Inside: Sales Enablement

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 13Sales enablement is a cross-functional role.You have to work positively with: salespeople, sales managers, sales leaders, sales operations, various HR functions, IT professionals, finance professionals, product marketers, field marketers, customer success professionals, sales engineers, product leaders, and manage expectations from the c-suite. How do you do it?It can be manageable when the breadth of your remit is focused solely on onboarding. However, if you don't have a framework and toolset - you can submarine yourself quickly without a stakeholder management strategy. In this episode, Scott Santucci and Brian Lambert introduce the idea of a cartoon to introduce the simplicity of the core idea around stakeholder management and we connect it to a famous quote from Zig Ziglar "you can get anything you want in life if you help enough people get what they want"  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 00:34Hello, I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:35And I'm Brian Lambert. And we're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to helping sales enablement leaders understand the big questions they should consider in order to be successful with sales enablement. In this podcast, we reframe, revisit, rethink and confront reality in sales enablement. And on this podcast episode today, we've got something pretty special, but I'm I'm not sure what it is Scott, frame it out for me. What do you got?Scott Santucci 01:04Thank you, Brian. And thank you everybody for joining our show. As you know, this is the part of our show where we frame out the topic or the theme today, this theme that that we're using, actually, we're going to go a little multimedia and try something different that we've never done before. I'm going to play you a clip. It's runs about a minute and 10 seconds. I'm going to comment a little bit along the way and see what you think. So, five bucks if you know who this is, or you know, buy a beer when I see you sometime. That is a little chicken Hawk. And that is one of the main characters and Foghorn Leghorn. So, the person talking now that's the dog. The dog is the arch nemesis of Foghorn Leghorn. So, he's just run in to another character in this little, tiny story. It's a cat. This character is a mouse. He's come out of the barn. All right, that's it.Brian Lambert 03:14That's a good question. So, so what will the cheese want? Got? No, just kidding. First of all, I don't know if the listeners can hear that. But it's pretty cool story. So, you may have to turn that up and you have my permission to hit the rewind button for a minute and listen to that again. The second of all, I don't know how you have time for all this to come up with this stuff. Are you watching chicken bog and Foghorn Leghorn for hours on end looking for clips there What?Scott Santucci 03:42Actually, when I was a kid, watching that, for whatever reason, I just remember some of the cartoons and this one stuck in me, because when I was getting sales trained, and I was listening to my Zig Ziglar tapes, Zig Ziglar has this quote. That just resonates with me at my core is quote, and I think anybody who knows what Zig Ziglar is, if not Google and learn all about it. He says, you can get anything in life that you want as long as you help enough people get what they want. And for whatever reason, I needed to have a way to connect the dots between those two. And so that's really how I get the this Foghorn Leghorn cartoon to me, epitomizes all of the challenges that we're dealing with sales enablement.Brian Lambert 04:34Yeah, everybody wants something different. Actually, I would add another component to that, you know, that the chain there, right, I need a bone, I need some cheese. Everybody's got a different need. But on the sales enablement side, you have to kind of orchestrate that all together into one outcome or one solution, right.Scott Santucci 04:53So, the way that I the way that I think about it into you know, put some, I feel like now we're in English class and trying to determine the meaning of Walt Whitman or some poem. For me, the chicken Hawk represents all of us sales enablement people and going from just a super eager Yay, I can get the dog a bone. But what is it that we want? And ultimately the end of this cartoon it's, you know, seven minutes it's way too long to play a clip like that is he ends up getting the plan from the dog because he gets that he gets the cheese to the mouse the mouse gives the bone or gives the fish that he caught with the cheese to the to the cat a cat gives get get it tells him how to get the bone and it gives the bone to the dog, who ultimately gives him the plan on how to get Foghorn Leghorn. So little chicken, chicken Hawk can eat that big, big, big, ridiculous Foghorn Leghorn. So, the point of this is, we sales enablement professionals. Like the little chicken Hawk, in the sense that we start off with, what is it that we want, we want to have a measurable impact. Now what our impact is, is different for each of us. But depending upon our company's scope and appetite, how strategic that we want to be, but at the end of the day, what is it that we want, you can get anything in life that you want, when we want big chickens for dinner?Brian Lambert 06:26And we want to help people, right? I mean, the mouse needed help the cat needed help the dog needed help, right? We want to be able to help people. So that's part of that to the chicken Hawk story to me was, not only did he want to get his own outcome, he actually was considering the needs of others. I'm not sure if that's what you meant as well. But I think I see that and sales enablement people all the time was is trying to be helpful.Scott Santucci 06:49That's right. And that's the second part. The way that you get what you want, is helping others get what they want. And the part that I like the best that resonate with me the most in this cartoon is when it goes, everybody wants something,Brian Lambert 07:05And they want something that they want something I think that was Zig Ziglar himself.Scott Santucci 07:10That's true. He also says that maybe Zig Ziglar his famous quote was inspired by watching, because Looney Tunes came out before Zig Ziglar. So yeah, who knows? Whatever it is, it's a universal truth. The user universal truth is that you are better you can get more of the things that you want, by supporting others what they want. Now to make this business focused, he because we don't want you to, quote, Foghorn Leghorn inside your company. This is just meant to make, make some of these big ideas, simple, but there's a term that maybe you should embrace. It's called stakeholder management. And really, that's one of the one of the critical success factors that all sales enablement leaders must master. If you're going to to keep your job and also continuously add value. So that's really the key. The key point that we're talking about here is stakeholder management, the importance of it, how stakeholder management helps you sell the value or the function of sales in a more and internally, and how challenging it is.Brian Lambert 08:19Yeah, like it. And, you know, little known fact, though the word cell is Icelandic. It's spelled like SJ e Ll, so our global audience could tell me how to pronounce that, like Val, or something like that. But a lot of our listeners may not know this, but the word sell actually means to serve. So, to your point, Scott enablement, who are you serving? Who are you helping, and this is a profession built on serving others and providing some sort of outcome to a group of people who are also serving others to provide some sort of outcome and it's an important profession, but yet from a stakeholder management perspective. Everybody wants to bow not only today, they wanted it yesterday, and everybody has their own needs. And you get into this I, you know, I've seen it before. And I've been in been in a role where this happen every day is a new request. And it's hard to serve people in that. What do you what do you think about that?Scott Santucci 09:17I think you're right. And I think that's one of the things we had a we had an episode. I think it was episode number seven, we're back on and we brought up this issue. But let's start to make this more real before we start making act academic. So, we're starting out with a cartoon. The nothing is less academic than that. But now then we bubbled it up to stakeholder management. Oh my god, the academic alert is way high. Let's talk about why you need these. It's why you need these things and why you need these tools. So, insert any Chickenhawk, any sales enablement practitioner like any of us, you've heard the stories from earlier podcasts. Our first two podcasts were about selling sales enablement, internally. The third podcast was how I set up a sales enablement function was heavy on on selling internally. Let's just break this down very simply, who are our constituents? To whom is it that we're enabling? And it's a very difficult topic topic. The sales members within the sales enablement society don't agree on what the definition of sales enablement is. We've commented before Brian for when we were at Forrester, we produced the first version for CERN upon itself has come up with a different version, elapsed time frame 10 years still debating about the definition of sales enablement. That's a circular wheel that doesn't add any value. Let's talk about your company inside your company. Who is it that you're trying to enable? Are they individual salespeople? If so, what's the bone they want? Is it the sales managers? If so, what's the fish? They want it? Is it the VP of Sales So what's the cheat that they want? And then in order to give them those things, we have to go into what is the CFO want? Because ultimately, we're going to need resources, right? We're going to ask for headcount or ask for for money. So, what is the CFO or finance organization want?Brian Lambert 11:20Yeah, like this, because visually, you can categorize by these big, big items, you know, then you can say, what kind of what kind of cheese, you know, cheddar, Colby cheese, what kind of fish is it? Right. And these are questions that you can ask your stakeholders without assuming and I think that's, that's important. Being a chicken Hawk and allScott Santucci 11:41that's right. And it becomes more complex as our businesses get more complex because we're trying to solve, solve universal problems for our clients, or bring them commercial insights or whatever we want to call them, rather than just selling a product. Okay.Brian Lambert 11:56Yeah, so before you go on to that, sorry to interrupt but by Are we making this? What would you say if somebody said okay, now now you guys are getting crazy? You're making this too complex. You went from a cartoon. We're one click into this and this is this is getting too complicated. What would you say to that?Scott Santucci 12:13That's the reason you got a job. The reason the role sales enablement has emerged is because somebody got tapped on the shoulder and said, Brian, this thing's broken, fix it. The things that are broken, are really the sales system, the sales engine, however you want to put it, your sales machine coming apart at the seams, because you don't have a execution fabric to connect the dots because your your company is organized in a bunch of different silos. With a ton of specialists. They're really smart in their own own areas. But none of your customers care about any of that stuff.Brian Lambert 12:51And you're getting handed broken things. It's not like they're all put together. I don't know if you've ever had to build something for kids and it exploded upon opening into A bunch of little piece parts, like Legos. Yeah, that can get kind of complicated.Scott Santucci 13:05And it can get very complicated to when when you open the package Christmas Eve night and you're putting together the kit putting together those those toys when you lose the instructions. Yeah, that's the thing. You don't have instructions. Yep. Others have instructions. This is a brand new, this is a relatively new role. There isn't an instruction manual. So unfortunately, this is you. The good news is you have a job, and you have a job in a function, that there's a lot of upside to if you can get it right. The con of that opportunity is guess what? You've got to confront the complexity of putting the jigsaw pieces pieces together. It's just it just goes with the territory. Sorry. If you know if you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.Brian Lambert 13:52Yeah, and I think that's why we're seeing that more and more roles in sales enablement. And then to the evolution of the role to be more, more strategic, in other words to take a purview of broader set of pieces. And, you know, that's a whole separate show. We'll talk about that. But back to the topic of being the chip Chickenhawk here. Remember that story from Elizabeth when when that one podcast who confronted reality where she was talking about what the sales managers wanted, and there was this, this friction, and we kind of coached her up on you know, you can't have that friction. What would you say about that? Productive friction and, and the the bringing together of people and where they're rubbing the wrong rubbing elbows and how how that relates to, you know, stakeholder management because to me, it's not all gonna be happy, you know, cartoon, it's gonna get messy.Scott Santucci 14:48Well, I think if you watch this cartoon, the little chicken isn't happy, right? Everybody wants something. Yeah. That's your dilemma. So that even that that that premise, isn't isn't true. But really the key point is, it's really getting at the heart of what enabled means. Enable doesn't enable could mean I give you what you want, and just give everybody what they want but then there's no quid pro quo. In order for me to do something for you I need something in return.Brian Lambert 15:21Yeah, that's a foreign, but that's that. Okay, first of all, you might be the first person that I've heard talk about that in a public setting about what are we getting back as enablement leaders? Because I've been to a lot of meetings, I've been to a lot of events. I've talked to hundreds of sales enablement people, nobody's nobody's asked, you know, what should I be asking for? What's my quid pro quo, they all they, although, however, have a challenge with resources, getting a seat at the table, you know, having a strategic partnership with sales, you know, they tend to talk in terms of the outcomes that they want. So, are you talking about that are you talking about something more tactical, a meeting cadence with others is a quid pro quo? are you what are you talking about with the ask for sales enablement can be more.Scott Santucci 16:09So really, I'm going to be simple about that. I know you know, we want to go in to start talking about what we're doing. But let's just make sure we're really clear on what it is I'm talking about. You only have a limited amount of budget, you can keep asking for more budget, you can keep asking for more resources. We both know that the way that you get it, that's probably you're never going to get enough resources that you asked for. You're going to want to own more things, but you're competing with other departments that want to own things. None of that's a winning strategy. The winning strategy is to look look at the deck of cards that you've got, and say based on what we've got, here's what I can do for you. The quid pro quo comes from other people granting you things take to get get having them give you or agree to give up ownership. things. So, for example, we can start that the scenario with Beth was she's, she's viewing the sales managers and the sales managers are viewing her as competitive. Well, the first thing is, let's make clear, how do I help you? Me a beat meal as a bit? How do I help you as a sales manager? What is it that you want? If I can give you x? What are you going to do in return for that? And they can say, well, that's just what I expect. But that's not who Beth who pays Beth's checks? Who writes Beth checks? The VP of sales, or the director of sales in this case is the one who writes the checks. That's the that's the one she has to make happy. So, in other words, she has to get permission, gain permission. So, I'll do this for you. You'll do this for me. And because we've done that together, both of us win at sales 101.Brian Lambert 17:53Yeah, and I know for a fact that that approach works, we actually in my enablement role took over additional headcount and even had a new function for a while we took over function based on that, because, you know, our leadership was complaining about a lack of service, we said we can provide it. But to do that, we need the headcount of those, those people cut over to us. And it was simple. Okay, make sense.Scott Santucci 18:19So, let's put this into more concrete terms, right, so some of our listeners, so we're gonna, we basically Brian, and I think think of the world of enable in three stages of maturity. stage number one is a highly reactive world, which unfortunately, most of us are in right now. Stage number two is a managed world. And stage number three is an adaptive world. And you have to be able to accumulate enough of these favors and be able to accumulate enough of the another of the piece parts in order to, you know, move up that value ladder. But let's talk about something a lot of us are doing right now, which is onboarding. Now we can take the point of view that says onboarding as I develop the program and then you can say, Well, I trained all the reps and throw your hands up and say, you know, it's up to them now look at all our scores that we add. But if at the end of the day, the time from New Hire to productivity, if that metric is small, you haven't really enabled sales, you haven't given anybody anything except made a bunch of deliverables. So, one way to think about that would be, hey, in terms of onboarding, what do sales managers want? And you can ask them, but you know, you can get really clear, one of the things that sales managers want are some sort of predictable performance,...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 12Sales Coaching -- the definition matters. Especially with regard to enablement and Sales ManagementThere is A LOT of noise in the market today about "sales coaching" The question is, does it help sales managers become force multipliers, or is it a source of conflict? In the episode, the guys use a role-play (Scott based on feedback he's heard from many different sales enablement leaders and Brain-based on research he's currently doing on front-line sales managers).  Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Scott Santucci 00:34Hi, this is Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:35And I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to helping leaders understand the big questions they should consider to be successful in sales enablement. On this podcast, we like to reframe, revisit, rethink and tackle reality in the sales enablement role. Scott, why don't you frame it out for us today.Scott Santucci 00:57Sure thing, Brian. And thank you very much for everybody listening, that's a great introduction, Brian. One of the things that we're going to be talking about here today is the fuzzy world, the gray area of sales coaching, and the difference between frontline sales managers and sales enablement and to give that some color, the the way that we're going to frame it out is I'm tell a little bit of story about the Hubble Space Telescope. And if you are a science nerd like myself, you're appreciating the wonderful images that we have shoot, they even took a photo a couple months ago of actual real life black hole. It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. But the story that of starting out wasn't so great. When the Hubble Space Telescope was first released and brought out of the space shuttle had a problem. It actually couldn't focus on, on anything really. And the problem that had is like most complex machinery, there were different teams. One team was focused on doing calculations using the metric system. Another team was focused on using the standard system. And you can think, oh, what a bunch of idiots. But I think no one in their right mind would call somebody who works at NASA literally a rocket scientist, stupid. The issue is when things get complicated, it's very, very, very, very, very, very easy for people to lose sight of, of clarity, particularly lack of communications and the like. So that's, that's what we're talking about. And, Brian, your thoughts?Brian Lambert 02:41Well, I would say we don't have the standard coaching system and the metric coaching system or maybe we do but when you look at that, Scott, what's what's your point as it relates to sales coaching?Scott Santucci 02:56My point on that is very simple sales. People are smart. Sales Managers are smart, sales enablement. People are smart, and VPS of sales are smart. Let's assume everybody in their roles are smart. It is very easy for us to sit there and call and think other people are not able to do one thing or the other. But maybe we have a bigger problem, which is a lack of clarity. And that's really the keystone of this. So, what we're going to do in this conversation is like most sales enablement, professionals, every single one of us has our own lens, our own perspective. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint that a little bit. And we're going to, we're going to roleplay this out and say for the sales enablement people who are saying, hmm, I've read a lot about frontline sales coaching. It's a great force multiplier for us to do. I'm going to provide coaching services coaching for our reps. And the reason that I'm going to do that is because we have to demonstrate value, right? I mean, let's let's let's cut to the chase, we have a fuzzy role. Most of the organization doesn't most of the rest of the organization doesn't really understand what we do. But I have so much out of humanity communicated so much expertise and talent around sales, training and sales coaching, that I'm going to get in that game because I'm not seeing frontline sales managers.Brian Lambert 04:32So doesn't know. I would say, don't do that.Scott Santucci 04:37What How can I not do that? Brian, I've got all this talent. I've I've done all this training. Look at the feedback scores I get when I actually do courses, my feedback scores are through the roof. Why are you telling me not to do it?Brian Lambert 04:49So, I didn't know you're gonna go there. So, this is totally, you know, unscripted, but I would say I'm having a visceral reaction to you taking on the frontline manager role. So, in other words to be more clear, if you're in a sales enablement function and you want to provide coaching services, you should be providing that to from my managers and helping them coach not doing their job for them. Because in today's world, in my opinion, the role of a frontline manager is to drive productivity of their team. And that's their job to coach their people, not yours.Scott Santucci 05:22Wait, what are you talking about? Brian? That sounds semantics coaching the frontline sales managers versus their people at the end of the day, the the salespeople aren't able, without reinforcement of the training that we've provided on let's say, we're rolling out challenger. Companies made a huge investment in that we don't have reinforcement in it. It's gonna it's it's gonna die on the vine. I know it, you know it, no one's really concentrating on reinforcement, so I need to do it.Brian Lambert 05:54So, I'm laughing because you must have been on the receiving end of a lot of this type of discussion because for people that know, Scott, there's no way he would just say, he does what you just said. So, I'm glad. I'm glad you clarified this as roleplay. So, I'm a listener. Yeah. listener. So, um, but I would say, Okay, um, in that view, then what's the purpose of the manager? Specifically, right? So, I framed about the admin side. And, you know, the role of a manager is just like any other frontline manager, the approving vacations, admin time, expenses, etc. On the productivity side, though, that's the challenge, you know, because their sales managers, they're responsible for, you know, pipeline forecasts, you know, closing deals, etc. And so, when you look at the role of the first line manager, there's not a lot of clarity there. And I think there's a lot of assumptions is what,Scott Santucci 06:46Well wait a second, Brian. I don't need to read their job descriptions. I know that their number one job is to help drive performance to their reps, and they're not providing performance coaching to their reps. I sit on all those the court the qbrs. I hear I hear it, they miss the qualifying opportunities left and right. They need help I need to provide a forum.Brian Lambert 07:11Well, have you asked them what help they need? To me unleashedScott Santucci 07:17I've been doing this for 20 years. I don't mean to ask to help. When I see when I see in a cube er, and I hear the conversations happening. And I see the holes in the in the pipeline. I gotta act. Yeah, we don't have time.Brian Lambert 07:31Yeah, I would agree that you have to act. But one of the things that I would ask you to act on is understanding the role specifically, and, more importantly, driving that clarity across the organization. Because you're making a lot of assumptions by acting to fill a gap that you may want, you may not need to to somebody else, maybeScott Santucci 07:52I was a frontline sales manager before.Brian Lambert 07:56Well, that was before not not today where customers have evolved. Solutions are a lot more sophisticated. And quite frankly, the demands on a sales managers time are exponentially higher than when you did it before. And also, I believe that the role has as more from individual manager driving individual deals, to creating team outcomes with an entire team of people. And to think that you can waltz right in there and start telling people how to close more deals. Not only are you going to perhaps undermine the authority of the frontline manager, right, you're also perhaps going to set back sales numbers, because you're not involved in it every day. It's a little naive to think you can walk into a sales process today and drive better results than somebody who's involved with five eight people on a daily basis. I mean, what are you talking about? Why would you even want to do that? Doesn't matter.Scott Santucci 08:56Wait a second. I'm the one who trained them all on our newest Sales methodology. So, I'm the I know everything there is to know about challenger, everything there is our reps aren't following the methodology. And I am in a unique position because I trained everybody on this. I'm in a unique position. How do I What do you mean? I don't know. I know because I know challenger.Brian Lambert 09:22Yeah. And you you can line up behind the 47 other people that know their widget that I want the sales manager to help roll it out from marketing from product from the CRM team, from the analytics team, from HR from talent acquisition, from product number 37. From the finance people to the operations, people that want to talk about quarterly read forecasts, etc. And to think that you know, you can come in as a sales training bias and say, you know, I taught your people I know better than than you do, on how to manage perhaps sales cycle, how to handle a sales call, how to prioritize time, and and coach people how to prioritize time, how to renegotiate the trade offs on a daily basis on on these demands is not right to me, I would say redirecting that energy to go do something into the, you know, broader team view or the system view is way more valuable. For example, you know, sales managers have the hardest job of anybody in the in the business world today, because of a lot of the pressures that they're under, who's helping simplify what's coming at them. And then with regard to coaching, and talent in general, for example, I think he could spend a lot more time understanding what type of talent you know, sales managers need to get from the recruiting team, for example, there's a lot of frustration there. You know, if you want to teach somebody challenge or go teach the talent acquisition folks, what salespeople are trying to do. You know, I think that would be a great use of your skills as a trainer. But to take over the sales managers job and coach their people on behalf of them is is to me insulting. I wouldn't appreciate it if if my teamScott Santucci 11:17Okay, so we're going to end roleplay So Brian, how'd I do?Brian Lambert 11:22Well, I'm pissed off right now. Yeah. So that was great. You know, I thinkScott Santucci 11:33Why pissed off?Brian Lambert 11:34Well, it's what is well, I have a visceral reaction because it's real, right? I had a sales manager call me I think a week and a half ago going, Oh, I just unleashed, you know, a whole a whole tirade on my town acquisition team. And I told him, they were screwing up. He didn't use that word. Because it was expletive laden. You know, my whole sales team because they need to get their stuff together. Right and you know, it’s frustrating to be a sales manager today. And nope, if you look at it the reason why I'm having a an emotive reaction to this kind of you should you as a manager should go do XYZ. I one was never asked by you, will it be helpful to when I started actually sharing what I believe should happen, you kept, you know, arguing with me. And that that I think is is frustrating for sales managers to be in that position.Scott Santucci 12:33And that was, that was that was pretty heightened. And, you know, the purpose of that is we hear a lot of these kinds of feedback. And the purpose of this show is or this particular episode is to understand the situation more holistically. So, taking a step back, let's let's break down this problem. The frontline, what actually is the role and responsibility of a frontline sales manager If you were to look at this like a Venn diagram, you have two Venn diagrams coming together, you have one, they are a cog, for lack of a better word in the sales machine. So, when you think about the sales leader working with human resources and finance, they have to put together a structure their department, and in that structure, their department, there's a there's a term called span of control. And they set a metric of how many reps report to whom. And it's a very mechanical viewpoint and lost in that shuffle. The job description of a frontline sales manager gets overlooked. So, it is not uncommon for many variations of a frontline job description to exist inside a company and somehow that gets baked into somebody's job performance and what that was, so that's one side of it. The second side of it is I have not I have yet to meet and I'm going to ask you, Brian, a frontline sales manager that doesn't feel a heck of a lot of responsibility. Heck, they're paid their most of their salary is variable, and it's based on their team's performance. I have yet to meet a frontline sales manager that isn't interested in helping their salespeople be better. Yeah, that's right. Have you ever met a frontline sales manager that isn't interested in that?Brian Lambert 14:25They wouldn't be in the job.Scott Santucci 14:27Not for long, right. Right. So, the question that then is, you have two competing forces. You have one force, which says this job description what we're asking of you as a frontline sales manager is unclear. And then secondly, you've learned how if you're probably if you're a frontline sales manager, you're at least a year or two away removed from the field, maybe even longer. So, you probably don't know everything that's going on. In terms of techniques, the techniques that got you here to where you were may be different than the techniques that work today. And you probably aren't as empathetic as you could be about the change that, you know, last year, two years ago, you're asking your sellers to sell a whole bunch of volume to minion level buyers. Now you're rolling out challenger or whatever, sales methodology. And now you want your sellers to go call sell commercial insights for God's sakes to business executives.Brian Lambert 15:33Yeah and 12 to an 8.4 to 13.1 by buyers, right?Scott Santucci 15:40Yeah. So, it's something has to give. And if we, if we in sales enablement want to partner and leverage and be a part of the frontline sales manager, we have to realize that they're under so much pressure. They don't have a lot of vocabulary like what you said before with that. They don't have A lot of our vocabulary describe these things. And these are the these are some challenges. So, let's get into some prescriptions now for what kind of sales enablement leader do to navigate? So do Brian, do you and I, what is it? What is our position on coaching as a thing, a business within business a service that sales enablement provides? What's our position on that?Brian Lambert 16:27Well one, I would say do not provide that service to reps. If you're going to provide coaching services provided to managers, and start with to your point, having clarity on the first line manager role, and ensuring if you do the interviews, do the needs analysis, whatever your name is for it, that there's clarity across not only the sales management team, but the HR team as well. That that'll be the first thing.Scott Santucci 16:54Yeah, so let me piggyback on that. So, I'm speaking to you directly as a listener. If You believe that your greatest contribution to your company is to provide frontline to provide coaching directly to reps. You are not a sales enablement professional. You are a sales coach. Call yourself a sales coach and be a sales coach and recognize that's what you are. For the rest of us doing sales enablement, we're doing broader things than thatBrian Lambert 17:27Well, isn't coaching underneath the enablement umbrella Scott? I'm gonna flip it back on you.Scott Santucci 17:32Well, sure. That's what I'm saying. If that's how you're defining what you're what you're adding the most value in, then you're not a force multiplier. Yeah, that multiplier would say, Okay. I'm so confident in my ability to coach individual reps. I'm going to teach frontline sales managers how to coach their reps. So, the service that I can get the best multiple out of my time is if I can get let's say, we have 100 reps out of out of my time I can coach maybe 10-20 reps, you know, let's say, or I can coach 20 sales managers who can coach their eight reps. Where am I going to have a greater return on my investment? I can build the same kind of similar kind of curriculum that I know how to do. And I can create a common language that currently doesn't exist, just like we say, with sales. The benefit of a great sales methodology is that we have a common language amongst our sales force. We don't have a common language across our sales managers. Without that common language, it's going to be very difficult for me to get feedback on other programs that I could do.Brian Lambert 18:43Yeah, that's a good point. I think less than 5% of organizations. I can't remember who put that research out. But they said that less than 5% have actual standardized, if you will, sales methodology and even to me coaching methodology coaching, right? Yeah. And I would even say if you take sales coaching to some sort of one, one page picture, that would be helpful. What is sales coaching? Because it's a conversation or is it a philosophy? Is it a task? Is it a process? Is it a methodology? What is it? And I think there's just a lack of clarity, not only on the manager role, which we both talked about, but the second point I would make to be successful in enablement. Here is, is what is sales coaching? And how would you define it so that it can scale? If you're not able to define it, so to speak, if you're not able to give it an identity, delineate it from a methodology versus a philosophy? Because the first perspective, pushback you're going to hear is from sales management, oh, I'm constantly coaching. It's...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 11Many sales enablement leaders are responsible for some (or all) of their company's sales kickoff. When it comes to adding the right value and ensuring a return on investment, it's important to view the kickoff from the lens of your customer -- the sales leadership team.In this episode, Brian and Scott revisit some research Brian did while he was at Forrester, and shed color on what we've learned since then about the good, bad, and ugly of sales kickoffs and what executives are getting for their investment. The key finding of the research?  There are 3 reasons why sales kickoffs exist. To launch, improve rep skills, or evolve the sales team. Find out more by listening to this edition of Inside Sales Enablement.This podcast will help you rethink sales kickoffs. Does your company create an overall plan with a planning cycle starting in August, or do you do most of the work in December or January?  Can you quantify the economic value of the sales kickoff?  Do you have a 30-60-90 plan post kickoff? Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here joined the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Scott Santucci 00:33I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:35I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions that you may be wondering about, especially if you thought something might be wrong or something might not be quite right. And I got to ask, you know, are you getting the value out of sales enablement? And are other people seeing the value of sales enablement that you would expect? In this podcast, we're going to into a specific time tangible activity that many organizations are involved in. And that's the sales kickoff. Scott, what do you have for us?Scott Santucci 01:09We're actually recording this. This episode. This is our episode number five. We're recording it after our first episode has been released. So, I wanted to share a little bit of feedback that we've gotten from some of the people who've listened to our first episode. And then of course, I'll let you let you share some of it too. So, one of one of the elements of feedback that I've gotten is that folks really like the color the way that we're describing it in the banter that Brian and I have and and the format. One of the requests that I got was, Hey, you know, the background and the history is really important. It's always great to know where we're coming. Can we talk about some more tangible, not tangible, that's not the way that was phrased more things that I'm dealing with in the trenches right now that will help me be successful? So those are those were two of the feedbacks, what we'd love for you to do is keep sharing feedback with us. Do you agree with that feedback? What feedback would you add to it? How can we improve to make this a better experience for you? Share your thoughts with us on LinkedIn, call Brian or I, or better Email us at engage at insidese.com. Brian, what what are some of the feedback that you've received?Brian Lambert 02:31Yeah, I shared this on one of our drives, drives home, we tend to call each other at the end of the day when we're driving. And one of the things that I was hearing was this idea of, you know, rethinking, and hey, I hadn't quite thought about that before. So, I had somebody shoot me up, you know, shoot me a message on LinkedIn and be like, Hey, that was a great way to think about it. These stories, you know, Galileo, really interesting and made me think differently. So, there was this rethinking piece What we're going to do today, you and I talked about when you got that feedback with something that that folks might be more involved in, it's this idea of, of revisiting. So that's the second thing that that I took away. And the third one is, both of you and I have developed the technique. And I was at a thought leadership conference last week at Stanford. And it has to do with this idea of reframing the problem. And somebody came up to me after the events and said, Hey, you know, the way you're framing this out, is completely different because you're actually focused on the customer. So that's the three Scott rethinking revisiting reframing, and those are basically going forward here guys, the the three that we're going to go with, so we'll have different episodes where we either reframe something today we're going to revisit sales, kickoffs and some research that we did a while back, and then the rethinking piece which we are helping folks move forward in a new way of working and the new reality that they're facing. So, let's talk a little bit about Scott moving forward here, how to revisit and let's revisit sales kickoffs.Scott Santucci 04:05Yes. So, to put this into perspective, when we're reframing something that's giving background or asking you to take a step back, when we're revisiting something, what we're going to do is first we're going to hold ourselves accountable and break down and critique some of our past reports, to eventually critique other people's reports and other people's information and revisit some of the research that's been out there. And then the last one here is let's rethink, and today we're rethinking sales kickoffs. So, to frame this out, what was interesting is why would why would you even tackle sales kickoffs? You guys are the knock or the pro depending on how you look at it. You guys at Forrester were really strategic. Why in the world were you covering sales kickoffs? And what I want to do is let you understand a little bit of perspective, again, more than inside baseball. When you're an analyst and at at the time, it really depends, you might want to ask other analysts how many inquiries that they get ask them questions about inquiries, because that's really the one of the big driving forces of the research agenda. And at the time, when we were at Forrester, our department, our group was maxed out on inquiries. We had inquiries, when we were we had some of the highest inquiry loads of the entire company. And one of the one of the trends that that emerged was a lot of questions around sales kickoffs, interestingly enough, and I was very curious about it, because the questions that we were getting asked, were all over the place. So here we have same rolls from similar sized companies, asking about the same topic from completely different ends of the spectrum. And for me, the one that Character characterize this, make it to a research one of our research meetings to discuss what we're going to talk about was one of the inquiries we got from Novell. And that particular individual had shared with me that they had done an audit and analysis of return on investment and that they got a negative return on investment of their sales kickoffs, when they factored in all the travel time, the opportunity cost of lost sales time expense of all the glitz and glamour. And what they've decided what they decided to do is to go to a completely virtual experience. And as a researcher, I try to resist my initial reaction having been a salesperson my whole life, how in the world am I going to go and have tequila shots with my peers?Brian Lambert 06:48I was wondering the same thing or go karting orScott Santucci 06:51Right, it, where am I going to get those interactions to build the culture, but then I just thought about it and what we what we did is we introduced this, that this topic and we assigned this topic to Brian to, to carry out. So, what we're going to do is we're going to ask Brian Tte first question, which is, how did you go about doing the research to figure out what our position might be on sales kickoffs?Brian Lambert 07:17So, we because we have such a high volume back then I had a, I was keeping records and, you know, as any good salesperson, you want to be able to tailor what you're doing and what you're saying and also build relationships with folks over time. So, I basically went through my records and found that indeed, I had actually talked about sales kickoffs, and, and how, brainstorm sales kickoffs and come up with ideas, etc. So, to move forward on Okay, what is perhaps the challenge that folks are facing? Or, you know, to the big question of how much of a return are we getting? What I did was I engaged through my relationships as an analyst with at least 10 companies, you know, companies like Cisco Or HP, Informatica Symantec etc. and asked about, you know, found found that the folks that were involved in planning a sales kickoff and or executing the sales kickoff, so kind of on the supply chain side, if you will. And then I also talked to the individuals that were recipients of that, that service, so sales managers and salespeople to try to get a 360-degree view of this experiences that was being created.Scott Santucci 08:30And to add to that experience, one of the one of the traits is as a Forrester analysts, you're often at least I was often, and I know, Brian, you, you went to several yourself, asked to participate and hired to speak at at sales kickoff. So, we have the experience of being immersed in the situation as well. Now, just so you're following, I still have a little bit about the researcher in me. I hope you notice that there's a bias at the point in time at Forrester, our research group was focused specifically on the tech industry. So, we didn't do a lot of research in other industries and other groups. So, this is information that has a bias to the tech industry. But Brian, what were some of the things? What were some three level? One of the one of the findings in that analysis that you had is there's really basically three types of goals of what a sales kickoff is about, is that right?Brian Lambert 09:31Yeah, that's right. And to get to those three goals, you know, wading through at all, you know, different expectations, different needs, different objectives for sales kickoff, there's different time horizons. Some folks would plan for a year other people would plan for 30 days. And but where all came together was basically three outcomes or three key objectives. The first one was as a sales organization or in support at a sales organization. We're going to help our sales team take a different tack or go in a different direction. That was one big area of focus. The second key outcome or objective of a sales kickoff was, we need to get started. So, we're going to initiate something new, such as a new product, the new focus from the executive team, etc. And then the third area was we need to fine tune, we were doing well. But there's some things that we want to tweak things that we need to adjust as we get in tune with our customers. So, we're going to go in a completely different direction we're going to work is one. The second one was we're going to take it first step and get people started on a path. And then the third one is we need to elevate or transform or fine tune, either the skills, the processes, the models, approaches, etc, of our existing team.Scott Santucci 10:46But let me add some color to that because I got after this report, I was I started paying very attention, very close attention to the sales kickoffs that I was involved at and what my role was as a keynote speaker, so let me add some stuff. Learn what Brian said. So, the first example was what Brian?Brian Lambert 11:05The first one is, hey, we're calling an audible, we're making a hard right turn, we're going in a different direction.Scott Santucci 11:13So, the way that I've interpreted that is basically the business has a new strategy. So, take for example, net app. In, you know, the 2013 timeframe is, oh my gosh, we got to move to cloud, or a lot of a lot of tech companies move into to a cloud-based business. So, CEO comes in talks about their business strategy, aligns it etc. And that's one element. Brian, what's number two?Brian Lambert 11:46The second one is we're going to help our sales team kind of get started on something. So, in other words, we're going to ask them to start doing something new.Scott Santucci 11:56So, the way that I've interpreted that I think a lot of us can appreciate reshape this that's introducing challenger sale or some new new sales technique or based on some of my experiences at the Alexander group in management consulting, rolling out a new coverage plan or source or something like that. So, we're going to go about getting started. So, you can kind of imagine what the flavor is there. And what questions and the attitude of the Salesforce is in both of those buckets. Brian, what was number three?Brian Lambert 12:29The third one was this idea of a sales team. You guys are doing some great things. However, comma, pause, we need to fine tune. So, we need you to start doing some things specifically. We need you to stop doing some things specifically, and we need you to fill these gaps.Scott Santucci 12:49What resonates with me there is having participated in a few sales kickoffs on that one. Immediately, I'm drawn to the readout the head of sales, who is sharing data about pipeline and forecasting, and talking about how many, how much of the multiple do we have in the forecast and how much of how much behind we are and what we need to do to accomplish that, etc. So, it's basically a call to arms, we're behind on missing a number, or we're behind on some of our clarity, or we're not doing these particular things pretty well. And it's a rallying of the troops and a very clear message is delivered about what we want to do to improve those, that would be my color of those three buckets. So, Brian, my next question to you is if we think about the goal for each one of those three things, what is the structure of a sales kickoff? So how do people structure these things? Are they all going to wear Novell did and Experiment with delivering this all online? Or how do they use their time and, you know, are their breakout sessions curriculum? What's the what's your what does it look like?Brian Lambert 14:12Well, what I've what I found back then, and I, and I believe it's still true today, given the conversations that I've had recently is, first, there's this choice of how much in person time do we want to have with the salespeople? So, in other words, when are the tequila shots at hand? When do we need to have everybody show up? And how much you know, team building and how much quote unquote fun Are we going to have? And how much time will that be allocated? If the question comes back that we don't need to get together and we're not going to do that fun stuff. It tends to go pretty quickly into something that's a little bit more remote because I think the bias has been that these kickoffs are about knowledge transfer, or quote, unquote, you know, telling the troops and so that's the first thing is how much face to face. Do we really think needs to happen if it goes on the other side where we need to have the face to face, we want to look people in the eye, we want them to pause their activities for a minute, take a step back and get re engaged, then it comes down to what's the best way to manage that in person experience? And there's some there's some, I think some cookie cutters there which has to do with you know, a group session at first and then some breakouts either by region or product, some knowledge transfer that needs to happen along the way and then you know, that kind of a lining up of different internal groups who want to you don't have access to the sales team.Scott Santucci 15:38So, to add color to that, so my involvement in sales, kickoffs has been, you know, sort of all over the place. In some cases, I've been asked to be the whole facilitator of the whole thing to keep everything together. other cases just show up and be pretty and deliver the messageBrian Lambert 15:57Thats hard for you I knowScott Santucci 15:59Yeah, very hard, requires a lot of makeup and in some props deliver the message that we want you to do in this box and go away and shut up. So, air, it tends to be all over the place. What I what I do notice is that the composition of a, I asked a lot of questions about the agenda. Maybe it's because of the background of a researcher. But I see a, you know, a lot of breakouts that don't necessarily make sense. They don't, they don't map to the flow. So, give you an example. I was doing one kickoff, and I'm going to not name the names of the companies because I don't want to embarrass anybody. But the CEO was very insistent, and very, very clear that we're entering into a brand-new business model. We're selling to completely different buyers. And what was interesting was after the CEO left and everybody said, Yep, we understand it. The conversations were all about how do you get better at targeting the existing people that they're selling to More or less the whole agenda from from Eric ranging from, how do we have better? How do we prospect better to our current patch? How do we let's roll out new playbooks that we're going to do and let's certify the salespeople on what those playbooks are? Let's introduce the new analytic program that we're rolling out. Let's have it let's hear from marketing about the new lead generation process and how we're going to go and fill those things. And I'm listening, and I'm participating in each one of those and taking notes. And at no point in time, did any of those acknowledge the fact that the CEO is asking them to sell to a completely new buyer completely new. And so essentially, what the result of that sales training program was, people thought they were doing the right thing, you know, checking the box, but all of it was in direct opposition of what the CEOs goals were. And I see that time and time and time again, because how our sales how our sales agenda is put together. So, Brian, what based on your research, how did you find sales agendas were put together? Is there structure to it? Is there one person who has say in it? How do they get set up to be focused on a business objective?Brian Lambert 18:17Yes, that's a great question. And in the two-tier story, Scott, this is interesting, right? Because it pans out or plays out almost every single time. You know, if you believe a sales kickoff is for communication purposes, that's going to set up a whole bias for the whole entire experience. However, if you look at a sales kickoff as a way in which to equip sellers to be successful against...

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