 (Ep29): What can Sales Enablement leaders do?Part 4 (Ep30): What are your peers thinking and doing?Part 5 (Ep31): How do we lead our teams, our companies, and our initiatives to help sellers be successful?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:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome 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 00:34I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:36I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is sales enablement. Leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:49Together, Brian and I've worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives as analysts, consultants, or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works Perhaps most importantly, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:03On this episode, we're going to have part four of our COVID response series. In March 2020, we had a panel discussion of a venture capitalist, an academic, a top performing sales professional, and Scott and I. And we talked through the impact of the global virus on the economy, and more importantly, on sales enablement. We talked about the data, comparing this to previous recessions. We talked through some ideas and some approaches you can take within your company and projected what we believe would happen inside of companies. As part of that. Scott and I put out a survey to the insider nation. And many of you responded not only with thoughts around what what's happening in the current economy, but also what you wanted to ask us and what you wanted to hear about, and that's what we're going to talk about today. On this episode, the questions from insider nation regarding the current condition, and the future of sales enablement. Scott, why don't you set us up? provide a story and center us around this this concept?Scott Santucci 02:14Yeah. So, we're going back to our, our format. So, we recorded all of the previous three episodes all at once. And we of course, chopped it out. So that's in a series. This one, what we're trying to do is make make sure that we capture enough or we're able to answer enough of the questions. So, what we did in our survey is more like a pulse check than a real research survey. We gave our insider nation a whopping six hours to respond. And 25 of you responded well, so that's, I think that's a fantastic turnaround. So, it shows that there's a level of interest and the like and some of the things that that that we learned from you and your your peers, here's what you like about our podcasts, we're going to try to keep doing more of this allows for a wide-open look at what works. I like that because that's actually a design point that we have the presentation and discussion of structured ways to help improve our sales enable initiative. Again, that's great that that's coming out are very, very focused on on the on the structure lots what comes to mind immediately to mind our strategic frameworks role playing executive points of view, and most of the history corpus historical analogies. Tell me the ones that don't work guys because I don't know.Brian Lambert 03:42They like beaches, that's for sure.Scott Santucci 03:44Well, the beaches that plays well with the ladies.Brian Lambert 03:47They also like the the metaphors and insight. Yeah, that was part of it. And the content and Frank approach that means I can interrupt you more. I think that's my, that's my opening.Scott Santucci 03:58Okay. That's how you take it. Instead of that we're talking to addressing real issues. Right? Always timely and insightful. They either affirm what I'm actively promoting or make me stop and reconsider some of the some of my approaches. It's exactly what we are hopeful is happening. The structure the back and forth really insightful, relevant content. I like this last part. Where does it say, Brian?Brian Lambert 04:22Oh, it doesn't waste my time, which is great.Scott Santucci 04:26Exactly. We're trying to not waste your time and try to help you make you think through these things to be thoughtful and practical at the same time. topics are often relevant to me a few helpful hints on sales enablement, focused topics, useful tips, format, and openness.Brian Lambert 04:42relevant topics are discussed and formal down to earth tone. And I like this one, the idea of it's a bit theoretical, but also, it's got practical ideas and that's one of the things that is a design point for this series in this podcast is provide a little bit of a top down but also sink Things you can go do and take away.Scott Santucci 05:02Yeah, our point of view on that is, is pretty simple. If you're too focused on practice over time, and you don't innovate and bring in any new ideas, guess what happens, your practices get stagnant. If you focus too much on the theory, guess what? Nothing ever happens, figuring out that balance and what that balance should be, is a tough task for anybody in sales enablement. So now moving forward, what's our centering story? And I'm going to, I'm going to keep it short because it's more of a metaphor than it is a story. But Brian, do you ever watch the BBC?Brian Lambert 05:40Oh, yeah. I'm fascinated. I like I like comparing the, the way they present the news thing and BBC News versus what we do in the in the States. Yeah.Scott Santucci 05:50So, what I've what I love is, so we have states of the Union addresses and they have something different over there. And I'm always fascinated Because what happens is the prime minister walks into whatever the house that is I don't know what it is but addresses parliament. And he stands and he does a very short, prepared remarks sort of like a the the letter to shareholders that a CEO might write.Brian Lambert 06:17Oh, yeah, right. And it's game on man.Scott Santucci 06:19Oh my gosh is a game on so they have that giant book. And he's you know that whatever that book is that that gigantic book that they have?Brian Lambert 06:27Oh yeah.Scott Santucci 06:28And then boom, they start they start getting all these aggressive summer aggressive questions and some are softball questions from all over the place ranging from this school district has a big drug problem. What are you doing about it too? What is the global geopolitical landscape look like? I mean, right topics all over the place. And it's amazing to me, how boom spot on and how quick, the Prime Minister answers those questions. And then I compare that to the past present. that we've had, and I go, huh, wow, would it be great if they could answer questions like that? So here we are, we're trying to mimic that. And what we're going to do is in the survey that we prepared to try to collect your feedback, and what's on your mind as investors of our as investors or our listeners of our show. And what's on your mind, we put out the survey and some of we had some open-ended topics and one of the topics was what topics discussion or advice would you like to hear in this special podcast? And after we recorded our panel session that Brian referred to with Dr. Dover and Kanaal metha and Lindsey Gore, we went through and said, you know, we think we answered these questions, but in a roundabout way, let's go through and be specific. So, what we're We're gonna do is we're going to go off we're going to alternate reading in order. So, these are questions that appeared in order. We've arranged them in no particular way. We don't know who has time for that. But these are the, in the exact words of you our audience.Brian Lambert 08:15Yeah. And these came in 24 hours ago and we do not have a big book. So, we're just gonna go for it. Exactly.Scott Santucci 08:22There you go. That's, that's what our podcast is about. It's what's on your mind? And what are some some thoughts? So, I'll start off with the first one. We're going to alternate reading the questions. And then we're going to alternate having a first answer and, and then move forward. We're going to move through the series really quickly. Then we're going to talk about what we observed in the questions and then figure out what new podcasts that we need to have and then we're out. Sound good?Brian Lambert 08:49Nice. Yeah, let's do it. I'm in a coffee shop setting. That's my mentality. Okay. So, office shop with the insider nation right now.Scott Santucci 08:57You know what it is? It's It's, it's addressing Parliament but COVID so they're at it, they're having to do it remotely.Brian Lambert 09:09That's right.Scott Santucci 09:11That's what we're doing. So, we're actually the the delegates have inputted their, their their questions. So here we go, here's the first one. And right off the get go is a great one. What's the process to go from an ad an ad hoc sales enablement to a robust dedicated strategic sales enablement? Go fire!Brian Lambert 09:37Well, so I think you got to define the from what to what very clearly what is ad hoc in versus dedicated and things that come to mind. There are ad hoc process ad hoc programs and projects, ad hoc stakeholder management. And if you just take an inventory of what those components are, and say, how do you get to a structured Strategic view of stakeholder management processes, programs, etc. You can start painting through and painting out a journey that you can take across critical components. Obviously doing that in the context of what's really happening in the sales teams that you're supporting. And we can talk through that on a probably a separate podcast, but that comes that's what comes to mind Scott, what do you think?Scott Santucci 10:24Gotcha. I think there's there's two parts right part number one, I like the from what to what. So, you can use the three levels of maturity that we that we've talked about in other shows, level of maturity number one is fragmented or highly reactive. So, think about yourself as a firefighter. Maturity Level Two is managed. Think about yourself as being planful about what your sales enablement programs are and coordinated with with other people. Sales enablement level stage number three is adaptive. You it is difficult to define a process going from one state to another state without also having a maturity model to work backwards from now that now having said that, so that's basically your North Star have three different phases. If you want to have five, that's fine. I think that's too complicated myself. Three is great. Now, what you have to first do is recognize why your ad hoc in the first place and that is difficult. So, the first step in the process, it's almost like AA Brian, right? It's it's step number one is admit you have the problem. Step nine is step number two is take inventory, what are all of the things that you're being asked to do it to begin with, and then figure out if you can put a price tag on them? That price tag could either be what does it cost us to do that thing? Or what are the results of that thing? If the cost is higher than what the results are Stop doing them. A big element of going from ad hoc to robust, isn't doing more stuff. It's stopping doing the things that don't add value, you're not going to be able to do that unless you do some sort of inventory with an 80/20 rule. So, we definitely think we need to go through that concept more. But to be simple about it, if you want to move from ad hoc to robust, the first thing that you have to do is stop taking all the inbound that you're doing and just take order taking. You have to figure out what, how to learn how to say no, if you will, and get good at that.Brian Lambert 12:39I like it. Great next question, how to how do we guide sellers in the types of conversations that are going to resonate most with customers and prospects during the uncertain times that we're in today and in the weeks to come? So how do we guide sellers?Scott Santucci 12:58So, there's a two parter here is Well, you must have a North Star. And what do I mean by a North Star is these are the principles that we're going to go through. If you engage customers and prospects during uncertain times and you're inauthentic, you might as well write them off forever. The trying to engage during these times and being honest and authentic is probably the worst, worst movie that you can make. So, what you need to do is create a Northstar of you know, here are the principles that we're going to follow. The second thing then is how do you add value in uncertainty in the way that you add value is to provide anything that's clarifying. So, for example, if you are engaging with a customer, and you've been, you know, in the stages and you've, you've constantly talked about products, change the conversation topic to be about how other clients have been successful. or collect, have those sellers talk to other other customers and ask them, how are they responding to COVID? Have teach them and give them a format to collect that information and say, that’s interesting, Brian, that you're responding this way. Here's how other people are responding. And what you're doing is by doing that, you're helping them feel less isolated, the customer feels less isolated, but you're also giving them clarity in uncertain times. That'd be my, my quick answer. I think how to do that is, is a bigger topic.Brian Lambert 14:37Yeah, I like that. Where my head went on this one is, well, who's the guide? So, the question is, you know, how do we guide sellers? And you know, on one of the episodes, Scott, we talked about the role of sales enablement, and the role of sales management. So, where I went on this was the real guide in my opinion right now probably is sales managers. As they're dealing with change, and you know how, how is sales enablement, going to help that unit that Team Drive team outcomes that sales manager and his or her team? And I think there's three key areas one, what are they seeing? So, in a time like this, there are a lot of, I don't know, anomalies, let's call them blips changes challenges. How is the manager in the management team inventorying these anomalies and then what are we doing about it? That's one second thing is the idea of remote work or changing the teaming dynamic? If there's a manager that used to go in the office all day, and that's where their salespeople were? Now you're in a remote environment? Are you equipping that manager to have the tools to help and not just inspected and or perhaps even run things like they used to say, what changes and are you providing that that help? And then the third thing is this idea of being real and being real with with what you know, like what you said Scott with with customers, but that reality to me, starts on the sales team. So, in a time like this, you know, people are human. How is the manager in the management team processing that humaneness whether it's, you know, school closures or kids in the background? And then how do they work through that together to stay focused to to work together to be creative and have the right kind of conversation with customers? That's what I would say.Scott Santucci 16:36Next question. So, get ready, Brian, you're up first. Okay, translating marketing's obsession with and that's in quotes brand, down to the something that is meaningful to the field stories on improving operational efficiency to give get of removing redundancy, but asking for different behavior. I think we did that already about the You know the how to say no. And more on manufacturing the right reps.Brian Lambert 17:05Yeah. This one is is an interesting one. And it's because the context and the backdrop here is the times that we're in and the changes that have been happening because of COVID. And the response, this one is a symptom that's been going on, perhaps longer than just the COVID situation. I mean, the idea of Mark quote, unquote, marketing's obsession, and translating that into real conversations. That's probably something that's been eating at this person for a while doing in the context or tackling that in the context of a dynamic market like we're in and risk aversion of customers. You can create an opportunity to be more specific, but it also could create some paralysis. So, timings probably not the best to tackle that. But if you had to, I would say, look, you know, our customers are more risk averse. They have, I think No, we're having conversations. But these conversations that we're having are not necessarily on the buying journey, so to speak, they're not on that buying path. So, I need to do two things I need to relate better, what kind of content Do we have to help me relate better, other than that COVID-19 message that legal wants me to stand? And then to, how do I actually, you know, be real enough to talk through their risks that they see inside their own organization? What kind of content Do I have there?Scott Santucci 18:32So, here's my reaction to that. I'm a big fan of Winston Churchill's, quote, never let a crisis go to waste. If this has been and I'm going to concentrate there, this is a three-part...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 29This is part 3 of 5 in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, specifically tailored to sales enablement. In our first two parts (episode 27 & episode 28) we talked about what is going on, and how companies are likely to respond. In this episode, we're synthesizing the information so you can take action. The panelists (Kunal, Lindsey, Howard) provide their thoughts and guide your decision-making by providing ideas that connect the dots and focus on what matters most.Concepts like "stitching together growth" and helping sales teams sell have a whole new meaning against the backdrop of the global pandemic. Working together, Sales Enablement leaders can provide sellers what they need while also improving engagement, and helping teams get back to being productive. In times of crisis, great leaders synthesize the information, confront reality, and overcome the disconnects that exist.Our agenda for this podcast series in response to the global pandemic has five parts:Part 1 (Ep27): What is really happening in the market?Part 2: (Ep28): How are companies likely going to respond?Part 3 (Ep29): What can Sales Enablement leaders do?Part 4 (Ep30): What are your peers thinking and doing?Part 5 (Ep31): How do we lead our teams, our companies, and our initiatives to help sellers be successful?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:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome 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 00:34I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:36I'm Brian Lambert and together were the sales enablement insiders. Today we're going to do a special edition to help our audience be the most equipped and prepared to navigate these trying times, insider nation. We're continuing our four-part series with part three, what you can do to take a leadership role in your company. If you remember the first two episodes in this series, we talk through what's going on in the global economy, how this particular situation compares to others, such as the Great Recession. And we also talked about the volatility and uncertainty and how companies likely react. You know, there's patterns to that. And we covered that in the second episode with regard to what john chambers, the former CEO of Cisco believes is going to happen, as well as the perspective of our distinguished panelists, Howard Dover, Lindsey, Kunaal and Scott as they talked through in much like a coffee shop format, what they believe is going to happen and how you as a sales enablement leader can process all of the complexity. In this particular episode, which is the third in the series, we're going to talk through what you can do to take a leadership role inside your organization. So, with that, let me hand it over to Scott.Scott Santucci 02:01Okay, what is it? What's that show with Joe? Joe Scarborough Morning Morning, Joe, and how they wrap up that show is, you know, what do we learn today? That's what we're going to wrap it up with and then and then close out our our special edition. So, I'll start with you. Dr. Dover. What did you What did you learn today?Howard Dover 02:23So, I'm not going to behave, Scott because I think there's an important piece that I don't know that we did touch. Okay, that is that as people go to work from home, we have a blind spot with sales management training, not necessarily occurring and not a good strategy to develop sales management leadership. Now we just dispersed everybody to their homes and went virtual. So, one of the pain points that exist and that need to be addressed immediately. Is this area of how do you support the work from environment when you used to be in the field and knowing that we had the blind spot before. So, transparency, things like conversation intelligence, things like analysis tools that allow us to be able to see what's happening and be able to address it quickly, are going to be essential. I've been on the phone or in communication with several CEOs in the SAS space, talking about enhancing, you know, work from home environments, their phones are ringing off the hook, because of the fact that sales management needs visibility and impact transparency into the field. I think that's a quick hit. And I think anybody who can do the lifting, I think sales nailing once again, this is an opportunity to go in and stitch the groups together and develop that transparency. What did I learn today? I think I learned I don't Know that I learned much new I think that that's the challenge is that I think many of us that are on this call have seen a lot of things that we've seen before. So, I'll stop there.Scott Santucci 04:12So did an educator just said and learn. Is that what I heard?Howard Dover 04:18I read I got information that reinforced my bias.Scott Santucci 04:23So that's interesting hat's interesting. I'll take that for this. I want to thank you. So how about you know, what did you learn, or do you have another thing that people should do that we missed?Kunaal 04:37Gosh, I learned from selling our and I should wear an Iron Man suit. And not ring the doorbell because I might get shot. Jeez like, actually, no, seriously, if if I love the Iron Man analogy, actually because he had all the tools kind of at his fingertips to be successful, and I liked where Howard was going with that, in terms of making sure our field is it has the range of tools they need to be equipped. You know, I think creativity will certainly result in a just dramatic changes to how we sell in work, because the constraints that have been applied right now are so extreme people, you know, and human ingenuity is just going to kind of rise as a result because it has to. And then three, I think, you know, what a consistent theme of continuing to bear hug your customers so to speak, will continue to be an important play that that sales enablement is going to have to equip their organizations to, to be effective.Scott Santucci 05:54Gotcha. Great. Thank you. How about you, Lindsay?Lindsey Gore 06:00thought this is a great discussion and just sort of codified a lot of points about sort of what's going on in the market right now and how to think about what's important in terms of some of the near-term stuff. And then the longer opportunity for, for innovation and creativity to to come out of the recession that we're in. Also, I thought it was interesting some of the the metrics in terms of the sales organization, so I think it was a 2018 at 5,280% increase in sales development reps and, and then all of the analogies that kind of came along with that in terms of building out a machine that's very activity focused and very, you know, trying to get those initial conversations going, hence the Iron Man analogy and the overcloud field analogy. So, you guys were going with I thought that was an interesting framing, to think about how things could be done differently and likely will be forced to be done differently. Coming up. The economic state we're in.Scott Santucci 07:02Awesome. How about you, Brian?Brian Lambert 07:06Yeah. When you look at the the bulk of this, and I appreciate everybody continuing to hang in there. And listen, I think, you know, we went with the outcome and went over on time. But you know, I think when you look at what we covered from depth and breadth perspective on this, we've got we've got an very clear inventory of of disconnects that we can go tackle. And I think that's, that's how I would summarize it. You know, we talked at length about the disconnect between strategy and tactics, the disconnect between sales and sales enablement, the disconnect between investors and those who are responsible for taking action. We got disconnected inventory items around what john chambers would do in a time like this versus perhaps what we're seeing on LinkedIn as what everybody's focused on. We've got a disconnect between the idea of history repeating itself and learning from that history to to lead. And all of these things are good to identify. And from there, take action on as a sales enablement leader. So, embrace the disconnects, is what I would say is what I've, I've learned today.Scott Santucci 08:25And here's here's my lesson learned. While a lot of these trends are knowable to some people, they're not no to enough people. And I am becoming increasingly light bulb, if you will, learned, incited whatever that whatever the right word is, is how little of a vocabulary we have to describe the systematic problems we're running into. So lacking vocabulary to describe things and why we had to use so many analogies and sound like Yoda all the time is we're not using parables because we're trying to be cute. We're not using a noun historical analogies, because we're trying to show how smart we are. We literally don't have the vocabulary to describe the environment around us. That the more I have these conversations, and the more I hear kunaal speak and when kunaal I talk one on one, it's got a heavy bias to financials and operating metrics. When I talk with Howard, one on one, it's very much trends and analyses and, you know, historical references, or Brian and I, it's a lot of shared personal experiences. And same thing with Lindsey but through a completely different lens, like what actually is happening. And for me, the aha moment is how important it is. That it's all of them and how Do we create an environment where I want to understand things the way I want to? But how do we bring enough people along? Because the only way that we're going to solve this problem is creating cohesion. And cohesion only comes by understanding other individuals. To me, that's really the crux of the problem here. How do we give that more of an identity, lacking the vocabulary lacking the business processes and lacking the techniques and methodologies to do it, so that we can achieve these results, and we can do it under the pressure that we're under? So those are those are, those are my lessons learned, hopefully. Hopefully, that makes sense. So, moving forward, what we'll do is hopefully you guys got a lot of value you the audience got a lot of value out of our special edition. I know I personally did and anytime I get to hear or talk with I mean, geez. Forget about what you did and what you're taking off. Think about it. You just heard from a professor Speaking extemporaneously about lessons learned, not a prepared speech, not a prepared lecture, feedback that he's dealing with on a day-to-day basis. You've heard from Kunaal, who works with, you know, dozens of portfolio companies that are struggling with this on a day-to-day basis, so you can hear the lens or the challenges that they're going through, you've gotten to hear the voice of a really well accomplished a levels, salesperson, and be able to pull all these things together. My challenge to you would be you guys are all educators, learners, professionals, what can we do as a community to start elevating that and tease out these lessons learned, and to make them more actionable, not one of us here on this call can do all of it alone. We need your help, and we need some of your ideas. So hopefully, you'll give us some feedback. And we'll use that to inform other podcasts. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you, insider nature insider nation, for being here. You are in giving us some feedback on on help this. Thank you so much Dr. Dover for this being your idea. I want to stress that it was your idea. We just took advantage of it. Thank you. Thank you Kunaal for taking your time out. The fact that a private equity person spent two hours with us is a big deal. So, it should share it share with you how important that is to him. Thank you so much. Lindsay is taking your time out from selling days to help us out. And thank you as always, Brian, for your help and pulling this together. Thank you, insider nation, and we'll see you next time.Nick Merinkers 12:37Thanks for joining us. To Become an insider and amplify your journey. Make sure you've subscribed to our show. If you have an idea for what Scott and Brian can cover in a future podcast or have a story to share, please email them at engage@insidese.com. You can also connect with them online by going to insidese.com following them on Twitter or sending them a LinkedIn requestMentioned 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 28This is part 2 of 5 in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, specifically tailored to sales enablement.In words of Wayne Gretzky "Don't go to where the puck was, skate to where it will be" Our COVID response plan is designed to help you prepare for where the puck will be -- when the economy comes back.We're bringing back the pane of experts to provide you a well rounded, thoughtful perspective so you can lead and make an ongoing impact in your organization, and with your sales team.Panelists include:Dr. Howard Dover, Professor from UT- Dallas Kunal Metha, Operations Principal at TCV private equity Lindsey Gore, Consumption Sales Executive, Microsoft In this episode (2 of 5), we cover:1) What advice are CEOs and private equity firms sharing 2) The economy of the past covered a lot of inefficiencies was are in a state of reconing.3) How important it is for someone to "stitch' together activities. Our agenda for this podcast series in response to the global pandemic has five parts:Part 1 (Ep27): What is really happening in the market?Part 2: (Ep28): How are companies likely going to respond?Part 3 (Ep29): What can Sales Enablement leaders do?Part 4 (Ep30): What are your peers thinking and doing?Part 5 (Ep31): How do we lead our teams, our companies, and our initiatives to help sellers be successful?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:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome 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 00:35Im Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:36And I'm Brian Lambert and together were the sales enablement insiders. Today we're going to do a special edition to help our audience be the most equipped and prepared to navigate these trying times, insider nation. This week, we actually hit 10,000 listeners from across the globe. I'm super excited about that. We've had listeners from 15 different countries and on seven or eight Major podcast platforms. So, thank you so much for that. And thanks for continuing to provide us feedback over at www.insidese.com so in this particular episode, Scott and I are continuing to record a four-part series with our distinguished panel of experts. Before I hand it over to Scott, I wanted to remind you that we've convened this lively discussion and debate with an academic thought leader, a top performing salesperson, a portfolio leader to some of the biggest names in technology, and also shared our analysis and synthesis of what we're seeing in the context of the COVID-19 Global virus. Why did we do this? Well, it's simple. It's to help you lead your team and make an impact while adding strategic value to your leadership and organization. Changes are going to happen, and you need to skate to the puck. So, let's recap in part one of our COVID-19 series that was Episode 27. We framed out the landscape and capital the current economic times to past recessions. In this episode, Episode 28. We're jumping into part two, where we discuss and project and make a call on what we believe will likely happen inside most organizations. So, you can make a better plan and differentiate your leadership and approached as strategic value. And I also want to let you know that in part three of our series, it's chock full of what you can do to lead from the front and balanced strategies and tactics, that's Episode 29. And then finally, we're going to wrap it up with part four, which I'm excited about. That's a rapid-fire question and answer session where Scott and I answer as many of the questions as possible that we're getting from you. So, stay tuned for that. Make sure you add us to your podcast player and let's get started. Scott, take it away.Scott Santucci 02:50Excellent. Now we're ready for chunk two. So, this is what we did is gave an overview of the environment to get more clarity. Now we need to predict Let's talk about uncertainty. What actions are going to happen inside your company? What's gonna happen? Now obviously, this isn't exactly true, but it gives us a template. There are common behaviors that all companies follow when they pull out the recession kit. And that recession kit gets broken by the CFO, right? So, to start this off canol had an amazing and maybe surreal experience, where he ran what was supposed to be a dinner, but it was just him. And john chambers having dinner together. Well, people were videoing in. If you don't know who john chambers is, he's the former CEO of Cisco and Cisco has a john chambers has a long history of outperforming the market and market expectations. So, he had I had the opportunity to have dinner with them. I think this gives us a foundation. Some clear insight about what tactics and actions other companies will take. So, you want to, you want to take the first stab at helping us give clarity about what's probably going to happen inside our businesses? So, you know, if you're asking me about summarizing that dinner with john chambers, um, you know, it was, it was certainly myself and a few others and we it's kind of like meeting with Yoda, right? Someone was so much wisdom and has seen the movie so many different times, in so many different angles. He just, he just has amazing advice. So, I'm just going to give you a stream of consciousness here and you know, transparency to a fault was kind of bullet point number one. bullet point number two is asking CEOs to take a look at their go to market and just pick three things or even less, and if it doesn't impact the top or the bottom line. It's not one of the things to focus on, and then report out to me employees, customers investors, your progress on those three things. Another lesson learned from him is be aggressive with your changes. Don't wait, don't witness, and watch that lead and be aggressive with your changes because he went through four different scenarios where the market had just been in chaos. And in each scenario, they gained anywhere from 10 to 20 points of market share, which, which which he outlined that in a lot of detail, they're looking at this from and john chambers is also an investor in many different companies right now. They're advising their companies that this is going to be anywhere from three to five quarters of kind of what they see is his pain of quick bounce back post that period. You know, the other areas is treating customers during a crisis. Well and engaging them matters. The top 10% of your customers should have the CEOs phone number because they They just, they don't need any in terms of services right now, so they should be able to get to you. And just more pragmatic advice was was putting your foot on the brakes and just terms of other spin, if you could associate an ROI to your spin, just cut that you can focus on on going after market share and going after the competition. And then I'd say the other really pragmatic view that he provided, he's like, there's things in in an organization that you just know are inefficient, but it hasn't been a priority to stop those processes. So, this is the time to just pull if it's inefficient, it doesn't show an ROI. It's time to pull the plug on those processes. So, there's no better time to do that than when when you absolutely have to do it. He considers his time to be certainly one of those times. So, I want to tease out a couple things and get your comments on this canal. So having been in this field for so long, with Forrester or with the sales enablement society or experience with Conference Board or working with clients, there seems to be a divide between the C suite and, and the doers. And I'm just being real simple about that. I don't mean like labor and management and anything like that, right? This isn't 1888. But there seems to be a divide in perspective. And when you talk to doers, there's a default way they're gonna cut, they're gonna get rid of our jobs because all they care about the money. What I'm gonna, what I'm gonna challenge you a little bit is here, we heard the voice and the exact words of a CEO of a CEO that's incredibly well respected. And I'm going to ask all of us to really reflect did he sound cutthroat? Did any of that tone to you? canol sound cutthroat? No, not at all. In fact, you know, I would be remiss if I didn't say he ended dinner saying how am I coordinate is to, to be integrated in your community right now as well. And make sure that you're also giving back at that time. So, none of it, none of it at all was cutthroat, I thought he was super pragmatic with the advice that he gave. So, what I want to do is I want to weave that point in, because it's really important. If you are in an individual contributor role, or you have a relatively small team, and there's a whole bunch of other people involved, you need to take a little bit of time to think about the community, aka your own business community. Does john chambers evaluate your own personal contributions? Or does he look at the sum of the parts? What are the some of the parts that you're participating in? So, this is this is something that we're going to challenge our listeners to really get because it's a gap. We don't think people see. Part of it is sales enablement. leaders don't feel valued. Okay, granted, the flip side is Do they really understand what their economic contribution is to the rest of the company and how they make customers more successful? And that's something that, that that's a debate that you have to wrestle with yourself. But I think it really wrestle, it really maps to what Brian shared earlier in our in our transition point here between the transition of, you know, you can believe what you want to leave, please confront reality. Cannot what what are some of the tips that TCB is doing and how are you guys advising your clients? Is it very similar? Is it similar advice to what john shared? Yeah, I would say it's extremely similar. There's a scorecard that focuses kind of on one on a rapid checklist to make sure we're hitting a few key areas around health and safety or in terms of protecting employees around liquidity and p&l defending against revenue declines, kind of making sure we're stabilizing the operation. For this normal that we have right now, there are scenarios to conserve cash and and take out costs where they're not necessary. But there's also I think what john said is there is this notion of also wanting to play offense, not just defense. I'm so we can bounce when we do bounce back, we're ready to bounce back fast. But also, while we're in this environment, there is an there is going to be an opportunity to go on offense as well. It's important to have checklists and all of those areas. Yeah, and I think what I want to stress is having had the opportunity through canal to interview many of the investors who sit on these boards of directors, the way that they talk is easily misinterpreted, as because they use metrics, and they understand metrics completely differently than the rest of us. If you as a sales enablement, professional or sales leader or whomever are, you know, resist metrics because of math, or whatever it is, please confront that and find a way to understand what the metrics mean, because there is meaning behind it. And just because it's a calculation doesn't mean it's cold. And when you start inferring that it's cold, and it's about the bottom line, it drives the wrong decisions, which is not what what the investors want. The investors want you to to get rid of the stuff that doesn't work and focus on finding new opportunities to make the company more valuable. That's it. So, I think that's an important thing to heed. Now, Dr. Dover, you're an educator by profession, and I think that's a good transition point. What are some of the things that you see are going to happen based on your interactions with executive leaders?11:46Well, I think the first thing is to realize that we were in an impotent state before the crisis started. So, I think the fact that the crisis is now hit the question is Is this going to be the tipping point? And so, what I mean by that is that there are a lot of different companies who have been doubling down on certain strategies trying to throw new tools throw new people throw new training at the problem, and, and the efficacy of those efforts have been consistently less than exciting. So, so we have actually pretty heavy turnover rates in the sales leadership position because of this fact that whatever the traditional methodology is out there, it hasn't been working. And so, behind the scenes, a lot of a lot of companies will sit down and say, Hey, you know, I had a one one global leader call me we haven't talked for three years because they quit doing work with us for three years ago. And it's a traditional more of a traditional approach but in the in the high end b2c space selling into to business executives. He said, Hey, everything we're doing its efficacy is dropping off and has been dropping off for 18 to 24 months. And I said yes. where, you know, where have you been? Did you and he had left us about three years ago, when we started seeing the beginning of this from our partners, the same that outreach had to be different. And we have to be a little bit more fine tuned. At the same time, we found scaling, and everybody's gone through the scale. So now the question is, we're scaled up we have all this capacity. One of the NBA clubs, I actually had a conversation with them after a keynote that I did in Vegas. The guy called me up and said, thank you for letting me know that, you know, we're probably overplayed on activities, because I've actually eliminated all activity tracking in my sales org. I said, that’s not what I said. I'm like, you know, he said, No, but that's what I heard. That's what I heard in the keynote is that I shouldn't be tracking activities, I should be tracking activities that that actually move revenue. And so, we're actually removing some of the some of the metrics. So, I think one of the things that's interesting I think from a sales enablement lens, and and even the leadership lens is that the root cause was here before the crisis that just hit us. So, we were already in a crisis mode as a sales and marketing space. So, this is this is actually facilitating in the last segment, but I think it's, it's relevant to this segment is, I read a book once on the stock market crash. And what it talks about is that we have manias, followed by a shock, which then induces a panic. Which then cry prices creates a crisis? Well, we were in we were in a mania prior to this moment where we were investing in demand Gen at levels and then automating that investment and demand Gen. What's amazing to me is that if that's done right, it creates a multiplier effect. But then the headcount isn't required. So, the guy from the NBA I won't say his name because I was permission to say the name. He said that they have one of the smallest head counts in in the NBA, and yet they have the most profit per seat in the NBA, and they have a losing team every year. But they've found a way to multiply the efforts of their salespeople in a productive way. But less than According to Jim Dickey, less than 1% of sales organizations, the 2% of sales organizations have even started to deploy artificial intelligence tools. And yet those artificial intelligence tools augment our capacity to do the job with precision instead of scale.Scott Santucci 16:13Well, how I was gonna say I think, you know, one of the things that I think you said that it's incredibly important is and not well understood is sales enablement needs to get really good at stitching together business results, like you know, growth, number of customers with two or more products or whatever the business result is that you're looking for with the objectives that that needs to happen and then the activities that need to happen, and that's teaching together on I would view is very much a broken process. And then in Scott, to your point, when general partners get frustrated and they look at a sales and marketing efficiency ratio, they have a hard time understanding why an enablement the person or the sales organization or the marketing organization, figure out the right activities to drive this ratio. I think that's I think that's great. And I I'm gonna pick up on something Dr. Dover shared with us. So, I think what we, what we have it's not I think I know, if we look at sales as one big monolith, one big giant thing. That perspective is going to lead to a lot of waste and inefficiency. And that inefficiency is going to cause the investors whether it be the C suite in a large public company, or the people who sit on boards for private equity company to replace the leadership and then you're going to get a whole new set of things you know, to worry about. There is no such thing as a one size fits all Salesforce and we're going to hear a little bit from Lindsay, you know on this, but an inside sales organization is different than a strategic account. organization is Different than a vertical specialized organization. So, one of the things that will happen, and I very much agree that there was a lot of poison in the well, but the overall economic health masked a lot of inefficiencies in sales and marketing. Absolutely. So, what we have is a day of reckoning, and we can either look at it as scary or a great opportunity for innovation. And I think what chronologist said was, this is a great opportunity for innovation. Just make sure you're aware of what that is. So, when I was at Forrester, I did a lot of analysis of what works, I became sort of obsessed with the What Works analysis or 8020 analysis, rather than just survey type of analysis. And one of the best examples or stories that we could plot over time was BMC. So, BMC had a strategy to get out of the economic recovery. So, it started that You know, in in the depths of the, of the deep, deep, deep recession, they had this vision called business service management. And a lot of investors really liked it. As a matter of fact, one of my friends was an investor and he bought into that investment, hook, line, and sinker. They made a big position in that a year later. So, we fast forward to 2010 A year later, or half a year later, what were their results while they grown their revenues 30% their market cap gains zero because they weren't demonstrating economic growth or organic growth. Here's the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was that in order to execute business service management that concept and can all you remember that we had the we you were at HP at the time and you heard from one of your clients, how much in love they work with the bsm VSM vision, for sure. Here's the problem. The problem is they built a sales engine where this...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 27This is part 1 of 5 in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, specifically tailored to sales enablement.We're bringing together a diverse set of perspectives to provide you actionable insights in response to the COVID-19 Virus gripping the global economy.Scott Santucci and Brian Lambert are joined by a group of leading experts to provide you with clarity about what's going on in a rapidly changing landscape. Joining us are:Dr. Howard Dover, Professor from UT- Dallas Kunal Metha, Operations Principal at TCV private equity Lindsey Gore, Consumption Sales Executive, Microsoft Our agenda for this podcast series in response to the global pandemic has five parts:Part 1 (Ep27): What is really happening in the market?Part 2: (Ep28): How are companies likely going to respond?Part 3 (Ep29): What can Sales Enablement leaders do?Part 4 (Ep30): What are your peers thinking and doing?Part 5 (Ep31): How do we lead our teams, our companies, and our initiatives to help sellers be successful?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:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome 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 00:34I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:36I'm Brian Lambert and together were the sales enablement insiders. Today, we're going to do a special edition to help our audience be the most equipped and prepared to navigate these trying times, insider nation, we're going to focus this episode on helping make sense out of what's going on explaining what you should expect to happen, providing you with actionable insights, you can take on and in order to help your business improve. And I'm going to hand it over to Scott in a minute but before I do, I want to orient you to the flow of this call. What we're going to do on this episode is run a panel of amazing experts, whom we will introduce this conversation is going to be pretty strategic in nature to provide you with a lot of context and clear ideas.Scott Santucci 01:23That's right, Brian, as part of our panel, what we're trying to do is create a format. There's so many different variables going on, we want to be able to give you lots of perspectives, the opportunity to synthesize it, and the perspective in the voice of sales might react to it.Brian Lambert 01:39Yeah, that's great. I love that and we've got quite a quite a diverse group today and as part of insider nation, you know that Scott and I are encouraged to wear this, this bifocal lens, you know, balancing strategy with tactics. And at the end of each section, I'm going to summarize this pretty strategic conversation into something that I believe you should take Way, and what it really means to you as a sales enablement leader, Scott while you introduce folks to the to our listeners.Scott Santucci 02:07Okay, so let's get started. So, we're going to introduce our panel, and I'm super excited that we have friends, friends of the show. And when you get to introduce these, these folks are going to be really impressed as well. So first up is Dr. Howard Dover. And actually, it was Howard's idea for us to do something like this in the first place. So, if it goes well, he gets all the credit and if it goes poorly, it's clearly Brian and I's poor execution. That's right. Oh, that's, that's that's the way things that the way things roll. But I first met Howard at the founding meeting of the sales enablement society, at the breakers in Palm Beach in November 2016. And if you know anything about that there were 100 people, they're all trying to figure out what is the sales enablement thing should we form a volunteer organization to share information. And there were two economists sitting at a table together. Of course, they didn't go and mingle.Brian Lambert 03:08I was there too, and I'm not sure you're not including Howard in that are you? Was he an economist or professor?Scott Santucci 03:15Did I say economist? I meant, so there we go, I meantt academics, right.Brian Lambert 03:22That's all right. I got you. I got you. He's gonna you're gonna have to buy him a drink. Now, though.Scott Santucci 03:26He's a he's a classically trained economist, turned sales and marketing professor. And one of the things that's amazing about him is he's the director. His official title is the director of the Center of sales and sales coaching, working out of the University of Texas, Dallas. Now this group and what he does, he's done some amazing innovative things which we're going to get to hear about he's he's involved in many programs of studying sales and the impact of it, just incredibly honored that he's joining us.Howard Dover 03:59Thanks, Scott. That was very kind. As, as Brian knows, we know a lot of people in our sales industry, so there's a lot of really amazing people. And you know, I remember the experience, I had to go to the breakers, a good friend of mine that I do research with Rob Peterson, and I were studying sales enablement. And when we saw that conference, I got on the phone with Rob and I said, Hey, we need we need to go and he said, are you kidding me? We don't have expense accounts, we can't go to the breakers. And I said, just just go figure out I'm going to be there you need to go and the two of us showed up. And I remember Scott was saying, you know, something many of you know Scott, so Scott was talking, and he was trying to get the group to discuss and, and he was sitting kind of right next to me. And and I just looked at him I finally said, we were acting like this whole thing's gonna stay the way it is. So, it's we UT Dallas we obviously right to have we were part of hosting your first conference here in Dallas to allow the first sales enablement society event and so that's enough about me I'm sure we'll get into other details in a little bit.Scott Santucci 05:12Yeah. So let me add a little bit of color to that. That moment what was actually happening as Scott wasn't talking, Scott was facilitating a lot of dialogue with a lot of people. Mr. Dover degraded a doctor there on that on that point, but really what what happened is, we gotten to this point of a lot of people are talking about things the existing way. And Howard asked the question, Well, why are we assuming we're going to be organized the same way that we've always been organized? And that's a great question. And to me, that's the value of having lots of perspectives. Nobody in a corporate world would think to ask that question. And having the courage to put it out there allows us to think and this is the kind of value of having multiple perspective There's and bringing it together. So, the next panelist I'd like to introduce is Kunaal, Kunaal Metha and Kunaal and I've worked together consistently since 2008. He's helped many sales enablement and operational roles and companies like HP, VMware, Informatica and implement infoblox. He was actually a regular attendee of the thing before the sales enablement society. The official title was the local area, the DC local area sales and marketing networking group, which of course, our members turned to the sales enablement society, which is way better, but he was very much participative and knows he's a systems thinker, and a design thinking advocate. He's actually been to a lot of that training. It's very interesting to hear him talk about design thinking and me being in the role to actually translate from translate and say, well, I can speak Kunaal, he means this. Today he works for TCP, which is a leading private equity firm. That's that if you don't know TCP, they are the money behind Netflix and Airbnb is a business that really, really knows what they're doing. In his role he works with CEO Sales and Marketing Leaders. So, his focus is on the commercial process. And he sits on boards of directors, board meetings, and is constantly working with portfolio companies around sales and marketing. So welcome Kunall would you give us a little color about about your background?Kunaal 07:34Thank you, Scott. Thank you for that really wonderful introduction. I remember when we met it was it was around my birthday, actually, my daughter had just given me a pen which wrote underwater and and I remember thinking like, man, if I'm underwater, I got bigger problems than thinking about what I'm going to write. But I felt that way about My onboarding program at HP and I remember being past your presentation that you had just given, and I was like, wow, somebody gets me and gets my problems. And I got to meet Scott and we we arranged for an analyst day with you in, in your in your office in in McLean.Scott Santucci 08:18That's right.Kunaal 08:20It's it's, we've been continuing to work with each other since then.Scott Santucci 08:24That's right. Excellent. I want to tell a lot of other stories. We've got a lot of war stories to share, but we got a, you know, we have a bigger agenda here. So finally, I want to share Lindsey Gore. So first of all, Lindsay's role in this isn't necessarily a panelist, but she's here to keep us honest. So, I want to make sure that we're very, very clear Lindsay's role in this podcast, but I actually met Lindsay during a client engagement I've been when I was working at Forrester, I've been hired by NetApp to run a sales boot camp. I don't I don't want to say teach, but to help introduce concepts to help the Salesforce sell to cloud. And I always run in so I'm a huge, huge fan of a reps. And you can tell them immediately, because they're the ones that ask you the hard questions. And Lindsay was one of those people during the breakout sessions like, What's this for? Will this really work? And ever since then we became good friends. We've, what we do is over over that period of time, she's been enrolled at nimble, and now she's at Microsoft. And we've had a lot of opportunities to talk about what's really going on in the trenches. And one of the things that we're really focused on is really trying to raise awareness and grow understanding around this English English translation problem, which I'm hopeful she'll join us for a podcast exclusively than that. But I want to just frame out what our perspective is because ultimately, if dots don't connected, none of these ideas work. He's one of the top reps at Microsoft earlier this year, or actually, at the end of last year, he was one of the keynote speakers at their global kickoff for some of the innovative strategies she's executing to sell cloud based and consumption, consumption products for Microsoft. Thank you so much for joining us. Lindsay. Could you tell us a little bit of background on yourself?Lindsey Gore 10:22Yeah, thanks so much, Scott. I appreciate the introduction. I I will say that, you know, our relationship over the years has started at net up and I've been at EMC, nimble and Microsoft since then, it's been incredibly helpful to be to try to understand, you know, a lot of times my customers are saying things to me, but but my commercial process internally, and it doesn't necessarily align with what my customers are asking for across multiple different companies that I've worked at. So really trying to figure out you know, how to align the messaging, why is so much of that translation sitting with me in the field and how to think about that stuff. So, you you've been incredibly helpful in terms of just sort of understanding that there's a much bigger picture context. So really excited to hear this panel today and and think about what you guys are talking about seeing from a broader level than just my view from the field.Scott Santucci 11:15Excellent. So, with that, what does this have to do with responding to the events around, so we've assembled this session, and what we're doing is we're tackling what's going on. And what should sales enablement do about it. So, before we do that, we typically in our show frame things out, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a memo in 1990, written in the Pentagon, that has become what we now know is vuca. And really, what it was is a prediction of goodness, we were all focused all of our attention on one thing, one big bad thing, the Soviet Union. Now we have lots and lots and lots and lots, and lots and lots and lots of unpredictable factors that we have to be aware of. So vuca stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. And the difficulty that we run into is none of us really have a strategy for handling it. And what happens when human beings in general, get overloaded or have to deal with unknown, we have one of three responses, we fight it, we run from it, or we freeze. And neither of those are good strategies in a downturn. So, what we're going to do is we're going to apply some, some thoughtfulness here to provide some some structure. And the way that we're going to go tackle this is we're going to say, first, let's talk about what's really going on. So, with volatility, instead of always reacting to events. Let's just pause, slow down to go fast. with uncertainty. It's to factor in you know what, maybe we don't know for sure exactly what's going to happen. But you know, we could probably figure out common patterns that have happened in the past and predict what's likely to occur. With complexity, it's really two variables, the number of interconnected parts and today, human beings are so interconnected with each other, we have to factor that in. And then also how many moving parts there are. And then finally, with ambiguity, this is one of the things that Lindsay and I talk a lot about, is that human to human connection, there are so many different people involved, all of us look at it through a different lens. How do you make things clear? And in order to do that, that's what the valuable about having different insights. So, the first thing that we're going to tackle is what's really going on. So, let's timestamp this as of March 19. Here's where we are. The stock market has lost all gains during the Trump entire administration. So basically, we're back to where we were four years ago, in terms of stock market, $4 trillion in market capital has been eliminated. Another thing that's that that's going on is the Fed. So, if you know what the Fed does, the Fed is one of the drivers of the economy and they they have a lot to do with banking. The fed on Sunday dropped the basis points or dropped the lending rate 100 basis points. So, what does that mean? It's just a measure of of significance, let's put it into context. At no point in time during the last recession, did the did the Fed drop basis points that much. Another thing that that the Fed has done is that they have authorized the printing of $1 trillion of of money to give you frame of reference during the last great recession. They only printed $2 trillion over that period of time. So, the point is the Fed is taking very aggressive stances to what's happening. Now the question is what is happening? We have two events happening at the same time. So, Dr. Dover called me out on one of the LinkedIn post trying to share, you know, some of these facts was, hey, you only highlighted responses to COVID. We also have this gas crisis or, or looming gas uncertainty. And markets hate uncertainty. They hate it more than anything which we're going to hear which we're going to hear from canola. So, as a lot of the attention happens to what to do with COVID, how to wash your hands, how to beat treat people with empathy. What we want to do is figure out what's going to happen with business and what what responses we should be taking, so that we are more productive or proactive and what what actions we take so that we find the tactics that work. The last key fact to share is if you look at analysis across Wall Street, they are producing acting as an 8% decline in GDP this quarter, many people think that's a conservative estimate about what's happening. We have completed the SMB space is pretty much shut down. There is a whole bunch of things going on and we're pushing work into into virtual experiences of which a lot of people don't really know how to do. So, we have a lot of uncertainty and factors there. So, these are the facts. What I'd like to do is ask Dr. Dover to share his perspective and then also get from from his perspective about what what they're seeing in each of their perspective, lenses. So, Kunaal, you are in the best position to comment on these things you work for more or less a micro economy, if you will. You guys are the lead investor and a group of 60 or 70 Companies tell us what your point of view is and what's happening within your company.Kunaal 17:06Well, Scott, certainly, you know, surreal, scary panic are all things that I think that are going on right now. You know, we, I certainly echo any company in the comments around staying safe and sound as we go through this. I'll start with a quick story. And then we'll kind of rotate it to, you know, the three areas where we see most of our conversations, but I actually live on a horse farm. And my favorite horse ever was was this midnight loop around the spectacular race in 2007. And he started dead last, but he ended up smoking the field and they were going to originally scratch him because of bad, bad weather conditions. And I think it's a good analogy because we start work, we our response overall, has been slow that you see Like a stronger and stronger sense of response and more organized, a more organized response. And I think we'll come out much stronger out of it. The three areas of focus where most of our conversations are one, you know, the health and safety of folks and making sure when they're comfortable working and can get to work from home and in an efficient way. There's, if you look at just the basic, there's actually no monitors left to order. If you go and try to order one, some of these basics just don't exist. There's a lot of questions around how do you how do we get transparency? How do we ensure effectiveness? How do we ensure teams are motivated? One really interesting fact that we're seeing from kind of a shared sales development perspective is that connect rates on calls have never been higher, they're like orders of magnitude higher. So, so people are answering the phones right then and uhm ou do see people taking calls and scheduling meetings. So those things are still working. But But you know, that's just health and safety and getting people to work remotely are...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 26What type of sales talent does your leadership team need, and what's your role in helping them acquire, develop, and improve those people?Respond to demandGenerate demandWhat do customers think?In this podcast, Scott Santucci and Brian Lambert provide a foundation helps you answer questions like:How do you on-board salespeople when they all come from so many different perspectivesHow do you get agreement from sales managers on what they are supposed to doWhat’s the turnover rate of the sales force and are you using your top talent instead of bottom performers and how would you knowWhen designing a development strategy, who do you listen to? Product, product marketing, sales leaders? Sales reps? Who gives inputs on the curriculum?How would you measure the impact of on-boarding programs across so many different teams?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:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome 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 00:34Hi, I'm Scott SantucciBrian Lambert 00:36And I'm Brian Lambert, we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement. Leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:48Together, 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 of what works and maybe what's most important, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:03That's right, Scott. And we've had a lot of feedback since our last podcast, which was on the flavors of sales enablement. So much so that we've actually decided to deep dive. And today we're going to talk about one of those flavors in the talent flavor. So, Scott, let's walk through what we've been talking about what we've been seeing as we've engaged with our our customers and clients.Scott Santucci 01:26Sure. So, to frame this out as if, if you're joining us, fresh and new on our podcast, welcome to insider nation, by the way that we frame this out is that sales enablement as it is a really giant topic, especially depending upon how you look at it. If you look at sales being the revenue of your company, and enablement is how you get more of it. Obviously, the scope can be very, very huge. And that's what we're seeing is we're seeing a lot of these different pockets and a lot of you know the most successful Strategic functions are emerging at intersection points between the sales organization and other organizations. So, for example, we I, we talked about the message, the message flavor, which is at the intersection point between marketing and sales, or the engagement, flavor, which is the intersection between marketing sales, business units and finance. It's a huge quagmire. And we also talked about the administrative or administer flavor, which is really at the intersection point between sales and, you know, the administration support team. So that might be if you have one administrative function that would that would include your legal it might include some sales operations, particularly revenue recognition parts and your IT department. But that would be that what that would focus on but what we're zooming in on is that intersection point between the human resource functions, which are typically responsible for training, culture learning and development, hiring, and the sales organization, which is starting to also pick up its own version of training and onboarding and participates in hiring. And as you could probably imagine, there's a lot of friction points between those two groups. And that's what we're going to be concentrating on.Brian Lambert 03:24Yeah, especially with all the digital transformation that's happening, the scope and change that's happening within the talent space, as it evolves, you know, skills need to become higher. The conversations that people need to be having need to be different. And I think this is a great topic for today. Because of those, those challenges that we're seeing.Scott Santucci 03:47Yeah, and to pick that back up, to pick up on that thread. One of the things that we're asking people to do is take a step back, and sometimes you can't See the forest through the trees if you're actually looking at the boss, right? And that's really where where we think a lot of people are today is that they're so focused on very specific details about it maybe do we have the exactly the right training curriculum? How many fields can we put in, in terms of our hiring specs? That maybe we've lost sight about where things are going. So, if you boil this back up and just use this podcast as an option to take a step back, one of the ways that we like to look at this as talent, why do you have a Salesforce in the first place?Brian Lambert 04:41Oh, that's way back. But I love that question. And, you know, when you and I started talking years ago, you would ask me questions like that, and I would laugh them off. But the more the more I thought about, I'm like, dang, that's a really good question. So why do we have a Salesforce, Scott, what's your thought on that?Scott Santucci 05:00Well, the simple answer is because customers still demand it. But I think where we are today is to have this idea that you have a one size fits all monolithic, Salesforce is just, it's just barbaric as barbaric thinking.Brian Lambert 05:15Well, but aren't 58% of all decisions made before before anybody ever talked to a customer?Scott Santucci 05:21Yeah, just like 58% of the decisions that I make when I go to a grocery store already made for me, right? Uhm it that those those metrics are good sort of talking points, but you can't ever know for sure. And it's kind of ridiculous to think that way. But let's talk a little bit more simply. Right? If if we have a Salesforce because customers demand it. Well, what kinds of customers are there? We don't, we don't want to make this about how do you segment your customers that would be a completely different topic. But let's just talk very specifically here. You have a Salesforce to Respond to demand, aka your markets blowing up, you have a lot of competitors, what you're doing and what you're selling is maybe not that differentiated from everybody else, and you're in a highly competitive landscape. That's scenario one. Or Scenario number two, is you're bringing differentiation or you're bringing innovation to your customers. And you have to go actually create demand. And this podcast is for the businesses who are investing in a Salesforce in the ladder. How do we create demand? And it's very difficult because, you know, let's say in the last 10 years, we've had a massive expansion, you know, since the, you know, the deep dark economic burden that we've had, we've had a pretty good recovery. And over that recovery, recovery period, we've had a lot of, you know, growth, but now where we're at today is that growth is it's a lot harder to want to Talking about the sales forces better designed to create demand with our customers.Brian Lambert 07:07Yeah, especially, as you're pointing out, you know, innovation is just exploded, you know, moving into platforms, cloud, Ai, automation, you know, every industry is transforming and salespeople, much like they had to do in the 1890s have to bring those innovate individual innovations to customers. And I like that concept for those that are generating demand. So, let's talk about that. What are we seeing? What are you seeing?Scott Santucci 07:38Yeah, so I think that's a really great way to think of it right. So, you have, you know, all those different trends. And you have businesses that, you know, is GE now a digital company, they certainly have tried to advertise that a lot. So, a lot of a lot of businesses are trying to shift and what what that requires Is your salespeople to go and actually educate your customers? So, when we think about education, that means you're selling ahead of a RFP, or you're selling ahead of a budgeting cycle. So, who is it that we're actually Who are those customers? So, let's zoom in a little bit more and talk about why you have a Salesforce. We have had the opportunity to either to survey and then interview hundreds of buying executives. So, the first thing is, who actually is the customer that we're designing our Salesforce by? Because the sales force exists to support customers. We've already isolated that the type of sales force that we're talking about other sales forces designed to create demand. So, who are those customers that we're after? And then if they're there to support customers, what is it that they expect? What do customers think makes a great salesperson?Brian Lambert 08:58Yeah, because that answer should determine the type of talent that you're bringing on and how you're supporting them. Right? That's the, that's the punch line is, if we understand that, then we could talk about the talent pillar.Scott Santucci 09:14Yes. It was like, what is the design point for all of the talent, not just who you're hiring, it's, how you're training them how they're developing, etc. So, here's the spec, right? The spec is we asked those executive buyers to tell us what makes a good Rep. And here is their definition. This is not our definition. This is not, you know, your definition from other sales forces. This is the definition of executive level buyers. All right.Brian Lambert 09:45I'm going to give the drumroll Yep. There you go. big reveal.Scott Santucci 09:49Okay. The salesperson shows they understand my business issues and can clearly articulate to me how to solve them.Brian Lambert 10:01That's the definition of executive buyers of what a good rep looks like they guess right? Those reps understand my business issues. And they, they articulate to me how to solve those issues.Scott Santucci 10:12Now, what's interesting is if you talk to a lot of people who are students of sales and said, they're gonna say, Well, no, bleep, right? No kidding. What's new about this? And really the issue is not a lot to know about that. If you're going to help somebody, think differently and drive change, you must understand their business, you must understand their challenges. And you must be able to articulate those or else there's no basis to change. What makes this difficult and unique is how complex those business issues are, and how hard it is to articulate them because they cut across multiple silos. So, the next question, we asked those executive buyers, is how often does your interaction with a typical salesperson lead to that criteria? So, in other words, how often do say do the conversations that they have with different reps meet that spec? What do you think that, that I'm gonna ask you, the leaders Brian knows what the number is gonna ask him?Brian Lambert 11:28Do the drumroll though.Scott Santucci 11:28Right. But before I share what the what the date is, think to yourself, what percentage of executive buyers find their interactions with sellers valuable? Is it 80%? Is it 50%? What's the number? Well, the number we have is it's 11%. So said differently, 90% of the interactions that they have with sellers is not valuable.Brian Lambert 11:59Yeah, this I've got a bit of a story on this. I've since 2002. I've traveled all over the world. And I asked a simple question. When I'm on the mainstage. I asked, I say, Hey, you know, I've got, I've got 500 US dollars right here, who can come up here and talk about their customer. And I always get a ton of people that want to come up when I bring up the salesperson who volunteers, which is great. I say okay, the only caveat to that is you cannot talk about your company, your product or yourself, you have to talk to minutes about your customer go. And to date since 2002, I have not been able to find a single salesperson who can do that yet. I haven't found a representation of of the 11%. And and I would challenge you as listeners, I would challenge you to try that same same thing. Go ask your salespeople to do that. And also, you tried to the world of the buyer has definitely evolved.Scott Santucci 12:59So, I think that's a great segue into we, here are some exact quotes. These are exact quotes from executive buyers, executive executive decision makers about why is it that so few of the reps add value. Here are some direct quotes five direct quotes because they don't do their homework. They can't think outside of their product. They're unable to provide any knowledgeable answers to queries raised. They don't understand how they fit into our company. They're focused totally on closing a sale. They don't understand the issues or problems I'm trying to solve. These are all direct quotes of executive buyers to describe why so few add value. Brandon comments on thatBrian Lambert 14:00Yeah, it's been interesting. I've actually been on the buyer side as in a fortune 500 company and this exact challenge came across my desk. I had, you know, probably 100 salespeople reach out to me, I took one, I took one call because of those those issues. If somebody and it's interesting, right, as, as somebody on the buy side, I didn't need them to articulate my challenges fully and become a, you know, Zen master at them. I was just looking for somebody to kind of meet me, not even in the middle. I mean, I guess at the 11% mark, if somebody can do just 11% did it, I would have taken a call. That's actually who I took the call with. So, they didn't have to be perfect either.Scott Santucci 14:44So, to add more color on that, so what we're what we're making a case is how case of what is the current state if the all of the talent investments that we're making across the company, whether it be in human resources or in the Salesforce All these things are happening, what type of rep are we producing out there in the industry? So, the next question is, how prepared are the reps? So, through the lens of an executive level buyer, here's some real data. These executive buyers believe that 62% of the sellers are knowledgeable about their company and products. 24% said, the salespeople were knowledgeable about my specific business. 23% said that those salespeople can relate to my role and responsibility in the organization. 22% said those salespeople can understand my issues and where they can help. 21% said those salespeople had relevant examples or case studies to share with me.Brian Lambert 15:58Yeah, that's interesting. So, in the 20% is knowledge about my business, my role responsibilities, my issues where they can help. And then and then this idea of providing examples or case studies, those are all 20%, which is a big, you know, big F, the highest is 62%. That's still a B, in most, most organizations. And that's an idea they're knowledgeable about their company and their products. And that's the, that's the most prepared that they are. That's so interesting.Scott Santucci 16:25And what's also interesting about that is if you were to break down and look abstractly, or you know, very high level, but force through cheese, and categorized content, or specifications, of what you're hiring people to onboarding people to do, coaching them to do, or developing them to do train them to do. The overwhelming majority of the amount of information that we're asking our salespeople to do behave is about us. It's about our products, it's about our products and services, etc. which is great if demand already exists. But it doesn't help to create demand. In order to create demand, you have to understand a company's business. Simple as that. You have to understand how that company makes money, or loses money, or what risks it factors in yet 24%. Only 24% of sellers can do that. If you're going to persuade somebody, a company in upon itself doesn't buy things a human being does. Somebody has to have the intestinal fortitude to drive change in a complex environment. So, if you can't relate to that individual's role and responsibility in the organization, how in the world are you going to empathize with them about all the risk factors? The next point then would be understand their issues of where to help if you can't understand their business challenges? How is it possible that salesperson could add any value and then if you don't have any examples of how you've helped solve that problem, specifically, what are you going to talk about? Right?Brian Lambert 18:08In that, you know, just to tie it back again, we're unpacking the spec here of which to drive the talent pillar. And I think it's really good to pause. And we've really spent 10 minutes on this. But you know, look at the contrast that we're painting here about, remember, I remember that one time, Scott, you and I worked on that project, and we audited the new hire training, and it was like 5% of new hire was about customers, and the company couldn't believe it. And then they looked at it. They're like, Oh, you know what, holy cow. You're right. Wow.Scott Santucci 18:43Exactly. The whole point was, there were so many different people involved in that onboarding program, that everybody assumed that somebody was doing the basics and it took an audit of the content to say, oh my gosh, we're not even all of the material that we're providing is all about us all about our products, because that's the muscle memory that we've gotten into. So, here's some good news. So, some good news is we also asked those executives, because in this interview process and this discovery process, you start to learn Hmm, this is painting a pretty bleak picture. But these executives didn't see it that way. Because the salespeople that actually do meet the criteria, add a lot of value. And as as a matter of fact, they offer so much value that they differentiate their vendor from all the competition. So, here's some here's some proof on that. We asked those executives to tell us what an open-ended question what most differentiates a vendor or supplier from their competition and the specific question asked to those executives. The top two answers were number one, the ability to match relevant capabilities to specific problems and to being prepared on my business, my role, and what is...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 25In this episode, we look at Sales Enablement strategically. The sales enablement profession has reached an important pivot point -- and it's likely you need to make some decisions.While the hype of the role continues to drive more and more hires, many executive leaders are still waiting to see the transformative benefits they expect by making continued investments into enablement. Most enablement functions start out as the fixer of broken things. Eventually, there is only so much value that can be created that way.  You will have to expand your scope and focus on identifying core root problems.We've been working with leading sales enablement functions for over 10 years.  In this podcast, we identify the emerging flavors of sales enablement excellence.  TALENT - Recruit, retain, and develop the right people to help sales leaders be successful with better, more skilled salespeopleMESSAGE - Customer stakeholder specific value-based messages to help sales leaders be successful by helping their salespeople have better and more relevant sales conversationsENGAGEMENT - Integrated programs to drive pipeline milestones to help sales leaders be successful with more targeted and focused pipeline stimulation programsADMINISTRATE - Simplification programs to reduce seller burden by helping sellers spend less time with data entry and more time sellingJoin 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:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome 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 00:34I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:35I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement. Leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:48Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives, ranging from analysts, consultants or even practitioners. We've learned the hard way. What works and most importantly, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:03And on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the flavors of sales enablement, not how tasty they are Scott, but how they're organized and the scope of sales enablement, as we're out and about and talking to folks. So why don't you frame this out for us.Scott Santucci 01:21So normally we have a framing story, but basically ever since October, you and I have been talking to lots of sales enablement, professionals, and sales leaders. And we're developing a kind of two things. One is sort of a clear pocket of where observation about where sales enablement is as a profession. And some of that is frankly very concerning to us. So, what we'd like to do is share with you an observation about sort of tensions and provide some texture about where the role is and then get into the topic of flavors after that, so that people have some context of why we're talking about that. So, Brian, you've recently been, you're just coming back from a trip where you visit a lot of enablement professionals. Let's sort of do the composite of all the different interactions that we've had. Describe for us, what are the characteristics of a sales enablement leader today?Brian Lambert 02:25Yeah, sure. And like, like you said, let's look at you know, the last three months so, you know, the end of the year quarter here, and then the beginning of a new year is really the, the timeline that we're looking at. And as you can imagine, Scott, you know, the end of year and start a new year can be pretty busy for sales teams. And, and that's obviously reflecting in the folks that I'm talking to and sales enablement. I don't know if that's also what you're saying, but everybody's busy. So, we'll use the phrase, everybody's busy. And there's there's really two types of busy that I'm seeing There's the busy with activity. And then there's the busy being productive. And that's, that's what I want to talk to our listeners about those are two different things to me. And Scott, I'd love your your take on this. But the idea of being, you know, actively busy is stuff like, Hey, I'm on a plane, I'm responding to requests, I'm running events, people are walking by, and I'm talking to them. I've got a bunch of emails I need to respond to, you know, I'm moving, you know, from meeting to meeting to meeting. I'm attending those, and I'm gathering inputs, and I'm president these, but I'm not necessarily running the meetings. And, you know, I'm thinking about who I need to talk to next, who's coming at me with a request and it's, it's very busy in that stance and a definitely, definitely seeing that on one one continuum on the other continuum. I had some conversations with folks who were also busy, their calendars are pretty, pretty full. But they're setting aside time to talk about, you know, here's what I'm seeing for the 2020 strategy. Here's the focus of the sales team. As as the sales leadership is meeting, this is what I'm, I'm hearing in the meetings across the different sales segments that I support the different sales channels. And you know, what I'm obsessed about and I'm worried about the talk track of my function, and how valuable it is and what its perceived like by these executives. And, you know, I'm not so much that Brian concerned about if I'm, like, I'm concerned about am I considered valuable to the go to market strategy, and I need more numbers, I need more analytics, I need to be able to tell this story better and that's what's keeping me busy in finding the right talent is a secondary, but it's more about, you know, quality of impact, not quantity. So those are the two continuum, everybody's busy but it's like two different types of busy and I've had both of those conversations and they, they couldn't be any more different to bee honest with you. That's what I'm seeing, what about you?Scott Santucci 05:11Yeah. So, the way that I would characterize it is it is twofold. I think that there is, on the one hand, there is the I have I have gotten into the role of sales enablement as the head of broken things, right. I'm a powerful person. I have made my name of fixing broken things, the thing that I look for things that are broken, I go to try to fix them. There's so many broken things, I have to go fix it. And you sort of get that mindset of, you know, my team really can't do it. No one else really can do it. I have to just do it. And there's just never enough cycles. There's never enough time in a day. And really, the way I would characterize it is that's being busy because that's what you think you're valuing proposition is the head of broken things. Whereas the flip side is in a role like sales enablement, which is, you know, frankly funnily defined, in even well chartered groups of which we see maybe less than 25%. Brian, I would consider a well chartered function, even those don't nearly have enough time to do all the internal selling required just because the amount of change that's happening in the selling environment and the multitude of different very strong perspectives about what's required to improve sales is it is overwhelming. So, there's the other side of busy which is how do we keep up with all of the demand and all the expectations? That's that would be more how I how I would characterize it sort of bucket number one. I'm busy Most of that's a self-fulfilling prophecy because I believe that my value is because I'm the head of I fix things, I need to be valued, because that's why people value me. That's why we have this department. So, you're always going to be busy. Because that's what you're looking for, you're looking for symptoms to treat, and put them out, put those fires out quickly. Whereas there's the other form of busy, which is maybe you've made maybe you've accomplished something like really standardized on the CPQ price quote system, or maybe you've simplified Salesforce or something like that. There's a lot of maintenance that goes with fixing that. But then what do you do next? But that would be how I could characterize it. Does that map to what you're seeing? Yeah,Brian Lambert 07:45yeah. And then to make this, you know, tangible for folks there's, you know, in the busy of attending the meetings versus the busy of heading the meetings and calling the meetings and organizing the cross functional team to fix something. You know, I think that's a good litmus test on how many meetings are you really running? What are you really controlling in that type of busy is completely different just to bring that home at a individual level? And then Scott, you know, as we lead into our topic for today, you know, we've talked about this. And we're seeing these these patterns develop of where sales enablement teams and are spending their time and what types of initiatives they're running, for example, some might be focused on messaging are where I spent a lot of time on the people and performance and training side of sales enablement. And you've developed over time, a lot of understanding of this type of scope. And, you know, we've been talking about these areas, which we were calling flavors of sales enablement. They'd be great to walk through that can you can you share the framework?Scott Santucci 09:01Sure. So, what it is it's it's a observational framework backed by a lot of practical, practical experience. And what it really comes down to is, if you are we delineated the two types, right? type number one is, hey, I am valuable because I get stuff done. And that's, that's the premise of my department. What I'm about to talk to you, you're probably going to reject everything, you're going to say this sounds too theoretical. What's my action? And, you know, frankly, what am I going to ask you to do is think about is it is fixing symptoms really valuable? Or is creating is elevating your function and create and actually proactively addressing the source of the symptoms is that's what's valuable. Yeah, that's really the second bucket. Right.Brian Lambert 09:55And I just wanted to quickly that's great point. There's there's what How everybody shows up to you as a sales enablement leader, let's park that and what people are asking for and what they're bombarding you with. And well, what are the inputs? I let's just, let's just talk about you and your role. And what is what is your value? What do you what do you think you should be? What do you need to be as a functional leader? And, you know, I like that dichotomy, Scott of are you fixing the broken things? Or are you doing something different? And that's regardless of how people are showing up to you right now in this conversation.Scott Santucci 10:30Yeah. And I think that the best way to, you know, park that right to create the space of it. I love this quote from Henry Ford. If I would ask customers what they want. They want a faster horse. It you have so much inbound demand about what you should be doing. If you just take that all on. You're just making faster horses instead of cars, right. So, let's make that pivot. And let's recognize that the full scope of all of this Things that sales enablement could touch is so galactically huge. We could look at this and say, sales is about driving revenue or bookings. And enablement is about doing anything to make that make that easier. So, with that scope with that huge, gigantic scope, we're basically talking about a function that is the connective tissue of all of the different silos inside the company. Obviously, that scope is too gigantic for any one group to really tackle. But you have to be able to move outside of, hey, our sales kickoff stinks. We need to have somebody just had better sales, kickoffs, let's tap you on the shoulder to go fix it. So, there's a balance between the two. So, what we've identified is there's four big chunks that you can fix that really go around fixing friction that exists among the sales organization and different functional groups. And that's really where a lot of these problems exist in the first place. Because customers don't really care about your organizational politics and you know, who reports to who they care about getting the answers. So, what we're going to do is we're going to walk through these four, we're going to do it one at a time. All right. Does that make sense?Brian Lambert 12:30Yeah, I like it.Scott Santucci 12:31Okay. So, the first function, the first chunk, of that big giant area is the chunk around talent. That talent you can look at and a lot of different ways. But let's just first talk about all of the different activities, or things that are involved in talent. Talent starts with hiring. So, the whole process of figuring out what kind of stuff Sales Rep do we need in the first place? To how do we go and recruit them or pay for them? All of that stuff all the way through to evaluating and, you know, improving reps. There's a whole lot that goes into talent. And then when you think about all the stuff that goes into talent, let's talk about all the functions involved. Finances involved because they have to improve approve the headcount in the first place. Different groups within HR involved from from the jeez every HR group is organized differently, but you have some basic functions like leadership development, you're gonna have sort of performance, HR performance people, you're gonna have recruiters and your l&d department might work in your your human resources group. Each one of those departments may or may not interact with each other. Then when you go to the sales organization Who's the primary interface point? Who's the primary interface point from the on taking? The, you know, how are we going to make requests of new hires? Is that an individual sales manager that does that get funneled through through sales operations? What role does sales enablement play in terms of, hey, we've got this amount of inbound calls, do you have foresight into onboarding? And when does onboarding begin and end? There's a whole slew of things under talent. So, the way that we like to look at talent is it's the process of recruiting, retaining, and developing the right people. That's sort of the scope of it. There are many different departments involved, the benefit to salespeople are better and more skilled reps and improvement. And we look at that as a business process from hire to retire. So that's, that's really the first bucket.Brian Lambert 14:56Yeah, like that. And you know, you talked about functions. And some of the titles that I've seen in there are, indeed, you know, l&d. I've seen sales enablement, have that title of sales enablement, but the scope is around the talent piece. And in the talent piece, they're really focused on, for example, just the onboarding slice. And so, there's an opportunity there to expand if you are in the talent piece, or flavor to think about, you know, how do you branch into recruiting and then also the ongoing development area to really improve the the, you know, the rep experience from hired through retire?Scott Santucci 15:38Yeah, so I think what we can do is we can zoom in and have a show on each one of the flavors to provide more context. But really, what we want to highlight would be the scope of what you're looking for, and who are the departments or the stakeholders whom you need to work with. What is the business process that this this would entail so that you can manufacture something and Produce sustainable results? And then what is the measurable impact on the sales organization?Brian Lambert 16:06Great. Let's go to the next flavor.Scott Santucci 16:09Okay, so the next flavor is really about the friction that exists between marketing and sales. And I personally do not like marketing and sales alignment that sounds like we're going to get a bunch of guitars together hold hands and sing Kumbaya. It is beyond alignment, it must be integrated. And so, what we're what we're looking at is let's think about it this way. If we get our talent, right, let's say that we develop the best course ever. We've got the most skilled reps in the entire industry. When they show up, they still have to talk about something. Right, that message of what they talk about, doesn't come from training. It comes from the synthesis of information from individual product Marketers. You might have solution experts, you might have vertical overlays. Think about all of the people in different departments that have a variety of subject matter expertise, and strong opinions about how to take your company's messaging and positioning and making it relevant to the individual human beings that salespeople engage with. So, we call this bucket or flavor message. And in message, it's about translating all of the stuff about your company into conversational specific things. And the business process that we look at it is concept to contact. And what that means really is when you go when we go and talk to a lot of customers, one of the things that are people like you, I really like to ask so you know, what do we sell? Who do we sell to? And why do they buy? And to me, those are the elements everybody should know those answers, but very few companies can give me consistent answers. And where they stumble the most is the who they give me personas. But personas aren't good enough. We need to be a salesperson must find somebody with an altitude level and a leadership position to drive a new thing forward. They have to have the right access to budgets or, you know, the ability to assemble budgets. And they have to have the right you know, sort of confidence level to be able to do this because let's face it, we're introducing something new into these into these clients. And there's a big change management component that is risky to most to most people. So really, what we're talking about here is how do you orchestrate all that messaging and move it away from being product focused, and to be make it more success or outcome I have major major transformation.Brian Lambert 19:02Absolutely. And that you get, you know, when you do that the fuel for customer conversations. And, you know, there there are multiple roles in the organization that benefit from that not, you know, there's sales and there's also customer service and solution architects, etc. So, there's a lot of stakeholders involved in that. And if you are in the talent space as a listener, and you're like, Well, you know, that's outside my scope, that's fine. The question I would also then ask or just think about is, are we still talking

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 24Right now, growth is anyone's turf. Growth can be aligned to the sales department, the marketing department, business operations or the strategy team. Everyone "owns" the customer, and very few people have the answer when it comes to creating sustainable impact and success.Today, only a few organizations have more strategic sales enablement capability aligned to the growth. The ones that do fold them into commercial operations or report directly to the CEO. While many Sales Enablement leaders aspire to become the Go-to-Market partner of the CEO, the reality on social media is quite different.  The key question: Why are you here? Why does Sales Enablement even Exist?Looking at the blogs, content, and discussions, there is certainly a big gap between the aspiration of Sales Enablement and the reality faced by many in the role. Transformation is happening in many sales organizations, but sales enablement is often a tactical "get stuff done" aspect of tactical decision making.In this episode, the guys as a great question: "Are You Providing Strategic Sales Enablement or Are You the Land of Misfit Toys?" The answer to this question will determine your impact and success including:allocating resources to projects you believe are most important.defining who you report intobalancing the completion "fast tasks" with "strategic ongoing business impact"That current state “island” of sales enablement is chaotic... it’s reactive. It’s where all the misfit initiatives are inherited by the VP of "broken things" end up.In this podcast, you'll hear actionable approaches and real-world examples on how to balance the short-term with the long-term impact required to support transformations. Using examples such as onboarding and training, the guys talk about the strategies you need to help sellers get what they need to be successful.  They will also share the discomfort many people have in being strategic (hang in there when you're listening!). The reward: Throughout the podcast, you'll learn how to do WITH sales, and stop doing TO sales.As Jack Welch once said; "Control your own destiny or someone else will."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:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome 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 joined 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 00:34I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:36Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:49Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants, or practitioners. We learned the hard way what works and maybe Maybe what most important, what doesn't?Brian Lambert 01:03In a previous episode, we talked about who the customer is of sales enablement. And we answered that as the person who decided on your role and invested in it. Your department often exists based on a challenge as someone in your organization wants to address and how you scope it matters. And today we're going to talk about why you're in this specific situation that you're in. And we're going to compare and contrast the different situations in order to help you move forward in next year's 2020. And also take action in a way that makes most sense for your organization. So as usual, we start with a centering story to give our episode a scene. So, Scott, take it away from here.Scott Santucci 01:46So, we're recording after Thanksgiving, so we thought maybe a holiday theme would be would be very appropriate. And what holiday what Christmas holiday story wouldn't be great without a whole conversation about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.Brian Lambert 02:02That's right, lay it on them.Scott Santucci 02:04Here. Here we are at the sales a day wood insiders podcast and we've talked about things like mendeleev and his periodic table. We recently talked about the Edsel. We're talking about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. And you know the story about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. He's tired of just being viewed as a as a parlor trick. So, him and Henry the elf, the elf, or if you remember, he's the elf that doesn't want to help. He wants to be a dentist. So, they go off to just on their own journey. And they run into, they land on an island, and that island is the island of what? Ah, it's the actually the land of Misfit Toys. The land, that's right, the land of Misfit Toys. Yep, thanks. And they run into that line. His name's King Moonracer.Brian Lambert 03:02I didn't know that.Scott Santucci 03:03You didn't know it was King Moonracer?Brian Lambert 03:07Is that the point of the story? Not just kidding.Scott Santucci 03:09Thats the point right to educate you on on Christmas tales. Actually Bob Britton. I wouldn't be surprised if he would send you send me a note. Because he, he likes the king King moon racer reference. But really, what is he the king of he's this land of Misfit Toys. And there's all of these toys that aren't good enough that were rejected by Santa to get to give toys to kids. And one of them. Like one of one of these toys that's particularly funny to me as a kite. And it's Miss fitness, is it, is afraid of heights.Brian Lambert 03:45That's right. And you know, when I first watched this, you know, I was not creeped out at all of this children's tale.Scott Santucci 03:54Right so there's all these different methods and King moon racer unites them and you know brings them together and makes them find meaning and the like. So that's, that's our story.Brian Lambert 04:06Wow, that's interesting. So, what effect does that have to do with sales enablement? Are you saying that we're misfits or we inherited misfit toys?Scott Santucci 04:16Well, it's a story that that resonates. So, this is how does it relate? There's two reasons. So, for those of you who don't who don't know, Brian and I, were, were involved at at Forrester, way back in as early as 2008 started my sales at a one research carcass. And back then, um, you know, there was a whole bunch of what is sales enablement? There were a lot of definition for it. Now, we probably have way too many definitions that were probably at the same. I think we were probably more clear about what it was back then. But a metaphor we use this metaphor a lot to describe the role. And really the role is, you know, the head of broken things. You are King moon racer of your own organization, you've been inherited, you might have inherited her a little less, a lot of those early sales enablement professionals would inherit things that maybe the marketing department wanted to touch. Things that sales managers didn't want to touch, things that sales VP didn't want to touch, and things that sales operations didn't want to touch. So wonderful things like simplifying the CRM system, or selecting new technologies to use, because vendors will come in and make, you know, make make briefings or, you know, fixing you know, various other broken things like the price configuration management system, things like that. So that's, that's really the Nicholas and the second reason that that, that maps is many of the people in the sales enablement side of which, you know, Brian and I were very instrumental and started actually, you know, Nico and Brian, up in February or in January of 2016, saying, hey, maybe we should start our local area networking group, and a lot of people who are really some of the first members of the sales enablement society really looked at that as a, that is also a metaphor. And we're a collection of people who are trying to get together to figure this stuff out. So those are what those are ways that uh why why it matches.Brian Lambert 06:23Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, since that time, it continues. And maybe they're not broken things, but they're the land of maybe cool and cutting-edge things such as, you know, ai driven coaching or role-based applications for learning, right? So, not only have sales enablement, leaders, maybe inherited broken things, but they're, they're piloting some cool stuff too. Right? So, I don't know what what island that is, but I like the metaphor because in both both situations these are items that that are maybe one off or a little bit outside the norm. Business as usual in both Yeah.Scott Santucci 07:07Yeah, maybe it's sort of it's the island of broken things are you exist to fix problems and Island shiny things is your your job is to help us figure out how to take advantage of it, you know, enable it, right? activate it. Either way, you're outside of the mainstream. And as we all know, the mainstream, the standard operating procedure is pretty aggressive. You know, pretty pretty. There's a lot of culture that goes around that and being outside of those those two windows is can put you in a tough spot.Brian Lambert 07:38Yeah, exactly. And it's also a tough spot because of the nature of the transformation that many companies are going under. I think when you look at growth today, and what companies are doing to drive new business models, new revenue streams, evolve their platforms. Become become more of a, you know, all inclusive, one stop shop for technology and bring new capabilities to market growth, it really becomes the mandate and it's it's almost anybody's turf. It could be products turf, marketing's turf sales, obviously and the CEOs really trying to drive and pull these different level levers and one of the levers that he or she is pulling is this idea of sales enablement, as as a growth driver, however, you know, Scott, you and I have both talked about this. We don't see that an awful lot. But where are those folks are doing it and becoming the other side of the go to market, you know, the execution side of go to market. They're pretty busy, and they're not hanging out at these conferences that many people are going to, and they don't necessarily want to hear from vendors about the strategies that they should be engaging in to drive the go to market forward. And there's a big gap between what I would say the aspiration is and what they're tackling versus the reality that's unfolding out on the internet or the web or even in job boards or sales enablement society postings, etc. And I think that gap, I would say is really around, you know, why are we here? And I like the misfit toy analogy because it really gets to the question of why are we here? What do you what do you think about that?Scott Santucci 09:23So, I think that's great. I think what you've done is have provided a great landscape. So first of all, in the overall market, we all know, sales transformation is happening in the overall landscape. Then within your company, these things are happening, whether they're being actively discussed to where you can see it is a different story. But if you're a sales enablement professional, you're probably stuck in the Hey, I'm in the I've got the bright shiny toys and I've got the broken toys and I am really struggling, struggling or trying to make carve out a niche or add value in the audience. Operating rhythm that our Salesforce is in right now. So, the challenge that that creates is it creates a situation where, if you're a sales enablement professional are probably thinking, hey, a lot of the stuff that you talked about Brian is interesting, but I can't afford to think about that stuff that sounds too theoretical to strategic. I got a I got to keep my nose to the grindstone and just execute. That's a gut reaction that we typically hear another reaction that you might be feeling sort of like when you go home from work and wonder, you know, did I add value today? At am I being valued? Go home and think about, you know, talk with your talk with your spouse about whether you should get a raise or not, or you know, whether or not you can go ask for next round of funding next, next next year. All of these different questions that you got going on in yourself and you just don't know. Why don't you know, why are those things clear? You don't know, because you don't really have control of managing expectations of what your department is. And maybe you think you do, because you think it's really, really, really, really, really clear my clarity my wall is very specific. It's clear on my mbo's, and all I have to do is execute those mbo's every quarter. And I show that I'm hitting those mbos every quarter, I'm valuable because somebody else has defined what that value is. But the reality is, is that many, many sales enablement leaders talk to us. Is this a common theme? I wonder if you you run into this to Brian, is that many sales leaders I talked to say I'm really frustrated. The company just thinks that I'm just a trainer. And sales enablement is so much more. Yeah, that's right. Just like a trainer. Yeah,Brian Lambert 11:51I've seen I've heard that. But I've also heard you know, if the executive team would find us more, we could do more. And I think you're spot on between this this area of, you know, super tactical, I get stuff done, versus the handful that are, you know, helping figure out what to do, you know, figure stuff out strategically, what are we going to do here. And then there's the get stuff done crowd in the middle is this gray area and you get kind of buffeted around by the forces, you know, it feels like you're maybe on a, you know, on on a ride there, and it's in that ride of your life. You know, things start coming up, like you're pointing out, Scott, and, you know, how do you get control of that? How do you enter into the rhythm of the business and drive as a valuable partner?Scott Santucci 12:40Yeah. So, you have, we're going to use a case study here. And Brian and I are going to solve two different ways, but there's really only three choices that you have. So, this is the good news, right? The good news is in the world of complexity and all the swirling dervish that we've just talked about, you really only have three choices. Right, so here they are choice number one, you can decide or believe, whichever it is you can decide that the way that you personally are going to add value to the company is say yes to as many as many people as possible. I am enabling your success, they're coming to me because they're asking me for, I gotta say, yes. Completing the tasks at a high quality. You know, we make sure that they're done well, they have the right polish. We get them on on getting them done on deadline and maybe your internal brand as I get shit done. That's choice number one. Choice number two, you can do the things and then wait with choice number one, really, the whole idea is if I keep doing more of that if I keep working hard, obviously somebody's gonna value our department, expand our scope and you know, give me a raise, and give me the resources that I need to do more. The second scenario is, well, I want to I want to take more than that and control my hand, so I want to plant the seed. So, I'm going to do everything that I'm doing in number one, you know, concentrating on getting stuff done. But I'm going to take some of these reports that I'm seeing, and I'm going to start sending them off to people, I'm going to start positioning my department, and I'm hopeful that these reports will allow a VP of sales to go wow, this sales man was way more than than training or, wow, I had no idea how complicated your, your, your function is, I should give you a promotion or what will you know, whatever, whatever your goal is. That's scenario number two. And scenario scenario number three is to campaign more proactively go and start talking to the individual department leaders. Talk to them and give them insights about challenges that they're running into and help them see what the real problems are let them let them dwell on it and then let wait to ask for your you know, how you can help, and you know really illuminate and elevate the elevate the function.Brian Lambert 15:14So those are those are three areas so number one if you're following along as the gets to get stuff done. Two would be sending up reports and data to help in you know, drive orScott Santucci 15:25Well, I wouldn't say data, I would say external reports. So, number three is you're providing insights, that's your own data, your own analysis.Brian Lambert 15:33Okay. And number two is maybe external thought leadership reports, etc. Yeah. Okay, gotcha. So, and then there's pros and cons to each of these and but what we're going to do before we get into that is tell a little bit of a have a situation that our listeners can participate in. So, we're going to use onboarding and the reason why we're gonna use onboarding is a lot of people are engaged in that in some form or fashion. And then one and then and then number two is if they're not engaged in it now, they probably will be at some point. So, we're going to use that as a way to have a shared experience here. And what I'm going to do is, I'll be I'll be, you know, in camp one to get stuff done crowd in basically talking about tasks, etc. And the Scott will be talking about, you know, area three about being more proactively managing and defining the value contribution to the function. So, from an onboarding perspective, you know, let's just say we we have a program already, and that program is a two-week boot camp, we have regularly scheduled classes, and the ask is, by by the management team, sales managers as well as our bosses to look at how we shorten it and then also have We add different skills to it. So that's the, that's the simple scenario. Is that good with you, Scott?Scott Santucci 17:07Sure. Okay.Brian Lambert 17:09So, I'll be reactive guy, my reactive guy, what I'll do, and how I might action is, I would do a bit of research, I would figure out trends, figure out through my own experience, what, what I might want to do to provide some, some topics through elearning because everybody else is doing it. I would build a bulleted list of what we're going to do. And then I give it to my boss and ask for permission to go and once I got it, I would go do that. And then then I would communicate what we're doing to sales. And I would make sure...