Inside: Sales Enablement

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 23Sales enablement leaders work at the intersection of sales leadership, marketing, product, and operations to help engineer and elevate sales conversations. As Sales Enablement pros work across these stakeholder groups they often experience very high expectations, leading to challenges and friction if not handled well.If you are a sales enablement professional, you know there are a lot of people to serve. You also know that they aren't all your customers, and you can't treat everyone who wants something the same. So, the question is, how do you parse people out? Who do you listen to?  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 00:36Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast 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, I've worked in over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives as analyst, consultants, or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works and maybe more importantly, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:03That's right, Scott. And today on this show, what we're going to discuss everybody is, who is the customer of sales enablement? That's right. It's a kind of a Zen question, but who is our customer? And as usual, we're going to start with a centering story. Give our episode of scene. So, Scott, what do you have for us?Scott Santucci 01:22Well, I feel like I'm going in a way, way, way forward machine here with a story that starts in 1958, not 1858, if you've been listening to our our show. In 1958, the executives at Ford got pretty much religion on this, this new thing about market research. So, if you've been following maybe watch madman and you realize that, you know, the advertising industry was really starting to evolve in the late 50s and early 60s, and that's actually a true thing. And they started doing market research. And the executives at Ford got this great idea. What if we did market research to design a car? Makes sense, right? So, they surveyed lots of users or lots of cuts or users, that's a modern term, lots of customers about what they want to see in a car. And they design this car based on this feedback of all these people, they're going to get massive market share because they made sure that they got every type of person involved from older people, people with families, single single people, people want to have people who wanted to, you know, a family environment, took all that information. And they designed a car for everybody. And they roll it out expecting marriage is going to clean house and dominate market share. You know what the name of that product was?Brian Lambert 02:57Was it the Edsel?Scott Santucci 02:59It was the Edsel yeah, and the Edsel claim by 1960. By 1960 they pulled it from the shelf. So, it's just a two-year life cycle, which is not a long time for any kind of car. And they invested so much money that in 1960, they reported a loss of $250 million on that initiative. $250 million. That's a lot of money isn't it, Brian.Brian Lambert 03:29Well, I'm sure in 1960, it was.Scott Santucci 03:32Well, it made a lot of money for today, I mean, losing $250 million. No one's gonna write that one, write that in a statement. That's what they'll give you. Let's put it in the frame. Let's frame it out, though. In if that were today, the scope of that failure would have been $2.2 billion dollars, without the headlines that would have on msnbc or what we'd be here to talk about the huge catastrophic failure before?Brian Lambert 04:02Hmm. Well, gee, that's, that's interesting because they did the research and they probably saw the huge market opportunity, built the car that hit all the customer feedback and had a colossal failure. So that's interesting. And what do you what do you think? What what why that story with regard to who is our customer?Scott Santucci 04:28Yeah, so what is so white right? What does that have to do with anything? The reason it has anything to do with why we're talking about it and the theme for today sales enablement? Who is your customer? is because when Ford the Ford executives designed the Edsel for everybody, they actually made it for nobody. And that's really what we're finding a lot of is a lot of people. There's a bunch of definitions about what sales enablement is or isn't. There's a lot of terminology that people keep debating at the end of the day, if you're not really clear on who your customers are, and servicing, it doesn't really matter.Brian Lambert 05:11Yeah. So, let me let me pop quiz are our nation, insider nation? Pop quiz. I'll give you three seconds to answer this question, Who who's the customer of sales enablement? Let's answer that question Who is the customer sales enablement? And I'm willing to guess if you're like most people, you're probably saying sales, or you're running down a huge list of people that you talk to or work with. So, you know, Scott, what do you think is that the right way to think about it is the first group that comes to mind are the people you're working with on a day-to-day basis?Scott Santucci 05:51Right, so the words the functions called sales enablement, of course sales is our customer, right?Brian Lambert 05:57That's rightScott Santucci 06:00I would beg to differ. Your customer is the person who gives you money.Brian Lambert 06:05Period. Yeah, you're a second. So, okay, so are you so a customer in business is somebody who definitely gives you money, I'll give you that. Take your wallet out by your ice cream, you're a customer of that ice cream place. Um, in this case and sales enablement, you're saying the same thing literally, that's not that's not a analog. That's a, that's a literal statement.Scott Santucci 06:31Your customer is the the person who's who's the department or whoever is giving who's funding your department or funding you if you're a one man show. If you're a one-man band, your customer is whoever's paying your check. Who you serve, may be salespeople. But a salesperson isn't going to write you a check. They're not your customers. Your customer is the person who's giving you the check. So, you have two variables here you have what your customer wants. And then you have the way that you're going to give them what they want. You service, the Salesforce. So right there you have you might have, you might be at odds with different people. And it's important to think about why my customer is the person who's giving me the money, who I serve is people in Salesforce.Brian Lambert 07:30Yeah. So, this is good. So, let's, let's, let's kind of pull this out. Right. So, you've got two buckets. And let's just say the whole entire group is, you know, people, and we broke the people into two groups. One is our customer, and that's who gives us the money. And I think that would be good to understand that because sometimes that money is centralized, and you just given a budget. So, we were probably let's, let's make sure we talked about how do we know who that customer is and then the second bucket I'll just call it stakeholders, you know, CFC stakeholders and customers. And the stakeholder bucket is the folks that we work with marketing, product sales, salespeople, our stakeholders, even, you know, the impacted groups. And I think there's a lot of impacted groups, it puts us in sales enablement. In a rock between a rock and a hard place. Basically, you have all these, you know, competing inputs, different priorities, different asks from from both groups, stakeholders and customers. And I, I can see where you're going with this. Because if you lose sight of who's in what bucket, you may take different types of action. And then sometimes, and I've seen this, in the folks that I've talked to, sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the most service because they're the loudest, is that really want to be serving is the person who's got the loudest opinion?Scott Santucci 08:52Does that put you in a spot or where you add the most value?Brian Lambert 08:55That's right. That's right. So, what do you think about that cost? buckets. stakeholder bucket?Scott Santucci 09:02Yeah, let's go yeah, let's go through some scenarios. There are, I think we identified three or four classic places where a sales enablement department can report into. Yeah. And let's, let's talk through, like, if you report into who you report into is your customer.Brian Lambert 09:25Okay, okay. Yeah, so what about, let's say, marketing, if you report into marketing, that senior VP CMOS, your customer, that who would be the people we serve are the stakeholders that we're working with?Scott Santucci 09:44Right, so if if you are reporting to the CMO, and you're the head of sales enablement, why do you report there? What is it that he or she wants? He or she wants to be able to improve how the company is delivering messages through the sales channel to be able to be differentiated. So, who do you serve? You serve one, the people who have messaging inside the marketing department to make it more sales accessible. That's one person you serve. You may even serve the product people to make it more translate translatable. You might be serving product launches and how to get the word out to sales. You also are servicing salespeople. Since your remit in that area probably won't include training. So, you are servicing information about your products and services and about differentiation. So, you are servicing salespeople by helping them with the information required for a launch where the information to differentiate or some some messaging that's who you're servicing and how you're servicing them.Brian Lambert 11:04So, if I'm a sales leader, and I come to you and your reporting in the marketing, I say, you know, hey, you should really take over that sales kickoff, you know, you're better at it. What would be your answer?Scott Santucci 11:17Well, I would say, are you going to give us funding for that?Brian Lambert 11:22Right, because it's out of your scope. Right now.Scott Santucci 11:24It well, it's, it's that is not a service that my customer is offering that's outside of the marketing span of control. So, I'd say let's go talk to our boss. So, I would go talk to my boss, the CMO. And I'd say, look, this is a great opportunity it's a great platform for us to provide a foundation to deliver lots of messages, we should do this. And they would say that makes a lot of sense that's great because it's part of your mission. You're right. It does give us a better platform. We should do it. Then we got we negotiate and say what do we want for in exchange? So, what are you going to give us? Are you going to give us the budget for it because we're not going to pay for the whole budget for it? You You already have a budget for sales kickoffs. So, let's use your budget, let's use your resources.Brian Lambert 12:18Right. So, send us the money plus two people or whatever. Yeah, right.Scott Santucci 12:22Yeah. And we'll, we'll happily do it.Brian Lambert 12:25Okay, let's go to the next one.Scott Santucci 12:26Yep.Brian Lambert 12:28Let's see a sales op. So, if I'm reporting it Ops, I'm a sales leader, a sales enablement leader reporting to ops and I'm probably, you know, working on the kickoff or sales process work, maybe even, you know, forecasting, pipeline reporting, stuff like that.Scott Santucci 12:48Okay, so these are again, each of these scenarios by the way, a disclaimer, each of these scenarios are going to be different. We need to make sure you're clear on what it is that each each one of your customers want. But let's, let's say a classic VP of or head of sales operations, if you're reporting there, they're probably looking at a bunch of functional capabilities that they need to have they need to possess. So, for example, it is very common that a sales Operations Group is going to look at the functionality of the sales force and what the capabilities are, whether we have the right skills and the right talent to be able to execute the sales model. Okay, so what they'll say is, you know, what, we need a talent pillar or talent component of that. We call that sales enablement. And I expect you as the sale, they probably won't say that. They'll just describe, you know, you know, what we're looking for, but this is what your job is to do is to make sure it's clear what's expected of you. What is the service, what does the customer want, but really what what they're looking for is probably adoption of the sales methodology that they've that they've worked on with the VP of sales. So, who am I servicing, I am servicing the I am servicing the sales managers and the sales leadership on first educating them on that sales methodology, how it works, how they can, how they can make it work, and then providing training for that? I might also own very specific tasks, like new hire training, but maybe even managing kickoffs, and we talked about the sales kickoff before I might manage those. So, I could I am servicing the sales force through that lens.Brian Lambert 14:46Yeah, and all that is to be to be determined discussions would happen then obviously, that would get documented in the charter and socialized so everybody understands. who your customer is of sales enablement? And then to who you're servicing and who you're working with and the stakeholders impacted, including dependencies, I would say like, what are you dependent upon? What do you need from people to pull off your, your services? And what's that working relationship?Scott Santucci 15:19And let me reiterate why this is so important. why it's so important is because let's take the sales kickoff, for example. If you are in this role in your report in a sales operation, you're going to feel obligated to make sure that all the content, all the kickoff stuff is all organized, all well done, etc. So, you're going to take on a lot more extra work. If you say my job is managing the kickoffs, and you can delineate roles and responsibilities and say, Hey, marketing, you need to get us this material a week before and it needs to be in this format, and we're going to roleplay how we present it then you spend less work and you're putting the work on to the people who are plugging into it. Obviously, you can't say that to your CEO who's going to show up at the last moment, you know, with their content. But that's how you manage that by saying this is what my remit is, and this is what my focus is, and my focus is on the head of sales operations.Brian Lambert 16:20Cause they're my primary customer.Scott Santucci 16:22They are they are my customer period. Yeah. Now, you'd have to be conscious about who their customers are. Right? Those are yours, they're secondary, so you know how your services fitting into an overall plan. But especially if you talk to stakeholders that are outside of your, you know, daily remit, they're going to want to know how it all fits together, so you should be aware of it. But it's just this intentionality and focus is really important in terms of establishing roles and responsibilities and more importantly, your workload, the quality of work that you provide, and the resources that you getBrian Lambert 17:00So where does the VP of Sales fit in these scenarios? If you're working under marketing and Ops, and those are your customers, what's the what's the role of the VP of sales, then the sales leadership?Scott Santucci 17:13Well, then the VPS in terms of the CMO, the CMO is the one who should pair up with a relationship with this VP of sales. I might be an account, we might work it out to where I clear the account manager role, you know, a liaison, but I should always have meetings with both of those together. Always. And sort of facilitate it is not my responsibility to build the relationship there. It's my responsibility to help the VP of Sales beat VP of Marketing have a better relationship there. My job is to make my customer, the hero. If the VP of Marketing is going engaged with the sales leaders, then that's what needs to be done. If he or she does doesn't want to work with it with the sales leaders, we didn't make that clear. It's our job to make sure that our customers are successful. So that means we might say we you need to participate, let me get you prepared let me give you you know, some of that feedback. You don't want to be in unnatural spots. Same thing with a with a with the head of sales operations. Here's the feedback that I'm going to give you. Let's rehearse beforehand what our messaging is. How are we going to tackle it? What's my role? What's your role?Brian Lambert 18:30Yeah. So that VP of sales is then what is that a the the beneficiary of the work that you're doing as a stakeholder it's not it's not a customer. Because you're if you're the CMO is the customer is the VP of sales, you're the benefit beneficiary.Scott Santucci 18:48I am in service of right so the value that the VP of Sales gets from New Hire training. He's a that's the benefit that he gets out of it. Everybody in our organization gets the benefit of the new hire training that I'm doing, say and if I'm reporting to have a sales op, sales ops, the customer is likely the VP of sales. So, we got a different, a different, a different situation to sort out, though I am responsible for providing capabilities that my boss, the VP of operations provides back. Gotcha. It's important, you know, you know that, so you don't start thinking that you're like, the king of everything, and then you get out of alignment with your with your boss. It's not good.Brian Lambert 19:39Right so whatScott Santucci 19:42What's another scenario,...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 22What happens when you go through a major organizational change and need to redefine your sales enablement operating model, vision, mission? During times of change, how do you frame out your sales enablement "moon shots" in order to engage strategically and tactically to overcome the internal complexity that bogs sellers down?On this podcast, Brian and Scott talk to Sandra about her stakeholders within the business how she might re-frame the relationships she has in her company in order to get closer to the business while also elevating her role to a strategic function. Topics on this podcast include:Sales Enablement operating modelStakeholder managementDefining your sales enablement domain / sandboxCommunicating with clarityBreaking through internal perceptionsFocusing on what matters to sellers and sales managers Key questions the guys talk through with Sandra include:- How do you evolve from a department of tactical projects to a strategic function?- What relationships does she leverage to gain more influence?- How might she define and clarify her sales enablement operating model- How do you become a truly cross-functional role to support sales team conversations?- How do you devote attention to building a team that propels sales effectiveness forwardJoin 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.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 00:33I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:35Brian 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, issues as analysts, consultants, or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works and maybe most importantly, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 00:59That's right. Our podcast is a bit different. We use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people who've been there and done that can provide, as we've been pushing the envelope in the profession for over a decade. And today, Scott, we've got a very special guest. We've got Sandra, from a large company, who's joining us in response to our podcasts. And as you know, we talked about in Episode 20, that conversation on the Securities Exchange Exchange Act and how CEOs look at sales enablement, and we outlined the strategic definition of sales enablement that we published in 2010. And in response to that, podcast, Sandra reached out and wanted to talk to us about some of the things that we were sharing. And so here she is, she's gonna put us on the spot.Scott Santucci 01:47That's excellent. And I'm really looking forward to that. I'm Look, I love as you know, I love getting challenged. And I also think that that's the best way for us to advance advance the role by challenging each other and and pushing ourselves but I love. I love the distinction about making making insiders. So good job on putting that together Brian.Brian Lambert 02:08Yeah, absolutely. And by the time she's done here, she'll be an official member of insider nation. So that'll be awesome. I did want to say also, um, you know, welcome Sandra to the show, appreciate you joining.Sandra 02:23Thank You.Brian Lambert 02:24Absolutely, and uhm when you and I were talking you brought up a lot of great points in our conversation and you shared a personal story in relation to understanding sales enablement, how to define the roll, and also you know when you're engaging inside your company sometimes it's hard to pivot to be something else to be more strategic. Can you share a little bit more about that and what you liked about episode 20?Sandra 02:49Absolutely, and thanks for having me on. I'm definitely getting a lot out of these podcasts and I hope others are as well. It sounds like oh, in order to become an official inside I have to explain what I liked about an episode.Brian Lambert 03:02That's right.Sandra 03:04So here goes, here's what I liked about Episode 20. And it did really resonate with me. You know, it's focused on grounding, any sales enablement function and a solid and consistent definition. And clarity helps everyone, and I love clarity. So that really resonated with me. And I like this idea of strategically consulting business problems. That really resonated with me as well. Instead of becoming tactical in nature, you want to solve the big problem and be more strategic. So, when I listened to that I reached out to brand because I started out that way. When I joined my company two years ago, you know, I started out very strategic, you know, I solve some big enablement problems that had been plaguing this company for years. It was very exciting, a lot of good change, and it created some consistency and clarity across the entire network. I did some things that actually changed the culture of the bank, but over time, i got caught up in being a door and a go to person for activities and less around strategy. And I wish I had stuck with that definition or had a definition that I could have stuck with that may have helped me get out of sort of this tactical space that I'm finding myself in. That said, I'm thinking about moving into another role at a different company, because it may be too late for me to get back into sort of that strategic space. So really, the main goal of me joining today is, you know, I want to find a way to engage with my company differently and redefine my role get back to that strategic space. Even though the ship may have sailed on that, you know, I'm a fighter, I want to go down swinging before I move on, and that way I've know I've tried everything before I move to another company. And in this conversation today, I think I can learn a lot from you on how to engage differently so that can help me in any future role.Brian Lambert 04:58Well, that's awesome. So, we've changed your name. So, you're not really Sandra. But that's the name we're using. And there's a lot of transparency there, right, you're in a bit of a change in position flux there. And I really, really appreciate you put yourself out there on the podcast to not only learn but to help others. I love that, that comment you made about helping others. And I know from my own background, that there are other people in this position that you're in. And it's really cool to see that you've come on. So, Scott, you know, we're in another one of our reality podcasts. So, you know, I'd love for you to jump in and share a little bit how this will work. And then you guys can get off and running. And I'll take, I'll take some notes.Scott Santucci 05:43Excellent. So, the way that this works is it's sort of like speed day consulting. What we're going to do is we're going to lead with some, some principles. So, let's talk about where Sandra and almost said the real name there. Where Sandra's situation is actually very, very common. So first of all, it's very, very common for somebody to run into the situation of where they thought they were being strategic, and now their environment not being strategic and wondering how is it them or what what's happening? So, on that point, what I like to share is in 1969, is what 50 years ago, right 5050 years ago this year, we actually put human beings put other human beings on the moon, and then we brought them back again. I mean, by all accounts is the most amazing achievement, right? What I think we don't recognize is that in 1972, we stopped doing it because Americans got bored. We got bored with putting people on the moon.Brian Lambert 06:56Yeah, we're done with that let's try something else.Scott Santucci 06:59Yeah. What are the Yankees gonna do this week? So, it's just really remarkable that when we go and do something amazing, and then we, you know, we have a culture of taking it for granted. So, the first thing is just because you've gotten to that point, Sandra doesn't necessarily mean that it's, it's with you. It's, it's, it's the fact that we have to resell that next, that next lunar mission. The other thing that I think is very common is if Brian and I have sort of a shorthand to think about the evolution of the role, we tend to believe that people go overboard on maturity models and make them too specific. We just want to provide some trajectory. So, what we see is that the evolution of the role if you can get in your mind's eye if you're driving to work right now, and and kind of can picture that evolution chart that I think we've all seen, that starts with monkeys and then then we get the caveman. And then we get the modern man that sort of picture. And think about evolution, one, sales enablement, people start out by being tapped on the shoulder to fix broken things, those broken things might be a fix our onboarding program or fix our fix our training program or whatever. Then what happens is the one of the departments that evolve actually start taking on many of those things. So, we'll take on the, you know, maybe be responsible for the sales training, the sales kickoff, and then maybe some frontline sales coaching or different things like that. And it becomes it becomes a department. And by getting coordination among those three parts, you get economies of scale. And then the third level of evolution is, hey, we need to start doing these things outside functions like we need to be coordinating between finance and sales. It'd be coordinating between human resources and sales and marketing and sales, and at that stage that, you know that highest level of evolution, the function is is very different. And each one of those three areas, it's very different. The reason I share that as a frame of reference, just hearing Sandra talk it, it really triggered those two things. So one is, I'd want to remind her and then we're going to talk a little bit about creating more fanfare and getting buy in and what it takes to do a lunar lunar type approach. And then the second thing would be, how can we use the maturity models as a way to think about what are other areas to tackle. So those are the things that if you're listening along what we're going to be following on and these are very, very common situations. And I'll say this last point. Before we get into the speed date part, the last point is, most people who've elevated their roles, leave their organizations, and go pursue a different company. And I'm going to talk about pros and cons with doing that on this call as well. So as that as a transition point, Sandra, how do you react to sort of the high-level observations I shared? And then I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions about where you are right now.Sandra 10:23Scott, it resonated really well. And I think what you said about space before, I mean, that's where I'm stuck in stage two, I want to find a way to get to stage three at my current company without having to leave and go somewhere else. You know, I built some strong connections where I am now, I'd really like to leverage all that I build to get into that stage three, without having to make a leap. But if that's what I need to do, given your advice today, then then that's what I'll do.Scott Santucci 10:56Well, no pressure on me on that one, huh? Right. Right. So, um, so let's talk about, uh, you know, stage to describe for me, what was the situation you inherited inside your existing company. And then you know what you've built up right now as sort of give me a from what to where you are right now.Sandra 11:19So, when I joined the company, there wasn't really a sales enablement function. So, I was brought in to create a sales enablement function. So before I built out a team, what I did is I met with all the stakeholders to identify what priorities they had, like what they thought we needed to do to best enable sales, I did a survey and we level set on four priorities because one of the things I realized is everybody had a different perspective on what success would look like and I was gonna make nobody happy without aligning to these, you know, sort of four common things that we needed to do and it was really around sales process, sales coaching, tools and resources and sort of this connection into the CRM. So, I set those priorities forward and then I i aligned with and I built a team of research trainers and I partnered with an outside vendor around the the enabling the coaching and the process. And then we did some real heavy communications. And we built sort of this cross functional team that also sort of started to manage, you know, the intake and triage of things that were coming into the organization because that was another challenge they had, which was they needed an air traffic controller person, because so much was hitting the front line and there was distraction there and we needed to focus on a consistent process. So, all of that was built out and we branded it internally and it's just part of the culture now in terms of process and how we have conversations, how we coach and our sales management practices. So that's sort of out there now and there's not sort of this next, ask around what the strategic priorities are. So, I'm left sort of executing on those things while I get requests for, you know, sales, kickoffs, and meetings and, you know, meeting cadence. So, there's just, yeah, it's just that the next big thing is coming my way. So how do I sort of get to that level three and and sort of get the next big assignment?Scott Santucci 13:29Right. Tell me more about this, the stakeholders that you currently worked with, and what their points of view where and the reason I'm asking this is twofold. One is, I'm trying to determine what departments are the stakeholders are who is it that you're working with? Maybe what wallets so sources? What budgets are you working with? Who might your internal customers be? And then also, I'm doing that because we Brian, and I've been really harping on a lot on the importance of stakeholder management. Who who are those stakeholders? Like what what are their roles?Sandra 14:05So, you know, the primary one is the head of the business. And you know, I have a really strong relationship with that individual. I've worked with him at a previous company. So, you know, fully engaged with him, also work very closely with our HR team. And you know, because they're the sort of the people, folks and there was some training involved in this. So, I really feel like I was at a solid level from an HR perspective, not so much the head of HR, but the business partner for that executive. You know, I worked with the head of marketing, I worked with the head of customer experience, because customer experience feeds what we train our folks on. And then, interestingly, somehow, I ended up with a really good relationship with a head of finance and in any role I've ever been in, you need the head of HR and the head of finance, right? You need those two things. If you're going to enable a sales team, and and nobody believed I could get the funding I got for the project. You know, I came in with a zero budget and was able to navigate, you know, a significant budget of people and expense in order to partner with an external vendor to bring in the right level of training. And somehow, I got the finance guy to trust me and and I don't know if it was my background or engaged the right stakeholders, but I was able to get a significant budget to execute on what I just talked about.Scott Santucci 15:38Perfect.Brian Lambert 15:39Can I chime in real quick? So, one of the things Sandra that you had shared and there's a timing thing around this that has to do it's a bit of an organizational shift. These these stakeholder relationships, were these when you first initially started and then you either went through a merger in order to change and did those those relationships stay intact?Sandra 16:03So, the head of the business has stayed intact, which is great for me, there's been some shift on the HR side, the finance side is unknown. The person I built the relationship with is still there, but we're still sort of navigating org structures. So, to your point, there's quite a bit of uncertainty across the organization right now and and we all know that, you know, those stakeholder relationships are really important. You go through a merger, nobody knows what's going on. So, you know, you're on rocky ground for a while until there's some clarity.Scott Santucci 16:39So, I'm glad you shared that. I'm a strong advocate. I repeat, I'm a broken record about you have a friend and finance so the difficulty is very few people in our in our profession, Sandra, actually build those relationships with the head of Finance. Describe for me the situation to where you're in now. You mentioned earlier on that you're spending most of your time caring feeding the things that you've already built. Is that right?Sandra 17:08Right. That's exactly it. And with the mer, and part of it is this merger, because there's not an appetite for new and exciting, there's an appetite for alignment, right? So, there's going to be system conversions. And we're going to have to enable team members as we convert systems. So that's really just sort of core system training, right? There's nothing new or transformational in that although it will transform the organization from a sales enablement perspective. It's really seen as you know, the the system's conversions are becoming our businesses usual stuff, and there's really not an opportunity to expand so I'm sort of stagnant right now. And I don't know what the other end of this if I'll sort of stay in this place and how I can get into that strategic space.Scott Santucci 17:57Got it. So, I think that we have two areas to talk about. So, area number one would be what are the new moonshots, you could think about tackling. Mm hmm. And then area number two, how do you build an operating model so that you can have you can hire other people to do a lot of the caring feeding. So, I think I think they go hand in hand, and this is where maturity levels really kick in. And this is where what what separates folks like you who are strategic, involve lots of stakeholders, creative problem solvers, things...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 21If you are a sales enablement practitioner, you are likely pulled in a lot of different directions.  You might:Be frustrated you are called a "training" function inside your company Struggle to get the right resources Have a hard time balancing your inbox (and your team's workload) Experience conflict with other departments 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 00:33I'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, as analysts, consultants, or practitioners, we've learned the hard way what works and what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:01On this podcast we use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people who've been there and done that can provide, as we've been pushing the envelope in the profession for over a decade. And today on this show, we're going to discuss if you want to be clear what sales enablement is, stop trying to ask what the definition is, and focus on the problem that you're trying to solve for your company. Scott, you usually start us out with a centering story. What do you have for us?Scott Santucci 01:31So, Brian, this one is just for you. For those of our listeners earlier, we did a chicken Hawk episode where we actually used to multimedia, and I've got a movie clip, another movie clip. You've been asking for it. Maybe the rest of insider nation has been asking for it. Here it goes. Tell me the movie. Tell me the scene and tell me why it's relevant. Okay, Brian.Brian Lambert 01:55I'll try.Scott Santucci 01:57You have no idea what it is, right?Brian Lambert 01:59Right.Scott Santucci 02:01I guarantee you, here's my bet. I guarantee you, you're gonna love this clip. I guarantee it. Ready?Brian Lambert 02:10All right.Moneyball 02:12Trying to solve problems like this. You're not even looking at the problem. very aware of the problem. Okay, good. What's the problem? Look, Billy we all understand what the problem we have. Good. What's the problem? The problem is we have to replace three key players. Nope what's the problem? Same as it's ever ever been we've got to replace these guys with what we have now. What's the problem Berry. We need 48 home runs 120 RBI. The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's 50 feet of crap. And then there's us. It's an unfair game. Now we've been gutted, organ donors for the rich are Boston's taking our kidneys Yankees taking our heart and you guys are sitting around talking the same Oh, good body nonsense. Like we're selling jeans. Like we're looking for Fabio. We are the last dog at the bowl. Se what happens to the runt of the litter? He dies. Really, that's a very touching story and everything but I think we're all verymuch aware of what we're facing here. We have a lot of experience and wisdom in this room. Now you need to have a little bit of faith to let us do the job of replacing Giambi. Is there another first baseman like Giambi? Oh, not really? No. And if there was, could we afford him? Then what the f are you talking about man? If we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there. That sounds like fortune cookie wisdom to me Billy. No, that's just logic. Who is Fabio? He's a short stop. All right.Brian Lambert 04:05Who is Fabio?Scott Santucci 04:07So, what's the quote? Mr. Lambert?Brian Lambert 04:10What's the problem? What's the effing problem? It's Moneyball the scout scene. I love that scene.Scott Santucci 04:18I told you, I know, my podcast partner. So why why do you think that this is relevant to our topic today about focusing, making sure that if you want clarity about sales enablement, and your department and your function, you got to first focus on what problem we're solving. Why do you think it's relevant?Brian Lambert 04:40Much like the Oakland A's baseball team, in that scene, the world has changed and applying legacy approaches, using gut feel and applying what's worked in the past isn't gonna work anymore today.Scott Santucci 04:58I love it. So, you're going to take over my job here as the setup guy.Brian Lambert 05:04What's in it for me? What the heck are you talking about?Scott Santucci 05:06Right? What am I talking about? So, what does this have to do with anything and everybody else? And you're exactly right. Every business that we're in, where we have to face the reality, and the reality is that we're in a digital economy. And in a digital economy, every single one of our companies has a new business strategy that we're rolling out, which requires massive, massive, massive coordination between product marketing, and sales. And the way that I like to think about this is the people who are going to win in this new economy, in this new digital economy, they're the ones who are the digi-tellers. The losers are going to be the ones who are told. Who is a digi-teller? Netflix is a digi-teller. They have had a vision about how people are going to use mobile and streaming media and were able to convey that message to their customers. And they told blockbuster and blockbuster wasn't able to wasn't able to catch up or compete and went out of business. Lots of people are doing the digitelling. More people are being digitold, we don't want our listeners to be -- we want our listeners to be the digi-tellers, not the digi-told. And that's really what we're here about is that we think the sales enablement can be a critical role to help companies do that. But to manage that process, however, you got to make sure you're focusing on the right problem. Yeah, that's really what we're talking about.Brian Lambert 06:42Yeah, love it. And, you know, if we're going to be digitold, you know, we're sitting around the scout room table and we know these things to be true, Scott that all salespeople are short attention span and coin operated, so we know what problem to solve. You know we need to give them more bite sized chunks faster, and flood them with as much information as possible as fast as possible. So, they'll be successful. I don't know what you're talking about.Scott Santucci 07:09Well, Brian, if that's your mindset, then you are on the digitold heap. Really what it comes down to. So, let's, let's break this down and what's driving this? So, what's driving this is an observation that Brian made back at the sales enablement summit. So, Brian did this really cool exercise with the audience, and I want to make sure we don't lose it. So, Brian, the exercise that I'm referring to was the one where basically you got the insight between individual contributors, department leaders or transformative could you could you walk us through what that exercise was and what you were trying to accomplish with it.Brian Lambert 07:51Right. Yeah. So, during my talk, I asked I said, based on the discussions you just had, we had two-minute discussions with partners there in the in the audience, you know, how many of you are building things out? How many of you are running programs and how many of you are leading a strategic function 65% or so were individual contributors building out is kind of solopreneurs, if you will, about 30% we're running a department or a program, like new hire training. So, they were the new hire training team, or they were the playbook team. They, they had a program and that's how their department was defined was, you know, that those are the folks that have, you know, the portal, the platform or the or the playbook, etc. And about 5% were leading a strategic function. And that's, that's the rundown. How does that jibe Scott with who you've been talking to, by the way?Scott Santucci 08:48Well, so that jives I have a slightly different lens, but it definitely fits fits yours. I think the I think there's a lot of room in the middle and that middle definition but what I have seen from my experience in the sales enablement society and participation at the at the Conference Board, I basically say that the overwhelming majority of current sales enablement practitioners are sole individual contributors. No doubt. And most of those are new to that role. However, what's interesting and what prompted this segmentation discussion was there, there has been a lot of people talking about different definitions. So, as we did in our last podcast, Episode Number 20. We talked about our position why the why the debt what what was the rationale behind the definition of sales enablement that I published and Brian peer reviewed in and other people contributed to why we wrote that lengthy of a bit of a definition and what was it for. And it's really the purpose was to provide a platform for a role. And what's been interesting is we're hearing a lot, maybe it's because we're doing the podcast, and we're targeting more of a strategic view of sales enablement, and I don't know what the reason is. But both Brian and I are getting a lot of people talking to us about how valuable that old definition was. And we think it's kind of interesting that the Forrester had the first definition of it. And they have since published another new definition and now they also have a serious, serious decisions definition of what sales enablement is. So, we have lots and lots and lots and lots of definitions. What we're here is to not really debate the definitions. We're here to help provide you clarity. So, we wanted to we want to talk about what those problems are, but the connecting point and I want to see if you see that too Brian the connecting point was the people who resonate very positively with the definition that we published, all fit either into the transformative or department level category. Yeah. And the people who are in the individual contributor role. Do not like it a lot. Does that jive with with your experience?Brian Lambert 11:25Yeah, definitely. You know, I've heard everything from that definitions too long. And, and, you know, you can't achieve the definition that you're talking about where it's a strategic ongoing function until those executives and invest moreScott Santucci 11:40"Those executives."Brian Lambert 11:41Yeah. And I think I'm interesting. I'm cracking open my email because today, about four hours ago, it says, Hey, Brian, this is an email from somebody that's listened to the podcast that just dropped yesterday, so less than 24 hours later. Hey, Brian, I listened to the podcast on The Securities Act and the foundation elevate the profession. It really got me thinking about my approach to sales enablement. And where I currently am now, and how I should tackle sales enablement, if I get a new role, so she's thinking about a new role. And she's actually interviewing, and I really wanted to talk to things. I want a fresh start. And given that there's a merger and reinvention in my current company to be successful, it may be too late to do that here. But I would love your thoughts on if I move. So, in other words, this, I believe I read between the lines, that podcast kind of struck a chord with, you know, the ship is set sail a little bit where she's currently at, but boy, wouldn't it be cool to apply that in a future organization? I didn't share that with you before Scott. But I think that's relevant to the conversation, you have two ways to approach it. Oh, that conversation that that definition that Brian and Scott are talking about, it's too long, or holy crap. I can really think about it as a strategic execution function that executes the business strategy. And I can, I could set it up that way if I lead.Scott Santucci 13:10So first of all, number one, I really appreciate that because you threw me threw me a surprise. So, one of the things that we're trying to do in the podcast, I'm going to get you the next one that we record. But we try to throw each other some things that we're not, we're not anticipating. So that was that was fantastic. And I think you're right. I think that the purpose of what we want to get into right now is, let's, let's be realistic here. No matter what definition you use, first of all, there isn't consensus within the market that there is a common definition. You agree with that, Brian?Brian Lambert 13:50I agree. Yeah.Scott Santucci 13:51So, if there is no common definition, using other people's definitions as the be with all in with all is a fool’s errand just just come come to the point right now. Okay, so then what does that mean? What it means is that you as an as a sales enablement professional have to own what the definition is inside your company.Brian Lambert 14:17Yeah. I get it.Scott Santucci 14:18So, let's talk about strategies that way.Brian Lambert 14:21Yeah, like it. So, in other words, let's stop worrying about the 14 definitions or however many there are, I don't even know I just made that up. And whatever one you pick, the importance of that in the language you use and how you approach your role and your function. And then how that might, you know, show that my enact inside your own organization. That's a great idea. Yeah, I think I got some stories we can, I can tell there too.Scott Santucci 14:49That's great. We'll choose a framework to follow first, right? So, the first point is, no matter what definition you have, and no matter what, even if it's, you know, published, you know, desk of God, people are still going to disagree with it because you put the word sales and enablement together and very few people are going to agree. So, the issue that is pick a definition Do you like that matches to your vision, but then you have to socialize it. And the first thing that you have to be able to socialize, shouldn't be, hey, here's the role, you should make sure you socialize. Hey, do we agree on a problem?Brian Lambert 15:27Hmm, yeah.Scott Santucci 15:28And the reason that that's so important is that most sales enablement roles start as VPS of broken things, you inherit you inherit a mess. And in order to articulate those things, not everybody, there are so many different little messes around that are that exist all over the organization, you'd probably want to be able to organize a bunch of them. So, depending on how you frame the business problem that you're trying to solve is going to attract the altitude level you know that that people pay attention to it, it's going to determine who your executive sponsor is, it's going to determine what budget you're going to get. It's going to determine how much teeth you can ask for and compliance. And it's gonna, it's going to set the tone of whether you're viewed as a strategic function, or a tactical one. So, in order to do that, we're going to concentrate on that first step, which is a problem. And everybody can say, oh, here's a problem. But inside a company, there's a big difference between what you see as a problem. What other people see as a problem. And also, are you really treating a symptom of a much larger problem? Not through problem solving.Brian Lambert 16:43Yeah, I like a lot because much like a ship that leaves the port and set sail, you know, if it's one or two degrees off from that initial launch, you could miss the whole country. Right? And I think That's what's coming to my mind. Scott is depending on how you think about your role or define it, and come out of the gate with it, and how you think about framing it out, could determine where you end up. And that's logical, right? So, if you ended up somewhere you didn't intend or perhaps didn't end up where you want it to be. It might be because you started off with the wrong trajectory. Yeah, which is the importance of a definition from the concept of what problem you're going to solve.Scott Santucci 17:31And also, what Northstar What's our Northstar. Yeah, how do we set our bearings? So, here's, here's a scenario I'm going to give a scenario to start off with that I hear from a lot of the listeners, so a lot of our listeners who go and are looking for jobs. Tell me that, number one first, the job descriptions that they run into are all over the place. Mm hmm. And then the second thing is that when they go and interview for those jobs, often I'm told well, they don't know what sales enablement is? Hmm. So, what's your take on on those observations? So first first take is that situation?Brian Lambert 18:09Oh yeah, it's it's funny because I'm laughing because that's exactly where I wanted to go his job descriptions and how people are hiring. So, I think we're having a mind meld or something. That's why I'm laughing. But yeah, the so Yeah, totally. And actually, I reviewed about 50 of them, I found about 10 of them were copied and pasted across four different industries. So that's, that's interesting to think about is, yeah, like this, this definition sounds cool so let me copy and paste it there you go that's who we're hiring for. So, I totally agree and one of the things that pops into my mind is, you know, in that interview process, that might be a good time to actually educate folks and have this definitional conversation.Scott Santucci 18:49Well, so yeah, there's two parts right. Let's start first with the job description itself. So, for our listeners, if you're looking at a job description, we tend to think of these things as ironclad. But let me give you more insight about where they come up where they come from. job descriptions also need a body of evidence and a foundation to work from. If we accept that there's no common definition of sales enablement, then these job descriptions are either being written by consultants, or by human resource analysts who are...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 20Since starting the podcast, the guys have received a lot of feedback from listeners who've built more advanced functions. These listeners have one thing in common... they all are using the "old Forrester sales enablement" definition Scott authored in 2008 and peer-reviewed by Brian and published for Forrester clients in 2010.In 2017, acting as the President of the Sales Enablement Society, Scott sponsored work by enablement professionals to bring together: analysts, academics, practitioners, and vendors to create a common definition that was published and shared at the first annual sales enablement society conference.Yet, here we are in 2019 and Forrester has not only a new definition of what sales enablement is - but also Sirius Decisions' definition to rationalize.  Gartner is talking about "buyer enablement" and "sense-making" while CSO insights have narrowed the focus to be about enabling the sales force.  Meanwhile, marketing has moved into their own versions of helping "sales" by advocating: content marketing, account-based marketing, and growth marketing.The guys think this has gotten out of hand and have decided to become far more definitive.  In this episode the guys:1) Highlight the key enabler that propelled accounting into the finance department and the rise of the CFO2) Contrast the similarities between finance and the sales enablement space3) Outline the drivers that exist in the economy that point to a huge gap between strategy and execution4) Discuss the purpose of sales enablement is to bridge that gap5) Observe the only way to solve that problem is to do it cross-functionally6) Review the basic pillars of what should be in the scope of a department tackling the strategy/execution gapJoin us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to let us know what you think, collaborate with peers and sign up to be notified of new releases, updates, and news.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: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 our 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 00:47Together, 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, underlined the hard way, what works and what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:01Our podcast is different. We use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people who've been there and done that can provide, as we've been pushing the envelope on the profession for over a decade. And today on this show, we're going to discuss sales enablement defined. And as usual, we're going to start with a centering story to give our episode a theme. Scott, take it away.Scott Santucci 01:27Thank you, Brian. And I think you're gonna like this, Brian. This is a very, very modern story for some of the stories that we've been talking about.Brian Lambert 01:34Oh, really? Yeah. Move up. Do we move up a different century yet?Scott Santucci 01:40This story starts in 1933. Oh, wow. Yes.Brian Lambert 01:46We moved out of the 18 hundreds nice.Scott Santucci 01:48Yes, how about that for modernization in 1933. The United States Congress passed the Securities Act. And what I'd like you to do is go back in the wave wayback machine and have some context. This is the time of the Great Depression. If you remember what happened, one of the starting points of the Great Depression was the stock market decline of 1929. And one of the things that was happening is that those stocks that people were buying weren't really regulated. So, you didn't really know whether the information was accurate or not. So, the 1933 Securities Act put down a an established the SEC, the securities exchange commission, which also empowered them to audit and oversee and even send people to jail for fraud on the stock market. So that's what led to it. The next thing that happened in 1939 General Accounting Principles started so basically we're generally accounting principles are is that the rules of which you organize or store finance data that gets logged into your business report, the business reporting, the financial reports, the the balance sheet, the income statement, all of those things started back in 19 standard got standardized back in 1933, with this sec act, but then the rules to make sure that you follow them and standardize all that that started in 1939. So, to bring that all to fruition today, in were 1939. The idea of a chief financial officer was not very common. Today, the idea of a chief financial officer is almost it's it's almost, you can't even separate the idea of not having them. So, one of the things that has led to the powerful rise of a CFO, is they actually have this, this construct this these rules to follow more or less like a lingua franca, and if it weren't for that, it'd be hard to say that The CFO wouldn't have evolved, because that role was just a bookkeeping function.Brian Lambert 04:06Yeah, that's a good point on the history of that evolution to think from bookkeeper to CFO, but, again, oh, what the heck does that have to do with sales enablement?Scott Santucci 04:20So, insider nation, I hope we hope you're getting the gist that we always have some sort of weird or interesting plugin. And the reason that this matters, is because you've heard Brian and I talk a lot about a charter. You've heard us talking about that. But you don't have a core foundation to stand on. It's really hard to elevate your role. And that's really what we're what we're talking about here is we there are a lot of discussions about definitions and wire defining things. Our lens when we set out to defining sales enablement was really more foundational. It's not does it sound the right way because I get it, I can guarantee you if you go and read the SEC definition of what revenue is, it's not a good read. It's not simple or elegant or beautiful or accessible or explains what an accountants job does. It's a very utility or utilitarian definition, to set a foundation to provide standards.Brian Lambert 05:25It's hard to blog that I'm sure to that deposition.Scott Santucci 05:29It is a tough blog, began it because it's an incredibly tough read. But the reason that that exists that way is because it must be precise. So that's really the the essence of how we started about defining sales enablement, when we when we were at Forrester, and the foundation for everything that we worked on, was that definition and it has a lot of principles behind it with the idea of building as a foundation to build a function of up on top of it.Brian Lambert 05:57Yeah, and I remember you know, you can say that the key here is to get it right. And we're going to talk about how we did it. And yes, we're going to go over that definition on here. But, you know, I need to, I feel like right now, this is a bit of a, let me challenge you on this, right? Like one, we said we weren't gonna necessarily redefine it. And on the show, and two, we've said, Listen, it's not about a definitional debate. We're not going to engage in that. And now now here we are, right. So, um, and the reason why I wanted to bring that up is it's interesting to me that over the course of the last two conferences that I was at that that's the definition that we put together in 2008 has shown up on you know, the mainstage screen and you know, even even your name is enforced or have been used as this is the definition that I like, etc. But why why are we on this podcast doing this? Why do you think it's important to restate when we've already stated 10 years ago?Scott Santucci 07:01Well, I think there's a bunch of reasons why there are many definitions out there. It's very confusing. And the reason that we're doing it for insider nation it's it's actually kind of interesting. Brian, you and I started this podcast because we saw a big giant hole in sales enablement conversations for more so from a more strategic lens, and as we started this, more people have been reaching out and a lot of people have been reaching out saying, Hey, you know, I'm glad you guys are doing this. I've been really leveraging that old sales enablement definition. And I was actually in Chicago at a meeting and the executive team had this definition and they had it had it written up. We haven't built on this thing in a long time. And the company that owned it had owned this intellectual property has now quote, discarded it and replacement of another one that's made to be more better sounding or, you know, more well written, Uh huh. But really the goal here is it's not an issue to debate definitions. And it's it's a, it's a conversation to say, we tried to lay foundations with this. And we want to talk about those foundations, because those foundations are what separate most of the people who are running sales enablement as units of one. And the sales enablement leaders who have strategic departments. So, what we thought we would do is say it just as if you are interested in promoting and elevating your role. Let's follow the game plan that accounting went through to become CFOs. They had a foundation that they built from, so we wanted to talk we wanted to lay that foundation. We think that's relevant here for inside sales enablement and insider nation.Brian Lambert 08:57Yeah, and let me let me stay obvious You know, we're sticking to the definition that we wrote in 2008. You know, we're not changing it, we're not redefining it, we're sticking with it. And we think it's even more relevant today than it was back then. And we're going to state it again. And here we go. You know, let's talk about why we did it, how we went about it, what the actual definition is and who it's for. So, let's start with why why we defined it.Scott Santucci 09:24Alright, so why do we Why do we find it? So, the first the first lens is, we made an observation that there is a gap between the go to market strategy or even the business strategy of a company and how it executes. So that was the observation that we laid. Then when we looked at that when we looked at an examine that business problem, what did we do is based on that, based on that gap, we tried to define what should be in the middle there to bridge that gap. And that's really where we came up with the idea of sales enablement. The idea being go to market is about interacting with customers. We were thinking about sales, aka meaning revenue or bookings, not sales, the Salesforce and enablement is to make sure we're enabling the execution of that strategy and profitable growth. That was the lens that we had. So that's why we created it and we didn't see any work in that space. And we, you know, frankly, Brian, and I still haven't been seen any work in that space.Brian Lambert 10:33Yeah. And also, to piggyback on that with the why drill drill a little bit deeper on that I actually think the gap is getting bigger, that the gap between go to market and the expectations that customers have continues to widen.Scott Santucci 10:51I agree with you. And I think the reason that it's widening is really because of the whole digital economy that we're in what you know, you've got business we've talked about some of this before, but we've got businesses who were office furniture companies, and they are now becoming space optimization businesses, because of this whole digital world. But I think that that is one of the driving forces that is illuminating or accelerating that gap between strategy and execution. And most companies don't have what Brian and I like to call an execution fabric to tie all those those pieces together.Brian Lambert 11:27And, and to that end, execution is extremely problematic, right? So, we're not going to get into that. But, you know, what I would say is, we can't let the idea of product marketing or messaging or demand Gen, or even sales enablement, trumped the idea of execution. Right, you know, executions, the most important thing here, that's when let's figure out back then we have this debate what means to fill that gap because silos are not getting us there. And sales conversations are suffering, what might that look like? How might we go about defining that? So, let's let's pivot there, you know how explain explain how we went about defining that? Did we lock ourselves in a conference room and write it?Scott Santucci 12:13So, the sequence of events were, and this is where the, you know, sort of the discipline of research and why I would recommend all of you before you pick a definition that you use, go and find out what's behind it. Just because it sounds good, doesn't mean it is good. So, the way that we went about doing it is we first shot this observation, right? So, I'm sorry if I'm going to sound like dusting off past memories of high school, but if the scientific method is you start with an observation, so we had the observation of a gap between strategy and execution. And then what you do before you develop a hypothesis is you get some reviews. So, we interviewed executives based on that observation from company like Accenture BMC computer associates or CA, Citrix, CSC Dell, HP, IBM NetApp, Oracle, SIP and Semantic. And what we did there is say is this is this phenomenon that we're observing something that you're observing too? So, we went and confirmed that hypothesis. So, the, the the confirmation was yes, that occurred. Then we went and looked at financial reports and pulled out some trends of other businesses that were happening. So, we pulled out examples of CEOs and from annual reports that highlight that provide proof points of this gap. So, we saw that executives are focusing on pragmatic, profitable growth, continuing to retool the sales engine, eliminating waste, trying to drive differentiated support at the point of sale, transforming rep seller behavior outside of their comfort zone. Were all trends that we saw way back in 2008. Do they sound familiar today? Brian?Brian Lambert 14:06Yes, they definitely do sound the same, they're actually getting more heightened, and new business models are actually emerging to tackle those things. And then to when you rattled off the list those companies, those companies have evolved, and they're still around, and some have been on the ropes, you know, but but they've all gone through some sort of evolution. And I think that was a good sample set there. To to use, right, you 10 years later, these companies are still still respected, and they've gone through their own evolutionary change.Scott Santucci 14:39So, the second thing that we did to confirm the observation was, maybe it makes sense to get a buyer's viewpoint of the gaps between execution. This is all before defining it. This is the work that we did before that. So, what we did is because we're Forrester, well, geez, we already have access to buyers. So, I just interviewed some actually many and here's some of the trends that we observed. Buyers are stratifying their suppliers into a caste system. We saw many, many, many efforts underway. Actually, there were many people forced her to do vendor analysis and the like, and saw a lot of vendor consolidations, actually real strategic programs to move people into procurement. Another one is that buyers are differentiating among vendors based largely on their engagement strategy. In other words, what we found is that buyers prefer to work with work with the companies based on the way that the sellers engage with them, not what their products and services are. That's a myth. That was we found that to be a myth that the branding is the preference, or the price point was the preference. Another thing that the third observation that we found in engaging with those buyers is that they rarely find value from conversations that they have with vendor salespeople, as a matter of fact, the data that we have at the time was less than 15% of executives found that their inner interactions with sellers was valuable. So, what that held us to to make ask the question is if these are if these things are going on, that buyers aren't really valuing it, companies are spending a tremendous amount of money something's something's gotta give.Brian Lambert 16:23So when you and when you look at that, on the buyer side that you mentioned the caste system that we're going to differentiate based on how people engage with us and this idea of relevant conversations and what that looks like, I think there's been fuel put on that that fire on the buyer side, you know, you hear you've got challenger sale now challenger buyer, but, you know, more importantly you have this idea that buyers and the people involved are really having a hard time making decisions, you know, 6.2 people are involved. This idea of a caste system is becoming You know, bipolar, if you will, or or, you know, two groups now instead of multiple groups, you there's either that you're in a transactional sales pattern or buying pattern and you're, or you're in a highly consultative one and in the middle ground is hard to occupy.Scott Santucci 17:15So, I think you're right. So, you know, going back to the scientific method of where we were right, it was, we have this observation about a gap between strategy and execution. Then we did the did the research to see whether it's true. So, we talked to people if that was a valid thing, then we looked at financial reports and, and earnings calls to get some data there. We collected data from buyers, and then we went back into into inside the resident companies and made observations there. And those observations really came up with this observation of random acts of sales support underlying the underlying the ability to execute. So, we found that companies are spending 15.9% of their SGA on stuff to enable sales conversations, we found that the fragmentation of these efforts confused customers. We found that because of that, because that information is all over the place, it creates an organizational drag. I'm wondering if all of the different definitions of sales enablement that haven't been thoughtful, are those that are is that's what's driving a lot of this activity that we're being so focused on getting something out the door and not worrying about...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 19The first Sales Enablement Summit was held in September 2019 and Inside Sales Enablement was there. Held in San Francisco, it attracted Sales Enablement leaders from the world’s largest companies and exciting startups to share success stories, experiences and challenges of the people actually doing the role.Companies presenting included Yelp, Salesforce, Workfront, Oracle, Lyft, Sage, Progress Software, Pluralsight, and Zendesk.Brian was one of those keynote presenters and blew away the audience with his talk that included: interactive exercises, findings from you - insider nation, some frameworks from Scott, mixed in with his own personal experiences. In this episode, Scott unpacks the lessons learned and the overall experience so if you didn't get to go to the conference, you will be able to get something out of it. Some observations the guys discuss 1) Three of the keynote presenters are still using the original Forrester definition of sales enablement 2) Individual contributors, program managers, or department builders: What type of sale enabler are you?3) The state of sales enablementJoin 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 00:33I'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 span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:48Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives, analysts, consultants who are practitioners, we've learned the hard way what works and maybe what's most important, what doesn't Yeah, and I podcast is different. We actually are spending a lot of time talking to our listeners. And what they're telling us is they appreciate our conversational format and how we're talking real issues. We're sharing the insights that we're learning from what's happening right now. And on this podcast today, we're going to talk about the sales enablement summit, which is the first ever sales enablement summit in San Francisco and that was here in September of 2019. And I Brian, were able to actually give a presentation and a keynote at that event, and I thought it would be good to debrief with that live with Scott because we haven't talked about it much. Thank you, Brian. So, the what we'd like to do here at insider nation for you our insiders is give you up to keep you up to speed on the things that are going on in the conversations but also the events to says I wasn't there. I have a bunch of friend’s questions that I want to know from Brian, and I'm sure you do, too. So, the first thing that I'd love to do is, you know, at a high level, I'd like to know, tell me about the event, Brian, you know, so what was this function? Who were the type of people there? What was the mood? Describe for me, you know what it was like? Because I want to know. All right, cool. Yeah. So, this is San Francisco. It was event was on like, Wednesday, Thursday, it's actually being run by an event management company. So, this is the first summit or event that was non us, you know, vendor sponsored, and also not run by the sales enablement society. So here you have basically a startup of a what it what they believe will be a global summit to bring together sales enablement practitioners, with others in the field, and in this case, they ran the sales enablement summit alongside the product. Marketing summit. So, in the sales enablement space, there are about 250 folks from a variety of different companies, small, medium, large startups, you know, even large international companies, and there were a couple of people there from overseas, but they were companies like Amazon, hired Pluralsight, etc. And the other conference, which was Product Marketing, at about, I'd say about 450 or so, um, so almost double the audience size there. There was one mainstage and we would have our networking events together with the product marketers, so from a content perspective, a lot of different topics, but Scott, I think it'd be great for me to share this little nugget. we haven't talked about the the Forrester definition before Oh the new one, right. Yeah, the new one. And, you know, as we shared with with our listeners in 2008, you know, we we actually defined sales enablement as Forrester came out in 2019 and redefined it. But interestingly enough, two presenters at this conference used your definition, our definition from foresters 2008 definition not the new one, to talk about sales enablement and frame it out. And both of them said that definition was their favorite. And there were two different lenses. One was, hey, this strategic view of sales enablement is what I liked. And the other person that shared it talked about how it was an ongoing initiative that it was a strategic function, yes, but it was also this idea of ongoing value add to the sales. So, what's interesting about that, Brian is literally just this week. I was I was in Chicago, working with an executive, an executive group about you know, transforming from one business to the cloud business. And you know, what they had as our as a as a reference material, the old sales enablement define report from back in 2008. Also, and they call that one.Brian Lambert 05:08So, the actual physical report?Scott Santucci 05:11Right, the outline and everythingBrian Lambert 05:14Printed out? Yeah, like laying around. Right, right. Well, that's good. They still print things. That's good.Scott Santucci 05:21Well, I think the point is, they're using that as a foundation to move forward towards the future, and some of the newer ones. AndBrian Lambert 05:31Yeah, that is cool, because I liked how that report broke on the definition, but it also broke down all the different ways that you could tackle sales enablement. And it was it was it was broad at the time, and people actually gave feedback that this was a pretty broad definition. But when you look at what's going on today, and I know you've done a lot of work around the digital transformation and how that drives strategies forward, that definition that that there were seeing pop up here in the course of, you know, two presenters and actually a company, a vendor company, a SaaS company, that definition is perfect for, you know, helping enable go to market. You know, that's pretty cool. So that's that's a, that's a, an interesting data point, I think, because when I looked at the presentation that I gave, that definition was obviously the definition that I use as well. So, there you go.Scott Santucci 06:29So that's what we should probably do a whole report on that, or a whole podcast on that, but it's so thanks for that update. So, you threw me for a loop in our report from when you were in Boston by telling me right by jumping on me live that boom, guess what? Forrester has a new definition that that was surprising. And now you're telling me Hey, we had a had a presentation of sales enablement practitioners that isn't vendor sponsored more is it sales enablement society and three the people use the old definition. So that's really weird. But guess what?Brian Lambert 07:05Yeah. And you should start going to these events and you can hear it yourself. There you go. Yeah, exactly.Scott Santucci 07:09I should start out that's funny. So, alright, that's now what I want to do is I want to know what did your What was your presentation? So, no, this is more for our vendors, Brian and I walked through some of it beforehand. So, you know, he got he got my eyes on it, we roleplay it out parts of it. But I didn't hear the exciting conclusion, right? Because we, we changed the ending a bit. So, I'm gonna get to hear exactly what goes through us the storyboard of what your presentation was. And then we'll unpack it later.Brian Lambert 07:45Yeah. And you said it's for our vendors. But I think you meant for insider nation.Scott Santucci 07:49Yes, insider nation. That's true. You're right. I met you I'm actually reading on the screen. So, in case you in case, you know, sometimes we actually have notes. And we're sharing them on on zoom. And I was actually talking and looking at that. So, I think a better without the notes, Brian.Brian Lambert 08:11That's right. And because one of the things that I did want to call out as, as I was sharing this with you is the idea that this was, again, as we saw in Boston vendor supported and again, I want to call out that this is great, it's great to have, you know, highspot seismic and others, they're supporting this because they made it possible. And they also injected a lot of case studies and examples that I could actually reference in throughout my presentation. But the timeline here are the story art, if you will, of mine was a, you know, businesses are evolving. We know that but industries are evolving, and I use the you know, the the news or print industry in the news industry and talked about how it's evolved from print all the way through to the vices and, and what's really driving that is customers. So, we all know these things. But then I asked, right, right after that, you know, what are you guys enabling? And they gave the ad two minutes, and they were able to kind of read out and I basically used, you know, Scott, the, the domains, the flavors of sales enablement, as a way to debrief that exercise. So, they were able to bucketize their work in either sales, talent development, sales messaging, demand generation or sales administration, as this is that the domains and the flavors. So, I would say at this conference that 250 people, let's say over over 50 to 60%, were in the talent development, sales, talent development 15 were in sales messaging, smaller than about, you know, small group or in demand Gen, and only like one or two are in sales administration. So then, so the bulk were in sales, talent development, and then I asked, okay, well, what are you guys working on and we bucketized that discuss into, there are those who are building something, there are those who are running ongoing programs. And then there are those who are leading a strategic business unit. And so, 250 I'd say 80% are in a build and deliver cadence or effort. 10 to 10 to 15% are in a running program, like for example, onboarding. And then three, three or four people were raise their hand if they let us strategic business unit. So, the story arch continues with Okay, well, what's common across all of these domains and lenses is you have to be able to generate demand, position yourself, get funding and have an operation. And what we did Scott is, you know, bar your idea of this concept that you've been working on and you and I both actually been working on for quite some time around thinking about sales enablement, as a business within a business. So, we walked through things like who are your investors, you know, do you get the finance to actually, you know, run your business? And what kind of business are you in? If you're going to build and deliver business, what does that look like? If you're running a program business, what does that look like? And if you are leading a business unit, what does that look like? And I use my past experiences of, I've started up now five sales enablement functions. I started one up with you and for others, and I use my example here of my recent work to set up a pivot and l&d organization to an enablement function. So that was that's the, the big, the big story arch. And that was what we covered. And I appreciate your help and landing this concept and around business led business because that really resonated with folks. They're really, really chomping at the bit to discuss this idea of running the function of enablement as a business within a business.Scott Santucci 11:58So let me before we talk more about that. Let me summarize what I heard. So, I heard what you did is you framed the conversation by saying, Hey, here's an example. And not I think I know, I know you use you yourself as an example, as an old paper boy, and how much that that whole industry is changed to frame it out. And then given this, all of our businesses are going through this kind of transformation. So, then you said, Okay, so given this transformation, we all work within companies that are that are transforming. So, what we're going to do is we're going to ask, what is it that you're enabling? So, the first question that you asked was, what type? And we should we should probably do a whole podcast on how we came up with the flavors or you call them the domains. But the overwhelming majority of your audience is focusing on training and development type activities, right?Brian Lambert 12:59Yep. That's correct.Scott Santucci 13:00So, then the next thing is of those the next lens that you do. So that's my lens. Brian's lens, in order to sort this out that I think is great, is looking at it is are you an individual contributor? Are you building programs? Or what we what Brian, I like to call services? Are you running a strategic department? And the overwhelming majority of your audience? Were individual contributors? that right?Brian Lambert 13:28Yeah, that's right. And they were in a, you know, startup mode, basically getting the function or their role off the ground.Scott Santucci 13:34Right. So, what I would imagine then is that people, those people would be ideal because most of your audience is training and development or the sales, talent development. And then the second part is individual contributors. They're probably their orientation before hearing your talk is probably, Hey, I got you know, building playbooks or I'm building training programs or or the like.Brian Lambert 13:57Yeah, that's right. How to drive change, how to get a seat at the table, things like that.Scott Santucci 14:03So that's it, that's where I'm at, then you drop the the bomb of business within a business on them. And you said that went over really weIl. I gotta tell you, I'm having a hard time understanding how that went really well, when somebody's thinking about the world through an individual playbook. Walk me through that, like, what was some of the reaction? Why did that resonate so much? Why did you get what kind of feedback did you get afterwards?Brian Lambert 14:29Yeah, that's a good question. Timing wise, I was towards the end of day one. And I sat in the audience and I had a lot of empathy for what I was hearing all the speakers. But but the challenge that I was having as a previous practitioner was, wow, everybody's talk is very laser beamed on things like a playbook on change management, on how to get a seat at the table on how to learn from past failures. These are, it's rapid fire, you know, and we just got kind a fire hose with a topic, topic, topic, topic topic, and there's no overarching structure for any of it. And you know, they're all individually passionate and well delivered. But the person that really struck me the most is this this lady that was a product marketer. And she came in and said, I treated sales as a customer. And she went through a method in approach this approach to talk. Like I said, you got to talk to Scott. And her her whole thing was, let me tell you about the approach I took to treat sales as a customer. Yeah. And she was the first to do that, as opposed to, this is what I did and unleashed. And I say, you know, two, I did this is what I did two sales was everybody's talk. This is what I did to sales. She was the first one that says, here's what I did with my sales leadership, which was a massive breath of fresh air for me personally, and then I came up.Scott Santucci 15:54Brian, let me pause on you that because I think you bury the lead on on those those kind of things. It sounds subtle what you're saying, doing things to sales versus doing things for sales. The or with sales. Talk to me a little bit more about what you mean by that, because I think that that idea is really powerful. But I think you gloss over it and bury the lead a little bit.Brian Lambert 16:21Yeah, sure, um, when you look at and I'm, I'm gonna, you know, me, just let me just tell you what, what the topics were, you know, if I, if I'm pulling up the agenda, you know, right now, and I look at it, it is, and I'll just, I'll just hit you with it. Um, it's it's playbooks. It's new hire training. It's playbooks. Again, it's sales kickoff. It's here's one on content, how to build content. here's here's why. on, you know, getting a seat at the table. So, in the thing about all of those is that I struggled with was nobody really ever talked about sales by hand. And you and I both know through the podcast is we've talked a lot about making sure you're managing stakeholders and that you're managing up down the cross, but also that you're serving sales leadership. Yep. So, I just call that out as a red flag to the audience to say, listen, you know, here's my approach to this talk. I'm at the end of the day, and I've asked them, I said, who here hat is now leaving with all the answers? And everybody laughed, literally, the whole room laughed. And I said, well, who here is actually leaving? And right now, in your moment in time, a little bit more confused about what you should be doing? Pretty much everybody raised. So, everybody agree that it was great topics, but with these inputs, it led to a little bit more confusion. Yes, this this is what I'm gonna talk to you about today. I'm going to attempt in this time that I Have to frame up everything you heard today. And also give you a launching pad for tomorrow in a way that organizes this stuff so that you can drive your business forward. And that's what we're doing. That's how I started my talk.Scott Santucci 18:11Wow, that sounds powerful. That's great. So will tell me how people reacted to it then. So, you've done your presentation you've done, you've done your mic drop, you know, you walk out of there, people are carrying you off the stage. Oh, tell me, tell me what the bar conversations were like. Yeah.Brian Lambert 18:33So, there were there were three buckets I'll say bucket. One was for folks that were new in their career, and they didn't...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 18In this episode, a listener (Amy) calls into the show to discuss managing disparate workgroups globally. The great thing about Amy is she has a marketing operations background -- and considers herself a sales enablement practitioner. Because she has a marketing operations background, she has a broad, yet practical view of what sales enablement deployments look like. Her biggest challenge? Managing up. As someone who helps sales sell, the experiences Amy has experience in• “Connecting dots” across a variety of stakeholders including business units, marketing ops, sales ops, sales enablement, and sales leadership• The idea of “governance” and what it means to ensure the various stakeholders have a say and protect the brand• The feedback loops using analytics and voice of sales data• Participation in the governance conversation• The idea of “taxonomy” and what it can mean to a variety of different stakeholders• The regional/global view of enrolling others in countryJoin 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 00:33I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:35And I'm Brian Lambert is a sales enablement insider. 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 00:47Together, 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 of what works and maybe what's more importantly, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 00:59We like to think our podcast is different, and our listeners are telling us that it's different. And we use a conversational format to help share the experiences and only people who've been there and done that can provide, as we've been pushing the envelope in the profession for over a decade. And today, everybody, I'm pretty excited about this episode because we have a very special guest. We have Amy from a large matrix organization. She's actually in marketing operations. And she's joining us today in response to our podcasts that we've been having on stakeholder management. So hi, Amy, how are you?Amy Benoit 01:35I'm well, how are you?Brian Lambert 01:37Great. Thanks so much for joining us. I know we had one quick conversation and we're throwing you on here. But we've done two episodes, we did an episode 13 we did a chicken Hawk episode and that, that got quite a lot of buzz on LinkedIn. And then as a follow up to that four episodes later in Episode 17. Scott and I walked through a story that I had around Managing stakeholders and a large fortune 50 company. And you reached out to us based on those two podcasts. And Scott, you know what? I'm bringing her on here today. You haven't even talked to her. And we're gonna put you on the spot.Scott Santucci 02:14I love it. That's great. So, you and Amy go way back then, huh?Brian Lambert 02:20That's right. But But she's part of the insider nation. And we should consider family but she's coming after you. And I say Here we go. SoAmy Benoit 02:31nicely.Brian Lambert 02:32That's right here from Pennsylvania here. So so, um, I really appreciate Amy, your background and how you've been involved in sales enablement. And one of the things that that was cool to hear from you is how you're passionate about helping salespeople be successful. But I'd love to hear from you. Why do you want to join us on the on the podcast today?Amy Benoit 02:56Well, you know, I listened to that fantastic podcast episode about humble chicken Hawk, and I thought, oh my goodness, this is part of my world, I am tasked with just executing something that is very large and trying to figure out how to collaborate and get that buy in from all of these different stakeholder groups because as chicken Hawk found out, you know, everybody wanted something. And so, I, you know, my heart went pitter patter a little bit because I could totally relate. And then I was so excited that you however many out it was like three or four episodes later, you kind of, you know, you broke it down a little bit more and went into that whole stakeholder management piece because it resonated with me, it's critically, you know, important in our organization. And I like could really appreciate how the level of effort that went into putting together the plan. And then of course, you have to operate the plan. And some of the trailing points there, as you were leading the discussion was, you know, how do you really more effectively manage up? And I think for me, I was like, Huh, that's a great question. Because while we and our you know, in our organization are charged with the same, you know, managing down, across and up, I would love to hear your expertise on how do you more effectively manage up.Scott Santucci 04:35Excellent. So, what we're going to do now is we're going to move into a section of our podcasts. So, if you followed along, this is very much like the conversation, Brian, that we had with Beth, but air quotes, but we're going to do some speed date consulting. And this is just a conversation between Amy and myself. Brian's going to pick it up and say what does this mean for Less than or so, Amy, when you talk when we talk about what expertise we have, I need a little bit of information about what it is that you're trying to manage in the first place. Right. So, what if you could give me a scope of the business problem that and what your remit is? I'd really love to get some context on that.Amy Benoit 05:20Sure. So, I am tasked with essentially leading the strategy for our sales enablement portal. And we are a unique organization and that that portal actually sits in our marketing office, you know, our Mar tech stack. So, I'm engaging oh my goodness, every day with sales. You know, that's, that's Sales Users, sales leaders, marketing stakeholders, Product Management, legal sales, support and so on. And one of the things that I find challenging is as well I get a lot of people who kind of understand what we have to say in See the value. I also want to, like get to a point where I have more aligned conversations with some of the leadership team. So how can I make sure that we're embedding some of those valuable metrics and learning points that tie back to our corporate imperative with our leadership team, so that they then you know, it's never a good point to say, you know, that they're gonna put a management down style, right? We always want that groundswell of users and people adopting our portal. But I really want to pick your brain and understand how it is best to engage with senior leadership. What are the things that resonate with them and how can they then cascade that information back down to their teams, so there's a circular loop?Scott Santucci 07:00Yeah. So, let's start there. So, you said something that you're responsible for the sales enablement portal that's part of the MAR tech stack. So, I assume you've made an investment already.Amy Benoit 07:13Absolutely. Yeah. So, we've had an investment. We've been operating our sales enablement portal for about five years now. And that's been funded on the marketing side.Scott Santucci 07:25So, let's go back to one of the things that's really vitally important. So, in terms of in terms of story arc, and I feel at I feel a bit handcuffs since I don't have a whiteboard. But if whiteboard, what I do is sort of imagine a story arc, right? And the story arc starts with why and then now, so why did the did this investment happen? And that's really where I want to start off with Because if I understand why, then I get get to now. And then we can start figuring out the different messaging. So, if you can give me what was the business driver that made the investment? And, you know, you don't need to tell us how much the investment was, but it was it was it significant? Was it little? How many people were involved? How, how much went into that?Amy Benoit 08:23Sure. That's a great question. So, it was a significant investment. And, but I will say, you know, we started more with a proof of concept, and then grew adoption from there. But really, you know, one of our driving factors as to why was, you know, twofold. We really wanted to have a place that was the source of truth for content. And we also really wanted to streamline and kind of shave off that time it takes for sellers to get those resources, kind of you know, get their business. airings and facilitate those conversations with their prospects and clients. So, looking to, you know, reduce the amount of time in process that it would take, you know, for a seller to get that kind of competency and, and direct conversation and also provide a place that people thought of as the source of truth. I will say, you know, we have driven he continued to drive towards, you know, those goals and, and have had success for sure. I think sometimes, you know, where we're headed now is, you know, other technologies come into play. And we want to continue to kind of point out the value and point out the connectivity between our platforms, that how can we ensure, you know, leadership is really continuing to connect those dots? Yes. So, what I would also imagine to just what you my last context question, before we get into it, I would assume that, so the audience doesn't know what company you're in, I know what company are in. So that's a little unfair. But I would assume that the amount, you have lots of products, you have different sales teams. So, part of the benefit of using an outside provider to provide a technical platform is to help provide, you know, connecting across all of that information. Is that true? So, part of the difficulty or not the difficulty, part of the complexity is that you'll have each one of your sellers can configure different different products and services together, they can configure different conversations together based on the complexity of the accounts that they're selling, too. Is that is that accurate? That is accurate. I mean, we do have them very expansive product portfolio. And, you know, being a part of a matrix organization and operating in 17 countries, we do follow some internal structure where we have sales teams obviously aligned by channel but also, you know, teams aligned to industries and capabilities. So, we have a lot of information to manage, and being able to have that central location that not only allows me access but allows us to see what's being used and allows those who are producing the content to ensure that the most current on brand legal compliant piece of content is accessible, that's how you know of high importance to us. So there, you know, by nature of where I fit, you know, interacting with all of these things. Different groups, and we're kind of like sitting at the hub of it, you know, there's a lot of importance placed on being able to not only streamline the processes, but you know, facilitate best practices as it relates to content. And, you know, provide a through our platform, that level of governance and kind of, you know, taxonomy in the sense of how that content is served up and aligned based on different regions and different industries and capabilities.Scott Santucci 12:36Yeah. So let me give a really simple framework here that will help drive our, our conversation. We have a challenge of communicating up, across and below. You're asking us about up right so we're going to just concentrate on. So, if you're following along in the bouncing ball. One of the challenges in order to do that, however, is you can't Only skewed adjust up. So, what I'm going to talk about here is apparently I am very much focused on on children's children's stories. But think about this as the Goldilocks condition, right? We have all the lights goes in the dad's bed is too big. kid's head is too small. You know, the middle one is just right. So how do we find the Goldilocks condition about managing information? And how we arrive at that is sometimes we start out too abstract. Because what we want to do is we want to find the simple, but the most basic, simplest design point. And then we can get to detail because we have so many different people who want their thing right now at this moment, and how do you balance between the two? So, what I've learned is that when talking with executives, I start with the abstract, the or what might seem too abstract. Which is too simple. So, one way to think about this is a platform like you've invested simple or too abstract, is I like to think about this as sort of like cable, a cable set box for sales. This is getting dated, right, I'm gonna have to come up with a different analogy as everybody moves to most digital, the cable set box for sales, where we can provide lots of programming, and that each individual seller can tune into the network programming that's available for them. And then you can work with all the other content suppliers who have their own shows, or have their own channels, different product, marketers might have their own channels. And of course, like any network, there's going to be FCC rules associated with things for standards in the like, you have compliance, that chapter factor too, because what, what what decencies in so is that in terms of that model, does that work as a starting point?Amy Benoit 14:56Yes, that works. And I'd like where you're headed. With that, because you know that that's kind of, you know, what we have driven towards. So, I'm, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how that can be more effective.Scott Santucci 15:14Right. So the reason that I share that is typically what happens and this is a story in general, I'm not saying this is the story that's happening inside your company, but story in general is there's a lot of momentum to get something like this going, and and each person who funds this because I doubt, maybe the funding got picked up by marketing, but I doubt very seriously marketing was going to advance forward unless they had support from sales, different sales, sales leaders, and I'm sure there was other people that had to chime in on it as well. Maybe it had to get bought in so there's a lot of cooks in that kitchen, and everybody's got very specific expectations. And so, you go through that process, and that helps get it started. And then you know, as it goes, On, what happens is people give feedback on maybe the design of the tool. So, if we use our cable set box analogy, we're going to get feedback on, hey, you're scrolling bar of how you communicate what what programming is available. Why don't you modernize it? Or this particular show sucks? fix that. Or I want reporting, I want analytics on how many people are using this or what their clicks are. And can you tell us about you start imagining if you're a network business, like a cable provider, start imagining all of the different information that you can have. And soon you are just spent time talking about all these deliverables and we're offside of managing the expectations. Why did we find this uh, this network in the first place? So, what I like to do is kind of go back and always make sure that for the key stakeholders and the way that I like to envision this is that you're Running a business within a business and the business that you're running, you're operating is this network, right? The cable set box, you are the cable provider for your company company x. And as that cable provider, you have a as a business within a business, you have investors. So, who are those investors? And what is it they want? So, I think we need to get back to what what is it that you're doing that can always add value to say the CMO. And maybe we can identify where the CMO is, are there issues about where we can bring branding in the trenches? Or is it an issue of where we can start communicating differentiation, or we can start seeing better connection points of all the sum total of all marketing, Product Marketing, for example, and the value there not just clicking into each individual click point. So, I'm going to I'm going to pause there. And then let's think through what are the ongoing value drivers that the CMO wants to provide to the rest of the company? And how does your business within a business help make him or her successful? Because I think if we start there and get really discipline and think about five things, then we can move on to a different stakeholder like a sales leader of a particular, I'm sure you're organizing verticals, or geographies, or things like that. So yeah, so let's just concentrate on the CMO since that's where the budgets happening.Amy Benoit 18:35Sure, so definitely, you know, on brand on brand content, compliance content, you know, so so ensuring that content is reviewed and updated within a specified cadence. Being able to support new Product initiatives, that's another important area. So that we have a way to bring in that information and communicate that out to our users. So, a little bit of a, you know, internal columns perspective. And really, you know, and I guess the other thing that I haven't mentioned, you know, were under a, some different technology transformations. But you know, our end goal is to eventually connect our sales enablement portal to our Salesforce instance and serve up that content to our seller so that they don't even have to look for it, you know, in essence, kind of shaving off more of that process time for them to be prepared. So, we we also, you know, carry that on the side of the marketing house. So, you know, that is very important to us from a measuring what works, what's getting used, what works. That these teams can go back and refine their budget. Yeah, and produce content that resonates.Scott Santucci 20:08So, let's, this is great just to start off with, right. So, you've mentioned a variety of different value drivers. We don't have the time to go into that. But here's how I'd like you to think about it. So, the CMO, you hit you have two ways to give updates to him or her, right? One way is, hey, I'm getting a lot of complaining about X, Y or Z and we can just start imagining all start rolling our eyes about all the complaints uhm product marketers think that oh my god, I got to do all this tagging. Why can't I get my beautiful material out directly to the...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 17In an earlier episode (#13), Brian and Scott discussed the very important concept of Stakeholder Management. When we published that episode, we received a lot of feedback from the Insider Nation. One of those feedback items was a person asking us for a more in-depth discussion on stakeholder management moving beyond the Chicken Hawk concept and asking us to breathe life into the idea.In this episode #17, Scott interviews Brian and his recent work internally at a large company. As a Sales Enablement leader, Brian shares his learning and experiences in managing across the organization and managing up the organization. The guys walk through this important concept and dive into the operational challenges. They also talk about expectation setting approaches, and they explore the importance of managing the message to multiple altitude levels.  Listen to the episode, and you'll hear what Brian and his team did to work up, down, and across the organization to: CommunicateManage the messageDeclare victories Handle push back and feedback from salesJoin 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 00:33I'm Scott SantucciBrian 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, 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 more importantly, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:04Our podcast is different. We use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people who've been there and done that can provide, as we have been pushing the envelope in the profession for over a decade. In this show, we're going to hear from one of our listeners and pick a topic and talk about it. What did you get Scott?Scott Santucci 01:24So, one of the things that's fantastic is that our listeners are becoming more and more engaged, and we're getting some, some emails and this one's particularly great. So hopefully you can tell that we're trying to include you all as as, as our audiences inside our nation. And I love this topic because what he did is share and I'm always protecting the names to protect the innocent, some points of view about what's important to him. Great. What he says is lastly my big my big big challenges as enablement practitioner are number one. stakeholder management and a pas and parental you started this and if you know what we're talking about, that's Episode 13. Or better yet our chicken Hawk chicken Hawk episode, but I think it's much bigger than any practitioner realizes we couldn't agree with you more. Number two prioritization process. I think it's different than stakeholder management. And this is often and then this and off of this is almost model a business case to justify investment enablement process. Number three is capacity planning, what it actually takes to do one facet of enablement properly. I think we all underestimate the resources, so be great to have some kind of strategy or formula for before taking on a project. That's very, very true.Brian Lambert 02:54That might take five or six.Scott Santucci 02:56Yeah, exactly. Oh, each of these topics might take five or six, right? Yeah. Number four, a strategy for general continued green reinvest in your function and selling to your CFO, your value. That's the business within a business strategy that we've talked to we're still trying to figure out how to introduce that one so, any ideas on how we can just get that topic going, we'd love to hear. Number five, how to say no without losing trust. And number six, it could be us here at insert company name here to protect the innocent. Innocence, but enablement practitioners to me are seemingly awful at reinforcement strategies.Brian Lambert 03:36That's a good one too.Scott Santucci 03:38Yep. So those are those are the topics and in the spirit of trying to give you what we want. This is this topic. We're going to go into stake holder management, or aka chicken Hawk. And with me we have we have Brian Lambert, who recently was with a he's under nondisclosure, so we can't say exactly what the company is. So just imagine I'm beeping it. I'm kidding. I'm not gonna say the name of the company was recently had a large fortune 500 company where he ran enablement function. And we're going to talk about the importance of stakeholder management. So, first question to you, Brian. On a scale of one to 10. How important do you think stakeholder management is as a sales enablement practitioner?Brian Lambert 04:25Well, 11. Right to 11Scott Santucci 04:30He's gone to 11Brian Lambert 04:33Yeah, how good how good am I? A Two. YeahScott Santucci 04:38it's a difficult it's a very, very difficult thing to master. But let's talk about a little bit why it's so important. Why would you say it is a 10? And why do we not hear about stakeholder management outside in the community of sales enablement? Why are we only hear about onboarding or coaching, or you know, tactics? How come sales outcome stakeholder management if you think it's 11 why isn't it getting a lot of talk out there.Brian Lambert 05:03I'm not 100% sure, maybe because nobody's got an approach to it. Because a lot of times, I think people inherit remit or the department and they just execute what has been going on. In this case, I think it's important to think about the transformational nature or where the function is going, and how disruptive it can be in a positive way to the success of salespeople. And when you think about that, it impacts a lot of people. And you have to do what salespeople do, and you have to map it all out. So maybe it's a quote unquote, a lot of work for folks to figure out but it has to be done.Scott Santucci 05:44Yeah, so I want to add comment a little bit there. Brian, you mentioned transformational. I think we would you agree that within the sales enablement world there are some people who like who believe sales enablement is transformative, but they're not doing it. Companies, there are some who believe sales enablement is tactical and it should be just tactical. And Aren't we all over the place in the community in terms of the flavors of sales enablement?Brian Lambert 06:10Yeah, absolutely. The flavors or domains of sales enablement, and then, you know, is it here to execute well, and optimize what we've been doing in the past? Or is it a transformative role that requires new ways of working or new processes and deliverables, if you will? Or outputs to help salespeople be successful to close some sort of gap? Yeah, you know, improve efficiencies, etc.Scott Santucci 06:38So, let's do this to help the listeners or help our audience or help inside our nation. I'm hoping guys that we can, you know, get behind that. So let us know like,Brian Lambert 06:47We might need a sound effect from Nick every time you say insider nation, right? Audio engineer, think about that one.Scott Santucci 06:55And I'm also thinking about if he does our listeners, just Hashtag insider nation out there and let us know that you like the term and let us know that you're out there. But back-to-back to this topic to help inside our nation known being able to identify with Brian's story. Brian, tell us a little bit about the scope of what your enablement function was. What was the impetus for what you were doing? What was the scope of role at a high level, just real lightweight with the business problem? Was this the size of your team? Where did you what what function Did you report into give us some of those demographics before we start talking about stakeholder management so that way somebody can engage in your organization and why stakeholder management be so important?Brian Lambert 07:43So ultimately, we reported into a shared service function. It was designed the Shared Services function was designed to support and enable the call center so the call centers or sales and service call centers. So, in that view, the group that I worked in had traditionally been an L&D group. However, the VP that came in was very transformational. We basically work together to sell a vision for evolving the function and from traditional l&d function into an enablement function, which means it had primarily two groups, technically three. So, I'll go with the three-legged stool, because these are important concepts. I think that we can work on later Scott with this business, a little bit business idea that you have, but the the first function was a solution in group, the group that would intake you know, tens of thousands of initiatives, we had quite a lot of feedback coming from the field, and also a lot of initiatives that we had to run so they would intake we would scope it we would architect with solution architects or in this case learning experience architects, as we call them. That was the group that I ran is about 35 people. That group broke into architecture and program project management or business relationship management and project management. So that was that was the one group. The second group was a Build Team, a build function writers, production folks, curriculum designers, creative specialists, etc. This was a group of about 80 people, they put finger on keyboards very technically skilled, very good at what they do to produce these types of outputs that reps would use in the field. And then the third groups analytics business analytics function to measure all that as we evolved our services over time. So that was my group was on the I ran the solutioning group, about 35 people. And this idea of stakeholder management is huge, because we were the group responsible forScott Santucci 09:55Great hold on let me let me ask, I want to just make sure I'm clear here, Brian. So, the sales enablement function had three stools, a solutioning. Stool, a build stool, and a analytics tool.Brian Lambert 10:11That's right. Three legs of the stool, same stool. Right.Scott Santucci 10:14So, and they all report into a shared services function. Where did the Shared Services function report to?Brian Lambert 10:19Into the business units.Scott Santucci 10:21Okay, directly into the business units. So yeah, funding from multiple different business units?Brian Lambert 10:27Yeah, in a way it was. It was a fixed investment that they figured out at the top, and then we had our, our funding was headcount plus, get consulting dollars, if you will, professional services that we would go get, and we'll get an annual drop, if you will. And then we had, we actually increased that over year over year, but that's that's how we were funded. Gotcha.Scott Santucci 10:50So, what I'd like everybody to do before we start talking about stakeholder management imagine in your head, you know, just a box that's the sandbox that the organization is in It's a shared services function of which there are multiple business units with which, whom are more or less contributing to pay for this function. There are three components within that within that masterbox, three smaller boxes within it. So, a solutioning box, a bill box and an advisor, a advisor analytics box, our hero, Brian, our hero is in the solution inbox. And so, within the solution box, let's talk about why stakeholder management is so important. What I try to do is do might do the job of laying the land Tell me why stakeholder management is so important.Brian Lambert 11:41It is really sets and manages expectations when you have an enablement function that is evolving. And, you know, we made a lot of promises. We we had to sell it internally. It had to be stood up internally, it got carved out from existing groups, we took some headcount over in the process. We Just come through a merger environment. And it was one of those things where we had to release that and manage expectations. And I think that's ultimately what stakeholder management it's about on both sides, ourselves and what our people can do what we can deliver in the context of an evolution or a transformation, but also the impact business impact we can get over time. That was critical.Scott Santucci 12:23Okay, so the, to be simple about it because we started off talking about stakeholder management, using a Looney Tunes cartoon. Right to go back to go back to centering, centering principles and simplicity. The simple answer to stakeholder management is about setting and managing expectations. Right, right. That's right art is that then you said you said it was a two on how well you are? Because it seems so hard.Brian Lambert 12:52Yeah, I learned a lot. We broke it into three groups. So just to keep it you know, actionable here. You have to manage up, you have to manage across, and you have to manage down the managing down. I think we should park that maybe for another podcast and just talk about the up and across piece. Because I had to learn a lot there. There's there are a lot of landmines. There are a lot of expectations, as we talked about, and quite frankly, some politics right there. And that's something that even though I'd come from a sales background, is important to make sure that that we stay on top of proactively to build the right kind of relationships across because that's ultimately where your your power and your funding comes from. And then also above because of the pressure that they're getting from the executive team to transform the customer conversation.Scott Santucci 13:46Right. So so, let's let's Park this here for a second. So, we have stakeholder management is about setting and managing expectations, not rocket science. Well, now that now that you've broken that down one, one level further You have three different groups, you have up, across and down. Let's talk about up right now. Just point number one, what is managing up me? Who is the up?Brian Lambert 14:12In this case, shared services leadership, who really cares about, you know, business impact the number of customers we're serving internally, the volume of initiatives, the quality of initiatives, and, you know, the feedback that they're getting, to make sure that they're adding the right kind of value. And then our business unit leaders who really care about business impact of, for example, new hires, or knowledge management articles with processes in them to make sure that they're right and they want to make sure that they are ultimately serving customers the right way. And in this business environment, compliance driven, making sure that it's done legally correct, etc. So, there's a lot of inspection by the business units to make sure that we're equipping the right reps with the right content, message, processes, etc.Scott Santucci 14:59So Let me ask it this way. So, I'm being purposely challenging here. Because Brian and I both know that bringing up a topic like stakeholder management can be difficult and people can tend to assume that's too theoretical or too big or whatnot. You just say you said that you are we're in the solutions team. How is messaging, why isn't messaging up? just deliver to the VP of the Shared Services function? I don't understand. Isn't, aren’t you just managing expectations of one person? Is that a pen or a woman who's managing all the other relationships of all the other groups? Why are you involved in that?Brian Lambert 15:42Yeah, that's, that's a good question. But it's, yeah, I guess it's easy to miss. But it's one of those things where if you don't do that, you are pigeonholing yourself, with assumptions So in other words, people will assume and by people, I mean, leaders and sister organizations, for example, shared services in this organization, let's pretend there's eight groups. And we were, you know, one of eight. So, seven eighths of the sister organization wouldn't really necessarily know what we're up to other than the interactions that they have with our people. And that's I don't think it's a good expectation to expect that one leader would be able to handle all that. And we really had to be proactive and actually plan out how we would stakeholder manage these, you know, seven other groups, if you will, from a communication perspective, messaging, declaring victory, even for some wins, which is important. And also, being clear on when we screwed up and doing that proactively so that things didn't fester bubble up or turn into an issue.Scott Santucci 16:53All right, so let me I think I need some stakeholder management to manage talking about This. So, I, here's where I got a little bit lost. And maybe you can help provide clarity for me in my head, as I'm following along with you. And I'm actually, if you're listening, I'm actually using a sheet of paper to draw out these things so I can make it more concrete. I have in my head that there's a variety of different business units with whom are contracting or have expectations with your VP. Mm hmm. You said seven other sister organizations. What's going on in my head is I'm confused because I thought you only had two other sister organizations, the ops group or sorry, not the ops group.Brian Lambert 17:45Oh, the analytics. Yeah. So, enablement had three three legs of the stool, huh? That is one function of eight.Scott Santucci 17:55Got it. So, there are eight total functions, what were the other functions?Brian Lambert 18:00Things like policy procedures, a group that would translate the product and technology into what our what our sites needed to be doing. That was a second group of third group was quality QA. A fourth group was tools technology. Our group was pretty much specifically aligned to equipping sellers with content. So, messaging and training content knowledge management content, but we didn't do the...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 16The more things change, the more they stay the same. For example, there was an old classification system the early Greeks came up with to classify the basic elements. In 1869, Dimitri Mendelev evolved that concept and began to classify the elements by their atomic mass. The idea of classification is critical to how you understand something. While sales managers have been critical to sales productivity for 100+ years, it's an often misunderstood role. The same applies here. Classification matters.Let's face it. Buyers have evolved, marketers have evolved, IT teams have evolved, leaders have evolved. And that leads to an important question -- What about sales managers? How have they evolved? Companies expect a LOT out of their sales management team. How they view (categorize) their sales management team at the organization matters. Do they expect forecasts on time? That means managers have to spend time in spreadsheets and opportunity reviews. 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 00:00Welcome 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 Saantucci 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 00:00I'm Scott Sachi.Brian Lambert 00:00I'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 00:00Together, 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 00:00Our podcast is different. We use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people who've been there and done that can provide, as we have been pushing the envelope in the profession for over a decade. And in today's show, we're going to discuss what changes in the marketplace that's causing you to re examine the role of sales managers. What is this idea or concept of role ambiguity? And why is it so destructive? And what are the five traits, timeless traits, sales managers should have to be successful in today's modern selling landscape? As usual, we start with a centering story to give our episode a theme. Scott take it away from here.Scott Santucci 00:00Thank you, Brian. And thank you all our listeners actually want to share a little bit an idea actually shared by one of our listeners. And I was talking with one of our listeners and he said, you know what we were doing. We're actually having a podcast listening club. And what they're doing is they're listening, they're sharing with their team.Brian Lambert 02:15That's cool,Scott Santucci 02:16a podcast, and then they're all talking about it the next day to come up with ideas and what inspired them was one of our earlier podcasts, it was the first one or the second one talking about how difficult it is to do all the internal selling. And this particular director like Geez, that's a big problem that we've got. And he shared shared that point of view with other with his other teammates and and they all said yeah, we have a hard time selling, whether it be the coaching program to the frontline sales managers or selling what's required with the, with the marketers, so they got this idea to do this pilot Cast listening club, and we'd like to share that with the rest of you. Maybe that's a way that you can, you can take advantage of our podcast.Brian Lambert 03:07That's greatScott Santucci 03:08with that. That's pretty cool story, right? Yeah. Speaking of cool stories, for a very forced segue, Plato, Plato. Plato was one of the first people to write about elements. And there was a classification system that the ancient Greeks use to describe the world around them. And if you know,Brian Lambert 03:31I know this, I know this, okay. Is it is it fire Earth, Wind and water,Scott Santucci 03:37close fire, earth, but air is what they call it, and then they added another oneBrian Lambert 03:44melancholy or whatever.Scott Santucci 03:46Nether. Yeah, sort of space. Right. Yeah. Right. And that those, those categories became the foundation for everything. And really, that's where alchemy, you know, it was a big deal, and we No alchemy has to be kind of silly. But if it weren't for alchemists, we wouldn't have modern chemistry. Along came back to 1869. And yes, that's the same year is when we have the Brooklyn Bridge story. So, a lot of great stuff happened in sales enablement.Brian Lambert 04:18Yeah, I'm sure somebody's driving down the roads. Like that's the same year as the Brooklyn Bridge story.Scott Santucci 04:23Yeah. All of them are doing that. Right. Right. My gosh, how uncanny?Brian Lambert 04:29I'm pretty sure you're the only person on the planet thatScott Santucci 04:33Well, then anyway, continue, or listeners doing engaging in 1869, same year as the Brooklyn Bridge story, but elsewhere in the world in Russia, a guy named Dmitri mendeleev was coming up with an idea and he made an observation that said, what if we classified elements not by Earth, Wind and Fire? Haha. That's a band but not by the classic Greek one, but by their atomic mass. And at the time in 1869, they only had the ability to measure a few of the atomic atomic mass. So really, basically, he had a different lens, on how to categorize things, which is really all all it is. And using the atomic lens, what happened is he created what is now we now know is the periodic table, and you learn about this in chemistry, or maybe you've forgotten that you've learned about chemistry. And when he first produced it, there were only maybe six or seven elements in there. And he predicted slots that ultimately were discovered because of of how we thought about this stuff.Brian Lambert 05:46There you go. So, what a great piece of history as usual, but what does that have to do with sales enablement, and I framed out a theme around sales managers. So, what's up with that? What does that have to do a sales manager?Scott Santucci 06:01Well, there's a couple ways that this has something to deal with it. One is categorization. So, one of the things that we're going to talk about here would be the categories of the attributes of what what makes a sales manager, a sales manager. And one of the things that the elements in the periodic table are is really is just a classification system. It's just categories. That's it. The second thing, the second reason that this is important is it's a from what to what, though whole universe, the whole idea of chemistry didn't start until after dimitrie metal of the periodic table because without it, it's not really a science. It's just a bunch of experimentations. It's alchemy. So, if it weren't for Dimitri, there wouldn't be chemistry so you can blame him. And then the third thing that makes this so important is modernization though World in 1969 was very, very, very different than the sandal, this handle clad pontificators of Plato and Aristotle. But yet somehow people kept doing the same thing over and over and over again, it took somebody different to look at it differently. And that's what we're talking about here is that the environment that we're selling in now is a different environment altogether. Maybe it's time to revisit what we're thinking about with sales managers.Brian Lambert 07:32Yeah, like that. And this is an interesting one because I often tell a story of hey, you know, raise your hand if you believe buyers have have drastically evolved, you know, roomful of people. Oh, absolutely. Everybody shakes their head. Okay. What if you What about marketing? they evolved? Absolutely. Everybody shakes their head. Oh, my God, I got so much stuff. complexity, oh, digitization, you know, everybody talks mumble Yeah. What about what about IT? Oh, absolutely. You know, we're all in the cloud. Okay, what about products? And how those products and platforms? Oh, yeah, you know, everything's in the cloud. It's subscription now. Yep. Okay, what about sellers? Oh my gosh, they need to change but the boy haven't they, they they're stuck in the 1800s. Everything's the same, you know, they need to elevate, they need to be different. But yeah, their worlds change too. But yes, it's still the same. That debate rages. And I say, Well, okay, cool. What about what about leadership? Oh, yeah. Everybody needs to be a better leader. build those cultures, we need to focus on inclusion and diversity and leadership and Okay, great. What about sales managers? Uhh good question. The often-forgotten sales manager, and that's the reaction I get. It's just crickets. They thought about that.Scott Santucci 08:52I think that's a great setup. Brian, you know, sort of going around the horn about how much things have changed. And I think also it's in my experience, and I'd love to know what you think about this is so what actually is the job of a sales manager? What what are they? What do they do?Brian Lambert 09:10Right? Well, it's a little bit tongue in cheek, right? People can be a little defensive when you walk up to them say, so what do you do here? Right? It's like the office episode office space. I have the obscure movie reference now. But, you know, but that is a great question. Because it's, it's a, you know, something that I think every role has to go through. Certainly, in my career, I've had to ask myself, what am I doing? What is my my role? And what's my value add? And when you do that, you end up a little bit out of the realm of your classic job description. I don't know about you, but if I'll ask the listeners here, you know, how many guys are doing exactly what your job description says. And most people would admit that what they're hired to do is is not the same thing that they're being asked to do on a day-to-day basis. And so is the same thing with sales management. And so, when you ask that question, what do they do? I think a better question is, you know, we talked about this a couple weeks ago is what's their what's their value? And what what, what are they asked to do? And what's their role value contribution in the company? And I think there's at least two camps. I don't know what you think about this, there's the compliance driven, drive your forecast, you know, look at the spreadsheets and do the reporting side. And then you have this you know, a little bit air quotes, the coach, and and these are presented as to, you know, bipolar by polar opposites, you know, not bipolar, just polar opposites of the spreadsheet jockey versus the coach. And those are your only two choices. And I think there's way more to that. And I wanted to explore that here on the podcast. But before we go on with that, what do you think of those two bifurcations eitherScott Santucci 11:00I think in our world that we're in now with a lot of certainty, we like to put things into buckets. I think the reality is, at least when I've talked about this, sales managers are human beings. And not unlike most of us if you've ever been in a situation where in your that catch 22 spot where you're being told to do one thing, and the other thing that you're being told to do, you're gonna leave something on the table. I think most sales managers want to do right for their salespeople. Yet, they also not yet they also want to do right and they want to look be looked at the eyes of all the things that are being asked of them to perform all the tasks. I think the challenge is that the number of tasks that they're being asked to like I've heard a lot of people say sales managers, your spreadsheet jockeys, well, I think the people who say that don't really have empathy or really understand all that pressures that the sales managers are under. So, I think what I think your characterization is very fair it would be it's pretty easy to say, the company wants me to enforce the forecast. So, I'm going to live in the spreadsheet and manage, manage my sellers and ask them constantly, you know, where's your forecast and you know, the weekly practice exams begin? That's an easy thing to do, because that is a request many companies have on their sales managers. But then it's it's definitely a request. Most sales managers, particularly the ones that came through the field don't like to do because they want to do what they they think and that's being client facing. So, you have this conflict, that's, that's rife. So, I think your your your contrast, we're in the business of imposing compliance and making sure our sales managers are following but you know, the road and then the other one is, we want to help develop our people. I think those people characterizations are right? But I don't think we're going to find a pure sales manager that fits neatly into either box because they're pulled in so many different directions.Brian Lambert 13:09Yeah. And then, so I agree. And maybe on this podcast, we'll we'll explore a characterization. I certainly have some traits that we're going to share here at the end. But before we get there, I think if you look at and pause in this gap, you know, this, from what-to-what gap that you mentioned, with your story, and you say, Okay, well, what is that? What are the categorizations? Right, and I could, I think their listeners could probably help us come up with 100 different things that are coming at sales managers right now. But the, the, you know, three or four that come to mind, which are massively, you know, sucking the time out of the day of sales managers to me, are, you know, marketing and sales aren't aligned to buyers. You know, there's a there's a disconnect, not between my marketing and sales. It's not about sales and marketing alignment. It's about marketing aligning the buyers and sales teams aligned to buyers and managers see that and they have to work through that. Um, another one is how they're organized. And you and I have talked a lot about this. And this is becoming more and more prevalent in the digital transformation literature that's out there and the trends that you're seeing in TED Talks, the organizational structures of yesterday, can't meet the needs of buyers today. And you see all kinds of new operating models and, you know, organizational structures popping up and its managers see that that their siloed views aren't helpful. Another one is that these random acts of all the stuff that they're asked to do from attending a focus group on you know, initiative 127 of the week, to, you know, the forecasting to the new messaging, the new sales, you know, methodology, the new product, push the new CEO and date, whatever, are actually putting more burden on salespeople than helping them. And you know, unfortunately, and we've talked about this on three or four episodes, the ideas or the initiatives in the program to the projects that sellers need to participate in are actually helpful to sales, they create more complexity. And he had a sales manager seeing all this, but what are they supposed to do? And that is where I wanted to put the put the pause in here, because that's the role of sales manager in that type of complexity. And in that type of pressure, from above, from from below, customers from internal groups, I just listed three or four, there's at least, you know, another 10 or 15 that I could easily come up with, but my point is, that's the role of sales manager to go in there and help sellers be successful. When I thinkScott Santucci 15:52I think that what you're talking about that all makes a lot of sense. And I think the the question that I'm going to answer myself here is, you know, kind of so what was so what, what what what business problems that that create? And I think that this is the challenge of the difference between executing and operating. So, this is one of those areas of what's the difference between sales enablement and sales operations. When you go through an operations standpoint and you think about things like span of control, and you say we have this number of salespeople, and is it eight is it six is it 12 whatever that number is that somebody computes in a management consulting world that span of control number then we assign a sales manager for it and for the most part, the roles forgotten after that. And so, you have this issue if you if you have sales managers who are smart people, they want to be successful. And they're they're mapped to a span of control number. And there's all this all these different variables, you get a lot of confusion about who's responsible for what. So, is the sales manager actually really responsible for enabling the rep? Or is it the responsibility of the sales enablement? department? We talked about that in one of our podcasts earlier, you should go listen, listen.Brian Lambert 17:27Yeah, and I totally agree because that I mean, we're obviously we're outside the realm of approving vacations or conducting performance reviews like every other line manager. This is uniquely sales.Scott Santucci 17:40Exactly and I think that's that that is the the lack of clarity that human resources so let's also talk about all the all the cooks in the kitchen. Like all span of control conversations, that's as a consultant you go through and think through the those different you know, what are the rules of the road and then you have all the HR requirements dealing with policies, you know trading, trading people, their jobs, every every every function in the whole company has that. What makes sales managers unique is somebody is responsible for developing a group of people that report to them. Some people believe that responsibility should be the frontline sales managers. Other people believe that responsibility should exist elsewhere. Right there we have conflict. Another challenge would be who's actually really responsible for developing the culture of the company, the culture of your individual team, you as a sales manager might want to be more aggressive or think that or the sales team might want to be more aggressive, and that might that might conflict with the overall culture of the company. Another example would be there's lots of policies about using I'll give you a quick Perfect example of that. The the storage restraint.Brian Lambert 19:08Hundred meg laptop storage constraint is right on the 10 meg 20 meg email

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 15Brian and Scott bring key issues to life, through the lens of a seller:The burden on SalespeopleCustomer buying journey and buyer enablementWhat sellers must do to sell moreScott shares real-life situations of his journey (very openly and honestly — you likely will not hear this kind of stuff from your sellers unless you have deep personal relationships with them). He talks about his journey from selling products to selling solutions to executives. The story starts off with a lot of excitement and thrill about doing something new but, by doing what he was told and taught - Scott found himself on a PIP (performance improvement plan).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 00:35I'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 00:50Together, 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 more importantly, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:06Our podcast is different. We use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people have been there done that can provide, as we have been pushing the envelope on the profession for over a decade. And today, in this show, we will discuss what does the seller's experience really look like? Is your system set up to help sellers be successful? And what does an integrated enabling program look like? As usual, we start with a centering story to give our episode a theme. So, Scott, take it away from here.Scott Santucci 01:41Thank you, Brian. And Hello, everybody. One of the things that we get the opportunity to do and as more and more of you users, we're calling you inside our nation, keep listening. We get more and more feedback and I had had the opportunity to have a conversation with one of our If one of our listeners, I'm going to try not to out too much about her, because I'm sure this is embarrassing. And we were talking and one of the things that she was saying is that sometimes some of the things that I say, you know, make her feel stupid. And you know, are you an academic person? And Brian, you know, full well, boy, I hate being called academic, but maybe sometimes the way that I think about things and talk about them in that way. Yeah, you deserve it. Thanks. Thanks. I appreciate solidarity there, Brian. Just kidding.Brian Lambert 02:35It's an interesting thing.Scott Santucci 02:37One of the things is, uh, this topic is such a hard thing. It's it's both simple and easy as as we like to talk about sales. It's both fit sales is simple, but simple and easy. And one of the things that I'd like to share this time is to talk about what makes me so passionate about sales enablement. And actually, one of the things that I'd like to share is a story from when I was in the field. So, we're going to go back in the way, way way back machine, the company at the time I was working at at Mehta group. And in our third episode, we actually talked about how I built a sales enablement function there. But this is before even that, and I'mBrian Lambert 03:20actually, because you you actually came out of the field you were a seller before that. That's right, that's created in that episode. So, this is actually is that going to be the story when you were a seller?Scott Santucci 03:30Exactly. It's pretty cool. So the this story isn't, isn't really that great. It doesn't put me in the in the greatest light, but as a seller, we've just gone through sales training, and specifically it was solution selling training. And if you've seen the movie, Jerry Maguire, where Jerry wrote that letter, that memo out, everybody was really really excited. I was really, really excited at the time. We were selling the subscription services. So meta group is been acquired by Gartner group. So, if you could imagine buying reports, and we would sit there and be trying to talk about what the deliverables are, here's our service. Here's our ssms service or GNS service, here are the five things that you do here, deliverables about it, you get these deliverables, and you get this teleconferencing. You get these conference tickets, and blah, blah, blah. So, if that's what we were talking about, who do you think that I was selling to? I was selling people up like a guy named Mark fleischman, who actually was at bellcore. And his job was more or less a librarian. He would meet me in the cafeteria with me. He wouldn't even bring me in I would even get the code to get in. Right. That's That's how low level and we debate about how many license fees and what the what the the usage was, and we would haggle between $15,000 For $16,000 about what the renewal was for that particular service. That was a rough and it sure as heck wasn't what I thought was was selling. I walked out of this solution selling training, and I'm excited. I'm gonna go and learn to go talk to executives. That's, that's what I was gonna do. So, my primary focus was, I'm gonna go talk to executives. So, think about it going all in how you drank the Kool Aid, you're excited. I really drank the Kool Aid. I, I was a process zealot. At the time. I thought the solution selling thing was fantastic. I drank the Kool Aid, I went all in. That's good. Yes, it is good. So, the first thing that I did, at the time, my territory was the state of New Jersey. And the very first opportunity that I got, I decided you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go call on the CIO at Merck. And literally This is no joke the the CIO at Merck's name was Dr. Popper.Brian Lambert 06:02So, you're gonna go from the library and eating a salad with a librarian to calling Dr. popper, the CIO at Merck.Scott Santucci 06:10Well, yeah, of course, right. That's what they wanted us to do in the training, right.Brian Lambert 06:14That's a transformative experience right there.Scott Santucci 06:16Well, we'll talk about that. So, I called up and I left a voicemail message. I can't remember exactly what it was. I went to lunch. I'm feeling pretty good. I come back, I see that I have a couple voicemails on my machine. I'm excited. Because Dr. popper is obviously gonna invite me back in so I can give him my pitch and all the solution selling stuff is great. Well, actually, on my voicemail, there were three voicemails, all of them were from Merck. None of them were from Dr. popper. And they were progressively more agitated, threatening, almost. And this is no lie, saying that I'm just a vendor. I'm not to talk to you. Good call on Dr. Dr. popper. I was gonna say Dr. Pepper doctor. And if you ever do this again, we're going to make sure that you don't sell anything to Merck ever again.Brian Lambert 07:12Dang. So that when only did you get one call? You got three calls back there just a little threatening.Scott Santucci 07:18That's right. So, I'd love to be able to tell you what awesome heroic thing that I did to be able to recover from that situation. But that wouldn't be the truth. The truth is, I said, screw it. I'm packed up my things. I went home. I shut the shades of my apartment at the time.Brian Lambert 07:39getting weirdScott Santucci 07:41I put on Free Willy and I just watched Free Will because I wanted to feel happy because I felt so small. I didn't call on a on a CIO again for a while. I went back to the RA Fleischmanns again, Michael fleischman again until finally, I Got my courage up again. So, my next time was, I said, all right, dust that off, you know, shake it off scotch shake it off, Scott, you still believe in that solution selling stuff. So, the next bat the next time I went after this was before Campbell soups moved their headquarters and their headquarters was in was in New Jersey. So, I called on the CIO of, of, of Campbell's soups and honest I can't even remember his name. And Brian had he did you see the movie Wall Street? Uh,Brian Lambert 08:30yeah, a long time ago, though, ya know, so, the Wayback Machine.Scott Santucci 08:34All my references are so David, I'm clearly not a millennial. But in Wall Street, there's this scene where bud Fox, the main character, Charlie Sheen, gets his meeting with Gordon Gekko. And how did he get his meeting with Gordon Gekko? Do you remember?Brian Lambert 08:53No, I don't tell us.Scott Santucci 08:54He called Gordon Gekko every day for like 80 days. in a row and showed up it is showed up the day of Gordon Gekko his birthday with a box of cigars. Oh, that's right. Gordon Gekko finally let him in. Well, you know, I'd seen that movie and I swear to God, I literally called this guy for 60 days straight till finally I got him on the phone. And every single time I left a voicemail so he you know, he kind of knew me. I would highlight research where I thought our research was better than Gartner's because I knew he was a big Gartner shop. And I just call kept calling kept calling. And lo and behold, one of those days he actually answered the phone. What did I do? What happened?Brian Lambert 09:43You froze upScott Santucci 09:44That Yeah, exactly. I would love to tell you an awesome story about I had this great rap and I you know, got a meeting with them. Nope. I kind of went uhh and he was nice about it. Scott, you've been pretty persistent. Can you Please tell me how you're different than gardener? And then I fumbled through some words. You know, it was sort of like a word salad of a bunch of things that I had heard or that we've been talking about. And he said, Well, I gave you my ear time. Will you please stop calling me now? And I went yep. So, opportunity number two. I do, I went back down to sell into the sound of the cubicle people.Brian Lambert 10:31All right. No, Free Willy. No Free Willy tune.Scott Santucci 10:34Okay, so fast forward now. Now, you know, maybe two, two months later, I had worked on an opportunity and I built a I was able to get access to this guy named Keith Kebel. Keith Kebel, at the time, was the VP of shared services at Bristol Myers Squibb. I knew that he had he had responsibility for a budget It was $50 million. So good access right, access to adult money. And at the time they were, they were implementing SAP. And they had the Cooper's the Cooper's team in there, and we were talking about how now I'm getting more into a rap about what our products do, and our products are you should be thinking about our products like an insurance policy because who knows what the risk of a bad decision could be? And I had told them about like, what would happen if Hershey if you know you've heard about the Hershey incident where they had an SAP challenge, and they weren't able to ship candy? What would happen to you if you did that? So, all you have to do is buy our you know, our particular service or X number of dollars is like a decision-making insurance policies that all sounded great, invited us in. And really what what the goal was, I didn't really know what the goal was. And I didn't ask I said, Oh, yeah, awesome, like as excited. Sure. So, I brought my brought my subject matter expert, Barry wildermann and with me, and the two of us show up and there were 20 of them. Because this is such a big deal. And they started using a lot of language that I had no idea what these people were talking about, honestly, there was like words like, release and instance and things like that. I had no idea what they were. And I just wrote the keywords down when we were leaving in the parking lot to get back in the car. So, what happened in that meeting? Barry, how did it go? He said it went great. And he listed off three or four problems that they they were going to have. So, I was like, super great. So, I called Keith back the next day. Hey, Keith Baba had a great relationship. How did it go? He's like, it was great. You know, that was a great meeting. Thank you very much. And I said, see you're ready to do business with us. I'm getting ready to close on my solution sale. Brian. How did that go? He said, Well, Scott, you kind of confirm that we're on the right track. Well, Barry says you're gonna have problems. What are they?Brian Lambert 13:08Barry says you got problems.Scott Santucci 13:13And I said, Uh, I don't know, you want to get them back on the phone. And at that point in time, I lost all my credibility. Yeah, you're never able to get Keith Kebel on the phone ever again. So here I'm here I'm at six months into my solution selling experience. How do you think I was performing? What would my overall numbers like?Brian Lambert 13:40Zero?Scott Santucci 13:41Yeah. Dude, I was on a pip. Yeah, so.Brian Lambert 13:48So, you had these at bats. You're trying to do what the company says. And your manager puts you on a pip.Scott Santucci 13:55Yeah, yeah, I was gonna talk about that later. So, I was on a pip, and we could talk about what our plan was. I was on a pip. So now I'm like, oh my goodness, I'm worried about losing my job. I certainly wasn't, you know, killing it. As a rep I was about at Target about it plan, maybe 80% when I was selling to the selling products to the Fleischmanns, but my, my, my cubicle pipeline was all gone because as you know, it takes a lot of energy and a lot of effort to try to build relationships with with the executives. But thank goodness. And I sort of had this come to Jesus moment with myself saying what the heck just just be you. So, thank goodness I've been building a relationship with with one of the CIOs. So, the way j&j is organized was is around these sectors, and I built a relationship with one of the with one of the CIOs and one of the sectors and I've been talking with him about the idea of an insurance policy but About one product, but across all of our all of our products. I talked a lot about decision making. I said why don't we facilitate a meeting of your direct reports and one thing led to another and suddenly, things started clicking in and with a with a company, so large and so many different, so many different IT leaders. I, at the end of the year, I had done $3 million, a business with with Johnson and Johnson. So, I'd done basically, three x what what my quota was, and that's one of the reasons that I became one of the top reps. Let's try it from writing all the business of the story that we talked about in the second part.Brian Lambert 15:44So, solution selling did work.Scott Santucci 15:46Well see, I don't know whether it did or didn't because I didn't really follow the solution selling script. I use some of the elements of it. Yeah, basically what I did was just get back to, you know, what problems do you have? Mr. CIO, well, we're worried about making the wrong decisions. There's a lot of choices with technology. Well, we have a lot of experts. Would you like to have experts on hand? That sounds great. How does that work? Well, let's simulate how that works. Let's let's put it to use. And you know, because I kept working on helping them use it, they actually gave me a desk there. I actually had a badge that I will go in and my desk and when you're there and you hear all the challenges, it's kind of easy, right to sell, but it took building that relationship. It took forgetting a lot of the stuff that I that I learned in solution selling and focus more on the people. And that's a that's, that's my story.Brian Lambert 16:47Cool. So, it started out with Dr. popper, then Free Willy, then Charlie Sheen and cigars. Then Bristol Myers Squibb with the insurance policy pitch. And then six months in you're on a pip on a pip.Scott Santucci 17:06Yep, on a pip about ready to get fired.Brian Lambert 17:09Then you had your soul-searching moment you're like screw it, I'm just going to be myself if I'm gonna get fired, I might as well go down just being true to myself. I can relate and then you know j&j conference meetings. And then that's that's how we ended up at that other podcast can't remember the exact number butScott Santucci 17:27Number three right yeahBrian Lambert 17:29yeah. So, they I mean and the cool thing about that is, um, it sounds like one you figured out how to get access to executives right?Scott Santucci 17:40Well, the hard way. Yeah. I mean, let's let's let's, let's be honest it would we want other people to learn that way?Brian Lambert 17:49No. Well, I mean, kudos to you a lot of people probably wouldn't have been as committed. I mean, that's what's cool about that story is you were all in you know, you came out of that experience you hit the outlaw you know the I believe button.Scott Santucci 18:04Oh, you have no idea how many of my friends told me to not they would say that stuff is BS, you know look at look at that and look at our pipelines you know at least you know we're not killing it either, but you know, at least money right like dude in my friends were what they thought they were watching out for me. So, I had that I had the internal talk track of not doing well. I had the my managers but my but and of course, when you're on a pip, it's not just your manager, right? You have a review with the VP of sales toBrian Lambert 18:38Because that's when that's when the help startsScott Santucci 18:40The quote unquote, help.Brian Lambert 18:43Yeah. And you know, remember, remember in Episode 10, I'm looking at the list here. We talked about the five sales objectives. Let's use that for our listeners here to structure this out a little bit. You know, in the first objective If you have to have, you know, a perspective, you have to bring a perspective to the buyer. Right. And you've got different...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode #14One of our listeners, Rachel, shared her companies view about sales management and the difficulty managers have in transitioning from being a top-performing rep to sales management. Sales managers have to live in two worlds, traditional "management skills" and also sales productivity contribution. Sales Enablement leaders looking to implement sales coaching need to be clear about their focus and intent. What can sales enablement leaders do to add value?  Joe Gibbs won Super Bowls 3 different quarterbacks. How? He coached to a system, encouraging people to be themselves, and focusing on outcomes.There are a lot of people talking about front-line sales managers and having them "go coach more." As much as that's been discussed, sales coaching hasn't really taken off. The guys talk about:- What is sales coaching - the difference between sales coaching activities and sales coaching programs- Unleashing the value of coaching, by embracing the sales leadership perspective- What are the attributes of successful coaching programs?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:Scott Santucci 00:01Hi, team, this is a What is that? So, what is a What is what is that? So, what I'm trying to do is create some structure and curiosity around some servers, certain things and some concepts and explain them and help make them relatable, explain why and whatnot and provide some texture around what's going on, what are some of the things we've got? They are super simple. The difficulty is there's a learning curve to get to simple, and then a comfort factor about applying. And a lot of this has to do with ambiguity, and why we need to produce lots of things to make things accessible. So, I'm trying to what is that? What do you think about what is that? Is that the right title? What should I call this series? You tell me because this is for you, you got to give me feedback. Okay, so one of the things that I think we all understand and can appreciate is that there are many silos involved inside of business. And they create lots of friction, which cancel each other out. And there is a need for Orchestration. I'm hopeful that casting you guys and in specific roles, what's fascinating is behaving in silos instead of operating and roles. What is that? What that is, is a massive amount of muscle memory that we have to create tools out visualize, that holds us in silos, we are prisoners of silos. And we think that we think we say, examples or symptoms of thinking in a silo. I don't know what marketing's doing. You don't need to know what marketing is doing if you're doing your role in our operating model. Or if you need to know column but ask them. There's nothing preventing anybody from doing that. Other examples of being in silos, I mean topics, you can generate your own topics, you you have your own, your job is to figure out how to make your role or the span of things that you can contribute to fit. And what we're all experiencing is this, either a lack of an operating model, or let you know, lack of clarity. And what we need to be able to recognize is all these things are VOCA related. We were clearly not prepared for the speed of V. We continue to use words like business outcomes, yet we haven't defined what makes business language versus nonbusiness language. So, we haven't made that tangible for other people. So, we're going to continue to struggle in uncertainty. So, we have uncertainty. Complexity is what's interesting is what makes something simple for one person is complex for something else. It feels complex learning something simple. So, there's a lot of paradox. If you look at the if you study complex systems theory, one of the things that is associated with complexity is paradoxes. Don't assume things are conflicting. Question it because it's probably complexity. And then finally, of course, ambiguity. Why do we have to have lots of slides because ambiguity is the thing that people hate the most, particularly in business, they can't stand it, they can accept the speed. People have recognized the complexity, that's something that people have tools over. It's the total fuzziness, and fog of ambiguity. And unfortunately, ambiguity is why there are so many friction points on the left. And, you know, the only way to overcome ambiguity is to create things to make things less and less foggy and to have patience as as we bring it along. But that's ultimately a key element of Orchestration. Now, one of the things around Orchestration is that Orchestration to Orchestrate across many departments requires an operating model. So not only do you need to be able to orchestrate yourself, but you have to orchestrate orchestrators. So, each of the different cogs have to be orchestration engines and upon themselves that have to tie together to overall orchestration. That's the role of being a catalyst. And that means there are rules that the other cogs have to follow. When those cogs don't follow those rules, they spin off out of control. Now, some of the cogs want to know how they fit into everything else. And what happens is too much time gets spent talking about the operating model and the philosophy of things and not doing so there's this balancing act that we need to learn how to establish and that clients are going to need you'd have to just establish the phenomenon that we are experiencing happens inside our clients. There is a reason we're organized. I'm going to repeat this. Stay in your roles and question your roles and why you're organized. Don't try to keep coming up with reasons to not be in your roles. The reason why is we have to simulate our clients’ experiences, it's the experience stupid to be able to appreciate what an operating model is. So, we can at least have the bedside manner to talk them through it. While we create the space to create the actual physical artifacts, we can't say things like muscle memory, that's not a tangible, concrete thing. And just because we've all experienced, and we use words, that means stuff to us, they don't have meaning to other people. So here are some examples of operating models. This is from IBM. I'm not going to talk to it. I'm just going to make observations. Here's one around the it operating model. Hint, notice the word capabilities over here, capability service, rigid service management on activities across functions. What its capabilities mean, here. Over here, let's zoom in on here. This is from Bain McKinsey. Look, what they're saying is the operating model is the gap between strategy and execution. Hopefully, you have seen often that we've talked about the blend between strategy and execution, what is the organizational thing that makes it happen? It's an operating model. But operating models are too new for people, or too conceptual, too theoretical, they're architecture driven. So, I've learned that particularly in the sales and marketing space, where the muscle memory that we have, there is too much activity. So, we have the balancing act, right? It seems contradictory. On the one hand, we're not doing enough, but yet we're criticizing people for doing activity without thinking. But we're thinking too much that we've got analysis, paralysis and not producing, then when we produce, it's not the right thing. So, all these different seemingly conflicting variables are experienced, even when you go try to introduce an operating model. Operating models are the key to success for any digital transformation, because what operating models do is cut between strategy and execution. And one of the things that we're going to talk about is, operating models have had their heyday in shared services organizations that are very functional, oriented, like legal, but they are introducing them breaks down because you don't have the vocabulary of only legal or the vocabulary of only human resources. What you're doing is you're cross pollinating across the vocabulary between sales, marketing, human resources, finance, and this English-to-English translation problem kicks in that English-to-English translation problem is huge, and colossally huge, and we need to do a whole lot more work of written bringing it to fruition and making it concrete. Now, that's not the purpose of this video, it's just sort of set up things, criteria for success, if you will.Scott Santucci 08:14But what is a business within a business? Why did I share all those other things? What I've learned is the easiest way to get people to think about a business within a business is to get them to think about their their function, as a company within a company, and what company are you? We use that metaphor in the, in the research, we have a lot of material to make this really, really concrete, I mean a ton of material, all we need to do is force ourselves to apply it, all that material and make it more concrete and connect the dots with what we're actually experiencing ourselves. What are we experiencing ourselves? It requires a lot of discipline just to stay super focused and say so what are we? What kind of entity is a sales enablement function? What kind of entity? What kind of service are we providing is growth enablement? What kind of slide am I producing? What is my role? How do I add value? The basic questions have to get answered. And that clarity allows you to operate. So, the business within a business construct is very simple. It's been developed over years and years and years. And it's very simple, but it's basically saying, who are your investors? Just like any other business, a business has investors, right? Then a company has its infrastructure. So, if your ups part of your infrastructure, your trucks, your fleets, the computing infrastructure, the buildings, physical infrastructure, all of that is infrastructure. And then in between, they have business processes a business has processes, where they convert inputs into outputs. And in between is where value is created. That's where value is created. That is how it works at its most simplistic way. So, the, the arrow represents a business process, which you can define at any altitude level that you want the conversion of inputs to outputs this conversion process. The more you do this, the more valuable you are. And it rests on top of infrastructure of which investors are paying for. So, investors are paying for this infrastructure. And what they really want are people who convert inputs to outputs valuable and add value. Okay, so now let's frame this out through the lens of Jen. So, Jen, is trying to figure out how she's adding value we can comment with, with subjectivity that she's adding value, but we don't have any objective measures to communicate if she's adding value or not. And that creates ambiguity. And any kind of ambiguity creates anxiety. What we have to do is police that place that out, so the way that we help that we're helping guide her on the organizational part. The other thing that she's got is I've got she's got a lot of people working for her, how are they contributing value? I hopefully, hopefully we all are experiencing probably the same dilemma, at least can experience on the on the hand of her own team. What how do we contribute? Everybody wants to add value. But do we know how all the piece parts fit together? Are we just blurting in and not understanding the situation, what the operating model or the business within a business construct does is allows us to lay out all the variables to start thinking through how the dots get connected? And in any business, that process there's going to be that group that converts the supply? You know, the suppliers are the input sources of input in a business. So, the suppliers have a manufacturing process might be the chemicals and all that other stuff, how it gets mixed together into something valuable, like maybe, maybe paint, and then it gets out to customers, it gets distributed customers. So, these that those are all clear processes in the digital world, what this process looks like we need to map out, it just isn't mapped out in a knowledge worker way. But we have the ability to say, Okay, let's put a box. And every one of these boxes represents a scope. And so, for Jen to continue to add value. So that's, that's her right here. She's gonna need investors, she gets funding from something, there is an expectation associated with the money that she gets, we're giving you money to do what in return, we get what.Scott Santucci 13:07So, think about the value proposition that we're trying to work on. Hi, I'm Jan, I want you to give me more money, that's investors. In return, I'm going to give you less stuff, you're not paying for a whole bunch of punchless things. As a result, you get better return. That's a really hard business proposition. Where inside the world, have you experienced somebody selling you that? Wherever you bought that before? So, it's hard to empathize. It's easy to conceptualize. It's hard to empathize. And this is why we have to do a lot better job of making things tangible. And the way we make things tangible is through slides, but the slides must be situationally aware, which means empathetic, we have to walk in the shoes. In your case, you need to walk in the shoes of me. Are you asking questions about what I'm experiencing? Your client isn't Jen, I am your client. Look how hard it is to get your head around anybody's head around who customers are. I'm going to flesh this out more. And there are many podcasts that we've got Brian and I have done to help flesh this out. But here's, here's the scope. Okay, so this is Jen in the middle. She's got her enablement operations team, we have to figure out what needs to go in scope to be able to deliver the most value. So, like any business, what what's the first thing you think about as any business while the business is what services that you offer? So, what services does Jen offer? Well, before we start thinking about the services, we could say, well, she does kickoff that's an activity. She has sales training. Is that a service? Is sales training a service, or is it an activity? How wired are people to just doing activities? And how immediately do we want to blurt that out? So, if we want to, if we want to go through the service part, like any business, you want to be able to establish the expectations with your investors. And the most basic form that businesses do is step number one, they write a mission and charter statement, you know, why do you exist? You need to write that out and flesh that out in order to get investors. Right. So, what does that look like? Well, then the next thing is you need to establish an executive committee, or a board of directors or some group of people in Jen's case, so the mission and charter statement is something that we need to work on, and we're going to fine tune. But she but it's pretty easy to identify who's paying, what budgets are, who are paying for her services. So, what that does is allows her to start connecting the dots between services versus expectations of people who aren't paying for something. This gets it this kind of decision making or discipline, as a word, again, helps create the foundation so that she can push back, it provides the foundation. So, who where are all of the sources of money? And then maybe there's other departments that she wants to include that she can stitch together to provide other services? Well, who would be those wallet owners? And how do you make the argument to move some budget resources to your budget resources? Okay, so then what you would need to be able to do is say, Okay, well, the quid pro quo, if this is the budget that I've got, and this is the things that I want to do, and these are the people involved, how will you evaluate my success? What does success look like? What are my success indicators? Are they measurable or not? Are they subjective? Or not? How do you create that kind of construct? So as a frame of reference, the value equation is a success indicator of a valuable conversation. In other words, a service that a customer that a salesperson gives to a customer, okay, now, given that, given that basic, hopefully, these these building blocks are in place, and by the way, hopefully, you guys are following here, there's a ton of detail on each one, and we establish or build up the details from there. Okay, so then what you would need to do is, if you want to run this overall department of services with success indicators, mission charter, you're gonna have to have a vision of what you're doing. And this is a big gap that a lot of people have coming up with a vision. So, for example, if you are an architect, what's your vision of how what services you're providing? To me, your executive committee of one, your suppliers would be detangler, clarity, etc. Every what success indicators have you co created to create? Alright.Scott Santucci 18:16So, these are the this is sort of structure. And this is where things start, you get to start really thinking and being thoughtful, how am I going to connect the dots? What is my responsibility? What is my accountability? accountability is a huge factor in making an operating model work. And in businesses where we're so associated with my value is on what I produce, rather than my value is what I enable, then it gets it gets really fuzzy. This is why it's incredibly important to have a consistent cadence, about establishing what your success indicators are. and managing expectations, talking through expectations. The only way that you're going to do it is just talking it through. So that's why you create a a feedback loop based on these indicators. Okay, now, it's likely that you're not going to have a one services company, you're going to have to have a portfolio. So, we have a portfolio of services that we offer, we offer clarity services, detangling, services, architect services, capability, services, concept or services. So, we're, my ability to manage the expectations of the whole part, if I'm Gen is dictated by the service portfolio and the vision that my of how well people are orchestrating in those in those groups. We have to be able to empathize with that, because we're going to have to be able to guide you through that because for Jen to be able to execute on some of the things that we're doing. She's gonna have to do this too. So, this is why things become self fulfilling prophecies if we don't produce them. We don't, aren't able to capitalize on the opportunities, we don't have to solve the problems, we just have to make slides and make things more and more clear. And make sure that what we're doing is we're interacting and engaging, engaging, engaging, engaging, not just doing and assuming. So, these are all things that are common challenges associated with an operating model. But using a business within a business model helps illuminate this stuff and gives guidance of what we should be doing. And what should be expected of somebody who's running a service portfolio, for example, okay. I did this wrong. Shoot, I did this in order, or so. Here's the service portfolio. The next thing that you're going to need to be able to do, or Jen's gonna need to do is, how does she steward How is she a good steward of her company's...