Today, I’m excited to have Debbi Varela, the author of Put Me In, Coach, here with us today. Debbi, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. 

Debbi Varela: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. My name is Debbi Varela. I have over 15 years of experience now in the sales enablement and transformation space before it was even really like what it is today. I have been lucky enough to have worked with some of the world’s smallest startups to some of the world’s largest tech companies. After working in these businesses of all sizes throughout my career, I have honestly met some of the coolest and most interesting people. I’ve learned so much about what works, what doesn’t work, why it didn’t work, and what to do next time. 

SS: We’re excited to have you here, Debbi. Now, going back to your book, you actually discuss how coaching can create a culture of success for businesses. In your opinion, what are the key components of a successful sales culture?

DV: That is a great question. Funny enough, I actually had just published a blog on my website on this exact topic a few weeks ago. I believe the recipe to create a winning sales culture is really around five key things. The first one for me is really just having a defined vision so everyone understands what their position is on the field or where they fit into the bigger picture of the organization. I just feel this is incredibly important because it gives a sense of belonging and purpose to individuals.

The second one I think it’s a key element that I’m passionate about, which is really around skill, or sometimes I call it action mapping and motivation. What I mean by this is truly knowing your team member’s strengths and their areas of improvement and how to motivate each person. Where will they naturally excel? Where will they need a little bit more encouragement? What’s the best way to encourage them? Are they extrinsically motivated or intrinsically motivated? That makes a huge difference. 

The third one I think is super important, which I see time and time again in organizations, is accountability and continuous feedback. That would honestly come in as one of the most important ingredients for a thriving sales culture. Interestingly enough, with many of the companies I’ve worked with, this is oftentimes their biggest weakness. When I say accountability, I’m talking about like, do you manage behavior? Do you as a leader take responsibility or do you blame other people? Do you manage your pipeline and then do you spend enough time on pipeline reviews? Do you have a cadence that you’re holding yourself and your team accountable to? That’s what I think of when I think about accountability.

The next one is really around team building and trust to ensure that your team operates as a single unit. You can see this really play out on the sports team when teammates trust each other and they really know each other. Things just look effortless for them and they just flow together.

Finally, for me, it’s the last one on my list, but it’s honestly just as important, which is celebrating successes and learning from failures. You should celebrate every win, no matter how small it is, because it’s still a win. I feel that setbacks should be reviewed with positive intent, not to blame, but to learn any ball from those.

 SS: I love that approach. Especially today in the current environment, why is coaching critical in today’s sales environment and how does it help nurture a healthy sales culture?

DV: I think coaching is absolutely critical and honestly it’s interesting because I think that most people would agree with that statement, but then when you dig into that with the sellers or managers, they have a different response. They don’t feel like they’re getting enough coaching from their managers and managers don’t necessarily feel like they have enough time or even the skills to do said coaching. Typically what I see happen is the managers try, but ultimately find it difficult to get on a regular and consistent coaching cadence with their teams.

In lieu of that, they tend to jump in and rescue the seller during a sales call to show them how it’s done, but that is not coaching. Ultimately that leads to an unhealthy sales culture because that decreases accountability and responsibility on both sides. It also erodes trust and it undermines the confidence of both sides.

For me, if a more consistent coaching cadence was in place and managers were given the skills to coach effectively, then a positive and supportive culture would help to motivate and engage teams, which would then attract and retain their top talent. It would drive performance and deliver better results for customers. Coaching is just a critical factor in creating and developing high-performing sales teams in my personal and humble opinion. 

SS: I love that opinion. I’d also love to get your opinion, Debbi, on what a good coaching program looks like.

DV: Absolutely. I believe that a good coaching program has to have a well-defined structure and it needs to provide some type of system, whatever it is, for managers to enhance the skills and performance for the overall effectiveness of just the individuals within their team. For example, it should have clear objectives that are measurable and aligned to the specific skills or the behaviors or outcomes that they want to improve. 

One thing I just want to mention is that coaching programs really can’t take a peanut butter spread approach. You have to develop them with the individual needs in mind and there should be some kind of feedback or performance management framework in place to help provide individuals with specific things in a timely manner and also focus on the behavior that can be observed in positive reinforcement as well as constructive criticism. I mean, in coaching, really, the key is continuous improvement. Goals or milestones are established and then also be adaptable to the needs of that individual. Your coaching begins to evolve over time. 

SS: Absolutely. Those are great key principles to structure your coaching program. What would you say some common challenges are when it comes to coaching and how can enablement help mitigate those challenges?

DV: I think the most common challenges that I see and hear are focused around three things, which is time, skill, and consistency. With time constraints, managers, just don’t have it. There are just way too many competing priorities. Enablement can help by providing some time management training for coaches, as well as even just like some type of structured coaching schedule. 

The next one is about the lack of skills or training, I hear this all the time that managers really want to coach, but they just don’t really know how to do it. I think enablement can offer some type of coaching skills training program or provide them with some kind of organized workshop resources and just offer some ongoing support. 

The third one I see a lot is that they will start coaching, but then it just falls off. Just a lack of consistency and inconsistency in coaching across teams always leads to some kind of uneven result. Enablement can help by implementing some kind of standardized coaching framework with cadences and guidelines. They can provide templates, resources, and checklists that will help managers keep that consistency and have that structure that can anchor them to keep it going over time. 

SS: I think those are some great suggestions. Oftentimes in sales teams, I think front-line managers really serve as the key coaches for their teams. How can enablement help prepare those front-line managers to be more effective coaches? 

DV: I think enablement teams can respond to some of the things we just talked about about the common challenges. For example, if enablement can provide comprehensive coaching skill training for frontline managers, where they focus on things like active listening, effective communication, and giving feedback, that’s often actually very hard for people to do in a way that’s effective for the person they’re giving the feedback to.

Goal setting and all the other essential coaching competencies. Developing a repository of coaching resources, as I mentioned, including guides, templates, and best practices, just so that these frontline managers have easy access to materials that can aid in their coaching efforts, make it a little bit easier for them, because remember, they have so much going on and so many competing priorities.

Offer training on goal setting and action planning. Use things like the SMART goal framework with their teams to create actionable plans to help the plans that they’re actually setting. Then establishing a system for ongoing monitoring and support. If enablement can do some kind of regular check-in with frontline managers, then they can offer them some additional training where they’re feeling maybe not as strong in certain areas of coaching and even just provide them with some type of support network that can help them work through some of the challenges that the managers had as they’re trying to build this coaching muscle in their own skills.

SS: That’s fantastic advice for frontline managers and enablement professionals. Last question for you, Debbi. How do you measure the impact of coaching on the business? 

DV: This is a great question of when that comes up all the time, measurement, and metrics. Let’s assume for a second that we’ve established the specific and measurable objectives for the coaching program so that if you do that, then you can measure impact in a few ways, in my opinion.

You can conduct some kind of baseline assessment before the coaching program begins, like gathering any kind of data on the metrics that you’re planning on using, such as individual or team performance. Whether it’s employee engagement, satisfaction, or any of the KPIs that are tied to the coaching. Once you do that, then you can identify and track those that align with the objectives of the coaching program. These could be things like sales metrics, customer retention rates, employee turnover, productivity, and anything that your company can track and actually use to hold managers and their teams accountable to these coaching programs. 

Another way is gathering feedback from participants through surveys and phone interviews. Measuring changes in their point of view, their attitudes, and any self-reported improvements in skills or behaviors. I think that’s really, really helpful. This qualitative data can give you all kinds of really great insights into the impact of what you’re doing from a coaching perspective. 

I said to conduct a baseline assessment, that will give you a kind of like where everyone starts, but also then follow that up with an assessment after the coaching program. That way you can compare against that baseline data and see any type of growth that happened across KPIs or any of the other things that you’re tracking. 

The two other ones are just around measuring employee engagement satisfaction, like are they enjoying the coaching program? Do they feel like it’s contributing positively to themselves, the organization, and their goals? Then just look at the organization’s performance metrics with industry benchmarks. That can be really helpful too. You can see maybe where the excellence benchmark is, then where maybe organizations that are similar to yours where they fall, and then where you fall. We can kind of see how you’re performing against those industry standards. 

SS: Fantastic advice for our audience. Debbi, thank you so much for joining us today.

DV: You are very welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

SS: To our audience, thank you for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Andy Springer, the chief client officer at RAIN Group, join us. Andy, I would love for you to introduce yourself, and your role in your organization to our audience.

Andy Springer: Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for having me. I am Andy Springer, the Chief Client Officer at the RAIN Group. My role is one that each and every day I am a practitioner leading teams in terms of supporting large-scale sales transformations and also working with small, and medium-sized enterprises in terms of upscaling and developing sales skills that are going to shift the dial in terms of sales performance.

SS: Wonderful. The reason that we wanted to pull you on to this podcast is because RAIN Group actually recently released a study that identified some key trends in the current sales landscape. In your opinion, what are the trends that have the greatest impact on businesses and their ability to succeed in the current environment?

AS: Yeah, I would say that the trends that we saw through our research were a significant increase in terms of sales cycles. Opportunities are taking longer to close. There’s more complexity in terms of that. The amount of opportunities that are being led to a loss due to no decision. While there may be significant needs, significant problems to solve, and objectives to be supported to achieve, for whatever reason we’re seeing a lot of no decision being what they lost to instead of competitors.

I think the third one is selling in an uncertain economy. If you look at the post-pandemic world and you look at the political challenges that have impacted the market, you look at the shift in terms of the financial impacts in terms of the post-pandemic inflationary world and then how that’s changed the dynamics of the economy, it’s made it really challenging particularly in the B2B space, but not exclusive to. That uncertainty cascades uncertainty in terms of sellers and how they approach the market and what they are dealing with.

SS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. From your perspective, Andy, how have these trends influenced or created top challenges that sales organizations are facing today? What would you say those top challenges are?

AS: I think it was pretty clear from our research that in terms of when I look at it through the lens of a sales leader and sales enablement space, one of the most consistent challenges that keeps showing its face in the sales space is recruiting and hiring sales talent and the associated challenges with that.

Also, the uncertain economy piece was represented very strongly, generating qualified sales leads continues to be a significant challenge for a lot of organizations. We dive into the skill areas where the key challenges in developing sales skills are relevant in the real-time selling environment. Also, the one which I found unsurprising, but I think some who I’ve spoken to in reflection on the report found surprising, which was the challenge of developing sales managers. Often in the sales enablement space, I see that sales managers are the ones who are most forgotten about. They’re also the ones that are often the loudest in asking, requesting, and demanding skills from their sellers. Often when it comes to developing skills for them to be better managers, it’s something that they’re either left out on, it’s not a focus or it may not be that there’s a budget to focus on developing them.

SS: Absolutely. Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. To that point, especially for our audience, what role can enablement play in helping businesses overcome these challenges?

AS: I think there are three key areas that we’ve really isolated and focused on. The first one is improving sales productivity as a whole. One of the fortunate things that we get to be involved in is introducing productivity thinking tools and ultimately seeking to shift behavior in productivity. Why is that? Well, every organization you go into, whether it’s, you’re going into a sales organization or the sales area of an organization or other parts, everyone says the same thing. ‘I’ve always got way too many things to do and not enough time to do them in.’

When we really focus on the sales organization, what we see is some of the greatest deficiency in skill is not necessarily around how to sell, it is how do I produce more? Everyone has the same amount of time in a week, and in our studies, what we seek to do is often define, well, what top performers in sales and sales management do that others don’t that makes them top performing.

I think one of the things that cried out really clearly was top performers have an incessant focus in terms of the productivity of their sellers and sales leaders inside their organization. and they seek to improve the way in which they focus on productivity before selling skills.

The next one I would say then leads to developing multi-skilled sellers. If you look at the journey that we’re just starting to build here we’ve identified ways to free up time for the sellers so they focus on what’s most important. Then, when we align that with the development of their selling skills in that multi-skill space, we start to see more time focused in the right areas, which means we’re going to start to see an impact on the win rate.

Those two factors are critically important. The last thing I’ve kind of touched on is leveraging our sales managers. I understand that a lot of organizations do a really good job in developing broad-based management skills, and a lot of that links very much to sales managers. We often go into organizations and we see that the management skill and application in the sales area is fairly good. I mean, obviously, there are deficiencies in some areas and industries and types, but broadly we see a consistent level of management skill. What we see as a broad-based deficit in terms of skill is coaching. Sales managers not just focusing on the management aspects, you know, territory planning, pipeline management, those sorts of day-to-day or weekly, quarterly activities including planning and those sorts of things when I’m talking in the management context, but what about the coaching? What are the coaching elements?

If we’ve got increased levels of productivity in our selling organization, we’re training our sellers in terms of the skills that are going to help enable them to perform better. When we combine that with a focus on the development of sales managers to not just manage but to be really good coaches of their selling team as well, and we develop coaching skills within that we see a transformative effect start to take place.

Now the team is operating as a whole and everyone knows their role in a lot of cases, we’re talking critical mass here. I know there’s a lot of people that will be listening to this saying, well, we’re never going to achieve that. With 100 percent of our selling organization, you don’t need to in order to see significant sales performance improvement. You only need a critical mass that is developing the learning and applying this new dynamic in their selling organization to see a significant shift. Often the first measure that we start to see lift his win rate.

SS: Absolutely. You just kind of got to thaw that frozen middle, right? What should enablement leaders be prioritizing in their strategies for the year ahead to help businesses address these challenges?

AS: What I’m seeing get the greatest traction, as I said, is probably the gap in terms of sales manager focus. How do we make our managers better managers and better coaches in order to help drive sales performance improvement? Particularly I see a lot of organizations do one thing really well, right? Selling organizations invest in training their teams.

Now, the one other thing about training is that sellers and sales managers get access to new information and knowledge. That knowledge can have an informative, motivational, and inspirational impact, but we all know that, outside of the virtual training room or the physical classroom, once they have obtained that knowledge, it means nothing without the application of that knowledge.

I think one of the critical areas is if we’re going to invest in improving the productivity of our sales organization, we’re going to develop the skills of our sellers, we’re going to develop the skills of our managers. How are we going to support the application of that learning over the first 7, 30, 90 days and beyond, so that we get the true impact of what we’re seeing?

When we see applied knowledge implemented, and then we see sellers and sales managers effectively held to account for the application of that learning, we start to see the rubber meet the road and ultimately the business outcomes that you’re seeking through developing your people start to show, as we say, the dial starts to shift in the direction that you want it to. That gap in terms of applied learning is a big one. There’s no point in working on those three areas that we’ve talked about without a significant focus on the enablement of that throughout the organization over a sustained period.

SS: I love that. You’ve talked about the importance of frontline managers, as well as I think sales leaders. How can enablement leaders and sales leaders partner to better align their strategies to the top priorities of the business?

AS: First of all, don’t fall into the delegation trap. The delegation trap is where we see sales leaders go, ‘we’ve done a training needs analysis, and here are all the skill gaps in terms of our team. I’m going to wheel in the sales enablement people and I’m going to say, here’s all the gaps that we have inside our organization. You go and figure out a plan and come back to us with how we’re going to fill those gaps and how we’re going to provide or bring some solution into the business.’

Where we see that occur, it is almost just the beginning of failure because sales leaders need to take and be heavily invested in that journey, not to just close skill gaps, but to align themselves with the support top down in terms of how we’re going to keep that change that we’re seeking to see sustain itself within the business ongoing.

Actually, if we don’t take a change management approach to any sort of meaningful development outcome that we’re seeking, we get a training event or series of training events occur, people walk away feeling good, they feel invested in, and not much happens. Where does that begin? It begins with senior executives, understanding that this is a transformation that involves change management. It also means having sales leaders and sales enablement glued to their hips because when we see they are operating as one team and sales enablement is in the selling organization, not separate to, not sitting in Learning and Development or sitting in an HR function, that they’re in the selling organization and we see a strong partnership between the importance of sales enablement and how it’s going to support the realization of the sales performance improvement. It is the recipe as a starting point for success.

I would encourage anyone who’s sitting outside of the selling organization in their function right now to have a really good look at, whether is really serving us. I can tell you it’s day and night when we go into all different types of selling organizations and we see the dynamic between the sales leadership and the sales enablement function. We already know we have a fantastic springboard to partner with them to build from. When they’re separate, we already know that if we don’t make some attempt before we go on a transformation to bring those teams together and unify, we’re going to struggle to create meaningful change.

SS: Absolutely. Last question for you, Andy. To close, what is one thing you’re surprised to learn from the survey and what would you recommend practitioners take as an action based on that learning?

AS: I think there are a few. I wasn’t surprised by productivity and the need to develop multi-skilled sellers in terms of the solution focus areas. I am constantly surprised by how forgotten about sales managers are, because as I said, they are often the ones who are requesting the development of their sellers, but they’re not proactive or they’re not realizing the need for their own development. That is certainly not a criticism, it’s an observation. There could be various reasons for that.

It screams to me how important sales manager development is, how often it’s an afterthought or it’s not included in terms of an overall sales development strategy, and the critical role that they play beyond just being a manager and how we have to develop sales coaching skill combined with really good sales management to create meaningful change in any development program, sales transformation, change management outcomes we’re seeking from change management program.

I think that was probably one of the things in terms of a surprise that most resonates broadly in the market because people go, yeah, we don’t really focus on our managers. We focus constantly on our sellers. It’s an all-around focus that we need to take.

SS: Could not agree more. Andy, thank you so much for joining us to talk about the findings from your recent research. We really appreciate the time.

AS: Absolute pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

SS: To our audience, thank you for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Jay Shephard at Bentley Systems join us. Jay, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jay Shephard: Thanks for the invite. I’m thrilled to meet you and spend some time with you. Where do you start? I have been doing this for a while. I started my career 25 years ago selling, and when you start your career in selling you start to pick up some things that seem to go well. All of a sudden I started being asked to do some coaching with new hires that were coming in by my boss. What I found out, Shawnna, is I loved it. It’s a lot of fun.

I thought, is there a career around this? I love selling, but I also love the coaching element. That’s how I kind of, we’ll call it backdoored into this thing called enablement. Specific to enablement, it is an evolving picture, which I’m sure we’ll get a chance to talk a little bit more about.

I’ve had an opportunity to work primarily in the enterprise software space in both sales effectiveness tools as well as software platforms. I started with Bentley in 2023 and really took on a very cool challenge and that was to redesign, revamp, and repurpose enablement to be more of a strategic aligned value add to our CRO. That’s where I am today.

SS: We’re excited to have you here, Jay. Now, a key focus for you at Bentley Systems is really, as you’ve stated in your intro, reframing the way that your organization thinks about enablement. From your perspective, what are some of enablement’s core responsibilities and what is the value that it brings to the business?

JS: I think enablement, the industry, the space, whether it’s in the United States, Europe, or Asia, doesn’t matter, it is in flux. In other words, if you ask 15 people what the definition of enablement is, you can get 25 answers. When it came to coming to Bentley, what we figured out early on was the fact that there is this talented group of people that make up the enablement team, but they were misunderstood. They were almost pushed into a corner and almost like enablement became the department of broken things, as I always call it.

They were an afterthought. It was the last thought, like oh yeah, we better get enablement involved. Well, that’s really not the purpose of enablement, but it was created to be that way based on just general culture and a lack of definition of the value of what enablement brings.

SS: Jay, I know that you created a sales enablement charter, which really kind of focuses on outlining the mission, the goals, the strategy, and the responsibilities of your enablement function. Tell our audience more about this. What are your best practices for creating an effective enablement charter?

JS: I’ll start off by saying the reason I went to Bentley. It had everything to do with the CRO. He wanted to lead a transformation project, initiative if you would, company-wide to drive the strategic value of Bentley Solutions to their end customer. The CRO realized that there were some significant gaps in there, which of course was enablement.

I took this position first and foremost because it was aligned with the CRO. I think that’s really important for your listeners to know. The CRO is critical to the direction, as well as the strategic value of what enablement brings. Knowing that, connecting with our CRO as I did through that interview process, I knew this was an opportunity I wanted to take advantage of.

Knowing that we were going to start from scratch, we went out and essentially asked individuals who were key to the business all throughout the globe, 1, what is your definition of enablement? You would not believe how many different definitions I had. 2, what are the current challenges here? Why are we not winning business? Why are we winning business? For that matter, what are the opportunities? We then used that information to build a charter that was strategically aligned to not only Bentley’s business priorities but also the CRO’s MBOs.

We built it from that perspective and then worked backward. Here are the metrics that we knew that we needed to hit to drive the priorities and the MBOs of the business. How do you design enablement to make that happen? We literally created functions as well as areas of responsibility to help drive those initiatives, those metrics, if you would, and of course, that strategic alignment, which was so critical to the CRO and myself.

SS: Absolutely. I love those. Tell us a little bit about your perspective on how an enablement charter helps to drive alignment with the broader organizational strategy and the objectives of your company.

JS: Since I have been here I probably have had no less than 50 conversations with people asking me, what does enablement do within Bentley? These are Bentley employees. First and foremost, that charter that you’re talking about, the reason it is so important is to ensure everybody’s on the same page in regards to expectations and what the possibilities could be in working with enablement or us working with that particular function of the business. That to me sets in motion a transparent relationship of our capabilities and what it is that we can deliver.

Anything you do when it comes to a charter has to be very clear in communicating what it is that you do, what you’re capable of doing, what your capacity is that you can be doing, and here’s how you are measured.

SS: It’s amazing to achieve that level of alignment. Jay, how are you driving strategic buy-in of this charter with your key stakeholders and in particular, perhaps some of your executive leaders?

JS: Well, first of all, executive leaders are measured just as well as enablement is measured. If we can align our agenda to their agenda, then we are in partnership. One of the first things that I did was I reached out to all of our global leaders and understood a little bit more about what their metrics were, what they were measured by, and really what the gaps were. Once we identified those gaps, we discovered ways that enablement could close those gaps.

Let me tell you something, when you can help someone else achieve their objectives, you don’t have a problem getting a phone call returned. That’s where they knew that I was working towards helping them with their agenda. I can tell you this team immediately got the credibility and the opportunity to drive value far more than they’ve been able to up until that point.

SS: The buy-in that you’ve been able to secure at Bentley is fantastic. Now, since Bentley is in a rapidly evolving business landscape, how do you ensure that your sales enablement strategy remains adaptive to emerging trends and industry changes?

JS: Well, that’s such a great question. Asking it in a different way, it’s almost like the old belief that when you train someone, they’re automatically trained. You never need to touch it again. We know you and I both know, Shawnna, that’s not true. To ensure that your enablement strategy and alignment are real, you have to have a continuous conversation. You have to be able to ensure that it’s not a one-and-done type of relationship.

For me, anyway, I have ongoing, anywhere from between two and four-week conversations with all of our respective leaders across the globe. I also have a similar relationship and frequency of meetings with the CRO. Here’s what we do that I think is uniquely different. I’ve taken my team and we have geographically dispersed ourselves from a coverage point of view. I have, for example, a European lead. I have a US lead. We’re going to be bringing on an Asia pack lead and so on and so on.

Because of that coverage, we now are closer to our customers. We are consistently asking not only in our coaching work that we do with them or the training work that we’re doing with them, we’re constantly getting feedback in regards to what’s missing, what we need to do differently, and so on and so on. We’re not necessarily looking for negativity, what we are looking for are opportunities to improve.

SS: Along with the adaptability of enablement, it’s also important to ensure reps are adaptable to change as well. I know a key way to do this is through coaching, which is an area that you have a lot of expertise in Jay. What role does coaching play in your enablement strategy?

JS: Coaching is critical. In fact, I would even say I put more of an emphasis on coaching and implementation than I do the training itself. Think about this. It doesn’t matter what generation you are in. If you’re millennial, if you’re Gen X, Gen Z, I don’t care. I mean, what’s the newest one now, Shawnna? I think it’s Generation Alpha, but I don’t know if they’re even in the workforce yet.

My point is they all learn differently. Some are attracted to badging, some people are attracted to microlearning, and some people want a dissertation with all the details. Then you got the audio and you got the visual and the kinesthetic elements that go into learning and transferring knowledge. That’s all well and good, and yes, you need to touch on some of those elements, but coaching is where it is applicable. You take that learning and you apply it.

It’s so different from reading a book. I don’t know about you, but I love to read. I’m always reading, but I always have that challenge that everybody else has too, like you just read a chapter, what did I just read? Right? You have to come back and reinforce it, revisit it, and that’s what coaching does. I would say that probably makes up 70% of our actual work is applying the learning that they picked up, either through a white paper, through micro-learning, through some type of course, or maybe even an assignment that they needed to reach out to, or we’ll even use learning where we’re using both virtual and live training as well. Trying to tap into not only how we learn, but most importantly, how we retain and sustain.

SS: Absolutely. To that point, to drill in, one of those areas where you coach is your sales methodology. You mentioned that having an integrated go-to-market sales methodology is a key focus for you next year. How does a methodology help drive alignment and consistency, and how are you bringing this to life at Bentley?

JS: A couple of things. We’re actually going through that process right now. The first thing we did not want to do, despite levels of background experience and experience, was pick something out of a box or go into a padded room and say, this worked for me here, so therefore it’s going to work here. There’s a lot of great methodologies out there. In fact, just pick one. If you focus on whatever you pick and reinforce it properly, I’m going to tell you something, you’ll have success. It may be measured that success, lower or higher doesn’t matter, but the key point here is to pick one and then deliver on it and coach to it. You’ll have success.

Now that all being said, we are going through the process right now of selecting a methodology, but we’re not doing it in a box. We involve people globally at all different levels of the sales process and role, and they have now made up a series of advisory teams. We created some decision criteria, collectively, and we are now going through a series of discussions with various methodology providers.

Bottom line, though, Shawnna, it’s not a decision that Jay’s making. It’s not a decision even the CRO’s making. It’s a decision that is based on a group collaborative effort where we come to a consensus. That, to me, I think is critically important. Everybody that you and I have ever worked with in the world of sales has been through training and has also experienced that training of the month club. It works. We’re going to try something different. Now, we can’t afford to do that. Why not get the collaborative buy-in from the beginning, that’s exactly what we did through this process.

SS: I love that you’ve built a committee around that. Last question for you, Jay. How do you envision your enablement strategy continuing to evolve in the next year and beyond?

JS: That’s a fascinating question because I am not one that has patience and I would imagine, Shawnna, you in sales, and anybody else in sales, you totally get what I just said. We want to deliver now. Probably the greatest challenge that I have in my career is to actually take a deep breath and understand you’re not going to create everything and change everything within a period of time, three months, six months, even a year.

Our strategy is built all the way out through 2027. Now, let’s be honest, are things going to change? Absolutely, they’re going to change, but at least we have a direction and a target in mind of where we want to be. Then you work backward to make that happen. That’s exactly how we will continue to evolve.

You’ll do that as well through these advisory teams, through that give and take and the feedback that we get from our various regions all over the globe. The bottom line is, if you listen, everybody’s on the same page. We all define enablement the same way in what we’re trying to do. Buy-in, as well as moving towards that target, just isn’t the issue that it used to be.

SS: Wonderful. Jay, thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate you sharing your insights.

JS: You bet. Nice to see you again.

SS: To our audience, thank you for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Rodney Umrah from Forcepoint join us. Rodney, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Rodney Umrah: Thank you so much, Shawnna. I am delighted to be here. My name is Rodney Umrah, and I’m the global head of enablement at our go-to-market organization here at Forcepoint.

SS: I’m excited to have you here. Now, I know that you’ve shared that enablement found you rather than you finding it. Tell us a little bit about that career journey. Why and how did you transition into the enablement field?

RU: I’ll take you back a little before I get to the transition because that will help to inform why that experience was so interesting to me. I was born on the lovely island of Jamaica, Shawnna. I’m not sure if you have been there before, but that’s where I was born. I went to the University of the West Indies and I studied computer science. I was fortunate to be hired right out of school by IBM. There’s a gentleman who did that, and I don’t know how I can pay it forward to him, his name is Carl Foster. He’s still my mentor and friend today. He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.

While being at IBM, there were 366,000 people in the organization. That was the largest IT company at the time, but it was like a university really, and I learned a lot. That’s where my true professionalism was honed. I migrated to Canada, that’s where I live now, and I was in technical roles between IBM Jamaica and IBM Canada, but I always wanted to be in sales. I transitioned from technical roles at IBM to sales, specifically software sales.

Now, a little bit of context, Shawnna, is that my mother is actually a teacher and my brother is a professor. I used to do that part-time, I was a part-time professor myself, so, as a result of that experience, enjoying the IBM experience, and doing well, I said I wanted to transition to Microsoft. I spent about eight and a half years at IBM, then over to Microsoft. I was there for five and a half years and then moved over to NetSuite. This is where, now, your question comes in, Shawnna, which is a transition. I was doing well in sales at NetSuite, going to club every year and especially leveraging my manager at the time. He was very instrumental in my success.

My GVP or Global Vice President of Sales, invited me into his office one day, and just asked me the question: are you interested in leading enablement? Now, the truth is I didn’t know what that term meant, enablement. I was like, enable what? I didn’t know because I was used to the term training. He asked me to speak to the leader of that organization because the GVP wanted me to lead enablement for his organization. As a result of that, the rest is history as they say, because here I am 10 years later and really, really enjoying it. I’ve been all over the globe, Shawnna. I was in Australia, the Philippines, Europe, across the US, Canada, you name it. I just have a great passion for the enablement vocation.

SS: I love that career journey, and I’d love to understand more about how you think that your non-linear career path and your background in roles, spanning sales and academia, have helped you in your role as an enablement leader.

RU: It certainly did, especially because I came from a sales background. It was, as I said, my group vice president who saw it in myself and also my manager. At the time, my manager asked me to do some best practices training with the team that we had at the time and it kind of grew and so they saw it and I didn’t.

As a result of having the sales background and then being able to enable sellers, there is instant credibility there. The reason for it is not because I’m brilliant. The reason for it is that you’re coming from the same vocation that you’re enabling. You don’t only talk the talk, but you have walked the talk. People can see it. Whenever you present, they can understand for sure that you have been in the trenches before. This is not a theory. It’s not just words on a page. Coming from that background was really, really instrumental in my success.

Now, the other area is academia as a result of being a part-time professor. Being able to stand and confidently deliver content, I took it for granted. Shawnna, you probably are aware, presenting in front of an audience is like one of the top three fears that people have. All of those pieces coming together and the experiences there really bode well for me in being in enablement and I’m absolutely enjoying the ride.

SS: I love to hear that. That is fantastic. What would you say are some of the challenges that practitioners might face when they’re trying to make a career transition, and how did you overcome some of those challenges as you pivoted into the enablement career?

RU: Wow, that’s, that’s a loaded question there, Shawnna, and we don’t have the time to go over the list, but the truth is, when you transition into enablement, just like any other new role, especially if it’s different from the one that you’re coming from, you will often feel less than, meaning it’s almost like you don’t feel like you are qualified to be there.

That’s a feeling that one would need to overcome with time. So, I struggled with that, which is why I asked my GVP at the time. I was like, why are you asking me to do this? I don’t know how to do this. You know what he said to me, Shawnna? I’ll never forget it. It was in his office. He said, Rodney, all I need for you to do is to teach others what you do and what you do well when you’re in sales. That gave me the comfort level to say “Oh, what I’ll be doing is very similar to what I’m doing today. All I’m doing is really imparting my, or paying forward, my knowledge in this field.”

That really helped feeling less than is one of the areas that you need to watch out for anyone transitioning into enablement. The other one is that there are very high expectations of individuals in enablement. Very high. In fact, we all know that in sales there is always high velocity, right? The expectations are high, and there’s an anticipation that you should make an impact now, and that can cause stress. It certainly can, but of course, as long as you are pacing yourself and ensuring that you’re doing the best you can, working with the resources that you have, ensuring that you’re aligned to the strategic priorities and you have ruthless prioritization, you will certainly overcome.

The demands are high, Shawnna. They’re coming from all over. They’re probably coming from your CRO. They’re coming from the RevOps organization, legal product marketing, et cetera.
Managing all of that can be really challenging, but of course, just like anything else, you will figure it out over time as you work with others and learn from others.

SS: I love that advice. I want to drill into this a little bit. What are some of the key skills that have helped you succeed as an enablement leader? What skills do you think other enablement leaders should look for when they’re building out their teams?

RU: I was fortunate, as I mentioned earlier, to have 10 years of experience in sales, software/cloud sales to be exact. As a result of that background, I wasn’t just enabling because it was on a slide. The content that I was delivering was coming from the heart and the brain at the same time because of my experience. I think people can see through that. People are looking for transparency so that decade of sales background really helped me.

As I transitioned in, and even today, going into my eleventh year, I think I have also shown the leadership skills that I’ve gathered along the way, even when interacting with clients when I was in sales. I’ll give you an example: When I was at Oracle NetSuite, I had fifteen strategic accounts in the northeast of the U.S. Going through that process, we had lots of challenges, but we had to overcome those to be able to ensure that those organizations thrive.

You had to exhibit, on a consistent basis, leadership skills and helping your customers.
It’s the same when you are in an enablement, because, especially when you’re dealing with a global company, people are scattered all across the world. Being able to deal with so many different individuals with diverse backgrounds and thoughts is very important.

I will also hasten to say that exhibiting empathy is key as well in our roles because the sales role is stressful. It really is, and I guess because I’ve been there, I know that. As a result, when dealing with that audience, and when I say sales here, it could be business development, it could be sales themselves or sales engineers, it could be renewals, it could be customer success, those are stressful roles. Executing your job in an empathetic way is very key. Always having an open mind to continuously learn, which is why we’re in this enablement role because we’re supposed to be life-learners.

SS: I love that, and I love the life-learner approach. What benefit do you think organizations can gain from diversifying their sales enablement teams and bringing in people with different or maybe unconventional backgrounds?

RU: It is absolutely powerful, Shawnna, and I’m saying it not because it’s the right thing to say, I’m indicating that clearly because I’ve experienced it. Let me tell you what I mean. I had the awesome privilege and opportunity to lead and develop an organization that had about 30 people located in 10 different countries around the globe—Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, France, Spain, the UK, the US, and Canada—and that experience, for me was absolutely breathtaking. The reason for that is that I was able to work with a totally global audience and be able to understand the differences in the region.

Now, Shawnna, the truth is, sometimes we over here in North America think that we’re the world. We’re not the world, okay? What I mean is, there are so many different perspectives that you can learn from. What works in North America is not necessarily what will work in Australia, you see what I’m saying? The same thing in France and et cetera. Having that experience for me really taught me that listening is very important.

Having that open mind, as we both spoke about just now, is very critical because I truly believe that whenever we get different thoughts or diverse ideas, and we put them in a pot and we mix it up, we will always get something richer and more and more impactful than the original idea. I have done it over and over again with my team. I tell my team all the time, please do not box yourself in. Just leave your mind open to creativity, because you never know what gems can emerge.

SS: I absolutely love that as well. Last question for you, Rodney. What advice would you give people who want to transition into an enablement role from another department?
How can they set themselves up for a successful career in enablement?

RU: I do believe that talking to individuals who are successful in enablement is key. We spoke about earlier, Shawnna, the life-learner attitude. I’ve been in enablement now for 10 years. That is just formally, because even prior to that, as I mentioned, I was a part-time professor and was at IBM and other places. I was doing enablement in different spheres.

The point is that I’m still learning. I still today challenge myself to think about things differently whenever I’m executing my role, even if it’s the same thing that I did in a previous organization. I’m challenging myself to ask if there is a better way to do onboarding. Is there a better way to do continuous learning? Is there a better way for manager enablement or partner enablement? The list goes on and I continuously do that. I would advise someone coming on board in an enablement role to have an open mind.

I would also say, join Sales Enablement PRO and other enablement communities so that you can absolutely learn from others. What I’ve found that is interesting about enablement and those who are here is that we love to share ideas with each other, and I just love that. If someone is coming on board and you’re selfish, this is the wrong place, because in enablement we love to share our best practices with each other. We love to see others succeed. That is what gets us up in the morning: to see others actually win in their roles. If that is what you have in mind, if you have that attitude, if you have that passion, this is indeed the place, a neighborhood for you.

SS: I could not agree more. That’s fantastic advice, Rodney. Thank you again so much for joining us today.

RU: Thank you so much for having me, Shawnna. It was a blast.

SS: To our audience, thank you for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Regan Barker from Grant Thornton, Australia join us. Regan, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. 

Regan Barker: Absolutely, Shawnna. It’s great to be here. My name is Regan Barker and I am the head of sales and sales enablement here at Grant Thornton Australia. Part of my role is to work closely with the business on their sales activity and sales coaching. Grant Thornton is an accounting audit and consulting firm. We have six offices across our beautiful nation and seven service lines. We sell over a hundred products and services across 11 industry specializations with about 170 partners and 1,300 people. 

SS: Thank you for joining us. We’re excited to have a guest on the podcast from the Australia region. Now, one area of expertise for you is coaching. I’d love to start there and understand why sales coaching is so important. 

RB: Great question. I think for particularly working in professional services, slightly different from more product-based businesses, our partners are the owners of the business. They’re also the experts and they’re actually the product. For me, coaching and advising our 170-odd partners is pivotal. 

In Australia, we have an ever-changing landscape across the business, regulation, and market pressure. We need to ensure that our partners and our people have the confidence to cut through the noise and really provide essential insights around business operations, regulatory change, and emerging issues for those businesses and senior leaders to make sound business decisions. Helping our partners in their activity helps them be more efficient as well as to be able to make sure that they’re talking to the right people around the right insights as well.

SS: Absolutely. From your perspective, what are some of the key components of an effective coaching program, especially in today’s sales landscape? 

RB: I think for effective coaching, it’s really about meeting people where they are. Most sales programs are based on supporting sales operators, our partners are the owners, and service providers, they’re the team leaders. They have to run the billing, run the client programs, absolutely everything. Our effective coaching has to be integrated as a part of their everyday life to make sure that it is effective and efficient. 

When I say meeting people where they are, really it’s about understanding their business, how it operates, what the sales cycles are, whether it’s heavily compliance-driven and you’ll be advising an organization and their CFO, for example, on a regular basis or cyclical basis versus some of our financial advisory experts that are heavily transactional. Meeting them where they are, both in how they operate, but also in terms of their own capability as well, some of which are extremely effective sales operators and others may be more introverted. It’s really about giving them confidence.

One of the pieces that we try to focus on is just focusing on one skill or development area at a time. Fine-tune that, making sure we find our efficiencies, and then as they build that confidence and capability, then we move on to the next area to help fine-tune something else, another skill. 

SS: I think those are absolutely key components to effective coaching programs. In your experience, what does good coaching look like? In other words, what does it take to be an effective sales coach? 

RB: I think the most powerful tool you can have is to also be a practitioner. In professional services, obviously, I’m not going to be a tax expert, I’m not going to be an auditor, but what I am is an expert around sales. A key thing that I’ve adopted here is in the last financial year, I took over inbound sales and really developed that channel. 

Everything that I coach on, I test and I use as a part of our inbound sales program as well. That’s led to great success. It means that we frequently on a daily basis run alongside our partners in a framework that I like to call coach to close. We are working with the client, working with the partner, and ensuring that the tactics and communications, the cadence, and our tools are all adopted as a part of those sales opportunities. We can then give them to the partner and they can use it in other opportunities that they’re working on.

What we’ve seen in terms of our adoption of inbound sales as well as sales enablement means that we’ve actually increased our revenue by that channel by over 93% in comparison to the previous year. We’ve actually qualified and won more opportunities from it as well. Our median opportunity fee has increased exponentially as well. With that, it means that we can give our partners practical tips to adopt within their sales programs rather than the more high-level traditional coaching that has occurred in the past within professional services.

SS: That is fantastic advice in terms of what good looks like. On the flip side, a common challenge when it comes to sales coaching is ensuring that sellers and sales managers are able to make the time for it. It feels like productivity and staying on top of quite a few things are definitely a challenge for folks these days. How do you get buy-in from the sales team and sales leadership to lean into coaching? 

RB: I think that one of the challenges for us is, again, because we are in professional services, the partners are everything. There is a power behind what we call the billable hour. There has to be enough time in the day for partners to be able to bill and provide services to their clients as well as sell. I think there are a few pieces to this one. 

We’re not going to be able to influence every partner across the firm some of them are already great operators. Really it’s about working with the people that want to work with us as well. Really focusing on from their perspective, tapping into their growth mindset and their willingness to learn and more on the flip side for us is about integrating it into partners every day.

We try to integrate our sales coaching into our pipeline meetings. Everything from our inbound sales, everything from our outbound prospecting, working across the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel with our marketing team. Then, making sure that we support them across as many interactions as possible, rather than only focusing on carving out time for that one-to-one coaching.

SS: I think that is a great way to go ahead and get buy-in from the leadership organization. How can coaching help sellers better engage their clients and deepen those client relationships? 

RB: This is probably my favorite question. I think that any good sales tool or anything that you can have in your arsenal will help you be a better provider to your existing clients. Take questioning, for example. We try to create a framework to ensure that we cover not just current questions, but say future and past questions to ensure that we can get the most information and the most effective information to help support our prospective clients, but also our current clients. Even adopting those components will help be able to ensure that we get accurate scoping with our existing clients and make sure that we’re delivering on our promises as well. 

SS: I’d love to hear that. Last question for you, Regan. What are your best practices for measuring the impact of coaching?

RB: We measure a few components around everything from the usability and adoption of our CRM. We obviously look at the bottom line, so from a partnership, it is individual partner revenue and service line revenue. Whether they’re in tax consulting or financial advisory, the average days to close opportunities obviously would be dependent on the service line and the products we’re offering. 

One of our key focuses, however, at the moment is around client mix. Making sure that when we are winning work, are we winning work with the right type of client that we want to work with? Given its services, there has to be a level of profitability as well. Also, we want to work with great clients that also want to work with us. Also, from earlier stage sales, it’s around outreach activity, the number of opportunities created, also that cross-collaboration between partners and service lines. Really looking to focus on introductions given, whether it’s across our firm, but then also our friends in other professional services like banking and law, for example. The overall engagement, particularly through say NPS scores, as well, because we want to make sure that while we’re growing as a firm, we really focus on delivering against the objectives of our clients as well. 

SS: I love that. Regan. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

RB: It was great to be here. I really appreciate it. 

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Marja Moore join us. I would love for you to introduce yourself to our audience.

Marja Moore: Thank you, Shawnna. Hi, everyone, my name is Marja Moore, and I am in the Seattle area. I have most recently worked at companies like SAP, Concur, and Infoblox. Right now, I’m taking some time off to explore some new adventures, but I have worked in everything from marketing to business development to sales enablement and value methodology building. I have a diverse background in many industries and I use all of that to inform how I go forward with every new role, especially with enablement. 

SS: Wonderful. I’m excited to chat with you. There was something on your LinkedIn profile that caught my eye. You mentioned that you lean toward being a human-centric leader who is also focused on data-driven outcomes. I’d love to understand from you, why are both sides of this coin important as an enablement leader. 

MM: I would say it’s an important thing to have for any leader. First of all, we’re dealing with humans every day. You need to know what’s going to compel people. What’s going to get them to do what you need them to do, not only perform in their roles but also in the organization? How are they expanding their view? How are they becoming greater than what they were before? Understanding who you’re working with, whether that be people on your team or people that you’re trying to enable, you need to understand their values and what makes them tick is important.

I think every enablement leader will say, you always have to give them what’s in it for me. I think this is true for literally any leader you need in order to compel somebody, you’re going to need to know who the human is behind it. That’s important to me, not only knowing the people that I help lead, but those that I help enable. What are their needs? What compels them? What gets them to do the things that we need them to do, and how does that make them feel? 

On the other side of the coin is the data, and that is really driven by the need to say, okay, we see a hurdle, what does the data tell us? I think all business data is important because it tells you a story. How you interpret that story may differ, and it may tell people different things. For me, it’s important for me to look at the data, not only to help lead in the right way but also to help innovate and grow in the right way. Whether that be growing people or growing the business, the data is important, but the human element of it is always there.

You need to make sure that you’re looking at both in order to make the right decisions. Data is only part of the story. The humans that interact to create that data or make that data are also important. Going behind the data to see what that looks like from a human perspective is important.

SS: I love that. I know on the human side, one of the ways that you focus on this is by developing a sales council to support your enablement strategy. Tell us about that program. What did it entail and how did it impact your enablement strategy? 

MM: This goes back to that human focus part of it. What we learned from interviewing a lot of our sales personnel was that we were hearing things like, we need more experts, more SMEs teaching us. We need a better way to actually understand what we’re supposed to be doing. To me, that human element of people coming to us saying what we need is a data point. You take that human element and that data point and you say how do we fix that for me? 

There were two things. One, you always know that people in your organization are trying to move up or trying to better themselves, and often It’s the ones that are excelling in their specific roles so if you look at your sales field and you say okay, I have this top 10% and they’re just kicking butt at everything they do. Why is the other 90% not performing as well? Well, we should be leveraging that knowledge those skills, and that experience to help teach the rest of the field. 

I think a lot of times we go outside or we use a sales coach. I’m not saying that we don’t need those things. I’m saying that you have a lot of knowledge in your salespeople today, how do you leverage that to give back to the rest of the field? How do you lift those salespeople? Who is that 10% to give them something to work towards? The program was really built around how we take the top salespeople who are interested in growing, who are interested in evolving, who are maybe one day interested in leadership, and how we build them up to help them achieve their goals while also achieving the business goals.

That whole council kind of came together and there were a lot of different facets of it. Not only would the participants be nominated and have to keep a certain threshold of meeting their quota, but they would have the opportunity to take part in special different programs. Those things could be mentorship, mentoring someone who is new in their region, or being a part of our field studies. Once a quarter we would bring them together to talk about what the issues are and get their best practices every different quarter. Every quarter it would be a different kind of subject so that we could gather more information and skill building and then take it from there to put out to the rest of the teams. 

They would also be featured on the enablement webinars. They would get some special training as well. All of this bundled together is a way to lift up your people who may want to continue to grow, learn more about the business, and learn more about leading by example. Transferring that knowledge to the less experienced sales reps, or even to those that are just coming into the business, and so we built it as a one-year cycle. You have to be nominated and once you take part in it, you’re basically on the bench for leadership. Then if you want to become a sales manager or some other leadership role within sales, this is a great boost for those people to do so because they’re learning more about the business and about the ways that we need to really focus in different areas in order to be successful. 

Of course, one of those is enabling the field. It gives both sides of the coin. You’re getting some people who are really great at what they do to share their experiences and their best practices with your field, but you’re also giving them the opportunity to take on increased responsibility and participate more in the growth of the company as well. 

SS: I love that. The other thing that I love about your background is that you have a blended background that incorporates customer success. How has that customer-centric approach to enablement? 

MM: That’s a really good question. I would have to say that if you’re thinking about customer success, one of the most important things that’s happening in the industry, especially if you are a SaaS company, but this actually works for all kinds of companies who are providing a measurable service for their customers. The thing that you’re going to see is customer success is where all of those proof points for sales come out. If you’re looking at building a value methodology, which is what the industry is working towards, how do you show value to your customers? 

We’re not talking nerd knobs here. We’re talking outcomes and value to your customers. What is the bottom line that that CEO is going to say? Yes, I need that product or I need that service because it’s going to save me money, help my people, reduce my risk, and save me time. All of those things are important to getting to that economic buyer. If you don’t have a value methodology, the one place you can look is your customer success team. They’re the ones that are going to know the success of the customers using the products or services. They’re going to be the ones that are engaging with them on a regular basis. That’s where you can do most of your learning to see where that success is. 

For me, customer success is important because that really helps you understand the customers and then it helps you dive further down into those customers to really get that clear understanding to then build. On the front end of the customer life cycle, how do you go about approaching those kinds of customers in the future? When you think about enablement, you take all those learnings and you kind of transfer them into the value methodology to make sure that you’re starting with that at the beginning. What value are we providing our customers? How do we build that to help the sales teams actually understand the technology the service or the product? 

You have this ability to really empower your sales teams to have better discussions. They’ll get to the C-suite a lot faster. Your customer acquisition costs will go down. All of those things. Learning from customer success is extremely important. It’s extremely important to organizations because that’s where the customer is having success, and then you can leverage that in the sales cycle to make sure that you’re finding those customers that have those similar scenarios to kind of push that sales cycle through based on the knowledge that you’ve learned from customer success.

SS: I love that. So you blend your understanding of your customer. You’re also leveraging feedback from sales, and then there’s also the data side, which we talked about earlier in the conversation. What are some of the ways that you leverage data to inform and optimize your sales enablement programs? 

MM: This is going to be a tricky one. We touched a lot of parts of the customer life cycle. We were enabling a lot of parts of operational and administrative things that sales need to do in order to keep the engine going. I think for me, it depends on where we are involved in enablement. What are we responsible for enabling? In that vein, if we’re looking at all of that data to say, are we being more proficient in our activities that we have to do when they’re engaging with the CRM, what does that look like? Your very first indicators of success, in my opinion, are how they’re doing in the prospecting and getting everybody through the pipeline.

If you’re seeing that they’re holding on to prospects for too long, there’s something going on there. They’re not qualifying them out or disqualifying them, if you will. They’re holding on to them and that’s not really efficient. You need to look at all parts of the sales cycle and where you can influence. For example, if that was a problem that they’re not qualifying their customers and they’re sitting in there for months and months and months on end, what kind of qualifying framework do you have? Do you need to adjust that? Do you need to reinforce it? How many people are actually paying attention to it?

That goes to how you are enabling and how you are graduating folks. We look at data all the time to say how we are performing in the business relative to what enablement is doing, but also what is enablement doing to qualify those people out to say, yep, they’re ready. Is it an individual looking at something? Often people do a pitchback practice and then they have the manager say yes or no on it. Well, the manager needs a butt in the seat. Is that really the right way to go about it, or do you really need to have a panel of people that are going to provide a more holistic view as to what that person pitched and say, no, you didn’t quite hit it, you need some more education here?

That’s another way to look at data. Not just looking at strict numbers, but also the stuff you can’t quantify, the skills, the abilities of those salespeople. I think when you talk about data, there’s so much that could go into it. It’s hard to pick one specific data point that’s going to matter the most to you because it really depends on where you fit in and where you have influence or ownership. You might not own all the parts that you could influence, but along that customer life cycle is most important for you to focus, to be more productive, and to make sure that your enablement programs are functioning the way you need them to.

SS: What are some of the key metrics that you look at to quantify enablement’s impact and value to the business?

MM: This goes back to what do you enable on? A lot of companies have separate enablement groups for different activities. For example, some people will enable the operations, and then the enablement team will enable the skills the product, and the way that we do things. The companies that I’ve worked at, have owned all of it. It depends on what I have to look at as far as my span of influence or my span of ownership. If I’m looking from my perspective, I’m going to look again at how long it’s taking them to either qualify or disqualify a customer or prospect.

I also like to look at the end. Once they’ve already purchased, they’re going to go through another sales cycle at some point. A good way to think about enablement is if you are enabling your customer success teams and you do have a value methodology. You’ll notice that once you sell to them and customer success is able to prove that value, the next sales cycle if they’re going to be buying another product or service from your company in CrossSell is going to go much quicker. You’re actually going to reduce that sales cycle for the next iteration of whatever they buy. That’s one way to tell that your value methodology is working, not just that they get through the sales cycle, but then their continuous sales cycle that you’re doing with them at the end. Is working and is moving faster.

Those two things are really important because they are the bookends. You’ve got the prospecting, how quickly are they churning through their pipeline, making sure that the people that they are looking at are qualified? If I’m looking at that, I’m going to look a lot at things like the scores. Are they focusing on the right customers? Are they getting the right customers through? Are they disqualifying customers that they shouldn’t have been? Doing a review of their books of business sometimes will be helpful and that’s a really good metric to say okay, they disqualified out all of the D’s and C’s of their scores, they’re focusing only on their A’s, and B’s. Great. 

What happens when all those A’s and B’s are gone? Do you need to adjust that behavior? I think it’s a matter of really where you fit into the customer life cycle, picking the bookends and then pulling in from there. If you’re pulling from prospecting, then you’re going to go to how long it takes them overall in the sales cycle, I always like to look at how high are they getting in the organization. That’s a data point where we can take that through and say, okay, you’ve got your list of contacts, but you have no one from the C-suite that tells me that you’re not getting to, the real decision maker. 

Even if you’re getting to a VP, that’s great, but how are you going to evolve that into your sales enablement to make sure that they are getting higher up in the accounts that they are able to sell to that decision maker and that economic buyer? For me, it’s a matter of what you touch, what you influence, what you own, and then taking a deeper dive into all of those facets, from start to finish to say, where can I pull this through into my enablement and make sure that we’re doing the right things for the field to make the company successful. 

SS: I love that. Last question, Marja. This one I think is going to be of a lot of interest to our audience. AI has rapidly advanced and evolved in the last year. How do you envision AI impacting both the human and the data side of enablement programs in the future? 

MM: I love this question because I have been working with a lot of this AI since I think before it became the latest and greatest thing out there. It’s a funny transition for the world. I think we’re all experiencing a little bit of wow, and then some people are scared that it’s going to take away their jobs. I don’t think that’s the case. I think AI is going to help us both do things a lot faster. One of the things that I used it for is taking meeting notes or a meeting transcript and distilling it down into some of the points that were most important from that meeting. That helps sellers too, to even understand what those points were in meetings that they’re having that were good points, bad points. Were they stuttering? Were they saying the wrong words? 

I know a lot of AI is now integrated into a lot of the products that are being used by the fields. That’s the sales fields that are collecting information on their calls and analyzing it and telling them when they’re saying the right things and when they’re saying the wrong things. I think that can only really help us in the future because it’s going to make us more efficient. We’re going to be able to look at that data and say, okay, you said X 12 times during that call, and X every single time made the customer hesitant. What’s something else you can say in place of that to move the customer forward and not have them have that kind of visceral reaction to it where they make a face or they grunt little things like that? 

Then we can start to get into the nuances of how you actually treat that human on the other side of your sales call to be a more engaged and fruitful relationship. I think that AI is going to help us grow. It’s going to help us learn. It’s going to help us evolve. We need to use it carefully as well because you need to remember that if you’re going on to some of these different platforms, the information you put in is now in there. You have to be very cognizant of what you’re providing what you’re trying to get back and, where that information goes. You don’t want to put anything proprietary in there, of course, because then it’s in the system, but at the same time. You should be able to leverage it to get the things that you need.

What are some of the best trends in certain industries used to help sellers and giving them education on what to look for is another way that enablement can be helpful in the whole sales cycle. What should they look for? How should they prompt the AI? If they need to understand more about their customer, what kind of questions should they be asking the AI? These are all opportunities for enablement to be a part of that journey and to help them maximize their interactions with AI if they are going to use it as a salesperson to do research. 

The one thing again I will say is to make sure that you’re talking to your legal department about using AI because you want to have some rules and regulations around it to say, hey, don’t put this kind of information in there, but you can use it for this kind of information. I think it’s a requirement going forward for every sales enablement team to learn how to use it, to leverage it, and to make sure that you are focusing on moving forward and evolving with technology. I also think you need to be careful and cognizant that it is basically sharing with the world. You need to work with your legal departments to make sure that you understand where those lines are of what you should share in those kinds of programs and what you shouldn’t. 

SS: Fantastic advice, Marja. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’ve enjoyed all of the insights that you’ve shared with our audience.

MM: Thank you so much for having me, Shawnna. Much appreciated. 

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Jonathan Kvarfordt from Simetrik and the founder of GTM AI Academy join us. Jonathan, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. 

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Shawnna, I’ve been looking forward to this. Thank you for having me on. As a big fan of the organization and podcast, I just want to say first off, thank you. I am currently the head of revenue enablement and product marketing at Simetrik. I do everything with revenue enablement teams, sporting partners, CS teams, sales, and business development. The other hat I wear is product marketing. I currently have a team of five content writers and designers all they do is your basic content creation from websites to one-pagers, white papers to all things content, which is a lot of fun. I’m loving the first month and a half of craziness. 

SS: Love that. On LinkedIn, I noticed that you mentioned you’re passionate about empowering leadership in the age of AI. What does that look like to empower leaders in this rapidly evolving era, especially as AI becomes more prevalent? 

JK: I think that a lot of people are either confused, afraid or just unsure or trying to figure out if it’s really even something they should focus on in the first place. For me, I want to make sure I can help educate and number one, give confidence that it is something they can not only focus on themselves but also help their team to do so they can do things better, faster and less expensive, or more efficiently. I also want to make sure that they’re able to hopefully have some confidence in where we’re going in the direction of technology. In my opinion, this is the next leap in what we’re going to be experiencing as humankind is all the automation and efficiency that will happen as a result of AI technology.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. For our audience, specifically when it comes to enablement, Jonathan, why is AI an important topic for enablement practitioners to pay attention to?

JK: Oh, I could go on for a while for this one because I’m actually really passionate about enablement specifically. On a side note, I am part of a core group of people who I have been working with over the past year and we are all business consultants from various industries. We have all been talking about how to use AI. We’ve been masterminding and collaborating on it. None of them are in the go-to-market or enablement space like I am. I have a little bit more unique views as opposed to them.

One thing they keep bringing up is how they want to start consulting businesses on how to adopt what they’re calling AI training. I was like, okay, tell me what you would do in that scenario, and they just said, okay, well, we’d go in and teach them about tools and how to best use them and how to impact revenue. I’m like, wait a second, that’s what enablement does. In my opinion, I think that enablement specifically should be leading the charge on not only using it in their own workflows but also helping the entire org become AI-powered. 

One more note with that is that in this last year, I know a lot of enabling people specifically have had challenges with providing or at least showing their value. At least that’s something that people have told me about, they’re just not sure how to show the value of what enablement can do. One way I think they can help expedite that process, both subjectively and objectively to show the impact of what we can do is using AI as the mechanism to show what enablement does on a day-to-day basis, but also to help the rest of the team do what they do better. That’s, in my opinion, the essence of why enablement exists is to enable a positive impact on an organization.

SS: Absolutely. On that note, what does AI-driven enablement look like? 

JK: That’s a good question. To me, it comes down to what are the outputs that we’re doing on a day-to-day basis. I’m going to back up a second and describe something to hopefully shift people’s mindsets around this. In the Industrial Revolution, the thing that drastically changed was instead of having a hundred humans doing an activity, you could have a machine complement those humans and then it ended up being five humans with big machines doing that same activity. I think the same thing is going to happen with all functions. Enablement specifically, the question I’d ask is what are your day-to-day tasks or workflows that you’re doing that could be automated or systematized using AI, because then you’ll be spending more time with your brain and strategy versus creating a deck or one-page or making a training outline or all the things that require kind of the menial stuff.

I mean, I love to create those types of content pieces, but overall, my true value comes from my experience and my mind, not so much from the ‘I have to make this one page that might take me two hours to do out of my day.’ To answer your question, it’s about identifying what you can automate and do better, faster with AI, so you have more time to do the more impactful activities or requirements of the job.

SS: I love that. You gave us one example, but what are some of the key ways that you’ve leveraged AI in your enablement programs? 

JK: One in particular is I don’t like to overwhelm my teams with tools. I’d rather keep it simple. So because ChatGPT specifically is kind of one that my team who is international is all heard of, I took them through a process of researching an account and an ideal ICP. From that research be able to take that information and apply it to a messaging framework of talk tracks or emails or LinkedIn requests, that kind of stuff. 

It was funny because the two days before, we spent a lot of time doing the manual way of understanding where to go on their website and how to research the company and all the people on LinkedIn and how to understand them. In an hour of training, I gave them all a thread run in a group Slack together, and I sent them one by one a thread on how to research a specific company, how to research a specific role, and how to take all of that, combine it with my company’s unique value prop and put it together to where they would have four or five different emails or LinkedIn messages or talk tracks they could use to a specific person at that company, which would have taken us weeks before they get that kind of information and we did it in an hour. That’s one example of many examples that I do on a daily basis of just trying to leverage and help them learn how to fish faster if that makes any sense. 

SS: No, it absolutely does. I have to say though, AI capabilities seem like they’re constantly evolving, especially in the last year. What are your best practices for continuously optimizing your enablement strategy to keep up with this new innovation? 

JK: There’s a lot out there. I was reading that there are a thousand plus new tools or companies launching every week, so it’s easy to get inundated or overwhelmed. For one there’s some research time, there’s a lot of aggregators out there. I don’t know if you want me to name any specific tools, but there are several out there that will give you a good summary of all the thousands of tools out there you can research. 

It really comes down to the mindset of just going back to automation. What am I doing on a daily basis that could be automated? Is there a tool out there that can help me do that faster? I ask that question with everything we do from what a sales rep does on a day-to-day basis, or what the CS team is doing, or what am I doing, and is there a way I could use three or four tools to be able to get those things done.

Then I’ll work through and I’ll take the time to make sure I can research it because sometimes it does take a little time to kind of experiment with ChatCPT or other tools to make sure that it’s working and has an output that you can actually use. When you figure it out, it’s really easy to scale that and to get the team where they can have the same type of results.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Last question, Jonathan. How do you think AI will continue to evolve in the next year and beyond? How do you think that evolution will impact enablement? 

JK: Well, I know it’s projected over the next seven years that the budgets for AI companies or products are going to be 10 times. Right now it’s in the billions, it’s going to be in the trillions within seven years, which just means this is not going anywhere. I think over the next year, just seeing where we have come since November when ChatGPT launched and all of the tools and technologies have come out over the past 10, 11 months. Over the next year, I would say things are going to be drastically different from the tools that you will use individually to the tools you could use as a team. 

How enablement should be thinking about how we can lead the charge instead of being behind? Again, there will come a time when a company, if they had a choice between getting a tool that could create really good-looking decks and just needed one person to edit it or a person whose all they did was create decks and that’s only value proposition as a role, they will probably be limited because more than likely the tool will be cheaper and faster and better overall. The question really is, do you understand your own value point as a mind and person, which I believe that people do have more value than an AI and how can you complement what you do with AI so that you become AI-powered?

A really crucial piece to the puzzle of how to get companies to the next level, and then can you identify those things and hopefully make them part of what you’re doing now? If you wait till next year to change, it’s going to be too late. You’ve got to start now to be able to start looking at what can I do better, faster, and easier with AI and how can I help my team do the same.

SS: Great advice, Jonathan. Thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate it. 

JK: Thank you. 

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Jennifer Ryan at Blackline join us. Jennifer, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jennifer Ryan: Absolutely. My name is Jennifer Ryan. I’m the director of global sales enablement here at Blackline. I went the long way around to find my way to enablement. When I was a solutions consultant, I was a customer success manager. I’ve done IT support, I’ve done customer training. I’ve done all of these things, and my senior VP of sales came up to me and he says, you keep circling the barrel, but until you understand sales, you can’t understand business, so you have two choices. You can go into sales enablement, or you can go into sales. I chose sales enablement.

SS: I love that. Now, you also describe yourself as someone who specializes in navigating fear and leaning into trying new things, as you just alluded to in your introduction with all of the various experiences that you’ve had throughout your career journey. How have you applied this mindset now to your role in enablement?

JR: When we think about enablement, the whole goal, whether we’re selling widgets or we’re selling software, we are asking people to change. When we ask others to change, that means that there’s something in us that has to change. As human beings, we are emotionally driven. Change is very difficult for us. It’s always steeped in the fear of the unknown. I use this idea behind being experimental, being okay with trying something, and failing because the magic is in the quote-unquote failure.

The idea that failure is negativity is horrible, it’s where all of the magic comes from. Think about science. How many things were discovered by accident because someone just tried something and what was a failure for one thing became something else? I apply this mindset to the folks in enablement that while you might be afraid to try something new, that while you might be resistant, there is absolutely nothing that you should be afraid of and just trying.

SS: I love that mindset. Now, that all being said, the sales environment has undergone a lot of change in the last few years, and change can cause fear for some folks. What are some of the common challenges that can arise from giving into fear?

JR: What I see most often that comes out of that fear mindset, and if we even think about all of the information that’s come out of Gartner and this idea behind buyer enablement, this idea that it’s not so much about us as the salespeople, but more about what the buyer knows about themselves. There’s a lot of fear of loss of control in the sales cycle. There’s this idea that historically we’ve gone in discovery and we’ve peppered questions and now it’s, how do we coach a buyer into answering those questions for themselves that we lead them instead of tell them?

That’s scary because you don’t know what’s coming. You have to be agile and you have to use your active listening skills. Those are not muscles that we always flex. Some are very good at it, but others struggle. When we struggle and then there’s the looming quota, those are all very fear-inducing instances in sales.

SS: I love that. What are some of your best practices to help sellers overcome fear though, through enablement efforts?

JR: My favorite practice to alleviate fear is humor. When you’re laughing, our bodies release serotonin, and dopamine in our brains. It’s almost like we’re drug addicts if you will. I don’t mean to use that term loosely, but we are subject to that release in our brains, and when we associate that with something new, something that we’ve learned, we have a Pavlovian response to learning.

With laughter, you release defenses. You get people to just relax. They lower their shoulders, their facial muscles release, and they’re with you. When people are with you and they feel like you are meeting them where they are, the fear goes away because you’re not lording over them. I use humor more than anything else in enablement and it has served me well for the many years I’ve been doing it.

SS: I think you’re spot on. Humor does alleviate a lot of that held in tension. Beyond that, the learning process can play a big role, I think, as well in helping sellers navigate fear because then it is no longer the unknown. It also helps to build a lot of confidence amongst your sales teams. I know one of your areas of expertise is in multimedia learning. How can a multimedia approach to learning help sellers develop confidence?

JR: I don’t know if you’ve ever read the books by Don Norman, and if you haven’t, do yourself a favor, they’re phenomenal, but Don talks about how cognitive learning by itself, that people only absorb so much information. If we couple new learning with an emotional response, if we associate emotion with it, then not only are people Viscerally responding to what’s happening, but they are also engaging a part of their brain that creates a reflective approach in the future.

That means that they can recall that learning again in the future. When you think about multimedia learning, I always lean into it. I’m going to age myself now, but when I was a kid, we had Schoolhouse Rock. At my age, I can still recite the preamble to the Declaration of Independence because I know it in a song. If you think about when someone tells you something new, and then you also see a picture of it. These things combined create an environment for learning.

We’re engaging people at different places instead of just a singular point of bringing learning to new people in whatever form that takes. My other favorite is storytelling. If I tell you a silly story with a point that makes a correlation between something that you don’t know, that correlation makes the learning.

SS: I love how you’re able to draw that correlation for your learners. If we can double-click into this a little bit, what are some of the key components of an effective multimedia learning experience?

JR: One of my favorite things to look at is called sensory motor synchronization. There’s been a lot of research done on it, but basically, the research started in babies. If we can do something that aligns with the beat of a baby’s heart, or the beat of the intake and outtake of their breath, then we align to the very basics of these babies as humans.

It also works with folks who are further in the ending stages of their life. I spent the early part of my career studying music therapy. I used to work in an Alzheimer’s unit and that’s where I started to align with that idea of the power of music, the power of the beat, and how we can reach people that the brain has literally made them unreachable for us.

One of the key components that I use is helping people align learning with that beat. Think about when you’re looking at a PowerPoint and someone has multiple lines and if you put a little music behind it and it comes out synchronized to that beat, that effect draws people’s attention, people’s attention and they’re like, oh, I loved that part. Look at how that exactly went with that beat.

Things like that are my favorite things to do in training. I’ll put up a picture that elicits that awe factor, like a picture of a kitten, and I’ll ask them, how does this make you feel? People will respond, oh, it’s just so sweet, or oh, look at that kitten. Then behind it, I’ll play the Jaws theme. Now, all of a sudden, this sweet little kitten’s eyes look like it’s coming for me! That idea that we can change the feeling, we can change the scenario of something by combining pictures with stories, and with music, we can control how people come to the table and how they’re going to ingest what we have to offer for them.

SS: That was quite the visualization, I have to say. Last question for you, Jennifer. What is one thing that you’re planning to try in your enablement programs this year? What is one thing that you’d recommend our audience try in their programs that maybe they haven’t tried before?

JR: This year we are actually rolling out what we’re calling Blackline TV. What we found is that our learners were giving us a lot of feedback that, we get too much email, and our LMS sends out email notifications. Our learning development team from HR sends out emails. We send out email announcements. There are emails about new meetings that are coming.

We had to find a different way to reach people in a way that they would again be open to learning something new. Blackline TV gives us this idea, think about the very best movie trailer you’ve ever seen. As soon as it’s done, you think, where’s my $20, I can’t wait to see that movie. Blackline TV is a snippet of different parts of the business. We didn’t just limit it to enablement functions, but we figured that this collaboration, this learning opportunity around the entire business would create not only collaboration between different teams but also reinforces that we are one company as a whole, not separate groups that happen to be part of the same quote unquote company family. That is our big one this year is BlacklineTV.

I would really recommend finding something that is off the beaten path. Something that people haven’t seen before. The beautiful part about this experimental mindset is that just try it. What’s the worst that could happen? Did it fall apart? Okay, well then you try something else. Try quickly, fail quickly, and iterate quickly.

SS: I love that advice. Thank you so much, Jennifer, for joining us today. I learned a lot.

JR: Absolutely. My pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Nicholas Gregory from Qlik join us. Nick, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Nicholas Gregory: Thank you so much, Shawnna, for the opportunity to speak to you and to speak to your audience here. My name is Nicholas Gregory. I started my career in sales after university. Specifically with a cybersecurity company called McAfee about 15 years ago, where I was given an opportunity to fulfill a very personal and professional goal of mine to work in Latin America, which is a different conversation for a different day. Nonetheless, the powers that be at the company, knowing my aspirations to work in Latin America, tap me on the shoulder to be a new member of a new global team of sales consultants placed regionally across the globe to deploy what we would call ‘enablement services today’ in a globally consistent manner.

I was brought on to that team to lead their Latin America efforts from a sales enablement services perspective and that’s where I found myself in enablement. Since that time I’ve led a regional, and most of my career now, global sales enablement teams for technology organizations such as Symantec, Veritas, Sabre, and Couchbase. Currently, I’m the global head of sales enablement and effectiveness at Qlik, and we’re a business intelligence, data analytics, and data integration company where we help organizations to better understand their data, whatever that might mean to them, to run their business and help turn their data into action.

SS: Well, Nick, we’re excited to have you here joining us with your wealth of experience. One of the things that caught my eye about your background was the focus on improving sales productivity, which I think is the ultimate goal for most folks in enablement. In your opinion, what is enablement’s role in helping to drive productivity for the business?

NG: Enablement’s role in improving sales productivity is very multifaceted. To answer, first, I’ll speak to what I feel is important to share with the audience, which is my opinion on what are the four key principle enablement services that enablement should provide to the organization itself. that we’re working for. This is from an end-to-end strategic discipline perspective. Those are four in this order. Technology services, so that is, we may not own the sales tech stack or most of the sales tech stack, but we train on those particular tools, let’s say, or in partnership with whoever might own those tools, whether it’s marketing or other parts of organization, and also in some cases, we own part of the tech stack as well, where we are from an admin perspective, but we’re here to train on those tools, no matter where they reside and who funds them on how to be more efficient and effective with those tools. Whether it’s a conversation intelligence tool, a prospecting tool, whatever the case may be, or your CRM whatever the case may be, we’re here to help support being more effective.

Number two, training services. We can’t forget where we came from in enablement. We’re born out of training, but that is a key component to the four services, training services. That is your onboarding, methodology, product training, business acumen training, industry training, and everything in between.

Number three is coaching services, which is a critical component and often doesn’t get funded as much as it should with organizations today, especially in this changing buyer-seller landscape. Any of the investments we make that are imperative for the organization, be the actual organization itself or the sales organization, we should be supporting the organization through coaching services to protect those investments we’re making, whether those are financial investments from an enablement perspective, or be it that it’s like time, a soft cost investment, whatever the case may be, what’s the most important to the organization, we should be coaching to the sustainment of those investments.

Last but not least is content services. A lot of times we create content and if you look at the research, sales themselves create a lot of content that they use in front of the customer or send to customers. Also, we work with partners in marketing that create a lot of content as well. Wherever the content comes from, we need to make sure that it’s synthesized for sales so that they make the most of that content and they’re not reinventing the wheel or having to edit a lot of that content that is being dispersed. Whether that’s through the technology services that I talked about before, integrated into the CRM, or however they get their content at their organization.

That’s just to provide a perspective of the four key principal enablement services that I feel are most important that we drive from a strategic perspective. Second, let’s agree on a high-level definition of sales productivity. If we can agree on that, it means how we measure how the organization leverages those enablement services I just spoke about to achieve organizational outcomes while reducing the time and costs to acquire new business. No service that I just talked about is more important than the other on its own, it’s how many of these services work in concert to drive the outcomes, to achieve those results that we’re looking for across the organization.

From my team’s perspective, the net on all this is that either we implement these services ourselves or work in partnership cross functionally to improve the efficacy and efficiency when using our sales tech stack as a part of our technology services, or reduce ramp time for new hires as a part of our onboarding to full productivity, or implement and drive adoption of the sales methodology that we might purchase from a methodology provider, or concentrate on the opportunities that will yield the most likelihood of winning or developing our most strategic accounts. That will increase selling time by focusing on those opportunities or on those accounts that matter the most as a part of training services.

What I mentioned about coaching services, keeping our sales skills sharp and reinforcing the most critical programs and initiatives so that leaders and reps know what to focus on. Lastly, content services, whether we create the content ourselves or work in partnership with product marketing as I mentioned before, it’s about providing the right content to the right people at the right time internally so that they can then turn that content into Action or into customer-facing content through customer engagements, and they’re wasting time to find that content that might be outdated, not relevant, or requires a lot of updates from the sales reps as I mentioned before.

It’s often these services working in concert to drive maximum productivity gains as much as possible, and we should always be measuring everything, whether it’s leading or lagging indicators across all these services. Especially at the cornerstone of productivity, whatever productivity might mean for you and your organization.

SS: I love that. I love how crisply you’ve defined what productivity means within your own organization. Now, one way that we’ve seen enablement help enhance productivity is by enabling reps with a sales methodology. Can you walk us through why a sales methodology is critical for success?

NG: First and foremost, you have to read the headlines over the last many years now that buyer expectations have dramatically changed and really sales, I would say more on the, maybe the B2B selling side, that our profession has truly changed and that what those buyer expectations are and the sales skills to keep up with those buyer expectations. It’s truly creating a gap. You can look at research to help show what that really looks like out there in the world today.

Sales reps are having a difficult time keeping up with the exponential change on the buying side, so, in my opinion, sales methodology is one of the best investments a sales organization can make to help close the gap between the buyer expectations and the selling skills to make sure that we’re driving those predictable and repeatable results across the organization at scale. It provides that center line where we can be consistent in how our sales reps prepare for customer engagements through call planning or how they strategize on their most important opportunities, or the region’s most important opportunities, or from a global account manager perspective of the world’s most important opportunities for our organization and how they manage their most important and strategic accounts.

With selling time at a premium, we can all agree that we’re not seeing more and more selling time across a given week, month, or quarter. When you establish a common way to operate. Internally away from the customer, as well as from an external perspective with the customer, a common language that is spoken by the entire sales force by the way of a methodology. Having a common scorecard to evaluate in a very succinct way, the most critical opportunities on the likelihood that they’ll close those opportunities that are worth pursuing the priorities from the organization on the opportunities that we should pursue now or later.

After we look at the higher and higher sales methodology adoption rates that have higher and higher adoption rates of the sales methodology they institute or implement within the organization. Typically high adoption rate is anything above 75% of the organization adopting the sales methodology. This is according to Korn Ferry Sales Performance Research. Organizations start to see double-digit improvement and win rates on forecasted deals or opportunities and a double-digit increase in sellers, achieving quota and an increase in revenue attainment all the while decreasing voluntary turnover.

More people making money, more people hitting quota, less and less likely to leave that organization. This is a very critical investment by the company to drive results that are most important to the organization. Oftentimes it gets overlooked in the place of more product training, or specifically just skills training or onboarding. They are all important, but if we don’t know where to place that new knowledge on skills training in a strategic way, through methodology, then it’s really missing a part of the formula to drive improved productivity across the organization.

SS: I think that is fantastic. You talked about some of the key elements of key services of bringing enablement to life in terms of improving productivity. A couple of those were things like training and coaching. What are your best practices for training reps to effectively leverage a sales methodology?

NG: I talked a little bit about the methodology as a whole and what it means to the organization, but in order to really start down a sales methodology journey, first and foremost, we have to understand that at the highest level, at the executive level, there has to be a commitment to change. That is demonstrated not only from a communication perspective, what is written and shared across the organization from senior leadership, but it’s also from a say, show, do perspective and leading by example. At the cornerstone of all of this is that leadership commitment shown across the organization way in advance of, hey, we’re moving down the sales methodology path of deployment.

Let’s say we’ve got that buy-in from a sales leadership perspective. We are going to invest with a true sales methodology provider that is very wide in nature from focusing on how we engage with customers, how we strategize in our most important opportunities, and how we manage our most important or strategic accounts, full end to end, not just deal scorecard or things of that nature. Then it’s about making sure that we have that commitment from the top shown through communication. What are we doing, why we’re doing it, and what KPIs we are looking to improve?

Also, a part of this before we even get to deploying the sales methodology is if we’re fortunate to have the funding to invest in a sales coach or a sales coaching team, a practice within the enablement team to help with not only deployment from a facilitation perspective, but ongoing reinforcement and sustainment adoption through the sales leaders as well as working one on one or one to many with sales teams.

That would be a key component of this as a part of the investment. Then, we’re looking at deploying the sales methodology and we’re providing that center line of skills and behaviors and a framework. First and foremost, I’m a big believer in beyond the communications that really provide that fertile ground for making sure that we have some semblance of pre-work, whether that’s provided by the sales methodology provider, or we develop it internally or a mixture hybrid of both. We need to make sure that everyone is on a common playing field, if you will, before we head into what would be the next portion of the deployment and best practice is having the actual formal workshop.

We have a coaching team, we commit to leadership, and we’re deploying pre-work that’s required before showing up at a virtual workshop, or if possible, an in-person workshop or various workshops to make sure we take care of the entire globe where they’ll apply their newly acquired knowledge. They got a lot of that knowledge from pre-work and they got a lot of that knowledge from the leadership commitment from communications and calls and things of that nature before deployment.

Now it’s applying that knowledge, not just with hypotheticals, but if we’re talking about opportunity strategy as a part of our methodology, applying that knowledge with real opportunities for the sales team as a part of this workshop. If we’re talking about preparing for our most critical engagements, it’s about preparing for real customer engagements that we’ll have the buying side, leveraging the new methodology. If it’s about managing our most important accounts, it’s about applying that knowledge by using our real accounts. It’s establishing those skills and behaviors through workshops by using what’s real to the sales team.

Also, part of this next is to establish a bi-weekly or weekly deal review. Now, a lot of companies already have that or should have that as a part of their operating cadence, but that being said, establishing a methodology is about providing a new way of going to market. It’s about providing a new way to strategize and opportunities. We should embed the methodology into what already exists and their deal reviews. We’re evaluating those deals through the methodology framework or a new method by which we strategize on opportunities.

We’ll have a lot of success stories over the next three, six, nine months. Let’s syndicate those success stories as a part of this process and best practices across the organization. Let’s not make them isolated within one territory or one region of the globe. If we’re a global company, let’s syndicate those across the entire globe of the success stories of how the methodology is adding value to be more productive, reducing the admin time, and improving and increasing the selling time that we might have to give it across a given week or month or quarter.

The number one thing when we’re thinking about those best practices I just mentioned is we have to define who was a part of this methodology as well. That goes back to the very beginning in some cases and what we’re going to deploy across the organization. While we call it a sales methodology, it’s truly an organization-wide commitment in many regards. We need to ensure that we are onboarding all members of the account team to the methodology and all of what I just said before, as far as those best practices are concerned. Most, if not all the people I’m about to mention should be a part of this journey, whether that’s through the full end-to-end methodology deployment experience or a subset of the deployment, depending on an individual’s role.

Let’s take B2B technology sales for a moment that might take the form of fully implementing the methodology across account executives, solution engineers, partners, account management, teams, professional services, and customer success. Also, of course, all levels of leadership across those teams. Those are the core teams that engage with an interface with prospects and customers. Then we take the perspective of who else supports the account team across the company and my interface with customers from time to time. We may be on board to a lesser extent, marketing teams such as digital or social teams, field marketing, legal, procurement, and others who often, like I said, interface with prospects and customers throughout the sales or customer buying cycles. Sometimes those teams contribute in a variety of ways to opportunity and account-level strategy. Implementing a sales methodology is truly a cross-functional deployment, not just specific to the sales team.

Number two, the last thing I’ll mention, Shawnna, is about partnership with marketing. While they will be going along the journey with us in many regards, maybe to a lesser extent from a full onboarding experience, we have to make sure that we support the sales team by partnering with marketing that supports us and enablement services so much and engages with sales directly with content and other ways. Our ongoing partnership with them shall provide that center line as marketing to engage with prospects and customers strategizes on those opportunities. They help us manage some of those most strategic accounts in a globally consistent manner.

As our internal language shifts, so should the language that marketing uses externally and internally to be more customer outcome-driven, less product feature function-oriented. Therefore any content they’re creating that is customer-facing or sent to the sales teams internally, or like I said, in some cases, externally should evolve as well. That partnership with marketing to ensure alignment on content, the new language that’s used the intent of the content has to change with it. Whether that’s sales play content, competitive battle cards, or ongoing support through the creation of discovery questions to be used throughout the entire, that sales cycle, no matter the asset, it should change and align to the methodology in that common language.

SS: I love that. You also mentioned coaching earlier a few times, actually throughout that. What role does coaching play in helping reps to effectively leverage a sales methodology?

NG: Coaching, or the lack thereof, is one of the most critical determining factors if an investment is worthwhile. It truly is an investment financially in most regards, unless you’re fortunate to build one internally. Coaching can and should come in many forms. Coaching can come in the form of practice from a coaching practice perspective. If we’re fortunate to have a coaching team, like I’m fortunate to have here at Qlik, this team is dedicated to sales to the sales professionals, their leaders, and their leaders leaders and their remit is to coach leaders in the sales teams on the key imperatives for the sales team, the organization, such as methodology in this case that you asked about.

Sales professionals can provide coaching themselves. It can come from not only the first-line, second-line leaders, a coaching team if we’re fortunate to have one, but also sales reps that are, I mentioned those success stories before. Sales can coach sales. I’m a big believer that sales learn best from sales. This is a great opportunity when we’re having success, We call out those sales reps to bring them into a pseudo-coaching role where they’re actually helping coach their peers from within their own teams, within their own region, whatever the case may be.

Also, we can look at successful leaders who can request that other leaders, let’s say, provide a community of coaches from across the leadership teams where those leaders are not only developing and coaching their teams, but they’re also helping develop and coach other teams around on an ad-hoc basis, or maybe even a more formal basis, as well across the region or across the globe. That ongoing and effective coaching drives sustainment, adoption, and reinforcement of the methodology investment that can be very expensive on top of the commitment to change. It can be very expensive from a financial and soft cost perspective. Coaching is critically important to longevity and the likelihood of success as I mentioned before.

On top of my coaching team being certified, I’m going to mention this point. Their responsibility is to facilitate the methodology training workshops and provide their own reinforcement in a variety of ways. My coaches are laser-focused when deploying a methodology to help those first-line and second-line leaders become better coaches. Oftentimes you’ll hear so many sales consultancy firms talk about how they are the most underinvested people in the sales organization with some of the most difficult jobs. That upward pressure from their teams, and downward pressure from leadership, but we provide little to no investment in them to be better coaches.

A lot of times they weren’t really trained to be sales leaders. They were an individual contributor on a Friday promoted from within, let’s say five, 10 years ago, and they’ve just been in this leadership role for quite some time. Maybe successful, maybe you know, plateauing a little bit here and there, but they’ve never been invested in. It’s my team’s job to help them be better first-line and second-line leaders underpinned by the methodology.

Sales organizations that have a sales methodology coupled with an ongoing and multifaceted coaching presence that I mentioned before, can see upwards of 28% of higher quota attainment and 32% higher win rates versus organizations that might have a methodology that made that investment. Leave coaching up to the leader’s discretion as I mentioned before, where they weren’t invested in their sales leadership career to be better coaches. This is an opportunity to have a coaching team drive true coaching in a consistent way, underpinned by the methodology to drive those results I just mentioned before.

SS: Wonderful. In both training and coaching on methodology, I love that there’s this leadership-first mentality. Can you tell our audience about this approach and the impact that it’s had on the effectiveness of your training and coaching programs?

NG: There are a few aspects to this that are top of mind and top of my list when deploying a true sales methodology. Let’s say that the org, as I mentioned previously, and the senior leadership have stacked hands, that there is a commitment to change, and that there are results that we’re looking to change and move the needle in a variety of different areas. From that commitment, we’re going to partner with a true sales methodology.

Now, in order for that leadership-first mentality, you spoke of to really take hold. Number one, we need to bring leaders along with the pre-deployment journey. It can’t be something, hey, this isolated vacuum, we decided as a part of a senior leadership team that we’re going to be investing in a sales methodology and then all of a sudden it’s about to happen and they don’t get much of an advanced warning or awareness on from a change management perspective itself. We got to bring them along that pre-deployment journey to help with the change management side of the house because this is a huge change management initiative, a transformation.

I think we agree that implementing a sales methodology is a big change management and transformational exercise. We need to work with those first-line leaders across all of the sales segments and across the cross-functional partners that I mentioned previously to help set expectations. What is their role during the actual implementation from a training perspective? What is the post-deployment? What are the expectations on how the leaders will reinforce, drive adoption, and sustainment?

Sharing what the plan is, end to end, early and often prior to deployment, and what KPIs we’ll be measuring so that there are no surprises there. Gaining their commitment, now that’s not a hundred percent always going to happen there are going to be detractors. I think we can all agree that nothing that we do from an enablement services perspective or program or strategic comparative gets a hundred percent commitment, but that being said, let’s take the majority and get that commitment where possible. What changes should they expect there will definitely be changes moving forward. Also, what communications in some cases we would like these first-line second leaders to send out to their teams, to the region?

A lot of those communications could be ghostwritten by us or others in the organization, but nonetheless, we need to make sure they put their voice behind the change that’s about to take place. In this regard, over-communication and constant engagement is key. With leaders, just as much as the individual contributors that report to them.

The second is through the deployment from a training perspective. I’m a big believer, especially when it comes to methodology deployment or any large imperative for that matter, that leaders go first. What I mean by that is that leaders go through the same mandatory pre-work that their individual contributors or teams will go through. I typically have leadership-only training workshops. They go through pre-work first, then they have what we have. Leadership-only workshops where the leaders are trained ahead of their teams. They go through the training as their team is about to go through throughout the deployment. They go from learner now going through these leadership-only workshops to a second time going through the training because they’ll now be going through the training workshops with their team. They turn from learner to coach the second time around.

As a quick recap, they take the pre-work, they go through leadership-only workshops, and they go through the workshop again with their teams when we deploy to the field at large, going from learner to coach. From that point, the individual contributors or field workshops become those coaches and start to reinforce and drive that adoption. That’s so critical during the workshop in real time, sitting next to their teams or at the same tables, if you will, or in a virtual setting with their team.

This approach is where it’s front-loaded per se from a training perspective, but the large focus of leaders is critically important because they truly are the force multipliers when deploying a methodology or again, any large investment, because they’re the ones within the organization. That decides if typically a large investment like this, whether financially or soft cost-wise, is going to be successful or not. It really falls on their shoulders. We have to take that extra work, that front-loaded work during the rollout, prior to the rollout, and then of course, through any deployment or any sustainment or adoption reinforcement activities and exercises moving forward.

Last but not least, this is for a very special group of leaders. In some cases, there are a handful of leaders who accept and go on a specific methodology deployment journey in a unique way by way of getting certified on the methodology themselves. While I’m a big believer in the enablement team, if we’re fortunate enough to have a coaching team or others across the needle, be certified to become facilitators. If we partner with an external methodology provider, sometimes these leaders also invest in themselves, their team, and the organization. by going through a very similar path that many of us go through an enablement to get certified in the methodology themselves.

I may not be up to a facilitation grade certification if you will, but that being said, they go on some assemblage of that journey by being trained on the methodology in a unique way beyond the workshop by partnering with the methodology provider. Then going on this journey for this very special group shows commitment. In some cases, we can lean on those leaders because they’ve been on this certain journey up to a certain point to support other efforts within their region or globally based on their subject matter expertise and dedication to knowing the methodology at a deeper level than let’s say a traditional leader going through a leadership workshop only, as well as the workshop with their teams to drive that coaching. This is a special breed, if you will, of leadership that ops in and we partner with to help them on going through that unique journey to drive a different level of results.

SS: I love that leader’s first mentality, Nick. Thank you so much for joining us. I enjoyed this conversation and I think it’s fantastic the work that you guys have been doing to increase productivity at Qlik.

NG: Thank you so much Shawnna for the time and look forward to a conversation in the future.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Rachael McCormick from Vonage join us. Rachael, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Rachael McCormick: Thanks, Shawnna, and thanks for having me here today on Sales Enablement PRO. As mentioned, my name is Rachael McCormick and I’m one of the managers for Vonage’s Global Sales Enablement Team. My journey actually started with a marketing degree. When I graduated, many of the marketing positions I was looking into required years and years of experience, which I think many recent grads tend to find, and instead, I got into sales.

I had success in that role and learned a lot of skills that I still utilize today and incorporate that perspective for enablement. Ultimately, when Vonage acquired the first company I was working with, there were a handful of us who were promoted into an operations role. From there, I found my love and passion for enablement.

As for our team, we focus on selling skills, systems training, and content creation for tenured reps as well as new hires. That being said, we’re also responsible for sales new hire ramp just overall in general. Being that there are only so many of us on the selling skills, systems training, and content creation team, our team tends to work closely with the product and technical enablement team as well. As one solid team together, we support all of our global sales route sales to markets. I’ve been with Vonage for about eight years now.

SS: Rachael, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I’m excited to talk to you. You mentioned you’re responsible for a lot of the new hire processes, including optimizing the ramp process for new hires on the global sales team. Now, in today’s sales environment where productivity is a top priority, why is effective onboarding so critical?

RM: Great question. In general, an effective sales new hire program is critical because it helps acclimate, engage, and retain good employees. If we focus specifically on the impact it can have on sales productivity, the knowledge shared during onboarding, whether it’s product, process, sales skills, or system knowledge, can really boost an individual’s confidence during a time that can be quite uncomfortable for some and simultaneously set them up for success to become a productive team member right off the gates.

SS: I love that. Now if we drill a little bit to understand onboarding, in your opinion, what are some of the key components of an effective onboarding program?

RM: I love this question. I’m going to focus on four components specifically. First, it’s important to integrate employees into the company’s culture and get them really excited about their career choices. A program should really embody the shared values, attitudes, and behaviors that your company aligns with. This specifically gives new joiners resources to also make professional connections. For example, make them aware of the employee resource groups that your company may offer. We work closely with the organizational effectiveness team to actually do this.

Second, keep it engaging by utilizing different delivery methods or formats, which appease different learning styles throughout their entire ramp time. Before COVID, we had all-day in-person training and it was information overload. Our new hire survey scores actually increased by approximately 30% when we moved to a more flexible training because we were able to utilize different delivery methods I mentioned, like live webinars, microlearning, and gamification. We started to present information long-term to help with that information retention.

Third, identify objectives that a sales new hire will need to achieve for effective job performance. You can identify the learning behaviors or techniques that a sales hire will need to execute that support the specific objective. Based on that, you can determine the enablement delivery method that supports the technique. I have an example of that. One objective could be that a sales rep needs to understand how to use a CRM. The behavior they need to execute might be to effectively use the CRM on their own to input leads or create a quote. Then you’d decide the delivery method to help them achieve that, which could be utilizing a test environment or even a gamified quiz.

Lastly, number four, keep it modernized and continuously listen to feedback. Our team likes to joke that sales enablement is like changing tires on a moving car or an 18-wheeler during busy times. We have to keep what is currently running and continuously evolve our programs and content to be up to date while simultaneously keeping into account, feedback from our audience and department leaders for improvement.

SS: Thank you. I think that is a great definition of the key components. What would you say are some of the common obstacles that sellers might experience as they are trying to ramp, and what would you say are some of your best practices to help mitigate those through onboarding?

RM: I’ll start with identifying those three common obstacles that we tend to see. Information retention, which I did mention in the previous response, and then lack of confidence as well, and third is lack of feeling connected in a virtual or hybrid work environment. In terms of information retention, we’ve adopted a model for just-in-time learning so that resources are short, targeted, and at our audience’s fingertips whenever they need it.

To support this, we’ve enhanced our resource repository tools and have standardized this by working closely cross-functionally with different departments, and we utilize the same tools altogether and align on the same messaging. This has been really impactful because, again, we have such a large audience across different time zones. Second, to mitigate a lack of confidence, it’s important to incorporate opportunities for simulated activities to practice. Whether it’s in a system test environment or role-playing sales skills, we really believe that repetition is key and we have a layered approach to that as well.

Lastly, to help new joiners feel more connected in a virtual or hybrid environment, we’ve implemented a buddy program where another sales team member works closely with the new hire to further welcome them, address questions, and help them navigate a new organizational culture.

SS: I have to say I love the buddy approach. It is like an instant friend whenever you enter a new organization. I think the other role that plays a key component in onboarding new hires is often the frontline sales manager. How do you collaborate with sales managers to reinforce the knowledge and skills learned in onboarding for these sellers?

RM: Another excellent question. We collaborate with sales leaders in two ways. First, we have regular communication with them, whether it’s during live calls or written out via collaboration software and weekly sales update newsletters, where we tend to provide updates on existing enablement initiatives, taking in feedback for enhancements, as well as making sure that they’re aware of some of the improvements from an onboarding perspective. This really gives us the opportunity to continuously collaborate.

Second being we’ve launched an enablement program for our sales leaders, where we’ve coached and collaborated on methods and tools that we also use during onboarding so they can continue to reinforce that message. For example, one focus for the sales leader training was data hygiene. We focused on that specifically on the ‘why’ it’s important so that managers can continue that message. We’ve had really great feedback from sales leaders on those resources and the release of these collaborative workshops to help them and their reps be more productive.

SS: I think those are fantastic approaches. I’d love to understand a little bit in terms of metrics or definitions. How do you define what it means for a rep to be fully ramped? What are some of those key metrics or maybe even milestones that you track throughout their ramp-up journey?

RM: We support all routes to markets with various ramp lengths, but on average, I’d say about 90 days. We ultimately break milestones up into buckets, whether it’s product, process, sales skills, or systems. For product, the rep might need to obtain all of their product badges that are specific to their role. For sales skills, the rep might need to submit a mock sales pitch that their manager approves and passes. For processes and systems, the rep might need to attend a training and then execute that process in a test environment to pass. In each one of those buckets, there are different milestones that need to be achieved over the course of those first 90 days or so.

SS: Amazing. Last question for you, Rachael. How do you assess and evolve the impact of your own onboarding programs to continually optimize the ramp time?

RM: Great question. We currently assess by evaluating NPS, so Net Promoter Score. We collaborate with sales leaders on the enhancements by utilizing internal cross-functional focus groups that our wonderful transformation manager actually does lead. As mentioned earlier, we’re really passionate about listening to feedback and hearing from our internal customers on what’s going well and where areas of improvement potentially sit. With recently launching our new enablement system less than a year ago, the next phase is to implement and utilize their integrated data analytics to further optimize ramp time in general, as well as further build out role-specific material for each route to market.

SS: I love that, Rachael. Thank you so much for joining the podcast today.

RM: Thank you, Shawnna. This has been great.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today we are having Ankita Tiwari join us. Ankita, I would love for you to introduce yourself and your background to our audience.

Ankita Tiwari: Thank you for having me today, Shawnna. I’m Ankita, originally from India. About five years ago, I found myself starting my enablement journey in France. It’s funny because of how I stumbled into enablement, just like many others in the field, back then it wasn’t a very clearly defined role, and I sort of ended up in it by chance. It’s been a fun journey so far, and I never looked back.

So far I’ve had the pleasure of working with scale-ups, super multicultural, and international companies. The growth that I have experienced in these organizations has been rapid, exciting, and challenging. That’s just roughly who I am and my experience so far.

SS: Wonderful. Well, we are excited to have you on our podcast today. Thank you so much for taking the time. I want to talk about the current economic climate. I think a lot of organizations are trying to do more with less and enablement teams are really needing to prove their value now more than ever. In your opinion, why is enablement mission-critical for businesses today?

AT: It’s funny because like you just said, we are in this economic climate trying to do more, but with less, and isn’t that an enablement person’s job? It’s basically our job to do more than less. If you see the ratio of enablement to the salespeople that we have in organizations is roughly between 1 to 230, 1 to 250. Overall, that’s more important right now than before I feel, because there are so many companies that are finding themselves with 50 fewer salespeople, maybe 25 fewer salespeople because of the entire situation right now in the market. This is like the time when enablement can actually prove its value most because now is the time when the leaders and C-suite of the organizations will need to figure it out.

How do we actually work with 50 sales instead of a hundred? That’s when enablement will come into the picture. That’s our main job. Of course, I think all practitioners would agree with the fact that it’s something that’s been defined. I mean the enablement role has been defined like what recently maybe four to five years ago. That’s when I started my enablement journey. That’s also why it has been like an ongoing effort to prove our value, and because of this economic climate, I feel like we’ll probably be able to do it well now as compared to before. The solution right now is basically our job.

SS: Absolutely. Why would you say, from your experience, is it important for organizations to have at least a dedicated enablement person or function available for their teams?

AT: If I have to put it in one word, definitely yes. If I have to put it in a couple of points just to explain myself, I would say this. Firstly, I like to put it in a way that we are here as enablers to convert strategies into things that can be executed. It’s a very important bridge between strategy and execution in an organization. If anything you do in life, if the execution has not done well, any great idea will never be appreciated.

First, I think the alignment between these two things, is super important, and you need a dedicated person or a team to do that. Secondly, your main role as an organization is to generate revenue. That’s what the main goal is, and where does that stand? Like, who’s exactly doing that? It’s your sales team. If you don’t have that entire sales force empowered enough, it just doesn’t make sense. Having someone who’s able to empower the sales force, and especially with the rapid pace of technological advancements that’s been happening, you have to have someone that’s super dedicated to that part.

Lastly, I feel like each project, and everything that we do in an organization, whether it’s a learning program, whether it’s just like introducing a tool, are all related to a change. A lot of adaptation is needed there. A lot of change has to be welcomed there. You need an enablement person or a team to actually be the catalyst for organizational change and adaptation, in my opinion.

Three things, in my opinion, are super important being the alignment between strategy and execution. Secondly, having a dedicated team to empower your sales team. Lastly, having someone dedicated to driving these changes and being a very good catalyst for all the organizational changes and adaptation that takes place, that’s dedicated to the enablement team, basically.

SS: Absolutely. Now what advice would you give to organizations that are looking to build out an enablement team or function? Where should they start?

AT: I would say overall you need to build that function and to be able to scale it later the foundation needs to be really strong. Having the right talent and the right ratio is really important. Nowadays, I feel that, as I said before, the ratio is usually like 1 to 60, and it ends up being too intense, especially in the beginning. If you’re starting off, you need to have a couple of people who are skilled in specific pillars of enablement.

When I say pillars, let’s say some like content, someone who’s really good with content. Second, someone who’s really good with onboarding. Lastly, somebody who’s had the experience of sales before and can’t coach well. I would say having skilled people for different functions is really important if you’re starting off. Of course, there are zillions of other things to do, but in my opinion, this is the key in the beginning.

SS: I think that is great advice. Now, you were recently included in our recognition of women making an impact in enablement. As a leader in the field, what are some of the key traits that make for a good enablement leader?

AT: I think the list can be endless, especially if you have an opinion about how and what a leader should be like. For me, the top three worked out really well, which of course came with experience, which came with a lot of mistakes. So first, I would say that there are three that I can actually shortlist. One is the knowledge and the experience that you have bringing that to the table. Now, when I say knowledge and experience, how will you get that?

Knowledge, I would say, inside the company, what is your company doing? What is your product doing? What are the people inside of the company wanting to sell? How do they want to sell it? Being in your sales team’s shoes is the key. Get all the knowledge you can from that perspective, because your customer is your sales team at the end of the day. When you’re selling a product, how you see it is that, okay, I’m trying to solve a problem for my customer. It’s the same thing internally. I’m here to solve a problem for the sales team. Knowledge about everything that’s related to a sales role and the product they’re selling internally.

Now, knowledge for the outside world, use the knowledge of the experience of the experts that’s out there and are happy to share. I think that’s one thing that really changed the game for me because when I started, there were hardly any certification courses or anyone speaking explicitly about enablement or an enablement session. It was just starting to take shape. For me, each time I would go on the internet nothing would properly explain what I need as a beginner. These days, slowly, we’ve been lucky to have communities who are so happy to share. Each time I have actually gone on my LinkedIn and tried to see that, okay I’m a little confused about how do I measure this initiative of mine, I’ve just looked up on my network and asked people who I think would know. I don’t think there’s ever been a point when I’ve not received an answer. I’ve been receiving and giving help so much that in my opinion, you always learn by teaching after a certain point. That is the key.

One is the knowledge that is inside of your company outside and the second is the experience overall. I like to take it from outside when people are ready to give it. That’s the first thing you should be open to knowledge and experience. Now the second is what you think and how you plan, like strategic thinking and planning. Now, you are literally a pivot between the sales team and so many other departments. If I have to give you an example, if I want to choose a learning platform, I have to think about so many things. It is not just that this is good for my sales or not, but that is something the sales and the others will experience when they enter the company in the beginning.

How will HR deal with this? How will the marketing team make use of this? After a certain point, can this become a really good part of our tech stack? It’s basically thinking and trying to have a helicopter view. I think in the beginning, I struggled quite a bit and had the helicopter view and at the same time doing everything hands being the first enabler in most of the companies I’ve joined. It was very hard to switch between these two, but then eventually I got used to it. It’s a really good skill to have. Being able to think strategically and plan according to all your future plans, making sure it aligns with the business objectives, and making sure it aligns with what other departments are doing. That’s the second one, strategic thinking and planning overall.

Then lastly, I would say communication and collaboration. That is gold in enablement. I cannot emphasize enough how important that is for you because when you’re communicating as an enabler, one hour you’ll be speaking to maybe the CEO if you’re in a scale the very next hour, you’ll be speaking to your sales. In the next hour, you’ll be speaking to a marketing team who’s doing a case study or something. Your audience is literally changing every hour with every meeting. You should be able to understand how and when to speak about certain things and when not. Do you need to mention very small details? Do you have to only talk about all your initiatives, like strategically being able to communicate? There’s a very good difference between communicating and talking. Don’t just talk, you have to communicate. Learning about the difference between these two. I would say it’s very important.

Then collaborating. If you are able to communicate and understand what your role is, you should be able to collaborate well. That’s also where change management comes into the picture because you’re speaking to a different department every single hour like I said before, and it’s really crucial. For me, I like these three things, your knowledge and experience, strategic thinking, and lastly, improving your communication and collaboration. These three, I would say, are the big ones for me.

SS: Those are fantastic skills to look for in an enablement leader. What about skills that someone looking to enter into the enablement field? What should they focus on potentially trying to advance from a skill set perspective?

AT: I wish that we had these kinds of things like four to five years ago because I used to think about this all the time. I would think, okay, I need to communicate and I know what tasks need to be done, but it’s so hard to do it in an organized manner. When I say organized, you have to be so organized when you are an enabler because you’re doing tasks that are from this radar to that radar. It’s just everywhere.
Then slowly I started to come across articles and stuff that started to articulate things that were in my mind, but in a really nice way that’s where I started to pick these things up and understand that, okay, these are the skills that are needed as an enabler. It will be like, basically, I think there are a couple of organizations or certifications that exist today, but I don’t think there’s anything that exists that gives everything all together at once.

For me, those will be like maybe four to five main things. One, your content and learning strategy. Understand what content is. How do you manage content? Are you okay with creating content? Everything related to content and adult learning strategies. Second, as I mentioned as a leader, it’s a very interesting role. Communication and influence are very important because you might have to convince somebody in your sales team that everyone’s doing it in one way. You’re not doing it the same way and how do you do that? It’s very risky and you should be able to influence and communicate.

Third, as I mentioned in the leadership skills, sales, and industry knowledge. Just be on it. Things are changing. It’s related to tech most of the time. Things are changing rapidly. If you stay on top of the news and everything, speak to all the experts outside of your company. It’s going to do the job. It’s really, it’s gold for me. That’s very important.

Then the other thing is project management. Go out, do a course on project management. Yes, it doesn’t say explicitly that an enabler needs a project management skill when you see a job description, but it’s really essential. Each time you’re trying to change something, whether it’s a learning program, you’re trying to introduce a tool. Each time you’re trying to make a change, whether it’s small or big and that’s where change management comes into the picture. That’s also something never written in a job description or will never be demanded, but it’s so crucial when it comes to enablement. If you know it, it’s going to be super helpful.

Then lastly, I would say, how do you do numbers with data? Is something that seems a little scary to a lot of people. Like I said, speak to a lot of experts and try to understand that, okay, not all data needs to be used, but some, yes, because at some point or the other, you need to show that enablement is important and it is definitely changing the revenue game as well as the analysis and the measurement part. Be comfortable with numbers and just learn how to use them. I would say these five to six things just do, like different courses out there, and try to get more comfortable with it.

SS: Fantastic advice. Absolutely love that. Last question for you. How can enablement practitioners hone some of these skills? Are there professional development resources that you might recommend?

AT: Like I said before, there are very few platforms that are giving a complete, proper course on enablement. When I say that, like there are a lot of videos on YouTube or maybe 10 minutes about what enablement is, but actually giving modules, like Sales Enablement PRO, for example, they are doing a very good job with this part. There are a couple of certifications that you can do, but if you’re not able to pay for courses or if you don’t feel like investing, I would say actively look for the skills that I’ve mentioned, do individual courses on them, and then you just get that skill to your job the next day. Just do it, execute it and you’ll know that it’s working.

In my opinion, I would say get all these skills separately. There’s LinkedIn learning. There are a lot of other platforms that are going to give you this for free. If you feel like no, I’m very serious about this, there may be one or two certification programs that people have actually put together. You can use them as well, and of course, there are zillions of articles you can read.

SS: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciated the conversation.

AT: Thank you so much for having me. I hope that my comments were insightful and at least they’ll be valuable to somebody.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Bana Kawar from AWS join us. Bana, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Bana Kawar: Thank you very much, Shawnna. Hello, everyone who’s listening to this podcast, and a shout out to all enablement professionals all over the world. My name is Bana, and oftentimes people think of a banana without an A to remember my name here in the UK. I look after the UK public sector enablement here at Amazon Web Services. I have been with the company for seven and a half years now in different functions and different countries. I currently spearhead the enablement function here in the public sector and help the organization grow to what it is today and reach our organizational outcomes.

Apart from work, I have a huge passion for ID&E. I try to call it IDEA where possible, where A stands for action. It’s inclusion, diversity, equity, and action. I’ve co-founded the EMEA chapter, along with two other Amazonians to reach where we are today. I love to mentor and empower different leaders on different topics. I’m a career coach as well. That’s a bit about me, Shawnna. I look forward to our discussion today.

SS: Absolutely. Likewise. I look forward to digging into that with you as well. Now to get started, for our audience and sales enablement, which I’m sure they can all relate to, you are extremely passionate about driving excellence in sales performance. I’d love to start there. From your perspective, how does enablement strategically influence sales performance?

BK: A lot of organizations, including ours, are focused on growth. I truly believe as an enablement function, we have key responsibility, and also a pleasure to be part of that journey as well. If I look at my current role for the UK, we’re trying to hit 1 billion business this year, and enablement is helping to drive insights that would help sellers in different orgs and different roles from ISRs, account managers, business developers, partner teams, etc, to drive those valuable conversations with their customers and help them on their key missions. I really think when enablement is aligned to the business and also aligned to revenue ops or business ops, depending on how organizations define it, you can influence strategically as well.

The last piece that comes to mind is how enablement can play a role in reducing time to market. When you’re enabling teams to be more adaptive versus reactive, you are already helping in reducing that time to launch and ramp up faster. Finally, the downstream impact of this is having more time and more focused resources to drive high-velocity decisions and build better products from there. In a nutshell, that’s three different ways, how I see enablement playing a role in the business strategy.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. One of your areas of expertise is really around building everboarding programs that continue to align with those organizational goals. I’d love to hear more about your everboarding programs. What are some of your best practices for building everboarding programs that drive sales performance? In other words, what does good everboarding look like?

BK: I really believe in the power of everboarding because it also shows that you’re a learn it all organization versus a know it all organization. I truly believe in any function, learning does not stop when you hit that 90-day mark that oftentimes is the industry standard for onboarding. That continuous learning journey is ongoing in so many different ways and functions. To build a good everboarding program I think you could look at it and dissect it into different ways.

The first one is the discovery piece. Truly understanding what are some of the problem statements that you’re solving for. In today’s world, we have a tsunami of information, and people are overwhelmed with how much they should get up to speed on. An everboarding program should sometimes also be a refresher. We have recharge programs here and I really think some of those key skills that a lot of people learn in their early selling journey are needed very much in everboarding programs. Examples that come to mind include prospecting, objection handling, mission understanding, and negotiation skills. Those are key to any seller in any role, and sometimes those refreshers can be absolutely valuable to drive those customer conversations and reduce time to ramp.

The second piece that comes to mind is making sure you’re always up to date with what’s happening in the market. That brings me to the second point product knowledge and market understanding. A lot of SaaS companies have so many solutions and products that they’re trying to bring to market and one way to really do that is certifying reps and making sure that they’re actually going through the knowledge check and getting certified on a specific use case. I’m a firm believer in having certifications on any new product releases and also on new market trend understanding because that also shows your customer that you are meeting them where they need you to be as well.

Last but not least, an everboarding program, or as a matter of fact, any enablement program, should align with business objectives. That includes successful OKRs to measure their success and iterate from there. If I zoom out, those are the three key things I would look at from an everboarding perspective and build from there.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. Bana, what would you say the importance is of having everboarding programs rather than just onboarding programs?

BK: One of the things that are important in any organization is staying agile and moving to a learning journey continuously. As I mentioned before, the learn it versus know it all, because of the pace and the agility that the market is moving towards. I think having everboarding programs is not nice to have, it is an absolute must-have, in my humble opinion, to be successful and have your position in the market lead and truly help to solve one customer problem at a time. A beautiful way to do that is to help grow the business and grow your own knowledge as well, whether you’re a seller, a partner, or even someone in enablement because I believe that you should enable the enablement org as well. You do that through creating everboarding programs to maintain that high performance, and retention, and also hit your OKRs at the end of the day.

SS: Absolutely. Everboarding is increasingly important, especially as you try to make sure that you’re maximizing the productivity of your in-sync sales team. Now your everboarding programs have reached upwards of 400 employees globally. What tips do you have maybe for our audience who are also trying to create enablement programs on a global scale?

BK: I really believe that scale happens a bit easier than what we expect when we’re solving the right problem. What I’ve noticed at Amazon, as an example, is that the problem statement is often shared across different functions and across different geographies versus only the actual customers that you’re looking after. That brings me to the first part of problem-solving, which is ensuring that the discovery phase is done really well. What I mean by that is what problem to solve first, and from there, you move into the solution.

Enablement could and should, in my opinion, spend a bit of time on the discovery phase understanding first, is that problem statement shared across? Is that a global or regional problem only? You do that by asking the same set of questions as an example across the board to understand who’s the customer at this point. What are some of the key missions that they’re solving for? Who are the customer profiles that they look at at the moment? What is their impact on the industry? What vertical do they sit in? What are some of the KPIs that they’re assessed against? More often than not, sellers have similar metrics, but different numbers that they need to hit. That’s one way how to approach it when you’re trying to scale as well before you move into build mode.

The second part that brings me to the ID&E is any perspective because I’m a huge believer in getting different perspectives and getting content reviews and content even being created by different people across the company and having that cross-functional and cross-pollination happening to build the best products you have so they get that impact that they need.

The third piece, if I’m thinking of the power of scaling, is what happens afterward. How do you make sure that you tie in your input with your output through what we call a mechanism? That’s when you build through iterations and have a phased approach and a very clear feedback process built in and weaved done and you hold yourself and your stakeholders accountable to make sure that whatever you’re building is insisting on the highest standards and also really impacting the end customer and helping them move faster towards their mission. If you put those 3 things together, that’s when a beautiful Venn diagram is shaped and you see the impact of what we think of as the power of scaling.

SS: I think that is amazing. You have done a phenomenal job building these programs at scale. Now, as you mentioned in your introduction, you are also a co-founder of the EMEA inclusion, diversity, and equity chapter. I think you also had action at the end of that at AWS. How do you incorporate ID&E best practices into your enablement programs, and what would you say is the impact of doing so?

BK: I love that question, Shawnna. Thank you for addressing it, especially in today’s world where ID&E is really helping a lot of customers understand what is important and how to create that diverse product line, and best programs, and build better. To achieve this, in my opinion, the first thing you could also look at is how you could address some of the biases we all have. Everyone has biases, including myself, and those are just the mental shortcuts you have in your programs and the content you produce. The first thing that I try to address when I have a new program is to build an advisory board and have different people with different experiences and backgrounds to help build this up.

You can cover it from different angles. If we focus on and double click on the enablement programs, you could also have people from different functions that you look after, like sales ops or biz ops, who should be part of that. The other pieces, having different and equal representation from your customers, for example, different geographies that you cover, different countries, different verticals, different personas, et cetera, bring that experience that you actually need to build that best product. If anyone wants a practitioner tip, one of the things that really helped me uncover some of those biases and understand them better is the Harvard Project Implicit Test to uncover some of those biases and address them.

The second piece you could do is also have diverse speakers when you build those programs. Building the content and having the content reviews and the advisory board is one thing and then you move into the build phase. That’s where diverse speakers can help refine their program, and bring that message to different folks. That can already embed representation within having different levels of seniority and creating opportunities for underrepresented groups throughout the process versus just calling it global and having speakers from one country, as an example.

The last topic, which is a dear topic to my heart and something that I’m trying now to learn more about is neurodivergence. A lot of products that we create sometimes have technical jargon and not the simplest visual aids that people should understand. We can take a step back and think from different perspectives and throughout that advisory board that you build, you can understand the different needs. For example, how do you build for people with visual impairment? How do you build for people with dyslexia? Understanding your neurodivergent customers in different sectors can be overwhelming at the beginning, but it is an absolute must to have that inclusive and best product. Those are the three key ingredients that come into play for enablement.

The key ingredient from all of that is woven in through communication. When you have communication flowing, bottom-up, top-down, and sideways, you make sure that you’re also using that inclusive language and embodying inclusion throughout to make adjustments where you need and stay humble. As I mentioned at the beginning, the A part comes into play. It’s not enough to say we care about ID&E, but not embed ID&E throughout the content and the programs that we build. Every seller deserves an equal chance to have the best impact they could have on their customer, and it starts with the enablement team to do that. That’s my two cents on ID&E and enablement, Shawnna.

SS: I love that. The last question for you, recently I saw a post from you on LinkedIn about how generative AI is really transforming businesses, including some of the ways that it influences the ID&E space. How do you think I will influence how you create and deliver enablement programs in the next year and maybe even beyond?

BK: I really believe that in today’s world, we have far more accessibility on the topic of AI than ever before, thanks to generative AI. AI has been around for a while now, and whether we thought about it or not, it has shaped how we learn in different ways. Whether we think of it in person-wise self-learning and customized versions of learning, into chatbots, which is quite prominent in today’s world, having virtual assistance, simulated learning has been around for quite some time in today’s world.

What I believe is important is how we’re using it and the ethical framework around it because it’s here to stay. I really think those tools can help us if used right, and if it’s a stress test and the accuracy is measured that it can help us be more productive. It also can help us reduce our time to impact our time to market. When we have that embedded in our processes, for example in our text summarizing that we could leverage, for example, generative AI for it can already have an impact on our sellers, and that will have the dominant effect on the end customer that we are already helping them on their mission.

I do believe that AI and generative AI can absolutely personalize learning experiences and provide real-time performance insights, let alone automate content delivery. I really think it’s important to develop those mechanisms and I would also stress the ethical framework around it to build for impact and build for performance. I’d like to tie that with what I mentioned in one of my answers earlier today about having a more agile and adaptive selling team. You do that when you use the resources that are available to you to help your learners grow in their own journey and remain obsessed with the right technology at the right time and the right way.

SS: I think that is phenomenal. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your insight.

BK: Thank you for having me, really enjoyed listening and having that discussion with you, Shawnna.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Chiara DiFede from Birdeye join us. Chiara, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Chiara DiFede: Hello, and thank you for having me. I am a sales enablement manager with a focus on partner sales at Birdeye. Birdeye is an all-in-one reputation management platform, and I currently support and focus on enabling our internal sales reps how to effectively sell to our channel partners. Sales ultimately found me like it does most people, and when I found success, I wanted everyone around me to find similar success.

I had an opportunity to dive into the enablement world, and I haven’t looked back since. I’m so happy I took that chance. I constantly seek to expand my own education and I have a multitude of certifications in product management, instructional design, customer success, and leadership development. I really crave to learn and I put myself in situations to learn new things as I find it important to understand what it feels like starting from the beginning and being in a new situation so I can bring that understanding to the programs I create.

SS: We’re excited to have you here. Now, one of the things that I loved about your profile and your background is that you refer to yourself as a behavior and process-focused sales leader. How do you balance both behavior and process in your approach to your enablement programs?

CD: Yeah, good catch. Personally, I find this is where the balance of equality and equity is important to achieve this approach. I recognize that individuals have different learning styles and needs when learning and retaining information in training programs, even if it is aimed at one unified common goal. With the training sessions and content I deliver, I always aim to tailor enablement programs to accommodate these diverse learning preferences by providing a variety of resources such as interactive workshops, eLearning modules, job aids, coaching sessions, and more.

I find when you offer a multitude of different platforms to learn in your programs, you get to see the reps retain their individuality which helps them sell, while still inciting the behaviors needed to succeed in their role. They can still follow that process roadmap needed for them to graduate and prosper at the company.

SS: Now, in your current role, you focus on enabling sales reps to sell to channel partners. What are some of the unique considerations for selling to channel partners?

CD: That is a great question, as it is a very unique role. In short, channel enablement is sales enablement, both for account executives and also for our partner sales teams. When I focus on our internal sales reps, and those account executives, it’s important to enable our AEs to understand the dynamics of the partner, their current operations, where products fit, and align our onboarding team with that structure. This ensures smooth implementation, partner training, and end-client adoption.

Ultimately, what makes it unique is having to go through that extra layer of teaching the AE how to sell and aiming to control the controllable. Not only are we ensuring our internal AEs understand our platform and best practices, but we also have to make sure they’re sharing the best practices with the partner just as we share and train our direct sales reps.

SS: From your perspective, what does good channel sales enablement look like? In other words, what are some of your best practices for enabling reps to sell the channel partners?

CD: To answer that simply, it comes from having a good solid framework and roadmap on what the AEs need to learn. As an enablement manager that comes from ensuring you have constant communication and cross-collaboration internally to set our sales teams up for success, especially when it comes to creating those training programs so that you don’t replicate our process from a direct selling. Partner sales are selling the idea of incorporating your company structure into their agency, not just the idea of products. The more that understanding can be fortified, the more successful AEs will be.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now on LinkedIn, another thing that I had seen that was really cool is that your ultimate goal as an enablement practitioner is to create a sales environment that values learning. How do you motivate reps to engage in learning programs focused on channel sales?

CD: That’s a great question. One thing I found in my career is that everyone I’ve come across is eager to learn, but it’s one thing to teach and provide resources and it’s another thing to have the attention and buy-in from the sales reps themselves. Most importantly, for reps selling into channel sales, the value prop of the training programs needs to be specifically tied to that target audience.

When the rep feels and understands the programs have value and impact on their role, specifically towards partners, and helps them sell to partners, the more engaged they will be. Plus, when reps find success in these calls with these training programs, it gives them a success story to speak to in further calls as well as enablement to utilize in trainings. That way we continue to gain that buy-in, that motivation, and participation from reps.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. What are some of your best practices for creating effective learning programs for sales reps so that they can also maximize their effectiveness with channel sales?

CD: Great question, and I’ll continue to reinforce how important it is for our sales reps to understand the partners they sell to and their business model. Throughout the sales cycle, it is important to encourage reps to get to know the partners, the size of their business, and the unique challenges they face. Understanding the characteristics and personas of the end customer is so crucial to ensure you have the proper information and are therefore offering the right solutions.

An effective way to encourage this, beyond regular scheduled trainings and resources, is by reinforcing this directly by providing feedback on the calls AEs will have with partners throughout the sales cycle. It is made even more helpful to use a call analytics tool that will allow it to be linked to the call directly for the AE to easily refer back to the feedback and that prospect that is exactly tied to it. This allows doors to open up for the AE and the company because, in addition to the coaching provided by enablement, these tools allow sales leaders and managers access to feedback, allowing AEs to have different avenues and perspectives for approaching certain calls.

Furthermore, when calls have feedback attached to them, especially those good calls, those could be used as examples for new AEs entering the company to have an idea of how to apply the knowledge from trainings on an actual call.

SS: Fantastic. Last question for you. What business impact have you seen from effective channel sales enablement?

CD: You will see reps establish more credibility in the sales process and ultimately more closed deals for the company. This really gives them success stories to speak on and use as examples in tandem with the training programs. Not only will you be able to continually add to training programs that you create, but you’ll be able to see the ultimate success, which is an increase in retention, upsell, and overall satisfaction from partners.

SS: Fantastic. Well, Chiara, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.

CD: Thank you so much for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today I am excited to have Anna Duong from Cisco join us. Anna, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Anna Duong: Thank you, Shawnna. It’s a pleasure being here and I consider it an honor to be part of this podcast. I lead product, solution marketing, and sales enablement at Cisco for two multi-billion dollar data center portfolios. I am a marketer by training who aspired to be more. When I first started out, I started my career in product management, then product marketing, then I ventured into demand gen, and now into sales enablement.

In between these experiences, I practice and hone my trade in a variety of business environments from startup to mid-size, and now I’m multinational. My company, Cisco, is a global industry leader in networking which is the connection of people, devices, and things. I’m sure a lot of you have heard of Cisco. We are also known as the company that offers networking security and collaboration hardware and software solutions.

SS: Well, awesome. Thank you so much, Anna, for joining us. Now, Cisco was actually one of the award winners for our Sales Enablement PRO member awards around the business impact on sales proficiency, and it was a well-deserved recognition. In your opinion, what does good look like when it comes to optimizing sales proficiency through enablement programs?

AD: Well, first of all, thank you for the recognition and we feel very privileged to be recognized along with industry peers. With respect to your questions, the way we think about proficiency is all about competency. I’m sure many of my industry peers would say that the optimization of that is when people, processes, and technology work together in unison. However, there’s one aspect of proficiency I want to spotlight is competency and that is the ability to understand complex problems and solutions and then effectively communicate that to your customers, and then build relationships along the way.

The latter two are often addressed by sales mastery training or even technical training on how to sell, how to be a good salesman, et cetera, but the first, the ability to understand complex problems and solutions is often undermined because all sales teams have one finite resource, and that is time. This means time to research and learn, it is time not to sell. To us, what good looks like is when product and marketing intelligence, which includes market, industry, competitive, intelligent, et cetera, and the insights are provided to our sales team at the right place, at the right time, in an easily digestible and memorable format.

Some of the KPIs that we can use, which we also use at Cisco to measure good and how optimal we are improving sales proficiency, our high seller engagement that sustains over time, we call this sentiment. Also, high utilization of sales enablement content and program, as well as high converter sales opportunity from the usage of those sales enablement content and programs.

SS: I love that. I think that’s a great definition of what good looks like. Now, in today’s sales environment, what are some of the challenges, Anna, that teams can face in optimizing proficiency and how can enablement teams help overcome these?

AD: Oh gosh. I think this list will probably be really long, but for the sake of time, I’ll just highlight the top two. The most prevailing ones are informational overload, and two, the nature of the landscape, whether in the industry, in the business, or even in the market itself. I’ll start with information overload, which is the constant inundation of information coming to our sales team from products or new products to product details and features and nuances within those customers’ needs and challenges and how their business changes over time. The market trends, the industry trends, et cetera, and even the competitors.

Oftentimes for multinationals, we don’t just have one or two competitors, we have a variety of them in different ways and in different markets. A lot of that is inundating and very challenging for our sales team to not only digest, and connect the dots, but also effectively formalize them in a way that can help them be effective in their day-to-day selling.

The second part of that, which also compounded the first is the rapidly evolving landscapes. Even if you get a hold of it, you spend a lot of time building the information, and the insight that you need, and then you start using it and become successful at using it, guess what? It’s going to change again next week, next month, or even next year. That constant change makes it even harder to digest the information overload and to really have a good grasp on it, especially for sales teams who are selling more than one product. We call those the generalists, not the specialists where they master the product in the portfolio that they’re selling.

Obviously, if I state the challenge I’d like to also share some of the ways we can address these challenges. With the two I mentioned, really it all boils down to the ability to simplify complex information. Simplification means more than just creating concise, easy-to-understand content or product presentations or enablement collateral, et cetera. It’s all about connecting the obvious for our sales team. How does this particular feature or capability connect back to the value, or the business outcome our customer wants, and as a result of that, what kind of tangible or even intangible benefit they can expect from it?

That’s where the simplification comes in. With that, it also helps with a particular selling strategy where our sales team is customer-centric, so that as their needs evolve, their pain points evolve or get even more complex, we’re able to understand and lack of a better word, propose a solution that would address that specific challenge showcasing the breadth and depth of our value.

SS: I love that, and I think that that is a fantastic recap of some of the challenges, but also how enablement has helped to overcome them. As a leader of a team of marketers, what role does product marketing play in driving sales proficiency?

AD: You’re hitting on a sweet spot here because as I shared, I started my career in product marketing and I think it plays a pivotal role. The top three areas where I see product marketing can really contribute to sales proficiency are product and market understanding. As product marketers, we are the experts on the company, product, and services, and then the market that we operate in as well as the customer persona that our product and services serve. With all of that, we are able to simplify that and also tailor it to the different selling journeys or the selling plays for sales to be proficient at.

Two is competitive intelligence. We continuously monitor our competitors, the landscape, their strategy, or even the positioning of their offering against ours, and where we’re good at, but also where we are not so good at. With this intelligence, we can extrapolate insight and then we can help when a sales team is engaging, let’s say a competitive deal against some of our prominent players, and how do we go down the path of differentiating our solution? It isn’t always who is the cheapest product out there.

Last but not least, is the customer insight and persona. I think this is the key foundation when it comes to competency in sales proficiency because like I said, the efficiency can be tackled by processes and better utilization of resources, sales mastery on the sales skills and training, but without really understanding who your customer is, what is their care about, their pain point, their motivation, and how do we already engage with them or haven’t engaged with them is really the missing foundation in all sales proficiency program. As product marketers, again, we understand our customers, and all the research and intelligence we have can be shared and even can be customized into training that can enable our sellers to be more informed.

SS: I love that. As a marketing professional myself, I couldn’t agree more. Now on the flip side, given your expertise in enablement as well, what role do you think enablement plays in driving proficiency and how can you bring marketing enablement and other teams across the company together to collaborate on optimizing proficiency?

AD: Certainly an equally pivotal role, just like product marketing. It’s all about providing assets due to the right tool, resources, and support that are needed in a timely manner. I will talk about two areas. It all started with aligned goals and objectives. By having shared objectives, for example, revenue targets or customer acquisitions, or market penetration, all teams can work together toward this common purpose. Therefore they are aligning their resources and program in the same direction, and also share learnings across their teams and programs to fine-tune it further going forward. As a result of these aligned goals and objectives, the collaboration will become a multiplier effect.

For example, in cross-functional collaboration when marketing bill selling guides to help improve opportunity qualifications, if that guide is built based on a methodology that our sales team is being trained on in sales mastery, let’s say Mapic as an example, that is one way that it can become a multiplier effect. Now you have theory and framework combined with real data and real selling strategy, but we can also provide timely product updates and market insight, and we can also build collateral that helps you deliver those to your customer based on where you are in the selling journey.

On the other hand, enablement teams can share feedback from their experience and suggest improvements in messaging or even training material for product marketing. Then based on the customer engagement and wanting to share insight, again, this is one of the marketing intelligence that product marketing teams can inform the business development teams about specific segments of the customer where we are leaving money on the table. Perhaps there are certain common characteristics and a corresponding sales motion that we can drive through a program to grow total deal size to grow to attach rate or even incremental market share.

SS: Fantastic. I’d love to dig in a little bit. Could you share with us a story about a key initiative that your team has implemented recently to help drive proficiency and tell us a little bit about some of the core components of that initiative?

AD: Absolutely. As part of a recent tier-one announcement, we shared a vision and a strategy with our customer within our sales force and channel team, and then we followed up with a particular piece of training that was the first of its kind. With this vision and strategy, it’s very important that our sales force is educated on the fundamentals of who the customer we’re going after with this new vision and strategy, why is it a fit, how is it going to be future proof with respect to the market and the industry trend, and more importantly, what is the solution pitch or the message we are can enable our sales team to deliver.

We did exactly that. We shared the fundamentals, we taught our sales force who are the different customer persona that will be interested in this vision and very appreciate the strategy. What are the decision criteria? What are their pain points? How is that mapping back to where the industry is going, and particularly where the business challenges of our customers are going? Then we build a go pitch deck for them to use as a starting point, but that isn’t enough. We next follow up with a level 200 learning map where we put all of the above into action. Again, the simplification of complex information comes into play here. It’s a two to three-minute portfolio-specific video that we did that helps put together the product solution pitch that highlights not only the product and market fit but also the customer fit with proven use cases, customer success stories, et cetera.

With this training, we rolled it out to the team. That was the first part of our enablement strategy on this. With this key initiative, we got really broad support from all levels of our sales organization all the way to the geography, to the last mile of field enablement. We got lots and lots of feedback. As I shared earlier, one of the ways we measure how optimal or optimized we are is by enabling proficiency with seller sentiment. Not only do we have anecdotes, but we also have commentary and ratings on how effective the training was. We also have sales teams that actually reach out and want to be part of the next training module to share their story, their experiences, and even sales strategy and tactics.

SS: I love that. Anna, last question for you. How do you measure the impact of your programs on sales proficiency and what are some of the key results that you’ve been able to achieve?

AD: Thank you. This is probably part of the scope of one of our awards. As I mentioned earlier, there are three key areas we measure, and this is only a sample of a few. The first is our seller’s engagement. Engagement is very important to first get sellers on board to be able to share information. Secondly, to be able to gauge whether a seller is learning and retaining the information being shared. The second part is, are they using the information and how are they using it, and last but not least, are they effective at using them?

For example, in the sales play or the sales campaign we provided, we actually worked with the business development teams or the sales ops team, and even the sales enablement team that put together the program to insert it in a strategic part of the sales journey, that in parallel with sales programs, a sales incentive and any other sales resources and tool. Then we gauge whether that content is being used for and how they are being used from which personnel for the sales force are using them. For example, are the technical team using them more or are the generalist team or the very early sales qualification reps?

Last but not least, are they effective? We observe, for lack of a better word, data on how the sales pipeline is and a particular sales individual’s productivity before, and then we observe the aftermath of that. Then we also asked for anecdotal or real-life validations of whether it helped and it helped in what way. Those are some of the measurements. The last part is, of course, anytime there is an announcement, there is an awareness activity to make sure we are hitting the right audience. First of all, are we reaching the sales audience that we want to, and to what extent we’re reaching them? Second, are they consuming the materials, et cetera?

SS: Fantastic. Anna, thank you so much for joining us and sharing with us your expertise.

AD: Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Kate Munday from Google join us. Kate, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Kate Munday: Thank you so much for having me. A bit about what I do, I help transform people and brands by educating them on how to communicate their stories effectively. I’m a communications coach, I’ve got my own company, Out The Box Speakers, and I’m also a creative business partner for Google.

I’ll just elaborate on that cause I think it’s really funny and ironic really that I am in communications and storytelling. I’ve always really loved storytelling, but communication has been something that I used to really struggle with. To tell you a little bit more about that, speaking particularly was my number one fear. I always talk about how it’s funny, I’ve turned my fear into my career. It has basically been a long journey from being very much an introverted individual born into this big family of extroverts who didn’t understand me. I am also dyslexic, and like I said, just shied away from communication a lot growing up.

It was only then really getting into the working world that I started to really understand the importance of it and how much it could do for me if I was able to master this skill of communication. It’s really been a bit of a whirlwind, a bit of a journey, but it was nine years ago that I joined Google and that’s when I joined our sales organization and since then they’ve really given me a platform to educate myself and now to help educate others in storytelling and speaking.

I mostly coach and I work with our brands, but in terms of individuals, it tends to fall within three buckets. It’s like people who want to speak for themselves, so that’s either getting up on stage or radio, or even podcasts, or they want to perhaps climb the corporate ladder, so they can get a promotion at work and they understand that communication is going to be a really important factor to that, or perhaps they want to, like we’re talking about now, become better sellers, communicate their products or services more effectively as well.

SS: From one introvert to another, I am excited to have you here on the podcast. Now, you talked a lot about storytelling in your introduction, and it is one of your key areas of expertise. To start, I’d love to understand from your perspective, why is storytelling so critical in sales.

KM: I guess to give you an idea, I started with Google nine years ago in our sales team, and of course, Google is known for our masses of data. That’s how I started selling. It’s like this actually makes sense for somebody then surely they should buy the product or service that we’re offering, but that’s not quite the case. Throughout those nine years, I have come to recognize that actually, of course, we are emotive beings when we make decisions, we feel something first, like how does that make me feel, and that’s why advertising works. We play into love and fear, these two big emotions, and then we rationalize something.

When we are telling somebody facts and figures, it only ignites two different parts of a person’s brain, whereas if you start to tell a story and you play into those emotions, you start to ignite seven different parts of their brains. There’s proof in the pudding there, that’s why storytelling is so important. It helps us relate and connect to other people, to products, and to brands. That’s really what we want. We want that connection. We want to feel like somebody understands us and our needs and they’re going to deliver an effective solution for us. In selling, a key part of that is relationships, isn’t it? Storytelling and relationships where we know these all go hand in hand. Even if we are out with our friends, with storytelling, with our partners, we’re at work, we’re constantly telling stories. It’s a critical part of sales.

SS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Kate, what would you say are some common mistakes that sellers might make when they’re trying to convey value to buyers and how can better storytelling help them overcome these challenges?

KM: I think, first of all, not hooking your audience in the first place, so it really is when we speak, people really only care about what’s in it for them, to be honest. They just want to know how to be better or they say tell me what I need to know to not make the mistakes you’ve made or to actually be successful, or whatever it is. It’s how we add value to someone’s life. I think that’s the very first thing that we need to do, is to call that out, like this is what I can improve your life and make it look however you want it to look.

That initial hook and I talk about there are multiple different hooks in the first stages. Even the title of your email is also a hook. The title of your speech, the very first words that exit your lips, because it actually takes five seconds, and that’s why the skip button on YouTube is after that five seconds because that’s the amount of time it takes somebody to decide whether they’re going to actually listen to you or not. I think that is one of the most common mistakes, people get excited, don’t we? We just get away with ourselves and start speaking, but it’s not about you as a seller or a speaker, it’s about your audience and it’s about how you can help them. I think delivering value first is really important. That’d be my first one.

Then I’d say that we get into this trap of highlighting features rather than benefits, and again, it comes back to that added value, doesn’t it? We’re really good at listing off, oh, you know, it does this, it’s shiny, it’s cool, it has all these fun things, but look, what does that mean? What’s the reason behind that? Yes, okay. It might be shiny, but what does that mean to someone’s life? How can that make it better?

The next one I’d say, and it’s going back to that relationship, it’s that relatability and that connection really throughout my sales career, I don’t really see it as selling. I’m just connecting with people and helping them and building relationships, and actually, somebody said this to me at a networking event the other day, and they said that the difference between contracts and contacts is the letter R, which stands for relationships. I really do think that you can’t get those contracts without having good contacts, which you have great relationships with.

The way that we can build better relationships with our clients is through storytelling. It’s about opening up, letting them in, showing them that you are a real human person just like them and that you perhaps have things in common and you can start to build those relationships and those connections and then the selling comes later. People do business with people and they’ll invest in you as a person before the product or service or future that you are about to tell them. They’re my three things. The hook at the start, highlighting the benefits again and delivering value, and then it’s about relationships.

SS: I think those things are absolutely critical in good storytelling. On that note, I would also love your advice because we are looking into understanding what good looks like. What does good storytelling look like in sales? In other words, what are some key best practices that sellers should leverage in their conversations with buyers?

KM: What does good storytelling look like in sales? So I guess there are all these common patterns. It depends on what that selling looks like and what platform you’re using. Is it a presentation or a podcast or a video? Whatever that looks like, of course, you’re going to tweak the way that you actually tell that story and be intentional about what part of that story you are telling, but I think again, to reiterate, to start off with, it’s really about why they should care on the very first instance, and that being upfront and center.

If we think about a normal pitch and how that goes, the first thing is hooking them in. Why should you listen? Then we kind of pre-frame them, so we talk about that’s why we set agendas, we are using the adult learning theory. This is what I’m gonna tell you, so perhaps again, if we think about it, that’s why you introduce characters. You set the scene, don’t you? You’re preparing people for what they’re about to receive. If this is a presentation, it’s like different from a video perhaps, but if it’s a presentation, then you might go into explain why you are the best person to deliver that information to them and that you are an expert and you do really care and you’re there to help them, and that’s the problem that you’re going to solve for them today.

Then you get into obviously the crux of the story. That’s when you actually can start to uncover things and we call that a Google the messy middle. In the end, you’ll come to some quiet kind of resolution or conclusion toward the end, but really, I think there are many different ways in which you can tell that story, it’s just really understanding what is the objective, I think first and foremost, or what is the story that you want to tell to them. How do you want them to feel, think, and do out the back of you telling that story? Is it that you want them to make a purchase or is it just that you want them to actually give them some information so they’re a bit more knowledgeable on something?

Of course, that story might look slightly different depending on what the objective is and then, what’s the right format as well to tell that story, so is it perhaps quite a bit longer educational piece or is it actually just something that’s quite quick that you might be able to deliver in a video or a quick explanation, so it’s really understanding, again, the use case for it. Going back to that objective, how you deliver that in the most impactful way, then it really is about bringing them on the journey with you again.

Don’t go after the money necessarily. I think that’s really important. I think if you are doing the right thing for the customer, that’s the most important thing. That’s number one. You have to be passionate about what you are selling I chose to work for Google because I think it’s a fantastic organization. I believe in the product, so it was easy to sell for me because it just came naturally and that’s it. When you are passionate, like passion’s, infectious, people love it when you’re passionate, they just want to hear more from you. I think if you go after your passion and you are true to yourself, then money will flow. If you’re doing the right thing and you’re being passionate, then bring them on that journey with you. Be really open and honest with them. Be human, be relatable, and I think the sales will speak for themselves.

SS: I love that. I think that’s a fantastic description of what good storytelling looks like. What role does sales enablement specifically play in helping sellers improve their storytelling?

KM: It really is about educating people through this sales process and I think we are natural storytellers. Storytelling and sales come hand in hand. We are natural storytellers. This is nothing new. Whether we were carving into caves back in the day or drawing with all forms of storytelling. However, of course, we can all be better at these things as well. I think I’m living proof that it’s not something that came naturally to me speaking. I did enjoy storytelling. Was I good at it? I think it’s definitely been a working progress. I’ve currently got nine coaches the moment, and some of the biggest businessmen and women have many different coaches there’s a good reason for that modeling behaviors, learning from people who have been through that and have been successful in something and are then passing on their knowledge is important.

That’s something that I implore you to do if you haven’t already got a coach, go and get one. Set out your objectives, and what you want to learn, and achieve with them and make sure you see that through. I think that the first thing is taking accountability and saying, yes, you know, I want to be better at this. Second of all, then actually taking action on that and doing it is always the first time that you do something is the hardest, then when you keep doing it, it becomes easier and easier, and it’s that repetition. The more stories that you tell, the more that you speak, the more that you sell, the easier it becomes.

Obviously, then you start to perfect it. You start to become better and better at it, and it becomes more natural. It’s like riding a bike. The first time you get on it, you might fall off, and then it becomes something that is just automatic. You get on, you don’t even think about it because you’re just a natural. I do implore not just organizations to lean into storytelling and understand the importance of that in selling and communication, but also the individual. As you, yourself, take ownership of your own career, of your own life, and, and get a coach, enable yourself.

SS: I love that advice. You have a lot of experience helping brands with their video storytelling strategies. Based on your expertise here, how can sales teams leverage video and other content formats to essentially help them tell a more compelling story to their buyers?

KM: I know that video can be a great tool. It’s a booming platform for pre-recorded content, of course, which could be great too, if you do need to sell it, send over materials perhaps that’s showing them what good looks like or guiding your buyer through a process perhaps that’s an amazing way to engage them and it gives them a nice resource that they can house on their internal sites so they can look back at the content as well. I think in terms of selling, for me personally, real-time selling and if you do have to do that on video, there really are some key ways to do that. I think the thing that we all probably can relate to is when people turn off their cameras on that video call and then you become this little faceless screen that number one you are presenting to, and then also receiving information. It just becomes very inhumane and that’s what we want to try and get away from.

One of the things I do is in every meeting I really do try and build in a good five to 10 minutes at the start to break down those walls of communication and get that flowing. It’s all really about leading with vulnerability for me and letting people in to show them that I am a human and how can I get somebody to connect and resonate with me as quickly as possible.

I do lots of things around the setup at home and what’s in my background, so I think that the setup around you is a great opportunity to show people different facets of you. I’ll put objects on the shelf behind me that have great stories or that show a reflection of my personality and often people say, oh, what, yeah, what is that behind you? And then it starts a really great good opportunity to tell the story. People do comment on that actually and then you get to tell them the story and then once you get them laughing and then their barriers are broken down and that’s when you can leave them with something memorable that they’ll remember you by, but also perhaps they’ll say, oh the same thing happened to me, or actually I’ve got a similar story, and then you create that resonance, that connection and that’s where you can get to start to build those relationships.

I’m going back to this time again, but really is about relationship building. That is what sales for me is about. That it can be a little bit more challenging over video sometimes when we’re selling, but actually there are some key differences that we can lean into, like you don’t get that kind of opportunity at work, you have a blank canvas behind you. You don’t get to dictate that, but actually, when you’re at home and you are presenting and selling over a video call, that’s a really unique opportunity that we can utilize.

SS: I think so as well. Last question for you, Kate. I have loved this topic, by the way. This has been extremely informative for me. Your favorite motto is ‘everyone is your teacher’, meaning you can learn something from anyone. To conclude, how do you think this mindset influences how you approach storytelling, and how can sellers apply that mindset to their interaction with buyers?

KM: I think mindset and attitude are everything. To be specific, a positive mindset, and that’s what I really do in all the work that I do, and try to integrate that into everything. The coaching, for example, like I go in there already, having visualized that coaching session being successful. I know it’s going to be transformational for my client. I see them at the end of that coaching session with a big smile on their face, having loved the session, telling me how much they’ve learned and grown through the experience and that’s it. I think it’s going in with that mindset that it’s already going to be a success.

I think going and reframing my clients, I’m their number one fan. I just want to help them succeed and that’s it. It’s about delivering that value, how we help others, and going back to my motto, ‘everyone is my teacher’. It’s because I learn also in these processes, so I’m grateful for these opportunities. Every time I go into storytelling or a selling situation, not only am I able to give back, but I’m learning and growing and developing myself, and it’s a part of my journey. We are living in one big narrative. It’s your narrative. You are the author. This is your book, and you get to make it a really good book that’s worth reading, so why not make it a really fun, positive book and have that attitude?

SS: I love that approach. Kate, thank you so much for joining us today.

KM: Thank you so much. I’m very grateful.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Christian Palmer from Riskified join us. Christian, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Christian Palmer: Thanks so much, Shawnna. Happy to be here. In my role at Riskified, I’m the global revenue enablement manager. I sit on a global enablement team that focuses primarily on the sales org that handles both inbound and outbound selling as well as our customer success function as well. Riskified is a fraud and abuse platform that aids and assists e-commerce companies to make sure that only the good customers are the ones who are buying and performing acts on their websites.

SS: We are excited to have you here, Christian. Thank you so much for joining us. Now, as an enablement leader, I’d love to hear from you. Why is it so critical to establish credibility with reps?

CP: This is a great question and I feel like it does not get spoken up enough about as we go through all the different enablement functions that we take on on a daily basis. When you think about enablement itself, your audience is your sales reps, your clients are your reps essentially. They can be your biggest advocates internally, not only to your enablement department and your manager but also to sales leadership and cross-functionally. What I think is really important here in establishing that credibility is to have strategic communication and more specifically within that over-communication.

I hold this to a pretty high standard when you enter an organization. You want to be able to shape the behaviors of the reps to help impact the future of that function and also get ahead of any future change that’s going to come and make it a little bit less of a blow to the sales function, especially for reps that have been there for quite a while. If you have great credibility coming in and you can establish that off the bat, your voice will matter that much more. You are destined to be able to make an impact very quickly, and like anything else, similar to sales, enablement is in the business of influencing. It is an influential role and because of that, having that credibility with reps is going to be so powerful for you down the line.

SS: Absolutely. I think that’s important to establish, especially for long-term relationships. What do you think enablement teams are commonly missing when it comes to this and how can some teams avoid these mistakes?

CP: Sales enablement itself is still relatively new. I think you guys, as well as myself and other people in the community, are still defining what sales enablement is. It’s funny because, in past roles and any other places that I worked probably prior to a couple of years ago, it felt like I was doing an enablement role, even though I was titled trainer, or learning and development and what have you. I think now as the role becomes a little bit more mature, there are probably some best practices that you can be thinking about that don’t generally come top of mind to people when they enter an org.

I think the biggest one is when it comes to reps, not being able to understand their perspective, and this is not dependent on you being in a previous sales role, it could still happen even if you’re in a sales role, but obviously will happen a little bit more if you’re coming from a non-sales background. It is important to align with what the reps are really going to care about. What at the end of the day are they there to do, and whatever it is that you’re asking them or working on with them, how is it going to benefit them? That should be at the forefront of every initiative that you’re trying to push. Start with why I think is a good way to kind of emphasize that. Very Simon Sinek of me, but essentially always starting with like, Hey, why are we here? What are we trying to get out of this? What’s the point really?

I think that oftentimes people come into the role, they just kind of dig in and jump right in, and they don’t necessarily take the time to see what it is that reps really care about. In addition to that, I think another area, and this is probably going to apply a little bit more towards folks that are on larger enablement teams, but staying siloed to just your enablement department and not branching out cross-functionally. In roles past that, I’ve been in a lot of the times where there would be teams that don’t necessarily interact with enablement that often but, could benefit from having an enablement voice in the room. At the very least, be a liaison to the sales team about any messaging or things that need to be communicated if there is any particular confusion around what it is that they’re trying to get across and how I can deliver that to the sales team, I think is important.

The last one, I think it’s commonly missed is something that I think in any role, you’re entering an org you really should take the time to do. This is a very traditional piece that I think is probably a part of everybody’s 30, 60, and 90-day plan, but more specifically the 30-day piece, but not building real relationships with reps is a problem. I always tend to start off personally with folks, and this could be applicable to sales org that only have 10 to 15 reps, or similar to the org that I’m in now, which has north of a hundred.

Taking the time to learn more about them, I’m not just saying like where they live so you can ask them what the weather’s like, but also what interests them, who’s in their life that’s important, why did they choose this role in the first place? All those things show that you really do care about them, and I think in order to avoid all of these different mistakes, you really do want to take a concerted approach with who you’re working with. Again, whether or not you were in a sales role previously, kind of putting yourself in the shoes of a sales rep is really important here.

If I was a sales rep and an enablement person was coming into the organization, how would I want them to exhibit themselves? How would I want them to work with me? What’s the best way of learning? Can they pivot and be flexible and necessary? Those are all the things that I would be caring about as an individual contributor who’s going to work with a support function like this, but it often is amiss and I tend to see it a lot more with organizations that have leadership that’s not echoing positive messaging about enablement.

What I mean by that is your senior leaders, your C-suite, really should be the ones who are helping advocate why having the role is going to be important for the organization that’s not happening. It can be difficult to make sure that you are setting yourself up for success.

SS: Now, you touched on a few tips and tricks on how to begin to build relationships with sales reps, but do you have advice for our audience on how to do so and how to start gaining their trust?

CP: As I had mentioned before, getting to know them personally, I think is a really important piece. Not only in a group setting but more importantly individually. If you want to insert yourself into projects, initiatives, and conversations, you are positioning yourself to kind of become an agent of change in that case, and if you’re involving yourself more often, the more agency you’re going to have when it comes to change management in the future.

A lot of the times how I generally start, and this has kind of been like the de facto starting point for me in any org, whether or not I was joining in an enablement capacity, is to be vulnerable. Recognize that you don’t have all the answers and that you’re here to learn just as much as they are. Emphasize the journey of learning and how impactful one nugget of knowledge can be to a rep and how that can change their entire perspective on their role and what it is that they can impact.

I always will come in straight up acknowledge the fact that I don’t have knowledge around specific topics or enablement is still ongoing, you know, function that’s being developed and I’m here for the ride, but I by no means, know more than you guys do, and I’ll be wanting to learn just as much from you, especially upfront as you will be wanting to learn from me. That’s definitely number one.

I think the second piece, and this is kind of an assumed one, but one thing it’s lost in the sauce, especially when you have a lot of priorities and projects you’re walking into, but deliver on what you say you’re going to. What I mean by that is if you say you’re going to do something for somebody, whether it’s following up with a Slack message or helping out with another person, or facilitating something, whether it’s a session or a project, or let’s say document that they’re going to walk away with, do what it is that you say you’re going to do.

I think this is a special piece to add to it. Ideally do it ahead of the time that you suggest. Anytime I’ve been a part of a project with a group, let’s say it’s like writing up different emails and how they could be structured, I would give some type of date that I was gonna be circling back to them on. Let’s say it’s the following call that we’re going to be meeting up on a recurring basis maybe like a week later, and then I would have the work done like the next day or the day after so then those reps know like, hey, I’m way ahead of schedule. Christian already sent this over to me, so we’re moving right now.

The few other ones are to be okay with citing specific examples from conversations with reps individually, and then inserting those into larger group conversations. I don’t mean this just on a work front, like, hey, this rep had a great deal that was similar to this, do you want to discuss that? But also on a personal level too. At the beginning of conversations or the beginning of a meeting, let’s say where all the small talk happening, like, oh, hey, you’re working from home today, the weather’s really nice here, bring up things that maybe another person had revealed to you, like one rep maybe went to the spa or something and they had an unbelievable experience there getting a great Thai massage, let’s say, and then say, hey, you know, I heard Zach really got a nice Thai massage, do you wanna share with the group how awesome that was?

Those small things really do indirectly help you build relationships with the larger group and ideally with that person that you’re calling out to. The fact that you remember those specific details and then you bring them up again shows that you really were listening to the person.

I think the last piece is to help build the relationships with reps is again, a little indirect, like the previous point, but gets incredible buy-in from sales leadership. You’re bearing a weight that they likely have had to hold up until this point, so you’re truly helping them do their job more effectively. A lot of the time you’ll have a sales leader who’s one of the people that’s interviewing you, and those are the people that generally are going to be the ones you’re probably going to be working quite closely with.

If you nail the interview, you score a home run or you have a slam dunk type of interview, that sales leader is gonna be advocating for you from day one, even though you have no knowledge about the company, its product, or what it is that they do. The more you have that buy-in, the better it’s going to extend to their reps. If the reps really love that manager, they’re going to take what that manager says as a band and we’re all playing on the same team here. If the manager is not as big of a fan for you, nor are they echoing sentiments that you mentioned, that can be a little bit debilitating to your credibility in the role.

SS: I can absolutely see that. How can you also go about showing reps that you have their best interest in mind, and that you’re not really just trying to make more work for them? In other words, how do you show them what’s in it for them as, as you mentioned at the onset?

CP: This is a great question that somewhat for me has a simple answer, which is to help them with the work. I mean, an example of this is, I had mentioned it before, but I like creating an email sequence and the content of each email. How is it positioned? How are we starting it? How are we ending it? What’s the messaging? What’s the subject line? How can we make it as punchy as possible so that we’re getting a little bit more than just a good open rate, but instead we’re getting a reply rate that’s stellar?

An example of this was when a rep had found a great article around a topic and we decided to base a sequence around that article weaving in the story of the article throughout the four to five emails. By the time the prospect gets to the fifth email, they know now who Riskified is, let’s say. I purposely don’t commit to doctoring up a rough draft of that, or another similar type of project. If somebody obviously asks me to help out with it or whatnot, I will jump in, but I purposely don’t commit or say it out loud and then I actually do it in the next day or two and help them jumpstart whatever further brainstorming there may be or edits that need to be had. I think that surprise shock element is refreshing for a rep. Those reps maybe we’re not expecting me to have come up with the four or five emails within a day or two, but hey, it’s there and ready for them to go. That’s very much appreciated.

I think another piece of this kind touches on the EQ portion, which is that professionals need to have empathy and understand the life of a sales rep and wherever possible look to reduce their cognitive load. Reps are thinking about a lot of different things and fluctuating between this deal that deals with what’s going on internally, processes, infrastructure, and all of those different role responsibilities. The job’s hard enough as it is, so you want to position yourself to look more like a teammate, not as much as like an authoritative figure up top, similar to how their leader is viewed.

Another way that you can kind of help them see that, hey, you know, I’m here to really help you and what’s going to be in for you is over-communicate, follow up, even when you don’t have anything legit to come back to them with. This is something that great sellers do. I’ve had a lot of success with it in my time selling. I used to tell a client, hey, I don’t have an answer yet for you, but I’m working on it and I’ll circle back with you on this date. It goes an incredibly long way, and I think more often than not, we see the flip side of that, which is, hey, you never followed up with me, or, hey, we don’t really know where this is going.

Always take that time to respond to somebody. Don’t leave a person hanging. Always let them know like, hey, I am working on this. I just wanted to make sure we touched base. That really does help show them that what’s in it for them is that they’re going to have somebody who’s going to help them out with the work, be empathetic to their situation and help them and point them in the right direction, and also somebody who’s reliable and will follow up with them as much as possible.

SS: I love that. Now on that point, we’ve talked about it a few times, what’s in it for them. For enablement practitioners who don’t have a sales background or may be further removed from individual contributors or IC roles, I think trying to figure out how to position what’s in it for them might feel a little daunting. How can leaders build credibility with sales reps in a way that’s both relatable and authentic?

CP: I used to think that not having a sales background would be a detriment to somebody coming into a sales enablement type role, but it’s really actually the opposite because I think you can offer perspectives that maybe sales reps are not thinking about. I think if you look at it the same way that you would actually conduct best practice sales behaviors in the past, it’s very similar. Ask thought-provoking questions. This helps you show that, hey, I’m listening to what you’re saying. I want to build off of that, and it also allows you to help show your authenticity about the way you’re thinking.

The types of questions you want to kind of start off with, it’s again, going back to like getting to know that rep upfront. Start with personal-type questions, not anything that you could just find out from their LinkedIn. Go a little bit deeper than that. From there, you can ask more opinion-styled questions like, why do you think you’re feeling this way or where do you think this deal could fall short? Then the last level is a little bit more developed, which is like observational. How many of these deals have not worked out as a result of this issue in maybe the last six months or so?

You can follow up the personal questions with some anecdotes of your own past experience and honestly, if you can align non-sales experience, I think that’s even better because it’s going to show that you can relate on a non-sales level and then follow up opinion and observational questions with that empathy and the like.

Sellers really don’t want to be told what to do, but they will answer great questions all day, especially if it is things about them. People love talking about themselves. I think if we think a little bit less about like how to position ourselves with the things that we tell them to do and more so how can we learn more about them and show them that we’re eager to understand what they have going on, who they are, what do they care about that really will help people propel themselves to the next level.

SS: I think that is phenomenal advice. Last question for you, Christian. You now work with, I believe, over 150 reps across sales and customer success departments. What are some of your best practices for building credibility at scale?

CP: I think especially when you’re in a global type of enablement function, sellers differ across different cultures. It can be difficult to see the same way I would establish credibility upfront in the US may be different in a different region. Understanding the nuances between what’s culturally acceptable as a sales rep in different regions can be really effective.

Also, the way that they learn a lot of the time, and the way that you build credibility at scale will depend a lot on how developed the infrastructure is within the sales organization. If we start with like, maybe more smaller startup leaner type teams, you can focus on the simplicity of it, which is people, process, and platforms. For people it’s like what teams are successful, which are struggling, do those teams interact with each other, is there any plan to develop those roles further and or change them down the road depending on how well they’re doing.

For process, what priorities do they have? Go down all the way down to activity metrics, like how many emails are they sending, or the flow of the sales process. What are the bottlenecks within that? What potential solutions are there that we can take action near term and then long term? And then lastly, for the platform, it’s going to be both from a proprietary platform, if that’s what your business is promoting, or for any tools that the sales teams use. Can we consolidate those? What is working well? What needs to go? Is the platform where it needs to be from a selling standpoint versus what are we actually selling?

In the case of maybe some businesses promoting on the website, hey, we have a certain proprietary platform it solves for this and does this, that, and the third, what is actually going on in the day-to-day. That will help you kind of understand and be able to bridge the gap in conversations with folks that are across all those different departments because you’ll show like, hey, I understand the inner workings of the teams, I understand the processes that we have in place, or lack thereof, and platform wise, are we aligned or are we not aligned? Where are we?

For larger teams, it is going to be a little bit more ambiguous. One thing I really do like to do is I tend to get myself out there immediately and early. One thing I’ve done to help differentiate myself, this is a practice that I’ve learned from one of my favorite directors in my past role is I send a Slack video introducing myself, talking through what I’m there to do, what I’m not so great at. That’s where the vulnerability aspect comes in, where reps could help me, and how I’m going to help them.

I usually tie in some type of sales tip or talk track that they can walk away with, and that’s proven very popular in the past and people ended up yearning to get to Sales Juice Fridays, as I’d like to call it where I’d do something funny. I would make a joke or something like that and especially in organizations where you don’t tend to see as much, rah-rah, not to say that rah rah-ing is the end all and be-all of an enablement function, it definitely is not, but it is helps. I think if you’re going to kind of promote yourself, you really need to be visible. Sending a video to a group of 200 reps, let’s say, will really get right in their face with who you are.

This is going back to a previous point but get in good with the sales leadership. Their voice is going to go a lot further than yours, especially in the beginning, so if they’re shouting about you from the rooftops to their higher-ups and other reps, their reps on larger calls, that helps build your presence in the org. Always make it a best practice to ask a sales leader to echo your same sentiments with their teams, with or without you there so there is alignment.

When they hear reps hear me speak about something that their manager had then echoed, it’s going to make a lot more sense. They’re gonna be like, yeah, you know, I’d heard that already and my manager also said the same thing, so it’s got to be right. Some people would say that this is like playing mind games with people, but I like to call it accelerated rapport building.

SS: I love that. Thank you for taking us through that, Christian, and thank you for joining us on this podcast today.

CP: Absolutely, Shawnna. It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Jennifer Rizzi from Squarespace join us. Jennifer, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jennifer Rizzi: Thank you so much for having me, Shawnna. My name is Jennifer Rizzi and I am the sales enablement manager for the enterprise team at Squarespace. My background is actually in journalism, believe it or not, and my career took several interesting turns to end up in my current role supporting technology sales, but I love it and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I started off in TV reporting and I worked as an on-air reporter in two state capitals, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Charleston, West Virginia. After that, I relocated to New York City and I became the first iPhone-only video reporter for the New York Daily News, and I used a storytelling app called Videolicious, which was very revolutionary for the time. Not many people were using iPhones to report, and my content there really helped the sales process for that company.

Videolicious was acquired by Squarespace in 2019, and that’s where I moved into my current role, which really blends my passion for content creation with my experience selling. I support the sales of our B2B enterprise product, which is a version of our website builder that’s made to serve complex organizations. Now, you might be familiar with Squarespace as a leader in website design for individuals and small businesses, but we also do support major companies with enterprise-grade security and team collaboration features.

SS: We’re excited to have you here, Jennifer, and what an interesting story about how you’ve ended up in the enablement space. I love learning more about your background. Now, I’d love to also understand from your perspective, at a high level, how would you say that enterprise-level sales enablement differs from sales enablement focused on other market segments.

JR: That’s a great question. I would say that I think enterprise companies have different needs and expectations throughout the sales process and rarely do enterprise buyers make decisions alone. They’re usually part of a decision-making team, or they’re an influencer at their organization who can persuade supervisors or colleagues to adopt their recommendations.

The content that you equip your sales teams with should be very shareable. It should be succinct and pithy, and it really should convey your value prop instantly to anyone who comes across it. Even if they don’t know your product and they weren’t part of previous sales conversations, it should be able to stand alone and convince audiences of your product’s value at first glance, even if they have no background.

SS: I love that. I also have some experience with enterprise deals and they are notorious for having long sales cycles. How can enablement help reps to accelerate those sales cycles?

JR: I think it’s really about qualifying prospects as much as possible before they have that discovery call or before they meet with an AE for the first time. Ideally, you want your prospects to self-select based on the content you publish online. You want them to get really excited after reading a blog or a white paper that speaks to their needs and then raise their hand for a meeting. In a perfect world, of course, it doesn’t always work that way, but you want to strive for that.

Then throughout the sales funnel, you want to keep providing prospects with relevant content that’s tailored to their particular needs and concerns, and that preemptively addresses them. That way you’ll have educated prospects who join your sales meetings and you’ll save really valuable time going over ideas that a piece of content could have communicated to them beforehand.

SS: Absolutely. You talked about the interesting dynamic within enterprise deals around having multiple people as part of the buying decision. With a lot of enterprise buyers, relationship building is absolutely key between the rep and not only the key buyer but actually multiple buyers within the organization. How do you equip reps to effectively engage buyers in a multi-threaded way throughout the sales process?

JR: As I touched on just a little bit earlier, you really want your reps to be skilled at adding value to buyers’ professional workflows, and you want them to essentially perform a consultative role in their sales discussions showing that you understand the issues they face and the goals that your prospects need to meet and that you have the right knowledge to help them navigate those. That’s what’s going to build those relationship bridges.

You want to position yourself as a resource they can count on to be in their corner who has their best interest in mind. That way you’re going to stay top of mind when they need that solution and they’re going to feel really comfortable coming to you.

SS: I love that. Now I do want to shift gears a little bit because you mentioned on LinkedIn that one of your areas of expertise is creating content to help reps guide their buyers, kind of like you just mentioned through the sales funnel. In your opinion, what are some of the key components of an effective sales content strategy?

JR: I think listening to your sales team and gathering their input is so important for producing content that really resonates with prospects. They’re the ones in the trenches having those conversations every day, whether it’s over email or over sales calls, they’re seeing what prospects respond to and where they get stuck in the funnel. Lean on their perspective to really diagnose what content will help prospects get unstuck, and what common questions can be answered more efficiently with content saving time on those sales calls.

I really believe that reps should view sales enablement as a partner working with them in strategy, and they should always feel comfortable bringing ideas to you with the confidence that they’re going to be heard and validated. It’s really important that they feel that validation. Even if you can’t deliver exactly what they’re asking for at a given time, maybe you don’t have the bandwidth or the resources, you can still use your content expertise to suggest an alternative path that may be a more efficient way to get their message across and accomplish the same goal.

SS: Now you also mentioned the importance of using customer-centric language, especially when you’re positioning enterprise products. Why is customer centricity so important, especially in times of economic uncertainty like we’re experiencing today?

JR: I really love this question and I think as Donald Miller put it so eloquently in his book, Building a Brand Story, your customers need to feel like they’re the hero in the sales journey. Too often sales reps make the mistake, I think, of trying to swoop in unsolicited to just be a customer’s white knight with the solution to all of their problems, when in reality that customer might not feel that they need to be rescued and they might even be resistant to that idea out of pride or for other reasons.

When you flip the script and you position them as the hero and you put yourself in the role of the mentor or guide, or the knowledgeable one that helps them achieve their full potential, that’s when they’re going to be open to building a relationship and partnering with you.

SS: I love that. How do you infuse that same notion of customer centricity into your sales content strategy?

JR: I think being mindful of your customer’s time is key. In enterprise sales your prospects are all busy professionals with a lot on their plate, so you can’t really expect them to devote a ton of time to consuming your content in the way you want them to necessarily, or also to engaging in quirky, novel experiences the way the general public might respond to.

Sometimes simple formats, just like a one-sheet, slide decks, and landing pages are the most effective at getting your message out, and you really want to be direct with your message and elegant. Speak to customers like the educated professionals they are. Avoid being overly casual and using slang unless your brand voice is known for that and just keep your content short and easily digestible.

I’m a big fan of using video whenever possible because it’s a really visual, engaging medium and links are very shareable. Video is something that viewers can possibly consume without much effort, so you really want to try and lower that effort bar as much as possible to consume your content.

SS: I love that advice. Last question for you, Jennifer. What advice would you give to other enablement practitioners to help get their reps to better engage buyers through content?

JR: I would say just try different types of content. Keep iterating based on learnings. Be open to ideas from your team and be really prolific with your content creation. Try to be agile in supporting sales rep needs. We know they can always change based on your product offerings and just larger economic patterns, so be reactive to that, be mindful of that, and just really try to adapt your tone to your audience and learn what they care about. Then deliver what they need before they even ask for it.

SS: I think that’s fantastic advice. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate your time and your insights.

JR: Absolutely. Thank you again for having me. Really enjoyed it.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Marina Jeanbart at Ankorstore join us. Marina, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Marina Jeanbart: Thank you very much for having me. My name is Marina Jeanbart, as you said, perfectly. I am based in Paris, France. I studied hospitality management back then and worked in a couple of hotels before moving to business operations five years ago, and this is where I got close to sales and account managers and started to understand their pain points. I then got the chance to join Ankorstore as a sales enable manager two years ago and this is when the company actually grew massively and we had to hire 200 sales reps across six different markets. We had a big need to develop the sales enablement function there.

SS: I love that. One thing that caught my eye, Marina, on LinkedIn is that you shared that you design sustainable learning frameworks for sales reps to succeed. What does this look like at your company and how do you make learning programs sustainable?

MJ: In order to create sustainable training programs, we need to identify training needs. We do it in two different ways, top-down to share business changes and bottom-up to respond to the team’s needs. For the bottom-up, every month we meet with the team leads individually to address their needs and either we scale training sessions to the rest of the markets if it makes sense, or we arrange a bespoke training session with the appropriate stakeholders. Basically, we grasp their pain points and needs and translate that into training topics.

For top-down, what we do for any change in the organization, we work beforehand with the right teams like product marketing and logistics to address new topics in the best possible way. What’s really important is that we bring expertise by speaking to the right people and enabling them to create impactful content. This is very important because they have the knowledge whereas we are more enablers and we make sure that they have all the keys to develop some interesting content and impactful content for the sales reps.

We also involve the team leads at this point to make sure that they raise awareness with their team before we roll out any training session. In both cases, so for bottom-up or top-down, we add all the topics to our enablement calendar, which basically serves as our training roadmap and we make that available and visible to everyone.

Back then, when I first joined Ankorstore, we used to create training for any topic that seemed interesting for the reps, but we have now understood that creating just-in-time training is what’s best for our teams who are already swamped with work, and they cannot all handle any nice to have a training session. They still exist and we share some interesting content with them, but we rather focus on creating training that has a direct impact on their performance and that can help them solve their issues and anticipate change in the best possible way. We have identified their needs, now we need to define the training format.

We like to use our learning management system to deliver training for us. It’s the best way to scale training and capture results. We also do live sessions, of course, but we do that a bit less than online sessions. For the online programs, we create one training path every quarter, so we have one source of truth when it comes to training, which is much easier for the learners. What we do is we use the training calendar that I was mentioning to populate the path every week or two weeks, and we make sure to address the topics that were either escalated as needs or that are related to business changes.

At the end of each week, we report the training results to the managers and to the reps to ensure that they have some perspective on their level of knowledge. At the end of the quarter, this is really the important part, we create a recap quiz to assess everyone’s knowledge across the teams and when it’s over, we share the results and the leaderboard to engage the teams even more into taking that quiz very seriously.

We provide a cheat sheet for them to have a summary of all the key topics and changes before closing the period. This definitely helps them be set up for success before they jump into that new quarter. The quiz also aims at helping team leads identify coaching opportunities and set objectives for the next period for their reps. The report is, of course, open, it’s shared with the general manager so that everyone can have a good understanding of the team’s behavior when it comes to training and quiz results.

SS: I love that. I think that that is a very thorough end-to-end sustainable program. Now, you also partner with a lot of other teams around the organization. How, in particular, do you partner with your L&D, or learning and development, teams to create impactful training programs?

MJ: That’s an interesting one. We did not create programs together yet, but this is definitely something that we want to do in the future. To me, the first step will be to scale the learning methodology at Ankorstore and make sure that we’re going in the right direction and that everyone does it in a way that fits the company culture.

Today we haven’t really discussed this, but I think we should definitely. One thing that we’re doing with the L&D department is we’re reviewing the HR performance review process. Basically at the end of the quarter, everyone chats with their manager to review their target achievement or objectives, we’re changing that to include training and coaching results there.

Today, we’re not targeting the sales reps on training because we think that otherwise they will be attending training for the wrong reasons, and their compensation plan is already very complex, but we think that if we include that in the performance review check-ins in collaboration with HR and L&D, we will make sure that the team leads have coaching opportunities and can help the reps set some objectives for themselves in the next period. We think that that would be very relevant and we’re working on that currently.

SS: I love that partnership. Now, just to shift gears a little bit, what metrics do you track to understand what good looks like when it comes to training?

MJ: Mainly we would be looking at participation rates, completion rates to see who commits to the full training, average score on the assessment quiz that I was mentioning earlier, and lastly, satisfaction rate or NPS for qualitative insight. We rely mostly on the average score on the assessment quiz because we think that’s the easiest way to identify what might have been unclear or if we need to coach reps on certain topics in more depth in the next period. The main goal is for managers to check our reports systematically to have a deep understanding of their team’s behavior, but this is still something that we need to educate them on because it’s not really something that they’re doing intuitively yet.

The challenge that we’re facing is actually that the teams are not taking the quizzes seriously. At least not all teams are doing that, which means that it’s hard for us to identify whether the quality of the training is good or not, and if the teams are knowledgeable enough or not. This is still something that we need to improve to make sure that they’re consistently not only attending training, but also doing the quiz thoroughly so that we can then make a statement that the teams are knowledgeable enough or not, and then take action based on that statement. It is a work in progress, but we’re getting there.

SS: I think that’s phenomenal. Now, how do you leverage these insights to potentially even uncover levers that lead to improved performance and, that also helped to scale some of the best practices across your sales teams?

MJ: To me, it’s quite sensitive to say that training has a direct impact on performance. There are many factors that can lead to performance variability, however, we can try to map sales performance with training performance and observe some trends. If we see that, let’s say, the reps that do the most training see their sales performance increase over time, we can assume that knowledgeable reps are more likely to perform. Also, if we observe that top performers are the ones to score the highest in training, we can assume that the quality of the training is high enough to drive performance.

Sharing the quiz leaderboard can increase competitiveness and make the reps want to score higher on their quiz, which is a good way also for us to boost training attendance and eventually, hopefully, sales performance. When we build training, we like to select champions, so ambassadors or champions based on their behavior and their willingness to take on side projects as well as their performance in a certain field. For example, we recently launched the product champions, as we called them, so we looked at performance in terms of product adoption on certain features, et cetera, but also training attendance when it came to product training.

That helped us designate product champions across all markets and they’re now responsible to help us in the creation of training, as well as answering some questions in-house to help their peers succeed even more. It’s pretty clear that reps, at least at Ankorstore, are much more receptive when training comes from their peers than purely from the sales enablement team. They’re also more willing to participate and interact during the sessions when we bring team expertise to the table. So, to us, the sales reps are very, very important when it comes to sharing best practices as they have much more trust in each other, rather than in the sales enablement team, which is a bit more theoretical for them.

We also leverage team leads to scale those best practices, so we make sure that they have some governance meetings, or at least that they see each other at least every two weeks, so that they can discuss a certain topic, exchange on the methodologies that they use in their markets, or that one rep in their team is using and is showing results, and then, we meet with them as an enablement support function to help them scale these practices if we realize that’s something that could be very impactful. Either we standardize that process or we include that in the training session, but we make sure to include the people that were at the origin of it at all costs to make sure we have an impact.

SS: I love that. Now, scaling the behaviors of high performers across the organization requires change management, which is another area in which you have a lot of expertise. What are some ways that you help reps anticipate and seamlessly adapt to change?

MJ: When we create training with a champion, so like a rep that we’ve identified as our best ambassador for this training, we make sure that they share the outcome, they share the why, and give as many numbers and examples as possible so that the other reps can include this in a concrete situation and they can really adopt it as it’s real and it’s not just a theory.

I would make sure that the experts are the ones speaking, are the ones delivering the training or the coaching session, so that it has much more impact. I would also say that we need to coach sales managers to engage their teams, make them collaborate, and exchange best practices. My recommendation would be for a team to leave the mic to one rep per week during the team meeting so that they can share their best practice, their methodologies, and then the team can discuss altogether to see how we could include this new method in the routine, and how we can make the most out of it.

To me, this helps them challenge each other and open their minds to new methodologies or new practices. Using call listening tools to me is also great as it can show them in real-time how applying their peers’ practices can convert a deal or remove blockers in a conversation.

SS: I think that’s phenomenal. Now, change can oftentimes be overwhelming for reps. Last question for you, Marina, in developing training programs that drive change, how do you help reps maintain resilience?

MJ: That’s a good one. I would say there are a few things. Show them impact regularly enough. For example, since we’ve changed their pitch, how many deals have they managed to sign, or since we introduced a new process, how has their velocity increased, etcetera? Show them the impact so that they remind them why they’re doing this and why they’re constantly adapting to change. Make team leads, coach them, and shadow their calls to ensure that they don’t forget anything.

As we know, feedback is a gift, and I think it’s real support for the sales team to make sure that they’re going in the right direction. Celebrate the wins, so that teams to discuss during the team meetings, and team huddles, to make sure that they have some things to discuss and again, be reminded of why they’re doing this and why they’re constantly adapting.

Lastly, always put context around training, so we in the enablement team, but also them when they’re coaching each other. Let’s never forget to talk about the outcome and why we’re making this change so that they know that in the long run, they can improve their targeted achievement by working like that. For example, we had a big shift of strategy at the beginning of the year, which involved many stakeholders such as marketing, and product marketing, and for that big change, we had to create a boot camp because one session was not enough.

We made sure that we not only included the new pitch, the new content, and the new processes but also a very clear way for them to reach their targets. This is what’s most important for them, so to me, driving change management, we need to make sure that we create a real framework around what are the steps to nail, their targets.

The last tool that we use for change management is that we send a weekly enablement newsletter in which we add all key changes of the business that they should be aware of. Basically, we aggregate all info coming from different departments so that it’s very easy to digest for the sales reps and they have everything in one very brief email so that they can start their week with all the info in mind.

SS: I think that’s phenomenal. Thank you so much, Marina, for sharing your best practices today. I learned a lot from you.

MJ: Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Jess Rodriguez: Thanks so much. My name is Jess Rodriguez. I am the senior sales enablement manager at Beyond, and what we do is we work in the short-term vacation rental space and we help property managers and hosts grow and keep their revenue.

SS: We’re excited to have you here, Jess. Now, in addition to your sales enablement experience, one of the things that I thought was really cool about your background is that you’re also a professionally trained actor and have coined yourself as The Improv Girl. How does your experience in improv influence your approach to sales enablement?

JR: This is a great question and there’s a lot of ways that I can answer it, but really both improv and enablement are about creativity and the willingness and the ability to adapt and learn to really see and feel and embody whatever project or program that you’re working on. Anyone that has done improv gets into it for a different reason. Some really like the opportunity to create something, some people want to make people laugh, others do it to build their confidence, and I think mine was a combination of the three. Regardless of why you do it, what you get out of improv are these magical moments of experiencing what it’s like to take an idea or a concept, and not only bring it to life but to see how far you can go with it.

In improv, you go from, let’s say, talking about taking a trip to the beach. That’s maybe the scene that you’re provided with, and you are then tasked with acting out this trip to the beach. If you want it to be good and you want the scene to really resonate with your audience, you have to make yourself believe and act like you are at the beach. Maybe you’re thinking through the details about packing, you are holding your figurative beach hat when the wind blows, and you’re feeling your toes in the sand, but it’s just like a real trip to the beach where you could experience a tidal wave mid-scene and you have to roll with it.

Having the familiarity and taking things from an idea and putting them into an action to really just embrace every part of that idea and learning to pivot has made a major impact on how I actually approach sales enablement and the programs that I work with.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now, what are some improv skills that could help sales reps improve their performance?

JR: I love this question. It’s one that I get a lot and I think people hear improv and sales and they automatically assume we’re going to use improv to teach people how to be better at a specific sales skill, like negotiating or objection handling or demoing a product. You can absolutely do that, but I think we have to look at what it takes now for someone to be a great seller. I actually read in the Sales Enablement PRO report on enabling the future of selling, it stated that some of the top priorities for salespeople would be learning to collaborate and how to create very personalized journeys for their prospects and customers.

What we know is that it actually takes something quite different today for sellers to be really great and it’s gone beyond these very standard sales skills. It’s really about having the ability to connect with that prospect or that customer to understand their story, their motivations, their pain points, and their goals, and then be able to communicate how their product or service not only fits into that story but actually makes it better.

What better way to improve that ability to learn that story, and tell that story than with improv? I think about the skills that improv has taught me and what I’ve applied in my career, and I think what really comes to mind first would be listening, which sounds very basic, but is so essential. I think about something called characterization, and as I mentioned, I think about storytelling as well.

SS: I love those elements. What are some of your improv techniques for training salespeople to be more effective at listening and responding to customers?

JR: Great question. Let’s start with listening. There is one technique that I use consistently during every workshop and keynote presentation that I’ve done that starts with explaining and demonstrating something called ‘yes, and’. One of the first things that you’re taught at improv is this concept of ‘yes, and’, and it represents the mindset that no matter what someone says or does in a scene, you have to accept it with a literal or figurative ‘yes’ and then you add to it.

The reason it’s so important is during improv, it prohibits you from going into a scene with this premeditated agenda of how the scene is going to go because you can’t control what your scene partner will do or say. That’s like the fun in improv. That means you go into this scene with zero expectations. When I think about why sales reps struggle with something like listening, I think it’s because they go into this “scene” or their conversations with an agenda and with an expectation of what’s going to happen.

They’ve done this before, maybe it’s their eighth demo of the week, and they feel like they know what Susan from Company A is going to express as pain points or obstacles, so they’re anticipating how this will go and they’re unintentionally closing themselves off to something that could be a really great conversation. When you go into a scene with zero expectations, it forces you to be what I call powerfully present in that scene. You will naturally start to pay attention not only to what is being said, but the body language, those nonverbal cues that you’re getting, and when you think about listening, that’s what you have to do. Listening means you are really just powerfully present in what is happening in that scene.

Now for the second part of your question, responding to customers’ needs, what I didn’t tell you about ‘yes, and’ is the, ‘and’ part of that means that there has to be this logical connection for what you add to the scene. Let’s say, for example, you start out the scene in the kitchen and you decide that the kitchen has caught on fire. That’s logical, quite unfortunate, but it’s logical. If you start in the kitchen and then you decide you’re on the moon, that’s not a logical connection, so at that point, you’re doing what we call going for the laugh, and you’re not actually thinking about the common good of the scene.

Let me kind of bring it all back together here. As a seller, I think about how to respond to a customer’s needs in a way that is for the common good of that scene, and the common good of their goals, their objectives, not my own objectives as a seller, and that can be really hard because we want to feel prepared. We want to be viewed as the expert, the consultant, the one with all the answers, so we think about maybe how you do this. How do I go into this conversation with no agenda or expectations, but still be able to act as that expert or consultant?

My response to you would be that you prepare. In improv, they tell you to expose yourself to as many cultures, references, characters, news articles, and happenings in the world as you can because it makes you well-rounded. It will set you up for success when you’re in a scene, someone throws something out there at you because you have to accept it and you have to know what to say and do next to effectively respond in that scene.

In sales, I think about all the resources that we have out there for us, like talk tracks, playbooks, competitor news, or information. Lean on the resources that your marketing or your enablement teams have given you to prepare for those conversations, but overall, when you’re going in, don’t go in with that expectation or that agenda and that will make you a better listener, and make you more equipped to respond in a way that really makes an impact for the person you’re speaking to.

SS: I think that is phenomenal advice. I can’t tell you how many times I feel like that’s exactly what reps struggle with because they’re more concerned about what they’re going to say next than actually listening to the customer and expanding upon their needs. I think that’s fantastic advice, and I love the analogy that you drew there. Now for sales enablement, one of the tools that we use is that manager/rep role play. This is a relatively common tool to use in the sales training world. I would love to understand from you how improv can be used in those scenarios to help managers better coach their teams.

JR: Yeah, that’s a great question. Let’s talk about roleplaying. First of all, it really breaks my heart for roleplaying because it just seems to have a very bad reputation and people don’t seem to like it. I have a theory, but I’m curious, like, as a sales enablement person, why do you think that is?

SS: Well, for me personally, I think I get a little bit of stage fright, but for others, maybe it feels a little scripted. It feels unnatural because it’s something that we’re not used to doing.

JR: Yes. I completely agree. The stage fright element is very valid for many individuals. I remember the first time I did role-playing in sales training as a salesperson. It was my very first, real onboarding with an organization. It was classroom style. There were probably 30 people in the class, and when the instructor said we’d be doing role-playing, my actor self was thrilled. I was so excited. I was like, this is my moment, I’m so great at this. Give me the scenario and a minute, and I’ll be ready. Then about 30 seconds in, I was like, wait a minute. This doesn’t feel right. This is uncomfortable. I don’t understand what’s happening right now. When we finished, the instructor threw all this feedback at us.

I think you hit the nail on the head, Shawnna, when you said that it feels so scripted because when I think about why that experience is really bad, there are two things that took place. One is that it wasn’t a real-life scenario, right? We’re told that it’s supposed to be this creative exercise designed to help you practice, but it’s not uncommon for the person on the other side to be either silly or not fully invested or say things that a prospect or customer would never say.

We’ve all experienced that, and/or your instructor has very specific things they’re looking for as far as responses, which doesn’t make sense either because every prospect and customer is different, so how can someone say with confidence, this is absolutely how you should have responded? Are you with me for those two reasons?

SS: Absolutely.

JR: I agree that oftentimes roleplaying is a challenge because it feels like a waste of time and what I would tell a manager or any sales enablement person is that your reps will only get out of roleplaying as much as the sales leader is willing to put into it. There are a few techniques on improv that come to mind. I actually have a whole guide about this on my website for anyone that would like to dig in further (JessRod.com), but the three things that I would look at first are to lean into that character. That means that the person acting like the prospect or customer needs to embody the prospect or the customer.

If you don’t have buyer personas to work from as a sales manager, I would encourage you to go create your own. In one of my previous roles, there was an activity where we had our reps create their own buyer personas they had this whole backstory and they named their prospect and we let them google a photo and pick a random photo of a person, we let them identify their pain points. We really let them create this persona. Then we used those personas throughout the onboarding kind of as a round robin, so everyone had experience with different personas, but it gave the person playing that character some strong roots and foundations in who they were embodying.

The second thing I would tell a sales manager is to be self-aware. One of the first things I always do after any performance, even after training, is I go back and I watch the recording. Let me tell you, Shawnna, it is painful and it is not fun, but you make notes about how you can improve. I look at my delivery, my demeanor, my facial expressions, and then of course specifics of what I said and then I know what to work on because I’m seeing it for myself. I’m not just being told by someone else like, hey, your training would’ve been a lot better if you would’ve done X, Y, Z.

What I would recommend for a sales manager is to have your seller listen to a call or watch a recent demo, and then come to the session for role-playing with notes on where and how they would like to improve, and then use that time, that role-playing session time to practice those areas. This not only will help them really take ownership, because they’ve spent time prepping, but it also just gives them some control of what they want to work on versus being told by someone else where they’re struggling.

Then the last thing I would say is really embrace this idea that there are no mistakes in roleplaying, there are only opportunities. I think we have to remember that roleplaying really should not be about assessing or looking for required outcomes. We’re not looking for the reps to say specific things or ask specific questions. It should be about providing this very positive, safe, and supportive space for them to practice this skill.

I always tell people to think of their favorite person to hang out with. They’re probably the ones that make you feel smart and funny and interesting and important, so make your seller feel like that, and role-playing won’t be as daunting.

SS: I love that and I think you’re absolutely right. A psychologically safe environment also I think would produce tremendously better outcomes in that role-playing scenario. Now you have experienced designing improv-based team-building activities. I would love to learn more about how that type of team building drives collaboration and communication between team members and whether there’s actually anything I can, you know, maybe try at my next team meeting.

JR: I love working with teams. It’s a lot of fun. There is a lot of that scary part of being in front of people sometimes for attendees. When I think about the workshops, have you ever attended a training or a workshop where, let’s say the focus was communication, and they put together a deck and you’re talking through what it means to communicate different styles of communication, how to apply in the workplace, but it’s, it’s mostly like a presentation? Does that sound familiar at all?

SS: Yes.

JR: Yeah. When you’re trying to drive something like collaboration or communication, a slide deck is not the way to do it, and that’s because collaboration and communication can be, I think, very vulnerable things to acknowledge a team is struggling with. If you give them this slide deck that explains five things they need to do to collaborate or the top four communication styles in the workplace, that’s not going to break down that barrier of what got them there in the first place. That barrier that’s causing them to not communicate or collaborate. They need to experience it.

What’s really magical about using improv for team building is that you start off by breaking down those walls. In my workshops, the first thing we do is play an improv game. Before we’ve pulled up any slides, any presentation within the first five minutes of the start without even being told how to do it or that they have to do it people are laughing together, they’re working together, they’re being creative together. They’re starting to experience what it actually feels like when they do communicate and they work together.

By the end, they’ve had 45 minutes of that experience and again, have felt and seen what happens and what it looks like when they are working effectively, and because of how the games are structured and the content is structured, they’ll also experience what it feels like and the impact it has on everyone when they don’t actually work together and communicate. It’s really about getting them to experience it for themselves, put themselves in that seat, and not just tell them how to do it.

SS: I love that. Jess, last question to close for you. In your own career, how has this improv training helped you advance your career in enablement?

JR: Thank you for that question. I owe a lot to my improv training and the directors I’ve had, the teams I’ve worked with. I mentioned earlier in our conversation that regardless of why you do improv, what you get out of doing improv are these magical moments of experience. In my keynote, I speak about having what I call an improv mindset and how I’ve used these foundations like ‘yes, and’ to really be a driver throughout my life. Improv has given me the confidence to take on new challenges and new opportunities because through those magical moments and through those experiences, I’ve been able to see how incredible something can be when I say yes to it.

SS: I love that and I love that say-yes approach. Well, Jess, thank you so much for saying yes to being on this podcast. I greatly appreciate the insights that you share today.

JR: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Kristin Klinkner: Hi Shawnna. I am the sales enablement manager at Zumper, which is a platform you can use to find your next rental property, whether long-term, short-term, or vacation rentals, we have them all in one place. We’ve got a fantastic user experience and because of that, we attract our audience organically, and then we’re able to provide our clients with high-quality leads for renters to their properties.

I’ve been at Zumper for a bit over two years. I’m a team of one, and this is the first job I’ve had with the official sales enablement title. I took a really non-traditional path to a formal sales enablement position as I spent the first 18 years of my career in the non-profit sector. The last 15 of those were for the American Cancer Society, where I started as a local staffer working on raising funds through events and sponsorships in a local community. I moved into a manager role and then into a national role coordinating corporate engagement strategy for some of the world’s largest fundraising events.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but all of that work in the early part of my career was sales. Fundraising is sales. My national role was really sales enablement. I built the strategy, infrastructure, marketing, resources, support, and training for thousands of employees and tens of thousands of volunteers to attract corporate financial support, essentially B2B sales. We were hugely successful raising around 80 million per year for cancer research and support through just my B2B programs, but when Covid hit, our in-person fundraising event method for the American Cancer Society had to change as our strategy for bringing in revenue.

My department was eliminated, as I’m sure many people can relate to back during the pandemic, but I really saw that as a great opportunity to find a role that encompassed all of what I truly love doing and it boiled down to the positive impact, the changes in programming, infrastructure, and strategy for gaining corporate partners through others providing the resources necessary for others to be successful in landing those partners, not doing it myself. That’s what I really loved about the last role I had there. We also had just gone through a transition to Salesforce as our CRM and I liked learning the technology and figuring out how I could use that technology to help our fundraisers achieve goals.

I started looking at the SaaS world and tech companies and startups, and I discovered some podcasts, probably sales enablement PRO, that mentioned sales enablement. As I dug in and joined webinars and online career fairs like I know you all hosted, I heard leaders in enablement talk about their roles and strategies to be effective, and I knew this was the right place for me, but I needed to figure out how to translate my career in nonprofits to sales, and that’s where a huge network of sales enablement professionals were really sold me on it and helped me find my way.

It was really scary at first, but I started being vulnerable and just asking to connect with some of those speakers in those webinars and asking them just to connect or give guidance. So many of them were willing to chat and give coaching advice and connect me to other leaders. That’s really where I started to take off, and one of the best pieces of advice I got was to do a better job of clearly translating fundraising to sales. That piece of coaching that I received. When I figured out how to do that, I very quickly secured a few offers and accepted my first enablement position.

That’s a really long-winded way to say that the coaching I received allowed me to see a clear path to achieve what I wanted to do with my career shift. I immediately started finding ways when I got into that sales enablement role to build the type of into the company where I work now.

SS: I love that. One of the things that stood out to me about you on LinkedIn was that you really focus on building a sales culture that values coaching, as you mentioned, and celebrates success, which I can’t stress how important that is these days. I’d love to learn more about some of the ways that you’ve built this into your company’s culture.

KK: I really do value a strong culture of coaching and celebrating wins in a sales team. Coaching is not something that came naturally to me, but I’ve seen that as more and more people in an organization embrace it, we can achieve greater things. Taking a step back for a second, about me, I’m a doer, a problem solver. When I was younger, I felt if I could just figure out a way to do something and then share it with other people, they could just copy what I did and we’d all be fantastic top performers, right? That didn’t go over super well, especially when I became a people manager, so I did a lot of introspection and work on emotional intelligence, and that helped me see that I didn’t need to, nor should I, solve everything for everyone because when I tried to do that, nobody was bought in and they really didn’t adopt my solution long term even if they gave it a shot.

Learning about and improving my EQ helped me figure out how to be a coach instead of a fixer, and that really gave better results for the whole team. There’s a quote in an episode of Ted Lasso that has really stuck with me, and it’s something to the effect of all people being different people, and that’s what I think building a culture of coaching can do. Explaining to our sales leaders or coaching them to see that all of the sellers on their team are different and need different approaches and methods of feedback delivery and have different learning styles is a good way to introduce some initial changes to our onboarding and ongoing development opportunities. The way I did that was by adding role plays to our formal onboarding and training cadence.

I know people hate role plays, because I kind of hate them too, but the vulnerability you need to show and the trust that you need to give that everybody there on that call or who’s giving you feedback is there to help you. All of that helps build engagement and really solidifies every person on a team or, hopefully, solidifies for everybody on the team who’s involved with this, that they are a valuable part of that team or that company and the shared success. When you’re open to receiving that help, many times it results in growth or a tangible win that then we can call attention to.

It’s sort of a cycle, right? Then as we start seeing those wins, based on a result of something we learned in a role play, it gains acceptance as a development strategy and garners buy-in for continuing that type of exercise. Even when I ask really directly after a role play, like, how’d you feel about that, I usually start by sharing where I messed up and saying like, ooh, I felt really awkward at this part. Then people also feel like it’s okay to say like, yeah, I didn’t love that either. In the end, they always talk about what they did learn and how it really did help them feel more comfortable with whatever skill they’re working on. It’s kind of those shared awkward experiences that propel a team to build stronger bonds, have more engagement, greater success, and then eventually enjoy helping others and celebrating those successes as a team.

SS: I love that. One of the ways that you’ve improved coaching at your organization is through sales management training to help them also become better coaches for their reps. Why are the role of the manager and their effectiveness as a coach so important, especially amid changing times?

KK: I think we can all agree that coaching is better in the long run. For somebody coaching them to find a result is better than me just fixing it. I think we can also agree and I can get a team of leaders to agree that if I’m the only person providing that coaching that’s not very effective either. Having several people in an organization who are strong coaches out in the field with our sellers can really amplify my work in enablement. I can’t be in every sales meeting and my particular industry is very face-to-face for our sales, so I can’t even listen to recorded calls to give coaching.

That’s not a function of our company for me in enablement that I know a lot of other companies have. Instead, it all has to be done either as a group on a call or face-to-face when out in the field and really making those presentations. When I know that a manager who is going to be in some of those meetings is capable of providing the coaching a seller needs to improve, or even just to keep doing the things they’re already really good at, that’s easier for me to focus then on correcting skills and knowledge gaps that can be detrimental to our sales. It’s amplified even further when our sellers feel comfortable coaching each other. So we incorporate that a lot at Zumper too.

For example, as I said, our industry is multifamily real estate. I didn’t know anything about that when I started here. I know how to sell and I know how to do enablement and coaching, all that kind of stuff, but multifamily, I’m not the expert there. Luckily we have a lot of those, like Patty, one of our VPs. She provides a lot of the coaching right alongside me for our sellers and where I can point out a different strategy or execution or something like that, Patty has actually had these conversations with clients so many times. The coaching that she provides is a whole other level of credibility and expertise, and when she takes the time to coach, it really encourages our sellers to grow because they see that somebody else, a teammate is investing her time in them and they can also see that these things work because of the massive success that she’s had in her career doing the same thing that they’re doing.

SS: I love that. What does that sales manager training program look like though? What do you think about measuring the success of that program?

KK: A lot of our sales leaders are competitive and they want to be the best. On that road, it’s maybe easy to default to ‘I’ll just fix it myself now and I’ll try to remember to talk to you more about this later’. The way we build our manager training is that it’s a lot of practice and it is, again, those live role plays and exercises and really learning and ingraining it in your day-to-day work how to take that pause and maybe rewire those managers for the tendency to immediately fix for somebody else, and instead shifting to ask questions and coaching a seller to see the fixes that they need to make for themselves.

That’s often a big change for a manager. I often start by explaining the benefits in the terms of what’s in it for me. The manager may have more time to do other things or focus on other team members, build strategies, and even maybe take some time off that they don’t seem to find enough time to do during the year. When we flip it in the terms of like, what’s in it for me, it might be a little uncomfortable at first for me to not just fix this and to see if they can work through it, but in the long run, it is going to pay off. Then, we teach how to coach instead of fixing and hardwiring that defaults to coaching. We practice coaching over a substantial period of time, so it’s not just a one-and-done type of learning. This is a really ingrained long-term program that we work on all the time.

Practicing with other leaders, with me, applying what they learn to sellers and receiving feedback and coaching on their own coaching, and then we repeat it over and over again, and that’s what helps it to stick. When they start using it and seeing the growth in their teammates, the bigger or more frequent wins that they get, they really become invested in coaching as a strategy for leadership and it helps the culture of coaching really take hold at our company.

Some of the ways that we measure this, yes, you can see more frequent wins or bigger wins or things for each of the sellers you’ve been working with. There are some of those sorts of lagging indicators that you can see movement, but there are other ways that we measure this at our company, and that is through engagement surveys. What we’ve seen as we’ve started to build the culture of coaching where we’re all supporting each other and working together to get better and improve, we see that people are really connecting with each other and that has improved our engagement scores tremendously. It’s really helped build a lot of teamwork when we are mostly remote and don’t actually get to see each other face-to-face very often.

SS: I love that. I have one last question for you. You have mentioned on LinkedIn too that you’ve seen some exceptional business outcomes from this approach to building a healthy sales culture. What do you think about tying the impact of sales culture back to things that the business cares a lot about?

KK: I think one of the things our company focuses on a lot is our core values. We’ve got five core values and we like everybody to feel part of the team. We call each other roomiez with a Z at the end. It’s funny, we add Zs to everything, so roomiez with a Z. When I started during the height of Covid, a lot of that engagement and people were shifting to a remote environment and they really started feeling disengaged, not just with each other, but I think even with the company. As we, in the sales team, started to build that culture where we’re all going to work together on this thing, we’re going to help each other out and we’re going to celebrate those wins, we really have seen an improvement in commitment to our company, commitment to the key performance indicators and the objectives of our organization, and just a real general enthusiasm to achieve it together and to do whatever you need to do, help wherever you need to help build the relationship within the company internally even, or eternally with clients in order to build that culture that we’re looking for in our company, which is just very inclusive and celebratory. Did that answer your question?

SS: That did. It’s important I think, to your point, to ground it back into the core principles of the company, so that makes a ton of sense.

KK: Obviously we have hard dollar goals and numbers to hit, but a lot of times what I’ve seen is sometimes it is just like a feel and those can be just as important to hit those number goals as well.

SS: Absolutely, because, well, there’s number goals behind some of the fields too, like retention of your top employees and all that fantastic stuff. Also, mental health keeps you from having to take massive amounts of sick days. Totally.

KK: 100%, yes.

SS: Thank you so much for joining us.

KK: Thank you for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Denyse Hannon: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here and hello to everyone out there. My name is Denyse Hannon and I work at Tray.io. Tray.io is really driven by the hope to create a world where really anyone can solve business problems without the constraint of technology, but in doing so through automation. We essentially help companies transform fragmented processes into very powerful business outcomes.

For example, our customers are able to automate business processes or even help accelerate a company’s integration roadmap by empowering product service developers to rapidly build integrations for their customers. My role at Tray.io is very focused on enablement. I am the senior sales enablement manager for the company, so I oversee their enablement strategy.

SS: Well, we’re excited to have you join us, Denyse. Now, one of the things that I love about your background is that you have a wide range of experience coming from enablement and marketing. How has that blended background really helped impact your approach to sales enablement?

DH: I’m so grateful to have that mixed background. It’s given me such an insight into just the different realms of enablement. I feel like we often think of sales enablement as one aspect of a business, but enablement really captures so many different elements from project managing, and operational processes, to collaborating with cross-functional teams in marketing, product, and even HR, with sales enablement onboarding. Having that background has really given me just the knowledge of how important it is to work cross-functionally and get to know those members because those cross-functional departments become an enabler’s true force to be able to create efficient content lessons, and honestly, that ongoing loop of communication that’s necessary for sales enablement.

SS: Absolutely. Oftentimes, within a lot of organizations, a common challenge that I hear about is just this misalignment between sales and marketing teams. In your experience, what would you say may be some of the root causes of this misalignment?

DH: I think the first thing that comes to my mind is communication. I think sometimes, and I see this through enablement, quite often teams are working in silos, unfortunately. Every team has its strategy and the goals they’re trying to hit. I think that the real root cause is miscommunication and not branching out to work cross-functionally and understand those strategies and create a consistent sales enablement strategy based on all the other strategies. I think that sales enablement has a really unique position in that sense and ability to look at an organization’s strategic angle in each department and intertwine those strategies to tell a consistent and effective story to the sales.

SS: I love that. Do you have any tips or things that you’ve done to prevent the silos between the two teams?

DH: Definitely. I think at the end of the day, the biggest tip I can say is we’re all human. Similar to what I teach from the sales enablement perspective, what is really important is trust, connection, and being authentic and genuine. These are all big aspects and tips that we overlook when it comes to breaking down these silos and working together as a team.

I mentioned that because I think a lot of the time, especially now more than ever in a digital world, we get into zoom and immediately we start kind of hitting on those key points we need to get at for the meeting. We have 30 minutes or whatever it might be, let’s get to it. I think sometimes we just need to have that human touch and really take a few minutes to get to know each other, get to understand what’s going on in your day, how are you feeling, and that really starts to create trust.

I think that’s really a key element to breaking down those silos because what I’ve noticed is people are more inclined, more willing, and they want to work with you. They want to loop you in on projects. I’ve even noticed even in situations where enablement wouldn’t come into play, people will come to you and say, hey, I need to talk this through. What sparks from that is other ideas, other projects where enablement can come and help. I don’t know if that’s a good tip there, but I think sometimes we overlook just the human touch and the power of truly connecting with other people.

SS: I love that advice. For our audience listening today, how can enablement help break down some of those sales and marketing silos and really start to drive really strong alignment across the teams?

DH: When I think of the sales side of things, obviously they are customer-facing, and they can provide such great feedback back into the company, like what they are hearing from prospects and from customers. From a marketing perspective, they’re the ones driving that message and approaching conversations. We really can’t have those silos. We need to have that ongoing feedback loop of what I’m hearing and marketing saying, hey, here’s how we’re tailoring that message. It’s going to be constantly evolving just with the trends that we notice in industry and the changing economy. That’s a constant form of communication that is necessary, and I think where enablement comes in and helps there is really to drive that communication.

They’re kind of that liaison between, hey, here’s what I’m hearing from my sales team, and from a marketing standpoint, providing the marketing team that message and then vice versa marketing might be saying, hey, here’s how we’re approaching this conversation now, or here’s how we’d like to frame the message here based on what we’re hearing, and then bringing that back to the sales team and working with them on how we can pitch this the right way. I think that’s a great way that enablement can really come in and play, and being that liaison between the two teams.

SS: I love that. Given enablement’s unique position as a core partner both to sales and marketing teams, do you have any advice for how to build strategic partnerships with the executive leaders, maybe the CMO or the head of sales within the organization?

DH: When it comes to working with executive leaders and to be quite frank, this is a somewhat newer area for myself and I’d love to continue my career down this path, but really looking at a higher-level strategy there. We touched on this a little bit before, but I think enablement has that unique ability to look at a micro strategy within, for example, the marketing department or a sales department and to first and foremost kind of flag to the executives, hey, we may not have alignment here, we need to create an efficient, streamlined process.

Also, vice versa, they can say hey, this is a gray area where we can all collaborate and grow together. I think from an executive leadership point, it’s almost kind of stepping outside of a sales enablement role, and it almost, in my opinion, it’s very much an operational, in some ways project management ability there to help executive leaders align on enablement needs to grow the business.

SS: Last question for you, Denyse, and I appreciate all of the insights that you’ve shared today. How, how do you correlate the impact of enablement’s effort to both sales and marketing priorities?

DH: It goes back to that ongoing loop of communication that’s necessary. Enablement is such a broad word. That is one thing I’ve learned in my career as an enabler. You can wear so many different faces as an enabler, and it’s one of the things that I love absolutely the most about the job. Not only can you see the impact in one area, but in so many different areas. I think that when you think about the impact enablement has on the priorities of a business, not even just marketing and sales, I mean, what’s really unique is that going back to communication, the information we’re pulling from sales and marketing should get communicated out to the rest of the organization.

This communication can help drive product strategy, and so I think there’s a much larger impact there, even from branching out to HR even saying hey this is what we’re noticing and this might be a future need for the company to hire. I kind of would expand that question to the impact enablement has on, on the entire company’s efforts. If you can think outside of the box that way and if you really want to have that company-wide impact, I think that sales enablement role really has that opportunity to do so and to branch much deeper than to personally a lot of different roles that I’ve been part of.

SS: Well, Denyse, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your insights. I really appreciate it.

DH: Thank you so much for having me on and letting me tell my story.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Rick Kickert from Zscaler join us. Rick, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Rick Kickert: Thanks, Shawnna. I am the global vice president of what we call REV, which is revenue enablement and velocity. Zscaler is a cloud security company, and I’ve had the opportunity to be here for almost four years now. I have also been in the pre-IPO space, mostly with tech, doing a similar rollover at Rubrik and then over AppDynamics doing enablement, sales emerging technologies, and also had the opportunity of working on the business value consulting team there.

Before that, I actually spent about 10 years over at Blue Cross Blue Shield and I always give the same story during boot camps and training sessions and that I used to actually live on the other side of the fence. I would be what salespeople would call their economic buyer champion, and in my office, you’d walk in and to the right. I always have a whiteboard that would have our top 5 or 6 projects for the company. A sales rep would walk into my office and we would exchange pleasantries for the first five or 10 minutes and get to know each other. Then, I’d ask, how do we align with some of the projects there on my whiteboard? If we couldn’t, that’s fine, we’ll talk later, otherwise, let’s talk about how you can help me be more valuable in my business. I use that story all the time because I spent a lot of time talking about the buying journey and understanding how the buyer makes investments.

I’m a true believer that within enablement if we can help enable our sellers, partners, and customer success teams on what the buyer has to go through with the buying journey looks like, we’ll just be more successful on the other side of the fence from a selling perspective.

SS: Absolutely. In your role, you are uniquely positioned to focus on go-to-market, partner, and customer enablement, which you shared with us that you call the global revenue enablement service center. Can you walk us through this process and how it impacts your view on enablement?

RK: If you think about an automotive center for a moment, Shawnna, I am assuming you’ve probably taken your car to some type of automotive center before, right?

SS: Absolutely.

RK: All right. When you pulled up to that service center, there could be multiple service areas behind all those bay doors. There’s usually not just one bay door that you go to get your car serviced, there are multiple. Even though you might need different tools and services from multiple areas, you just go in the front door and go to the front desk. The front desk takes the requirements, they do the paperwork, and hopefully, something very efficiently and effectively happens in the back end and they drive your automobile back out and it’s all revved up and ready to go. That’s the perfect scenario, right?

In this REV Center, which is revenue enablement and velocity, the same analogy holds true. Our marketing teams, our product, and our engineering growth teams, all come to the front door of the REV center and we want to understand what they’re launching. We collect the paperwork, we make sure it follows a value framework that we’ve built out, playbooks, LMS and then we go enable the proper teams, whether it’s sales specialists, partners, customers, customer success, renewal’s professional services, all of that. Anything inside of go-to-market and external. You think about most things you launch and for enablement within a company, and it shouldn’t just only go to sales, we make sure that maybe there’s a play there for customer success, maybe there’s a play there for partners. Maybe there’s something we can do to highlight the customer training partner portal that also helps enable that launch. Maybe we’ve created a demo that can be leveraged for not just sales but also for partners. Getting everyone in the same boat and rowing in the same direction with full momentum’s goal. Just make sure everyone is enabled at the same time efficiently with some of the same tools and then using the same common measurements. That’s the vision that we built for this revenue enablement service center and why we’ve kind of married everybody together in that same model.

SS: I love that, but I imagine there are some unique challenges to building an enablement strategy that can fit all of the needs that are part of your role. How do you overcome these challenges as you design enablement programs?

RK: There is. It’s a lot of different bay doors if we’re sticking with that analogy, to try and make sure we get everybody enabled at the same time, but luckily I’m a pretty big fan of enabling the buyer, the partner, the customer success rep the same way we’ve been able to the seller. Putting the most enablement available out there in the market I think really helps engage people, help them learn about your product, your solution, and your use cases, and understand what they can solve for it. The challenge there is just making sure that you’re getting the right content to the right consumer at the right time. We always make sure we’ve got a pretty large bill of materials in place. We’ve built that consistency in place with the marketing teams and the product teams. Everyone’s prepared when they’re coming to that front door of the REV center what things need to look like and make sure that we’re able to launch all at the same time.

SS: What are some ways that you go about ensuring that you’re tracking the right metrics across the entire enablement program, today?

RK: Metrics are probably one of the most critical elements of a successful enablement program. Just rarely will you see me or hear me talk about the amount of training that is specifically consumed. How many people completed the training inside of our LMS or courses or webinar that we might have hosted? I’m a lot more around the measurable outputs of it.

Now that is a leading indicator and in a lot of cases training is consumed, but at the end of the day, if everyone consumed their training, but if it still didn’t create more visible opportunities or drive more new business meetings or create more pipeline generation or we’re not improving our win rate, we’re not selling more specific products, then who cares about the training consumed. I try to align all of our metrics with what business partners care about. What’s the most important to the CRO? What’s the most important to the CMO? Whatever their indicators are that are important to them, we want to make sure that we’re measuring the same metrics in the same type of success.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. You talked about the auto body shop analogy, how does enablement prevent and fix potential roadblocks that may happen within your organization?

RK: If you didn’t have that service center analogy, which we experienced initially also and I’ve seen this a lot of other companies, you might have a lot of training going over into specifically your sellers, but maybe the SEs didn’t get that same training or maybe your partners are not getting enabled with the same content at the same time for a new product launch or solution that might be coming out. Those are the roadblocks that you could potentially come across or some of the bottlenecks. Again, it’s making sure that you do all the prep ahead of time, understand that launches have an impact, what you want each team to be able to articulate from an enablement perspective, and build those business partners to make sure that we’re not having delays in making those teams each being very effective.

SS: I want to shift gears a little bit because you also focus a bit on partners and have a partner enablement background. You shared an article on LinkedIn about developing a robust partner enablement strategy and how that’s really a key to driving revenue. Why is partner enablement important to the business, especially in the current economic climate?

RK: Well, for one, it’s how you scale. I truly believe that you have to have a partner motion and the easiest way to be able to do that is by making sure that you’re enabling them. You think about it, you brought up the economic times of today and there are not a lot of companies that are still accelerating at the same headcount they had in the past, so you’ve got to look for other ways how to continue to grow your revenue year over year by 40 or 50%, or whatever the number is, you’ve got to continue that growth rate and partners are truly a great way to be able to do that. It’s hard for partners to be able to help you drive that kind of growth and be able to position your solutions if they’re not enabled and if they don’t understand how you integrate together with things that they might sell today.

They’ve got a book of business, they’ve got customers, they’re working with other solutions, they might be competitive, so helping them understand how that entire architecture goes together, how do they offer the best value to their customers, to their buyers with the solutions that we sell today? If you don’t put them in that position, it makes it really difficult just like it would your internal sellers if they don’t know how to position the value position, the right use cases, and be able to find the right buying personas, it makes things more difficult. I think partners have a unique advantage where they have trusted advisors to these customers.

I think about when I was over at Blue Cross Blue Shield, we leverage a lot of partners to be able to give us insight into if I want to be able to roll out new products if I want to be able to fix some of the problems inside of my company, what’re the best tools to be able to use? Partners are kind of that extension for a lot of business. I think today, in the current economic times, partners are a great way and a great extension of anyone’s business to be able to help, but you need to be able to enable them and teach them what your products do. I’ll even say; give them the same tools, the same demos, the same labs, all of that, open the door of enablement to them as much as you would internally.

SS: I think that is great advice. In closing, do you have any additional advice you’d give to organizations wanting to incorporate an enablement strategy with this model and their business?

RK: I think it’s about alignment. It took us a while to be able to make this journey and be able to get to this type of model. I truly believe that for efficiency it’s definitely a much better model to go through. If you can align and build business partners inside each area and show your metrics of success. Whether you think about customer success, I care about churn and enablement as much as you do, how do we help improve those things? I care about renewal and up, sell as much as you do, how do we measure and build playbooks to be able to support that from a partner perspective? We care about deal reg as I want to make sure that we’re doing everything in enablement to help drive that. Obviously, for sales and SEs, we care about success and demos, we care about success and POVs and again, your measurements and your areas of success are the same as enablement. If you can get to that type of relationship and kind of be kind of the same fabric together, that to me is the power behind being able to build a model like this that works and has everybody essentially rowing their boat in the same direction. If you’re doing that, you’re going faster and you’re going to beat the competition.

SS: I love it. Thank you so much, Rick. I appreciate the time.

RK: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Eric Lindroos from Culture Amp join us. Eric, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Eric Lindroos: Absolutely, thank you so much for having me, I am so excited to be on the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. My name is Eric Lindroos, and a little bit about me is that I love traveling, I am a proud uncle, I am a wine enthusiast, and I just moved to Portland, Oregon after living in Ireland for the last year. I am also on an active surrogacy journey to fatherhood, so fingers crossed, I should also be a new papa by the end of the year.

I love all things enablement, of course. Recently, I joined Culture Amp as their revenue enablement partner with a focus on building out our go-to-market outbound sales motion. If you’re not familiar with Culture Amp, we are the leading employee experience platform driving engagement, development, performance, and retention for over 6,000 organizations. Prior to Culture Amp, I was the 24th employee at Gong, I spent almost 4.5 years with the company and held roles that ranged from sales to recruiting from the SDR enablement manager to the go-to-market global enablement onboarding manager as well, so that’s a little bit about me and again, I’m so excited to be spending my time with you.

SS: Eric, we’re so excited to have you on the podcast today, so thank you so much for joining us and bringing this energy. I want to start by talking about maximizing sales productivity because that’s top of mind for a lot of companies, especially given the current economic climate. With your experience building global learning programs that scale onboarding, training, and coaching, how can enablement help to drive productivity?

EL: Great question. Right now, onboarding and training are definitely top of mind for everyone given the current economic environment, especially if your employees are still remote, or I think if you’re one of the lucky companies that are still hiring. I think having a strong onboarding program is crucial when facilitating an impactful new hire experience. I think a strong onboarding program ensures that new hires feel connected, have cross-functional exposure, have access to leaders, mentors, and buddies, and are given the resources and content that they need to hit the ground running.

I also firmly believe that a strong program is key when driving a new higher engagement and productivity. Sorry to say this, but if you’re bored, your new hires are also bored and that’s a ton of time, information, and enablement resources that are just going in one ear and out the other. I think that when properly engaged and when there are a variety of learning styles incorporated into the programs that you’re running, you’re going to see that engagement and the adoption results that you’re looking for. Those desired results, of course, are going to lead to a decrease in your ramp time of new hires and just employee retention long term. When it comes to new hire onboarding specifically, I see onboarding really as the initial foundation that training programs and reinforcement programs should be built on to ensure a deep understanding and skill set of one’s new role.

SS: That is fantastic advice. Now, because you have that global experience, what are some of the unique challenges that come along with designing global programs that really kind of address regional markets?

EL: Oh my gosh, that question is a trigger. The first thing that comes to mind is time zones. Definitely, time zones are going to be a challenge, but I think how you overcome that challenge to the best of your ability is to try to overlap as many live sessions as you can. If I have US and EMEA onboarding or training, I know that I have an EMEA until like 6 PM their time, which means I’m going to get as much out by 8 to 10 a.m. PST as I can because I want to ensure that teams feel really connected and not siloed from a global perspective and because I want to drive engagement and performance. I also want to guarantee a space for global mindshare and just bonding.

When it comes to sessions and trainings that might fall outside of those overlapped hours, I am going to make sure that I record every single one of those sessions and then I’m going to build global library folders of that content to ensure that I drive foundational consistency across the teams. Also, I want to make sure I’m tracking against the completion of any of those self-led programs and trainings to ensure and measure the adoption as well from a global lens.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I also think tech is definitely something that can be a challenge if you don’t have the right tech resources in place. In my opinion, if you’re not recording and analyzing the impact of your global sessions, you’re never going to scale or have the organizational and go-to-market consistency in the way that you want. I also think that it’s really important for you to utilize your learning management system, have a knowledge-based platform for collaboration, and invest in an e-learning solution. I think with all of that, you’re also going to help drive reinforcement and development across your teams. Over here at Culture Amp, I am lucky enough to have all of those resources, and from a global lens, I do not know what I would do without them, specifically because we have teams over in APAC, EMEA, and over here in North America.

SS: I’d love to actually drill into that because it sounds like you have teams all around the world and obviously there are a lot of differences in background and cultures if you’re scaling global programs. How do you build a program that makes sense for different geography?

EL: I think first you have to seek to understand. Be slow to build and fast to listen is my mantra, which is why we have two ears and one mouth. From a foundational level, I think that there should be a program baseline that reflects the company first. When we’re thinking about this, your company values, your value proposition, your buyer personas, your customer use cases, and your leadership should all be accessible and the same regardless of geography. Build that foundation and then scale it because that’s how employees feel engaged and brought into a mission.

For example, our mission at Culture Amp is to improve the lives of 100 million people with our platform and I guarantee you that even in the short amount of time I’ve been here, you can feel that that is our mission that everybody is fighting for every single day, regardless of location because it was a part of our global onboarding experience. I say, double down on that baseline and then build programs that reflect the nuances of diverse teams and regions. My grandmother always taught us growing up, never to be the smartest one in the room. She said, if you’re the smartest one in the room, get out of that room because you’re not learning, you’re not growing, you’re not being challenged. Do not try to be the smartest one in the room if it’s not your culture. Don’t build your programs around your own preconceived ideas of what should work. I highly encourage you to seek out employees or consultants in those regions and let them be the smartest ones in the room.

I think a huge challenge that I’ve also experienced while building out global programs is not understanding that there are global market differences and thinking that what worked for you in one place is going to guarantee success in another. I have seen this time and time again, leaders saying ‘well that’s what we do in the US so that’s what we’re doing in EMEA. Let’s cut and copy that for other regions.’ I think that this approach is literally the deathbed for so many organizations trying to expand globally or scale programs and training efforts. Every single region is different and taking a very thorough and intentional approach to understanding those differences is imperative to see success. When it comes to global programs, talk tracks are received differently, the competitive landscape is different, and company brand awareness is never apples to apples, in my experience. Marketing and lead gen efforts need to be adjusted accordingly and global programs have to reflect those incongruences in order to be successful as well.

Let’s also make note that work-life balance looks very different across continents. That has to be factored into global programs and just the conversation. The live-to-work mentality in North America is alive and well compared to the work-to-live mindset that you see with a lot of organizations in Europe. I think that’s a huge challenge that one should be aware of when building out these global programs. Just have that sort of top of mind to have a conversation around with your leadership team and your enablement team as well.

SS: Your grandmother sounds like a very smart woman, I have to say. I love that advice. Now, in addition to your experience with the global programs, you’re also really passionate about DE&I, in the workplace. What are some of your best practices for creating an open and inclusive environment for learning?

EL: What a question, I feel like I could talk about this for hours. I say first be your authentic self and be unapologetic about it. This obviously looks different for everyone and that’s completely okay, as long as you always feel comfortable. When it comes to feeling comfortable bring up your partners, children, or your weekend activities in your work conversations. Obviously, as long as it’s professional, don’t make a career-limiting move, that is not what I’m proposing here, but show up as your authentic self. Join an employee resource group or otherwise known as an ERG and if there isn’t one, start one. At Gong, I created Proud Gongsters with the help of my CMO, which was an LGBTQ+ Gongster community. The workplace here at Culture Amp already had incredible resources and ERGs in place, so on my first day I was added to camp out and was immediately a part of a community where I felt accepted and supported.

I’m also a huge fan of building a DEI or ERG session into your onboarding so that new hires understand the DNA of your company and are encouraged to show up as their true and authentic self from week one or day one. At Culture Amp, we are very heavy on using our pronouns in our Slack and Zoom profiles, which creates a safe space for others to just show up. It also tells them that we support them for whoever they are. I would also say to be intentional about training on unconscious biases so that you can educate your talent teams, you’re hiring managers, and your employees. Fight to have a diverse workplace and diversity in your leadership team so that people see themselves in all aspects of the organization. As you can tell, I think there’s a lot that you can do, but I do guarantee if you do any of the things I just mentioned, you are going to create a space that promotes open and inclusive environments and people are just going to learn organically because they feel comfortable. Last but not least, if your company doesn’t want to support what I mentioned to you or you feel like you have to hide, find a company and a leader that does support you for you.

SS: I couldn’t agree more with that statement, Eric. You just touched on this just a second ago, but I’d love to drill into this a little bit more and that’s around leadership’s role in this. What advice do you have for leaders of global teams to help them create a more inclusive team culture?

EL: My first piece of advice is to listen to this podcast and follow Sales Enablement PRO. No plug intended, and I know you don’t make me say that, but jokes aside, educate yourself about DEI Initiatives and other cultural norms so that you can be a leader who educates others. Create a space where diversity is not just tolerated, but it’s absolutely celebrated. Demand for an atmosphere that promotes psychological safety for absolutely everyone on your team. Just be curious about others and ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask questions that you might not know the answer to. I feel like a lot of times we are so scared to look silly or stupid or ask the wrong thing when it comes to something that we don’t know, but in my experience, I promise you that your teams are going to welcome this dialogue because it shows that you care and that you want to grow and become more aware of something that maybe you don’t understand.

I’d say provide anonymous feedback surveys as well and be open, not defensive about the results and data. If you’re not collecting employee engagement data around these conversations, I firmly believe that you should be, especially if you have global teams because everybody is different and everybody needs something different. No plug intended, but I do know a platform, Culture Amp, that can help you if you want to talk to me about that further. Those are just a few things that a leader can do to really drive a more inclusive culture within their teams.

SS: Well, absolutely, and I will outright plug it because I have used Culture Amp before at past companies and I have to say, I absolutely love it. It does exactly what it is intended to do, particularly around DEI&B, which is near and dear to me. I’m all about the plug for this one.

EL: I love that, thank you.

SS: Thank you, Eric, closing question for you. This goes back to the environment that we’re in today, at least particularly in the tech sector. How can teams balance a healthy culture with what a lot of companies are feeling about the need to maximize productivity?

EL: Oh my gosh, trigger again, for me as somebody who has experienced burnout professionally, this one definitely hits home. I think it’s really important to find a healthy balance of people first and I think that once you do that, productivity and business will seamlessly overlap. There’s actually just a quote I recently heard from Brad Bird who’s an academy award-winning director and he said ‘If you have low morale, for every dollar you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every dollar you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay more attention to morale.” I totally agree. Find what that people’s first balance looks like and everything else I think is going to come to place.

I also think it’s really important right now more than ever in a remote environment if you do have remote teams or global teams to have really clear expectations around KPIs. What does that look like for you and for your team? I have now been a part of two different companies where we’ve had company-wide recharge days, and I think that that’s an incredible way to create a healthy culture of balance as well. It also shows your employees that you value them and you care and when you demonstrate that to your team, and to your employees and that’s a part of your DNA, again to that quote I mentioned, you’re going to see the return because people are going to want to work harder for you and for your mission.

Also, I actually encourage people to take time off to recharge. This is something I haven’t always been good at myself, especially over the last few years, and now in this remote environment where we a lot have found ourselves, the burnout is so real. I’ve worked for companies in the past where there’s unlimited PTO, but no one actually takes it because it’s a bait and switch. Every tech company says unlimited PTO, but really that means nothing. I’ve also worked for companies where there were 20 paid business days that were on a use-it or loose-type model. Do you think I took my 20 days off? Yes, I took my 20 days and I was actually able to disconnect. Every company is different, every team is different. You have to find what works for you to establish that healthy culture with balance while also maximizing productivity. Those are some of the things that I’ve seen work for myself and the teams that I’ve been a part of.

SS: I love that. Eric, thank you so much for joining us today. It has been an energizing discussion, so thank you so much.

EL: Thank you. The pleasure’s all mine.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Brooke Eklund from Vonage join us. Brooke, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Brooke Eklund: Hi Shawnna, thank you so much for having me. I’m Brooke Eklund and I’m a sales enablement manager at Vonage. I’ve been with the organization for just over a year now. I was previously with IBM for 13 years in many different roles, so my background is in sales actually. I’ve held roles as a seller, and a front-line sales manager leading early career sales professionals, as well as then moving into global sales transformation and this has really led me on my sales enablement journey. I’m also a member of a community called Women in Sales Enablement, WiSE, and it is such a wonderful community of professionals that get together and share best practices, ask each other questions, and open communication and this has really helped to shape the way I operate within sales enablement.

SS: Brooke, we’re excited to have you and I absolutely echo the sentiment around WiSE. We recently partnered with them as well around a compensation career pathing and DE&I enablement report. So, to our audience, if you haven’t seen that yet go to salesenablement.pro to our report section and check that out. It’s a worthwhile read. Brooke, we’re excited to have you join us here on our podcast today and one of the reasons why we wanted to bring you on is to talk about one of your specialties which is around finding inefficiencies in the sales process and creating ways to solve them. I’d love for you to help our audience understand how you go about identifying these inefficiencies.

BE: Absolutely. The biggest part for me is being hands-on. When I start to learn a new process, I want to know everything about it. I tend to use my personal sales experience as I’m going through this would this make sense to me as a seller? Would this be beneficial to me as a sales manager? I try to put that hat on as well. Another theme you’ll hear me use throughout the entire podcast is communication. Constantly communicating with sellers and other stakeholders in the organization. I can give you one example of a particular project I worked on a certain tool adoption where my role was to design a superior user experience for sellers. In doing that, I probably interviewed 60 sellers, looked at the different fields within the tool, and saw what tied into other tools and what would be beneficial. That’s just one of the ways of being hands-on and communicating to help find those inefficiencies.

SS: Really interesting. How do you differentiate inefficiencies in the actual sales process and inefficiencies in an individual sales rep skill set?

BE: That’s a great question. I would say that I look at it as if is it affecting all sellers or just a subset of sellers. Again, I’ll go back to communication and feedback. I lead a team called SEAT which is a seller experience advisory team’ which is made up of a core group of sellers from across the business and different go-to-market functions. We meet on a structured basis two times a quarter but we have a very open and ongoing dialogue through different communication channels. We’re always listening to their needs. They’re very open with us. The feedback and engagement we get is very high quality in terms of helping us understand what’s working and what’s not, and where we can make refinements and advancements.

SS: Once gaps have been identified in the process, what are the next steps that sales enablement practitioners should take to resolve them?

BE: I would say that it takes constant optimization. Keeping up with new technologies, staying with the headwind, of course, being proactive in assessing inefficiencies, and being ahead of those conversations. Connecting with our audience on an ongoing basis across different parts of the business is just crucial.

SS: Absolutely, many companies are currently changing their priorities to really reflect the current economic climate. When changes need to happen at scale, what do you do to drive the adoption of those new processes?

BE: I try to use change management methodologies, particularly the ADKAR model: awareness for the seller’s desire, or the what’s in it for me, do they have the knowledge and the ability and then that constant reinforcement with them. Individuals in sales roles have variable skill sets and differences in the timing of their enablement needs. One of the things that I think is really helpful is for sellers to self-assess their skills than have the managers validate them. We can then identify gaps, provide just-in-time learning, and then do knowledge checks. At that point, we’ll be able to see the relevance of learning to their daily activities.

SS: Interesting, and what are some of the key metrics that you tracked to ensure the success of the change management effort?

BE: Some of the metrics that I tend to use are particularly around engagement. Are they engaged in the process and being advocates or champions for what we’re trying to do in the business? Then, of course, we use NPS surveys to get additional feedback and data points from our audience.

SS: Especially right now, everything’s changing at a rapid pace, but we know buyers’ needs in particular are changing. What advice would you have for other enablement practitioners on how to effectively keep up with the changes in the market?

BE: Well you are definitely on track with things constantly changing. I would say the first thing would be the ability to pivot and be agile. Oftentimes I’ve been in situations where working on something specific suddenly takes a back burner and I have to be able to pivot. The other thing I would say is to stay up to date with trends in the industry and then also ensure that there’s alignment with ever-evolving customer journeys. Assuring that the buyer’s needs are aligned with what the sellers are doing. Those would be my recommendations.

SS: I think that’s fantastic advice. Brooke, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your insights.

BE: Thank you so much. It’s been an honor.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Jessica Hoffman from AlertMedia join us. Jessica, I’d love you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jessica Hoffman: Thank you so much for having me. As you mentioned, my name is Jessica Hoffman, I go by Jess, and I am the sales enablement manager at AlertMedia. I support our enterprise and mid-market amazing alert-es which are our sales reps. AlertMedia is an amazing company that helps organizations respond to critical events faster with emergency communication software. In short, we help people save lives which is pretty cool. I very much enjoy working for AlertMedia.

I like to say my background is a beautiful winding road that led me to enablement. I always like to say that sales find you, but you don’t really find sales. I started back in the day when you could actually rent movies in a store. I don’t know if you guys remember that, but back in the day that’s what I did and I didn’t know it was sales but that’s what I was doing. Then, I went into banking, and financial services, and then I kind of stumbled into software sales and I was selling audit and accounting software, which was super exciting and I became really good at it in my first year. My passion has always been to help people. Fun fact, I have a medical assistant degree in my back pocket that I don’t use because I wanted to help people but realized blood isn’t my thing and a better way to help people is by enabling them to do what they do best just better. I helped train on the audit and accounting software and then I did onboarding and fell in love with enablement and I’ve been continuing to do some sort of that for the past five years in different organizations.

SS: I love that. Thank you Jessica for joining us. Now, on the point of onboarding, which you just kind of closed out on, can you tell us a little bit about your perspective on the key components of an effective onboarding program?

JH: Oh absolutely, I mean there’s so many, but to kind of break it down, I have like the key four components to think about. First and foremost, I’m super passionate about making it welcoming. We all know starting a new job and a new experience is super scary, so when you have new hires you may have somebody that has been experienced in the industry and some that might just have zero experience. This may be their first job out of college or this might be their job to retirement, so you have to kind of be that person to make them feel welcome and make them feel comfortable, which kind of leads into my second component here, which is when you make them feel comfortable, you have to give them a clear roadmap and expectations. What kind of skills, behaviors, industry knowledge, and tools are they expected to achieve in 30, 60, 90 days and then beyond and then not only what, but how is enablement going to help them get there? Giving them the kind of support that they need. Again, a new job is super scary and they need a person to go to, to ask the questions, and to be vulnerable with to truly succeed. I really focus on building those kinds of relationships and when you build those relationships, it actually allows you to seek their opinions after onboarding to evaluate the success and maybe where things need to evolve, which I’m going to get to in a moment.

Then, thirdly, leadership support. Leadership support is crucial to any sort of effective onboarding program. You need to work closely with the managers, supporting them and the new hires, identifying and agreeing on clear expectations and roles. What will enable my own, what will leadership own and what will we own together? We have a clear understanding that allows the program to run smoothly and allows the reps to understand those sorts of expectations and have the support to be able to do so. Then, lastly, which I kind of touched on in my second key point onboarding is ever-evolving. Onboarding should have key criteria metrics and frameworks, but things change, and platforms change. Right now we are seeing a huge economic change. So you need to be and yes, I am going to insert the buzzword here of agile, you need to make sure that things are relevant up to date, and that your information and the information that your reps are getting, that they’re getting to be successful. Those wrap up my four components of an effective program.

SS: Absolutely. You touched on this a little bit about how important it is to make onboarding fun and engaging. How does learning engagement help drive knowledge and skill retention?

JH: Shawnna, this is my favorite part. I love fun, I love being able to see what it does to keep knowledge and skill retention. When we get new hires, we’re all adults, we learn in so many different ways, but at some point, we all bring some sort of amazing experience and that’s how we learn. I really believe in teaching a concept rather than practicing that concept with peers to learn and grow with each other. I always say this to my new hires, but if you’re uncomfortable, good news, you’re growing and you’re learning I think the retention piece comes from the practice, but it can also be taught through the concept of a story. Concepts of stories are so powerful because it helps you relate and actually practice that in real life and I believe that that’s where it all comes from. For instance, my daughter is working really hard at soccer. She came up with short-term and long-term goals. That’s kind of the curse of having an enablement mom, right? Then she talked to her coach and her coach shortly to do it, and practice them here. Practice it here and then get really good at them and use them in the games, don’t be afraid to fail and I think that’s so powerful and applies to onboarding because that’s what we’re teaching our new hires and being able to relax them and with stories, they’re able to enjoy their own and then they have more knowledge, share better ways to bring it around and bring it around to that skill that they can practically apply to their job role.

SS: I love that. I think that that is fantastic. What are some best practices that you’ve learned along the way around maximizing engagement during the onboarding process?

JH: Yeah, absolutely. I touched on it a little bit by sharing my own story, but it’s getting in the trenches. It’s understanding the language, the business, the process, the sales cycle, and maybe you’re sharing a time that you messed up, you did something wrong and just being human. Then sometimes you share things that you did really, really well. Let them know and understand that you’ve been there. A lot of times when we think about sales and prospecting and calling and closing deals, we talk about personalization and customization for our prospects and our clients and this just rolls right into onboarding. It’s human nature to want to feel heard. Everyone has a life outside of the role that they are hired for. So what is their, why, why, sales, why this job, if you could figure that out, relate to it and if they can relate to it, you have better success with engagement. Last but not least, as I’m sure you guys can tell, I love to have fun, so having fun and I know this is another surprise, but typically salespeople are a smidge competitive, so making it fun by throwing in some Gamification, this will help that retention and that doesn’t stop at 30, 60, 90 days, that’s continuous. This is always a great way to throw in some fun as they navigate all the tools and resources that they have at their disposal and they continue to learn.

SS: I think that’s fantastic, especially in today’s business landscape, I think it’s increasingly important for business leaders to know how their investments in talent development and hiring are translating to performance, especially. What are some of the ways that you measure the success of onboarding and how do you go about tying that to performance metrics that your leadership cares about?

JH: When you’re measuring success, you look at the main KPIs, right? So from the first time to deal, demo, how many meetings are booked, what’s the annual sales price, pipeline book, these are all really big things that leadership is looking for and to make sure that you have an effective onboarding and also the time it takes to get them to that. As we measure this through the 30, 60, and 90 days and beyond, we also need to take a deeper look into why they are driving those big behaviors. Take a look at skills and behaviors and things like, are they bringing in multiple people, are they doing the correct exit criteria for moving a deal along if they’re not, are they getting stuck somewhere? Are they able to customize their talk track and demo to different stakeholders? Are they speaking the language? All of those things are taking the big first time to demo meetings booked and all of that and taking the skills and behaviors and making sure that was hitting on them in the onboarding to make them successful and make sure that they get from point A to point B quicker, faster and more efficiently.

This is where I am so very thankful for our tech stack is to be able to listen in to those calls to see those behaviors and tie them back and have more consistent success with that by being able to also bring this back to, as I mentioned before and the key components, onboarding is ever evolving. I mentioned our economy is a little bit different, which means that prospects buy a little bit differently. We have to make sure to continuously have those things, skills, and behaviors and our onboarding to make sure they’re successful so when leadership looks at the time it’s taking that it means what they’re looking for in their expectations as well and we can do that with just storytelling through data. When I talk about stories telling through data, it’s pulling all of these things of what’s the why being it, is there a skill gap? Are there a few reps that need extra attention or is it an overarching gap that we need to be able to fill and address onboarding? Is at the top of the funnel, where are we getting stuck? Is it at the bottom of the funnel? All of these things that you can find in data and your story tell it to leadership, you fix it, you evolve, you’re agile and you move in and to be able to continue to measure the success of your onboarding.

SS: I love that. Now you alluded to this a little bit but I would love to drill in. How can enablement, help accelerate ramp time to help reps become more productive more quickly within their organization?

JH: Enablement can help accelerate ramp time by helping them truly understand. I always like to think about it and I know I’m going to put a really technical term on the table, but when I put my butt in the seat what do I need to know? What is the need to know? I need to put myself in their shoes, right, I’ve been a rep, I’ve been there before and so when you’re a new hire you’re inundated with all this information. I like to think of it kind of like the mind-blown emoji that kind of comes up. We don’t want to do that to them, so what do I need to know during week one, what’s important in week two, week three, and beyond? We don’t want to cripple them. Enablement can help with this productivity by working extremely close to leadership and as amazing as enablement is we need support from leadership to accomplish this kind of success. Again, it goes back to what’s enablement role, what’s a leadership role, and what’s the rep’s role. As you continue to do that and not intimidate them, just make sure that they get what they need, the support they need. It’s kind of like coaching week one, this is the information, let’s get really good at it. Now, week two and that takes everybody.

SS: Absolutely. Last question for you, Jessica. With the current economic climate, retaining high-performing reps is obviously top of mind for a lot of organizations. What advice do you have for ensuring reps can continue performing and achieving success post-onboarding?

JH: Yeah, absolutely. I mean it’s kind of this weird setting that we’re in nowadays, but continuing to look at the data and any gaps where there’s maybe there’s something about a skill or behavior or product knowledge gap, and let’s do it before it’s a fire drill. If possible, get a training calendar out there so they know what trainings are coming up and make it relevant to them. When they are invested in the training, growing, and company, they will stay. Continuing to open that welcome environment. I continuously have scheduled office hours or role plays. Yes. I said role plays. I know how everybody can feel about those and even as much as people dread them, I always say it’s a great way to be prepared for the clients and learn. That’s where it goes back to having fun and welcoming mistakes and room for growth. so when they can make that call, do the demo, and or maybe have that pricing call, they’re prepared.

Also, following the same idea when they were onboarded. Teach and then practice. I think that when we think about success post onboarding, it’s having a clear path forward. Where do I want to be? As I said before you have new hires that might be their first job out of college or some that are looking for retirement, you also have people that want to move up in the company, so let’s give them a path and let give them the tools, the resources, and enablement they need to be able to get there. When I kind of think about all of this in a really big hole is that if there’s just kind of like this key takeaway, it’s that it takes a village. It takes a strategic village. Learning never stops, there are always ways to improve and it’s our job in enablement to identify that work with leadership, and work with our reps new and seasoned to deliver the most effective programs.

SS: Jessica. I think this is phenomenal. Thank you so much for talking to us about how you approach onboarding at your organization. I appreciate the time.

JH: Absolutely thank you so much, Shawnna. It was a pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Dianne Kleber from Paradox join us. Dianne, I would love for you to introduce yourself, and your role in your organization to our audience.

Dianne Kleber: Thank you for having me here today. As you said, I’m Dianne Kleber and I am the VP of sales enablement at Paradox. If you’re not familiar with Paradox, we help companies with their talent acquisition. We do this through our text and conversational ai chat tool and we have so much fun doing this. I’m having so much fun in this role in sales enablement. It’s actually my first official sales enablement role, but I say it all the time, and this is part of my background. I have been a seller, a sales leader, and passionate about sales enablement for my entire career. I started in high school selling shoes at a shoe store and from the moment I sold that first pair of shoes, I’m like oh I’m sold. This is what I want to be doing and have really throughout my entire career been focused on helping sellers be the best they can be through training, coaching, and leadership.

SS: I’m excited to have you here. Based on your experience surrounding enablement and as you mentioned, your experience as a sales leader as well, what is the value of enablement for sales leaders?

DK: It’s so interesting because sales leaders, prior to sales enablement being its own thing, sales leaders had to do it all. They had to absolutely lead teams through all efforts and help them to be the best that they can be. They were even doing training and whatnot. Now, what’s super exciting is this is a team effort. I love the fact that I get to work with the other sales leaders at Paradox and we put our heads together and really try to figure out exactly what our team needs quarter over the quarter so that we can achieve our goals. The value of enablement for sales leaders is, I think number one, that they’re not doing it alone. I know that when I was leading sales teams, even though I was one of many leaders within the company, I felt like I was alone many times. The enablement teams that are now out there, we’re partnering up with those sales leaders and really making a difference. The value of those sales leaders is that they can focus on exactly what they need to do related to deals, deals strategy, and those types of things, and allow folks like myself who can really work on elevating the sales team to the next level.

SS: I think that’s absolutely true that there is a ton of value delivered to sales leaders from enablement. One area where I often see enablement partner really closely with sales leaders is around coaching. I noticed that LinkedIn coaching is one of your areas of expertise. How has your background as a sales leader influenced how you create coaching programs?

DK: Coaching is my passion in both sales leadership and the enablement side. I think the time that I spent as a sales leader has greatly influenced how I’m developing programs now because I was in the weeds and I had the experience of sellers of different levels. There were folks that this was their first job and then there were some that had been doing it for years and years and each of those reps had different needs and skills. The thing that’s beautiful about coaching is that it meets those folks where they are. That’s the goal. Training, on one hand, says, okay, we have this track and we know these folks need this knowledge, whereas coaching is like I want to meet you where you are and help you get to the next place you want to be. By being that sales leader and understanding like I would at one point I was managing 17 individual contributors, which is way too many, everybody knows that, but 17 individual contributors are direct managers. That’s 17, 1 on 1 meeting in a week and every single one was different.

Now, as I work on coaching programs, it’s focused on how we allow each of the reps to be their individual selves to meet them where they are, and the other side of it too is I feel very strongly that everybody shows up really trying to do their best every day. We don’t want to make anybody wrong, we want to help them find the best way for them to be right on that given day. Really, a lot of thought goes into how we create a coaching program that allows that to happen, but at the same time has a container or a space that really allows you to measure the growth and the change of a rep. There are a number of components that absolutely go into that.

SS: As you mentioned there, there are a lot of different types of coaching, You’ve mentioned one on one coaching. Can you share with our audience the difference between one on one and group coaching and your perspective on either the value of both, but in particular one-on-one coaching?

DK: I think they both really have great value. Group coaching, I find, is generally centered around a topic or an event and it relies on peer involvement and sharing of wisdom. I think those are fantastic coaching sessions and an example of that would be, I’ve had some coaching programs where we asked reps to bring a call recording to a session, and maybe it’s around a given topic or it might be a snippet of that recording, and they play that recording and then we all put our heads together on what we heard and how that rep could make it better and just offering suggestions. We do that too with a deal strategy session. Group coaching is really great for that pure brainstorming and shared wisdom.

On the other hand, one thing that I particularly love about the one-on-one coaching is it allows that rep to be the unique seller, a unique person that they are. It also allows them to be vulnerable and authentic. When I’m coaching, I establish this is a safe space and everything that we talk about remains confidential. In a really great one-on-one coaching session that rep can get to the place where they’re like, okay, I do want to get better, these are the challenges I have and they can be honest with themselves, honest with me if they’re coaching with their manager just having that really open conversation. That allows a level of accountability with that.

In one-on-one coaching, I just want to call out two different areas. Number one is skill coaching, that’s things like, hey, I’m struggling with X and I need to know how to do it better. There are things like call reviews, we can evaluate calls and meetings with a rubric and we can have specific skills that we’re seeking. Skill coaching is fantastic and that tends to be a little bit more of a conversation around what I should do is the timing and the pace, you know, those types of conversations. Number two, there’s another layer of coaching that is around growth and this is where a rep is saying, I think I’m doing an okay job, but I know I want to be better, get better, but it’s not a specific skill, it’s more around, well, I’ll be honest, it’s really up to that particular individual, what’s important to them, where they want to go, what they want to work on. For example, I’ve been in coaching sessions where someone just wants to work on just attitude and showing up day after day because sales are hard. We all know this and it takes a lot out of you and you have to really have an amazing attitude day after day how do you do that? Sometimes that’s what we’re talking about is how we bring the right energy to a day, whereas another rep can come in and say I’m absolutely struggling with getting my workouts in and that’s so important to me in my professional life as well as my personal life and so sometimes a coaching session is around how they are going to find a way to get their workout in. Growth coaching is really fun stuff, but skills coaching, at the same time, those little tactical things help make that person better day after day. I love the one-on-one.

SS: I love that as well. How would you say mindset plays a role in the effectiveness of one on one coaching and what mindset would you recommend leaders have when they go into a one-on-one session with a rep?

DK: Mindset is huge on both sides. Let me start with the rep themselves. I think everybody could probably relate to this. You can’t be coached if you don’t want to be coached. The rep needs to show up saying yes I’m here, I’m going to do the work, and I’m going to allow myself to be coached. The flip side of that is the leader. One of the things I know, when I prepare myself for a coaching session, is it’s almost like a little mantra that I say before I even get on a call, I have to give myself the space to let go of everything I was doing prior to that session, providing focus, turn the phone off, step away from everything, but then actually saying to myself, my role here is to help this rep discover all the possibilities for themselves.

It’s funny that coaching is a lot like doing a really great discovery in the sales process and that you don’t have to know the answers to the questions, you just have to know the right questions to ask. The mindset of curiosity I think is the most important thing a sales leader needs to have. I know that there have been times where there’s maybe a day where I’m just not 100% focused and we’ve all done this thing to where it’s like, oh I think I know what they’re going to say next, and make that assumption. If you can have the mindset of curiosity, and openness and I am here to ask the right questions so this person really figures out on their own where they need to go, those are the best coaching sessions. Mindset is huge in this and there’s actually, I would say, for anyone who is listening and thinking about starting a coaching program or bringing more coaching into your leadership role, I would even suggest if you have a day where you’re like, I just don’t feel like I’m ready or I don’t know that I’m in the right mindset, I would say don’t do the session. It’s actually better to say that and say, I think we need to come back to this another day, another time when I’m in the right space to work with you. My mindset is huge.

SS: That’s absolutely fantastic. Do you have some recommendations or advice for the next steps post-coaching call? Is there a process that you use for ensuring that the behaviors that were discussed in the coaching were actually implemented?

DK: I think there are a couple of ways to do this and I’ve done it a few different ways. My favorite is having the rep hold themselves accountable, so creating an accountability plan that we co-create. I could certainly set up a number of accountability structures, but really if the rep wants to have change and really grow, they are the ones that need to create the accountability plan. I like the method of let’s co-create, what’s the plan that you need to or want to follow, and then even going as far as seeking an accountability partner. It’s one thing to say to your sales leader or coach if you’re working separately with either a leader or a coach or both, something to say to them, but then it’s another thing to say it to appear as a friend. An accountability plan can look a lot of different ways and a lot of times requires some visual triggers or cues. Some folks like post-its, some like notepads, and some like images that they have to put up, like what is the cue that you need to put in place to remember the habit that you’re trying to create here.

The flip side of this is that in an actual structured coaching program, there could be an actual document. Just like I’m a huge fan of sales one on one meetings which are different from sales, one on one coaching sessions but having some kind of a document where everybody’s keeping track of what we talked about and it’s a shared document that both the sales leader and the rep can access and reference. Same with the coaching, having that accountability plan but also having a document where you’re keeping track of what are the behaviors, specifically when we’re talking about skills coaching because skills coaching, as I mentioned before, I’m a fan of a rubric, especially if we’re evaluating calls or a manager sitting in on an actual meeting, let’s have that rubric, let’s document that and actually document what that rep wants to work on so that you can go back the next time and say, okay, how’s it going and really see if there are other tactics and other things that we need to talk through.

SS: I love that. Last question for you Dianne, how can coaching impact sales productivity?

DK: It’s funny that you ask this because I just had this conversation with our CRO last week. I have certainly in my career seen a lot of different methods for increasing or impacting sales productivity. Training is obviously huge. There are certain things that everybody needs to know to become more productive. Tools and technology are such a huge part of sales productivity and making sure that every team member knows how to use those tools is so important. I think, especially with newer reps, and what I mean by newer, it could be someone early in their career or someone new to the organization, which we’ve had this huge growth at Paradox, so we have a lot of folks who’ve joined the team in the last 6-9 months, and one on one coaching, I think actually has the greatest impact on those newer sellers. Really working with them on both the skills as well as the growth and taking the time to meet with them is important. It’s like the 1% rule. If you can get 1% better every day then by the end of the year you’re going to be an amazing space.

Coaching can impact not just productivity but actually can impact the end results and revenue. I think any organization if you have those new sellers or reps who are going along in their career and get a little stagnant, coaching can take them to the next level where they learn some new tricks. You can teach old-selling dogs new tricks and become more productive. I really think it has a huge impact and if I could say what would be the best thing you can do for your sales team, it would be to work in a coaching program if you don’t already have one.

SS: I love that. Dianne, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your insights on coaching. It’s been a fantastic conversation.

DK: Thank you. It has been such a pleasure as you can probably tell, I love it, I’m passionate about it and it makes me want to go and coach someone.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I am excited to have Lisa Contini from Redis join us. Lisa, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Lisa Contini: Thank you so much for inviting me to share my experience. I am the Vice President of sales enablement and go-to-market strategy for Redis. I started my career in sales many years ago out of college and I would say in the nineties I found a niche as an independent contractor and then built a business with my sisters where we worked with very large technology companies like HP, Oracle, and Cisco, helping them drive adoption around their sales methodology because many companies had methodologies that just sat in a binder on a bookshelf. What I did not realize at the time was that I was pioneering this concept of sales enablement. I’ve been in the field for probably 20 years or so. I have a lot of practical experience in sales and it’s my passion.

SS: Well, I’m excited to have you here with us today, Lisa. I’d love to jump right in based on your extensive experience in enablement, particularly around helping sales. In this current economic climate predicting trends is vital. Can you explain how you use data and analytics to identify early signs of potential decline in your seller’s productivity?

LC: Absolutely. Taking a look at leading indicators is really where the magic is. For years, many people would use lagging indicators. Many companies use lagging indicators such as the percentage of sellers to reach quota or even looking at quarterly or half yearly or yearly revenue goals. The problem, of course, is that looking at those numbers is that they’re lagging indicators and it doesn’t give you any time to fix anything. We take a fairly detailed look at all sorts of leading productivity indicators. That is everything from the number of new contacts that are added to our customer database. The number of contacts that are put into different sorts of sequences for the purpose of outreach through the number of meetings that an individual has. Then, we also look at things like deal age and conversion rates, etcetera. There’s really a whole plethora of numbers that we look at and we look at them constantly in order to find those trends that will signal sometimes it can be a different product that is across a particular region, particular sales segment, or the whole company.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. What are some of the key metrics that you track when it comes to sales productivity and how do you gather the right analytics?

LC: We actually, in the last two years have really focused on operationalizing how we use data to identify trends and sales productivity. One of the things that we did is we put together a scorecard that allows us to look all the way down to the rep level. Let me start there. With the individual sellers, we have about four different categories that we track for productivity. We look at data in the pipeline build and account planning, opportunity management, and close deals. Those are the different areas that we know provide us with these leading indicators. For account planning, it can be things like the number of account plans, and the activity on account plans, it’s not just about having the plan but it’s actually having the activity, and some of those activities will be like new opportunities created as a result of that plan. That’s a little bit of a longer-term view that we look at because account planning tends to be half-yearly and yearly.

The next category is what we call the top of the funnel and that’s where we look at pipeline generation. We look at pipeline generation, and certainly, as a company as a whole, we take a look at what marketing produces. We take a look at what is delivered through our sales development organization, but also reps. It’s very important for reps to own the building of their pipeline. We take a look at not just the pipeline ad, but also conversion rates and the age of that pipeline. When it comes to opportunity management we have a program that was developed by somebody on my team called Deal Health. We have a sales methodology that we piece together based on all the best things that are out in the market. Then, a gentleman on my team worked with sales operations to actually build this methodology into our CRM by sales stage.

Now, what that allows us to do then is to gather data and analyze data that shows us not just where the deal is in terms of the sale stages but at each sales stage there are different elements for health. That may have to do with who we’ve met, whether have we identified a business problem that the customer agrees needs to be fixed, etcetera. There are these different subcategories of data at each sales stage that we’re monitoring and that has a weight and a score against them. Now, as a seller or as a sales manager, I can take a look at the deals in a dashboard for any period of time, for this month, for this quarter based on the pipeline or sale stage. I can look and see what’s the health of these deals and where there may be a subscore. Then, it gives the salesperson and the manager an indication of where they need to be digging into that deal.

That’s an example of these are a couple of examples of things that we do at the rep level. Also at the rep level, one of the things that we’ve just started implementing that we do for each of our sellers is we created a scorecard for them that looks at their individual pipeline build, their own conversion rates, their average sales price, their average discount, their attainment, and we can look and based on that information we can tell somebody based on their productivity and activity, it looks like the number of meetings they are having per week needs to be stepped up a little bit because if they continue down the path based on their past performance they are going to end up short. Does that make sense, conceptually at least?

SS: It does and I love that. In fact, I’d like to drill in a little bit more on that, Lisa, because to the point that you’re making around seeing trends in some of the analytics that you’re looking at. Can you explain your process for determining how you then go about doing course correction?

LC: Yes, absolutely. We do look at the individual level, as I mentioned, but we also look at the sales organization by the market like whether it’s our mid-market or enterprise or strategic and we look at the aggregate numbers which are important to look at in order to find where there are within that sales role cross-functional dips in the attainment of these different metrics. Now, one of the things that I absolutely recommend to anybody that chooses to do this is that you look at medians because averages can hide lapses across a team. What I mean by that is you can look at a sales manager and say, wow, they’ve hit their quota every quarter over the past two years, but then if you look at the median attainment of each person on their team you can see often times that there’s a huge exposure to risk because they’re making that number based on one or two people. What we do is we have different metrics that we look at across each segment or part of a sales engagement cycle. We have those metrics that we talked about. We look at that for example, that is the top of the funnel, we look at conversion rates at the top of the funnel. Then we take a look at what’s going on mid-funnel and we’ll look at how we are doing with regard to the length of time that a deal is in a stage of qualifier scope versus onto the to the next place where it should go. We take a look at these metrics and the next thing we do is look at those metrics against different cuts of the sales organization, meaning attainment.

We look at those that are under 25% attainment, which we understand many times can have people that are ramping. We look up to 25% then we look at 25 to 70% and then 70% to 100 100% and over. The reason why we do that is that there’s nothing worse than investing time and money with sellers who are already doing just fine. We find that segmenting our sellers by attainment and then mapping these different leading indicators of data against that it helps us be able to narrow in on a group of people that are all struggling with likely a particular area of skill, tactics, or knowledge. Then, what we do is we have coursework that we have set up across all of those stages. What we do going into a new quarter, we go to the managers and we’ll say based on the scorecard, it looks like this person and this person are doing a really great job when it comes to getting their pipe built, but they’re lagging and they’re not getting stuff closed. You can see there’s this huge drop off after 60 days, it goes into nowhere as land. We’d like to have those folks join our workshop on accelerating deals through the late stages.

SS: Absolutely. I like your approach to that now. I noticed on LinkedIn that you have implemented a plan that significantly contributed to a 32% improvement in sales productivity. Right now improving sales productivity is definitely something that is top of mind for a lot of organizations. Can you share more about how you went about doing that?

LC: One of the ways that we did it, I don’t wanna say it’s counterintuitive but not what you would expect, which is we made a concerted effort to clean all garbage out of our pipeline. Our data will tell us after a certain date there’s a cliff. The chances of a deal closing after, let’s just say 90 days, it drops down to like .2%. One of the ways that we increased productivity was by removing those opportunities that reps should not be even focusing on and removing them from the pipeline. I’d love to say that it was our skills, although we did skills training, part of what we did is we helped reset a salesperson’s mind to less is more. It’s not about having 30 or 60 or 80 open opportunities that you haven’t touched in whatever period of time, but rather it’s about prioritizing your opportunities in any given quarter using data, both data that we have and external market data that are now available that will tell you things like this customer appears to be in a buying mood et cetera. We teach our reps how to focus and amazingly when you remove opportunities and deals and busy work and you force the reps to work on only a certain number of opportunities, the productivity in three quarters completely turned. It was amazing.

SS: Those are some very impressive results. I think you’re spot on when it comes to folks being a really important thing to drive for your sales reps, particularly in the year ahead. I’d love to understand how you take the work that you’re doing, the enablement initiatives, and what are some of your best practices for correlating those initiatives to the improvement that’s being seen in sales productivity.

LC: Good question. I’ve mentioned a lot so far about these different dashboards and data points that we look at. When we put together a dashboard we first work with sales leadership to gain agreement and this can be not just sales leadership, I should say this includes leadership from finance and from operations etcetera, and we’ll say, okay, do we agree that these four or five metrics are the best ones for us to be looking at with regard to, let’s say it’s pipeline development is a place where we’ve been having problems. Last year, as many people did, especially as this year has gone on, we started to see some big slips in pipeline generation. We looked at the analytics, and the data that we were using, and we gained agreement across all businesses that was okay. We agree that if we can move these leading indicators then we’ll be successful. The next thing we did then is we said, here’s our proposal, leadership team, these are the different workshops, coaching sessions, sales tools, these are the different requirements that we recommend that sales managers hold their salespeople to for this next quarter.

We get their agreement, and then the most important thing that we do is we report that out weekly, to at least two front-line management. Each week the SDR manager knows these are all of their SDRs here, here’s how they all are against their quota. These three people had a lagging indicator with the completing sequences or something and here’s how they’ve improved. By sharing the data at that level at the appropriate level of depth for the sales role and keeping in constant contact with the sales manager while we’re working with their reps, they can reinforce it and they’re always seeing those numbers. As a sales manager, I think that’s probably the hardest job in sales these days because there are many different competing priorities that are sort of begging for your attention. I actually see it in my team, we see it as our job to be watching those dials and surfacing these data indicators to the managers so that they know this is what we’re working on with their salespeople so that they can reinforce it.

SS: I love it. I think that’s phenomenal. Last question for you, Lisa, and I really appreciate the time I’ve learned so much already. We’ve talked a lot about how times are changing significantly right now and many enablement teams are really needing to prove their value. How do you leverage data and analytics to communicate enablement value to some of your stakeholders?

LC: Let me give you an example. We rolled out a new onboarding program last year and in the development of that onboarding program, we did some of the things that we do for all different parts of the business, which was, we looked at the last few years of data that we had around the performance of our ramping reps and we created targets. We looked at the last three years, the sellers that ramped the most quickly and the most successfully, here is what their activity looked like. Those were the metrics that we used in order to report back to leadership on how effective our onboarding was because our arm boarding program then, all of the different content pieces and segments were directly aligned with moving the needle in those different areas.

For example, in order to drive pipeline, a seller needs to understand the market that we’re in, the competitive landscape, and the differentiators of our product and they need to be able to articulate that. We would take metrics around pipeline ad and persona engagement and we would use that as a measure of okay, this is we’re going to say that we’re doing well with the content that we’re teaching around market and persona because we’re seeing a successful ramp against building a pipeline with that persona. One of the ways that we can communicate our value to stakeholders is through data and numbers. The other thing is by being actively involved with our sellers and with our manager’s side by side using our own personal sales skills and experience.

I’m kind of picky with my team, I require anybody that’s on the sales enablement team to have recent meaning within the last 3 to 4 years, and recent relevant sales experience, it’s a really difficult thing to try to earn credibility with sellers and sales leaders if you’ve never been out there doing it yourself. Not only are we able to communicate or show our value by things like here’s the numbers. Look, we have this program, and isn’t it getting better, but also by our participation in go-to-market strategy meetings, how we partner with our alliances and partner organization and with our marketing organization and we see our function as the glue between these different parts of the business that need to work together in concert in order to deliver results. I think it’s a combination of the numbers that we have to back up the assertions that we make and then the ability to have really credible conversations around sales and selling and strategy with our leaders.

SS: I think that is phenomenal. Thank you so much, Lisa, for sharing some of your best practices and tips and tricks around how to leverage analytics to help reinforce enablement value. Really appreciate the time.

LC: You bet. It’s my pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Shawn Fowler from RevenueReady join us. Shawn, I would love it if you would introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Shawn Fowler: Thank you for having me today. My name is Shawn Fowler and last year started a company called RevenueReady with a couple of partners. Before that, I really had three careers. My undergrad degree is in philosophy which got me a great job waiting tables, so I went back and got a degree in computer programming and did IT and programming for a while and then ended up doing academic research before I went to grad school. After that, I ended up doing training at a startup and it was mostly the technical training part of the startup. People kept telling me ‘you should be a sales engineer’ and I kept thinking I definitely don’t want to be in sales, I think they’re bad people, and I definitely think I’m not that kind of person. Then I found out how much more sales engineers made than me and decided that I did want to be a sales engineer.

My first foray into sales was sales engineering at a company called Silverpop. We sold email marketing software and I loved it. Being a sales engineer was awesome. It took me a while to figure out how to be a sales engineer instead of a trainer because I think I initially was really training more than anything else and I had a few sales leaders and sales reps who essentially taught me how to sell instead of train. I did that for a while and ended up going into services sales and then went into sales enablement. I didn’t even know what it was but basically, I was told that I would be good at it when they were hiring their first sales enablement person at Silverpop.

After that IBM acquired Silverpop and I ended up being responsible for taking the Silverpop brand to market in Latin America, Japan, and China. For 2.5 or 3 years I was basically doing international sales and go-to-market. That got kind of old and I got tired of traveling so much and I had a young family. After that, I ended up going back into enablement there at IBM for our business unit before joining Salesloft, which was a wonderful place to work. I essentially got to build the sales enablement program there and got to teach salespeople to sell sales software to other salespeople which mean you get to study sales a lot. Then, a couple of years ago I joined a company called Attentive which was fantastic because Attentive has a sales-assisted PLF sales motion, so I got to learn more about that. That’s my background in a nutshell.

SS: I love it. You definitely have a diverse background. I want to dig in because you said you have a Ph.D. in educational psychology with a focus on motivation. How does this expertise give you a unique perspective as an enablement leader?

SF: It’s interesting. I didn’t even know enablement was a thing in 2012 and it actually sits at the intersection of what I really love. Sales, really when you get down to it, is applied psychology. It’s basically taking principles of persuasion, and principles of education and applying them in a real-world setting and figuring out what works and what doesn’t work. My approach to enablement is a combination of what I’ve learned through actually selling and being in sales management and then what I learned through my education in graduate school studying educational psychology.

I think a lot about motivation and learning and how to create situations in which people come to the conclusions that I have come to because ultimately selling and teaching is kind of the same thing. You’re trying to get someone to see things the way that you see them and come to the conclusions that you’ve come to and a lot of people in teaching and a lot of people in sales try to push. They try to get someone to accept their opinions, they try to get someone to accept their approaches and this almost never works. In fact, it often creates resistance. A much better way to approach selling and a much better way to approach teaching is to create an environment in which people can see what you’re seeing and come to the conclusions that you’ve come to. I think a lot about that when I tried to create enablement programs, I think a lot about that when I’m actually leading a classroom and I think a lot about that whenever I’m selling,

SS: That’s fantastic. Now, what would you say though are potentially some common barriers to motivation that you’ve seen in sales learning programs, and what do you think is the root cause of some of those challenges?

SF: There are as many barriers to the success of enablement programs as there are stars in the sky, to be honest with you. One of my favorite quotes is the opening line of Anna Karenina by Tolstoy it says ‘all happy families are the same, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ and I think that’s probably true of most dysfunctional things, including enablement programs. The biggest obstacle to motivation and success and enablement programs is frankly that the reps don’t want to do it. They think it’s a waste of time, and there’s a variety of reasons they could think that. One is they just want to spend their time selling. Two, they might think that the thing that you want them to learn is not important or not something they need to work on. Three, a lot of times there’s a lack of buy-in from leadership, and a lot of times you have all three of those things going on at once and that’s not a very easy situation to approach.

The way around that a lot of times is actually getting buy-in from the start from leadership. Like, as collaborating with leadership on what specifically they would like to focus on in order to improve the performance of their reps. This is best done at the front-line manager level because you can sit down and have conversations about where the gaps are in performance and when you’re doing that you need to start with data like having very specific team and individual level data that you can use to say, hey, it looks like you’ve got a problem with creating opportunities for instance on your team. If you can increase your opportunity volume and get them up to speed with some of these other teams, it looks like you’re going to have much better outcomes as a result, you’re more likely to hit your number. These specific reps seem to be the ones who have the biggest problem with opportunity creation. Could be discovery, could be demoing, could be progressing deals that are late stage and closing whatever, but having the data that helps you identify where those gaps are is really the starting point because that allows you to prioritize. If you’re not having a data-focused conversation, you end up in this weird situation as an enablement leader where you’re waiting to be told what to do by someone who is having ideas, but those ideas might not always be the ones that are the most important and you end up kind of being a junk drawer as a result of that. Starting with the data, working with leadership is the first thing.

The second one is actually getting the reps to see what you see as well, and for that, it’s really useful to use tools like Gong or Chorus, or Salesloft where people can go in and see their own calls. I’m a big fan of self-scoring. Getting people to actually score their own calls and to score the calls of others with a guided scorecard, is really important actually, you have to give them a good focus scorecard because if you don’t, people don’t always pay attention to the most important things. But getting people to self-score is really important because it allows them to begin to understand where their actual gaps are and to think critically about how they’re conducting deals versus how someone else might be conducting a deal. Then, the final thing is recognition, and praise, like actually giving people the opportunity to be recognized for good work and praising people who are doing things well that you want other people to do. If you look at the research, money is necessary but not sufficient. People in sales typically like money, but a lot of times they like money because it’s an indicator of the fact that they are performing well. It is a form of recognition. Top salespeople typically like recognition from their peers and their superiors even more than money. Using that as an avenue to motivate people can be very effective as well.

SS: Absolutely. One of your specific areas of focus in your Ph.D. research that we’ve spoken about this was around motivating in online educational environments. How does motivation differ based on the environment that the learner is in and maybe what are some of the unique considerations for virtual programs?

SF: I spent seven years thinking about this when I was doing my research. It is something I’ve thought about a lot. If you look at a traditional learning environment, like a classroom-based learning environment versus a virtual learning environment, obviously the context is the biggest difference and the thing that I drilled in specifically on was the difference in social engagement. That can be engaged with your professor or your teacher as well as engagement with your fellow students mostly in informal ways. I think we’ve all had experiences in college, for instance, where you didn’t really like a class, you weren’t into it, but there was somebody who you would go grab coffee with after class or talk to on the way to the next class or you had this study group that likes kept you going at it. These are kind of these informal social interactions that really do a lot to motivate and reinforce people because identity plays such a key part in motivation.

My research is based on self-determination theory, which clauses there are three factors that are necessary for motivation. One is autonomy, so do I have the ability to control how I spend my time, how I spend my energy, and things like that? Obviously, that’s within some level of constraint, nobody has absolute autonomy either in a classroom or a work setting. The second one is competence, so do I feel like I’m good at what I’m doing? The third one is relatedness, do I feel like I’m part of something bigger than myself? How much have I incorporated that thing into my own personal identity? The first two things, autonomy, and competence are pretty well researched, the relatedness one isn’t as well researched and that’s what I focused a lot on and that really is the fundamental difference between a traditional and a virtual classroom setting.

Figuring out how to create opportunities for informal engagement is really important in motivating students in a virtual classroom because they don’t have those informal opportunities. They don’t feel necessary like they’re part of a classroom, part of this larger thing that is really important when it comes to motivation. What’s interesting is I finished my Ph.D. research in 2018 and 2 years later, the pandemic hit and suddenly everybody’s experiencing a lot of these same things from a work perspective, because we had this situation where pretty much everybody in software at least went remote and it’s not going back. I think we’re seeing a lot of those issues begin to arise associated with remote work. There’s a lot of depression, there are a lot of people who don’t feel like they’re part of this bigger culture for their team or this bigger culture for their company and that’s a real problem because when you don’t feel like you’re part of it, then you don’t end up putting the same level of effort in and you create these kinds of fragile or brittle teams who don’t have the resilience to get through hard times because they don’t feel that same sense of connecting this. So it’s really interesting because that’s something that we as a society are going to have to figure out over the next few years as we begin to move more and more to a remote environment.

SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve had conversations around just the social disconnect that the new way of working has seemed to have created in the workplace, to be honest. Do you have some best practices may be around motivating reps in this virtual, slightly more siloed environment?

SF: There are a few things. One is creating opportunities for informal interaction. I mean I started doing this when I was at IBM, I had 80-something people on my team at IBM and they were spread literally all over the world across five different continents. People had never met in person, and likely never would meet in person, and I wanted them to feel like they were part of something. A lot of times in my meetings, like it’s 50% work, really kind of 50% hanging out now. I was never explicit about the 50% hanging out piece because then it feels weird because you’re being forced to hang out, but that’s really kind of what was happening. I, as the leader, tried to be as vulnerable as possible and as transparent as possible. If you are a leader, it’s on you to kind of set the tone for what the rest of the team can do, you’re kind of establishing what is okay in your team from a cultural perspective and so I would share parts about my personal life, I would ask people how their weekend was. I would have a lot of those conversations that you would normally have and I would have those in a virtual setting instead of in a break room or around the water cooler or wherever you would have had them in a physical setting. It takes a minute because people aren’t used to it, but after a while, people begin to open up and start to share some of those things and I began to see it kind of trickle down a little bit in some of the conversations they would have with each other as well, which I found very valuable made me very happy.

Another thing that I pretty much always do is a daily stand up and again with the daily stand-up, it’s only part work. I mean there is a focus on like, hey what are you gonna knock out today, what are some of your blockers, what did you not get done yesterday? There’s also a lot of like, hey how’s it going, like that cup of coffee conversation you have in the morning because I think that makes people feel like they’re part of something else. Another thing that I focus on a lot is spotlighting people. If you have a sales all-hands on a weekly or biweekly basis, like identify reps who are doing a really good job and spend 10 minutes interviewing them. Interview them with someone on how they perform well, but also give people an opportunity just to get to know that rep. Like where are they from? Where did they go to school? What do they do for fun? When you don’t have the opportunity to get to know people like that informally, you have to start to formally incorporate that into what you do.

SS: Absolutely Shawn, this has been phenomenal. Last question for you. In today’s world it feels like we want to be able to track everything, so how do you track rep motivation? Do you maybe have any tips on understanding how to correlate the impact of motivation on the effectiveness of enablement programs?

SF: It’s a tricky thing to track, there’s not like a good direct way to track it. I rely a lot on working with HR teams on engagement surveys. I think most companies now do at least a yearly engagement survey. I think many of them are also doing quarterly pulse surveys as well, and that’s really valuable because it helps me figure out how engaged are people, how motivated are people, and how much they feel like they’re part of their team in their organization. That’s one big factor. Another one is activity. People who are motivated do the activities that will get the outcomes. When you find people who are consistently engaging in those activities, you’ve got a motivated team. Those are the two biggest ways that I typically track that stuff.

SS: I love it, Shawn. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the insights that you’ve shared with us.

SF: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Chuck Marcouiller from Freightwaves join us. Chuck, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Chuck Marcouiller: My name is Chuck Marcouiller and I’m the Vice President of revenue enablement for Freightwaves. Freightwaves is an interesting space. We are sort of like the Bloomberg of the supply chain in that we’re a media company as well as a technology company, software as a service company, that supports the shippers, carriers, and brokers on anything that moves by ship, road, and rail. We’re sort of like the database that says what it cost to move anything, where you go for business, and the analytics on anything within the supply chain. I’ve been with them for just about a year, but as far as enablement, I’ve been in pre-IPO SaaS and sales and sales enablement for about 27 years plus. That’s a little bit about my background and where I’m working right now.

SS: You and I have known each other for a while and I know that you have focused on building enablement programs broadly across sales, marketing, and customer success teams. I’d love to understand, what are some of your best practices for tailoring your programs to meet the needs of each of those roles.

CM: That’s a really interesting question. I’ve really built a career in pre-IPO SaaS companies over the past 10 years and as I’ve been doing revenue enablement programs, meaning working with everything from marketing to demand generation to new logo acquisition and then into CS, I’ve learned that as I’ve gone from company to company no size fits all and what I have to do when I come into a company is really sit down with senior leadership and figure out how we are making the cake here. I need to understand what is the program and what is the process we’re doing in order to be able to deliver the revenue and the buying experience for the customer. It always comes down to the buying experience. How are we trying to bring in the customers and what is the experience we’re trying to give to the customers in the product and the process that we’re trying to do and then back engineer into the sales process and make sure that we’re getting a scalable repeatable process that our sales teams can deliver to.

That’s what we’re really trying to do with enablement is how do we put in a program and a process that we can train our people to and then we can measure against to improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of our teams and ensure the overall success of the program and the people and the company as a whole. My best practices really sitting down and first analyzing, then sitting with my leadership and then putting together sort of a hypothesis of how we can take it to the next level and really understanding what’s there first and then bringing in best practices of how do we take that to the next level and what should we be measuring and what are the outcomes that we’re trying to deliver to and understanding that each role has a different piece to play, but every role is interlinked in order to bring that success for the customer. The customer really doesn’t care what each role is, as long as they’re getting the end outcome that they’re looking for and as long as we’re staying focused on what the customer is trying to achieve along that whole lifecycle from first look to full impact, it’s how do we sit there and engineer together to make sure that that’s achieved for what the customers are coming to us for.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now you mentioned briefly that when you’re starting the creation of a new program, you really sit and analyze the current situation at the onset and try to understand maybe what are some of the gaps between the current capabilities and the desired capabilities. How can enablement practitioners identify some of these gaps? What are some tips or tricks that you have about how to approach doing that?

CM: Well, it’s two parts. First, I come in and I say do we have a defined process? It’s funny when I come into a lot of different companies, I find that they really have a very loosely defined process. First of all, is there a documented process at all as far as the sales process, and then are they actually adhering to the sales process? This means oftentimes there’s something in a playbook or something that’s written down for a sales process and then I like to sit down and what I like to say is my listening tour is I’ll sit down with reps and with leaders and I say, so, how do we do this here? You know, what do you do on a day-to-day basis?
What is the experience that we take a customer through? Show that to me. I love tools to listen to the sales calls themselves to see what is actually happening in the street. Then I take my notes and I say, okay, so now that we’ve seen this thing, what’s actually happening and then we go and say, alright, now that we see what’s happening, I go back to sales ops and say show me the stats, how are things going along this process and what’s the conversion rates from the steps that we’re seeing within Salesforce?

It may sit there and say that, oh, you know, on paper, we’ve got a seven-step sales process from the first look from SQL to close won or close loss, but when you look at it in the actual feed on the street, they’re actually doing three steps. We do a first meeting, we do this long demo, we throw out a bid and then we start negotiating whether they’re actually going to go forward and go through some sort of legal process before we try to close them. That’s not what we’re trying to do and so we have this abysmal conversion rate and they wonder why the business is working or it’s not working, and we go, okay, well this is what the numbers we’re seeing from Salesforce and this are what people are saying is really happening in the street and well here’s what the paper process said that we were going to try to do, so how do we sort of get this all working together? Then we sit down and we sort of back engineer and say, alright, salespeople, why are we doing this deviating from what the standard we said we wanted to do, and then we pull it apart and then start building best practices back together. This is what I’ve been doing from, from one team to the next, and we say, okay, so here’s what we needed to do, and then here’s what’s really happening and we start pulling the skills and processes together.

One of the things that I found as we re-engineer the sales process to the buying experience that the customer is really expecting so that we can have success in what we’re trying to sell is looking for that domino rep. So, Shawnna, are you familiar with the term domino rep, what that concept is?

SS: No, love for you to tell me more.

CM: So one of the mistakes that I made early on in my enablement career is looking for a process and then saying, okay with leaders, here’s a process, let’s roll it out, and let’s see if the field adapts to it. You can train a process and then say, okay, here’s the slide deck, here’s the training, go forth and do great things. Then it goes out, and the sales reps try it, but it really doesn’t stick. What I found is that in any team, there are one or two reps who really are sort of the heart of that team, who everybody else looks at and says is she or he doing it? If they’re doing it then, are they having any success with it and if they’re having success with it, well then I got to try to. Those are your domino reps, those are the ones who everybody else looks to say, is it going to work or is it not going to work? If they can do it and if they’re doing it then it really does work.

I found that with my programs, one of the things that I’m going to try to do is I’m going to try to get that one or two reps that everybody else looks to and I’m going to co-op them early on in my process to have them look at my process and be part of the design process, have them try it and help me get the rough edges off it before I train and roll it out to anyone else. I find that when I train and put the process together and have that domino rep as part of the initial rollout, then it goes so much smoother. I get better feedback from the field and a lot better field adoption when we roll out the new process.

SS: I love that approach to getting reps on board with your programs. How do you go about partnering with other senior leaders, maybe in sales, marketing, customer success, and maybe even operations to align enablement programs with their priorities?

CM: I think you can’t please everybody with your enablement programs and I think one of the things right off the bat, you’ve got to figure out which master you’re going to serve and what you’re going to try to achieve right off the bat. You have to tackle a few programs and tackle them well and then make sure that you’re building the right partners along the way in order to achieve those. On a quarter-by-quarter basis, I sit down with my CRO and say, all right, what are the things that you want to move the needle on and why is this important for us to move the needle on? We can’t do everything, but what is the big bet that we have to have? We announced that together and built a consensus committee with the others and made sure that it was aligned with the same big bet that they were trying to make with my marketing partner or my partnership partner or the other senior leaders. Then, we are aligned on our QBRs as to what the big bet is, and we sit down and we say, okay, we know what the CRO wants us to do, or the CFO wants us to do, and then we can say, okay, so this is my project, here’s where we overlap, can I get your support and partnership on this and what do you need from me? We do a little horse trading. If I work on these things for you, will you help me with these things here?

That goes a long way because everybody understands what each other is trying to do and what support is going to be needed, what resources are going to need in order to make sure that all of us are successful and it’s not done in a vacuum. I know what my marketing partner is trying to achieve and they know what I’m trying to achieve so that I can make sure that she’s successful and she can make sure that I’m successful, but we’re all hearing it at the same time from our boss as to what they’re trying to move the needle on and we’re all working towards that same goal. It’s that goal alignment, when the goal alignment is done together, then we stand a chance to achieve it, but when we are each trying to do these things in a vacuum and we reach popcorn in each other going, hey, I need your help here or hey I need your help there and no one knows what each other are doing, that’s when we sort of get into conflict with each other.

SS: I really do like that approach of bringing all of those teams together. Now to ask a slightly different question, since you are building a lot of these learning programs for many of the revenue-facing teams from onboarding to ongoing training and coaching, how do you design the programs to maximize real role effectiveness across the different teams you support?

CM: Role effectiveness is one of those ongoing things that you are always trying to chase. I think it’s one of those things where you’ve got to sit down with your leaders and say, okay, what are we trying to tune, and why are we trying to tune that thing? One of the processes that I’ve adapted from my partners at winning by design, I brought an outside group in and I like what we call REKS. What are the results, efforts, knowledge, and skills? We sit down and we say, all right, instead of the lagging metrics of achieving quota, we say what is a leading metric, what is a leading result that we’re trying to do? Say for example, I’ve been working with my demand generation group and we want to increase the SQL to SAL, meaning the qualified leads to the accepted leads conversions and we say in order to be able to do that, that’s the result that we want to get, so what are the efforts that we have to do in order to do that? We list a bunch of efforts to do that and then we say, all right, what’s the knowledge that they have to have in order to be able to do that well, and then what are the skills that they have to do in order to be able to do that. One is the knowledge and then the other is the skill to be able to do it.

We break that down on a couple of things that we want to measure and we want to move forward in their overall ability and we pick one to two per roll and we try to work on that on a quarter-by-quarter basis with each of my leaders, them identifying and having, again, the domino reps help us identify how to do that. That kind of program of documentation and working on that as a whole has helped us get into a better routine of figuring out, not trying to boil the ocean, what are a couple of things that we can work on and build programs around to help everybody improve and feel like they’ve got a say in it, but also have things that we can achieve and have tangible metrics that we can go back to our senior leadership and say, hey, the investment that you’re making enablement in the investment that you’re making in skills and tools is having tangible results on the ultimate outcome that you want to have, which is sales.

SS: Absolutely. Now, speaking of tangible benefits, I’ve seen something that you shared on, LinkedIn about applying “sales-as-a-science” principles to designing enablement metrics. Can you walk us through that approach?

CM: Sales, by its very nature, you know, both art and science, the individual art of the delivery, but there’s always the measurements of each stage within your process to say, okay, as I go from stage to stage, what are my conversion rates as a whole within the team and then as an individual. How far off is the individual deviating from each stage within the steps of the process? We can measure those within the tools that we have, whether it’s conversations to appointments booked, from appointments to discovery calls, discovery calls to whatever stage is with the process, and we look at those and we say, okay, so what’s as a whole, within the team over time, is the team getting better, is the team getting better because the skill is getting better, is the economy getting better? What are the factors that are going into it? Then, what are we making as a leadership team, a bet on our investment within tools or programs to help our reps be more successful and who are we applying it to? Then we’re listening and coaching within tools such as Gong or Chorus to say, all right, what are we hearing, is that improving overall, and are we seeing within numbers?

There’s the balance between designing a program, rolling it out, coaching to that, and then measuring the overall effectiveness of that within the systems that we have to say, are we seeing an outcome to it, and then what does that mean? Sometimes we’re successful, sometimes we’re not successful and we have to go back to the drawing board and use the science of the data to say, what is this telling us, and then what are we going to do about it? Then we adjust. The whole art and science is adjusting to the reality of the numbers and making sure that we’re not waiting too long to make an adjustment.

SS: I love that. Last question for you, Chuck. What are some of the core metrics you track to determine success and how do those maybe vary by the different various teams that you work with?

CM: We have a tendency where we want to sit there and look at the metrics of quota because, in every role that we have within the sales team, we have some sort of end quota goal, which is the lagging metric. The key metrics on the front side are a few key activity metrics and I found success in making sure that we’re looking at quick key weekly metrics, such as when we look at the SDRs, what are the activity metrics, and are we seeing enough of the input metrics to give them a chance to hit the output metrics or the lagging metrics that we measure on a monthly basis and is there a decent, are they adhering to the conversion rates that we expect to see? This is an early indicator of if there is a chance for them to be successful or if we see some gaps in their skills. When we look at the AEs, when we’re looking at the new logo sellers, we sit there and analyze if there are enough conversations and enough meetings that they’re having in order to have enough deals within the funnel, and if are they converting at the pace that we expect to see within the team in order for them to have a chance to be able to hit the quota on a month by month, quarter by quarter basis.

On an individual basis, what are their numbers telling us? Then diving into their calls to say, are they delivering what we expect to hear skill-wise, or do we need to work with this individual person on a coaching basis to deliver their skill back up into the areas that we expect them to be in in order for them to be successful? On the CS side, we sit there and we look at, are seeing them having success, bringing them in, and then are they having the kind of conversations that we expect in order to be able to get ahead of churn and be able to delight and deliver the impact that our customers expect? Are they touching base? What is the sentiment of the conversations when they do have conversations with our customers? Are they able to retain the current renewals and dollars that we expect and is that allowing us to, again, look at the metrics with the individual reps to say, is there a skill gap there or are there opportunities for us to put better processes in place in order to expand the revenue with their existing customers?

SS: I love that, Chuck. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your insights.

CM: My pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Kelley Jarrett from Gainsight join us. Kelley, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Kelley Jarrett: Hi Shawnna, it’s nice to be here. My name is Kelley Jarrett. I head up kind of a three-part team here at Gainsight. It’s sales strategy, enablement, and operations. I have been with Gainsight for just under two years now and was actually brought in to build the enablement function here at Gainsight. We had one individual who was leading that effort and as Gainsight was heading into a growth period and fast growth and scale it was important to the company to bring in a leader to build this team so that we could help the sales organization at Gainsight really scale our sales function. I’ve been with Gainsight for just under two years. If you’re not familiar with what Gainsight does, essentially we help companies build deep and lasting relationships with their customers through customer success and product adoption and community solution platform. It’s been a great couple of years.

SS: We’re really excited to have you here Kelley. As you said in your intro, you recently added sales ops to your team. Can you share how this has changed the way that you think about enablement as a function within Gainsight?

KJ: It really has been an interesting evolution of this function since I joined. A lot of people think of enablement as enabling or training sellers on what they need to know to sell but I think of it a little bit differently. I think our job is to ensure that all of our team’s time, energy, effort, and resources really go to four key objectives. One is to give sellers the tools, skills, and knowledge they need. Two is to sell more to increase selling time. Three is to keep them happy and engaged in the territory and then finally to future-proof the sales organization for consistency and scale the last one is really important to be able to leverage metrics and data in order to find the right areas of focus for the sales team.

SS: What are some of the key points of intersection between enablement and sales ops? How would you say the two complement each other and how can they best collaborate for shared success?

KJ: Yeah, it’s a great question because I know not all enablement functions really have these two teams aligned super closely. I truly believe that when these groups are aligned it is a game changer for Gainsight and could be a game changer for other companies. It really kind of completes the full circle in my opinion. You have a strategy that is really all about sales methodology and sales processes and combining that with the data and tools component, which is, you know, everything from account scoring to run-of-business data tracking, to optimizing the tech stack. Then finally sort of the last piece of this circle is enablement and that’s getting the right message at the right time to the field.

I feel like these three components really can function together so that we can ensure that our time and resources are ruthless, and prioritized and make sure that we are getting the right message to the right sellers that are also going to move the needle for the key business objectives for the company. It’s important to kind of have all of those working together and in tandem on common objectives and goals. If they’re separate, it makes it a little bit harder to ensure that we are all working towards the same objectives and the same goals. There are a couple of key points of intersection. I can give a couple of examples if it would be useful to kind of explain how we leverage the operations group alongside the enablement team.

SS: Yes, I’d love for you to dig more into that.

KJ: One of those is we can look at our operations group and ask for some metrics that we know are meaningful to our business. We, of course, are part of the vista family at Gainsight and there are some core metrics that we need to track and watch to make sure that we are not only performing in accordance with what they hope and expect from our company but also to ensure that we’re set up for the future of what Gainsight really needs to grow into. One example of this is, you know, we run a prospecting program within our enablement team. Essentially that prospecting program allows us to focus on what’s important to be prospecting into at any certain time within the business. In Q3, SAAS companies everywhere started to see a slowdown in buyers. We started to see that deal progression was a little bit slower than normal and that was in large part due to uncertainty and fear in the market. With the prospecting program that we had, we knew that cold outreach might not be the best place to start, so we shifted our enablement focus using the data that was telling us that we were starting to see a slowdown and deals and opportunities and we shift that program to focus on deal progression rather than cold outreach to new prospects.

What that did for us that we saw in the data was that it actually ended up giving us a better mix of late-stage opportunities heading into Q4 than we thought was going to be there. It was pretty exciting for us to be able to take a look at the data, see some things that were happening within the business and then use our great enablement engine to really get after the areas of greatest need for the company and help those buyers overcome some of those market fears that they were seeing.

SS: I love the synergy there. You touched on it a little bit but I’d love it if you could drill in a little further. How do you then take that data-driven approach to your enablement strategy?

KJ: There are a lot of ways that you can incorporate data into an enablement strategy and it always comes back to me to where do we need to focus right now? Different sales teams have different needs at any given time and so your resources can really be strapped. What we’ve learned to do is leverage the data to understand where there are common needs across all of the sales teams and that really allows us to use our resources most effectively where we can move the needle most. So that’s super important. One of the other collaborations, in addition to simple data, is how we’ve incorporated optimizing tools. I know this is something that a lot of enablement teams struggle with how do we make sure that our sales team is leveraging tools most effectively? Now that we have that operations group within our team, we’re able to leverage these tools more effectively.

For example, we use the sales methodology that incorporates MEDDIC, and what we’ve done in our conversation analytics tool is we’ve set up trackers so that we can see when the MEDDIC concepts are being used in conversations and how that affects the progression of those deals and even the win rates for those teams. Even just a little tweak like that, using some of the technology a little more effectively that we weren’t necessarily doing prior to having these teams together has really allowed us to see where there are some opportunities for improvement and give real examples to sales and how they can just do a better job and what they’re already doing well.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. For sales enablement teams that may be less first in leveraging data, what advice do you have for them to embrace a data-driven mindset, and what is the importance of having that type of mindset?

KJ: I think with data you can make the data basically say what you wanted to say at any given time, which is a common mistake and or a common issue that a lot of operations teams face. For those that are new to leveraging data in the enablement team, I would suggest starting small. There’s so much out there, don’t try to do too much at the outset. Start with the basics and there’s an acronym that we use at Gainsight to really try to get tight on what we’re trying to accomplish from a data perspective that allows us to orient our programs according to where the areas of greatest needs are. That acronym is AIR: activities, indicators, and results. The way we look at it and if you’re just getting started with leveraging data and your enablement programs, one way you can look at it is what are the key activities or behaviors that you need your sellers to perform to ensure you hit your goals.

For us, these are things like outbound activities and meetings. Like I said before, we are doing some conversation tracking to make sure the behaviors are there, but that’s a little more advanced. You can simply look at the number of emails or outbound calls as an example. For indicators, indicators are typically pieces of data that are indicating whether or not you’re going to hit your results, so the pipeline is a great one. If you’re new to checking data to enable your efforts, you can look at pipeline coverage and pipeline products and that will help you understand if you’re on the right track for hitting your numbers. Then, of course, results can be as simple as bookings, but it can also incorporate other results that you should track, like win rate, average sales price, and those types of metrics. One key kind of underlying principle that we follow within this AIR concept is we track trending data which actually gives us a better understanding, not necessarily of actuals because sometimes those are less meaningful, but rather what’s happening over time and is your sales organization as a whole and teams getting better or getting worse or staying the same. If you can sort of keep the AIR concept in mind and look at it from a trend perspective, it will give you a pretty good understanding of where your sales enablement team needs to focus their efforts to build skills and knowledge within your team.

SS: Fantastic. To drill into this a little bit more, what are some of the core metrics that you and your team track to measure enablement impact?

KJ: For us, we typically use the AIR concept as well, but we’re just taking it a little bit further than what I mentioned before with getting started with AIR. We’re looking at emails, calls, and the percentage of our sales team that is driving the pipeline for different products that we think should be in a higher growth category for our company. We’re just keeping an eye on slightly more detailed metrics that follow the same AIR concepts that I mentioned before.

SS: That’s phenomenal. The last question for you is, how does this data help you better influence business priorities?

KJ: It comes full circle to why we brought these teams together in the first place, which was we’re all SaaS professionals trying to be better at ruthless prioritization, especially in today’s economy. We have to do more with the same amount of people and we really need to focus our efforts on what are those critical skills and critical knowledge that our sales team needs to know and needs to have in order to optimize their days and data really help us ruthless prioritize. It helps us to give sales managers access and an understanding of where they’re spending their time and where they may need to shift their priorities to ensure they’re supporting their teammates in the way that’s going to get the best results and support them in a way that they need to be supported in today’s environment. It also puts information in the hands of sellers who really want to own their territory. We have a really great sales team at Gainsight. They care about their customers, they care about what we do for our customers, and at the end of the day, while they’re in sales and they want to sell, they also want to help customers become successful. Our job as an operations team is really to give them the right resources and the right understanding of their own personal data so that they know that not only are they hitting their metrics to sell but that we’re also providing them with an understanding of how that will impact the results of the customers that they’re serving, which is a huge part of why I think we’re different here at Gainsight.

We have a methodology at Gainsight called the human-first selling methodology and the difference between a typical sales process that is very inward-focused and a checklist focused by the sellers, we are really oriented around the needs of the buyer and the way that we can help be the front line to that that change in the market is by providing our sellers with the right information they need to know if their job is actually moving the needle for their customer’s success. We talked a lot about some of the selling resources that we have and some of the data that we use in our day-to-day operations, but at the end of the day, it’s all about business outcomes for our customers. We expose those to our sellers, we provide access to information that helps them understand what their work is and what their job is actually doing for the customers that they’re serving. At the end of the day, when we think about our business priorities, it is to serve that market more effectively. We want our sellers to sing from that same sheet of music as well.

SS: Fantastic. I loved this conversation, Kelley. Thank you so much for joining us today.

KJ: No problem. It was a pleasure, Shawnna.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Elena Beletsioti from Yokoy join us. Elena, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Jonah, thank you very much for having me today.

Elena Beletsioti: Hi Shawnna, thank you very much for having me today. As you said I am Elena Beletsioti and I’m responsible for sales enablement at Yokoy. Yokoy is a spend management solution for midsize and enterprise companies. What we do is bring together expense management, invoice processing, and smart corporate cards in one platform and we really aim to transform the way companies do spending from the ground up. If you look at my background it is somewhat atypical for a sales leader or sales enablement specialist as I was in consulting before and supported startups on their founding and scaling journeys before I joined Yokoy in April.

SS: I’m excited to have you here. You have a ton of experience helping companies grow and scale, particularly startups. I’d love to start the conversation understanding from your experience, what is the enablement role in helping teams really scale effectively.

EB: If you think about scaling, one of the most important factors that impact that is a sales function. I mean think of a company that is growing and is hiring more and more salespeople in order to scale the business across different countries. Now if each and every member of the team has its own approach to selling, replicating success and scaling the company can be very difficult. In contrast, if all members of the sales team can follow a proven sales process, it is so much easier to scale the business more quickly, more efficiently, and much more successfully. Thinking about when we implemented one of the predictable kinds of processes within Yokoy, we were able to also predict and forecast so much better. I think sales enablement can really help with that. We can create a strong sales process, set up playbooks, constantly train and coach the team on each and every step along the customer journey and bring the relevant content at the right time to the team.

SS: Absolutely, I think enablement can play such a big role in those areas. What are some of the challenges that you’ve encountered that companies can face as they scale and how can enablement really help to overcome some of those challenges?

EB: That’s a great question. I mean when you’re small and you’re growing fast, you’re under a lot of pressure. Sales managers are especially under a lot of pressure to hit numbers. This can hinder skills coaching not an intention, but usually, it gets in the way. For example, they see sometimes when a crucial deal is at stake, then the sales manager will very often kind of take over the call instead of providing the background sales coaching that he intended to do right. In other words, you’re very tempted to give your team just the fish for the day instead of teaching them how to fish by themselves.

What I see as the biggest challenge when you’re growing very fast is that you think you don’t have time to worry about right now, about soft skills, about coaching, about exactly those things are the things that enable us to scale so much faster. As a sales enablement person within Yokoy, I do care about revenue and hitting quotas, however, I do have the luxury to step out of the deal and I know that my focus is clearly on teaching the reps how to fish. I have tried a little bit around and I found different ways to support that says leadership here, I think it touched on this a little bit before, but supporting with a playbook with a very clear understanding on what are the essential steps along the customer journey, but also things like training and storytelling, the most common objections, how you would anticipate those, that is also very helpful for everybody.

Once you have laid out these, the second step would be kind of a framework over a scoring model on what good looks like, for example, for a discovery call or for a demo. This helps the sales managers and myself in my role in enablement to know what to look for, to benchmark, and to coach against this. Another point maybe is to really pick and focus on one skill at a time, I am sure you have seen that kind of manager who tries to find all the flaws and all the mistakes in one call and addresses all of them at once. Yeah, that usually doesn’t work, that’s too much. If a sales rep needs to know how to ask strategic questions to better understand the prospect then the coaching effort should be really focused on this one specific skill. Only when that specific skill is kind of built up only then we can move on to the next one.

SS: I love that. I think that there are really three key areas. Now, I have a bit of experience in startups as well and I can say that when you are running lean, oftentimes collaboration and partnerships are absolutely keys to success. I’d love to understand from you who are some of the key teams that you collaborate with across the business to really ensure that you can deliver effective enablement programs at scale.

EB: I absolutely agree with you. Sales enablement is not the responsibility of one person, it’s a collaboration across different departments and actually, they cover the whole customer journey. I think there is one important area where sales enablement in the marketing team comes together and that’s content. Whenever there is content created for the sales team, we really need to put it in the sales language, make it digestible, but also ensure that there is consistent messaging, which is aligned then with the marketing team. I do have various touchpoints with the product marketing team when it comes to product knowledge, to new product launches. I also talk a lot with the sales operations team, especially when it comes to sales processes, and technology commissions, all of that sit within the sales operations team with Yokoy, so we have some touch points there. I think one of the departments that are very often overlooked but super important for me is learning and development. Top of mind, I would also say I align a lot with the customer success team to make sure that we have a smooth handover but also to gather feedback from customer success on what a successful customer looks like and how we can leverage that kind of knowledge,

SS: I love all of those areas now. The one that you hit on, that I would love to elaborate on a little bit more, is a partnership when it comes to scaling around learning and development. Why would you say that partnership is so important in startups?

EB: Great question is enablement, as we all know, about skills reinforcement, onboarding, training, field observations, and coaching. All of these are what L&D is doing with the broader organization and therefore there is a lot we can leverage from that partnership. Let’s say how to define learning goals, I didn’t know how to do that in the beginning, how to facilitate an effective training session with 50-plus people, how to measure the effectiveness of a training program after this has happened and then to give kind of numbers and crunch it down for the leadership team or even evaluate, let’s say the stickiness of it.

One specific thing I learned from learning and development that helped me a lot personally is to focus on the challenges that the sales reps currently have to understand the revenue pressure they’re constantly having and use a more empathetic approach so you can create a safe space for them to learn. Only when you have created this safe space, the reps can bring real-life questions into the training or role-play their worst client scenario. I would really like to think of myself or my role to be considered kind of neutral. I don’t judge them if there are knowledge gaps for the product or if somebody is feeling very uncomfortable doing something. I just want to push them and challenge them to practice and learn a little bit more, or at least help them work through their challenges.

SS: I love that. I think that is such a key value that enablement helps to drive. Do you have some best practices for our audience around collaborating really effectively with some of these cross-functional teams to maybe build out shared programs to help the company overall scale?

EB: I wish there was a silver bullet there. I think my personal advice would be communication, communication, and communication. At Yokoy, we try very hard to keep each other informed and aligned, especially when it comes to relying on the learning goals, and the content and we really try to get everyone on board quite early in the process. However, regardless there are still things that kind of will slip through the cracks and it could have been better to have aligned with somebody else, with another team before we rolled out to the whole organization. I mean this will happen with a startup, we’re scaling up, it will happen, but it is very good and this is what I learned personally. After we have kind of a shared program altogether, we just regroup together, do a debriefing and discuss what went well, and what could have been better, and put all of these learnings in a kind of blueprint for the next program so we can learn from that.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now, Elena, last question for you, for companies that might have a lot of silos between departments, what advice would you give practitioners to break down these barriers and begin to establish stronger cross-functional relationships?

EB: That’s a very interesting question, I believe the very first step is to sit all at the same table and the line on the goals of the business and then jointly break down the business goals into the department goals. If you openly share and discuss those kinds of goals, usually you will very, very quickly see how they intersect, sometimes how they even complement each other, or how many dependencies there are between those different departments. I believe sales enablement plays a role in making sure that we have that kind of visibility, that we’re aligned, that we really thinking about it from a customer perspective, and that we are communicating along the way. As I speak one last piece of advice that comes to my mind, I would say when you ask for something, try to offer something as well. Usually, that helps to build kind of trust and establish a relationship with your key stakeholders in the organization.

SS: I think that’s fantastic advice to close us out. Thank you so much. Elena, I really appreciate your time today.

EB: Thank you for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you

Today I’m excited to have Julie Cecilio from Collibra join us. Julie, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Julie Cecilio: Great, thank you so much, Shawnna. Thanks for having me. As you said, my name is Julie Cecilio and I am the vice president of go-to-market revenue enablement here at Collibra. I am coming up for two years, and have been in high-tech for quite some time. I was previously at VMware and before that at Cisco all in various roles supporting the sales organization’s effectiveness.

SS: I’m excited to chat with you because, in addition to organizational effectiveness, one of your areas of expertise for you is also around change management. So I’d love to hear from you and your perspective. Why is change management an important area of focus for enablement leaders?

JC: Yeah, it’s an interesting inflection point, isn’t it? I actually started out my career in marketing and have a graduate degree in marketing and found out that I didn’t want to be quite that removed from the people that I was trying to engage with, but the principles are very much the same. You’re trying to change buying behavior, right? You’re trying to build a brand, and you want somebody to buy more of your products and services, so it’s a very similar formula to sales enablement. I worked my way from marketing into a change management role at Cisco where we were trying to support our services sales organization in how we were selling services with customers and partners, and we rolled out a lot of change, whether it was the pricing and packaging or the systems that they had to work with, and so I was able to apply a lot of what I did on the marketing side to change buying behavior to that change management approach with customers and partners at Cisco.

That was my first foray into change management and what I really learned from that was you have to take a very good look at what is the delta of the behavior that you’re trying to change and how much effort is it going to take to get that change to stick. When I morphed over into the sales enablement side, it’s really again the same principles. You are trying to drive transformation within a sales organization, most likely. I’ve been in high tech as I mentioned for a number of years and we’re always evolving and changing quickly and trying to keep up with or ahead of the market.

The pandemic is a great example of this. Sellers had to learn how to do things virtually, much as these podcasts have just mushroomed into something really important for people to be able to connect with others and do things like thought leadership. It’s like, okay, well how do we reach our customer base in a different way? Virtual selling skills are an example of how we had to adjust and so then you have to look at well what are the things that are changing, what are the tools, the technologies, the skills, knowledge, behavior and then figure out where people are now and where you want them to be. Based on that you put an enablement plan together also known as a change plan to get them from here to there and then track your progress along the way and look at the business results. It’s kind of a nice through line between changing customer buying behavior to changing seller behavior all about driving transformation for the company.

SS: Absolutely. I think it absolutely is a critical thing that enablement and leaders need to be able to impact, but change can be hard. I’d love to get some advice from you. What are some of your best practices for effective change management?

JC: Great question. We’re actually working on this right now at Collibra. One of the big things is sponsorship. Making sure that you are aligned with your strategic initiative or strategic plan for the company for the year for the three-year plan, whatever it is that you’re rooted in and then make sure that you’ve got that sponsorship upfront for the initiatives that you’re driving and then create those early successes in those wins. The best way to create that sponsorship is to be clear on where we are and where we want to be and make sure that’s aligned and then clear on what it’s gonna take to get from here to there and maybe even some of the risks and obstacles that you’re facing and get that help. Then work with the leaders to establish some of those quick wins and those success stories that you can highlight as proof points, because sales and sellers, even our partners, often are motivated by the shortest route to closing, closing the sale, but oftentimes that doesn’t drive the right behavior, which is, let’s say we want to drive and NPS with the customer or we want to drive an expansion behavior with our customers and so we want to make sure that we are thinking long term and we’re not thinking short term as an example. How would you get people through that knothole of like well sort of the bird in the hand versus having the whole flock with you is kind of the way to think about that.

SS: I’d love to drill in a little bit more on that because you hit on a really key point and that is the long-term adoption of behavior change. What are some strategies that practitioners might be able to use to motivate behavior change amongst reps to get that long-term adoption?

JC: Having those early successes really helps. Making it tangible to people so they can see that they’re getting better, win rates, bigger deal sizes, shorter sales cycles, so understanding what your KPIs are and then reporting back on those on a regular basis. We do some things around dashboards that allow managers and senior leaders to be able to see the impact of the change programs that we’re running otherwise known as sales enablement training every quarter and so they can see that, okay, we said we wanted to shift to this new sales methodology let’s say and why? Well because we’re seeing those who are applying the knowledge and the skills are seeing the impact to their deals. They’re seeing their quota attainment come sooner, they’re seeing their customers having a higher sat rate etcetera. So connecting the two dots for people so they can see that it’s going to benefit them and the company right and our customers ultimately because we want them to be happy and using our products and services as well and making that really tangible for folks and keeping it front and center about these are the KPIs this is how it’s going to make our customers happier you more successful and the company is going to be able to reach strategic objectives.

SS: I love that. I want to shift gears because I noticed too that on LinkedIn you mentioned that authentic leadership plays a key role in enablement’s ability to inspire teams to achieve high performance. Now I love that because I feel like we all need an extra dose of inspiration nowadays, but can you tell our audience about what authentic leadership means to you?

JC: I just led a breakout session on this last week because I also lead our women of Collibra employee resource group here and back to being virtual again, we don’t have a lot of time with each other. We’re always running from one meeting to the next. We don’t have the opportunity to get to know people on a more casual basis to identify commonalities and I think we just have to create space for that. Allowing people to bring their whole selves to their job every day is really important for a couple of different reasons. We know that diverse workforces on whole are more productive and more impactful, and so we want to encourage that diversity. We don’t want people to mask that we’re all looking the same, doing the work the same, and approaching the work the same, and part of that includes encouraging people to bring their whole selves to their job every day. Again, I think back to the pandemic a little bit, it sort of forced this. We all saw each other’s animals, children, spouses, and whatever was happening in the background because we were all trying to figure out how to adjust. So we were sort of pushed into it a little bit.

We don’t want to walk away from that in my opinion. We want to continue to encourage people to bring their whole selves to work and that’s when I can understand that somebody is having a great day and they’re getting a lot done and we can really give them some shout-outs for that. Then there are times when they’re struggling a little bit and then maybe need a little more air cover or support or leadership there. I think it’s really important to do that yourself and that’s what authentic leadership is to really lead by example. So making sure that I’m clear with my team and my coworkers because one of the things I love about enablement is we work probably one of the more cross-functional teams in the entire company. Whether I was at VMware or here at Collibra, I found that pretty consistently and leading by example is important. I’ve had several people reach out to me offline to ask for guidance or support asking how did you do this. You just do it, you just do it, and don’t be apologetic and be clear that this is coming from your heart and in a good place and people will build trust with you, and then you also create that opportunity for really diverse viewpoints and approaches to things and in that way you build more trust. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. That’s my experience.

SS: Yeah. Now, to tie it back though, how does an authentic leadership style help you effectively drive change as an enablement leader?

JC: Yeah, great question. At the end of the day, in both cases, I think trust is the big word and on the change management side, you build trust by understanding that change, communicating it, identifying the successes, and then tying it back to outcomes. Oftentimes you’re asking people to take a little bit of a leap of faith with you. It’s like, yeah, I’ve got a plan and I know what I expect to get out of it and I want you to get in the boat and go with me, but I’m gonna point out all the sights along the way so you can see that we’re working our way towards that end goal of that end journey, but there’s trust there and the same thing with leadership, in general, is creating that that space of trust and allowing people to feel safe. There’s a new newish more common topic that gets talked about a lot, which is around, you know, safety, emotional safety in the, in the workplace and I think people feel like they need that connective tissue to kind of go with you on that change journey in order to really do their best work every day.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. Now, last question for you Julie. As a broader business landscape changes we’ve seen with the recent economic environment, customers are often experiencing change right alongside our reps. How can enablement help go-to-market teams support customers as they navigate these changes themselves?

JC: So I think some of it is a continuation of the previous topic, is really extending your authentic self into those customer conversations, helping the customers understand what the success could look like with your product and service and how that’s going to help them and their company achieve their goals and objectives because at the end of the day, that’s really what we’re trying to do in most cases, is to help other organizations achieve what their stated goals are. We all have a piece of skin in that game, whether we are on the buying side or the selling side. So I think that’s one thing, is just to sort of encourage those mindsets and those behaviors.

The second is to have a closed-loop idea of what the customer buying journey looks like. Enablement should be able to connect the dots all the way from a lead generation where our marketing organization drives a lot of that digital interface and we know more and more customers are preferring a rep-free or a seller-free quote-unquote buying environment. So that connection between the customer’s digital experience and then their live experience, whether it’s in person or virtual, needs to be seamless. What we can do is help connect those dots to make sure that the programs, the messaging, the tone, the tenor, the knowledge, everything that’s up, you know, on our websites and through our emails and the way we engage with customers digitally feel continuous when the customer comes into buying engagement with a live person, whether that’s an SDR BDR or it’s a strategic major enterprise sales rep or your SCs or your professional services team when we come through the implementation. So making sure that we’re helping to connect the dots all the way through and staying really focused on those core values that are important to our company and that we extend those all the way through to our customer engagement.

SS: I love that approach. Julie, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. I appreciate your insights.

JC: Thank you very much for taking the time. I appreciate it

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Devi Madhavan, a sales enablement expert join us. Devi, I would love for you to introduce yourself and your background to our audience.

Devi Madhavan: Thank you, Shawnna. It’s a real pleasure to be here with you. A little bit about myself, I’ve spent the last 20 years in business development, sales leader, and enablement roles at both enterprise and startup companies, with my last role being Vice President of Oracle Sales and Partner Academy. I also spent time as an advisor to a handful of startups, focusing on how companies can increase sales productivity. It’s very key to have a solid enablement strategy in alignment with the stage of company growth, which is largely dependent on product fit and customer demand. I’ve had the privilege of seeing enablement at sub 100 million in revenue and then at a larger scale. It’s my pleasure today to share some of those insights back with you.

SS: Tell us about your experience, transitioning from sales leadership to enablement leadership. How would you say that that background helped to inform your approach to enablement?

DM: Absolutely. Sales leadership is really focused on execution versus enablement is really focused on learning and having the opportunity to practice in a mock environment. When I was running a sales team, I was very focused on the day-to-day deals and pipe and closing them along with coaching my team members. There wasn’t enough time to be proactive and think about how to close the skill gaps ahead of actually being in that customer conversation. As I transitioned from sales leadership into running enablement, the biggest luxury was being able to translate what reps lacked into a curriculum and being able to identify where reinforcement training and coaching are actually needed.

I’ve also learned that being proactive in investing in the rep’s toolbox saves a lot of time instead of having them learn 100% on the job by trial and error because you don’t want to ruin your credibility in front of a customer. Time to productivity is much longer and at scale this chips away at revenue opportunities for your company. Finally, I’d say invest in your first-line managers and build training for them side by side along with anything that you do for your sales team that way you’re coaching them on the same vernacular.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. It’s so interesting to hear you talk about how your sales leadership background helped you to understand what were some of those areas where enablement could really step up and play a fantastic role. For enablement practitioners who maybe don’t have sales leadership experience prior to moving into enablement, what are some key things that maybe they should know about how to effectively partner with sales leaders?

DM: First of all, I’d say sales leaders don’t waste time at all. They’re very focused and they always prioritize their customers. They’re definitely not going to be spending time with enablement if they don’t see their agenda or enough of their footprint or the customer’s footprint, bringing value to add. When you’re having those conversations with your sales leaders, you really want to go in with a simple plan and avoid as much complexity as possible. Listen to them because good sales leaders know what challenges they’re facing and you actually can be really prescriptive with enablement to help solve those challenges specifically.

Finally, I’d say you really want to make sure enablement is not a policing function or something that is seen as busy work or training that the team has to do. The goal really is to spread out training so it becomes a part of a lifestyle and it also suits their calendar needs with enough flexibility. Some key things to keep in mind are don’t offer training a quarter end, and also structure your onboarding programs and sales kickoff as macro-events. Don’t allow those to be serving a training purpose. It should really be around launching what’s new at sales kickoff and onboarding should be about reducing your ramp time in your role. What you really want to do is take microlearning to reinforce after these macro events and turn those into learning opportunities with reinforcement. Leaders are very invested in ongoing development, so selling the value of that is really key.

SS: I think that’s a phenomenal way to think about it in some fantastic tips and tricks there. Now, with sales, and especially with your background in sales, I think that there’s a lot of deep empathy for understanding the importance of the sales process framework. With that background, how has that helped you to effectively build sales process frameworks on the enablement side of the house?

DM: I love that question. Something very dear and close to my heart is the sales process framework I really think of the sales process framework as something that’s living and you can change it and tweak it based on how your landscape changes. First of all, I think it’s key that it’s not built just based on your internal needs. It’s actually a customer-buying journey. It’s about their activities in the process and how you’re aligning with that, so not just about your company. This is the number one mistake I’ve seen companies make.

Second of all, I think a sales process framework is not as linear as we all like to think. There can be back and forth, so we make sure that there is fluidity and that we’re addressing what the customer’s needs are. You can structure phase gates but that’ll allow you to really come back and revisit areas to close the loop. Third, I’d say your CRM really needs to be in sync with that sales process so your team can record data and track their engagements in their own workflow. That synergy between your sales process and your CRM is necessary, so you’re minimizing ad hoc engagement and you’re able to use data-driven insights as you navigate the customer better. I would also say make sure that you have a champion for your sales process of the company and that there’s buy-in across your go-to-market functions since the sales process is not just about the seller’s role, it’s also about the support roles in the post-sales roles so that your handoffs really need to be well defined. Most companies end up taking some existing sales process frameworks and customizing them for their own needs and for a customer buying journey.

SS: I think that those are fantastic tips. Can you walk us through some actionable steps for implementing an effective sales framework?

DM: I would say outside of the cross-functional buy-in it’s really key that you’re looking at your sales motion. For example, if you’re selling in cloud or SAAS products, you know ongoing consumption and usage are key. Different types of customer engagement really need to be factored in as you’re implementing it in the CRM. Then I would say pilot any kind of process that you’re launching for gaps so you can keep iterating. As I said, it’s a living process that should be revisited every 6 to 12 months. Awareness to ensure that the proper checks and balances are there is key.

SS: I think that is fantastic. Now I want to take a slight pivot on this because I think given the current economic climate, a lot of companies are focused on trying to retain and maybe even expand within established customer accounts. How can enablement help reps that are focused on those existing customers to execute the sales process to move customers forward in their journey throughout their lifecycle?

DM: That is a great question and I would say very timely for what we’re facing as an economy. In general, what we’re seeing is that buying cycles are much longer because more internal approvals are needed from the customer and budgets are rapidly changing. The key is to really hone in on sales velocity and the way I like to measure sales velocity is you look at the number of your opportunities, multiply that by the average deal size and your win rate and then you divide that by the length of the sales cycle time. So that’s probably changing and as you understand each of those components, you have an opportunity to tweak and figure out where you need to actually isolate and pay attention to close the gaps. I think that’s key, really measuring your sales velocity and the impact of the extended cycle time in the sale.

Second, I’d say you still want to understand the budget, authority, need, and timing, BANT is the industry-known acronym for that, to really understand how the customers are thinking about those things. What are the internal processes that have actually changed in their own internal roadmap? It’s unlikely that you’re going to change any of their internal decisions, but you can understand what the challenges are earlier in the process and you can think through creative strategies as to how you’re going to keep the customer engaged. As always, finding triggers that can help them solve the challenges that they’re facing today is really key.

SS: I love that. Devi, I have one last question for you because we’ve been talking about a lot of things, particularly with regard to sales process frameworks. In order to do that, obviously you have to be almost like a change agent within your organization. I’d love to close with a question to you about how enablement helps sales teams adapt as they execute and as companies scale or are going through a lot of these change motions. What role can enablement play in helping the sales teams adapt?

DM: I think enablement can really be that change agent that you just described during a transformation. I think enablement has the opportunity to take a leadership role in that because the function is looking at multiple roles across the go-to-market. Bringing all that together with a succinct strategy and change management, I think it’s key that leadership buys into the role that enablement is going to play. Socializing that upfront and having that understanding is great. They can also actually train on the change and as they train on the change, they’re creating awareness, and change management is really key in that along with the communication plan. You can raise the level of awareness and empathy internally that’s needed for the organization as they go through this change by socializing the why and the how and helping everyone really get on the same page realizing what the outcome is going to be of the change.

SS: I love that. Devi, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time and insights.

DM: Thank you, Shawnna.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Amy DeBartolo from ACA group join us. Amy, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role and your organization to our audience.

Amy DeBartolo: Hi, I’m Amy DeBartolo, I work with ACA group. My job is manager of sales enablement and I’ve been working in sales enablement now for 3.5 years. I’m excited to be here today.

SS: Thank you so much for joining us. Now, one of the things I wanted to make sure we got to chat about on this podcast was around driving adoption of new initiatives and it really starts with getting the right teams involved at the right time. I’d love to learn a little bit more about your experience. How have you been able to do that in your enablement career journey?

AD: Obviously the hardest thing about sales enablement is getting people involved and especially in larger companies when we’re rolling out new initiatives, what seems like, every day. One of the things that I like to do is introduce things to my team as things that are going to be helpful. Teams are often a little bit leery each time that you bring in something new, so one thing that I like to do with my team that I feel like is something that motivates them the most is I bring in a lot of contest work.

I like to motivate my teams with contests, whether their silly little contests or bigger contests with bigger prizes, I always like to motivate the teams with a little bit of friendly competition. By adding a contest, we can motivate the team to compete against each other and to learn the new product at the same time. Whether it’s a prize as simple as a t-shirt or a cash prize, we seem to get the team to motivate each other by competing against each other to learn the new products.

SS: I think that’s a really great approach. What are some of the challenges that enablement can face when it comes to driving adoption?

AD: The challenges are definitely with all the different programs that are out there. There are so many new sales enablement programs and platforms that are coming out. We roll out so many that the team is a bit hesitant to learn so many new programs, especially when we roll them out all at once. What we try to do is to not roll out too many at the same time and give them a chance to learn each program and see how they integrate in with each other. By showing them that they integrate with each other, they see that they’re beneficial to how their sales performance is going to increase. We try to pick our programs carefully and pick our platforms with specific intent so that they can see how they’re going to integrate all in one platform. By picking out platforms that work together, we can show the team that each one is beneficial to one another and they work together.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now, what are some examples of unique ways that you’ve been able to get teams involved and interested in new initiatives?

AD: I like to do weekly phone calls with my teams and instead of doing weekly phone calls that are serious and just training sessions, I like to give them fun titles. I’ve had calls before that I’ve called ‘it’s monday, don’t forget to be awesome.’ Right now I have one that’s called Shane’s loft and we call it Shane’s world and we bring in special speakers. I try to pick out people who are doing exceptionally well on the platform so that we can highlight our top performers so that people can see, hey, this is really working for someone and this can work for you too. I like to highlight the team and I feel like by highlighting our strongest workers that other people can see, hey, this is working for someone and it can work for me too.

SS: That’s fantastic. A lot of enablement practitioners really like to utilize intrinsic motivators and extrinsic motivators. How have you utilized these types of motivation to accelerate the adoption of new programs among reps?

AD: As I just mentioned, by using the teams and by having team phone calls, we find that a lot of people join these calls to see how other people are working on these platforms. Another thing that we do are newsletters. We can highlight big wins from using the platforms, so if we have an exceptionally large win, we’ll highlight that win. I also try to get a quote from the rep saying, you know, hey, this win was because I sent out this email or because of this program, I was able to do this. This is something that I hadn’t been able to do in the past. By highlighting wins and by highlighting good performance or things that are coming up, we’re able to send out that newsletter in a positive way.

I try to send out newsletters as often as possible, even though it’s hard on myself to send out a newsletter weekly, but I try to send them out as frequently as possible so that we can highlight those great win and highlight all these great programs that our company lets us buy into so that we can get the team motivated.

SS: Now on the topic of buy-in, leadership buy-in is I think often a critical factor and driving adoption from the top down. What are some of your best practices for gaining leadership buy-in?

AD: Obviously the motivation here is to make money. Anytime you can go to leadership and say, hey, you know, I can see a return on investment on this one as x amount of dollars. I’m lucky that I work for a company right now who is very adaptable. Our sales enablement program at the company right now is brand new, so they are very interested in anything that I’m going to roll out that’s going to help enable the team to make more money and to make life easier for our sales team. We have a very busy sales team right now with high quotas and anything that we can do to help enable our team to make life easier our team is very into right now.

I’m lucky and fortunate that I work for a company that’s into it. For other people who have trouble with getting buy-in, something to do is to go to that leadership team and to say there’s only 12% return on emails is average and with some of these sales enablement programs right now you can see returns on your investment so much higher. It’s so important to stress that these programs are there to help and not to hinder and obviously what you’re doing right now is working, but with the help of sales enablement and the help of sales enablement teams and training and all the initiatives that we can roll out, it’s only going to improve the investment. I’m all for bringing in new products all the time.

SS: I love that. Now, to close, what advice do you have for practitioners that maybe want to try new strategies when promoting their programs rather than just the conventional way that may have been used in the past?

AD: Make it fun. I’m all about making things fun. My teams always know me as the person that doesn’t take things too seriously because I’m always on calls trying to make things fun. You can’t take a sales enablement program, especially some of the ones that are more complex and have serious training calls constantly. You’re not going to have a sales team that’s going to be involved if you’re always serious and this is how it’s going to be and you’ve got to do this this way and this this way and this way and that. That’s why I bring in contest work. Right now I’m running a contest with a $500 cash prize for whoever has the most emails returned to them because I want it to be fun for them. I want them to realize that if they see someone win $500 just by winning a contest and see that they get 600 emails sent out in a week, they’re going to go, I can do that too. If they won $500, imagine how much money I can make by actually getting out 600 emails and having that many clients return things.

I always try to make things fun, keep things light, explain that we’re here to help them, we’re not here to make their lives more difficult. We’re here to actually make their lives easier. By having a sales enablement team and having a team that’s there to train them on things and make them feel more confident in what they’re doing is the best practice out there.

SS: I think that’s fantastic advice. Amy, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

AD: Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Lorenzo Hill from Vonage join us. Lorenzo, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Lorenzo Hill: Thank you, Shawnna. As you mentioned, my name is Lorenzo Hill and I am a sales enablement professional at Vonage. If you don’t know Vonage, we are a cloud-based communication platform provider recently acquired by Ericsson, the largest 5G provider in the galaxy. My sales career started back in 2006, many, many moons ago. I worked as a publishing rep selling textbooks to college professors. I did that for about 10 years and then the company I was with launched a program called the regional rep trainer, in which reps who were top performers, could also take on an additional role of onboarding or assisting with the onboarding of new hires, so I got my feet wet in training and enablement with that role. I did that for a few years and then officially became the full trainer for that organization and that was about 2017. I’ve been in training enablement since that time and that’s where I am today.

SS: Well we’re excited to have you here. You talked a little bit about your background, particularly around sales and sales training programs. What are some of your best practices to ensure that you develop and deliver really engaging training content?

LH: Sure. Speaking of content as far as the actual delivery of the content, I would say the number one best practice for me is to ensure that I am considering the attendees’ experience. As with adult learners, you may know, they come with a lot of experience and if you don’t leverage that experience or allow them to utilize and share that experience, there may be a little bit of resentment. There may be a little bit of closed-mindedness which can derail any sort of training. I always try to incorporate the learner’s experience by saying this is how we do it but tell me how you used to do it and I think that opens the door for a great engaging training session.

As far as the actual development of the content, it’s really just a matter of finding out what the main purpose or the goal of the training is and what the content is supposed to do. Is it instructional training, or is it behavior change training? Those different types of goals can have an impact on the type of training or the type of content that we develop.

SS: Absolutely. Oftentimes behavior change is one of those goals, I would imagine. Driving that behavior change, especially through training can take some time and some effort. What are some of the obstacles that you’ve encountered that can prevent behavior change?

LH: Oh, there are no obstacles. Totally kidding, but wouldn’t that be wonderful? It goes back to the old saying you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink. A lot of times you can deliver the most impactful, engaging training and everyone is high-fiving, they’re giving you high marks on the post-survey and then they go right back to the same exact behaviors without any changes. Really trying to instill the importance of the change, and why the change is necessary, I think sometimes it can open the eyes of the attendees and really help them to focus on why this change is needed.

Another obstacle is just reinforcement after the training has taken place. That’s where we have to leverage our sales leaders a lot because once they leave the training room there in the hands of the managers and the leaders and so we have to really have them on board hand in hand with us to reinforce that training so that we can see that that behavior change. If that’s not in lockstep together, to put it bluntly, you’re spinning your wheels and wasting your time.

One of the challenges I also want to touch on is that sometimes as sales enablement we have too many tools, and too many resources and the last thing that we want to do as sales enablement is to take the sales teams away from selling. Our job is to obviously make it easier, make it more efficient for the sellers to sell and so sometimes having all these tools can get in the way. One of the number one jobs a sales enablement team can do is to ensure that the tools and resources are easy to find. At Vonage, we have what we call a confluence page where it’s like a Wikipedia page. You can go to this site and enter whatever information you’re looking for and you’ll find a list of resources that you can use that relate to that topic.

The other part of that is, as you probably know, information processes are constantly evolving and changing and so be sure that you are rotating the stock, I like to say. You have old documents, and old resources and you update them and get the old ones out of there so the reps aren’t trying to figure out which one is the most current and which one has the most accurate information. Just little things like that I think can add to the efficiency of what the reps are trying to do.

SS: How have you gone about overcoming some of those challenges to ensure that the behavior change really takes hold post-training?

LH: I love this question because this is something I’ve really tried to bring light to at Vonage. How can we ensure that the behavior change is taking place once training happens? The first thing is, as I mentioned before, to be in lockstep with the leaders. The leaders that I support have weekly team meetings, so I try to commit to at least two of those per month. That way it allows me to be in step with the team. What are some of the team’s concerns? What’s top of mind for them? I’m able to hear those concerns firsthand and then I’m also able to reinforce some of the initiatives and the training that we’ve offered or will soon be offering. Just to have that team together to be able to share that with them in that environment sometimes reinforces some of the changes that we’re trying to make.

SS: Absolutely. Now, you’ve talked a little bit about partnering with leadership. I’d love some really practical advice for our audience. How do you partner with sales managers and leaders to reinforce behavior change?

LH: As I mentioned, attending their meetings makes them feel as if I am a part of the team, a resource they can leverage if they need any sort of sales enablement from tools, and resources to coaching. I want to make myself available to that team. Additionally, I think having the managers or the leaders involved in the development of any sort of initiative or any strategies starts with understanding what the team needs. I think sometimes as sales enablement we can sort of put the cart before the horse and that we think we know what the team needs, we think we know when they need it and sometimes the manager or the leader has a little better understanding of that information. I think it’s really important to keep the leaders in the loop on any future or current initiatives that will be presented to their teams.

SS: Absolutely. I think the other reason it’s important for frontline managers to be involved is the coaching element. From your perspective, what role does coaching play and driving behavior change, and what are some ways that you’ve designed coaching programs to optimize behavior change?

LH: Well, you hit on something that’s a sensitive subject for me. Just because of bandwidth we aren’t able to get as involved in the coaching aspect as I would like. There are two of us that support the Americas and we have 700 or 800 reps. I may be understating that if we count some of the SDRs and BDRs. There’s just not enough of us to go around to provide that more intimate coaching. We do offer group call coaching, where we pull together teams and listen to recorded calls and have each of the reps provide feedback to each other. We get a lot of positive feedback from that exercise and activity.

As far as being able to coach, we just are not able to do it in that capacity right now. With that being said, I am always open to ideas or strategies that can sort of duplicate or clone us as sales enablement so that we can be in more places to provide those services. To that fact, coaching for us really falls back on the leaders and so we’ve developed a coaching plan or coaching strategies for the leaders that they all went through that basically showed the principles of coaching, what’s the most effective coaching style or strategies and tactics, and so every manager went through that training.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. That is absolutely the best place to start and a cloning machine would be nice these days.

LH: For some of us.

SS: Very true. Now, to close, can you share how you track if the behavior is changing and some of the key metrics that you’re measuring for this particular aspect?

LH: The first step in measurement is what we call our NPS surveys. We distribute those after every session, workshop, and what have you. We take the feedback from those surveys very seriously. We’re always looking for ways to improve not only the sales team but to improve ourselves as well. We take that feedback, constructive or however, and we adjust accordingly. In addition to the surveys, again, I’m always in front of the managers and I’m asking what’s going on and what we need. Sometimes it’s something such as sales pipeline cleanup and so we’ll look at that for a few weeks and offer some content to kind of provide suggestions on how to maintain a healthy clean pipeline and then we’ll just look at that over the next few weeks, like I said, to see if it is improving. If not we’ll do some remediation. Usually, with the help of the managers and the leader, those types of things usually correct themselves after one or two interactions with the sales teams. Other than that it is kind of hard to measure some of the changes that you’re trying to instill or identify, but the surveys are the main resource that we use.

SS: Fantastic. Well Lorenzo, thank you so much for joining us to talk about how you’re approaching behavior change advantage. I really appreciate your time.

LH: I appreciate you having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Cristina Patranoiu, the partner enablement training specialist at RingCentral join us. Cristina would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Cristina Patranoiu: Absolutely. Hi everyone, I’m Cristina Patranoiu, a sales enablement professional activating within the cloud as we generically call it for an American company with an international expansion mindset. I am based in France and joining you all from here with my glass of wine that you cannot see, but there is no croissant this time, unfortunately. I joined RingCentral a little over 12 months ago to lead enablement for France, coming with about five years of sales enablement experience. If I was to go a little bit deeper here, I think my motivation for doing what I do began back about 12 years ago when I was starting my career as a junior financial analyst and I realized that I’m particularly interested in understanding how the things around me move and coming to place together and taking something complicated and making it simple for others to understand. It’s kind of been a roller coaster ever since.

SS: Well, I’m excited that you are here as part of that roller coaster ride to join us today. One of your areas of expertise is adult learning. Why is adult learning so critical to understand as an enablement professional?

CP: Yes, indeed it’s kind of what I specialize in. I often say during my training to the various audiences that this is not school and I won’t grade you and I won’t give you homework, but I am very set on making sure that everyone lives here having learned something from the time we spend together. Obviously, there are adults in front of me and they’re professionals and that really is my fuel for the programs I run and during the sessions I deliver. I believe we all learn differently today. Our attention span is so diminished since the internet and the cell phone took over and enablement nowadays is about giving your teams the information they need when they need it and is readily available. Very plug-and-play. At least the way I see enablement around me and the technology space if you want, it’s very plug-and-play. Adult learning really goes to the foundation of what we do because you have to really know what makes them tick, what they need, and give that to them the way they need. It needs to be very simple, very dumbed down if you want but extremely efficient like a cube that has all the nutrients but none of the fluff if that makes any sense.

SS: It absolutely does. What are some essential adult learning techniques that you’ve learned that you embed in your training programs?

CP: I do absolutely agree that adult learning is critically important to anyone aiming for added value in this type of role. A few tricks I’m using are actually modeling my sessions with a lot of storytelling inside. I think that would be the first tip that I would share with you. We generally recall stories six or seven times easier and for longer periods of time than we do stats or hard facts. It’s this native human connection that we have to stories that’s been inherited through our genes and every single time I try this it helps the audiences really pragmatically live with the messaging needed in their heads and it actually sticks with them longer, but it has the added benefit of leaving them enough space to make it their own. Storytelling absolutely every time I recommend it. If anything it is the secret ingredients that I put into all the training I deliver.

Secondly, what I recommend for adult learning and what I’ve seen that works extremely efficiently nowadays, especially because we are in an industry that has been over-engineered and creativity has been at the foundation of everything we do but we’ve done it so many times that it doesn’t really feel like we can do it anymore. I would say secondly it’s coaching. There is a very large subject to unpack here, but adults come with experience and various degrees of awareness and generally, they already have the capacity to be a lot more creative and find extra motivation when given the chance. I’m a big advocate for professional coaching to enable people to take ownership of their success and we can probably expand on this based on the questions you guys have, but last and probably definitely not least practice.

Now, there’s always time built into my sessions for sales to practice what I have just preached, so to say, be it the methodology we are using, certainly be it the new features we’re launching, Beit negotiating within a development program. Whatever it is that we’re doing, we always reserve time for them to practice what they’ve just learned. I always make it engaging so I interact a lot with the participants and I ensure that everyone is participating. You actually laugh if you saw me doing any sort of online training because I always have my agenda next to me and I keep a list of all the participants and I have like a little star for if they participate, like did this person say anything? Should I push them further? Did I ask a question of everyone? I always do my best to keep an eye on everybody participating and engaging in the session and with each other. I absolutely do that a lot and recommend it a lot. It is absolutely needed, especially in this digital world of video training and remote work.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now to build on that a little bit, as you just mentioned, participation is important. What career advice do you have to offer leaders to help them actually curate a more open environment where their sellers feel empowered maybe to ask questions or lean in and participate in the company culture, essentially?

CP: It’s funny to me that you would ask that because I actually find the US is extremely good at doing it natively. Like I think culturally speaking the way I noticed our sellers and our teams in North America, I find you guys generally being extremely curious and never feeling like you cannot ask. If I were to think about the advice I would give leaders, I would say to try to make your cultures as inclusive as possible and encourage yourself as leaders. If I look around me at the people we look up to within my organization and the people that generally have been very approachable, we can tell that the happiness in their teams is at the highest level and people are generally thriving in that environment of let’s say the leaders that empower their teams, they’re the kind of leaders that are vulnerable and human.

I think on advice I would have for leadership is to be vulnerable, and honest with the people in front of you. A lot of the time in the corporate world we portray ourselves as bigger-than-life, perfect professionals that have no flaws that know everything that knows the solution or the product, know the training, know the book, who read everything, and read all the news. It’s very hard to connect with that level of perfection so I think a culture that would let people be who they are is a culture that has leaders that are honest and vulnerable with the people in front of them, be their teams, be their clients, be any other stakeholders that they might have. People who can come to the table and say, hey, we’ve been struggling. It’s been a very tough two years because of COVID. We’ve lost money, we’ve lost people, but we’re still doing the best we can to innovate. We’re still doing the best we can to be there for our employees. We’re still doing the best we can to maybe offer that flexibility that our workforce needs. Whatever your situation might be, be open about it and that will get the people on your team to open up to you. It will get them to want to learn more, it will get them to want to be better for the product they sell for the company they represent. I think that would be my advice. I hope it’s not too cheesy. I know it sounds a little bit cheesy, but it’s really not, there’s a lot of strength in asking for help when you need it.

SS: No, absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. Now, you mentioned that you’re also passionate about enabling others to make sense of what more needs to look like for them. How do you help to also personalize some of the training programs that you create to meet these individual, unique needs of different sellers?

CP: That exact phrase, what more needs to look like for them, is actually a phrase that came from my coaching. I am a certified professional coach as well for the past three years and that’s really truly my passion, practicing enablement and training in general, and is the foundation of what I consider a job well done in today’s sales environment and industry if you want. More really can mean slowing down so we can speed up as one of my favorite colleagues in my team often says, and more can mean better team cohesion between the different stakeholders inside the group and it can very well mean more revenue or better empowerment for the teams or better and more efficient alignment.

What I personally did at the very start of my current role was to reach out to each of my stakeholders individually and find out what they needed to do a better job in their roles. After running through them one by one individually, we then gathered in groups by teams and decided on a few joint areas of improvement and focus that we wanted to build our relationship on, like the relationship enablement revenue if I were to consider sales revenue in general because depending on what kind of enablement you’re doing and what your industries, you’re going to have different levels of stakeholders so I called revenue everybody who touches revenue one directly or indirectly and with whom enablement needs to interact with. We basically got together to share expectations, create a shared plan and set up a schedule of how often we are going to meet to touch base on this and to see how things are evolving. That’s how I basically got to take this idea more, understand what it means for them individually, and then take it one step further. I can’t tell if this recipe would actually work the same everywhere. I don’t even really call it a recipe, but it’s my modus operandi, my M.O. because it looks like a complex system from both individual levels and as a total sum of its parts.

SS: I love that. I think that’s phenomenal. Now I want to dig into a little bit more about what you are currently focused on. Your focus is around partner enablement and training, what are some of the unique needs that maybe partner sellers might have, and what are some ways that you’ve designed training programs to meet those needs?

CP: As tough as training internal sales folk is because I was saying adult learning, they need everything super fast, they want to know the exact thing when they want to know when they need it and be done with it. With partners, the relationship is a lot more delicate. On one hand, you want to give them all the information you could possibly give them so that from an enablement standpoint, you feel you’ve done a good job and they’ve had everything they could possibly need to know in order to go out there and sell your solution, but on the other, you don’t want to overwhelm them. It’s really this fine line, this dance you need to constantly do of holding their hand, but also pushing them to do better and to ask for information that they need that might be very particular to what they do and how they understand the industry they’re an expert of. That’s why you have a go-to-market strategy that involves distribution and sellers.

Generally what we do is we work very closely with the channel account managers, like we try to make sure that the people who onboard those partners and realistically the people who interact with them more come to us for feedback before we plan any sort of session or academy or enablement day with any of the partners we work with and we take their feedback into consideration while building the content. We always go back and forth to make sure that it matches their needs. It goes to be very personalized for some of them and at least for me, because again, I work in France and as you might or might not know France has to be very particular with the way partnerships work. We do a lot for our partners, so we do this exact dance of holding their hands but not giving them too much and trying to give them exactly what they need when they ask for it. The exact answer for me would be to have a channel account manager or whoever is taking care of those partners step in and carry the load because they already have the trust and the relationship built with the partner.

Let them make it easy for you as enablement to bring in your message. Personalize as much as you can so the information you’re providing is the one they want to take out of the sessions and more than anything really listen. With partners, a lot of the times enablement I think has a tendency of pushing as much content as they can because we work so hard making it and we also work hard with marketing to have the pretty slides and the messaging and everything else we want to communicate, but we don’t spend enough time with partners so we get to really listen to them. My absolute advice and what we try to do mostly is listen to them when we have them for those sessions so we can improve it for future sessions or for the future partners or for whatever other programs are coming after. The same advice you would give your sellers in trying to make them better sellers apply to you as an enablement professional, sell yourself through those sessions the same way you want your sellers to sell your solution when they go in the field.

SS: Cristina, thank you so much for your time. I want to ask one closing question. Sales enablement obviously takes many shapes, sizes, and colors in the real world, and in various industries, there’s really no one size fits all, but what would you say that your key takeaways are moving from training into enablement?

CP: Oh, I love this one. Here’s how I would define enablement and kind of how I built it for myself. I’m trying the best I can to be the bridge between revenue and the rest of the business. I’m trying to be the catalyst for change or process change or any sort of thing that’s happening in the business, I try to be the first person bringing it to sales. I don’t want sales spending time doing anything else other than their job. I want to be the person bridging them to everything that’s happening, bringing that information to them, digested, explained with impacts, and with whatever they need to know distilled into the meaning of it to them. I think all in all be as much a bridge with the rest of the business for sales as you can. That’s my personal way of doing my business. Absolutely, everybody can do it differently. That’s not what works for them, but that’s how I perceive enablement. Generally, you need all that information for yourself anyway because you’re going to need to infuse it into your training and your programs and you need to know what’s happening around you. The more you do that and the more people you know so you can get the information the better and the more efficient you’re going to be.

I think one thing that I’ve learned and probably the hard way and I’m very sure a lot of people are going to relate to this is enable don’t save. In enablement, we’re a bunch of empaths, like we are the kind of people that are into this job because they care for others. They see them struggle, they see how hard it is selling today, they see how much people have to juggle, they see how tough the different industries are and they want to be there to help. We don’t become doctors, we somehow chose enablement, and we’re here today. A lot of the time the business will push on us, the things that are not necessarily within the enablement job description, because it’s so easy because we’re there and we always want to help so we will take more upon ourselves and we’ll do that deck and we’ll do that training and we’ll do that at the training and we’ll do the training for HR and we’ll talk to marketing and maybe just take the deck, but do it ourselves. There’s a lot that ends up being done by enablement that’s really not enablement.

My takeaway was how do I turn this into actually enabling these people and not saving them because saving them is literally giving someone a fish rather than teaching them how to fish. I will be honest, saying that I’m much, much better at saying no today, and switching this exact circumstance in my favor and getting people to fish for their fish and not get it from me, but it does require a lot of work and a lot of trusts built between the different stakeholders you’re gonna work for. Again, enable don’t save, It’s in your best interest, and it’s that’s exactly where the switch gets made where enablement is an investment, and it’s an actual part of the business that helps and not just this other department that we don’t really know what they do so let’s just get them to do this and that and the other thing, and let’s get them to do everything that doesn’t ever get done, because they will manage because they’re the training people. Don’t let them do that to you. It’s absolutely counterproductive.

I think, last but not least, this might be just my case because in Europe we tend to be a little bit behind where the US is in enablement wise, you guys are just more advanced, you’ve always been, you are the pioneers in this and we’re just following in your footsteps. What I would say is whenever you start a new enablement mission, be it in a new company, be it in a different team, whatever your case might be, try to look around you and figure out what the gaps are and do your best to fill them in as fast as you can by priority and impact. There are always gaps that are really why enablement is here. If everything worked perfectly and sales knew exactly what to sell and where to sell it and how to get the information and not have anyone do it and give it to them, we wouldn’t be here. There are always gaps. That’s really the point, you can go in get your big wins in the beginning and start establishing that trust with your stakeholders and build on a strong foundation of I’m here to help and I know what I’m doing and I got this because look, I know maybe you’re not moving from opportunity to closing fast enough, maybe the lead doesn’t turn into an opportunity fast enough, I can help with all of that, I can keep people happy, I can help with metrics, I can show you why enablement is worth the investment you’re putting into it if that makes sense.

SS: I think that is fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time.

CP: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, I’m absolutely grateful to speak to anyone that would learn something from this because as I was saying, I need people to learn something from me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Kasey Stinson from Co-Op Solutions join us. Kasey, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Kasey Stinson: Thanks so much for having me. I am Kasey Stinson, Vice President of Sales Enablement and Product Marketing at Co-Op Solutions. For those of you unfamiliar with Co-Op Solutions, we are a financial technology organization that exists to help credit unions in particular grow and compete with other financial institutions. I have about 15 years of experience in sales, sales leadership, and now in sales enablement and product marketing which I have been doing at Co-Op Solutions for the past 3.5 years.

SS: I’m excited to have you here, Kasey. As a leader for both sales and product marketing, what are some of the key points of intersection that you see between those two functions?

KS: In my organization at Co-Op leading both sales enablement and product marketing really makes sense from a strategic perspective. It enables me to have oversight and control of product positioning throughout the entire product development process. From start to finish we have very close alignment on that positioning with our sales team and, of course, with our relationship teams as well. Once that is all established and the product is through the product development process, it’s then a really easy transition from that product marketing and positioning into messaging, which then informs our sales tools and our sales training.

Just to note though, I do have two distinct teams. I have a product marketing team and a sales enablement team, but the product marketing team members are absolutely critical partners in helping to inform our sales enablement strategy and they have very strong relationships and understand the needs of the sales team through their work with them during the product development process when they’re constantly weighing in for their feedback on how we should be positioning the products and then what tools and training we need to support those.

SS: Absolutely. You touched on this just a moment ago, but you talked a little bit about alignment. What are some of the challenges that organizations can face when they’re attempting to drive alignment between sales enablement and the greater organization?

KS: When I started at Co-Op Solutions 3.5 years ago, the sales enablement function was in its relatively early stages. Co-Op started a sales enablement function in about 2016 of which I was along for the ride in 2016 when I was doing some consulting work, but even when I started in 2019, I often had to ask to have a seat at the table or be a part of a meeting or I would hear a sales team meeting was going on and we weren’t invited so I’d raise my hand and reach out to my sales leader counterparts and say, Hey, can I tag along to that? Then once I got that seat at the table, I had to prove the value that I brought through our sales enablement function and how we could enrich their meetings and enrich their tools in training.

Fast forward 3.5 years, and now we’re absolutely missed when we’re not at the table and brought in right away. I would say they rely on us as true partners, but it’s required work, it’s required the building of trust and those challenges exist really early on when you’re not connected or collaborating as a team. Then, I would say once we really established ourselves with the sales organization, that expanded into different areas of the organization as well. We have tools and training that we make available for our executive-level management team, leaders across the organization, and other departments, like our client service organization and more, so we’ve been able to overcome some of those challenges and then expand our value and our impact on Co-Op solutions.

SS: That is fantastic. If you could share some of your best practices for breaking down the silos between sales enablement and the greater organization. What were some of the things that you did?

KS: I briefly alluded to this, but building relationships is really number one. My advice to others would be to find out who the influential and maybe outspoken partners in the organization are and I would say regardless of their role or position we all know that there are influential people throughout the layers of management of an organization and its key to understand their needs and build trust with those people. Once you’re able to forge those relationships, they’ll advocate on your behalf and tell their friends and tell their coworkers and speak to the value that you really bring to the organization.

I would say even just taking that one step further, once you are able to earn that trust, you can start pushing and that’s where the magic begins. You can push the envelope to get the team outside of their comfort zone and suggest new ideas and you’ve built that trust so they’re more willing to be open and have a growth mindset for new ideas for sales tools, maybe some new strategies. We’ve been able to do this with our tools and training, expanding the topics that we train the team on, having maybe new and different sessions at our sales meeting, and really encouraging the growth of our organization along with the growth of the market and the industry as well.

SS: That’s fantastic. As you said, relationship building, that’s absolutely number one. Can you share some advice on how you’ve built strategic partnerships with other leaders throughout your organization?

KS: I think it comes as no surprise to anyone that investing time is critical and it does take all of that time to connect with people. Once you have that time established, listen. If you are a truly active listener and you’re able to understand their needs and typically these might be verbalized in the form of pain points they’re experiencing, maybe experiencing in front of their prospective clients or their clients, and you’re able to help them overcome some of those pain points and provide value in helping them overcome, then you’ve really begun to build your value as that strategic partner that they’re looking for.

The other tip I have is to incorporate processes. We have needed to build processes around incorporating the voice of the sales team and that ensures that we have a very consistent and reliable set of touchpoints to allow for this feedback throughout our work in whatever it is that we’re doing, whether it be the sales team meeting or sales tools or sales training or that positioning of the products that I spoke about, we want to make sure that we have high performing rep voices or sales leadership voice is always at the table so that they become active participants and were able to build those relationships and prove that we always have their best interests in mind.

SS: I love that, I think that’s fantastic. You have really been working to essentially drive a culture of collaboration, so what are some of the ways that enablement practitioners can help drive a similar culture throughout all levels of their organization?

KS: It really goes back to what I just hit on which is listening and understanding needs and finding ways that you can partner to provide value to those teams. Usually, at the end of the day in organizations, everyone’s working to achieve common outcomes so if you’re at the table sharing out your plans and ideas and you’re asking for collaboration and input and you have your go-to people, you know what your team can bring to the table, and you’re listening and partnering, then it really helps to drive that culture.

Two other things, one is we joke that we have something called the awareness carnival. It’s just our internal sales enablement term, but we want to make sure that we are sharing value and being strategic partners with other cross-functional departments. We’re continuously having this awareness carnival of what we bring to the table and how we can partner. That drives a culture of collaboration, we drive excellent conversations through some of those discussions, and we are constantly pressure testing our work to say how can we do this better, what input do you have?

Secondly, I think it’s important to know what your team is known for, almost the brand or identity of your team, and lean into those to find points of collaboration. There are very few pieces of the work that we do that are really key points for collaboration for our organization. We lead the strategy and production of our sales enablement webinars and those are such great opportunities for collaboration because they drive participation from all facets of the organization. We might have a guest speaker from our pricing team, we might have someone leading a cross-functional presentation on sales strategy and internal and external strategy and how that comes together to be a consultative partner. We’re always looking for ways to drive engagement from different teams across the organization to present to our sales team.

SS: I love those. Last question for you, how can cross-functional alignment and collaboration ultimately impact the key business priorities and really drive results against perhaps some of the organization’s more strategic goals?

KS: The strategic goal that really comes to mind for me outside of we will say a revenue impact or renewal in and retention of existing clients would be a client impact. We are striving at Co-Op to always have happy clients and clients who want to do business with us. When you have more engaged teams across an organization, they are supported with more training, more knowledge, strong expertise, a high level of strategy, and really effective tools, they are able to provide our clients with a consistent experience and have a very high level of knowledge and are able to be strategic partners and also, of course, help navigate anything that may come to the client that we can provide support on. I would say more engaged teams even above and beyond, just sales, expanding into other departments, any client-facing teams, and we really are able to make a significant impact on our clients and their experience with our organization.

SS: That is fantastic. Kasey, thank you so much for joining the podcast today.

KS: Thanks for having me

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Annelie Girard from PlayPlay join us. Annelie, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Annelie Girard: Thank you for having me today. As you mentioned, my name is Annelie Girard and I work as the Sales Enablement Manager at PlayPlay. PlayPlay is the ultimate video creation platform that empowers teams to create engaging professional-quality videos with no technical skills. About my background, I’ve been in the sales space for six years and I spent the last four years in the tech industry helping companies and sales representatives grow.

SS: Fantastic. Well, I’m so excited to have you join us today. Now, as you mentioned in your intro, you focus on providing sales reps with the resourcing that they need to essentially close more deals. At a high level, what does this entail?

AG: That’s a great question. Providing sales reps with the resources they need implies making sure the sales team has the content, tools, processes, and knowledge necessary to perform their role most efficiently at the manager and the sales representative levels, but also the different stages of the sales role. From onboarding to ramp-up until they reach their senior level.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now from your experience, can you share what types of resources are usually needed to help drive productivity?

AG: Sales productivity has two components. The first one is sales efficiency, which is about optimizing reps’ use of time. You want to make sure the salesperson spends that time on high-impact activities as opposed to low-impact activities. Sales efficiency would evolve around tools for example, do you have a CRM, do you have automation tools? You just want them to spend time on only tasks that would make the most impact on your business. For example, can you maximize their time related to prospecting? Do you have tools where they can prospect easily? Do you have tools that can automate follow-up personalized outreach and track engagement? The other aspect of sales efficiency is do you have a routine they can rely on. Share a routine, and tell them when they should prospect versus when they should do their administrative tasks.

The second component of productivity is sales effectiveness. The ability of a rep to drive revenue and in that category include things such as self-training, shadowing programs, and tutorials, but also have a routine where you can share the best practices. The last thing in the sales effectiveness will be about content. Provide them with frameworks such as how are you supposed to prepare a call. Do you have any frameworks on your qualification method, but also one-pagers on your bio personas as well as a library of email templates dedicated to each stage of your sales process?

SS: Fantastic. And what would you say are the qualities that you see in maybe some of your top-performing sales reps?

AG: Over the years, the top qualities that I’ve seen in top performers would be essentially business acumen, so the ability to understand how a business works, what are the goals, challenges, and the decision-making process. It’s crucial and necessary so sales reps can align the strategies with the customers’ pain points. Be genuine about your prospects and organization. A second quality that I’ve seen is active listening. When they pay full attention to the prospecting problem, pain points, or ideas, it really avoids assumptions and makes them more relevant to their prospect’s situation.

Another quality would be relationship building. Those that are top performers are great at building trust with their customers. Another one would be the growth mindset. A growth mindset would mean having the ability to create a strategy to cope with setbacks and have that resilient skills, but also be willing to learn and acknowledge weaknesses and act on them. Then I would say there are two other qualities that I’ve noticed in top performers. One is product knowledge because ultimately the job of the sales rep is to help that customer solve the problem by implementing the product. The ability to do so relies heavily on that product knowledge but also on understanding what they’re selling and the value of the product that they are selling. The last quality that I see in top performance is data analysis. Being able to prioritize revenue-driving activities against low-impact tasks.

SS: Absolutely. What are some best practices for identifying gaps between high and low-performing sales reps and how can different enablement resources help to close these gaps?

AG: The way we’re doing at PlayPlay is that we actually use multiple data sources, both quantitative and qualitative. What we’re going to look at is for example KPIs. Do they reach quota, where is the sales velocity, what is the deal size, and what are the conversion rates? Then besides those quantitative aspects, what I’m also going to look at is for example employee and leadership interviews. I want to look at the customer interactions that we have across the phone, maybe rep conferencing or even emails but also dig into the CRM. What content are they sharing? How do they create quotes? Also having a defined competency framework really helps us to identify what are the gaps.

I would say one of the best practices after that one would be to actually cross-validate all those results so you can consolidate all those data and really pinpoint those gaps between high and low performers. Different enablement resources can help to close those gaps, for example, if you think about content, creating sales plays is a good way to guide reps on what they have to say, show, or even what to do during a certain sales process. You can also create plays on how to create value at every touch point.

Another solution that can be developed by enablement to close those gaps is designing programs to emphasize other right behavior to improve consistency and remove distractions from optimum productivity. One of the last resources that enablement can use is of course training and coaching. You want to be able to identify your top performers’ strengths and associate them with those who need training through, for example shadowing programs.

SS: I think those are fantastic. Now you have experience as a sales success coach, how can coaching help reps maximize the impact of a lot of those resources that you mentioned earlier available to them?

AG: Because sales coaching is individualized and inclusive when offered on that 1-to-1 basis, you can easily identify areas of improvement and ensure that no team members fall into the cracks. That is because self-discovery is not easy, so coaching will allow you to have a closer look at how every sales rep uses your resources. For example, how does the sales rep pitch your sales deck? How does he or she execute the process you designed on your CRM? You can then provide an individualized solution such as direct feedback and role play to reinforce the right behavior that leads to success.

SS: Fantastic. Now, the last question for you. How can sales enablement partner with sales leaders to coach the reps to long-term success?

AG: I believe that’s a very key question. In the same way, if you want to provide your sales team with the tools, processes, content, and knowledge they need to perform, you need to enable your leaders with the four elements as well. The first step is to design a sales leader program to show your leaders what you want them to be coaching on and how they’re supposed to do it. That should include training such as what a good manager routine looks like, developing communication skills, how to provide constructive feedback, and, at the same time, it is crucial to train sales either on processes and products their team is using or is using or pitching daily.

Another way to enable your leaders is to coach them through a peer-to-peer mentoring program or an ask me anything session for those new leaders. The second aspect is to collaborate with them on materials they need to coach such as scorecards to track goals, key questions to guide a sales reps learning, tools to track their progress, and make sure they know how to use those tools. Enabling yourself I would say is an ongoing process where selling routines to hear what is happening on the floor, and what good or improvable behavior they identified is a key component of a successful partnership. I would say the last ingredient to a very successful partnership with your sales leader is to work very closely with them to be able to provide those individualized coaching plans when requested.

SS: Fantastic, I love that. Well Annelie, thank you so much for joining us today. I enjoyed learning from you.

AG: Thank you very much for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Emily Drew: Hi Shawnna, I am absolutely thrilled to be here today first and foremost. My name is Emily. My role is senior director for the world’s largest job title coming at you, the Global Sales Leader Excellence Program which I can dive into a little bit later with you. I’m originally Irish as you can hopefully tell from the accent but based just outside London and have a pretty varied background. I started off doing a little bit of teaching abroad in Asia, transitioned into sales and marketing roles, and then I found my true calling in the world of enablement and coaching about seven years ago and that’s led me to my current role at Salesforce. For those that don’t know, Salesforce is a pretty profound CRM solution and I’ve been working there for the last number of years.

SS: We’re very excited to have you on the podcast today, Emily. As you mentioned in your introduction, one of your areas of expertise is leadership enablement from your experience, working with different leaders across your organization, what are some of the qualities that make for a great leader?

ED: That’s a brilliant question and I have two responses because I think some leadership qualities are role agnostic. Regardless of whether you’re a sales leader or a BDR manager or a supervisor in a supermarket, for example, that is a really important success. Those are things like being visionary, being a great listener, being a great coach, having the ability to have great empathy, and having the ability to engage with and build strong relationships with others. Those are some of the leadership-agnostic ones. For sales and solutions, more specifically, this is a question I spoke about a lot with my peers as we introduced the concept of leadership enablement for sales leaders at Salesforce and as a result, came up with this sales leader excellence model. This involved the creation of three key pillars that constitute greatness in a leader in the sales space and they are one, my personal favorite, being a great talent multiplier, so investing and understanding, developing your people, and establishing psychological safety. The next one is a business leader, so that’s all things, pipe gen, forecasting, execution, and being and knowing how to flex those in different ways as you move up the leadership ladder. Lastly, being a trusted partner. Being able to engage with influence, gained the trust of your customers. I think it is really important to have those broad leadership qualities as a leader, but when your sales or solutions leader you need those extra nuances and levels of expertise as well.

SS: I think those are absolutely key components that make up a great leader. I love those. How can leadership enablement help leaders across the business really harness these characteristics to more effectively lead their teams?

ED: I look back to 5 or 6 years ago when we didn’t have this in place and what the world was like, certainly at Salesforce, and it was very, very different. What I always think about is you can’t be what you can’t see. We were asking our account executives or people who are under leaders to do things and act in a certain way and be a certain way, but then they were kind of looking up and saying, well my leader doesn’t necessarily do things in that way or thinking that way or coach me to act that way. I think when you enable, I use this analogy of the life jacket when you’re on a flight and you’re a parent, you’re supposed to put your life jacket on first and you then are set up to be safe and take care of your children, for example. So in the case of the leader if you set them up for success and provide them the ability to become excellent at what they do and equipped to better coach and enable and encourage their teams that has just such a waterfall effect and enables everyone beneath them to see greatness in action to aspire towards that level of greatness and everyone’s on the same page and able to work towards being ever more productive.

SS: I think that’s phenomenal. Now, what does leadership enablement actually look like in practice? What are some of the core components of leadership enablement programs that you’ve deployed?

ED: Another great question. Shawnna, you’re on a roll. First of all, I mentioned it earlier, but you need to define what you’re aspiring towards. That sales leader excellence model that I spoke about, creating a robust framework to define what the great competencies the aspiring leaders to work is first and foremost because then you can develop all of the enablement programs around that and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing at salesforce. We defined what great looks like across those three pillars and within those three pillars, there are many, many different competencies and all the programs tie back to that. An example of a big program I’ve been involved in is overhauling or essentially we’ve been creating an onboarding journey for our leaders and some of the ways that are a little bit different maybe from enablement we might have done with ICs, is that it’s very, very interactive and engaging. When new leader joins the organization, they go through some of the more standard workshop activities and lots of online learning but that’s supplemented by them being given a coach to work with 1 to 1 on a biweekly basis to help see them through their entire onboarding journey. That culminates at the six-month mark in their journey where they present on a panel, sort of a capstone event, where they reflect on their six months in leadership, they relate it to that model and how they’re exhibiting greater excellence across all of those key pillars and it’s a really good opportunity for them to demonstrate all they’ve learned all they’ve gained, how far they’ve come.

Another part of the onboarding journey that’s been important is the provision of mentors. Using another program, like the Leader Excellence Academy, we take our most talented top-performing leaders and have them act as mentors to our new starters so that their coach, their mentor, all the standard enablement, and they’re also brought together in coaching circles to discuss, debate, reflect on the most pertinent topics that arise when you’re a new leader. Stuff from how you drive pipe gen efforts as a leader, how you engage with your customers when you’re elevated from an IC to a leadership role, performance management, and having a safe space to explore that is great. I think with leader enablement you need to be a bit more hands-on in one way with the coaching element, but you also need to be a bit more hands-off in other ways, in less death by PowerPoint sessions for them and more allowing them to learn from their peers as well as from more talented leaders. I think the onboarding program has been a huge one and the coaching program of which I’m a part. We established a whole coaching practice for leadership whereby in every region there’s a coach assigned to work 1 to 1 with those new leaders, in need leaders, our leaders of leaders, and to help them not only heightened their self-awareness to become better leaders but also to guide them through and towards excellence on that model that I referenced earlier. That’s been a huge one.

The one I’m most excited about because it’s my it’s become my full-time job is our Leader Excellence Academy and what that encompasses as I sort of touched earlier is we take our top 10% of leaders at various levels and we take them through this year-long program that is all designed to prep them for their next roles. If they’re in the first line, we prepare them to move to the second line. Lots of training, investment coaching, and in turn they help us and our mentors and enablers for the wider organization, and that’s been an absolute game changer because its peers teaching peers, there are levels of credibility there that could never have been possible before, and it’s allowed us to scale. We’re not a huge enablement team, so to have this wealth of people bought into helping and supporting has been amazing. There are some other great programs and experiential learning which I’m less involved with but are working well and it’s basically taking people out of the business away for a few days to somewhere we call the ranch and doing lots of really hands-on practical application of learning. It’s working well but quite different from what I’ve done historically when I worked primarily with ICs.

SS: Absolutely those programs do sound amazing. Now, leaders are often very busy when it comes to their schedules and I imagine it can be difficult to convince them to make time for their own development and learning. How have you gained buy-in with different leaders to make time for enablement programs like these?

ED: I have to tell you if I rewound around three years ago, I was really struggling with this. When I didn’t have a role that was solely focused on leader enablement and I would run an ad hoc leader training event, no one would show up, or if they did they were very disengaged. That’s very different now. Now we’re in a place where we can’t keep up with the demand from leaders and that’s been achieved in a few key ways. I think the first one is building trust and the best way that I would recommend that people try and apply this if they’re enablers with the leadership team is by using a coaching approach. Building key relationships with leaders of all levels through coaching them through, getting to know them, listening, and deeply understanding what’s going on for them in their world. The other one is piloting. What I did with the program in the UK&I for coaching is we piloted there and there was another peer of mine doing the same in America, we were like, let’s try this out, let’s run a few programs, see what the feedback is and they proved really successful. Then to go forward to all the other leaders and be like, hey your peers in the UK&I I have done this and they’ve seen XY results, this is the quality of feedback for them, would you like this done for you and that’s exactly what’s happened. Word of mouth has meant that the reputation and the perception of leadership enablement have shifted. The things I hear a lot are you really understand us, you really understand our role, you understand our pain points and you provide us great levels of value also. I mentioned it already, but coaching is key. Just making that a central pillar of how you enable leaders and peer learning, peer mentorship, all of that is so vital and sponsorship from senior leaders, of course, to get bums on seats for certain sessions is always helpful. What I love about that is I’ve had to do that less and less now, people organically want to engage because they feel like they’re getting value

SS: Absolutely. When organizations invest in leadership enablement in the way that they’ve done at Salesforce, what are some of the impacts that you’ve seen actually trickle down, maybe even into performance within your organization?

ED: It’s pretty profound. When I first came into this role, my focus was on enabling first-line leaders and what was really interesting to see was the knock-on effect, the qualitative and quantitative results that demonstrated the success of that not only with their AEs, but often with their leader because they were taking learnings and their enablement and it was influencing leaders above them, their peers and different roles and all of that. I think the key thing, I have a slide that I often bring up, minus the numbers, but I’ll give you some of the headlines on it. Focusing on leadership enablement has had a huge increase in the pipeline of the leaders that have been actively involved in the leadership programs and enablement we’ve provided them. We’ve seen a stronger uplift in deal closures and deals closing more quickly, and more efficiently and that’s linked directly to deal coaching workshops we’ve led with leaders and had them run with their teams. We’ve seen the development of a coaching culture, which is a knock-on effect in creating this sense of psychological safety on teams, and that in turn has meant reduced attrition, both among leaders themselves and their AEs.

We’ve also seen a reduction and performance management issues because one of the most prevailing issues I suppose that I walked into and saw time and time again with leaders dealing with underperformers and not knowing how to tackle that. Our offering this sort of well-rounded leadership enablement journey for them inclusive of how to have difficult conversations, and how to coach your team has resulted in retaining more people returning and improving the performance of those who were previously struggling a little bit. These are some of the best things. My personal favorite going back to that talent multiplier pillar is seeing survey results and people’s satisfaction and enjoyment at working for Salesforce in a sales role, increasing and increasing.

SS: I think that is phenomenal. Last question for you, Emily. To close, how can leadership enablement help create a more people-centric culture in an organization?

ED: I’m going to kind of tackle that in two ways. Firstly they have to want to create a more people-centric culture, so we have to aim to hire people for whom that talent multiplier element of leadership that I keep referring back to its importance. It is very hard if someone is not by their nature people-centric or talent multiplier to turn around to be that. Once they’re in there, the enablement provided to them has to marry up with rewarding them and encouraging them, providing them the skill set, and the mindset necessary to deliver on that. All of the enablement that I try to deliver, whether it’s on business leader, pipe gen, or forecasting, for that matter, will always try and weave in elements of how important as a leader it is to be authentic, to show vulnerability and adopt a growth mindset because that has such a waterfall effect on the wider leadership and sales organization. I think when we invest the time, invest the money, invest the people to enable and coach our leaders to become more coach-like, inspirational, to better listen and empathize, all those skills that I mentioned as being important to a leader in any sphere of influence has a profound impact on their teams the wider organization.

When we have our culture, and our values displayed on our company website, I mean any company in the world, those need to be lived and breathed by our leaders. Otherwise, how can we expect our ICs or people joining the company to really feel that they’re true and lived and breathed by everyone? One message that I’m lucky enough in the role to be able to call on very senior execs to come and speak to some of the more junior leaders and one of them said recently that his ethos is leaving people better than you found them. That’s something that I am trying to have underpinned everything we do in terms of developing our leaders. They should be focused on leaving their teams, their peers, and their customers better than they found them and by virtue of that fact they’re very likely to have more successful teams, customers hit their quotas in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if they had a different approach.

SS: I love that philosophy as well. Always leave it better than you found it. Emily, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your insights.

ED: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been wonderful.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Jeromy Proulx from Humana join us. Jeromy, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jeromy Proulx: Hi Shawnna, thank you for having me. I’m Jeromy Proulx and I currently serve as the head of sales technology and transformation at Humana. We’re a leading Fortune 50 healthcare organization that provides a number of different products and services to help people achieve lifelong well-being. In addition to my responsibilities at Humana, I also serve as an adjunct faculty at Northeastern University, a top 50 research institution in Boston Massachusetts. My career started in sales and marketing across several different industries including consumer packaged goods, investments, and insurance products, before stepping into sales management, execution and enablement roles over the last several years.

SS: Fantastic. Well, we’re excited to have you here Jeromy. I noticed that you also actually teach as a professor at Northeastern University and one of your areas of expertise is around project management. From your perspective, why are project management skills so critical for enablement professionals?

JP: Thank you for the question, Shawnna. I believe project management skills are imperative regardless of what role you serve to an organization, but more particularly within the sales enablement space. My focus in the classroom has been on the intersection of common waterfall project management skills and agile project management skills that have become more prevalent in the workplace today. These are skills that absolutely transcend both disciplines, such as being an effective communicator, the art of negotiation and influence, general time management, and risk management skills, just to name a few. If you think about it, these are also critical skills to being a great enablement leader. Whether you’re focused on training and development activities or enablement tools and technology, you will undoubtedly have to use project management skills to deliver value to the organization. Over the last decade, the emergence of agile project management has created greater alignment in my opinion with the enablement space as you think about some of the core principles and agile methodologies.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. You talk about this a little bit, but what are some of the key principles of project management that you found most essential to your role, particularly leading sales technology and transformation efforts?

JP: One of the first agile principles centers around the rapid and continuous delivery of value. Whereas traditional project management methods would focus more on a big bang that could take several months to get to. In the sales enablement space, it’s all about the value of delivering to field-facing roles. If you have the ability to deploy practices, test, learn, and iterate, that is way more effective than doing a significant amount of work only to find out you missed the mark in the end. Agile inherently promotes this fail-forward mentality and teams which ensures that you achieve the desired impact as efficiently as possible in your work. By taking this test, learn and iterate mindset, you hit three other agile principles, simplicity is essential, regular reflection, and continuous excellence promotes agility. As an example in action, if you are tasked with building a 90-day sales onboarding program, rather than go build out all 90 days in detail, you would break down the work into minimum viable program elements that would allow you to get some feedback, incorporate that feedback and enhance the design. That might mean focusing on the first 30 days, or even smaller increments to understand what are the right things for a rep to know to improve ramp or time to market.

SS: I love that approach. Now when it comes to implementing new tools in your tech stack, what are some of your best practices for managing that process?

JP: This is a great question and I think there are two parts to this answer. First, is the project management side of implementation, and the second is the change management components. When implementing new tools, there was some advice I received from a leader a few years back as we worked through a pretty tough transformation and merger of two companies. She always used to say for every project it is imperative that there’s clarity on scope and that everyone operates with a sense of urgency. That’s not really earth-shattering advice but it’s a good grounding factor whenever you’re working towards bringing new capabilities to your sales partners. Having clarity on the scope means you’re crisp on what the new tools are intended to do, who your impacted audience is, and ultimately your path that gets you to that objective. Without a clearly defined and documented scope, you’ll end up moving the goalpost for the project and driving an increased risk of going behind schedule or more adversely, over budget.

When it comes to a sense of urgency. I trace this back to the aforementioned points on value. The quintessential saying in sales time is money, the more time you take to implement a tool ultimately means time lost when the value could have been delivered to your end user.

The second part of this answer is the change management components that support the delivery. We often get sucked into the project plan for the development of these capabilities and overlook the most important part, which is how we generate excitement and desire with the end users. Don’t discount how important this is having great change management, go-to-market or operational readiness plan can make an incredible difference in driving a successful tool or technology implementation. People often think of change management plans as being a communication plan, and while communication is absolutely a major component of the change management plan, it’s not the only thing, it’s about managing everything from the why we’re giving this awesome tool to you, to how you manage resistance and provide reinforcement as individuals move through the change curve. There’s a ton of research that points to, you know, nearly two-thirds of implementations failing due to the inability to manage behaviors and drive adoption. Two-thirds is a lot.

SS: Absolutely, it is. As you mentioned, one challenge that can arise is driving that adoption, especially amongst reps who may be resistant to change. How can enablement practitioners overcome this challenge to help sales reps navigate digital transformation?

JP: I’m a big believer in the adkar model for change management and every go-to-market or operational readiness plan should address each element within that model. Adkar stands for awareness, desire, knowledge, assessment, and reinforcement. While there is no one component of the adkar model that’s more important than the other, I want to focus our conversation on desire as executing well in that stage is the best way to manage rep resistance right out of the gate. Think of desire as either the carrot or the stick to quoting that often used idiom. In the enablement space nearly everything a team will deliver is an effort of making reps more efficient and effective in their job with the carrots being more time, more sales, and ultimately more commission in their pocket. To take that a bit further an approach I’ve used several times is to designate a pilot or change champion group. They get to be a part of the sausage making if you will and ultimately lead the change in their respective roles as you start to inch closer to deployment.

A dear friend of mine and author of The Snowball System, Mo Bunnell, described this approach well. It’s called the red velvet rope approach. When you bring a certain group of people inside the red velvet rope, they feel that exclusivity, that special treatment that not everyone is getting, and in nearly all situations, they become your biggest supporters. Inversely, those that are outside of the velvet rope start to hear that positivity from your change champions and inherently develop a sense of excitement and desire for the change. If you do this well, you’ve likely captured the hearts and minds of 90% of the group. Now for the remaining 10%, this is where the preparation for your front-line managers with a plan to handle objections and resistance becomes important. Research shows that when it comes to talking about the impacts and importance of changes, they don’t want to hear from the enablement team or even the executive leaders. Over 70% of the recipients of change want that detail to come directly from their front-line leader. So ensuring that you equip sales leaders to handle those conversations and potential objections is very important.

SS: Absolutely, I like that adkar model. Now, beyond adding new tools, what are some of your best practices for ensuring the long-term efficiency and effectiveness of your existing text stack to help drive up productivity?

JP: In today’s world of sales enablement there are so many tools and technologies that can drive productivity and I think a lot of people inherently go to we need another application or vendor to solve X problem when really that problem could be the result of poor adoption in another capability. From my perspective, there are three core components in ensuring that you get efficiency and effectiveness out of your technology. Knowing your platform KPIs, creating a regular cadence of communication, and an approach to ongoing reinforcement are those 3 components. If you know what outcomes you want to see, maybe that’s time spent in a particular application or tool, you communicate regularly on how things are going, top to bottom of the organization, and use that data to build that reinforcement plan, maybe that’s more training, maybe that’s some sort of compensation penalty. By doing those three things consistently you’ll ensure you’re getting the most out of your text stack.

The other piece of guidance I would give here is to look for opportunities for integration and rationalization for the organizations. I’ve led we don’t even consider a tool if there isn’t a CRM integration since that’s the primary technology we want our sales teams to utilize. There are so many things that a rep could use to execute their job effectively and going back to the agile principle of simplicity is essential, either rationalizing these tools into one vendor or having integrations that make them feel like it’s one vendor is a straightforward way to avoid barriers to utilization.

SS: I do like that approach. Now, the last question for you, Jeromy. Looking ahead to the next year, how do you think the digital landscape will continue to evolve and how can enablement practitioners effectively prepare reps for those transformations on the horizon?

JP: There’s a ton of research pointing to digital or omnichannel sales interactions being the way of the future coming out of the pandemic. B2B buyers have shifted their preferences to digital and when you think about the purchasing process, less than 20% of that time in the process will the buyer actually spend with a sales rep. That means as a sales rep, you need to find ways for you or your brand to show up in a digital mode. As a sales manager, you need to ensure that reps lean into those capabilities that promote that digital engagement. So much revenue intelligence can be gathered through digital channels and this can be incredibly insightful to how that buyer’s journey progresses. As a practitioner, preparation starts with the organization’s culture. The saying of change is the only constant is so true. We continue to be in this time of unprecedented technological advancement and that means the way in which we sell will also evolve. I believe if you create a culture of empowerment, and transparency and remain highly communicative, your organization will be less change adverse and will decrease the amplitude between the peaks and valleys of your transformation.

The last piece of advice here is to watch for leaky sponges. When you think about the pace of transformation, like a sponge, an organization can only absorb so much. When you start to see people’s sponges leak, you know it’s time to take pause, let them dry out, and give them the ability to absorb more.

SS: I like that analogy. Jeromy, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. I appreciate your insights on digital transformation within sales enablement.

JP: Thank you Shawnna. It was great speaking with you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Aurore Pautet from Malt join us. Aurore, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Aurore Pautet: Thank you, Shawnna. I am Aurore, the sales enablement manager for Malt, a French marketplace specializing in freelancing. I have been in sales for six years, starting with the Expedia group and then moving to Malt. Now, I am in charge of the onboarding, training, animation, and knowledge of 150 sales teams in 5 countries.

SS: Impressive. Now you mentioned that your experience is really around sales training and coaching programs. I’d love for you to walk us through your design process for creating a new program.

AP: Sure. The design process is really different according to your goal, your audience, the topic, and the importance. Through my diverse experiences, I tested different formats, such as coaching sessions with live use case partners, roleplay with the manager, online training made by our own sales teams, shadowing, elevator pitch, etcetera. The choice of the design is really linked to the topic and the volume of information to assimilate. The last innovative formal training that we did was, for example, to train our sales teams on our competitors. The goal was not to describe all the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors by listing them because it was too difficult to assimilate and memorize. That’s why we organize competitors’ debates. This works as an example of functional training and at the same time, we had a well developed flow with the level of acting, of course. That’s why the design is really according to the topic and the volume of knowledge that the sales have to assimilate.

SS: I do love that approach. Now in your opinion, what are some of the key components of effective training and coaching programs, and what are the core elements that practitioners should include?

AP: First of all, you need to understand the objectives of the training. Usually, when you create training it is because you identified a lack of knowledge and a real need for your sales. Then, with that clear content, you can identify not only why, but also how it can be useful for sales. What I also like to do is a short test of comprehension, just to make sure that everything has been well assimilated. Without any hesitation, I think that the Q&A part is the part that you can’t exclude from any training. It is important to remember that what is clear for you is not always clear for your audience. That’s why the Q&A allows you to clarify all the doubts or misunderstandings. If you don’t do the Q&A, I can bet you that you will need to set up a second run to clarify the training. Those are the clear components of good training.

SS: I absolutely agree. What are some of your best practices for aligning your training programs with the real-world needs of reps and how are you able to fully understand the needs of your team for that?

AP: I have three pieces of advice. What helps me in my day-to-day is my past experience as a salesperson. This is a real added value to my job now because I’m able to identify some gray areas and how to address some topics to this population. Sometimes when you are disconnected from the sales teams you can have a lack of actionability in your training. Actionable content is key, this is my first piece of advice. The second one is leaning on the previous one. You need to be close to the sales team by always being with them. By being open to their questions and participating in meetings, you can identify what their needs are.

To start, try to always be available to the sales team and make sure that they know you are available. Of course, sometimes it can be a heavy workload, but in the end, it is worth it. By being solicited by the sales team, you can identify the lack of knowledge and you can fix it rapidly and spread the knowledge to the rest of the team. It also creates trust where the salesperson can come to you for help rather than being afraid when they do not know something. These are my three pieces of advice.

SS: I love those three points. I think that those are spot on. Now, to the needs of your team and thinking and putting yourself in your rep’s shoes, how do you drive adoption and engagement by reps in a new training or coaching program?

AP: I think for us the secret sauce is really to employ some salespeople in the organization of your training. First, for example, I identify with the managers where there is a lack of knowledge and where additional training could be useful. Once done, I identify the best person who is skilled on this topic, and with their help, I will build the training. This person will contribute to the content and above all deploy and present the training to the rest of the team. There are a couple of reasons why we do this. Mainly, it is to create more commitment as the other salespeople on the team are curious to go to the training of one of their colleagues. Also, we can ensure the training will be actionable and directly linked to the business issues as a salesperson has been comforted with this topic previously. Our secret sauce is really to employ a salesperson to deliver the training to the others.

SS: I think that’s a really fantastic approach to driving adoption and engagement. For reps who may need extra support to sharpen their skills, how can enablement help support their continued learning beyond the completion of a training or coaching program?

AP: I think this is a magical thing in enablement. From a well-defined global strategy, you can free up some time to hold specific 1 on 1 coaching and follow-up. For example, we have set up a sales onboarding process and spread it over six weeks. With some online tests each week on our learning management system, we can make sure that the new sales reps master the key topics. For example, if we identify that one of the salespeople didn’t correctly master the CRM or finance process, it is no problem because I can take that person into a one-on-one meeting and offer them specific training to fix it. At the same time, we can have a strategic plan for the rep to self-coach, with of course the help of the manager. If we set up correctly, we can split the time to have more focus and one on one coaching with the sales reps who need it.

SS: I love that approach to helping them with that additional coaching. Now, the last question for you, in a rapidly changing industry, can you share some best practices for keeping your coaching and training programs up to date and relevant to your reps needs to be?

AP: To be honest, that’s really the hardest part since processes can change quickly and often. My advice would be to be close to your peers of enablement from other companies within your industry to get some insights. Be close to all the different teams within your company so you can always be aware and up to date on all the planned changes. I think this is key, you just need to be really curious about other new training ideas. Curiosity allows us to be up to date.

SS: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

AP: Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Richard Giorgi from Swiss Re join us. Richard, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Richard Giorgi: Thanks for having me on today. I’ve been in sales enablement and sales ops roles for over a decade now. I started out in direct sales as an account executive but after I finished grad school I made the jump to Sales Ops and Sales Enablement with a bit of marketing sprinkled in as well. I currently lead sales enablement in the Americas for a company called Swiss Re and we’re a global reinsurer. Essentially we allow insurance companies and other risk transfer providers to insulate their own risk by seeding a portion of that risk to us. In the most basic sense, we are insurance for insurance companies.

SS: Well, Rich, I’m excited to have you here on the podcast. You are uniquely positioned within your organization as a leader in sales enablement that’s reporting through marketing. From your perspective, what are some of the key intersection points between sales enablement and marketing?

RG: Aligning sales and marketing is something that I’m really passionate about. My first post-sales role was actually called Sales and Marketing Associate and I think we’re seeing it more and more today as companies shift to this revenue enablement and revenue ops nomenclature. The idea is that it’s not just sales and marketing being exclusive to each other, but they really need to be aligned and work together. Marketing is driving leads but sellers need the right content for things like follow-up. If a prospect doesn’t end up buying, the old way was for a salesperson to just nurture that prospect over time. In my first sales role I had lists of people who I had spoken to and it was my job as a salesperson to every now and then just send an email or make a phone call, but now you want to kick that back to marketing to help drive top of mind awareness.

Thinking about things like MQLs, measuring MQLs just really isn’t sufficient anymore. Those leads need to be connected to revenue somehow and ultimately sales is still a steward of the brand in the market. It’s important during onboarding to ensure that sellers understand this and they don’t have to create their own content from scratch that could damage the brand or cause confusion in the market, but someone needs to pull that all together and kind of be a referee, so to speak, between sales and marketing. I think that’s where sales enablement can play its most important role, at least in my experience. Ensuring anything that goes to sales is filtered through enablement. The marketing teams and the product teams are very clear on the needs of the sales teams.

SS: Absolutely, I agree. Now, how do you go about driving alignment between the sales enablement and marketing efforts within your organization today?

RG: As you said in the introduction, I’m pretty lucky that I report to marketing, so that’s a big help. Interestingly, marketing here also reports even higher up into strategy and I love that because it helps give me a bigger picture of the business. Strategy touches everything right from go-to-market initiatives to back-end processes, so having that picture of the business allows me to foster better alignment by ensuring that the enablement processes we put in place, support the most wins or the business goals of each team. In the past, in other companies, I’ve also reported up through marketing, but in some cases, I’ve reported up through sales, and sometimes what ends up happening with sales enablement or sales operations or any of those sales support roles, when they report to one or the other, there ends up being a pretty clear bias towards the people that they report into.

If you’re reporting to a CMO, you’re handling more marketing operations and maybe more lead management and things like that, whereas on the sales side you might be pulled into more of the CRM issues or process and methodology and things like that. Being in the strategy team overall allows me to kind of stay in the middle and really do what I like to do and foster the alignment that way because ultimately I’m not really beholden to our head of sales or our head of global marketing or something like that. I have that strategy team that’s giving me a bigger picture of the whole business.

SS: Absolutely. Now you’ve already touched on quite a few areas of potential impact, but what would you say the impact is of alignment between sales enablement and marketing on the business?

RG: Increased revenue and better customer experience. That’s number one and number two, but also hopefully less churn in the ranks and happier employees because they’re doing what they were hired to do which is sell and achieve their own target earnings and not have to create content or search on SharePoint sites are looking for whatever they need in all these different places and having a good understanding of which of their clients or prospects are being marketed to.

Just speaking from experience, when I was in a sales management role so much of what we had to do we had to create ourselves. It makes it difficult to do the things that you want to do, which is being in front of your customers. If you’re constantly searching for things, constantly feeling like you have to write your own content, that’s an impact on revenue and that’s an impact on all the goals that you want to achieve because you’re out there doing other people’s jobs, so to speak. I think sales enablement, being able to align marketing and sales opens up the sales team to do what they do best and what they were hired to do.

SS: Absolutely. On the topic of business impact as you said, your core responsibilities are really around driving revenue growth across the region you support and improving the customer experience. What are some of the key ways that enablement can impact revenue growth?

RG: Enablement exists in my view to make the lives of sellers easier, but also to enable that customer experience. My goal is to ensure that the right seller is speaking to the right prospect about the right solution at the right time. If any one of those things is incorrect or off, it could compromise closing the deal. Ensuring those things are as correct as can be all have an impact on revenue, we don’t want people speaking to companies that we can’t do business with. We want sellers to be able to ascertain the right product or solution that will benefit the customer pretty quickly and we want to make sure the timing is right and that we’re internally aligned.

I can give you an example from the side of a potential customer. This is a true story. When I started at Swiss Re we were in the market for a sales enablement tool and we went to a few different companies one of those companies first had a mid-market rep helping us. Now normally that wouldn’t matter to me as long as the person knows what they’re doing, but for them, I guess it did. When they learned more about Swiss Re they clearly moved us to an enterprise rep based on our company size and our company revenue and everything. We’re clearly an enterprise-level prospect. So step one, it is important to have internal alignment and understand your prospects so don’t split your teams by company if you can’t execute. Now I’m retelling our challenges to a new rep, meanwhile, their competitor has a sales engineer joined from the outset, answering my questions and sending me clear pricing. All in all, it was a much better experience and it was no doubt supported by a strong sales enablement team. One team ends up losing an enterprise-level sale worth six figures in ARR because their teams just weren’t internally aligned. Again, that alignment means so much in terms of impacting revenue.

SS: Absolutely. How can enablement leaders correlate their programs to revenue targets, what are some of the core metrics that you track today?

RG: This kind of goes back to understanding the business goals and being very in the know in terms of revenue goals broken down in some cases, all the way down to the individual seller. In a company that I was at prior to Swiss Re called Spectrum, selling our managed services products was a huge priority and how much quota relief came from managed services sales could affect a seller’s commission. We set up a very intensive program around managed services, a cadence of emails from our sales enablement tool, lead lists and CRM, both prospects and current clients who fit our customer profile, pricing incentives, and all of this aligned with marketing in a larger campaign around these products. We could say this is a lead that you’re receiving from marketing, here are all the companies with all the prospects on all your current clients in this list, and here’s what you can do and speak about when you call on these companies. In that way, two of the biggest metrics that I track today, are our conversion and deal velocity. I want our programs and the tools we invest in the training that we provide to help sellers close more deals, but I also want them to close those deals faster. What’s the impact if I can decrease the sales cycle from say 120 plus days to less than 90? Can we close one more deal a year, and what does one more deal a year per seller means to our revenue goal? Both of those metrics have a huge impact.

Another metric that we’ve taken to looking at Swiss Re more and more is qualified meetings. I said earlier that I think MQLs aren’t really sufficient anymore, and I think a lot of people, at least on the sales side, would probably agree with that statement. It’s great if you’re getting a lot of leads from one channel but which channel is providing the most qualified meetings because those are the channels you want to invest in to maximize the chance of getting the prospects who are closer to buying and that in turn speeds up your sales cycle, helps with your conversion and then again, really goes back to that core goal of mine, which is to help drive our revenue goals.

SS: Last question for you, how do you utilize data such as the impact of enablement on revenue growth to continue to also maybe even optimize your enablement programs?

RG: That’s a great question, and so relevant because data is everything. We look at all those metrics that I listed before and, of course, lots of others and we use that to create our business cases for a new program or an investment in a new tool. We can use it to show sellers where they should spend their time and we use it to tighten up what we’re already doing. We use that data to level set and adjust our programs as we go. It’s kind of funny, I like to use analogies and I like to cook. One of the things you learn when you start cooking is that you have to adjust your seasoning as you go through the recipe and kind of taste and adjust accordingly. Every time you add a new ingredient you have to adjust. It’s no different when you’re running a sales program.

At Spectrum, we ran across a sales program aimed at selling one of our managed services to our current clients because we wanted to drive that incremental revenue. We could find a way to add to our revenue goals, sort of that hat unplanned revenue, that extra revenue that you aren’t really thinking about because these are new programs. We were doing pretty well with it and we noticed that our AEs assigned to the healthcare vertical were struggling. There was like a minimal impact on their targets relative to their peers. We looked at the data, we looked at what we had given them, and one thing that stood out was we had decided to limit this program to companies that had less than 10 locations. A huge portion of our healthcare clients had more than 10 locations. They were big hospital systems like nursing home systems and things like that, and we basically delivered zero leads to these account executives. For this program, we had to use that data and reassess it for that team so we can make sure that we were delivering to them the same thing we were delivering to their peers. You’re just always adjusting and always using data to optimize those programs and ensure you’re on the right track.

SS: I love that, Richard. Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today.

RG: Thank you. I really appreciate it.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Rehmat Kharal from Harness join us. Rehmat, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Rehmat Kharal: Thanks for having me, Shawnna. My name is Rehmat Kharal, a lot of you probably know me by Rem. My current title is VP of Go To Market Strategic Enablement. I’m also a mother of three originally from Toronto Canada, but now reside in the Bay Area and am working for a fantastic startup by the name of Harness.

SS: I’m excited to have you here. You were recognized earlier this year as one of our women making an impact in enablement and as a very accomplished enablement leader and woman, I would love to start off by learning in your opinion, how women in enablement can support each other in growing their careers and achieving professional success?

RK: That’s a really great question and honestly, I feel like enablement is still a very new career that people have entered into probably in the last 10 years or so. It used to be very male-dominated. I would say in the last maybe three or four years there are a lot more females who are entering the enablement space and females who are entering the enablement leadership space. I would say the biggest way that women can support each other is by honestly learning and asking questions and being there for each other. If you’re an enablement leader and you lead a team and you have other people on that team, you should be a mentor to everybody regardless of gender, but if there are females on that team and they have questions about growing in their role and their function, first of all, they should be very open in asking those to their leader and second, there are a lot of different forums that I’m actually just becoming aware of now that are for women. There’s an organization called WiSE, Women in Sales Enablement, and being part of those forums and just having very open, candid conversations about what it means to be great at enablement and how to have a career in that space.

SS: Absolutely. In a video you shared on LinkedIn, you talked about how you personally have been able to work your way up the ladder and get a seat at the table. In your career, how have you been able to prove the value sales enablement provides so that you could earn that seat?

RK: That’s a really good question as well. I mean listen in any role you have to understand the importance of your role and function and how it plays a part in the overall success of the company that you work at. I honestly think that is step one. If you just think, you are just on the enablement team and that you are just an individual contributor and what I do doesn’t really matter, it’s funny because there are a lot of people who do think in that way, you’re not setting yourself up for success. When you’re able to prove your value and I don’t mean proving constantly having to prove yourself because I think that’s that’s a whole other topic, but proving your value in the sense of if you are somebody who’s working on building out internal enablement content or you are running the LMS tools for the sales organization, being able to show the impact of your work and how it is affecting the overall goal of the company, I’m going to dig into that a little bit, if the company’s goal is to make sure that the reps are ramped in X amount of time, how is your LMS tool that you have put together that you are very deliberate about what the UI looks like and what the paths look like for new hires and even current sellers to be going through, if you can show that impact and say because I built this LMS out deliberately in this fashion, we’re able to shave off 10 days, one week, 10% 15% off of ramp time for new sellers and increase productivity by 10 or 15% whatever it is of existing sellers, you’re proving value. You’re showing value to the entire organization by doing that.

Understanding that regardless of what your role or function is on the enablement team, I’ve always said, if they have enough budget to give me a job to sit and be a part of this team, I have to show my value and show that I can not only can I do my job well that I know otherwise I wouldn’t be hired for it, but how is it actually impacting the overall goals of the organization that I’m supporting. I think honestly that’s how I’ve been able to move up in my career. It’s very metrics-driven, proving the value, so I mean, again, using the different metrics whether you’re building an LMS system and proving value there or if you’re building a FED practice enterprise, being able to show that because of this onboarding program that I introduced to the FED sellers or commercial sellers, we were able to convert deals so much faster or convert them from the different stages in the sales process so much faster.

I honestly think that’s the way you move up the career ladder in enablement, quite frankly in anything right, is if you can actually prove value, it’s not just, “I’m really smart, I’m really good at this,” it’s about whatever I’m working on, it’s actually having an impact, not just on my direct team, but it’s actually having an impact on ARR or ACV for the entire company.

SS: I think that’s phenomenal. In this rapidly changing industry, can you share some advice for professionals who are trying to seek executive buy-in?

RK: I think this is a really hard one for a lot of people that are in the enablement space. The way that you’re going to really get that executive buy-in is if you’re a part of the conversation that’s being had behind closed doors and not an afterthought. What I mean by that is depending on who you roll up into, for myself, I roll up into our CRO, and be able to be a part of those closed-door conversations that are talking about strategy, numbers, and how we’re going to get there, by having that level of insight it actually helps you build out the enablement strategy to map the strategy for the entire company. Listen, if you’re brand new in your career or brand new in your job at this company, getting that executive buy-in from the very beginning can be very hard and it is something that you need to be able to prove over a course of time.

Let’s just say you have a history of climbing the enablement ladder and are now joining a company, you can actually show what you were able to accomplish in past roles. If you were able to reduce the ramp by so much if you were able to actually show how sellers are able to move from the hardest sales process, conversion of moving from a prospecting phase into discovery and taking that discovery, converting it into a first meeting, I think those numbers are always the lowest for every company, but if you can say the numbers were 20, 30, and 50% and I was able to change them to 50, 60, and 80% at the other company, you’re going to get the ear of the executive. If you just go in there with ideas and thoughts, not so much.

If you can prove it with the numbers and what your track record has been, I think that makes a really big difference. Again, if you don’t have a track record, this is the first time you’re in a seat and in this role, it’s about being a really good listener getting invited to those closed-door conversations, listening, and then building your overall enablement strategy around the strategy of the overall organization.

SS: Do you have recommendations or best practices around how to stay plugged in on those top priorities of the business and how can this help enablement leaders to continue to position themselves as strategic partners to executive leaders?

RK: I think saying plugged into the business is all about establishing relationships with the broader ecosystems. Establishing relationships with your marketing counterparts, your customer success counterparts, and with your engineering counterparts. It’s funny because a lot of the time from an enablement standpoint, we’re not really having conversations with product and I think that’s a really big miss. Having those conversations with product to understand what’s coming down the pipe, what the product road map looks like when a beta release is coming out and when that’s going to translate into a gradual or full GA release, these things matter. The reason I kind of start with the product side and building out those relationships is to listen, you’re going to have a lot more buy-in, you’re going to be able to work better with the rest of the ecosystem and understand what the top priorities of the business are is if you’re part of every single one of those conversations. Without there being a product to sell there is no business, but if you’re brought into the product timeline and the road map, that gives you a better idea of what kind of enablement you should be building around it.

If you’re brought into what the marketing campaigns are, it gives you a really good idea as to what’s being pushed and what is the priority for the company. Hence I’m gonna build an internal enablement program around it or use those marketing campaigns to drive users to my university site or whatever it might be. The same thing with customer support, understanding what’s top of mind for the customer support team is interesting, where the customer support team is really honing in on x. It might be implementation, it might be coming down to renewing as it gives me the level of visibility that I need, as a leader to say, hey, this is how I can help and how I can contribute, and Shawnna, it goes back to the question that you asked before, how do you get the executives here, how do you get executive buy-in? You get executive buy-in when you actually understand the strategy of the ecosystem around you and how you play a part in that. Otherwise, every component on its own is not so strong, but when you take all the ecosystem components, like the ones that I mentioned, when you work collaboratively and you work together you have a much, much bigger impact on each of you individually and you can take that to the executive and that’s how you get that executive buy-in and that’s how you get people to listen to how you can contribute and make a difference.

SS: Absolutely, now I’d love some advice. How can enablement leaders build strong partnerships cross-functionally as well to gain that support and continue to expand the value that they deliver so that they can keep that seat at the table?

RK: Cross-functionally building those partnerships comes down to honestly building trust amongst the ecosystem. So how do you do that? How can you better support that ego system? If marketing is working on a particular campaign, how can you build the trust of the marketing team to say, Okay, great, I love what you guys are building externally for the external audience, I think that this campaign would be a great way to build internal courses as well for our internal audience and working very closely with them or even honestly participating in the conversation for adoption, so bringing them into enablement conversation. If we are focusing on marketing and a lot of enablement leaders have different customer enablements under them, and so how do you work cross-functionally with marketing org and bring them into those customer conversations.

Like everything in life, it’s a give and take right, and building trust and building strong cross-functional partnerships is when we all have the same goal in mind. We all want to be successful, we all want to see our companies be successful and you can only do that if you have open transparent conversations. If I’m building out an enablement strategy, there’s got to be different components to it, including product, customer success, the partner org, the marketing org, and of course the sales and engineering orgs. Sharing that with cross-functional leaders to say, hey, I can’t do this by myself, you guys play a really big part in this as well, and bringing them into the conversation and I honestly think that level of transparency and communication is so important.

Sometimes we’re running so fast that we don’t have it, but I would say slow down, have those conversations, build those relationships, gain that trust and it’s going to make a world of difference and build those strong partnerships across the organization. We are much much stronger together. Being heard, getting a seat at the table, having an impact in the overall company strategy of how you’re going to achieve that ARR, that vision, becomes much clearer if you’re having those conversations and you have those types of strategic alliances within the company.

SS: Last question for you, what advice would you give early in career enablement professionals who are looking to build their leadership skills and climb the ladder in enablement?

RK: I’d say if you’re early in your career for enablement, the best advice I could give you is to figure out what you like, but figure out what you’re great at. There are a lot of different rules that are part of the enablement organization. Everything from building content to managing LMS as to being a program manager to doing field enablement, partner enablement, technical enablement, customer enablement, there’s a ton. Really know what you’re interested in and become the master of that. Don’t spread yourself so thin that you only understand the basics of the different components of enablement, dig in. Dig in deep and say you know what, I’m actually really good in front of customers, I’m really good in front of people, maybe field enablement is what I should be doing, and then grow your career and field enablement, prove yourself out.

The same thing when it comes to partner enablement, understand what partner enablement means. If you are really good at building strategic relationships and maintaining relationships with people over a long duration, you’re really good at live training, maybe partner enablement is something that you’d be interested in. Take your strengths and say, you know, where would my strengths do really well, what part of it? Don’t try to take on too much. Start off as a specialist. Really home in on that and then figure out from there what the next step is, but be very clear and deliberate about where you start in the enablement space.

SS: I love that advice. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it and I learned a lot from you.

RK: Thank you, Shawnna.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Sidd Hora from super.AI join us. Sidd, I would love for you to introduce yourself and your role in your organization to our audience.

Sidd Hora: Thanks for welcoming me to the podcast and I’m happy to talk about sales enablement tips, tricks, and operations. About me, I work at super.AI, which is an enterprise-based company. We provide AI-based API’s to enterprises for automating day-to-day tasks and transforming their unstructured data into structured data. I work for the team as Senior Sales Operation or you can also say enablement or marketing. I’ll be helping the team put the processes in place, putting the onboarding plan in place, and onboarding the new salespeople, account executives, SDRs and BDRs.

SS: Fantastic. Well, I’m excited to have you here today. Now you’ve mentioned that you value being able to balance both conceptual and analytical thinking. I’d love to start there. Why are both of these things essential in enablement?

SH: Of course. I read this on the internet when I entered the sales operation and the enablement world about this AD approach which is to analyze, design, develop, implement and evaluate I found this approach super amazing and super successful because it follows both conceptual thinking and also analytical. For me, I would say that every sales operation and enablement reader should follow this because it takes both approaches together so whenever I get a new project on my plate I just don’t run after and start doing the task and start delegating the responsibility, I prefer to stay back and understand the project before getting into and doing the actions. I want to understand the why behind the project, I want to understand why we are doing it, what is the purpose behind the project, and how it will be impacting the organization, the team members, and the KPIs.

I feel like both are really important because you have to take a step back and understand the basics, like what is going to be like to ask and how you’re going to like it, and then get into the analytical thinking. That’s why I feel like this AD approach really focuses on board, it tells you that they could take a step back, brainstorm a little, put a mind map, put a flow chart in the process, and try to understand what’s going around, try to interview the people, then evaluate that’s where the data and analytical thinking comes into the place. After gathering all that information together you have a good approach, a good level of understanding to start working on the task and now start working on things like how the project would be in place, how can we complete the project, and what is going to be the responsibility, the delegations and all that.

SS: Fantastic. I do love that approach and I think it’s well known in the space enough but it’s a fantastic reminder for those in sales enablement. Now how can an analytical data-driven approach to enablement programs really help to even drive innovation?

SH: I think data is really important because data makes it easier for you to take the action. Data is there to tell you that, okay you know it’s a solid point to understand what is going right and what is not. I feel like when you’re creating any processes, when you’re creating the enablement programs and all data does help to achieve you better and build better processes in place, build better enablement programs, onboarding plans, and everything. One example would be to have a good tool in place because everything can be measured especially but it’s not always optimum and not easy to scale up. Having a nice enablement program in place really helps you gather those insights, gather those KPIs and data so that you can take that data and then build or improve the process around there.

One example would be when you have an enablement program in place, you get to know certain insights on the market. That’s really important. Those insights will help your marketing team to improve its marketing strategy. For example, when salespeople are sending blogs and marketing collateral, when you’re sending it through a proper enablement program you can get those certain KPIs in a place where the marketing team can benefit from it to understand okay what marketing collateral is basically getting more engagement for that particular persona. It helps reduce the cost, it helps accelerate the sales cycle even further. That’s why I would say that the data-driven approach in the enablement program really helps innovation in a lot of perspectives on the marketing front then also like another front as well.

For example, when you have a proper enablement program in place, this particular salesperson is really successful. You have the data around that, you can take the key insights around why this particular salesperson is more successful than the others. We believe in equality. We believe that everybody should be pushed around the common objective. Of course, a healthy amount of competition is necessary but that’s the same amount it’s also important to develop other people. When you see the other salesperson on the enablement for being really great, we can take the key insights from there, put it into the enablement program and make the modules, make the program better and give it to the new onboarding employees and also the existing one so they can do better in the process.

SS: I love that, that’s a fantastic approach. Now you also share that, you developed a process improvement roadmap and a KPI initiative that reduced costs and sales cycle time. To start this is incredible. Can you share how you were able to achieve these results?

SH: Of course, I’ve mostly worked for startups where there isn’t enough data or where there’s no data at all or no process at all. My mindset has always been team first so I really take that approach when I’m developing processes or putting the KPIs in place and everything. The second thing which I take into consideration is cost should be reduced and the process should be totally optimized in a way that we can reduce the sales cycle to the least. When I get on board whenever it comes to like new processes, I try to interview the team, I try to interview the stakeholders involved in that process, and try to understand what exactly is the pain point. I try to leverage the tools out there then if you have already put tools in place, then it’s time to try to leverage the tools to understand the data. Then, we can also use that tool to make the process better. For example, with a CRM there are so many great tools on the market nowadays to have a data different approach or like an approach where you can really improve the processes and reduce the cost.

One of the examples I can give you is I was previously working for a FinTech company and it was always very rigid to change the processes. The processes were very Orthodox, it’s super difficult and the cost is usually higher when it comes to those processes. One of the processes was that whenever we are onboarding a prospect, we send them a contract physically, the prospect needs to sign it, send it back to us, and then we need to put it into the file. I know it’s so much time, but where exactly it’s written that we need to really have a physical contract in place, why can’t we use some e-signature now? A lot of these institutions have allowed having e signature in place so it helps us reduce the cost there because if you think about it, having any other e-signature tool in place is usually cheaper than sending a document to the prospect around the world and then getting it back because you have to have that cost to the company and then also if you think about it we also take into the cost considering the amount of time the employees spending on that process.

There are so many things to take into perspective and that’s why you have to leverage and that’s where the AD approach comes and you have to analyze it and try to understand what exactly are the pain points and how you can remove those pain points either by automating it, either by communicating better and everything. I try to automate that process. I like to counter-question the stakeholders, I asked them why we need a physical copy and not a digital copy. It’s equally recognized by the government, equally recognized by the regulating body, and all that. It automatically reduces the sales cycle if you think about it because that’s one example I gave you was like sending it by post and waiting for the prospect to sign it coming back, imagine two weeks on average I would say a good amount if the address is correct and all that, but when you’re sending a digital copy it can be done within seconds. It automatically reduces the sales cycle in that particular stage which may be named as getting the proposal signed.

Also, I’m a huge fan of customization, I’m a huge fan of automation, and I’m a lazy person so I’ll try to automate a lot things as possible. I try to implement automation wherever I feel that we require the automation, it will reduce the cost, and will also reduce the sales cycle time. One example would be whenever we are in the entry stage of the sales process and we usually are customizing the proposal or the slide deck, there are so many things to customize that usually it takes time. It takes maybe a good three to maybe even five days depending on the prospect’s company size then you can automate a lot of. There are multiple tools in the market nowadays and we are totally surrounded by technology. There are tools that can automate an API image-based tool. You can just tell the tool what exactly is going to be the domain of the company and based on that domain it gets the logo, it puts the logo automatically on the slide deck, make it more customized, and send it to the prospect, so you can imagine that there are so many things you can like automate it which will reduce the course, reduce the sales cycle and the team will eventually be happy as well.

SS: I love that. Speaking of the team, what are some ways in which you’ve leveraged data and insights to streamline and optimize processes for reps? You talked about a few of them that really impact the sales cycle, but is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience?

SH: I think the sales cycle is one of the most important because it covers the starting and the end of the thing. Apart from that one other KPI which I feel is really important is that there may be a lot of sales operations or sales leaders forget a sales funnel leakage. I really enjoy that KPI because basically if you measure it you can see where exactly you’re losing the deal or basically you can see where exactly you’re spending more amount of time, where on average your team is spending more amount of time. That particular KPI will then enable the sales operation, sales enablement, and the sales leaders basically to understand how, for example, we can see that we’re losing a lot of opportunity in that particular stage or that particular stage has an average amount of deal for quite long so we can dig in deeper and try to understand, try to interview the sales reps, try to interview the account execute and understand why exactly that is happening. Then we take the interview, we take the pain points and that’s where we try to improve them.

We get the data and KPIs and then take those insights, interview the team, understand the pain points and then optimize the process, optimize the enablement program, and optimize your CRM according to it. I think sales cycling and sales funnel leakage, there are different wordings, pipeline leakage or whatever, but as we call it sales funnel leakage, it’s really amazing because you get to know where you’re losing it.

Another one is the deal age which I enjoy a lot. It is where we can understand how many days exactly that opportunity has been in that deal age on average. That also is such an important KPI because if you’re trying to understand why it’s not moving, that’s where you can get the story there and then you interview it, and then you exactly like your framework, you can improve the process.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now in optimizing these processes beyond the impact of key business metrics, how have you seen the rep experience improve?

SH: Basically the team gets super happy. They feel motivated. If you have a nice structured process in place and the structured tools are there to help them, they become very motivated in achieving their professional goals. Of course, the sales leaders should align the rep’s personal and professional goals together. Try to understand what their personal goals are as well. I learned it from my leader as well and he does a very great job, putting up monthly retrospective meetings with the team members where we align basically with the professional goals and also the personal goals. We try to see how our professional goals are keeping up and how we also want to personally achieve other things in life. Somebody wants to become a leader, somebody wants to change their position, somebody wants to change in SDR, we can then look at how we can do that. We can see how certain KPIs can make that happen. It is also motivating them to have those things in places like regular meetings, reinforcement learning, and some internal certifications.

I have seen a lot of companies also really help by creating enablement programs that after a sales rep completes that enablement or the learning path, they get certification from the company itself. That really benefits a lot. It’s a great idea and it’s a great initiative. I feel like a lot of companies should do it. I personally feel very much reinforced when I complete a certification program. I feel that I definitely learned it. It also will look good on my CV. It will also help me to excel better in my career. I think that’s also really great and I’ve seen a lot of companies that have certification programs in their enablement or like your sales plan and all that.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. Now last question for you, how do you partner with the sales leadership to continuously improve programs and processes?

SH: I believe in transparency and communication. It’s really important to be transparent and communicate with your sales leadership. I’ve been very transparent with both the leadership and the team. For example, when I feel that a certain program or process don’t suit the team but may be beneficial for the company, I try to communicate with the leadership and try to develop a program that benefits both side, not only just one side, because then that’s where the sales rep for the sales team starts getting demotivated about it because we’re forcing them to do something and like that’s exactly what we don’t want them. We want them to be happy when they’re following a process. We want them to be happy with what they’re doing. So that’s where I step in and that’s where my responsibility is to create harmony and create something which benefits both the organization in terms of whatever they want and also the team in terms of how they want it. It’s really important when you’re doing something when you’re trying to improve a process when you’re trying to develop a program, it’s really important that you’re transparent and communicative to both not only the leaders but also to the team members. These are the most important points I could take about transparency in communication.

SS: I love that. Sidd, thank you so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed learning from you.

SH: Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Lauren Metheney from Blend join us. Lauren, I would love to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Lauren Metheney: Hi Shawnna, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. I’m Lauren Metheney and I’m located in Chicago, Illinois. My background is primarily in tech sales. I started my career as an account executive selling for about three years and then I was a sales manager for almost six years before coming over to my current company, Blend. At Blend, I’ve been here for about 4.5 years now doing sales enablement and operations. Just to give some background on Blend, we are part of the financial technology industry or a lot of folks refer to it as FinTech for short. We are a cloud-based banking platform used by banks, credit unions, and independent mortgage brokers and we streamline their workflows as well as transform the experiences for their customers.

SS: Fantastic. Well, Lauren, I’m excited to have you here with us because on LinkedIn, you talked about your passion for coaching and how that was really a key factor for your career pivot, which you just talked us through a little bit from sales to enablement. How did you develop your passion for coaching?

LM: I’ve always enjoyed helping others both personally and professionally. It’s very rewarding for me to see individuals learn, grow and succeed as a result of my mentoring them along the way. After a couple of years as a seller, I had the opportunity to start mentoring other sellers as a team lead. It was like a player-coach type role where I still had my own book of the individual business, but I was also responsible for managing and mentoring a small team. It was that particular experience where I really discovered that I truly enjoy coaching other sellers and as a result helping them achieve their goals as well as mine too since I had my own personal goals. Actually, for the next five years after that I spent managing sales teams and it was a great challenge, I learned a lot and there were some great team memories of course along the way, but after a while, I was looking for a change and took a step back to think more about what I wanted to do and what I enjoy most about what I’m currently doing.

I was wondering how I can do more of that — so coaching, mentoring, and helping others. That’s what really got me excited about work each day. That was interesting because sales enablement at the time as a career was fairly new or at least the role itself was fairly new, and the definition of sales enablement definitely varies between companies, and it actually still kind of does today. With that, I started networking with some folks that I knew in the sales training space or ones that I knew that had recently moved over into a sales enablement type role. I just wanted to learn a bit more and so just speaking with them, I quickly realized that’s what I wanted to do. Fast forward a little bit, I landed over at Blend, which is obviously where I’m at today as their first enablement hire and of course, the rest is history from there.

SS: I love that. Now, in your opinion, why is coaching so important in sales today?

LM: Yes, so to me it’s important because whether you’re brand new to sales or have been doing it for 20 years you can always be better. A great example is back when I started selling, people still made a ton of cold calls, which I know is almost archaic these days, which sounds crazy, but folks would still make a ton of cold calls and prospects would actually pick up the phone or even on a very rare occasion return a voicemail. There was no such thing as networking tools online where you could message a prospect or other emailing tools that you could send out your prospecting emails to try and schedule calls. There was no real automation type of thing back in the day and so today it’s just much different than it was 10 years ago and even it was more different 20 years ago, so that’s one thing.

While that’s just one example of why it’s important, it’s always good to get feedback from your peers, managers, outside sales coaches, etc to get those different perspectives and so I encourage all sales folks to have some sort of regular cadence scheduled to get that feedback. It’s funny, I have to mention because my husband is actually in tech sales as well, and he’s been doing sales for 10 years but he’s always soliciting my feedback so I’m even coaching him at home each day, that’s what it seems.

SS: Oh goodness, you can never leave work behind when it comes to coaching. Now, what is enablement’s role in coaching within your organization and how do you partner today with sales managers to effectively coach reps?

LM: We have a few different what I like to call coaching phases within Blend. The first of course is the onboarding which is for new hires within the sales organization. There’s not a lot of true coaching going on here, however, it’s more training on how to use the various tools and such. Sales enablement also likes to be a part of the new hires and provide mentorship and make them feel like they can come to us as resources and we want them to be able to give us feedback, not just on the onboarding process, but also just how their first few months at Blend are going and we just want to make sure they’re comfortable and thriving in their new roles.

So the next phase I’ll call structured sales coaching. So we use the specific sales methodology at Blend and while a lot of folks have used something similar in other organizations, we want to make sure that everyone uses it the same way we do within our sales organization. There are specific trainings on the methodology which involve role plays, feedback, and all that good stuff, and then as part of that we practice it in our day-to-day, and we provide additional coaching and feedback. So the sales managers actually play a huge role in reinforcing the methodologies and their conversations with their sellers throughout the deal cycles.

Then, the last phase which I would say is ongoing, just like the sales methodology is, is the training phase. So whether it’s training on a new product, brushing up on existing products etcetera, we have many different formats in which we can train. Some are structured sessions led by saying a product manager for example or even modules within our learning management tool.

SS: I love that. I’d love to dig in because you have again as we talked about a background in sales, both as a rep and as a manager and how has that informed your approach to coaching as an enablement practitioner?

LM: It’s interesting because one of the reasons I wanted to pivot into enablement is at the time I noticed a lot of enablement folks did not actually come from a sales or sales management background as I have. A couple of my mentors and former sales trainers came from a sales background and I was able to connect with them on a deeper level at work than others because they understood what it was like to be in sales. They’ve carried the bag, they’ve done it themselves, right? So that’s why I love what I do because I know what it’s like to be in the position of the people I’m coaching and they know I understand where they’re coming from. In addition to that, I help create operational efficiencies for our sales org so I’m working with folks that don’t have that sales point of view and it’s really cool to take lead in creating those different processes that I know in the end will benefit our sales org, so they can do their jobs better while giving the internal stakeholders what they need as well.

SS: I want to shift gears a little bit, what are some of the key metrics that you track today to understand the impact of coaching and to help optimize your programs?

LM: From a coaching and training perspective as it relates to sales methodology and such, we look at are the reps constantly following the methodology for each deal and for the deals where the methodology is used, how long was the deal cycle, and what are the win rates for those. Then, on the other side of things, for the deals where there was no methodology or the methodology was inconsistently used, what do those cycles and win rates look like? Also, another huge factor that informs who we coach and what specifically is why we lose deals. There are all different types of factors, but in some cases, there may be trends with a certain rep where we identify there are areas where they can be coached to increase win rates, whether it’s product knowledge, methodology, engagement with the prospect etcetera.

We also, of course, have insights where we can coach reps on their calls as well. We can learn if they’re talking too much, what kind of questions they’re asking, and also how they are asking those questions, how they handle objections, and so on. We work with the managers to leverage these insights so they can track progress as we coach the sellers. I could go on and on about different metrics, but one more that stands out is the quality of the deals. There are all kinds of sellers out there as we know and every deal is different, but you may have some sellers who close a ton of deals but maybe have a high churn rate, or on the other hand, there may be a seller who doesn’t close as many deals but has a very low churn rate and high growth of those customers over time. These are all things that we look at to determine what that sweet spot kind of looks like and try to coach our sellers accordingly.

SS: I love that. The last question then for you Lauren, how has technology changed how reps engage with coaching just over the last few years, I’d say especially with the rise of virtual and hybrid teams and environments, and how we think coaching will continue to evolve in the near future?

LM: Yeah, I love this question. I just think about how fortunate to have all the tech that we have these days, it definitely makes my life at work a lot easier. I can’t imagine what it would have been like 10 years ago even in a non-virtual world, but even in the 4.5 years that I’ve been in this role at Blend, technology has blown up in the sales enablement community. Whether it’s tools to help sellers become more efficient in their day-to-day while also giving insights to sales, enablement managers on productivity, or coaching tools to help sellers become better or learn faster. It’s all amazing. I love it. I literally feel like there’s a tool for everything these days which is maybe a good and a bad thing because it can be overwhelming, but especially now that we are a remote-first company at Blend, I can’t imagine life without some of these tools, they are life savers.

To answer your second question as far as the future goes, I feel like as new ways to sell evolve, the technology will also adapt as well as how we are coaching sellers. I think some foundational things will still exist, so for example, coaching methodology I think those are going to stay pretty consistent. Those haven’t changed too much over the last 20 or 30 years but the way and how we sell may change and of course, there are going to be more tools that exist that I couldn’t even think of today, I would be remiss if I didn’t include the tools.

SS: Of course. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for joining us today, I really appreciate the time and the insights from you on coaching.

LM: Thanks so much Shawnna, I really appreciate you having me, it’s been a pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Chris Neal from Blue Prism join us. Chris, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Chris Neal: Hi Shawnna and thank you for inviting me. I’m Chris Neal and I am the director of global sales enablement at Blue Prism. I’ve been with the company for about three and a half years. We have a team of eight people to do sales enablement for a sales force of around 500. I oversee the global programs and am excited to be here to talk about those today.

SS: Fantastic. Well, we’re excited to have you here as well. Now, one of the things that I know you’ve referenced in the past is really around how to make enablement programs successful and in order to do so, rep engagement is absolutely critical, but I think getting that engagement can often be easier said than done. In your experience, what are some of the common challenges that you’ve experienced in getting reps to engage in enablement programs?

CN: Yeah, a good question to start, it can definitely be a challenge. I’ve seen it before and I’ve run progress before they have done really well and reps have been really engaged and there have been others not just in Blue Prism but in previous roles as well, where you really struggle to get engagement. For me, it comes down to two things. It’s about awareness and communication. So they have to know what the program is, how to get engaged with it, and what the expectation is on them, so they can’t use the excuse that I didn’t know about it. That’s the basic one.

The more critical one is alignment. If you’ve got an enablement team with a review from headquarters about what you need to learn this month, if that’s not aligned with the goals that your first line manager has for you as a sales representative for that month or that quarter, then there’s a conflict you’re being pulled in two directions. You’ve got your direct manager measuring you on one thing and a corporate sales enablement team saying you’re going to be measured on something else and that’s where you can get a challenge. So for me, it’s mostly about working with sales leadership all the way from Chief Revenue Officer down to first-line managers to make sure that the initiatives and programs that we develop and run are as aligned as possible with what field teams need in order to be successful.

SS: Absolutely. How have you overcome some of the challenges so that you can encourage higher engagement?

CN: The best way to do that is to consult with sales leaders from the get-go. As soon as an initiative is conceived and you’re thinking of building something, we need to bring sales managers along for that ride, along that journey. Let’s say the Chief Marketing Officer has a new set of messaging and they want everybody in sales to learn that new value proposition presentation for example. That’s important, and I’m sure if you had a conversation with a sales leader, they would agree that it’s important, but if you don’t talk to me about it in the right way and then position it in the right way, it can come across as a demand from HQ, that, as I said before, doesn’t directly align with what people are needing to do out in the field. So, it’s important to start with why, I keep going back to the Simon Sinek book, “Start with Why.” Let’s start with why we’re doing this and what we’re trying to achieve and how it’s going to help everyone, not just enablement, but sales leaders and sales reps themselves. Let’s make sure everybody understands that and then build that into the cadence so that by the time we roll out the program, the rep is hearing about it and being driven to do it, not by a corporate sales enablement team, but by their direct manager.

SS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Now, you mentioned that aligning with what matters most to your audience can help improve the effectiveness of enablement programs. Now, when you’re developing a new program, how do you ensure that it’ll both be relevant for your reps and also make it easy for them to consume to reduce maybe some of that complexity?

CN: Yeah, good question. So, take the first part of that question first. How do we ensure that it’s relevant? I think this comes down to how you introduce it because quite often an enablement initiative or it might be a training course or it might be an assessment or something like that is coming from a group or department in the company, like a product management function or something like that where the presenter or the subject matter expert delivering the training is not necessarily looking at the big picture of why this is important for sales. So if you just record something or you just put something out there and you put it directly in front of the SME, it’s not always easy for them to join the dots and see that relevance for themselves. So, a good job that sales enablement professionals can do is to bookend that presentation or that training module with some scene setting. So, I would go on and I would explain to them that we understand the challenges that they face, what it is that they are being asked to deliver for the company in terms of revenue, and position what they’re about to see in the context of that and talk about how it’s going to help them and then we’ll come back on at the end and kind of summarize what they just heard and relate it back to their role. So that helps them see the relevance, even though the meat of the presentation itself may not. That’s part one of your question.

The other one was about how we can make it easy to consume to reduce some of the complexity. If we’ve got an initiative or a program we want to roll out, then what we do is there’s a number of ways you can do this, and the platforms are all over the place. There are digital sales enablement platforms, there are all kinds of platforms you can use to host multimedia material. We use one of those and what we do is we break it up. If it’s learning a solution from beginning to end, including how to position, how to present who the competition is, which personas to talk to etcetera. We break that up into individual modules to make it a bit more bite-sized so that we’re not asking them to take a whole day out of the field to learn, we’re asking them to do like 30 minutes a day. Something like that, and then as we go along, we have a little mini-assessment. So instead of saying, do this six hours of self-study and then take this huge exam, it’s 30 minutes and a five-question test or 40 minutes in a four-question test. And at the end, we could even do something like a video pitch back where they actually present back and their manager gets to see that.

SS: I think that’s phenomenal. Now, what are some of your strategies for showing reps the whole picture though, from maybe the beginning of your enablement program so that they can see that smooth path to success?

CN: There’s a couple of things here, one of which we’re already doing and another one that I would like to do that we haven’t done yet. The one that we’re already doing, again I’m not mentioning product names here, but we have a sales enablement platform that all of our reps have access to. We can basically draw a pick of all of the things available and present it to them in a way that’s easy for them to navigate and browse around and that enables them to kind of see the big picture when they go in and then they double click here, double click there and they dive into the specific product or the specific service offering that they want to learn more about. It’s almost like an online encyclopedia if you like. That’s the thing we’re already doing.

The thing that I think would be just as useful, but I’ve never quite managed it yet, is if you work for a company that has a number of products that it sells, a portfolio of products rather than just one thing that they sell, then what’s really useful, because if you have multiple products and then next week we’re doing a training on Product A and the week after that we’re doing training and Product B, and the week after that we do training on Product C, that can get kind of overwhelming and confusing for them because they don’t always necessarily know how A relates to B relates to C and how they all fit into the bigger picture. So the thing I’m talking about here is what I call a solution picture and you can think of it almost as an infographic that shows the whole world of what your company does and what it sells and how it helps customers. Each product and piece of the jigsaw would be a small item on that infographic, and that way, if you’re doing a training on Product B, firstly, why are you training Product B? Because version two is coming out and it’s improved over version one. Well, what are the improvements? And so you end up with showing the big picture and then zooming in on Product B is one of the capabilities and then talking about how the new features change the overall picture of what we’re selling and if it doesn’t then we probably don’t need to enable it. So that’s something I’d like to do, but I haven’t actually gotten around to you yet.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now we’ve discussed a lot of ways to create effective enablement programs. I’d love to dig into what effective enablement means to you and how do you quantify the effectiveness of your enablement programs?

CN: Yeah, this is a tricky question. It always comes up and if you are in sales enablement, you’re regularly asked by sales leaders and others, how you make success. It’s difficult to measure success in real hard numbers because while there are specific numbers that sales can measure like revenue, win rates, discount, and quota attainment, all of those things are hard numbers that you can measure, but the role that sales enablement played in achieving those numbers is much harder to quantify because there’s a number of factors that contribute to a good or poor performance. Sales enablement is just one of them. So it is quite hard to do. There are a couple of ways that you can look at that. One is to step back from those numbers and just look at the reason why you’re doing an enablement program in the first place, making sure everybody’s clear on what the objective is. What is it we want sales reps to be able to say or do differently as a result of this program and then you assess their ability to do that?

So going back to my earlier example, if you’ve got a brand new value proposition PowerPoint deck that’s come out, then the behavior change you’re trying to instill is you’re getting people to get confident and credible and proficient in delivering that new presentation. So you can teach them how to do it. You can show them an expert on video presenting it. Then you ask them to have a go and you ask their managers to review it. If all of that’s done and they have a good go and the manager gives them a good review, then that’s a good way of measuring the effectiveness of that program. It doesn’t necessarily give you a direct impact on the bottom line or the following quarter, but it’s as far as you can get.

The other thing you could do and I was at an event recently where I attended another session by another sales enablement professional and it was very interesting. They talked about sales velocity and so sales velocity includes things like the length of the sales cycle and how many opportunities and the average deal size and your win percentage and so on. If you’re starting with Y at the beginning and you’re linking activity to a virtual knob you can turn to increase the number of opportunities or to increase the deal size, maybe increase the deal size by positioning services. Those are things you can measure. So changes to metrics that affect sales velocity can be directly attributed to the enablement that supported it if you see what I mean.

SS: I love it, Chris. Thank you so much. I enjoyed this conversation in the insights that you provided today.

CN: You’re welcome.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Joseph Tonye from Ivalua join us. Joseph, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Joseph Tonye: Sure. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I’m really happy to join this session with you today. My name is Joseph, I am a director of sales enablement for the EMEA region. I just joined a company called Ivalua in Paris. I have a background in sales, channel sales, partner relationship management, business development, and also sales enablement. I have had the opportunity to work with various companies in France, Ireland, and also Cameroon in Africa and across different industries, various fields going from sales, SaaS, cloud computing, recruitment, and now procurement.

SS: We are excited to have you join our podcast, Joseph. Just one of your areas of expertise is enabling channel sales teams. I’d love to talk about that a little bit. What are some of the unique challenges that can arise when you’re delivering enablement programs to sales reps who may be from external organizations?

JT: Yes, I think it’s a very interesting question because you might face many challenges working with channel partners. I think one of the first reasons why you might have challenges working with channel partners is the fact that you’re not part of the same organizations. If you represent a vendor and you have to work with sales teams from various partners, you’re not part of the same organization, so you need to talk to them, you need to create close collaboration and relationship with them, but you’re not part of the same organization, but at the same time, you need to be part of the same team because you will have common objectives, common goals to reach, and the same challenges and issues to address together. I think the main challenge here is to make sure that you can build collaboration and relationships with the partners, and make them feel that show part of the same thing, but at the same time you need to be aware of what is their approach to the market, what are their habits, how do they address the market, the customers that they have, what are their priorities?

All these challenges need to be addressed at an early stage. I think this is not a situation where it should be partner versus vendor, but at the same time, you need to understand the mindset and the organization you’re gonna work with. One of my recommendations here would be to first understand the organization by talking with the external stakeholders. The main stakeholders that represent these partner sales teams, so you might have to work with alliance managers and partner managers. These are the people who build and maintain the relationship with the vendor that you all represent. The first step here is to gain their confidence, and their trust, and make sure that they understand what is the outcome of the program that you want to implement. This is the introduction, you need to make sure that you align on the same objectives.

For example, in the cloud space, I had to work with a partner but this partner already used to work with different cloud providers, so I had to understand. We had to create a joint business plan together because I was in charge of business development and sales enablement at the same time. I was a channel manager. The objective of the joint business plan is to create some KPIs, objectives, and common goals, and then they can understand the value, and why they should resell your solution because if it’s beneficial for us, it’s going to be beneficial to everyone.

Then, after getting the approval from external stakeholders, the main point of contact, I think what is very important here is to gain attention and interest from salespeople. The sales reps directly, because this is all the people who will face the customers. One of the challenges here is the fact that they don’t have much time to spare in general. I mean, salespeople are very, very busy. They might have conflicting meetings. Sometimes you might face challenges in scheduling some meetings with them because they are not available. Sometimes they might also be more reticent because maybe they used to work with another vendor, and they already have a close relationship with them. They all used to sell a specific solution and they might not understand your product which comes as a new product or new service. They might find the project of your dissolution complex which can be another challenge. It’s not just about some challenges, but these are a few examples that I can mention.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. You went through a lot of the ways in which you overcame those challenges, but how have you overcome specifically the challenge to reduce the complexity of channel enablement?

JT: I think the key here is to be able to get to know each other first because if you don’t know each other if you don’t know the people you’re gonna work with, it’s going to be very, very difficult to be able to create a joint business plan and all the key actions or the sales enablement programs that you want to implement. Create proximity with partner sales teams. You can use the main stakeholders, such as the managers of the sales team because first they can open the doors and introduce you to the team which can be more effective since they already know their teams. They can help you identify who all the champions are, like the sponsor in these teams. They might have one or two sales reps that have an influence on the rest of the team and they can easily spread the message within the organization. You can use these champions in order to spread your message within the team and make it easier to come up with new sales enablement programs and make it easier to start and initiate the directions with the whole team.

With proximity, there are many examples. This is something I’ve done in the past, we used to organize on-site events at the office. It’s a good idea when you want to create proximity because they can visit the office, they can have a drink with you or lunch. It’s like an informal introductory meeting where you can get to know each other and gain trust and confidence from these sales reps. Like I said before, I think in order to overcome these challenges, you need to make sure that partners understand the value of joint collaboration.

As mentioned earlier, from my experience, sales enablement is not just about content management or maybe training or coaching. I’ve worked with sales reps and business developers and they have an objective at the end of the month or at the end of the quarter of the year, they need to reach a specific goal, close a certain number of deals opportunities, and need to understand what is the value of your products? Is it valuable? Is it beneficial to them? Is it going to help them close opportunities to generate more revenue and maybe more sales? I think it’s very important to make sure that everyone within the organization understands the value of this joint collaboration and anticipates the blockers. Once you have created a plan together, you understand the partner goals, you have your own goals, and you are aligned together on these goals, you can then add the sales enablement problems or initiative that you want to lead because you can present this as a tool that will have them reach these goals.

Finally, I would say what I’ve done in the past, I’ve also scheduled weekly sales meetings, and monthly operational meetings, and these meetings are very important because this is where you can propose new initiatives. So for example, if you have a meeting in the first week of the month and you see that there is a need for salespeople to better understand the product or maybe there is a need for them to better understand how to use a reseller console, for example, you can then introduce or propose new ideas initiatives to these partner alliance managers and they will help you implement the solution to the problem. Then for the implementation of the programs, whether it is about sales, how to manage a sales cycle, or how to manage importance, I think for every problem that we have tried to implement in the past I would always prepare a session in advance. A preparation meeting where we can scale together, I’ll have the alliance managers, I have some regional sales managers and we can discuss together what would be the best topics for their sales reps. What would be the priority? They can give insight and give ideas, they can propose some initiatives, and getting validation and getting a recommendation from the partner organization is valuable because once you start implementing a sales enablement program you do it not because you want to do it, but because you got some advice, recommendations, and insights from the partner in the first place.

SS: Absolutely. Now, in addition to your background enabling channel sales teams, you also have experience as a channel manager and business development manager for channel sales as you had mentioned earlier. Through that experience would have been some of your key learnings about how to build effective partnerships with channel sales teams and how has that helped you shape your approach to channel enablement?

JT: Thanks for this question, because sometimes when we think about the partnership we think that the approach can be the same with different partners, and what I want to say here is as a channel sales manager, I have to work with different partners in different regions. Every partner has its own way to address topics and challenges. Some of them like your brand, some of them just started working with you and some have long experience working with your organization or maybe with competitors. This is something that you need to be aware of before implementing any type of programs initiatives. We’re just talking here about the background, so be aware of the background, the history, the context, because this is something that’s gonna help you address the situation and make sure that you’re gonna be relevant to these partners. I would say for a little bit of context when starting as a channel sales manager, I used to ask questions to my director and to my manager in order to understand what has been done in the past with these partners. Then during the first introduction call with the different partner leaders, I would always try to understand what had been done in the past, what was relevant to them, what could be done better in the future, and what are the benefits of the competitors? What is the reason why the sales rep prefers another vendor, for example? What are all the blockers and what can be improved?

This is partner knowledge. Once you have this part of the knowledge of the complex and the history, you can start watching them much easier. I would say one of the first steps would be at this stage, to make sure to understand what are the sources of motivation. So the motivation factors and success factors and what I want to say here is for sales reps, what counts the most for them? Some sales reps or motivated by money. Some of them are motivated by learning more about the products and getting more knowledge. Some of them like recognition. If you’re aware of the success factors, the motivation factors become much easier to work with people. Everything should be linked to success and motivation factors. For me, this is something that I’ve done in the past that was really helpful for me, but of course, there are plenty of, many more examples.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to dig into maybe some of the best practices for driving adoption of your enablement programs amongst channel sales teams. How do you gain mindshare from channel sales reps, especially if they have other competing priorities as you mentioned earlier?

JT: Yes. I think one of the key points here is, I think it’s crucial for every sales enablement practitioner to be available. When I say available is what happens after the sales training session. What happens next? For example, we’ve organized sales training sessions with 60-plus sales people in my previous company. After this sales training station, what I try to do is to see what is the progress. Is there anything that we can measure in terms of metrics? It’s not always easy, but being able to measure the impact of the sales training or maybe a sales program, it’s not always just about training, but being able to measure the impact is key because you can see how it has been implemented and what is impactful to the department organization, so therefore there are different factors here. Different metrics can be certifications, opportunity is not always easy to measure.

Another thing here is when I mentioned availability, I was talking about the fact that reps might have questions after the sales training session. They might prefer to work with a specific vendor just because the sales enablement or the sales coach from this organization is more available. This is something very simple but very important for us to have someone that you can talk to. Someone you can contact in case of need. If a sales rep has a question about the product and is looking for answers for a specific type of customer looking for advice and recommendation, being available for this sales team is crucial because they will have confidence, they will trust you, and it’s something that really counts. This is where you can make a difference as opposed to the competitors. About the responses and the elements that you provide to the sales reps, I think that being accurate, and making sure to provide the right information at the right time is very important, even if it takes time, but make sure to provide the right information.

To your question regarding mindshare, Shawnna, what I mentioned in the past regarding the introduction called gain confidence within proximity, this is something that has to be maintained during the whole cycle during the whole year, every time. This is not something that has to be done in the early stage only, but all the time. An example here is to schedule 1-1 conversations, maybe monthly meetings with the sales reps, they can be a formal or informal conversation about how it goes, what all the challenges faced by the sales reps, how we can help, what has been done since the last training session. Make sure to have this monthly conversation where you can measure the impact and at the same time gain more insights from the sales reps and be able to help with whatever is needed.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now, how can enablement motivate and incentivize channel sales teams to improve performance specifically?

JT: Yes, so in sales enablement, there is a little bit of psychology. Being able to understand what motivates salespeople is key, as understanding their personality. As I said before, I think that enablement is not just about the content, it’s not just about training or coaching, but since you’re working with salespeople, you need to understand what the outcome of the enablement process is and what is the motivation for the partner organizations, but also the direct sales teams. I said this before, but there are many motivating factors. Once you get a better idea of what is important for salespeople it becomes much easier. Some people like activities, like kickoffs, some people like to be recognized for their efforts, and some sales reps like to get better knowledge or experiences.

I remember in the past example, during the sales training session we used to mention the value of the certifications for sales reps. We were going through the session and at the end of the training session, we can get a new certification these certifications can be valuable because you can receive more leads from the vendor because the vendor will recognize your expertise or specialization in a specific area and at the same time you can get more credibility in the market because customers will see that you are certified in a specific field. This is maybe the type of problem I will say that can motivate channel sales teams, but there are many other examples, challenges, incentives, everything. Once the enablement program has been implemented I think it’s important to link enablement to the performance and to motivation factors in order to drive initiative and inject the dynamic.

Regarding the question, how can enablement motivate sales reps, I would say that as sales enablement professionals, if we are able to make it easy for them to sell the solution, they will get more comfortable in selling the solution, especially in the SaaS space on cloud computing where solutions can be complex sometimes. I mean if the process is difficult to understand, if the product of the solution or complex, it will be very challenging and difficult for us to implement programs since everything seems to be complicated, so make it easier for salespeople to understand that they can do it easily. I think that this is very important and it can be a source of motivation because you will get more motivation from a sales rep if you sell a solution that you understand. In some cases, a person prefers to work with a specific vendor because they find the competitor is more complex to understand.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now in a quickly changing sales environment, can you share some ways that you’re able to stay on top of changes impacting your channel partners to ensure that the enablement programs you’re delivering remain relevant?

JT: Yes. As I said, I think the safe environment is changing constantly and very quickly. It’s also important to get updated on the market trends, understand the customer behaviors, and understand what is relevant to customers because, in order to understand what is relevant to partners, we need to understand what’s relevant to customers because everything is driven by the customer. You can see values and messages from companies who say they are a customer-centric company, with a customer-centric approach. Everyone is driven by the customer’s needs and I think it’s the same thing at any company in any industry. Being able to understand the market trends, and work with marketing is important. You can also review success stories. When I was walking in the cloud space, we used to have customer success stories for some wins and opportunities that have won in the past and in different regions of the world. This was very helpful for me because I was able to understand how the opportunity has been won in the past and what can be important for the partner to know.

Additionally, it helped me understand what is important for the customers. Every week you have new customers with stories, you have case studies, so you have different scenarios and you can understand how the technology is evolving, how the sales environment is changing because you have examples of customer objections, how the sales rep was able to handle these objections, which argument or maybe which resources this sales rep was able to use, so you can think of the solutions. Once you get this knowledge, it becomes much easier to understand what’s happening in the market and talk to partner organizations. Say, “okay, so this is what you can do, this is what could be beneficial to you because it has been done in the past, it worked and it helped us generate more revenue.” When I say success stories, I’m talking about vendor success stories and so it can be success stories or opportunities that have been closed by the vendor or between vendor and other partners because you can have public success stories. Using this is very helpful to understand how the environment is changing.

I would also say attend events, and conferences, like the events that Sales Enablement PRO is organizing. These are very relevant because you can hear from other professionals and understand how the market is changing and you can get insights and then it is much easier than to implement new ideas, In addition to success stories or market trends. You can also use internal tools such as CRM where you can see opportunities that are closed every week and talking with internal regional sales managers, for example, can give you a good idea of how the environment is changing because they can give you insight and then you can use these inside ideas to talk to your partners in order to work together and adapt to this changing environment.

SS: I’ve loved this conversation, thank you so much.

JT: Thank you, Shawnna. It was great speaking with you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Arup Chakravarti from Equifax UK join us. Arup, I would love to introduce yourself, your role in your organization to our audience.

Arup Chakravarti: Absolutely, firstly thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It’s a real pleasure to be here. A little bit about myself, I have been in sales enablement essentially for almost all of my career. I started off in maybe more of a sales operations stream and that’s again going back almost 20 years now working in financial services. I’ve always been in a B2B context, so therefore always been in that space where I’ve been very close to sales teams and account management teams and helped them become much more effective and productive in what they do.

Certainly 20 years ago there wasn’t really a sales enablement domain, I think sales operations was perhaps just starting out then, but you know, in terms of what that domain is today, if you think about it either its revenue operations or revenue enablement, it’s so much more sophisticated, it’s so much more mature and so much more complex. In many respects also so much more of a satisfying environment in which to work, say than 20 years ago. Over that period of time of seeing how the entire domain, the discipline has matured, as I said, how it’s moved from saying sales operations, which is you know, again 20 years ago maybe literally looking at things like sales incentive plans to doing sales performance to maturing into sales tools such as CRM etcetera. Of course, now, that whole space is such a strong blend of sales operations and sales enablement which naturally includes training and coaching and development. So that’s been my career pathway for actually all of my career, all in a B2B context.

SS: We’re excited to have you here Arup, we’ve worked with you numerous times over the years, so I’m so glad you’re able to join our podcast. Now in the past, we’ve talked about the power of leveraging artificial intelligence or AI to increase sales effectiveness. In your experience, what are some of the benefits of using AI and enablement?

AC: Grand, I’m glad you asked me that question. Let’s just cut it back to something that you know, why would you use AI, why would any organization use AI, and what value does it get from AI in different business functions and different business use cases? So fundamentally the value of AI is essentially getting the computer to process a huge amount of data and to process all of that data in a much more intelligent and frankly much more powerful than accelerated manner than any human being could do. AI in most applications, in most use cases artificial intelligence, machine learning, what it’s effectively doing is going through huge amounts of data and finding consistent patterns in those data and in the process of finding consistent patterns, flagging up those patterns for some type of decision making. At its simplest, even in the consumer world when you’re looking at things like Netflix, if you’ve got your Netflix account and Netflix throws up or Amazon throws up certain items that you might be interested in purchasing or certain movies or TV shows that you might be interested in watching what’s happening, there really is just a huge amount of data that are being processed data about yourself in terms of what you like to do, but data about similar profile consumers that are also looking at similar programs and then a decision is being made in terms of what you might like. That’s all in many respects that AI is doing right in the context of what we think about in most business use cases, it’s looking at a huge amount of data and then being able to pinpoint certain behavioral patterns in that data.

Within the context of enablement, especially revenue enablement it’s really powerful because essentially what it’s doing is it’s helping an organization and individuals in an organization be much more intelligent in the context of identifying some of their customers, their clients, whether it’s existing or prospective customers, that may be closer to making some type of buying decision. You’re looking at patterns of behavior either at the individual level or you’re looking at patterns of behavior within a firm level. If you think about buyers and buyers in the marketplace and you know this yourself, the way that enablement has changed the way that buyers purchase has shifted so fundamentally that now it’s so much less about the sales effort to the buyer, but so much more about how a buyer discovers a particular company, how buyer goes through that buyer journey, and how sellers are able to educate that buyer through that process. What AI does is kind of just help sellers within an organization just be much smarter about identifying which companies are closer to making a buying decision.

SS: I love that. What does it look like to embed AI into your enablement programs though, what are some of the key ways that you’ve implemented AI-driven programs?

AC: Yeah, so I’ll take that in two halves because in the second half you’re asking me how I implemented AI and you know, to be perfectly honest with you, I would love to have implemented a lot more AI. I think it’s a really exciting space. I think forward-looking companies that do implement AI in terms of their sales, and marketing processes, get a lot of value from it, and absolutely, I would love to have done some more. Let’s first talk about, you know, some of the use cases and some of the implementations that we see.

We sort of hear AI being much more prevalent in terms of some of the sales stack, in terms of some of the marketing stack, and how that’s helping, again, as I said, companies make much more intelligent decisions about which buyers they should engage with and when. We definitely see that in terms of conversation intelligence, I mean obviously, you know, some of the big names, they’re great companies because what they’ve been doing is clearly being able to build out capabilities where they can analyze unstructured verbal communications and in the process start to identify different types of sentiments and again, it’s just that process of if you can listen to that conversation, you can be intelligent in terms of how you analyze that conversation, you can get the machine the computer to flag up insights and behavioral patterns to you. It then starts to give you as a sales rep that capability in a company that’s selling to a set of buyers. It starts to give you a really clear indication in terms of which of your buyers are potentially closer to making a buying decision. So we absolutely see that when you see deals being tracked through CRM and through the pipeline, the revenue intelligence capabilities have AI that is analyzing again how that deal and information about that deal is being tracked. So it starts to again exhibit information about is a particular deal closer to being a converted close one or actually is there less confidence in terms of that deal coming to a successful closure. So those are sort of the areas where and when you look at revenue enablement, in particular, those are the sorts of areas where we’re starting to see AI getting embedded into a lot of that revenue value chain.

If you think about all of the different activities that a seller needs to go through to be able to prepare for, engage with, proposed to, go through a negotiation process, and again, capture information in their CRM system, capturing information across a number of different systems, utilizing sells enablement platforms to be able to access information and be much smarter in terms of their there they’re kind of they’re selling engagement, all of those areas are just becoming much more sophisticated in terms of utilizing machine learning artificial intelligence to be able to help automate a number of decisions to be able to help bring the information up to a sales rep and also to be able to help that sales rep understand how they’re engaging with the customer and the levels of kind of sentiment and engagement from that customer.

SS: Fantastic. One thing you’ve mentioned is the importance of essentially demystifying AI for enablement leaders. Why do you think some leaders might be apprehensive about leveraging AI? And what is your advice for demystifying AI for them?

AC: That’s a great question. I don’t know if enablement leaders are necessarily apprehensive about implementing AI, I think it’s just a case of not necessarily having a clear picture of what AI means and how it can deliver value. I think there’s also a certain confusion in terms of artificial intelligence machine learning, its association with data science, and having a very big data science function. I sort of see the deployment of AI into business processes, it really falls into a kind of two buckets for me, what I call the kind of the functional level deployment of AI or the kind of application-level deployment of AI and in the functional level deployment of AI, what you’ve got there is exactly that. You’ve got like very big organizations oftentimes banks because banks have been doing this to very big financial institutions. Banks have been doing this for a really long period of time. You get a whole bunch of really smart people, data engineers, and data scientists that know what they’re doing and know how to code the machine and code the data. Because it’s a bank they’ll have lots of on-premise infrastructures, lots of server power, lots of space that they can bring in a huge amount of data, and again, oftentimes because its banks, whether it’s credit card companies or mortgage companies or any type of financial transaction related businesses, they have a huge amount of information in terms of how people utilize their products, their financial services products. So they’re able to do a huge amount of analysis engineer that day to process that data have the smart guys, in terms of the data scientists looking at that and then being able to build out decision models in terms of is Arup going to default on his credit card is Arup looking like the type of person we want to be able to make a mortgage loan to etcetera. That’s kind of AI at the functional level. Utilizing a huge amount of Human Resources to build out, I got a very powerful and of course a very expensive function. So that’s what I call AI at the functional level.

A lot of big institutions are doing that, but you need to be a very, very large scale well established enterprise. Again, oftentimes banks are in terms of financial services to be able to have that type of a function. Whereas I think a lot of companies now are starting to realize that AI is now being embedded more into the application, that you can get it in all of those different capabilities. You don’t necessarily know how the AI is working 100%, it’s a little bit of a black box, but that’s okay if you know that you’re buying into one of those companies and you know that as you plug it in into your sales process, you plug it into kind of your sales enablement and engagement processes that you start to see the value, it starts to help automate decisions, it makes life easier for the sales rep, that’s the application level kind of deployment of AI.

If you talk about our enablement leaders going to apprehend and everyone nervous about engaging with AI I don’t think they are, I think it’s just a case of being able to realize that a lot of the AI though, that enablement leaders work with is already there, it’s already embedded into their application, it’s already embedded into the way that they’re kind of working. So the big challenge for enablement Leaders is if you have all of those applications, how do you ensure that in a way the AI across each of those individual platforms is working in as harmonized a manner as possible? I think again there are a lot of talks that’s been coming out recently about Frankenstein where you end up with too many kinds of different tools within your sales stack, they don’t necessarily fit together really well. The AI within each of those tools is kind of sending you up to different decisions and different kinds of insights that might not be harmonized. So whilst you’ve got all of this AI the challenge for an enablement Leader might not be the desire to utilize AI might actually be the sort of problem that AI delivers, because if you’ve got all of these applications, you may suddenly find that actually the decision that you’re getting from, it is not necessarily harmonized all the way through.

SS: I love that now, AI helps make predictions but it’s up to enablement teams to really utilize these predictions for success. What are some of the ways in which you’ve leveraged AI predictions to aid in decision-making?

AC: Thank you for asking that. I’d love to call out my time at Elavon, which is my most recent company. I joined Equifax about 6 or 7 weeks ago, so I’ve still yet to figure out where we have some of these opportunities and what we can develop and do, and perhaps what are some of the vendors and deployment capabilities we’re going to look at. More recently Elavon, I spent seven years there, and in the last three years looking at developing and building out a customer data platform capability with AI embedded into it. What we did with that was a really simple business retention use case, a kind of customer retention use case. Elavon merchant services is a payments processor. So our portfolio of customers is huge so we have in the region of 200,000 plus customers across all of Europe. So we have a very big portfolio of S&B customers that are remotely managed and we have naturally a very small proportion of account managers as opposed to the number of accounts in the portfolio. In fact, we’ve got about 50 to 60 account managers against a total portfolio in that S&B space, a total portfolio of more than 100,000 accounts.

You’ve got a very big portfolio and a very small team on a proportionate basis. So when it comes to saving customers when it comes to retaining customers, that’s the biggest challenge that the team had. In a lot of instances, they weren’t even necessarily speaking as proactively as they would like to an individual customer in that portfolio on a regular basis. So the challenge that we have is how do you then flag up customers into the team that could be at a much higher risk of canceling. Through that customer data platform, the CDP solution that we deployed, we were able to train that with the AI data with the huge amount of information that we had in terms of where we’ve seen retention, retention challenges, where customers had canceled, equally where customers have been going to cancel but we’d save them. We trained that entire environment. So effectively what we could start to do was about 3-4 months ahead of a customer potentially canceling. We were able to see some of the signals and those signals that were coming through would give us an indication that this customer is at risk of canceling.

So we did that and we did. Obviously no longer with them, but of course very proud of the team because we deployed that, and certainly through the course of 2021 we worked through a total list of about 7500 customers. About 50% of those customers were genuinely at risk of canceling. We caught those 50%. You’re talking about 3200 customers. We caught those customers 2 to 3 months ahead of canceling. And again, not my team, but this is the account management team, we facilitated their effectiveness, and we facilitated their productivity so they had the right conversations at the right time and were able to save about 80% of those customers, which is fantastic. So all in all, you know across the board, the contribution that my team made through that AI deployment through the customer data platform, the contribution that the team made was now $2 million through the course of 2021. So really pleased in terms of a simple use case like that, which is like how do you identify customers that are potentially going to cancel, be confident about that and get in front of that conversation before the customer does cancel.

SS: In your experience, what are some of the business outcomes that you’ve been able to correlate to your AI-driven programs?

AC: So again, in the context of say using something like a customer data platform and then utilizing that with insights in terms of what you should do, absolutely, it kind of goes in two directions. For me it’s the direction of how you generate more revenue through cross-sell, upsell, better engagement with the customer, or even deal conversion or how do you protect revenue by promptly identifying customers that are potentially at risk of canceling. So again not that we do not use this capability but you know again just through my reading and understanding of the marketplace.

I think a lot of what we’re seeing in terms of business outcomes has got to be and we were talking about it from an enablement perspective again we’re talking about revenue enablement has got to be that. It’s got to be like how do we help sellers be more confident, be focused and more productive and focused on the right deals at the right time and be more confident in that engagement so that they can increase their sales conversion rates, their win rates and AI should be able to help with that. The CDP platform that I deployed at Elavon offered up a 2 to 3 times stronger win rate, and a sales conversion rate than you would have on your average. We piloted that and it proved itself in that context on the flip side as well you should be able to then engage with customers that are potentially going to cancel so you want to hold onto and protect that revenue again, AI should be able to identify those customers before they go through that process, before they experience any dissatisfaction or any challenges and they threatened to cancel. AI should be able to help you get ahead of that so that you can protect that revenue.

SS: Fantastic. Now, the last question for you Arup. With AI technology and capabilities constantly evolving, what predictions do you have for the future of these tools and how they might continue to drive innovation and enablement?

AC: I think one of the biggest trends I think that we’ll see over the next 3-4 years is consolidation. I think there are a lot of applications and platforms out there. Clearly, there will be some consolidation, that happens all the time. Each of the different providers and players in the marketplace is just trying to identify which part of that revenue value chain do they not have in their mix today that they could stretch into, and is there a platform in that place? Oftentimes facilitated by AI the primary players will buy, so again, I think that consolidation of these different tools and capabilities so that the sales stack starts to become a lot more, for lack of a different expression, consolidated. That is the direction that it’s going and I think that the part of the challenge, again, that’s a double-edged sword, that makes it easier sometimes for a customer, a kind of a buying client in that space that’s looking for those types of tools, it makes it easier for buying clients to get to the right decision, but also you could end up with a loss of some of the sophistication and some of the kind of the features and the benefits and the quality of the capabilities in terms of the current context as it sits across all of these different providers.

So consolidation is a good thing in some respects for buyers that want to buy AI, want to buy this kind of sales stack and marketing stack, and want to buy that capability. It’s good because it simplifies the buying decision but also maybe, you know, again, as I said, I think maybe a bit challenging in terms of loss of features and benefits etcetera. So that’s number one, I’d say, absolutely consolidation.

I think number two, within that technology space, integration. So you want to see a number of the different key providers that are still big names that continue to have a market presence, looking to integrate more with each other. So this notion of frenemies, working closely with another provider in that space, in the sales stack and utilizing AI machine learning. Providers that are able to kind of work together and think about that sort of revenue value chain and being able to build out a kind of a coordinated comprehensive solution set. I think that the integration piece is going to be key and I guess part of that integration piece will be how do you get much more API kind of glue-based capabilities, as opposed to types of capabilities that help add your AI-driven sales stack into your core business platforms. That’s the space where I think a lot of things will start to evolve. I think you know in terms of AI it’s already driving a lot of sophistication. So you’ve already got speech analytics in terms of conversation intelligence, you have text analytics obviously you know, in terms of kind of revenue intelligence. Again all of that’s going on there, so the power of AI it’s really fantastic to know where it’s going. I think that the key will be how that all starts to come together in a more consolidated manner.

SS: Thank you so much, Arup. I greatly appreciated the opportunity to reconnect with you and have you share your insights with our audience. Thank you.

AC: That’s very kind, thank you very much for inviting me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I am excited to have Maria Willait from Salesforce join us. Maria, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Maria Willait: Thank you very much, Shawnna. Hello everyone, my name is Maria Willait. I am the director of sales enablement for Salesforce in France. I am based and located in France. I’ve been in tech for 25 years now, 18 years in sales, and seven years in enablement, so getting used to all the sales, marketing, and enablement practices.

SS: Well, we are very excited to have you join us today. Now, you actually recently spoke at our Sales Enablement Soirée we hosted in Paris, France on sales and marketing alignment. In a rapidly growing business environment, it can be really easy for departments to drift apart and start to create silos. I would love to better understand from you, what do you do to really keep communication flowing between sales and marketing, and what are some best practices that you might have for aligning sales and marketing around organizational goals?

MW: Yes, and thank you very much for the question. I think it is important to understand that when we work in an organization like Salesforce or any other organization, we need to keep communicating all the time. The first thing that we do is weekly meetings, not only with marketing but with sales management because the sales objectives are the same for us, enablement, and the same for marketing. We need to be aligned. We are part of the same management meeting and we are clear on the objectives that we want to achieve each month, quarter, or each year. When we create a plan, we create a business plan together with the same objective which is the success of the salespeople, we are very, very careful with that, and again, it’s about meeting regularly, not only with marketing but with the sales team and making sure that we keep on track and achieve the same objectives.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. Now, what are some of the key points of intersection though, maybe even within Salesforce between sales and marketing?

MW: Yes. For us at Salesforce, we have decided to ask salespeople to be champions. So some salespeople are champions. What does it mean to be a champion? It’s very important because when we are working with marketing to create a webinar, for example, we are always looking for speakers internally, as well as customers. We ask our salespeople to be champions, and then marketing brings all the content, all the exchanges, all the customer content, webinars events, etc. It’s very important to align both and to work in and coordinate both roles. Again, salespeople are champions for our marketing team and for the enablement team, as well. I can use them to do my training but we can use them for speaking in front of a customer or doing some interviews or doing some customer stories, for example, on videos or on a podcast like this one.

SS: Fantastic. Beyond marketing, what are some of the other departments that sales enablement needs to be in close collaboration and alignment with and how have you gone about building some of those relationships?

MW: First of all, sales and development at Salesforce is part of the COO office, so business operations. Business operations include sales strategy, sales program, and sales and development. What does it mean? It means that sales enablements are aligned to the business objectives. We don’t only do marketing, we are aligned to the business objectives. It means that sales strategy works with the sales leaders to set up the goals for each sale, for each manager, and then the sales program, it’s all the programs that we are going to deliver to generate pipeline and enablement is all the training around these programs.

What kind of training do we give to salespeople in order to reach the target of the sales strategy team with the programs that the sales program team is putting in place for them? It’s not only salespeople, it’s not only sales enablement or sales program, it’s as well, of course, marketing. Marketing creates a lot of events to generate a pipeline, and again, it’s always on the objective and the success of our salespeople because we know that the success of our salespeople, it’s creating pipeline and closing the pipeline they’re creating. I think all these people together work really well as long as they are in the same team and they work toward the same objective, which is the success of our salespeople. I hope it’s not a generic answer to say we are working together and we are really making an impact and success in the field.

SS: I love that. In terms of thinking about the buyer, what are some best practices for enablement to bridge the gap between sales and marketing so that they help curate a better buyer experience?

MW: Rather than trying to just speak critically about it, I’m going to speak and tell you a story and the project I’m working on with marketing. We are working on a customer story competition at Salesforce at the moment what it is? It’s very simple marketing are always looking for customer stories, you know that and who are the best people to speak about customer stories, there are the salespeople. Rather than just asking them to tell about the story, we are making competition around it. We are asking the team. They do some meetings there. They have judges that are in the room. Each salesperson is going to tell a story and at the end, the jury is going to choose the best customer story from this best customer story we are going to do a video podcast that we are going to share with the rest of the salespeople.

As you can see, in terms of thinking about our buyers it’s our salespeople and how do we work with marketing? This is the best way that we found to work in marketing because it’s in the own interest of salespeople that joined Salesforce. They want to know what we do at sales at the customer site, but as well, it’s very interesting for marketing because then they can find some customers to speak about our biggest events. As you can see, we can really find some great projects to work together with and, most importantly, to achieve the same objective which is the success of salespeople. You might think I’m repeating myself, but really, I think my job is to support and make sure that each salesperson is successful.

SS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more now to tie everything together. How can sales enablement practitioners ensure that maybe sales and marketing stay aligned from the onset and then remain aligned long term?

MW: Again, it’s about the business plan. You remember at the beginning I told you in order to work well together and to continue to work well together first we need to have the same objective. Second, we need to work on the same business plan. When we are presenting our business plan to the sales leaders in France, we are telling them this is what enablement is doing, this is what programs are doing and this is what marketing is doing and everything is linked to the success of the business, to the success of the objective that the strategy has asked us to reach.

You can see that it’s not only a one-shot, and I spoke about one project which is the customer story competition, but we have multiple projects that we work on in common, so I can tell you about what we are working on the events as well. We are supporting marketing when they are doing some events like the Salesforce World Tour or Dreamforce, we have all these sales and marketing people working together for success, and of course, sales enablement is always here to train and to make sure that sales know what’s going to happen during these big events. It’s not just the one shot, it’s continuous learning. Marketing supports sales and salespeople support marketing by being very close to each other and by counting on each other. That’s very, very important. Sales enablement is the glue between all these teams. I hope I was able to share with you some of my ideas and that you will be able to use them in your own company as well.

SS: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to walk us through that.

MW: No problem. It was a pleasure for me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Don Schmidt, who’s an enablement expert from a wide range of tech companies join us today on our podcast. Don, I would love for you to introduce yourself to our audience.

Don Schmidt: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Shawnna. I really appreciate it. My background has really been specialized in business-to-business and SaaS model industries and I’ve been within enablement and training for more than 15 years. I’ve built five startup enablement teams series A through D with up to about 30 employees in some of those cases and I’ve led enablement programs that have served and supported more than 700 fields and sales reps and then about 20,000 clients. So really the area of my startups are really three areas. One was Fintech, which was with human interest, which provides 401k plans for small businesses, then E-learning startups, Lynda.com, which eventually became LinkedIn learning, and then Green Flower, which is a cannabis-centric training company, and then third was the automotive industry where I worked for cars.com and Edmunds.com setting up their programs. My point would be for our listeners is that what it shows is that enablement kind of stretches us across our platforms so don’t feel like you have to stay in one lane for your entire career. Within enablement, training is training no matter if you’re selling automotive or cannabis or financial services. If you’re in the enablement industry, you have a lot of opportunities and career options that are coming forward, so I’m glad to be able to share any of my thoughts or experiences to help your listeners.

SS: Thank you, Don. I’m excited to have you here and to the comment that you made around building a career in enablement, on LinkedIn you mentioned one of your passions as building enablement teams. I’d love to understand your opinion, what are some of the core pillars of an effective enablement team?

DS: Yeah, that’s a good question because it really has expanded over the years. It started with training and then just became kind of a fancy word for training and so I would say that it isn’t training alone, although that is a large part. The way I’ve set up my teams is really in three verticals and the first is performance management. What I mean by that is really looking at the data and not necessarily just working with revenue or sales operations to get data from Salesforce. I mean creating skill assessment health cards aka scorecards sometimes people call them, but I don’t particularly like that word because it feels like as the seller, you’re going to tell them where they suck. Health cards are really where we can help you improve your efficiency and your effectiveness and along with that. Often I set up the tech stack. With enablement, I definitely recommend taking over all of the productivity tools and then either managing or being part of that sales and retention process creation, the sales methodology, because performance management as that first pillar dictates what your content is going to be and technically how you’re going to deliver it.

That would be my second pillar — I create a content team and when I say team it could be one instructional designer, it could be a lot. My advice for people is not to just look at it as face-to-face learning and webinar-based content creation, there are two new areas in the industry that I’m really jazzed about. One is guided paths, there are great companies out there that lay on top of tools like Salesforce and guide people in a kinesthetic way. That should be part of your content creation and then also there are video coaching tools that are out there that are sometimes within enablement tools and sometimes outside sometimes within an LMS but video-based coaching I think is an important kind of delivery method of your curriculum team. Now, I often have taken over the communication because often salespeople get either so much slack or so many emails that they start ignoring it, so my team will consolidate that and try to make that more efficient so that people actually see what they need to see. Then also within content, I’ve never had a marketing team under me, but there’s marketing enablement that will build all of your sales collateral, but also I have had my team build out playbooks and battle cards to go against competitors.

Then the third pillar is really delivery. Obviously, it’s the training of new hires and veterans, but I would also suggest training to leverage and take over motivational events, the sales kickoffs, or whatever you might call it at your organization that are either quarterly or yearly. You’re all hands calls, my team takes that over and MCs it. You may still have sales leadership running those, but you have a facilitator and those, all-hand meetings I would say should always go down to the director level or regional level down to the weekly level where your trainers are in the weekly sales meetings for a specific regional director and then I think the last parts of that delivery is obviously data-driven coaching that comes from the performance management, leadership development and you know, I’ve done at two companies, recruitment support, where the trainers actually will conduct sales centric interviews with candidates that have gotten far into the process and just test them on one thing like their sales methodology so the hiring manager doesn’t have to do that during their service. My advice is really to think about what you aren’t managing yet and then begin expanding your team’s role.

SS: Absolutely. I love that approach. Now that said, in your experience, what are some of the challenges that can maybe come up with building and developing an enablement team, and what have you found to be successful in overcoming those challenges?

DS: There’s definitely a lot and it does matter if you’re a one-person show or you have a big team. Often what has happened with me is that I come in and it’s a one-man show in many cases for me or it’s two or 3 people and typically the enablement team or sometimes when I come in they were still called sales training were seen as kind of superfluous. What I mean by that is the number one thing is to change sales management’s view and that can be tough. There’s no doubt about it, but the question you have to ask leadership is do you want us to be a superfluous training team or do you want us to be an essential part of the sales organization? That makes sellers more effective at their jobs and if you can weave in what I had talked about earlier of all the things that you could do for the organization and support people to be more effective, it gives you more and more abilities to be valuable. I think my number one goal in that challenge is can you become that trusted advisor for sales leadership and if you can, you’re in a good position. Ultimately it’s getting their trust advisor set up that you need to concentrate on the right metrics and that’s often the challenge is that we’re not looking at the right metrics.

SS: I think that’s a fantastic point. I’d love to better understand how you measure the impact of your team on the rest of the business. What are some examples of the key metrics you leverage to reinforce the enablement team’s value?

DS: Yeah. That gets right into that main challenge. I think where I made the mistakes at the beginning of my career and I think for the listeners here in this situation of trying to create more relevance and getting management buy-in is that you have to steer away from what I would say are the least valuable metrics, which are how many classes we trained. The number of attendants, how many e-learning courses are collateral did we put in the LMS or the enablement repository? What were our evaluation scores? Smile sheets are fine, but if the trainers are really good at delivery, they’re of course going to get fives and so you can say to yourself, you’re really great, but sales management isn’t necessarily brought into that. Test scores, I don’t know about you and some of your other presenters that have been on the podcast, but I found that the people that test multiple choice questions in new hire training typically are like the worst salespeople. You think they’d be the best because they know the product but they get caught in the weeds. So giving a sales management test scores or how many people you certified is the wrong way to approach and I would say one sales metric, I always stay away from the time of the first sale. I know a lot of managers want to know that it is ramped and ready and get it really fast, but at the time of the first sale, there could be something that was already in the pipeline. I think it’s pretty misleading. So in that sense, then what are the hot buttons?

My advice, and what’s worked well for me, is to track from the date that that person started or the first day of the month that they started and follow them with their career so that everything that you train, you can see what goes up and down. My advice would be overall revenue, which is obviously a pretty easy one, but what was their overall revenue, was there an increase in sales, management wants to know what that ramp speed was in the sense that they are on their own and ready to go. Now, pipeline predictability we’re not the silver bullet in all of this, but we can absolutely affect that if you can say our prediction on forecasting and pipeline is more accurate because of this training it gives real relevance. Increasing retention of your top talent, improving quota performance, decreased time to close, the opportunity open to opportunity closed, that can be tough if an organization doesn’t follow that method of creating an op right when you talk to a client, but that’s a huge one and then decrease of the churn of not only the clients but also of employees. So there are a lot of metrics, but if you look at those and my advice to listeners is if you’ve never looked at this is Kirkpatrick 4 levels of ROI, that can help coupled in with all of the data that I was mentioning earlier.

SS: Absolutely, the Kirkpatrick Model is phenomenal. We actually had a representative from there on our Book Club Podcast recently. So to shift gears just a little bit as an enablement leader, you’ve pointed out in the past that one of your goals is to be a great coach. I’d love to learn a little bit from you, how can coaching help you develop the talent on your enablement team?

DS: I like how you do it internally about my team, but you know, I’m gonna step a little outside of that and say, let’s first start with the common issue, which is regardless if you’re an enablement leader or your sales leader or anyone else is that many leaders think they’re coaching, but really what they’re doing is directing and they don’t realize it. No fault to them, often, L&D departments don’t necessarily hit everyone with situational leadership training and other courses, but often somebody thinks they’re coaching. That is one thing to always be aware of, including thinking about yourself. So an example I’d give, I think everyone that’s a listener here has experienced this, have you ever been to a weekly regional sales team meeting where there’s a regional director and maybe there are 10 salespeople or so that manager goes around the circle of sellers and asks, what are they planning to close this week? And just goes around the horn, they say I’m going to bring in this amount of money, which sometimes is a lie because they don’t have anything, they’re not looking at their forecasting well, but they don’t want to say zero, right? Then the manager gives them pointed, what I would put in quotes, “advice” on how to approach those deals and to get them across the line, and then they’ll go from one person to the next person. Once you’ve talked, you’re just like, well, okay now and I’m not listening to my colleagues like I’m off the hook, so those can be really ineffective sessions and in my opinion, they’re a waste of time because all they are doing in those situations is telling them what to do. There’s no problem-solving.

Now I get into the coaching part of this with my team, and with the sales leader, you have to work and coaching is an individual basis and I kind of see coaching is more about self-discovery and having the person that you’re talking to discover those answers for themselves. Often I try to use data behind it to guide that employee to that new approach. It might not necessarily be my approach, it might be a better one actually, but for them to self-discover, because then they’re much more likely to execute on what’s being said. To give you an example, instead of telling a trainer that their delivery was too rigid in the classroom, ask him something like what would you change in your training delivery today if you were going to train the class again. How would you rate yourself training delivery-wise from 1 to 10? Well if they say 10, then we have a different issue, but anything from 1 to 9, it doesn’t really matter, it’s like, okay, well then how could we have gone up to 10?

Sometimes what I will do then with a trainer, I’ll look at verbal tics like um, or uh or you know, and I’ll start writing them down and putting in how many totals during a certain period of time. Then I ask them that question, so data-based, I say, what do you think your social, your verbal tic? They may come up with it, let’s say they say ‘Um’. Then I ask, if that’s the case, how many ‘ums’ do you think you said in 30 minutes? 107. So how do you feel we should approach this? Then I’d say it’s not just about the trainers you could put a coaching philosophy with anyone in your team. Instead of stating, let’s say we need to increase our competitive curriculum, maybe with you with one of your content people, you share the salesforce data and how many deals were lost to competitors as an example. So we know because when there is a close loss, there’s a reason why the person quit and maybe or didn’t sign, and maybe it was because they went with a competitor. So you show that data to the content person, and you say, okay, what are your thoughts about how we can combat this challenge? What are the ways we can do it? Now, you can then feed in your information based on that, but I really think open-ended questions are the best way for coaching. Now I will say at the end of this though, I did say you shouldn’t be directing. I also do believe in situational leadership. So if someone is brand new, they’re very enthusiastic but they don’t know what they’re doing well then you do have to direct them. You can’t just delegate a task to them. It’s not fair, but coaching you can use with new people or veterans.

SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. It works well across the team. You’ve touched on some fantastic best practices, but do you have any additional ones that you would recommend when it comes to coaching your teams?

DS: I am a huge believer in data-driven coaching. Even if you’re one person show, you can do this, you can do that, or where I’ve had actual data analysts combine all the data into a snowflake through tableau and create individual health cards. Earlier I said that they are sometimes called scorecards, I like calling them health cards, and that allows you to deliver customized and personalized learning to each seller and sales leader but also in regards to coaching. Now you know what to coach. We break that out typically in my teams in four areas, so sales metrics. So did you close a sale? How many units did you sell? What is your average selling price? How long did it take? Activity is the second part. So how many phones, email, and text outreach calls did you do, and then what’s your closing ratio based on those second meetings, third meetings, and such? Productivity tools, so if your team is in charge of any productivity tools, it could be stuff that’s within Salesforce. I’ve done this with Salesforce maps, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, with outreach with Highspot, there are all kinds of companies that you might have in your text stack. I would look at those metrics and see what the usage is.

Then the last one is just knowledge checks, did they complete training in the past? If you put that all into one kind of spreadsheet and look at salespeople individually, then you’re able to find what I would say are red flags. Think of it as like Moneyball in the movie, Moneyball with Brad Pitt and there’s this great scene with Chris Pratt and he’s watching a video of himself at the plate and they’re throwing pitches at him and he self discovers by looking at that data that if I let some pitches come through, I’ll get more balls, which means I’ll get more walks, which means I’ll get on base and it was an epiphany for him in the movie. I feel it’s the same way when you’re coaching. If you look at these metrics and you can compare people with others, then you’re able to coach them because they can see it compared to their colleagues, and that works really well. Now you’re not just pulling KPIs from the ether and saying, yeah, this is about how many calls you should do. You should look at the top salespeople and make it much easier to coach.

SS: I love that approach. Don, last question for you. You’ve also mentioned that results only come through collaboration. So how do you foster a culture of collaboration amongst your teams?

DS: It can be hard, especially the larger the organization, the more siloed it gets. At smaller startups, everybody’s talking and I find that it’s not malicious when silos start, it just isn’t. I think people just get in their own world and they start working and collaboration starts breaking down. I think you do it in two ways. You look internally and you look externally. So here are some suggestions that have worked for me. Firstly internally I would replace the weekly team meeting that you have with your enablement folks and I would actually break it up into more small group sprints and then do daily stand-ups with your direct reports and also assign productivity tools to each trainer. I’ll give you an example when I was at Edmonds, every trainer had one productivity tool that was assigned to them and they had to take ownership of it and now it forced them to then have to work with other teams to make sure that that works, so it’s not just working within our team, it’s getting them to think I need to collaborate outside because I won’t be successful.

The goal is always this, I want you to speak at whatever vendor’s conference is next. So one was Salesforce maps and I said to that trainer you should absolutely try to get to Dreamforce and she took it over and did an amazing job. She worked with the actual vendor with the sales team, found top sellers that were doing really well, shadowing them, used that for the training content, and worked with marketing to create collateral, all this happened and happened, and I lost her to salesforce and she’s now a salesforce maps employee. That is wonderful. That made me feel so great because she was expanding on her career and I was able to be that one that kind of started it. She got it all herself, but I got that started by assigning a productivity tool to her and then coaching her through it on how to collaborate.

Also, just the last parts of the internal I would say, I like conducting quarterly team in-person workshop meetings and monthly all-hands calls, but those quarterly in-person meanings are where you do your problem-solving. So everyone is working together on solving our five main issues. They’re all working together and they’re figuring out, okay, who do we need outside of our team to help us be successful? So then the last part of this is external. In regards to collaboration, I mean I could give you the standard ones that everybody does. You’ve got to have a meeting with the head of each of the department heads once a week. Okay, fine, but what has also worked for me that’s a little more outside of the norm is that I’ve created advisory boards. They’re not decision boards, but their advisory boards, which often are made up of top sellers. You create an advisory board for industry, for competitive, for selling, for retention and you find based on your health cards, who are those top users and then they help you create that content. Whenever you have an all-hands meeting where everyone is coming together, you bring them in a day early and you have these advisory board meetings and you have specific questions for them. It helps you create content. It creates people that will be rating fans of your content because they were part of that process and they’ll amplify it, but also it opens up for better content.

I would also suggest shadowing sellers if you’re in a management role, the best way you’re going to learn to be able to understand what are the real trials and tribulations is to shadow a salesperson and just listen. If they’re doing things that seem right or they’re following the sales process that you taught and they’re using it or whatever it might be, create a sales success video of them saying, hey, I love how you handled that objection. I saw that you used alternative close or you clarified, rephrased, and isolated that objection. Can we record you for a one or two-minute video on how you did that with a client and how much money you made and they get really excited and now you put that into the LMS.

The last one externally is as a leader, I not only meet with the managers of other teams, but I also attend the product and product marketing sprint meetings because the worst thing in enablement is that you’re given this time when you’re going to market and it’s limited and you didn’t know what was in the pipeline, get yourself in those meetings months ahead what the product team is working on so you’re ready with your team to go on day one.

SS: Don, thank you so much. I really appreciate the fantastic advice for our audience. I appreciate you joining us today.

DS: Thank you and I really appreciate the opportunity. I mean it’s great to work with an organization like yours and I definitely recommend for listeners to look at some of the certification programs that you have. I’m highly impressed with the Sales Enablement Professional Certificate and I really like Sales Personas also. It’s great to work with people like yourselves that are in this industry trying to help people get better.

SS: Well, I appreciate that additional plug. To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Simon Gilks from Ometria join us. Simon, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Simon Gilks: Thank you very much for having me today. As you said, my name is Simon Gilks and I work at Ometria. I come from a background in sales. I spent about 12 years in sales before doing a short stint in product marketing and then have spent the last best part of 10 years in that sort of sales, revenue operations, and enablement world. Currently, I lead our global revenue operations and enablement function. We support primarily sales marketing and our customer world, but in reality, I’m a service provider to the whole business. At Ometria we have a single mission. Our mission is to create marketing experiences that our customers love. We’re a customer data marketing platform and what we try to do is help retailers increase customer loyalty and CRM revenue by essentially sending personalized marketing messages throughout the entire customer journey.

SS: Really excited to have you here. Now on LinkedIn, you mentioned that you act as a cross-functional conduit. How are you able to break down the silos between different departments to ensure strategy alignment?

SG: With difficulty but essentially I see my role here to ensure that we have that accountability and sort of synchronicity around the goals and activities that each of the functions that are responsible for driving revenue. So like I said, we are a sales marketing and customer organization, I do this by really enforcing that sort of accountability, but probably more importantly the visibility to making sure that everyone’s goals are visible. All the activities that we’re doing are bringing that together in a single plan. No, it’s not always easy, but that’s what we need to do. I think the easiest way to make sure we are all aligned is actually bringing it back to the customer and standing in the customer’s shoes and understanding what they need, because if we all align behind what our customers doing what our customer needs, what they want from us, then hopefully that aligns us all behind that single goal, which makes my life significantly easier.

As a business, we have an underlying sort of methodology that we use that comes from a book called the Four Disciplines of Execution and it’s about WIGs. So WIGs stand for Wildly Important Goals and as a business, we adopt this methodology. We have a single wildly important goal as a business and then every quarter, each function within that business has a wildly important goal and it must roll up to the overall company’s wildly important goal. My role is to make sure that we all have that visibility, we are all aligned, and we’re really thinking about it from a customer perspective, and then using this 4 step methodology really helps to make sure that the silos are brought down and that we are all aligned as departments.

SS: Absolutely. Now, in your experience, Simon, what is the impact of having strong cross-functional alignment on project and program execution?

SG: I think strong cross-functional alignment is essential. Without it, I believe that projects will either fail or their success will be severely limited. I think the world we’re operating in now, this post covid world, where we’re not necessarily in the office as much or we don’t have an office or we’re not seeing people face to face as much as meaning, that this is even more important. When we were in the office, you would bump into someone at the coffee machine, walk down the corridor, hold the door, and you’d have those Ad Hoc conversations, you would be talking about what you’re working on your priorities and it may have been a very informal conversation, but what it did do was it helped you communicate with everybody what you were working on, which actually subconsciously really helped with that cross-functional alignment.

We have to be really more conscious about what we’re going to do, we have to make an effort to really focus on this alignment. We have to make sure that right the way from the planning of the project to the execution, everyone is involved, all of the right stakeholders to maximize success. So really, I do believe that the cross-functional alignment is essential to the success of any project or program, but not necessarily just for this one, what it will do is lead to much higher engagement because we know that whatever happens with this project, there’s always going to be another one and another one and another one. That sort of cross-functional alignment, that engagement, that success, will only lead to future projects being even more successful, so for me, it’s absolutely critical and has to be one of the really strongest parts of any project.

SS: I’d love to talk about how we bring this to life. What habits do you instill in your reps to promote teamwork and collaboration and how do you reinforce the value of cross-team alignment?

SG: Again, this is so much tougher in a post covid world, but I believe it really starts at the top. This is actually about the culture of the organization. I believe this absolutely starts at the CEO and works its way down. You find some organizations really thrive on people just working in the silos and putting their heads down and just doing stuff. I think in a SAS startup or a scale-up like I operate, working together and this collaborating is essential. I don’t have all the answers. I need to work with people. I need to bounce these ideas off each other so we can get to that best place. For us, we’re really fortunate because our CEO and our entire executive team really support and encourage that collaboration working together to the point we all work remotely, but once a month we try and get everybody into the office in that one place just to get together to encourage that working together. Also, the WIG process really really helps us here. So we have teams, BDRs, partner managers, we have multiple teams but we need to come together as a single team to focus on what’s most important.

For example, as I said, I run the revenue operations and enablement team. Last quarter my team was split in two, so we had one team but then we had a WIG team for operations and a WIG team for enablement, and the enablement team was actually joined by the product marketing team. We then formed a single WIG team because that was the best thing for the business for us to get together and collaborate on the single most important thing we could do to help the business. I think in summary, this starts at the top, it trickles down and our methodology really helps this but my personal role, my responsibility here is to support and encourage and really ensure that everyone understands what we’re doing and why. It comes back to that plan at the beginning as well. So having that plan, having that methodology, and then as a leader continuously encouraging that and then correcting if you need to but hopefully there shouldn’t be much correction required.

SS: Absolutely. Now Simon, in your experience, what are some ways that you leverage technology to enable cross-departmental communication amongst your teams?

SG: Whenever we talk about technology, it’s a dangerous subject, right? Especially in a startup or a scale-up because my experience is you get some funding and you normally go out and buy loads of technology because you believe it’s going to automate or it’s going to help this process or help you collaborate more and your tech stack swells and it actually really confuses things and makes things 10 times harder because you end up with five project management tools and everyone’s working differently in a different tool. So for me, you have to be really, really careful when it comes to tech. You need to understand exactly what you need and why you need it and how you’re going to use it. What problem is it solving? If you can’t articulate that really quickly, then just forget it. You don’t need that piece of technology. Project management tools are probably a good example because you’ll find some people prefer one tool because they like the way that was laid out and another one prefers this and another one likes that. That’s a really dangerous way of looking at collaboration.

I think from a technology point and what’s been really successful for hours are probably two prime examples. An RFP tool, you sort of think about an RFP to how’s that going to enable collaboration, but we’ve got our product marketing team talking about our value proposition and our strategy, we’ve got our sales engineers that deal with the technical requirements, we’ve got our BDR team generating the opportunities, the AE’s closing them. All of them work on RFPs and actually by bringing in a really good RFP tool, it’s given them a platform where they can all come together, collaborate on a single RFP using all of the resources available, and actually what that has meant is we’ve been able to turn around RFP so much quicker, better aligned and with a much better response rate from our customers, hopefully leading to more business. When you talk about collaboration and communication, you wouldn’t normally think about an RFP tool, it has been extremely successful for us.

Another example is, I know I said project management tools is a bit of a dangerous area to go, by deciding on your single project management tool, we’ve been able to get a tool now that we integrate our core CRM system, our CSM team uses it, our professional services team use it, our onboarding team uses it, and our customers use it. They all collaborate on a single project where we’re all working together in real-time and communication leading to a much better posts contract project, whether that’s onboarding or an additional sort of integration or whatever that may be, that those types of tools, thinking slightly differently to a standard communication tool has really helped us communicate and collaborate so much better.

SS: Absolutely, and this is a question I think our audience is often very interested in understanding. How do you measure the enablement role in driving impact on cross-functional priorities?

SG: Yes, I think measuring the impact of enablement is always quite a difficult one. A lot of people talk about enablement and their gut feel is like, I’m going to focus on time to ramp or percentage of people hitting quota, which yes, you can absolutely measure those but they’re very much lagging indicators and they’re not necessarily within your control. So for me, enablement has to really start with the metric and you have to be really clear about what you’re going to try and impact. Now I’m a massive believer in the sound velocity equation, so focusing on a number of ops you are working in, times the value, times your win rate divided by a sales cycle because ultimately those four levers are the only levers you’ve got to drive revenue.

The way enablement comes in for me is when we’re working on any cross-functional priority, which one of those levers are we going to impact. If we think about the product team introducing a new product or a new feature, well, which lever are we impacting? Are we trying to unlock more revenue? Are we trying to make it easier for someone to buy, therefore shortening the sales cycle we are offering? This is a must-have feature, therefore impacting the win rate as long as we understand that we’re able to measure it, and then you’ve always got the anecdotal measurement as well. So using potentially a core intelligence platform to understand how are our sales reps position in this new feature, how is the customer responding to it, how is that landing in the marketplace, and then flowing that through to the win rate or the average order value and that’s where enablement has to come in because we’re the conduit that’s going to bring that product into the system, into the sales people, out to the customer, so we have to be really clear on what that measurement is and then we need to be the conduit that brings it all together at the end.

SS: Last question for you, what is the impact of cross-functional alignment on the buyer experience and how would you say it can help teams keep up with changing buyer needs to continue to really deliver value?

SG: Yeah, I think cross-functional work is when it comes to the buyer actually it exposes you to significant risk. I pride myself on always thinking about it from the customer’s perspective. Yes, we are a business. Yes, we have certain things we need to do. We’ve got processes we need to follow, but ultimately we’re here to provide a service to our customers and to our buyers and we need to make it as easy as possible for them to buy from us. Now, our sales process means that we have BDRs in the process at the start, then we have AEs, sales engineers probably coming at some point, then we have on board and then we have customer success. There are probably partnerships and leadership. So there are so many people involved in this process and actually what that does is that gives a customer a natural break point in a buying process. It makes it really easy for them to get out. So for us, by understanding the customer, therefore being able to make sure that we’ve got the right person involved at the right time, therefore hopefully exceeding the customer’s expectations. So actually being really clear about that breakpoint and say, hey, you know, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to hand you over to this person because they are the best, they’re the best person to work with you on this topic. That means that we’re constantly listening to the customer and making sure that we’re giving them the resource they need to make that process as smooth as possible and hopefully maximize the buyer’s experience so that when they buy from us now they buy again, they stay with us or if they go to another company, they continue to buy from us because we make it really, really easy by ensuring they’re always talking to the right person at the right time.

SS: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation today, thank you for sharing your expertise.

SG: Thank you very much for having me. It’s a real pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Anthony Tripyear from StarTech.com join us. Anthony, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Anthony Tripyear: Thank you. My name is Anthony, I’m 42 years old, I live in the UK with my wife and three-year-old daughter. I have worked in the IT industry pretty much my whole career but my background is actually modern languages. I did a degree in French and German and my first role was working as a translator basically for a large IT reseller in Germany. I used to translate their product catalog into English, did other translation work for them, and then from there I moved into a role in project management and procurement which started to take me internationally and I’ve really worked internationally ever since. I have worked in quite a few different countries for them and set up new offices for them in new markets. Back in 2010 I moved back to the UK, started working at Startech.com in 2014 as sales director and now I’m the director of sales operations and sales enablement. Basically, I’m accountable for our global channel marketing, and how we invest in business development across our network of distributors and channel partners and I manage a team of global sales professionals as well.

Just briefly Startech.com is a Canadian manufacturer of hard-to-find connectivity products. We’ve been around for 35 years. We like to say that we’re the IT professionals trusted source for performance, connectivity, and accessories. Basically, we’re a B2B company, we make Products that connect one device to another, we make docking stations, and we make cables and adapters. We also make racks, we make a whole variety of stuff. We’ve got about 3000 products. About 80% of the Fortune 500 uses our products and one thing that we’re really proud of, we’re on the Deloitte 50 best-managed companies list this year, so we’re a platinum member, this is the 12th successive year that we’ve been on that list as well. That was announced fairly recently and we’re really, really proud of that.

SS: That’s amazing. Well, thank you Anthony for sharing that. Now, in addition to the items that you mentioned just now on LinkedIn, you mentioned that you are also responsible for ensuring the alignment of sales and market development activities. In your opinion, what are some of the challenges of driving this alignment?

AT: That’s a great question. For us specifically, we’re a global business, so we’re in over 20 countries, we’ve got over 3000 products, so we’ve got lots of moving parts. Some of the challenges as I see them are really being relevant to our local markets and developing programs that scale, but also being really where our customer needs us to be. One thing to highlight with us as well is that our sales model is quite different from the majority and that our models are a pull model. It’s very relationship-focused. We sell to a restricted number of distributors, they sell to a large number of resellers who then sell to our end users, and our job really is to enable sales at each stage of the value chain. For us, having really good customer understanding is at the heart of what we do. We’re a customer-centric business. We challenge ourselves to always understand our customers understand the markets in which we operate as well. I think sometimes we’re guilty of thinking we understand our customers, but do we really understand them, and to do that one thing that’s really integral is listening to our sales team. So creating that alignment, listening to our sales team, and getting that feedback from them and from our customers is really important and that’s one of the challenges that we have.

I think one risk that would highlight as well in that is that we often say, ‘think global act local’ and that has long been a part of what we do and our strategy, but I think it’s really tempting for companies to ignore the views of their customers in local markets when they’re focused more on achieving operational efficiency. I think, especially now, when we’re arguably coming out of the pandemic, I think during the pandemic, and even now with some of the product shortages that we’re seeing globally, customers tended to buy what was available rather than what was really best aligned with their needs. I think that’s skewed demand and I think that skewed the future view of demand potentially as well. Moving out of the pandemic we risk not being aligned with our customer’s requirements. I think we’ve got to really challenge ourselves to double down on customer understanding and again, I think that starts with the alignment with sales and that’s one thing that we really, really need to get right, putting the customer at the heart of what we do, aligning with our sales team.

The third and final thing that I’ll just mention there as well, it was a challenge that we have as a global business has a global company strategy that’s consistent and behind which everyone can align themselves and having that really clear and having it across the whole business, but still being able to execute in a way that’s relevant for the local markets, I think that is really essential to what we do.

SS: Absolutely. Now you went through some of the challenges, but how do you go about overcoming those to ensure that sales and market development initiatives are effective and scalable?

AT: That’s a really good question. If I think about what we’ve done with our experience, I mean we’ve basically made it so we’re all trying to achieve the same thing. Alignment, consistency, understanding the customer, I mentioned the strategy that’s really fundamental to what we do is aligning around the strategy. What are we actually trying to accomplish, how we’ve overcome that is really, yeah, just making it really super clear what our company strategy is and making that so simple and easily digestible for everybody that everyone can get behind it. I think about our business, everybody in our business can articulate what our strategy is. It’s really clear, it’s reinforced frequently and it’s very, very clearly communicated. I can’t remember which book it was, it was Patrick Letzion, I think it was the advantage where he wrote about creating clarity and over-communicating clarity and that’s really what we’re trying to do with the strategy is to make sure that is so clear that everybody can line up behind that. Then it has to be consistent as well.

So, again, we’re a global business being consistent is what’s allowing us to scale. If we’re developing programs for France or Japan or North America, we’ve got the same approach in that we’re aligned behind the same strategy and we understand how we deliver value to customers, aligning KPIs as well, so we’re all pulling in the same direction and aligning around accountabilities. One thing that I think is really, really important is that we try to execute in a way that’s really relevant for our customers and relevant for our local market. So our strategy is consistent, but the way in which we execute that strategy locally is nuanced. We’ve got global sales teams who are market experts, we’ve invested in local resources, we’ve empowered them and I think that’s really the key to this is having that sort of empowering and trusting leadership and having clear accountabilities so everybody knows what they’re accountable for and effectively what their sandbox is.

So people are clear on what their accountabilities are, they’re clear on the sandbox that they’re playing in and they can then they can go off and execute then they know exactly what they’re able to do. They can execute our strategy locally in a way that’s relevant for their customers and relevant for the market and that’s what makes it effective and that’s what makes our strategy scalable, but that’s also what’s making the job enjoyable as well is that it’s really clear what we’re accountable for, but we’re given the freedom to execute on that and that’s what’s really helped us. I think as well that if we’ve got that in region resource and we engage people in the region when we’re building go-to-market plans when we’re looking at how we execute locally on strategy, then that’s instrumental and that’s instrumental has been able to execute effectively.

SS: Phenomenal. Now, who are some of the key stakeholders, Anthony, that you partner with to drive this alignment, and what are your best practices for building collaborative relationships with those stakeholders?

AT: This is an interesting one. I report to the president, so I align with him on pretty much everything. The strategy comes from him and I basically build functional plans and find ways of executing that strategy. Until we’re in alignment, nothing much can happen in my world, because I need that direction, so I have to align with my boss basically there. Then I mentioned earlier, this concept of the sandbox and that’s really important. So for me personally, I know really well what I’m accountable for and what I’m not accountable for. I’ve got a great picture of who gets a say when it comes to what I do. Basically when I’m executing, who gets a seat on the table and who has an opinion and who has input into that and I think that’s really often overlooked having those clear accountabilities and knowing the area for which you’re accountable your sandbox, I think that’s really empowering and that’s quite often overlooked. I think that’s really important when building a collaborative relationship with internal stakeholders and of people with whom you collaborate. It’s understanding where your own accountability starts and finishes, but also knowing what the accountabilities of others are.

I have to align with a whole bunch of people to do my job and build those functional plans and that includes my colleagues in sales, so sales VP, my peers in marketing, product management, digital merchandising, and then other key people across the business, but then equally important I have my direct reports in full alignment and also the people and culture play a big part in what I do as well.

There’s a whole bunch of sort of cross-functional alignment that has to be managed and this is something that I think is really key because and again, on a practical note, for me personally, I’ve been working remotely for the best part of 10 years, so my head offices in Canada, many of my colleagues have sort of thrown around the globe, so I’m used to doing all this in a remote environment and I think that kind of remote to a hybrid workplace is something that many people are new to. My tip for this is really simple actually, but it’s just that you need to be really proactive. I think as a remote worker or someone who’s got an international team or if you’ve got a bunch of colleagues that all sit together in one room in an office somewhere and you’re the one remote person or if everybody’s remote, I think you really need to go out of your way to be visible. I think to do this collaboratively with our stakeholders, you need to approach them, go to them and solicit input, ask questions, and find out what’s important to them as well, as what’s important to their business. How can you add value to their business? Most people are usually really happy to give you their time, especially when you’re asking for their opinion on something or you’re inviting them to talk about what’s important to them but take some time to understand that and understand their KPIs and their motivations, but also take time to understand how you can impact them and their business positively as well.

When building that collaborative relationship, I think it’s incumbent on you to go out of your way to really engage with people in a meaningful way, but then what also is equally critical to that is closing the loop. Once you’ve got that you’ve built your plan, you’re adding value, then show them that you’re adding value as well by demonstrating how the input from your stakeholders actually influenced your approach. Tell them how they helped you and show how your approach with their input is now adding value to them. I think there’s a definite approach that needs to be taken when trying to drive that kind of alignment and I think it needs dedicated effort, especially in the current environment where many people are remote.

SS: Absolutely, absolutely. Now let’s actually trickle down a little bit. From your experience, how does this alignment also help to improve the experience for your reps, and from your perspective, how can it help make them more efficient and effective in the roles?

AT: Our reps work according to the functional plans that we are constructing. So the better those plans are, the more effective they can be as well. They are aligned with our strategy, the strategy is really the North Star for them, they understand their accountability, so they understand their sandbox and what they’re empowered to do. You put all that together and it kind of gives them a lot of the tools that they need to really be empowered when they go ahead and execute in the market. I mentioned earlier our business is very relationship focused. So for our reps in particular for they to have a very clear view of what they are accountable for, and what others are accountable for, which enables them to focus on key relationships with their partners, and add value to them, but then they are the ones that engage subject matter experts where necessary. So I always say that our reps are kind of like the conductor of an orchestra, so when looking at the relationship with a partner, they’re the ones who are really orchestrating that. They set the pace, they engage other departments, other teams, they facilitate expert-to-expert communication, they delegate, but they’re the ones that are holding the baton, they’re the ones that are empowered to really, like I said, orchestrate that relationship, again, because they’re very clear on what their role is and they are very clear on what the role of others is.

So, being empowered in that way really helps to drive execution and it gives them the freedom to also execute in a way that’s relevant to their partners and customers that is relevant to their markets. It helps them to take the strategy and nuance it in a way that makes it relevant for the people that they’re dealing with. They can find ways of adding value that is very specific to their partners because they’ve got a very well-grounded understanding of what’s important to them. One of the things to touch on is that being aligned at my level and when creating functional plans means that our reps have the tools that they need to execute in the field. From a product perspective, they understand very well what products are being promoted to, which partners, what the USPs of those products are from a marketing standpoint, they’ve got the tools that they need to engage with their partners, and they’ve got supporting material and collateral, from a commercial standpoint they understand terms and have a very clear about budgets. They’ve got everything they need in their kit bag to go ahead and execute effectively.

I mean reps are our customer market experts and they’re really essential to our success. I said earlier if they’re engaged when we’re building the functional plans and if they’re aligned as an in-region resource, they become really instrumental. Then we can execute locally and we can execute in a way that adds the most value to our customers and also makes their job more enjoyable as well.

SS: Absolutely. On the other side, how does that alignment help improve the customer experience?

AT: Basically everything that we do starts with the customer. We have an understanding of needs that are customer-based, really not product based. We focus on the customer, we focus on how we can add value to our customer beyond the product, so that’s core to what we do and core to how we execute because it directly impacts the customer. The other thing is we’re a B2B company, so we operate a customer segmentation model so that we can understand how we can best serve the needs of each customer group. Having that foundation of customer understanding helps us to do that, and that in turn improves the customer experience. I mentioned a little earlier that alignment and a really well understanding of our customer allow us to tailor the approach locally when we’re delivering global programs, so how we execute in a way that’s relevant to our target customer, and without that everything else falls down basically. It has a very direct and very big impact on our customers.

SS: Absolutely. Now, last question for you, Anthony, what is the business impact that you’ve seen when it comes to alignment between sales and market development and how do you go about tracking this progress?

AT: It allows us to align behind one vision. Having a consistent and coherent strategy allows us to execute effectively. We can articulate the value that we had really clearly at each stage of the value chain, basically, because we’ve got a really good understanding of what’s important to our customers. One example that I’m thinking of is a couple of years ago we entered a new market segment. First, it was really uncharted territory. We were basically being told that we needed to be in that area for our customers. We did our research and entered into that segment and we partnered with an exciting new partner. We spent a lot of time understanding their business and trying to understand the market. We started off with them and things were going pretty well on paper, but knowing their business and knowing our shared wall with their business, we knew that we were just scratching the surface. We engage really well with them at some levels, but we found it really hard to engage with their marketing, for example, so we focused our sales team on building a relationship in different areas of the business. We found there was a product marketing team, so our sales team made contact with them. They got in contact with that team and they facilitated and were introduced to our product information team. So those two experts were talking to each other.

Through that, they understood how we were trying to make it easy for them in a way that we do for other partners, but we’re actually making their lives more difficult in the process. Having that alignment with sales and product information facilitated that conversation and we understood more clearly what was important to them. Then we were able to engage our channel marketing team and market development teams to specifically develop a program in collaboration with the partner in an area of the business we just didn’t have access to previously and that directly involved that team. Having KPIs aligned, strategy aligned, and customer understanding aligned again is instrumental to us executing properly on that.

Aligning around expectations allowed us to free up the budget for that project and also understanding what was important in a very specific way for that partner helped us to positively impact their KPIs. It was one of those really nice moments where you can plot very easily on a graph where at what point we did that basic revenue doubled pretty much overnight and has carried on to developing incredibly well. It’s like with each door that we’ve opened in that way, marketing, inventory, product, logistics, you can see basically like a step change in the business that we do with that partner. That all started out with our sales team being aligned so for us that was a massive success story and just again having everybody pulling in the same direction and having that alignment really enabled that to happen. From a market development perspective, we track pretty normal stuff I suppose. Revenue, customer accounts, that kind of thing, but we’re a customer-centric business like I said, so we try to venture beyond just purely product-based metrics. We measure customer satisfaction daily. We measure customer loyalty and you know, through getting to the root of what customer loyalty is we can basically segment more effectively and serve those customers even better and further our customer understanding.

One thing I found really interesting and I mentioned having that alignment and having KPIs that are aligned as well and aligned to outcomes, I was chatting with a colleague this morning and he was telling me about a friend of his who works for the Mercedes F1 racing team and moved there a few years ago. He mentioned that everybody involved in that business, we’re talking about mechanics, test drivers, engineers, IT technicians, catering staff, everybody who’s involved in that business, everyone has the same KPI and that is where their lead driver finishes in each race. So like they might have other KPIs as well, but absolutely everybody in that business shares that one KPI. I think that’s kind of what we’re really trying to do here as well, is really align behind the needs of the customer, understand the customer, and be able to execute in a way that’s going to add value and be relevant to them locally.

SS: I’ve loved this conversation. Thank you so much.

AT: Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Andy Conduit-Turner from Cartus join us. Andy, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Andy Conduit-Turner: Thank you very much for having me. As you said, my name is Andy Conduit-Turner, I work for Cartus, a global relocation company supporting corporate clients moving their employees and their families around the world. I work as Director of Sales and Technology Enablement. It is a little bit of a hybrid role. We work very closely with the sales team as part of the sales organization but we’re also linked to marketing. We work with our operational teams as well, and also our technology partners internally. It’s a very exciting hybrid role. It’s nice that you get to touch a lot of areas around the business. I’ve been with Cartus for what will be approaching 11 years this year.

SS: Amazing. You caught my eye because on LinkedIn you mentioned that one of your core responsibilities is leveraging intelligence to drive sales success and you also recently got certified in competitive intelligence. In your experience, how does competitive intelligence play a role in sales success?

AC: It’s so important for us really to direct the focus of the team and make sure we’re doing everything as strategically and as intelligently as we possibly can. It helps us make really deliberate choices as to how we would approach every single opportunity. Now, in our industry, RFP opportunities, the opportunity to partner with an organization, they’re not particularly frequent, they come around 3-5 years and so that building of a relationship and understanding of how we can best serve that potential customer or retain the customer we already have really comes down to understanding not only what their needs are, but how the market is functioning, so engaging with competitive intel, understanding what our competition’s main values are, the areas that they are really focused on and also the areas where we are able to best outperform those competitors is incredibly important. It is so important that we are making sure we give every response, every RFP that we respond to, and every conversation our salesperson has with that particular prospect or existing client is really geared towards touching on the topics that they’re going to be interested in. This gives us the best opportunity to win. It really helps us be very deliberate in making those choices.

SS: Fantastic. Now how do you enable your teams with the intelligence and insights that they need to succeed against the competition?

AC: The reality is that there’s so much information that is out there filtering that down, directing people’s attention to what is important and what is going to be meaningful to them. Giving them some coaching and some tools to understand how they can leverage it and how they can make comment on it as well is really important. I’d say the biggest point is the filtering aspect and the communication of it as well. Creating the right forums where we can have those discussions, making sure it’s being shared broadly, which I think is where a lot of competitive intelligence drives sometimes fall down. The collection of that information is possibly the easiest part of it, but then finding it in a way that makes it digestible, accessible and making sure the conversations are happening around that competitive intelligence, I think that’s where we invest a lot of time to make sure we get that right because put very bluntly having a great deal of information just in a big old digital pile that you then can’t use kind of makes it fairly worthless.

SS: Now what are some of your best practices for gathering these insights for your team? As you said, there’s a lot of intel out there.

AC: You’re right. We have a couple of methods that we use. We engage a supplier, so we work with a partner that helps us gather and store that information and provides us with a platform that we can use to make it accessible in competitor-focused documents that are updated and have some great auto-updating features that automatically pull in really nice insights and we have analysts support on that as well that they can pull things like recent reviews or changes to their website or staffing changes or trends on where people are hiring or removing roles from the company. Those automated tools are really solid in giving us a low-effort, really up-to-date pool of that information. The other pieces that I mentioned previously are really about that conversational portion and making sure that we’re having discussions about it as well. So making sure we have a really regular cadence within our sales and operational teams where we can share the competitive insights, we can give our leadership folks the digest of the observations we’ve made and the approaches we’re making on these things and also making sure that they’re directed to the right members of our development teams to understand what clients are asking for and how the competition is responding to it so they can use that as they formulate our own response as well.

One of the best practices we like to have is building not only that communication but that really build up a good community approach and a really good culture of sharing and engaging with competitive intelligence. A lot of the information we gather outside of the automated tools is driven by the conversations our teams are having with their customers and the sales people are having out there with prospects as well. A lot of observations come from discussions in the field, so by building up that culture and encouraging people to share it freely when they have some really good insights or observations from out in the marketplace and then getting those observations into the engine where they can be kept and stored for future use as well, building up that culture is probably the best thing we can recommend from a best practice point of view.

SS: Absolutely. Now workplace environments and buyer needs, I think everyone can agree, have shifted significantly in the past few years. How do you go about keeping up with the trends in the market and also ensure your reps are able to keep pace with all of the changing intelligence and insights?

AC: So again, we can lean into that conversation piece, making sure that things that people are hearing are shared broadly amongst the team, but you’re right, the agility that’s required to make those changes is only becoming more and more important. I think the challenge is that the last few years, especially in the world of global mobility, have accelerated any form of change that a lot of businesses have had, such as how they’re supporting their employees with relocating, the work shift towards enabling more remote work as well. It’s a lot about listening to what people are saying, we can observe it from our world in understanding the questions that people are asking us in RFPs, and again that’s where my team who is responding to those RFPs has a role within the wider business. We can engage not only with our salespeople but all our development teams to make sure that they are kept on top of the questions that people are asking today.

The reality is that questions being asked in RFPs today are the clients you’re going to have on-boarded in six months or a year’s time. So understanding the questions that people care about and their decision factors right now helps them invest properly in developing solutions that are going to continue to serve these people in months and years to come. We really look at the questions that people are asking and the priorities that people say as well, both at the stage of RFPs, in debriefs, every time we get an opportunity to gather feedback much like with competitive intelligence, making sure we capture it, making sure we share it and making sure it’s our responsibility as people having these frontline communications with our business partners and with the people we potentially would work with and making sure those priorities in their future focus as well are shared to our development teams and our salespeople to make sure that they becoming aware of those things, educating themselves on them, and our company is evolving in ways that are meaningful to people.

SS: Absolutely. Now with technology enablement really being a core focus of your role, how are you leveraging technology to drive innovation in your sales enablement strategy?

AC: That comes kind of to tiers on my side. One is the element I already touched upon which is sharing with their own internal development teams the features that our potential customers want to see to make sure they are recognized and prioritized within our own strategy to build winning technology. The other side comes from just being open to being out and listening to and paying attention to what is in the marketplace. Looking at the technology from a sales enablement point of view, you guys will know better than me I would imagine, like how much technology and how many tools and resources from everything from training to you lead generation and technology to enhance your communication. There is so much out there available.

Part of it is investing a portion of my time into just meeting with organizations, meeting with people that are selling these technologies, taking in demonstrations, understanding how they measure up to their competitors as well as what unique points they have and what features they have. I invest a lot of my time in this. I try to make sure I dedicate at least 1-5 demos of some description a month so I can take in what technology are available and then we can find those ones that really strike a chord with me to then bring back to our sales leadership or bring back to our sales folks and say, hey, I’ve been out there assessing the marketplace and I think this would be a useful tool for this team and then get their input and their validation on things that we might be able to take forward. There are activities in prioritizing these things, of course, there are some tools that we find we have bigger gaps than others, but I’d say the major thing is really just being open to understanding what is in the marketplace and how everyone else is developing as well.

SS: What are some of your best practices for ensuring that reps are effectively equipped to get the most out of the tools in their tech stack?

AC: Really, it’s looking at what that engagement looks like. I think it would be very easy to invest heavily in lots of technologies or even simpler things like the resources that people are using. So what slide decks do you invest in building, and what marketing materials do you prioritize with the marketing team to build as well? It’s really about looking at what people are engaging with and making sure you’ve invested the time to get their feedback as well. Understand what things have had an impact, what things didn’t quite hit the mark for them, or what things, regardless of how impressive a tool or resource was, what their thoughts are in using them. If it’s inaccessible for them or they struggle to know how to weave it into a conversation or how they’re going to get someone to invest the time to really engage with something if it’s perhaps too complex, those are pieces of feedback we need to take very seriously and we need to take back to our development of these tools and materials to understand how they’re using them.

That feedback loop, not only from customers but making sure our sales team are given a good opportunity to share their feedback and the angles they want to take on these things, making sure we take the time to hear those and actually act on them is incredibly important for us to make sure we keep those conversations open.

SS: Absolutely, Andy, last question for you. How can effective use of technology help reps to be agile, especially as we were talking about a moment ago as things are changing so that they can ultimately really remain competitive in this market?

AC: I think technology for all its uses, certainly in our world, will never fully replace the human element of those communications and the relationship building that our salespeople and our account management teams invest so much of their time in doing. They are really making sure they are listening to people and developing solutions that are right for the person. Where technology helps us is making efficient use of that time. Using technology to do the things that are less demanding of human interaction and human innovation and imagination, but gathering that thing to make sure that we’ve gathered the contacts effectively that we can showcase things in a meaningful and quick way that we can do bulk volume gathering of information and using that to make sure we’ve got the information and the statistics that quantified information. That’s where technology really helps us in pumping out that quantified information and then finding great different ways for us to present it. By investing in ways that we can develop video messaging, audio messaging, and things like that, we can find ways to reach different audiences.

I think technology serves to enhance and maybe make our communications more efficient but definitely, for us it is a tool rather than a replacement. I think my sales team would not be too thrilled if I was talking about automating a lot of their communication for them. It’s definitely an efficiency tool rather than a replacement for that human interaction, that relationship building that they really, really focus a lot of investment in.

SS: Fantastic. Well Andy, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it and I enjoyed the conversation.

AC: Thank you so much for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Gerry Hurley from Tripadvisor join us. Gerry, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Gerry Hurley: Thank you, Shawnna, I’m delighted to be here with you today and to share my story. My name as you said is Gerry Hurley and I’m the Senior Director of Sales Enablement for Tripadvisor’s B2B business. So for those that are not familiar with Tripadvisor, we are the world’s largest travel platform, helping close to half a billion travelers each month plan, book, and share their experiences of their trips. I’m based in Ireland, just north of Dublin, and have worked in training, enablement, and sales roles for 20-plus years across education, insurance, telecoms, and hospitality industries.

At Tripadvisor, I lead a team of amazing sales enablement professionals supporting the needs of roughly about 500 global sellers across our SMB, enterprise, media, and meta businesses.

SS: I’m very excited to have you on our podcast today. You mentioned on LinkedIn that you built a robust new hire training program and you were able to correlate that to a reduction in time to productivity from seven months to three months. First off, that’s amazing, but I’d love to understand how you designed and structured these programs?

GH: Sure, delighted to share a bit more. Let me start with a bit of context. We were all acutely aware of the impact Covid has had and continues to have on our lives. In particular, the hospitality industry has had a very challenging two years which in turn has had a dramatic impact on Tripadvisor. At our lowest point in the pandemic, we were down nearly as much as 86% in revenue. As you can imagine, this required us to go into triage mode and to look at ways to weather the storm, which resulted in unfortunately a reduction of force where we took close to 900 people had to leave trip advisor, furlough schemes for sales, a cost reduction program, a consolidation of our restaurants and hotels business and a shift in our sales motion from acquisition to support.

Thankfully the hospitality industry is resilient and by the start of 2021, we were starting to see some really good green shoots of recovery. With a massive pent-up desire to travel and a global vaccination program that was accelerating the path to recovery. It was at this point that we felt it was the right time to start recruiting again and we set about the task of recruiting and onboarding over 130 new sellers across our global SMB business. As you can imagine with a high philosophy hiring plan, we needed a way to onboard reps that was firstly scalable, secondly, could fast track reps to productivity. We were aiming for three months from our traditional seven months that we see in pre-Covid and a processor plan that allowed us to identify people at risk and take action quickly. We built an onboarding program that spanned 12 weeks with the first two weeks focused on the sales academy equipping reps with the product, system, process, and sales skills required to be successful. The remaining 10 weeks were focused on sharpening these skills on the job where managers and team leaders could provide high levels of coaching and support to help build activity and deliver revenue. To successfully graduate from the onboarding reps must pass the number of formal control gates hitting or exceeding set KPIs. That in a nutshell, Shawnna, is how we went about designing the program.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. What were some of the key levers you focused on in order to accelerate that time to productivity and how do you track progress to continue to optimize your programs?

GH: Yeah, great question. If you bear with me and go to digress for a moment, trust me, I’ll get to answering your question. I’m a big believer in inputs driving outputs and actively try to utilize a concept from engineering called the transfer function. The transfer function simply is defined as Y is a function of X. It’s a simple way to model the relationship between the system’s inputs and outputs. So in a business or a sales context the why is the revenue and the X are the variables or the activities that drive that revenue. In general, I found that sales leaders think in terms of Y’s, so be it like I need revenue, I need productivity, I need to deliver results, I need to drive people which makes total sense when you think about it. That’s what they’re accountable for. In contrast, it’s been my experience that in sales enablement we think in terms of X’s, the inputs or activities that deliver the Ys.

Sales enablement doesn’t drive revenue, they’re not accountable for that, but in my humble opinion, they do influence and impact the inputs that drive the revenue. How I see it as sales enablement is responsible for thinking and designing and ideation on performance and defining and influencing the Xs. To have a successful ecosystem, you require a symbiotic relationship where you’ve got sales leaders and managers that are held accountable for those specific activities that drive revenue, and sales enablement is accountable to develop the skills to create a spike in activity.

Back to your question, outlining the key levels we focused on to accelerate ramp in terms of the transfer function where the Y, in this case, was monthly recurring revenue, MRR. More specifically we focused on profitability at the end of month three. Our goal was to ramp reps to a point where their revenue contribution covers our costs. Now ideally you’d like to ramp reps to productivity and we define productivity as the average monthly MRR in 2019 because 2019 was our last normal year before COVID, but we felt with market uncertainty that this just was a leap too far to jump through productivity, so we put the stepping stone to profitability in first. So with the Y around the profitability benchmark in terms of MRR, we focused on the X’s, the activity or inputs that could drive that Y. We define those as talk time daily, activities in Salesforce, opportunities created over a week, obviously monthly recurring revenue, call quality as determined by a call review and adherence to a call flow and behavioral feedback, how reps were engaging, attitude, etcetera.

Having established the metrics, we set about mapping a ramp path across each role and function. We put in place three control gates at weeks four, eight, and 12 where there was a formal review of rep performance against the agreed metrics. We put in place a RAG status which we use to assess progress with green indicating they’re hitting or exceeding KPIs and are good to proceed, orange meaning that they are close but can proceed with coaching and a plan to address gaps, and red indicated the need to move to a short term improvement plan or even exit. We set expectations upfront with new hires in terms of interviews in contracts and even an all-true sales academy that we are a performance-driven organization and to be successful they need to meet or exceed the KPIs otherwise they wouldn’t be able to proceed.

We also aligned our control gates to coincide with probationary periods. Working with our RevOps team, we built out a report that showcases performance in trending benchmarks weekly by role, by team, and by region. Now having robust reporting that both reps and team leaders can utilize is fantastic, but we also needed a cadence of utilizing the reports to drive performance conversations and corrective actions. With that in mind, we created tools to support team leaders and managers to manage performance. These included behavioral scorecards where they could assess engagement, participation, attitude, and things like openness to feedback, so that they could assess the how as well as the what and a control gate report to track performance against KPIs on a weekly basis and a feedback loop to share best practice, identify blockages and validate performance conversations were taking place.

Finally, we met managers bi-monthly to review how each cohort of hires is performing on average pinpointing areas of progress and concern and we use this meeting to identify and track corrective actions and continuous improvements.

SS: Absolutely. Now beyond the new hire training, you also focus on enhancing productivity and efficiency through ongoing talent development. What are some of the core ways you support long-term development through learning programs?

GH: I suppose our top three initiatives that spring to mind when considering long-term development for me are firstly our management enablement program and this is one that I’m really passionate about. Because of a reduction in force, we now have a lot of new managers, many in the early years of their management careers. The management enablement program is a structured investment to help uplevel our managers and help them build a sales management operating rhythm so that they have skills to build high-performance teams, manage performance and drive rep productivity. We spend time initially upfront aligning with our sales leaders and defining playbooks to guide our managers around what’s expected of them in the role, so what we expect them to do when it comes to coaching, what we expect them to do in terms of pipeline and forecasting in performance management and building high-performance teams. We’re now at a stage on that program where we’re rolling out skill development components to build the skills to execute against these playbooks, and of course, we’re tracking all of this against set KPIs.

The second area of investment is around sales methodology, I believe it’s impossible to improve our sales capability without a consistent methodology. We set about solving the problem of how we can implement a practical repeatable scalable way to sell a Tripadvisor that spans across our full B2B sales businesses. We selected a consultative selling methodology, built an internal certification program, and are in the process of rolling this out globally. In addition, we’re utilizing conversation analytic tools that we can measure adoption on customer calls and we’re starting to see a clear correlation of performance uplift from reps utilizing the methodology, so that’s quite exciting, and more to come in that space.

The final of the three big initiatives we’re looking at is continuous professional development. If you look at professions like doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, and so on, they all have continued professional development. In other words, they learn from what’s happening out there in best practice and apply it to get continually better. So utilizing launch and learns and external speakers, we’ve rolled out a series of CPD events to provide opportunities to help continually improve our sales professionals.

SS: I love that, that sounds like a very thorough approach. How do you partner with subject matter experts as you are developing some of these training programs?

GH: When it comes to requirements for training for new products or new functionality launches or even strategic initiatives, we’re very fortunate in Tripadvisor in that we have a great go-to-market team who supports the project management and cross-functional coordination for us. They make our lives easy by working with us on contracting subject matter experts to support the development of our programs. In some ways, it’s a little bit easier for us compared to other organizations in that we have this function and they help us contract subject matter experts. We then put in place a set of expectations in the timeline and we work closely with our subject matter experts to turn that into a robust instructional design program with clear tracking and measurement.

SS: That’s phenomenal. Now to another point that I think is of a lot of interest to our audience, you shared on LinkedIn that you’ve been able to position learning as a key factor to influence revenue growth. I think there are a lot of enablement practitioners that would love to be able to do this better. How do you correlate your learning programs to revenue impact?

GH: That is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I’m still struggling a little bit with that one, but I’ll tell you what we are doing in the success we’ve had. I’m going to go back to what I talked about earlier, the transfer function. I’m using that concept as a North Star to help my team transition from talking about our activity, so in other words, hey, this is all the things we did this month and talking about how that activity was perceived, so hey look, we’ve got this great feedback and happy sheets, and talking about how many people have passed certification. These are all amazing and great, but we were trying to move beyond this to really look at adoption over time and talk in terms of impact and their contribution to the success equation. For our key initiatives, we spend time upfront determining what are the Y’s we’re trying to impact and more importantly, what are the X’s that drive the Y and how can we influence these Xs?

Let me give you an example, I talked earlier about methodology. One of the Y’s we’re tracking for methodology is how do we improve conversion rates? How do we get more closed deals? We’re doing that by looking at some of the Xs that might influence that Y and those Xs are things like certification and methodology, so have we trained people on this new methodology, and have they passed that training and shown that they’ve acquired that knowledge. We’re looking at the adoption of the methodology. We’re using our conversational analytics tools to go into those calls and track where we hear on calls adoption of that methodology and use of the tools and techniques that we’ve trained on. Another X for us is coaching activity and we’re looking at are our managers support our sellers in building the habit of using that methodology in terms of the coaching activity and we’re also looking at the coaching quality score cards to determine, look might be a lot of activity but is a good activity and what is the quality of that coaching like? Hopefully, that gives you a sense in terms of we’re constantly looking for that transfer function. What are the Xs that we own and can influence that we believe can drive the Y and we spend a lot of time upfront defining and contracting those in.

SS: Phenomenal. Now, the last question for you, as sales enablement continues to evolve, what would you encourage organizations to focus on in regard to onboarding and training programs?

GH: I think there are a couple of things that spring to mind. The first one is to be crystal clear on what you’re trying to influence, and what are the Xs that drive the Y. Ensure you can measure them, ensure you baseline the data before you start so that you can track improvement over time is the first one. The second thing I would encourage people to do is truly partner with your sales function and be clear on who is accountable for what. If sales enablement is about creating an activity, then our sales are accountable for sustaining that activity over time and building that habit and how do we support them with that? The third area I would encourage people to do is embrace technology. Utilize the vast array of amazing tools that are out there to help you fast-track adoption and drive accountability. Finally, leverage peer learning. Sellers love to learn from other sellers. They love to hear from people that are on the ground doing it every day and being successful. If you can find systematic ways to leverage that peer learning, you will accelerate your sales enablement initiatives.

SS: Gerry, thank you so much for joining our podcast today and sharing your expertise on onboarding, training, and overall learning programs. I enjoyed learning from you.

GH: Thank you so much. I appreciate getting the opportunity to share my story.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Robert Bosch from ExxE Energy join us. Robert, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Robert Bosch: Thanks for having me. To tell a bit about myself I was born in Central America, raised in West Africa, and now in Western Germany where I live my life with my family and my four kids. I have been in Munich and the sales industry for nearly 20 years, where I have been in different branches of the sales business. I have a load of experience with which I gathered in this time from different sectors.

Today I’m in a new environment for me which is in the area of energy efficiency and renewable energies, virus and bacteria control systems, all these types of things. In our type of organization, we have different companies with different specifications in areas that they’re experts in, like building technologies, heating technologies, solar panel technologies, air purifying systems, and all these types of things. We deliver to our customers all from one hand depending on the needs of the customer.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now Robert on LinkedIn you actually share a quote from Benjamin Franklin that says “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of a low price is forgotten.” I think that is so relevant to sales. How can enablement help sales reps deliver high-quality experiences for their customers?

RB: The quote from Benjamin Franklin is quite honest because in 20 years of sales I experienced a lot of types of customers from small, medium to large. If they only focus on saving money and on pricing it may start off as sweet, but they will probably forget this sweetness quickly because the bitterness of the low-price quality will remain. This quote tells you that the lowest price is not always the best thing to choose. Our organization stands for really high quality and high services. Some technology costs loads of cash, so you really need to explain to the customer what they are paying for. If you can convince the customer and really give them an outlook on what the future would look like if they choose this way or that way, every customer will choose the right way and will not choose based on price. They will choose quality and that’s why this quote matches with the ideology of our company and of all our staff who want to deliver top quality.

SS: I love that. Now to talk a little bit more about the quality component, how do you see quality help to really drive customer loyalty?

RB: That’s a good question because that’s implicating also on pricing. For example, most of the renewable tech nowadays comes from China and China offers really cheap prices. If you want to purchase the same type of technology with more care and more quality behind it, maybe buy renewable tech that was produced in Germany, Europe, or maybe the U.S. It will cost more, but the quality will be much higher. I believe there are loads of customers out there who need quality and are willing to pay if they are consulted by a true and honest salesperson.

If you sell to a customer with this type of approach, the customer will see the value, will experience the quality results, and will tell others about it. They will be the one who is the storyteller for you and nowadays it’s all about storytelling. You need to help your customer, and in return, they will help you. You need to show your customer that you take their issues seriously and that you respect them and are thankful for their purchase because they could have chosen another organization. I have encountered this many times through an online selling job that I had some years ago. All of these customers returned and they brought back friends, families, and colleagues, which meant a lot of revenue for us.

SS: I love that perspective. Now in addition to your sales background, you also have experience as a customer service leader. How does this background help inform your approach to sales enablement?

RB: The main thing I learned from my background is to listen to the customer, listen to their pain, listen to their problem and get it done. Help them out and the customer will be your customer for a lifetime. When I train staff I usually take the trainees with me on the journey for one day and say hey just stay with me, listen to how I speak to them, listen to how I listen to them, and notice how deeply I really connect with the customer.

You need to really emotionally open up, enter into your vice versa, and need to understand the human you are selling to. What is his problem? What is his pain? Find a solution. You need to really get the mindset to be a problem solver. This implies the solution must be obtained, you must be the solver, so you need to take the steps to get it done to make the decision to pick the right solution for your customers so that he’s happy and will return forever.

SS: Now, the sales landscape has been changing quite drastically, especially over the last few years. To your point, how do you think that the buyer’s needs are shifting or evolving?

RB: If we take the current global crisis in Ukraine and as well the global coronavirus pandemic and all these things into account, the landscape has changed. Loads of companies are off the planet sadly and you sense that the customer needs are changing because they think about what they really need and not just what is nice to have. We’re no longer in that era where you can sell and buy everything that you want. I think the buyer landscape has changed in very specific areas and in specific industries as well. For example, people are overthinking about food and how their daily nutrition looks. Pricings are going up everywhere so people also think about their health in combination with food.

With technology, people do not have the money to waste on fun technology. I strongly believe that the customer has changed into the way that they say ‘I’m the buyer, this is what I want and need, can you deliver?’ In account to all these global situations, many companies are in a position where they can’t deliver and that’s what I sense is changing. I believe loads of companies need to change their strategies to survive. I feel strongly that many types of industries are changing because of buyer behavior.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. I’d love some best practices for our audience around how to help salespeople adapt to the changing buyer and customer needs that you just outlined.

RB: Look really deeply into your customer. Get informed about your customer, listen to your customer, understand your customer, stay with the customer, and know your customer. I think that’s enough to adapt because I have a feeling in many companies these basics are met because their organization does not allow it or they are experiencing high stress and lots of work.

SS: Absolutely. I think that makes a ton of sense. Now to close, I’d really love to understand what are some of the ways in which enablement has an impact on emotional intelligence or EQ and how can this help you better respond to some of the changes in the market that we’ve been talking about today?

RB: With my staff how I try to show them things hands-on to have them learn how I learned them. I like them to get their hands on selling to understand the technique. At the end of the day, it’s up to them if they use it or not, but I believe if you use your emotional intelligence it has a huge impact. Before I let my staff sell a single product or service, I show them how to do it. You cannot expect anybody to get things done if you as a boss or as a manager cannot do it. I believe that every little move, every little call with a customer, every little visit with a customer if you are not capable of doing it, you can’t expect it from any of your staff.

There is always stress and work, and if you are not there for your staff to show them how things should be done, they will feel the stress more. Just be a human, be like you are at home, be that person that you are with all your talent, all your love, and all your greatness. Stay respectful to your vice versa, you never know who is your vice versa, because there is always a door in life which opens and another one that closes. You need to enable your sales reps to succeed or they will fail, and as a manager, I wouldn’t expect my reps to understand before I teach them.

SS: I love that advice Robert, thank you so much for joining our podcast today. I really appreciate the advice that you shared with our audience.

RB: Many thanks for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

I’m excited to have Rebecca Reyes from IBM join us. Rebecca, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Rebecca Reyes: Thank you so much for the opportunity. My name is Rebecca Reyes. I come from a diverse background of different skills, which I think represents many in the sales enablement space. I started with a background in finance, international marketing, and computers, which led me eventually to IBM where I spent time in the marketing organization, in our software group, and today in our sales enablement organization. IBM, as many of you know, has been around for more than 100 years. We are working with our clients to solve tremendous problems of digital business and working with our partners and our clients together to navigate that new space.

SS: Rebecca, I’m excited to have you on the podcast today. Your LinkedIn profile actually caught my eye because on it you mentioned that enablement at IBM focuses on giving reps the competencies, confidence, and data currency to spark innovation. I’d love to drill into the components there and I’d love to start with what are some of the key competencies that you focus on instilling in your reps?

RR: You nailed the big one. Our reps talk a lot about relationships and making sure that we listen first and lead with client needs. I think sellers have the coolest job in the world and at IBM we really get to help businesses that support the way the world works and think about how to solve problems in a whole new way. We deal with everything from world banks to providing micro-financing to very small individual clients who would normally be able to secure funding for farms or banking. We work with giant shipping companies to make sure that we can understand a supply chain and how it can work better and have confidence in the materials being what you think you purchased. There are so many parts of the business that IBM touches and it sounds so hokey, but our sellers get to really work with our clients to really make those dreams a reality. I just think it’s amazing. It’s so important that our sales teams take the time to really listen to what our clients feel are some of the major challenges or opportunities that they’re facing. That’s the big one.

SS: I love that. I think that’s a fantastic one. I’d love to get your perspective, how are competency and confidence related, and what are some of your best practices for improving rep confidence?

RR: Confidence is a really important part of how we show up and it’s one thing to learn something, but it’s another to really have confidence in what it is that you learn. We spend a lot of time with multiple stages of learning and practice because practice is a big part of how we operate. There’s a tremendous amount of resources available for self-study and we encourage any seller in our business to take the training that will help them where their clients need to go. From an enablement standpoint, we also have a solution that lets our sales teams practice the story. They hear first from a sales coach who will tell a story and then we have a forum and a practice for the sales teams to record their message, and then have SMEs ready to give feedback on the individual seller’s delivery of that message. Practice is a really big part of developing confidence. We want to make sure that we poke any holes possible before we get to meet with a client.

SS: I love that. If we can double-click into that a little bit, how do you track and measure confidence improvements? How are you correlating that to the business impact of having highly confident reps?

RR: The data of skills is a constantly evolving space in our field. I will say that we’re making great progress here, but we still have a lot to learn and discover. We are practicing it as we go. One thing we do measure is how many people participate in the content and the sessions. The second thing we measure is the quality of those practices that I mentioned, so as you do your stand and deliver, what capability or score are you having? Some of those sessions are done in an asynchronous model where they’re uploaded online and then scored later. We do have a standard rubric for feedback against that so that they are scored and the sales reps do get the feedback on the participation.

In our onboarding program where we have people who are new to our business and new to representing the products, we have a stand and deliver practice as part of the exit from the onboarding. Those sellers who go through that part of the experience go in front of a live panel and get feedback against that rubric. Again, feedback is really important to build your confidence in the work. It’s a pretty rigorous experience, they really don’t like it and they love it at the same time. We find our stand and delivery practice to be one of those things where the reps stay up late the night before to make sure they are really ready. They get sweaty palms when they are delivering, but then they are so happy that they went through the gauntlet at the end and the feedback helps them be better in front of the client.

Confidence is not something that has a number next to it though. What we do see is success in our clients and how they feel about the IBM reps that they work with. We measure things like NPS scores from our clients, and we do measure the success rate for the individual reps and compare that to those who haven’t gone through the training. We also look at how many of our sales reps come back to participate as trainers in our work. It’s one thing to be a student, but it’s another thing to have the confidence and capability to be able to share that story and teach the next round of peers.

SS: That’s phenomenal. Now on the third element that was mentioned at the onset of this podcast, the data aspect, what are some of the key metrics that you aim to arm reps with and how does data help your reps achieve high performance?

RR: 90% of the world’s data is untapped. I think it is just such a rich field that lots of people are looking at how it can be better. We have data about our clients and what they’re searching for, we also have data about their own history with us and our history with comparable clients. We like to benchmark some of our top clients against each other in a positive way. We can know that banks in a similar size or in a similar market are interested in exploring certain capabilities, but more than that, we can pair market insights with particular clients and we can put an aggregate of data together in ways that are really interesting.

Let me give you an example. It’s kind of table stakes now to know that someone has landed on your website, maybe clicked the chat with me button on the side and had a conversation, or perhaps downloaded a white paper. If 10 different people from a client did that and two of them downloaded a trial, and they used that trial several times and someone else attended one of your marketing events, now you have multi-touch different experiences that are not all measured through the same system. In aggregate though, that can really demonstrate that a client at the firm level has a huge interest in a certain capability. What we’re working to do is to analyze the data not from an individual but from the aggregate and what that can teach us about the opportunities or the needs. What are people researching and experimenting more about your target account?

SS: I love that. I think that’s very cool. Now how do you also leverage data to measure the impact of your enablement programs on the business?

RR: Measuring the impact of enablement on business is a combination of things. We have to look at the tooling investment that we make and look at the return on investment there. We look at the training, of course, as we attend our SKO events or kickoffs and the others, there’s often a pretty large return on investment measure from that. We have to look at how many people participate in different training. Again, we look at the comparable results of sellers who participate in the training versus those who don’t. We can see a highly engaged workforce and we look at those who have higher yields. We look at the rate and flow of opportunities as they move through the pipeline and close wins faster when they have the training, so the velocity of opportunities. We also look at the retention rate. We look at how many of our top talents are really happy with the opportunities they have with IBM and how they engage our clients and that they stay. It’s really looking at the whole human and what are the things that interest them.

SS: I think that’s phenomenal. Well, Rebecca, last question for you before we wrap up, do you have some best practices that you can share with our audience around communicating and proving enablement impact back to your key stakeholders?

RR: One thing we do is test a lot of our messages with a subgroup ahead of time. We do have a panel of executives that we work with, but we also have a panel of ground sellers and we rotate them through in a six-month basis, so they’re giving us feedback before we launch anything to the field so that we’re sure of what we’re creating is what there’s actually a need for. In large enterprises like IBM, it’s pretty easy to get far away from the field and it’s important that what we create has a practical need to help them engage with their clients faster and better. We also love to lead with data, we mentioned a little bit today how data can change how you work, so whether that’s using tools like LinkedIn or some of the other providers we have from a content management or learning management system.

Being able to show the stories of peers is really important. We try to feed out messages that we hear from the field are important. We try to make sure that we listen more and talk less and we try to make sure that any message we deliver is first delivered by peers, and if it’s not delivered by peers, we try to get it as close as possible. Oftentimes it’s not the global leadership team that’s delivering the message, but it’s someone in your market, part of your leadership team so that you really see and hear and feel it coming from someone that you trust and who is driving your own business and performance. Those have been pretty important components in our success.

SS: Fantastic. Well, Rebecca, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today.

RR: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Terry Bird from Vonage join us. Terry, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Terry Bird: I’m Terry Bird, I am the vice president of enablement at Vonage. I’ve been here just under a year now. Prior to that, I was with IBM for around 13 years in various roles, many of them in and around the sales enablement space, and actually came to IBM through the acquisition of Cognos. So my background is in financial performance management and analytics.

SS: I’m very excited to have you here, Terry. Now, part of your background and your expertise is around leading teams across very diverse geography and cultures. I’d love to get a sense from you, what are some of the key things that you consider when you’re creating enablement programs for audiences, especially across different geography?

TB: Good question. I’m a big fan of design thinking. One thing I try to do and I always encourage my teams to do is really think outside in. A big premise of design thinking is really understanding the experience that your audience has, what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, what they’re saying, and what they’re doing to help inform what you do to help improve their experience. So definitely putting ourselves in the shoes of the audience is a very important thing. Many of the folks in my enablement team and enablement teams that I’ve worked in in the past actually come from sales or from technical sales, so from the field in some way, shape, or form, and having that experience really helps us to understand our audience.

Beyond that as well, I think it’s very important to have a really good geographic spread in terms of the team that you have. It’s something we’ve certainly worked on in the past 12 months since I came into Vonage is making sure that we have that geographic footprint with the enablement team. I’m very used to working with a global team that has that presence throughout different regions and markets that we operate in. So really having that outside-in perspective is very important in how we align what we do.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. In your experiences though, what are some of the key challenges that can occur in leading enablement efforts across the globe?

TB: Well, yeah, of course, it’s a global effort and that means that we have 24 hours of timelines to deal with. I certainly don’t work a structured 9-5 role, having a global role within Vonage and having had a global role for many years of my career, I’m very used to working in a way that allows us to connect around the clock. That means being able to sometimes be on late or very early to have calls with teams in the Asia Pacific for example, or it can mean having different times of your day to try and align our audience. One of the biggest challenges when you have a team with folks in the US or North America and in Europe and somewhere in the Asia Pacific that you’re trying to get on at the same time, that’s always going to be a short straw for somebody in the middle of their night, but I try not to make too much of a habit of that.

Like I said, having a footprint in the team where you can have a presence globally, always helps to address that. Of course, timelines are one thing, but we also have cultural and regional considerations that we have to appreciate at all times. Sometimes messaging that is very suitable for the North American market may need to be very different for our market in the Asia Pacific so you have these cultural business considerations and language considerations that we have to adapt for at all times. Our business can be very different in different geographies, you have different competitors, and different industries are prevalent in different geographies, so there’s not a one size fits all in terms of what we do with regard to enablement programs. There will be a core of content and messaging for sure, but it can only be truly effective with a geo footprint when we start to adapt it for their particular go-to-market models, that particular cultural appreciation.

SS: Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. What are some of the ways in which you’ve overcome some of those challenges as you’re building your global programs?

TB: It is always an interesting challenge to work with other organizations or other teams around the organization to help them shape that appreciation of the audience. I think typically a key role of sales enablement will be helping other teams, such as product management, product marketing, engineering teams, in bringing our products to market to really not be led by our features and functions and really understand the audience from a sales enablement perspective. Those will be our sales teams, our technical sales teams, and other customer-facing teams, like professional services etcetera, and of course our business partners. If we go to market with partners and help them to understand that language that we use is very important. I think sometimes we have to help some of those teams, especially if they’re predominantly based in one geo, like North America for example, to use language that is truly universal and can be understood around the globe.

I also think it’s very important, and this is something that myself and other teams I’ve worked with for a number of years have really focused on doing, is when we produce things like customer-facing pitch decks or sales enablement decks, for example, to really understand that actually we have many parts of our audience that where English isn’t their first language and therefore to help them, simple things like scripting, comprehensive scripting of slides in clear English is really going to help those audiences. We would love to be able to translate and localize every single piece of content that we have and that isn’t always possible from a budget and time perspective. So being able to do things like comprehensive scripting, and very clear scripting helps our audience where English isn’t their first language to take that localize it and understand it because it’s one thing being able to watch a subject matter expert from different geo present a piece of content either in a live or prerecorded state, but having the script and quite often close captioning will help open that up and make it reusable and digestible for those teams to go and localize it themselves. I do think that having that local footprint and being able to connect at their local level helps with that.

I was lucky enough when I came into Vonage to actually be handed some headcount to hire as well. It was very clear that we had a gap from a sales enablement perspective in connecting very locally with our audience in Asia Pacific. So one of the people we hired actually spent many, many years of their career working in Singapore and is bilingual in English and Chinese and forged a very good connection early on during the interview process with some of our sales leaders in Asia Pacific. Now that person is giving us a true local presence but also bidirectionally is able to bring back and translate very effectively the needs of the local audiences in our Asia Pacific region.

I think again it all comes back to that design thinking and that outside in appreciation of the audience, their particular needs, and the experience they have on a day-to-day basis. The more things we can do to connect with that closely all the time will only help us overcome those challenges.

SS: Absolutely. Now you mentioned briefly earlier that oftentimes across various geography, there are also slightly different business needs or business plans or go-to-market plans? I’m curious to understand, do you also need to engage different business partners to ensure that your programs are successful, and who would you say are some of those core partners in building out your global programs?

TB: In terms of business partners in this context I’m going to frame that in terms of partners within our business. Obviously, they will go-to-market business partners as well and we do have some that are kind of software or tool based in terms of vendors that we work with. The partnerships within our business from a global perspective are very important and Vonage truly is a global company and it’s made up of a legacy of organic growth, but it’s also made up of some quite significant acquisitions over the past few years. Those acquisitions actually have a very geographic spread from Europe and the UK to Asia Pacific itself. One of our most recent acquisitions was actually based in Asia Pacific. We also have a strong footprint in Israel, for example, with some of our AI capabilities.

I think very naturally Vonage has a very global spread and a very global culture, but in terms of what we do from a sales enablement angle, some of my key partners within the business that I work with would certainly be regional VPs of sales. Vonage is split across three major regions, as many companies are, but I know everybody has kind of variances on this, but from an Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific perspective. I have peers who are sales leaders and technical leaders for the business. I talked to them and worked with them almost on a daily basis and in some way, shape, or form of the conversations that we have.

Something else we’ve done to really amplify and extend the reach of that ongoing conversation is to implement a program called SEAT. SEAT stands for our sales experience activation team. That team is really made up of a core number of sellers and other roles from across the business and different go-to-market functions that represent all of those geographers we meet on a structured basis once a month but we have a very open and ongoing communication channel through tools like Slack for example. We’re always listening to their needs. They’re very open with us. We’ve implemented that program on a rotational basis, so it’s a 6 to 9-month membership to keep the engagement and the involvement fresh, we try not to overload them with too many things in terms of the conversation, but the feedback and the engagement that we get from them is very high quality in terms of helping us to understand what’s working and, sometimes also of course what’s not working and where we can make refinements and advancements.

That’s just a really good example of just how we’re actively connecting at the local level. I’ve seen in the past examples where there’s a headquarter-driven approach to push out content and we just hope it’s going to get good leverage and a good footprint across the globe and that’s not always the case. So being proactive and being ahead of those conversations, connecting with our audience on an ongoing basis around the globe and across different parts of the business is very important. We can’t talk to everybody all of the time but finding a good balance in terms of having structured interlocks and also good feedback mechanisms, good abilities where anybody can ask questions and those be routed to the right people to answer perpetually is a very good practice and that’s something I think Vonage is very good at in terms of keeping that 360-degree process open.

SS: I love that and I love that communication is really at the core of everything that you guys do. To build on that a little bit, how do you continue to create strong relationships with your business partners so that you can really solidify the credibility of your programs and to the point, you made a moment ago, really helped to improve that scalability?

TB: Yeah, it’s an interesting one, I think I kind of talked a bit about this in that last answer, but we’re doing a lot of things all of the time and sales enablement is such a universal topic in terms of content that you’re delivering, training and activation that we’re delivering, it also covers technology in the way that we deliver tools to our sales teams to leverage every day. Also, the way that we communicate. Communication is a huge part of effective enablement and it’s very easy for communications from a number of functions to overwhelmed sellers and for it to just be noise every day. So we’ve really focused on four key themes in what we’re doing with our sales enablement strategy and very sharp and curated content that’s intuitive and easy to access, like structured skills and training curriculum now where we’ve also started attaching badges to that, so trying to pivot to an aspirational learning culture and a way to measure skills growth and then the text stack that we put in the hands of our sellers. There are many, many tools out there that cover all kinds of activities, from prospecting to outreach to engagement to negotiations, competitive research, etcetera.

I think the best technologies are the ones that you can put in the hands of sellers often in a mobile experience and bring intuitively and intelligently the most relevant content and messaging to them in the context of what they’re doing and ultimately streamlining communications and having a really clear message. It’s great having that connection and understanding the feedback, but it’s how we act on it in terms of delivering sharp content that’s globally applicable and can be localized very easily through technology that makes that very agile and easy to access and with communications and messaging that is very crisp and clear and really consolidating communications to a way that sellers can focus on a particular funnel and understand what’s important to them from a personal perspective. Otherwise, it just all becomes noise and they just switch off and enablement becomes almost null and void in terms of an exercise.

It’s great building great content, but the way that you deliver it is very important. The way you communicate is very important. All of those things when we build them of course then give us data and data informs us how effective a piece of content data is around skills and learning, where do we have gaps and where do we where can we proactively take enablement steps and then tours around digital adoption and tools around click-throughs on communications. All of that data gives us an insight into what’s working and what’s not working. That’s very important. So, constantly learning from that data in real-time allows us to get those insights, and that feedback that allows us to improve all the time in terms of what we’re doing and that’s really what we’re doing in enablement is constantly improving.

SS: Terry, I think that’s fantastic. I am curious to get your perspective, obviously, we’ve been working in either hybrid or virtual work environment now and as you know, a lot of organizations try to figure out how they really do kind of a transition from in-person or hybrid, what has been your approach to leading global teams and how has that evolved over the past few years? Do you think it might continue to evolve in the coming year?

TB: Where do we start with that one? I mean, I come from a place where even with a global team, traveling a lot and travel was kind of frictionless and seamless and we would be getting together at least every quarter and when we’re delivering events like new hire boot camps or sales kickoffs, the team is generally seeing each other face to face multiple times through a year in full or in part. There was a time when I was driving up and down from my house in Bristol to Heathrow a couple of times a month to travel around the world somewhere to be in person with teams and that makes engagement and having that relationship very easy. Then, of course, the world changed and for a good couple of years I didn’t travel at all and it’s only really starting to just get going again now, of course nowhere near like it was before the pandemic and certainly since I’ve been in Vonage. I joined in late 2021 and there are members of my team who I’m very close to, who I’ve never seen face to face and won’t for a while yet. So the way that we engage as teams globally has changed fundamentally.

I think technology has caught up to help with the way that we engage. Obviously, Vonage is in the business of unified communications, so if we can’t find ways to communicate and collaborate digitally, then there’s something wrong. So luckily our own backyard is technology that can help us collaborate very closely as a team, but it’s still very difficult when you don’t have the ability to connect face to face to overcome some of those challenges. Engagement is a critical word in terms of how we’re coming together as teams and that’s not just meeting in virtual environments and discussing in virtual environments. I think sometimes we have to get away from work completely and take extra lengths to really understand each other as people and how we interact as a team and interact with each other. Engagement activities that are completely non-work related are very important, focusing on digital teams and virtual teams and how we collaborate is very important. We have some very important program management and collaboration tools, without naming names specifically too much that really facilitate us coming together and working in a very agile and connected way, and of course, talking. I mean we have to talk to each other all of the time and really make sure that we’re connecting on a human level. I’m also a big ally and advocate for our ERGs within Vonage. I was a big diversity ally in IBM as well. I think it’s so important for people who work together in any organization in virtual teams to connect as human beings as well as colleagues within a business of course. So that’s incredibly important.

Now, will things change? They’re starting to change again. I don’t think we’ll ever see a working environment as it was three years ago with the ease of travel. Companies have adapted in terms of their expense models and their operating models and how people connect. I think we’re much more thoughtful now about travel and when we get together face-to-face sales kickoffs and other events like that, I think we will gradually come back to be hybrid models.

I think there will always have to be a combination of live in-person and virtual now, just because of the global nature of things like the pandemic and of course the way that business has changed for us. Something we’re experimenting with ourselves now as a team is really true hybrid events, true hybrid events where you can have a face-to-face audience and a virtual audience where the virtual audience hasn’t got an experience that is just being fed over a camera from a live event that’s happening in a room. I think you have to find ways to truly engage with that virtual audience in the same way as if you were looking at someone who sat in front of you and that’s something we’re really experimenting with now in our team and we’re hoping to get some success with that. We’ll see what happens with sales kickoff 2023 in terms of how that plays out for planning, which of course, it won’t be too long before our thoughts start to turn to that now.

SS: Absolutely. Agility is completely key as we go into the coming years. Well, Terry, thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation today. Thank you for sharing your expertise.

TB: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Catherine Young from Worldline Global join us. Catherine, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role and your organization to our audience.

Catherine Young: Thank you, Shawnna, I’m so excited to be here. So my name is Catherine Young as introduced already and I am the director of sales enablement at Worldline. I work for a particular go-to-market division so I’m very close to the front line and I’m helping the salespeople sell by the usual sales enablement tricks of sorting out the contents, the data, the training, the communications, the CRM, the whole gamut. It’s a really fun place to be.

I’ve been in sales enablement since 2014 when I joined Xerox and I was a global sales enablement lead there and that was a bit more of an HQ role, so it’s fun to come back to the front line, but the other interesting thing is in my whole career I’ve realized, I have always operated at that interface between technology and humans and so that’s been the theme that’s run through my career.

SS: I’m very excited to have you join us today. Now, Catherine, I’ve known you for a while and one of your areas of expertise is driving digital selling transformation. In your opinion, how has digital selling evolved, especially in recent years, and why is it becoming increasingly important for sales organizations today?

CY: Yeah, I think digital selling has always been and continues to be about connecting with people, learning about them, what matters to them, and helping them, and by doing that you nurture your deep and strong relationships. This continues even through evolution. So, the sort of fundamental principles remain, but what is changing I think is that seven or eight years ago digital selling was a support to the face to face selling. It was used well by both business development representatives and account managers, but usually in the interim between the face-to-face encounters. Of course, during the pandemic, we didn’t have that face-to-face bit, we only had the digital engagement with prospects and customers and influences. Now that we’ve left the pandemic and we’re moving into a hybrid world, I think that digital selling has become equally important to in-person selling.

I think one of the reasons it’s becoming so is because digital-first is the new normal. We mean that in both the sense of the younger generation who are coming through into the buying positions that are digital natives, so they’re going to go digital-first. Even the other generations, everyone in the buying community uses the internet and social networks to educate themselves and they will gen up on everything to do with your products, you, your company, and your competition and they do all this before they even want to have a sales conversation. For salespeople to actually connect with buyers, they have to be online. I think it’s just the compulsion to be a digital seller has become greater than it ever was, but if they do that, then the seller becomes a beacon by sharing their knowledge, guiding their buyers, and creating two-way conversations and they will be successful in selling so they can emulate some of that face to face stuff that they used to do using digital selling techniques.

There is a wonderful statistic that floats around in the sales enablement world about the fact that 74% of buyers choose a company that first adds value. It’s increasingly important for our salespeople to be online in these digital spaces. Being engaging and helpful because that’s where they’re going to add value and therefore they will get the sale a bit further down the line, if we don’t, then it’s simple, one of your competitors will come along and sweep the buyer off their feet.

SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. You touched on this a little bit in that response, but from your perspective how are buyer expectations shifting alongside the digital selling transformation?

CY: It’s so interesting because this has been talked about for a while in our space but I think we have to come back to the fundamental reason, which is to think about what you experience in your personal life, in your day-to-day lives. We’ve got On Demand TV, we’ve got hyper-personalized news feeds in our social platforms, recommendations in every website we visit, and even adverts. We can get the answer to any question you can imagine just with a few chosen words typed into the right place. More recently we’ve got things like the rise of the same-hour delivery of groceries. If you live in cities, I mean within an hour you can get what you need to your door at a click of a button. I was doing some sightseeing recently and I was just reminding myself that I’ve got in the palm of my hands a personal guide to the city. Somebody to tell me where to go, which road to take, which turn to take and it’s giving me information about the city as I’m walking around. These are all things that have become intrinsic in our experience of the world, but we sometimes as B2B professionals or B2C professionals, in the business world, we sometimes forget that the people we are selling to are still the same people who have access to those great features, functionalities, and experiences.

The buyer’s expectations are shifting towards this sort of speed and this personalization and this digital and everything in the palm of their hands. We have to try and be there in our selling capacity doing the same. We can be present, we can be digital, we can be personalized in the experiences we deliver, answer questions, you know, be there, be the guide, be relevant and that’s what digital selling is to me.

SS: What would you say digital selling looks like today? And how can enablement really effectively prepare reps for this type of environment?

CY: I think if we go back to thinking about those expectations of the buyers, we can certainly talk about what digital selling should look like. To answer the question more directly, the good proponents of this are doing what I’m about to say, and then the rest of us can perhaps catch up, but think about this on-demand expectation. We can’t as human beings be on-demand 24/7. We have to think about other ways of achieving that, so what about asynchronous methods of communication like personalized video messages. In fact, what I like about something like giving the buyer a message through a video means that they consume the information when it suits them best. Not necessarily when it suits you best, but I love the fact that they can stop, rewind, speed up, whatever suits their circumstances. What’s fascinating about this is that it’s actually something that’s only possible with video, not even possible in real life. So maybe that’s even better than a live meeting if we believe that the buyer should be the one that is in control of the experience.

Then talking about providing answers to questions. Well, that’s really easy for social sellers to achieve on social platforms and they do it in two ways. You can do it by sharing your knowledge, sort of broadcasting it out there, the 1 to many so that you are, again, I used the word beacon earlier, you know, you’re this beacon of knowledge and helpfulness that people will be attracted to, but also by responding to queries. People do ask questions on social platforms. They do seek help, advice, and recommendations. So the secret for a successful social or digital seller is to be there. Be there to hear that those questions are being asked and then be able to answer them.

The same hour delivery, I mean initially you think, yeah that’s never going to happen, in the B2B world, so, okay, I’m not asking for a salesperson to be on your doorstep within one hour, but what about thinking about providing your buyers with more of a self-service or self-directed experience? You’re allowing them to get the information they want when they want it. I mean they couldn’t really be more immediate in your delivery than that, I’d say. Good salespeople have always been the trusted guide, the one that helps the buyer navigate their complex or unfamiliar environments. I just see that like a mobile phone guiding me around a foreign city, not only are you helping me make decisions at each junction, along the way you’ll give me those tips and recommendations that further enhance my experience. Of course, we can and should personalize the content we deliver to our buyers to get that hyper relevancy that they expect and to be frank they deserve.

So, digital selling looks like these things to me. It looks like using the platforms, the tools, the content in a more agile way, in a way that can be repackaged to personalize the journeys for the buyers and to give them what they need when they need it. Sales enablement is basically there to support all of that. So we look at the platforms, the content, the data, the training, the processes. All of those things need to be aligned to help the salesperson operate in this digitally agile way and then the salesperson is unable to deliver the experience the buyer wants and therefore the buyer gets a great experience and that to me actually encapsulates what sales enablement is.

SS: Absolutely. Now as there is a shift to digital selling, obviously that adds in a bit of a layer of complexity for sales reps. From your point of view, how can enablement help reduce friction for reps, especially as they navigate transformation in the sales landscape?

CY: I thought about answering this in many different ways because to me almost my raison d’être is to reduce friction. So it comes in many different forms. It comes in my day-to-day activity and supporting the salespeople, but also in what I do to push back into the organization to improve the way that the organization interfaces with sales. I think it’s sort of summarized by sales enablers who see the big picture, they join the dots and they orchestrate. They orchestrate all of the different elements that impact upon the seller’s ability to do their job and to do their job. In other words, we help salespeople sell. When we talk about removing the friction, I think it’s a lot to do with orchestration or coordination.

Working with other departments to deliver things in an organized way, in a structured way, so that the salesperson isn’t bombarded by many different voices and many different messages. Perhaps we start by coordinating it and that can be really simple things like setting up a training academy that has set dates and times for any sales training and having a calendar that if you want to go and deliver training to the salespeople, you come and fit into the next available slot in the calendar. It’s a really simple idea, but it really reduces the amount of tension that you can get between the sales teams and the other departments.

In a similar way, emails. There are so many emails that get sent out there and everybody says, oh you must know about this thing and I’m going to send an email to hundreds of salespeople and dozens of departments are doing this every day and it gets very noisy. So another simple solution is to create a digest newsletter, put everything that they need to know in one place, but combine the messages from the product team, the operations team, marketing, even from sales leadership, so that it becomes an easy to read message and one that you can go back to as well. Then sales enablers are working on big projects that help to reduce the friction. A sales enablement platform integrated into the CRM becomes the single focus point for the salespeople. Not only does that remove so much wasted time, it makes things quicker and easier. It reduces friction, which improves the sales experience and therefore that translates to improving the buyer’s experience.

One final point of friction that I’m enjoying dealing with in my current role is the relationship between sales and the wider company. This is important because we all perform better if we are joined together in our objectives and we understand each other and what we all do. So you can start with data. You can’t always get people to talk to people but you can start pulling data from around the business and sharing it with one another. That starts to help, for example, products to understand what’s being sold. Even also things like where we lose sales, why are we losing those sales, and feeding that back to the different teams, pricing, product process operations. Legal wants to understand what is the role of an account manager or business development manager because they’re looking at contracts for a customer that the salesperson has sold a product to and they’re just looking at words on a page, unless they can start to understand what’s going on in the sales world and vice versa. Obvious things like sales need to be aware of the marketing campaigns that are going on and operations need to know how many new customers are going to come knocking on their door in the next few weeks or months so that they can resource up.

I think for me, what I’ve done is I’ve taken a formula and if we can make improvements in each of the elements in that sum, then we get a better outcome. The formula is visibility plus efficiency plus consistency equals repeatability and predictability. So what I mean by that is visibility comes back to this data point. Just get information out there and share it widely and share it with each other and don’t be siloed in who sees the data and be as transparent as you can because that way lies understanding. Efficiency is reasonably obvious and this is another area where we reduce friction, looking at ways to improve processes to improve collaborations and cross-departmental communication wherever you see something being inefficient, a sales enabler should step in and try and turn it into something that is efficient.

Consistency is about creating that consistency so that you’ve got your processes, your structure, your content platform, whatever it is, but it’s built-in a consistent way so that it’s understandable and more importantly it’s scalable and that equals repeatability and predictability. If we can get all of this line then we can create a world in which we know what’s happening, things like sales pipeline forecasting and like I said about operations knowing what customers are coming, we can predict what’s happening with confidence and the repeatability is important, if we want to scale, if we want to bring new people on new hires or even expanding people’s knowledge and understanding. If we can do it in a consistent, efficient, visible way, then we can get that repeatability. So for me this is where performance comes from, is nailing down that repeatability and predictability and that’s where if we’ve done that by reducing the friction.

SS: That’s amazing. I want to shift gears a little bit. You wrote in an article that the three must-haves for sales enablement are sponsorship, empowerment, and resources, particularly when it comes to driving change initiatives like digital selling transformation. How do these three factors influence the success of it?

CY: Well, these three elements are essential to have an effective sales enablement function, particularly a formal sales enablement function. As enablers were often operating with some but not all of these, but if that’s the case, what you tend to be delivering are random acts of enablement and we all know in our hearts that random acts of enablement do not improve business results. It’s been proven time and time again with statistics that organizations that have a formal, structured, and supported sales enablement function have higher win rates, higher quota attainment, and quicker time to revenue. What quicker ramp-up time whatever your KPI is because random just doesn’t move the needle enough it’s just 1 firework. It’s just pretty for a while, but then it all fades away. If we think about things like the fact that sales enablement is by its nature across collaboration function then, of course, we can use our charm and our influence to persuade others that they should work with us, but this can be exhausting and it doesn’t always work, so something like sponsorship which was one of those three key elements we need to step in.

I’ll give you an example. I ran a campaign to drive up the adoption of a sales tool a few years ago and the first thing I did was engage the senior VP for sales. Once I got his advocacy, I was able to use his name and his photo, and a quote from him in the launch email and it said that he supported this initiative and that he expects everyone to sign up. This is so much more motivating to the salespeople than receiving an email from me who is an unknown from HQ. More importantly for me, it motivated the sales directors and the sales managers because they knew their boss wanted this to happen. So it didn’t rely on me going to them and saying, please, please, please, will you help with this? It just had the boss’s name at the end of the letter so they made it a priority and they put the effort in to support the project. Now I supported them to support the project. That’s what enablement is. This was a key factor and through all of the different parts of the campaign, the success was that the adoption rate went up from 20% to 80% within six weeks. These things are essential to influence the success of both individual initiatives, like the adoption campaign, and the overall business results, like win rates, quota attainment and time to revenue.

SS: This has been fantastic, Catherine. In closing, I have one last question for you. How do you think digital selling will continue to transform in the next year and beyond and how can enablement help organizations really stay ahead of these changes?

CY: I think the first part can be answered quite easily, which is digital selling will become digital experience selling. Another statistic I found was that 89% of consumers buy based on their overall sales experience regardless of price and functionality. We know from our out-of-work lives that a great experience is what we seek. We don’t just want functional factual interactions and maybe it’s because we’ve been through two years of being so removed from one another that we do crave that human element. We also like hybrid working, we like the flexibility of online encounters because they’re easier to arrange, less costly and take up less time. So we want the human element, but we also quite like doing it from our own living rooms or dining rooms.

I think that means what you need to do in the digital selling world and it is that you need to make your online encounters as good as your face-to-face encounters used to be. So that’s what I mean about digital experience selling. All the characteristics of digital selling remain that we talked about earlier about connecting with people, listening and learning about them and helping and guiding them, but adding to that, providing a smooth, engaging, effective digital experience to the buyers. So this is the thing, allowing them to self discover information or maybe the salesperson helps guide them, like the fruit from the palm of the hand, and they explore those options together, but what’s shifted is that the buyer and seller are more side-by-side in this way of working rather than face to face.

I think it’s important that the experience should be however the buyer prefers it to be. Where the sales enablers come in and it goes back to the basics, you know, it’s providing the platforms that allow these experiences to be designed, built, and consumed. I think we need to use the data to know and understand what is meaningful to the buyer so that we can continue to evolve those experiences and we need to allow our content to be flexible because we tend to create content in quite a structured way, but it needs to be more snippets so that we can use the ingredients in different ways to create different outputs and that’s what supports the many different journeys. Of course, if we want our salespeople to operate in this new world, they need to be trained and coached and supported, and I think that’s what’s going to be so important over the coming year or two in sales enablement.

SS: Catherine, thank you so much, I learned so much from you in this conversation today. I really appreciate the time.

CY: Thank you. You’re most welcome.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Daniel West from MYOB join us. Daniel, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role and your organization to our audience.

Daniel West: Hello, it’s great to be here with you today. I am the chief sales and support officer for MYOB and we’re a SAAS provider of business management solutions to almost a million small and medium-sized businesses across Australia and New Zealand. We are an organization of about 2000 people and I have the pleasure of leading our teams across marketing, sales, solution consulting, partners, customer success services, and support along with the operations and enablement teams who support those functions.

I actually returned to Australia about 18 months ago after spending 17 years living and working in Palo Alto in California for Oracle, Salesforce, Informatica, Infoblox, and HP in a number of different Go-To-Market operations and enablement leadership roles. I was actually one of the founding members and chapter president of the Bay Area chapter of the Sales Enablement Society. Enablement as a discipline is certainly something that I’m very passionate about and something that’s been part of my career for more than 20 years now.

SS: Well, Daniel, I’m very excited to have you on the podcast given your deep involvement in the enablement space. I have to say I am jealous, Australia is on my list of must-visit places in my lifetime so I’m jealous that you are back there. It is a beautiful, beautiful country,

On LinkedIn, you mentioned that you are responsible for leading efforts to improve go-to-market effectiveness. In your opinion, what role does enablement play in driving GTM effectiveness?

DW: So I’ve always believed that fundamentally the role of enablement is to drive change and transform the way that an organization’s, what I call the value delivery system, so these are all the parts of the organization that deliver value to customers, so sales, pre-sales services, customer success, those parts of the organization that they number one are aligned and that they have the level of readiness that’s needed to deliver those customer outcomes.

As an example, if a company is making the shift from a product selling to a value selling motion, enablement is responsible for ensuring that sales and the other frontline teams are equipped not only with the right skills and assets but also the right processes so that they can drive those value-based conversations with those target customers and really connect with their business challenges and demonstrate how that particular organization can help those customers solve those challenges and ultimately drive better outcomes for the customer but also better outcomes from bookings and revenue perspective for that sales organization.

SS: Now you actually spoke at a recent event and you were talking about the importance of customer-focused, go-to-market initiatives to drive sales transformation, I think in today’s business environment, why is it especially important to make sure that you align the go-to-market strategy with the needs of your customers?

DW: The more relevant you can be to your customers the better off you will be. Just to give you an example, MYOB is currently going through a transformation of our own, we’re moving from a SaaS and on-premise products to a SaaS platform solution focused around this idea of business management and as part of that transformation journey, we have aligned our go-to-market function around customer segments. These are specific cohorts or groups of customers that share a set of common attributes and this structure helps to ensure that our go-to-market initiatives defined, orchestrated, and executed by the teams that are as close to the customer as possible and therefore as informed about that customer’s specific needs and requirements as possible, which increases our relevancy and our ability to serve a particular customer segment as effectively as we can.

SS: I love that. To dig into that a little bit more, what are some of your best practices for gaining the customer insights that you need to inform some of your initiatives?

DW: Yes, so I think there’s a couple but talking to them is always good, just to state the obvious. Talking to your customers either formally through a research effort or customer focus groups and so on or even just informally through check-ins and and things like that is always good. I think more formally, we have established some structures internally within MYOB so that we can gather input and feedback from the people who spend the most time with our customers, which unsurprisingly are our frontline teams. So we’ve established what we call an advisory council that’s made up from representatives across sales, support, success, and services and they play a role in bringing the voice of the customer to the table when we’re reviewing the types of go-to-market initiatives and programs that we’re looking to run as part of our 90-day planning and execution cadence.

Every 90 days as we look at our go-to-market initiatives for three or six months out, we bring this group of people together and they provide us with the input and feedback on those go-to-market opportunities that can then inform how effective they are going to be, what changes we need to make again to drive that customer relevance that I talked about earlier and also how we can ensure that they’re going to be executed well when they get into the field or into those frontline teams.

On top of that, we also use data. We use Gong data, we use usage complaints, calls, data, website visits, reviews, etcetera and kind of gather all of that information together to extract insights about how our customers are reacting to what we’re putting into the market and so that we can make adjustments as necessary.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now, another thing that you had mentioned, Daniel, was you talked about the role specialization that helps align to the buyer’s journey. What does that look like in terms of enablement and how can this help improve the customer experience?

DW: Yes, I think there are two elements of that. One is making sure that you have specialists, and most organizations have this today in the SaaS world, but you have people who are specialists at different parts of the buyer’s journey. What I mean by that is you have market development and sales development reps who are focused on driving that initial interaction and discovery qualification with the customer, you have a sales specialist who is responsible for ensuring that they’re working with that customer to guide them through that buying journey, you have customer success, who is then responsible for ensuring that customer get once they’ve made that purchase decision that they are getting on-boarded as effectively as possible and they are starting to adopt and use whatever the key capabilities are in the given solution that’s going to help that customer extract value as quickly as possible.

So number one, there’s having the right specialized roles as opposed to kind of a general account management role that tries to do all of those things and usually doesn’t do them particularly well, but then there’s also the enablement element which is what I would call role-based enablement. Role-based enablement is the opposite of one size fits all enablement and it’s really making sure that you have an enablement program, enablement content that is tailor-made for those specialist roles that I just mentioned.

So you have an enablement program for those business development roles that are predominantly focused on the front end of that customer journey. You have enablement that is tailored for sales, for solution, consulting, for customer success so that the individuals in those roles have the specific content and assets and knowledge that align to their role in that customer journey and then allows in the case of sellers for example, to provide that customer or prospect with compelling insights that demonstrate why change, why now, why MYOB, or why your company.

Just maybe to build on that a little bit we have built out sales playbooks by sales specialization. Even within our sales organization, we have acquisition-focused sales specialists and we have expansion-focused sales specialists. We also have within our business sales teams who are focused on very small customers that tend to have very high velocity, high volume transactions and then more enterprise type buying processes without ERP solutions and so on. So again, we haven’t taken a one size fits all approach to enabling those sales roles because they are quite different. So we’ve built out sales playbooks against those different types of sales specialists, so that even though our sales methodology has a common foundation, the customers have different needs and types of conversations and talk tracks that they’re going to respond to that address their specific needs and challenges, so that tailoring is quite critical.

From a customer experience perspective, obviously, again, the more relevant those conversations that your sales specialists are having with particular types of customers is going to improve that customer experience, demonstrate to that customer that you really understand their business and their pain and ultimately going to predispose them to working with your company and your solution and ultimately getting value from that offering.

SS: I love that. Now, Daniel, you’ve been in enablement for quite some time and now your role has really expanded quite a bit. As a GTM leader how do you foster collaboration across the business to ensure progress against a lot of the company’s core objectives?

DW: So, I think ultimately communication and stakeholder alignment are the secret sauce to effective transformation and change. Making sure that you are establishing clear priorities with your stakeholders, providing regular updates on those priorities and managing resources and capacity constraints against those priorities is critical to managing and meeting expectations and then to secure the support and participation that you need from other parts of the business, you have to again be able to connect those initiatives that you’re working on back to those broader business objectives or OKRs that your company is putting front and center and really use those as the way to drive alignment against those initiatives that you need to move forward but that you need other parts of the organization to work with you on to move those forward. Communication and stakeholder alignment, the more senior you go, the more time you spend in those areas.

SS: Absolutely. That could be said across a lot of different roles for sure. Now, last question for you, Daniel, because I realized we’re almost at time, what are some of the key metrics that you prioritize to really understand the effectiveness of these GTM efforts and how can enablement teams better correlate their efforts to impact on these key metrics?

DW: So I think the ultimate metrics for go-to-market effectiveness, did we hit the revenue target? And did we hit the EBITDA targets? In terms of the type, the leading indicators that that would that would roll up to those are the ones that I really focus on bookings attainment against the target, bookings per sales head, which is a key measure of sales effectiveness because if you can over time see an improving trend in the output from a bookings perspective per sales head that you have in the organization, then that means you’re getting more out of the investments that you’ve made in sales from a headcount perspective. I think there’s also bookings per dollar invested in sales or what I would call a bookings to cost yield metric from an onboarding and a productivity perspective there is time to first deal, so when you have a new rep, once they’ve completed the onboarding program, how quickly are they actually closing their first deal. From a customer success perspective, obviously reducing turn. CAC to LTV I think is one that is becoming increasingly more important as we need to both manage customer acquisition costs against the lifetime value of a SaaS customer.

Then for go-to-market specifically the two things that I look at is one, what is the absolute value of the pipeline and of created by a particular go-to-market initiative and did it hit the targets and how well is it converting to bookings, and for go-to-market overall, what percentage of those of your total bookings and pipeline targets are those go-to-market initiatives delivering to the company because ultimately the role of go-to-market is to make sure that as an organization you are focused on the most important opportunities in the market and that you were aligning all of your resources to execute effectively against those opportunities. If you’re not driving 60% of your pipeline and bookings from those go-to-market initiatives, then you’re probably focusing potentially in the wrong area. I think those would be the key ones that I would call out.

SS: I think those are fantastic. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. I learned a lot from you and I really appreciate the time.

DW: My pleasure, Shawnna and lovely to speak to you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have David Seugling from monday.com join us. Dave, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

David Seugling: Thank you so much for having me, I really, really appreciate it. I work for Monday.com as the senior director of sales enablement. Essentially I oversee pretty much anything having to do with sales enablement and sales success, so onboarding, training, continued education, cross-departmental collaboration, pretty much anything that falls under the guise of ensuring our sales reps are successful and continuing to learn is my forte.

I have a background in sales in tech and I started at monday.com a little over four years ago and ultimately saw that there was something missing in the sales process as it pertained to some kind of training and enabling sales reps. Before anyone in the company had ever heard of sales enablement, it was just something like a blip on the radar. I put that in motion by asking to take on some additional challenges and trained some of the new joiners for the company and that actually flourished into what is now today a 12-person department spanning across five countries.

SS: We’re excited to have you, Dave. Now, you spoke at an event recently about some of the processes that you’ve implemented to help your organization scale effectively at hypergrowth. In your opinion, what are some of the key challenges that companies can face when experiencing hypergrowth and how can enablement help overcome these challenges?

DS: Great question. Some of the challenges that I’ve seen personally and also that I’ve spoken to others in the enablement and sales space specifically about, I think one of the biggest ones is obviously changes occurring too quickly and too often. I think the second one might look something like focusing on the wrong things when going through hyper-growth. One of the things that I feel is most important to our company and myself specifically is losing culture and losing sense of that culture. In terms of how we as enablement can assist on those, I think ultimately we can help to build out plans for process change. Whatever that might look like, whether it’s a lesson or an FAQ, maybe a live session or engaging with a subject matter expert, we want to be able to form strong communication channels cross-departmentally to ensure that as these changes are occurring quickly and often we have the proper channel set up to manage that communication, to manage that process change.

In terms of focusing on the wrong things, or rather focusing on the right things, making sure that the company puts an emphasis on sales, so if you’re going through hyper-growth as a company, you need to make sure that you’re focusing on the right things. I think that we need to make sure that we have a strong foundational sales training program leaning into those top sellers and learning from our mistakes just to ensure that our sellers are building the confidence needed to succeed ultimately. I think making sure that we can invest in their learnings and retention to ensure they are successful in their role, instead of necessarily focusing too much on capturing the market or rather putting emphasis on capturing the market and less focused on trying to perfect the product or process.

The last point for me was really that emphasis on culture and ways that enablement can step in is really placing that emphasis on culture from the beginning. So making sure that we put the right people in the right positions because as most of us know enablement onboarding is a huge differentiating factor in setting the foundation for an employee’s experience and really kind of setting the tone for cultural engagement. We want to ensure that what they’re learning is engaging and interesting and ultimately that it mirrors our identity as a company. We want to encourage things like meetups or social gatherings and make sure that we’re constantly checking in with new joiners on their experience, learning, and iterating along the way.

SS: What are some of the key processes that you put in place to drive the scalability of the enablement function?

DS: Some of the key processes, well, I think again, one of the biggest things for me is the right people. So you always need a strong foundation to build upon and I think understanding the strengths of the team members that you have allows for you to put those members in charge of forming the right processes. Part of that process is putting those people in the right places and making sure that you’re building trust with them. As the manager, as the lead, as the person that’s kind of driving the change in enablement and making sure that we have scalability, we want to make sure that we’re building out a professional development plan for our team members and mapping out our ideas and plans for growth early and often. We want to learn from the things that we’ve done, Iterate on those programs and plans and constantly update.

Additionally, we want to always stay close to our team leads and to leadership specifically ensure that we’re communicating with them often to understand their goals, their challenges, and ultimately interests. Sales enablement essentially works for the sales department, so in order to scale and prove success, you’ve got to have alignment.

SS: Yeah, excellent. You also mentioned in an article that the primary goal of enablement at your organization is to increase predictable results. I think especially as an organization experiences growth, change can really happen rapidly. How do you help drive predictable and consistent performance amongst your sales team even as they grow and have to navigate that change?

DS: It’s a very interesting question. I think that something that you constantly think about when you experience growth of any kind, but especially growth as fast as we and many others have experienced. So while we can’t always account for or predict every change or adjustment coming down the line, I think we can definitely lean into the existing programs that we’ve created to understand what key components have been working well to drive success up until this point. So, which sessions we are delivering, which assets we are creating, et cetera. From a structural perspective, understand what was working well about those. Is that the length of the session, the delivery mechanism, the way that we analyzed the feedback we’re getting and then essentially imparting those building blocks into everything that we build moving forward. So taking those successful learnings and making sure that and while we are driving change and iterating constantly, we also are keeping in an idea of what has worked historically.

Additionally, I think making sure that you create clear and discoverable repositories of knowledge, learning, assets, documents for your sales reps to leverage. Making sure that it’s kept up to date clearly instructive and again, highly discoverable. We all know that sales reps are super busy and if we want to keep them focused on what’s important I.E. closing deals and bringing in revenue, we essentially need to empower them with self-sufficiency in a way that won’t slow them down. So that way when new changes are made or information is presented to them, they can easily reference it anytime they need.

Last but certainly not least, always look at the data early and often. What are the numbers telling us? Do we see any new trends emerging? Are reps slowly increasing pipeline gen or decreasing pipeline gen? Is there a traceable correlation to external factors? What do we need to focus on based on what the numbers are telling us and ultimately making sure that we have those close relationships with our Rev Ops or Biz Ops teams to help build out those reports and dashboards so that we can adjust and pivot accordingly.

SS: I love that. In that same article you also talk about how communication, connection, and collaboration are core to your success. How can cross-collaboration with departments help to improve efficiency and effectiveness of your programs as you scale?

DS: I think that cross-departmental collaboration isn’t just something that will help, but it’s absolutely vital. It’s everything to sales enablement. We tend to sit at the intersection of almost every department in the company because as we know, our number one priority is to ensure that sales reps are successful and there aren’t really many departments at least that I can think of that don’t have an effect on the sales success. We’re constantly communicating with marketing, for example, to ensure proper content delivery. If we didn’t have that communication chain well oiled, we may not receive content that’s necessarily aligned to our messaging or our goals. If we don’t have collaboration with finance or legal, we may generate gaps in our sales process when we go to issue POS or when we need to engage with clients in legal discussions or documentation reviews. Our sales enablement department is constantly working immediately alongside all of these departments in a way that is not only beneficial to us, sales, but for those departments as well.

Relationship building is key and we want to ensure that the work that sales is doing isn’t necessarily making the lives of the individuals and those other departments more difficult either, and in turn creating inefficient processes or leaving a bad taste for anyone down the road. So making sure that not only do we have cross-departmental collaboration, but really just relationships based on communication and trust go a very long way in the success of our programs.

SS: Those are great tips on how to collaborate. Now, you mentioned the importance of breaking down silos to improve cross-team collaboration. How can enablement help reduce silos and how can that help improve your partnership with some of those other teams?

DS: Well, I think that it’s something that most, if not all, companies struggle with the siloed information and ironically enough, we happen to sell solutions and products to help break down those silos at the source. So of course, as they say, we drink our own champagne as a solution for this. However, it’s not necessarily just about the exact means that you used to break down the silos, but the manner in which you do it in my opinion. I think making sure that we’re constantly focusing on the what, so what are we trying to solve for and then building out a proper process to help mitigate those issues or frustrations. So whether it’s a forum for sharing information or a document that helps to bridge a procedural gap, a Slack channel to answer questions or a board on Monday.com to manage entire workflows. It’s imperative that you map out the clear need and then always, always, always explain the value of what this will do for the end-users, for the individuals that will be benefiting from it. Essentially by creating these channels of knowledge and information and knowledge sharing. You’re creating a space for people to listen and to be heard. If you ask me these are fundamental successes in anything in life, not just sales enablement.

People want to feel heard, they want to feel supported, and ultimately want to lean into consistency and if you can help to mend or create these channels then you will ultimately improve the partnerships you have with all of those involved. So I have to say it’s not just the mechanisms, but really the means.

SS: As your company continues to scale, how do you see your own enablement strategy evolving to ensure scalability in the next year and beyond?

DS: It’s a great question and I think it’s something that’s constantly top of mind for me. I touched on it briefly before, but really wanted to emphasize the focus on the people. It is so, so, so important that the people and I speak about the incredible folks that make enablement functions globally, feel supported and feel that they have a place to grow. Enablement is still a pretty new function in most companies, so it’s important to do your best to create a strong foundation of growth and stability for those involved. Build out a PDP, a personal development plan, show them where they can go and what they need to do to achieve that. Invest in them, whether it’s external training or additional learning opportunities, and listen to them right genuinely and intently ask questions regularly and really ensure that they constantly feel appreciated, heard, and challenged.

At the core of it, it’s making sure that you have a team that believes in the mission that you’re building and pushing forward just as much as you do. Additionally, thinking about the structure of the department, one year from now, two years from now, always have that big picture in mind because that day will come faster than usually anticipated. So planning, planning, planning as they always say, failure to plan and plan to fail, right? So make sure that you have plans for the future, even if those things do change, we always want to make sure that we have that kind of eye in the sky.

Outside of the immediate team, the immediate enablement team really stayed close to leadership. I have mentioned this before, but I can’t emphasize it enough, understand what keeps them up at night. What are the things that are on top of their mind and how can we adjust and grow in our approach to constantly support leaders and reps accordingly. Last but certainly not least, and this is more of an individual basis. Stay hungry for information, reach out to peers, read blogs, listen to podcasts, whether it’s a subtle plug for this one or really any, but don’t be afraid to learn, don’t be afraid to ask questions, don’t be afraid to fail and because that will happen, be prepared to get up and learn from it.

SS: I have loved this conversation Dave, thank you so much.

To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today I’m excited to have Sonia Pupaza from Camunda join us. Sonia, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Sonia Pupaza: Hi Shawnna, thank you for having me here. I feel honored and excited to be here today. As you mentioned, my name is Sonia and I work in field enablement at Camunda. My professional experience expands across multiple fields and multiple industries. I started in marketing in the public sector, moved to project management in banking, then marketing and exports in a manufacturing company, like a tableware producer, and then, amazing, I moved to Japan where I graduated from an executive training program, worked in an embassy supporting some events, market research. Then I came back to my country and moved to the other side of learning and became a program manager for Angloville, which is an English learning training program for adults.

After that, I designed my own courses on Udemy. Deciding what to do with my life was the most difficult part ever. For Udemy, I designed courses where I mapped the skills that I felt needed for certain domains like marketing and sales because at that point I didn’t know what to choose to do next. Those courses became very popular. I also enjoyed producing them, so I started to look for a job developing courses and started working in Oracle as a sales enablement professional designing courses for sales and consulting. I probably would be still working in Oracle, but I’ve changed the country I live in and by changing the country, I decided to join another company, which is now Camunda. It’s a company with only 300 people compared to what Oracle was, giant, but I feel like all the skills and knowledge that I gathered working in Oracle can be easily applied. I can try new things here in Camunda.

SS: Well, I’m excited to have you on our podcast today. On LinkedIn, you wrote a post about microlearning that says “in order to have a sustainable approach to learning, we need to be more mindful and intentional regarding where we put our energy and our attention.” I love that quote, how does microlearning help create a sustainable approach to learning?

SP: Well, mindfulness and being intentional are on my mind all the time because I was also a founder of a well-being enthusiast group and it became part of my life. I feel like in today’s fast-paced world, most of us become so attached to the digital environment that we feel disconnected from everyone and everything when we put down our gadgets. We are bombarded with so much content that it becomes very difficult to distinguish what’s valuable, what’s of immediate use or just nice to have. If it’s just filling up our free time with something of interest, then it’s fine to do what you like, read a book, read a blog, listen to a podcast or watch a movie, but if we have a plan of personal or professional growth all this time spent doing whatever is a valuable resource that we can use to move intentionally towards reaching our goals. Being spontaneous is great, but having a plan in mind helps us get further with baby steps and helps us build our blocks.

If we could plan some small bites of learning into our everyday life, it gets us further than blocking only two hours for one day at the end of the week, let’s say. Those small chunks of time build your long-lasting habits of learning something new every day rather than those two hours just because you have to.

SS: Absolutely. Now, you’ve also talked about the importance of keeping reps engaged in learning programs, especially in the virtual and hybrid environments that you were just chatting about. What are some of your best practices for generating that engagement?

SP: So sharing from my own experience, I have traveled and concentrated in learning in uni, just reading a book and making it somehow work and basing all my programs on bite-sized content. Just because the learner’s attention span is between two and six minutes. I’m also guiding all the SMEs that I work with to concentrate on just one topic that’s no longer than six minutes. My aim is to set up our team for success by being ready to reuse, recombine, and repurpose some of it. Some information might get outdated very fast and some other information might need to be replaced.

We are trying to cover one topic in a video and then keep the section under 30 minutes so a person can schedule that 30 minutes during the day. They don’t necessarily need to consume all the content of the program in one day, as I mentioned, they can split it during several consecutive days or when they have the time to dedicate 30 minutes for their learning.

We use short training materials to cover how-to videos for tools and other stuff that can be covered in such a short time. We also extract short success stories or interviews from longer presentation sessions and webinars. For the longer presentation sessions and webinars that the leaders want us to share with our team, the least I can do is to add some timestamps to help navigate faster and go directly to the information of their immediate use.

SS: So you mentioned that the content in your programs can play a big role in delivering genuine engagement. When it comes to content, what are your best practices for finding the right in-house content to use to create your training programs?

SP: Well, finding the right in-house content is always difficult, especially if you are working for an older, larger, and more mature organization. The challenge is to identify that content. That usually files into three piles, like outdated, needs updated, and still up to date. The key to surface the most useful content and keep it all up to date is to have a procedure in place to revise it periodically and have it mapped on specific skills and keywords, curated, and repurposed as needed. For younger, smaller organizations the challenge is to identify existing content and mapping the gaps. There is also the challenge of how to best use the low resources in human capital. Usually, your field enablement team is very small and they have to do a lot of things. In Camunda, we have to start from information stored on conference pages and organize informative sessions about what’s new in the company, then what sales teams need to know in order to perform their jobs, and we are now moving towards video-based learning practical sessions and life certification.

When you are starting in our company and there is no tracking system in place, what you have to do is map your content to know what you have. So by the time you need to create something at least you will know what you have and what needs to be further developed.

SS: You just mentioned different ways that content developers can create content to be easily consumed by the learners, so how do you work with subject matter experts or SMEs to create that consumable content?

SP: Well, approaching different SMEs depends on the type of training we want to create as a process. Your first step would be to ask the sales leaders about what they need, then tie their needs to the company goals, validate the needs and then create a calendar based on the sales enablement team availability to create and deliver, and the sales team availability to consume the training. It doesn’t make sense to work so much in developing content that the sales team do not have the time to consume and the sales either do not have the buying and do not promote your training.

Once you have decided what training you want to create, the next step would be deciding who’s going to be your SMEs and guide them into what you need. Usually, you are using many subject matter experts who are coming from different fields and you will have to make sure they are on the same page so you’re program is consistent and delivered on the same level of quality.

So for company-related knowledge like strategy, positioning, specific solutions, we work with the founders. We have two co-founders to share the message and then different field leaders like sales leaders, product marketing team leaders and also professionals on their job who already have authority in the company and the face for delivering that content.

For training on how to use specific tools, we use vendor training materials combined with in-house specialists like the early adopters who have tried it and made it work for themselves and learn how to navigate the tools, while for skills training, like the sales skills throughout the sales cycle. If it’s general knowledge or general skills we can try to bring in a specialist on the topic who has already delivered training materials and training programs because it doesn’t make sense to reinvent the width.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now, as the sales environment continues to evolve, how do you anticipate your training programs will also evolve and how are you beginning to plan for this in your current enablement strategy?

SP: Well Shawnna, I think that’s a really great question. I can only provide an answer that fits a medium-sized company, like we are about 300 people at Camunda with a relatively new function. Field enablement function is less than three years old. The experience I got from Oracle where the sales enablement function was covered by almost 300 people showed me what good looks like. Now at Camunda, with a team of two, soon to become three people, we need to provide the best possible experience with our training program so that the teams in the field become more successful due to the new gained knowledge and skills and they return to us to ask for what they need. Initially, the team was focusing on putting up fires meaning reacting to the leaders immediate needs more on communicating what’s new and trust me, there is always something new in this company that the sales still needs to be aware of and know how to position that information to their prospects and customers.

We have monthly spark sessions for creating awareness on this subject and updates. We’ve developed a couple of training programs which include sharing information, checking learner’s understanding and testing how they apply what they’ve learned and of course more topics to come on that. We are also moving towards creating a safe playground where our sales team can apply what they learned before going to the customers, like incorporating training sessions in our programs with breakout rooms and places where they can interact with each other on the topics.

The next step would be creating certification sessions for more sensitive content. When I’m saying sensitive content and talking about Camunda launching our new platform product which is revolutionary for us and everyone needs to be enabled on what to say and how to position this new product. We need people to train on how to position things because we haven’t done it before on this topic. We’ve been through a lot of changes and now it’s time to get us all aligned. Our field enablement team initially had the VP and now we moved under the RevOps. We have promoted a new sales leader, because the previous one left, so it’s time for everyone to get on the same page and we are trying to set the priorities and the broad map for the next two years. Even if you are saying maybe in sales enablement two years is a lot and it’s too much, starting from scratch is usually very difficult and if there is something on that road map at least there is a way to grab what’s there and maybe reprioritize.

Another way to help us navigate and get faster to create training programs is by defining the process of how to get there by also creating templates and processes and checklists and procedures, so it’s easier to replicate faster.

SS: Fantastic, Sonia, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it today.

To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Daniel Haden from Google join us. Daniel, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Daniel Haden: Sure, thank you. My name is Daniel Haden, I’m currently the lead of the Sales Skills Curriculum at Google, based in Chicago in the US. We’re part of the sales organization in which we support a lot of sellers and managers across our organization. Prior to Google, I spent ten years at American Express in a range of roles from sales enablement to marketing to training, analytics – a range of different roles at American Express.

SS: Absolutely, and you are a returning guest to our podcast. We actually had you with us back in 2020 and during that podcast you had mentioned that delivering effective training programs really requires staying on top of the changing needs of the business, which over the past two years I feel we’ve been submersed in change. What are some of your best practices for anticipating change and then proactively aligning with your stakeholders and their priorities?

DH: Well, the number one best practice I always keep in my mind whenever I’m working on sales enablement programs is to really stay close to the customer. You’ve really got to try and pre-empt how their needs will change in the future based on problems that they face. You really want to look at competition to see what they’re doing and anticipate what their weaknesses are, what their next move will be. That can help fuel you in the right direction to ensure that your sales teams are really honing in on their strengths and being supported with their opportunities to really ensure that the learning that you create is going to have a measurable impact on the business. I would say the closer you can stay to the customer and the more you can plan your business and sales strategy and enablement tools around that, the more successful you’re likely to be.

SS: Absolutely. One of the things we’ve been talking about a lot, I feel especially in the last two years, is this need to be agile and flexible. How do you keep your training programs flexible so that you can adjust as the need arises?

DH: Yeah, if I think about sales enablement programs I’ve seen over the years or learning programs in general that I’ve seen over the years, there is a tendency that the more information you can cram into it, the more useful it is going to be for the learner or salesperson. I think that we within sales enablement are realizing that this isn’t really true anymore. My advice, in terms of keeping training programs agile and flexible, is to keep the message in the training very simple and very concise. If you can, keep your training programs short to strengthen your engagement because you’re more likely to engage with learning that seems digestible and possible to actually fit into your very busy day.

Also, it makes it easier to update and adjust the programs as needed because they are shorter. You want to keep your eye on changes in the business so you can respond as quickly as possible, and that training development cycle can take some time, so the shorter the engagement the easier it tends to be to update and make sure the message still stays on point. My advice would be to pick a few key points that you’re trying to make within the training engagement and really find effective ways of crafting that message concisely so that if you do have to make updates later, it’s much easier to inject those updates into something that is five or ten minutes versus ninety minutes. That would be my advice.

SS: I love that advice. Now, in addition to keeping the training programs agile, in our last conversation you talked about the importance of enabling salespeople to be adaptable and agile in their approach as they have to respond to a lot of shifts in the sales environment and even within their buyer’s needs. How have you built these skills through your training programs?

DH: This is a very important topic in the area of sales. It’s very difficult with skill development programs, if you’re trying to create incredible sellers, to just rely on content or just rely on knowledge because ultimately, the only way you’re going to create a very strong and impactful sales force is to develop their skills and change their behavior. In training programs, you should ideally create a framework that gives the learner structure, but at the same time allows freedom within that framework for them to use their own style or respond to customer objectives that could throw them off a little.

They’re going to get questions or concerns that are raised by customers and if you give them a rigid script to follow, that’s not going to be very much use. If you gave them a framework on to how to tackle those particular objections, then they’re more likely to be effective and they’re going to be able to respond in the moment so that it’s a really relevant response and really helps take that customer towards the solution. You want structure without that rigidity, and I think that approach to learning can really help develop salespeople that feel empowered to take what they’ve learned from the learning, but actually apply it in their own way to their own set of customers.

SS: That’s fantastic. I want to shift gears a little bit. You were recently featured in another interview, and you talked about practice as the key ingredient to building skills. How does practice help reinforce knowledge learned in training?

DH: Yes, this goes back a little to what I was just discussing. Knowledge or content alone is just not enough to be successful. I can read a book on how to play soccer, and even if I remembered that book word-for-word, it doesn’t mean that when I go onto the pitch that I will be any good at playing soccer. The only way I’m going to get better at playing soccer is if I actually practice, get coached by people, great soccer players themselves, who know how to play soccer well and it’s that continuous practice that’s going to make me a fantastic player. I’m only going to get better by applying techniques over time so that I can really perfect the way that I strike, the way I tackle, and it’s the same for any skill development.

Whether you’re in sales, whether you’re learning a language, whatever it is, you’re going to have to practice, because ultimately, it’s the change in behavior that’s going to take you to a much more effective place where you’re going to be more effective at selling. The practice helps you reinforce the knowledge by changing your behavior and that’s why within sales enablement, you can’t just rely on great content and long e-learnings, for example, because they just don’t have the same impact with skill development as they do with, let’s say, having to acquire product knowledge at a company.

My advice would be creating programs that actually rely on practice and have a really big practice component rather than lots of content because it’s going to encourage your learner to want to try and develop these new skills through many different activities. When they go back to their day jobs, they have already learned new behaviors that they can experiment with and try on the job, which is ultimately, potentially going to make them a more successful salesperson. You really want to ensure that the practice components are within the sales enablement programs, otherwise that knowledge will easily be forgotten and won’t actually have much impact on the sales resource.

SS: Absolutely. I’d love to double-click, what are some of your strategies for going about embedding the practice into your learning curriculums?

DH: I think the main one that I mentioned before was really reducing content. What this helps to do is reduce how much information the learner has to consume so they’re not overwhelmed, and you can bring people together to practice in really smart ways. There are many different things you can do.

You mentioned strategies, so you can implement pair-to-pair team sessions where they learn from other people that they work with, which can be really good because they’re working with people that understand and do their roles today, so it’s incredibly relatable. Simulated coaching, gaming platforms is something I’ve seen in the past being utilized because it’s fun, it’s a bit more engaging; you kind of feel like you’re playing a video game rather than in a learning experience. What’s becoming quite popular, particularly simulated coaching when gaming is integrated with the real world, when you have, potentially an avatar or a simulation, where you’ve got real people that are actually driving the learning for the learner – that’s getting pretty popular. I’m seeing that get more and more utilized by companies.

Coaching role plays with your managers, not a particularly popular one, but it can be really effective if it’s done in the right way. Even trying new things with different customers just to see how receptive they are. The proof is really going to be in how different customers respond to the way that you position the product or the way that you have those conversations. I wouldn’t practice something for the first time necessarily with a customer, but I think if you’ve been trying new things outside of with the customer, then go to speak to a particular customer in a particular industry, you might want to try a particular technique that you’ve learned and just see how receptive they are. I think practice has to be embedded not just outside of the customer situation or the sales conversation, but actually when you are working with the customer because that’s when you’re going to really see the impact and how that has helped change and improve the way that you sell as a salesperson.

SS: I love that approach. In closing, the last time we spoke I think I asked a question about the future of sales enablement, and you really anchored that around tools and access to knowledge. How has that come to fruition for you this year and how can increased accessibility impact the success of your learning programs?

DH: Well, as you know from my conversation last time, I think it was early to mid-2020, at the start of the pandemic, it’s really brought to life that accessibility is key, particularly when it comes to many people working remotely or having geographically disbursed sales teams. Knowledge is important in learning, but it changes a lot, so you really need to make sure that that knowledge can easily be updated and stored on a tool that is, as you said before, easily accessible to the salesperson. Increased accessibility to that knowledge really enables learning programs to focus on developing the skills that will ultimately make the biggest difference with customers and prospects. If your tools and the technologies that you have available are really powerful at bringing the knowledge and the product information and the product benefits and all that to the salesperson, then your sales enablement and learning programs can focus more on changing behavior, really ensuring practice is at the forefront of learning and really getting your salespeople to explore different ways of doing things so that they can be more effective with the customers. That’s the way I would think about it.

I do think there are a lot of great tools out there, there are a lot of great sales enablement tools out there that provide really easy access to information. The key is really blending the practice and learning opportunities with how the salespeople access the information. Just because you know every single thing about every single product doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to be a great salesperson, so that practice and that behavioral change is really what’s going to help you improve as a salesperson.

But if you haven’t got easy access to the knowledge, then it’s going to be difficult for you to communicate the benefits of the products to the customer. I think it’s a bit of a mix. You do need some knowledge, but I think the key really is to have great tools where you can access the knowledge easily so it can be updated because product knowledge is changing, in my view, at a much faster pace than it has ever done before as companies strive to update their products to make them more attractive to new markets but also to existing customers. That would be my advice, really, focus not just on the sales enablement programs, but also on the accessibility as well.

SS: I love that. I always get phenomenal enablement advice from you, Daniel. Thank you so much for coming back and joining us as a speaker on our podcast. Again, thank you, I really appreciate it.

DH: You’re welcome, thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Over the past 199 episodes, we’ve spoken to enablement leaders spanning geos, industries, and organization sizes about how they are upleveling their own programs to drive business impact and solidify enablement as a must-have function in the business. Across all pillars of enablement, from onboarding to training, coaching, content, and engagement, one theme remains a throughline to effective enablement: proving business impact.

To celebrate the 200th episode, we want to highlight 20 powerful sales enablement statistics that reinforce the value of effective enablement, along with insights from some of our past guests and enablement leaders that help shed light on what good looks like in enablement today.

Let’s start with the programs that often serve as a rep’s first impression of enablement: onboarding and training. For our first sales enablement stat, we found that teams that effectively provide foundational knowledge in their onboarding and training programs see a 10-percentage-point increase in quota attainment. Nina LaRouche from Bazaarvoice shared some advice with us on how to set reps up for success from the beginning of onboarding to ongoing training.

Nina LaRouche: For me, as an enablement practitioner and somebody who’s been in the learning space for a long time, I really think about learning as a journey. It’s not a destination, it’s not an event. One of the books that I’ve recently read is by Laura Fletcher and Sharon Boller, and they talk about the four stages of learning. First, preparing to learn, second, acquiring knowledge or skills, third, building memory practice, and then fourth, sustain and grow. I think all of these pieces are critical when you think about really designing effective learning experiences.

SS: For our second sales enablement stat, using data effectively to improve sales onboarding and training programs can lead to a 9-percentage-point increase in average win rates. Amanda Romeo from DailyPay talked to us about how she measures the success of her learning programs.

Amanda Romeo: I’m very results-driven. I’m a big fan of the Kirkpatrick model for measuring effectiveness and I presented on this topic with some other enablement groups. Simply put, the Kirkpatrick model is broken into four levels: reaction, learning, behavior, and results. Reaction, simple satisfaction surveys…The second component is learning, and this is achieved through written tests, certifications, so on and so forth. One thing to note is that for reaction and learning to be really telling, you usually want to pair those two results together. For example, if they liked the training but didn’t learn anything, it wasn’t necessarily an effective initiative. Now, usually this is where I hear a lot of practitioners stop…Where I think we really get the business’s attention is beyond that when we talk about behavior and results.

SS: In tracking the impact of onboarding and training, having the right tools in place can make a big difference. For our third sales enablement stat, we found that teams using onboarding tools see quota attainment improvements of 3 percentage points. Let’s hear from Celine Laffargue at Salesforce to learn how her team is leveraging tools to improve learning in the virtual environment.

Celine Laffargue: We are using lots of tools today. The virtual world opened many new perspectives on this type of usage and apps. We do a lot of simulations, and you use simulations to really have people active during the training. We know that today, just delivering your content when you have a speaker and people listening is not enough. You need to have the interaction, you need to have people involved, and you need to use all the tools you can.

SS: Alongside seamless onboarding and training, coaching reps can help strengthen the skills and behaviors that ultimately lead to an improved customer experience. Our 4th sales enablement stat highlights this, as companies with effective sales coaching are 177% more likely to be effective at negotiation and handling objections. To add insight on how coaching can improve the customer experience, let’s hear from Aaron Evans at Flow State.

Aaron Evans: I think that it’s been incredibly valuable. The byproduct of that is how will it affect the customer? Well the things that you are coaching on, whether that is strategies that you are going to approach the customers with, or processes, whatever it may be that you are coaching on, 2e are finding that the outcomes are much stronger and much better. I think coaching will ultimately create a better customer experience because you’re coaching on the fundamentals that the business wants to execute on to ultimately achieve the goal of adding value in generating revenue.

SS: With insights on how coaching is leading to behavior change, enablement leaders can refine their programs. This brings us to our 5th sales enablement stat. Teams that use data to optimize sales coaching have quota attainment rates that are 5 percentage points greater. Here is Stacey Justice at HashiCorp talking about the ideal outcomes of coaching.

Stacey Justice: Good coaching shows progress. It shows development. If it’s not happening consistently, if there aren’t goals, if there isn’t a level of accountability that comes from it, then I just don’t think that you see that progress.

SS: For our 6th sales enablement stat, we found that teams that use sales coaching tools are 20% more likely to effectively negotiate and handle objections. Let’s hear from Chad Dyar from Zoom about the impact of coaching tools on the effectiveness of coaching programs.

Chad Dyar: For coaching, we use coaching technology to make sure managers were doing it every week and that their reps are improving the different areas that they were coaching on. So, if we identify that a rep was maybe stronger in discovery, but weaker in qualification, we would be measuring how they improved and how they’re qualifying their deals over the course of the quarter. So, forecasting went right down the line with what the reps were responsible for and how the managers were coaching to better behaviors.

SS: To equip reps to effectively engage with customers, training and coaching the right behaviors is only part of the full puzzle. Reps also need impactful content to deliver the right messages to buyers at the right time. Our 7th sales enablement stat found that having a proactive content strategy increases employee engagement by 25%. Hear why this is so important from Henry Adaso, author of “Content Mapping”.

Henry Adaso: We need to figure out how to increase the value of the work that we’re doing. That means constantly reviewing and evaluating our content strategies to make sure that whatever we’re doing is actually working. Our content strategy will need to be re-evaluated from time to time as we receive inputs from the marketplace, as we receive input from the organization or the brand or the customer, we need to pivot just like we’ve done recently to make sure that we’re still able to resonate.

SS: This brings us to our 8th sales enablement stat: sales enablement teams that strategically organize their sales content see a 14-percentage-point increase in win rates. Marcela Piñeros at Stripe shared with us a bit about why this is so important.

Marcela Piñeros: One major shift that I feel we need to make as enablement functions in general is to go from being content creators to being content curators…A lot of us do this work manually, so you know that the lift is enormous, and it does feel like a hamster wheel. You’re constantly trying to catch up and you can never really catch up when you’re talking about a hundred assets. You can potentially manage that content in a spreadsheet, but when you start thinking in the hundreds or the thousands, you really need technology to support you. You need to be able to lean on processes and tools that help you automate that. You can focus on more impactful tasks, like deciding what content you actually need to source to support key business priorities.

SS: We have all heard the phrase “time is money” and when it comes to sales, this really is true. Take our 9th sales enablement stat for example: companies that track the time spent searching for content see a 4-percentage-point increase in cross-sell deals. To double-tap into this statistic, let’s get insight from Chris Wrenn at Adobe.

Chris Wrenn: A lot of the work from a design and content strategy and management perspective and content delivery perspective has been around really making content easy to find, making sure that it is authoritative, and also just making sure that there are some governance activities in place to keep it up to date and current. Those three areas, search, governing, and authoritativeness of documents so people know they’ve got the right version at the right time, and also that it’s up to date, those are the three things that I think have been continuous in what my team’s journey has been, going from managing content to getting more involved in the actual experience of how people receive content, where they get it, and how they use it.

SS: Having content that is easy to find is only half the battle. That content also needs to resonate with buyers. Our 10th sales enablement stat emphasizes this: teams that effectively engage customers with content see a 20-percentage-point increase in win rate. Eric Andrews from TriNet shared some thoughts with us on how his team prioritizes customer-centricity in their content strategy.

Eric Andrews: I think one of the best ways to get the team more customer-centric is to focus on doing fewer things but doing them consistently and with a high level of quality. There’s only so much content that sellers or buyers can consume and we’re trying to shift from a “more is more” motto to a “more is less” motto. It’s the old Mark Twain adage, “I’d have written a shorter note if I’d had more time.” This is really about providing fewer, really high-quality enablement assets that sellers understand and can use effectively in the buying process rather than having to hunt through hundreds of documents to find the ones that make the most sense for their customers.

SS: Beyond just having the right content, reps need guidance on when and how to engage buyers through sales plays. For our 11th sales enablement stat, we found that those who use data to optimize their sales plays see win rates that are 15 percentage points higher. Let’s hear from Nieka Mamczak at Drift on the impact of data-driven sales plays.

Nieka Mamczak: Sales plays are not just warm and fuzzy, nice ideas, they are meant to drive results. You want to make sure that you’re establishing a sales play metric protocol that shows results – is this play influencing a customer conversation? Or is this play influencing a pipeline number, or is this play influencing a growth target or an expansion target? Make sure that revenue impact is also very key.

SS: In sales, customer engagement is one of the most important factors of success. Our 12th sales enablement stat highlights this: we found that effectively tracking sales engagement efforts can lead to 10-percentage-point greater win rates. Kris Rudeegraap, the CEO and co-founder of Sendoso shared with us a bit about why customer engagement is so important to sales success today.

Kris Rudeegraap: Today’s buyers really do a lot of homework in advance of buying. So, there’s a lot of information out there on the web and because of that, when salespeople are reaching out, I think relevancy and personalization are some key things that you’ve got to think about when going after the buyer. I think an orchestrated outreach and not bombarding with generic mass outreach is really what matters to them. I think you’ve probably seen yourself that people can be bombarded with thousands of messages every day, so it’s really reaching out with something that feels more genuine specifically to them.

SS: Our 13th sales enablement stat digs into this even further. We found that teams that leverage sales engagement data to improve the buyer experience have win rates that are 8 percentage points higher. Let’s hear from Wynne Brown at Fable on how her team optimizes the customer experience through data.

Wynne Brown: What we’ve seen is our most successful customers have us see them throughout that whole customer journey, not just in the sales process where we’re trying to get the dollars, but during implementation and of course after implementation with our customer success management team. I feel like customer-centricity is a little bit like art – you know it when you see it. But we are trying to put at least that cipher or that symbol in place that we know that if we visit and we show up and we form real human relationships, we succeed more because the customer succeeds more.

SS: When reps are highly engaged in an organization, they are better positioned to provide a positive buyer experience. This brings us to our 14th sales enablement stat: organizations that have above-average employee engagement are 3 times more likely to have above-average customer engagement. Let’s hear from Michelle Anthony at LHH on how she is keeping her employees engaged.

Michelle Anthony: I think it really does come down to empathy at the core, especially as leaders. I have found that I’ve had to put on my calendar as a reminder to make sure, whether it’s a team meeting, whether it’s one-on-ones, that I’m creating time and space just to check in and ask people how they’re doing. And not like, how is work going, but like, how are you doing? How is life? How are things going for you? What can I do to help? What is it that you need for me? Amazing conversations surface…We’re all part of different communities and making people feel valued and appreciated for the work that they’re doing as part of this community is really important. I think that empathy is needed from our team now more than ever. I think just listening, honestly, and responding on a human level is the best thing that we can be doing.

SS: One way that companies can improve employee engagement is by investing in professional development for reps. Our 15th sales enablement stat shows why: companies that provide career development support are 50% more likely to have high employee engagement. Imogen McCourt of AndGrow.io shared some insight with us on this.

Imogen McCourt: I think if you are really trying to drive world-class sales organizations and world-class sales rep productivity, you need to think very seriously about how your teams are motivated and how you can create a constantly curious approach to their attitude. That is how you get to real productivity.

SS: Of course, all these initiatives can’t be possible without sufficient investment in the enablement function. Our 16th sales enablement stat sheds some light here, as we found that every additional $50,000 spent on sales enablement leads to a 1-point higher win rate. Sharon Little from Skillsoft talked to us about the value of having investment from leadership in the success of the enablement function.

Sharon Little: I think we’re in a situation now where leaders, CEOs, heads of sales organizations really understand the value and the strategic impact that sales enablement can make. While most of us who work with sales understand that pain is a huge driver for many decisions including buying decisions and org structure decisions and where you invest your money internally within your company, I think that now sales enablement has almost become an aspirational type of investment. Most often when I talk to sales leaders, what their dream is when it comes to having a world-class sales enablement team is to have that be the impetus for creating a best-in-class sales organization overall and a selling team that has a reputation in the market of being the very best.

SS: Investment in enablement efforts can encompass everything from building the team to delivering programs – but one of the most critical investments is the tech stack. In fact, our 17th sales enablement stat shows that teams using a sales enablement tool see 9-percentage-point higher win rates. Gerald Alston from Varonis spoke to us about how tools can improve rep performance.

Gerald Alston: Today, salespeople really need to have a certain level of comfort with the tools and the stack to get the most out of the role. It’s nearly impossible for sales rep to really generate the type of success they probably want for themselves without some tools working in unison to get them there. A big part of my role is to make sure that reps are comfortable with not only knowing how the tools function and why we actually have them, but also giving them some strategy on how to use them together, especially in-house because all companies are different.

SS: Beyond improving rep performance, enablement tools can help improve collaboration across the organization. Take our 18th sales enablement stat for example. We found that those that use a sales enablement tool are 52% more likely to collaborate cross-functionally. Heidi Castagna of NVIDIA shared her perspective on how tools improve collaboration.

Heidi Castagna: There is so much mutual benefit to a well-oiled enablement organization when it comes to the product we use between the marketing teams and the sales leadership. Getting excellent resources out in the field, getting those over the finish line is incredibly important, but also it’s not like pulling teeth because it is obvious where the shared benefits are.

SS: Enablement is well-positioned to drive this collaboration, particularly with executive leaders. Our 19th sales enablement stat shows why. We found that 87% of sales enablement teams meet or exceed expectations in collaborating with sales leadership. Caroline Holt at Bonterra shared with us how enablement can drive collaboration with executive leaders.

Caroline Holt: I think that a big part of alignment is understanding both what does that person or that team need to get accomplished? What is it that they need to get out of the revenue organization or the sales organization? How does the revenue organization or sales organization affect them? How do you start to create that collaboration and alignment on business objectives? Then that starts to trickle into what we actually need to accomplish together. I think if you understand the needs of your internal stakeholders, and they understand what’s in it for them to work together, it’s a lot easier to build something in a collaborative zone.

Even if you know what you think the direction is that you want to take from a revenue perspective or revenue enablement perspective, it gives you more clarity and it enables you to work much more closely together because you feel like you have similar consensus-based objectives as opposed to, “this is the stuff that the revenue team needs to get done and here’s how I need you to help me get that done.” Which feels a lot more like, I’m either going in and selling them something or I’m going in and telling them that they need to get on board. It’s tough to create that interest if they are feeling “volun-told” as opposed to a collaborative part of the solution.

SS: Overall, being able to prove the business impact of enablement is a key ingredient to effective collaboration, as it can help enablement leaders earn a seat at the table. This brings us to our 20th sales enablement stat. The 56% of enablement teams that are exceptional at communicating business impact are also 2.3 times as likely to exceed expectations in collaborating with executive leaders. Let’s hear from Adriana Romero at Salesforce on how data can help enablement earn a seat at the table.

Adriana Romero: It is about credibility. One of the things that I would say is, you have to demonstrate that what you’re doing in terms of enablement functions or workshops or any initiatives are backed up by the data that you have in the company and that you are backing up data in terms of numbers, in terms of gaps. And you’re coming to the sales managers with an intelligent solution around, “look, I am not only thinking about implementing X, Y, or Zed workshop, it’s that we’re seeing these trends on the floor and we believe that we can actually impact efficiency or performance or any metric by doing this.” Having a very good grasp on the data that your managers and your leaders have is very important.

SS: Thanks for tuning into 200 episodes of the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. To learn more about all the statistics we shared today on the impact of enablement, be sure to check out the Reports section of our website.

And as always, if there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Numa Sales: Thank you very much for having me today. I’m Numa, I’m 27 years old, and I come from a lovely city in the south of France called Aix-en-Provence. I am French, but I am in Switzerland.

What I would say about me, I’m strongly passionate about entrepreneurship, sales negotiation and I want to state right away that I didn’t change my last name because of my occupation. It was much more the other way around, I was born with it. Kind of like destiny. I’m actually really enjoying it. Nothing to do with a curse actually, because my last name is Sales I always worked in sales roles with great B2B sales team, generating hundreds of millions at leadership companies like Microsoft, CWT, L’Oréal, and now I would say I really found the right place at the right time being responsible for the sales enablement here at Hedera Dx, which is a very, very exciting and a very fast-growing company based in the Biopôle campus of Lausanne working with tremendous and very inspiring profiles. We are definitely contributing to making this world a better place, just concerning the mission of the company.

To give you a glimpse of this amazing adventure, we are making liquid biopsy a reality in Europe. So I’m sure you are very aware of what liquid biopsy is in America, but here in Europe it is not very popular for now, so we will try to sell a very great platform. I really do not want to spoil things for the moment so it will remain a tease, but just to have in mind that soon we will definitely witness a very European focus project here that addresses suffering for a large number of people here in Europe.

SS: Well, Numa, I am honored that you are able to join us on this podcast today. You actually caught my eye because you wrote an article where you talked about your career journey so far, and there was a quote in there that really caught my eye because you said that “adaptation is intelligence.” I’d love for you to explain to our audience from your perspective why our resiliency and the ability to adapt are so important for salespeople to succeed today.

NS: Yeah, definitely. It was my mathematics teacher that used to tell me this sentence “adaptation is intelligence.” I meditated on it since this time and actually adaptation is a very common trait in nature to survive. That’s a very dumb picture of life, but that’s inherently very true. You cannot see a dog complaining about losing a leg in his life, he would still enjoy his life and he would try to jump over everything, even if he is handicap. We are not dogs and even if I really like them and they are great teachers for us, focusing on ourselves today as human beings is very complex by essentially confronting two different kinds of challenges on the daily routine, especially for salespeople.

I would say that being resilient is really a key skill to work on. I said to work on because you need to involve yourself at some point in the process of becoming more adaptable, and it leads us naturally in this process to these other very needed skills you should get as a seller which is empathy. Empathy is the possibility for you to really feel and put yourself in the very own shoes of the people you have in front of you and being able to solve their specific issues. So if you are not capable of adaptation, if you’re not smart enough, smart speaking in terms of emotional intelligence, you won’t be able to identify and provide answers after listening carefully to what is being said. You have to transform yourself to become a sponge to the water following the arrival of information provided by the one which is currently in front of you to be able. Then you will be able to provide efficient solutions. That is a very short list of things to say about adaptation. If you are not capable of being resilient, for example, when the negotiation is becoming a tough place or the projects are not being shipped in time because the boat gets stuck in the Suez Canal for example, you won’t get anywhere.

What I especially like about these very simple quotes is that I can understand that a young student studying mathematics was able to remember for years is now revealing something much more fundamental, which is that life is always changing and that’s a very, very basic thing to say, but we are always forgetting it. You enjoy things, and tomorrow morning while you were sleeping peacefully in your bed, you wake up and everything is kind of changed, so it is therefore our responsibility to accept it and to evolve accordingly because those are the possibilities you have. You can get stuck in the exact same place for a very long time just by saying to yourself and believing that it should not be like this, but in reality, just accepting change for what it is will help you grow.

SS: Absolutely. Now to double click on this, how do you help salespeople adapt to some of the evolving business environment and buyer needs that are surfacing today?

NS: Yes, that’s a great question. I am not going to speak about working in a remote office or stuff like that, but I think nowadays we are confronted to the very buying journey paradigm changes from the buyer just telling the seller what he wants and needs. In this whole new picture the buyer is waiting for the seller to work for him. To do the process and to evangelize him with a new solution or project. Today, with electric cars for example, people are already very busy with their own lives. They expect you to provide the insights because we are supposed to be the master of our own industry to be the master of our solution.It doesn’t mean to know everything, but it does mean you are able to find the answer the customer expects from you. If you’re not able to place yourself as an expert, no one will listen to you today. When we look at the news, there are tons of experts and they are the one we listen to and receive answers to the covid crisis for example. I don’t say that I agree with it, but it is what it is.

On one side you have to be an expert, right? Being super-specialized and on the other side you have to evolve to match with the specific chaotic environment of selling, meeting with the high expectations of your customer, which is already very well informed about your solutions, thanks to our friend Google, so my humble motive here is to help my team and I have our minds at ease when we have business.

What I mean by that is I want us to be comfortable with the idea of navigating in the notion of information, insights, comments, catching news sometimes with fake data and to be able to catch the ones that will lead to somewhere interesting for us and our customers and patients. Pragmatically speaking and to answer your question, it is much more dealing with us as human beings, turning ourselves into effective business people aware of our environment, aware of the real innovations, aware of the real values and the real answers, not just sellers trying to push a product as it was in the previous paradigm. Especially in my company where we are dealing with patients and because everyone on my team is personally involving him or herself in doing their job.

SS: Well, I think that’s fantastic advice on how to address evolving buyer needs. Now I want to shift a little bit you mentioned on LinkedIn and I loved this, that you guide salespeople to maximize their potential according to their uniqueness. How can enablement practitioners help salespeople identify what their unique skills are and then how do you go about nurturing these strengths through enablement?

NS: That’s actually a perfect transition to what I was just saying because one of my objectives is to lead everyone to the next step where they are fully aware and conscious about the whats and whys that are in front of customers today. When representing a company composed of a bunch of people, they are working hard behind you, developing products that they believe in, designing stuff that they have spent hours working on, so what I mean is that you have to know yourself at a point that you can say with confidence “I don’t know.” I didn’t discover this by myself. It’s like this mindset of being able to say, I don’t know. I had the chance of meeting incredible people who were really comfortable to tell me straight in the eyes, I don’t know, and that’s not an issue because I never questioned their legitimacy. It was absolutely the opposite. If you are capable of saying, I don’t know, it means a lot because you worked on being comfortable with you not being the superhero of the story, the kind of the supermom providing a great education to her children, the super managers knowing everything, being the perfect one, you are remaining with your human traits.

By saying, “I don’t know”, you tell the truth and make everyone acknowledge the fact that you cut the bullshit. Particularly speaking, everyone at my company did this personality test a couple of weeks ago and they really enjoy doing it. It was really insightful because personally, I worked for years with the Myers Briggs test, which is really, really great, but the DISC is much more focusing on interpersonal skills and for a team. It is really a game-changer. So answering your question about helping people find their unique skills, I would say it’s not just strengths, it is to also work on our weaknesses. It’s much more about finding the golden balance between strengths and weaknesses, and raising awareness about the reasons someone is where she or he is today.

SS: I do love that approach. Now, on the flip side, thinking beyond just unique strengths. I’d love to understand, have you actually identified what are some of the common skills that you’ve noticed amongst your top-performing salespeople? How can sales enablement help replicate those similar skills across their entire sales team?

NS: I really like the world to replicate, not to copy. Actually, the answer is really simple. They know how to shut up. It’s like they know how to actively listen and while they are listening to their prospecting customers’, they know how to build a picture of their interlocutor while they are already busy speaking with them. They know how to listen without trying to find the moment to answer their questions. It’s like we had a project demo with an external vendor a couple of weeks ago and I’m really convinced it was not his fault at all, but he always repeated during his demo, “Does it mean something to you, what I just presented? Does it make sense for you?” And I think he was expecting us to say, “Yeah, exactly what I was looking for. That’s terrific. I’m greatly surprised. Where and when can I sign the contract?”

Instead, a top performer would not in any way have this awkward setup at any point during the sales process, because he or she would have presented something that the very customer asked for at first. So it will make sense. The most effective people I met in my life are the ones that know how to put aside their ego to benefit the world. Speaking about benefiting the companies they work for, but most of all benefiting the people they are speaking to. I strongly recommend this book, “Good To Great” from Jim Collins, which is really great on this subject. Putting aside one’s ego to benefit all, that’s immensely demanding for someone to be at this stage of development in her or his life to achieve. To put aside all of his imaginary plans and to cut the bullshit, to focus on the very needs of the human currently expressing his struggling point and being comfortable saying my products will answer your issue.

SS: Well, I think that’s some fantastic advice. Now in closing, Numa, my last question to you, in addition to some of the art of selling or soft skills, I think there also is some science to consider, such as process and tools. So Numa, how do you effectively balance the two to ensure that salespeople can really leverage all of the processes and tools that are at their fingertips in combination with some of those soft skills?

NS: Actually, I have to confess that here at Hedera Dx we have a very great sales manager. My role is not to deal with the tools, and I’m really glad to count on him for these things, but I do play a role when representing the kind of legitimacy of using these tools in our team. So for example, in the next few weeks we are going to implement a very great tool, and my role here is to identify and try to evangelize my team with what and how it will benefit us. I did a lot of research on tools to help with my specific self productivity in the past, and each time I tried, it often didn’t work. Not because I tried each time a shitty one, it was definitely because I didn’t state at the very early stage what was my issue. If you work 90% of the process identifying your pain point, you will get the job done with the right tools. This mandatory element of my problem is not present, so it won’t benefit it. Even if I paid for this, I get rid of it immediately. To answer the question, we want sellers already very busy enjoying sales negotiation and exploratory meetings with our clients. To adopt processes and tools if we are not bright and clear on which pain point we are currently solving, will just get in our way.

Pragmatically speaking, we are not focusing on implementing processes and tools, but much more on solving pain points. My real objective is to help to maintain this balance between a data-driven approach that could be constraining sometimes with the very chaotic trait of the improvisation and freedom we can find in the selling process. I try to act as a gatekeeper of which pain points are relevant to address today, but I am grateful to have a wonderful, skilled and experienced team already addressing these items. I’m much more concerned with the fun part, which is the implementation phase, and using new tools that will bring us more joy in our daily routine, instead of making everyone worried about mastering the tools that are not efficient or trying to adopting a time-consuming process that will prevent us from achieving our very demanding objectives.

SS: Well, Numa, I really appreciate you sharing your experience and your story with our audience today, so thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us.

NS: Thank you. It was a pleasure speaking with you today and I really appreciate your time and work as well. Thank you for evangelizing people with sales enablement and especially interviewing European people, because sales enablement is not very famous here, but it could benefit a lot of our companies. Thank you very much and have a lovely time.

SS: Fantastic to our audience. Thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Sharif Wilson: Hi, how are you doing? It’s really a pleasure to be here with you, Shawnna, and the audience. As you’ve said, my name is Sharif, I currently work at Forter as a global sales enablement manager. Currently, our company works on creating trust within the e-commerce space, working to fight growing complexities and abuse and fraud within the e-commerce space, and creating a more seamless customer journey on the web. That’s currently what I am doing at Forter, helping the go-to-market team strategize and build out ongoing education, keep our reps sharp, and constantly growing the book of business.

SS: Well, I’m excited to have you here with us today. On Linkedin, you caught my eye because you had shared a quote that said measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually improvement. In the context of your sales enablement efforts, how does measurement help you optimize your programs?

SW: Well, measurement helps you to see what’s working and what’s not working. I think in the sales world there’s a misconception of going strictly off of gut, strictly off of impromptu notions of, “hey, this worked at this company or this worked in this industry”. There may be some credibility to that for sure, but I think if we really want to systematize and create programs that can scale and that can be repeatable, we need to see what the metrics are bearing forth. Until we’re able to measure something, unless we’re able to analyze, there’s no way for us to control, there’s no way for us to credibly say that we’ve improved anything. It was actually a quote that I had read in one of the sales books that I feel like was really great. My manager actually passed it to me when I first started this role, “The Qualified Sales Leader” and that was just so impactful to me.

SS: Absolutely, now to double click into this, what are some of the core metrics that you use to measure the success of your enablement efforts?

SW: Yes, so it’s a little bit double-fold. At the end of the day, sales is measured by revenue. How much revenue is that team generating? That’s kind of one of the core purposes of that organization within any business is to grow the bottom line. I think from one standpoint, you want to have an eye on how the sales organization is doing in general, how well they’re doing as far as gaining new business opportunities, creating new opportunities, creating new conversations, how long is it taking from initially meeting an opportunity to bringing it within to the business community as a customer.

On one end, there’s looking at the revenue, and then on the other side, you want to see what the adoption is like to your actual training internally. There are a ton of different LMS tools, learning management systems, that teams can use. Also, looking at how the programs you’re actually creating, how are the people within your organization adopting them? Are they doing them at all? You want to see how people are adopting your programs. If there is a correlation between when you rolled out these programs with the bottom line, sometimes sales directors or VPs, people in the field will bring up things in real-time and you’ll have the opportunity to create programs in response to a real-time challenge. Being able to measure if your program has actually had an impact on that specific challenge that was brought up to you is important.

SS: You’ve touched on a lot and with so many potential metrics to measure, how would you say sales enablement practitioners should go about really prioritizing and determining which are the right metrics for their business?

SW: It’s my opinion that the sales enablement organization is a part of the sales strategy arm within a business. The bottom line is we want to sharpen our reps, we want our reps to be more equipped, and more able to scale time from discovery meetings to close. We want to shorten that gap, we want to increase revenue. I think all the metrics that we’re looking at have to be tied to is this having an impact on the bottom line? Is this having a positive impact on the bottom line? Is more revenue being created? Are more opportunities at the end of the day being created? Are reps shortening their time from discovery calls to signed contracts? That’s the end goal. I think the metrics that we look at have to be tied to that.

Different organizations measure metrics based on how different opportunities are progressing. There are multiple stages to awareness and different companies measure that differently. Some have numerical stages, some have alphabetical stages. At the end of the day, it’s the same thing. We’re trying to see how long it’s taking specific opportunities to go from one stage to the next and ultimately hopefully a signed contract. I think that it’s important to make sure that anything that we’re looking at is serving that purpose. I don’t think there’s any metric in the sales enablement field that is, in my opinion, more important than that. We should be positively affecting the bottom line, growing our business, growing logos, causing our reps to be able to shorten the time span on our activities to reach their ultimate goals.

SS: Absolutely. Now, with all that said, enablement often has to work rather cross-functionally, especially across the go-to-market teams. Who are some of the core stakeholders that sales enablement should really partner with to define the right metrics for the organization?

SW: That’s a good one. I know different organizations are made up a bit differently. At my former company, the sales enablement program rolled up under the education department and now we’re under the sales operations department, so that colors things a little bit differently for us. In my current role where we’re heavy metrics-driven, our main stakeholders are VP of sales ops. I think that’s an important place and I think it’s a proper emphasis, but I think that’s maybe one of the main stakeholders that we want to be looking at, sales ops, the people who are in charge of the forecasting in charge of all of the metrics. How long are our deals hanging around within the pipeline? How are the different reps doing? They’re the ones creating a lot of the dashboards that are visualizing how the sales operation is actually progressing.

It’s able to give, in its best state, an accurate depiction of what’s happening in the field and in a very measurable, concrete, and black-and-white way. We’re able to draw nuance from the metrics that they provide. I think sales operations, no matter where the sales enablement department follows, you have to have a close relationship there. There’s got to be a regular cadence. There’s got to be a strong bond there.

From there, I think sales leaders and frontline managers, these are great people to be in contact with because you never want to be in a position where you’re just creating programs in a bubble. You want it to be something that’s actually practical and tangible for the frontline managers, for the sales leaders, the VPs, the directors. It has to be something that is relevant to them and something that they feel like addresses their needs. Within any organization, there’s politics, there is a vine for attention as far as what’s the most important thing to focus on and though everybody wants the business to be successful, everyone has an opinion on exactly what to focus on to get to that end.

Sales enablement managers have to be quite diplomatic, they have to know how to get buy-in from multiple different people. You want to have a good relationship with sales leaders as well. I’m talking about frontline managers, directors, VPs who are looking at their regions from different vantage points. I think also potentially product marketing. Product marketing are typically the people who are creating the language and the collateral that the sellers are bringing to market. It’s really important that they are able to have the feedback and an understanding of what’s actually happening in the field as well. I think sales enablement plays an important role as far as doubly on both sides, translating what’s important and how to solve the different issues that are coming up and create that bridge within the organization.

SS: Absolutely. Now, I think a lot of the times when we really start to talk about key metrics, there’s definitely a difference between how those are leveraged. How do you go about using the data that you’re able to gather to really develop and hone in on insights around what’s working and what’s not? Then to take and tailor that conversation back to the stakeholders that we just chatted about, how do you elevate those insights to really communicate enablement impact back to those key leaders?

SW: Yes, so I think it’s really great to start with understanding where your particular business is. Every sales organization is in a different place. There are some things that they’re extremely excited about and there are some things that there’s room for improvement. Whether that is shortening sales cycles, whether that’s trying to break into this particular vertical where there’s probably a lot of opportunity, whether it’s prospecting. There are all different types of things that sales leaders and sales operations will identify as being room for improvement. I think that’s where you want to start. You want to leverage the success that you are having with things that you are doing well and then use that to be able to discern how to crack the code of what you’re trying to deal with. If you’re an organization and you’re trying to get into a different vertical, you want to see how you fared with that so far.

Let’s say you’re trying to get into the manufacturing vertical, you feel like there’s a lot of opportunity there, you feel like there are a lot of customers there. Senior leadership has identified this as a vertical that they want to break into within the new year. More than likely, we’ve had reps try to break into those in general. We want to see what data we have already on that. Who have we already attempted to talk to? How far in those conversations did we get? Where did things break down in that conversation? Have we even been that successful with getting meetings in the first place?

I think trying to discern from that also doing some market research, that’s where the product marketing team is really helpful as well. A lot of times they’ll do market research and they’ll be able to help us with cultivating successful tactics to break into those markets. We will want to use that information to discern exactly how we can break into those areas of the business. If we’re not even able to get a meeting we look into Salesforce or some type of CRM, and we’re seeing that 80% of these businesses that we’ve attempted to get in contact with, like manufacturing, don’t even progress past stage one or, we’re not even able to get a meeting. Well, that means we probably have to work on building curriculum and collateral around something that’s more catered to that industry, where they feel like they can even have a conversation with us, where they feel like we’re even relevant enough to have a conversation with, getting a better understanding of the buyer personas.

That’s a hypothesis, we spend some time looking at that, we work with the product marketing team too to build some tactics, some sequences, maybe some marketing events to break into these markets and we trial it and then we see how successful it is. We build out programs. First, the enablement team wants to see if the reps are taking advantage of the training that we’ve created based on the research we’ve done and teaming up with the different product marketing teams and then we test that. We see, #1, are the reps taking advantage of the training? Then #2, is it being successful? Are we seeing a difference from let’s say, quarter one and quarter two? Quarter one was how things were operating before in quarter two. Are we able to get more meetings? Are we generating more opportunities? Are we getting further along? Is it not doing anything?

I want to go all the way back to my initial thesis: the bottom line of sales, in general, is to grow, the bottom line, is to generate revenue. Different businesses are at different places. Some are early-stage startups, some are real established organizations and they have different goals, but I think sales enablement is always trying to align itself with the growing of the bottom line but also trying to be where the business is trying to seek new opportunities to do that. We take our cues from the ops team and also stakeholders, the leadership, the CEOs, the CMOs, as far as where they see the company going. Then we try to dig into the metrics, teaming up with a product marketing team, teaming up with the sales operations team to hypothesize and try to build out curriculums and trainings and live sessions to equip sellers to be able to achieve these goals that have been set forth for us.

SS: That’s fantastic. Sharif, one of the things that I like to do as a closing question to a lot of these podcasts is really take a look forward. I know obviously, none of us have a crystal ball into the future, but I know that you’ve shared some content around the future of artificial intelligence and as enablement continues to evolve, how do you envision AI playing a role in tracking metrics and really optimizing enablement impact?

SW: That’s a pretty loaded question. AI is pretty much already heavily integrated into a lot of the businesses we see every day. I mean Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, Amazon, all of these companies that we use daily are already leveraging AI to curate a lot of the things that we see on the internet. It’s funny, nobody’s internet is the same. On my and your computer right now we can search the exact same term and the exact same subject, but our Google search will show up differently based on our user profiles, our identities based on what we’ve looked up and how we behaved on the internet. I find this extremely fascinating.

I think there are a lot of different ways it can be applied. I think AI could potentially generate curriculums for individual sellers. I think a big challenge that a lot of enablement people run into is trying to create that one-size-fits-all curriculum for everybody. Everyone learns differently. Some people like videos, some people like to read, some people just like to watch other people do things. Some people want a mixture of it all. There are so many different learning styles, so the challenge is always how to strike that balance, where AI potentially could have a software that assesses different people’s activities, some of their different selling activities, their learning styles, and potentially create for them, automated in the same way a lot of these platforms I mentioned before. We can have tools that curate curriculums based on maybe a learning assessment. You take like learning assessment, Myers Briggs and all these different types of things, and build you a bespoke curriculum that kind of helps you specifically get ramped up. That’s potentially something that could be created.

I’ve seen LMSs and content systems starting to leverage AI. Let’s say you have a curriculum where you’re trying to teach your team about a new product that you’re about to roll out. Maybe you’ve got a bunch of information from product marketing, you’ve got a bunch of information from your UX designers and your software engineers, but it’s your job to create it into something digestible for the sales team. I forget the name of the LMS, but what it enables you to do is upload a bunch of information. It didn’t matter if it was videos, random notes, or audio. Essentially what it was able to do was create a beautiful curriculum out of that information, like generate a narrative out of it. I found that to be quite fascinating. I have it written down somewhere, but that’s the type of stuff that we’ll probably be seeing more and more within the enablement world, which can actually probably free up enablement professionals to be a lot more forward-thinking and strategic if they’re able to have more leeway with tools that can take up some of the harder things to think through a lot of the times when it comes to pragmatically rolling something out.

SS: Absolutely. I love the potential though that it is there with technologies, so it’s an exciting future to look forward to. Sharif, thank you so much for your time today.

SW: Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share, or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Kathryn Schoeberlein at Twitch at Amazon Advertising join us. Kathryn, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Kathryn Schoeberlein: Hi, my name is Kathryn Schoeberlein. I am in global enablement for Twitch at Amazon Advertising. I started at Twitch two years ago. Prior to that, I worked for a variety of different startups in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before I got into enablement I was, very involved in education. I started as a K-12 educator and worked my way up into administrative roles within middle school and high schools, and then pivoted to the enablement space when I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Enablement was a great fit for the skills that I had developed as an educator, and it was a great way to kind of make the connection to working with curriculum, working with training, working with creating learning pathways, and some of the skills that I had developed in the classroom and as an administrator. That’s where I have been building my career for the last few years in the global enablement sales enablement space in tech companies.

SS: Well, we’re very excited to have you on our show, Kathryn. I love to learn more about how folks have come into enablement from a variety of backgrounds. As you mentioned in your introduction, you have an extensive background in education, including both classroom teaching and enablement, but also outdoor education.

I’d love to start there. How does your outdoor education experience influence your approach to enablement?

KS: Outdoor education was always a huge part of the reason why I loved teaching in the first place, it was an opportunity to get students outside the traditional confines of a classroom. Get them excited about learning about the natural world, experiencing some of the same skills that we wanted them to learn in the classroom, but in a totally different context.

One of things that I love about outdoor education that I’ve been able to apply in a lot of the work that I’ve done in enablement is the development of skills, like decision making or problem solving, empathy towards others, and that classic learning by doing philosophy. I found that in outdoor education, you have to think about things in a different way when you are 1500 feet up a mountain and something goes wrong, or when you are trying to figure out “how do I put together this tent and I have a missing pole for it.” Or, thinking about going on a class hiking trip and you have some friends there who may be very experienced hikers and you have other friends who this may be the first time they’ve ever been hiking. How do you help work as a collaborative team on your hike to make sure that everybody stays together and works together to get to your final destination safely? I think a lot of that’s enveloped in the concept of learning by doing.

The more you practice something or the more you step outside of your traditional boundaries and try something different or try something for the first time, you ignite those learning pathways that help you to develop skills like self-confidence or the ability to creatively problem solve in situations that are new to you. For me, outdoor education was this great tie into all the traditional ways of learning that I was seeing in the classroom. A lot of what I learned from being an outdoor educator I try to apply in my adult education trainings and in the way that I help learners approach enablement.

SS: I think that’s a fantastic application of your existing experience into your current role. Now, you’ve also mentioned you’re a strong advocate for experiential education or learning by doing. In your experience, why is learning by doing so effective and how have you created these experiences within your enablement programs?

KS: Yeah, absolutely. I think that learning by doing, or what’s commonly referred to as experiential education, it’s tackling a real-life problem by adapting and learning based on your interactions with the environment around you. The pieces of the puzzle that you have, how can you mold those and change those around and experiment with those to get to the destination that you want to be in or to solve the problem that’s at hand. I think that experiential learning is super helpful for any type of learner, whether you’re five or 55 or 105, because you’re really modeling and learning to execute those new skills in an entirely new situation.

The more that you can get your hands dirty with the experience I think the more the learning sticks. Think about like baking cookies. It’s one thing to read the recipe. It’s another thing to get in the kitchen and mix up the flour and the eggs and put it in the oven and taste the final product. I try to always think about that “baking of the cookie” analogy when I’m working with creating learnings or trainings for learners of any age. I think when you speak specifically about tech, for example, that guided practice is a huge component of that. I found that helps learners keep in mind those foundational pieces that are so important to increasing their ability to be confident in the skills that they have and developing and refining them over time.

For example, when I was doing a lot of sales enablement and training new reps on different products, we did a lot of playing with the product. In order to sell the product, you need to know what it does. Like try it out, see what it looks like, run it by yourself, pull up the app, see how it works. Get to talk to some of the product engineers and the product team, and just really understand the why. Why does this product exist? What is it doing? How does it work? Kind of the background of the entire experience.

I did a lot of utilizing tools where early reps were able to shadow more veteran reps and hear them go through the practice. We would utilize a checklist, like, “Hey, did the rep introduce themselves? Did they come in and give an objective for the call or an agenda? How many times did they ask questions?” That checklist could help new reps guide themselves. What does the framework look like for a really good sales call?

We did a lot of role-playing and mock calls. I would do things for example, where I would get a bunch of situations that we were currently facing about a product that we were selling and I’d type up these situations and we’d put them in a hat and we’d divide the room up into sellers and potential customers. Everybody would pull a situation out of the hat and we would have to work on that mock call the sellers wouldn’t know what the customer’s potential objections were and the customer also had a series of questions that they had for the seller and the seller would need to expand and iterate on them as a conversation was going. It gave the ability to practice a real-life situation by doing it in the most repeatable way possible without actually getting in the high stakes call situation.

I think the last thing is a lot of gamification. If you can learn by doing and by gamifying it and making it fun and exciting, that just increases the engagement and gives learners a real chance to take that information that they’re interested in developing more thoughtfully and make it the framework of how they develop their thoughts and their learning about a specific topic.

SS: Now, I also want to dig in a little bit because your team recently launched a new e-learning for advertisers called Twitch Game Plan. With the rise in virtual learning over the past few years, what are some of the ways that practitioners can create opportunities for practice and reinforcement in a virtual learning environment?

KS: Absolutely. Game Plan is our premier agency training tool. We use it to help agencies and media buyers understand who Twitch is, what we are, what we can do, what kind of ad products that we have, and how they can leverage those ad products for their clients and brands. We made Game Plan with the idea that we wanted learners to come in, be able to understand the basic tenants of who we are and what we do, and also be able to think creatively about how our solutions might be helpful, effective, interesting for their own clients, for the media companies, or for the brands that were interested in advertising but didn’t really know where to start with Twitch.

One of the ways that I think that we’ve really focused on the practice of taking those learnings and reinforcing upon them is gamifying our learning pathway. We worked with E-learning Brothers who helped us to create these very interactive modules. Each of the modules has a lot of informational content, but it also has reinforcing games whether it’s matching, or we have a couple of games where there’s little races where you race little icons. We have examples of Twitch chat where we use our bits and different Twitch emojis to showcase conversations of how things would actually look on the Twitch platform to reinforce some of what Twitch is capable of as a service.

Then, also to reinforce the learning that we are trying to get across to our audience, I think another thing that we’ve done that’s been super helpful to reinforce our key points, especially with virtual setup for learning at this time is having some type of takeaway. We’ve created some downloadable one-pagers that are graphic heavy with the main points so that even if you’re overwhelmed and you’ve listened to nine modules worth of information and it’s all swimming around you in your head and you haven’t had time to really digest all of it, we’ve got some one-pagers that you can download that you can take away those key points and bring them into your next meeting, or sit with them and digest it before you have a client meeting and they want to talk a little bit more about Twitch. You’ve got those key points with you.

Another thing that we’ve found that’s been really successful in getting learners excited about taking Twitch Game Plan and going through the certification to become a Twitch expert is creating some virtual live events. Whether it’s through an exciting launch opportunity or through things like a seller’s office hours, for example, where we block time on our calendar, and then we invite agencies one by one to come in and block their calendars and we go through certification with them. We talk about the modules. We offer some type of FAQ help or technical help if they might need that. We’re there to answer questions. We’re there to dive deeper into the modules. That’s been a great way to take that e-learning experience and make it more individualized and more of a person-to-person experience when we give the ability to have learners connect in real time with our team, while they’re also partaking in this e-learning experience.

SS: That’s very cool. Now, when it comes to engaging participants in these learning experiences, you’ve mentioned before that you’re passionate about creating that “aha” moment. How do you create those moments for learners and how does engagement in a learning experience really translate to the success of the program?

KS: We’ve always heard that the more engaged that you are with any subject material or the more that you put into something, the more you’re going to get out of it. In a day and age right now where there’s a thousand different trainings for things, and everything’s virtual and you’re sitting through meetings all day, taking another training or doing another course or sitting through hours of onboarding can sometimes be tedious. One of the things that I think that I try to focus on is how do we make that content engaging and exciting for learners and not just, “oh boy, another training, another learning, another module that I have to do.”

I think the more engaged that a learner is, the more that they retain and especially in sales, the more information that you retain. Whether it’s about a project or the sales framework or the methodology that your team uses or even just about sales in general, about how to interact with people, about how to show in your conversations, how to ask questions, how to take notes when you’re on a sales call. The more that you are engaged with understanding that, and the more you are engaged with learning new techniques the more that you will be able to retain and put into practice. We always hear the more you practice, the better you perform. I think creating those “aha” moments where you are able to create a learning or develop a type of training where you lead learners 90% of the way, and then you let them come to that conclusion on their own is helpful. Are we always successful at doing that? No. Sometimes there are some learnings where you have to give all learners step-by-step instructions or very concrete steps here and there.

Something like sales scripting, for example, is one of those places where I feel like you can really develop an aha moment. Having a prescribed script is not a great way, in my opinion, for sellers to be their authentic selves when they’re on a phone call with a potential customer. I have always preferred that when we talk about helping new reps learn about a product and speak fluently about a product on a phone call with a client that we utilize a framework of bullet points or a framework of general ideas, and then let them talk about it and develop their own cadence of language or their own different take on the topic at hand. It’s more deliberate when the sales rep can use their own language or use their own cadence to help have a natural phone call with someone.

Again, I know that I have been on phone calls before, whether it’s with sales reps, or even people calling me to sell me different products where I can tell that they’re reading a piece of paper in front of them and, of course, that comes across as, “oh boy, another sales pitch. I’m not interested. Thanks anyway.” I try to help our reps get to that “aha” moment by giving them the framework and then letting them experiment with it on their own. Maybe a sales rep goes through and they try to write a script and they realize, “oh yikes, that didn’t go as well as I thought.” Give them the framework to experiment with that, let them make their own conversational piece about a product or about specific components of what they’re trying to sell and let them be. “When I say it in my way or when it makes sense to me and how I talk about it this is great. I’ve already got a second call booked. This is awesome.”

I think helping to create those guardrails, that framework for “sales scripts”, helps to create those “aha” moments down the line so that you are not leading them straight to the solution, but you’re giving them the opportunity to explore and experiment on their own and find what works for them. Of course, anytime that an authentic learner figures out, “Hey, I can do this on my own. I get this, this is awesome,” that just increases the confidence that they have and their excitement about what they’re doing. Of course, a confident and excited sales rep is somebody who’s going to be making sales and that’s what we all want.

SS: Now, you touched on this just a moment ago, and I want to double click into it where you were talking about experimentation. I’d love to understand, how is experimenting with new ideas an important part of your process as an enablement leader and then how does experimentation help you refine your programs?

KS: Experimentation for me is one of the key foundations of being a lifelong learner. Learning just doesn’t stop when you graduate from school. Learning doesn’t stop once you’ve onboarded. All the products you’re selling, it’s a continuous ever-changing part of life, of the learning process. I love experimentation. When I was a classroom teacher to even now an enablement leader, I’m always open to new ideas. I love hearing what other people doing. I love iterating on projects that I’ve done in the past. What can I do differently? How can I make this better? How can I refine this?

I think finding what works is just as important as finding what doesn’t work, what resonates with learners and what was a total miss. Some of the ways that I try to take advantage of that experimentation when I am building programs or learning pathways is through beta testing, for example. I’ll mockup an example role play or I’ll mock up training and I’ll hand pick some people from my organization, sellers to directors to even people that aren’t even associated with it. Somebody may be on HR. I’ll say, “Hey, what do you think of this? Do you have time to just like do a once over glance? Does this make sense? Is this like interesting to you? What kind of feedback do you have? Does it make sense? Is it confusing? I also like to try it myself and step outside of the blinders that I sometimes get in enablement and say, “okay, this makes sense to me, but is this going to make sense to a brand-new sales rep who’s coming in for onboarding? Is this going to be engaging as a continued training for somebody who’s been selling here for five years and knows a product inside and out?”

I think gathering that feedback and doing that beta testing before I release or launch anything is super helpful in figuring out what does my audience need and what are they looking for to make this exciting, make this engaging, and make this a worthwhile learning journey?

Another key component of the experimentation and how I utilize that in my building of enablement programs is always, always, always keeping “why” as a central question to everything that we’re doing. Why is this important? Why is this our business objective? Why do this activity? Especially with adult learners, I feel like if you set it up and you’re like, “we’re going to do this and that’s the end of it,” people immediately tune out. It’s same with fifth graders, same with kids. If they’re like, “okay, we have to learn about this. Why?” If I don’t have a good answer for why, kids are tuned out. They’re not paying attention. Adults are tuned out. They’re not paying attention. If you lead with a why, “this is why we’re doing this training, this is why it’s important to practice your mock calls. This is why we are going to do this specific feedback grading”, that helps to give learners, the ability to think about how the program can be helpful or successful for them in terms of learning. Then, it also helps me to continually refine and iterate on my programs because sometimes that why changes. Sometimes it becomes, “okay, well, this isn’t necessarily a business need anymore, but this is a super important skill, so let me re let me rephrase this. Let me re-look at things and make sure that the why is lining up so that it doesn’t come off as, well, you just have to do it because, or this program exists because it’s just a program us to exist”

SS: Absolutely. I have two young children myself, and I know that route does not work nine times out of 10. Now, last question for you. This is something that I’ve heard you say before, that failures and mistakes are an inevitable part of the learning process. As an enablement leader, how do you cultivate a learning environment where people really feel safe making mistakes, and how does that help reps improve their confidence?

KS: Like you said, I think mistakes and misses are part of any successful learning process. I’m sure if you go and ask Tom Brady he will tell you that there’s been a lot of misses and mistakes in his career, but he’s still out there as one of the greatest quarterbacks, if not the greatest quarterback, of all time. Mistakes and misses are part of what get you to be at the top of your game, literally and figuratively. For me, what I always like to make sure that everybody knows that mistakes are part of this. There are no perfect sales reps out of the box. Nobody shows up and is automatically the top sales leader for their region. Two weeks into the show, six months into the show, a year into it, there are always things that you can learn. There are always going to be things that trip you up. There are always going to be things that you thought were going to be an easy success that turns out to be a big failure. There are things that you go into and you might be like, “I don’t know about this.” Then, you turn out to be a raging success.

Understanding that there’s an ebb and flow and there’s a give and take, and that mistakes are just as important as successes and setting that context from day one with new reps, I think is super important. Some of the things that I do to help reps understand that mistakes are part of it is I would involve some of our top reps. Of course, everybody knows in an organization who are your top sellers? Word goes around during onboarding, “oh, these people are great, watch what he does at his desk. She’s been top of the charts for a number of months, listen to her calls if you get a chance.” I love to bring those reps in and have them highlight, “this one time I forgot to take notes for this meeting.” But I also try to have them explain “from that time when I blew that call, this is what I changed.
And now look what happened. I wound up closing this big deal”. Or, “I forgot to take notes that time and it was a total mess coming into it, so next time I used a notes template and I really used that template until I got it down. That was able to help inform me from my next calls and these amazing notes that I took for this call helped me close this deal six months later and it was the biggest deal of my career so far.”

I try to showcase the fact that there are going to be misses. There are going to be mistakes. It’s totally part of it. Nobody closes every deal all the time, even though we all like to think so. I want to highlight that as part of the learning process. I also like to utilize a call recording software that I can go back and give examples of “here’s a call that needs a little bit of work, and here’s why, and here’s the same person doing that call after they’ve gotten their feedback after they sat down with their sales director and talked about what they could do better. And here’s an example of how they change the call — they brought their talk time down. They set the agenda really early. They created follows.” Using those real-life examples and showcasing that no one gets to the top of their game by always winning and having things come easy that there is a learning curve for everyone, for the top reps, for the sales directors, for the CEO, there’s always going to be a learning curve and making sure that you’re able to rebound from those mistakes or those misses, learn from them, and apply those learnings is what’s going to make you successful as a sales rep. It’s going to make you successful in relationships. It’s what’s going to make you successful as a learner. It’s what’s going to make you successful with friendships. I think just being able to identify when something didn’t go the right way or missed a little bit or was off and then figuring out what we could do differently, applying that critical thinking and that feedback from others who may have been there before you, and has been through the same thing, and then putting that into action will lead to success down the line. It’s okay to not be successful overnight.

SS: I think that’s fantastic advice, not just for enablement, but life itself. Kathryn, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciated learning from you.

KS: Thank you so much for having me. This was great.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Roderick Jefferson: Absolutely. First of all, Shawnna, I’m absolutely honored to be here with you again and looking forward to diving in on this. From an intro perspective, my name is Roderick Jefferson, I’m the VP of field enablement at Netskope, a cybersecurity company. I am responsible for field enablement – that includes everything other than customer education. So, I’ve got SDR, BDR, sales, technical, alliances, and channels as well as customer experience, so the full gamut.

SS: Very excited to have you here RJ. Now, we’ve known each other for years and you’ve actually previously joined us on our Book Club podcast with Olivia Fuller, and there we asked you about kind of the core components of an enablement strategy and you broke it down for that audience into three key categories: strategy, architecture, and reinforcement. I’d love to start at the top. How does strategy lay the foundation for the architecture and reinforcement pieces?

RJ: Well, I think it starts at the very foundation of things. What I mean here is you need to understand who’s your audience, what are you looking for, what’s your definition of enablement and who’s your audience? Finally, what are the metrics and how are you going to validate all the things that you’re doing from an enablement perspective? I don’t mean the old-school smiley sheets and butts in seats, but what are we doing to really impact a few things? One is overall revenue. Secondly, accelerated speed to revenue. Next is overall proficiency for our folks. Then finally, how are we now building out what I call the front and the back of the house, which is inclusive of sales, pre-sales, product marketing, marketing, etc… all the way out through customer support and customer experience so that you’re not building a big, beautiful house with a short hallway where your prospects and your customers are turning out the back door.

SS: I always love the analogies that you come up with. Now, as you’re building out your house or your sales enablement strategy, what are some methods for ensuring that your approach has longevity and is really built for scale?

RJ: Well, first and foremost, it starts with working with sales leadership and understanding what their needs are and their expectations and then agreeing upfront before you dive into things that these are going to be the key three to five objectives and then you’re going to have to agree on the KPIs. The reason I say that first is so that the ball when you get close to, let’s say you’re in the red zone and you’re about to score, the post doesn’t move and the end zone doesn’t move as it happens. Also, as practitioners, we’ve all seen it before. Here are our top five things, and here’s two more that we need to do. Well, the answer is literally, absolutely, we can do anything, but we can’t do everything. In order to make sure that it’s realistic and we’re all being set up for success, what are the two things we’re going to take off of my plate and my team rather than just continually piling things on?

SS: That’s a fantastic approach. I don’t know if I can handle the football analogies right now, though, with all the trading that’s been going on recently.

RJ: There’s a lot going on out there, a lot of craziness.

SS: Just lost one of my favorite players.

RJ: Russell Wilson, let me guess.

SS: Yes. And Bobby Wagner.

RJ: Yes, he’s gone now as well.

SS: Yes, it’s a tough time to think about football. When you’re outlining the goals for your strategy, though, getting back on the topic of enablement, how can you create goals that drive specific transformation and measurable change in the organization and its performance?

RJ: Again, it’s a collaborative effort, it’s a matter of understanding from top-down and I mean from the CEO and the e-staff going down, what are the key objectives and that way it doesn’t become just a sales enablement initiative. This is something that is now woven into the fabric of the company and the culture. Also, it’s something that’s being driven down. I’ll give you an example. We are in the midst of rolling out a brand spanking new sales methodology. Instead of me going out, and I could jump on these workshops and say, “hey, here’s the value of it. Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s why we’re doing it. Here are all the KPIs, here the objectives.” Instead, what we actually did was had our CEO do a 30-second recording on the value and how important this is transformationally across the entire organization and company. Now, what does that say? One, it says that the CEO is fully behind this and is a part of the strategy and the execution piece. Secondly, it says this is a companywide initiative. This is not something that’s only being driven by sales or field enablement, in my case.

SS: Yes, I think getting executive reinforcement is absolutely critical, especially when it comes to those big initiatives like rolling out a new sales methodology, for sure.

RJ: It takes a village.

SS: It really does. I want to actually return to something that you had also brought up in the Book Club episode that you had done with us previously. You talked about the idea of creating an enablement council to improve alignment with other teams. I’d love to dig into this a little bit so that our audience can get tips and tricks on how they might be able to comprise a similar council. How do you go about identifying the right players to bring to the table? How can it help you secure maybe some more of that buy-in at the executive level for enablement strategy and really improve the collaboration across these teams?

RJ: Great questions. If I may, let me do them backwards about the buy-in piece and I’ll come back to who should be at the table and what the enablement council is. The second part of this is all about making sure that everyone is on the same page, that everyone is hearing the same instructions, definitions, goals, objectives, again KPIs. But the key piece here is, Shawnna, that they hear it in their language.

Now, let me go back to who should be at the table. That should be marketing, product marketing, HR, engineering, channels, and alliances, as well as sales and enablement. Why? Because it requires all of them to service our internal customers. I don’t believe in calling them stakeholders. They should be your internal customers and enablement should be that hub that spokes out to each one of them. But that’s not enough.

The other piece is you have to be able to speak in their language. Thus, I call us the translators of dialects and languages. You’ve got to be able to speak Spanish, French, Russian, German, Swiss, English, etc. – and that would be all of the multiplicity of languages of each of those lines of business. Don’t go out trying to teach them “sales enablement-ease”, because you’ll lose them right away. The purpose of the field enablement – or sales enablement – council is getting all of these folks together at the same table on a monthly basis. There are executables. There are deliverables and most importantly, there is accountability for each one of those.

Let’s look at a real-life example. You bring them together, and let’s say you’re rolling out a brand-new sales bootcamp, as we’re doing. I’m going to talk to product marketing and make sure we’ve got the most current and consistent messaging and positioning. We just came out of SKO, so I want to make sure everything is fresh there. I’m talking to product management around release cycles and making sure that the things we’re teaching these folks that are coming through onboarding and eventually boot camp are getting the most current information. I’m talking to channels and alliances because I want to make sure that we’re getting at the same level for our partners that we’re getting internally, or if there needs to be some kind of adjustment, that we’re all on the same page. I’m talking to SEs, sales engineering folks, on the technical side as well as our CS and CX organizations because we need to understand what those roles need on a different, sometimes deeper and wider level versus just trying to peanut butter things across all of the various roles.

Now, once you get them all together, it’s amazing how much collaboration, communication and then finally orchestration comes out of this because you’re not having to repeat this multiple times. It’s not like the old telephone game that we did is as a kid where you whisper in their ear and by the time that same message gets to the other side of the room, suddenly the bunny wears fuzzy slippers. Well, that’s not exactly what I said. You don’t have to repeat that multiple times, and there’s nothing better than bringing sales and marketing and all these other groups to the same table at the same time.

SS: I could not agree more. To the audience, if you don’t yet have an enablement council in place, take Roderick’s advice and establish one this year. It will change the game for you within your organization. Now, you brought up your book, “Sales Enablement 3.0,” which is absolutely one of my favorite books in our space. In it, you really talk about the importance for enablement leaders to position the function as a strategic lever in the business to overcome that old perception that we have around enablement being the “fixer of the broken things”. In your opinion, what are some of the challenges that practitioners might have in proving that strategic impact? How can they overcome some of those challenges?

RJ: Well, I think first of all, another fantastic question, and I think it starts with not identifying yourself and being only viewed as either schedulers and coordinators or just training. Don’t get me wrong, training serves its purpose, but it also puts you in a box, as Shawnna said. You become the fixers of broken things and broken people. That’s not what we do, right? We bring so much more value to an organization than just doing those things. And by the way, I think IT has that whole fixer of broken things kind of cornered. I’m going to let them keep that.

Instead of doing that, get away from just NPS scores. Everything that you do has to resonate back from a focus metric on how are you accelerating speed to revenue? You’re increasing productivity per head and you are creating synergy between the front and the back of the house. I always start with talking with your leaders right away and understanding what’s important to them from metrics, and I don’t mean just numbers. I go to a sales leader and I say, “hey, I’ve got a laundry list that we can talk about. Everything from average deal size, collateral use and frequency, deal velocity, new pipeline creation, number of closed deals, product mix, quota attainment, win and loss rates. Of all of those things, what’s important to you?” That way I can now go back with sales ops and work inside of my CRM to say, all right, here are dashboards, and here are reports that I can show you on an ongoing basis.

Here’s an example. When I first came into a previous life at Marketo, the time-to-first- close in the mid-market was 88 days. By the time I left, two and a half years later, it was 54 days. Now, I can go back and say, “okay, the number of times that folks are now more productive times the number of sellers times their quota, here’s how enablement has impacted and influenced it.” Please, don’t say that we drive revenue because we don’t carry a bag, but we do impact and influence revenue, and here’s how we did it from a hard-line revenue metrics perspective. That speaks volumes to not only the sales leader but to your executive team. It makes you show up in a whole different light whereby now you become a partner with sales, marketing, product marketing, engineering, HR etc… versus this is the training team, these are the people that do scheduling and coordinating. Does that answer your question?

SS: Yes, and it’s night and day the difference that enablement can make when they get that seat at the table.

RJ: Absolutely.

SS: Well, RJ, I always learn a ton when I talk to you. I’d like to close on one question though, because the enablement function has been evolving rapidly over the years. I mean, we’ve seen significant change in the time that we’ve been in it. What is your advice for how other enablement leaders can keep up with and stay ahead of the curve here?

RJ: Yes, I always start with networking and networking with people that are more senior than you and also less senior, and it may sound oxymoronic, but I want to explain. You’re talking to the more seasoned folks. Why? Because they’ve been there and done it. As we say, you’ve been to a couple of picnics and rodeos, so they’ve been through where you’re going so they can give you not only how to do things, but how not to. To me, it’s equally as important, if not more important.

And why do I say someone more junior than you? Here’s why. They’re on the cutting edge they may have inlets and outlets for new technology, for new fresh ideas, for integrations of things that you may not even have thought of because you’ve gotten comfortable doing things the way that you’re doing it. They will break you from that on both sides. So, I try and submit myself between very seasoned people and then people that are kind of net-new coming into enablement so that I can learn from both of them.

The second piece is always be a perpetual learner. I don’t care what your title is, I don’t care how large the logo is on your company. Always be a perpetual learner, because you can learn something new every day and look at things and shift. To your point, Shawnna, for as long as we’ve been in enablement, what I realize is it constantly shifts.

The third piece is you have to keep your pulse on the direction the company is going, not just focus on how can I get them there by working on doing right now? And finally, you have to build what I call a culture of learning across your organization, and that means everything from beginning on the front end of enablement, being a part of the talent assessment and acquisition. Yes, you should be a part of the interview cycle. Make sure that you have a role-specific onboarding program, because we’re doing this virtual. I’d say now start thinking about how you can shift your virtual to live because before the end of the year, we’ll be back on-site doing these. I have no doubt.

The next is what are we doing from a business acumen perspective and what new tools are available, but not from the perspective of just shiny new tools, but instead, what can I learn more about that will fit and parse out inside of my organization based upon where we are in the maturation cycle of our company? Next is the coaching and reinforcement of your first and second-line managers. That’s where the buck stops. You can have an amazing world-class enablement program, but if they’re not a part of building this and they don’t buy into it, they won’t own the adoption, the execution or most importantly, they will not own the positive modeling of this.

The next is I go back to metrics. For me, everything goes back to metrics because if you just have numbers, you’re not of high value to the company. And finally, and most importantly, make sure that you’re putting in succession plans around guided learning paths. For those that don’t know what those are, that is from the first day of employment for a given role that is role-specific all the way through until leadership, coaching, and delivery. If you’ve got all of that in place, you now have a world-class sales enablement program versus just training.

SS: Fantastic advice, Roderick, as always. Thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate the time.

RJ: My absolute honor. Thank you.

SS: Again to our audience, I will give a plug – if you haven’t read Roderick Jefferson’s book, “Sales Enablement 3.0” yet, definitely check it out. You can find it on Amazon, or you can connect with Roderick for additional details.

To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Crystal Thompson from AmerisourceBergen join us. Crystal, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Crystal Thompson: Hi, Shawnna, thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be here and have this discussion. As you said, I’m Crystal Thompson. I’m Senior Vice President of Business Enablement for AmerisourceBergen. AB is a leading global health care company with a foundation and pharmaceutical distribution and solutions for manufacturers, pharmacies and providers, and we have over 42,000 team members around the globe.

In my role as SVP of Business Enablement, the functions have varied since I have been in the role in 2018 to include sales operations and enablement, fleet management, commercial learning and development, which includes the training of sales teams along with distribution center team members, customer operations and enterprise data and analytics. The team also supports Salesforce knowledge management. Lastly, we provide project management support for various initiatives, and right now, we’re having an increased emphasis on supporting strategic transformation programs. Personally, I’m a native of Kansas City, Missouri, and I currently live in Philadelphia with my fiancé.

SS: Well, Crystal, we are excited to have you here, and you certainly cover a breadth of responsibilities at AB. You lead the team that really drives the go-to-market transformation initiatives as you concluded in your intro. From your perspective, I’d love to understand, how is enablement uniquely positioned to lead transformation efforts for the business?

CT: Sure. One of the things I talk to my team about all the time is what is our superpower? Our superpower is that we are that connection point between the various business functions. AmerisourceBergen is a complex, large matrix organization, and because we sit in the center of sales, distribution, customer service, and others, we can see that intersection or potential collisions that others might not see. To take advantage of that superpower, what makes us special, we have to eliminate silos within our own team, creating opportunities to share information with the teams we support. Ultimately, that’s what enablement is, it’s making the teams we support successful.

SS: I love that you think about it in terms of superpowers. It really does take quite a tremendous effort. What are some of the key elements of a successful transformation strategy?

CT: Sure, Shawnna. I can think of three elements that really stand out to me. Of course, there are a lot more, but the three that come top of mind. One is alignment of the vision, two, solid decision making, and three, an inclusive environment, and I’ll explain a little bit about what I mean by each of those.

First, having alignment on the vision, we need everyone to be on the same page with the desired outcomes. The details and the how will be unclear initially, and that is some of the ambiguity that needs to be resolved with any transformation. However, everyone needs to be aligned on that same North Star and understand the vision. When I say solid decision-making, I think of that also in threes, that it’s fact-based, swift, and defined decision rights. Striking that balance between having the right amount of information to make an informed decision, but not finding yourself in analysis paralysis. It also means you are delegating decisions where appropriate. If you have senior leaders that don’t allow the people closest to the work to have input and make decisions where appropriate, you find that decisions are made without a full understanding of all the downstream implications and that can be tragic.

Then when I say creating and fostering an inclusive culture, a culture where everyone is allowed to speak, a culture where dissenting voices are not only allowed but encouraged. If we’re in the midst of a real transformation and everyone around the table always agrees and nods their head, yes, you should look out. You have trouble. That means there are voices that aren’t being heard, and if you’re not hearing those voices, you’re not getting all of the value from your team members.

SS: I think those are really phenomenal points. What are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve experienced leading transformation projects and how have you worked to overcome some of those challenges?

CT: It’s interesting. I think of it in the context of the three areas that I mentioned. There wasn’t alignment on the vision, decision-making took literally years, and it wasn’t clear who could make decisions. I’ve been in projects where I was personally afraid to speak up because I knew those in leadership positions weren’t opening to listening. When you ask, how do you overcome, you really don’t. When we talk about projects that are late, over budget, people are drained, that’s a recipe for disaster. It’s really about making sure that you have a solid foundation to lead a successful transformation. Without that foundation, you’re really setting yourself up and really putting yourself in a hole that you can’t recover from.

SS: You had mentioned you have expertise in implementing solutions across people, process, and technology. What role do each of these play in driving transformation projects and how do you balance each as you build your strategy?

CT: As I think about the balance, I think about some of those hard lessons that I’ve learned throughout my career. An example was I was involved in a transformation initiative that was viewed as a technology project. This technology project was bringing multiple sales teams into the same CRM. OK, technology is a large component of it, but because it was seen as a technology program, we didn’t map the converging business processes, we didn’t validate the readiness of the sales teams, we didn’t validate the readiness of the supporting operational teams, we didn’t train on business process, and it was a failure. The bottom line is a true transformation has both people process and technology that all have to work together. They all have to be blended to make sure that we have careful consideration of all three.

SS: Now, transformation initiatives rely very heavily on behavior change as well. How do you gain buy-in across the teams that you support to really motivate them to change?

CT: There’s no single answer to motivating teams around change. I would say the first step is listening and understanding the dynamics of the environment and the people you’re working with. Meeting people where they are is such an important component when you’re asking people to change. For some teams, they’re experiencing pain points from older technology or inefficient processes, so they might be motivated by understanding how this change will streamline their day-to-day activity. Some teams are customer-facing and in the field, so they might be driven by real-time access to information or how a change will provide them with customer insights. Other teams might be driven by innovation and the ability to be next-minded. I think it’s really understanding where a team is, then you can develop tactics to help support them through change. I would say this is another area where I will highlight inclusion. Involving change agents from the impacted teams is critical. The more people feel heard and engaged, the more likely they are to accept the change.

SS: I agree completely. Now, a closing question for you, Crystal. How can practitioners measure behavior change and then really correlate that back to the impact of their programs?

CT: Now, this is one of the more challenging areas that I’ve seen in terms of measurement around behavior change because there tend to be so many factors involved. If we say we’re implementing an initiative to increase revenue, how do we tie that initiative or project to revenue when there are so many factors that might impact that? What I would say that I’ve seen be successful is breaking measurement down into behaviors that are truly measurable. If we believe implementing a CRM will drive increased revenue, then measure CRM usage and we should start to see that increase over time and then be able to tie that to revenue. Measuring where knowledge management articles are being used pre and post-learning intervention. We should see after a learning intervention that people don’t need to rely on knowledge management as much. Measuring days until a new sales team member meets the criteria to go out into the field. For me, it’s really about breaking down those actual behaviors into tactics that can be measured, but it’s definitely a challenge.

SS: Absolutely. Well, Crystal, I really appreciate your time today and all of the amazing advice that you provided on transformation initiatives here during this podcast session.

CT: My pleasure. Happy to be here.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have April Logan from the Reuters News Agency join us. April, I would love for you to introduce yourself your role, and your organization to our audience.

April Logan: Hi there, and thank you so much for inviting me to participate. It’s great being here. I’m originally from Scotland, but I have been living in London or around London since 2010. I currently live on a small farm just outside London with my husband James, son Edward, and we have a Rhodesian Ridgeback, Zula. In terms of my character, I would say I am a driven individual and I think lots of people in enablement are, and I always have been. I think I started working for a pound an hour since I was 11 years old, and I’ve thankfully progressed since then.

I studied events management at Leeds Beckett University, which is North Yorkshire sort of northern England. I started my career organizing conferences globally, which was suitably fun in my early twenties, and then I pivoted into the charitable sector where I was responsible for fundraising events. In the end, I found that my passion was actually in learning and development or helping people in that way through training or coaching. I started working for training organizations such as MindGym and Euromoney Training before I joined Thomson Reuters, which is where I am currently.

I work within the Reuters News Agency side of Thomson Reuters, and it’s the largest, most trusted news source in the world. I think that in terms of its culture, it’s an incredibly inclusive organization, it has a huge amount of talent and opportunity, and it’s been a fantastic place to work. I lead the Sales Enablement Team for Reuters News Agency, and I tend to break down my role and remit into a couple of pillars. We’ve got learning and development, which includes sales coaching and soft skills training, as well as product accreditations. We then pivot to the second pillar, which is around sales talent and recruitment. This includes anything from sales onboarding through to competency assessments during the recruitment process and, of course, measurement of performance in their first 30, 60, 90 days, internal communications, and asset management. I own the sales leadership operating rhythm, which also includes the performance or the strategic review, feedback and analytics, both internal and customer feedback, go-to-market to ensure that our sales are ready, and then our sales tools as well. A really broad remit. I’ve got an incredibly talented team; we are small and we have a global audience.

SS: I’m excited to have you here, April. Now, you mentioned that you are a sales leadership business partner and that you act as the conduit between departmental teams and the senior sales management. How is sales enablement uniquely positioned within the business to really be that core business partner to sales leaders?

AL: Thanks for that. First of all, I think there’s a trend where sales enablement is starting to be part of that executive committee. We are very much in the center. What I mean by that is every department such as legal products, finance, even billing or marketing, they all support the commercial organization. I believe that to be true within most or any business. Sales enablement is uniquely positioned to be able to facilitate developments from any supporting team. Whatever they’re working on, we’re able to take that, translate it in a digestible way for sales, and then we can roll out those developments in a way that adds value to our customers. Having a sales enablement function is incredibly beneficial to sales, but also to any supporting team that helps businesses accelerate the rollout of any enhancements or changes or new processes being put in place.

SS: Absolutely. I’d love to understand from your perspective, what are some strategies for successfully bridging the gap between the departmental teams and sales leadership to really create better alignment?

AL: Great question. I think alignment is incredibly important, particularly in sales enablement, but also with your cross-functional team. One of the main strategies that I have worked on recently was looking at the go-to-market strategy and process surrounding it, and I worked with two other colleagues, and we designed a tier system.

Tier one is being a big launch that has significant commercial value or strategic importance. Tier two and tier three are enhancements or smaller upgrades still super important, but not as much as tier one. We defined those tiers, we mapped out deliverables against each of those tiers, and we were able to get the buy-in and alignment from the executive committee, which meant that everyone was very clear on what enhancements or launches were considered tier one, tier two, tier three. We were able to then deliver that to the rest of the organization, make sure that we had everyone’s buy-in and that everyone could see value in this new process. When we look at our product roadmap today, it’s incredibly clear what is required for each launch, whether it be big or small, who is responsible, accountable or informed at each stage across the different departments, and it clearly defines opportunities for focus for the sales team and our customers. That’s an example of where alignment can work incredibly well, and we’ve seen some great success since its launch.

Other examples of strategies could be on having consistency around sales methodology. Absolutely, the sales team need to know what your sales methodology is from an internal perspective and how we want to be communicating to our customers. I think we could also consider the supporting functions to be involved in that, so proposition marketing or integrated marketing or products. If they are creating collateral for the sales team and for our customers, it should be in line with the sales methodology our sellers are embracing to ensure that there is alignment and consistency around how we are delivering things to sales and fundamentally to our customers.

SS: Now, another thing you mentioned that you are responsible for is managing the sales and sales leadership operating rhythm. To start, I would love for you to define how you think about the operating rhythm, but I’d also love to understand how you go about analyzing the most efficient rhythms for the overall sales or to operate within, especially when there is so many moving parts?

AL: Thank you. First of all, when I talk about operating rhythm, I’m thinking about what is it that the leadership and sales team need to focus on and how are we going to be able to plan out the year and their operating rhythm for the year to ensure that we are focused on the right things? I think it can mean different things and in different organizations. I’d say I don’t know about everyone else, but every year for me is faster than the previous one. Change is constant and it’s relentless, and that’s all being part of an enablement team.

The operating rhythm at Reuters is a crucial part in ensuring that we deliver things timely. When I say we, I mean, the sales organization are on track to hit targets and our goals and the team are motivated and learning from one another, as well as them feeling informed of any changes or developments coming their way. It’s a crucial part. Certain items in the operating rhythm happen quarterly, such as quarterly business reviews, whereas other items are monthly given the mass volume of product changes or enhancements or market insights that we may want to share with the sales team.

Some aspects of this as well could be mandatory, whereas others are optional, it’s important to identify what they are. As a sales team, time is precious, but we trust the team to pick and choose what’s right for their needs. If we’re doing lunch and learns or if we’re posting podcasts, then they aren’t mandatory to listen to, but they’re going to help some of the individuals, for sure.

Sales tools are fundamental to the success and speed in which our sellers can find content and collateral to support customer engagement and conversations. Whether it’s a content management system or a social tool to support an advocacy program, all of this and all of these ways of communicating with sales are part of the operating rhythm. Lastly, it’s important to always speak with sales, ask for their feedback and respond to feedback, to ensure that we, as a team, are hitting their needs. In terms of that final part of your question, how do we ensure what’s most efficient, it’s just keeping close on what we are delivering and how it’s impacting the sales team.

SS: Absolutely. What would you say are some challenges to maintaining a consistent operating rhythm? How often do you go about re-evaluating these workflows to keep up with all of the shifts that have happened in the business, especially as you said in the last two years?

AL: There is a lot and I think we always start at the beginning of the year with a schedule of meetings, deliverables and calendars. I think gone are the days where individuals have annual goals. Most of us now have quarterly goals because things change so quickly, so we need to be able to continuously pivot or adjust the operating rhythm to align with the business priorities. Of course, that can be a challenge.

One of the other key challenges for my team is the global nature of our audience. Our sales team sits across 33 countries and therefore we need to be mindful of some individuals missing out on some of the developments that we’re doing. We tend to ensure that we have two options in place, that we’re thinking about the global time scale, not just US-focused or a UK-focused, it’s really got to be central and thinking about the entire sales team. Of course, with every global audience, there comes a challenge. I’d say that’s another challenge for us, but we navigate it, we flex our errors accordingly, and we double book most things. If we are having a training program, then there will be two of them. If we have a monthly sales call, there will be two of them, just to ensure that we are supporting all parts of the business.

In terms of re-evaluating and measuring, we measure the following areas. I’d say, do our sellers have clarity on the strategic execution or operational goals in our business? If yes, then great. Are we seeing business improvements or are we speeding up the sales cycle? Are we selling to more new customers? Are we retaining more of our customers? Is our NPS score improving? How is our internal health index doing? Are our sellers motivated? Are they happy? Lastly, we can monitor activity across sales tools. Are the team using them? That also includes leadership dashboards. Are our leadership team coaching the sales team to help them retain the information that we are pushing out to them? There are just a couple of areas that we look at in terms of measurement.

SS: Now, I want to shift gears a little bit. You called out the importance of supporting sales leaders through performance management. What are some of the key performance metrics you track to help inform the strategy and decision-making of the sales leaders?

AL: Yes, we do support the leaders, but I would say most importantly, we support each and every salesperson and the entire sales team are the sales enablement customers. When looking at performance, the sellers that I work with are some of the smartest people I know. When it comes to performance, there are many things to consider and offer leadership support on.

A few examples could include we’ve got coaching tools available for the sales leaders, dashboards that they can use in their one-to-ones to reinforce key messages or behaviors, we can look at competency levels to help identify things like skill gaps or even personality gaps within a team. It could be at an individual level, a team level or even regional level and implement training programs to support those gaps. In terms of other performance-related items, the market could change, someone might have personal circumstances. In terms of matrix, it really does depend on each and every single situation.

SS: Alright April, last question for you. How do you go about ensuring your programs within sales enablement are really rolling up into the larger business initiatives and priorities across sales leaders in the executive team? How do you go about really demonstrating the impact of enablement on those key business priorities?

AL: I love this question because I think genuinely, over the last four years, sales enablement is increasingly becoming and being part of that strategic executive team. I feel like it is not as if that we need to roll up because I think we are already there. Actually, it’s not uncommon now for enablement to recommend areas for focus to the executive team to then consider. I’d say sales enablement tends to have high presence across the business because the majority of our projects or the work that we all do, it is high profile. We are getting exposure because we are making an impact on sales or the growth of our business.

In terms of what success looks like or impact, I’d say sales enablement demonstrates – my team certainly demonstrates their impact by directly influencing the growth or achievements being made by our sales team. When a new proposition reaches target in record time, we can attribute that to our sales enablement program, or if we are seeing more new joiners close their fast sales quicker than previously, we can attribute that to mid-year sales onboarding program. Then we could look at something like the sales process. Is it faster because of the latest tool that we have launched and rolled out across sales? In terms of our impact and how we align with the executive team, I think we are definitely seeing us having a seat at that table more and more and more.

SS: April, thank you so much for joining us. I learned a ton.

AL: No worries. I hope it was helpful, loved being part of it. Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you would like to share or a topic you would like to learn more about, please let us know we would love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Kevin Morrell from R3 join us. Kevin, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Kevin Morrell: Wonderful. Thank you so much Shawnna for having me, I’m really excited to be a part of this.

For me, my name is Kevin Morrell and I’m the senior manager of global sales enablement at R3. R3 really is a software company that builds blockchain solutions in the financial space. So in other words, it really builds the future of transactions on a very large scale. As for me, my background is that I’ve held a number of different jobs in my past, anywhere from being a cowboy for two years, a theater and circus coach, before transitioning into initially an SDR role and then an account executive. Then finally, for my most recent future, I have been sitting very steadily in sales enablement.

SS: Well, I’m extremely excited to have you here Kevin. I think we all heard correctly that in your past, prior to your time in enablement, you spent time as a theater and circus coach, which you also have on your LinkedIn profile. That’s definitely what sparked my interest and I think it’s also what sparked your passion for training. So how does that experience influence your approach to enablement?

KM: My background is in theater and my passion for training really started when I took a year off from college and traveled to Northern Greenland to a small island called Umiak to be a theater and circus coach for at-risk children. And when I say at-risk, I mean, one of the children, his name was Nuke and he was eight years old and the leader of a gang of 20-year-olds. So very intimidating in many ways and I had to teach him a “Little Star” on the saxophone.

Over that time, many instruments were thrown, broken, you name it. But one day, after months of really not getting anywhere, he overheard me playing the Titanic theme song and something clicked for both of us. His eyes lit up, he knew the song, and he practiced it every day and became my top student. The way I see it, he saw what’s in it for him, he had the freedom to play what he wanted to and I saw what was in it for me, which is really empowering others to unleash their skills.

So, enablement is very similar in that regard where salespeople, they’re hungry for knowledge, but on the one hand, you may have a certain plan that you want to support them with, but it might not necessarily resonate. You really have to find what’s in it for them and that’s kind of been my approach for enablement ever since.

SS: I think your approach is spot on and that’s quite the background. Given your unique career path to sales enablement, what advice would you give to people who might want to make the transition into an enablement role from another department? How can they set themselves up for success in an enablement career?

KM: That’s an excellent question. I think the wonderful thing about enablement is that you can come from so many different backgrounds. For me, I come primarily from a sales background, but that’s not a prerequisite. I’ve seen people come from revenue operations, finance, executive assistants, even a person that was a trainer for very gruff construction workers for her whole life that came to a very hip tech company. So completely different worlds, but she was one of the best enablement trainers I have had and that’s just because she was able to bring in an angle and a perspective that the others did not. So in this case, diversity in enablement is a blessing and you should use that to your success.

As for some of the key principles, I would say one, get to know the team where enablement sits. So it depends if it’s an existing team or maybe it’s something new that you can bring up, but really understand the needs of that specific team. Two, learn everything and anything enablement. It’s a fairly new field with many opinions and especially if you’re seeing opinions that are contradictory, that’s really where something interesting is at stake there, pay close attention to those. Since you’re listening to this podcast, you’re already on the right track to that learning.

Finally, try to identify where you can have an impact. For example, if you’re coming from a RevOps perspective, what type of sales-specific process knowledge can you imbue in this enablement role? If you’re coming from a product or marketing side, is it something that you can help with positioning? Find what you can bring to the table and that would be my best advice.

SS: That’s phenomenal advice. Now, in your opinion, what are some of the core skills that it takes to be successful as an enablement practitioner today?

KM: In terms of the core skills, I would say that there are really three main ones that, at least, I live by. The first one is listening and asking questions. I always say that the floor has answers, you just have to listen to them through the lens of a salesperson. You’ll hear a ton of different ideas, but they’ll really paint the picture for the solution that you’re looking for. Also, as part of listening, be a connector between multiple teams. When you’re first entering a new enablement role, you will have tons of ideas that you will want to implement, write them down, but in the meantime, listen.

The second would be that enablement professionals have a million day-to-day tasks and those are important, but always ask, what am I trying to achieve and what will the impact be? It’s very easy to get bogged down in details and not realize that maybe I’m going in the wrong direction altogether. Is this aligned with the larger goals? Are there other stakeholders in agreement? I’ve gone down that path, the wrong path many times before, so I would say, just always try to take a step back and see what am I trying to impact?

And three, this is a less sexy one, but I would say repetition. It’s definitely less glamorous, but it can make or break even a million-dollar investment. Find creative ways to remind the team of something you rolled out, so it doesn’t go stale. In summary, listening, ensuring that you’re staying true to the real goal, and repetition, repetition, repetition.

SS: I think that’s fantastic advice. Now, to shift gears a little bit, you mentioned that you also have experience building enablement teams. From your perspective, what does an ideal team structure look like for an enablement function?

KM: This is an interesting one, as really there’s no ideal enablement team in theory. What I mean by that is that each situation and sales team will require a different group of people. How mature is the team? What are the needs of the team? For example, at one of my previous companies, the main challenge was to up-skill the value selling behavior of around 120 different people. We had to do certifications for multiple different stages in each call for each one of those people, as they got a little bit more stale and uncomfortable when the market was in fact changing. For that one, the need is going to be that you might potentially need somebody who is helping you take on that role of certifications.

At my current company, R3, it’s quite a different challenge where most of the salespeople don’t come from a traditional SAS with tech background and they needed more enablement on existing systems and getting existing knowledge spread out easier. What the team needs right now is more process knowledge. That’s really going to dictate how you are going to build out your team.

Overall, I would say in terms of best practices is one, diversity, you don’t want to have everybody having a similar thought style in a team. I would be looking for somebody who is highly detail-oriented and making sure that they’ll be focusing on collateral, that the systems are consistent, and I can bounce my ideas off them. As a team matures and that dynamic changes, maybe you’ll want to build out the team that might focus specifically on account managers, on direct account executives, so on and so forth. So that’s my answer, as building out an ideal team is really fluid and you’ll have to really listen to what the company needs.

SS: I think that’s fantastic advice and I agree oftentimes enablement has to be built around the construct of the business. I think we have time for maybe a couple more questions if you don’t mind. We’ve talked a little bit about a data-driven approach and I know that you believe that that is key in order to build and lead an enablement team. Why from your perspective is taking a data-driven approach so important?

KM: Yes, so data tends to be a very scary word, especially for somebody who’s like me and doesn’t really like numbers too much. So one thing I’ll clarify is that when I speak about data, it doesn’t necessarily always mean numbers, it can be a part of it, but it could be are we targeting the correct buyer personas? It could be a lot more.
Ultimately the reason data is so important is that earlier, I spoke about how important it is to ask questions, the floor has answers. A lot of the time when you’ll be asking a lot of questions and you’ll be getting conflicting reports, how do you understand what is actually happening? That’s where data comes in.

You can take a look at a problem, let’s say somebody mentions that there’s a lack of collateral, that’s a problem. Then you have to continue. How would they use that collateral, a sales cycle? Is there existing collateral that the team is aware of? No, they can’t find something on the current internal Wiki system. That’s how you begin to fine-tune where the actual problem is and have it through that data dictate, how am I going to build that out for that team?

The secondary reason is that a lot of the decision-makers in a company might not be as close to the sales team, but they do trust data. That’s kind of where you can show them on the numbers, that by shifting the buyer personas that we’re targeting, we can increase revenues by 20%, as an example. That’s something that can really speak to the larger company broadly.

SS: Excellent. Now, the last question on this before we close out is, how can enablement leaders use that data to really position the enablement team as a strategic lever for the business?

KM: Some of the ways that enablement leaders can use data to position the enablement team as a strategic lever for the business, is really to show problems that might not initially be apparent. Enablement roles, I think are a combination of data, which is the more quantitative side, but also the qualitative side, which is you’re representing the sales team in many ways, you understand the context of the numbers being put in place.

In that way, the enablement team can come together and not only show raw numbers or raw data, but also have the qualitative side, the story behind it that can really shine a lot of light on where the business should be pivoting potentially that they might not have otherwise. That can help you in influencing what is the product team going to work on all the way to what is marketing going to focus on? At least that’s how in my previous and current positions I’ve been able to leverage the enablement team and its strategic role.

SS: Well, thank you so much Kevin for taking the time to talk to us today. I appreciated learning more about you, your background, and your approach to enablement.

KM: Wonderful. Thank you so much again, Shawnna.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Alex Zikakis at Sales Assembly join us. Alex, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Alex Zikakis: Perfect. Thank you for having me, I’m excited to be here. Who am I? I am just a Midwest dad trying to raise my kids right, I’m trying to enjoy some sports, fix some things around the house, make my wife proud, and have a fun job.

What is that job? I am a VP of Enablement at a company called a Sales Assembly. It is a membership company for scaling businesses. We leverage the power of community to help support businesses as they scale through programming, through resources, and connection. That’s Sales Assembly in a nutshell.

SS: Awesome. Well, I’m excited to have you joining our Sales Enablement PRO podcast since we have very similar missions, but ours is focused on sales enablement professionals specifically. You actually often talk about enablement challenges even within Sales Assembly.

You wrote an article on some common onboarding pitfalls to avoid. I’d love to understand from your enablement experience, what are some key challenges that you’ve encountered in building out an onboarding program?

AZ: There are no shortage of challenges when it comes to building an effective onboarding program, so I appreciate the question. I will try and narrow it down to the five that I put in the article just to make it nice and packaged here

The five I wrote were an undefined partnership with HR or people teams. Basically, where do they stop and where do you begin and how does that interaction work? That’s one, number two would be the lack of community support. Either the community doesn’t know how to support you or there just isn’t any support, so enablement folks are forced to do it on their own. The third one would be knowledge loss. How do you ensure that when folks are drinking from the fire hose when they first join the company that they retain some of that important information? The fourth one would be the handoff to managers. After the onboarding experience, how do you ensure that the managers are set up for success to make sure that their people can be successful once they hit the floor, so to speak? The fifth one, unclear metrics. What does readiness actually mean, how do you measure it, and what does success look like, both for the individual as well as for the company at large?

Those are the five that I wrote. Like I said, there are countless challenges with onboarding programs, but those felt like the ones that were the most salient.

SS: I agree. Those are definitely some key five challenges. Now, how have you worked to overcome some of those, at least in your experience?

AZ: Yeah, it’s tough because those challenges span the scope of a bunch of different groups and programs and elements within the program. The way I’ve thought about it is thoughtful planning. First and foremost, identifying what the goals are and then how you back into those goals through the planning that you’re doing. The second piece is I really think setting and resetting expectations with the folks that you’re working with as well as with the onboarding new hires. If there’s not clear expectations, then that could lead to assumptions and it could lead to misaligned ideas of what to expect, and so setting and then resetting expectations consistently throughout the process, to me, feels super important.

I’d also say don’t be married to the solution that you build. This should be ever-changing and ever-growing and evolving to meet the needs of the learners and the business. Those are some of the ways in which that I’ve thought about tackling that.

SS: I love that very straightforward advice as well. Now, in that article, you also talked about defining a partnership with HR teams when you’re building onboarding programs. Why is that particular partnership so important?

AZ: It’s a great question. HR, to me, married up with the onboarding group, whoever is part of that team, between the two groups you’re responsible for welcoming new folks to the company, establishing culture, and setting them up for success. If there is unclear expectations or unclear processes, you won’t effectively be able to do those things. If you can’t set those folks up for success, the new hires, the folks going through onboarding, the likelihood of them having a successful experience both in the first couple of weeks and then just a longer-term tenure at the company, the likelihood of that goes significantly down if they don’t have a good onboarding experience. That’s why if you can’t partner successfully with HR, then you’re putting a lot at risk with these new hires, which can be super costly.

SS: Absolutely. Now beyond HR, who are some of the other core teams that you have to partner with in order to really create effective onboarding programs? I’d love to drill into how you go about cultivating really strong partnerships where there’s like shared accountability for onboarding success?

AZ: That’s a great question. Every company is different, and the groups that make up the onboarding team, the onboarding program, are going to be different in every company. The groups that I’ve bucketed or thought through as I’ve been thinking about onboarding over the past career of mine, HR, obviously, we already mentioned that, the hiring manager, the enablement team, both the folks that are focused on onboarding as well as maybe the broader enablement team will be valuable when it comes to the onboarding process and program. Revenue leadership, that’s the sales and success leadership, the executives of the company. I’m even thinking CEO, CFO, COO, that C-Suite should be a part of the onboarding program, and I’m happy to talk about why too. SMEs, so subject matter experts for the specific areas in which you’re continuing to train and onboard. Peers of the new hires, so folks that will sit in the seat next to them, so to speak, virtually obviously not quite that anymore. Then the new hires, obviously they’re a part of this program as much as anybody. Those are the groups that I thought about it. It’s a lot of groups, but that, to me, that community is what makes onboarding successful.

SS: Absolutely. No, I think that those are quite a few groups they have to align with, but it’s an all-in effort to make the overall company successful.

AZ: Yeah. You also asked, how do we cultivate those partnerships? Let me dive into that for a second here. I think it’s important that you are the quarterback for these groups. There’s so many groups and it would be foolish to assume that any of these groups have a clear sense of exactly what role they should be playing and how they should be playing that role. Again, this goes back to the idea of setting expectations and resetting expectations, having a clear sense of what role they play and sharing that with them.
I love this quote, “inspect what you expect,” so having a clear sense of what they should be doing and then ensuring that they know what they’re doing, inspecting that, and making sure that it’s exactly what you want so that they can play the role that they’re meant to play in the onboarding program. That goes for everyone from the new hire all the way up to the C-suite, like telling the CEO what you expect of them. Turns out it’s easier for them to do that than if you’re just like, oh, you’re the CEO, you can figure it out. That’s how I think about it.

SS: Yeah, absolutely, even CEOs need guidance sometimes. Now, in another LinkedIn post, you talked about your interest in utilizing AI technology to better equip remote employees. I’d love to tie this back into onboarding. How do you envision these types of digital tools being used in onboarding programs in the next year and beyond?

AZ: AI is the future. That’s what we’re all hoping for, that way I won’t have to work as hard. That’s my idea. I think about AI specifically in onboarding like this: Ideally, when you get someone new to the company, a new hire in onboarding, AI can help you identify the coaching opportunities and development opportunities before that person even starts. I would love to start the onboarding program and say, oh, Billy, I know he was strong in this area and needs help in that area. Sally over here is stronger in a different area in and weaker in another area over here. Now I’m going to partner them together and they’re going to learn really powerfully together based on the areas of opportunity I already know before onboarding starts. This opportunity identification before I think is super interesting, which would happen through screening tools and things like that.

In the HR and hiring process, I think another one is leveraging coaching opportunities or identifying coaching opportunities during the onboarding process. Through role-plays and potentially certifications and conversations like that, using recording tools that can help identify these coaching areas and opportunities in the onboarding process, to me, feels like a big opportunity. Then the other one would be surfacing the right content. Based on these opportunities, what’s content that enablement has built or resources that exist that we could surface to these folks so that they can easily enable themselves and self-learn to continue to develop? That way they wouldn’t be coming to the onboarding team with questions of like, what did go well, where am I weak, what do I do, and how do I do this? These things are naturally surfaced to them based on the actions they’ve been taking in the onboarding process. That’s my ideal state of what AI looks like. It’s the future so who knows it could be way cooler than that.

SS: I love that. Now, the last question for you. In closing, how do you measure the success of onboarding? What are some of the key metrics that you focus on to really prove the value or maybe even highlight areas to approve upon?

AZ: This is another one that’s super dependent on the business itself and what the goal is of onboarding, what the goal is of these folks. I would say, there’s the Kirkpatrick measurement model that I like to use all the time when I think about enablement. There are four levels of that measurement model.

There’s the reaction, there’s knowledge transfer, there’s behavioral change, and then there are results. I think you can apply this to onboarding as well. I’ll give specific examples for each of those because I think that might be helpful. The reaction, that first level of measurement, can come with like an NPS type of score, or tell me, would you recommend this course to a friend, or it’s a confidence-based score, how competent are you exhibiting XYZ? How competent are you delivering value propositions or talking to customers about so on and so forth? I think that the confidence score to me is really valuable. It’s a snapshot in time, that’s the only thing is like, I’m really confident today, but tomorrow you might tell me something and all of a sudden, my competence goes away down. I think it’s important, but it’s important in that moment and shouldn’t dictate anything much further than that momentary thing. You can use it for trend analysis, but the reaction and confidence scores is an interesting place to start.

The next one is knowledge transfer. I think about knowledge transfer when I think about quizzing and assessments. You didn’t know this one thing and after enablement or training, you now know this thing. Again, it’s a short-term measurement, which is like it could just be a memory measurement, which is valuable, but not ultimately long-term valuable.

That’s when the behavioral change, which is that next level of measurement, comes into play. You can see behavioral change through role-play, through call recording, through that type of cooperative assessment. A role-play is a really good example of that. I think that certification element can be really helpful to determine if behavior has changed from before you joined the company to after the onboarding experience.

The last one would be results. This one has the most variety in terms of how companies can measure this and how I’ve seen companies measure it. Some examples would be time to first deal or time to quota. How long does it take to close your first deal or pass your first lead? How long does it take to achieve your quota? There are a lot of factors that go into that because again, once the handoff happens to managers, then there’s a whole set of factors that can contribute to this and variables. The other one that I like to think through is time to readiness. Now, it’s really important that you define what readiness means because readiness to company A could mean something very different than readiness at company B, and readiness at 30 days is different than readiness at 60 days. 30 days, maybe it’s just you need to be comfortable talking to your peers about the product. At 60 days in you have to be comfortable talking to your customers about the product. Time to readiness and how you measure that, I think, is a really interesting idea, but it’s got to be right for the business and it’s got to be something that you can measure over time, and you can feel like you have a real impact on. More often than not, time to first deal, time to first lead time, to first handoff, time to first quota, those are ones that I see more often than not.

SS: Well, thank you so much, Alex. I’ve loved this conversation and got some really great insights along the way. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us, I appreciate it.

AZ: Listen, it is my pleasure. I love talking about this stuff. If you have 40 more questions, I’d answer all of those too.

SS: Thank you, Alex. To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Jasmine Coffee: Hi, I’m so excited to be here today. As you mentioned, my name is Jasmine. I’ve been in the instructional design space for almost six years. I’ve worked in the financial industry, the telecommunications industry, and now I work at ServiceNow, which provides a cloud platform that helps companies manage digital workflows.

I started at ServiceNow a little over a year ago in the global sales enablement organization, and recently I started a new role as a learning experience designer on an innovation team within the training and certification organization at ServiceNow. It’s a really exciting group to be a part of, I could probably spend a whole podcast episode just fangirling over my entire chain of leadership, to be honest.

SS: I love that. Actually, you caught my eye on LinkedIn because you mentioned that your focus is really around developing next-generation learning experiences. I’d love to double click there to start with. What does that look like in practice, and how are you innovating and improving learning through instructional design?

JC: This is an awesome question. Before jumping into the practice of it, I’d love to touch on the zeitgeist that makes up what next-generation learning experiences I think will be like, and I see them falling into three main buckets. The first bucket includes next-generation learning experiences that include an emotional element woven throughout.

We all know that the most impactful lessons that we learn are emotionally driven experiences that probably take place in our personal lives, or if they don’t, they are still tied up in emotions that touch on our sense of identity. Not all emotions have a place in a corporate learning experience, but engaging learners using elements like surprise, anticipation, and humor can be incredibly impactful.

As humans, we have emotional scripts that we follow, where an emotion is triggered, and a series of other feelings unfold that are also very much wrapped up in how we remember things. You can see emotional scripts, crossing languages, crossing cultures, and there’s actually a strategy called emotional scripting, and it is where someone is intentionally trying to prompt an emotion to trigger that innate brain process to enhance a learning experience and increase the retention of the information delivered. Standardizing how we do that is one bucket I would say for what next-generation learning experiences look like in a corporate setting.

Bucket two is, in my opinion, using familiar tools in a new way. Over the last six years, I’ve created so many e-learning assets, and how we use offering tools is pretty much uniform across companies, but the functionality and logic that you can create in tools like that can really spice things up if you think outside of the box. Instead of creating a standard e-learning course and uploading it to an LMS, why not create an interactive media experience like a branching scenario or a game that can be embedded on a webpage with an eye frame and focuses more on creating a fun experience for the learner instead of using that tool to collect assessment or completion data on them.

The third bucket is creating learning experiences that mimic real-life experiences as close as possible. So, simulations and training framed around a real-life scenario is what we see these days, but I believe that the next wave is using AI to create conversations that feel like you’re talking to a real person. Also augmented and virtual reality as a standard way of life is a lot closer than people think it is.

I have a headset and because I’m a nerd, I mostly use it to watch educational content. And when I say those learning experiences are mind-bending, I mean that with my whole heart. There’s already a lot of existing content out there. If that was how I learned biology or chemistry in high school, I might be on a totally different career path just based on how exciting that content is.

In the same way it was brand new 10 years ago to see tablets instead of textbooks in a classroom setting, I think we’ll start seeing equipment for AR and VR experiences in the different learning settings we’re in. So, circling back to what that looks like in practice. For me right now, it’s all about experimenting with tools like chatbots to build out conversations that feel like you’re talking to a person online, which hits on that emotional scripting point and the mimicking real-life experiences point that I just talked about.

Everyone on my team is very invested in exploring how to create learning experiences using AR and VR right now. I personally own a 360 camera and have created content in that space that’s compatible with the VR headset. I also think creating simulated software experiences that feel like you’re in a system without actually being in the system has been a trick that’s very simple to use, but very impactful from an assessment standpoint. Essentially what creating new experiences looks like in practice is finding the balancing point between what you’re good at, what tools would be ideal to create the experience, and what you know people care about.

SS: I love that Jasmine and that does sound very, very next generation from a learning experience perspective. I mean, in contrast with kind of traditional learning experiences, for sure. I’d love to talk about, you know, what are some of the challenges that maybe, you know, you touched on this a tad, but I want to deep dive into this. What are some of the challenges that traditional learning experiences might pose for salespeople specifically today? How do you address those challenges as you design your learning programs?

JC: We’re so conditioned through social media platforms and video channels that we follow to prefer engaging and quick content. Dying on an instructional design academic hill isn’t going to change that anytime soon. Traditional learning experiences are typically synchronous and formal while next-generation learning experiences lean even further into being asynchronous and should weave effortlessly into the flow of work throughout the day. I think that the biggest challenge that traditional learning experiences pose for salespeople is that they often stifle the natural skillsets of a salesperson.

It’s usually not personalized to the individual. So, let’s use a hypothetical salesperson named Sally, for example, and let’s say Sally is just an absolute titan when it comes to sales. Whether she realizes it or not, Sally is an expert in creating learning experiences. That’s what she is doing all day with her clients.

She is using emotional scripting and critical thinking all day. In my opinion, enablement for Sally should be personalized and she should have a lot of input about what kind of enablement she needs for the year or the quarter. And she should have a choice about the format of that enablement based on her own preferences, instead of being forced to follow traditional learning paths if they don’t suit her well.

SS: I love that scenario and examples so thank you for walking us through that. Now, you serve a variety of audiences with your learning programs. How do you go about learning the needs of each of your audiences and how do you ensure that those needs are reflected in the experiences that you deliver?

JC: Yeah, it can be hard at times, but honestly you have to talk to frontline learners. You can’t collect that information from leadership only. You can do this in a variety of ways like surveys or other traditional needs assessment methods. My preference is to have ongoing conversations with key people in the audience that I’m serving.

There is always at least one person who everyone goes to for information who has taken it upon themselves to create content or resources already, and who is essentially running a grassroots campaign of enablement before a decision is made to formally get someone like me involved. Connecting with that person is always so critical for a project.

They are the most important stakeholder in my opinion, and also the most important reviewer. And they’re also the most important ally to have on any project because they are already more invested than anybody else on that project being successful.

To ensure the needs are met on a project that is done, you have to have a mechanism for learners to give you feedback. And it’s good to determine on the front end of a project when would be a good time to check back in at a later date if we need to update that content.

SS: That makes a ton of sense. Now, you have yourself a master’s degree in learning systems design. I’d love to understand, given your expertise in this area, how can technology be leveraged to improve learning experiences?

JC: Technology is so ingrained in all of our lives. It allows you to take a concept and create an enriched experience that goes beyond me simply explaining something to you with a PowerPoint.

On top of enriching learning experiences technology allows us to scale and reach thousands if not millions of people with a small number of folks. I think what we’re going to see moving forward is even more tech that is personalized and scalable in the learning space.

SS: Now I want to click in because you earlier had mentioned some really interesting multimedia projects that incorporate AR and animation. Talk to me about how LX designers can incorporate multimedia into learning experiences a little bit more and how that can have a direct impact on driving engagement.

JC: In my opinion, at this point in the industry, all LX designers should be incorporating multimedia into their learning experiences. That is just the standard at this point, in my opinion. Overall, I think LX designers should accept that short video content is a preferred consumption method for learners and focus on getting comfortable with creating that kind of content and exploring how they want to package that into offering tools that they’re not ready to get rid of quite yet.

Something I’d like to see more of in my industry is people using social media, like LinkedIn, to plug the content they’ve created, because it’s such an easy and low-hanging fruit to build engagement easily. The engagement loop of promoting a learning experience on LinkedIn with an engaging social media video that links out to an actual course is more impactful than if an email just hits my inbox with a new course available in the body of it.

SS: Absolutely. Jasmine, I’ve learned a ton from you. I would love your perspective in closing, you know, how do you think that the learning experience design will continue to evolve this year and maybe in the years to come? How can sales enablement and learning practitioners plan for that transformation?

JC: Yeah. This is a really great question. This year, I think we’re going to see a lot more in the AR VR space than we’re even expecting. I think we’re going to see the art of explaining something in 15 to 30-second chunks be even more polished and prevalent in the industry. I also think we’re going to see a shift in the metrics we care about.

Metrics like views versus enrollments, and learner satisfaction over assessment scores. I think the best way to prepare for it is to stay agile, stay open, and take the initiative to learn more about those areas if you aren’t ready. Don’t be afraid to fail and fail fast, try something, get feedback, and adapt from there.

SS: I love that advice. Jasmine, thank you so much for joining our podcast today. I learned a ton from you.

JC: Awesome. I’m super thankful to join you guys today. It was really fun.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro.

If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Wes Ulysse from Red Points join us. Wes, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Wesley Ulysse: Yeah, great to be here. Obviously, my name is Wes, I’m the VP of Sales over at Red Points. Our software allows brands to protect their online revenue against counterfeits, piracy, and impersonation, so it’s pretty cool, pretty relevant in these times.

SS: Fantastic. Well, we’re really excited to have you here. Now, you caught my eye because on LinkedIn, you emphasized that sales is a challenging career that requires a lot of perseverance. I’d love to just kick off this conversation by understanding, in your opinion what are some of the biggest challenges that sales teams are faced with today?

WU: To be honest, and this might sound kind of counter-intuitive, but information. There are a lot of different ways to sell, a lot of different strategies, and I’m sure we’ve all heard plenty of acronyms. LinkedIn is great, but there are so many opinions and in the age of information, information is just so accessible and maybe too easily accessible. It can be tough for a rep seeking guidance to focus.

I like to keep things simple, but the other side to it is the social aspect of it all. We’re still in a pandemic, the job, housing and financial markets are crazy. I won’t even get into politics, but it’s very easy to get distracted, and sales is difficult. Sales requires mental focus and execution, so in my humble opinion, I feel as if information – and this information overload right now – can be one of the biggest challenges, for almost anyone, but particularly for those in sales.

SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. The last two years have definitely been challenging. Given all the change that has also happened over the last two years, how can sales leaders like yourself help set their teams up to persevere through the change and actually thrive in this type of environment?

WU: I think from that perspective, nothing has really changed. I think transparency, vulnerability and accountability, they’re all still necessary. That’s how we can connect with or understand people, that’s helping them through change. I think keeping to those principles, that’s the best we can do, in terms of sales leaders, to help those persevere through any type of change.

SS: I agree. Now, I do want to talk about something that seems to be prevalent, these days especially, and that’s burnout. Especially amongst sales reps, I think it’s a common challenge a lot of organizations are facing right now. How do we help our sales reps from feeling that sense of burnout in the day-to-day grind and all the chaos that’s going on in the world? What are some of your strategies for mitigating the risks of burnout for your sales teams?

WU: Yeah, sales burnout is definitely a thing. I think, from my perspective, staying in tune with the person – just little things, common things, nothing ground-breaking – is just knowing when to tell that person, hey, take a day off. I mean, this is going to sound crazy in this day and age, but dare I say being okay with Zoom calls with the cameras off. I think little things like that really help when it comes to burnout.

Not only that, I feel as if traditionally in sales, there is this idea and this mantra: well, I’ve hit my target, but do more. And again, this is a bit counter-intuitive, but to some extent I think we as sales leaders need to be okay with someone doing what’s expected of them. When they do that, you know, meet their targets and don’t overachieve, and let’s say they want to take the last week of the month or quarter off, not to judge them for that. I think that is something we need to keep in mind. I could go on and on about that, but I do think that is part of the sales culture that, as sales leaders, in today’s climate, given everything that’s going on, we do need to be conscious of: being okay with just doing what’s expected and not necessarily going above and beyond.

SS: I love that approach and advice. Obviously, our audience is predominantly in sales enablement, so I’d love to hear from a sales leader’s perspective, how can enablement best partner with sales leaders like yourself to help retain high-performing reps and really do things to curate a healthy sales culture?

WU: First of all, I think sales enablement is absolutely necessary in almost every organization. I would say to really help push and challenge teams, in more ways than one – for me it’s less about picking up new skills and refining one’s pitch or guiding one’s pitch – I think it’s more about learning to identify those who might be top performers but aren’t necessarily growing. They’re pretty stagnant, they’re comfortable and often sales leaders tend to, I wouldn’t say ignore top performers, but put them on autopilot. In my opinion, that’s a great opportunity for sales enablement to step in and identify someone who is doing well but isn’t necessarily challenged enough. We don’t know one’s potential until it’s met. And even when it’s met, we don’t really know their potential. I think that’s a key area where sales enablement can assist and partner with sales leaders to help drive the business, but also increase the ceilings in any way.

SS: Absolutely, I think that’s phenomenal. In addition to your role as a sales leader, you also serve as a DE&I chair for a community organization. That’s something I’m also exceptionally passionate about. As an advocate for DE&I, how can sales leaders really nurture diverse teams and build an inclusive culture in a really authentic way? Is there anything that perhaps enablement can do to partner and assist on that front?

WU: You said the keyword: in an authentic way. For me, it again goes back to knowing your people, taking an interest in their culture, who they are, in and out of work, without being too invasive. The keyword there again is interest and authenticity, so I think it’s more on the organizations to hire someone who is genuinely interested in creating and maintaining that diversity. That obviously goes hand in hand with enablement, so being able to partner with someone who is genuinely interested in creating that type of environment, partnering with sales enablement to propel that environment into success.

SS: Absolutely. Well Wes, my last question for you is just really a look ahead. We’ve just started 2022 and as we look ahead to this year, what is your biggest priority to ensure that your sales teams are equipped for success this year?

WU: Honestly, it’s simple. Just keeping up with the ever-changing times. Like I mentioned earlier, information is just circulating so fast, things are evolving at probably the fastest pace, fastest rate ever, in history, so just being able to make sure that the team is taken care of, making sure they have everything they need to succeed. But again, staying or trying to stay ahead of the current and keeping up with everything they need, that’s my plan; making sure that we evolve as the world evolves.

SS: I love that. Well Wes, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time and your advice.

WU: Thank you, thank you guys for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Rachel Chambers from Marketplacer join us. Rachel, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Rachel Chambers: Hi Shawnna, thanks for the invitation to be on the program. As you mentioned, my name is Rachel. I am based in Melbourne, and I’d like to start by acknowledging the Wurundjeri people, the traditional custodians of this land.

I’m the Head of Enablement at Marketplacer. We are a global leader in providing SaaS platforms to retailers and businesses to enable them to bring their marketplace strategies to life. We offer more than technology; we’ve got deep expertise and experience and have successfully partnered with many prominent brands across the globe. From an enablement perspective, I’ve been in the discipline for close to two decades. I’ve worked in a variety of sectors, from advertising, hospitality and finance, but regardless of the area, I just love the role. That’s a little bit about me.

SS: Rachel, I’m super excited to have you here today. You have a lot of experience in building and scaling an enablement function, so for our audience, for practitioners that are maybe just getting started in building an enablement function, where do you recommend that they begin?

RC: Thanks, Shawnna. This is a really exciting question, as there is nothing quite like getting a phone call saying we’ve selected you or we need your help in setting up an enablement function. It’s a high-impact role and a great responsibility, but the success is incredibly rewarding. With that opportunity, it’s natural for us to want to deliver ROI and add value as soon as possible, and they’re great traits to have, but on the flipside, it means we sometimes move into delivery and implementation and change mode too quickly without taking the time to lay the foundations for success. I’ll share with you the four pillars that I’ve used when setting up sales enablement teams across various sectors. Through the lessons I’ve learned and my experience, spending this extra time upfront will save you a lot of pain and time in the long run, it will help build better relationships, greater adoption of your change, and essentially get you better results. Who doesn’t want that? So, let’s start with the first step, which is alignment.

Aligning on what sales enablement is, is crucial, as there are many definitions. The industry has also really evolved over the last three years, so having a shared understanding across an organization on what enablement is, what it isn’t, the value it brings and some of the deliverables will help expedite success. The best way to do this is to create an enablement charter, which is different to your plan. It’s an overview, it’s not the detailed actions on what you’ll deliver. The best way to do this is I’ll have a template or a draft on our best practice enablement methodology and share it with the sponsor or stakeholder who has brought me into the business. I get their agreement and alignment and make some changes to customize and tailor it for the organization that I’m servicing because their needs will be slightly different to other companies, whether it’s scaling into new markets or rapidly growing their sales team. Once the charter has been created, then share it with other areas like product and marketing and go-to-market, so they can see how partnering with enablement will really accelerate success for both areas.

The second step is to connect with customers. It might sound so basic, so why do we need to even explain it as an action? When you move into a new role, it’s so easy to be absorbed with getting to understand the ins and outs of your new organization that we often leave meeting our most important people to the end. We want to make sure we are connecting with our customers early, and I mean our internal and external customers. There’s also an opportunity to tap into some great data that already exists in the organization. Generally, there will already be customer satisfaction data with verbatims. I always try to get my hands on that because I think it’s absolute gold. You have customers telling you what they love in what you’re doing and what you need to fix to keep them and what you need to do to grow them. Absolutely tap into customer satisfaction data as well.

The third tip is stock take an audit and it probably sounds not very exciting, but it’s hugely beneficial as a way to demonstrate ROI and progress. Everybody knows that when you join an organization, it’s more than likely that there’s a lot of content in a lot of different places, so working out what’s being used and loved, what’s not being used and why, and what’s needed, will really help you build your plan. You can start to put some metrics around it, so you can start to identify the number of courses we need to create to enable our sales team. Then, each month, update on what’s been created and how often those courses have been completed. It really starts to help to measure ROI.

Finally, you’ve aligned, you’ve connected with your customers, you’ve done your audit, build your plan and communicate it with passion and conviction. Keep it simple but comprehensive. Outline what will be delivered when, what are the risks, what are the dependencies and share it with your stakeholders. Ask them how often they want to be kept informed of the progress and what method they want to be kept updated with. It’s important to keep the communication going and keep the plan visible. All those four steps are fundamental to success, but there’s probably one that underpins all of it and that’s to have fun throughout the process. Be inspired, not intimidated by the opportunity. Enablement works, it’s been proven. You have great people to support you throughout the enablement community.

SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. I think that the enablement category has done a lot to solidify over the years, but there’s still a way to go for us. Based on your experience, what are some potential pitfalls in standing up an enablement function and how do you go about mitigating those risks?

RC: There have been many lessons learned over the years and there are three key ones. The first one is overcommitting and saying yes to everything. When you start to produce work and you’re getting feedback that sales love your content, and hopefully that happens, then more requests will come through. Ideally, you’ve been through a thorough planning process, and you’ve set the priorities with the sales team, so that should minimize that happening. But if you haven’t and you’re getting all these requests, it could happen that you overcommit; you add extra things to the plan, which means you’re working really long hours or you’re missing original timeframes and deadlines. Or you’re delivering work not to the quality that you need it to be. When you do get those requests, understand that if you replace something existing in the plan, what additional resources are available to deliver this and if we can’t deliver it today, what can we do and when can we do it. Anything you say no to, make sure to document, as it’s going to be vital in helping you get more resources in the future as you want to grow out the enablement team. Then you can say, we were unable to deliver X number of training sessions or build X pieces of content to meet the needs of our sales team due to resourcing.

Pitfall number two is a blurred line between sales leadership and sales enablement. This shouldn’t happen if enablement is defined from the top-down early on. If it’s not, sometimes sales leaders think, are you going to come in and coach my team now, are you going to run bespoke training sessions, and in extreme cases, build customer presentations? Generally, the answer is no. The best we can do is enable our sales leaders and enable our front line to be as self-sufficient as possible. We do that by providing best practice coaching frameworks for our sales leaders, quality content to our sales team that’s easily accessible, sales technology that will make it easier for sales to interact with their clients and speed up the buying cycle, online training to really close any capability gaps. By providing these services, not only will we be able to scale, but we’ll also accelerate success.

The final one is underestimating the time to deliver the sales enablement initiatives, whether it’s a piece of content or training program. Ideally, our sales team will have visibility of the plan on what we’re working on, but it’s also important to educate them at a really high level on what the timeframes are to build. Often the perception could be, it’s pulling together a PowerPoint deck and rolling it out the next day, but that’s not the case. To create highly relevant and quality content takes some time and the pay-off will be huge, because you’ll get a more engaged piece of content or training and that’s getting utilized. When mapping out the time to deliver, make sure you include things like time for re-works, dependencies on what you need from your key stakeholders and communicate them as early as possible. If they miss those timeframes, adjust your deliverables accordingly. Also, there are normally people that need to sign off on a piece of content or training, let them know in advance when that will occur. Probably the last piece, is allowing time for embedding and measuring the success of the initiative that you’ve delivered. We can spend a month building an amazing online training program, roll it out, but we need to make sure we go back in a week, in a month, to see, has it been completed, what are the ratings and has that lifted sales performance? Hopefully that gives you some ideas of the pitfalls and how to mitigate those.

SS: Absolutely, and you touched on this a minute ago around stakeholders, but I want to dig into that a little bit more because whenever you’re building something new in the business world, taking the stakeholder priorities and perspectives into account is critical. Stakeholder management is another one of your areas of expertise, so I’d love to understand how you manage their expectations for the enablement function and balance that with your own visions for success?

RC: Before I get into managing expectations, I want to highlight that stakeholder management is an absolute bonus of working in sales enablement. We get access to so many smart and passionate people that we can learn from because not only do we work with sales, but we also get to work with sales operations, product, marketing, go-to-market, finance and IT. When engaging with stakeholders, I always try to learn from them as well. One of the highlights of my career has been the strong partnerships that are built and maintained along the way, and the shared success we’ve had. So how do we get to that point?

I’ll focus on sales, as they’re our key customers, and I’ll do two things. The first is to measure their level of engagement around sales enablement and I do that by asking what has their previous experience been. If it was negative, why? If it was positive, what did they love and what do they think we can do for this organization, to help for it to be successful? I also like to showcase three or four different types of assets so they can start to understand how sales enablement has evolved. This could be an online video; it could be a training course or a piece of customer-facing collateral. You can see in the lightbulb moments that sales enablement is more than process. It’s like showing a picture of the cake, rather than just explaining the ingredients. It’s much more exciting.

The second part is aligning on expectations, and I might be really dumbing this down, but for me the best way to do this is to keep connecting to our overall business outcomes and our business goals, our customer goals and our values. When you keep connecting back to those pillars, alignment should always happen, and we should accelerate success.

SS: Absolutely. I also want to talk a little bit about growth. I think, as the organization is growing, ideally, the enablement team should be growing alongside it. Given your experience in growing out an enablement team, what are some of the challenges that enablement leaders might encounter in building out their teams and how can they overcome those challenges?

RC: This is a really good problem to have because you’re getting to build out your team. The first thing you need for sales enablement is find good people. What I like to do is start building the team of tomorrow today. Think about what roles we’re going to be needing in six to twelve months and have a look around the business. Think about who could potentially move into those roles. As you get closer to the time of recruiting, speak to the leaders, speak to the potential candidates and see if there’s something that they’re interested in. You can even start the development. Obviously, you can’t promise them a role, but give them some challenges, get them really familiar with the function, so they can see if it’s something they’re interested in. And of course, use your network. We know referrals are the best way to get people in and they’re more likely to stay and succeed.

The second challenge is finding people that can hit the ground running. I overcome that by having a balance of people who have great internal knowledge vs hiring people who are really great sales enablement practitioners. I find, when you mesh those two together, you’re going to get a high-performing team sooner. Really balance the diversity of who you’re employing and who you’re bringing in to get an accelerated result.

The third challenge can be getting a high volume of quality candidates. This can happen because often people see the words sales enablement and they think I don’t know what that is, or I can’t do that. So just have a look at how you’re advertising your role and the words that you’re using. Make sure you have a really strong value prop for each role, for people to think, yes, that’s something that I want to do and that’s something that I can do. Just really look at the language, to attract the type of talent that you’re after.

SS: I love that approach. You have scaled your enablement function across businesses to support multiple teams, from sales to pre-sales and customer success. When you’re supporting several teams, how can enablement practitioners ensure that they’re resourced appropriately to do so and how to you structure your team to prepare for scale?

RC: Firstly, when requesting more resources, that discussion should not come as a surprise to the decision-makers you are having that conversation with. When you joined the business, ideally you set the scene on what is best practice sales enablement from a structural point of view and what is the phased approach to get to that optimal model, so that there are no surprises. In regard to building out that business case and having that discussion, there are four key topics I want to cover.

The first one is to start building your business case from day one. You’ve set that best practice framework; start collecting feedback that you’re receiving from the sales team when they say that training was great or that piece of content is really working, or I love that tech. Get granular. How much time is it saving you? Has it helped you win more deals? If yes, how many? What is the average dollar value of those deals, or has it helped you retain customers? Which customers have you retained and what are they worth? Start building the case from day one, not just a week before you start putting together your presentation. The other thing is tracking each time you receive a request but cannot fulfil it due to lack of resourcing. That will demonstrate that there is a desire from our sales team or our customers which we’re not meeting; that there is a requirement to help and support them, to lift capability or help them have better conversations and we need more resources to fill that.

The second thing is clearly defining the roles that you’re requesting. What are the tangible outputs our customers or our salespeople will receive as a result of this role? And keep linking it back to the business strategy as that is the quickest way to get the resources approved.

Thirdly, ROI and payback. Sales enablement should pay for itself in the long run. If you’re in a company that has a low number of deals but of high value, how many additional sales need to be made to cover the investment of that role? It could be two or three additional sales for that year, the rest is upside. If you’re in an industry that has low-dollar sales but high volume, how many sales per person will it take to cover the investment in the role?

The last one, other than growth and new customers, look at different metrics like retention, reduction in admin, employee engagement, because this is an investment in helping our sales team be successful. These are some of the talking points I would add to my conversation when requesting additional resourcing for the optimal sales enablement team.

SS: Absolutely. Just to close out, what are some of your best practices for advocating for the resources that your team needs in order to achieve your goals for the enablement function?

RC: This is another one I’m very passionate about, it’s to know your numbers. As a sales enablement team, we should absolutely know what the sales targets are, what our results are and how our customers are going. How can we help them improve, if we don’t know the performance results? I understand that is a lagging indicator, but really, know your numbers. I think that’s a base line, that’s what you need to do.

Also, know your sales enablement metrics. There are a ton of things that you can report on because at the end of the day metrics matter. Whatever you’re going to do to get more resources, you need to prove ROI on roles. Look at things like speed to competency with induction onboarding. How long did they spend on onboarding today? What could we reduce that to? What could the potential uplift be and what would the revenue benefits be? And do test-and-learn, for example, I might need one resource to re-design our onboarding. That resource will cost X amount of dollars, then demonstrate how you’ll make it up. It means our team will get off the training track and onto the floor two weeks earlier, which means they will get to their target earlier, so really linking it to metrics.

The other thing is looking at engagement metrics as well. Normally, in an engagement survey there is a question around training and development. Look at what the engagement score is today vs what it could be. Obviously, enablement plays a massive play to that. I’m very into running test-and-learn, so running a sales enablement project on a small scale, demonstrating what that uplift is and once they have a taste for it, you’ll get more credibility and more buy-in to do that on a broader scale. And yeah, just work out that essentially, I’m going to need X dollars to hire this role, so how many sales will it take to make it back? Understand what your average sales result is, what your average customer number is. If your average sale is fifty thousand dollars and you’re wanting to hire an instructional designer to help build your content, then it will essentially take an additional two and a half sales per year to repay that.

SS: I think that’s a really interesting way to think about it. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time and thought you put into each of your responses.

RC: Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Chris Wrenn from Adobe join us. Chris, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Chris Wrenn: Sure, thanks for having me. I’m Chris Wrenn. I’m a Senior Manager of Experience Delivery Management at Adobe, and I’ve been at Adobe, boy, going on almost 25 years now doing different roles throughout, but the last five years or so I’ve been in the sales operations organization.

The focus of my team had really been primarily, when I started, around content delivery whether it’s training or sales collateral. It’s really shifting in this last year or so for us to become much more of a user experience type of organization team that’s focused on trying to really reinforce what the business wants with our sales teams and do that through design as opposed to just relying on training alone and coaching and some of those other activities.

SS: Well, I’m very excited to have you here with us, Chris. On LinkedIn, you highlight your experience with managing the development of digital experiences to support enablement objectives. From a content delivery perspective, how does a focus on the digital experience improve engagement with content?

CW: I think that really where that comes into play is I think many businesses realize that they’ve got a lot of content for complex deals in particular, and Adobe was among these groups that often had content in different buckets and different places. The problem wasn’t necessarily that there was bad content or content that wasn’t very helpful, it really was not available or consumable in an easy way for our sales organization historically.

A lot of the work from a design and content strategy and management perspective and content delivery perspective has been around really making content easy to find, making sure that it is authoritative, and also just making sure that there are some governance activities in place to keep it up to date and current. Those three areas, search, governing, and authoritativeness of documents so people know they’ve got the right version at the right time, and also that it’s up to date, those are the three things that

I think have been continuous in what my team’s journey has been, going from managing content to getting more involved in the actual experience of how people receive content, where they get it, and how they use it.

SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. What role does content governance play though in really optimizing the delivery of content and the digital experiences for users?

CW: Well, I think content governance ends up being one of those huge items that any organization has to deal with. I think at a place like Adobe, which is a large organization, it has a lot of different moving parts, a lot of different teams, the issue becomes really, okay, how do you get centralized management when there’s a lot of teams that are really empowered to do their own thing? How do you provide an experience that from the perspective of, let’s just say a seller, that is consistent? It doesn’t change depending on what product they’re selling or what area or domain that they’re in, they have a consistent experience with the content.

Part of the governance pieces I think that need to be solved are making sure that the people who are contributing are doing it in a way, delivered in a way at least, that is easy for users to understand and take in. It’s not just, okay, we’ve got our one-stop-shop for this little, small-scoped area that we are concerned about. Somebody is mining the whole shop and understanding how to get content, how it flows to the system, how to get content from point A to point B in the most effective way.

We certainly have found that there isn’t really a way to get that experience optimized for sellers of any kind if there isn’t a group of folks focused really on the ability to really consolidate and deliver and focus on that experience separate from actually the content itself.

SS: Absolutely. Now, shifting gears a little bit beyond content delivery and management, you also focus on, as I mentioned earlier, providing user experience guidance on technology for the field. As part of this, you’ve emphasized the importance of user-centered design. What does it mean to have user-centered design in the integration of tools for sellers and what are some of your best practices for really infusing that across the tech stack?

CW: Yeah, that’s a great question and it’s a difficult one for large organizations in particular. One challenge is just trying to get teams on the same toolsets and the tool stacks. You might have multiple instances of CRMs, multiple instances of quoting tools, and different types of tools that have been used based on acquisitions and things, and so it can be a very complex network of sometimes technological debt, sometimes homegrown tools and things like that.

We found that we really wanted to tackle that problem the way we were trying to tackle it with content delivery. We wanted to really treat this from the seller perspective as opposed to the business perspective. I think we have a lot of tools and a lot of great product teams that are working on delivering things for our fields and partner sellers, but they don’t always connect the dots between each other, between these different tools, and look at things from the seller’s journey the way we would look at things from a customer journey, for example, if we’re doing marketing and selling together. Doing that internally and focusing on people who are involved in sales and deals as really that same customer base regardless of the multiple products we have and not necessarily treating these as separate silos and competing little fiefdoms, but actually as one sort of holistic approach to getting a customer from point A to point B in the most effective way possible requires us to really use a lot of the same things that Adobe product teams would use with our customers. Use that internally on our sellers, our BDRs, our other key roles in the sales process to say, hey, look, we’ve got a lot of competing technologies, some are third-party, some are homegrown, some are our own types of tools, but they don’t necessarily connect to each other the way we would want them to or the way that the user would want them to connect and work together.

What we’ve done is really look at a lot of the personas internally, focus on the personas and focus on what their needs are as much as what the business is wanting to do or what the go-to-market strategy is. We’re looking at things a lot more now across the different teams and folks who are trying to use any of these multiple tools we have, what’s their experience going to be like and how do we optimize that? How do we increase the velocity all of those things that I think everybody knows are important? I think we’ve done a good job of dealing with training and coaching and what our sales managers working on, how do we infuse more of that into the design of our systems?

I think the obvious challenge there is, well, many of them are built on different technologies. We’re throwing out the idea of this isn’t an issue of visual design or any kind of UX from that perspective, it’s really more about how we dig in and make sure information architecture and all these points, all these pain points, are looked at from the user perspective not just the business perspective of what the business KPIs are.

I think a lot of what we’re trying to do now is invest a lot of the tools that we deliver to a sales organization with some usability KPIs that stand really at the same level as some of the business KPIs. I think as we all know, if we don’t really reinforce with our tooling what we’re trying to accomplish and make the tooling effective enough for users to either want to use it or to actually have an easy time of using it, we’re not going to have the adoption. We’re going to have people leveraging different tooling for doing the same job, all that sort of stuff that makes it much more difficult to manage at an enterprise level.

SS: Absolutely. You’d be back to the ad hoc chaos all over again. No, I think that’s a phenomenal approach. How do you ensure that the design and integration of tools for sellers don’t just reinforce business goals, but are also truly valuable to the end-user as well?

CW: Right. Well, that’s the key, I think. It’s not because people don’t necessarily care about what the user experience is, I think that there’s been a lot of well, it’s boiling the ocean to consider it. When we’re talking about what sellers have to go through, there’s obviously changes and tweaks to the go-to-market every year. It’s not so much what people have to relearn or learn again, it’s what they need to forget and do differently. Having to manage all those changes, for the most part people think that, well, the tool is the tool, and you can’t really do much with that.

I think that where we want to focus is essentially flip this a little bit and try not to get too focused on the systems themselves, the tools themselves, but focus more on the capabilities that we’re trying to deliver and see to what extent we can really say, well, this is going to be consistent. We’re always going to have to progress a lead to an opportunity to get a quote. We know what those basic capabilities areas are, and we also have a pretty good idea, or at least through doing research and interviews and conversations with folks, what they like. If you do things that the sellers like, or more things that the sellers like or that are more natural to the way that the sellers are trying to sell, you’re going to be more successful with whatever you deliver. Some of that is not, like I said, that people haven’t wanted to do that or thought about that in the past, and some people do it themselves, I think it’s just been more at the ad hoc level, at the small scope level, not really horizontally across the whole thing where we’re focusing a lot more now with my team.

I’ll admit it’s emergent right now, it’s not really a full team of a cast of thousands that that’s doing all this work. We’re really starting with a team of about five folks that are trying to look across all of the touchpoints for many of the key roles, what these key roles are, and even just settling on where some key personas that we can go after are and think about where we can actually add the most value. The value that we’re trying to add is making things easier for users in a way that it really reinforces the business. The business gets what they want out of it, the users get what they want out of it, and we’re in that happy place.

SS: I love that. Now, we talked about how important adoption is I’d love to hear from you from your perspective and your experience, what are some challenges to tool adoption among sellers, and then how have you helped to overcome those challenges through the user experience design?

CW: Yeah, that’s a great question because I think you find with adoption that there can be any number of reasons why things have low adoption. There might be something just about awareness, it might be something related to regional differences with a global company, it’s hard to provide a one tool solution that’s going to work in all circumstances. Then there are sometimes issues with knowledge or reinforcement, the people are not necessarily remembering something. It’s not something that they do enough that they do it the right way every time.

What we’re looking at from a design perspective is, are there opportunities there where we can look at providing more structure where it’s needed to essentially invite people to do things the right way by making the right way easier than any other way? One example of that might be if people are storing documents that they use for deals, they might store them on their One Drive, they might store on their desktop, they might store them in a SharePoint, they might store them in the CRM itself. They have different ways of storing it because there wasn’t really an easy way to make it easy to get the document you need, update it, send it out the door, and then keep track of it and what happens with it. Things like that are areas where I don’t think it’s a matter of people maybe not adopting so much as it really wasn’t clear what to adopt. We’re trying to focus some attention there.

To the other question about some areas where we’ve seen lower adoption than we wanted I think goes into many of those types of self-service things that we try to do. Can we get people to do a bit more self-service quoting, like get some quotes together without necessarily calling a deal desk or getting other people involved? Can they do some ROI calculations on their own without calling an expert? How much of that can we get folks to do? Sometimes you’ll have issues with that being it’s not really a design thing, it might be more of a time thing. like people. I don’t have time to wrap my head around what’s needed here to make this change.

I think for us to be successful now and going forward, is really to be aligned with our business change managers and other folks to determine really what is that core problem with adoption. At least what I’ve found so far as there isn’t any one reason. It’s often you have to get into the weeds and get into the details of why something specific isn’t adopted. For us, at least from the user-centered perspective, I think we get the best information when we go out and do the interviews. When we go out and do a user study and you usually find something you really had no idea why that was the case, or you had all these assumptions, and you find out that they weren’t very good assumptions because people are coming to different conclusions, or they are having completely different motivations than what you were expecting.

One of the values that our team has been trying to promote is formalizing more of that user research where we go out, and particularly if there’s an adoption problem or if there’s something new that’s coming out and we want to make sure it goes smoothly, really trying to find out what people are doing today, what their motivations are to ensure that it’s as smooth as we can possibly make it when they transition to something different.

SS: Absolutely. Well, you touched on this a little bit earlier, but I would love to close on thinking about success metrics. How do you measure success when it comes to the user experience with technology?

CW: Again, that’s a great question because I think there isn’t a cookie-cutter approach. I mentioned before that we’re trying to infuse some usability KPIs into the overall business KPIs that go with any type of project or rollout. Some of the things that we get focused on might be a pure usability problem. Like, hey, have an error prevention approach with this. Maybe there’s just a consistency problem where you can detect like, okay, the labels are completely different in these different tools, but they mean the same thing. Stuff like that that we try to address.

We would basically apply the KPIs that are the most important usability KPIs areas with what the business KPIs are because obviously we’re not just making things consistent for the sake of consistency or we’re not making error messages nice just for the sake of doing that. If they’re not that common, what we’re really trying to do is take a look at what the business is trying to accomplish, whether it’s increasing the deal velocity or if it’s basically increasing customer satisfaction with the process, things like that that as designers we have to adopt those as well as figure out how our individual usability KPI can basically move the needle the best.

The idea is that our KPIs tend to be shared where we’re half of them are, okay, what is the business trying to accomplish at this point? We have to partner with them on that, and what we do with what we’re measuring is okay, do we have user satisfaction with what the tool is doing? Do we have consistency things that we can measure across the board there?

SS: That’s fantastic. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today. I learned a ton from you today, and I appreciate your time.

CW: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Ella Pebbles join us. Ella, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Ella Pebbles: Hi, my name is Ella Pebbles and I am the director of operations at Indeed. At Indeed, we help people get jobs. We connect job seekers with the best-fit companies and roles based on their skillsets and career goals. It’s matchmaking professionally.

SS: Well, we’re excited to have you join us today. Now, in your LinkedIn bio you mentioned that you specialize in the utilization of enablement to improve business performance. From your perspective, how can enablement and revenue operations complement each other and work together to impact business performance?

EP: Yeah. I feel like operations defines process and it defines not only day-to-day, but just overall project management and efficiency and just general optimization. For you to be able to do things by rote, do things intelligently, you need to be well informed as to what that best process might be. That action of informing is where enablement really does come in. Whether enablement is a part of your operations team or separate, you need to be very closely aligned. Otherwise, you don’t have that well-versed, well-orchestrated machine of person worker doing exactly what you ID’d as the best possible actions per day, per hour, per minute.

SS: Absolutely. Now, revenue operations often partners with many functions, including enablement, to encourage cohesiveness in the go-to-market strategy, if you will. What are some strategies for collaborating with partners across the organization to create alignment on GTM initiatives that have worked well for you?

EP: I think being able to be, I think there’s a negative connotation to this word, but almost political. Working with the different leadership teams and the people on the floor to make sure that not only are the leadership individuals well aware of what actions you want to make, what actions you want to take, but they’re also in agreement with them. They’re willing to, for instance, sometimes say, hey, I don’t really want to do that, but I know that you’re doing this for this reason, so I’m happy to do so. Or, hey, can you push up my project and then I’ll be able to do this thing? It’s a little bit of give and take. I think that bureaucracy, that sort of political working behind the scenes to garner your votes to some extent is one of the best ways that you can really aggregate general cohesiveness in the way that you’re sort of talking about.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because I want to reference a previous interview that you did where you had mentioned that a common objective can actually help to unite teams and make interactions with other revenue teams even more seamless. What are some of your best practices for creating and getting buy-in for that common objective?

EP: I think one of the things that revenue operations does as a whole is it’s able to see pretty much upstream and downstream. So much so that a lot of those individual contributors, different departments don’t have that oversight. When you’re able to articulate that oversight, you’re able to say, hey, you are in this specific department, I’m telling you how this specifically will help you do better, help you make more money because that’s my main objective and you’re one of my constituents, so I’m here to make you happy. My actions are here to benefit you to some extent. Really engaging them and how it’s really beneficial for them, and if there are things that they’re giving up or things that make their day a little bit harder, really reinforcing and actually putting it into your thought process when you’re building out things, whether it’s processed, what have you, how to make their day easier. They feel like, hey, I know that you’ve reduced my workload by this amount in this activity, in this action, and I know that’s your objective, so whatever more work you’re putting on my plate it’s not because you weren’t thinking about how to make my day easier. It’s because frankly, I need to do this for the betterment of the company.

I think most companies, most businesses have people who, we all just want to be successful. I want to work at a pretty successful company, I want the people around me to be successful. I think utilizing that and thinking about those other people and from their perspective, knowing that we’re all there with good intent is a really good way to sort of start that conversation. It usually works its way out shortly after.

SS: I love that. I think that’s spot on, assuming good intent is always a great foot to start off on. I want to pivot a little bit and talk about key metrics. What are some of the key business metrics that you look at to track business health?

EP: I mean, I think it’s interesting. It depends on the business as a whole because for instance, at my current role, we have a pretty long sales cycle. That notion of generally just looking at qualification and close isn’t actually sufficient for us. We actually have a midpoint between there we also take a look at and make sure, like, are we hitting that? What’s our conversion rate on that? Which types of businesses convert that far down into the process? It’s almost too long of a wingspan for us to gain true insight. What I’m saying is that really, it’s almost dependent upon the business, but there are some just general statistics, general rules.

Something that I’ve seen really not done too terribly well in a lot of different places is a lot of web analytics, like form conversions. It’s not really something that I think people take enough of a look-see at, and I think that you’re just losing money. You’re losing money so much when you just have these forms that are nearly impossible to fill, or you’re not doing everything in your power to make it easy for these people to try and get ahold of you. You see that in all sorts of businesses, whether it’s retail, whether it’s education so on and so forth. I think a lot of the web analytics stuff is not something that enough people focus on.

Specific to metrics, which is what you asked, win rates are always important, qualification rates are always important. Your MQL conversion is incredibly important. That’s how you know as a finger in the air whether your marketing team is doing a really good job at demand generation for partners. It’s almost like we look at it as partner-generated ops. The conversion rates for partner-generated ops versus outbound versus inbound, incredibly important.

Then another thing that a lot of people bypass is that there’s another point to not forget, which is we think about counts a lot, like 15 out of 25 opportunities closed, 1 qualified, what have you. What we’re missing there is almost always that secondary notion of how much were those opportunities? What was the quantity of those opportunities? That sometimes changes those numbers, and you might be qualifying a lower count, but you’re actually qualifying a higher dollar value. It’s a better indicator to look at all of those different variables and how they affect your business. Specifically, if you have pretty variant deal value sizes, things like that. I always hesitate to be too prescriptive on metrics without looking, but I think that those are some high-level ones that I think are always very important for people to take a look.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. How can these analytics help you understand opportunities to continue to improve and drive towards more consistent performance across the revenue organization and how can revenue operations elevate these insights to stakeholders across revenue teams to optimize performance?

EP: Yeah, I think the first question is how we can use them to sort of optimize revenue. I think that’s our bread and butter, that’s what we’re there for. More often than not all of those numbers are telling you what your true ICP really looks like. It’s telling you which sales cycles, which sale types, what kind of deals specifically are you doing better at selling? It’s always very important to identify, hey, maybe we’re skewing one way for some reason. You have to take into account the real-world portions because any data will, if you massage it well enough, probably tell you what you want it to tell you. You have to be really careful with data. If you’re looking at all of the different variables, if you’re looking at the data without bias, it should be able to tell you how to optimize. Whether it’s, like I said, these types of businesses require free trials, these types of businesses are the ones who are going to purchase at a much higher quantity, these types of businesses expand upon land, and so we can do a much smaller deal on our new business deal and we know we’re going to recoup that money almost immediately. Those types of pieces of information it’s a really big puzzle piece pretty much, and those metrics are helping you put that puzzle together for your business.

I think specifically those revenue aspects are the driving factor of why you want to look at those metrics. I think again, more often than not, it’s important for you to just play around with the data a little bit because there are going to be things that surprise you that you didn’t even think about taking a look at. I think that those are the things that are always the most surprisingly insightful. I think one of the things that revenue operations is supposed to do very well, and that’s where this bureaucracy comes in, is helping to teach others how to do better in business. I think whether you’re in a startup, whether you’re in a 50,000-person company, a lot of times we all fall into this habit sometimes where we think we know what’s best. I think it’s very important to not come in saying you know everything because you might not.

Again, here’s a specific example of where metrics might tell me something incorrect. At a prior company, I had been hearing from the leader of one of our other lines of business that there was a specific individual who was not performing well. I take a look at the metrics, and it says she’s really riding the middle of the pack. She’s doing a fantastic job, really. Middle of the pack may not be the best person, but she’s clearly not the least. We go and have a conversation with this leader and his response was, yeah, actually both myself and my direct manager spend hours a day with her, so there’s a reason why she’s middle of the pack because we’re doing a lot of that stuff with her, we’re sitting with her. That’s been a really long time and it takes all of the other things for her to get up to speed. The point being is, again, you need to come to those conversations with this is what I’m seeing, is there a reason why this might be? Is there some way that like you can give me a real-world, on-the-ground understanding of how we can better work together to action these insights so that again, you can do better? All of those things will net to everybody benefiting.

I don’t usually run into other leaders being resistant, but I do try to approach those conversations with here’s something I’m seeing, do you have an opinion on it? Let’s talk about it together and see how we can come to a better agreement on what actions to take as a result of this possible finding.

SS: I think that’s a great approach to it, for sure. Last question for you, Ella, how can enablement move the needle on some of these core metrics to help ensure the health of the overall business?

EP: I don’t think I’m underplaying this when I say I think enablement is the linchpin. It’s the most important part. When I look at businesses that I’ve worked in and environments that I’ve worked in, without having the ability to teach and train and then reinforce and then teach and train and reinforce again, you’re not giving your teams, the people that you work with, the ability to do the best job possible. You’re not allowing for your business to flourish. Don’t tell them, hey, this is what you’re doing wrong, this is what you’re doing right, this is how we can optimize doing wrong. You can see even given these metrics that Billy might be doing X, Y wrong, and Jenny might be doing A, B wrong. You’re using these things to help. They’re not always tiny but moving these tiny levers slightly higher and slightly higher and slightly higher. That allows you to not only get people’s loyalty to yourself and the business and willingness to work harder, do harder things, what have you, because they know that you’re invested in them.

Not only are you benefiting the company by building and ensuring that the individual contributors know that they’re valued, and that professional development is something that we want to showcase in all of our team members, but also optimizing for yourself. The more that you allow somebody to do a good job and take them on that plane with you, people like being successful, people like being perfect, people want to do a good job. It’s almost like you could even leave them out on a buoy in the ocean and say figure it out, or you can give them a life preserver, bring them on the boat, and like take them to the promise land. I think that without giving them those tools to be successful, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. You’re not doing the right job.

I guess very long answer to a very short question, which is without enablement, I don’t think that you’re showing these team members how valuable they are to you. I don’t think you’re giving yourself the ability to do a better job. It’s almost like it’s the cost of doing business. There’s no benefit to not working with your team and trying to make them better, and if you were the one who hired them, then you have a responsibility to try to bring them to where you want them to be.

SS: I love that, enablement impacts the cost of doing business. That’s fantastic. Ella, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time.

EP: Yeah, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed this chat.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Céline Laffargue from Salesforce join us. Celine, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Céline Laffargue: Thank you Shawnna, I’m very happy to be with you today. I’m Céline Laffargue, I’m a sales enablement leader for all the delivery in Europe, EMEA to be exactly precise, for all the content for our own sales leaders at Salesforce. I joined the company more than four years ago. I started after 20 years in tech as a seller myself, I was a sales leader and a global account manager. I started at Salesforce as an account executive, so a salesperson at Salesforce, and I had the chance and the opportunity to move to enablement, in which I have been working for three years now and I’ve moved from different roles. As you can hear by my voice or maybe by my accent, I’m French, so first I was working with French teams for all the sales, also solution engineers, and all the onboarding for every person at Salesforce France. Now, I’ve got to wider role dedicated to sales leaders, but only for EMEA.

SS: Well, I’m extremely honored to have you here. I’d love to dive in. As you mentioned, one of your core responsibilities at Salesforce as you got started in enablement was really around onboarding new hires. From your experience, how does onboarding help amplify sales productivity for new hires?

CL: It’s an excellent question, Shawnna, because we know onboarding is key. From the first moment, first minute, first time you’re in a new company, you first need to be really welcomed. I think this is also key to understand the culture of the company. For us at Salesforce, it’s something we really focus on a lot. Onboarding is always at stake because we know different people are joining the company, different backgrounds, there are different ways of learning. It’s important to remember this.

Today, Salesforce is providing a tremendous platform. Of course, for our customers, but internally we use the platform to train and to onboard all the employees. We have digital content as every company has today, we believe, and we use this platform you may have heard about called Trailhead, which is a public platform where you can be trained on Salesforce. We use our Trailhead, called My Trailhead internally, to train people, to onboard them, to help them understand what their role is in the company. What is the product? How are we organized?

Everything is of course accessible for everybody at any place. It’s a virtual world today, it’s important to have this ability to do so. We use our tools to train and to onboard everybody. Of course, it depends on what your role is. I mean, role as in if you are an individual contributor or a leader, but also in which business unit you will belong to at the end. We don’t have the same paths of training and learning for someone who is going to be a solution engineer and run demos to customers as for an account executive who would be a seller and needs to understand what the methodology of selling at Salesforce is and how he can, or she can succeed in the role.

SS: Absolutely. What would you say are some of the key components to an effective onboarding program? How do you go about delivering onboarding programs to really ensure that there is a consistent experience for new hires, and it really starts to drive towards that consistent performance that you were talking about?

CL: So first you asked me about the key component. The key component is really the first thing we do at Salesforce. It’s explaining the culture of the company, our core values. We have four core values and it’s really completely embedded in the DNA of anything we do.

The first one is trust, and trust is key to everything we do. It is for customers, but it’s also internally. It’s the trust of people you work with, trust in the fact that you can talk about what’s happening for you and you can make your points. It’s very important. The second one is customer success. Everything is driven for customer success and designed to help this. The third one is innovation, and I think Salesforce has shown year over year how innovative we can be. We try to find every new solution. I believe you heard about the fact that Slack is now a Salesforce company. Embedding a company like Slack makes big changes for our customers, but obviously it does internally too. The last one’s the last but not least value, which is equality. We want equality to be seen at every level of everything we do in the company. We can say we have a fifth core value, which is sustainability. It’s not written in the same way, but it’s also in everything we do because we are a net zero carbon company today and we keep on working on this.

First of all, the key component of onboarding is to understand that those values, it’s not just something written on a wall, it’s really something we do and embedded in every action we can do. Then for the onboarding itself and how we can succeed, the best design people already do the job, so it’s really something that we can validate with them because the results you see in the field. I mean, you need to see what’s happening with your customers to see how you grow your business to make sure that what you learn is bringing you value. Obviously, we have the best design depending on the role you have to play in the company.

We use, of course, our data because our platform is full of data and we’re able to follow up on every personal journey of learning and onboarding. We have a dedicated webinar for all newcomers and then you be sorted by role. If you are a manager, not a manager, if you are a leader, not a leader, whatever you do, you will have dedicated webinar and dedicated content to absorb and to understand.

At the end, we are working on an analytical way of understanding what went well, what didn’t go well, what can we improve. We are running different types of programs and at each program, you can be sure that we ask for feedback. We are very keen to know what is the CSAT of the session, and we ask all the attendees to our trainings to our enablement moment to understand, what can be done differently? What do we need to enhance? Where do you think there is room for improvement for our team for enablement? We want to understand what they’re really looking for to get what the real outcome is that they want. We are very happy because we have very good CSAT coming from the content we deliver today, but we keep on an answering, and we keep on moving forward because we want this to be a great success.

SS: Absolutely. It sounds like a very impressive program, and I love the way that you guys really tailor the learning experience and learning journey, I think as you called it, for every new hire. It’s quite impressive. Now, beyond just improving new hire productivity, you had also focused on training as a key lever to drive overall sales productivity. How can training programs reinforce skills and performance expectations?

CL: This is exactly the point. We are always trying to find a way to link that what you learn in a program is really driving your day-to-day success and the overall success you can get in a year. I’m talking mostly about sales because this is the population I’m working with; all of my audience is mainly sales and obviously sales leaders today.

How do we make sure that it’s linked? We are using lots of tools today. The virtual world opened many new perspectives on this type of usage and apps. We do a lot of simulations, and you use simulations to really have people active during the training. We know that today, just delivering your content when you have a speaker and people listening is not enough. You need to have the interaction, you need to have people involved, and you need to use all the tools you can. Today we use Kahoot to make it fun with quizzes and learning, which is a tool that everybody’s using around the world. We use all the facilitation tools in Google Meet or Zoom because we need to also be able to send a poll to drive people in breakout rooms.

We try to use the technology as nice tools to have and nice tools to use to make it more interactive. We use simulation tools to help people to learn by being active. They need to listen, they need to watch videos, they need to answer questions. They will get the results of the questions they ask at the end as a gathering of information we had, and then they can learn because sometimes you need to make mistakes if you want to learn about it and if you want to change the way you’re doing things. Otherwise, it’s very difficult to know that you’re learning something because if you don’t jeopardize what you thought was the right way to do things, you don’t learn a new way of doing. We are in a technology business, and technology business is moving very fast. We change every day. I mean, business is changing every day, so we need to also help our leaders, ourselves, and everybody at the company to make it more in a wider way, but we need everybody to be able to change, to learn differently, and to use all the tools.

We really love when people can practice because this is where you really try it out. We do practice with pairs, we try to set up sessions where people can be two, three, or four, and there is a role play with a scenario at the beginning. Everybody will be in a different role, but everybody will go through the role he or she is supposed to have in the company, for instance a sales leader, and practice understanding how questioning can be important, how doing things differently can bring value. This is, I think, where making people active in the way they learn can make a difference and can really bring great learnings, and sometimes a breakthrough. We have feedback from learners who say it’s great because I never thought doing this thing like you told me to or like you explained to us and it’s really making a difference for me today.

SS: I think that is phenomenal. Now, you also have a bit of experience yourself from a sales professional background. What are some of the challenges salespeople might experience in applying what they learned in training to day-to-day roles to improve performance, and how can enablement help salespeople overcome these challenges?

CL: We hope they are practicing what they learn. This is a very good point. I mean, the biggest part of my life I’ve been a seller, so going through the roller coaster of emotion you can have with a customer when you need to fight for deal. You need to be very bold; you need to be creative; you need to find ways to sell differently. I’ve been there and I can really tell you what Salesforce is offering, and the methodology of sales is tremendous. I say that because I’ve been to different companies, I’ve seen different ways of doing it, and I can really tell you it’s really fantastic.

How are we making sure they learn? This is exactly what I was saying before, we ask them to practice in a training session to not be shy to do the same in a real-life situation. When do we do this practicing moment, learning moment, we will ask them, what will you do in real life? This simulation, it’s exactly when you’re a pilot for a plane, you don’t fly a plane the first day you start to train as a pilot, you go through a simulation. This is exactly the same. We tell them to use a simulation but do it like it’s a real-life decision you’re making. It’s a big difference because if you take the simulation on saying, oh, it’s a simulation, I don’t care, you won’t get a lot out of it. If you really see the simulation as a point where I can do and try things that I’m not really sure that I can do in the real life because I will be taking a risk, this is wonderful because you practice differently. You are bolder in the decisions that you make and then you can see the result. Sometimes the result is not the one you want it or the one you expected. It can be good, or it can be bad, but at the end you’ve tried, and you learn because you’ve tried.

SS: I love that approach. Now, how do you ensure salespeople have the right resources and content to continue learning and reinforcing their knowledge beyond just the initial training events that you provide?

CL: We are working at Salesforce, specifically the global enablement team is working on a basis of what we call a 2-2-2 model. I will explain what it means. We will, as per any company, every quarter you need to achieve a quota, you need to do some a different type of business. I won’t explain to you how the business is working, but ever quarter we apply the 2-2-2 method saying we only give an element of training on no more than two days during the two first weeks of the two first months of the quarter in order to have free time for ourselves and our teams to close deal sand be with customers at the end of each month. Of course, the last months of the quarter must be focusing on customers, on closing, and on deal-making and not enablement.

What we do during those two days, we assign automatically some content to people depending on their role, global content for the company. I will give you an example, which is the corporate pitch Salesforce is providing to customers, to the world is something we work on every year. Everybody needs to go through the corporate pitch, and this is something for the whole company, for instance as an example.

On the other hand, personalized content for sellers. If I can give you an example, we ask them at the beginning of the year, the beginning of the year at Salesforce is February 1, we will have revised new content to offer. We are currently working on them, about, for instance account planning. All the sellers will have to go through a training, so virtual training, exactly what I was talking about, simulations and quizzes and questions you will ask, and they will do the training about account planning at the beginning of the year. Why? Because it’s the first quarter of the year and you need to build a strategy that you want to deploy to your customers.

This is how we make sure the content is really personalized and is also I would say time personalized, meaning we don’t do the same with our customers at the beginning of a new year as we do know in the first quarter of the year, which is focusing on closing the deals.

SS: Absolutely. That makes 100% sense. Now, just to close us out Céline, this has been a fantastic conversation. I’d love to understand from you with productivity being one of the key goals for your onboarding and training programs, what are some of the ways that you measure how productive salespeople are and the impact of your programs on that productivity?

CL: For the productivity, first we did tremendous work and the global enablement team worked on the new methodology that we started a year ago. By using this new methodology, we were able to reduce onboarding ramp up time. We moved from around five or six months to something closer to three or four months to really get everything you need to know, and you need to learn. I will always say the best way to learn is to go into the field, to see the customer, and to do it. Practicing is the only way to learn. You can make mistakes, but that’s fine because you have tools, you have assets, you have everything available for you to know exactly what you should do at each step with your customer. This methodology is a fantastic foundation for everybody to understand and to learn.

Of course, first we can see the productivity and time it takes to be enabled and to understand. Then we will also have very dedicated tools for following a customer opportunity. Then we use scorecards, which can help us to see exactly, what are the questions you need to ask to your customer? What are the key points or the key meetings you need to have to move forward the stage on your opportunity? If you don’t do it, we can see that using the scorecard can really help the account executive and their sales leaders to have a great vision of where they stand with the opportunity and what are the next actions that they need to take to make it a success and to win the deal at the end.

This is also very visible because we know today by using this kind of scorecard, it’s times three on capacity of winning the deal and it’s more deals won at the end. We are able to see that by using the data and this is why Salesforce is so fantastic, which is the fact that everything is embedded in our platform. All the information is in the same place. It’s a single source of truth and it’s moving forward every day because people or the teams are adding activities, information, and they feed the information in the platform. That’s why and that’s how we can have great data dashboards and vision of the result.

SS: I think that’s phenomenal. Céline, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate you joining us and speaking to our audience.

CL: Thank you so much. I’m very honored to be with you. Also, I the hope that many people will be interested to know more about Salesforce.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Gerald Alston at Varonis join us. Gerald, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Gerald Alston: My pleasure. My name is Gerald Alston. My role is Platform Enablement Manager at Varonis, and Varonis is a pioneer in the data security and analytics space, specializing in software for really three core use cases: data protection, threat detection and response, and compliance.

SS: We’re excited to have you join us today. One thing on your LinkedIn bio that caught my eyes is that you like to challenge sales professionals to do better. I’d love to hear, from your opinion, what are some of the biggest obstacles that salespeople face today?

GA: Well, you mentioned it really in the intro that sales is evolving and it’s doing so rapidly. The landscape is changing and COVID has only accelerated a lot of that. One of the biggest things for me in terms of pushing sales reps to do better is helping them embrace the technologies needed to be optimal in sales. It’s really tough to generate consistent success today without some help. Most of the help is some type of software or other technology that we must use to make us more efficient.

When I challenge sales professionals to do better, it’s in large of part getting more out of the tools in your stack, but also just making sure that you understand where your strengths are, and you show up every day looking to leverage those to the best of your ability.

SS: I love that approach. Now, I do want to double click into this because you’re obviously responsible for platforms at Varonis, so how do you help reps overcome these challenges through platform enablement?

GA: With my role, it’s important that when a sales rep starts at Varonis, you have onboarding and you have training when it comes to the product and selling, but today, salespeople really need to have a certain level of comfort with the tools and the stack to get the most out of the role. It’s nearly impossible for sales rep to really generate the type of success they probably want for themselves without some tools working in unison to get them there.

A big part of my role is to make sure that reps are comfortable with not only knowing how the tools function and why we actually have them, but also giving them some strategy on how to use them together, especially in-house because all companies are different. They use things different ways and Varonis is no different in that respect. My role is to really make sure that when they come on board, not only do I get them up to running on the tools, but we dive deeper into best practices and strategy, depending on the rep and their territory.

SS: Yeah, I think that’s phenomenal. I think adoption of new platforms is absolutely critical. What are some of the types of platforms that you think reps need in order to really maximize success in today’s selling environment? How would you say that these platforms help to streamline processes for reps?

GA: With a question like this, there are so many options out there to choose from, but I would say at minimum, you need tools that are going to help you gather insights. You need tools that will help you get to know prospective customers without them necessarily knowing that you’re there. If you aren’t solutions-focused with your approach hoping to solve people’s problems, it’s going to be tough to get their attention. You need tools that will help you not only gather insights, but also verify your contact information to make sure you have the most accurate information that you can work with.

Beyond that, you need a tool that’s going to help you reach out to these individuals across multiple channels and do so consistently without having leads fall through the cracks. You need to stay organized and ultimately you need something that’s going to help you scale your activity day to day in a way where you can keep up with the demands of the landscape.

Unfortunately for salespeople, the job just gets harder year over year. The number of touches that it takes to take a stranger and turn them into a prospect and now they’re sitting here looking at your demo, that just increases year over year. How do you keep up with that demand? If you’re a salesperson, it’s really tough to do so if you don’t have certain platforms in place to help with that process.

SS: Absolutely. I think part of the process for equipping reps is making sure that they’re armed with the right resources that they need to effectively engage with their buyers. What role do platforms play in this?

GA: Well, from my perspective, the platforms are critical, but I guess for me the first domino to fall is you have to get in contact with someone to even start a conversation. If you have to get in contact with someone, how do you even get their attention to get in contact? That’s really what the tools are there to do, to really help you get their attention. If you don’t have certain tools and you have more of a traditional approach where maybe you spray and pray email, you just stick to templates, you don’t add elements of personalization, some reps of course might be allergic to cold calls, if you will, some might be allergic to adding little elements of personalization they really just prefer for the speed of things to send out the template as is, unfortunately these types of approaches that maybe have generated success years ago, they won’t give you the consistent results today. If you don’t have platforms in place to get their attention, then how do you even start the conversation?

My biggest part is not so much focused on engaging with customers, but I want to make sure that our reps, when they reach out, they have everything they need to not only get someone’s attention, but to leave a lasting and memorable impression so that they stay top of mind with these prospects. That’s really the game that I focus on. That introduction, leaving an impression good enough to where they actually want to see more of your product, and they show up to see it. That is really what I think is the bread and butter when it comes to top of the funnel, and you can leverage these tools in ways to really check a lot of boxes in that respect.

SS: No, absolutely. In fact, I’d love to dig a little deeper into this notion of engagement. What are some of the key metrics that you look at in determining how successful maybe some of your reps are at engaging with these buyers and customers? What are some of the ways that you gather these insights?

GA: So, I like this question because when it comes to key metrics, it’s really contextual on who I’m working with. What it takes to sell in say New York or in Seattle may be different than what it takes to sell in North Carolina or Georgia. When I meet with a rep, first and foremost before I look at any metrics, I want to look at the art of what they’re doing. The things that can’t necessarily be measured in the day-to-day to see, is there anything that we can do? It may not be that you don’t work hard enough. It could be that you have the right numbers, the right output, you’re sending out the emails, but the nuance in your messaging may be off.

What I really look for is, one, what result are you looking to get? Did you get it? If you didn’t get your result, let’s take a look at what you did and then I’m going to try my best to help you figure out how to eventually get there. Honestly, I don’t know if there’s a key metric other than talking to the rep. Did you meet your goal, or did you not meet your goal? That’s my approach from an enablement standpoint. It’s not that I don’t care about the metrics, but my job is just to help ensure that reps are getting the most out of their experience. I’ll leave the metrics and all that to the managers.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that definitely makes a ton of sense for managers to be looking at those key metrics. A closing question for you, Gerald, looking ahead to 2022, what do you think some of the biggest opportunities are for organizations to better enable their sales teams through platforms?

GA: You know, looking ahead, the reality of these tools and their impact in the sales world is undeniable. It’s a requirement now that sales reps have a certain level of comfort with these tools to really get the most out of the role. Organizations moving forward, I think the biggest opportunities really just lie in the fact that the role that I am currently in, it didn’t exist until it was created. I think that there’s a lot of opportunities to really specialize the training around some of these tools in the stack, and it’s needed because again, companies use these technologies in so many different ways. You need people inside the organization who understand how it fits within the scheme of the organization, and then they can communicate that to others as they come on board.

I think that we have so many tools that we invest in, the opportunity is there to just further develop support around those tools to support the organization and it’s something that I don’t want to say is unlimited, but the technology is not going anywhere and it’s going to be only more and more important to have that expertise inside the organization. I think that’s really the biggest opportunity moving forward, leveraging the expertise to make sure that when sales reps come on board, they don’t really have as much of an uphill battle that they may have experienced in other places.

SS: Absolutely. Well, thank you Gerald so much for your time today and your insights that you shared with us.

GA: Oh, my pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Josh Penzell from Zillow join us. Josh, I would love for you to introduce yourself and your background to our audience.

Josh Penzell: Hi everyone. First of all, thanks for having me, Shawnna. I’m Josh, I came into sales enablement by way of theater 15 years ago. I ended up working my way through the theater into corporate America and most recently have been running sales enablement for the Zillow rentals team for the last little over two and a half years. I’m actually going to be moving to another challenge pretty soon, so stay tuned on LinkedIn. Thanks for having me, Shawnna.

SS: Absolutely, we’re excited to have you with us. Now, you wrote an article on LinkedIn and it was titled “Training is not a Performance.” You started the article though by saying our approach to learning is broken. I would love to understand from you, what is broken about learning programs today and what are some strategies that could be implemented to improve learning?

JP: Yeah. Thanks for reading the articles that I spent hours writing, and I didn’t think anyone would ever read them. There are two things. One is that in general, when we think about learning and development within sales enablement, which is based on that, a lot of those theories, a lot of the stuff we think about when we think about adult learning and training is based on post-World War II product management pre-internet. In my mind and if we look at technologies that we install, everything’s really focused on content. Everything’s really focused on learning objectives, which was really important when we didn’t have the information at our fingertips. I think now though, we have people who are naturally learners, we have people who can get information they need, and we should be focusing on outcomes. By the way, this is why I think sales enablement has become such a larger recognized separate study, if you will, because it really focuses on increasing revenue.

I would just say, for instance, our approach to learning I think is broken in the sense that instead of saying how do we get this outcome we need, we focus on what training do I need to create? I’ll give you a really great example I use with my sales leaders, which is if we were to create an e-learning on some rollout, or any learning, there’s a cost to create it, there’s a cost to bring the people together. That could be a $50,000 training investment. Then my question becomes, would a $25,000 contest be more effective? That’s what I mean by our approach is wrong.

I also think, specific to that article, a lot of times people used to say to me earlier in my career when I was facilitating a lot more, oh wow, your theater background allows you to stand up in front of people and perform your voice work and all this. What I tell them is no, that’s not correct. I’m not performing for you. You are performing. You’re actually going to perform a role. Your role is your job role and I’m directing a performance. Really, you’re the performer. We call them performance reviews. My job isn’t to act in front of you or entertain you. The job of human engineers or learning and development professionals or whatever the current term you want to use for enablement professionals, is to get you as the employee or the learner to be able to do something effectively and honestly. That is, frankly, what acting and performance is all about.

What I meant by our approach is wrong is that we often think about the learning professionals as performers, but that’s not right. The performers are the employees, they are the ones who need to enter that stuff into Salesforce. We are simply trying to figure out how to get them to do it. I think the focus on content and on modalities rather than outcomes has caused issues and continues to.

SS: Absolutely. I think you also struck another really good point because you mentioned that you believe in passion transfer, not learning transfer. I hear the term learning transfer a lot in our space, so can you share what the difference is between the two, and why passion transfer is the better approach.

JP: Yeah. Now, first of all, these are all semantics. It’s all a way of metaphorically figuring out how to get someone to think differently, that’s why I use some of these terms. Learning transfer, to me, that implies somehow, I have a bucket, it’s your brain, and I’m going to transfer the learning in. I’m going to pour it in. Almost sounds like osmosis. Like you put the book down and it transfers in. If we focus on learning transfer, that really focuses on content. I need you to learn something. How will you ever know that we’ve accomplished that? I mean, this is classic instructional design theory, but learning is not the key. The key is doing something. It’s a behavioral thing.

I use the example of a ukulele now. I don’t know why I use the example of a ukulele, but let’s say Shawnna, you wanted to learn how to play the ukulele. There are two approaches. One is I could try to sign up for classes and I could try to find the right teacher and we do all this stuff, and you’d learn theory and blah, blah, blah. That is the old school approach. I would think a new school approach, and the one I really want, is Shawnna, you want to play ukulele? You go on Amazon, you buy it. You go on YouTube, you see what works, and you teach yourself. Then at some point you find a coach or someone to help you provide feedback, which is really what the learning is all about.

That’s what I mean by passion transfers. If I can get people passionate, I don’t have to “teach them anything,” I don’t have to transfer any knowledge. They’ll transfer it themselves through doing. That’s why I say passion transfer. It’s also because I’m a passionate person and maybe it just makes up for the fact that I “soapbox” a lot, so it could be that.

SS: I love that. No, I think that’s fantastic. I want to circle back to something you also said a moment ago, you talked about how you really try to propel learning by really focusing on the end results and that a lot of times that’s what gets missed in these enablement opportunities within organizations. You focus on trying to create value without having to always create new content. How do you manage content governance within your learning programs and how has this approach impacted the success of your learning programs?

JP: Yeah. One of the challenges with content is once you create it, it has to be updated. I see this as one of those chicken and the egg issues because we generally run into an issue on any sales team where you have a certain amount of tribal knowledge and you want those people to pass it on, and then you start trying to create content that captures it.

I don’t have a great answer for you. What I’ll say is the industry, I think as a whole, has decided to focus on the content aspect, which is important. I’m not saying it’s not for all the reasons you’re saying. We need some way to make sure it’s up to date, to have people be able to update it, to find the correct answer at any one time. We have to assess the risk upfront of what happens if it’s not checked, or something is said incorrectly on a call or whatever. If we start to make those decisions, we can start to say, well, maybe the content and the management of the content and making sure it is up-to-date and putting all that resources into it is important, but not as important as enacting the behaviors.

In a weird way, what starts to happen is you create a vessel for content to be stored, and then really you can empower the sales professionals themselves and the sales leaders to figure out what they need and how they’re going to find that content. Again, you’re reversing it. Instead of saying you’re going to go learn from content to begin with, or you’re going to present content to a client, it really becomes less about the content and more about the sales.

I think, Shawnna, one interesting thing is in sales enablement, I think all I’m doing is selling. I’m just selling the sales professionals on what solutions they need to accomplish what they need to do at the end. I’ve just personally found that a focus on content means a focus on money, investment, and spend. That is an easier place to spend money, but it also is in a harder place to determine the return on investment. I don’t know if I have the solution yet, because as we’ve talked about sales enablement is relatively new, measuring these things is relatively new, but what I do know is if I focus less on that and I focus more on what I’m hearing in Gong or I’m seeing in Salesforce, and I worry less about the content I’m putting out there, then I can start to calibrate exactly what I need and when.

What I’ve generally found is content is not as important as sales coaching or having your managers involved. I’ll give you an example. If we were starting a brand new, new hire program and you had content, generally speaking, when I go to the sales leaders they say, yeah, it’s not really good or I tell them to forget everything when they leave. My first question would be what happens if we put someone on a call day one and they haven’t learned it. At that point, we’ve probably learned where the risks are and then we can attack those risks however we want to, whether it’s content or some or a manager or whatever. Then we can have them sell or we can have them scrimmage or role-play and then we give them feedback on that.

It becomes less about the content, more about the behaviors. The content becomes important when we try mechanizing and we scale, but frankly, I haven’t seen any organization that’s ready for that anyway. Step one, then step two.

SS: I think that’s fantastic advice. Now, one problem that you identified in training today, which I think a lot of enablement practitioners can relate to, is a lack of data. Why does this problem exist? What are maybe some of your best practices for gathering meaningful data for your organization?

JP: I mean, there’s a lot of arguments here. The easiest one is simply that in learning and development, it is extremely difficult to prove out ROI, and so we might as well not even focus on it, is generally what I hear. I also hear stuff like it’s very hard to measure that, so let’s measure level one. Kirkpatrick, we have level one, two, three, four. We have reaction, knowledge, behavior, and then results. It’s easy to focus on reaction and attendance and these metrics over in the front end because I can show those to leaders and the leaders like those. I can say, oh, I gave you 500 hours of training, and I did it in less time than it took me to create last year. Those look like good metrics and our industry traditionally, I think, has just been stuck with that because there’s no really good way to measure the other stuff. That being said, I actually think that’s not because of technology, it’s just because we focus too much on the level ones and level twos.

The first thing I say is let’s focus on the level four, and I ask my leaders, what are we going to need to see to know that this was successful? We can hypothesize on a behavior that we think will drive the result. I would much rather see if the behavior is occurring rather than the learning, the knowledge. I don’t care if someone know how to use a specific method to overcome an objection theory. What I care about is, can they overcome the objection on the phone and then are they doing it effectively? Then we can dig into that.

The reason I think it’s hard is because people don’t want to do it. I also think once you start doing that, it opens up a big can of worms of why we have invested so much in content developers and instructional designers and people who are creating content, which again is a spend rather than all the other stuff — consulting, looking at the end result, which is savings.

How do I do that successfully? I run sales with my leaders. They’ll say we need a training on X, and I do my discovery. Great, we can do a training. Before we get there, tell me what’s going on? What’s the issue? That way I can give you a solution that’ll help. As we start talking through things, usually the issue is not training. It’s something different. As we start listening through that, then I go through, and I isolate my objections just like any salesperson would. I’d say great, so I’m hearing that they’re having trouble, let’s use this objection handling one. They’re having trouble handling this very specific objection. If they could do that at the end of this training or this learning or this enablement or whatever we want to call it, and we haven’t done that yet, but if we could, what else is going to fix this problem? What else is going to have you say yeah, the problem is solved.

Generally, when we start doing that, we discover that there are other core issues that have nothing to do with training. There are systems issues, there are belief issues, there are motivation issues, there are comp issues. When you start running through that and you run your learning and development or your sales enablement or the likely business that has to provide a return on investment, you almost have no choice but to prove that out because at the end of the year, your leaders are going to say, how much did you get me? What money did you get? For me, it’s really from leadership at the top, they need to be saying, how much money did you save me? How much money did you earn? When a learning or development or sales enablement person says that’s very difficult to do or I can’t do it, that’s where we have to push back and say, I think you can do it, we just haven’t done it in the past.

New hire, a lot of people don’t want to risk throwing new hire out the window for some reason, but it’s like three weeks or two weeks or whatever. That’s a lot of money upfront. You’ve got to get leadership to say let’s throw that out the window and let’s try without that for one week and let’s see what the results are. Then you make an iteration, and you measure those results as well. We were able to see stuff where we did something with our new hire classes and between the first group that went through it and the second group, we did see a huge increase and we changed things we did. We saw an increase in whether they were hitting their ramp and their quota. Now, I don’t know if that is seasonal or because of other things, but statistically speaking and if I just look at significance, it’s higher. Even if we set out $300,000, $100,000 of that was due to training or $50,000 of that, that’s still money I can report on. That’s a headcount, that’s a person, that’s not a spend.

This is a big topic, and it gets me into trouble sometimes, but I truly think we should not be taking any learning and development, sales enablement task unless you can measure its efficacy, which any business would require.

SS: No, absolutely. When creating training, because I think you’ve talked a little bit about this notion of return on investment, how can starting with ROI and utilizing those measurable metrics help companies avoid a lot of what you talked about, like wasted time and money and morale, on training?

JP: Well, I think first of all, we need to all acknowledge that most corporate training is terrible. This comes from a training person. Maybe I’m wrong, so someone listen to the podcast message me and tell me I’m wrong, but if 75% of the e-learning you’re required to take in your org is entertaining and you love it and you can’t wait to learn and it’s effective, please let me know because I would love to do that. Same with universities, by the way. All we are doing is learning how to learn in a very specific way. I think traditionally, most corporate learning is broken, and everyone knows it. A, we can all start with that general approach. We all can acknowledge that getting reaction scores and knowing whether they learn something in an hour training, we should just all be able to acknowledge that that’s not worth anything, that just spend. There’s the first thing. We have to get leaders on board with saying that.

I mean, there’s two types of knowledge. Everyone knows this, not everyone, but implicitly. There’s this procedural knowledge, doing knowledge, and there’s the knowing knowledge. I cannot think of just about anything in sales, especially in sales enablement, where I’m hiring someone who doesn’t have some basic understanding of how to sell. Even if they’re just a human being. You’re a parent too, Shawnna, our kids are naturally selling us all the time. They’re manipulating us. They know it’s natural. All we’re trying to do is give them form and trying to help them mechanize and apply process so they can do it consistently.

For me, it really has to do with just letting people do their thing and throwing them into the fire originally. A new hire program, for instance, with me would be let’s just have them sell every day and listen to where they’re getting it wrong. Now, how do you mechanize that and move that up, that’s the real question. We need to focus on the behavior, the outcome. Those are things we can measure in here, especially in sales. Saying we’re going to learn some objection handling method, or I’m going to learn SPIN settling, or Challenger sales, that’s great, but is that actually what you want, or do you just want them to close more sales?

By the way, this gets to post-sales enablement, pre-sales enablement too. Our customers aren’t getting past the pilot phase, for instance. We need training for customer service. All right, let’s dig into that. Why? Well, some people love it, but they don’t need the training and the people who need the training, don’t take it. Oh, interesting. That sounds like a passion transfer problem. Why is that happening? As we dig into this, it really has nothing to do with training. It has to do with motivation, has to do with your sales professionals understanding the objections.

I don’t know if I answered your question specifically there, but I think we just really need to stop thinking about things as information. It’s just natural. No one learned how to ride a bike through a PowerPoint in a book. You got up on a bike and you started peddling and you fell down.

SS: I love that. No, I think that’s a fantastic analogy, Josh. Now, last question for you. Your team has achieved some really impressive results and one of those you highlighted on LinkedIn is the revenue impact, what we’ve been talking about up until this point. What are your best practices for correlating your efforts back to the organization’s revenue?

JP: Well, make really, really, really good friends with whoever your data and Salesforce people are, first of all. They’re going to be able to get the data, but you need to figure out a way to access that Salesforce data in some regard. Also, I mean, this is the thing with data, but just like taxes or data or money, numbers can tell a story. I don’t want to say flub the numbers, but you can omit and add things that you need. I don’t say that to say do that to your leaders, but what I say is everyone uses data, and everyone is trying to tell us the story they want. Its which data is going to be the most compelling.

What I would focus on to begin with is simply look at Salesforce. Is revenue going up or down? Are there are trends that we can see? Once we start with the data as opposed to the feelings, it’s really easy to go to the leadership and say, let’s try this or let’s do that. Of course, that requires technology and iteration, but I think the end result is focused on those things. What are you trying to accomplish? I really think the end result, the best approach, and this sounds crazy, but I would throw out all the training and make your managers, who should be their coaches, who by the way have a quota aligned with their quota, make them in charge of making sure these people are going to be successful. Once we get everyone operating in a certain way, then we can go in, we can mechanize it, we can figure out what everyone’s doing, we can look at trends.

Generally, what I’ve found in a sales org is you have different managers operating differently. Different teams are operating differently. Really the key to everything we’re talking about is up leveling your coaches and your managers to enable them to do the coaching and the training. Really what it comes down to is stop focusing on the content for the IC’s, focus on enabling the managers and the coaches to deliver and to continue to coach and support their people. By the way, then you create a bench and you’re doing all sorts of stuff and you’re able to identify the people who are strong. But that’s the number one thing.

The other thing is whoever the VP of Sales is or your CRO or whatever, you need to be at that table. Personally, the shared services model of being up to HR and then supporting a sales organization, I don’t think it’s impossible, but structurally it’s problematic because you’re dealing with different objectives. The CHRO has different metrics that they’re reporting on then the CRO or the Chief Sales Officer. You need to figure out which ones you’re aligning to, and I’ve generally found unless you’re aligning with the business metrics, everything becomes that old style stuff. I think that’s part of it.

The other thing is you’ve got to measure, and you’ve got to be willing to take chances. You have to be willing to throw out your new hire training and start from something different. You have to be willing to put one group through something and put another group through something else so you can see which one was effective. That doesn’t mean you have to build it out perfectly. Again, if you stop worrying about content and you stop worrying about beauty and all of this stuff, and you just start thinking about TikTok and YouTube and the fact that you have people with knowledge, you can actually really start to get people together. Then your job as a learning professional or sales enablement professional really becomes more about curation and coaching, which is what it should be.

SS: I’ve gotten some fantastic advice from you today, Josh. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us.

JP: Thank you for having me

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Monty Fowler from Lob join us. Monty, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Monty Fowler: Thanks, Shawnna. Well, my name is Monty, I lead our revenue enablement team at Lob. I’ve been there about three years and honestly, this is the first time I’m ever leading or working in an enablement organization. I’ve been a sales leader and a sales contributor for nearly 30 years, so it’s a new journey for me and I’m loving it.

SS: Well, we’re excited to have you here on our podcast today. I noticed on LinkedIn that you mentioned your passion is coaching and mentoring sales professionals, and really to focus that around selling with high integrity. What does high integrity mean to you and why is it important to master that in sales?

MF: Yeah, great question. To me, high integrity means first and foremost, always telling the truth about your company, about your products, about your features, about your place in the marketplace. Whatever the topic of conversation is, we want to always strive to be as truthful as we possibly can.

The other side of integrity for me is making sure that we’re always coming from a place where we’re truly interested in the outcome for the customer. We’re trying to solve a problem, we’re trying to give them a new capability, we’re trying to maximize some value point for their company, or we’re trying to minimize some mitigation risk or mitigate some risk for their company. You have to truly care about that outcome if you’re going to be a high-integrity seller. I stress those two things, be honest and really try to care as much as you can about your customer.

SS: I love that approach. Now, how can coaching help reps maximize their talents and what would you say good coaching looks like particularly today?

MF: Yeah. Well, for me, the approach I’ve always taken to coaching is really grounded in my military training. In the military, they assess an individual’s capabilities from the first moment they’re there. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t break you down and try to turn you into a robot or a clone of every other person there. What they really do is they try to identify, where are your strengths? What are the things that you already have mastered and that you can help other people come along with? Where are your deficiencies? Where the areas that you struggle so we know where to focus our attention and training and development?

We do the exact same thing in sales and in revenue enablement. When I’m coaching either a new employee or an existing employee, we always start the conversation with one, what are we trying to address? Are trying to learn a new behavior? Are we trying to get rid of a bad habit? Are we trying to try something new and we’re not sure what the outcome’s going to be? Then we always go to, alright, what area with that are you struggling? Where do you need some help? Where do you need some additional instruction? Where do you need some development? Then I’ll, I’ll either point them to resources that I’m familiar with, or I’ll go find some. In many cases, if it’s directly Lob related knowledge, we’ve already got assets and I can just point them to what they need.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now, I want to pivot a little bit. You mentioned before that the most talented reps are those who have both something special about them and the ability to follow a sales process. How do you balance the sales process in the coaching programs? Why is it important to focus on process as well as talents when coaching?

MF: You know, for years, I’ve talked about the two sides of the selling coin. The artistry, or the art of selling, and then there’s the science of selling. I think the artistry has more to do with your natural makeup as a person. Your personality type, your methods or preferences in terms of communication, how you speak, how you present yourself, how engaging you are, whether you’re funny or a little bit more stoic. All of those things go into the artistry of selling. Those are things that you’re either born with or traits that have developed through other aspects outside of work.

Then there’s the science of selling. I think this is where a lot of companies try to get it right and end up doing more harm than good. What I’ve found over the years is that while process is important, it’s not the most important thing. The most important thing, going back to the earlier question, is making sure that your customer-facing people, and that’s everybody, not just sellers, but customer success, customer experience, marketers, product people, anybody who has face-to-face contact with your customers, they have to be able to communicate properly. They have to be able to ask good questions and they have to be able to follow a process to a point.

What we don’t want to do with processes is that we don’t want to be so prescriptive that we remove the artistry from selling. We have to leave space for someone’s personality to shine through for their individual communication style to come through because at the end of the day, that’s when you get the best results. Be yourself, follow the process, and when you find a friction point in the process that isn’t working for you, let leadership now because chances are good that somebody else is feeling that same friction point and we need to address it.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. Now, along with coaching, I feel like mentorship also plays a significant role, and you are passionate about both. How does mentoring differ from coaching for revenue teams?

MF: Coaching is what I would consider a one-to-many process. One person with the requisite skills and experience can effectively coach fairly large groups of people. Think like a football team or soccer team or something, there’s usually a handful of coaches and a whole bunch of players and it gets the job done. Mentoring is absolutely a one-to-one proposition. It’s not a relationship that can be forced on someone, it has to come organically. All the mentoring that I’ve done over the years and that I’ve been on the receiving end of, those are relationships that just kind of came together. Either I asked the mentor, hey, would you be willing to spend some time helping me with this or that, or the mentor came alongside me and said, hey, I see a couple of rough spots here I think we need to work on, would you be willing to do it with me? That’s the way mentoring works, at least in my mind.

SS: No, absolutely. What would you say it takes to be an effective mentor though, and have you been able to, through enablement, successfully implement mentorship programs for revenue teams?

MF: We don’t take a programmatic approach to mentoring for the reasons I just stated, it needs to be an organic relationship that’s born out of some sense of mutual desire. I need some help with this, I’ve identified that you’re the person who’s got that skillset, and I reach out to you, and you say yes or no. Or vice versa, a junior person you see a struggling in an area you offer to help. Again, it’s more than just one or two sessions. We’re going to outline a process and a relationship by which we’re going to take you from where you are today to where you want to be as a mentee.

Putting that into a program and putting it into a process, I think it defeats the purpose of it. That’s why coaching has such an important role in enablement though, because you always have those situations where someone is struggling or needs help, and somebody else on the team or within the organization has that requisite skillset or can help unlock that ability for that person, if you were to just put them together in a coaching relationship, that is something that we do all the time at Lob. It’s something that we’ve got baked into our enablement and training processes and it’s something that I ask our department leaders to always be on the lookout for. Who do you think could use some coaching? Who do you think would be the best person for that? Then I’ll go ahead and put the people together and try to outline at least some sort of framework that’s going to get them from point A to point B over a reasonable period of time.

SS: I do like that though and I think you’re right. We have this term called radical responsibility with my team and I think that holds absolutely true when it comes to mentorships. To close Monty, my final question for you is, what are some of the key metrics that you use to measure the success of coaching? Maybe to a lesser extent with mentoring programs, maybe they’re not metrics-driven, but are there sentiment measurements that you’re looking at, and then how do you demonstrate the impact of those programs to your executive stakeholder?

MF: Yeah, both of those are squishy topics, I have to be honest with you. It’s not like, hey, I need you to log into this new piece of software, do this training module, and then take this quiz at the end and demonstrate your knowledge attainment. When it comes to coaching, and especially mentoring, being able to objectively measure the impact and the outcome or the effect I think is very difficult. I think some companies probably have figured it out. We sure haven’t. What we really try to focus on are the things that we can measure. All of the training that we do, all of the content that we produce, all of those have a set of analytics around them and certain measures that tell us whether it’s good, bad, we need to change it, keep it the same, do more, do less, whatever.

When it comes to coaching, though, really all you can go by is two things. What is the person you’re coaching, or mentoring say about the experience before and after, and what observations can you make about their behavior or performance or whatever it is that you were coaching them or mentoring them on? I think that’s the best that we’ve been able to do so far, not to say we won’t do better in the future or figure something else out. Really what you’re talking about is, how do you measure the relationship between two people and the effectiveness of it? If somebody were to say, hey, measure your marriage or your parent-child relationships on a scale of one to ten, it’s completely subjective and it changes over time. That’s a tough one.

SS: It changes daily sometimes with my children. Well, Monty, thank you so much for joining us today. I greatly enjoyed this conversation.

MF: Absolutely, my pleasure. Happy to do it.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesnablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Jeff Scannella from FullStory join us. Jeff, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jeff Scannella: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Shawnna. Again, my name is Jeff Scannella, the Senior Product Manager of Productivity and Enablement at FullStory. For those of you who are not familiar with FullStory, we provide digital experience intelligence to companies that allow them to know everything about their customer’s digital experience, whether that’s on mobile, whether that’s on apps. As we see a transition to that becoming steadily the norm from an experience perspective, that’s where we can support our clients. I live outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. Grew up, born and raised in Atlanta, but proud to call Charlotte home now.

SS: Well, excited to have you here on our podcast today. I actually read an article that you were featured on for the FullStory blog where you were talking about your Sales Academy, which is your new hire onboarding program. I’d love to start there. How is that program structured to set new sales reps up for success in their roles?

JS: Yeah, this has been a great work in progress for us over the last six months to really establish the fundamentals of who we are as a business when someone steps their foot in the door. When it comes to the variety of sales roles, Shawnna, that we bring in on a pretty much weekly basis, we want to make sure that there is a tried-and-true plan of attack for them to know what they’re getting into in their first month of being a FullStory employee.

We’ve set out to create certain objectives, competencies, and weekly challenges, as many milestones for our team members to really strive towards day in and day out for their first month with us at FullStory. Each of these weeks, again, really centralizes on some of the core fundamentals that will help them be successful in the role. Getting familiar with the types of personas and industries that they will be working in, specific focus on our product, and then rounding that out with some essential focus on process and sales skills that will enable them to take that learning and bring it into the field with them to be successful very quickly.

We then coupled that with a nine-week program specifically around the behaviors, the interactions, the customer conversations that they will be having, almost from start to finish, from an initial outreach all the way through the demonstration and closing of a new client to give them that safe space to perfect and practice a lot of these key scenarios alongside their teammates. Really being able to start there, but also creating familiarity, Shawna, with key assets, key pieces of content. Where do those live? How to get help? How to communicate effectively through Slack, which is what we use? This gives them some of the more under the radar type of insights and knowledge base that sets them up, not just to be successful from a growth acumen standpoint, but just how to be efficient and productive day to day throughout their first couple of months of working at FullStory.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now, you mentioned that the program is applicable for any sales role, but do you tailor different aspects of the programs for specific sales type roles?

JS: Yes. That’s a great question. We’ve worked very hard to be diligent and mindful that not only does every team member who joins the business maybe learn a little bit different from the next, but their roles have different nuances to them just the same. What we’ve really built this program around is creating cohesion amongst the group to set the core fundamentals, core foundational elements in place, and then where appropriate based on a team member’s specific role, have tracks that are applicable more so to their day to day.

From an SDR perspective, from a sales engineering perspective, there are skills, activities, behaviors that are absolutely more relevant to each one of those use cases than the next. We want to provide that opportunity to them to partner with key stakeholders within the business, bringing in subject matter experts that again are aligned with their specific role. That’s given us a lot of strength to be able to meet team members where they are and their journey over their first month and beyond, but also to create that harmony between the large group as well as some of the smaller breakout tracks that we’ve put in place.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now, there’s another piece of the program, which I also found impressive and quite valuable, which is peer-to-peer learning. What are some of the ways that you’ve been able to foster peer learning in onboarding, and particularly so in the virtual environment that a lot of us have been in the last two years? How can sales enablement practitioners or practitioners running these types of programs motivate new reps to engage in and lean into peer learning?

JS: Yeah. That’s been a pretty big part of the culture that we’re trying to create, Shawnna, within a team member’s first couple of months, specifically around the onboarding perspective. Really at the heart of it is that each role learns from the next. There’s cultivation of respect between teams when we’re all together despite our difference in roles.

SDRs, for example, their outreach is very heavy compared to maybe an enterprise account executive, but there’s great things to be learned from the grind that they go through on a day-to-day basis, the tenacity, the approach to outreach and securing opportunities with new customers. Our enterprise account executives can absolutely take a page from, learn from, understand the messaging, the habits, the touchpoint cadence of SDRs that can in turn, help them as they approach this perhaps on their own. On the other end of that coin is that the AEs, they can show the SDRs what their future within the business can look like at that next level, the level after that in terms of some of the high-level conversations, some of the habits that our SDRs can aim for in growing their own careers.

First, it starts with the respect that is cultivated between team members across the board, but secondarily, the idea sharing in the breakout practice sessions is really where we’ve seen the most growth across the board within our program. It’s sharing ideas, complimenting ideas, challenging each other in a healthy fashion to think differently about a given topic, a given concept, a given sales interaction. If, Shawnna, you and I were in the same group, maybe there’s something that you said or a way you approach something that I wouldn’t have thought of myself. As a result, I’m taking bits and pieces, not just from the core content, but from my teammates day to day, week to week. We firmly believe at the end of the program, that there is a lot to gain from those interactions across the board.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit. After the initial onboarding program, you also leverage coaching to help reinforce the concepts that were introduced in onboarding. In your experience, what has been the impact of coaching on new hire productivity?

JS: It’s done a lot for the confidence and the exposure of core concepts, core situations, and specific sales process elements that our team members really need to be successful in the field. Because of coaching, it’s allowing things to happen faster, it’s allowing team members to see things, digest things, and act on things much faster, which is allowing us to see quicker ramp times in which we are selling more, but more importantly, we’re understanding the fundamentals that are replicable that can lead to long-term success.

Whether that’s good engagement with prospects, excellent in thorough discovery, impactful thought-provoking questions during a demonstration. The one-to-one small group cohort, large group cohort coaching environments that we position straight after the initial onboarding creates cohesion in what they’ve just learned for that first month but carries it out with real field awareness for that next eight to nine weeks, giving them a full 90 days to really start to put these things in action when they hit the field.

Also understand that there’s those things that we can refine, that we can complement, that we can change to allow the sellers to find their best foot forward individually. That is the most important message that we try to position, that over the course of that 90-day timeframe, your journey may not look like your team members, but at the end of the day it is yours and yours alone to get to where you want to be, which will not only impact your future success and longevity, but also your teams.
We have a lot of competitive people who come through our program who want to succeed, and it’s about meeting them where they are, challenging them to think differently and raise their own personal bar, but also understand that it is a process and one that we firmly believe will help them get to their next level, whatever that is.

SS: Jeff you participated in an AMA session with us recently on coaching. What metrics are you looking at to measure the impact of sales coaching at your organization and how are you using these metrics to improve your future programs?

JS: Yeah, great question, Shawnna. This is one that really fascinates me to take a deeper look at when we iterate on or create additions to existing coaching programs because it’s important for us to be very tight to the core KPIs of the sales organization in total.

The two high-level KPIs that really, we’ve tried to evolve even since that conversation, are twofold. Number one, of course, is at the end of the day, are we at our quota from a quarterly onset? Are we striving towards what we call, “in the green,” which is above 70% of your quarterly number? Our goal is to have every single person who steps foot within Sales Academy and/or the coaching program in unison, to be even in their first quarter in that green zone. We want to challenge our team members to really strive for themselves to have that as their first milestone within our business, but also to know that there are a lot of working pieces working collaboratively with their frontline managers to be able to help them. The first and most impactful is that initial goal of getting them in the green.

Now, second, and really where we’re trying to push the threshold a bit, is with team members that may not have a quota because they are on a ramp. Our challenge has been to measure what percentage of those people who are not on a ramp are still closing business. That’s giving us some really great data to see, how can we do things faster than maybe we would have envisioned before? How do we take that ramp time of maybe two to three months and shrink that down to a month? Shrink it from six months down to three? Doing so with precision around understanding that we’d still have to provide our team members with a deliberate process and a vision to get there.

Those two KPIs shown are really the macro level, if you will, but in addition, you know, we’re looking for also some micro KPIs that are a little less easy to track, but are ones such as, how is our sales methodology and our messaging appearing in more conversations? How does our competitive positioning and the ways that we differentiate in the marketplace appear in more customer conversations? Being able to leverage some of the tools that we have at our disposal to really coach from what we see.

I think you’ll remember me talking through in our AMA that coaching really starts from changing behavior that is witnessed. We have a really strong grasp on how we want to continue to push that envelope to make sure that our team members have a great runway, a great platform to be successful. In the enablement world, we are very deliberate on what we’re measuring and how that plays into future programming as well.

SS: Absolutely. Now in that AMA session, just to round us out and close us out, you also said that accountability is one of the most important things that you’re looking at as you plan for 2022. How are you planning your onboarding and coaching programs for the year ahead with accountability as a business goal in mind?

JS: Yeah, that’s a great question and one that I’m always striving to challenge my team and for my boss to be challenging me on how we can get better here. That goes, Shawna, from week to week, month to month, how are we analyzing performance not just of our new team members when it comes to onboarding, but also coaching programs as a whole? What’s working? What’s moving the needle? What isn’t? Why isn’t it? Thinking about the touchpoints, the content we create, the ways that we can provide visibility into that content, the ways we secondarily build programming in general, is there a better way, a more assertive way, a more creative way to contextualize that opportunity so all of those pieces to that very grandiose puzzle are what we are trying to analyze on a week in and week out basis?

For us as a team, our standard is to never be stagnant in how we’re approaching things. It’s to always be thinking of that next move and what that can unlock from a skillset development standpoint, a business objective standard. How do we think differently about our approach? Even when we are seeing things that are winning, how do we challenge to what that next level can look like? How do we think differently about the next set of team members that join the business? How does their experience not just stay the same as someone three months before, but improve? Always looking at that reflection component to our methods, as well as just being comfortable challenging each other within the team to be hyper-focused on our planning.
When we look at 2022 in particular, Shawnna, it’s all about working at scale. It’s raising our bar from that enablement focus from team members and their experiences. How do we align that with both personal team and business goals globally? In between, finding those personal touchpoints that we know is essential to creating positive team culture.

SS: That’s fantastic. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us on our podcast today. I appreciate the time.

JS: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Christie, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Christie Spain: Great. Hi, my name is Christie Spain, and I’m the sales enablement business partner for our field sales team at LaunchDarkly. At LaunchDarkly, we help companies release new features faster and safer by separating deployments from releases through the use of feature flags.

In non-technical speak, what that means is simply a “dark launch.” It just means that you have control over your releases because you can deploy a new feature without it being live to all users.

SS: Well, as someone who manages our updates to our community site, I can tell you, I love having a feature for that. I’m also excited to have you here, given your expertise. On LinkedIn, you actually mentioned a quote from Zig Ziglar, which is “you don’t build a business, you build people, and they build your business,” which I love. How do you find this quote though, to be true in sales enablement and, and how does sales enablement contribute to organizational development?

CS: Yeah, great question. I actually love this quote. I first heard it from my manager back in college when I did a door-to-door sales job, and I learned firsthand working with him and building a team. At that time, what was a volunteer army of salespeople working on straight commission that the people on your team should really always be your biggest investment and that if you help enough people be successful, you really secure your own fate of also being successful.

I believe that the inverse of this is also really true. At times, I had to learn this the hard way. I think that we sometimes leave managers and a culture. That’s not working, not the business and it’s not always the case, but it is a lot of the time. I think how this applies in sales enablement, it really looks a little bit at every business based on where the company is at in terms of size and scale. In fact, I think if you were to line up 10 of us in sales enablement across 10 different stages of companies. We’d all have a slightly different take on it. Right? Our priorities would look a little different, but I do think at its core, we can all agree that sales enablement is about really increasing sales productivity.

Now, there are a lot of layers to that statement, but helping teams be more productive really requires me to wear a lot of hats. It could be mobilizers, synthesizer, trainer, or coach. But really, the goal while wearing all of these hats is to understand what’s needed and then put together the right team to go make that happen. Really, when you’re working to improve productivity and scale a business, at some point, you need a certain amount of repeatability and sales enablement is a really critical business partner for that.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. Now, you also mentioned that one of your specialties is talent recruitment and it is an extremely hot market for talent right now. In your opinion, how can sales enablement though add really unique value to the talent recruitment process?

CS: I think that sales enablement has a really unique vantage point in the business in that we’re working across all segments. We see not only what’s working really well on one team, but across all the different teams, as well as what’s not working right. Having worked in recruitment for part of my career.

I know that helping someone have a fast start in a new role has so much to do with expectation setting. I’m a big believer in radical transparency in the recruiting process, and you can still recruit great talent even if your team or business is going through a low period. As long as you’re honest about it and you’re equipped to share what they’ll be gaining by joining you, I think this is where sales enablement can align and really equip hiring managers with these insights in order to build that value story.

SS: Absolutely. What are some of the key skills or characteristics that you look for when you’re hiring sales reps?

CS: I think the specific skills needed vary by business, but there are three that are universal: curiosity, a problem-solving mentality, and good old-fashioned grit.

SS: I think that those are great characteristics to look for in reps. Now, once new reps are hired though, and this is where sales enablement definitely comes in, how do you help ensure that they have the tools that they need to become productive quickly? How do you balance that with the need to also ensure that they have a positive employee experience as they join a new company?

CS: We are in the process of improving our onboarding experience. Without giving too much away, there are two things that really stand out here. One of our reps said to me recently that A’s are expensive. So, get us a minimum viable product and onboarding so that we can do our job quickly and just come back to the rest later. This is something that we are really focused on in those first 30 days, ensuring that we can do just that. Also, we want to ensure that those 30, 60, 90 milestones are clearly defined and understood. The more you can eliminate the question in that first quarter of what to spend time on, it’s just going to help them build pipeline faster, which is ultimately what we all want to get to.

SS: Absolutely. I could not agree more. Now, final question for you. How can sales enablement not only help to bring in the right talent and get them ramped through the recruiting and onboarding process, but then also help to retain that talent long term?

CS: I’m going to reiterate the importance of transparency here. I think that reps can have an incredibly positive onboarding experience and have a fast art. Even if you don’t have a comprehensive bootcamp or onboarding experience fully built out, do those things help? Absolutely. Yes. At a certain time, they are necessary to scale quickly, but even before you get to that point, definitely do not underestimate the value of just setting the right expectations.

SS: Absolutely. Well, Christie, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. I really appreciate it.

CS: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Amanda Romeo at DailyPay join us. Amanda, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Amanda Romeo: Thanks, Shawnna. Thank you so much for having me as well. Yes, my name is Amanda Romeo. I am the Senior Manager of Revenue Training and Enablement at DailyPay, which is a hyper-growth New York-based technology company. To put it simply, what we do is provide an industry-leading service that enables employees to access or save their pay as they earn it without having to wait for that traditional pay cycle.

SS: Very excited to have you here, Amanda. You’ve been a core partner to Sales Enablement PRO over the years. In fact, you have extensive experience around building training, onboarding, and coaching programs, and were awarded our award for Initiative of the Year based on those programs at DailyPay last year. As the work environment has continued to evolve since then, how are you planning and designing your programs and preparing your reps for success for the coming year in 2022?

AR: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much again for that award. It’s probably the nicest trophy that I’ve ever gotten, and I have it up in my office. It’s such a nice reminder that hard work pays off.

Moving into 2022, a lot of things coming up. First, to start with onboarding, as the new year approaches my team is currently going through extensive curriculum health assessments to identify areas of opportunity for our onboarding program so that we can help our new hires ramp quickly. With that said, one of the things that we identified is the need to stretch our onboarding program. Most go from about three to six weeks depending on the role. We’ll want to extend that through their full first 90 days of their onboarding so that we can provide more reinforcement, timely learnings, things such as that.

With the timeliness of learnings, another component of our 2022 plan is furthering our just-in-time learning. Things like releasing more micro learnings, utilizing our training and coaching platform a little bit more extensively, self-service learning such as microlearning videos, we’re actually starting an internal podcast series which I’m super excited for, and e-learning modules as well.

The third component would be our coaching programs. Something I think that’s a little unique to our team is that in the last month of every quarter we essentially have a blackout period. What that means is that we want to keep our reps hyper-focused on closing out the quarter strong, but to supplement that and continue developing and supporting our teams, we do one-on-one coaching sessions with the reps that they can request to help role-play or strategize or go through decks or whatever that may be. That’s something that we’ll continue to do throughout 2022 and then something that’s a little bit newer to our org, or my team specifically rather, is furthering our leadership development in enablement. As our company’s growing really rapidly so is our leadership team, so we’re going to be focusing on more leadership enablement in 2022 to help drive success of the enablement initiatives through that frontline management team.

SS: I think that’s very cool and awesome that you guys are focusing on helping to develop leaders within your organization. What would you say are some of the key challenges though that you anticipate and how can practitioners overcome those challenges when planning their training programs for the year ahead?

AR: Yeah. To that point of the leadership enablement, it’s no secret to any enablement practitioner that having the support and reinforcement of enablement initiatives from the management team is mission-critical. The second piece of that is navigating a hybrid environment. While I think that we can all agree that we’d hope that this would be a non-issue going into 2022, we need to figure out the most scalable way to service both in office as well as the remote employees, and I believe that the programming for those two populations will need to look different in order to be effective. Manager reinforcement and that hybrid environment I think are probably going to be the two key challenges that are top of mind for me, so really looking to extend the program development for both of those components.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now, you’ve touched on this a little bit in your last two responses around that buy-in that you need from leadership and that was also something that was mentioned in that award spotlight, how critical it is for driving that adoption. What are some of your best practices for gaining buy-in for your new enablement programs?

AR: Yes, I wish there was a silver bullet here, I really do. My personal advice is communicate, communicate, communicate. I often joke with my own management team that I sound like a broken record. I’m totally fine with that. The truth is, and from my own management experience, there’s just a lot going on all the time, especially at a startup. First and foremost, you need buy-in from the executive leaders because without them holding that frontline management team accountable, adoption of initiatives will always be an uphill battle.

The second piece is to build relationships with the leadership team that you’re relying on to carry the rest of the way. I always tell my team that the client-facing teams that we support are our customers and it’s up to us to provide them a great customer experience. Hyper communication with emails, slacks, announcing of new hires, announcing of classes, and just constantly having a cadence that they can rely on to receive the information around the training programs and the enablement initiatives is something that we’re going to continue to scale out and something that I think we’ve gotten to a pretty good repeatable pattern at this point.

SS: That’s fantastic. One of the ways that your approach to training has changed in the past year, as you mentioned in that article, is expanding the scope to cover the entire revenue team. I think there are sales enablement teams that are starting to take that remit of supporting the entire revenue org. What is the role of on-demand learning in helping you to scale your training programs as you expand across the entire revenue team, and how have you delivered this on-demand learning?

AR: Yeah, that’s a great point. We’re seeing the term sales enablement turn into revenue enablement in more ways than one. I see it in job descriptions, I see it in all sorts of platforms. We’ve done a few things through our training and coaching platform. We’ve launched a few product demo certifications in that same platform, we’ve sought to leverage it for onboarding to help create that stickiness with the content by allowing new hires to revisit their learnings as they ramp up and start to get that real-life experience once they start interacting with prospects and clients. We also partnered with a third-party online learning platform, and we’ll distribute a weekly e-learning to the team on various topics anywhere from selling skills to professional development just to keep those skills sharp, like remote presentation skills or things like that.

We also went through a few system launches in the past year, which anyone that’s launched a new system can probably relate to the struggle to get our teams to adopt that system. From a micro-learning perspective, we really leveraged videos to help support that launch because when you do an instructor-led training on a new platform launch, it can be difficult for the teams to really envision the issues that they’re going to come up with. Having those videos and that just-in-time learning piece to refer back to as they begin to use the system, I think has been really crucial.

Those are some of the things that we’ve done from an on-demand learning perspective to support this past year. Like I said earlier, we’ll be ramping that up in a few different ways throughout 2022.

SS: Well, ramp is definitely a great segue into my next question. As outcomes of training and onboarding, I think the velocity of ramp and productivity are absolutely key and something that a lot of enablement practitioners look at. What are some of your best practices for really optimizing ramp time and assessing rep productivity?

AR: Yeah, measuring the effectiveness of enablement initiatives is definitely a passion of mine, I’m very results-driven. Specifically, as it relates to optimizing ramp time, we structure our onboarding programs to identify the first step in a new hire’s role and get them to start doing that as soon as possible. For example, in the case of our account executives, the discovery call is traditionally the first thing that they’ll do as a new hire. Within that first week of their sales training, which usually comes around week three of their tenure, we’re going to train and certify them on that discovery process so that way we can get them doing their job as early as possible. Of course, we continue training beyond that for the next few weeks, but we taper that schedule off, meaning that after that initial certification we want to find a good balance between learning and productivity, a.k.a. doing their job.

We’ve also found that this approach allows for more practical learning scenarios. Because the reps are starting to do their job, they are coming to training with real-life questions, objections, scenarios that they’re encountering on their calls, and we can help them work through it. You could probably think of a scenario where you were learning something new recently, when you can practically apply that to your everyday life or your past experience, that learning becomes stickier in your brain. Those are a couple of ways that we’re accelerating that ramp time while still maintaining a continuous learning environment for our new hires.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. We talked about coaching at the early onset of the interview, and I’d also love to understand from your perspective, how you think about measuring potentially productivity improvements as it relates to coaching?

AR: Yeah. One thing that we’re doing, like I said, I feel like this is a little unique to my organization, but it’s something I feel really passionate about. When I started at my company in the beginning of 2020, I was a one-woman show and now I’m lucky enough to have my team, but one of the things that we identified early on was we were getting people ramped up, we were getting them onboarded, they were starting to do their deals, but we identified people were interested in coming back and saying I know we learned this in training, but I just got this on this call, can I set up time with you and go through this? We were seeing such progress with the new hires, and they were really able to do their jobs so much more effectively that I really became an extension of the leadership team. When I started to hire my team, it was really important to me that they also build those relationships with the reps where they were comfortable coming back to us from a training and enablement org and saying, hey, I need help here.

We usually send out an email at the beginning of each month saying, okay, we have five coaching sessions available this month, and usually they’re “sold out” within the first day or two of that email being sent. That just speaks, I think, to the effectiveness and the impact that the enablement team is able to have on those. We are really seeing, and something that we’re going to be tracking in the next couple months and into 2022, is if we’re coaching on a specific deal with a specific rep, is there a way for us to tie ourselves to that revenue because we’ve been able to help coaching with that deal specifically?

SS: Absolutely. Last question for you. How do you gather insights on the effectiveness of your training and coaching and onboarding programs? What are some of the key analytics that you measure as you plan your programs for the upcoming year?

AR: Yes, great question. Like I said earlier, I’m very results-driven. I’m a big fan of the Kirkpatrick model for measuring effectiveness and I presented on this topic with some other enablement groups. Simply put, the Kirkpatrick model is broken into four levels: reaction, learning, behavior, and results. Reaction, simple satisfaction surveys. Did you like the training? Did you like the content? What would you change? Things like that. We are constantly polling our team at DailyPay on what they want from enablement as well as what they like and don’t like.

The second component is learning, and this is achieved through written tests, certifications, so on and so forth. One thing to note is that for reaction and learning to be really telling, you usually want to pair those two results together. For example, if they liked the training but didn’t learn anything, it wasn’t necessarily an effective initiative. Now, usually this is where I hear a lot of practitioners stop. When I’m interviewing or working with some of my peers in the industry and we talk about measuring effectiveness, it’s usually a satisfaction survey or a certification. Where I think we really get the business’s attention is beyond that when we talk about behavior and results.

Behavior change is hard to measure, I will be the first to admit it. Like I said, I usually hear a lot of people stopping here because it gets a little grey, but when you get to behavior change and looking at the results components, so those last two stages, the one key piece of this is benchmark data. For behavior change, you can leverage a conversation intelligence tool to measure rep performance before and after an initiative. For results, you can look at benchmark data for ramp time before implementing an onboarding program and after implementing to see if the program was impactful.

For example, when I started at DailyPay in January of 2020, we looked at the time to first sale for all of the reps that had not gone through the program that we launched, and then looked at the ramp time and the time to first sale for all of the new account executives that had gone through that program. We saw a pretty large decrease in that time to first sale because we were able to have that benchmark data. Not every organization has access to benchmark data, so that can be difficult for some practitioners to nail down, but that comes with maturity of the organization.

For the year ahead, we’re going to continue to look at the time to first sale, time to second sale. The new one I’d like to focus on, which I’d mentioned earlier, is that deal impact. If my team or I find ourselves in one-on-one coaching sessions when they are deal-specific, I’d like to find a way to attribute the enablement team’s involvement in that deal to the revenue that it brought into the company. That’s something that I’m going to be looking at a little bit more closely as we move into 2022.

SS: Well, I think that’s fantastic advice to our audience about how to actually and practically measure against behavior change by benchmarking. I think that’s fantastic. Thank you, Amanda, and I’m very excited to understand how the deal impact metric pans out for you over the coming year. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us, I always learn a lot of new things whenever we get a chance to connect and chat.

AR: Amazing. Thank you so much again for having me, it’s been a pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Jeff Fedro from FedEx Office join us. Jeff, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jeff Fedro: Very good. Well, I’m glad to be on the call. I have been with this great company for almost 29 years. I’ve held various roles. I’ll tell you it’s gone back to my college days when I was just a part-time cashier with this organization, moving up to where I am now holding roles from operations to learning and development now in sales. I really think that the amount of experience I’ve been able to gain over the years has really allowed me to be able to connect better from a sales enablement perspective and really being able to bring a lot of that experience to life, so I have thoroughly enjoyed the 29 years. I’ve always told them, I’ll always stay on it as long as you keep me, and they’ve held their end of the bargain and I’m holding my end of the bargain. We’re having a great time.

SS: I love to hear that. Now, I would also say that the sales landscape has also been evolving, especially in the past two years, and enablement itself has experienced a lot of transformation. How has your approach to sales enablement evolved in recent years? How has this evolution helped drive innovation for your enablement program?

JF: Well, I have to tell you, we have several great leaders in our organization, and one of them just the other day said this great statement. It’s been out there for years, but “what got you here, won’t get you there.” We had to really step back and even though the pandemic was the worst of times, it’s allowing us to really have a great vision for what could be the best of times. It has given us a clear line of sight on how we need to move forward from a sales enablement perspective.

We really had to step back and say, you know what, we need to look at our channels. With our organization, those are the various levels of sales that we have within our organization. We had to say, whether they’re regional or national or whether they’re strategic or tactical. we had to look at it from a customer perspective. How are we going to be able to get in front of our customer moving forward? Like you said, the landscape has changed. We had to step back and say, let’s re-look at the competencies that we have put out there and for our teams and where are the activities standards now versus the way they were? Then how is that driving a new set of key performance indicators? All those things will start to work together for a complete sales enablement landscape, giving us a readiness score, giving our teams where are they from a readiness perspective to say, how can we continue to move them forward and develop them along the way?

Again, they’re learning just like we’re learning because the pandemic has changed the way we go to sales. We have to meet our customers where they are and at the same time, we have to meet our sales team where they are. Keeping all this in mind, if you don’t have a good set of systems to help drive that behavior, you’ve got to step back and say, how are we going to allow all those items I just said to be built into the system to really know that selling is an art, but we have to bring the science back to support it.

SS: I love that approach. I think that’s fantastic. Now, another thing that you focused on is the importance of cross-functional strategies to drive business success. Now, in your experience, how can enablement help build bridges across the organization?

JF: Well, I tell you sales enablement is not on an island on their own, and in order to get a full sales organization moving and headed in the same direction, you have got to have business partners bringing in their key level experience of where it’s needed for the plan that you’re putting in place. Sales must feel that alignment. If they feel that you are putting programs out there that no one else across the organization knows or understands, they’re less likely, obviously, to act upon it or have trust in it. You can’t design a program without all the applicable individuals across the organization being aligned in one approach.

We as sales enablement teams and you as a sales enabler, you are the director. You are the one that directs and creates that strategy and plan, but you also are the one that is the voice and the advocate of that plan across the organization. No one’s going to be more passionate about that plan than you. If you can express that passion across your business partners, they will align with you to allow you to truly activate that plan to show that all the talents coming together is now putting this one plan in place to help push a sales organization forward and to really support the field sales team.

SS: Now, in addition to cross-functional collaboration, sales enablement also must partner with teams across different regions. I know that you do globally as well. What are some of your best practices for scaling your enablement programs across regions?

JF: Well, our regions are really broken up into different channel types. As I stated earlier, we had to really step back and say, you know what, it’s not a one size fits all approach. You’ve got to understand your landscape within your organization, and again, now not only are you meeting your customers where they are, you’ve got to meet your team where they are.

We have a group of national sales individuals, we have regional sales individuals, we have tactical individuals versus strategy individuals. How do we make sure that we are conveying our messages and developing the programs that are very elastic in nature, that can expand across many different channels to be able to fit them all? It doesn’t mean you have to customize every single thing for those individuals, but what it does mean is that whatever you’re doing for one group, you need to step back and say, does it align to them, or do I need to tweak it for their absorption? That’s why it’s crucial that you have to step back.

Sometimes it’s easy. Hey, let’s just develop a program that’s absorbable by everybody and move on and then hope for the best. You just can’t do that. Nowadays times your teams are meeting and delivering in many different ways, and we’ve got to make sure that we are meeting and delivering them in many different ways at the same time. I think it’s crucial that you’ve got to look at your regions as individual customer types, and then how are you going to deliver to them specifically?

SS: I really like that approach of looking at them as individual customer types. Now, I’d love to talk about driving consistency across teams, especially as your processes and your programs have been evolving. A lot of sales enablement practitioners will leverage sales plays. They see them as a critical tool for enablement practitioners, but how have you utilized sales plays to improve sales behavior and what has been the impact of doing so?

JF: Well, I would tell you that sales plays are a true sales guidance tool. A lot of times when you think of sales plays, you think of a specific product or a specific initiative that maybe you’re putting out there. We look at it as an all-up solution. What is a solution that we can provide our customers at the time of need? We’ve really started developing the sales plays for that particular purpose.

We have found that obviously it gives a central point of reference for our field sales team and allows them to build a solution, not only at the opportunity level, but also at the customer strategy level. We have layered in our sales plays in many different facets to be able to really ignite our sales organization for quicker absorption and allows us to really measure that information quickly. The quicker you can get information absorbed, the quicker you can get them moving forward on a particular solution allows them to build a specific customer communication strategy that allows that sales play to be a key component on how they move forward.

We all know how they’re structured. It’s crucial that we always put in front of them, what is it you need to know? What is it you need to say, show and do? If you can keep that same formula, it becomes very predictable and whenever a sales play is in front of them, they’ll know exactly what to look at, how to look at it, and how to activate upon it. It has been a valuable tool that we’ve been able to utilize and really reinforce and getting our teams moving forward.

SS: That’s fantastic. Well, while we’re on the topic of business impact, what are some of your strategies for gathering insights on how enablement is impacting performance?

JF: Well, I have to tell you, data is key. I’ve really had to step back and say, what type of data do we have? I saw this great illustration the other day on LinkedIn. It was all in Lego format, which was fun, and it was the formation of data. You have all these pieces jumbled up together, and then how do you go about sorting and arranging and presenting that data in a logical manner that allows you to truly create the full story. That illustration showed, like I said, the pieces in one area, then they were sorted by color, they were stacked by color, and then at the end they actually saw house being built by those Legos. It just gives a great illustration for you to know that data can be your friend and can also drive success and gives you a great formula of success of how you move forward.

Creating a national enablement program, you’ve got to always start with the end goal in mind, and then how do I then move that goal forward? How do I utilize data to assist me in developing that story and improving the overall health of the sales organization? Again, short term performance is great, you’ve got to have that. You’ve got to have those quick wins and what’s happening and allow the data to say it, but then you also got to step back and go look at making sure that long term sustainability performance is the goal by ensuring that we have sales linearity for a consistent set of results.

That is one of the key areas that I have looked at and have found again, going back to the very beginning when I said bringing science to the art of selling, that is true. You hire sales individuals to do what they do best. We as sales enablers bring together and format what they do on a daily basis, and present to them in a story approach to say this is not only what you’re doing, but this is what you can do to even make it better as you continue to move forward.

SS: I love that particular point. Jeff, as my last question for you that is a follow on to that, how can enablement practitioners leverage those insights and analytics to continuously improve the enablement programs and increase that business impact?

JF: Well, as I stated, you have to have the end goal in mind to create the clear vision. A lot of times we try to hit the ground running with the problem at hand, and yes, we can always fall into that pit, but we’ve got to step back and say, okay, here’s the problem, but why are we having that problem? Let’s start digging in and doing a scientific approach to unraveling and finding out the key “why’s” of something that’s occurring so that we can redevelop or develop a new program that may be able to be a better fit.

Again, once that occurs, you’ve got to have sales leadership alignment across the board. Top down and across. If we do not have the full support of sales leadership, again, you can’t get off the ground running. You are the advocate for your sales team. As a sales enabler, you are the one that must sell that program and how it will benefit the individual, but also how it will benefit the organization. That’s where you bring those sales leaders along the way. Again, systems must be orchestrated in a way that they deliver data in a clean, organized manner.

They cannot be a jumbled-up pack of Legos. You’ve got to be able to show the clear story of what the expectation is, and if your systems aren’t able to drive that clear set of data, you’ve got to step back and say, what is it that I can do to make sure I’m conveying that information in an organized fashion so that my sales team can act accordingly and then deliver it in a good, better, best format?

You’ve got to either have that 60:40 or 80:20 rule. I’m either going to be able to deliver 60% of it right now and continue to develop the other 40%, or either 80, 20. From a good, better, best approach, know that you’ve got to get your items out there, your programs out there, and get them activated, but you’re never going to have that nice bow. A lot of times we like to deliver things that are a nice bow, but by the time we get the bow tied, the market has changed, things have moved on. The way that the market is changing today, we’ve got to make sure that they can at least see the ribbon. Here’s the ribbon on how we’re going to tie that bow, and here’s the vision on how we’re going to get there and here’s the steps we’re going to take. Keep them aligned. Keep communication in front of them. Ensure that you are staying and knowing that you’re right there along with them so that at the end, the bow is tied, they can see what the finished product is, and you have not missed a beat as things change along the way.

SS: I love that analogy. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today.

JF: Sure. Thank you for having me. It was a great pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Jasmine Jackson-Irwin from CircleCI join us. Jasmine, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jasmine Jackson-Irwin: Awesome. Thanks so much, Shawnna. Again, my name is Jasmine, and I lead Global Enablement at CircleCI. CircleCI is a continuous integration delivery platform that automates the build, test, and deployment process of software applications, so we really want to focus on helping teams shorten the distance between idea and value delivery while ensuring that they have a quality experience for their customers and end-users. I’ve been at the organization since mid-2018 and have built the enablement team from the ground up here.

Prior to that, I started my career in sales at Oracle, and I really credit that time in my career to my first exposure with sales enablement and what really robust enablement programming can look like, especially around new hire experience. I moved to the Bay Area after that and worked in a combination of sales and sales operations and enablement roles for a few small startups. Long before that, I had a background in policy and government, I’ve worked overseas, I’m bilingual, so while that’s not in my work anymore, it definitely has influenced how I approach my current work, especially around cross-functional collaboration, building better communication and information channels, and working with globally distributed teams.

SS: Well, we’re excited to have you here, Jasmine, thank you so much. Recently you’ve gotten involved in a lot of hiring efforts as your enablement team at CircleCI is growing. I’d love to hear from your perspective, what are some of the core skills or attributes that practitioners need to be successful in sales enablement?

JJI: Yeah, I think every organization is different. To me, it’s really crucial to align your criteria to the expectations of your stakeholders, your executive team, and of course yourself as the hiring manager. That can look different at every organization, but for me, the big things that I focus on are stakeholder management, clear communication, and a really clear and strong commitment to process and efficiency.

When we talk about stakeholder management, at CircleCI, we have a pretty large middle and senior-level management layer across our go-to-market teams given that we are also supporting the organization globally. We have teams in North America, EMEA, and JAPAC, so we have a really complex decision-making process, and it requires a lot of consensus-building and alignment.

Anyone joining my team needs to be comfortable managing expectations across that large group of stakeholders and feeling comfortable working in some of the uncertainty and conflicts that can come with having a lot of different voices represented in the room, which gets into the clear communication piece.

Again, having a global team, it’s really important that you are driving consistent communication that is easy for folks to understand, regardless of what their first language is, regardless of which time zone they’re operating in. CircleCI was a remote-first organization before the pandemic made it cool. I think by nature of us working in the dev-ops space, we’ve always had a lot of team members in different locations, so we’re used to trying to accommodate the needs of a lot of different locations and teams, even when those needs sometimes are in conflict with one another. The goal is always to be clear, direct, and accessible in how we talk to our teams. That’s also an expectation that I really hold of my team when working with each other.

On the process piece, our organization moves at a really, really fast pace. I think like a lot of startups, but especially for us, we’ve grown the organization to basically double the size it was at the beginning of this year. Our revenue team when I joined was less than 30 people, and now we’re almost 130 people. There are always multiple initiatives going on at once. It’s really not an organization where you’re ever working on just one project or with one team, so we have to have folks who know how to work effectively and build programs that sustain that scale and velocity of information.

I think that those three things, again, stakeholder management, communication, and process really all feed into each other. I think it’s also important to hire for folks that have a clear understanding of how those three attributes play off of one another and when to employ them in the right situations. It’s not necessarily a skill per se, but I also think it’s really important to build a team that has complementary, but still very different approaches to solving problems and working together. I like to have my team engaged in the hiring process too, so that they feel that they have some amount of say in who they work with on a day-to-day basis and who their peers are going to be. As much as I care about how someone works with me as the hiring manager, I care more that they can work with my team and be a strong collaborator and that we are building in the same direction with an aligned vision and goals.

SS: I think those are some fantastic attributes to be looking for. Now, what are some of your best practices to not only find and bring in the right talent into your team, but also retain top talent?

JJI: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll tackle the first piece on the hiring front. I think that it cannot be understated that hiring is a two-way street. In my interview process, I work really hard to give a very clear vision of not only the company and our goals, but also what is the day-to-day of this role? I tend to overemphasize that because I really want folks to feel confident that they know what they’re getting into when they sign up to work at CircleCI and work on our enablement team. It can be a challenging place to work in really fun and exciting ways, but that’s not always a right fit for everyone.

I proactively talk about the bright spots of the role and also the aspects of it that might be more challenging or demanding. More often than not, folks who are really excited by those challenges and they find that it motivates them to be more interested in the role, in joining the team. Of course, occasionally it’s also going to disqualify some candidates because they realize it’s not a fit for them and I think that that’s completely okay. Like I said, interviewing is a two-way decision and I feel a strong sense of duty to the candidates that I speak to that they feel they have a really strong understanding of what they’re getting into, and they can make a decision that’s right for them in their career.

Once we’re past that hiring stage and folks have actively joined, I really try to focus in the onboarding period of dedicating multiple conversations to understand the new hires on my team, both as a person and as a professional. We have a lot of dedicated conversations that focus around, how do you like to be recognized? What type of praise or recognition is important to you? What’s your communication style? Are you someone who wants everything in writing? Do you do best in one-on-one conversations? How comfortable are you with async communication?

Then we start to get into some of the more personal weeds of, when during the day is the best time for our one-on-one? What factors might stand in the way of you doing your best work on a given day? When is the best time that I, as your manager, can reach you and share feedback and make sure that you feel that I’m supporting you? It all comes down to me asking them, how can I help you be as successful and impactful in your role and also in your career more broadly? I want to use that time to show my team that I’m on their side. As much as I’m going to push them, because that is a given, I’m also here to be their advocate and ensure that they are successful during the time that they’re at our organization.

Another thing that’s important to me is just being really transparent and direct with my team about changes that are in flight or decisions that might impact their day-to-day. I think that that level of transparency as it’s appropriate helps folks feel safe and secure knowing that they’re working on the right things, knowing that their manager has their back, and knowing that the business is making decisions that will make the business and our team successful in the long run. The number one priority that I have is making sure that my team feels that they can do their best work without restriction and that they’re valued for the work that they do and that they know that I’m on their side and I’m going to help them be as successful as they can.

SS: Yeah. As you mentioned earlier in this podcast, I know you’re passionate about building engaged, learning-oriented, and inclusive teams. What are some best practices that you utilize to encourage involvement and inclusion on your teams?

JJI: We use our weekly team meeting as a dedicated time to collaborate as a group. This could be on a specific project or discussing how best we want to handle a request or a concern from the broader organization. I think it’s really easy to just use team meetings for status updates, but I find that carving out the time to workshop as a group really helps us all feel connected as a team and sharing in the learning of what our work is about.

Also, with such a technical product and customer base, we’re selling engineering tooling to software engineers, I try to get my team working with other teams across the business and other departments as much as possible. It’s awesome that we have teams internally that reflect our customers, so we try to work closely with them to help build out the content and the programs that we’re delivering to our customer-facing team audience.

And of course, I want to make sure that we also are taking time to talk about the hard stuff that’s going on, whether that’s at work at home or in the world. It’s been a really tumultuous past two years with the pandemic, and I find that sharing about our own personal experiences and reflecting on some of those big systemic challenges really helps us think about the small changes that we can make in our day-to-day to make our work more inclusive and accessible to our team, and to make sure that we have a good perspective and point of view around where our team might be struggling and what are the realities that they’re facing on a day-to-day basis.

We aren’t perfect, but I think we are getting better and it’s something that we try to keep a really open line of communication about as a group.

SS: That’s fantastic, Jasmine, thank you. Now, you yourself are in a leadership role. How do you help instill the importance of these values and create really a shared mindset around your core goals amongst your team?

JJI: Yeah. My team could probably get rich off of how many times I use the phrase, “make sure that we’re on the same page.” So much of what enablement is about is making sure that you’re connecting the dots across your organization to ensure that best experience for your internal teams. Our team has to mirror that same experience so that we can all move in lock step and make sure that our goals and initiatives are aligned.

I’ll talk a little bit about how we approach our planning process and identifying the work that we focus on on a quarterly basis. Towards the end of each quarter, I work with my team to understand what areas they’ve identified as being the next step so to speak for development from the enablement team. This likely comes from either rep or manager feedback, observations from coaching sessions, or reactions to organizational needs that have been identified, or some combination of all of those things. From there, I’ll work with our sales and customer success department heads to align on those strategic OKRs and make sure that our initiatives fit their upcoming quarterly goals. Where possible, we’re really looking to have a shared metric of success to drive accountability and alignment from the executive leadership layer down to the managers, down to our customer-facing teams.

Then from there, I go back to my team, and I share the feedback and the decisions, and I discuss with them what execution might look like. We take time to account for any changes that we might not have considered in the first place. We do this as a group across all the roles on my team because I think it’s really important to ensure that everyone understands not only what they personally are working on, but what their colleagues are working on and how those efforts may intersect.

At any time when we feel that we’re getting away from what we intended to do, we regroup to identify those gaps and determine a course of action to continually drive that alignment or realignment as the case may be. Making sure that the team has some amount of participation and ownership in that process is really important so that they feel confident I’m working on the right things, I have the support of my manager, and I know that this is aligned to the broader department goals that we have.

SS: Thank you, Jasmine. This is fantastic. I have one final question for you, and it’s actually about a quote that you had in an article recently. It said, “If you see a colleague who routinely delivers high quality timely work and goes above and beyond with little recognition, you have an obligation to speak up on their behalf.” I love that quote. As a leader, how do you not only recognize the work of your own team, but also help to advocate for other teams work across the rest of the organization?

JJI: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it’s one that’s really important for every leader be they in enablement or not to consider. I think from my point of view, it really goes back to what I mentioned earlier about being an advocate. From, a one-on-one perspective, I try to make sure that I’m providing proactive and direct feedback on what is or isn’t working to everyone on my team. I never want a single one of them to feel that they don’t know where I stand on their performance or output, and I want them to know that their work isn’t in vain and that anything that they do doesn’t just exist in a vacuum but has real impact on the folks that they’re supporting. I do my best to make sure that there’s an open line of communication around that.

Outside of my one-on-one conversations. I also take time to really actively source feedback from our key stakeholders on programs or initiatives that we have in flight and look to understand from their perspective, what have been the highs and lows? In most cases, I’ll share those with my team so that they have the confidence in knowing that their work is valued and that they have a sense of what can be improved on if needed. Again, it all goes back to knowing their personal communication style and preference for recognition to make sure that they can receive that information in a way that will be most impactful for them.

I think the biggest thing that you can do for cross-functional recognition is to be open and honest about how the process works. There have definitely been times when stakeholders on my team have felt concerned about another team’s work in a cross-functional project, and I try to drive clarity around who’s involved? What are their responsibilities? How are decisions being made? What are the motivating factors for that decision that might not be blatantly obvious to everyone? In those moments, I think it’s all about showing that we’re working towards the same goal, even if our approaches may differ. I think from there, there can be a lot of healthy conversation around, oh, I didn’t understand that now I do. Or I think we can make an adjustment on this to make this more impactful. It just drives that collaboration and cross-functional communication.

We have a really incredible internal saying at CircleCI that comes from a former employee called, “that motivates me.” It’s honestly been a hugely empowering phrase for me since joining the organization, and I try to employ it early and often when working with cross-functional groups so that they can understand not only that I, as a leader, I’m on their side and invested in their success, but also affirm that the direction they’re going is impactful and empowering for the teams that I represent. It’s not always sunshine and rainbows. I’m definitely a very fierce advocate for our customer-facing teams and the groups that I support, but I find that keeping that line of communication open for what isn’t working can ensure that alignment continues to get better and better. TLDR, I think that the more praise and recognition you can offer the better and tying it to both small and larger actions at the end of the day is just going to make everyone feel great.

SS: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jasmine. I really appreciate you taking the time today to talk to our audience.

JJI: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have a return guest with us, Marcela Piñeros, the Head of Sales Enablement from Stripe. Marcella, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Marcela Piñeros: Absolutely. Well first, thank you for having me. I love to be back here, and I love the conversations with you, Shawnna. I always walk away just a little bit smarter, so thank you for that.

I have the honor of leading the sales enablement organization at Stripe. For those of you that are not familiar, Stripe is a platform that helps us increase the overall GDP of the internet. It’s a really exciting company, dual-based in Dublin and San Francisco, and we’ve got folks all over the world that are really just helping everything, from small business owners to enterprise, grow their commercial space. It’s a really exciting time to be there.

SS: Well, Marcela, thank you so much for joining us. I feel the same way, I learn something new every time I talked to you. In fact, you recently wrote a LinkedIn article that I found really interesting, where you discuss the hamster wheel of content governance efforts. What are some of the challenges to effective content governance that sales enablement practitioners might encounter?

MP: Yes. I think one of the biggest challenges with enablement in general is just keeping up. Keeping up with the demand to generate content, keeping up with the demand to keep it updated, the demand to avoid skill fade, to future proof an organization, it’s a lot. Essentially, any content governance strategy really needs to ensure that materials that the field can access have three qualities: that they’re current, they’re accurate, and that they add value. If any of those three criteria fall apart, then it takes a hit, it impacts efficiency and productivity and seller experience. We don’t want that.

One major shift that I feel we need to make as enablement functions in general is to go from being content creators to being content curators. I say that because I feel that our expertise is actually in sales productivity and enablement, and we can’t, nor should we try to become experts in all things because that immediately puts us into a reactive mode. Instead, I tell my team that we need to be masters at sourcing expertise from the field, and we need to be able to enable our SMEs to create content that is accurate and valuable and current and that can be easily shared with the broader organization.

A lot of us do this work manually, so you know that the lift is enormous, and it does feel like a hamster wheel. You’re constantly trying to catch up and you can never really catch up when you’re talking about a hundred assets. You can potentially manage that content in a spreadsheet, but when you start thinking in the hundreds or the thousands, you really need technology to support you. You need to be able to lean on processes and tools that help you automate that toy. You can focus on more impactful tasks, like deciding what content you actually need to source to support key business priorities. I encourage everybody to get off the hamster wheel, shift away from being a content generation function and focus on what processes you can put in place to be a content curation function.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. In that same article, you offered some strategies on how to overcome these challenges by really shifting the enablement mindset. I’d love for you to give our audience some tips and tricks. What are these mindset shifts and how can they help move the needle and get practitioners off of that hamster?

MP: Sure. I think that the most important shift I talk about quite regularly is shifting the finish line. I got this from a book called “The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning.” I ask all of my team members to read it. I actually gave it to some team members for Christmas, I really like it and it covers this idea really well.

The concept is, instead of saying that somebody has enabled and checking the box after they’ve completed a course or they’ve taken an exam, what if you actually shift the finish line and only consider somebody enabled when they’ve successfully done it on the job. If I pause for a second and think about what all of that entails, it’s not so much capturing data around completion rates and exam scores and consumption of content, it’s more, where are we on pipeline? Where are we on product attached rate? When you shift that finish line, you immediately take a broader and a more strategic view of enablement.
For example, if I’m rolling out a module on prospecting, I wouldn’t check the box and call somebody enabled until I see that they’ve hit 2.5x in their pipeline. Or an enablement campaign on multithreading, I wouldn’t say that folks are enabled until I see in Salesforce that they’ve met with multiple decision-makers and were kept.

By focusing on that, we are actually impacting the business and enablement becomes more of a campaign than a moment in time. You’re able to expand your view so you’re not just thinking about pre-work, but what touchpoints should managers be involved in? What performance support mechanisms do you have to have in place so that when somebody leaves a workshop, they have the opportunity to practice and reinforce and get recognition and rewards?

When the time comes for them to choose between doing what they’ve always done and doing what you want them to do, they actually choose a behavior you’ve trained them to do. That in my mind is when you get out of the hamster wheel, you step away from that and you become much more strategic, and you have a long-term view. You think of enablement as a campaign.

SS: I love that approach. Now, you talked about the shift a bit as well in your article, but one of those is the shift from this notion of onboarding to ever-boarding. I have started to hear enablement talk about this term ever-boarding even more. How does your approach to ever-boarding differ from onboarding and how do ever-boarding programs really help to equip reps with the skills that they need at every point in their tenure with an organization?

MP: I do talk about three shifts. The first is shifting from content creation to content curation, the second is shifting the finish line, and the third is that shift from onboarding to ever-boarding. I say that I have a little bit of a love-hate relationship right now with the entire concept of onboarding, and I say that with love for some many of my peers that are out there are dedicated to onboarding. The challenge I find is that onboarding tends to be a very content-driven architecture. It’s about getting topics out and about getting as much information into somebody’s head as early on in the job as possible. I think that many of us struggle to see how that retention sticks over time.

I find that new hires actually share two qualities. On one end, they have a greater sense of urgency to prove themselves and to confirm they made the right choice. On the other hand, they have more available time or tolerance than the people around them to dedicate to training. The kicker is we take those qualities of urgency and time, and we put folks in a room and try to spoon-feed them information. We know that if we’re lucky after the first week, they’ll remember 20%. If we’re lucky after the second week, they might remember 8%. In truth, it’s not the best ROI and it gets new hires in the habit of being spoon-fed information, which is rarely the reality when they leave the program.

I’m a huge fan of an alternative model, which is using customer ride alongs. My thought is if in your first 30 days, you do 20 customer ride alongs or something to that effect, you’re going to be able to observe in the wild what exactly is happening. Then if we’re able to give you the content so that you have access to it when it is relevant to you, then it’s going to be stickier. That pull of content based off of need is much more effective than an arbitrary, oh, this needs to happen on day 12 because it turns out that’s when we’re available.

It’s definitely a shift and also tied into that is we assume that depending on the program, whether that’s a 30, 60, 90-day, 180-day program, that at the end of it, folks are magically onboarded. It’s midnight on new year’s, boom, now it’s a new year. The truth is that there is no cliff for that. The alternative is with an ever-boarding program, the hire date that somebody has isn’t this key that magically opens a vault of information and disappears at your 90 days. Everybody has access to that vault. It’s an open door for everyone at all times, and it contains what people need to know or do to be successful in their job.

It’s definitely a different model at Stripe. We call it “spin up” and we’re piloting that customer ride along, that use a ride-along model, including masterclasses. There’s a whole other system of work that helps us scale while at the same time making sure that any time someone is spending in enablement is getting them closer to doing the job rather than closer to learning information related to doing the job.

SS: Absolutely. Now not to bring up onboarding because it sounds like, as you said, there’s a bit of a love-hate relationship there, but in our original podcast episode, which is episode number seven of the series, you were actually talking about the difference between metrics enablement can impact directly versus those practitioners can influence. I’d love to carry on this conversation and understand your evolution on this perspective. What are some of the key metrics that you use to prove enablement’s impact on the business, including both direct and influenced metrics?

MP: Sure. This goes back to when you shift the finish line. If you’re shifting the finish line, that means that you already have a measure of success in mind at the very beginning even before you start designing the enablement program. Let’s say that someone is sharing with you that we need to improve our forecast accuracy. It’s like, great. What is our forecast accuracy today? Where do we want that variance to be? What is the target? Then we backtrack from those metrics to design what the enablement campaign is going to be. What are the activities, the reinforcement to drive the behavior that is going to get us to the forecast accuracy we want? Just to use an example.

By shifting the finish line, you’re already thinking about the metrics that you can inflate. We know that forecast accuracy has a whole lot more involved than just whether or not people are practicing certain behaviors. You also want to be able to track the lead indicators that show that you’re trending in the right direction.

This applies also to onboarding where you can take a top performer and you identify, for example, how many high-value activities they have in the month? You can actually create benchmarks to those, and you can say, okay, then at the 90-day mark, let’s say as a top performer you’re holding 54 high-value activities or customer-facing activities a month. Then I could potentially say that your 90-day mark, you should be trending around 30 high-value activities. At your 60-day, you should be down to 20. At your 30 days you should be at 15 high-value activities. The intention is to have those mile markers so that you can show if somebody’s trending in the right direction, on their way to being a top performer.

You can actually take that same approach in all things. In an entire enablement campaign, you can figure out what is the end result and what are the top performers doing? Then you can backtrack with some metrics as lead indicators. Those are all from an influence perspective. From a direct impact perspective, we have the practitioners that are out there figuring out, okay, well, what can I actually directly impact. From that sense, I think that there’s everything from scorecards that you can track for your teams, you can track everything related to lead conversion, you can track account penetration, you can track quota attainment, you can track pipeline health. All of those things are really important. As an enabling function, you can look at it in terms of time. Time to quota, you can look at relevance scores, you can look at confidence scores. Are people more confident and does that correlate to the actual business results?

That correlation piece is really important. We clarify, it’s not causation. We’re not going to say that our enabling program led to a 25% increase in revenue. We can say that when people completed this program, they saw better scores or better results than when people did. My team is huge on A/B testing. We do that a lot where I’ll ask them whenever there’s a hypothesis, an idea, to run a small test over the course of two weeks. A two-week sprint or a month with a control group then with the new group trying this new model so we have indicators to know, yes, this is something that we want to do a lot more.

SS: Absolutely. I love that approach. Now, and this is the last question, you have always been a huge advocate for using data to establish enablement as a strategic function rather than a tactical one always on that hamster wheel. In your experience, how have you been able to communicate and validate the strategic impact that enablement brings to the business with your executive stakeholder?

MP: Well, first my word of advice to anybody out there that’s listening is get to know your business. Really get to know your business. Not necessarily your skills as an enablement professional, but how does the company make money? What are the biggest risks to revenue? What are the biggest challenges that are facing the company in the market? Really get to know and understand the business so that every conversation that you have with an executive stakeholder is grounded in that. That’s first and foremost, really key.

The other part is executive stakeholders care about being able to de-risk the organization. They care about efficiency, and they care about effectiveness. If you are continually assessing why top performers succeed and you’re continually assessing why someone is underperforming, then you can actually proactively create programs to intervene before it impacts the business. That’s part of de-risking.

We can also focus from an enablement function. We work very heavily on how do we collect and share those best practices across the organization so that we can increase the effectiveness of the organization? What is the infrastructure that we’re going to maintain as a sales enablement function to support people being more efficient?

If you’re able to connect your programs to risk or de-risking efficiency and effectiveness, those are the types of things that will capture someone’s attention far beyond volume of content that’s produced, for example, or far beyond satisfaction scores. Those really don’t necessarily capture an executive leader’s attention in my experience.

SS: Marcela, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Again, I always learn something new every time I talk to you. I think I learned a ton of valuable information out of this conversation, and I know our audience will, so thank you so much for taking the time.

MP: It is so my pleasure. Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Sebastian Shimomichi: Definitely. Thank you for having me. I’m Sebastian Shimomichi and I am a management consultant at Accenture Singapore. I’m a consultant specialized in analytics and business development. I primarily focus on delivering marketing excellence for clients in Japan, Southeast Asia, and China, essentially as a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital cloud.

As a management consultant, I’m responsible for amplifying marketing effectiveness for our portfolio of clients in the Asia Pacific market. I essentially work closely with the clients’ sales and marketing teams and identify opportunities to implement solutions we could bring on board to accelerating pipelines.

ShS: Fantastic, Sebastian. I’m so glad that you’re able to join us today. Thank you for taking the time. We came across you on LinkedIn when you wrote an article around the importance of curiosity for business leaders today in order to solve problems. You mentioned in your introduction that you guys work specifically with marketing leaders and you yourself have been one. How do you embrace curiosity and how has this mindset helped you drive innovation?

SeS: Wow, that was my article in Japanese on the topic of curiosity. I believe being curious about how sales and marketing teams can tackle business challenges, this is essential to the success of an organization. With the current pandemic at hand, it is becoming increasingly crucial for leaders to question how to ensure efficiency in how sales and marketing collaborate. For the longest time, many organizations took baby steps in digitizing operations in sales and marketing. However, with the pandemic disrupting how teams such as sales and marketing collaborate to achieve KPIs, leaders are now required to reevaluate how to accelerate digitizing the workplace and skill up their employees to keep steady momentum in achieving all of the small to big wins.

It takes a curious mindset to observe what is not working and define how digitizing sales and marketing could succeed. By embracing a curious mindset, I believe sales and marketing leaders can evaluate exactly what data solutions and talent is needed to bring about success for an organization. All my years of being a consultant in the domain of marketing specialize in the Japanese market. I have witnessed Japanese clients from various industries scramble to digitize their marketing activities to maximize sales pipeline. The most commonly asked question from senior leaders at major Japanese corporations was how do we transform the way sales and marketing teams collaborate without impacting our sales performance? While it may be simple for an organization to implement automated solutions – CDPs, DMP, CRM, marketing automation, so on, it takes the right mindset to leverage digital transformation solutions and marketing to its full potential.

A leader who embraces curiosity can look at the intersection between digitization and employees’ state of mind from different perspectives. A true leader is often said to be someone who can make a judgment all while being empathetic. That’s true for a leader with a curious mindset. They would look to identify how employees could learn to relearn while gradually introducing digitized solutions within an organization to essentially keep that momentum and grow even further as an organism.

ShS: I think that’s absolutely spot on. I think you’re right. I think especially in the past year, there’s been this massive wave to digitize everything that we’re doing. I think remaining curious is extremely important, particularly in these changing times. As a marketing leader myself, I’d love your perspective on this. How can marketing leaders help to inspire curiosity across their teams? What would you say the potential impact of that type of culture on an organization is as a whole?

SeS: I briefly mentioned the notion of employees learning to relearn. As we attempt to make sense of changes brought about by the pandemic, we find ourselves learning how to work from home efficiently. In my current line of work, I lead a team of analysts and specialists to deploy skilled marketing programs to drive product awareness and adoption. When the pandemic came in at full force across the globe, we had to scrap a large portion of our 2020 growth strategy. We had to rethink the client experience as well, as the journey from awareness to conversion all was happening online. Instead of just having a small group of colleagues go back to the drawing board and build a strategy, we invited our extended team to brainstorm with us. We didn’t ask what should change, but rather, what are the types of experiences you miss in the process of deciding to purchase a product? From this exercise, we were able to identify that personalized experiences were the most missed.

This exercise we had was to adjust our strategy for 2020 and beyond. What we want to achieve is for our extended team to challenge the status quo constantly. What I mean by this is to have colleagues across the board, regardless of seniority, have a voice to share various perspectives. By fostering an environment where employees can voice their opinions on how marketing and sales achieve success, we can identify how to innovate the way we collaborate in a digitizing environment.

In fact, by empowering our colleagues to feel confident in voicing their opinions, we have optimized marketing attribution models for our clients. For example, before the pandemic, marketing teams would deploy one-off programs to drive awareness and readiness through white papers, playbooks, and webinars. That alone was sufficient to accelerate the sales funnel. However, it is becoming increasingly important to offer a consistent, personalized experience to prospects. What I mean by consistent is to put into place a sequential client experience whereby marketing can measure its influence on the sales pipeline efforts and effectively redefine how we assess readiness and our buyer segments – essentially CXOs all the way to end-users. All of this is possible in making sure our team is in an environment where they can be curious in their domain and ultimately provide different points of view, which would lead to innovation.

ShS: Absolutely. I think that’s fantastic. Marketing attribution is a very hard thing to get right, for those of you less familiar with marketing attribution analytics. I think that’s fantastic. Now, to shift gears a little bit I’d love to understand, I think from an audience perspective that is predominantly in sales enablement, this is one area within the organization, particularly on the revenue side of organizations, that marketing and sales enablement can very much relate. That’s with regard to collaboration. I’d love to understand from your experience, how can marketing best collaborate with cross-functional leaders across the business, such as sales enablement, to help solve problems and innovate for the business?

SeS: Great question. While I firmly believe being curious and challenging the status quo is essential to bring about innovation, so reducing the steps in sales and marketing operations to produce output, it is also essential to be technically strategic. As organizations move to digitally transform the way marketing teams work to produce engaging content, marketers need to learn how to become technically strategic in building value for the organization and its customers. At the core of every successful collaboration initiative with cross-functional leaders is communication. However, as marketers leverage data to produce data-driven marketing positions, it is then critical for marketers to communicate how technology will maximize marketing strategies. This essentially would mean understanding nuances in third-party data to zero-party data – how lead data is ingested across platforms and systems and how leads are scored across the marketing funnel. Why is this necessary? It simply boils down to marketing being able to highlight how their mar-tech stack can contribute the team’s efforts in achieving KPIs.

Let me walk you through an example. When I was based in Japan, I was a data and analytics manager at an advertising agency also responsible for the end-to-end development of an Asia Pacific-wide nurture campaign for a major high-tech firm that incorporated marketing automation, lead scoring, and web scraping to generate them graphic data insights for all incoming leads. The objective for the campaign was clear: increased sales readiness of incoming leads through personalized communications whereby each marketing communication would alter depending on user behavior on our client’s CMS or web forms. You can think of this as contact sales. Due to the scale of this, the budget required for this program was high for the marketing team on the client side.

This is where I partnered with the marketing team to advocate for the program to various teams at our client’s company through effective communication and defining the value behind the program, so essentially not only discussing the technicals but rather how does that translate to success, we were able to deliver the offering. In fact, I’m being told that it’s still being run to this very day. On top of having communication at the core of success, I see that being able to translate technical, so systems platforms, etc., to how different teams within an organization will use them is just as important because you have to think of different perspectives and align them so that you can achieve buy-in. That’s one thing I think is quite important.

ShS: I think that’s absolutely spot on, Sebastian, with cross-collaboration. One way that I’ve seen marketing and sales enablement often work together is to help to optimize the client experience. My last question for you has to do with another article that you recently wrote about the importance of omotenashi or hospitality in building long-lasting relationships with clients. What does that mean to display omotenashi in marketing today?

SeS: Before I go any further, I think it’s important to unpack what omotenashi means. The best way to translate it in English would be hospitality, but it is generally believed that omotenashi is much more than hospitality. It is a philosophy in customer service. To practice the philosophy of omotenashi is to be selfless when giving the best service or experience.

Let me paint you a picture of the Japanese corporate world. In Japan, marketing and sales teams at companies from various industries work tirelessly to gain the trust of their clients. In the west, it’s pretty common to have account-based marketing strategies whereby you attempt to have various buyer segments in an organization, engage with marketing content. In Japan, however, leaders carry a lot more authoritative power than their Western counterparts. The reason for that is that in a corporate culture in Japan, collectivism is preferred. This translates to Japanese companies attempting to narrow down their ABM strategies to key leaders within a specified division of a company, rather than the broader range of buyer segments. So, end-users, decision-makers, just straight to CXOs.

In earning the trust of your clients, marketing and sales enablement closely collaborate to develop customer experiences that resonate with their prospects with omotenashi. Even if sales are in contact with prospects, the clients still expect to have a consistent customer experience throughout the entire lifetime of the company-client relationship. This means for sales and marketing to always identify opportunities to show omotenashi to prospects.

Methodologies I have often seen these days are establishing private, VIP webinars hosted by marketing whereby sales enablement team members are on standby to participate in breakout sessions, which would often be broken out by a product function or particular solution for a given industry. In activities like this, it’s not expected for sales to immediately land on a contract deal. Instead, through consistent customer experiences, the marketing and sales expectation is that prospects will trust the organizations’ capabilities and vision. If a company can win trust from its prospects, those prospects, which will then be clients, will likely one day become loyal clients whereby they would not hesitate to spread the love by promoting the company.

I have seen success in this domain whereby by implementing omotenashi in marketing and sales enablement, I’ve seen companies have 10-plus year relationships with their clients all due to that particular notion that in the customer experience journey, having omotenashi is very important. Now, a lot of the clients I’ve worked with in the past were in the cloud industry, especially in Japan. If I were to give a very rough estimate of the dollar value of such relationships in the cloud industry, I would say they contributed $2-4 billion a year. While I cannot comment on whether such an approach would work in the west, it does in Japan. It is often regarded as marketing excellence by key figures in the Japanese marketing industry as well.

ShS: I love that concept. I absolutely agree. I think if it were applied in the west it could have significant business impact. Thank you for sharing that philosophy with our audience today, Sebastian, and thank you for joining us.

SeS: Thank you.

ShS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Tim Ohai from Workday join us. Tim. I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role in your organization to our audience.

Tim Ohai: Hey, aloha everybody. This is Tim Ohai and I am a director at Workday. We provide cloud-based solutions in HR, and fins, and strategic sourcing, and employee engagement areas. I work specifically with our Salesforce globally around helping them figure out how to be better in the conversations and interactions they’re in.

And we work heavily with not only the AEs, but the RSDs, the RVPs, and then cross-functionally with our pre-sales organization and value, etc. And I get to play in all those spaces.

SS: I love that, Tim. And we’re so excited to have you here today. We’ve been connected for some time and on LinkedIn, you actually wrote an article earlier this year on the impact of poor decision-making. So I’d love to start there with our conversation. What are some of the factors that can drive poor decision-making for business leaders these days and how can poor decision-making impact the organization?

TO: Wow. So, yeah, that’s a huge topic because I’ll lead off with this idea that the number one reason that businesses fail is poor decision-making. And you could take that down to initiatives and projects, etc. Decision-making is where you not only get off on the right foot, but you stay on the right foot all the way through to execution.

The biggest problem I see is there’s often a lack of clarity of what success looks like and in that article you mentioned, I talk about goal clarity and role clarity, and they’re huge. Man, go back to the 1970s and then the eighties with GE when they were pushing really hard to be a number one or number two in their industries and one of the things that they drove, part of the secret of their success back then, was to make sure people had goal clarity and role clarity.

The result is, if you make it really clear what success looks like and bring people into alignment so they all have the same goal, they’re all pursuing the same definition of success, it’s amazing how people naturally just clean up in their efforts.

The same thing then comes right down with role clarity. If you know what the goal is, and everybody is doing their job and not undoing somebody else’s job or redoing somebody else’s job, it changes the entire execution. So all of those elements are contingent upon great decision-making.

Unfortunately, A, we don’t provide that clarity so people wind up making their own information up as they go and that affects decision-making in the moment. And B, we have a tendency to inject a lot of bias in how we think, so if we don’t have that information, we don’t have that clarity, then you wind up seeing leaders actually stumble over each other.

Well-intentioned, wonderful human beings are literally causing conflict in their own organizations and it’s really true. It’s really true in sales enablement. So when I think about how poor decision-making impacts an organization, I have to think about how great decision-making impacts an organization.

That’s where I would say, what can you do as a sales enablement professional to both surface that idea, bring it into the discussion and say, okay, how can we make sure that we’ve got clarity? Because if you’re asking the question, what does success look like? You can go one step further and say, what’s the outcome you’re looking for? What are the metrics we’re going to apply? And what are the requirements you’re expecting as a sponsor of this initiative that we should all know?

I’m amazed at how often those three questions get, well, I won’t say blank stares, but you will get senior leaders and senior executives going, that’s a great question, I haven’t thought that through.

So it cleans up dramatically, not only your alignment with your executive sponsor, but all of a sudden when that is stated and then shared, everybody starts moving in the same direction without even telling people they need to make better decisions, they’re going to.

SS: I love that and I think that leads into the next question. I’d love some advice for our audience. What are some things that leaders, from your perspective, can do to make better, more impactful decisions?

TO: Well, that whole definition of success conversation is critical, I start there. Actually, I’ll start with who’s the sponsor and what’s their definition of success?

People often say it’s got to be better and I go, well, so that’s not very specific, walk me through the outcome that they’re really looking for and how we’re going to measure it. If people have that answer, fantastic, we aligned very quickly. If they don’t, then it becomes a door opener. Should we go talk to that person now and ask them directly? Or can you do that?

It’s always better, of course, to go there with that person, but it’s not always possible. But when you get that clarity, one of the things I’ll ask is, especially if I’m talking to the leader directly, I’ll ask him or her I’ll say, “Hey, are you saying that if we achieve this outcome, we measure it this way, and we meet the requirements that you just stated, and I’ll list them out, you promise you won’t complain about anything else?”

That last question it’s incredibly crystallizing because if a leader is spot-on then they go, “Nope,” and that’s exactly what I want. Fantastic, we’re ready to run. But if they have that intake of air, they go, “Oh let me think for a second,” it completely changes the entire dialogue and goes one click deeper and you really make sure you’re getting those spoken and unspoken things figured out.

But the key here is that you’re having that leader say something that they may have only said in their head. If you can really master that conversation, all the other things that are in your toolkit open up. If you take away that conversation, all the other tools in your toolkit become an extra weight to carry.

SS: Now you alluded to data earlier in your response and you also wrote an article on how to make data meaningful. I’d love to learn from you, how can sales enablement leverage data to make better decisions and what is the impact of doing so?

TO: Sure. So in that article, I talked about how a lot of times we over-rotate into our pipeline data and my experience, actually what we do at Workday and what we teach our leaders as an expectation, even we’re changing how we run our QBRs, lead with the people data first. Your people data are driving what you’re seeing on your pipeline data.

So if you have great results, or you have horrible results, or you have in-between results, at least 80% of the time, that’s going to be driven by people’s gaps or people’s strengths. So when I talk about people data, I’m looking at the classic stuff like, do we even have people enrolled? So in some places, especially right now with a great resignation, there is a lot of open headcounts and at the same time, we’re calling it the great swap, because there are some people leaving, but there are people coming in.

We have this nether space to fill, but at the same time, it’s going deeper. So people data for us is around the capabilities of the individual players, not just AEs, but also the sales leaders themselves. So we have two different frameworks and that people data tells us that if people struggle, for example with account planning, we have correlational data from our analysis that says, “Hey, that’s going to affect your win rate.” Or we have a gap in deal size, or we see some groups are doing better than others. We can go into the people data and see which capabilities are driving win rate and which capabilities are driving deal size and get very specific by market.

We can then tie into how we do things with other leaders, like around recruiting or even promotion and saying, “You want to copy your best performers? Then use this people data to drive those sales results.

From this, we’re literally seeing regions around the globe turn around their performance by leveraging people data before their pipe data and that’s the game-changer. Unfortunately, if you only focus on pipe first and maybe people data comes later, or if people data comes at all, you want to play whack-a-mole. How do we increase our win rate? How do we get deals? How do we get better velocity? How do we get all of those different things, better presentation rates, et cetera? It’s just whack-a-mole and you’re going to constantly be chasing after KPI busting instead of actually driving a true revenue engine.

SS: Absolutely. I love the whack-a-mole analogy. I was playing that with my son yesterday.

TO: Hey folks, if you’re laughing at whack-a-mole or more important, or you’re living in whack-a-mole, trust me, we all are.

SS: No, I love that. Now you mentioned this earlier and you also actually wrote an article on this, which we’ll share with our audience later, that when functions within an organization compete with each other, that time and resources are just completely wasted. So how can sales enablement gain internal alignment to kind of help increase that efficiency and maximize business impact across the organization by creating a sense of collaboration?

TO: So that’s a huge topic, right? So let’s back up. We open with, how do we really drive a great business? With decision-making and one of the most important decisions you can make is how you prioritize. I go so far as to say, prioritization is the Achilles’ heel of strategy. You can have a great strategy, I mean, a phenomenal strategy, and you can have really smart people, really highly collaborative inputs, but when it comes to execution if you don’t prioritize appropriately, what’s going to happen is either, A, everything is a priority therefore for nothing is, and or, B, resources will be used in the wrong way.

So because you didn’t prioritize accordingly, you don’t have the resources you need when you’re in the middle of execution. That is what I’m talking about when I see functions competing with each other, whether it’s marketing and sales, or business development, or enablement, and field sales ops, and corporate sales ops and all these other groups because everybody is trying to help.

Let’s just pause and recognize that nobody’s trying to break this thing. Everybody’s trying to help, but if we don’t prioritize together and really create a unified roadmap then we’re going to struggle to execute. That is when you start getting into how to get a much tighter, shorter list of focused objectives? Then we put everything we have behind the shorter, tighter list. That’s really the key here.

SS: Absolutely. Now I want to close on a question, because from my perspective and I’d be willing to bet you agree with me Tim, I do believe that sales enablement is a significantly strategic arm of the business within any organization and in particular, I think that they are uniquely positioned to help the executive team set the strategy within the business.

I want to kind of tie that back into the topic at hand. How, from your perspective, is enablement uniquely positioned to help executive leaders in their decision-making? As an enablement leader, what are some of your best practices for bringing insights to the leadership team to help inform their strategy?

TO: Wow. So this could be its own podcast by itself. It’s really big. It’s a big thing because if you don’t position yourself as a true business partner with your business leaders, you’re going to lose your credibility and credibility is our currency. It’s true in sales and it’s very true in enablement.

If you don’t have credibility, you’ve got no resources, so to speak, to be able to leverage when it comes to making a difference in the business. I want to be very clear on what I say, so I’ve got three points for this question.

The first one is, start with understanding is the request from the business or the need for the business to transform or optimize? Because if you’re putting a lot of your time and energy behind optimizing things, when the real need is to transform, you’re going to lose your credibility. Then you’ll be given what I’ll call the tactical projects and everybody’s got onboarding, we all get that, but you may be just onboarding. That may be all you get to do because just make it better, just fix it, just to keep it going.

If you really need to understand how to position yourself differently, that is a whole other discussion. But, start with understanding is the need to transform or is the need to optimize? Transformation, I always challenge or I press and lean in on the conversation, so I’ll go, “So how much disruption are you asking me to generate? Because if you’re not going to give me permission to disrupt, I cannot transform. Or if you want me to optimize, then I get the goal of optimization is to minimize or reduce disruption,” and have that discussion as well.

That’s first and foremost because that sets your strategy and unfortunately, sometimes you get in a case where you get transformation overload. Everything has changed and you just need to stop and pause and say, “Look, leaders, stakeholders, everyone. Let’s calm down for a minute. Let’s pull the firehose back. Can we go spend some time, maybe a quarter, maybe a year on just reinforcing what we’ve already transformed and just optimize it? One of our leaders talks about extra coats of paint. Can we just get extra coats of paints on this thing and even just give it time to dry? If you do that, just by that alone, you’re going to position yourself as a huge business advisor to the leaders that you’re serving.

Secondly then, is to focus on manager enablement. The number one enablement you can give any AE is a great manager and that is beyond salespeople. Invest in leadership development and invest in manager enablement. The way I kind of test how we’re doing overall as an industry is, how many individual seller podcasts are out there versus how many sales leader podcasts are out there?

There are a few really good ones. One of my favorites I’ll give a shout-out to is Mike Weinberg, just as a person, he gets this, but generally speaking, there is a constant appetite for leaders to find stuff and they have to often go outside of sales leadership and get into generic leadership, where there is a gap in how we provide manager enablement.

But, if you can be that gap, if you could bring in your own leaders, do your own internal podcasts, that’d be huge. But it’s beyond podcasts, it’s really about getting involved and helping people grow and develop into the best version of themselves as a senior leader and not as an individual contributor.

Lastly, that gets right into this third point of are you trying to fix the system, or are you trying to fix the function? Not everybody has this mandate though, so I want to be careful here with this last one because this is a little bit of playing with fire. But, our reality is that our customers need us to show up in the most coordinated way possible and that means we need to think like systems thinkers, not just function thinkers. It’s not just about helping sales, it’s about helping the sales experience and more importantly, that customer experience and designing backward.

I love the way that we’re starting to talk now about the customer journey and that broader, bigger perspective of how do we design backward from that customer’s experience, from the very beginning and all the way through to renewal?

We need to be thinking around that whole system because it’s the content, it’s the technology and tools, it’s the behaviors, and it’s the coordination of all those things that come together. If you really, really, really want to change your game as an enablement pro, go there.

SS: I love that, Tim. Thank you so much for taking the time out to join our podcast and provide this advice to our audience. I really appreciate the time, Tim. Thank you.

TO: My genuine pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Nina LaRouche from Salesforce join us. Nina, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Nina LaRouche: Thanks, Shawnna. Again, my name is Nina LaRouche, and I actually currently support our account executives in what we call our mastery enablement programs, or in other words, our continuous learning. This is for our .org sellers, so those are the ones specifically serving our education and non-profit verticals.
I’ve actually been in the enablement space, I would say in a formal capacity, since 2014. I actually spent about 15 years in a selling capacity, which was after I started my career as a high school science teacher. I’ve always had a passion for learning and development, and I love solving problems and building things, so this is why sales enablement is such a perfect fit for me. It truly is my dream job.

SS: Absolutely it sounds like a fantastic fit Nina. Thank you so much for joining us today. Now, you recently posted a video on LinkedIn detailing your process that you use when working cross-functionally with teams to design a learning experience, which is obviously something many practitioners need to do within their organization.
You called it the Learning Brief. Can you share with our audience what the Learning Brief is and how it encourages that internal alignment while delivering programs at scale?

NL: Absolutely. As you mentioned, the Learning Brief really is an alignment and design tool that I’ve used for several years now. It actually has evolved over time. It really helps to templatize the learning design process so that we can move faster and it creates transparency between our cross-functional teams, our key stakeholders, our subject matter experts. This essentially has become my source of truth for anything related to the learning experience that we are building.

It actually includes some basic information about the learning experience. It talks about the topic, the target, and secondary learning audiences. Obviously, if it’s a live session, it’ll be focused on the date and time of that live session or information about the course and delivery mechanisms.

Now, one of the most important elements of the learning brief is the alignment around learning objectives and then the measures of success. One of the first things that I always ask when I’m designing learning is what do we want our learners to do or to say that’s different than today? Then my follow-up question is always, how will we know when they can do that? That’s at the essence of designing those learning objectives, which I think is really important when you’re first starting to design learning.

Other things in the Learning Brief, I also began collecting assets that were going to help in development of the content or the course. This could be internal assets, external assets, anything really that might be helpful as we start to design. This is also where I start to draft the actual learning experience. In some cases, this is a single moment. It might be one course or one live session, but in many cases, it’s multiple touchpoints.

For example, we were recently doing some training around LinkedIn Sales Navigator and there were four learning, what I call, moments. There was the pre-learning, this was communications to the users. Some of our users didn’t have accounts, some of them did, so there was a communication stream there. We also created a sales guide to help our sellers optimize their LinkedIn profile. That was the second moment. The third step was really where we think about the traditional learning, which is where we built and assigned a course to our learners to prepare them for the actual live session. The last piece was a workshop that we hosted. In the Learning Brief, I actually outline that draft and iterate on that as we continue the development process. Now, I think any program has probably a communication stream that rolls around it for most of our big programs, so that would be outlined in that Learning Brief as well. Drafting those communications. When are they going out? Who’s sending them. What channel are they going through?

I would say finally, and this might be the most important part of the Learning Brief, is creating a work back plan. Understanding what those key deliverables are, who owns it, what the dependencies are. This document is, like I said, a shared resource between myself and any other content contributors, as well as our key stakeholders, so that we can all stay aligned from the very start of the design through delivery.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Nina, in your opinion, what are some of the key components of an effective learning experience for reps?

NL: That is such a great question. For me, as an enablement practitioner and somebody who’s been in the learning space for a long time, I really think about learning as a journey. It’s not a destination, it’s not an event. One of the books that I’ve recently read is by Laura Fletcher and Sharon Boller, and they talk about the four stages of learning. First, preparing to learn, second, acquiring knowledge or skills, third, building memory practice, and then fourth, sustain and grow. I think all of these pieces are critical when you think about really designing effective learning experiences.

I think oftentimes as practitioners, we focus really heavily on stage two, acquiring knowledge and skills. When we’re doing really well, we might also hit on the practical application, which is that step three. More often than not, we miss stages one and four. To me, my job is to really help sellers change their behavior. Let’s face it, change is hard. You have to be really, really intentional about how you design learning.

Stage one is important because we can’t force learning to happen. Our learners need to understand why they need to learn this information and they need to be receptive to the learning. Stage three, I think is probably the most important step in the journey, and this is where we actually get reps to demonstrate that they can do what it is that we’re asking them to do. Stage four really is about maintaining all of those great behaviors over time and continuing to sharpen their saw.

I think when you’re thinking about effective learning design, you’ve got to focus in on all four things, especially when there’s limited learner attention or time. When this is done really effectively, this is what creates the best learning outcomes.

SS: I think those are fantastic stages when it comes to a learning experience. Now, you also wrote an article on LinkedIn where you discussed some ways to engage reps in pure learning. I think a lot of sales enablement practitioners would love to be able to incorporate that into learning experiences for their teams. In your experience, what is the value of peer to peer learning and how can practitioners foster a peer learning experience within a virtual environment?

NL: Yeah, another really great question, especially in this time of virtual learning. I think there’s nothing more powerful than reps learning from other reps. They really value getting that information and getting those best practices from other people who are walking in their shoes. That’s really why this is so important. Peers have a natural credibility. The same information I could share as an enablement practitioner or potentially a subject matter expert, but when it comes from a peer, it is absolutely more readily accepted by the end learner. That’s why I think this is such a critical piece to include in any program.

I’ve used peer learning groups in a few different ways throughout my career. In the article that you mentioned, which I wrote a few years ago, we actually created what we called thought partner groups. These were in groups of two to three sellers across different teams and each month we would actually give them suggested topics to discuss. Those could be a variety of things from operational processes, seller tips, a number of things. This was really helpful because they not only got to partner with other people that maybe they didn’t get to work with on a regular basis because they weren’t on their same team, but it gave them a chance to really showcase what they knew for other sellers. I tried to partner folks together that were maybe less experienced with more experienced to bring in those different perspectives.

I’ve also helped facilitate account executive mentor programs where you can, again, partner together someone who’s maybe less tenured with someone who’s more tenured. You could also pair people together maybe in a career path progression. For example, here at Salesforce, we have different segments. For example, you could partner a small business rep with a mid-market rep and that way they can start to learn what things are different as they progress in their career. These mentor programs can be informal or structured, it really just depends on what your sellers are looking for.

Now of course, probably the most recent way I’ve used peer groups is for our learning workshops. We have live virtual workshops and in those workshops we create small peer learning groups.
This could be anything from four to six, maybe eight, you wouldn’t want to get any larger than that. In these workshops, we then push those peer groups into breakouts. Whether you’re using zoom or Google meet or whatever your platform is, we push them into breakouts and have them complete some learning activity. This could be a role play, it could be a pitch, it could be just a discussion. It could be all kinds of different things, but in that exercise, everyone has a chance to participate. Everyone’s taking an active role in learning and potentially in providing feedback if it’s a pitch of role play. I think creating peer groups in a virtual environment is probably more important than it used to be when we were all in person. This provides an opportunity for that natural exchange of knowledge and skills that just wouldn’t happen otherwise since we’re all remote now.

SS: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I love your approach to peer learning. Now, I think many sales enablement practitioners are, especially as we approach the end of the year, are deeply thinking about how to look at particular metrics for any of their given programs. You recently did a webinar where you shared insights into how you’re looking at training metrics to ensure that your programs are helping to move the needle. What are some of the key metrics that practitioners should be tracking to measure the success of their training programs?

NL: Yeah, such a great question. I think at the end of the day, we all want to make sure that our programs are moving the needle. When I think about metrics, one of the things that’s really important to understand is that the metrics that you’re tracking are directly related to the maturity of your program. I’ve literally walked into situations where there were existing programs and they weren’t really measuring anything, not even the baseline metrics of say attendance or course completion. You’ve got to start somewhere, and so think about where you are in the maturity of your programs and really where you want to take them to the next level.

Anytime I’m thinking about learning metrics, I always use the Kirkpatrick’s model for evaluating learning, which starts at level one, which is learner satisfaction. In other words, was the training or enablement program useful? How relevant was it? I tried to avoid asking questions like, did they like it? Yeah, it’s great if they like it, but it really doesn’t help determine if it was effective.

Again, more about was it useful or how relevant was it to their goal. Level two in Kirkpatrick is really about measuring the actual change in knowledge or skill. This could be accomplished through a quiz; it could be through some type of practical application or exercise. I mentioned before, a role play or a stand and deliver, those are good ways to measure a change in skill. Then you get to level three, level three is about really measuring the actual desired behavior. This could be a number of things. It could be the number of meetings that have been set it could be how many opportunities were created, how many demos were completed. These are all great measures of that actual behavior that we’re trying to promote through the enablement program. Then of course, level four, which is sort of the pinnacle of Kirkpatrick, is really where we start to tie enablement to the business impact by measuring things like, how did it impact deal size or win rate or deal velocity or in the case of onboarding, how did we impact new hire ramp?

In general, I would say that for most practitioners, getting to level three is pretty good. Obviously, level four is what we’re all striving for, but to be honest, I don’t see a ton of organizations that actually get there, especially if you have a long sales cycle. It’s just a little bit more difficult to tie those things together, but that’s absolutely what we’re striving for when we’re looking for enablement metrics is how are we actually impacting the business.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now, as a closing question for you, how do you use metrics to communicate and demonstrate the impact of learning programs back up into your stakeholders?

NL: Yeah. We just talked about the different levels of metrics. One of the things that we have done for some of our programs, we’ve created Tableau dashboards using Salesforce to show some of those level one metrics that our leaders are using to help drive accountability in the enablement programs. This is something that we update pretty regularly as soon as courses or sessions are released.

Now, something else that we’ve been using for a while is what we call an enablement scorecard. This is something that we create internally with our enablement team, and this really helps us align on those key metrics that we’re measuring, and then also helps us to identify any adjustments that we might need to make to our programs to improve them even further. What we do is we create a bi-monthly slide deck. This is the format that it takes, and we review that together as a team so that we can ask questions, we can seek input from our counterparts.

The scorecard is made up of two parts. It includes what we call the executive summary, which is a simple red, yellow, green indicator on the health of the program based on our key metrics for that program. Then it has the more program details, which each program owner actually then creates their own view of their program. Right now, as I mentioned, we produce the scorecard as a slide deck, so each program owner would have their slide that they can highlight the specific metrics that are key for their program. Then we actually publish that scorecard out to our key stakeholders, our collaborators to help show the impact of our programs and to have ultimate transparency in what we’re building for our learners.

SS: Thank you so much for joining us today, I learned a ton from you. To our audience, thanks for listening. for more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m really excited to have a return guest to our podcast, one of our original podcast members, Chris Kingman from TransUnion. Chris, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Christopher Kingman: Thanks, Shawnna. My name is Chris Kingman. I’m the Global Head of Digital Enablement for TransUnion, founding member and current member of the Board of Advisors for the Sales Enablement Society, and now a member of the Board of Evangelists for Sales Enablement PRO. I’ve been at TransUnion for 10.5 years in various roles in enablement in the U.S. for seven years. Just wrapped up international support for three and a half years and now in a global role supporting both.

SS: I’m excited to have you back with us, Chris, and representing our Evangelist program, thank you so much. As you mentioned in your intro, you’ve been an established leader in enablement for several years, and you and I go back several years as well. You’ve personally experienced how the sales enablement function has grown and evolved over the years, so I’d love to hear from you, what drew you to sales enablement originally? What would you say keeps you motivated and passionate about enablement?

CK: Well, I don’t think I was drawn to enablement. I think like most people, I got pushed into it or I fell into the role. I was working at a tech startup and for anybody who’s ever come from the tech startup background knows there is more work than people. Over a really short period of I think about three years, I just amassed all of the responsibilities that we today lump under enablement. That’s how I got my start, I was doing a lot of the necessities. I’m motivated by the idea that sales enablement can immensely impact or affect our organizations in a positive manner.

Firstly, it’s the immediate seller. I was in sales once and I did absolutely horribly, I failed at it so bad. I know what it’s like to feel unsupported and have no resources or help. I don’t ever want my sellers to feel that way. A lot of the programs I design or any of the strategies I lay out are grounded in that idea.

Second, as you scale, and as I have over the years gone from supporting a localized team to a global organization, you begin to have positive effects on other areas. The biggest one being revenue, you get to actually see how your programs and initiatives are impacting the bottom line. You also get to impact things like morale, you get to reduce turnover, and you get to help individuals. You get to know them, and you get to help them. I think all of those things are some of the things that always keep me motivated, interested.

The great thing about enablement and the thing I also really enjoy is connecting with my fellow leaders and practitioners. I’ve been very fortunate over the last few years between all of the organizations and the seminars to meet so many amazing, great people. I always keep coming back for that.

SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. I love our sales enablement space, but I think a lot of practitioners that are listening could understand and align with how you fell into enablement back in the day.
Now, you are actually, as I mentioned, one of our first guests that we ever had on this podcast. In that episode, I want to say almost three years ago now, we asked you where you saw the momentum for sales enablement leading in the future. Now that we’re a ways into that future, what has the evolution of sales enablement looked like in the past couple of years from your perspective?

CK: The first thing I’m happy to see happen over the last few years is the gradual dropping of the word sales from enablement. Certainly, we refer to it here as sales enablement, but the farther you go out into organizations, and especially if you look into a lot of the information on hiring, a lot of the information on jobs, or if you scour the job boards, you’re going to find more results searching for enablement than sales. When you dig into the quality of those JDs and those postings, they’re grounded in sales enablement roles. I said that a long time ago that one of our biggest limiters was just that term, it confuses a lot of people. I believe this has helped the discipline become more approachable.

It’s been interesting to watch the discipline evolve, especially as there’s been increasingly more studies on the function and its impact, including the one Sales Enablement PRO does. I’ve noticed a few things I think are important over the last few years. Anecdotally, I’ve seen more jobs for SE roles in general, but as you read through them, there’s a better description of how that role exists in the organization. A while back it was a single discipline or a single role. Now, I see more and more leader roles or SE manager roles with the prospect of building teams within defined hierarchies and structures. This is good because some of the earlier research indicated there was a real hesitancy to hire and build enablement functions because organizations didn’t quite know where to start. I think this is on the decline now as more understanding of enablement is being established. This may not sound like a big achievement, but if you looked at all the data, three, four years ago, a lot of the stuff really indicated that people were aware of it, they understood the need, but they didn’t know really where to start. Now I think we’re seeing some of that ambiguity die off and we’re seeing people investing where they think enablement should be in their organization.

I think those are really big changes that have been great to see over the last few years. Of course, the second one is the move to digital. That was always coming. A lot of thought leaders and things like that have always said the move to digital is where people are looking to go, but it was certainly accelerated due to the pandemic. It’s been interesting to see the initial reaction to the move to digital and what we thought what was important, like changing digital engagements for structures, access, and modalities of learning and the emergence of the dreaded zoom fatigue. Today, we’re looking to balance impactful meetings without burning our sellers out. A very different approach compared to a few years ago, where face-to-face was how you sold, and less attention was paid in certain areas in certain organizations.

I think the acceleration of the adoption of digital and how we’ve progressed through it, at first everybody went double down on video cons and having virtual happy hours and every training was a face-to-face video call to where we are now where there’s a little bit less hands-on. There are dedicated days when you leave people alone or you go back to older ways of training or developing sellers through links to content or watch this video. It’s all been very interesting to see the reaction of practitioners and leadership.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. Now, you also shared with us some of the skills and expertise needed to succeed in enablement, and at the time it included listening and staying close to the front lines and thinking about the big picture. How would you say that’s evolved recently? Would you say that things that things like the shift to digital has impacted the traits that organizations look for in enablement candidates?

CK: Certainly. I still believe listening and staying close to the frontline are key. I would argue those will never go away, even now sellers need a defined outlet if you will, to voice their needs and concerns. I still believe that those sellers’ anecdotal feedback and the leader anecdotal feedback leads to larger issues.

That’s always how I’ve approached finding out my own business needs and critical business issues. Even in this digital space, sellers, leaders, they don’t feel as connected, so that connection to them, listening to them and offering them outlets and stuff and staying on top of the sellers and constantly engaging and saying, what’s going on? What support do you need? I think it’s more critical now that we don’t have the benefit of maybe sitting in a call center or having a meeting every Friday in the office, things like that. It’s those little moments that are missing that you now have to artificially recreate in order to maintain some of the benefits.

Given the recent changes, if I was hiring or staffing teams, I would look for someone with proven abilities in digital selling or supporting digital or inside sales organizations. Not necessarily from the skills perspective, but the discipline and the technology perspective. Right now, CRM is probably your second most important tool behind maybe telephone and email. Somebody that can drive effective adoption of those things is key. If you weren’t technologically inclined, I feel now is the time to get educated on the tools that organizations are using past things like zoom or your video con platform and past the CRM. Especially if you’re in a discipline like training, maybe like support or comp, what are the other avenues? What are the other tools that you might be able to adopt in this new environment?

I would also look for practitioners with demonstrated communication skills and change management skills. I’m pretty sure everyone will agree, the number of emails they’ve gotten has gone up, the number of meetings they attend has gone up, so you need somebody who has that conscientious mind. They are mindful in how they approach change or introduce new concepts or initiatives in all digital organizations.

We don’t have the luxury of in-person meetings, most of us don’t, or on-demand resources where you can walk to someone’s desk for support. Right now, to me, one of the most critical things that we look at is how well we navigate and communicate these changes or what we’re attempting to do from a strategic and tactical perspective. Those are some of the skills I would look for in a practitioner role to join my organization.

SS: Those are fantastic traits to be looking for. Now, you recently wrote an article on spring cleaning, which I loved. Talking about your sales enablement practices, how often would you say you’re re-evaluating your processes to keep pace with the evolution of the sales enablement function, and what is the impact of doing so?

CK: As I’ve scaled my remit at TransUnion, if you will, I’ve had to approach the spring cleaning in two different ways. In about a quarterly fashion, I go and review what programs and what initiatives and what things we’re doing to support sellers, and then align those to the sales and go-to-market strategies that our teams are employing to make sure that from a tactical perspective they’re supported. That’s very quick and iterative. Do they have the assets? The campaigns? Is the technology lined up? Is the training lined up? Is the certification lined up? Do they understand what they need to do in this three-to-six-month window? Those are always iterative and we’re always sitting down and aligning and making sure that the processes and the things that we do are set to support these people.

Then strategically, I reevaluate the priorities every six months. Now, this is for larger-scale initiatives around development programs, leadership identified needs, technology investments, and the scaling of those technologies. Because of the longer build and lead times, never mind securing funding, I try to maximize the design time when we go to launch or execute these programs so there’s little deviation or modification once they’re launched. This short cycle iterative review and then long cycle review helps me stay on top of the tactical actions to make sure our sellers have everything they need to do in the short term, but also make sure that long-term strategically my technology investments, my programs are all aligned to the three-year plans, the organizational goals, the management identified gaps or needs or things like that.

We can make sure that wherever the organization wants to go, we have a strategic all the way down to a tactical plan to cover that. I don’t like guessing games, I certainly hate surprises. Anytime we get the opportunity to sit down with the leadership and say, tell us what you want us to go do and we will tell you how we’re going to support it, never pass those.

SS: Those are golden opportunities. Now, just for the sake of staying in alignment to how we get started in our first podcast, in the next couple of years, how do you see the sales enablement function evolving and what are a few focus areas that organizations should be paying attention to as they’re moving into the year ahead?

CK: I think we can agree that digital selling is here to stay in some capacity. I believe all major consulting firms have published some data to attest to that. How much time your sellers will spend in that channel will remain to be seen.

I feel that there are a few things to consider when looking forward at the future of enablement. First, practitioners and leaders should reevaluate their tech stacks, especially given the dominance of digital selling and the assumed prevalence here moving forward. Are you using platforms to their fullest potential? Those are some of the things that I would look at. Are you duplicating functionalities? This could be a key exercise as the cost of maintaining multiple platforms will become unscalable at a certain point. Certainly, something I look to do constantly is making sure that adoption of a platform is there and then understanding the capabilities of it, similar to an iPhone. You can make a phone call with an iPhone, but that isn’t necessarily all it can’t do, so why not explore the full breadth and depth of a platform.

I’d recommend getting most of your tools aligned and making sure that you’re using them to the fullest ability, and then leveraging things like AI or machine learning where possible to further pair down how much software you actually have to pay for. If you have three applications when in reality two of them can suffice, save the money, get rid of the third application and reinvest that into something that’s going to drive efficiency or drive effectiveness.

Over the next three years, I think you’ll see a lot of consolidation of tech platforms. We’ve certainly seen it this year with a couple of the bigger ones acquiring smaller entities. I think there should always be a review of the technology compared to where do we want to go as an organization. If we want to grow to a certain amount of money or a certain size, or you want to emerge into a certain market, are we technologically enabled to do that. I think for a practitioner, especially those in the tech space, it’s something you’re going to be spending a lot of time on.

The other thing I would look at is up-skilling sellers. That is an endless process in my opinion. You should always be preparing them for the next way to sell or preparing them for the way that buyers want to buy. It may not seem obvious, but how we sell and how customers want to buy is evolving due to this digital environment. A lot of great work has been put out over the last few years about the size of buying committees or what I think is pretty notable is the Sense Maker work done by Gartner, which talks about how customers want to be engaged with from a sales rep and the perspective that they want.

I think all of those things are key in understanding in what market that you sell and what space is your product or your solution and the people that you sell to. How do they want to buy it? What are they like? Deeper dives into what works, how are you winning, and more importantly, how are you losing, are all things that are going to feed into how you’re preparing your sellers.

One of the key areas to focus on is developing the skills to maximize the value for a client, providing the right information, and addressing their critical business issues all while minimizing the time on calls. Customers are more educated than ever, and you combine that with a very real digital fatigue, and you now have a new buying dynamic that I don’t feel we’ve really dug into as a discipline or a practice. I think over the next few years, you’ll see a lot of thought leadership and sales development or coaching around how to drive the utmost value in the smallest amount of time. Whether that’s pitch templates, whether that’s how to address certain customers, whether that’s allowing customers better resources to enable themselves through digital sales rooms or a better website. Those are all things I think practitioners need to consider and partner with their internal partners through marketing, through technology, things like that to enable. I think things are going to only get more complex, unfortunately, as we navigate the next three years.

The last thing I challenge practitioners and leaders to consider is how to prepare for the return to field selling. At some point we may go back to a semblance of normal. I think an emerging key differentiator in the next three years is the willingness to go see clients in person. I think developing a safe strategy that brings the benefits of digital engagement combined with the effectiveness of an in-person interaction will be a winning formula in the next few years,

SS: Chris, as always, I learn a ton every time I talk to you. Thank you so much for joining us today, I really appreciate you making the time.

CK: Absolutely, thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesnablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Nimrah Zaid from Algo, join us. Nimrah, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Nimrah Zaid: Hello, Shawnna. First of all, I would like to thank you for having me on. I’m Nimrah and I’m based out of Munich, Germany. Since August this year, I have been part of AlgoMarketing. It’s a marketing agency that offers a unique blend of services to its clients that range from providing the right talent, marketing technology and tools for optimization, and scaling of marketing activities. A1go partners with clients, such as Google, and that is where I am assigned as a Marketing Enablement Manager for Google Cloud.

I basically work with the Google Cloud Strategy and Operations team on enabling the marketing teams, specifically in the EMEA and APAC regions with the planning and budgeting processes, providing best practice consultation to marketing teams on how to improve their ROI and building insights on how to further optimize the internal processes and tools that I use for marketing, planning, and budgeting. I also manage and collect data to measure the efficacy of resources, promote adoption and consistent use of tools, and to maintain thorough data hygiene. Prior to this, I have around five years of experience of working in companies, big and small, in roles such as digital marketing, market research, and marketing.

SS: Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Now, you mentioned you recently transitioned from a marketing operations role into marketing enablement. How does your background in operations help inform your approach to your new role?

NZ: That’s a good question. I have been asked this a lot lately. You see, having previously worked as a Marketing Operations Specialist, I have a good understanding of convoluted mesh networks of processes, data analytics, technology, and taxonomy. This set up the stage for my current role, where I have to transform these complexities into a format that is easy to comprehend by the upper management and teams likewise.

To put it into perspective, the field marketing operations gives us a heterogeneous spectrum of marketing solutions. It focuses on end-to-end marketing optimization with functions, including, and not limited to planning, analyzing, automating, and enabling the core marketing to operate and scale. At a granular level, marketing enablement is helping drive marketing operations. They have a higher-level view of marketing needs and can orchestrate success.

SS: That’s fantastic. I love how your past experience translates really well into that. Now, within some marketing teams, marketing enablement may be a newer role. In your opinion, how does marketing enablement help to scale the success of the marketing team?

NZ: In theory, marketing enablement fills the sweet spot between marketing, technology, and analytics. It is an additional layer of efficiency to the whole marketing structure. Marketing enablement connects product and solution innovators with business leaders and stakeholders. It is a multi-fold role that not only allows marketing teams to more effectively use various tools by creating training and learning resources, but also to work cross-functionally with platform renders, automation, and other operation teams to improve the process. Also, to advocate for the internal customer experience by developing a strategy for the creation and adoption of training and content.

In my opinion, marketing enablement is not a new idea. We have been tossing around the stone for years. In the past, it never caught on as a buzzword for marketers, but now the need for dedicated marketing enablement function is critical.

SS: Absolutely. I think so as well with all of the things that are changing so quickly in the marketing landscape. Now, in a recent post on LinkedIn, you said that the best strategy for marketing success is to work in partnership with marketing operations. From your experience, how does partnering with marketing operations lead to better overall marketing results? In particular, how does that impact the capacity to innovate?

NZ: Yes. I remember this post. You see, the role of marketing operations is to focus on the strategy, execution, and operations of the marketing process. It is more like a hub where processes and metrics and goals are brought into alignment. Professionally speaking, there have been many instances where this partnership between marketing ops and marketing have led to better results. I have seen how introducing smart solutions to the marketing process can get better conversion. Even simple things like setting up a chatbot on a website that simultaneously not only minimizes manual work for SDRs but can generate double the number of leads.

To have a one-stop documentation resource and technologies and processes can go a long way of not only onboarding new colleagues, but for enablement of existing team members. All of this in a nutshell, can help marketing in an overarching way to not only achieve goals, but also be scalable.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. I think scalability is critical in these days. Now, in that same post, you mentioned that marketing operations handles the nuts and bolts of marketing, including reporting out on analytics. In your opinion, how do marketing analytics help to increase the effectiveness of decision-making for marketing leaders? How do you leverage that from a marketing enablement standpoint?

NZ: Data analytics and reporting are one of the pain points of a marketing operations professional. Short answer would be that data analytics is important. Why? To learn what has happened, to understand what is happening, to know what might happen, to maximize efforts, and to streamline budgets.

Let me shed some more light on it. Marketing analytics is crucial as it provides a holistic view of the performance of the marketing activities of an organization. The analysis is important to illustrate not only the performance, but its associated influence on sales. Here, I would like to mention Darrell Alfonso, who is a marketing ops guru, and I totally resonate with him and his ideas and approaches. He once mentioned that we need to prioritize data analytics and marketing so the processes can be well segmented. The reporting becomes credible with added granularity, and that in turn will enable stakeholders to make smart investments in future demand generation.

Good data insight is not only beneficial for marketers or business leaders, but also for sales and SDRs so they can have meaningful conversations with prospects. To summarize, accurate data gives you a clear funnel visibility, and to make your marketing dollars stretch further.

SS: From your perspective, what are some of the key metrics that enablement teams need to track to help increase marketing success?

NZ: First, we need to recognize that marketing enablement is an organizational capability. This means if one person or several people find they want to leave the marketing team, this capability can successfully persist. An organizational capability is derived from a strategy and consists of a bundle of people, processes and technology that drives a business result.

Another key element to marketing enablement is the identification and use of technologies that enable marketing results. In short, it is adding value to the whole marketing process. We can easily quantify marketing enablement results by internally keeping track of all the documentation and standardization we have in place, by checking the quality of marketing and sales qualified leads to make sure there are no roadblocks in the funnel, to setting up optimized reports and dashboards for demonstrating marketing impact to key stakeholders, to visualizing the opportunities and areas for improvement.

We have to start with a marketing strategy and how it supports, enables, and drives the company strategy. Whatever the company’s strategy is, marketing needs to create a parallel strategy. Once it is defined, it’s in place, it must be operationalized. Part of operationalizing this strategy includes marketing enablement.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. In closing, I have one last question for you. If you don’t mind. While marketing operations deals heavily with data and planning, it also requires creative problem-solving. How have you applied creativity to your work in a data-driven role?

NZ: That’s a wonderful question, Shawnna. You see, being data-driven is no longer an optional thing, it is a must now. We have seen in this post-pandemic year that agile companies can pivot quickly in turbulent times. This pivot is only possible with greater insights to data analytics and having a creative approach. Through analytics, you are reporting on the effectiveness of the process, and when combined with creativity, you can also anticipate possible roadblocks and come up with viable recommendations.

It is creativity that has always helped me understand the technical acumen of the teams I’m going to address and curate my content accordingly. It requires a creative approach to translate the requirements from the marketing teams into technical requirements for creating the workflow, to ensure smooth working of tools. To make the teams aware of trends in a way that they understand the actionable points without getting lost in the complex data matrix. You cannot achieve these goals without being created.

To put it concisely, data analytics and creativity go hand-in-hand. It’s the ability to interpret, manipulate, and extract meaning from data. Then use it to build predictive models for generating business insights and eventually to spread the wisdom across teams effectively.

SS: I love that. Nimrah, thank you so much for joining us today, I learned a lot from you.

NZ: Thank you, Shawnna.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Jeff Everton: Thanks, Shawnna. I appreciate the opportunity. As Shawnna mentioned, I’m Jeff Everton. I’ve been a worldwide sales enablement practitioner for probably the last 30 years, and now most recently with Absolute Software where we’ve recently made an acquisition from another company called NetMotion. It’s really bringing the convergence of these two organizations together to really transform the way we get out and sell and have a consultative conversation with our prospects and our customers.

SS: Well, Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. On that particular note, in your LinkedIn bio one of the things that caught my eye was that you talked about how you guys leverage solution selling methodology to really drive sales productivity and enhance that customer competence of your reps. I’d love for our audience to just learn a little bit more about the methodology that you guys are taking and how it helps better enable sales teams and improve those sales results.

JE: Okay. Well, sales methodologies have been around for a long time. There’s a plethora of them out there that you can pick and choose from. We happened to land on one that I found to be very successful over the years, and it’s truly changing the conversations that most sales professionals have when they’re talking to a prospect or a customer. Often, they’re showing up with a corporate pitch and trying to position something that might resonate with the individual, and then pivoting to that discussion point. The sales methodology that we’ve deployed in the last two companies I’ve been at have been highly successful because it’s a very consultative conversation. It’s all about the business and their needs and their challenges and having the team effectively listen for the key indicators that will lead us to the right solutions at the appropriate point.

We never really start talking about us and what we bring to the table in those conversations. It’s trying to figure out what are they trying to do and why are they looking at it now before we ever talk about how we can help solve that problem. The methodologies that we’ve deployed have really transformed the sales teams in a way to have more cadence and adoption, the managers to coach and reinforce and inspect the things that are going on during that buyer’s journey, and the sales process to make sure that we’re firing on all cylinders and being successful.

SS: I love that. Now, on the point of making sure that methodologies are successful, I think most enablement folks know that you really have to bundle them with sales readiness programs. I mean, those are critical to ensuring that the methodologies get adopted and that they are able to lead to the desired results within the sales team. How have you been able to increase adoption of sales methodology amongst your teams through readiness program?

JE: It starts with the organization. You have to have an organizational alignment for success. It’s not just what readiness or enablement and training is doing to move the needle and get the smile sheets from a Kirkpatrick’s level one analysis or level two knowledge and comprehension. We’re talking about a behavioral change and how the teams are approaching the market from inside lens perspective to the outside from a buyer’s viewpoint and perspective. That organizational alignment is critical.

I have to go back, and I have to work with the marketing teams, I have to work with the operations teams, the leadership team on the sales side of the house, the success teams and ensuring that they all understand what the methodology is about and the language internally. That then allows us to go out to the field and start to articulate that value and have that consultative conversation with those prospects and customers.

As a manager then, they have to come in and inspect coach and reinforce what they’re seeing and hearing and observing to help that individual become more of an effective player. It’s kind of like moving them from being B players that were just recently hired into the organization and drinking from a fire hose and learning all about the different solutions and services to transforming those individuals to being truly hunters out there and being able to effectively listen and understand the needs and problems that their organization is going through, and then, only then, aligning to what solution the methodology brings to the table and how we do it better and different.

SS: I like that approach. Now, what role would you say coaching plays in helping reps effectively leverage a methodology?

JE: Well, traditionally sales leaders have often come in to save the deal, and I don’t think they’ve been effective coaches. I’d say that a good coach is going to spend 30 to 40% of their time helping their teams develop. It’s bringing training into their staff calls, it’s being effective in one-on-ones. We have two methodologies, we use a sales methodology and then we use a qualification methodology, so two different ones that we’re using during an opportunity and in a sales process. What we have the leaders do is set up a cadence, not only with the individual to inspect what they’ve accomplished or through the learning and micro-learning site, but also how they’re applying it, and helping that individual get further along than they might’ve been able to get to on their own. That’s one angle that we’ll take.

The second angle, they might bring it into a staff call and a conversation with a group of people and share best practices and experiences with each other because people like to hear their stories from their peers on the front lines. I find that very successful to get these guys more confidence in being able to go up there and articulate that value and differentiation.

The third angle that any type of a program that you put in place, I’ve learned through the decades of doing this, it’s not just a one and done. It’s not like a transaction when you sell something, you walk away. It’s a relationship. I have relationships across my entire organization and I’m constantly checking in with these folks. The same thing for the field and managers and coaching, they have relationships with their sellers.

To be effective, we put in programs and a cadence that typically takes a program several quarters beyond the initial implementation of a methodology for example. The first quarter might be what we call more of a fast start 13 weeks where we’re going to go through rigor, manager coaching one-on-one, team reviews. Maybe there’s some type of up gamification activities and contests that we do, contests work extremely well. People are motivated by money, and we certainly liked to give them prizes and recognize what they can accomplish. Those are the things that we typically do.

From a manager’s perspective, I have to help the managers get to that place and feel confident and are comfortable in being able to lead. Sometimes when they’re not subject matter experts, let’s say on a methodology, it really takes me taking time and backing up and rewinding and really understanding what it is from a psychological perspective how these individuals are motivated, how you get down and have a conversation with the individuals, how do you make sure that they’re going through the learning? If they aren’t going through the foundational pieces, it’s going to be hard to apply that change of behavior in the street and inspect and reinforce that. I’ve always taught them a simple rule. What are two things that the rep did extremely well and one or two things that they could do differently and improve upon?

SS: I really liked that role. I think that’s a great way to approach coaching. Now, you alluded to this a bit earlier, but obviously in the last year to 18 months or so I think a lot of practitioners have had to adapt their methods to a virtual or remote environment. How can a sales methodology help reps adapt and improve performance in the midst of all of the transitions that we’ve been going through in the past 18 months or so?

JE: That’s a hard one because we’re dealing more with video conferencing calls, we’re having to more effectively listen than we ever had to before. It’s also learning the different needs, wants, and desires of different individuals that you’re talking to. For example, if I’m used to talking with folks in the IT organization, and now I need to talk to people in the security organization, it’s a different language. The methodology is still very applicable. You have to prepare for any conversation that you’re going to have. Proper preparation and due diligence about understanding the business and the individuals that you’re speaking to as well as their industry are critical and paramount.

I always use this analogy of where a trial attorney wouldn’t go into the courtroom and ask a series of questions that they didn’t know the answers to. The same thing you want your reps to be able to do, the exact same thing. Coaching and reinforcing helps the reps build that confidence. The enablement, the virtual programs that I put in over the years, I use a crawl, walk, run, and I want these guys to discover things and apply that and synthesize it in a way. That gets them very comfortable through use case scenarios and role-plays. There’s a multitude of things I do from a readiness perspective to help these guys build that competence in their onboarding journey.

As they’re having these conversations on the street or virtually with these prospects and customers, one of the things that we’ve also done with the methodology is do opportunity coaching and reinforcement sessions where we’ll actually group ahead of time prior to a call, discuss who we’re going to speak to, review the pre-call plan. What are the series of questions? What are the anticipated objections that we might get? And be prepared to respond to that. We also have to be prepared to pivot on two or three different points if the first point isn’t resonating and isn’t relevant to that buyer or individual that we’re speaking to.

Finally, we also have to realize that if I’m going in, let’s say talking to a technical buyer, and an economic buyer walks into the room, I have to be audible ready. I have to be able to just my conversation and bring that individual into the conversations and discussions. What’s important to them is different than the individual I’m speaking to. I don’t want to forget about the individual while I’m there. Let’s say if we’re doing a demo with an SC, we want to make sure that we’re balancing the conversation. Again, it’s more of a conversation, not a monologue that’s taking place, we’re giving a pitch per se or talking about our solutions, but what I want to be able to do after that meeting is go back and do the coaching and reinforcement with the individual and ask them, what went well? What did you like? What do you think you did extremely well? What do you want to keep doing, and what would you change? What would you do differently? That opportunity to review becomes a vehicle for us to help reinforce the right attributes and behaviors that we’re expecting the individuals to do on a regular basis. It builds that confidence.

Other things, like I mentioned to you, we’ll do some games and contests on a quarterly basis to get these teams comfortable in front of their peers because if they can’t speak in front of them or our own executive teams, why would I ever put them in front of a customer or prospect? That’s part of the processes that we go through to make sure that they’re comfortable and getting into virtual discussions with the business. Sometimes they don’t get there. I’ll be very honest with you. Sometimes they get the conversation going and they recognize that they’re not talking to the right individuals, but part of a good sales rapport and building out that pre-call plan is being able to get delegated to who you sound like, being able to ask a series of questions that move you beyond the individual that you’re talking to.

I had a vice president one time reach out to me and tell me, he says, Jeff, I’ve got a problem. I said, what’s that? My people are not effectively listening and learning about the business and preparing for their conversations. When they go in and have a meeting, they have one meeting and that’s the only meeting that they get. They never get invited back to continue that journey and build that trust and rapport. I said, hmm, that is a challenge. Hence why the methodologies are so important, that we can coach and reinforce that behavior and what we’re inspecting and looking for, but I’ve got to get those people comfortable and being able to have that conversation.

It’s really critical that we work together as a team. We always use a philosophy of one team, and we win as a team we lose as a team. We always look at that success. We always look at what went well, what could we do better and differently? How do we learn from the differentiation against the competition and doing all of these things, and put that all together?

SS: I love that. Well, Jeff, I have one last question for you, if you don’t mind. I think at the end of the day, metrics are on everyone’s mind, in particular with sales enablement professionals, as they leverage them to demonstrate business impact. What specific metrics do you recommend tracking to understand if a methodology is leading to those enhanced business results that one would be expecting?

JE: For any methodology to be effective, again, I always start with the organizational alignment and understand what exactly success looks like from a business lens and viewpoint. What are the key imperatives that the organization is trying to accomplish? From there, what I’ll look at it and go, okay, if this is what success looks like, what are the goals to achieve that imperative and what’s required to get there?

What it often comes down to is both qualitative and quantitative key performance indicators. I want to look at leading and lagging indicators, I want to be able to effectively measure activities that have an impact on the performance. Let’s say if moving the needle from a leader to accelerating and making club rank velocity of deals, I want to be able to look at the financial KPIs as maybe lagging indicators, I want to look at qualitative KPIs and descriptive measures and options or characteristics that are involved with this and quantitative KPIs where I can measure the results right against the averages, the ratios percentages, and things like that.

What I mean by that is, we started this journey looking at our sales methodology and this is one of the things that any vendor that’s really doing this correctly is going to ask you is, what does success look like from your lens and your viewpoint and what are the business requirements to get there and measuring those key performance indicators? We start to look at things like, how are we accelerating growth? How are we increasing deal size? Are we increasing net new logos? Are we increasing the expansion of our opportunities? How are we dealing with our renewals and the retention of those renewals? Are we effective in converting our pipeline conversion rates? Are we decreasing the sales cycle and increasing time to productivity let’s say from our onboarding programs?

We look at all those factors and put that into view into some type of a dashboard, so that we can say that we’re truly getting out there and differentiating, we’re having more qualitative conversations, we’re calling higher because that’s always something we want to have happen. We don’t want to be stuck in the glass house per se, but we want to get to the economic buyer and decision-makers, or the panel and committee that makes those decisions. Then I want to be able to monitor this and trend this over time to see if there’s a change in behaviors, particularly with individuals. Not only will I look at the metrics from a business perspective and how my programs are measuring success and how we’re accomplishing that success, but I’m also looking at it from the individual performance and productivity and saying, have I been effective improving their time to competency and improving their productivity?

I can give you an example of that. When we were selling in a previous company in the technology security space, we were very quick to be able to drop a box and line it up and find evil and have a compelling event. Pretty easy to sell something like that, it was unique. As the competition came into the field, it became more complex. There were more acquisitions that took place, and it was harder and harder for those teams to be effective. We were stuck in that rut measuring some of these metrics, and particularly the average deal size. Well, we look at a deal size, let’s say roughly $130,000-$150,000 on a deal. Now, that might sound like a lot to some of you out there, that’s a pretty big deal, but it really wasn’t attaching to the biggest problems in an organization that they were facing and truly solving for the bigger issues that were on the table versus just what typical sellers attach to is the first thing they hear and the first problem they want to try to solve.

We try to get our teams to resist that. Through the methodology think about, is there something bigger? Is there someone else that cares about this problem? When we did this right, I was able to go back to the CRO at the end of the year and say, you asked me to track both leading and lagging indicators, we aligned this to our key imperatives of the organization and how we’re being measured and successful as an organization, but I want to bring this to your attention. Not only did we increase the velocity of deals and take deals down from less than eight to 12 months down to roughly six months on a given sales cycle, but we were also calling higher on those deals and oh, by the way, the average size deal went from that 130 to 150 K range to 2.2 million on 24 different deals. When I can show that type of return off an investment of, let’s say a million-dollar investment that we made, in the methodology it pays 50x the return on just 24 deals. That’s how we look at things.

Then, I’m constantly adjusting it from a dashboard perspective. This is today, is it going to be the same tomorrow? The quarterly reviews become very important to making sure that we’re effective and measuring the right things at the right time.

SS: Absolutely. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. I learned a lot about your approach to sales methodology.

JE: Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Eric Andrews from Infor join us. Eric, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Eric Andrews: Hi, thanks, I’m delighted to be here. My name is Eric Andrews, I am Vice President of Sales Enablement at Infor. Infor is an enterprise SaaS provider with solutions that are built for specific industries, including ERP, human capital management, supply chain management and solutions like that.

As the VP of sales enablement, I’m responsible for our sales enablement platform and the content and tools that sellers use to prepare to sell and use to engage customers within the selling process.

SS: Well, Eric, thank you so much for joining us today. On LinkedIn, you’ve been referred to as an exec that really understands customer care and solving their problems. I’d love to understand from you, how can sales enablement leaders embrace a more customer-centric mindset if you will, and why would you say that’s important?

EA: Sure. I think it’s critical to remember that today’s buyers can do and are doing most of their research on their own. In fact, there are many surveys out there that would suggest that they prefer to do so. If we want to participate in that process, we need to make sure that we’re adding value to their buying journey.

I think one of the best ways to get the team more customer-centric is to focus on doing fewer things but doing them consistently and with a high level of quality. There’s only so much content that sellers or buyers can consume and we’re trying to shift from a “more is more” motto to a “more is less” motto. It’s the old Mark Twain adage, “I’d have written a shorter note if I’d had more time.” This is really about providing fewer, really high-quality enablement assets that sellers understand and can use effectively in the buying process rather than having to hunt through hundreds of documents to find the ones that make the most sense for their customers.

SS: I love that. I think that’s fantastic. How do you take that same mindset though, and really make sure that it trickles down throughout all the levels of the organization? What are some of the strategies that you’ve used for how sales enablement can help enable reps to build customer relevance throughout that entire buyer’s journey?

EA: Sure. Some of the things we’re doing to really ensure that our reps are able to build that relevance throughout the buyer’s journey is to really be thoughtful about the assets that we’re creating at each stage of the buyer’s journey and how they’re meant to be used. We then create templates for those so that they’re consistent across every product we sell and every industry we sell into so that if you’re a rep and you want to know how to handle customer objection, you know exactly where to. It’s the second page of a battle card. It doesn’t matter which product in the company or which industry, it’s always the second page. In fact, it’s always the little lower right-hand corner of the second page.

We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for the rep to find the answers they need. We think this gives them confidence in the buying process and we think that confidence really translates into a more customer-oriented experience.

SS: I love that, I think that’s fantastic. Now, we’ve all had to pivot to virtual or maybe hybrid work environments as of late. What are some of the skills that salespeople need in order to still effectively engage with their customers through these new channels?

EA: Well, I think it’s a combination of skills and assets. I mean the reality is, sellers to the whole sellers to their inside sellers. What we’ve been doing is focusing on helping our sellers engage virtually and digitally. We’re creating more digital tools that they can use with customers and frankly, there’s some real advantages to that. A lot of these tools tend to be what I would call, choose your own adventure. As a customer, you can navigate to the content that you want to consume within that digital experience and that gives the reps real insight into what the customer’s demonstrated interests are. They can then tailor subsequent conversations by understanding that, hey, this customer really spent a lot of time on HCM and not so much time on ERP, so for my next conversation, I’m really going to focus in on HCM.

The other area is we’ve enabled our sellers to create tailored microsites for each customer opportunity that they have going. That’s become a really interesting opportunity. Those microsites are where the seller can share content with the customer, can share conversations, they can record their meetings and put those recordings in there so that everyone has access. We know that buying is a team sport and so not everybody’s available for every meeting. If we record those meetings and put them in there, we can have conversations within these microsites and what happens is that microsite, or we call them shared space, becomes a record of that customer engagement from start to finish. All the assets, all the conversations are there. That for us is really interesting and gives us the ability to start to analyze lots of these different conversations to understand which assets are most effective at which part of the buying process, which conversations are most effective at moving a customer forward.

SS: That’s fantastic. That’s a really great approach. Now, you’ve also been described, Eric, as a team-first leader on LinkedIn. I’d love to understand from your perspective, how does focusing on the success of your enablement team internally translate to success externally with the customer experience?

EA: I had a boss once who said, “you’re only as tall as the shoulders you stand on.” This is very much a team effort. It’s working together to determine what the appropriate bill of materials is for a different product or industry, it’s working together to ensure that really consistent high-quality curated environment, and everybody takes a role in that. Before an asset gets posted, we work with a content creator to make sure that it’s on-brand. We then will check every link in it to make sure that those links all work, we’ll check the legal disclaimers, we’ll check everything. It’s really all about trying to create a really high-quality environment. I think everybody has a responsibility in that.

SS: Absolutely, I love that. I love that philosophy and management. Now, in addition to the partnership between sales enablement, sales, and marketing, that can be super critical when it comes to driving a seamless customer journey. I’d love to hear your opinion, how can alignment across revenue teams impact the customer experience?

EA: I think that’s really important. The alignment is really important and it’s really important because we spend a lot of money with our marketing teams to generate demand for our products. As we pass those leads over to sellers, it’s critical the sellers know what to do with those leads, understand the conversations that generated those leads, and have we created enablement materials for them to continue those conversations and continue to progress those customers forward? We don’t want that handoff to be jarring. We’d ideally like it to be a seamless transition.

SS: Absolutely. think you’re completely right. How have you gone about, because I think at the end of the day something we’re always curious about when it comes to the business world is understanding impact, so how can sales enablement practitioners measure the impact of their efforts on the customer experience? Then how do you communicate and translate that impact back to your stakeholders?

EA: Yeah. We have a lot of different metrics, but I think the most important one was the one I was mentioning a little bit earlier, which for us tying the content shared and the conversations had back to individual opportunities, and then looking across those as a portfolio of opportunities and trying to understand through relatively simple analyses which assets at which point in the buying process are having the most positive impact. Which conversations at which point in the buying process are having the most positive impact.

By the way, it’s both our content creators and content owners, to help them understand how to refine that portfolio of content based on what we see is working and not working. Also going back to the sales leadership team and being able to say, hey, when these assets are shared at this point in the buying process, when these issues are explained in this way, there’s a significantly greater likelihood of a positive outcome.

SS: I love that. Well, Eric, thank you so much for joining us today. I learned a ton and I enjoyed our conversation, so thank you.

EA: Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Amy LaBree from F5 join us. Amy, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your background, and your organization to our audience.

Amy Kendall LaBree: Hi Shawna, thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here today. Like you mentioned, I am a Sales Enablement Specialist supporting a global team of sales specialists, which is a bit word on word. What we specialize in at F5 is application delivery, networking, application availability and performance, multi-cloud management, application security, network security, access and authorization, and online fraud prevention. I know that sounds like a lot, so sometimes it’s easier for me to just think of it as code-to-code application support. In my role, I support a team of specialists that focus on application security and preventing fraud for the end user.

While enablement isn’t necessarily new to the F5 organization, or the company I should say, the organization that I support was acquired almost two years ago and we didn’t have anybody in that role here at F5. I was hired back in February of 2021 to really help be that person, that point of contact for the sales team. Since I’ve been on the team, I’ve helped them create and deploy an onboarding program for our new hires, I curate these bi-weekly global sales talks that cover a variety of topics in the enablement field, anything from products to changes in legal. In addition, I’m also working on creating a smear, a subject matter expert program, to really help build confidence and skills in some of our theaters across the globe, giving them access to best practices, maybe additional folks to talk to in the company to give them that edge to better their pitch and customer engagements.

Sales enablement is newer to me as a role, but I do come from sales. I started in telecommunications as a frontline sales rep and worked my way up through management in the store, and then converted over to the corporate side of the house and really into training specifically. I went from being a trainer to managing a team of trainers across multiple markets. I guess what you could say about me is I have a true passion for helping people learn. For me, I look at the light bulb or those “aha” moments as my way of gauging my own engagement with any group that I’m working with.

SS: Well, Amy, we’re really excited to have you here to engage with our audience. One of the things that caught my eye was on LinkedIn, you actually contributed a post and in it you were really talking about culture. In particular, the importance of authenticity in work environments. I’d love to understand, what is the impact from your perspective on customer conversations when your sales reps are able to lead with authenticity?

AL: It’s a great question. Authenticity is so important to me and you really you have to start by being authentic. Dropping that poker face and just being willing to have candid and transparent conversations with your buyers, because that’s what they expect. With our salespeople, the goal really should be to build a mutually beneficial partnership with the customers. Becoming more transparent as a salesperson, while it’s uncomfortable at first, especially if we’re taught to keep our cards close like we don’t want to show our hand, but we have so much to gain from being transparent and authentic.

I’m one of those people that believes in the discomfort is where we learn, is where we grow. Authenticity is really your sales superpower, so being transparent helps to connect on a deeper level, it helps to lead to favorable outcomes for everyone. Not only are you looking at solutions for your customer’s problems, but you’re also helping to drive revenue for your company.
What does that look like then? To be authentic, what does that truly mean? I believe it’s subjective. It’s a crucial element for building trust in any relationship and trustworthiness helps determine what you’re willing, or what the customer I should say, is willing to share. How honestly they’re willing to talk about their concerns and then how willing they are to take that leap of faith in us or the company that they’re looking to buy from. I think about that, especially if a solution is new to their space. How do you sell that authentically?

Well, I think it starts with acknowledging some of your own limitations. If you’re working with someone who has experience in that field, it’s important to ask open-ended questions to understand where the customer currently is. You don’t assume that you know their business better than they do, and you really have to acknowledge them as the domain expert on the topic by continuing to ask questions about how they envision the project. What do they see? Really, it’s about level setting to drive better solutions than to pretend that you have the answers.

I’m a big believer of it’s okay to admit when you do not have all the answers. I think that there is more appreciativeness in that. I think it’s also then very important that we follow up. It’s okay to not have the answers, but it’s not okay to not go find the answers and let them know that. I think that being authentic and super transparent, it makes us look human and credible. We’re creating that relationship of it’s okay not to know everything, let’s go figure out how to find those answers and get back to your person.

SS: Absolutely. Now, another point that you made in that same post was that in order for employees to embrace authenticity, it’s important to have an environment that really fosters it. I’d love to get your best practices or some of your key strategies for promoting authenticity within the workplace?

AL: Yeah, it really starts at the top down, Shawnna. I think that having leaders within an organization who are also transparent and authentic, we see that as the example being set. Teams have to be willing to be honest, and they have to be open about what works and doesn’t work. They have to understand the strategy. While we all probably roll our eyes when our employee satisfaction surveys come out, they’re super important though. They’re super important in the fact that we have to be honest in these so that our leaders can understand what’s broken and what’s not working. I’m thankful that I have a company that looks at those scores and really took that as an opportunity as something to fix. For example, it was voices not being heard. How do we change that? How do we make sure that everybody’s being heard in this space? If we don’t share those things and let them know what’s not working, we’re never going to get better.

We have to learn from our mistakes. Just like we celebrate our wins, we have to learn from the things that didn’t work. I think with a culture of transparency, there’s no longer the pressure to flood through the product gaps or hide from the misses. Ideally, we want our sales reps to acknowledge their strengths along with their weaknesses, which I think can actually get you to the outcome faster.

The second part of that is letting everyone bring their whole selves to work. There’s been talk about it amongst the industries of what does that actually mean? It’s one thing to say to let your folks bring their full selves, but are you actually fostering that environment? I think it starts, again, we talk about leadership, so hiring practices. Are your teams diverse? I’m not just talking about race. It’s so much bigger than that. We look at gender, race, religion, sexuality, neurodiversity. It’s a new group of people that I haven’t necessarily seen focus on from an industry standpoint of including. You just have to create this environment where everybody is welcome because really everyone has something to bring to the table.

When you have a leader at the front of the organization who is a champion for this and helps to set the tone to make it happen, that’s where you start to see the shift in culture. It’s also important that companies have ERGs or EIGs, employee resource groups. While they’re important, they need to be active in providing content that helps enable the company to be more inclusive. As you can see enablement isn’t just in sales. There’s the ability to enable companies in all different ways.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. Now, I want to go back because you did start though with the importance of having it come from the top and the correlation between a positive work environment and leadership’s responsibilities. You made a comment that I came across around the difference between armored leadership and daring leadership. I’d love for those in the audience maybe less familiar, what does daring leadership mean to you? How can this leadership style drive business success for sales enablement leaders?

AL: Brené Brown, huge fan of Brené Brown. That is where the daring leadership comes from. I was introduced to this concept a few years back when I read “Dare to Lead.” It’s really about being courageous and setting the example or leading by example. In an armored stance, you’re leading by fear. You’re never really giving yourself a chance to learn more or really lean in when things get tough. You’re used to using shame or blame to manage others instead of accountability and empathy. As a daring leader, I allow my vulnerability to come through. I admit when I’m not sure about something. I’m a learner, I don’t want to be the know it all, I want to be constantly learning. That even means learning from your reports, it’s your peers. I think that there’s a lot that comes from upward coaching. I think that we need to take a minute to step back and look at that when we’re leaders and listening to the people that we lead because we can learn so much.

I also think it’s about making sure that you’re living your values rather than just professing them and being able to rely on trust and be the first to trust. Finally, standing up when things get uncomfortable. I think that that’s something that’s super important and especially as a woman as well, to find your voice and use your voice in those situations when it might be uncomfortable. In the enablement field, we have folks coming to us to find the answers or solutions to make them better at their jobs, and using daring leadership just helps to drive business success by creating a culture that helps create accountability, uses empathy, it creates a learner’s mindset and really learning to embrace change.

As we know, COVID-19 put us into a tailspin of how this new work environment works. For sales folks, they went from doing in-person face-to-face training or interactions to now they’re having to do things virtually. We have to be able to embrace those changes and just know we need to be agile and constantly changing. That’s where I said it all starts by leading by example. As leader, if you’re willing to put yourself out there, be a little daring, know that it might not work the way that you want it to but be okay with that and show your team that you’re okay with that, and you take those moments and learn from them instead of blaming or shaming someone who might have messed up for the team.

SS: I love that advice and I also love that book as well. One of the challenges, I think, to creating a healthy workplace culture and those authentic relationships that we were talking about just a moment ago, really can be ego. I think you’ve said previously that egos crash harder than character. From your experience, what are some best practices that sales enablement can utilize to help reps maybe overcome that ego that they might have and approach skill development with a little bit more humility?

AL: Oh, yes, the ego. In the sales world, ego can be front and center. It doesn’t always mean it’s a bad thing. Ego is your drive and how driven you are. As we know in sales, I mean we’re in constant competition to close deals. Who’s going to get the bigger deal? Who’s going to get the most ad-ons? Healthy doses of ego can help folks stay resilient when things go wrong and deployed properly that they can help us grow. I’ve seen account managers who have that know-it-all attitude, and honestly, they have the numbers to back it up. However, that doesn’t mean that they’re giving their customers that best experience. They’re not creating relationships to grow with them. The chances of their customer coming back to renew or to upsell could be hard.
I’m all about that customer experience first and foremost, I think that’s really what’s led me through my entire career. Are we creating the best experience? If you’re not creating a relationship with your customer, and you can’t understand them from that point of empathy that I spoke about earlier, eventually the relationship will not withstand. You truly have to deliver the value before selling the product.

Sales folks, they need to really follow a few true norths to help guide their efforts. The first of those being that they need to be able to articulate the business’s impact that the product will drive. Being able to add value context around the content that already exists. This will help uncover the business impact that their solution will deliver.

Number two, they need to acknowledge the products strengths and gaps. Remember the information’s out there. Anybody can go onto Google, or they can search about your product, so the goal should be to build trust and credibility by being authentic and driving toward a mutually beneficial goal. Educate your buyer about the broader market in there too. You have to know more than just your product. You have to know what the competition is, you have to be able to speak to the trends out there, and you want to make these conversations relevant and meaningful. A great salesperson helps the buyer understand the potential benefits of implementing a solution that resonates with them.

SS: Absolutely. I think you’ve touched on this a little bit already, but I want to double click into when engaging with customers, how can sales enablement also help reps remove ego from that sales process? I know this is front and center for you, but how can that have a positive impact on the customer experience?

AL: If I’m being honest, it all goes back to training. I had a manager or a leader tell me that at one point, that really it all starts with training. When the sales reps can understand the personas that they’re engaging with, I feel that there is a more solid relationship that can be built.
For example, we have a program that we started called Executive Conversations. What this does is each quarter, we invite a C-suite executive from our own organization to come in and sit with us and talk with a sales leader and have a conversation about things like, what will get them the meeting? Who has the money? Who controls the purse strings? What are the key words that you use? Just really hearing it from that persona themselves, what’s important to them, and I think that’s really important to understand that person. That helps guide for future conversations.

Ultimately, if a salesperson can lead with authenticity and transparency, I think the ego subsides a little bit. It’s okay to embrace the weaknesses the same way we celebrate strengths. I’ve mentioned that earlier. There’s power in both and it’s important to be authentic in a way that one sells. Great partnerships are built on trust first and foremost.

SS: Absolutely. Amy, thank you so much. I learned so much during this podcast and I know our audience did too. I appreciate you taking the time.

AL: Thank you so much for having me, Shawnna, and I look forward to future conversations.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Teri Long at CB Insights join us. Teri, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Teri Long: Great. Thank you so much for having me, I’m excited to be here. As you mentioned, I am the VP of our Sales Enablement at CB Insights. I’ve been in enablement now for about 15 years and am very excited that I’m able to pull together all of the previous experiences as a strategic account manager, corporate sales trainer, customer success, project manager, and incorporate those into our enablement program here.

CB Insights itself is a market intelligence platform that teams use to track and identify emerging technologies. We work with enterprise, we work with startups and essentially, we provide insights that they’ll need to buy, to build, to partner, to research, to invest. This is based on data, not based on opinion.

SS: Well, I’m excited to have you here. Speaking of data, or insights if you will, I noticed on LinkedIn that you highlighted that there’s a difference between sales enablement’s more traditional activity-based metrics and business impact KPIs. I’d love to jump in there first. In your opinion, what are the KPIs that sales enablement practitioners should be tracking in order to measure their impact on business performance?

TL: Yes, it’s a great question and I’m really glad you asked it. Traditionally, enablement has been measuring along the lines of content. Content created, content consumed, number of trainings completed, certifications, who has been onboarded. All of those things are very important. The concern from an enablement perspective is they don’t correlate back to how we’re driving revenue at the organization or the impact that enablement is having on the organization.

Best in class from my experience and from what we have done is looking at a variety of different metrics. One, overall plan achievement. We look at stage conversion, time to first close deal, average deal size, sales win rate, our sales velocity. Even with our new hires, we’ll look at ramp and how long it’s actually taking them to get to a performing status based on different milestones that we give them. When we look holistically at enablement and the ecosystem that exists, all of these should be included in monthly and quarterly tracking so that they can align to our go-to-market OKR’s.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. I think that’s really critical when you set up your KPIs for your team and your organization. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the mindset that you need in order to hit some of these strategic business outcomes because you often talk a lot about a growth mindset. I’d love to understand from you, what does it mean to have a growth mindset as an enablement leader? How can that growth mindset lead to more strategic business outcomes?

TL: Yes, exactly. I do see enablement as a strategic function. The industry itself has become more visible and I think demonstrated in such a way that it is evolving into a strategic function by some of the top meters that we have. I think ultimately instead of having a myopic view solely focused on the enablement team and the function, you really have to start with an outward in approach.

That new lens that starts more at the executive go-to-market level. I equate it oftentimes to how we teach our sellers to do their job. They’re in a position where they need to align to the buyer’s journey and help their buyer through that process. It becomes much more strategic when you take that approach. What are you trying to accomplish? Why? What is the growth strategy? What are the KPIs? Really starting to understand where enablement plays a role and what the levers are that we can pull to really have an impact in drive growth.

If you look at what I would consider our top three, it’s accelerating speed to revenue, it’s increasing individual seller productivity, and creating raving fans. Being very focused on results, driving the sales velocity, and overall sales productivity is really done through assessment, operationalization, and optimization.

SS: Well, that’s fantastic. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because I think the past 18 months or so have been quite challenging, and you wrote an article on LinkedIn titled “Don’t Limit Your Challenges, Challenge Your Limits,” which I love. How can sales enablement leaders help reps challenge their limits and reach peak performance?

TL: Well, I appreciate you bringing that article up, it was a fun one to write. I think there’s a few things that we need to do. First, we really need to become a trusted advisor and start spending time in their world, our sellers’ world, so that we can experience their challenges firsthand. The second thing, we really need to dive into data. Make sure that it’s not just our opinion. While there’s objective and subjective pieces to every situation, that data can really help us better understand the insights around leading and lagging indicators that we can then start using better in our coaching. That data gives us immediate feedback and it can help us with our sales leadership team course-correct more quickly and not stalling out and not making changes as quickly as we might need to.

Third, I would say using the enablement systems to build out scorecards to benchmark so we can really understand impact over time. It’s become a way to focus on overall performance and growth trajectory. When we coach to this, we oftentimes say, hey, let’s start with the end in mind. Where do you want to be? What’s the baseline and how do we help you create that roadmap to get there? What are those levers that we need to help you with?

The fourth thing, as simple as it sounds, it’s celebrating the small wins. Especially right now, we’re seeing that when we see the right performance, we need to say something. We need to recognize it. It’s such an important step in the process and reinforcing the behaviors we want to see both in enablement and with our sales leadership, we just cannot underestimate the value of this step. Validation can be a key driver in moving the needle on performance.

SS: I love those four tips; I think those are fantastic. I want to press on along the topic of challenges because I think this past year, as I mentioned, has really challenged all of our limits with the shift to virtual work environments. Now we’re in this weird limbo land at the moment with this pending transition to potentially hybrid or in-person environments again for some organizations. We’re all hoping there’s light at the end of the tunnel for sales enablement leaders. What are some best practices for really helping the entire organization, but especially the fields teams, navigate all the change that’s happening? What are some best practices around effective change management essentially?

TL: In terms of change management, there’s a lot of great resources out there and we really follow John Potter quite a bit. It’s about the head and the heart, it’s if I can see it and if I can feel it, I can make the change. That oftentimes is much more effective than analyzing the information, thinking about it, and then expecting change to happen.

Ultimately why we see that as a much better approach is once there’s an emotional reaction, there’s a desire to make a change. Again, I equate this back to think about how we teach our sellers to sell. It’s no different than taking a customer through a pain funnel or through rational drowning and emotional impact as we teach Challenger Choreography for instance. When you look at that holistically, I would say to be very specific, it’s about having empathy, it’s about empowering, and it’s about engaging.

Breaking those down a little bit more, I would say empathy with objectivity. The last year has been absolutely an entire shift to businesses, to how people work. I don’t think I need to go into all of the details. We have to be very aware of how we’re responding to the team and ensuring that we’re giving them the right tools to do their job. Reviewing tech stack, for instance, what is our tech strategy? Do we have the right tools in place not only to help them do their job, but to provide them the resources that they’re going to need? Maybe it’s mentally, emotionally, physically, the whole myriad of different things. Really taking some time to evaluate, do they have the skill? Do they have the will? How do we help them get to a point in time where they’re comfortable doing what they need to do from a delivery perspective? That’s why I say there’s that empathy with objectivity. We have to perform, we’re here to drive revenue. We also need to ensure that we’re taking that lens and shifting it slightly so that we can be more reflective.

I think the second thing I mentioned on empowerment, this is all about, again, going back and ensuring that we’re engaging them and helping them identify areas of growth. Scorecards, for instance, coaching on specific skills that we’ve identified in heat mapping, soft skills training, and elevating managers. We’ve really invested a lot of time and energy in ensuring that we’ve helped our managers get to a point in time where they are delivering at the level they need to, to help their teams be more successful.

The third thing is engagement. I think this oftentimes gets overlooked and in the situation we’re in today, it’s really easy to check out. Being incredibly intentional about engaging early and often with the teams is key. Doing a listening tour. I did one a couple of months ago and spent time listening and engaging with over a hundred people in the organization. There were so many great insights that came out great ideas. It also gave people an opportunity to just feel heard. I think we have to, again, not minimize that, especially in times of uncertainty. Those three things really have been key, I believe, in helping us drive some of the change.

SS: I love that. Empathy, empowering, and engaging. I think that that’s a fantastic approach. Now, if I take a slightly different lens to almost the same question on the topic of change, the market is continuing to evolve and buyers, their needs are continuously shifting, especially right now. How can sales enablement help ease the pain for sales reps amidst all of the shifting business landscapes and really help them adapt quickly to the changing buyer needs?

TL: Great question again. From our perspective and my perspective individually, I think it goes back to ensuring you’ve got a very strong sales buyer and customer journey. Do you have those documents? Do those align to each other? Do they overlay on top of each other the right way? Do they align to the sales stages? That’s one way because without clear identification of the sales journey, the buyer’s journey, and the customer journey, we really become lost. We’re doing things that may or may not be driving the right behaviors to get to the results.

The other thing is having really strong partnerships with product and marketing to evaluate things like the buyer persona, the markets and the trends, and creating seamless access to assets that the team is going to need organized by roles, stages, verticals. Having those integrated and served up as prescriptively as possible so that we are making their job easier to do and not forcing them to shift between different systems every two seconds. Taking some time to do win-loss analysis has been really helpful in taking those insights and making them actionable, providing that information back to product, to marketing, to leadership essentially, sales, so we can pull different levers again to actually affect change.

I think the last thing is around messaging and ensuring that as we are teaching our teams to message proactively through their prospecting, include relevant CTAs. What are those call to actions? Do they mean something again? Are they provoking an emotional response with our buyer? If they’re not, then we need to re-evaluate that.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. This has been fantastic, Teri. Now, I have a closing question for you on another article that you wrote around perseverance, which has really been a necessary pillar these past few months for a lot of businesses. From your experience, what are some key strategies to really motivate teams to persevere through the challenges and the change that will lead to business success?

TL: Focus on the long game. It’s about focusing on the long game and making sure you know what success looks like. While success can shift over time, having clear milestones of what the element of success could look like one month from now, three months, six months, a year. Business planning, looking into the three-five year. I think those two things are critical. Then ensuring that you have a clear intention. In a world where we’ve got so much focus on instant gratification, we really have to rewire ourselves to understand some of this takes time. It takes time to nurture, it takes time to see the changes. It really isn’t going to be as quick as I’m going to send you a text and get the result right back. Everything that we’re working on is shorter long game, but to get to where we’re going to need to be at is a long game.

I go through this exercise. We take our teams to these exercises about reverse engineering their roadmap. What is that going to look like for you? Whether that’s about you hitting your number, maybe it’s a personal goal, maybe it’s a professional goal, whatever that is, how do we reverse engineer that roadmap and help you anticipate obstacles or challenges that might be coming up? How do we help you be agile and adapt? Are there skills that you need? Is there coaching? Is there a tool that will help you do that? We also encourage it’s okay not to know. Sometimes you just don’t know, and you can get better at accepting that there is ambiguity and that’s okay, but taking a step back to always reprioritize, look at that roadmap, make sure you have the self-discipline to keep moving forward even if you do fail often.

One thing that we do here at CB Insights is focus on draw the owl. If you’re not familiar with draw the owl, the concept is about honoring a core value and realizing that when there’s no clear roadmap, no directions, you still just go for it. You just keep moving forward. I think it really boils down to being intentional and you just make a decision each morning to get up, make that next right decision, and move forward.

SS: I love that advice. Teri, thank you so much for joining us today. I learned a ton from you, and I appreciate the time.

TL: Absolutely. Thank you again.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Dan Reinbold join us. Dan, I would love for you to introduce yourself and your background to our audience.

Dan Reinbold: Sure. Thanks, Shawnna. I have been in sales my entire career ever since graduating from college, so if you met me on an airplane and asked me what I did for a living, I’d say sales and sales management. However, I had the opportunity years ago to go into sales training it was called at the time, which I did. I then through a series of promotions with the company called PAETEC at the time was able to go back into sales leadership. I ended up managing about 350 million in revenue and about 350 people. After we were purchased by a company called Windstream, I went back into sales enablement it’s now called and have been doing that for about the past 10 years. It’s been a career of sales, selling, sales management, and sales training.

SS: I love that. You’ve actually been referred to as a pioneer in sales training and I’d love your opinion. What are the core components of a successful training program?

DR: To be called a pioneer is quite generous, but I think the things that make a successful sales training program, and probably where some of the individuals that have mentioned that or gave me good recommendations really caught onto the fact that, to me, when you teach selling, and everybody knows there’s tons of sales training out there, hundreds and hundreds of books on selling lots of methodologies, but I really like to teach as a systematic, almost scientific approach. This is layered in with what I’ll call some psychology of why people might do what they do or say what they say. That’s all designed to be reactive to what the salesperson does.

I think what resonates with a lot of the people that I’ve taught over the years is the fact that we break down the sales training into steps. I call them the three pillars. Every step has a goal that would be the second pillar and then you layer in different tactics. This is all designed, so your three pillars would be the step of the sale, the goal of that particular step, and then any type of tactics that you might deploy, I’ll call it.

This is all designed to increase your probability of making a sale. Let me emphasize that when I teach selling, this is not about tricks and let’s not confuse tactics with gimmicks. This is really about sound selling practices that are all designed to really try to operate in the best interest of the prospect. If you don’t have that at heart, they’re going to smell that insincerity on you and this is why so many salespeople and sales training programs either aren’t successful or get labeled the old fashioned, not to denigrate them, but the used car sales approach.

This is not about high pressure. This is all about trying to increase your probability of making a sale, but not doing it at the expense of your prospect. Actually, Shawnna, done correctly, it should generate happy customers who then give you referrals and then the machine starts to pick up on that.

SS: I love that. I heard a panel that you were on recently, and while you may be a pioneer, I also think that you are very forward-leaning in a lot of that sales training space and its components because on the panel you actually discussed nurturing consistent continuous learning environments. I feel like that’s very cutting edge for the sales training space. I’d love for you to explain to our audience, what’s your perception on that and how can sales enablement help reinforce key skills and knowledge for reps through continuous learning?

DR: Well, that’s a great question. Boy, if I used the phrase nurturing consistent and continuous learning environments, then that sounds pretty highbrow for me, but I like it. To drive a consistent learning environment, and your question was really centered around the reinforcement of key skills. The way you reinforce key skills is, let’s go back to that procedural method of teaching where the most important thing, the biggest test of any type of learning program, whether it’s selling skills, product knowledge, system, and process is the application and the ability of the student to apply the knowledge.

This isn’t theoretical. If it doesn’t work in the field, if it doesn’t give you the result, then it might as well as just be left on a whiteboard in a classroom. Anything that you teach, and let’s go back to the comment I think about being a pioneer or even let’s say forward-leaning. it’s really about figuring out what your student is doing in the field and then coaching to that.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t use some sports analogy here. It’s like if you practice a certain thing on the practice field, but you can’t deploy it in a game-time situation or if it fails in a game-time situation, which sometimes that’s going to happen because your opponent is reacting, of course, at the same time. Then it probably wasn’t effective education.

To me, the true test of the ability of any learning program is, what kind of field results are you getting? Then that speaks to the whole topic of metrics and tracking and that, but when it comes down to sales program effectiveness, to me that comes down to, can you dissect or coach actual field sales calls? Whether you’re there in person as a coach, AKA a sales leader with your rep and the prospect, or if now with all the virtual meetings occurring, if you can break down a recorded call.

To me, all of the programs that are out there now that allow for recording and practicing and role-playing within an LMS or a learning environment are great, but where the rubber meets the road and the true test of effectiveness is in the field. If you can get real field data to break down real game film as I call it, that’s where you’re really going to see the effectiveness of your program.

SS: I think that’s fantastic advice and love that we get to drill into the reinforcement component of that. Now I’d love to go into the environment component though, from your perspective, what role does the learning environment play in the success of sales training programs and how can enablement practitioners help to nurture a really positive learning environment for their reps?

DR: The company that I was just most recently with is a great microcosm of your question. When I came in, they did the traditional, okay, we fly people in for the traditional week-long “new hire training” where lots of seasoned reps and even new people, cue the eye-roll, got to fly to corporate. We have to be there Monday morning, flying in on Sunday, be there Monday morning at 8:00 a.m. We do Monday through Thursday from 8:30 a.m. or whatever until evening time, come back on Friday, maybe have half or three-quarters of the day, and then people fly back home. Well, that becomes as companies grow, and you’re sitting in a three-hour different time zone than I am and we’re still in the United States, but if you’re international, that becomes even more challenging. To me, this is where if you were looking for a silver lining of COVID for training, let’s say, this is where it occurred.

It forced companies like mine at the time to examine that program, which when you really get down to it is terribly inefficient. What I mean by that, forget COVID, the pure nature of going into a classroom, sitting there all day after having flown in, and then maybe you go to dinner in the evening, you have homework, you get back in the classroom. It’s just overload. People reach their cognitive overload very quickly. Depending on the person, they can be overloaded by Monday at noon, some people will maybe last through Tuesday.

COVID forced us to really look at that and immediately transition everything to virtual, and we actually embraced it as a training department and found it to be more effective and more enjoyable for the audience. Now, don’t get me wrong. To me, I love the face-to-face in-person interaction that can occur, but when you look at the entire spectrum, meaning the full gamut of benefit and detriment when you look at that week to two-week long corporate new hire training, I come back to the word efficiency and say, look, it’s just not that efficient. If you now go virtual and you get set up with really good applications that allow good visual clarity of a virtual classroom, and you have anywhere from 15 to I’ll say 50 attendees and you can all be on camera, you can break them into groups, you can use a variety of different things. Let’s say you use slack, you can create different slack channels for your groups to communicate and do question and answer in, and then you can do role-plays, but you also still have to have that engagement, so you create games.

We broke our trainings into teams and we tried to make it fun. Since it’s virtual, we try to do some stuff that may be considered silly but engaging. One day wear your craziest hat or you introduce us to your pet that day or whatever it is, but you try to create a comradery on the virtual training. Since you’re going into their environment, they have more of the ability to do show and tell on stuff that is important to them. You’ve got this real trade-off between the two environments where, yeah physical interaction in the classroom is nice, but when you look at the prototypical corporate training program, virtual can actually bring you so many more benefits.
You can spread it out over time. You don’t have as lengthy of class time so you get better cognitive participation because people could focus for a couple of hours, then you take a break.

Let’s say they’re salespeople, they can go off and they can do prospecting or study on some of the other things that they have to do to do their job. They’re not tied up wall-to-wall for one to two weeks. You can spread it out, you get a lot more efficiency in a lot of ways, it’s a much better training program. We were finding that the students like it better, you don’t have to worry about flights and planes and hotels and where you’re sleeping and all that kind of stuff. There’s a lot of benefit to the new virtual learning environment when it’s set up properly.

SS: Absolutely. I think that’s a fantastic answer and it makes a ton of sense; I appreciate that. I want to shift gears a little bit in this podcast because in addition to your sales enablement experience, as you mentioned in your introduction, you also have extensive experience as a sales leader. I know a lot of sales enablement practitioners often need to partner very closely with their sales leaders to design and deliver a lot of these training programs. I’d love to understand from you, what are some best practices around helping sales leaders achieve their core goals through training programs?

DR: There are a couple of things. The wonderful thing about learning how to sell and sell well is that you’ll never be without the ability to generate income for yourself. I think there’s a lot of benefit. At least to me personally, having been a salesperson, lived under a quota, at times in my career even being on straight commission, and then advancing up through sales leadership and getting larger and larger staffs, and like I said to the point where it culminated in hundreds of salespeople working for me. The benefit there is that then when you transition that to the classroom, it gives you credibility.

A lot of corporate sales trainers unfortunately don’t have that field experience. Now, this is not a knock on them, it’s just the way of the world. I think many companies are missing out on a particular element of taking successful salespeople and finding the ones that really enjoy coaching and training others and affording them an opportunity to be in sales enablement or sales training. What usually happens, Shawnna, just to be real here, is that trainers don’t make as much money as sales leaders and salespeople. You have to be willing to pay a little bit more to get those people that love to do that. I think the value is they have that field experience, they’ve done it before, they walk the walk. When they step in front of the classroom, it gives them that all important credibility. I think that’s one component.

The second component that you asked about is then how does this allow you to partner with the sales leaders? Well, look, when sales leaders found out that I manage teams, that credibility was built in. Look, you have to manage teams successfully, you could be really bad at something so therefore it doesn’t translate, but if you had a good track record that gives you the credibility.

They start to listen and open their minds more. When you show them a program that’s duplicatable and it’s combined with coaching and they’re seeing a mediocre salesperson increase their metrics, move up from 70% of quota to 100% or 110%, it just builds momentum, and it allows the programs in and of itself to be more received. Therefore, they’re more used and when they’re used, there are better results in the field and that’s what it’s all about.

Let’s be real, most sales leaders are looking at one thing and so are their managers. Did you make your number? Month in and month out, year in and year out, quarter in and quarter out, are you consistently making them? I think that’s the ultimate metric is, how are you doing with respect to your quota?

SS: Yep. I couldn’t agree more. That definitely is the ultimate end goal. Now, what are some of best practices that you might have then when it comes to gaining buy-in for enablement programs though from executive stakeholders because obviously they’re critical to have as business partners in the organization as well?

DR: Great question. I’m going to give you an unusual answer. One of the things I’ve always tried to do is try to continue to learn, to continue to evolve my ideas, to continue to listen to other ideas. Within the past year, if you’d asked me that question a year ago, I’d have said, oh, you have to have absolute buy-in from the executive level right down to your entire program and every detail of it.

Then, I was exposed to a philosophy from a senior vice president of sales. He said, you know what I want, buy-in from the bottom up. He goes, yeah, I want to support your program, but for me I’m going to support your program if the reps are loving the program, if they’re getting results. Then their managers are going to buy-in and they’re going to start to be looking at going, hey what’s Susie doing that the others aren’t doing? Susie is like, oh, I followed this procedure and I do this, I use these tactics and these steps, and I learned this from the sales trainer and then I have him on calls and we do coaching afterwards and they break down my calls with me.

Suddenly their managers are going, okay, I want Joey and Tom and Claire doing all that too. It starts to create this groundswell from the bottom up that other people are starting to catch on. They want to duplicate that success. When that filters up, the executives again, they’re going to be fine as long as you’re making your number, doing it ethically, doing it professionally, that your customers are happy.

It was an interesting philosophy to me that this Senior Vice President was saying, look, for me it’s fine, but he goes, I’m really not on sales calls, so I want the buy-in from the bottom up. I listened to that, and it really started to realign my thinking. I’ve seen a lot of programs fail where the executives went out and bought a program and hired a high price consulting firm to come in.

They did this at the company I worked at prior to me coming in and it actually did fail. They went out and spent a ton of money on a program and it just did not catch on, the salespeople didn’t buy it. They flew trainers all around the world and trained on this and it just didn’t get the buy-in. Even though the executives said, oh, this looks like a great program and purchased it and invested in it, they couldn’t force it downstream.

I think that’s a very interesting concept is you can’t force stuff downstream. If you really want to build a program, make sure that your reps that are you going to use the program buy-in before the executives go spend all the money on it. If you can get the field working and using the program, which is the most important thing in purchasing or buying any type of program or any type of internal sales enablement program or sales training program, then you’re going to have success. You’re not always going to have success just because you have executive buy-in from the top if your people aren’t finding it usable, duplicatable, coachable in the field. And that’s a very, very important distinction.

SS: I love that piece of advice, Dan, it is very solid. I loved the notion of thinking about bottom-up buy-in, that’s fantastic. Now, I know we’re almost at time. I’ve learned a ton of things from you throughout this podcast. I want to close on something that you had also mentioned just a moment ago, the importance of helping to drive revenue growth.

Now, you specifically call this out, even on your profile on LinkedIn that you help do so through education and development of salespeople. I’d love in closing for our audience some advice on how sales enablement practitioners can tie their efforts into revenue impact.

DR: You take your sales force, you look at, everybody’s doing forecasting and everybody’s trying to create more and more metrics to be able to evaluate their salespeople, but the one thing that continues to I think be missing is the grassroots game film, I’ll call it again, it’s worth repeating, approach to seeing how individual sales reps sell. You get people on their appointments, listening in. You listen to actual, not role play, I’m talking actual prospect calls.

I think one of the things that I never let go of that made me successful as a sales leader is what I went into my markets, I wanted to do one thing. I wanted to run real sales appointments with my regional director and one of their reps with prospects. Not with happy satisfied current customers. Those are important when the retention is involved, especially in the fields I’ve been in, which is, you know, SaaS and telecom. That recurring revenue is what makes all the efforts worthwhile, but I want it to be on the new prospect calls because that’s where salesperson performance can make a difference.

I went on to customer retention calls with the account manager, but I wanted to be on a call belly to belly with the rep and their manager. When we were done, we would go get a cup of coffee and we would sit down and we would start with the rep and say, how’d you do? What could you do better? Then we’d go to the manager. How do you think they did? What could they do better?

Then they would go to me as the I’ll say head coach, and we would go through it, and we would break it down. That grassroots ability to look into the performance of an individual will bring up the whole performance of the team if that manager takes those tidbits and starts to use that with all their people, whether they have a staff of 3, 5, 10, whatever.

Now with technology, you can accelerate that because you can record your calls, you can get transcriptions of calls. That grassroots coaching is what will ultimately drive revenue growth because sometimes the difference between making your number that month or that quarter is the difference between one or two big deals. That difference is often totally reliant on what that salesperson said and did throughout that sale.

I think that the biggest thing to go back and tie sales enablement practices to revenue impact is to drive a systematic approach to selling that’s duplicatable, replicable with every rep, resonating with them, and coachable in the field. That in and of itself is going to be able to drive up that primary metric of revenue increase. It starts with all the steps, whether it’s prospecting and you’re increasing your appointment rate, whether it’s increasing your second ability to get that next appointment. All the appointments I’ve been on are never a one-call close. Some of the very technical applications we’ve sold sometimes take anywhere from 6 to 18 months to persuade a customer to come over and give your company a try, so I think those are significant.

SS: Again, Dan, thank you so much for the fantastic advice on this podcast. I appreciate your time.

DR: My pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Beth Shuman join us. Beth, I would love for you to introduce yourself and your background to our audience.

Beth Shuman: I am a sales enablement expert. I have been in the business for probably more years than I care to admit, but like many of us, we started out in a sales role, and found some success in those positions. Through those positions and our desire to want to help other people, we started to gravitate into roles that would allow us to help people become their better selves, at least in their professional space. I have had roles in positions such as a vice president of sales, sales operations director, as well as the vice president in sales enablement. You’ll find me in one of those three spaces.

SS: I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Beth. Now, you’ve previously highlighted the importance of having value-based buyer journey conversations with customers and I think that’s such a critical topic. How can sales enablement help reps meet the buyers where they are in the buyer journey?

BS: Right. It’s really about being able to practice and help the learner or the salesperson with the various stages that a buyer is going through. Depending upon the company and how they identify the buyer journey, there are corresponding steps that a sales rep needs to be able to walk with the customer as they’re going through. It’s important that we match where the buyer is. If they’re not quite yet ready in let’s say, the evaluation stage, we really don’t want to jump into a demonstration, we want to slow down. If they’re really more in their vendor categorization stage, or maybe the inflection points of where their actual problems are that they want to solve, we want to stay there a little longer and make sure that we direct them to resources or provide them with resources that can help them in that stage that they are in.

The way sales enablement helps is to make sure that they can practice having those relevant conversations in each stage and help them with their discovery conversation with the customer to ensure they know exactly where the buyer is on their journey.

SS: Absolutely, I think that’s really critical. Now, you also talk about the need to refine the handoff between sales and client services teams to really ensure that there’s a solid and seamless customer onboarding experience. Why is that handoff so important and how, from your perspective, can enablement help to ensure that the process is as smooth as possible?

BS: Ultimately, we’re trying to validate that our solution does in fact solve the pain better than the other choices the customer had. That really happens after the sale is done and when we move into the implementation stage. Where enablement can help is to help the rep balance that pressure of needing to meet a quota and not rush too fast earlier in the conversations with the customer. They really need to be able to take a little bit more time and dive into a little bit more deep pain and potential value as to why the customer is buying the solution. If we, as sales enablement experts, can help the reps have more meaningful conversations and validate through the discovery stages earlier rather than rushing, as we talked about a few minutes ago, right into a demo, we’re going to have a better handoff process, or we will have a less watered-down handoff process when we put the customer into our implementation or customer success experts’ hands. What we want to do is if we’ve done this right, what the reasons are the rep said the customer is buying and the potential value will be mirrored when the customer service or the implementation team are asking these same questions.

Where we can help again, is to make sure that the reps balance that they are working on the best deals that are winnable deals. As we talked about the buyer journey, if a customer is too far down on their journey and they’re not willing to back up so that we as a vendor can jump in and talk about how we solve pains, if they’re too quick to do a demo, it’s probably not a winnable deal. These concepts and topics that we’re talking about really all dovetail together.

First of all, we might not win this deal. If we do win this deal, we may not have won it for the right reasons and we may not be able to realize the value that the customer is needing. If we do these things right, we’ll have a very sticky customer who will renew with us without much effort as opposed to it being a very difficult drawn-out process that may not happen or happen months or quarters after a renewal was expired. If we do it right, the customer will buy more licenses, buy adjacent products, they might be a good referral for us. If we get it wrong, they’ll do none of the above. It can be very expensive proposition for a customer and for the rep and to have to go find a new customer because we rushed.

Again, where enablement can help is that balance between, what are the right winnable deals? Are you working with the right customers that you jumped in at the right point with? Can we slow down and truly understand the value as to why they’re buying and what they’re hoping to realize so when they are with the implementation team, we can in fact realize that value?

SS: Absolutely. Now, you’ve also mentioned in the past, and I think that this is a really critical point as well, you mentioned how important it is to you use data to pinpoint gaps in some of those handoff processes. What are some of the metrics that you look at to understand where those inefficiencies might exist and how are you using those insights to refine your enablement programs?

BS: It’s a combination of systems. There are so many systems and tools from so many great vendors out there today, and the metrics. Some tried and true metrics are your retention rate. Are you getting the retention rate within the quarter, which implies that the customer has seen value when they quickly want to renew, and they can’t be without your solution?

If you’re not seeing a good, strong retention in the mid-nineties, if you’re not seeing retention that’s happening in quarter, there could be something else there.
If you’re seeing a customer who is adopting and adding more people or upselling to adjacent or cross-selling to adjacent products, these things can all pinpoint that we’ve done the handoff right, we have sold the solution right, we’ve shared it with the rest of the team that we’ll be working with the customer and the customer validates that there’s no difference.

Some of the things you can do certainly is the programming of your CRM to ensure that what the rep is telling us and what the customer success team is seeing are the same. When there’s some deltas, it’s that feedback loop with so many processes. If there’s a difference between why the rep thought the customer was mine and what the customer success team is finding, then that’s a great time to loop and have a conversation back. Was there something within sales enablement that we didn’t share with the reps? Do they understand the real products and the use cases? Do they know what we do and don’t do or how well we do it? Do they know when they should move forward with a deal or when they shouldn’t be there?

There’s a saying that says, sometimes you want to fail fast. We may not have the right solution for this customer and there are many other places where you may want to focus on your pipeline. What I would say is retention, your add ons, your upselling, things are moving at the clip at which you would expect, and that your systems like your CRMs can back them up and your revenue intelligence tools can also help the sales rep. Those are some great platforms that are available in the market today, and they can really help the rep understand whether they’re really hearing what the customer is saying.

Again, these are revenue intelligence tools that capture customer conversations, and enablement can help the sales team by listening to these conversations and really pinpointing what the customer is saying and seeing if it aligns with where you’ve put the customer in your forecast or in your pipeline. And helping them make sure that they’re not being too positive or too optimistic and maybe missing some of the cues from the buyer that says maybe there’s more work to be done. Again, a lot of this has to do with awareness, has to do with repetition, has to do with having a feedback loop.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. All of that is fundamentally critical. Another thing that you’ve talked about as part of your enablement programs for client services, you talked about how you utilize playbooks. I think sales enablement professionals have been using variations of playbooks over the years, and they’ve definitely come a long way. You’re using it in particular though, to focus on helping to drive retention. I would love to hear from you, how do you use playbooks to increase rep engagement, and also help enable those reps to improve customer satisfaction so that you can see that improvement in retention rates?

BS: I think that the customer success team is one of the last teams to actually get some of the care and feeding and nurturing that the sales teams have been getting. To your point, many of the things we’ve done for sales, we need to mirror for the customer success teams. They also need to have a customer success methodology, just like a sales team has a sales methodology. What are the steps that they need to go through for the adoption, for the initial handoff, the introduction calls, the training that needs to happen, getting people in the system and the adoption and then using it? When they’re getting challenges, this points back to one of our earlier conversations as did the rep sell it right or tell customer service why the customer’s buying them? When these things are wrong, there needs to be some playbooks here and some scenarios here for customer success to slow down, to go back over this information with the customer, make sure we get it right.

Certainly, there’s a feedback loop back over to sales if they got it wrong. With customer service, they need to know with the personas that have just acquired, the solution or the software, why did they buy it? How are they going to use it? If they’re getting sticking points, they need to have plays about what to say to each of the different personas, what to show each of them, what to do to help them over the hurdle, and making sure that they can handle objections just like sales do. Customers don’t always show up for their handoff calls, they don’t always show up for their training, so what are the plays that you give customer success to keep that adoption, implementation, and the use of the solution on track?

SS: Absolutely. I love that. I think we’ve looked a lot at the customer side of things, but one aspect to creating a seamless customer experience can also be that internal alignment. How have you gone about fostering alignment with key stakeholders in order to improve customer experience?

BS: The collaboration is so important. All of us are tied together. We need to have a common vision and common alignment if we’re going to be successful in the market. What I usually have done and would recommend to others is again, lots of conversation around our space in the market. How do we go to market? Is there an agreement between the product teams, the marketing teams, the sales teams, sales enablement, into customer success? The way that I’ve found works well is to make sure that everybody’s job description, if you will, has some of these elements in it.

For example, if sales enablement is going to be successful, we need the time of all of these groups, but if they are so busy and their job has already been defined, that leaves no time for us. One of the things I’ve been successful doing is going back to the head of each of these organizations and asking that they adjust their job description so that there is time to work collaboratively with sales enablement. If marketing gets a message out in the market with their brochures and all of the various good material they produce, the white papers, their webinars, what they’re doing on the website, but they don’t have any time to work with enablement to turn that into training, that’s not training if there’s not active participation, a chance to work with the material for a sales rep to actually practice it in a safe way and learn how to use it. For me, making sure that folks have time for enablement, to work with us, to take all the great material and messaging that they’ve put together and then help us actually turn it into training, that’s worked really well.

SS: I love that. I think that’s fantastic, particularly to ensure that they are getting the training they need. In your experience, what is the business impact though, of having internal alignment, both for your sales enablement function, but as well as maybe even from the lens of the customer?

BS: Right. Well, you get more of the right deals more quickly and you get a longer-term customer or more longer-term customers if everybody in the company is aligned, and we have the same shared vision and we’re working on it together. Again, that means more on-time deals, less lumpy forecast or quarterly revenue, if you will. For the customer, they get what they think they’re signing up for. If we are correct and accurate with all of their touchpoints, and we all know our products, we know the pains, we know the industry types and the customers and the personas, we’re going to be doing the right thing for that customer. They will be getting what they think that they’re acquiring and then they will then of course, as the years go by, be even more efficient and effective because they’ve gotten the right solution from the beginning versus having to start over and jump to a different solution.

SS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve loved this conversation. I have one final question for you and it’s just really around the evolution. How do you envision buyer and customer behavior and expectations evolving over the next year, or maybe even beyond that? How do you see sales enablement evolving alongside them?

BS: Right. You know, it really has changed these last 18 months because you saw us in our home environments. You saw all kinds of things we tried not to let our public persona show. You see the kids in the background, you see the dogs barking. Whereas two years ago, if I was doing a webinar, it would be considered highly unprofessional if that dog barked. Now, you show them the humanity and that we’re all human. If you see a kid, a picture of them crossed behind me on my webinar, we’re all going through the same thing.

I think what’s happening is there are less pretenses. We’re actually taking time to care more about each other and we’re having more deeper conversations because of what the world has been going through, at least I know that’s true for me. I’ve also found that because the money is a bit tighter and companies need to make sure they are doing the best they can with the funds that are available for investments and new solutions to help with their business, I’m finding there’s more buyers in the decision process.
Where enablement can help is, obviously, it’s the tools. How do you use the tools? How do you use all of the various hoarding tools? How do you have the right backgrounds without making it fake? How do you get more buyer personas? Do you know more about their care abouts? New industries have come forward to us depending upon what solution you’re selling, especially if you’re offering remote capabilities, security capabilities, etc.

How enablement can help is obviously with all the technology, making sure that we’re having the right deeper conversations and uncovering new personas that maybe weren’t part of the deal in the past.

SS: I couldn’t agree more, Beth, thank you so much for joining us today. I enjoyed your customer perspective on sales enablement.

BS: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Jill Guardia at TriNet join us. Jill, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jill Guardia: Thanks, Shawnna. I’m super excited to be here myself. I am a big fan, so I am happy to also get the stage if you will. Jill Guardia, I’m here in the Boston, Massachusetts area. I have been with TriNet for four-plus years and before that have had a variety of sales enablement roles, even back to the days of old sales training roles through a lot of different software companies such as Symantec, Groove Networks, Constant Contact, and Rapid7. I’ve been around the bend, if you will.

TriNet is what we call a PEO, or a professional employer organization, and what that means is that we partner with small to midsize companies to do a lot of their HR services so they can focus on what they do best, which is the passionate management of the business that they started. I’m excited to be here.

SS: Well, I’m excited to have you as well, Jill. I believe right now is actually a really exciting time for your team. I heard that you guys are growing and scaling the Enablement Org over at TriNet, and so I’d love to talk to you today a little bit about your advice on how to approach a transition into a new sales enablement role.
I think there’s been a lot of change that has occurred in the past year with the shift of virtual, and now a lot of organizations are trying to figure out how to go back into maybe hybrid or in-person environments. I’d love to just start there. What advice do you have for how practitioners can set them up for success if they’re starting a new sales enablement role amidst all this change?

JG: Yeah. I mean, it’s a great time to be in sales enablement and there are a lot of roles opening to both to supplement existing teams or to start teams brand new. I think sales forever has changed. We’ve talked about the changes in sales over the years, about how the buyer is so much more informed. That’s certainly something that has really weighed into a lot of decisions that sales enablement practitioners are considering, but now we add in the whole world changing post pandemic and you’re right, companies will probably do some things very differently. Probably have some sort of hybrid approach to how they sell and how they enable their teams, how to keep them motivated.

For a sales enablement practitioner, I think we should start with the old adage of listen and learn. Spend some time listening to your clients, to your customers, to the sales organization across all levels, and be curious. Verify and validate what they’re saying to you. If one person says it, is it gospel? Do you need to hear from other people? Where is the trend so that you really know that you’re putting your energies into the right places?

I think you need to think about, who are your advocates, your evangelists, your go-to people within the selling organization, and create a way to keep them on your hotline number, if you will. Whether it’s a chat, or slack, or just on your cell phone, a straight-up old-fashioned text. Talk to those people and get feedback from them.
Think about removing assumptions, or even better yet, test assumptions. Don’t go into a new opportunity as a sales enablement leader and think, well, I know exactly how this should be, or I listened for three hours now I know what to do. Throw out some ideas, throw out some hypotheses, and test them and see if they’re going to work.

SS: I love that. I think that’s a great technique. Another thing that we expect going into uncertainty with all of the changes is being able to navigate change, in particular at the leadership level. How does leadership turnover impact sales enablement, and what advice do you have for how enablement leaders can effectively manage this change?

JG: Yeah, that’s a big one. I mean, we are all in the business of change in sales enablement. Changing around us, changing the selling environment, changing the leadership team, these are all transitions that you have to deal with on a regular basis. You’re going to have situations where new a leadership team is going to bring in their own teams, and that might leave you in a predicament, but be open to what that means to you and how you can learn something. Or worst comes to worst, leave, but leave on a good foot.

They are calling this coming out of the pandemic, the post-pandemic, as the great resignation. We need to recognize that there’s change afoot in this theory of lots of job changers out there, so you need to think about your relationship with the new leaders. Think about what’s important to you. How have you been successful in the past? How do you build relationships with these people who are now in the seat of power? Find a way to connect first and foremost at a personal level.

After that, think about, I need to be open. Maybe the new leader does enablement a different way. Maybe they would like to hear about how we’re doing it here. Be open to change. Have an open mind, it’s really important. I would say be your authentic self. Don’t play games. It goes without saying, but this is business we’re in, so don’t play games. Come with authenticity and plan for how you’re going to represent you, how you’re going to represent your team.

Don’t try to flood the new leader with we did this, and we were successful here, and we always do this, and this is the way we’ve done it, because you’ve lost them right from the start. On the other end of that, I would encourage full transparency and open, honest communication. You’re probably not perfect in your role today, and so as you meet and engage with your new leader, talk about some of the things that you’ve struggled with, some of the things that you would love to do better. I think coming with that open mindset is really going to make a difference as you learn and transition into a new team.

SS: I think that open mindset is absolutely critical. What would you say from your perspective are some of the other core skills and attributes that sales enablement practitioners need to be successful in sales enablement today?

JG: Yeah. I think that the post-pandemic world and really what’s happened in the last, what 15, 18 months has really just identified that we all need to be thinking and acting much more flexibly. We turned on a dime to transition all going home and working from an environment that we weren’t normally working in, and we were both flexible and adaptable. I think as we come out of that and look at the new world, we also have to keep that skill, so flexibility and adaptability would be really important I think.

Also, ongoing would be just empathy for the seller, their environment is changing underfoot. The world is so different, but it’s also the same. You really need to put yourself in the shoes of the selling organization that you’re supporting. I think you need to work with urgency as long as you’re working on the right things. You have to balance between important and urgent. And then the last thing, be willing to make mistakes. You learn from your mistakes. That’s how we get better at what we do.
SS: Absolutely. Now, Jill, you are from my perspective, and I know many in the sales enablement industry view you as not only an enablement leader within your own organization, but amongst the community of enablement professionals. I’d love to understand from you, what are some of your top tips for how enablement professionals can advance their own careers within the enablement field?

JG: I love that question too, Shawnna, because it is a great time to be in the world of sales enablement, revenue enablement, or whatever employee experience and enablement. It’s really getting very broad. I think that, like we often talk to sellers it’s about building your ecosystem, networking. You need to think like a seller and create an environment around you of people who can help you succeed. Now, some of those people are going to be in sales enablement, and some of them might be in sales operations, or they might be in true seller roles, but I think you need to think through, what does your own personal ecosystem look like?

I would add to that, there’s so many enablement organizations that are coming out, Sales Enablement PRO, of course, SE Society as well, and there are other little groups that are bubbling up. Find one that works for you. You might not want a big, broad one, you might want something really local, you might want something that networks on a monthly basis. You need to find something that you can invest in and make the time for and prioritize.

As I was thinking about our conversation today and I went back to a 1995 issue of Fast Company, and probably some of the listeners may not have even been born yet in 1995, but there was one of the early Fast Company magazines that came out and it said, “work is personal.” I remember that headline, even though it’s so long ago, because it really resonated even for me and my career around sales enablement. Some of my best friends are enablement practitioners. This has become a lifelong journey, and I think that people will find people who share the same ideas, share the same strategies, share the same values in sales enablement, and they’ll connect with them. Forever, they will all be better people.

SS: I love that. In any enablement role, we’ve talked about being able to partner with those in leadership roles, but getting stakeholder buy-in has always, I think especially for enablement been, an important component of success. I mention this because at one of Sales Enablement PRO’s Sales Enablement Soiree Events back when we were having in-person events, which hopefully we will again very soon, you mentioned in a panel that you were on at that event how critical it is to get 360-degree buy-in, not just at the executive level. How can sales enablement practitioners get buy-in for enablement initiatives across all levels of the organization?

JG: Yeah, that’s a great question because it’s really important. If you just have a relationship with the leadership team, you probably don’t get the results that you want because it becomes more of a police nation. I don’t think anybody really sets out with that goal in mind. It’s important that you, whether you’re a team of one or a team of many, really look across the sales organization and make the time to invest in building those relationships.

With a rep, you might ask to do ride alongs, listen in to phone calls, help coach them If they’re struggling. With a sales manager, you might have a monthly one-on-one and talk about how everyone’s doing on the team and see if there’s any areas that you or someone on your team can support in their growth and development. With the leadership team, it’s gaining buy-in. It’s almost starting at the top with an enablement initiative. I want to get you Mr./Ms. VP through the program so you see the content, you consume it like a rep would, consume it and you give us real actionable feedback about how we can ensure that it’s part and parcel of what we do. We talked about it a little bit already, but it’s about making that investment in the individuals throughout your organization that gravitate to you, gravitate to enablement, gravitate to the content and the programs that you’re delivering. I’m sure everyone knows who they are. You can probably get a list of people off the top of your head. If you think about it, who’s always the first one to do that training? Who’s always the one who says this is great, you should do it?

Work on building and establishing those relationships and use them to help spread the news, spread the wealth, and to give you real practical feedback on everything that you do. Don’t just do it as a one-off, do it continuously, and you’ll find that people will voluntarily give you the feedback that you desire and that you need to do better with what you are doing.

SS: I love that answer, Jill. Now, I’ve enjoyed this entire conversation. I think this is not only exceptionally useful for those that might be looking to go into the role of sales enablement, but even for those that have well-established careers within enablement. I just want to close with one final question because I love that, and you’d mentioned earlier that it’s really important for enablement professionals to be in the mindset of a seller.

I had once heard you mention that selling with curiosity is one of your key priorities for this current year. I think curiosity is so important across multiple professions, but especially within sales enablement. Can you share what this means for your enablement team and how this mindset can help the sales organization get set up for success in the coming years?

JG: That’s a great question. Selling through curiosity is definitely a mindset, and when you take out any “fancy words,” it’s just wanting to know more. When we think about the whole profession of being a seller, our best sellers want to know more. They’re motivated to understand their prospect and how they can solve problems for their prospect. If we take that out of the seller and put it into the seller enablement team, then we’re doing the same thing. We’re asking questions, we’re not ever satisfied, we want to do better. When we do something, anything, whether it’s our kickoff or it’s a new product launch training, before during, and after we say, what could we do better? How would this have been more useful for you?

We have a leadership meeting coming this week and our last poll question is, should we do more of these? It’s as simple yes, no, of course, but it’s the kind of thing that lets you be curious about the types of reactions that you’re going to get. We try and do that whether the projects big or small.

SS: I love that. I tell my team something very similar. That nothing’s ever perfect, and we can always find new ways to improve. Jill, thank you so much for joining us today. I enjoyed this conversation and the opportunity to catch up with you.

JG: Thank you, Shawnna. It was great.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Ashton Williams join us. Ashton, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Ashton Williams: Thanks, Shawnna, I’m so happy to be here. My name is Ashton Williams, I’m currently the Revenue Enablement Manager at Ada. Ada helps companies scale their CX using AI-powered automation. I was their first enablement hire, so I’ve been building from the ground up.

SS: Extremely excited to have you joining us, and that sounds like a really exciting initiative over there at ADA. As you said, you were the first enablement hire and have been responsible for building the function from the ground up. I would love to get your perspective on your experience, what are some of the key building blocks of enablement that are needed in order to create a really successful enablement function within an organization?

AW: Oh, such a good question. I think I always start by saying you really need to fail fast. I know that’s not a building block of enablement, but so much of what we do comes from learning a company, learning a culture, learning how that team needs to grow in the strategy. First, I say try things.

One of the things that I started with was really putting together what I call an MVP, or the minimum viable product. What’s that one thing I can get out the door really quick and iterate on? If I think about something like onboarding, which was always the first thing at a fast-growth company that you build, we built something really bare-bones and quick. Then we’re able to get data on that, track that, and continue to optimize that as we grew.

I’d also say, be prepared for having a team one day. When you get hired, you’re usually a team of one and you’re not ready when the time comes and you need headcount. You weren’t thinking about them ahead of time, so maybe you didn’t build things accordingly to bring people on board easily, or you’re making that ask a little late in the game when there’s too much going on. I always say future-proof yourself and be ready for a team and assume you’re going to get it.

Then, of course, that partnership with your managers. Your frontline managers especially are going to be your best allies in building anything. In any enablement function, whether you’re taking organization from good to great or starting from nothing, those have to be the cross-functional collaborators you spend time with as well as your product marketing team, if you have one.

SS: Absolutely. I think that’s fantastic. I imagine it’s not all easygoing, especially in the earlier days, so what were some of the biggest challenges that you faced in your journey as you were building out the sales enablement function? Do you have any advice on how you overcame some of them?

AW: Yeah, I’d say for me personally, I came from a large and established company, and I think I really took for granted some of the building blocks that were already there. They had a culture of coaching, they had wide staff, they had programs that were already built, and you didn’t have to spend a ton of time getting buy-in to make change, if that makes sense. The things you were changing were already part of this large ecosystem. For me, I was new to tech, I was new to startup, and being the first enablement hire, I spent a lot of time just educating on what enablement is.

I think the biggest challenge that I faced was really the Sales Ops partnership. At a fast-growth company, especially a new startup, you don’t have a ton of data or historical models to build off of, you’re learning as you go. While you can look at trends, sometimes they’re short-term, depending on where you are in your growth. I was so used to having the dashboard, the historical metrics, all the activity metrics, all the things to really quantify enablement. I realized that before I could build out a truly optimal function, I had to spend some time understanding our operations situation.

We actually had to get the team on Salesforce. That was the first thing I did when I got there, getting everyone on Salesforce so we could have data, and then implementing some tools so we can actually track the enablement that’s happening. Getting a CRM was not something I expected to be part of in my enablement journey or to be super important for my enablement journey, but just being able to really track activity, what the reps are doing, successful conversations, and find the places we could make those incremental lifts that enablement is usually known for, ended up being my first start.

I’d say advice to those being the first hire or even looking for a job right now is just really understanding where that company is at in their tech stack, their growth, their operations, so that you’re prepared for the challenge ahead of you. I wouldn’t take it back, it was a great learning experience, but I definitely didn’t envision that that’d be the first thing I would do there.

SS: No, I imagine that’s quite a lift right out of the gate. Now, you also talked about one of your key initiatives being implementing the first sales onboarding program, and in a recent interview that I watched of yours, you stressed the importance of onboarding in cohorts to really immerse reps in the culture of the organization. How can that help set reps up for success and improve the impact of onboarding?

AW: Oh yeah, such a good question. I’d say that there are a couple things. Onboarding is probably the one program where how someone feels about your organization is critical to the success of that program in addition to them completing certifications and leading onto ramp. It’s your second chance to make a first impression, especially in a virtual world where we’re starting in our living rooms and bedrooms.

What I’ve seen is when you ramp people together, they tend to move faster. They have a colleague, they have someone at the same stage as them, they can ask those questions. That organic learning even virtually happens because they’re starting at the same place. Also, from a scalability perspective, just being able to run your programs in little batches definitely takes the lift-off of quite a few people and allows you to run that white-glove onboarding that still has your live session, your coaching, and certifications that aren’t all asynchronous at a scale that makes sense for the pace of growth.

I also would say that most, especially in sales, reps are competitive. If the bar is set high by someone in the class, or if you have a bunch of people who are competing, they will finish so much faster. We actually saw that firsthand. We had two people start on their own and not that they moved slowly, they were moving at their own pace, and we had two people join together, and those two people finished the program before the last two who started individually even finished. Those last two caught up. It was crazy to see ramp equalize even though they all have different start dates just based on the pair having started together.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now, how do you go about driving adoption and really building excitement amongst reps for a lot of the new enablement programs that you implement, similar to the onboarding program?

AW: Yeah, that’s a good question. I’d say that you want to start with why. I have a sales background myself and I remember being put through training and not really knowing how it was going to help me make quota or why I needed it. Or sometimes, your enablement team gets it wrong on timing and timing matters. In enablement, that’s going to take teams off the floor or it’s going to take time from their day. It has to show a payoff. The same way you would communicate to a customer about ROI, I think you need to do that for your reps.

There’s excitement that you want to build that I’m solving a problem you’ve asked for. Or I understand your world and you’re struggling with this and I’m going to help you get to your goal. Or here’s how much time we’re going to dedicate, but here’s the impact of that that we hope to see. I don’t even think you need to drive excitement necessarily, but you do need to gather buy-in and commitment. We don’t all have to be aligned, but we need to commit. And I’d say for that, my reps have been pretty wonderful, and I’ve had my sales managers really be beacons there.

People care about promotable work, so if enablement’s running training, but managers are like, don’t worry you don’t really have to do it, it’s not really going to help, they’re not going to do it. I think we always forget that we have to go through managers to get things done properly, and to ensure that managers are your vehicles to scale some of those programs.

We always do a pre-launch to our managers, get them to anticipate any questions the rest might have, share what timing works best, what space we should be in. We try to run our programs in collaboration with them.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now you mentioned your sales background yourself. How does that help you with sales empathy as you are informing your approach to building new enablement programs?

AW: Yeah, I worked for a sales training company, so I had a pretty unique sales background where I was also selling training, being trained, and acquiring partnerships. I’d say having done the job and actually done the job of a sales manager, it helps me remember what it’s like to carry quota. The stress, the peaks and valleys that come with that. How prioritization of things like enablement or training can be difficult because I don’t have all day to do trainings, I have customers calling me. Or the impact of small things.

I think in enablement, when you get far removed from your team or you lose that empathy for them, you want to build something big and grand and beefy and on paper it looks great, but we’re not thinking about the learner who has to go through that or the person who on the other end has to take that and implement it. That’s when programs often are really a ton of certifications and not a lot of practical application, or they’re long and cumbersome and they don’t make sense and people are working overtime to finish training and do their jobs, or they’re pulling them away from activities that have priority. I think that helps me remember the seasonality of the role as well as how important time and prioritization is when you’re managing customer demands.

SS: Absolutely. Now, I have one final question for you. I had heard you say in a recent interview, you talked about your experience moving from sales into an enablement role. I would just love your tips for our audience, what are some of your tips on how professionals can make that transition themselves into enablement and find the role that really best suits them?

AW: Yeah, of course. I’d say that my search was very much like selling. When I wanted to break into a new industry and a new field, I went on LinkedIn and sent a bunch of messages to ask people who were already in the role, already in the field, for advice of this community, and this community is so wonderful. So many people responded and helped me understand terms of the job I didn’t quite get or things that were unique to that field. I’d say start off by growing your network.

I did that through visiting a ton of open houses for roles and just meeting with people. Enablement is not something that, I’m sure you know, those roles back then didn’t open up very often. People who were in training or enablement didn’t leave. I remember going to startups and going, have you thought about enablement? How’s your team scaling? Have you thought about it? Are you growing? I remember consulting with companies on, do you need this role? Trying to make a home for myself.

I’d say if you’re trying to break in for the first time, do your research on the trade and what that role can look like because it can look very different at a company that’s scaling quickly versus a company that’s in a turnaround for example. Interview as much as possible, get familiar with interviews, even if the job isn’t your favorite job. Sometimes you just learn so much in those interactions or the job description doesn’t describe what you actually see when you get there. Those were some of the best learnings that I had as well.

Then three, oftentimes we get really caught up on not having done the role before or coming from a different industry or not having the experience. Oftentimes sales enablement’s job is to have a different viewpoint. It’s to be between the silos and live in that gray area and see things from the customer lens to help empower your sellers. Sometimes the people who come from completely different places have the best experience and to not be afraid of making that switch based on your past.

SS: I love that. I think that’s such a powerful statement to close this podcast on. Ashton, thank you so much for your time today, I enjoyed the conversation.

AW: Oh, it was wonderful. Thanks for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Michelle from Star2Star join us. Michelle, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Michelle Accardi: Great. Hi everyone, I’m Michelle Accardi. I’m the president and chief revenue officer of Start2Star, a Sangoma company. Star2Star is a communications company that is able to handle all of your cloud communications and collaboration needs, whether that means you need assistance with communications on-premise with an SD-WAN or directly all in the cloud, as well as any other cloud needs you might have with regards to bringing a secure workspace that has communications all baked into your organization. Thus, enabling you to get all your applications and communications and collaborations in the cloud via our connected workspace. That’s what Star2Star does. Happy to be here today.

SS: Extremely happy to have you as well. You have a wide range of experience, and I want to click into some of the things that you’ve done along the way during this conversation, but you have a ton of experience leading teams across the business including marketing, sales, and operations.

I’d love to understand from you, Michelle, how does this experience across many types of revenue-facing roles really influence your approach as a revenue leader?

MA: Well, it’s important to me as a revenue leader to know that whatever I’m going to sell is going to be able to be implemented and give a really, really good customer experience. Having been in all of those different roles, I really learned how important it is that an organization becomes a well-oiled machine between its operational backend and the message it puts out into the market and the promise that it makes to its customers.

SS: Absolutely. Now, you also, in a recent interview, stated that one of your secrets to success is empathy. How does empathy improve your effectiveness as a revenue leader?

MA: Well, first of all, we’re all human. We all have different stressors and challenges, whether in business or in personal life. For me, being an empathetic listener and someone who can relate to the different challenges that my employees, that my partners, that my customers have, really makes me more effective. I can come at solving problems from the perspective of those employees, customers, and partners. At different times in our lives, we all go through different stressors, and I think that when your leader is someone who you can confide in and can explain where you’re having troubles and that person can be honest and open and transparent with you around where they may have also overcome challenges can be very uplifting. Whether that’s leading an organization or whether that’s partnering and helping a business grow, being able to share the pains and trials and tribulations I think make people closer. That’s why I think empathy is so important.

SS: I love that. I think you’re spot on, it’s absolutely critical. How can teams across the revenue organization embrace and utilize empathy with customers to improve the customer experience that you’ve been talking about up until this point?

MA: First, I think it’s just leaning into understanding what are the customer’s pain points? Why are they talking to you right now? What’s the thing that they’re trying to solve? Versus saying, I have this thing that I’m trying to sell. Let’s take a step back and say, what problem are you trying to solve?

Also, understanding the impact that it might be having on a customer. You might find out that if that project doesn’t get done, that person may be on the line or they’re experiencing some other challenge that’s tying up their time. Again, the more personally you can get to know people and share experience, the more likely they’re going to have trust in you to go forward in a project.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the customer experience a bit more and the sales process because in 2018, which feels like a lifetime ago now at this point, you discussed the ways in which the traditional sales funnel had changed as a result of the internet.

How has the virtual world that we have all been living in, drastically so in the last 18 months, how has that exacerbated these changes and how can companies, from your perspective, effectively adapt as the sales funnel continues to evolve?

MA: Well, look at almost every sale in some way or another starts on the internet. People are going to be researching and looking for the right solution and then they’re going to go out into their networks as well as going into your websites. Going out and again, going to events. There are all these different vectors where opportunity can happen, and you have to be at the tip of the spear of all of those. It can be very challenging, especially if you’re a smaller organization that doesn’t have the resources necessarily to be everywhere. You’ve got to more effectively use all of your employees.

I like to say everyone is in revenue generation and sales in my organization. It really starts with, I’ll call it, creating a great employee experience. All of your employees become advocates for you. Then, figuring out how you deploy those resources, whether that’s making sure that you’ve got a great web presence, a great SEO, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, that if your sales teams and everyone in your organization go out to an event, whether it’s sponsored by your company or not, is representing your brand and who you are well. And doing so because they love who they’re working for. Honestly for me, I think it’s, it’s all of those things.

SS: Yeah. You mentioned that the sales process doesn’t end with the purchase. I’d love for you to elaborate on that to our audience, but how can, from your perspective, how can sales enablement help support revenue teams beyond the initial sale to continue to drive value with customers throughout their entire life cycle?

MA: Sure. Well, first of all, things don’t end when the sale happens. I mean, first of all, you want to be able to stay connected. This is going to sound funny probably, but sometimes when things go wrong it’s actually the biggest opportunity to have your company shine because it’s all in how you handle when things go wrong. Or when you’re in the middle of an implementation, it’s how well you’re servicing and treating that customer that’s going to give them brand affinity later on to hopefully help you grow your revenue share because it’s so much easier to sell into a current customer than it is to go out and get a net new one.

I think it’s everything from how someone answers the phone to making that customer feel really important and not like an afterthought after the sale, to being proactive and following up with the customer. Let’s say you don’t have any issues with something that you sold or implemented, but if you haven’t touched your customer, you’re giving someone else the opportunity to get in there and create a wedge for the future. You want to make sure that you’re always touching your customer, telling them that you thank them and that you want to get their feedback on how the product is working for them. If there are challenges, bringing that forward to your operational staff and product staff and such, and helping to get whatever needs to be worked into the next dev and design cycles.

That’s the opportunity if you do your post-sales engagement right, and that’s going to grow your customer for the long-term and hopefully lead to more revenue for it.

SS: Absolutely, I think that’s spot on. Now, just to close out on this though, change can really be intimidating for human beings in general, but maybe especially so even with sales teams or revenue facing teams that are charged with a quota potentially every quarter.

Do you have any advice on persevering through new and uncomfortable things? I think you said, “feeling the fear” and doing it anyway, how can sales enablement help revenue teams to embrace that mantra and successfully navigate change in today’s business world?

MA: We’ve all just lived through an incredible amount of change, having gone through COVID and lockdowns and uncertainty around the economic and social change that’s been happening in our world. What I’d like to say to everyone is you’re probably not going to feel that level of change hopefully in your lifetime again. Anything you’re going to be up against is not going to compare probably to what you’ve literally just gone through, at least on a global economic scale, or at least I hope.

That’s why I say you can “feel the fear” and do it anyway. Most decisions that salespeople and sales enablement organizations have to make are not existential to your business, so make a decision, commit to it. As a sales enablement organization, provide the data to the sales organization to help them know what the good safe bets to make are, but also support them if you see that things are not going the way that they should. I’m a big fan of agility and don’t be afraid to say, hey, we’re going in the wrong direction, we need to pivot. I think what smart sales enablement leaders do to enable their revenue organizations is provide good insights into, are you making the headway that you need to? If you’re not, helping revenue leaders to know where else they can go and how else you can pivot to try to find that success.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today. I enjoyed our conversation.

MA: Me too. Thanks so much for having me Shawnna.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Uttam Reddy from Rackspace join us. Uttam, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Uttam Reddy: Hi, my name is Uttam Reddy. I’m the Vice President of Global Sales Enablement and Strategy at Rackspace Technology. I joined last August and previously I’ve had a wide range of roles at large and small companies, private and public. Coming on board, it’s been an exciting time at Rackspace to see it grow.

SS: Absolutely. Uttam, I’m so excited that you’re joining us. Again, as you mentioned, you come with a wide breadth of experience across teams building the business, including revenue operations and sales operations. How would you say that that experience, in particular in those types of operational type roles, influence your approach as an enablement leader?

UR: No, thank you for that Shawnna. Those experiences shaped and molded my thinking of what enablement needs to do and what it means to the company, having a laser-like focus on business outcomes of coaching up our people. If I had to put one word on it, it would be relevance: business relevance for enablement.

Enablement isn’t just about training, which is what it used to be. Enablement is truly making our customer-facing Rackers, whether it’s customer success or client executives, making them successful. The roles that I had previous to Rackspace, running the business, owning a P&L, and being a Chief Operating Officer, help form business relevance to everything that we do.

SS: Absolutely. Now, given your experience as an operations leader and a member of the C-Suite, what advice would you have for sales enablement practitioners in how to build alignment with their executive leaders to maximize the impact of their efforts?

UR: Again, awesome question. I start with the end in mind. My approach is really cascade; I start with the company goals. Rackspace wants to become X, Y, and Z, so what are my stated goals? I work backward to what is the overall strategy for the company from our CEO and our executive leadership team, and then underneath it, what role does enablement play to align with these things?

It’s having the alignment from the company goals, all the way down to our frontline Rackers and doing the stakeholder management, making sure that everything that we’re doing informs the thing above it. As long as those things are in full alignment, we’re going to be successful.

SS: Absolutely. Now, on that note, in a recent panel discussion you shared your best practices on measuring sales enablement outcomes. In your opinion, what are some of the core metrics that listeners should be tracking in order to make sure that they’re demonstrating business impact?

UR: I love this question because back to the relevance and business impact, the things that we look at and I report to quarterly with our board of directors specifically is really, are we effectively attracting the right talent into sales and are we onboarding them successfully? Are we ramping them productively?

What does that mean? We’re looking at everything on a quarterly basis around everything from time to first sale as well as average deal size, time to second sale, average pipeline created. These are applied outcomes of everything we’re reinforcing in enablement.

Again, tying back to, am I helping a Racker that’s customer-facing carrying a quota? Am I making them successful? We maniacally measure this stuff. We do 90-day check-ins, we do 180-day check-ins with not only the sales manager, but the individual themselves. We’re always continuously improving, continuously learning with closed-loop feedback on the effectiveness of our enablement programs.

SS: I love that, I think that’s fantastic. Now, I’m hearing from a lot of sales enablement practitioners that a lot of their organizations are coming to them understanding, what is it that enablement can do? What are the initiatives enablement can do to help our organization protect and preserve the positive elements of our culture, particularly in the past year as everything shifted to virtual.

I wanted to ask you a question just as a bit of a follow-on to that. From your perspective, what are the things or initiatives that enablement can put in place to help organizations both preserve positive culture as well as to potentially even enhance it amongst revenue teams?

UR: No, that’s a terrific question. It’s hard. I’ll tell you with 15 months of COVID and remote work, sellers that are used to being in front of customers physically and having to adapt to virtual and being able to have that sales and winning culture, customer-facing culture, without physically meeting someone has been a challenge.

The culture here is very customer-obsessed and they’re very interpersonal. Everyone’s used to being in the headquarters or traveling and being in front of customers. It was a very strong adjustment for the enablement team to get creative around virtual and keeping connected with sellers because maintaining that sense of teamwork and camaraderie while still engaging people productively in Zoom was definitely something that we had to work on.

Some of the things that we did on our side was we tried to make it more fun, especially since everyone was working from home. We added some elements of gamification and prizes and points for completing different things and different tasks within our enablement program. We tried to add some fun factor into it, just to keep people smiling, keep people focused, keep people on task around what we were doing for enablement.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now you did talk about the transition, and I think virtual enablement really was uncharted territory for many sales enablement practitioners. You recently spoke about how your team at Rackspace dealt with all the unprecedented events from last year, and really came out on top. How have you approached this transition and what aspects of virtual enablement do you see being a continued practice as we returned to maybe in-person or a combined hybrid environment?

UR: What I would tell you that we learned at Rackspace, it started again before my arrival at the company last year, but taking a three-week in-person at the headquarters sales onboarding program and making it a hundred percent virtual, talk about pressure to go deliver something in a challenging environment.

I don’t think we’ll ever go back to 100% in-person anymore. There are definitely elements of it that can be done between pre-work, some of it virtual, some of it in-person. The human touch is very, very important. It’ll never fully go away. It’s part of embedding and assimilating people into our culture as they join the company, it’s an important piece.

We learned a lot about making things interactive, making things fun, making things live. We would do a lot of preparation with subject matter experts that were delivering our modules. We built out 150 different unique learning modules for our program last year virtually. There were four distinct learning paths by role, and I’ll tell you, we didn’t miss a beat because we tried to simulate as much of the physical class as we could and tried to make it that way. We had break rooms, breakout rooms that had break times, we made it feel as much as we could as the real class.

SS: That’s amazing, I love that. In that same talk, you used a phrase that I think is common, but I’d love to hear the context behind it. You mentioned diamonds are created under pressure. Can you explain what this meant to you in terms of sales enablement, and how that mindset sets your team up for success?

UR: Yes. For us, failure was not an option. There was a tremendous amount of pressure here from the business. Last year was a watershed event for Rackspace. We were reemerging from being privately held, private equity-backed, back into the public markets. Going public was a major milestone for us, so we had this pressure of the company wants to IPO in August.

COVID hit. We needed to continue training and we were aggressively hiring a lot of salespeople last year. We’re hiring at a fast clip, lots and lots of people who have never been to our headquarters who need to assimilate and learn to sell the Rack way, if you will. That’s our constituted selling methodology in the company.

These were tremendous amounts of pressure. When I say diamonds get created under pressure, coming out of all of these constraints and external pressures we created an award-winning sales enablement program. In fact, we were awarded a 2021 Stevie for Global Sales Enablement Program of the Year, we were bronze winners.

It was good external validation, good internal validation, good feedback from our actual Rackers that have been through the program. If we just did this without the pressure of the external factors, I don’t know if we would’ve gotten there.

SS: Well, congratulations on the award, very well-deserved. Thank you again so much for the time today.

UR: Awesome, thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Malvina from Silverfin join us. Malvina, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Malvina EL-Sayegh: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I am really excited to join you on the podcast today. My name is Malvina and I’m the Head of Sales Enablement within Silverfin.

Silverfin is a SaaS, B2B company. It’s a startup scale-up disrupting the accountancy sector and the status quo that accountants are used to for the longest time. I’m heading up sales enablement at Silverfin.

SS: Fantastic. Well, I’m so excited that you’re here. In fact, I heard your podcast, which is called #stayhuman, and in it, you discuss what it means to be a great salesperson and how to do so by focusing on the human side of sales. From your perspective, what does it mean to humanize sales and why is that necessary in today’s environment?

ME: Yeah, that’s a really great question. I think sales has changed so much over the years. I mean, if you look at how sales was done even 10 years ago, it’s a completely different ball game today. The buyer or the prospective buyer just requires and needs so much more from the seller. Actually, in a lot of these deals in a lot of these organizations, you’re really acting more so like a consultant to them, rather than just a vendor and selling a solution.

I am really passionate about being human within sales. What that really means is using the innate traits that we have within us. Those are things like empathy, communication, listening, and not focusing so much on the close. I think when salespeople focus so much on the numbers and hitting their quota for the quarter or for the year, it almost becomes a numbers game.

What salespeople have to do is really remember that ultimately, we’re in a human-to-human type business. We’re dealing with individuals and it’s not that organizations buy from us, it’s usually individuals that buy from us. By really leveraging things like empathy, showing your empathy, making those good judgment calls, communicating effectively, listening, which is a huge one because salespeople have this tendency to potentially go on a rant and maybe not listen to what the other person is saying because we’re so eager to get our message across. But what salespeople really have to do is just take a step back, listen, and actively listen, which is challenging in itself, but really take a step back and remember that we’re dealing with other individuals, and for them buying is just as challenging as selling is for us.

SS: It absolutely is, buying has become extremely difficult. Now, you mentioned some of the key human-centric skills like empathy, but why are those the skills that salespeople need to be successful today?

ME: Yeah. I think if you look at the way that sales has changed and evolved over the years, back in the day, salespeople were just information givers in the sense that the information wasn’t available on the internet. If you wanted to research product, you had to ask around, you had to ask people who had the know-how. Nowadays, if you look at any buying process, actually by the time that the potential buyer interacts with you, they’re already more than 50% in the entire sales process, which means that they have already done their research. They know everything about your company, they have the facts, and oftentimes salespeople have to almost act as information checkers, or actually validating that the information that the prospect has found online is accurate.

In order to really communicate and build that element of know, like, and trust, which is so important in sales because ultimately, we buy from people who we know, like, and trust. If you look at just those three elements, how can you effectively build on them and build that element of trust with your customer? You can do that by showing empathy, by really communicating with them, actively listening, asking the right questions and really taking a step back so that the best interest of the prospect is always in mind.

I think salespeople sometimes forget that it’s not about us. It’s not about us selling a particular product or service. It’s not even about us hitting that potential number at the end of the quarter, even though that’s what we want to do. Ultimately, to really make that buying experience as enjoyable and useful for the prospect, you really need to bring out those human elements so that you can stand above and beyond other salespeople who potentially aren’t doing those things.

SS: I love that. Now you mentioned that salespeople have to transition out of being information-based. You actually did an interview where you talked about the transition from being information givers to meaning makers, which I loved.

In the midst of all the change that has occurred in the past year with the shift to virtual, and now we’re actually transitioning back into in-person or hybrid environments, how can salespeople help to create meaningful experiences for their customers during this time?

ME: Yeah, I think it’s a great question. I think if we rewind the clock back to say a year, what is it a year and a half ago now when COVID really started, making that transition for a lot of salespeople from being able to meet customers in person to then having to do meetings fully remote was a huge game-changer. I mean, a lot of people, a lot of salespeople actually, struggled with that. You’re used to sitting in a room with someone, potentially walking to the conference room, grabbing a coffee, you’re able to read body language and potentially have slightly more meaningful conversation.

When COVID happened and salespeople had to move to this fully remote environment, we had to be, or we still have to be a lot more in tune with what’s going on. We don’t see the full body; we don’t see the full person that we’re speaking to. I see everything basically from the waist up. We have to really look out and see what are the facial expressions? What’s the body language or even just the hands telling us? What’s the tone of voice? We have to be really in tune with what the prospect or potential customer is saying to us.

I think if we look at meaning-makers, and why I think that’s so important, it goes back to what I said previously. In the past, salespeople were just giving out information. We were just talking about the features and then maybe linking them back to benefits. But everyone already today is well aware of the features of your product. I mean, they just have to go to the website, and they will have a whole list of the features and capabilities of your potential solution.

I think the reason why salespeople play such a crucial role in this is because they are answering the question, which is, “so what’s in it for me?” Ultimately, that’s what the potential buyer wants to know. It’s not about the features, it’s what’s in it for me, what does that mean, where is the value? You’re basically taking all this information that you have, the prospect has, and you’re really turning it into meaning for them. What does it mean in their particular situation? What does it mean for their business? How is that tying into the objectives, into the overall strategy of the organization?

I think if you look at why people buy, it’s usually to align with that strategy, with that objective. What capabilities are they missing? The salesperson really comes in to add that meaning and tie in the capabilities to the overarching strategy of the organization.

SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. Now, I do want to for our audience pivot this a little towards the enablement lens.

You wrote an article on LinkedIn where you talked about how many customers are just overwhelmed with all of the information that is out there and available. How can enablement help salespeople cut through the noise to provide value rather than just more information like you just were talking about.

ME: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think what we have to realize collectively across any organization, whether you’re in a corporation, in a startup, or in a scale-up, is that our potential buyers, our potential customers, they don’t need just a whole lot of information. Ultimately, what we’re trying to do as salespeople is cut through the noise. I think if you look at the number of emails, messages, social media channels, even slack messages in the workplace, there’s a lot of noise out there. Ultimately, the role of enablement is to equip salespeople with information and content that they can share with their prospective buyers that will help cut through the noise.

It really has to be tangible; it has to be aligned with the buyer’s journey; it has to be aligned with where they are within our internal sales process. If we are in a discovery phase with a potential prospect, we want to be asking the right questions, but oftentimes salespeople need guidance. They need someone to almost hold their hand and say, look, potentially this is what you should be asking, this is what you should be looking out for. Maybe at this stage, it’s great to share a case study. It’s great to share an experience that potentially another customer has had with your organization.

I think where enablement really comes into play is making sure that the content that we’re sharing out with our customers, and also internally, is tailored, cuts through the noise, and is exactly what the salesperson and the customer needs.

SS: Yes, I love that. Now, the other thing that you talked about, you wrote an article on LinkedIn and you talked about behaviors that salespeople can control to improve their success. One of them I loved a lot and I wanted you to talk about that to our audience, and it’s the ability to be coachable. How can enablement people, help salespeople see the value in coaching and help them buy into the whole process?

ME: Yeah. I’m a huge fan of Mark Roberge’s book, which is called the “Sales Acceleration Formula.” I highly recommend it to everyone, but the reason why I love it is because Mark Roberge really talks about this aspect of being coachable. When making that first sales hire or second sales hire, the key thing that he looks out for, and he almost recommends that others do the same, is this element of coachability. How quickly can a salesperson take on feedback and really put it into action?

Ultimately, where enablement becomes slightly challenging is we’re dealing with salespeople, and salespeople always think one, they know it all, and two, they don’t need any help. We’re almost dealing with an audience that is slightly difficult in the change management aspect of things. I think where enablement really comes into play to help salespeople is knowing what’s in it and being able to say what’s in it for them. Your potentially providing training or you’re building out content.

I think this element of what’s in it for them, how is this going to benefit them? How is it going to make them better in their sales role? How is it going to allow them to have more intelligent conversations with their customers? That has to be the key selling point and I think when you deal with an audience like salespeople, you really have to start small to get their buy-in. Then, what you’re able to see really is, are they coachable? Are they taking onboard the small pieces of information and content that you’re providing to them?

I think so often where we go wrong is, a new person will come into enablement, and they will roll out an entire program that lasts for say two months. It’s a huge time commitment from the salespeople and that’s potentially when you can lose them. If you start in small increments, you’re then able to really look back and see, are they taking onboard what you have shared with them?

SS: I think that’s a fantastic example. Actually, that goes to my last question a bit. We’ve talked about human-centered skills, and we’ve talked about behaviors for sales success, but how can sales enablement practitioners track the impact of those things on sales success? How do you use those metrics to inform the design of your enablement programs going forward?

ME: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that’s always a tricky question when comes to enablement. The way that I look at it is that enablement really has a correlation with revenue and ultimately any kind of training or content that you’re rolling out really has to tie in very closely with the business objectives. That is the number one thing that I look at. If someone within the organization has an idea for a training, my first question is how does it tie into the business objectives? What is the outcome and how are we going to measure success? You can look at that correlation with revenue. Ultimately, if you’ve launched an enablement function and we know that there’s a correlation with revenue and you’re able to end the year on a high, that’s awesome.

Then there are smaller metrics that you can use. Tying back to that element of coachability, are people really implementing and putting into practice what you’re teaching or sharing with them? If you do a knowledge check or if you do a review or some sort of certification, have they actually retained the knowledge? I think just a point to add on here, it’s not that you roll out one training and it solves the issue. That’s never the case. Training always has to be done in small sizes; it has to be done in increments. Maybe there is an idea for a training, but actually you’re probably going to have to break it down and scatter it in. Otherwise, the truth is people are just going to forget the content.

Finally, it’s also that token of appreciation that comes from salespeople. I think that random thank you when they have learned something new and more importantly, when they were able to actually start using it in their conversations, on a personal level I think that puts a smile on any practitioner or people within sales enablement, that just makes them smile.

You really have to look at where it ties into the business objectives. Is it aligned with revenue? Are you capturing and actually checking that people have retained the knowledge and are they putting it into practice?

SS: I love that. Malvina, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I learned a lot from you on our podcast, and I think your podcast is fantastic, so thank you again for making the time.

ME: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Terri Petion: Hey, everybody. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Terri, and I work at Hyperscience. I currently lead our Sales Enablement function, which is part of our Revenue Operations department. I’m a team of one, supporting around 90 in total in the sales org.
A little bit about myself, I got into enablement through training roles where I did internal and external product training and onboarding. It’s not something I imagined doing growing up, although for a while I thought I would become a teacher, but it is something I truly enjoy. Even more, I enjoy seeing the impact of the work that I do.

SS: Excited to have you here. You and I connected on LinkedIn because you are such a strong advocate for DE&I in the workplace and I think that that is an absolutely critical thing for organizations to get right. From your perspective, how can sales enablement nurture DE&I efforts within the revenue organization in both a meaningful and authentic way?

TP: It’s a really great question. Sales enablement’s primary focus is typically on onboarding and obviously ensuring reps have what they need in terms of tools, processes, and resources to effectively sell your solution or product, whatever it may be. It also serves as an extension of company enablement. There’s so much opportunity to expand the scope of enablement to cover things that impact the world outside of sales.

Part of that includes talking about the impact that we as individuals and as a company can have. I think the first step in creating opportunities to speak about DE&I efforts has to come from leadership and it has to be authentic. It’s important that we think about current events, mental health, and the overall impact that the state of the world has on the people with the closest ties. Doing things like having company all hands, workshops, DE&I groups within an organization both within and outside of sales, those all are things that are key to making sure that there is space for people to share their experiences, but more importantly, find support amongst their peers.

I think there’s an opportunity for enablement leaders to advocate for company funding of these types of initiatives outside of the direct organization as well. On the Revenue Operations side of the house, we’re all very closely aligned to the success of the business. Using that position to push for action is definitely something that you can do to encourage more participation and definitely create more awareness in the space.

SS: Now, how can enablement though go about helping to remove barriers to ensure that there’s equity in the opportunities for reps to succeed and advance their careers within an organization?

TP: The most important thing, and sometimes the hardest thing to do in enablement I think, is to listen for things that are not said. Paying close attention to areas where reps need support the most, but maybe they don’t recognize it on their own is critical. You have to be able to read between the lines in some cases, and in others where it is more explicit, you can create programs that are tailored to the specific needs of the organization and of those reps.

It’s also about holding everyone equally accountable for the success of the team. It’s about celebrating wins, coaching when there are losses. Enablement has a unique perspective that puts us in a position to support reps and how they’re treated, how they’re coached, and in the opportunities that we help create within the organization.

It should always be about the team success, driving that point home as much as possible because ultimately that means the success of each individual and the fair treatment of each individual matters within that. While enablement doesn’t necessarily create “career ladders,” we can influence those who do by being a voice for the reps and an advocate for fairness across the board.

SS: Absolutely. Now, on the point about being an advocate and a sales enablement leader, what has been your experience in navigating the industry and rising to levels of leadership throughout your career?

TP: Sure, it’s a really great question. Working in sales as a woman of color is not easy as I’m sure a lot of people know. I think working in tech isn’t easy as a woman of color, and really, working period is not easy as a woman of color. I think there are so many challenges that we face just being a woman. I’ve had to ask myself over and over again, do I speak loudly enough without being too loud? How do I do that? How do I ask a question without seeming incompetent?
There’s so much doubt and second guessing and questioning your ability when in truth, you have what you need within you. I think once I realized that, it stopped being about what people thought about me and my capabilities and my knowledge, and it became about what I needed to do for me. That’s where I had to shift my focus and that’s the place that I’m in today.

SS: I love that. As the Sales Enablement team has been expanding over at Hyperscience, you’ve also been involved in some active hiring for enablement roles on your own team. In your opinion, what are some of the core skills or attributes that practitioners need to be successful in sales enablement today?

TP: I love this question. There’s such a long list of skills, but I can focus on a couple. I think enablement requires someone who is agile because of the ever-changing world that we live in, we work in, we exist in. They need to be a critical thinker because a lot of times the role expectations and needs of the organization are undefined. I’d say technical, because there are some complex aspects of the jobs such as working with product teams. I’d say process oriented because the goal is to create scalable programs, so processes go hand in hand with that.

I think one of the other things I’d highlight, because as I said I can go on and on, but the last thing I’ll say is that the person needs to understand the impact that enablement can have on the company’s bottom line. Someone who is a clever thinker and really understands the work that they put into something can directly have an impact on how the company sees success and experience success overall.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. What advice would you give professionals interested in pursuing a career in sales enablement that maybe haven’t come from this space before? How can they build up their skills or maybe position themselves for success?

TP: Yeah. There are certifications and books out there that you can reference. If you’re interested in learning more about enablement, I’d say check out courses from ATD, Sales Enablement PRO, Roderick Jefferson also came out with a book this year called “Sales Enablement 3.0.” It’s a really great book.
There are podcasts you can listen to, the one that we’re on. There are blogs and articles. I’m also available to chat with anyone interested in joining the space, but beyond learning enablement, I think it’s important to understand sales. How to sell, the different methodologies that are out there, and to get a good understanding of what success looks like and the types of organizations that they want to be part of.

SS: Absolutely. I think those are some great resources, of course I’m not biased at all. The last question for you, how can enablement practitioners position themselves as leaders within their organization?

TP: Yeah. In order to do this, I think you have to develop good relationships with leadership, inside and outside of the sales organization. Meet with them regularly, listen to their complaints and requests, and show and prove that you’re truly an advocate for them and that you’ll do what is required to help make change happen. You’re the representative when they’re not present, so showing that you’re knowledgeable, credible, and will get the job done is how you’re going to position yourself as a leader.

SS: Fantastic advice, Terri. Thank you so much for joining us today. I learned a ton and I know our audience will as well. Thank you so much.

TP: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Bryan Suit from Siemens Healthineers join us. Bryan, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Bryan Suit: I’m Bryan Suit from Siemens Healthineers. If you’re unfamiliar with Siemens Healthineers, we actually are a global leader in health technology. We focus on enabling healthcare providers to increase their value really by focusing on four elements: providing precision care, transforming care delivery, improving the patient experience, and number four, all the while trying to digitalize healthcare. As we look at our comprehensive portfolio, we focus on products, solutions, and services that focus on clinical imaging, clinical therapy, and laboratory diagnostics.

From my perspective, I’m part of the global commercial excellence team based in Erlangen, Germany. I’m responsible for sitting in the team of standards and process excellence with a focus in customer relationship and partner management excellence, working with our global programs and also interacting with our 16 zones to help them optimize the use of these programs while also making improvements for their sales professionals at the localities.

SS: I’m excited to have you here, Bryan. I noticed that you actually recently earned a certificate in organizational design for digital transformation from MIT, and you’ve discussed your interest in digitally enabling reps on LinkedIn, in fact, that’s what caught my eye.

Given the acceleration of virtual and hybrid work environments in the past year, I’d love to understand from you, how are you setting your reps up for success in a more digital-first world?

BS: Starting there is probably a good standpoint. I think the aspects of digital and digitalization are two frequently used terms as we look at the enablement space. Really the concept as we look at combining these together to make improvements for the sales professional is, how can we ultimately take off the low-value work? For example, digitalizing things that nobody wants to do or things that are just taking time that can be done in automated fashions. The idea of trying to create new ways, new digital approaches to allow us to be more efficient. More importantly, identifying the right customers at the right times and then leading the sales professional in that engagement. Whether that is using data to leverage the insights, to create actions, or whether just serving up what’s been successful.

As we all look at playbooks, really having tangible quantitative information that allows us to look at evaluating across each of the steps of our sales process. When we should be engaging, what we should be engaging with, and ultimately what is successful with the customers. As we talk about the last year-plus, I think many of us see the challenges that sales has been put through, but I think it’s ultimately more of an opportunity for organizations such as mine and everyone else’s to focus on changing engagement with customers. The first part is we cannot sell like we used to. We have to take in the aspects of understanding how our customers are interacting with our digital assets. As they look at engaging in the websites, making sure we’re collecting that information and feeding it to the salespeople as much as possible, so again that we have a better way to personalize that customer journey and really focus on what’s important as we try to provide value back to solving business problems.

SS: Absolutely. How are some of the ways sales enablement can leverage technology to its advantage to really improve the effectiveness of sales enablement programs?

BS: As we look at technology, I think there are a couple areas we can look into. The first is data. Data is the new gold, and we produce more of it every day then we all realize, but the key to it as we look at becoming effective as organizations is, what data is important? How can we use that data today?

More importantly, how can we look at the addition of, whether it’s artificial intelligence, whether it’s machine learning to be more predictive to either identify customers earlier or as we talked about, those success plays that we’re running to make sure that we’re using the right assets at the right time to provide better successes. Even if we look at the sales professional based on what they’ve been able to do, where they’re successful and where they have opportunities to improve. Using that data to help point out where we can provide not only better tools, but skills and competencies, really to help them be successful when interacting with the customer.

SS: Absolutely. Now, part of your background is also in sales operations. I’d love to understand, how does that influence your approach to the digital enablement of the teams that you support?

BS: Even before getting into operations, I also had more than 13 years of experience as a field salesperson, both as an account executive and as a product specialist or technical clinical salesperson for Siemens Healthineers. I think when I bring that together with the aspects of what we try to do in enablement, it really gives me a unique way to look at understanding not only what the true pain points of our people in the field are, but also applying structured problem-solving in different ways to look at how can we bring in not only tools, but other things that can complement and allow us to have a more focused approach around enablement.

Ultimately, it helps internally when we look at selling back the ideas, the concepts, the products that we develop for our salespeople. Being able to talk the language of the salesperson, being able to sit in the room with the rest of our teams, bringing together those two worlds I think really provides me a unique experience and a unique benefit for the organization as we develop solutions.

SS: Absolutely. Now, I want to go back to what you said just a few minutes ago around the importance of centralizing things around the customer. You’re focused on customer relationships. What are some of the best practices for engaging with customers in a digital world?

BS: I think the first aspect is always research. Before you speak to a customer, you really need to spend the time digging deep, looking at LinkedIn to find the context or the associated context of who you want to reach out to, looking at the information you can find from the company’s website. For us who deal with hospitals, it’s looking into the hospital, looking at the services, looking at other third-party data sets that allow us to look at what’s happening so that when we have those opportunities to interact. It is using those data points to really create a robust discussion. It’s not just going in and talking about a box, a set of widgets that will make it better, but truly understanding the pressures that they’re feeling from their competitive environments, from the age of their technology, from the influence of clinical advancements, and changes really allows you to have that discussion.

When you can leverage data, you come off as a little bit more trustworthy. The other side of it too, especially in today’s environments where we may not have as much of the face-to-face interaction, it all starts in the same way that you would that face-to-face interaction. You have to build rapport. You have to build trust because without those it’s really hard to overcome opening the digital front door to really start that discussion with the customer.

SS: Now, you actually wrote an article on LinkedIn a few years ago where you were talking about some of the mistakes to avoid when connecting with customers virtually. Are there any lessons that you’ve learned just in the past year, or maybe common pitfalls that you continue to see that you can maybe share with our audience and maybe some ways to avoid those, if it’s at all possible?

BS: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for reading the article. The Genesis of that article is at the time I was working for another company, and we had rolled out iPads to our staff and nobody changed their signature blocks. It was great advertisement for Apple because everything was person’s first name and then sent by iPad. As we look at how technology has evolved, we’ve obviously overcome that one. I think most people include a signature block today, but it’s going back to that first ideal of make it your brand.

As you’re selling yourself and as we all sell something every day, make sure that your customers, number one, know who you work for. More importantly, know how to get back in touch with you. Include your phone number, an email address. Those are the real basics from that standpoint. I think the aspect of this shift to digital and digital-first engagement, we have to fight the urge to sell immediately. You can’t jump right into I have this solution and it’s going to provide you all of these things. You have to find a nice way to open the dialogue, connect, and find a way to listen. I think it’s that listening piece that allows us to really diagnose what the customer’s issues are. Then you can start to position where your solutions, where your services, where your products can come in and help solve that and add value back for the customer.

SS: I think that’s a great transition to the last question that I have for you, Bryan. As a lot of organizations are starting to shift back to in-person or maybe even a hybrid work environment in the year ahead, how can sales enablement teams continue to provide value to customers amid all this continuous transformation?

BS: I think the transformation question is an interesting one. I think that we all have the same hopes that everything will return back to “normal,” if we can use that word in air quotes. I think the reality is that we’re going to see first off, a big change. Not only have sellers gotten used to selling digitally, but I think customers have also gotten used to it. For the vertical industry that I work in, face-to-face is normally the way that we sell with contacting the administrators, working with the clinicians, working with some of the technical and clinical users.

I think the first question coming out of this when we are able to see customers again is first understanding, what is it your customer wants and expect in interactions? I think ultimately, many of them perceive that digital is not a bad way to interact with salespeople. I think when we look at from the other side of it as the salesperson, for the time that I was a clinical rep, I covered three and a half states. It took me a long time to get from my home to the bottom side of my territory, which would have been a four-and-a-half-hour drive, which would have been another two and a half to three to the top side. If I can do more digitally, I become ultimately more effective in that.

I think, again, as we look at it, there’s a lot of benefits that can come from a more hybrid approach. We’ve toyed with the idea of looking at how we approach the customer. We have our general salespeople, and they likely will stay more in that face-to-face functionality. Can we use some of our other technical and clinical resources in this hybrid manner where we have the account executive onsite setting up the meeting, and then ultimately bringing in that technical and clinical expert in a digital way that allows us to cut down their travel time and allow them to touch more customers on a given day because they’re not worried about traveling.

All the while we need to figure out how to use the data that’s being generated by customers in the sense that as they are downloading materials and opting into communication, using some of that intent and interest data to really effectively position the salesperson be better prepared for that first discussion, or to understand as they’re going through the latter parts of that buying process, really what’s most important to this individual? That hyper-personalization combined with the research that hopefully they’ve done really allows them to be more effective when they do get the moments to be face-to-face

SS: I love that, Bryan. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on how you’ve digitalized sales enablement at Siemens Healthineers. Thank you so much for your time today.

BS: Thank you for the opportunity to share, and I hope that it was beneficial for everyone else.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Kathryn Frankson from Informa join us. Kathryn, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Kathryn Frankson: Yeah. Hi Shawnna, thanks so much for having me on. I am the Director of Event Marketing at Informa, and Informa is a global events and intelligence company. We produce conferences, trade shows, user conferences, sales events all around the world in a variety of markets. We’ve also got content that we sell, white papers that we produce. It’s a very interesting time to be in this industry. I oversee all of our event marketing, but my background is actually in sales.

SS: Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Now, your experience developing events for virtual, hybrid, and in-person environments is also something that I think a lot of sales enablement practitioners are deeply involved in within their organizations, particularly when it comes to things like their sales kickoff events or any quarterly events or maybe president’s club.

As many sales practitioners are responsible for events for sales teams, I’d love to understand from you, what are some of the different factors that you need to take into consideration for each of those different types of event environments?

KF: Yeah. All of our events, pre COVID world were physical events. We were exactly living in that, so field events, what are we handling for sponsorship and lead generation, audience acquisition, major conference and trade show production. I feel like it’s a great question because the different factors are front and center more than they ever have been. There was a lot of getting into our routine of events and going, great, this is how our enablement conference went last year, so we’re going to lift and shift it again. When everything stopped and we made the shift to virtual, new questions were right at the forefront.

For us, the three biggest factors when you’re planning a virtual event specifically is one, the product that you’re actually creating. I say to our team, congratulations, you are product marketers now. We have a lot of specialists, but if we’re not using the right insights that we need to create an in-demand product that the market has acceptance and a level of aptitude for, then you’re going to start doing all of your channel work and you’re going to have your goals and your audience acquisition or your KPIs around how many leads you want to feel to your reps, but you’re not going to get there because the actual product that you’ve created isn’t in alignment with where your audience is right now.

Taking that quintessential step back and going, what is the right? What is the right format? What is the right timing? What is the right length of time? How hyper-specific do we have to get in terms of niching down? One of the things that we’ve seen more success in is going into persona-heavy, themed, highly targeted, more niche events. It speaks to your audience in a deeper way.

You also really need to think about price or objective. We do run paid events as well, so when you think of that pricing model, are you doing audience acquisition, free events leading up to something that might have a price point attached to it? If your objective is just lead generation, brand health, brand reach, and awareness, then you have to go in with that because there’s no way to build similar programming out like you had in past years without it stemming from the objective that you really have to hit.

Then the other big factor is promotion. We’re usually working on a tighter promotion cycle for virtual events, which I think is opportunistic in many ways, but you definitely can be out sprinting really, really quick. How we’ve managed that is marketing plans that are a little bit pithier but have your macro plan. Here’s our audience, we need to achieve X. This is where we’re going. Here are our benchmarks. It doesn’t have to be so fully baked from channel strategy end to end because that’s going to take a little bit too much time, but then that leaves room for all of your micro strategies. As we go along, we might pop up into a clubhouse room or we’re seeing some success here so we’re going to lean into that a little bit more. That just allows you to move faster.

Virtually that’s how we’ve been planning for those events, which we’re still doing a lot of. We are starting to think about physical events again. It’s going to really depend on the regionality, your audience, what your goals are there. That move into in-person, the considerations are very different. Market support, safety, location, budget, data. We’re probably going to see a heavy regional focus, so does our own data that we have support this from an attendance perspective? Does this make sense financially? If we need more space with these safety protocols and we’re capped in some ways, does it feel viable? Are we actually achieving our goals that we need to successfully with our virtual events? The considerations become very different.

Then of course, for hybrid, there is an intersection point between both of those, but it becomes a little bit more nuanced even when you get into the production of we’re going to design an experience for a virtual audience and then for an in-person audience as well.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. You actually touched on a few of these already in that response, but just to really focus on this, what are some of the key challenges that you encountered in the past with the shift to primarily virtual events? What are some ways in which you can overcome some of those challenges?

KF: It’s interesting, we uncovered all of the challenges as we were doing our events. Content translates really well, so challenges were sponsor and exhibitor inclusion, getting that formula right. Building out partnerships that made more sense, were in better alignment, they felt like they were getting the return that they wanted. Audience acquisition, how do we get the attendance that we want on our events? Also, how do we onboard them appropriately?

There was certainly a lot of new technology, and when you think of what makes this successful is if we feel like we’ve got all the right building blocks, but we need to have this level of attendance, this performance makes it viable for either our sales team or our sponsor or just us as an event. This is the lift that we’re hoping to achieve from it.

Then, making sure that you’re solving for engagement because if you do get your audience, many of them who might be super fans of your brand or alumni or key partners, if you get them on and it feels like there’s a lag or a drag and there isn’t the engagement that they want, you certainly don’t want it to be something that actually becomes a disincentive for partnerships.

The ways around that, some of it was flying the plane while you’re building it, so a lot of information sharing. We had a slack channel where it was really tight communication from our sales enablement, from marketing, from ops, from content, so that everyone is on the same page with the type of feedback that we’re getting. I think it was really important. One of the goals of our team was to make sure people were speaking, exhibiting, partnering at other events so that you can get this level of empathy and understanding for the new production and design. What’s working? What is your attention span for the event? If we sponsor, we’re an exhibitor, so how does that feel?

Getting all the right inputs and communication sharing throughout the process really made a big difference because then you’re just able to be honest, course-correct, iterate, and at your next event or your next virtual field event, you’re just that much tighter in your execution.

SS: Absolutely. Now, you hit on a very keyword there, and that was empathy. You’ve said before that empathy is extremely important when it comes to the audience and what and how they’re experiencing things.
Why is that important? What are some ways that practitioners can build on that empathy?

KF: Yeah. Your event isn’t going to feel right if you don’t plan it with empathy. It’s going to feel a little tone-deaf, and you don’t want to go to market with that same messaging, which is easier said than done. There’s a lot of new moving parts and some teams are working leaner, some people in the tech space are busier than ever and they’re scaling, so it’s a really unique time to be producing this new volume of virtual events, but you really have to.

You’re iterating, your revenue models are changing, but without that pause and saying, we have to rethink what our value prop is. What’s actually going to land? What copy are we using? How are we positioning? Are we being really honest with what’s going to be valuable for our audience? If you don’t lead with that level of consciousness and you just go, here’s the plan, we’re going to open registration, we’re going to announce this, here’s our key milestones that we that we want to hit, it’s going to really feel like there’s a disconnect with your audience.

Some of the areas that we found that we needed to take a really empathetic approach was with technology. Virtual events have scaled, so the comfort level of your audiences and your partners and your speakers is there in a much more profound way, but helping your audiences get into the event, being really clear about tech preferences, holding their hand in new ways, sending the right volume of reminders and being really realistic about what the hurdles are for them to join.

We took the approach where we wanted to audit all of our communications. Nothing was rinse and repeat. Almost to the point where you’re thinking, okay, if I am getting this message, I’m working in this sector, I’m home, I’m really busy, I’ve got kids, I’m in my socks, is it going to feel right? Is it what they’re going through in their day to day at work? Are we capturing their attention? Are we making it as easy as possible to opt in?

One quick note was normally we thought, gosh, if you send five reminders a day, that would be really obnoxious. Turns out to be helpful. Everyone’s hopping on, they’re hopping off. They don’t actually want to miss a keynote, then they’re going to tackle something else, then maybe they do want to pop back in for the round table.

When you lead with that, your business outcomes are still right there, but I think it just sets the right tone because all of the communication that you’re sending out around your event and has just evolved so seismically end to end, both from promotions, to confirmations, how they access survey follow-ups, and where you take them on the journey from there.

SS: I love that. I think that that’s fantastic advice on how to incorporate empathy into audience building. One other thing that you wrote that really caught my eyes, you wrote about the importance of using the first minute of your event thoughtfully.

I’d love for you to explain that concept to our audience, and what are some common mistakes to avoid when it comes to that first minute? How can practitioners instead really leverage it to grab the attention of the audience?

KF: Yeah. I think that this feeds back into the empathy piece too. Previously, when you went to a physical event, you often travel, you’re on a plane, you’re flying somewhere, you’re excited, you’ve packed a bag, you’ve checked into the hotel, your lanyard is on. It’s. immersive. It’s very, very different. When you’re watching a virtual event, even if you’re excited, you’ve got your laptop on, you’ve got your event going in one browser tab, maybe have LinkedIn open in another, your outlook, your Gmail, you’ve got your phone in your lap, you’re at home, there’s an Amazon delivery. All of that doesn’t mean that you’re not eager to participate, to get this content, but you don’t have that immersion that anyone creating event experiences before benefited from. You have to grip your audience right away, provide them value right away, or you’re going to lose them to all of these other incoming messages that they have.

No one is going okay, I’m going to watch this, I’m going to shut down absolutely everything else, I’m going to go totally into a quiet room. It’s just not realistic. You’ve put all of this hard work into getting however many people on this event, and that’s where you have to activate it. If you get them, if you grip them right away, you’re hooking your audience.

A lot of the mistakes that I see being made is the event opens up, maybe you’ve got the holding slide, which is fine, sometimes events will start a few minutes late because they’re still getting some tech rolling on the back end, which is understandable, although that margin for error is getting tighter and tighter. Then it’s housekeeping slides. You’re going into this long thing you’re doing really long intros, maybe your CEO wants to say hello. That can all feel right as rain. That might’ve been how things were formulated in your physical event, but you don’t have that benefit of a captive audience.

You have to dive right in and then you bake any of those components in later, if you really do feel like you have to include them. A lot of them I would argue you don’t have to but bake them in later because then you’ve got your audience invested.

Some easy examples, one, have a really great moderator. Have them diving in right away. We found that depending on the size and scale of your event, networking can be a little bit tougher, but people love chat. Diving right into chat. “I see we’ve got Katherine from Minneapolis.” Engage your audience, have something really visually stimulating, have some banter with your guests.

I saw a virtual event yesterday actually that was really great. They were talking about what was hot in events, event trends. They pulled this from a TV concept, which I think is great, but the panelists did it while they were eating wings with hot sauce. Right as it started, their wings were delivered, it felt a little bit like TV. You were engaged. Where are they? Where are they going? They’re actually leaving, oh, they’re coming back with the wings. They’re putting the sauce on. I would imagine the audience attendance that stayed on through that event, mainly because it was so captivating right from the onset was high.

It doesn’t have to be something that’s costly, it doesn’t have to have production value. All you have to think about is great, we’ve done a ton of hard work to get our audience here, if we challenge ourselves, we’ve got one minute to make sure that they feel like this is how they want to spend the next hour or half-day or a day. Put that healthy pressure on yourself and think of something that would be visually attention-grabbing. You’re going to have people joining just with audio as well, so think about something that would be really entertaining to listen to, and just dive right in. Then build in some of those components that might feel like you’re easing a little bit into your event later on.

SS: Absolutely. I love that. I love that you’re always challenging the status quo with your virtual events. I think that’s really important because you and I have talked about this a few times now, but there is a lot of fatigue, especially virtually. How can you help maintain that high energy and that momentum throughout a virtual event?

KF: Well, I think you have to also decide that you want to have a high-energy virtual event. A lot of this is a mindset that leads to execution. Some of making sure that it is high energy is doing less. It’s going gosh, did we overproduce our last day? We wanted to provide so much value in so many sessions and content and interactivity and channel choices or room choices. Was that maybe too much? What if we do this one thing more condensed. One great speaker here. An experiential element. Let’s kick up the design factor a little bit, challenge our designer to just do something really fun and let’s go all-in on that.

It’s also the willingness of your team to have those conversations and also not romanticize what you’ve already done. We’re all learning, it’s changing for everyone, and there is success in every event that you’re producing. Pat yourself on the back and then go, how do we freshen it up? Less of, oh, that works so we can do one of these a month. More saying, that worked, excellent. We checked the box and now we’re going to really do something and try to try to level up. Or, we went to another event, this worked well for them. Let’s borrow that, let’s use that format.

There’s also a lot of inspiration out there, so it doesn’t have to feel like reinventing the wheel every time, but I think having that right mindset of your team, keeping everyone excited about that process too will also keep it from feeling a little bit fatiguing even internally as well.

SS: I could not agree more having done a few of these virtual events. It’s important not to get complacent.

Now, this has been a fantastic conversation, I’ve learned so much. I do want to close this out a little bit because I think, and you’ve written about this as well, it is really important to give audiences the opportunity to create things together, not even just learning together during these events. What are some ways in which our audience, our sales enablement practitioners can cultivate meaningful experiences during events?

KF: Yeah. Creating together I do think is the next opportunity for events. We’ve scaled free content really well and I think we’ve now taught our audiences that we are going to be doing really smart, specific, interesting events. People are available to speak more than ever, we’re getting really good thought leaders, but the next layer to peel back in the onion is the value exchange for my time, what am I getting out of it? Especially if our audiences can just watch something on demand. If you know that you’re opting into something and you’re able to create together, leave with a level of work product together, that can really shift how they feel about what you’re building for them.

Some of the execution that we’ve seen work really well is virtual breakouts, round tables, sponsored sessions. Sponsored content works really well too. We’ve seen this decoupling of church and state, or we do pure editorial content and speakers from the industry, and then we’ve got suppliers. Your suppliers are thought leaders, so integrate that. They may lead a working session as well. If you’re in the tech space, maybe we’re going to bring them together. They’re going to do demos. We know you’re solving for these problems, and you have questions, we’re going to walk through it together.

Maybe you’re in the marketing space, we’re going to do some website teardowns. We’re going to actually show you how we would build landing pages. We’re going to do a screen share and walk you through how we think of our sales funnel or our marketing plans. Here’s an actual example of how we’re scheduling out our content.

That moving into the really tactical “how” is what your audience wants, and they will opt in for that. That feels like the piece that they’re waiting for. I think too, virtual does still offer that. We had a partner event where it was in the sustainability space and they did a virtual a virtual tour of a biochar field in Helsinki, very scientific. In the site, it took them in, showed them how it was planted and how it’s a soil amendment, all of that. The reality is no one on that call would have had that experience without that event. Then putting everyone into breakouts and saying, okay great, we know there’s this new level of funding coming in nationally. How are you building that into your plans? Then working through some of that and your net promoter scores go through the roof.

There’s a lot of ways. It’s being really close to your audience, understanding what they would want, thinking creatively. It doesn’t have to be a super heavy lift. It can feel like, oh my gosh, they have to bake something together, as opposed to, we’re just hiring a speaker and they’ll present and that’ll be great. Audiences and partners and sponsors are responding so well to that, and it’s really valuable.

SS: I love that. Kathryn, thank you so much for the time today, I appreciate it.

KF: Thank you, Shawnna, I appreciate it too.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Lewis from MuleSoft join us. Lewis, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Lewis Baird: Well, firstly, thank you very much for having me. I’m very excited to share what we’re doing over here at MuleSoft and to share a little bit more about what I do specifically. My name is Lewis Baird, I’m originally from Scotland, now living in Australia, and I’m currently heading up the partner enablement for MuleSoft, which is now part of Salesforce.

I’m responsible for our go-to-market strategy, responsible for what industries we’re going to be looking at, and also responsible for spearheading the overhauling of our enablement practice globally as well for MuleSoft. So, no pressure.

SS: Well, I am extremely excited to have you join us. Now, I want to talk to you a little bit about partner programs because I know that that’s part of your scope.

What are some unique challenges of delivering enablement programs to partners, and how have you overcome those challenges in the past?

LB: Yeah. One of the biggest issues with partners is that question around the so what. Why should I take time out of my busy day in my busy schedule to learn more about what you’re offering and why your technology is better than others?

Sometimes the issue as well is coming from a vendor or you’re trying to sell something, we think that we are the center of the universe and that nothing else matters. We need to overcome that question of, we’re not the only technology out there, we’re not the only thing that someone is focused on, so how can we ensure that the programs that we deliver are really adding value?

What I call this is enablement with intent. When we design our programs and we start getting that pushback around “I’m not attending, I don’t see value,” we ask, why don’t you see value? What can we add to your role specifically? What can we bring in terms of knowledge of MuleSoft that really aligns to what you’re trying to do in the context of your everyday, the context of your customer transformation programs, and in the context of what will actually enable you to go further in your career as well?

When we start answering those questions, that’s when we start to overcome those problems. But again, there’s particular areas of our partners where you’re never going to win them over. You just have to take the small wins and then start building up from that.

SS: That’s fantastic, Lewis. Now, you also mentioned on LinkedIn that one of your responsibilities is driving engagement between your partners and the MuleSoft sales team to really drive revenue opportunities for both parties.

How do you see enablement fitting in to bridge the gap between the two and really enhance each other’s efforts?

LB: Yeah, absolutely. This is one of the reasons that I took this role at MuleSoft. I used to be on the sales team and thought to myself, what do partners do every day? I’m not getting any value from partners. They come in here and talk about things that just make no sense and they don’t know about our product. What’s going on?
And then partners were also sitting going, why am I here? They’re not giving me anything. They have not earned the right to have access to our mutual customer, so I’m not going to attend that, see you later.

You know that meme with the four pictures that has what they think they do, what you think they do, what they should do, and what everyone else thinks they do. That’s exactly what happens within partners and our internal teams. They expect each other to be providing information that hasn’t necessarily been providing the context as to why they should be meeting.

The amazing thing about enablement is it’s the bridge between the partner and the internal sales team. The awesome thing about enablement, I think it’s the most crucial role actually in any company, because we are neutral. I honestly wouldn’t care whether you chose MuleSoft as a technology or something else, as long as we provided you the best enablement and education around MuleSoft. If it was a fit, fantastic. If it wasn’t, then that’s just how the cookie crumbles.

What we do is that we don’t base what we deliver on assumptions. Sometimes what we see within sales teams specifically is that if they hear that our partner is doing something with a customer, they don’t necessarily care about what the partner thinks, they just want to be introduced. That just doesn’t work. What we have to do is create programs that not just enable our partners and the context of what our sales teams are trying to do, but also take that information from our partners, take it back to our sales team, and enable them on what our partners are doing. Do you understand what the point of view is within the industry for the partner to have that mutual accountability and have that mutual success?

It’s all about enablement really bringing home the bacon, shall I say, in terms of bringing them information and nibbling on what’s important, and also carrying that through until the end result as well.

SS: Absolutely. I think that’s a fantastic perspective. Now, explain to our audience, particularly those that may either do partner or direct, how can the approach to sales enablement differ for partners then for internal sales teams, and when an organization has an internal team and a partner team, how do you balance enablement resources to support both adequately?

LB: Yeah, absolutely. What tends to happen, well, I can talk from a MuleSoft perspective as we do have an internal enablement team and then I look after our external enablement. I am not saying that we are perfect in terms of our alignment and our resources, but what I can say is that consistency across enablement if you’re looking at partners and internal, it shouldn’t be different. There should always just be one question in your mind when you’re delivering enablement and it’s, does this bring value to my team? Will his enable them to sell better and sell larger?

That’s the same questions that we ask within the partner ecosystem. Do our teams have the specific sales messaging and the same kind of buzzwords and go-to-market strategies internally as they do externally. Do we have consistency across that messaging? What that does is that it brings these teams together because everyone’s getting that same messaging.

Effectively, what you need to do if you have an external and an internal enablement team, they shouldn’t be working without knowing what each other are doing. It’s very, very likely, and I’ll speak from a partner perspective, for any internal sales team that is working on a prospect or an account, it’s 99% likely that a partner will be in the account as an advisor, as a technologist, and may well be evaluating your technology.
As an external enablement, if we’re not providing that information to our internal teams, that’s not going to work in terms of being successful. I like to call it one team, one dream and killing two birds with one stone.

The other nuance to that is we may have people within internal enablement that are taking a lot of things from global and HQ, and there may be a few people on the call thinking, “Oh yeah, a lot of our programs and a lot of our strategy comes from HQ, and we just regurgitate what’s available.” Enablement, whether it’s internal or external, needs to be regionalizing their content. What I mean by that is you can build the foundations of what is coming out of HQ, but that can’t be delivered in the form that you have been presented it in your region because it’s just not going to resonate unless you’re really targeting what the focus is within that region.

For example, our HQ is in San Francisco. We get all this information, our internal and external teams will look at it, and there’ll be particular things in there that just won’t work in APAC, for example. We have to ensure that when we’re spreading resources, we’re putting them in the right place. You can have a really high-caliber team, but if they’re focused on the wrong things, then it’s just a waste of time.

If people are struggling with, “Oh my God, there’s only two people on our enablement team, how can we get this across hundreds of partners?” Really focus on what the value is and leverage what is going to be a quick win, leverage what is relevant within the region. That’s when you start to see whether you’re a team of 2 or 100, that’s when you actually start seeing value in what you’re delivering. It’s certainly quality over quantity.

SS: Absolutely. Now, you touched on this a little bit earlier, how partners will often have very competing priorities and I know that you’ve been very focused on making sure that you’re delivering training paths for partners.

How do you ensure that you not only get participation, but also engagement during your training programs? I would love to hear if there are some tips or tricks that you have on gaining mindshare with partners for enablement programs.

LB: Absolutely. I’m kind of different in the sense that the way that I am in work is the same as I am out of work, which means that I’m a bit no filter and what you see is what you get. The reason I say that is because within sales or enablement, people buy from people and people get excited by other people. I don’t necessarily go, wow, I really want to learn about MuleSoft today, this is amazing. No one thinks that, but what they do remember is someone that goes damn, he was pretty funny, and people should learn about this technology in a much more exciting way.

In terms of getting mindshare from your partners, be your authentic self, have a laugh, have a joke because you’re not there to be selling to a customer account or a prospect. You’re there to go, hey guys, this is awesome, we really want to deliver this for you, we think that we can, and we think that we can do it in this really, really fun way. That’s just one tick at the box.

The second tick is not assuming that you have earned the right to deliver enablement or programs. Just because that partner uses your technology or possesses your technology does not mean that you can go to a partner and say, well, we should deliver this because you need it and because you sell our product, and we are going to do this. You really have to ask them, can we come in and deliver something different? What is the value to you? What is the value to your organization?

Where we started here was basically calling out, and I think enablement is really, really in a strong position to effectively ask this. If you think to yourself, how many sales teams say this there’s probably not many, but what I say to partners is, “I don’t think that we did a good job last year in terms of our pipeline, in terms of our ACV, in terms of our sourced and it’s my responsibility and enablement to make sure that you’re provided as much value and support as possible. What did we do last year that we should do this year?”

Nine out of 10 people will not ask that because the assumption is that since there’s a partnership, there that there shouldn’t be that ask, you should know. It shouldn’t be based on assumptions. Once you ask that question, partners will completely flip and go, wow, we’ve never been asked that, that is amazing. Yeah, let’s do that. Then what that tends to do is start leading down this path of you understanding where the gaps were last year around your partners, around the technology. Why weren’t they possessing your technology? What you actually find is that there are just fundamental knowledge gaps at the very base level.

What you do with that is that you start building from the ground up, where you’re casting that net weight, so you get as many people into your sessions as possible. It doesn’t matter who it is, whether it’s the CEO down to the coffee lady, it doesn’t matter. Get as many people as you can into those sessions and start building that traction and the awareness because if people don’t know the basics of a MuleSoft or a Salesforce, how can they possibly identify opportunity and the context of the industry that they’re working in? It’s just not going to happen.

Once we call that out, that’s when these programs start running with intent, they start running a value, and that’s when partners go, yeah, this is really delivering on what we are trying to do this year. One of our partners, for example, by using this technique we went from having maybe three or four people attending programs to over 250. What that’s done is that it’s now opened up the global partner to enablement and enablement is reading that, leading that by the front. That’s what I mean by just asking them, what did we do last year that we should do this year? It’s not a stupid question.

I get really passionate about it this part because I think what tends to happen is a lot of people within enablement don’t ask those questions because they think “oh, if I ask that question, they’re going to beat me down with a stick because I should know that.” Well, no, you shouldn’t because there are thousands of people in a partner organization and asking that question will really open up doors.

SS: I love that question. Now, to call things out as well, or maybe even to highlight, you recently received MuleSoft’s team player award.

I’d love for you to talk to our audience about, how does cross-team collaboration help enhance your own partner enablement efforts?

LB: You hear this thing called focus on your swim lane. That tends to transcend not just from a sales team, but to all the other teams. Enablement should not just focus on their own swim lane because enablement is that bridge between all functions, all the external and internal partners.

What we try to do is if it has not been tried, just try it. This is where we built this cross-collaboration around, well, I could go and do what you tell me to do, but no, I’m not going to do that because I don’t know if that’s the right approach because I haven’t asked specifically.

What you’ll find is that enablement tends to come across as a support function, comes across as a way to have other functions maybe not do as much work as they should be doing. Enablement as a function should not be viewed as supportive. It should be viewed as pivotal and delivering success for the business and delivering success for partners.

There was one thing that really got me going on this, and it was something from our global team where we had our awards and someone had said in the messaging channel, “it’s so amazing to see enablement right next to channels. Wow, we are valuable.” I thought to myself, why is someone putting that in the channel, that we are valuable as if we’ve never been valuable? It should be ingrained in your mind with enablement that you are probably the most valuable function in any organization. Without enablement, your organization will not function, and it will not function externally either.

Once you start thinking to yourself, yeah, I’m going to own this, I’m going to go to every function and understand what their priorities are and how I can bridge these gaps. I’m not going to wait for someone to tell me what the issue is or what the gap is, I’m going to be really proactive and get out there and speak to as many people as possible and design programs where I think I see gaps.

We are neutral in enablement. If you’ve got customer success or sales, there’s always a hidden motivation around, I need this because I want that. Whereas enablement is, we’re going to give you this because we think that this will enable you to do a better job. That’s what I started to do last year with our team, which was not wait for someone to tell me where their gaps were but go out.

I would definitely say be more proactive than reactive within your organization. Start speaking to people that you haven’t spoken to before and really step outside of your comfort zone. Then you should hopefully see a difference between your internal and your external sales teams and functions as well.

SS: I love that, and I couldn’t agree with you more. Sales enablement is such a strategic function for an organization if utilized appropriately, so I absolutely agree. Lewis, in closing, you also mentioned that sales enablement contributes quite heavily to the success of the organization. Now, in order to do that, you have to think about how you’re measuring the impact. How do you go about measuring the impact of your partner enablement efforts?

LB: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a brilliant question because it varies across organizations around different metrics and different MBOs. From our end, our enablement was based upon certifications. Successful enablement was when we had to get 300 architects and developers certified on MuleSoft. If we did that, that was considered successful. However, I did not think that that was a suitable metric for success.

Sometimes, what tends to happen is for anyone that’s measured on technical aspects of enablement, there’s a difference between practice development and enablement. We know that practice development is, how are you building your ecosystem to deliver on a technology or deliver on a platform? Whereas enablement is that top of the funnel. We’re going to arm you with the best messaging and the best techniques to identify those opportunities to drive that pipeline.

When I joined the team last year, I thought to myself, wow, this is not how enablement should be run and I’m not going to run it this way. What I had said was, “I don’t expect you to really care about enablement or care about what we offer. If we can’t help you drive pipeline or ACV or opportunities, there’s no justification for you to do this.” What we’ve done this year is move away from this whole obsession with technical certifications, the whole obsession with project delivery around enablement in its purest sense. What we now measure on is enablement being able to identify opportunities. We are measured on how many opportunities can we influence through our sessions. We obviously get measured on our feedback. It’s very important as well that it’s not just black and white MBOs or KPIs. You have to have good feedback so that you can better improve or edit your next set of programs. Also looking at ACVs, did any of our enablement sessions contribute to the close of a deal? What that does is that it really puts enablement at that forefront of, where are we really adding value? Where do we not? And where can we expand our footprint?

SS: Thank you so much for the time today, I appreciate it. To our audience. Thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited have Jacqueline from Splunk join us. Jacqueline, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jacqueline Menzel: Great, thank you for having me. Yes, I am Jacqueline Menzel, and I make a living as a Regional Sales Enablement Manager at Splunk. I live in Munich, near the beautiful mountains, and I work from home like most of us have been for over a year now.

Initially, I was born in Eastern Germany and I was once a refugee from East to West Germany. I can tell you that this background has basically influenced my personality significantly. As for me as a person, I think the biggest part of my DNA is natural curiosity and the desire to support people. It’s helping people to become a better version of who they are already. With that DNA, I decided a while ago to move into a self-supporting role, helping sellers to get what’s needed to sell successfully, make more money, and to do this as fast as possible and as individually impacting as possible.

SS: Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m very excited to have the opportunity to talk to you. You actually recently wrote an article that caught my attention about your experience working from South Africa for a few months and your outlook on the home office of the future, which I think a lot of us are currently experiencing given the past year.

With your experience helping salespeople adjust and onboard in virtual environments this past year, what are some of your key learnings about the shift to virtual work and the impact that can have on productivity?

JM: Oh, yes. Virtual work has changed all of our lives, not only for sellers, but also for their customers. I think there lays the trigger for working successfully from home or anywhere. I think realizing that most of us work remotely and once we understand that this is what we do right now, we know that we’re not alone in this.

My personal experience with that in Africa, and by the way, due to COVID travel restrictions, it was not at all voluntary and it took you guys a while to get me here online, but I can just tell you it was a life-changing experience. It not only changed my role as such, but also my way of thinking about remote work.

It does reflect the new normal and also the possibilities we can get from it alongside the adjusted work style, the working hours, but also the lack of social contacts. Also working, and yes, even selling from anywhere, onboarding new people into a virtual world with most of them coming from a virtual world already, and keeping our own work-life balance healthy hopefully. Self-designed level has such a high impact on productivity and is still such a challenge. Even one year later, we are still, or even more than ever, struggling with it. How can one assure that knowledge is shared virtually? How can we make the whole thing have a lasting effect? How can you bring leadership to fly the plane with you since so many people are working more and harder, and since the age of Zoom or Teams or Google Hangouts has changed this world?

Let me look at it from two aspects. Employers and employees need to start to look at the give and the take. For example, my employer allows me to work from anywhere. I have the commitment that they support me during the pandemic, and even give me some extra time off or take leave when I need it because of the pandemic.

In return, I give back by being more flexible, healthier, and also happier. As an employee, think of how to best serve your customers these days, or how to generate big revenue. Think of how I can still have small talks when I meet my customers virtually? How can I start building sustaining relationships without social contact? How can I still perform good discovery and uncover the purpose of what I’m doing, what I want to sell to the person on the other side of the screen?

As a seller today, you need to learn the basics, like how to run virtual meetings. It’s not at all self-speaking. How do you engage? How do you demo or even whiteboard virtually while holding your coffee cup? Some people say, “Oh, it’s so easy we’ve done this for a year,” but I can tell you, this is such a transformational ask for some people. Working in a remote environment, selling remotely, will either lead to good or poor productivity.

SS: Absolutely. Now, I also want to understand, because obviously you’ve traveled the world and your focus is really around being able to tailor enablement programs for all of the different regions that you support.

In a similar vein I’d love to understand, what are your best practices for delivering tailored enablement programs at scale, but also how has that been impacted as you’ve had to shift everything to virtual?

JM: That’s a very good question. Let’s start with definition with the definition of tailoring. Tailoring simply means to take something existing, something like global programs (we don’t need to reinvent the wheel these days), and now you have to put some flavor like culture length, timing, or even essential needs the region has to it.

I think one need to keep in mind is that some content does not even land with every learner, especially when you think about cultural or language differences. I think that the most challenging part is really what you asked me about scaling. Scaling is a masterpiece here, so you need to make sure that you promote your work and find code delivering supporters. For example, your sales leaders. The virtual shift, I believe, is probably the hardest part. Take what you have, and almost reassign it into virtual workshops, virtual programs, and even adjust the metrics to measure success.

What does it take to bring something tailored into a virtual environment? I think the most challenging part is feeling you need to have clear outlines. What is the virtual deliver designed for?

Great planning. It is super important to have a solid timeline and agenda to your programs. You need to make sure you understand the resources you are going to replace today. There’s no more training in front of a class, it’s all virtual. Think about giving your learners homework and have them start it and prepare it for your session. Embed practical exercises to mold muscle memory. It takes seven times to stick to our brains, but how about practicing it? Most of all, the ownership of the sales leadership. I mentioned earlier that you need to have co-pilots to drive programs. Having sales leadership help you own those programs with clear metrics to measure your and their success will help you in the short and long term.

What I personally tend to forget, collect feedback from the receiver, the learners. That also helps me and even the people who co-deliver with me to improve the learning experience.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now, one thing that I noticed recently is that you were awarded an award for collaboration. I’d love to learn more about that award and what your best practices are because collaboration is so important, especially across all the stakeholders and cross-functional partners that you work with in enablement. What are some of the best practices for ensuring strong collaboration with stakeholders, especially in a virtual environment?

JM: Yeah. I have a saying, “collaboration is sharing, and sharing is caring.” Here comes my DNA into play. I love helping people and I think it’s very simple. First, think of what you have, what you get, or what you come across along your way. May it be know-how, a nice read, a piece of great work, whatever. Who else can make use of it?

Secondly, you need to know your stakeholders and their ecosystem. Who do you want to work with? Who do you want to collaborate with?

Thirdly, ways to share and collaborate using the tools you have at work and even outside of your work. What are the tools you’re using? I think last but not least, just be curious, nurture your relationships, make yourself relevant to them. Most importantly, always keep in touch with your stakeholders today and in the future.

SS: Absolutely. Now, I want to pivot a little bit because, in addition to collaboration, one of your passions is networking.
How do you leverage networking to not only enhance that internal collaboration, but also your external professional development?

JM: Yeah, that’s a great question too. Collaboration for me is simply networking and networking is collaboration, one doesn’t exist without the other one. You probably know that generally speaking, your career progresses because of 10% knowledge, 30% self-promotion, and 60% networking. If I would talk in a biased world, I think the male proportion of sales enablement leaders, or even sales leaders, do this so much better than we females do.

I do share and collaborate outside of my network, the same principle as described earlier. What’s important here is to think long-term. If you share something outside, you do help people outside of your organization or your personal life. If you think about it, they met may act as your multiplier. If you share today, they will benefit from it today, but they will also remember you in the future, and either help you to develop or share some golden nuggets.

If you put this into perspective of the sales world today, I think it’s super simple. People buy from people. If you share stuff with your customers, if you acknowledge the relationship, and if you keep networking with them today, with your employer in the future, with other companies you work for, you’re going to be super successful.

SS: I absolutely agree. Now, in your professional development, you mentioned the importance of having a growth mindset.
My last question for you is, as a sales enablement leader, how do you also foster the concept of a growth mindset amongst the sales teams to really help motivate new learning skills amongst the field teams?

JM: Yeah, let’s start with the definition. What is a growth mindset? Behind a growth mindset simply sits the idea that, let’s say with some efforts, is it possible to increase your talents, your learned, and even your forgotten skills and abilities. I would add authenticity to it. Who are you and what are you proud of? What makes you remarkable? By the way, what makes you remarkable or makes me remarkable is a great Google initiative. If you want to look that up, please do so.

When you look into sales teams today, you always find different mindsets, different skill levels, and even resistance, but also resilience for lifelong learning. Or as our Splunk CEO, Doug Merritt says, relentless learning.

That brings me back to the tailoring aspect and the simple frame around the why. What’s in it for them? Why have a growth mindset? Every enablement you deliver, every know-how transfer you deliver today, needs to start with a frame. Why are you getting this? What’s in it for you? As a result of today, or at the end of the workshop, what will you be able to do? Having a growth mindset is essential for lifelong success.

SS: I love the notion of resilience learning; I think that’s fantastic. Jacqueline, thank you so much for joining us today. I learned so much from you, thank you.

JM: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m really excited to have Eline from Sana Commerce join us. Eline, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Eline van den Brink: Thank you, Shawnna. Hi, my name is Eline van den Brink, and I lead a global team in sales enablement and operations at Sana Commerce, a software company in the e-commerce space. We basically make e-commerce and ERP systems work as one for B2B organizations.

I’m from the Netherlands, as you might’ve heard by my accent. I’m from a beautiful city called Rotterdam and I have a background in supply chain management and operations. I’ve been in the sales enablement space for about five years now. When I started at Sana, I was the only one in our commercial team with a full focus on providing insights into our commercial performance and making our sales operations more efficient.

Over the years, I have further developed the team, formalized our approach into what we now call sales enablement and operations.

SS: Eline, thank you so much for joining us. You have such a beautiful name, I’m jealous I can’t pronounce it as beautifully as you do.

Now, to dive right in, given your position and how you oversee both sale enablement and operations, what does the intersection between those two disciplines look like from your perspective?

EB: From my point of view, I think enablement and operations can really strengthen each other. For us, operations focus more on the technical side, the process side of things like tooling, activity tracking, KPI reporting, and processing deals. Enablement can really reinforce this and the other way around, it also works.

For example, enablement thinks about, how do we land new processes and solutions that maybe the operations team came up with? How do we make sure that they land in our organization, that they are adopted? How do we make sure that all of this knowledge is captured in a great onboarding program? How do we make sure that our sellers can always access the right marketing and product content at the right time? And also ensure that they actually use it when it’s needed?

It often happens that our enablement team would actually come up with a great idea on how to capture more insights on the usage of content in our sales process. They might want to embed this in reporting or another technology like our CRM system, and that’s where operation would then come in and they would collaborate on making that happen.

The other way around, operations have access to lots of data from tracking sales activities to more performance-related data. They would use this as input to determine, for example, where bottlenecks are in a process and if additional training is needed in certain areas. That’s where enablement can then add great value, creating more content or e-learnings or better onboarding to improve that.

SS: I think that’s spot on. Now, you also mentioned in your intro that you have expertise in supply chain management, and really thinking about how to optimize business processes.
How does this expertise inform your approach to sales enablement and operations and how can sales enablement practitioners really think about helping to streamline processes for salespeople?

EB: Yes, I’m a very process-minded person. I see everything as a supply chain, with at the end, the value that we deliver to our customer, which can be internal or external. Even though we don’t sell a tangible product at Sana, we sell software, I basically see our entire commercial process as a supply chain.

Every time our enablement team is facing a complex challenge, or we need to rethink a certain process, I try to encourage my team to really visualize that from start to end. What is your desired end result? Who is doing what? How does information flow from one person to another or from one system to another?

That often helps us to identify where things can be improved, to be more efficient, to be more effective. Most of what we do in enablement and operations has impacts on either efficiency or performance, so I do believe that that’s a great starting point for us.

SS: Absolutely. Now, as a sales enablement professional, you have a ton of stakeholders within the organization, and on LinkedIn you had mentioned the importance of translating the needs of stakeholders into your plans.

I’d love some advice from you. How can sales enablement collaborate with stakeholders from across the organization to improve alignment on all of the strategic initiatives for the organization?

EB: Yeah, I think sales enablement is a key player in the alignment between management, marketing, sales, product team, or the delivery team in our case. Even though our goal is to enable our sales team to be successful, we also understand and act upon the challenges and needs from those other departments.

I think in enablement you really have the ideal position to bring all of that together. For example, last quarter, we drove an initiative where we combined sales data on the usage of content and capturing seller’s qualitative input, and then combining that with marketing’s content strategy in order to drive real improvements into what assets we share out into the market.

We also worked with a product team to create better demo environments to showcase our product, which our sellers use, but we also take into consideration the needs and the challenges that our product developers face.

SS: I love that. Now, one strategic initiative that you’re passionate about is enhancing diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and I believe you are even part of the D&I team for your organization. In a recent article, you talked about the importance of D&I saying that it means everyone can be their true selves without compromising their identity. Personally, that is an area that I am extremely passionate about as well.

I would love to hear from you and for our audience, how can enablement help to ensure that people feel included and safe to be their authentic selves at work?

EB: That’s a great question. I truly believe that in enablement, you are the eyes and ears of the commercial organization, and you should use that ability to spot issues early on and make sure that things can be discussed openly and with the right person.

What I see in our organization is that often people from all over the business would ask my team, why does it always seem like you know everyone in the company? Well, I think we do. We do actually know a lot of people in the company because we have such a central position in the organization where we talk with so many different stakeholders and people from different regions, different teams. We really know a lot about what’s going on and we understand the different challenges and the different cultures that people actually have to work with.

Now, our company is still growing and scaling up, so we’re not a large enterprise yet, we currently have around 500 employees worldwide. I can imagine that if you’re in a larger enterprise, it’s more difficult to always know everything that’s going on. As an enablement team, you’re probably not going to know everything in the entire organization, but on a smaller scale, I think still within your department or within your region, enablement can fulfill that role being in that central position.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. Now, another area where inclusivity comes into play is with regard to gender diversity. I know that you have also been a really strong advocate for that, particularly for women in tech.

What has been your own experience navigating the industry, and being able to rise up to the levels of leadership throughout your career?

EB: I’m lucky to be working in a position and in a company where I could really craft my own job. Even though the environment I was working in at the beginning was predominantly male, I still built the team from scratch and therefore I could also prove myself in the field before I became the leader of the team.

I also think that maybe it’s not something that I like about myself, I’m going to share it anyway, but throughout my career, I’ve been very good at adjusting my behavior and my attitudes to what was expected from me by my mostly male colleagues. It got me to where I am now, but it also took some self-reflection and rethinking about, okay, who am I really? And how can I be a good leader while also staying true to myself?

That’s exactly one of the things that I want to make other women aware of so that they can avoid this type of behavior in their journey, and that they can really stay true to themselves, but also be a great leader. That’s why together with a colleague, I’ve initiated a women in tech community at our company. We’re trying to enable other women to overcome these challenges and be more confident in this male-dominated environment. We want to create awareness on the challenges that many women face and create a platform where these challenges can be discussed openly.
We’re still in the startup phase, but the feedback that we got so far has been great.

SS: I think that’s a fantastic initiative, I really do. Now, to close out on this topic, and my last question for you, Eline, what are some actionable ways that sales enablement can help remove barriers to really ensure equity in the opportunities to succeed for all reps within the organization?

EB: Yeah. I talked about the central position, and what I really love about sales enablement is that central position in our organization. Even though we are reporting into the commercial organization and we’re really driven by our ambitious goals and our KPIs and sales performance, our enablement team connects and collaborates with so many different stakeholders from different departments.

We just know a lot about the company’s processes, about the people, our customers. We can use that position to connect people from our product development team in Ukraine to our regional marketers in the US in order to create impactful content or create beautiful demo environments.

It allows us to play a key role in overcoming those cultural biases that you see when you work with people from different countries and different regions. Creating connections between people that go beyond their inner circle of the team or the country that they work in, and that’s what I really love about this position that we have in an enablement team.

SS: Eline, I’ve enjoyed chatting with you. Thank you so much for making the time.

EB: It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me and good luck with the rest of your podcasts.

SS: Thank you. To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have JD Miller, the Chief Revenue Officer at Motus, join us. JD, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

JD Miller: Thanks, I’m JD Miller. I’m a Chicagoan, and I went to school at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana originally thinking that I’d be an attorney. The summer before law school I did an internship in the Clinton White House and realized that the lawyers really weren’t having a lot of fun, so I needed a new career goal.
I had an undergraduate degree that was a double major in philosophy and communication with a minor in literature, which is a really great pre-law curriculum that doesn’t lend itself to any specific career. I knew that I wasn’t going to become a philosopher, so I stayed for a master’s degree in communication where we were studying how groups of people formed communities online. It was the late nineties, so a degree in social networking was a strange new thing. Ultimately it started me in a job at a small tech startup that grew to be a really big public company and a career in technology sales was born.

If we fast forward 20 years, I finished the PhD in tech-enabled communications, and professionally I’ve done a series of roles at rapidly growing software companies, generally in the sales or marketing functions.

Today, I’m the Chief Revenue Officer at Motus where I run the sales and marketing teams. We have a series of solutions that help organizations to do what we call “working anywhere.” It really helps people figure out how to ensure that employees have the phones, internet connections, home office setups, and car reimbursements they need to make sure that it can be as efficient and effective as possible in this new paradigm of work where everyone seems to be working from home.

SS: Yes. I was going to say, right now your company is very well positioned given the state of the world. Now, you have a wide range of experience, JD, leading teams across the business, including marketing and sales.

How has this experience in many types of revenue-facing roles really helped to set you up for success as a revenue leader?

JM: We know there’s a lot of discussion lately about the role of the CRO and how that’s different from what people might historically have thought of as simply the head of sales. When you’re responsible for all revenue-generating functions, you certainly have to have solid stable skills, but you also need to be able to lead in areas of partnership, customer retention, customer satisfaction, you need to have some financial concepts, marketing, online sales and a whole lot more.

Most of my career has been spent in private equity-backed companies that generally operate on a three or four-year investment drumbeat. That really let me be fortunate enough to be able to change directions and strategies with a new investor or a new role pretty frequently. Because of that, as a leader, I don’t think that I have to know exactly how to do every one of my team members roles. My management style has been much more surrounding myself with people who are really smart and capable in each of their functions, and then let them go at it.

But it’s important that I’m able to have good conversations with team members about their function and engage in strategic discussions practically. While I might not personally know exactly how to go bid on today’s trending Google AdWords, I still need to be able to know what it’s all about and how it can drive us forward. I think that wide range of experience with all the PE firms really has given me more than an inch deep, but that mile deep knowledge, and a lot of different functions that lets me do that.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now, in addition to an expansive professional background, as you mentioned in your introduction, you have a very unique educational background with your master’s degree in virtual and collaboration technologies and the PhD in communication technology.

As businesses are rapidly evolving and trying to adopt these types of technologies this past year, really out of necessity, I think this is an area where you have a lot of expertise, so I would love to get your opinion and your perspective. How can businesses effectively utilize these types of technologies to really maximize collaboration across the revenue-facing teams?

JM: I think that’s a great question because you’re right. This is really a year where virtual work has come into the spotlight. At Motus we developed this hashtag, we call it “work anywhere.” I think a year ago, a lot of companies who’d never thought about it before suddenly had to implement this work anywhere strategy in a matter of days when the pandemic came in and sent people home.

That has some very tactical things, like making sure everyone is connected by phone and internet at home to do their job. There’s also higher-level thinking like, how are you going to build a sense of connection across your sales team? Are you going to create trust online between your sellers and your clients? How do you actually create a sense of community and loyalty to your company? And how do you really have teams who don’t just manage to meet in Zoom, but actually flourish in the environment?

When I think about how the communication technology background and PhD kind of plays in, it’s really helped us to pay a lot of attention to what people are saying. We’re seeing a lot of companies who have employees and jobs that used to think they couldn’t do at home at all, suddenly seeing that it works and that their future is going to be a workforce that demands flexibility as part of their work week.

When I think about the future, and I’m putting on my academic hat, I don’t think that people are necessarily ever going back to work or back to the office in the way that we used to do that five days a week before. Instead, at Motus we talk about work forward. The work forward paradigm is one where people get to choose when they want to be in the office and when they don’t. If that’s what the paradigm is going to be, and you’re going to be an employer that people want to work for, it’s really essential that their online experience isn’t just a second choice or an afterthought. It really needs to be equally rich and equally valuable when you engage with someone online.

What does that mean, topically? Well prosaically, for companies that have physical offices, they need to be sure that they have easy access to teleconferencing equipment and microphones and all of that kind of stuff. I also think there are a lot of implications for how a professional team structures their workday. I’ve been talking with a lot of my colleagues in sales who just finished their quarterly sales kickoffs, or their QBRs. Those events used to be sending everyone out to a hotel ballroom for two or three days, and they’d sit for eight hours a day and just tour of all of this training.

People really are structured to work that way, even then when they’re face-to-face. Now if you’re going to do it online, we know that meeting on any sort of teleconferencing system, you really get diminishing returns of attention if you’ve got somebody sitting in front of a video camera for eight hours. We’ve really had to think in our sales team about how you restructure learning experiences and our own sales kickoff. Instead of being an intensive two-day event, now it’s really stretched out across maybe two or three weeks. Each day there’s maybe one or two 45-minute sessions that you can dial into or get into.

I’m thinking a lot about as businesses are adapted to technology, figuring out how you can actually embrace the characteristics of the technology to make it a perfect experience in itself, not this sort of secondary carbon copy of something in person.

SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. Now, JD I think a lot of organizations right now, and to the point you just made, they’re starting to think about, how do we shift back into in-person environments or, maybe to your point, some sort of a hybrid in-person and virtual environment.

Do you have any advice or how should they go about doing that effectively while still being able to take advantage of a lot of the lessons that they might’ve learned when they had to shift to virtual in the first place last year?

JM: Yeah, great question. Let me tell you a little bit about how we did that with our own sales kickoff at the beginning of the year because we really had to think a lot about, given the state of the pandemic, is it going to be entirely virtual? Are we ready to be in person? Are we ready for some people to be in person? And so on.

My team really sat down and looked at the basics of our sales meeting and said, if we were all together, what would we be doing? We’d be wanting to have training, we’d be wanting to build community amongst the participants. We also have a really strong philanthropic commitment that every time our teams to come together, we want to do something good for the local community. Ultimately, the state of the virus in Illinois said we had to be a virtual event, but we really wanted to figure out how could we get each of those there’s three themes into our virtual meeting.

It started with a conversation I had with someone who works at the auditorium theater. It’s a big historic theater, downtown Chicago. With the pandemic, they had their doors shut for nine or ten months, so they were really struggling. We thought about our philanthropic hat and said, how could we help this community organization? How could we use who they are as a foundation for us to do our training and our community building and all of our online stuff.

We asked them to be our virtual host for us. What that meant was, it’s a five-thousand-seat auditorium that’s a hundred years old, and I got to be there live, in-person with a handful of my sales team. The other hundred-plus participants were dialing in virtually. We did our different training sessions, and they were broken up by what we call an “only at Motus experience” where we took the camera and went on a tour of the theater and had the stage managers show us the upper rafters where no audience member had ever been. How do they make it fun thunder and lightning down on the stage? We had a performer do a discussion about some of the performances they have done and things like that. For our virtual participants, they wound up feeling that sense of place even though they weren’t physically in Chicago. They felt like it’s a place that they were in.

Then we also tried to extend that out to their homes by sending each participant a box of theater concessions, programs for the event, popcorn, candy, all of that. And then per social hour, we had 20 of our salespeople put together an online zoom play, where they had ordered costumes on Amazon and wore them and presented them on Zoom.

We think that that hybrid experience works because it was true to all of our core values and core senses. Even if we were together, we would have wanted to see people’s personalities. We would’ve wanted to have small breakout sessions where they get to know each other really well. We really want them to leave with a memory that will last. When I think about the future, I’m sure I will have a sales meeting that gets back together physically all together in one place again. I know a lot of my sales team wants to actually have it in the auditorium theater because they developed sense of place there.

I also think with customer events, we’re finding with user groups and user conferences that these multi-day experiences that happen online are ones that people will kind of dip into, maybe for just 20 or 30 minutes. That’s really exciting from a customer engagement standpoint as well.

I really think, again, it’s not going back to just physical events. I think we’ve raised the bar now where every physical event is also going to need to have an online component that’s equally strong and equally as engaging as the in-person components so that clients and partners and different participants can choose how invested they want to be. Maybe it’s just dropping in for a half-hour session, or maybe it’s going onsite for the whole two or three-day event. I think this year’s events being virtual has raised the standard for marketing events. People now expect them to do the double duty with all the events going forward.

SS: I absolutely agree. In particular, because we have two events coming up that will be hybrid this year. It’ll be a fun new challenge for us to tackle. Now, JD, I’d love to shift gears just a little bit because there is another area that really became a critical focus for a lot of companies. That was, how do I engage my customers in a really deep and meaningful way, particularly over the past year?

You wrote an article about this, about being professionally persistent, I think is what you coined in that article, without obviously being annoying to customers. Since sales enablement professionals, our audience, often help drive sales engagement strategies, can you share some of your best practices with our audience?

JM: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the notion of professional persistence comes from data. With the academic background, I’m always trying to look at data and trends and see what we can learn. When I looked at data across multiple companies that I’ve worked for, we found that it took about 17 touches to actually make a connection with a prospect. 17 times you needed to reach out on a cold call or an email or something before they recognized your name, understood your products, and were able to decide whether or not they wanted to meet with you. 17 is an awful lot of engagement, so we really had to come up with, what are the best practices for that persistence so that I get my client’s attention, but I’m not annoying them or being unprofessional.

The first thing is, find the people where they are. When I began my sales career 20 years ago, the old paradigm was about everyone’s going to work in an office, they’re sitting at a desk with a phone there. It was just about cold calling and getting someone to answer their phone. Today, of course we’re not in offices as much as we used to be, but technology is flourishing so we also have all of these online labs with Facebook and Twitter and cell phones and all different modes of communication. When we’re trying to engage your prospect cold, we really need to use all of those modes of communication. Phone calls, texts. Nope, social networks, LinkedIn, all of those different places to really engage the prospect where they’re at and where they’re living.

Now, part of the flourishing of technology has also meant that it’s really lowered the cost to be able to engage somebody. I could send a personalized email to 5,000 people in just a few minutes for just pennies. As a result, their inboxes are flooded with sales emails every day. The second thing we need to do is cut through the clutter. Part of it is having a high enough volume that if your message is getting sent out and it’s one of 16 emails someone receives that day, there’s a high likelihood that it was just deleted without being read. We need to know that, and we need to teach our salespeople that you don’t just send one email and expect you’re going to get a result. You really need to have a reason to engage multiple times or a way to kind of modify that message 5, 6, 7, 12, 17 times, so that it’s actually seen.

Finally, I think another best practice is really all about targeting the message and having something meaningful to say to the person that you are talking to. When I began selling two decades ago, a typical cold call said, “I’m wondering if I could get 15 minutes of your time to learn more about you.” Whereas people always say when they call me, “I want to hear what’s keeping you up at night.”

Today, the expectation is that there is a lot you should know about me before you even picked up the phone because I have so much of my life online with my LinkedIn profile, my website and my company’s website or whatever. The third best practice is really making sure that you have a good-targeted message that resonates with something that you know about the person and brings them meaning on the first engagement, rather than hoping that they’re going to be generous with their time and engagement sales process with you.

SS: I want to talk to you a little bit about productivity because I think it’s always been a primary focus for revenue leaders, but I think as teams have had to adjust to some new working norms, I think it’s become a little bit of a concern. How productive and how much are their reps actually participating and engaging in what they’re supposed to do to hit their goals and their targets?

In an article you wrote about how important it is to set appropriate targets. You mentioned it’s important to really base the goals on evidence that it can actually be attained. How can that help improve productivity and effectiveness of a sales team from your perspective?

JM: Great question. When I started working at Motus, the leadership team here and our board really spent a lot of time in the early weeks refining how would we set sales targets. We landed with this philosophy that we wanted to give our sales teams a culture of winning, we wanted them to be able to stretch and overachieve and not have it super easy. We didn’t want people to have targets that were unrealistic.

We spent a lot of time really refining a methodology from looking back at what does the legacy performance been of individual reps? Of individual teams? Of individual products? What’s the seasonality of that? Then really trying to set sales goals that history says not only can be achieved, but are highly likely to be achieved, and adding a little bit of a stretch goal so that people need to expend a little bit of effort.

Now, I know a lot of other organizations just begin top-down and say, we want our company to grow 15% this year, so let’s just raise everyone’s quota 15% or let’s hire 15% more salespeople. The problem with that is that it’s not based in any fact. Those blanket goals assume there’s never going to be any turnover in your sales organization, no one’s ever going to leave. It assumes that if you hire a new person, they’re going to be a hundred percent effective on day one. We just know that that’s not true.
Spending time looking at what has happened in the past and then giving people just a tiny stretch is really a formula that I’ve landed on that makes everybody happy, helps us hit our sales targets, and really gets us in a culture of success.

My other kind of secret that I don’t admit to you all the time is that when I set out the quarterly goals, I also really like to have the first quarter goal be a little bit less than what I know the team is going to do, and I’ll make up for it in Q3 or Q4. That first quarter lets us really get out of the gates with a feeling of success.
We set targets where my team actually hit 120% of what we put out there as a Q1 goal. Now, we’ve actually landed pretty much where I thought the team was going to be, but I knocked down their Q1 quotas so every seller feels a sense of accomplishment, they’re happy, they’re motivated. They’re not going to be thinking about going to another organization because they think the rest of the years can be really successful.

I think that little trick is important because if you end Q1 missing your number, you’re just playing catch up for the rest of the year. Setting those targets in that way I think is what’s led to success for me.

You also asked about the sense of, how do I know people are working at home? I think that there’s two schools of thought in that culture. Do you believe you’ve hired professionals that you trust to do the job? Or do you have more of a kindergarten teacher approach where you feel you need to be supervising everything all the time?

Our salespeople are some of the most highly compensated people in our organization. We do a rigorous recruiting process with them. We really dive in on values. I really have a sense of trust amongst my team that they’re going to work wherever they are. Now, at Motus we never had, even when we were in offices, we never had a nightmare culture. We set people’s goals and said, here’s the target you’re supposed to achieve. We trust that you’re smart, we trust that you’re hardworking, and we trust that you’re going to do what it takes to achieve. If that means you can hit your quarter by working two hours a day, that’s great. If that means you’re going to hit your quota by working 10 hours a day, that’s great. You figure out what works for you.

We call it, find your own balance. If we set the targets at industry standards and reasonable things that most people are accomplishing in seven or eight hours, we think we’ve had a good balance with our employees and have happy sellers as well.

SS: I think that is a very healthy approach. Now to close, and this has been a fantastic conversation, so thank you so much for your time, but to close, I’d love to get your opinion.
What do you think will be the future? What will the future of business look like given the technological innovation that organizations have encountered and adopted in the past year?

JM: Yeah. Again, it comes back to that notion of work forward. I am convinced we are never going back to an office that’s 9 to 5 that has employees in that office all the time. We know that we have technology that makes virtual work really possible. High-speed internet connections, great cameras and microphones in our computers. It makes it really simple for people to kind of connect from anywhere in the world.

We know from a year of experience now that not only can it be done, but it has been done and employees really liked it. Data also shows that people are much more productive than the last year, than they were when they were commuting into an office and all of that. I believe that employers of choice are going to be companies that recognize this work-life integration that everyone has and will say, “we’re going to have some physical office spaces and there’ll be times that you’re going to want to meet face-to-face with a colleague or a client, so here’s a physical office to do that in.”

I also think that they’re going to recognize you’ve got kids or a dog that needs to get taken to the vet or whatever your personal life might be and creating flexibility to let people structure there their workdays around their personal commitments. In the end, I think then it’s a fluid environment where if you go into an office, great. If you want to go live in an Airbnb in Hawaii for a week and do all of your sales meetings from there, that’s great too. I think it’s flexibility that makes people effective, makes people happy, and ultimately, I think loyal to their employers.

SS: JD, thank you again so much for your time today. I enjoyed learning from you.

JM: I enjoyed being with you, thanks for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Jeff Depa from Gainsight join us. Jeff, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jeff Depa: Thank you, it’s great to be here. I can give you just a 50,000-foot overview on me. I began my professional career as a developer and moved through professional services to a number of different go-to-market functions at both large organizations and startups. I have been a CRO for the past six years now, and the past six months have been at Gainsight.

That means I’m accountable for our overall go-to-market and our revenue performance as a whole. For those not familiar, Gainsight really is the customer success market leader and category creator. As the economy continues to transition to subscription and consumption-based business models, it’s really, really critical for businesses to be able to enable their product adoption to optimize their customer experience and to drive outcomes, but ultimately to retain and expand. We offer a platform that provides the analytics, the actionable insights, and really the tooling to support the entire customer life cycle in that regard.

Just to size us a little bit, we raised over a hundred million in recurring revenue last fiscal year, we are global. The majority of our revenue sits in North America, but we have a large presence in Europe and a growing presence in APAC. What I would think is a fairly standard segmentation in terms of a large focus on enterprise verticals team, we’ve got a mid-market organization and I’ve got an account management team as well as your supporting cast of SDRs, SEs, and a business development team in the field.

SS: Well, that is an impressive go-to-market team, and on LinkedIn you actually described yourself as being an architect of GTM teams. As a revenue leader, how do you approach building GTM teams or go-to-market teams to drive hypergrowth?

JD: I think the question is how much time you have. It really starts with a deep understanding of your market, your value proposition, and particularly your buyer’s ideal customer profile or ICP. There are companies out there today that are lucky enough to be a product like growth play. Can you rely on a viral spread of your product and your brand, or do you need a growth plus sales approach? That’s particularly important in the enterprise and the mid-market space. I spent the bulk of my career in that large-scale enterprise technology, and ultimately, I think it comes down to what outcomes can you go create in your client’s business. Creating those outcomes requires a fairly detailed understanding of your strategy, how you operate, and how you execute.

There’s a framework that I like to use where there are about seven key areas that you need to be able to dig into to go build that go-to-market framework. The first is really understanding your product and the value drivers. What are your key features? More importantly, what are the key value drivers and outcomes that you can go create? How do you then align to the market? How do you segment that market? What are the personas? What are the verticals? What are the needs and behaviors of your potential customers by segment?

From there, you can move on to what’s your messaging? What is that unique value proposition and ultimately, what is that positive business outcome that you can go create in your customer’s business? When you know that, you can move on to coverage. How do I build my sales team? How do I cover that market based on portfolio potential? What are the roles and skills of different types of sales resources, whether it’s hunters or farmers or lands and expands? Oftentimes you need to augment that with channels. I think especially in the enterprise space, having a really focused channel strategy, where you understand the architecture and economics of your partners and how you build a bigger addressable market together is key. On top of that, you need to layer sales process. If we’re going to effectively execute at scale, there needs to be a cadence, there needs to be a level of operational support and process so people know what to expect and people can communicate effectively.

Finally, it all comes together with competence centers. Sending the right quotas and targets and having the appropriate visibility for the team as to where they stand. You layer that on top of a foundation. I like to call it my air dashboards, which is activities, indicators, and results. When you tie all that together, you can structure a really powerful framework where you are checking the box of really everything you need to think about to go bring a product or a solution to market.

SS: I bet, and I imagine enablement plays a significant role in a lot of those components. From your perspective, what role does enablement play in helping those go-to-market teams sustain hypergrowth?

JD: Enablement is really a key aspect of it. In fact, as I mentioned, I’m roughly six months into Gainsight and when I did the assessment of what we needed to either shore up or invest in to get to the next level of revenue as a company, enablement is one of those key functions. You cannot systematically execute at scale if you don’t have an ability to go arm and equip your team. And that’s everything from content and messaging all the way down to tools and baselining how you expect the knowledge to be both deployed and leveraged by your sales organization.

My enablement team here, we’ve actually just hired and added a few folks into the organization. We are launching our first inaugural bootcamps, which I think is really, really important as you’re growing a sales organization to actually have a consistent manner to go onboard folks, putting them through a process where they can understand everything from the customer to why we even exist. Why is there a problem in the marketplace and how are we uniquely positioned to go solve that? But doing it in a way that’s repeatable and allows you to get some consistency in your business.

I’ve worked in organizations in the past that haven’t really focused on enablement, and oftentimes you bring a new hire to the company, you give them a laptop, you give them a pat on the back and say have fun. You get very, very different results when you do that. You have some folks that can come in as high performers and kind of navigate their way, but more often than not, you get really inconsistent performance. This is why when you go look at things like sales productivity, you will see the haves and have-nots, you’ll see reps that are blowing it out every quarter, and you’ll see others that aren’t. Or you see one quarter of great performance and three quarters of incredibly poor performance. Oftentimes it comes down to, have we consistently enabled the team? It requires the rep, and it requires your field team to take it the last 20, 30%, but that core 70, 80% of content messaging, knowledge, value prop, all of that needs to be tied together and really institutionalized by your enablement team.

You can’t do that with enablement alone. It requires having a solid foundation and things like your PMM organization, your product marketing organization, the marketing team having that cross-functional organization that supports how the entire company coalesces and goes to market is really, really important.

SS: Absolutely. Now, one component of that is culture. Organizations like Gainsight that are experiencing hypergrowth might come across an issue where there can be turbulence in culture or sustaining a positive culture, particularly amongst the sales team.

I’d love your advice. How can revenue leaders help to sustain a healthy culture as organizations grow? And how do you see enablement’s role in supporting that?

JD: Values and culture are absolutely key. I’ll tell you I literally just got off another call before I joined this one and it was a fireside chat with all of our new hires and bootcamp. I spent probably 30 minutes talking about Gainsight values. This is something that a lot of companies talk about, but I will say, and obviously I’m a big fan of Gainsight because I work here, this is one of the few places I’ve seen or worked in my career that actually takes them to heart and lives them on a day-by-day basis. They are more than a poster up in your break room.

We’ve got a couple of core values. The golden rule, we believe in treating everyone the way in which you’d want to be treated. Another is success for all, meaning a really critical pursuit of balancing the success for our customers, for our teammates, for our families, for our investors. A third value is childlike joy. This is one that you can go search some YouTube videos on Gainsight and you will see the different rap songs that we put out. I actually dressed up in the orange tuxedo from Dumb and Dumber as part of our revenue kickoff this year. But bringing that inner child and that joy to work every day, it just makes it a fun place to work. Shoshin is another value we have. It’s about beginner’s mind, and this is really important across the company. Every time you approach a problem, have that beginner’s mind, be able to go ask the five why’s instead of just jumping to the conclusion as to here’s what I think we need to go do. And then finally, the last one that’s important for us is called stay thirsty. We believe in a really internally driven strive for greatness.

All of these values, they comprise the core DNA of your culture. This is something that, A: you need to hire for it. When we go through the hiring process, we score everyone on their ability to be a cultural match to our values. How much they exhibit our values, and can they do that? B: you need to deliver, like I’ve talked across the board, it’s up to every executive to really be a key leader and demonstrate how these values matter. And you can’t tolerate behavior that goes against that. Oftentimes, things will get brushed under the rug, but you need to go address that head-on because otherwise you’re not truly living your values.

Finally, I’ll say this, especially with regard to enablement and values, there’s this old adage: when you scale a sales organization, hire the masses, put them in classes. Then there’s the last part of it that I won’t say because it’s a bit off color, but the reality is it can’t just be about pushing people through a system, you’ve got to make it fun. You have to support the team’s ability to achieve. Designing your enablement programs with your field organization as the customer is key. Is your PMM team, is your competitive intelligence team, is your marketing team thinking about how the sales rep can use this. How is an SE going to go leverage this and drive value in a customer environment?

If you’re not thinking about that, it tends to fall rather flat, and they become artifacts that go up in whatever your content management system is, and they’re not used. To me, it’s key to have that embedded across everything you do from a culture perspective.

SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. Now, you also receive a lot of praise from your peers for your coaching skills. Given your experience as a successful coach, I’d love to understand, what are some ways that enablement can help sales and revenue leaders like yourself effectively coach their teams?

JD: I think first and foremost, we need to recognize that coaching is a behavior, It’s not a task. It’s not hey, I need to go check this box, I need to go coach my team. It’s how we approach and engage with our team. Again, enablement treating the field as their customer and taking that coaching mindset into account with everything that they produce in every engagement we have is really critical.

You need to think about, especially as a sales leader, but even importantly as an enablement leader, how do I remove obstacles? How do I help my team reframe the problem to potentially see it in a new way, ultimately, that will allow them to create more value for their customers? How do we understand the motivations of the team?

It’s not easy, especially in a field organization. “Everything is easy, it’s money.” It’s not. There’s more to it than that. There’s recognition, there’s that tangible sense of accomplishment, building and designing your programs where you can understand there’s motivators and engage with your team. It’s really key.

A couple last ones are focusing on people’s strengths. There’s an old, you know, whether you’re in football and coaching, they talk about it’s the players not the plays. The reality is it’s both. You have to understand the strengths of the people within your organization and put them in positions to be successful. That’s really what coaching is about, and your enablement team can really help you do that as you architect, both your bootcamps and then your ongoing training. We have a sales academy here where we launch new content and processes as part of almost like a product manager type of launch. All that has to be taken into account.

Then, finally, know when and where to go provide feedback. You have to have a constant mechanism for that feedback so that people expect it, but also that they want, and they welcome it. If it’s of the guise of removing obstacles and helping them go drive the things that are important to them and their business, such as increasing selling time, giving them more at-bats, things like that, all of those become really key.

SS: Fantastic, this has been a fantastic conversation. Jeff, I have one last question for you. I always like to round out our podcasts on this particular topic, but particularly from you and your revenue perspective, how can sales enablement really maximize its business impact? You mentioned AIR earlier, but what are some of the key metrics that you look at to measure the success of enablement’s efforts?

JD: I’ll give you a consulting answer. It depends on where you’re at in your journey and actually having a fully built out enablement function. There’s a number of different metrics you should look at. Obviously at the top level, once you’re in that sustained steady-state, you’re looking at things like productivity and yield across the organization. Supporting resource yield, so if I’m doing a great job enabling my team, I theoretically should be able to get to really industry best in class standards when it comes to perhaps SE and rep ratios, things like that.

But other things that you look at, I just mentioned one, increase selling time. The ability that we can make people so good at what they do, and we can support them as a tool, as a process. Having the right artifact at the right time with the right tools behind them just gives them more selling time and allows them to be more productive. Measuring that selling time is key. Time to first deal, so not just when am I a fully ramped and productive rep, but how quickly can we get you out there and can get you closing opportunities is another good metric to go track.

Then longer term, one of the other ones that I’ve looked at over time is the actual sales cycle. If we do a good job of truly enabling the team and more importantly, aligning to the buyer’s journey, we should be able to go accelerate that sales cycle because we understand the challenges our buyers are facing and we are optimizing artifacts and messaging to help them through that process, which ultimately should lead to quicker deal cycles.

SS: I appreciate this so much, Jeff, I’ve learned so much from you. Thank you again for your time today.

JD: Awesome. I really appreciate being here. Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Michelle join us. Michelle, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Michelle Anthony: Hi, thanks so much for having me, it’s great to be with you today. I’m Michelle Anthony, the chief revenue officer here at Lee Hecht Harrison, known as LHH, and we’re part of the Adecco group. What we do is we help organizations transform their workforces. Historically, LHH has been known as a career transition or outplacement business, but what we have found more and more is that organizations are looking to transform their workforces to be future-proof or ready for the workforce that they need for the future.

We’ve been doing a lot of work to assist organizations, developing new skillsets and new leadership profiles that they need to have the right talent to match their business strategy going forward. We’ve been transforming as we’ve been helping our clients transform. As the chief revenue officer, I have the pleasure of looking after both sales and marketing globally here at LHH.

SS: Well Michelle, thank you so much for making the time for us today. You have a wide range of experience leading teams across the business, and as you mentioned, currently you’re leading both sales and marketing. I’d love to hear from you, Michelle, how has this experience in many types of revenue-facing roles really helped set you up for success as a revenue leader yourself?

MA: Yeah, thanks for the question. I’ve enjoyed a lot of variety in my career, both in sales leadership and in marketing leadership. I think being client-centric and being grounded and serving the needs of clients is really at the heart of good marketing and at the heart of good sales performance. I think that’s what unites us as functions and that’s really where we have a lot of common ground.

Also, I began my career, my formative days as a marketer, my first decade as a marketer, with Dell many moons ago and we were really focused, not only on meeting client needs, but also having a revenue-generating mindset. That really shaped my thinking as a marketer. I’ve always been exceptionally close to clients and exceptionally close to the sales team, even in marketing roles, and have always considered marketing in many ways to be an extension of the sales team. That sales and marketing divide that many people experience or talk about or write about, my experience has been quite the opposite. I’ve always felt that we’ve been one team. One go-to-market team is the framework that I’ve always operated under and was trained under from a very, very early stage. That’s how I approach things here at LHH and I think we’ve been able to grow the team and grow revenue as a result.

SS: That’s fantastic. I think you absolutely have the ideal setup. You’ve also said in the past that you believe sales and marketing have a joint responsibility to deliver value to clients. What are some of your best practices to create alignment between sales and marketing so that they can do exactly that?

MA: Yeah, I think when we’re at our best, we’re co-creating with our clients and we’re uncovering those needs that our clients have that are informing things like our product strategy and our product roadmap. They’re informing our editorial calendar or thought leadership calendar or campaign calendar from a marketing standpoint so that our content that we’re putting out is topical and relevant and adds value to our clients. And then arms our sellers, arms our salesforce with things that are adding value and that are relevant so that they’re showing up in a way that is adding value and that is trusted and helping them build that trust with clients. It’s that dialogue.

Some things that we’ve done to help facilitate that co-creation with our clients are establishing a client advisory board, I know a lot of organizations do this, with some of our biggest clients, some of our best clients, and some prospects as well, so that we can have a good sensing ear for what is really going on. What are their most pressing needs, what are some of the future sensing needs that we can be in front of and help them solve so that we can institutionalize that internally all the way from product development, all the way down through sales enablement. That has really been one of the things that’s added a lot of value across the organization for us.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now, I want to pivot back to what you were talking about with regards to LHH and how you guys are helping organizations build a workforce for the future. You recently wrote an article where you said companies should focus on lifelong employability because as you said, technology innovations continued to create this gap between the skills a company needs and the skills that the workforce of today possesses. I’d love to understand from you, how can leaders shift their mindset and really think about helping to develop employees internally?

MA: Yeah, thanks for the question. It’s so timely and topical right now as you’ve mentioned, It’s a bit of a perfect storm, isn’t it, that’s been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re in a world where things have been massively undergoing digitalization with the prominence of artificial intelligence that have only been accelerated because of the virtual nature that we’re living and working in now with the pandemic.

As a result, we’ve got some critical skill gaps in the market. We haven’t been able to re-skill and retrain the talent fast enough, and we have an aging workforce. We’re not able demographically in many countries, in many markets, to refill the supply of talent at a fast enough rate.

Bringing all of these things together, all of these macro trends together, and you have this perfect storm where you have this critical shortage of skills that are needed to do the jobs of the future. As a result, what got you here won’t get you there. The old hiring and firing practices won’t get you the workforce that you need because those jobs can’t be filled with talent readily available on the market because the skills don’t exist in enough supply. What you need to do is you need to look from within, and that’s what the most progressive companies have realized. That’s what the most progressive clients that we work with today are doing. They’re looking from within, and they are retraining and reskilling their own employees to fit these critical roles that they know that they going to need to be a viable business in the future.

We’ve worked with several large organizations, but I’ll just take a large financial services client that we’re working with today. We have assisted them in essentially identifying populations of individuals that have the aptitude to be re-skilled. We also have diagnostics where we can help them predict which jobs are likely to change in skill composition and skill profile in the future 5 years out, 10 years out. So, what does your workforce look like today? What should your workforce look like 5 years from now, 10 years from now? What are the pools of talent that have the aptitude and are likely to be successful in a rescaling intervention? Then, what is the rescaling intervention that’s needed ultimately in order to place those individuals in those future-focused roles?

That is the work that we’re doing actively with clients. One of the examples that I think is really cool is that insurance firms no longer need a lot of actuaries because a lot of that work has been automated through AI. We found out through doing this work in partnership with them that they tend to be really great data security workers. They’re very successful in those re-skilling interventions and it turns out large financial services or insurance providers do need a lot of data security talent in their future workforce. That’s just one example of how we’re working with clients to develop employees internally to be fit for the future.

SS: I think that’s amazing. Now, you talked about how retraining is important, but on its own, it’s not enough to keep employees agile, and sales enablement is often very involved in training and professional development efforts. How can sales enablement practitioners take those efforts a step further to help drive retention?

MA: Yeah, it’s so important, isn’t it? In terms of enablement and retention. What we’re finding right now is that it’s really agility and empathy that tend to be the softer skills that are leading to higher engagement and higher retention rates, especially given the COVID-19 fatigue. I think we’ve all pivoted and we’re all working virtually in this new world and no one really knows what the new normal is going to be. Everyone’s a bit fatigued based on Zoom fatigue or Teams fatigue, whatever your virtual medium is. What we have found in some of the research that we have done, again, in partnership with some of our clients, is that team empathy and team resilience is stronger, It retains better, it has higher engagement and performs stronger than individual resilience and empathy.

What we have done is produced an article that’s out on LinkedIn that was actually co-authored by Keith Ferrazzi and our chief innovation and product officer Mary Claire Race and published in Harvard Business Review. It has some tips on how you build team resilience because that’s ultimately what drives engagement and retention. One of the coolest tips in that article is about your team huddle or your team meeting that you may have on a weekly basis or a bi-weekly basis. I know some sales teams even have huddle up on a daily basis. One of the coolest things that you can do to build some team resilience is just to do a quick temperature check at the beginning of every meeting and say, “Hey, on a scale of one to five today, how’s your energy? Are you a one? Are you all the way up at a five? And what’s driving that?” It just surfaces some really honest and open and safe conversations, and it builds some of that more emotive, more human connection. It’s really powerful, especially for folks who maybe aren’t naturally empathetic leaders because empathy is more of a behavior than a skill for some folks.

That is just a quick tip, a bit of practical advice that will build empathy and ultimately will build resilience and engagement and your team that will lead to higher retention. Perhaps, maybe give that a try.

SS: That’s fantastic. One of the things that sales enablement is often faced with is working with frontline managers because they are often the daily interaction or the daily point of contact into a lot of the folks on the frontline. It’s really important to be able to work with frontline managers in order to be able to drive that agility and that empathy that you were just talking about. How can sales enablement help set managers up for success in empowering lifelong learning amongst their own teams?

MA: Yeah, I think it’s a great question. I know when we talked about it as a sales leadership team here at LHH and within the Adecco group, we institutionalized a couple of things at our sales kickoff and in early February this year that we’re giving a try because I think so much of the learning journey and the learning burden falls on the frontline manager, the first line manager. We were trying to institutionalize a couple of other things to see if that would help increase appetite for learning and the stickiness of the things that we were trying to get adoption on within the entire sales organization.

The first thing we did was try to instill this concept of having a growth mindset and that all of us are always learning all the time. You’re never too old to learn new tricks, so we had an artist come in. Most of us in the professional working world probably think we’re not very good artists, at least I know I’m someone who only can draw a stick figure. We had someone who came into our virtual global sales conference and taught us all how to draw cartoon characters. By the end of the session, we all had these amazing drawings that we shared socially and we all really enjoyed seeing everyone else’s work we were all like, “Oh my gosh, we totally can learn something new.”

Whether it’s cooking or drawing or coming together in a new way and having that aha moment, which is like, “Oh my gosh, I actually can learn something new.” I think it’s important to adopt that learning mindset or growth mindset.

The second thing that we did is we put sellers together, not in their nucleus team, not in their normal sales team. We built some cross-functional teams, and we built these learning cohorts and folks are in their cohorts of six to eight people for the remainder of the year, this year. Every month we have a new learning module, whether they’re learning about a new product or practicing a specific sell skill, or working on prospecting techniques, you name it. They go and then practice that skill with a couple of dedicated 30 minutes slots each month with their cohort in a very safe space. Rather than all of that learning burden sitting with the frontline manager directly, they’re learning from one another in these cohorts.

It’s an experiment for sure. I can let you know maybe if we do a podcast again at the end of the year, this time next year, how that experiment is going, but we’re hoping that the peer-to-peer learning will help institutionalize some of our learning objectives this year.

SS: I love that. And yes, I would love to have you back to tell us how it’s gone. Michelle, I’ve learned a lot in this interview. I want to close with a question circling back to something that you said around the importance of resilience. I would love to close out understanding how leaders can help to basically fuel employee’s motivation and remove the obstacles that are draining the energy or contributing to burnout for them.

MA: Yeah, I know we’re all feeling it aren’t we? I think we all have good days and bad days. I know I speak for myself and certainly my two teenage daughters that I’ve been working alongside as they’ve been homeschooling this past year. I think it really does come down to empathy at the core, especially as leaders.

I have found that I’ve had to put on my calendar as a reminder to make sure, whether it’s a team meeting, whether it’s one-on-ones, that I’m creating time and space just to check in and ask people how they’re doing. And not like, how is work going, but like, how are you doing? How is life? How are things going for you? What can I do to help? What is it that you need for me? Amazing conversations surface. People are dealing with a lot of stuff right now as a result of the pandemic, so I have had to reach out and help my colleagues, my teammates in different ways as a leader than I ever have had to in the past.

One example, I have a direct report who lives alone, and I think not having that social interaction for months on end when we were in the early days of lockdown, not having that daily coffee run that provided some social interaction was really critical to her. I was like, Oh my gosh, I need to send this person some of her favorite cold-brew or I need to do something different, inclined to make sure that this person knows that they’re needed and valued and part of this team and part of this community that we have here.

We’re all part of different communities and making people feel valued and appreciated for the work that they’re doing as part of this community is really important. I think that empathy is needed from our team now more than ever. I think just listening, honestly, and responding on a human level is the best thing that we can be doing.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. Thank you so much, Michelle, for the time today.

MA: You bet, happy to do it. Thanks again for having me. I had a whole lot of fun.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Eilidh from Relative Insight join us. Eilidh, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Eilidh Reynolds: My name is pronounced Eilidh, and I’m obviously never offended if people get that wrong. I work for a company called Relative Insight as the VP of sales enablement. To cut a very long story short, Relative Insight is what we call a comparative linguistics platform. We’ve actually been around for 14 years, but the first 10 years of that, the software was used to catch bad guys online. So, what I mean by that is the software would overlay on huge amounts of text, be that from chat rooms or forums or high school internets and was used to identify linguistic outliers. What I mean by that is adults doing a very sophisticated, but not quite perfect impression of a young person speaking online. That’s what it did for the first 10 years.

Four years ago, we were updated and adapted to help brands and agencies better understand audiences, trends, competitors, anything they’re interested in, still by where you can put any language data in there so we can understand anything that’s written down – be it from the likes of social media forums or also traditional research. That could be focus group transcripts, that could be survey opens, anything you like, we can put that in there. As well as that, we use comparison to identify things in language that you wouldn’t know to search for.

SS: Having two young children, I am glad that there are organizations like yours out there. Now, you mentioned on LinkedIn, and this is definitely one of the reasons I wanted to chat with you, that one of your core responsibilities is helping Relative Insight expand its global commercial team. From your perspective, what are some of the necessary steps that sales enablement can take in order to help ensure that they’re delivering very impactful onboarding at scale?

ER: Absolutely. I think one of the first things to consider is you should be endlessly open to feedback from any new hire. I always think in the world of coaching and enablement, it’s a really important message someone taught me in the early days here, is it’s impossible to imagine not knowing what you know. Organizing a really sensible structure and flow of onboarding sessions, you automatically build that. Obviously, this is a startup, so I built a lot of the onboarding structure that we have here, but I came from the industry, so I know a lot of the things that already happened here.

Every round of new starters that goes through the onboarding that we run at Relative Insight, we let them know that it’s not personal if they give us bad feedback on certain sessions or the order of sessions. We’ve actually hugely improved our onboarding through making really sensible changes that people have given us. The other two things, I think it’s specifically what makes it impactful is a blend of different sessions. Our onboarding is split into from us and from you. The from us is sessions run either by different teams in the company, or I work with the People team for that, or specifically ones within your role, with your manager, or with me. But then the from you sessions are activities we want people to complete and when to complete them by. It’s a bit self-starter as well, and not so much sitting, listening to endless sessions or hearing my voice, which I’m sure all new starters at Relative Insight are sick of after the first three weeks.

The final thing we do a lot of here is there’s a surprising amount of a parallel between new people starting at Relative Insight and new clients starting with Relative Insight, because it’s all people who know a bit about the company and are quite excited about it, but haven’t really gotten into the weeds of it yet. We have an amazing audience marketer here who does a lot of standard sessions for new clients, such as we have Comparison University which you can graduate from. I’m a graduate, very proud. All our new starters join Comparison University and sessions that new clients are actually joining, to learn exactly what new relative insights customers land.

SS: Very fascinating. I love that you allow some of that pace learning in your onboarding program as well and are able to repurpose a lot of that material. Now, when designing onboarding programs, there can be challenges along the way, particularly as you’re scaling quickly. From your perspective, what are some of the top challenges that sales enablement professionals can face when they’re designing or even implementing onboarding programs?
Do you have strategies around how to overcome those obstacles?

ER: Yeah. I think one main challenge we face when designing an onboarding program from scratch is definitely that there’s multiple stakeholders involved. I always see sales enablement as a supporting function. All the people who work in the commercial team at Relative Insight are my clients and all of the senior people in the commercial teams will have an opinion on how our onboarding should be done best, what sessions they should run, what sessions I should run, how it should be put. There are multiple different teams.

In commercial, we have marketing, we have new business, then we have retention teams, and some people need to go through certain sessions with everyone and other ones split out. I also am responsible for training managers how to run the sessions appropriately. I think that there’s lots of different moving parts with onboarding and everyone cares just as much as the next person about how quickly people ramp when they’re new to their teams and rightfully so. I think the only way I’ve found to overcome that is, I’m really lucky at Relative that I report straight into the CRO and he completely backs sales enablement. I also work closely with the CEO who also fully supports sales enablement. When designing the onboarding, I was able to just request full ownership of it and say, I want to work with the People team, and I want to build it all myself based on my previous experience of helping to build onboarding programs. Then, I promise I will be constantly open to feedback on any changes that need to be made throughout it. I think just having it as my project, the other people could have opinions on media. It’s easier than having lots of people around the table with different ideas, so that’s one of them.

The second thing is, I guess everyone’s going to say this, it’s measuring the success of an onboarding program. There are obviously very simple ways to do that. But also, maybe a richer longer tail of qual and softer ways to measure it. I think it’s also working with my clients or the sales leadership team and sales managers and account management to decide what success would look like. What do you want this person to be able to do after a certain amount of time? I had an interesting one recently where it was a sales manager who hadn’t hired anyone new for a while. They just weren’t sure what good would look like at different stages. We had a very open dialogue of, this is what’s normal at this stage for people to understand, and this person’s actually here in measurement to that. I think that open dialogue and clear guidelines of what success is in a softer way that isn’t just complete quants is another way to make that work.

SS: Absolutely. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d love to dive a little bit deeper with regard to thinking about key objectives and to your point, metrics of success. One way that a lot of people think about onboarding is to accelerate ramp time for new hires. I think the catch there is, everybody, even within maybe the same organization, might think about ramp in different ways. How do you define ramp time and what are some of your strategies to accelerate ramp time for reps?

ER: Absolutely. I think one of the things I’m a strong advocate for is only focusing on what you can control right now. We have a structure at Relative Insight where we hire at the bottom and promote from within. We hire junior sales commercial associates, who then become our BDRs here and they move up to then become our BDMs, and then our managers. Most of the people I’m working with haven’t worked in a sales environment before or have a small amount of sales experience. So, I think to say to them, time to first deal, while I think that is an important metric, when you’re new to a new job, you can’t really wake up and make sure your BDM closes a deal today. You can’t control that. What you can control as a new commercial associate or a new SDR is you can control making sure you do the right amount of work that day. Then what you can also control is when you look at that amount of work. I hate setting an exact activity level to do every day, but we can obviously see how many activities people are doing. I do constantly just say, just do an amount of work that it looks like everyone else is roughly doing. We obviously have a sales automation tool where we can measure that. They can control that in the early days. Great. You’re now doing as much work as everyone else. That’s the first tick.

Then I want people to look at their open rates. So, have you got the lowest open rate in the team? Are you targeting the right people? Here’s your personas. Make sure it’s the right job titles. Then, let’s tweak your email subject line or let’s tweak the opening line of your email. Then that’s another metric you can work on in terms of ramp time is getting your open rates up, then your reply rates by effecting the body of the emails, then your success rates from the reply rates. Then, moving on to how you conduct yourself in your first call with clients.

I think the way I measure success is very incremental. I then think people can see the successes are not just time to first deal, which can take longer and can make people feel like they’re not impacting it now. My way of doing it is always to break it down into lots of small measures that are incremental and build up to that lovely first deal.

SS: I love that. I think that sets expectations well along the way for the new hire on what the expectation is of them. Now, other than ramp time, how do you measure the success of your onboarding programs overall?

ER: As I said in the first point we talked about is the qual feedback is absolutely essentially at the end of the day. We’re onboarding people and we need to be people when we’re checking in with them on how it went. That’s definitely important. Our onboarding in the first two weeks is pretty set in stone. This is what everyone will go through. When you start in this, we’ll send you your onboarding doc with all the sessions and all of that. At the end of the two weeks, we have a check-in session where we take feedback on how it’s been to see if I can improve it or iterate it for the next round of onboarding.

But secondly, the third week is bespoke to what that person needs and what their manager thinks they need. So, definitely measuring constantly what that qualitative feedback is. As well as that, we have a progression document. We’re very much about creating a culture where you know what you have to do to get to the next level. We’re very lucky to have lots of very driven people here. It’s cool to stay at the level you’re at, if that’s what you want. But if you want to see from day one, the kind of things you need to work on to be promoted, our progression document has some softer skills on there that we want people to meet before we’d consider them for promotion.

Of course, we have your standard “hit your KPIs, hit your target”. It’s still a commercial environment, but we also have things like we want you to always have completed your actions from your one-to-one. So, whatever your managers told you to do that week, by the next week, you always have to have done it because we really prioritize a culture of coachability and being open to following instructions and being collaborative in that respect.

We also have another, which I love personally, obviously being in enablement, which is you have to have lead by example training sessions. You have to have proven application of new methodologies that are taught in them to show that you’ve listened in training sessions and have gone out and applied it, and being open to feedback about it. We’ve got lots of Slack channels for feeding back new methodologies that have been taught. Measuring success comes in definitely the little metrics we all just talked about, definitely feedback from them, but also our onboarding is about building long-term colleagues and friends that all follow certain approaches that we have within the company as well. There are all those softer skills we look at as well.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Now, I want to dive into that a little bit more as well, because I think one of the points that you’ve made is that Relative Insight is very focused on culture. I noticed in a blog post that you did that one of the things that you focus on is kindness. That’s a very unique company culture and company value. What are some of your strategies for ensuring that new hires feel included and immersed in that culture?

ER: Firstly, I feel so proud to work at a company that puts being kind as one of its values. I think that’s so, so important. Life’s hard without working somewhere with really nice people and promoting kindness. I think that’s a fantastic, so I’m flying the flag of Relative Insight for how proud I am of that. There’s lots of things that I try and implement. I’m very lucky to work naturally in a culture that is absolutely unbelievably, naturally supportive, even before I started working here. The culture already existed before I even started. I’ve been here a year now, so I can take no credit for that. That’s all down to my colleagues. But I have brought in a couple of things that I think should help.

One thing that was actually already here before I started is there’s weekly shout outs, which are quite lovely, something quite funny, some quite serious, which are really nice. I don’t know if anyone else felt the first week of this year was particularly tough. My friend in marketing and I created an award ceremony called the FBAs. It was the First Friday Back Awards, and we did a poll for lots of different awards for all of our colleagues, which was lovely. There was a broad mix of wins of lots of different people from lots of different teams contributing as well.

Particularly for onboarding, with April who works in our People team, we’ve launched a buddy system. From day one, we have people internally who volunteer that want to be buddies. When a new person starts, we pair them up with someone who isn’t their manager and isn’t in their direct team. It’s someone they probably wouldn’t talk to any of the rest of the time. Once a week, in real life you would go for lunch with them, but now we’re just grabbing a virtual coffee and you can talk to them about work if you want. You also can talk to them about actually anything that you like. I know we have one buddy pair here who go for a walk together and ring each other once a week, which is really nice. Then finally, we also have a new SDR club, it’s called The Buds for a multitude of reasons, it was decided internally and I think it’s quite lovely, where if you’ve been here for six months or less, we just have a little club where once a week we sit down and we talk about things that maybe you don’t want to go and ask someone else. Maybe you’re like, “Oh, how does this part of the software work? Or what on earth is an API? What does that actually mean? Building all these lists together. There’s also a really nice little new starter supportive community there as well.

SS: I love that idea. In fact, we might, we might need to borrow that even within our own organization. Now, last question for you, and this goes back to the notion of scaling. How can sales enablement help maintain an organization’s culture as it grows and expands, particularly as you start to span global teams and work cultures might be a little bit different?

ER: I think it can be easy because sales enablement is a bit of a different pillar in the company. You’re there to support everyone and help everyone and instruct everyone and coach everyone. It can be easy to become an island. I think one of the first things is for sales enablement to be a part of the company and culture yourselves if they’re asking for volunteers to do certain things, or if they’re asking people to apply for certain questionnaires or be visible. I like to really contribute to the organization’s culture myself, because I think it’s leading from the front and that’s very important. I also think, as I’ve said throughout this, being open to feedback is completely instrumental. We have an office in the U.S. and of course they can’t join our morning kickoff meetings because it be about four o’clock in the morning for them. Making sure someone’s there to run through everything with them so they don’t feel like as much of a satellite and constantly making sure that they know it’s okay to be like, “Hey, we would like to have something like this more at our time.”

We’re actually in a weird position at the moment where one of our employees is in Hong Kong. Because of COVID, they can’t get back to the UK, so they’re actually working almost through the night. We’re currently trying to align calendars to people in Texas, all the way to people in Hong Kong with quite a small team. It’s also telling people that if the timing’s absolutely ridiculous for you and it is midnight wherever you’re based or four o’clock in the morning, that’s fine. We’ll organize something at your time.

I also think, much like in a SaaS company when you win a new client, their first few weeks with you is absolutely pivotal to their success with you as a client. It’s the same as a new hire. I think onboarding is completely pivotal to being really amazing. I’ve had some really fun sessions recently with my CRO and April who runs our recruitment of how we can try and make starting work at Relative Insight one of the best things that ever could happen to you? So, really fun, really different. We really care. We’ve hired you because we’re really going to invest in you and making sure that the culture, the fact that we really care and we’re really invested in this, is there from the second you first speak to us, before you’ve even properly interviewed for the job. The long answer sort of distilled down would be to be involved in the culture simply means that I have to be involved in the culture and anyone I hire in the enablement team here does as well. We have to spider across and work with so many different teams within the company to make sure we help every team be involved in the culture. We mirror that and make sure that it’s all aligned.

SS: I think that’s a fantastic approach, Eilidh. Thank you so much for joining us today. I enjoyed learning from you.

ER: It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you want to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Ruben from ifm join us. Ruben, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Ruben Boom: Thank you, Shawnna. As you mentioned, my name is Ruben Boom. I live in the Netherlands close to the German border, near headquarters for the company that I work for. I have been working for ifm for the last six years. I live in a region that’s very green with a forest nearby, and what I love to do is being involved in technology as well as in business. So, not only on the business side or only on the technology side, but really combining both. That’s also what I found within the company that I work for now. The company is located in over 42 countries globally, with about 230 locations and over 7,000 employees. It’s really focused on industrial automation, so helping machine builders, but also manufacturers. If you find a machine, then the chance is big that there’s a sensor, a cable, or a controller from ifm involved.

SS: Ruben, very excited to have you here. One of your responsibilities at ifm is to accelerate sales training activities for the global workforce. In your experience, what are some of the challenges to designing training for global teams and what are some strategies that you’ve used to overcome those challenges?

RB: Well, if I think about the challenges and I look at our organization, it’s definitely the cultural differences and language differences. If we have all these different countries and we talk about Australia and compare it with Japan and compare that with Italy and the U.S., etc., we see many differences. If we want to train people in sales, it’s not always the same way. The way we close a meeting in the Netherlands might be different than how our colleagues close a meeting in Vietnam. We really have to keep all those cultural differences in mind as well, and also the languages. Of course, it’s already hard enough to set up a complete program in one language, but if you then have to translate it so that everybody understands, that makes it very complex.

How do we overcome that? We overcome that by keeping the material limited, so really condense it to what matters most. So, no long videos with two hours of training material, but two and a half minutes, for example, so that we really come to the point. Limiting the time that people have to watch this material makes them excited and keeps them excited.
It also has the benefit that we can translate this much easier.

SS: Those are some really great insights. Now, what steps do you take when developing a new sales training program from scratch?

RB: If we think about sales training as well as coaching with sales enablement that we’re working on and developing, there are so many ways of doing this and there are so many good ideas from other companies that sometimes it might be overwhelming in the beginning. That’s why we really do internal and external research before jumping in and start working on things first to ask our colleagues what their expectations are. What do you expect from a sales enablement department? A lot of good feedback came in and we put all those ideas together and then really came to the point, “okay, this is where we’re needed most at this time.” That helps with really setting priorities. Getting input from colleagues globally means lots of talking, lots of calls, etc., but it is definitely needed.

SS: Now, as part of your background, you also oversee coaching activities. I’d love your opinion, what does good sales coaching look like?

RB: We really need the sales managers. A lot of things can be automated. It’s like looking at numbers and what are the trends? What is in my funnel? All those things there are good. There’s good software for that. What cannot be automated is working close to the people, to the sales team, asking them how they’re doing, how they’re feeling, what their challenges are, what they would like to do in the coming years, etc. For example, in our company, we have a slogan that is “close to you”, and we often use that slogan for our customers. We want to be close to our customers. But with sales enablement and with coaching, we say “close to you” really means being close to the salespeople. Just as they are close to their customers, we should be close to them. That’s also really an expectation that we bring to the sales managers and expect them to be true coaches.

SS: Yes, absolutely. That’s fantastic. Now, what are some considerations sales enablement practitioners need to keep in mind though when conducting training and coaching in this virtual setting that a lot of us are in today?

RB: We often hear, “let’s wait until the COVID-19 situation is over because face-to-face is always better and different than virtual.” The reality is that we’ve already been in this situation for a year, and we don’t know what’s ahead of us. We have to deal with what we can do now. That is the only thing we have the power over, so to speak. We cannot influence what’s going on outside. What we say is the show must go on and we must use the tools that we have. That means that we also should not be afraid of the tool. It’s okay to turn your camera on. It’s okay to talk digitally. Just like we can also have a good conversation via phone, we can also have a good conversation via the digital means that we have nowadays. We should not postpone improvement just because we cannot do certain things. We have the tools, so now let’s just do it. Let’s move forward.

SS: Absolutely. Ruben, what do you think are the most important skills sales teams need in order to be successful in today’s environment?

RB: Definitely listening and asking the right questions. All the other things often can be automated as well. Sometimes I like to compare sales engineers with a robot, and you could say, what if a company would introduce a robot that is never sick, that does not have to sleep, that does not take vacation, that does have a database with all the technical knowledge, knows exactly what to do. Would that really be a danger for the role for sales engineer? I believe not because there’s one thing missing and that is empathy. The robot does not, it cannot place itself in the situation of a customer, of a real person. If we don’t want to be automated or replaced by robots, we should do what Google cannot do. Google can give us the input we ask for, but Google never asks us the questions as to why do you do this? What keeps you awake at night? What are some issues you have in your facility? How can we help with that?

We really see the role of a salesperson – that we call sales engineers in our company – as local doctor, so to speak, really finding the pain points by asking the right questions, just like going to the doctor. The doctor does not just give you a medicine, the doctor asks you questions and then sees how he or she can help you. That should be our role as well.

SS: This has been a fantastic conversation. I have one last question for you. How do you track whether salespeople are building these skills through training and coaching?

RB: That’s always the big question, because we would all like to see a dashboard with exactly who’s improving, who’s not improving, etc. Can that happen? Yes, to a certain extent, I believe that that can happen. There are great learning monitoring systems, etc., around, so those dashboards will be there. But truly knowing and tracking if salespeople are building these skills, that has to be, again, these coaches. I had sales managers just seeing on a global level, how everybody is doing in the sales force. That is, in my opinion, a utopia. There will always be a certain level that you can see, but there’s always a story behind the numbers. For the story behind the numbers, we need people talking with people, have peer-to-peer conversations, and those are those coaches locally.

That’s also what we’re really investing in in the beginning. It’s not immediately jumping into tools and jumping into training. With the sales enablement department, we started to say, “okay, let’s build that foundation of coaches first, work with them, the managing directors, to learn who the true coaches are in their company.” We also ask them who are excited to be true coaches sometimes that might not even be a sales manager, or really ask them who is excited and onboard them with the coaching program. We make sure that they have the knowledge they need to make sure that they have the help they need. Then when that foundation is there, we start building with training programs. In the meantime, we have frequent sessions between all of these coaches in different countries, link them together and make sure that they learn from each other. We really believe the foundation in sales enablement is coaching even more than training sometimes.

SS: Thank you so much, Ruben. I enjoyed learning from you today.

RB: You’re very welcome and enjoy the rest of your day.

SS: Thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you want to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Nia Barnabie join us. Nia, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your background to our audience.

NB: Hi, my name Nia Barnabie. I have been working within the revenue operations space for the last 12 years. My background has been working with scaling corporate businesses within the SaaS tech space. Having worked at companies like Amazon, Hootsuite, and Jumio, I’ve worked in spaces where we’ve either seen a great deal of growth within a company, or we’re looking to try and find ways to achieve and build upon that.

SS: Well, thank you so much for joining us. As you mentioned, you have really been in roles that are responsible for growing and scaling the business. I know that you have experience as a revenue operations leader, and you have experience within sales enablement. From your perspective, what does that intersection look like between sales enablement and revenue operations? How do those two types of roles complement each other?

NB: If I think about revenue operations as a strategic function that is aligned and supporting the different departments within the commercial org – so you’ve got your marketing, your sales, and your customer success teams – revenue operations can provide the operational infrastructure and that can help them to keep very clear and focused and deliverables. Then the rev ops team have very clear roles and very defined departments. You may have one that’s focused on the strategy and the analysis, another on the systems, and then lastly, you would have your sales enablement. I like to think of enablement in many ways as becoming the connective tissue that helps companies leverage the strategies with the sellers or the individuals to create clear deliverables, OKRs, or KPIs. Driving revenue in this way helps create clear focus.

When you asked me, how do they complement each other? I always start with the data. The revenue teams begin with the data. We think about how we make decisions based on what we have in front of us and if all the metrics and all the data-driven questions are being held in one space, we can ensure that the betterment of the strategy is coming from the right place, so partnering with the marketing, the CS, and the sales team or leadership team. Generally, we like to answer the questions of what is possible and how can we make what you want possible? Then we can start to think about what is the plan that we need to build around that and work with the different departments and align with them to create that.

SS: One of the things that I noticed is that in an interview that you had done, you mentioned the important role that revenue ops plays in ensuring departments can work cohesively with each other. You alluded to that in your answer just a moment ago as well. From your perspective, what are some best practices for collaborating with partners from across the organization to improve alignment on your initiatives?

NB: I like to think of rev ops as there to provide answers. We take the questions from the different departments and we use this to understand what the right data points are that are needed. In this way, you can instinctively become a business partner to different departments. Historically, you’ll find that different departments are responsible and own specific metrics or processes. In this way, they can start to work in isolation. My best practices would include, firstly, understanding what those questions are, making sure you’ve got the right data points and metrics, having collaborative meetings and QBRs, making sure that you have the stakeholders from the different parts of the business available and a part of that, clearly defining what your metrics are so that you can actually focus on building a narrative around that.

Generally, just being more customer centric. If you’re able to do some of those things, then when you’re bringing on other elements like new technologies, you can really make sure that those other elements are in the middle of that. The data is in the middle of that, so that you’re making sure you’re able to optimize for the actual questions that those departments are really trying to solve.

SS: Now, I imagine that there are some challenges that you’ve experienced in building and maintaining this alignment with partners. What do you recommend for ways to overcome some of those challenges?

NB: Yeah, for sure. I think one of the challenges is having them understand how to work with us, and really, we are there to help align and collaborate with you guys. Where there are issues is around who is owner, who is owning the metrics, who is owning the process. When we are clear on who that is and what relationship needs to be between the two, it really does help massage away some of those problems.

There can sometimes be a resistance to change. When you’re able to provide collaboration and support, you strip away all of the other elements and you really start to have a clear focus and be able to prioritize what it is you’re trying to do. Challenges often come from not having a clear focus or a clear vision and a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the people involved.

SS: Yes, I have found that communication and clear roles and responsibilities are critical to ensuring alignment. You also touched on something just a moment ago around the help that alignment provides when it comes to rolling things out to the field. One area where we’ve seen sales enablement and revenue operations often overlap is when it comes to rolling out new technology or tools. What are some of your best practices for driving adoption among the field and how do you partner with enablement to do this effectively?

NB: When you’re looking at a new tool or new tech stack, at least with the teams I work with, I like to include them within all of our performance reviews and all of our forecast calls, making them very aware of our strategic focus. That way, when it comes to purchasing new tools, they’re very aware of the processes that we’ve got in play. Ultimately what you’re looking to do is purchase tools to help drive revenue and to do that, we need adoption from the users.

Normally, you’ll find that the sales enablement team are extremely close to the users and to the processes on a day-to-day basis. By including them from the beginning in that process, you get all the additional information and additional expertise that comes from them from the get-go. They can ask the questions to the product and really understand what the goals and the requirements are, and then build a project and build a solution based on that.

Any adoption requires clear goals and clear requirements. You need to be able to build a project plan around that. For example, if we were going to re-introduce Salesforce to an environment, you’d first want to know what the pain points of that customer were, find a champion user, make sure that you’ve got a clear and good understanding of what the users on a day-to-day basis are doing, what are their processes, and build to alleviate as many of the problems that they usually see. An overlap with enablement helps keep that clear focus top of mind. You often find sometimes that companies can purchase tools to patch up processes or data inconsistencies. To avoid that, I feel that enablement is a key piece of making some really great improvements.

SS: Absolutely. Given your revenue operations background, what are some of your best practices for gathering insights into what’s working and what’s not as it relates to sales performance? How do you use those insights to help improve the enablement programs?

NB: Yeah, I’m going to sound like a broken record, but clean data. I always feel that clean data is where you start from and a clear understanding of what your metrics need to be. Once you’ve got that, you then need to be communicating often and have real visibility into what’s happening. What conversations are happening with your customers? Talking with the sellers, talking with marketing and CS to find out exactly what’s working well and what isn’t working and then optimizing for it.

When I include the layer of sales enablement, my best practices around that are having a weekly or biweekly cadence of structured forecast calls and clear governance and scheduled performance reviews. Bringing us back to what was our initial goal, thinking about what was the strategy that we were looking to put in place, and looking at our current pipeline or the way in which our sellers are performing helps us kind of zoom in and take a view back to understand the landscape and what’s really driving the change and is it the change that we want?

SS: Thank you so much for joining us. I love your perspectives on revenue operations, and I’m so excited that you got the chance to join us and share your expertise with our audience.

NB: Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you want to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Callie Apt: Sure. Thanks, Shawnna. I really appreciate you having me. I’m Callie Apt and I’m the senior director of global sales enablement at Domo, where I am responsible for the strategy and leading the team that enables our global revenue teams, which is made up of AMs, AEs, solution consultants, customer success managers, and then also our external partners. I really spent my career building out proposal and sales enablement teams, primarily with cloud software and high-tech companies.

For those who aren’t familiar with Domo, Domo is a public cloud software company with more than 2000 customers, including 40% of the fortune 50. We help top brands like Disney, L’Oreal, and Cisco get BI leverage at cloud scale in record time. What I mean by that is we help our customers leverage the data assets throughout their business to innovate and accelerate the way they do business.

SS: Callie, I’m honored to have you. I’ve actually wanted you as a guest on our podcast for some time, but you’ve been really busy lately because you recently got done executing Domo sales kickoff. I’d love to dive in there as our first topic and understand, how was your sales kickoff structured and how did you go about delivering it this year?

CA: I appreciate the partnership and the chance to have this discussion. In terms of our structure this year, our sales kickoff was actually a two-day virtual event a few weeks after the start of our new fiscal year. We designed it really as three distinct segments this year. First, we actually held a manager kickoff before we held our sales kickoff. That was a new thing for us at Domo. What we wanted to do is really set the stage with anybody who manages team members in our revenue organization and let them know what we were planning to focus on, get their support, and really introduce our leaders to the theme, which was “Elevate.” That was also a chance for us to review the operational cadences and the focus areas that we required this year.

Then, the second part was the actual sales kickoff, which was a few weeks later. Day one of that I’ll refer to as our main stage day. That included really a lot of things, things you would typically see in a kickoff event that’s live. We had one of our great Domo customers speak, we got to hear the vision of our chief revenue officer, and we have a leader round table, product and marketing sessions, we recognize top performance by our teams, and we had a keynote speaker, which I’ll talk about in just a little bit. We also got the chance to hear from our CEO about the company strategy.

Then, the second day was actually a half day and it was just the next day. We had a leader-led half day where each leader got to discuss their own operating principles and go to work at plans. They could really focus on the role-specific skills and enablement that they felt were important to their teams and they had the chance to really reinforce their own team culture. Our enablement team actually got to rotate among all of those sessions, and it was really neat to see them put their own spin on our SKO theme and apply it to how they’re running their own business. Then, we were able to share all of those recordings from the different groups with everybody else so they could learn what the other teams were focused on.

That three-pronged approach allowed us for buy-in from the leaders early and allowed the leaders to have the freedom to springboard off of the theme and make it their own. That turned out to be a winning combination this year. Our survey results said 98% of our team members felt inspired and excited and prepared to execute this year as a result of our kickoff.

SS: I love that. That’s definitely the objective. As a frontline manager myself, I can tell you, I always appreciate when enablement rolls things out in advance to me so that I am prepared to answer all of my ICs’ questions on things, so I love that approach. I think a lot of other enablement practitioners might be writing that down as a best practice for their future SKOs. You talked a little bit about the planning process and making sure that you were getting buy-in, but what did that look like? What other departments and stakeholders were you partnering with to ensure that it was a successful SKO?

CA: I think the biggest takeaway for anyone planning a sales kickoff, especially if it’s your first one, is it’s never too early to get started. As you know, the planning process involves many stakeholders, which at Domo was our CRO first and foremost, our sales leadership, product and marketing leaders, creative teams, outside speakers, vendors, and Domo customers. It’s really like an external event almost, except it’s internal. There are a lot of different players involved.

Some of the big milestones that we had that we set out months before the actual event were first setting that theme because it drives all of our content creation and strategy. We leveraged our own internal creative team to bring our theme to life, which I mentioned was “Elevate” this year. We had three parts to that: elevating you, so elevating yourself and your skills and your role, elevating your team and your culture, and then third, elevating what we do for our customers. So, elevate you, elevate team, and elevate customer, that was our theme. It’s really important to get that early because if you don’t have that, it’s hard to plan and to get things done. Set the theme early and then that can help you set your agenda. That’s something where you really want to get sales leadership input, so regular meetings, regular communications. You feel like they’re getting sick of you, but in the end it’s all worth it.

The other big part of planning a successful SKO is building in the time to do content reviews and dry runs of content. At Domo, we had any content that was being presented go through what we call our SKO content review committee, because we wanted to make sure that everything was aligned with our go-to-market strategy, that we had quality control, and just make sure that we had proper representation from all the groups and regions at Domo.

SS: I agree with you that it’s never too early to get started with planning on that front. How did you get leadership involved and bought into your scope, both during the planning process, as well as just throughout the event?

CA: Yeah. As I said, the theme and the strategy and the execution of our kickoff was the result of really close alignment and partnership with our chief revenue officer. But I think there are a lot of other ways, easy ways, to get leadership involved in the process. First was with the content. On the main stage, we had a leader round table where our leaders got to talk about some of the areas that they’re most excited about for this year and the successes that they’re seeing.

Then another thing we did this year that was new is we really wanted to share the love. We asked each general manager or leader to sponsor a breakout session of their choice. As the sponsor, they were the ones ultimately responsible for coming up with a topic that tied into our focus areas that they thought would be valuable to their teams. They got to select the speakers, which might’ve been sellers on their team, to present a session. This really spread out the responsibility for the content, which takes some of the pressure off of enablement. I think that worked out really well. Plus, then they can’t say, “you should’ve had a session on this”, or “I wish we would have done that” because they all got to give an idea.

Then another way we got leaders involved was with the recognition that we gave. A huge part of SKO is recognizing the amazing performance of your teams. We started this last year where we brainstormed with our leaders on what were the categories of recognition that we wanted to give at SKO? You always want to congratulate team members for top attainment and your top reps. You should always do that, but we wanted to create some special categories that were a little bit more of a balanced scorecard and that really focused on the behaviors that we wanted to drive in our sales organization. Those are things such as collaboration, coaching, if you’re a manager, how do you do in developing your team? Then we even had a “most enabled seller” awards as someone who is constantly working to elevate their craft. It’s really fun to look back and give those awards out. The leader’s got to nominate their team members. They got to give input on the categories. As you know, recognition goes a long way. They love recognizing their teams. That was another way we involve them.

Then finally, I mentioned this earlier, but holding that manager kickoff first. The leaders came out of that excited about the plan for the year and really had a good understanding of their own role in the kickoff. They could plan and ask us for support if they needed it.

SS: I think that’s fantastic and awarding behavior change is a fantastic spin from sales enablement. What were some of the key challenges that you encountered in trying to figure out how to deliver an effective sales kickoff virtually? In today’s day and age with everything virtual, I can imagine it’s hard to maintain energy and momentum. How did you overcome some of those challenges?

CA: Yeah, Shawnna. That is a challenge to keep everybody engaged and excited through these. Like you said, we’re all experiencing Zoom fatigue and our teams have been working remotely for a year now. There are a few ways that we address that in our SKO event. First, while it was only over a day, we broke up that main stage day with breakout sessions that were halfway through the day. The teams got to pick the content they were most interested in and because those groups were smaller, they got to really engage, ask questions, and hear from a SME that they were really excited about. We got a lot of good feedback on that, because it didn’t make it feel like a full day since there were some breaks in the way the content was presented.

Another way we kept our audience engaged was with an inspiring speaker. Obviously, speakers are fun to have at SKO, and we looked at a lot of options this year, but some of them were more around sales skills and we knew these areas would be important to our reps. We decided after this last year of being in a pandemic, we needed someone who was going to bring just a riveting and powerful story as a bit of an escape from all the other things going on. We ended up selecting Alison Levine, who you might know as a history-making adventurer and New York Times bestselling author. Our teams were just really captivated by her story, and she took them through a range of emotions in her talk and even some humor as she recounted her experiences climbing Mount Everest. There’s a lot of great speakers out there, and I would just say, build in time for something different, something outside of the norm, not about how to get more leads, but something a little bit fun and different.

Then the last thing we did was we had trivia throughout the day at all the transition points between speakers. We had some trivia on our sales team, our leaders, and our company history. That was a fun way to shake things up and give the next presenters time to set up without losing our audience. That worked out really well. But what was funny is, I’m all about having everything run on time. For this event, we actually were running slightly early almost every single time. We’re so glad that we had prepared this trivia and it was fun. We gave away swag to the winner, so people looked forward to that.

SS: I love that idea of virtual trivia. We might have to borrow that idea for one of our virtual events. Now, Callie, I have one last question for you before we wrap up. I think that sales enablement practitioners get this question often, but it’s around how you think about success. How did you go about measuring your ROI on sales kickoff this year?

CA: Sure. Satisfaction is obviously one of the first things you can measure post-event. One of the tricks we did this year was we did the post-event survey right at the end of SKO in the meeting. We just dropped it into the chat. We left time for everybody to do it because as you know, once they leave, you lose their focus. We just built it right into the agenda. Do the survey now, give us your feedback while it’s fresh in your mind. That worked out really well where we got more responses than you would normally do from a survey. I do that on all my enablement trainings now. We’re excited that our teams felt inspired, excited, and prepared to execute this year. We looked at our NPS, we also looked at each session individually, and that helps us guide future topics for this year for enablement.

Then another thing we’re doing at Domo is we continue our SKO theme throughout the year. We don’t want to limit it just to the event. We actually have post-event virtual backgrounds and templates and slide presentations that everybody can use. It keeps the momentum going on “Elevate.” We use that theme in our monthly all-hands. We use it for lunch and learns and just tie it to everything that we’re trying to drive this year. That’s one thing that you can do to keep the SKO spirit alive.

SS: Callie, thank you so much for joining us. I really enjoyed learning more about how you executed sales kickoff virtually at Domo this year.

CA: Thanks, Shawnna. It was a pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you want to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Paul-Olivier join us. Paul-Olivier, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Paul-Olivier Raynaud-Lacroze: Thanks, Shawnna. I’m Paul-Olivier. I’m French, like the accent probably betrays, and I am working for a Swiss company, dormakaba. We are specializing in secure access to buildings and all the hardware and software which closes or opens doors. I am the senior vice president for human resources and sales enablement for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region.

SS: Well, I’m extremely excited that you’re here to talk to us today. As you mentioned in your introduction, you have a unique position as you oversee both human resources and sales enablement for your organization. I’d love to understand from your perspective, what does the intersection between HR and enablement look like and how do they complement each other?

PR: For me, sales enablement at it’s heart is around cultural change, changing the mindset of our sales organization. We make everything, culturally and also from the process point of view, perfect for the sales organization to be efficient, to be able to sell better, to sell more products to our customers. In the end, we revolve around the people, having the right people with the right competencies in place, having the right organizational structure. Onboarding is important and training on soft skills and the product.

A lot is actually stuff that I do for other parts of the organization. But I was put in charge the sales enablement function also a year ago, because in a sense, for some strange reason, it was one part of the organization which was forgotten. I’m part of the executive team of EMEA, and I could see that as a good nugget we had to tackle. In a sense, I was pushing for a while to have this function more prominent, or at least say it is a function, but more prominently presented in the executive team. We don’t have any chief sales officer or something like that. Because I’ve pushed too hard probably, it was created and then it was given to me.

So, there are a lot of similarities between what I did before in HR, but there are a lot of specificities. I had the luck that very early on, I could hire internally one of our most senior sales directors who can complement myself very well because he’s been doing the sales role for many years. I think we complement each other extremely well. He brings the credibility, the huge knowledge he has, and hopefully I can bring some of my change management and training abilities and experience.

SS: Absolutely. Now, how does it sales enablement help you to achieve some of your goals on the human resources side?

PR: For me, honestly, it’s not so much of a HR leader. I see more that sales enablement helps me to achieve my goals as one of the members of the executive team of the EMEA region. I think that we didn’t equip our salespeople with the right tools, the right training, the right processes. In a sense, we were not able sometimes to achieve some of our strategic objectives and, of course, related to the customer, sales revenue, etc. I see myself much more as a business leader who has by chance an HR hat, and I just complemented that with another hat now, which is the sales enablement hat. In the end, everything we do in the area of sales enablement is for me to help our EMEA teams and executive team to achieve our common goals. That’s more how I see it. From an HR point of view, the sales teams or salespeople are very important, like any other team, but I think I put myself more as an executive leader, more than as a pure HR leader when I started to push a lot for sales enablement to have a place at the table.

SS: I love that, I think you’re absolutely right. I think sales enablement is strategically positioned to help the entire business, especially the executive team. Now, you also have experienced, as you mentioned, leading sales transformation initiatives such as helping your organization navigate a merger. From your perspective, what are some key things to consider as you build a strategy for a transformation initiative to ensure that it’s successful?

PR: First of all, you need a vision for where you want to go. We started early on in our sales enablement journey and in collaboration with a business, with alignment with my peers, my colleagues in the management team, a lot of discussion and interviews. We created what we call the sales enablement manifesto. It was just two PowerPoint pages where we established, what was our vision and where we are going to work and where we are not going to work. We started by doing the vision and then of course, starting to communicate a lot, you can never communicate enough.

We are in a process where we are constantly aligning where we are with the executive team, but also the country managers, some of the big sales directors, just to make sure that they know where we are going. Of course, we are taking that feedback into account as long as we are making progress in the journey. For instance, we have completely revamped the way we have described our sales operating model, the way we have our sales channels. We have redefined a lot of things, which were probably in some heads and parts in some different PowerPoint presentations, but there were always some differences. It’s really to work together with the business to make that coherent and then with a lot of communication and making sure that it is truly understood by the people, it’s bought in.

It’s only when you have achieved that level that you can start going a bit further down the journey. In my company, we are quite decentralized. If you don’t have these constant alignment and discussion it won’t work if you just come from the top-down. If I use my senior VP title, it can work, but it won’t be super long lasting or it won’t be super motivating.
We’ll do it in a much more collaborative way.

SS: On the topic of alignment, aligning with stakeholders on goals is critical for transformation initiatives, as you mentioned. What are some best practices for securing stakeholder buy-in for your initiatives?

PR: It’s really understanding what the priorities of the important stakeholders are and when you understand them, it’s to see how when we are doing the sales enablement initiative or any other initiative, how we can help the key stakeholders achieve their own priorities. For most of my colleagues, they have a strong sales priority in their target. It’s clearly seen then how we can help them achieve their own priorities and overcome their own challenges. It’s a lot of discussion, understanding, using empathy, having a lot of business acumen, because we’re talking about customers, we’re talking about sales, so we need to understand sales.

You need to understand PLL and revenue and all of that. It’s really bridging the gap between what we want to do, what the users for it are, and making sure that they are aligned. Basically, it’s making sure that my colleagues understand that if we work together, they have a bigger chance to succeed, and we do as well. So, it’s really a collaborative effort. It takes a lot of communication, a lot of discussion, empathy, business acumen, and making sure that it all comes into one place at the end.

SS: Absolutely. You mentioned, as well, this notion of change management. For transformation to happen people need to be motivated to change. What are some of your best practices for, for persuading and motivating people to adopt new approaches?

PR: If I focus on what we’re doing at the moment in sales enablement, I think the main behavior that we have chosen is role modeling. For instance, we have established quite early on in our back in October last year, so still quite recent, a weekly call between my boss, the president of EMEA, and the five regional VPs. We have cut our EMEA zone into five regions, and every week we have a call with the president, myself and my deputy in sales enablement, and the five heads of the regions on key metrics. We are looking at pipeline, forecast for the week, forecast for the month, etc. We have started this cadence because we said to start changing the mindset to make sales enablement really part of the business, we needed to instill this sense of rhythm and rigor.

We have a weekly rhythm where it starts at the top, and now is being cascaded from the regional heads to the country heads from the country heads to their sales directors, sales managers, and salespeople. People don’t believe that we will sustain because we’re all busy, we have big calendars. But still every week now for the last five or six months, we have these regular calls. I must say that everyone is enjoying them. It’s not like punishment, it’s not asking why you lost this contract or this opportunity. It’s really just to have a lot of discussion about customers, about opportunities, what we can do to win these opportunities. It is creating a lot of talks about sales matters, which I think a lot of my colleagues are super happy with because they are salespeople at heart.

At the same time, it’s bringing this rhythm and rigor, which is a phrase we love to use, because people see that it’s not going away, it’s really being cascaded now. In a sense that is a push way, we have really started from the top and role modeling what we expect each level of the organization to do around sales matters or sales topics. At the same time, we also have a more pulling effect where we are understanding, talking with a business about what they need, where they would like us to create or what best practices they would like us to establish. It’s constantly pulling different levers and having a pushing and a pulling effect together. By doing this, we think that we can change little by little behavior because it’s coherent from the top to the lowest levels of the hierarchy. Because we’re working on topics which are important for the business, when a change needs to happen, people just are ready in their mind to change because they see that it is something they wanted also.

SS: I love that, rhythm and rigor. I think that’s fantastic. How would you go about measuring the business impact of your sales enablement efforts?

PR: We are still early in our journey. We started probably a year ago and of course at the beginning it was more establishing what was our vision and what we were supposed to do.
We are still early in the journey. Now, we have the typical metrics such as sales revenue, revenue by product line, revenue by sales channel, so we hope to see an increase over the years.

Now, it’s not only through sales enablement that that things may improve. We would like also to measure things which are a bit more specific. At the moment, one key metric we have in mind is simple one, we just want to measure year-over-year, from 2020 and measuring then 2021, 2022, etc., the proportion of salespeople who will have achieved one hundred percent or more of their targets. We assume that the targets have been fairly distributed and fairly established, and just how many people have indeed met or achieved those targets in 2020. So, we look at 2019 before we started anything, 2020 when we are getting on our feet, and 2021 and so forth where we probably will get more and more mature. That’s one specific metric that we never measured before, at least on the EMEA level that we are going to put in place.

The second one specific to our sales enablement initiative is just looking at what we call the conversion rate. We know from the number of opportunities which come our way, how many can we convert into others? Again, it’s a relatively simple measure which is not always tracked or perhaps tracked in a slightly different manner. We are going to clarify how it should be measured so that it can be comparable year over year, country to country. These two metrics, how many salespeople can achieve 1% or more of their targets and what is our conversion rate, will be the two main metrics we are going to follow for the moment. Perhaps in the few years we could be more sophisticated, but we are still early. We are going to focus on these two first.

SS: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really did enjoy learning from you. To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Kerry from Google join us. Kerry, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Kerry Campbell: Hi, my name is Kerry Campbell and I lead a global team supporting leadership enablement in Google Cloud Sales. I have a background in academic education as an English professor. That’s where I started, and I accidentally fell into corporate training in the area of project management in the beginning. Since then, I’ve led learning and development initiatives across the gamut, including sales enablement, technical enablement, leadership development, culture, and diversity and inclusion initiatives as well.

Then on top of that, I’m also a visual artist and poet. I do have a certification in instructional design and organizational development, as well as project management. I like to bring everything across all of those different dimensions in terms of my experience and background into anything that I’m doing.

SS: I love that. Those are gorgeous paintings behind you, by the way. I’m so excited to have you here. As you mentioned, one of your areas of expertise is leadership development for aspiring sales leaders. I’d love to get your perspective, Kerry, what are the key skills or attributes that make sales leaders successful?

KC: There’s this thing that happens a lot in this particular space where someone who made a great sales rep winds up in a manager or leadership role, because they were a good sales rep. But it is a completely different thing that you are doing when you are a sales leader. It’s not really about providing accurate forecasting reports to upper management or filling the pipeline, for example. True sales leadership is about supporting and enabling your people to shine and bring their best to work and everything that they do.

That’s not only in how they show up for their colleagues, but it’s also in supporting your people in how they show up and serve your customers. Sales leaders set the vision and the strategy, and then they mentor, coach, and inspire their team to achieve success together. Ultimately, that success is how do we support our partners in supporting our customers to achieve their goals.

SS: Absolutely. I think you’re spot on. One of the reasons I reached out to you is because of your background and your expertise with regard to culture and in particular also DE&I. Sales managers can have a very strong influence on culture, particularly within the sales organization and among their teams. How can sales enablement prepare and support managers to ensure that the managers are fostering a healthy sales culture?

KC: One of the key things about that is psychological safety. As a sales rep, you need to be able to feel safe to take risks. You need a sales manager and sales leader who’s willing to support you in thinking outside the box with the customer, taking risks in terms of how we actually bring a solution to that customer, and how to think creatively. To me, a healthy sales culture requires taking risks, it requires being vulnerable, and it requires pushing yourself and even the customer outside their comfort zone to envision these big goals and transformation and what they can achieve and execute on.

For instance, at Google Cloud, we seek to provide value to our customers and supporting them to solve their most important business problems while painting a vision of the future for their digital transformation. We want to be that partner with them to help them create that vision of their future and transform your business. If you can’t think big or have a grand vision or be able to tell a story around what is possible, you’ll remain in the mind of “it’s impossible” and then nothing will happen. Therefore, it’s very important from a culture standpoint to provide a psychologically safe environment where people feel that they can take the risks, they can be vulnerable, they can push themselves in what in order to really get to that big impact.

SS: That’s fantastic. On the other side of that conversation, one key aspect of a healthy culture is diversity, equity, and inclusion to ensure that all employees feel a sense of belonging. I’d love to hear from you, what can sales managers and leaders do to nurture DE&I efforts on their teams in a really meaningful and authentic way?

KC: The one thing is really to be an authentic leader, to show up in your full self and to show your own vulnerability. People follow leaders based on the example that they set. Sales leaders should encourage a healthy sales culture by coaching their teams to lean into those risks, demonstrating psychological safety, being consistent, being transparent, being a trustworthy leader, and showing up in a way where people can believe that you’re authentic and real and legit and can be trusted.

When it comes to diversity and belonging, that means many different things. It’s not just diversity of the people around you who bring different backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, but it’s also about diversity of thought, so being open and curious, honoring each person as who they are, valuing what they bring. Most importantly, as a leader, proactively seeking to create a team where diversity is built-in by design. It’s not a homogenous group that looks and thinks like you, but a diverse group of gender orientation, backgrounds, voices, etc.

At Google, we have a concept around hiring that is called culture-add versus culture fit. Instead of looking to hire someone to “fit the mold”, seek to find candidates that can add something unique, different, valuable that isn’t necessarily reflective on what other folks on the team may already be bringing. In that regard, not only is it building a diverse team, but it’s also leveraging the diversity in the team and it’s asking for people to contribute their voices, to share their experiences, to honor what people are bringing to the conversation and being open and curious to what everybody could potentially bring that makes you stronger in the end, that makes you able to bring something more innovative to the customers.

If you’re all thinking and looking at act in the same, you’re just like everybody else. When you’re out there in a competitive situation and everybody else is looking like everybody else and speaking like everybody else and doing like everybody else, how are you differentiating yourself? Diversity and inclusion is one of those key ways that you can actually build a culture and a team and relationships with customers that are different.

SS: I love that. I think that you have very strongly articulated the business value and why DE&I should be a top priority for all organizations this year. Now, to pivot a little bit, in addition to your work developing sales leaders, you also write about topics focusing on individual professional development and growth. In one of your articles, you talked about the importance of taking time to do nothing, which I love, and I wish I could have more time to do because in today’s fast-paced world and with everything virtual, I feel like there is immense pressure to be productive. What is some of your advice for how to maintain productivity without burnout in this particular environment that we’re all living in right now?

KC: Yeah, it’s tough times. People are on these video calls all day long and sometimes, their work-life is bleeding all over into their regular life. Yet, you hear sort of this emphasis on wellbeing, wellbeing, wellbeing, but at the same time you hear this emphasis on productivity, productivity, productivity. Then, you’re sort of caught in the middle. I used to be someone who was just fully focused on producing results, all about results, results, results. In a sales environment, especially when you have quota that you’re trying to attain, it’s an extra driver on top of just being results-oriented, generally speaking.

The thing with being unproductive is taking the time out to give yourself space to breathe and do absolutely nothing. That can be sitting in the sun for five minutes. That can be taking a couple of minutes to just doodle aimlessly on a piece of paper. Anything that can give you some separation. Being unproductive actually recharges your batteries. It actually also helps facilitate creativity because when you’re so busy doing, doing, doing, there’s a lot of noise and chatter going on. When you separate and spend time to do nothing, suddenly, things can come out of thin air. You had a problem that you couldn’t solve and suddenly a creative idea comes to mind. Well, that’s because you had space focusing on doing absolutely nothing. That can bring in other things for you as well.

The title of that article you’re referring to is “Why Do I Stare Idley Out the Window and Do Other Unproductive Things”. I will actually stare out the window literally and space off and daydream. I will schedule it into my calendar sometimes where I’m like, “this is my do-nothing time.” I’m walking outside, and I am going to go sit under that tree for 10 minutes and I’m going to do nothing. I literally give myself permission to do that. You’ll begin to shift some perspectives on some things where you’ll find that being unproductive actually sets you up for being more productive.

Number one, it recharges your batteries. Number two, some creative idea can drop out of the sky for you. Number three, you’re connecting to life, the world, joy – whatever feeds you, you’re connecting to it. Then, you’ll start to recognize that being unproductive is a very important thing that supports and honors your wellbeing. You’re going to do more of it. Then you’ll get to the point where you’ll start to be able to decipher more between being productive and driving for results versus just pushing paper around or doing things that don’t really need to be done, or you’ll find that there’s a line where it’s like, “I have done enough. It doesn’t need to be 110% perfect. I have done enough. I am complete with this. I’m moving onto my next thing.” All those sorts of things can start to positively become a result out of you investing some time in just being unproductive.

SS: I love that notion of doing nothing so that you can be more productive and focused when you are back at work. You also wrote an article about courage. Kerry, I’d love to hear from you, what does courage look like in the workplace and how can it help professionals grow in their own career?

KC: Courage is being willing to take risks. Courage is leaning into the unknown. Courage is embracing others and your relationships with others. What kind of ways do you look at people? Do you look at them as your colleagues are here to add more work or take your job? Or are they here to add to your success? Courage is about having conviction and faith that things will work out. Most of all, courage is you accepting your responsibility and your part in your experience, both in the workplace where your career goes and in your personal relationships. Ultimately, courage is about self-discovery and owning your life and taking a stand for that in the workplace.

I am going to honor my colleagues. I’m going to honor their diversity. Whoever they are, wherever they come from, I’m going to leverage their strengths. I’m going to see them as a value-add. I’m going to lean in. I’m going to have faith that things are going to work out and I’m not going to stress out so much about controlling it, and it has to be this one way, or it has to go this certain way or it’s going to be a failure. I’m going to be open to different things arriving in the way they arrive. I’m going to take a responsibility for my part in it. I’m going to embrace the unknown. In this particular time that we’re in, change is just a constant. The only constant in nature is change, and you know what, I’m just going to ride that wave instead of fighting it.

These are all the things about courage. It’s not only finding courage within, but then it’s also going out into the world and engaging in the world from a place of courage. Basically, it’s walking in the uncomfortable zone and getting comfortable with discomfort and leaning in and being willing to take risks, try new things, fail, and learn from your mistakes. I think if we could all learn to be just 1% more courageous, that would go a long way. There are times where I will challenge myself. I will give myself a BHAG. A BHAG stands for big, hairy, audacious goal. I will throw something out there that’s just way out there. That’s something I would be too scared to do. I just say, “I’m going to give myself a BHAG and I’m just going to go for it.” That’s my practice in being 1% more courage than I normally do, or in this case, maybe it’s 100% more courage than I normally do, but there’s no attachment to it. Because it’s a BHAG, it’s I have no attachment to the outcome, but I’m going to have the courage and the bravery to go give it a try. Then, I learned things from that experience and lots of times when I go for that BHAG, I actually achieve it. Then, that becomes, “wow, look what I’m capable of, and if I hadn’t taken the courage to even put something down and to go for it, I wouldn’t have even built my courage to get it done.”

Find your courage practice. Then, the more you develop that skill, the more and more you’ll embrace it as your standard way of living, and the more and more you embrace the courage in the way that you live, and the more fantastic your life can become.

SS: I love that. I think you’re right. I think failure is often the fastest way to learn, but it takes a lot of courage to be willing, to put yourself out there to potentially fail. Thank you so much, Kerry. I’ve learned so much in this podcast. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.

KC: Thank you very much.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you want to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Sharon from Citrix join us. Sharon, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Sharon Ehrlich: Sure. Hi, my name is Sharon, and I am the senior director of readiness and enablement for Citrix. Citrix is an American company that’s based in Florida. I’m responsible for leading the sales preparedness for our sellers and our systems engineers across Europe, Middle East, and Africa. I’m a native New Yorker and I’ve been living in Europe for over 20 years now.

SS: Well, Sharon, I’m excited to have you join us. One of your areas of expertise is around promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. I’d love to hear from you, what are some of the common mistakes that organizations make when trying to implement impactful DE&I programs? And what are the potential impacts of those mistakes on organizational health?

SE: Well, I think one of the mistakes you see very often is organizations engage in what I would consider feel good, high-visibility diversity and inclusion activities, which is basically a one-off thing: let’s have a cultural food fair, or let’s have a film festival that is showing films from this underrepresented group or something like that. But they’re not part of a broader D&I strategic imperative and people feel when that’s happening as not being really authentic in any sort of way.

The other thing that can derail a D&I program is the actual lack of focus on the I part, which is the inclusion part of that equation. What that effectively means is that people feel like they are an insider or they’re not an insider. If they’re feeling inclusion, they feel like they’re being treated as an insider and that they’re allowed to retain their uniqueness as well, and that they’re able to express themselves authentically. The risk of getting that wrong is basically that you have issues with lower engagement, so effectively disengagement of employees, which impacts productivity and the real realization of any of your strategic imperatives.

SS: Absolutely. I think that’s a fantastic point. You also recently wrote in an article that diversity will not work as long as organizations do not ensure inclusion, to your point that you just made. How can enablement help organizations overcome this and drive that inclusiveness?

SE: Sure. I think one of the areas to start this sort of examination is just looking at your onboarding process. Our people are joining the organization throughout the year and one would and should look at, first off, who’s delivering your onboarding? Are those people representing a diverse group of whatever ethnic demographics or geographical demographics exist in your area?

The other thing is, how are the people who are leading your onboarding actually engaging with the group and interacting with the new hires? Are they allowing all of the voices in the room to be heard? Because this is really setting the stage for how the organization behaves culturally. Those new employees and new hires are going to take that back into the field with them.

Then the other point I’d like to raise here is just an examination of your training materials and the content that you’re using. Does it link actually to the geographical or cultural differences of the participants? Or is it very American-centric or European-centric, depending on where you’re located. This is of particular importance for those organizations that are training global sales forces. This is actually a point of concern when you get the post-onboarding surveys. Oftentimes, you hear that the examples have absolutely nothing to do or are completely divorced from the environment that the seller is working in.

SS: Absolutely. I think those are really good areas to focus because on in order to better incorporate inclusion. Now, you also mentioned in the article something about psychological safety and how critical that is to inclusion. What are some ways that enablement can help cultivate psychological safety among sales teams?

SE: Well, psychological safety is this idea that people feel like they can speak without repercussion. One of the things that I think has to be a focus is on how feedback is delivered and it needs to be delivered in a constructive way. It needs to remove any sort of personal angle to it. In addition to that, enablement can be very supportive in driving home this message that we can learn from our failures.

When you think about role-playing exercises that we often put our sellers through, when they don’t excel at that role-playing exercise, the way that you give the feedback is really important. Is it delivered in a constructive way? Are the participants instructed on how they should give feedback? Is the recipient instructed on how they should receive that feedback? And then more importantly, if the feedback is constructive, how can we learn from it? So, mistakes should really be framed as learning opportunities.

SS: I think that’s been a fantastic way to think about it. Now, you’re also passionate about mentorship and professional development, as am I. I’d love to hear from you, how can enablement help remove barriers to ensure that there’s equity in the opportunity for reps to succeed and advance their careers?

SE: Some organizations have very tight alignment with enablement and recruitment. Oftentimes, what we discover is a typical profile is being recruited for sales roles. If enablement has any way of influencing that, one of the areas where one can be particularly vocal is about looking outside of that stereotypical seller profile that the company or the organization has embraced for hiring. So that’s one area.

Then if you do happen to have a group of hires who are diverse, those who are falling outside of this stereotypical profile need to be included, they need to be brought in. That’s when you have an enablement facilitator or a trainer who can really make that happen, making sure that all of the voices are heard, and that people are assigned mentors. Again, depending on the kind of organization or structure you have up in how aligned the readiness team is with those kinds of activities. Who are the people who are getting mentors, is it the typical sales profile? Meaning, a certain gender, a certain age – who’s allowed to be a mentor?

The other thing is, I think we have to open our mind about the mentoring pool. One thing that I’ve read about recently is that at any single time in a larger organization, you may have five generations of people working there. If you have five generations of folks working under one corporate structure or one business, then how are we going to include them all in our development strategies? Are we making decisions that all of them are worth investing in those who are obviously motivated and who want to grow? Are we focusing our energies on those who fit a specific profile or fall into a very specific age category? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I believe that the professional development should be not limited to any particular group, but across the whole swath of employees that you have no matter which age group or demographic they’re falling into.

SS: I think that’s very important to call attention to. In a recent LinkedIn post, in a similar vein, you talked about the importance of compassion in the workplace. So, from your perspective, how can compassion help people be more effective and authentic leaders?

SE: If we think about compassion, we think about it as having positive or good intentions and genuine concern for others. When you’re able to listen and hear people without judgment, and then really show empathy in an authentic way, what happens is it eventually leads you to greater understanding of the people who you’re leading or the people on your team. What that then drives, and this is what the dividend is, it really invites sharing an openness from your team. This strengthening of the communication is absolutely valuable. Invariably what you end up getting is more creativity around problem-solving, increased engagement, and a lot of openness, not just in a single direction of employee to manager or leader, but also amongst the team and the employee group.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. Sharon, thank you so much for joining us today. I enjoyed our conversation.

SE: Thank you for having me

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know.

Today, I’m excited to have Hannah from Red Canary join us. Hannah, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Hannah Ensler-Rivel: Sure. My name is Hannah Ensler-Rivel and I’m the director of revenue enablement over at Red Canary. Red Canary is a security company focused on the endpoint and investigating, detecting, and responding to threats there as well as being a security operations ally to our customers.

I was hired as a sales enablement manager, the first enablement hire for Red Canary, in October of last year and recently was promoted to the director role, which is going to give me oversight into all of our revenue-facing folks and think about all the enablement they might need and start growing our enablement team over at Red Canary, which I’m really excited about.

SS: Well, we’re also excited to have you joining us today. You mentioned on LinkedIn that you recently rolled out a new onboarding program. I would love to hear from you, what does that program look like?

HER: Yeah, so not only was I new to the role, I jumped right in and built a brand new onboarding program because we hire for sales in cohorts. We were hiring for this next fiscal year in December, so in December we hired about 30 new SDRs and account executives. I spent January and February onboarding all of them in our new program, which we called Flight School. It’s been interesting approaching that challenge in such a high-growth environment.

I think the framework I really wanted to think about was building purposefully for the virtual space. I think last year, most enablement professionals, we very suddenly and spontaneously had to make all of our enablement programs virtual, and most of us just took our in-person content and put it on Zoom and did our best. But now, a year into this pandemic and looking ahead to the future of work, which I think is going to look very different, I really wanted to build for doing onboarding virtually for the future.

I really focused on really three things. One was lots of short sessions. It seems like a simple thing, but the human brain cannot do more than 90 minutes or so on Zoom. Even though it made the logistics a little more complex and it made the program a little bit longer, it was important to me to do a lot of shorter sessions. Each session was outcome-driven around a specific theme. Which made it really easy to check into the learning and know exactly what was going to happen.

The second thing I was focused on was really utilizing the flipped classroom style of learning. This is something that I think became a little trendy when I was maybe in middle school or high school. I don’t know if a lot of schools are doing it anymore, but I always found it really appealing. Instead of doing your lecture in class and your homework at home, you flip the two. So, you do your lecture notes, readings, watching videos on your own. When you come to your classroom, in this case, your Zoom room, you’re doing the activities live together and getting immediate feedback. I found it to be a really effective way of teaching sellers because they get that immediate interaction, and they get to work with each other. I had them build a lot of resources that they were going to use in their day-to-day roles that way. I think it was a really effective way to make that virtual learning interactive.

The third thing is just really including the voice of sales. I was brand-new to Red Canary. I learned quickly, but I certainly didn’t have the experience of some of our longest-tenured sellers. So, getting their buy-in to help and be co-facilitators and work on content, and we have such an incredible team here that really jumped in to do that and bring that voice of sales throughout. All of those were really important to figuring out a successful onboarding program, which we just finished, and I think went really well.

SS: Congratulations on that. It sounds like a fantastic program and three very key areas. How can you ensure that the knowledge and skills that are learned in the onboarding stick long-term and really lead to the right behaviors?

HER: Enablement doesn’t end with onboarding, although it’s such a vital part and it’s the first part. It’s so important to focus on it, but we have to continue that otherwise everything learned in onboarding is just going to fall by the wayside. I think it’s important to have an enablement brand, just like we have a Red Canary brand about allyship with our customers. We need an internal enablement brand aligned with similar values of allyship with our sales folks. For me, that brand is about being expected, repeatable, and consistent. With expected, that’s about when we’re doing enablement. We have our monthly all-hands, we have our QBRs, we have our regular newsletter and other channels of communication. So, sales always knows when they’re showing up to learn and can be in that right headspace with those correct expectations.

From a repeatable standpoint, that’s to ensure everyone’s learning the same behaviors and that we’re really making sure to be consistent with that. To run enablement at scale, you really need to have that repeatable content, and that’s somewhere I really leverage content creation like videos to make sure we’re always using that repeatable enablement content.

Finally, consistent. Every session we do, every enablement activity, has outcomes. Then, the content is driven by those outcomes. Also, it’s important to me that everybody who’s coming to speak to the sales team speaks in the sales voice. That often means I’m doing some translation for our product teams or our marketing teams or our engineering teams, anyone that wants to talk to sales. I want them to bring their knowledge to the table and then I want us to convert that to, why does this matter to me as a seller? How does this impact my pipeline tomorrow? How do I talk about this with a customer? There’s a fair amount of translation that needs to happen. That’s such a key role of enablement. I think focusing on those three things as the enablement brand ensures that everything you learn in onboarding continues to be reinforced throughout your Red Canary career.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now, as you mentioned, Red Canary is growing rapidly. How have you gone about building enablement programs that are able to support the revenue teams as the company’s scaling?

HER: We’re growing like crazy. We basically doubled our sales team this year, which has been really fun, but it’s also happening very quickly. There are a couple of things you need to do there. One is the right people. As I start to build my team, I’m thinking about this. One of the things that I really love about the field of enablement is that it’s so new. It doesn’t necessarily require or demand a particular background. It really harnesses a whole variety of skills, and those skills can come from a lot of different places. I was a teacher and then I was in recruiting and then I was in event management, and somehow all of those things added up to getting an opportunity in sales enablement, where I do apply all of those things. But I had that opportunity and I got to enter this world.

As I take on a leadership position, it’s really important to me to be able to provide those same opportunities to others who might be coming from different backgrounds than we expect. Maybe not from sales specifically, but bringing incredible diversity and creativity to the table. When we do that, I think we really are able to reflect within our enablement team the diverse partners and customers that we serve. Enablement’s a really high visibility team and a driver of so much communication and collaboration. Having those really diverse, interesting teams I think is an important part of the puzzle of scaling – getting those right people in those roles.

I think another part is the right tools. There’s a lot out there. Figuring out the right sales enablement tools for your business is really key to operationalizing and scaling what you do. You can create great content, but if you can’t figure out how to share that meaningfully, it’ll never get seen. Picking your tool stack is really key.

Then, I also think just encouraging the right conversations. Figuring out how to capture institutional knowledge is such a tricky part of enablement, but so important, especially now that we’re all working remotely. All those opportunities that sales folks used to have to learn by osmosis just by sitting next to great other sellers and hearing their calls and turning them and saying, “Hey, can you look at this quote? Does this seem right?” We’re missing a lot of those opportunities now, especially when you come in brand new to a company. How do we capture that and make sure it resonates?

Something we’ve done here is we built the Red Canary Rep Council or RC-Squared, and that’s made up of six of our longest-tenured sellers who are committed to being coaches and facilitators for a six-month term. They teach a lot of Flight School. They do a lot of coaching on pitches, feedback on our certifications, they’re the voice of sales for other organizations that need to understand what people are seeing in the field. I think that’s helped a lot for our new sellers to feel immediately plugged into smart people who’ve done this for a long time. All of those I think are helping scale this but there’s certainly a lot more work to do as we continue to grow at this rapid pace.

SS: One other way organizations can scale success is through partners. Given your experience overseeing partner enablement programs in the past, I’d love to get your perspective. What are some unique challenges of delivering enablement programs to partners and how have you overcome some of those challenges?

HER: Yeah, I’ve certainly come across some challenges with that. I think the first challenge, the biggest one, is every partner’s going to have a different knowledge base, different expertise, different resources, and a different level of commitment to the partnership. You could have a partner who’s basically just selling your products and an extension of your team. Then, you could have a partner who can sell 300 different things and is not focused specifically on your organization or product. Determining how to build enablement to account for all those different levels is really a tricky part of partner enablement.

I think the way you do it is you have to make your content really flexible and adaptable. You have to build really brief self-paced videos and quizzes, you have to build in-person delivery that your channel account managers or other folks can do, you have to build some comprehensive technical courses as well to cover those folks that really want to get in-depth in your product. You just need to give partners all the different options to learn all the same things at the pace and level that they need to. If you make your content way too deep, you’re going to lose people who are only selling it 5% of the time. And if you make it way too high-level, you’re going to lose those deeper technical people who really want to get immersed in your product. A flexible, adaptable, wide range of content is really important.

I think the second challenge is you can’t always just lift and shift your existing enablement content because the partner perspective and the partner voice are different. It’s different depending on what side of the table they’re sitting on: are they looking at integrating your product with a variety of other ones? You have to make it applicable to their mindset. Keep it simple, keep it connected to their day-to-day. One of the best ways to do that is to ask them. When you have great partners, ask them, what’s the best piece of content you’ve seen? What’s the best partner enablement course you’ve been through? Can I ride along with you while you’re selling our products and hear what’s going well and what’s not? Once you form some really good relationships, asking them what they need and what’s working will really help you adapt your existing sales enablement content for what they need to be doing on a day-to-day basis.

SS: I love that term “lift and shift”. How do you ensure that you get broad adoption of your enablement initiatives with your partners? What are some tips to gain mindshare with partners for some of your enablement programs, given that it can be hard when partners have a lot of competing priorities?

HER: They certainly do. The first thing is really being an ally to them. This is something I love at Red Canary. It’s so important to our brand that we are a security ally to our customers and to our partners. It’s not just lip service. It’s really something we provide in the knowledge share we do in the community at large. Establishing yourself as an ally overall helps a lot with this, showing your commitment to partners so they can count on you. But there’s a lot more you need to do as well. The first is really to demonstrate your value. When you have wins together, when you have enablement content that helped lead to sales, when you have certified partners who helped do the services, you need to highlight those wins publicly with your partners and show them how much they mean to your business.

I’ve also found a lot of success partnering with internal marketing teams to do that. I’ve had a lot of success with partner marketing, working hand-in-hand with partner enablement to do events and to do various challenges and things we can do to build the overall brand together. That’s been really successful for me too. Really, it’s just showing that commitment to your partners, so they understand when they invest in you, it’ll be worth their time.

Sometimes that’s just going to meet them where they are. Last year when the entire world shut down, I was actually in Australia on a two-week tour of all of the partners down there and going into all of their offices and walking through all of our content. It was a big investment on our part, but it was so important because we were able to show them how important they were to our business by going to them, not asking them to take time out to go to a conference, but saying, “we’ll come into your office on our own dime and teach you what you need to know.” It’s really just about demonstrating that commitment throughout the entire enablement experience.

SS: The last question I have for you is one many of us often have to think about which is to be able to demonstrate the impact. How do you measure the impact of your partner enablement efforts?

HER: It’s definitely something we all struggle with in measuring enablement impact. It’s really so hard and I think it’s something I still am learning as I gain more experience in enablement. One of the things that’s great now at Red Canary, I actually sit on our revenue operations team. I think that’s becoming a more popular model for enablement, but it’s the first time in my enablement career I’ve done that. I have a real bird’s eye view into all the metrics that are being tracked across the organization and what’s important to all the different teams, what they’re asking of our sales operations specialist and managers, what our CRO is asking for in dashboards. As a result, I can see where the trends are. I can see where the concerns are, and I can try to map what I’m doing in enablement to what those metrics are.

On the partner enablement side, I think you can do the same thing, where you’re tracking how the enablement engagement is happening when it’s happening and then looking at when deals are coming in. Did we do a big enablement session? Then, did we see an increase in pipeline from that particular partner? That’s one of the easiest, most straightforward ways to track it. It’s a little bit of causation versus correlation, but I think again, if you can demonstrate that both to partners and to your internal teams, you get so much more buy-in for your programs that you can show it directly led to pipeline.

I think one of the key things is just being in lockstep with your operations team. Even if you as enablement or partner enablement don’t sit on the revenue operations team, still really being connected to the folks on that team, to your sales operations manager and understanding what’s important to them, and then getting to map your efforts to that, that’s been really helpful to me. I sit on the same team as our great sales operations manager. I talk to him all the time about how do we track what we’ve just done in onboarding to what’s going to happen as these folks bring in their first deals. We are able to work together to build some of those dashboards. Collaboration with your operations team helps a lot with figuring out the impact of enablement.

SS: Hannah, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. I learned so much from you today and I really enjoyed the conversation, so thank you again.

HER: Thank you, Shawnna, for having me. I really enjoyed it as well.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know, we’d love to hear from you.

Today, I’m excited to have Yohan from Lectra join us. Yohan, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Yohan Labesse: Hello everyone, I’m Yohan Labesse from Lectra, and I’m very happy to have the opportunity to talk to you about why I really like sales enablement. I’ve been working in sales enablement for 15 years, and my role at Lectra is to be the director of the sales enablement team within the international sales department. I’m based in Bordeaux, where we have our corporate teams. I have a team of 8 people and we have around 200 salespeople across the world. I’m very happy to have this opportunity with the Sales Enablement PRO audience to talk about these topics today.

SS: We are very honored to have you join us. In fact, on LinkedIn, you wrote that enablement acts as a liaison between teams such as sales, marketing, and product. I would love to learn from you, how can enablement professionals help to improve the collaboration between those departments?

YL: I think it’s one of the main added values of the sales enablement function. If you look in history at why some companies have decided to create sales enablement, one of the main reasons is that in many companies, they have lost the connection between marketing and sales. I have to say that I never faced any internal barriers with being in between sales, marketing, product, and other functions because all of those functions and departments very easily see the added value to having someone that can digest everything and create the content that the salespeople need. Sometimes, it’s very hard for the other departments to know exactly what the salespeople need in the field, and it can be a bit frustrated to create content that is not really used by the field and other salespersons. This is where I think the added value is very easy to see internally by the other departments. Marketing, again, has direct access to salespeople through sales enablement and have only one department they are wanting to speak with. On the other hand, they know that we are doing our best to make sure that the salespeople will use the marketing content they created. So, it’s a win-win situation where it’s very easy internally to get buy-in from different departments because we make life easier for sales, marketing, and all the departments. For me, this one is not really a challenge. It’s something that has been very welcomed at different organizations and companies I’ve worked for.

SS: Absolutely. I think that is definitely one of the benefits of enablement. Now, when you go about developing a strategic roadmap for your enablement programs, how do you ensure that the program aligns with the goals and the interests of some of enablement’s key stakeholders?

YL: Good question. The way I see sales enablement is that on its own, you cannot have a specific and dedicated plan for sales enablement. Sales enablement is here to make the other plans easier to execute. The way I always create the plan for my team is always to go to the field, go to the sales management first, and also departments involved in the sales process. So, not only the sales team, but all the departments that at some point can influence the sales process. And just ask them what their challenges are, what would they like to improve, and where do they think that sales enablement can help. From here, it’s very easy to build the plan of the sales enablement team and validate this plan first with all the internal stakeholders. It’s always the way I have been building my different plans. It works well in that way, because then all the different departments are involved in designing the sales enablement plan. They can see very easily the benefits of the plan and can recognize themselves and their needs in the plan I’m going to build.

As I said, with no interaction with different departments, we don’t need sales enablement. The main purpose of sales enablement is that we need some team, like sales enablement, to gather the input from different departments to improve the selling experience in the end. Again, the easy way to align our goals with the other stakeholders is to first ask the other stakeholders, what do they need, what are their KPIs, their goals, and where we can help. And at the end, it will fit very well with what the sales team in the field also really wants and needs. This is the way I build my program, starting by asking the field and different departments, what do they need? Then, just ask the key stakeholders to validate my plan and then it’s quite easy to execute it.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now on the execution side, when you launch enablement programs in the field with the sales reps, what are some strategies to ensure that you are getting broad adoption of your programs?

YL: I have a double strategy here. I think the first strategy is to get the key executive sponsorship and make sure that all the content has been validated by the key executives. I’m not speaking about the top-down strategy, I’m speaking about being an internal trust advisor for the sales teams to explain that everything we are going to deliver has been validated by the marketing team, the legal team, the finance team, and so on.

Then, they can trust in it, they can reach all of our documents with no doubt, with no questions about the right version of the sales proposals, rules I need to play with, and so on. They know that whatever comes from sales enablement has been first validated, and it’s ready to be shared externally. That’s one side of the strategy.

The second side of the strategy is just to be close to the field and spend time with salespeople on a daily basis to know exactly what they need, what they use, what are their pain points on the daily basis. Then, just reprioritize what you think you can change. When you have a couple of quick wins, you will win trust, they will believe in you, they will see that you bring some value to the job.
I think the best strategies I have always used are getting the feedback from the field. We have different tactics for that, shadowing salespeople or building some local champions and network where we can get the voice of the field. The second part of the strategy is always come with something that is ready to be shared and to be used with no doubt about the validation and so on. That’s the way we do it here at Lectra.

SS: I think those are two fantastic approaches. Now, you’ve mentioned sales leadership. I would love to understand from you how a partnership with sales managers can also enhance adoption of enablement programs. What are some of the ways that enablement professionals can strengthen their relationships with sales managers and really leverage that partnership to improve their initiatives?

YL: For me, the sales leaders are the most important internal clients to work with for many reasons. But the two main reasons are that first, they are acting as the key actors to transform the strategy into real life, because whatever the strategy is that you will define, if you have no one or no team to execute this strategy locally, then your strategy will be only a vision. We need a team on the field to transform it into actions. That’s why sales leaders are very important.

The second thing is coming back to the way we work as a small team is that you only get one sales leader and under the sales leader you have six to seven salespeople. By only working with one person, you can engage 6 people in the end, and you know that if the sales leader buys your program, you make sure that the salespeople will use it. I prefer to go first to the sales managers to make sure that my program will be deployed easily in the field.

Now, to answer your question about the way we work with the sales leaders, I think first is to get the confidence and the trust of the sales leaders. Come first to the sales leaders with some tools and programs to help them. There is always something that works, and that is that with sales leaders, their time is limited. They have plenty of tasks to do – administrative tasks, selling tasks, coaching tasks, and so on. That’s a starting point, if you find a way to help them limit their time or to better manage their effort and energy, you will get their attention and you will win their confidence. I think that’s the first thing to do.

The second thing is to get in touch with sales leaders on a regular basis. Listen to them and tell them in a smart way, because they like to be challenged, and it’s a way for them to make sure that you are the expert in sales efficiency because you are you able to challenge them with smart ideas, tools, new ways to do stuff.

Again, I think it’s a two or three-step approach. First, you have to gain the confidence, give them something, a quick win — especially on the time. Then, you can challenge them on what they need to change to get better. At the end, if you can really make the connection between your programs and the fact that it will help them to achieve their sales objectives, it will be very easy to work with them. If you still have in mind the final goals at the end of the year, your job is to help them to achieve their sales objectives. It will also be very easy for you to work with the sales leaders. Again, one game-changer is to give them more time to coach the team, to do some deal reports, and spend more time on the selling tasks. If you can remove all the admin task to the minimum, then of course, it will be really easy for you to work with the sales leaders.

SS: I couldn’t agree more with that advice. Now, what role does feedback play in your process when you are thinking about designing and implementing enablement programs? It sounds like you work very cross-collaboratively with a lot of departments and a lot of key stakeholders like the sales leader. How do you go about sourcing feedback from some of your key stakeholders?

YL: I think you have to mix the way you want to get the feedback. The first way to get the feedback of the programs you launch is a very easy one: it comes from the data. When you launch a new sales enablement platform or when you push for new e-learnings, it’s very easy to see how many people connect on your e-learning and so on. Those are just quantitative data.

On top of this, what you also have to look for is more quantitative data and feedback. When you go to the data, you have a good understanding of the usage of your programs, but it doesn’t mean that it was really efficient for them or useful because sometimes they know they have to do it because it comes from corporate. But it doesn’t mean that they really see the value in the field. The second way to get feedback is to just ask them what their feedback is. Again, you can have filters, and it depends on the culture of the company. But sometimes in some companies, they will feel that they have to say what you want to hear. They might be afraid to be very challenging with giving you bad feedback about your program.

Getting feedback is good, but I think at the end, the best way to get the feedback is to go in the field, to shadow them, to spend time with them in a customer meeting, in the car when you go back to a client meeting, and so on. When you go in the field with someone, you will always get the right feedback back to make sure that they use the tool, but also that they really liked it, not that they just followed the e-learning because the sales leader said, “you know what guys, I have the pressure from corporate, so please follow the e-learnings because we have to.” What works best for me is to go into the field with the salespeople and just see on the daily basis the way they discuss with their colleagues about your program, the way they use it when they are in a client meeting. In the end, that’s the best feedback you can ever have.

SS: Absolutely. I think in-the-field feedback is critical to sales enablement success. This has been a fantastic conversation. In closing, I do want to ask one last question. I think sales enablement often needs to ensure that stakeholders have visibility into the results that enablement is driving. How can sales enablement practitioners go about ensuring that their stakeholders understand the business impact that sales enablement is having on the business?

YL: This one is a very tricky topic. When you talk about coaching, training, or providing the best sales content, it’s very hard to connect those activities to the business or to the additional deals you may influence. At the end of the day, you are only part of a very long sales cycle where you influence some steps. So, it is always an indirect impact, which is very hard to make tangible. When it comes to programs on the sales enablement team that leverage new ways to find leads or new ways to close deals – like managing partners or working with consulting firms, all these kinds of programs that really help at some point to close a deal — then it becomes much easier to prove the direct value of sales enablement programming to the business.

My advice here is to educate the key executives on all the different steps it takes, especially for a complex sales cycle, to close a deal. When you have done this job, explain the cause-and-effect chain starting from awareness, starting from the leads funnel, the coalition rights, and so on. Then, you can come back to some part of this process to say, “here we are going to improve it to influence the overall sales process.” When the key executives start to understand this breakdown process to close a deal, then they can see the added value of the sales enablement team.

When you start to understand the process it takes to close a deal, then they can better see the added value of the sales enablement team. If you do not do this job and just say the very high-level vision with number of sales closed at the end of the year, and enablement programs, and then you see before after. There are a lot of different things on a year basis that can influence the overarching sales plan and achievement. If you do not do this job internally to educate everyone on what it takes to close a deal, you will never achieve this to connect all sales enablement programs to the sales final results.

SS: I think that is a fantastic approach, Yohan. Thank you so much for joining us today. I certainly learned a lot.

YL: Thank you for the invitation.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

March is Women’s History Month, a time dedicated to celebrating the contributions that women have made to society throughout history. In this special episode, we dive into how women have and continue to drive impact in sales enablement by highlighting expert advice from female leaders in sales enablement.

First, research shows that women are highly effective leaders. Yet, they are still significantly underrepresented in leadership positions in the business world today. So, how can women in sales enablement gain a seat at the table? Mary Shea and Alyssa Clark share their thoughts on the importance of representation in leadership and advice to support personal leadership development.

Mary Shea: Women are dramatically underrepresented in leadership. In terms of Fortune 500 CEOs, only 7.4% of those CEOs are female. For those of you who are entrepreneurs or who make investments in companies – 85% of venture capital funding goes to all male-led companies. And what I find fascinating and disturbing at the same time is that female founders are more likely to bring their companies to cash flow positive than males are.

First of all, interestingly enough, we learned that sales teams led by women deliver better commercial results. One of the reasons we wanted to talk about moving beyond “lean in” is because there are institutional responsibilities, corporate responsibilities, policy responsibilities that others have, in addition to female sellers themselves, to breaking some of this glass. Women are subject to both explicit and implicit biases – explicit on the gender pay side, implicit, in not “being in the room” when key decisions are being made. We find both of those types of biases as being very, very harmful for female progress in the workplace.

It’s called the “she’s not strategic enough” roadblock. And one of the things we found in addition to the confidence issue throughout the survey was this concept of feeling that you were being treated or thought you were being treated differently because of your gender. If you’re told you’re not strategic enough, how do you actually work on that? What we recommend is that you start to think about developing your own personal leadership, recognize your own strengths, and cultivate a range of leadership styles.

We all appreciate that Sheryl Sandberg brought forward an important conversation with “lean in”, but we’re at a place now where we can’t say it’s on women wholly to solve these problems. There are policies that need to be made. Policies that need to be changed at the governmental level, at the organizational level, and business leaders need to take responsibility: Are there visible women on the executive committee or board? Is there a commitment to diversity across the company? Do you see those folks that represent a range of backgrounds and views? Is there a chief diversity officer or does that role not exist within the organization?

Alyssa Clark: I think for me as I started to mature in the corporate learning space, I don’t see a lot of women as I look left, right. I want that, I want that for us to make sure that we are equally represented, and there’s so much room around race, sexuality, etc., to continue on to. But I think for women it’s really important for us to see our leadership positions as an opportunity to groom someone else to take our spot. We need to be committed as peers and allies in this battle of representation to look at each other and say, “Hey, we know what it took to get here. And it’s our responsibility to bring others forward.” One of my recent hires, she actually was someone who, as I was talking through the process, I just kept thinking like, “wow, like I should be working for her.” Right? Like she is the one who should be making these decisions because I feel like I’m better off every time we interact. And as I reflected on my experience, a lot of those mentors for me were men and men that I still to this day admire and respect.

Quite honestly, I modeled myself after, but I think about the future and I think about how much more empathy, how much more awareness can we share on certain topics in the workplace if we simply had a better representation of females, in these senior leadership positions. And that is something that I’ve made a cornerstone of my personal career is trying to make sure that I’m committed to, empowering and supporting, and hopefully motivating other women to continue their hunger and their lust for their curiosity and for responsibility and for wanting to make an impact.

SS: Peer support can be a powerful way to overcome obstacles and help colleagues ascend to leadership positions. Shannon Hempel, Lisa Hammack, and Sally Kim share how women can support each other in professional development and career growth.

Shannon Hempel: I think one of the most empowering ways a woman can support other women is to be a champion for them in meetings. No matter who is in the meeting, it could just be a small group of people that is your team. Maybe you’re on a team of people and you want to speak up for somebody and just highlight that was a great idea. Something as small as that, just being a champion in a room. If you are a leader and you have people that are your direct reports, start championing them and leading in meetings that you have with people that are two levels above them in a way that is meaningful. Not just because they’re a woman, but because the work is really good.

The other thing that I would suggest is just sitting and listening to others and digging in and asking them questions. I say that because the more you listen to somebody, women specifically in this case, the more you’re going to hear what is it that they really want to do with their career, how they want to drive enablement in their company and grow the position. It’s more visible depending on the kind of company that you’re in. And if something that they say is something that you have a strength in, talk to them and volunteer to say “I will do this particular thing for you. I know of a great book that I just read that is super empowering. Let me send you the link to it.” Start small because people are going to start coming to you because they see that you are empowering if you build trust. Whatever you do, follow through with it. If you say you’re going to help somebody with any particular task, do it. If you are asking them questions to explain things so that you can learn more about them, really listen and show that you heard them. It really is all just a bunch of small acts that I think are the big drivers.

Lisa Hammack: I think the best thing we can do is really encourage each other, always be authentic and vulnerable. And take the time to know those strengths and not be afraid to speak up even when it’s awkward sometimes because let’s face it, sometimes when you’re in a room with a group full of men, it feels awkward. So, I think we have to challenge ourselves and our fellow women coworkers to not be afraid to speak. Another thing I think is too, I think sometimes we are afraid that if we are outspoken, that if we’re assertive, that we might come away as sounding arrogant, but I think we have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable sometimes. It’s really up to us and our teammates to encourage each other and consistently find ways to give each other feedback and to really, to pull each other up.

Sally Kim: There are so many more opportunities for career advancement for women that are just an arms reach away, that when you see those opportunities for other women, all you want to do is be able to extend the hand and help. I think more tactically, how that happens is everyday actions. If you see, for instance, that a colleague of yours isn’t getting the time and attention in a meeting, even though they have great ideas, and if you’re in a more senior position, or even if you’re just a colleague being able to step in on their behalf to say, “Hey, let’s hear from this person.” It starts with small actions like that, and giving opportunities to your peers that might not always be as easy to find all the way to being allies and sponsors when it comes time for things like reviews and performance reviews, right? How can you be a sponsor to another person who you know, has done great work?

SS: Whether you are seeking career advice or looking to pay it forward, mentorship can be an extremely beneficial way to support leadership development for both mentors and mentees. Shannon Hempel and Jen Scandariato share how mentorship can help professionals develop leadership skills.

Shannon Hempel: Be a mentor, find a mentor, and remember a mentor doesn’t have to be someone you know well. It can be somebody you’ve had a certain acquaintance with. It can be somebody who you just see that in your industry on LinkedIn or whatever forums that you’re following, that you have a lot of respect for and schedule a meeting with them to just say, I want to talk to you about how I can move forward in whatever area. But be assertive. When I know for myself that if I get a note from a young person in their enablement career and they are truly asking for help, I am all over it. I’m going to make the time because finding people who reach out and ask for that help honestly is not often found. In my opinion, in my experience, definitely the obvious is find networks, reach out to them, but to really engage yourself because that’s where the learning is going to take place. That’s going to be where you see it grow your career and your enablement career much faster.

Jen Scandariato: I think what I did was I wanted to surround myself with people that were brilliant and then I could learn from. You never want to be the smartest person in the room because then you aren’t learning anymore and growing. They always say, if you’re in your comfort zone, and you’re not taking risks then you’re not learning. I think my aptitude to learn and grow was just an important part of my career development. I just had that affinity to take on the world. I do recommend now to have individuals be that sponsor or be that mentor. And it doesn’t have to be a formal conversation. I think it’s about finding people that you admire, and you want to emulate. It’s difficult in the virtual world to have a cup of coffee with somebody these days but if you could saddle up with them and learn by their example and then emulate that in your real world, I think those are the best mentors when it’s unofficial.

But I do believe you need a sponsor, you need somebody advocating on your behalf when you’re not in that room and in order to do that I think it’s important to tell your supervisors and people that you work with that you’re looking for an adventure, you’re looking for a new opportunity. You want to raise your hand and take on something that maybe is out of your comfort zone, out of your wheelhouse. When you put it out there that you’re looking for more opportunity and you’re raising your hand, people are much more willing to give you that opportunity and give you that room to grow. You have to have trust though. So, I think it’s important that you set yourself up for success, show your capability on what you can do, and then people will trust you.

SS: In addition to supporting one another, there are also several things that women can do to take ownership of their career development and seek out opportunities for professional growth. Alyssa, Sally, Lisa, and Jen share advice on how women can proactively build the skills that will help them continue to advance in their careers.

Alyssa Clark: I would encourage people early in their careers, especially women to think about how are you using your voice? And what I mean by that specifically is your lack of speaking up is sometimes even louder than being silent. And I would really encourage women who are sitting in a meeting thinking, should I ask this question? Should I raise this complaint? Should I voice this concern? I would say if you’re thinking it and you have a reason for it, ask the question, but ask it from a place of curiosity. That is something, a secret weapon of mine that I’ve really tried to home in on over the years is coming from a place of curiosity and not allowing that to kill the cat. Thinking about the why behind the what, and asking for it, sometimes relentlessly. That is what earns respect. That is what earns credibility and honestly, stamina.

Career progression is driven by you. Your curiosity is driven by you and your success ultimately is driven by you. And I know first hand that it is an absolute responsibility of mine. I know you’re committed to it as well, Shawnna, to invite women into these conversations. Your voice is wanted, it is heard, and your unique perspective is what makes you not only a viable asset to an organization, but to the world, to our communities as well.

Sally Kim: I would say to not be afraid. Everybody is willing to help and just dive in and ask for the plethora of wisdom that lives within the industry. Don’t shy away from the stigmas that exist within helping a sales organization or a customer-facing organization that might be dominated by biases or preexisting stigmas. There are more and more women that I see entering sales enablement, and some of the best mentors that I’ve had within the space have been women as well. There is a lot to take away from the rockstar women that are within sales enablement. So reach out and ask for all the help that you can get and not be afraid to dive in because I’ve been learning a lot and it’s still a continuous learning journey. There are always offering hands to help.

Lisa Hammack: I would recommend that they find ways to first volunteer to assist them in enablement efforts. For us, we’re always looking for subject matter experts. We’re always looking for sales reps, sales managers that want to be involved in our initiatives. So, I would definitely recommend that they look for ways to get involved, to find out like, is this something that I would want to do as a career? For myself, I started out, I had a couple of jobs in business development where sales enablement was just a little piece of what I did, but I fell in love with it. And so that’s where I kind of determined that that’s where I wanted my career to go. So, I would just recommend looking for opportunities to get involved, to kind of check it out before you actually jump in with both feet.

Jen Scandariato: Get out of your comfort zone and learn, grow, take a new class. There are so many offerings right now, especially in the Zoom world. Join a network, whether it’s a woman in tech or an agile meetup or tech meetup. Find your passion and surround yourself with people that share that passion. I would say the second part that I would recommend is really around your brand. You have to figure out, what is your brand? What are you telling people when they meet you? What is your passion? Who am I when I’m meeting with people, do I say, “I’m a mother of two teenagers?” Do I say, “I’m a woman in tech?” Do I say, “I love big data?” You have to have that tagline. I think you surround yourself with those allies and those mentors. And this is great advice, somebody told me this, and I never thought about this before: You want to be that person that people want on their team.

SS: Thanks for listening to this special episode to honor Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Ashley, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Ashley Crisostomo: Sure. Hi, my name is Ashley and I’m the principal sales enablement program manager at Reddit. I’ve been at Reddit for about one year. I just passed my one-year mark on January 21st, and I was the team’s second hire. My focus has been primarily to build out our new hire program and our go-to-market efforts from the ground up with an emphasis on creating scalable programs. We are a small but mighty team that has grown over the past year to support the Reddit sales organization. We do a bit of everything from running our core programs like onboarding, go-to-market efforts and seller skills. We’ve recently expanded our efforts to support education for our external customers and partners.

SS: That sounds like a lot of things to do for a tiny and mighty team. Ashley, I’m so excited to have you here. You actually caught my eye because in a recent interview, you said that the past year really taught you the importance of flexibility and creativity in executing your sales enablement strategy. I’d love to hear from you, what are some of the ways that you adapted your plans to continue to really deliver impactful results in the midst of all of the change that we had last year?

AC: Yes. Last year it was super interesting. I only had about four to five weeks in the office to meet people before we went on lockdown. So, it was an interesting year for me, but our old normal looked like everybody else’s early enablement programs. We were hosting orientation for all new hires in-person during their first week. When they were flown into headquarters, we hosted lunches, facilitator-led training sessions, and they were able to hang out with their new cohort all week.

Our director of enablement had led the charge on go-to-market efforts and sellers really love the interactive product sessions that we had. She designed desk drops with printed note cards with key value statements on them and with stickers for major releases to get sellers excited for what’s to come. So, everything was very in-person related and they needed that face-to-face interaction.

As soon as lockdown happened, we had to pivot quickly like everybody else. We pretty much just took everything that we were doing in real life and threw it up on Zoom, on live sessions. But as many people experienced, the Zoom fatigue was really real. It was really apparent early on that we knew we had to move fast on our scaled strategy. For our new hire program, we went heads down to pilot our first four on-demand courses for new hires. We really doubled down on a polished learner experience and released our LMS with some fanfare because we knew we really had to rely more on on-demand training while everyone was remote.

The other thing we did was to change all in-person or live training time that we used to have to be opportunities to connect with their coworkers and salient leaders. Instead of being passive in a training session, we really just wanted to cultivate a more cultural experience and merge them into Reddit because they didn’t have the opportunity to meet people live. When we were able to move all of our training to on-demand, it just really better avoided Zoom fatigue.

Then when it came to go-to-market, we turned those desk drops that we had to virtual internal marketing campaigns. We started creating fun gifts all with our value props. We were really lucky to be at Reddit where we can fully embrace creating weird and entertaining gifts and videos full of memes and Reddit humor. So, we had the opportunity to just lean into that and give everybody a good time.

SS: I love that creativity. How are you going to be incorporating some of the lessons learned into your strategy and plans for this year though?

AC: Well, the good news is remote working really just expedited our plans to scale and develop our strategy by creating those on-demand experiences. Now that we’re seeing faster growth this year, we’re fortunate to have already established our foundation and are prepared to evolve really rapidly and grow with the company. Now, we look forward to challenging ourselves to find even more creative ways for our teams to learn, especially as we’re still remote.

We don’t really know what that timeline looks like. So, things like podcasting, things like fun games, anything to keep them engaged, but not have to force them into a Zoom session. We will look forward to like evolving in that way after our foundational creation last year.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now, when you’re going about crafting your sales enablement strategy, who all needs to be involved? Who are some of the core partners that you work to align with within your organization at Reddit?

AC: Yeah, we’re pretty much the center of everybody, the bridge connecting everything across all teams. So, we have great partnerships with our business and product team marketing teams, our product managers who are essential subject matter experts, our data teams. Really, we are the eyes outside of the sales organization directly and the bridge that connects them to our sales team. But more importantly, our strategy needs to align with our sales leader’s strategy. We work closely with them to identify their needs and priorities for the upcoming quarters or the upcoming year, depending on the planning cycle.

SS: And speaking of leaders, I’d love to hear from you some advice for our audience of sales enablement practitioners around how they can gain buy-in from executive stakeholders on their sales enablement strategy.

AC: Definitely. That’s super important. Never plan in a vacuum. But really, my advice is to start with their strategy, work with their time, use their language. A lot of the enablement has concepts and language that is just foreign. While it makes sense and really aligns with them, it’s foreign to our sales leaders. So, make sure to use their language. Our sales strategy should dictate enablement’s roadmap, and if possible, anticipate what the company’s priorities are. In our case, the writing on the wall was for a super growth year. So, we planned for scale. But I think my pro tip is always to save some space in the team’s capacity for anything that will inevitably come up during the year. Try not to be married to a roadmap, but really double down on that macro strategy that can evolve with the sales needs.

SS: Awesome. That’s fantastic. Now, you’ve mentioned this a few times during the podcast but Reddit, as you said, is experiencing a lot of growth at the moment. How do you plan ahead for rapid growth and really ensure that you have the scalability of your enablement programs?

AC: Yeah, so we were really lucky enough to start growing the team and developing our strategy right as remote working started. We didn’t have any old programs or default habits that we weren’t ready to let go of yet. We were really able to start from scratch and think scale from day one. Our team grew and strategy developed with scale and growth in mind from the beginning. That means letting go of relying on purely instructor-led or live training, investing in blended experiences and developing strong training online for our current sellers and our new hires.

I think the silver lining of the past year is that our growth was intended for 2020. We were going to have to build the ship while we were sailing it. But with the pandemic, like everyone else, we began to be conservative with our hiring efforts. That bought us time to prepare, to hit the gas in 2021. We were able to actually have time to build in lieu of this year, which this year we’re definitely putting our foot on the gas.

SS: Absolutely. I think a lot of other organizations are in a similar boat. Tell us then, what does success look like for you this year and what are some of the core metrics that you’ll be measuring to really prove and demonstrate business impact?

AC: Yeah. After we’ve built our foundation, it’s like fast forward to really aligning our metrics and our goals and doubling down on what is successful in the long-term beyond just our foundational programs. We align our programs with business goals. For new hires, we continue to drive down our seller time to productivity. That is and has always been our metric there for go-to-market and product training.

We align with our product teams to look at sell-through rates and are, ideally this year, moving to a more evergreen or always-on type of partnership with our customers that take advantage of multi-product solutions. Again, product has those benchmarks that we can contribute to. As we expand to external customer training this year we’re looking at improving consideration and reducing the friction to our customers to learn how to leverage Reddit to reach their marketing goals.

SS: Those are fantastic metrics to be tracking. Ashley, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. I enjoyed the conversation.

AC: Thank you so much for having me.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Jennifer Robinson: Hi Shawnna. My role right now is as the director of sales enablement for Proxyclick. I’m brand new to this role. Previous to that, I was in charge of sales engagement programs at Veeam software. I have an interesting background in that I’ve been in all three sales learning, development, and marketing. So, I have an interesting viewpoint on the intersection of where all those come together and how it can enable better sales, messaging tools, and training to get them to the next level.

SS: Well, Jennifer, I’m really excited to have you join us. You came to my attention because you wrote about some of the do’s and don’ts when it comes to facilitating sales advisory councils. I know that’s something that a lot of sales enablement practitioners are considering implementing within their organizations this year. So, I would love to understand from you, when done right, what are some of the key benefits that you’ve experienced as a result of having a sales advisory council?

JR: Sales advisory councils are one of my big passions. What it does is takes you down to the street level in your information gathering. So usually, we have good contacts in the executive level, the management level, but we may not always talk to every rep on the street. This gives you a really intimate view of what’s going on in the day-to-day conversations that our salespeople are having with their customers. So, you can make better products, you can make better training, you can tighten the alignment between sales and marketing because you have real-time feedback on marketing assets, and just really can speed up production. It also gives you some serious buy-in from the sales teams and you get a bottom-up influence instead of only have a top-down influence. And combining those two things can bring you to a really strong place and a really great seat at the table.

SS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Now you mentioned some tips about who should be involved, such as a mix of both experienced as well as maybe newer sales reps as well as maybe who should not be involved, including potentially sales managers. Given some of those parameters, what are some of the core characteristics that you look for in reps that you asked to join the council?

JR: Yeah, it’s really tricky to find the right people or it can be. I really enjoy finding people that are not necessarily always strong sellers. I like to have a mix of high performers and maybe greener members or even low performers just to get their perspective. But the one thing that they need to have in common is the confidence to speak up and to maybe go against the grain and disagree with the rest of the group. So, they have to be able to do that.

And at the same time, not take over the meeting because that can happen, too. So, if you have those personalities that are just overwhelming to everyone else, you either have to get really good at facilitating keeping them, in their time limit or make sure that you have people that are outspoken and yet won’t completely take over the meeting.

SS: You’re right. I think finding the right personality types is really important. How do you also ensure that reps across regions, time zones, segments, and all of the different variables that can go into, how you have your sales force set up? How do you ensure that you get equal participation across the various types of reps within your org?

JR: That’s a great question. So, in my previous sales advisory council, I had global regions. So, I did have a separate council for Americas, EMEA, and APAC. And so, each of those, we had a separate meeting, but then if we all got together for something like kickoff, which hopefully someday we’ll be able to physically do again. I was able to get all of the regions together in one room, which was just an amazing touchpoint because you could really see the similarities and the struggles that each of the teams were going through. But then I also make sure to have somebody represented in every segment within those regions. So, every region will have every segment represented so that we can have a really broad view over what is happening on that street level, across all the segments and all the regions.

SS: Now, you mentioned being back in person again, which I absolutely cannot wait for, but in the virtual environment that we’re in, what are some strategies that you have to foster engagement in the sales advisory council?

JR: It’s been tricky because everybody is burnout on Zoom meetings and everything else. But some of the things that I found that has really worked well is one making sure I do a round-robin approach to facilitating the meetings and hosting so that each person really has time and a voice, but secondarily to that also, including things like using the annotation tools, in whatever virtual environment you use, people love those.

It just amazes me how much interaction I can get using annotation tools. It is almost like in-person using a whiteboard and how that draws people in when they see the words going up as they’re happening. That really has seemed to bring out interaction in a lot of areas, especially in maybe regions like APAC, where they may not be as vocal as Americas. They really love those annotation tools, and we’ll jump in and start giving their opinion through that.

SS: I think that’s a fantastic tip. Now, you also wrote about the importance of asking meaningful questions. What are some of your best practices for crafting questions that prompt thoughtful responses from your teams?

JR: Well, I think the problem, a lot of people run into is asking questions like, did you like this training? Or did you like this material? And while that’s a great starting point to start a conversation, a better question would be something much more specific and how it’s being used. So, if you think of each material or action having a job to do within the selling process, getting the sale from point A to point B, what is the job that that piece has to do? So, you can ask, if you’re talking about a particular, let’s say a tool. How did you use that? What reaction did you expect from the customer or in what way were you wanting this tool to change the customer’s viewpoint so you can really understand that? What is the current state, what is the desired state that there has to be a reason why they’re using that tool, and did they accomplish the desired state? So that gives you a much more granular view of what job they are expecting that tool to do and if that tool did accomplish the job that they set out to use it for.

SS: I love that. Jennifer, this has been a fantastic conversation. I do want to close, but one of your tips for success was to create an atmosphere of open dialogue and honesty. I’d love to understand how for our audience in particular, how sales enablement practitioners can help to build an environment where reps feel really comfortable sharing their authentic feedback?

JR: That’s huge. That’s incredibly important in this role. And I think it starts with being authentically yourself and putting things out there that may be sensitive and being very honest about it, putting all your cards on the table, so to speak, and then also giving them ways to say things to you that they know will stay with you, that won’t get passed on. A simple example of that is let’s say you’re going to have a meeting with an executive and you’re representing some sales team, but the sales teams are there. If they have questions that they don’t feel comfortable asking directly, if you allow them some kind of method to funnel questions to you, and then you ask that question in representation of them for the executive or for the product team or for whatever the case may be. They start to trust that you will represent them without giving away their anonymity. So, they can be very comfortable in telling you anything that comes to mind and being very authentic and honest with you. And you can then have that information to be able to gather and make the actions that are appropriate to make your practice better.

SS: I love that. Jennifer, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. I really loved learning about sales advisory councils from you.

JR: Thanks for your time, Shawnna. It was a pleasure.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Ken Millard: Yeah. Hi. Thanks, Shawnna. As you said, Ken Millard here. I am English, as you can probably tell from my accent. But I have lived outside of the UK for the last 25 years in Italy, Germany, and Poland. In that time, I’ve worked for a variety of software companies. And for most of that time, I’ve been in an enablement role. Currently, I live in Germany, married with two kids and working for, as you said, Delphix as a senior sales enablement program manager.

A quick word on Delphix, principally, it’s all about data for Delphix. They take the view that every company is a data company and also pretty much every large company is undergoing some form of digital transformation and where those two meet, where data meets digital transformation, is where Delphix really scores.

SS: Well, Ken, I’m honored to have you join us today. So, thank you so much for making the time. In fact, you caught my eye because you wrote an article about the importance of mastering the basics: communication, context, focus, and connection. And you need all of these things essentially in order to succeed in sales. I’d love to hear from you, for our audience, what do the basics look like in a sales enablement context? How can sales enablement practitioners master those fundamentals?

KM: Yeah, right. The focus of that article was to remind people that salespeople don’t need to master everything. In fact, hardly anybody needs to master everything but the basics. It’s a bit of a sporting analogy. Anybody that is a professional sportsperson, whether they’re hitting the ball or catching the ball, or sliding the puck along the ice or whatever it happens to be, they need to be able to do those simple things that are involved in that sport without thinking about them. And only once they’ve mastered those basics, can they then move on to the finer points. Maybe somebody is about to tackle them when they’re about to pass the ball and they still have to complete the pass. These kinds of things, the interruptions or the objections or whatever, get in the way of their normal communication. They know the basic business of selling and as a consequence, that salesperson or the sportsperson needs to be able to do those basics absolutely automatically without having to think about it. Only when they’ve got that, can they then start to do the finer points and make a 1% difference, which is the difference between succeeding and failing at the end of the day.

In the context of sales enablement, the basic aims are that salespeople have to be able to confidently deliver the company message. Now, some people would call that a pitch. I’m not really in favor of the word pitch because it’s not just a standard pitch from a door-to-door salesman kind of background. It is something that is specific to each customer. In order for you to be able to deliver something specific to a customer, you need to understand absolutely the basics of your company’s message and how it might be applied to the customer. So, that’s the kind of pitch that you would do there as enablement people. We need to give them the confidence to deliver that well, and they need to be able to instill some kind of curiosity in salespeople and also a certain persistence in uncovering details within a company, uncovering points about the company where the product might be applicable for them.

We need to teach familiarity with the product value add. Now, why, why do I say that? Because they need to be so familiar with it that whenever a customer starts talking about how they apply in a Delphix context, how they work with data or how they develop applications or how they’re moving to the cloud, the salesperson can take what they’re listening to and apply a particular value add from the set of values that they’ve been familiarized with by enablement.

Lastly, A particular favorite of mine is enabling them to have the confidence in themselves and in the product to be humble when they receive an objection or they receive a particularly tough question from the customer. In each of those four cases, the salespeople need to be the ones that do it. We as individuals and enablement people don’t have to master all those things. We need to, as I said, encourage the salespeople to have an environment in which they can learn about these things and they can practice these things. That needs to be a safe environment. It’s a lot safer talking to me about issues they have with objection handling or how they might uncover more situations at a customer where Delphix might be applicable than it is trying to do it on the fly in front of the customer or on a virtual call with a customer. As enablement people, we’ve got to provide a way for them to learn. We’ve got to provide an environment that is safe for them to question, a way for them to practice and get feedback, an opportunity to discuss these things that they might not feel that they have with their sales manager and they definitely don’t want to be practicing it in front of the customer.

SS: I think that’s a really fantastic point. Now, for newer sales enablement folks, when starting in a new role, what advice would you give to sales enablement practitioners to set themselves up for success and begin to identify priorities within the organization?

KM: I think that there are two distinct points for enablement people. And that is that before they joined, so during the application process, they should try and appreciate it from the outside, but they should try and understand what the company is about from an enablement point of view and what kind of challenges that person might have within that company. I repeat, from the outside. They’re not going to know all the nuances. They’re not going to know necessarily all of the messaging, etc. But they need to think about what the person or the company might be struggling with in regard to the enablement of its salespeople.

In the case of Delphix, when I went through the application process, I used Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why”. I tried to understand, why does Delphix do what it does and then how does it do it? Then, what does it use to do that? And with that, I was able to pull out a number of points that a startup like Delphix — when I say a startup, it’s been around for a long time, but it’s going through a hyper-growth at the moment so it’s kind of like a startup. It has an issue with a brand, so that’s one of the challenges. It has an issue with getting people to understand, “You can do that with data. You can virtualize data or mask data. That would have saved me so much time if only I’d known.” There’s an awful lot of issues that salespeople have in Delphix with regards to not only getting the brand out there, but also getting the understanding out there. It’s almost as if we have a solution for which they never knew that there was a possible solution for. During the application process, I uncovered that by using the start with the why and was able to pitch something as an outsider during the process. When I came in, most of what I’d uncovered, or I thought it uncovered actually wasn’t true, but it is something that you should go through as a way to demonstrate that you do understand them and you do understand how you would impact enablement.

Then, when you start in a company, in talking with sales management, you get to appreciate what their priorities are with regards to the people that are working for them. Senior sales management will have goals that they want to achieve with regards to strategies, with regards to objectives and things like that. Some of those can be impacted by sales enablement. What sales managers looking for, maybe you would identify from them who their problem children are within the sales force. I don’t want to call the salespeople children, but it’s just a phrase that is used. Those individual salespeople, when you talk to them, they’re going to have their input as to what they’re missing and what they need to succeed. And it’s combining those three things: the individual’s needs, the needs of senior management, give you an idea about what you could start to work on in the first 30 days, what you would need to wait a little bit longer to work on, and what is coming up in terms of changes within the company. Maybe they’re introducing a new way to do pricing. Maybe they’re introducing a new way to use Salesforce, or maybe they’re using another CRM, maybe they’ve got new products coming out. Enablement can help in all of those areas.

In summary, I would say when you are planning to join the organization, try and think about what kind of challenges that there might be and how you would approach them as part of your interview process. When you join, if you take the approach to listen a lot to those three groups that I mentioned and get input, try not to promise anything, even though it’s very tempting to get involved in solving problems. Try not to promise too much and try to get a plan. Get some buy-in with management as to what your plan is going to be for 30, 60, 90 days. Once you’ve spoken to a few people and then start to implement it and then comes the key point. Once you’ve implemented a few things, make a bit of noise about it. Do your own PR. Not only tell your boss, but tell everybody else that you’ve achieved these things. Maybe start a newsletter, maybe start a Slack channel. There are very many things that you can do to publicize this success. Once you’ve started to demonstrate your own value, people will come to you and start to ask you to do things for them, because they’ve seen that you can demonstrate that you understand what’s going on and that you can produce things that help them sell better.

SS: I love that advice. I think that’s fantastic advice for those starting out in sales enablement. Now, you touched on this ever so briefly just a moment ago, but it’s around making sure that there is a centralized understanding of sales enablement within the organization once you start. In your experience, how can the definition of sales enablement vary from organization to organization? And are there any fundamentals that you think are critical for any enablement function to include in its strategy?

KM: The whole topic of definition of sales enablement has been occupying a lot of people who are far cleverer than I am. But I do feel that at the moment, the industry and the profession of sales enablement is a little bit too new to have a definition that works across the board. What is very key, I think, is that the individuals who are involved in an enablement organization or enablement department of an organization decide what enablement is going to do within that organization. They write themselves a charter, and in that charter, they’re going to say what they want to do and what they want to influence as well as what they’re not going to do, because you can get pulled in all sorts of different directions and you need to be able to say, “here’s my charter. Here’s what has been agreed, and what it is going to do and what it’s not going to do.” Otherwise, you’re spread too thin across larger organizations and you can’t get the opportunity to succeed enough in an area to make a difference. The definition is difficult to pin down. The charter really helps in a particular case.

If I can just give you one example of why I think that the definition is difficult to pin down, if you take one of my favorite topics, which is objection handling, if you are a salesperson for a real startup, you are in a position in which objection handling is really key to the success of a startup. Why? Because they are in that objection. They’re giving you an opportunity to give you some input as to which direction your brand-new products should go in. So, if you’re not able to really listen to that and take it back to product development or product management and say, “Oh, I just was at this excellent customer and they are right in our sweet spot and they could really do with this.” If you’re not listening to that and you’re not receiving it in the startup with a startup mind, then the startup is going to fail. Something different happens when a company gets a bit bigger, maybe it’s post-IPO, maybe it has distractions about shareholder meetings, or maybe it has other very important meetings that have to happen. Maybe you feel as if your product is already successful, you feel as if, “Oh you’re asking me questions about my product, but we are already the market leader. Why are you hassling me about this, that or the other?” And so, you have a slightly different approach to the objection or the question that a customer has for you. As a consequence, how you handle the objection is something that you almost have to relearn in a larger organization.

It’s difficult to say even when should you teach people objection handling. I feel that you cannot say that given that the enablement is required and therefore the tasks or the objectives that they enable the department are going to be given will be dictated by where the company is in its own trajectory from startup through to corporate. On top of that, you’ve also got, what kind of customers are they talking to? If they’re a transactional seller, then they don’t want to go in for long sales cycles. So, you don’t teach them those things. You don’t put them in a situation where they can expect to sell in six months thereafter, a six weeks sale otherwise, and then move on to the next one.

There are so many different variables. It’s difficult to pin down what is an enablement definition. However, very generally put, it’s about making salespeople successful, whether that’s training, whether that’s coaching, whether that’s the right kind of assets, whether that’s helping them to do their own discovery, whether it’s giving them a sounding board for a new proposal, whatever it happens to be. Enablement has to be a part of that. So, that’s my best definition.

SS: I think that’s a fantastic definition. As you said, it’s all relatively unique. I’d love your perspective on how practitioners can build upon the enablement foundations to add their own unique flavor or value to the organization.

KM: This is extremely important. Each individual has been hired because they have certain strengths that the hiring manager has seen in the interview and that they themselves believe that they have. Those are the things that they walk in the door with, and they can start to apply those, whether they’re excellent teachers, whether they’re excellent coaches or whether they are good at creating an e-learning that works. Whatever your strengths are, work with those. Use those in the first 30, 60 days. Then as I said before, once you’ve established yourself, there’s an excellent opportunity to start stretching yourself. Start with support from management or from sales management. Start looking at new areas that you can build yourself up on provided they fit in with what people are asking.

Once the company has got a bit bigger, you might say, “okay, let’s roll out a whole learning management system.” You may never have done that before. I would advise you to ask the community that’s out there, how do I do this? And stretch yourself. Then you can put it on your CV. You can tick the box, “I’ve implemented an LMS at corporate and rolled out this number of courses, that number of courses, whatever.” So, you’ve got your own toolbox, but you’ve also got the opportunity to start new things given the right kind of support. That will obviously help you grow personally, as well. Doing things exactly like this podcast helps me grow personally and gives me an opportunity to try new things.

SS: Well, Ken, I appreciate you joining this podcast. In closing, if we could just wrap up on this final question, how do you think enablement as a discipline could potentially evolve in the next year?

KM: Yeah, this is obviously extremely important to every person that’s involved in enablement. As I said before, it’s a fairly new profession and you do get a lot of people that are coming into it also more and more organizations are getting involved in sales enablement. Some of those organizations have already started to call it revenue enablement, and that already spreads the remit into perhaps customer success or perhaps professional services, maybe even renewals are involved in revenue enablement. I think that there’s an opportunity for enablement as a general practice to cover every department of an organization.

If I can use one example, let’s say the furthest removed from sales enablement, and that is let’s say, engineering. Engineering doesn’t just need training on how to develop or how to use the tools that engineering are working with. It also needs to get enablement on how to work with other departments, how to work with sales, how to understand sales. Also, if you take a thing that a company will very often do, which is make a big noise about the wins that it has among this customer base, which is great news, everyone loves to see wins success, but for engineering, you might be able to add to that win. If the winning includes which use cases were used by which company, then the engineering team or development team that built that piece of the software, the individuals that were involved can say, “wow, the bit of software that I developed is now being used by Company XYZ.” And as a consequence, they feel, “Oh, I’ve made a difference to that company.” That company might be a household name.

Therefore, when they’re talking about their job among their peers or even amongst their friends and family, they can say, “Oh, my bit of software is now working with a Company XYZ.” Everybody gets a warm feeling about the contribution that that person may make to his job and to the other company. It’s not just, “Oh, I’m a developer. I work in whichever language” — which is all very techie — everyone can relate to that household name and everyone can relate to how good it feels for that engineering person to have developed something that the company is using. As a consequence, they are further enabled. They get a boost from that. So, I see that enablement has a future as a profession to impact way beyond the confines of sales enablement. I think that is one of the directions that the profession could go in, and become an enablement role across an organization.

SS: I love that forward-looking view, Ken, thank you again so much for joining us today. I enjoyed the conversation.

KM: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking about my profession.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Debra Flick: I’m Debra Flick and I’m a training and sales enablement leader with over 15 years of diverse experience with a B2B sales background. I managed a regional sales team covering a nine-state area, and then I moved into program and product management. I started my sales enablement journey as a training facilitator, then moved into instructional design and then leading the strategy teams and programs. I’ve spent five years contracting and consulting with several fortune 500 companies and a few startups. I’ve developed and enhanced training and sales enablement programs for five companies.

My education is in business and organizational leadership. I enjoy digging into the data to find opportunities, to make an impact solving challenges and helping salespeople engage with their prospects and creating training and resources that help them close more deals or advance them in their sales career.

SS: In addition to sales enablement, as you mentioned in your intro, you have experience in training and instructional design. So, in your opinion, what are some of the core factors you need to consider when you’re designing a learning experience for sales reps?

DF: Training can make such a big impact that people often think that training’s the answer for every performance improvement issue, but it’s really not. I often think of training being the appropriate solution when skills and knowledge are needed. And then there are other things that we can do if it’s a lack of motivation or lack of information and that type of thing.
Some of the things I think of are that you need to begin with an understanding of your training needs by conducting a needs analysis. That can be super simple, or it can be more complex depending on what you’re trying to do, but really trying to identify the gap between where you are and the desired performance, or where you want to go with regard to knowledge and skills. Identifying gaps may be seen in trends such as tasks or your assessments, surveys, interviews, you could do full focus groups. Observations is something that I work with a lot. I tend to sit by, of course not during COVID, but sit by salespeople and really listen to what they’re saying, what they’re doing, what’s working, what’s not working. And then you can also use qualitative data and quantitative data to really get the big picture.

Another thing that we use in training and development is the ADDIE approach. That stands for analyze, which is basically what I’ve just described. That would also go into really getting a sense of what’s the best type of training. Is it e-learning? Is it a podcast? Is it a classroom training? Is it virtual? Getting a sense of that and designing a storyboard to start developing what you’re trying to do. And then it goes into design, develop, implement, and evaluate. So, it’s an iterative process, meaning it’s not simply linear one through five. It’s really where during the cycle you may be learning new information or there might be a change in the company that changes. It could be a leadership change or something happens that changes the direction or some of the content. So, it’s really looking at all of those pieces and knowing that it continues to evolve.

One thing I like to always do as a beta whereby when you’re implementing it, doing it with a group of people that have some knowledge and potentially maybe there’s people in there that don’t really have any knowledge of the topic and they can give you really good feedback on how things land. What makes sense? What do you need to add or areas where you could certainly improve it or making it more fun, more engaging, whatever the case may be.

SS: I think that’s a great place to start. Now, you had mentioned on your LinkedIn that stakeholder management is an important aspect of instructional design. How do you go about aligning with stakeholders on the goals and the outcomes of the learning programs that you’re developing?

DF: I think definitely having buy-in and support, whether it’s a project sponsor or other stakeholders, is really important. And I think it really comes down to getting that level of trust that what you’re doing and that you’re working together to figure out what it is they’re trying to accomplish. What is missing? What’s the gap? Also really communicating any issues clearly so that they are informed early on so that they know exactly what’s going on. And I mentioned earlier, just being a constant observer of people. I’m always looking for that, listening to calls, learning about what’s working.

The main reason for that is every organization’s different with how they approach things, and I’m always trying to tie into how they do things. But also getting that level of expertise so that the stakeholders realize that I know what I’m doing, and that they trust that their expertise might be sales. My expertise, I’m building it from that perspective, but also knowing how adults learn and what’s the best way for us to help them learn what they need to do in order to be successful. Then setting up meetings upfront is really helpful.

Something that I find really imperative because people’s schedules get really busy. When you have that kind of sign off upfront that they’re going to be attending the meetings, and I would really gear it around that ADDIE process so that you are getting some sign off at each stage of that process. It really helps to mitigate any issues down the road when changes become much more time consuming and definitely more expensive as well.

SS: Fantastic. I think those are some great ways to get stakeholder alignment. Now, with regard to the experience for the reps themselves, how do you make learning experiences engaging for reps and what are some strategies to grab and maintain their attention?

DF: With sales training, I think the most important thing that you can add is a level of competition because they’re competitive. They tend to be competitive. That’s why they are in sales, partly, and they love winning. So, I’ve used prizes and it doesn’t really matter what it is. It could be company pens or company swag, anything that helps allow them to win something and have that bragging right. I think that’s one of the critical things with sales training.

I like to add in a lot of role-play of various types, whether it’s prospecting calls or anything to do with your sales process and really building it from kind of that foundational level. And then building on that key knowledge, always trying to tie back to something they already know, so that it just makes it easier for them to put all the pieces together. Then I’ve used flashcards. Nowadays, you can do those online for any topic on the note of competition. At the end, have it known upfront that you’re going to do a competition with the entire sales process, adding in the products so that they really start to have that level of not just competition, but more that, “Hey, I’m going to have to present this at the end.” They start to really engage in what do I need to know in order to be able to do it well at the end. So, a lot of role-play and it could be pop quizzes.

One thing I like to do is something where you’re giving them a scenario and then you’re just asking them questions. And it’s a pop quiz, say there’s eight people in the training and you’re just picking on each person randomly and they have to be on their toes. It’s similar to being in the hot seat when you’re in front of a prospect. So, always being able to help them really understand what it is I need to know, and that they’re ready for it. The more they get that time to practice, the better off they’re going to be when they get in the field.

It’s super important that they feel the same in the classroom or in the training versus when they’re in front of a prospect. That is a big deal. And that prospect may not know that they’re not saying the right things or doing the right things or talking about the product, but if you give them enough practice ahead of time, it really alleviates any of those issues.

One thing I like to do, whether it’s an online classroom or in the classroom, is something I call think-pair-share. This allows everyone to think on their own before sharing. Some people take more time to process. Some people are more thorough and need that time. So, they do that piece on their own. Just write out a bunch of answers or maybe it’s a one-minute essay on a topic, and then they share with another person.

Then finally, maybe depending on the size of a group, you might have a few different groups share together. They get the top ideas out of their group, and then they share with a larger group. Another one is online that we’re getting used to thumbs up, thumbs down, chat answers to the quiz or a series of questions. Then having to maybe do a step-by-step sequence. Like if you’re teaching them a sales process to really help them know which step comes next, having each person have a step and then it could be a fun exercise where they get up in a classroom and really talk about that particular step. But they line up in the sequence of the steps. And then of course, group discussion is always good as well. There’s a lot of different things you can do to keep their attention.

SS: I love that. I think you gave some fantastic examples. Now, beyond attention, I think retention is the other thing that we think about when we’re trying to skill up sales reps. So, how do you reinforce the knowledge learned in your training programs to ensure that reps can apply it and also begin to change their own behaviors?

DF: Repetition. I think I mentioned that, but repetition is the key to learning by using all the engagement tools, using some assessments. I didn’t mention this earlier but doing a pre-test ahead of time in a post-class test whereby they know they’re going to have those, or at least they know the post-test and that can be really helpful. Then also something I call round-robin questioning. And I somewhat mentioned that where you’re just given a scenario and asking random people, I think that really helps build the knowledge and reinforces what they need to do, and also puts that bit of pressure on them so that they come to class or they come to the training environment ready having practiced. Maybe it’s a five-day training. They’ve practiced after day one.

Another thing is always involving that manager, so that they’re championing the course or the content and having a one-on-one after each day of class so that they know what was talked about. And they’re asking some key questions about that so that the salesperson starts to realize, one, I’m not only learning, but my manager, it’s important to them and they know what’s going on. And they’re asking me and engage me. Maybe they’re asking some questions that are somewhat quiz questions, things that are important to them when their reps get out in the field or on the phones. I think that can be really helpful.

Then, I highly recommend adding a full practice. I kind of mentioned that earlier, but having something at the end where they have to go through the full. If it’s a sales process and there’s multiple products that they at least know several of the products that they can actually demonstrate for that customer. Then, whether they’re doing it in front of the class, or they’re doing it in front of their manager, or both, I think is really important because then you know that they know what you need them to do in the field or on the phones.

SS: I think that’s fantastic to help with reinforcement. Now, you mentioned on LinkedIn that you also specialize in coaching people through change with what you called motivational interviewing. I would love for you to explain to our audience what is motivational interviewing and how does it help to guide behavior change?

DF: Motivational interviewing is a collaborative conversation. It’s really for strengthening a person’s own motivation and their commitment to change. I learned it through wellness coaching and they use it in counseling as well. It’s really powerful and it’s a conversation that guides versus directs and its primary purpose is to strengthen the motivation for change. That’s a way of activating their own motivation, their own commitment and resources for change through that conversation. It’s interesting because we are more likely to be persuaded by what we hear ourselves say than potentially someone else. In asking them questions, it’s more of guiding rather than telling them what to do. In some ways of coaching, it might be more of giving a bit of advice or constructive feedback. This is really putting the onus on them.

There’s an underlying spirit that connects a coach’s heart and mind to the conversation whereby you’re really in partnership with that person. You’re helping them to accept that there’s a need for change and having that compassion and helping them to evoke the change on their own. Some of the ways that you use the questioning is open-ended questions, affirmations, reflections, and then summarizing. It’s interesting because it’s similar to sales where you really want them doing more of the talking, like you would a prospect.

Then yourself as the coach, you want to be asking some questions that are open-ended or affirming what they’ve just said, and then letting them speak because as they speak, they start to realize some of the things they’ve been saying for a long time potentially. And they start to realize just that I’ve said this for a long time, but I haven’t activated or done something. I think it just, again, puts the onus on them and they start to realize there is a problem, or I’ve been looking at this for a long time, or maybe it’s been showing up in their life for a long time and they start to take more ownership of it. They’re determining what the resources are that I need in order to make the change.

SS: think that’s a really interesting approach to that. Now, Debra, in closing, I’d love to hear from you around the topic of metrics and measuring success, which I think all sales enablement professionals are keen to do better at. How do you measure the success of your learning programs?

DF: I think you’re absolutely right. This is something that is really important and sometimes it can be difficult. One of the things that I used and continue to work on is Kirkpatrick’s four levels of really looking at return on investment. The first thing would be reaction. Sometimes people will call this in learning and development, “smile sheets”, but I don’t look at it that way. It could be just a survey at the end of the program and asking that learner. Was the information relevant, easy to follow questions, such as about the facilitator – there are lots of different questions that you can ask.

I’d keep it pretty simple, like probably 10 questions, probably not more than that. And then the second level is really learning, measuring the knowledge and skills gain, and that could be your test scores, it could be an influence on your KPIs. Is there a change with that? Is the ramp time getting to be less? Are they getting to their first sale more quickly? And then also it could be one-on-one manager feedback. There should be assessing along the way, how things are going with the new person. Are they getting up to speed more quickly than potentially people did previously? Maybe it’s three months ago or six months ago, are we continuing to improve the training so that it’s better each and every time from the feedback and then level three is really behavior.

So again, that could be self-assessment down the road could be 90 days later and on the job observations, as well, looking at those KPIs. Then it could be net promoter scores or some type of customer surveys. And I think the biggest thing there is, are the learners confident to share their new knowledge and skills? Maybe the manager says 90 days out, I’m going to have you present our team on XYZ. And then finally, level four is the result measuring the results such as reduced costs, increased productivity, employee retention, customer retention, increasing sales, getting to full quota. How quickly is that happening? And then learning transfer back on the job. Do they know what they need to know in order to do what they need to do? Is that evident?

At that point you could also start implementing certification exams if you’ve got a program for that. It could be level four. And then finally, the return on investment. In its simplest form, a return on investment is really your return. The benefit you’re getting minus the training costs divided by the investment costs. So, in this simple example, say that you determined that the benefit is $120,000. That might be from in a customer service unit where you have reduced the time that calls are being conducted. So, you’ve reduced that, or you’ve had an increase in sales, whatever the case may be minus — say, you have a training that costs $30,000 — and then you’re dividing it by that $30,000 times 100. Then that equals, in this example, 300%. So, you have a 3% increase from that $30,000 investment, which most people of course would be like, of course we’ll invest $30,000. But if you don’t explain what the benefit is going to be, they may think $30,000 sounds like a lot. But if I get three times my money back, I’m in.

SS: Debra, thank you so much. I think you landed a lot of really fantastic points for our audience. I really appreciate your time today.

DF: Appreciate it. I enjoyed the conversation as well and love sales enablement, so happy to help.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

In celebration of Black History Month, we wanted to lift up the voices of some of the many Black sales enablement experts in our community to share their insights into how sales enablement is helping to reshape the business world to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

Driving a rich and diverse culture is becoming a critical priority for a lot of organizations, and sales enablement can be a strategic lever for organizations to enhance their efforts in this arena because of its unique cross-functional nature. Let’s hear Roderick Jefferson and Simon T. Bailey share their thoughts on how sales enablement improves innovation through collaboration and communication, especially when faced with adversity.

Roderick Jefferson: I believe that sales enablement is all about breaking the complexity of sales into practical ideas, through scalable and repeatable practice that ultimately leads to increased revenue. I also believe that there are three components. There’s communication, there’s collaboration, and there’s orchestration. On the communication piece, it’s all about making sure that we are getting out clear, consistent communications across the entirety of our organization, that everyone understands what’s going on and what’s the value that we bring so that we’re not viewed as the fixers of broken things, or just simply training because we know there’s way more to it than just that. The collaboration piece is making sure that everyone understands their role, that they have to play in order to support the entire organization, as well as our prospects and our customers, and even our partners.

Finally, as the orchestration piece, I always give this analogy of a true orchestra. And what I mean there is you’ve got brass, percussion, strings, woodwinds. Now let’s take those to the different lines of business. Internally, you’ve got sales, sales enablement, product marketing, product management, engineering, HR. They’re all trying to do the right thing for the customer. The problem is there’s really no true orchestra master that’s making sure that they play these in sync that we’re not stepping on top of each other and no sour notes being played until one individual or organization, which I believe is sales enablement, steps up to sustain. Now all of that chaos becomes a beautiful piece of music.

Simon T. Bailey: We know that right now in this world, there is information that is swirly, industries are being transformed, and people are worried. They may not say what’s going on, but they’re thinking, “Does my leader value who I am and my contribution to the team?” And how we have to show up is recognizing that fortitude is the new attitude by helping people fortify their future, to say here’s what’s right. Alright?

Now let me just give you some quick examples of what fortitude looks like. If you saw the movie “300”, right. King Leonidas, right? That’s fortitude. If you saw “Wonder Woman”, that is fortitude in action. If you saw Jennifer Lawrence in “Hunger Games”, that’s fortitude in action. Courage in the midst of adversity.

So, then the question becomes, “Simon, how do I now encourage my team in the midst of uncertainty, especially when people are working remote?” Well, think about when you do your conference calls with the teams that are obviously happening virtually. How do we start with the question? And the question is “What are you most grateful for?” And it’s a different question because you’re probably saying it has nothing to do with business. But it has everything to do with business. It’s counterintuitive. So, allowing people to start with the first exercise, What’s Right. But then to answer a question, “what are you most grateful for?” allows them to be centered when everything is shifting around them. So, if I see how I fit tomorrow, starting today, when I answer I’m most grateful, what they’re doing is they’re setting that intention, creating that tone, and that disposition that I am totally present to this moment. I am supposed to be right here, and everything is working out for my good.

SS: When people feel a sense of belonging in an organization, it enhances psychological safety, which in turn creates an open, collaborative, and supportive culture. Blaire Hervey and Lakisha C. Brooks explain the power of psychological safety in improving team performance.

Blaire Hervey: Give everyone permission to feel the way they’re feeling, to speak how they speak, and to have a space where they can share those thoughts, those emotions, etc. I think at this point, we truly have to activate our superpower of being empathetic and understanding that everyone is feeling and thinking something different, but all of those things add true value to our teams, our departments, and our organizations.

LaKisha C. Brooks: If people feel that I belong, I’m accepted, I am appreciated to have around, morale is going to go up, they’re going to want to come to work. They’re going to want to work for a year. They’re going to want to show their best because they feel that sense of belonging within your organization as well. You’re going to see heightened psychological safety; people are able to share their thoughts. People feel free that they can share whatever is going on without feeling that they’re going to be reprimanded or they’re looking over their shoulder if you are embracing that people feel like this is a safe place for me to share how I feel.

SS: One of the core ways in which enablement can help build a culture that empowers psychological safety is in the hiring and development of sales talent. Blaire, LaKisha, and Kate Philpot share advice on how to prioritize DE&I in the hiring process to improve retention.

Blaire Hervey: Oftentimes we hear these leaders out here saying it’s just too hard to recruit people of color. The talent isn’t there. That’s not true. That is so false. The pipeline is full and I’m still having to compete against those other individuals of color. And me in particular, I don’t have a degree. So, my grittiness and my passion in my experience is that competitive factor.

So, when I get that role, when I get that job, when I get that position or that seat on a board of directors or whatever the case may be, I have to stop thinking it’s because they needed a black person. Or because they needed a woman. It’s because they needed a Blaire. And so, I think about that, I show up with my red hair, my natural hair girl. I show my earrings. I show up with all of my energy, not only for myself and in my authenticity, but because it gives Shawnna the same permission to be herself because she may see me. Maybe not just you, but say, “Wow, I didn’t know I could come to the table like that.” And then we are starting to duplicate that effort and then there’s just less only’s and then we become more of a force together.

LaKisha C. Brooks: First, we want to identify our own biases. This may be our organization may have biases, maybe we’re hiring the same people. Maybe you are someone that hires people and you’re realizing I’m actually hiring the same type of people. I’m having an affinity bias. Or, maybe you realize that people are quitting because they feel that they’re not feeling as though they’re being fairly judged in their performance assessments, because you have a performance bias. So, identify your own biases and then figure out where they’re coming from so that you can actually overcome that and your organization. I also would recommend you guys look at cultural competency as well. And that also talks a little bit about those biases. Next, we want to conduct a diversity assessment. This can be any type of assessment and you can go and ask questions. You can look at some of your records and data as well. You really want to be honest about where you guys fall with your assessment as well. That assessment can be something short or it could be long-term. It could be something that’s inexpensive. It could be something expensive. You have to look at your own organization to see what’s best for you all. Create a coalition. You can’t do this on your own. You want to have people support you.

Kate Philpot: The challenge for a lot of organizations is they have to set up activities that notionally address culture. So, we do an engagement survey every year. We do an exit survey. We do check-ins at the six month and the end of year basis. The question is, what are you doing with the information that comes out of those things? If you’re just going through the exercise without then taking the information that’s produced and making some different decisions as a consequence, then it’s a complete waste of time…What happens if the feedback from the person who’s exited is, “I left because I didn’t feel included”? What conversation happens with the manager of that person who let that happen? And what are the consequences with that manager in order to make sure it doesn’t happen again? Those are the kinds of live conversations that we’re having now. Not only about because you know, by the time somebody exits, it’s too late, let’s be honest. You want to get people feeling included at the beginning of their experience in our organization, rather than by the time they’ve tendered their resignation.

SS: Implementing programs aimed at improving or enhancing organizational health also requires a great deal of behavior change. Aisha Wallace-Wyche and April Terry explain strategies that enablement practitioners can leverage to drive behavior change.

April Terry: We’re doing all of this work and changing our behaviors because we want to see a different result. So, within this final level and the result stages, we are really tying the impact of changes to behavior to metrics in the business. We talked about beginning with the end in mind, right? That’s the whole reason why we’re doing a lot of these programs. So, now that we understand that people are finding it enjoyable, right? They’re engaged, they feel maybe more confident about the lesson or the subject now, before they came in, and went through the program. We’re seeing changes in behavior. Now we’re asking, what does that look like in the context of our business?

Aisha Wallace-Wyche: A lot of times, enablement is looked at as the person that is going to come and save the day and fix it, but in certain circumstances where performance is in question, training may not be the answer. Oftentimes, it could be a systems issue, like lack of access or know-how for a system. Other times it could be compensation or incentive related, the commercial team may not be being incentivized properly, and that’s why you’re not getting the behavior out of them that you want. Then, a lot of times you have to look at your talent, you may not have the right butts in seats. So again, don’t be afraid to speak up after you’ve done some analysis and asked the right identifying questions to just simply state that training may not be the answer.

SS: While sales enablement can be the champion for driving DE&I efforts in an organization, alignment and buy-in with leadership is essential to maximize the impact of enablement programs. Glenn Clark and Blaire Hervey outline tips to secure leadership buy-in and garner support for critical enablement initiatives.

Glenn Clark: My team and I have the opportunity to be on the floor, in the trenches with reps, and making observations that we capture. We also have a sales background as a team. Being salespeople, carrying a bag, so we know what we believe are the ingredients of being a great salesperson, and so we led with that. And then what we asked the sales leadership team to do is decide–based on what’s important to you in terms of success of the business, in terms of revenue–would you adjust these? What would you add? Is there anything we missed? So, I love that approach because what it does is it allows for us to come with an initial recommendation helps increase our value, but it also gives managers an opportunity to weigh in and say, ‘I think I would tweak this’ or ‘I want to add that’. So, we’re gaining buy-in while we’re getting their input so that when we launch it, we actually have a consensus across enablement and senior leadership. And sales reps because their managers have input also tend to buy-in on that as well.

Blaire Hervey: Now you can start with the top and you can try to get their buy-in and, you know, reach out to all the stakeholders. And I hate to say this, but oftentimes you’re going to be disappointed because they’re not going to share the same passion for you because they’re focused on a different end result. That’s fine, starting a grassroots campaign, if you will. And really getting that groundswell by talking to other individuals who may have similar experiences and learning more about how we can attribute to their retainment, then that’s a number. And then that’s something that’s quantifiable you can take back to leadership. You can take that impact that you can make there and let them know that we can make an impact by focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging programs. We can make an impact on retainment by this much and by doing so that saves the organization this much, because now we don’t have to rehire and retrain. And additionally, we can focus on grooming these individuals and helping them become our next set of leaders, which also means that could be less for training. And that could be a less tedious succession plan because we already have the folks in house.

SS: Thanks for listening to this special episode to honor Black History Month. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Kevin Casey: Hello, Shawnna. Thank you for having me. As mentioned, I am Kevin Casey, and I am with Degreed. I direct the revenue enablement function for degreed. So, within that capacity, we’re responsible for both the sales, as well as our customer service and customer experience organization. A little bit about Degreed – exciting company, fast-paced company, but a little bit of our background is one of the things that our founder came to realize about seven, eight years ago is that when we look across an organization, we have human capital management applications, we have a talent management tool, we have learning management systems and they’re all just built really separately from each other. They don’t really connect. They don’t talk, they don’t help an individual really grow their career. They’re typically just in place for just that right management versus the individual.

So, what Degreed allows an individual to do is manage their career. Which is understanding their core skill sets, looking for opportunities within an organization, being able to enhance their skills, being able to track where their learning really takes place. All this is done within a learning experience platform. So effectively we pull all of those disparate systems together in order for the individuals within organizations to manage their careers.

SS: Well, Kevin, I’m very excited to have you here. As part of your revenue enablement role, you’re responsible for enablement essentially to support all of the go-to-market and customer experience teams. I’d love to hear from you, how do you tailor your enablement programs to each of those different audiences?

KC: Wonderful question. One of our biggest challenges, right? What we first start to do is really understand what’s consistent across our go-to-market, as well as our customer experience organizations. What do they need to know? So, what are those core fundamentals as they apply to better servicing and educating our customers. Our next level is to look at a role-based enablement strategy, which can encompass our frontline salespeople. It can be our pre-call salespeople, so they all need a little bit different information in order for them to be effective in their roles. Then we look at post-sale, we have technical, we have client engagement partners. We have customer service managers.

What we look at is that role-based enablement, our strategies really do begin to hit that fork in the road, which is what does a technical team need to nail specifically? What does our customer engagement partners really need to know? They’re the front lines of that handoff from our sales organization to our customer experience. And it’s critical that that knowledge, all that’s learned throughout that whole sales process is handed over to our CX team in order for them to better service our customers. I don’t think there’s anything more frustrating for a new customer to come on board and have to answer all of the questions that they just spent the previous six months answering. So, that’s a big area that we focus on. We’re ensuring that handoff is spotless and it’s seamless for our customers.

SS: I love that. I think you’re right, that is one of the most frustrating customer experiences. So how do the means of these various teams intersect and complement each other? And then, how do you use that knowledge to help drive cross-team alignment through revenue enablement?

KC: Yeah, Shawnna, if I solve that, I may not have a job at this point. We’re a rapidly growing organization. We’ve grown tremendously over the past seven years. We’ve gone from about seven employees to over 600 as we’re at today. Oftentimes the processes are put in place following that growth. It’ll be wonderful. We could see ahead and understand what processes, in terms of how the different functions interact to better service our customers, how that would take place before it actually happens, but like most organizations, we’re following that growth. So, the enablement function has spent the past year since 2020, we had an acquisition. We’ve had new products and services offerings. The critical piece of what we needed to drive last year, and then looking ahead into this year is how those functions really do relate to each other.

I think, as with most sales organizations, we follow adherences to the salesforce.com. Are we utilizing the tools and processes that we have in place to their fullest? We’ll never be perfect. I don’t think many revenue enablement or sales enablement functions can claim that, or we have the ultimate profile, the ultimate way that we go-to-market as well as servicing our customers. Our ongoing challenge does revolve around always reviewing, measuring, and understanding where we’re doing well. Then where we have those gaps, we have to address those gaps in order to ensure that complete customer experience.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. So, who are some of the core partners that you need buy-in from, in order to deliver both successful revenue enablement programs, but also the best customer experience, and how do you collaborate with each of those partners?

KC: Great question. That’s the primary challenge. It is revolved around developing that relationship with the leaders of both our go-to-market sales, as well as customer experience. It’s understanding what their goals are as a function, as it relates to the overarching goals of Degreed, we need to be able to be in a position where we understand, and we partner with them to drive those goals. We need to be able to be proactive in terms of coming to those organizations with strategic vision of how we can help them deliver on that partnership is absolutely critical. That’s where our strategy begins.

Ideally, once we get to end of that, once we put those measurements in place to show our progress over a period of time, we can then reflect on what efforts were successful, what areas we still maybe have to look at and to rethink and drive through. We also have to partner with our product marketing teams, in order to ensure that we have the latest information around our product roadmaps, that we have the latest information about our positioning in the market, whether it’s competition, whether it could be the product enhancements, the product upgrades, it’s multiple pieces of the organization that we need to interact with on a weekly basis.

How I go about that, it could be the ongoing call cadences with the leadership team. It is an enablement partnership across the dread organization. We have a team that’s made up of product of marketing, of sales of the customer experience. They get together on a weekly basis to share information, to share calendars and to share updates. Some weeks those calls don’t take place, and those are great because we’re in a position where we’ve put together the insights and the processes, so that we’re in a position that we can direct our time to maybe other pieces that go to it. But that’s been a very proactive implementation across our leadership, which is that ongoing open communications and cadence.

SS: That’s fantastic. Now, Kevin, throughout this whole podcast, you have a very customer-centric mindset, which I love. How does your approach to revenue enablement help provide value to customers throughout the customer life cycle?

KC: Wonderful question. One of the areas in coming to Degreed, and I started just about a year ago this month. And one of the topics that I really wanted to incorporate into the Degreed mindset was the customer perspective in looking at how traditionally most companies go-to-market, they incorporate a sales process, which is very internally focused. I want to get some of the prospect’s time. I want to conduct a needs analysis. I want to conduct a demo. I want the contract signed. That’s the way sales have worked since the beginning of time, we need to have our sales process, so we know what we need to accomplish, but what if we turn that and we look at it from the customer buyer perspective, what does the customer need to do in order to make a purchasing decision?

The customer has to recognize that they have a need, or they have an opportunity to improve as an organization. The customer has to find a budget. They have to pull together a buying committee. They have to sell the idea internally. It’s a lot of work to make a purchasing decision in today’s business world. That’s just the way it is. So, what if we were to look at our processes from the customer perspective, thereby we’re facilitating a sale versus selling to the customer, the more we’re able to help them drive their decision-making process internally, the more that we’re able to help consult them. This might be something you should think about in order to meet the deadline that we have to close this opportunity. Hey, can we help you with the buying committee?

Does this have to go to procurement? If so, what’s procurement going to think about this. It’s really turning that on its ear and looking at it from the BI perspective versus the sell perspective and the same goes for our client experience team. When we bring a new customer on board, we have an endless list of things we need to accomplish in order to make sure that they’re onboarded correctly, they’re trained correctly. Their technical team is aware of what’s happening, that the contract is signed. What if we were to turn that around and look at the maturation of the usage of our products and services. As they begin to roll this out, how can we be consultative with them by understanding what they need to do to make this a successful purchase? And what we think about this right people’s names are attached to making big decisions and they want to make sure that this is going to be successful. What we want to help them do is not only be competent in their purchasing decision, but also make them the champion or the hero and what we have and what we know our products and services can do for them over the long run.

SS: I love that. I think that’s a great lens for the customers. What would you say a customer-centric approach is important to revenue enablement and from your perspective, what are some of the areas in which this is really impactful for the business?

KC: The impact to the customer is pretty straightforward. There’s the confidence that they made the right decision. It’s the confidence that this is going to be a solution that helps their organization grow, that ultimately helps their organization serve their customers as well as their employees. Those are the two critical factors. When I look at an organization, regardless of what the CEO has for their annual planning, for the annual strategy, it comes down to their customers and their employees. Those are the two primary components in that for our organization, what it does for Degreed, it helps point out where our gaps are. We’ll put in any number of metrics. We try and limit it clearly. Although some people would like to see those increased, but we do want to put metrics behind what our efforts entails so that we can see once again where we’re really driving change, where we’re really impacting both the go-to-market and the customer experience organization, and ultimately where we’re successful and where we’re not as successful.

All those metrics really go into understanding. It’s what is impactful and what’s driving the business and what’s driving the performance of our organizations because it’s all too often. When it comes down to the sales team, it’s very black and white. You got the sale; you didn’t get the sale with our CX organization. We retained a customer; we didn’t retain a customer. All of that is very expensive. Here’s where the payoff is in order for us to be successful, we need to be able to measure our efforts as they go into supporting both our go to market, as well as customer experience organizations.

SS: Now, for my last question, I would love for you to dig in what are some of the key metrics that you think are most important to demonstrate the success of revenue enablement initiatives?

KC: A couple that we’ve put some rigorous process behind it with, which has been a task that not always maybe the most fun. But it does give us an understanding of the impact of our efforts. So, I’m going to focus on two things internally. The first is onboarding with the growth of the degree organization. We’ve added any number of new sales and CX new hires in 2020, so we were quite busy with onboarding and with our remote onboarding that presented a whole new challenge. So how do we make it productive? How do we ensure that it’s engaging all the while we’re doing this remotely?

Within the sales organization, specifically for onboarding, we implemented a few metrics. The first is, what successful completion of the topics, insights learning that’s associated with the formal onboarding. Our formal onboarding is about four weeks. So that’s one of them. And we really challenged ourselves with how do we make this engaging so it’s not a passive learning experience, where people aren’t sitting back, not paying attention, doing whatever they’re doing. That was a challenge. The second is we wanted to see what their first 90 days in the field look like. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges and mistakes with onboarding is trying to give too much information too soon. Whereas what we wanted to understand in the first 90 days, what does the management expect of their sales team?

What are those skills, insights, resources needed? So that those first 90 days they can have a ramp-up experience. That’s going to be impactful again, versus for example, having them go through a four-hour, how to sign contracts session. That doesn’t make sense if they happen to get a sale in the first 90 days. We’re going to find a way for them to get that done. But overall, as much as they have to learn, we just had to scale that back. At the 90-day mark, we run a few reports and the metrics that we’ve found to be most impactful, one it’s around activity. I know for some sales leads, it’s kind of a controversial topic. Well, activity doesn’t really necessarily affect productivity. Well, in a sense, it does, we want to give our new salespeople look at what good looks like.

When we take a summary of our sales team, top performers, what their activity looks like, number of appointments, number of calls, number of emails, very tactical stuff, but it does give them something to react to and to drive towards. So that’s one. The second one is time to deal. This doesn’t have to be the enterprise deal. This could be a cross-sell. It could be an upsell, but how long does it take them to get there. The third one is around what’s that average opportunity size. So, we put those in place. And then at the end of the year, just a few weeks ago, we ran the report as compared to 2019. And the wonderful news is we dropped decreased time to deal by a full month. And you multiply that by 30 some new salespeople, that’s real dollars, right? That’s real money sooner for the organization. The average deal size, it dropped a little, it dropped by a couple thousand dollars. But what that indicates is that we’re better at expanding our footprint within organizations, right.

That stickiness that we always love to talk about. So, we’re expanding our footprint by cross-selling by upselling and renewing. So that’s of course, it’s going to be a little bit less in terms of ballers versus the full enterprise sale. So those are the three ones that are very effective in terms of the onboarding and our tracking purposes. For the sales team, it gets a little bit more detailed in terms of what we’re looking at. So, the first thing we’re looking at is what is the current time to deal close, right? From the time it’s a prospect all the way through signing the contract. Ultimately, we want to decrease that on average, we’re about nine months. We want to decrease that closer to seven months. So that’s one. Then, fully understand that we’re digging directly into an opportunity stage. The research we’ve done now is we see there’s two stages of our process that we get bogged down the most. The first is prospecting. That’s not a surprise, right?

From the time we find a prospect, we start making calls to start sending emails. We tend to have a lot of deals or potential opportunities in that stage. The second one, which is not as surprising either, it’s the middle of that process, where the customer has to make that go or no-go decision. That is where in most of the opportunities we get the longest part of our cycle. The key there is really understanding, determining what we’ve done, what we haven’t done, what we need to do, maybe something we’ve skipped, maybe something we haven’t asked. That’s where really need to dig in the opportunity to understand what is not happening here that needs to happen for the customer to make this decision, or in this instance, the prospect to make this decision, any number of things can be happening. That’s where according to the buyer sales process, we can look at it from their perspective versus our perspective.

Just think of the salesperson who’s going to keep sending emails or keep leading voicemails in order to advance that opportunity. When we look at it from the detailed bioprocess, we can see the customer needed to have budget that they have budget confirm the buying committee technology, looking at it from their perspective. It’s going to give us a better insight of what we need to do next. And of course, we have the old status quo of, they’re not going to make a decision because not making a decision is easier. So, we’re going to lose the opportunity to status quo.

SS: Kevin. Thank you so much for that very detailed answer. I think that’s fantastic and exactly what our audience is interested in learning more about. So, thank you so much, Kevin, I appreciate your time.

KC: Great. Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Sheryl Floyd: Hi, Shawnna. Thank you. I am the sales enablement and product marketing manager for Papaya Global. We are a SaaS platform for global payroll and organizations that are expanding and hiring in other countries. The unique thing about my organization is that we are in hyper-growth mode, despite all of the pandemic going on. I’ve been a remote employee starting about eight months ago. The majority of our workforce sits in Israel where our headquarters are, so this has also been a unique experience for me not being where the headquarters are located as well. I would say about 75% of my time is supporting the sales organization, and about 25% of my time is supporting their product team in terms of go-to-market activities.

SS: Sheryl, I’m very excited to have you here today. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Now, you have a unique background. Your career path has brought you to sales enablement through a bit of a unique journey because you actually started your career as a high school teacher. Tell us about your journey from being an educator to working in product marketing and sales enablement.

SF: Yeah. I spent about 15 years as a high school teacher. I taught fun stuff. I was a media teacher. I always joked that if I could hold the attention of a room full of teenagers, then I could surely train and work with adults in the same kind of fashion, so surely it can’t be as hard. While I was a teacher, I was always keeping up with things like video, web design, photoshop, whatever the latest technologies were to keep my students updated of the current trends in media and journalism.

I actually went back and got a second master’s degree in instructional design, and I found that I really loved doing this media myself. I thought I would just go out into the real world and try it. My first role after teaching, about 11 years ago, was working with a little boutique firm here in Austin. I was thrown into creating sales training for a really technical role. And it was just eye-opening for me. It was almost like getting an MBA or computer science degree at one time, but I just fell in love with technology and the training part. From there, I landed in areas that really allowed me to hone my skills in product marketing or customer marketing and sales training. So, it’s this all kind of been utilizing those media and journalism skills.

SS: I love that. What is it about sales enablement that inspired you and made you want to make this career switch? Why are you passionate about your career in sales enablement?

SF: I think it goes back to why I wanted to be a teacher in the first place of just having an impact on others. This to me is very similar after having taught for so many years and leading statewide organizations for other teachers and things like that. I just really felt like another challenge was out there for me. So just having kind of that servant’s heart was where I really felt I could help others in even different capacities. One of my early roles was really in an amazing, transparent company where they had very open-door leadership. It was very easy to work with others. It was a supportive environment and I decided this is the way it should be in work. I wanted to make sure that I could influence other organizations in that same way. I felt like, what are my superpowers in that capacity is what I would call a gap filler.

I tend to try to find what that missing piece is from a current process or customer experience and just figure out a proactive way to get it done or to stay ahead of the needs of my organization. So just having that empathetic view of what can I do to help, I think has served me. It’s kind of kept my passion alive for helping others. I would say the other kind of thing I love doing is knowing how to connect one piece of an organization of knowledge from one part of the organization to another, how can I be that channel so that people across the business know what’s going on. It goes back to that open door, understanding or making it easy for things to happen. That’s where I’ve kind of felt like I could make a difference, just having those kinds of empathetic powers, I guess you would say.

SS: Absolutely. You definitely need that for a role in enablement. Now, how do you leverage the skills that you learned as an educator in your career in sales enablement?

SF: It’s almost like something I could do with my sleep. I kind of joke with people curriculum development and assessment experiences are just things that you learn to do so quickly as a teacher. But I think aside from that, it’s really starting with the end in mind. Like, what is it at the end of the day that you want to be accomplished? Whether it’s a goal of training or of a message or of communication, keeping that in mind and then walking yourself backward and marking the key milestones that you want to be accomplished in order to reach that goal. It is so, so simple as something like, what does an objective look like?

It’s like by completing this training session, you’ll understand X feature, how to sell it and right fits into your current selling process. So, if you’d just kind of keep that very simplistic goal, and then at the end of the day, did you accomplish that by whatever assessment or methodology you applied to that situation? It’s just a very natural segue from education to training for me. I would say the other thing is what I would call audience empathy. How do I gauge a specific persona or group? Whether it’s a group of teenagers or a group of adults, maybe it’s a marketing group or a cross-functional group. How can you kind of reach them where they’re at in that specific time? Is it via being interactive? Is it understanding that they’re there to gain knowledge? Is it there was an update? Just having kind of that reason for speaking to them and meeting them at that level, I think is a really important skill that you can transfer from teaching to training or enablement.

SS: Absolutely. I love that. How has your approach to training and educating adults in a corporate setting maybe different from how you approach teaching children or young adults?

SF: I don’t know that it is that different, I think it goes back to knowing your audience. What is it that you’re trying to get across to adults or how is it that you can really understand their needs? It’s a very similar situation. I think the main difference though, is having that knowledge transfer, it’s more relevant for adults in a way that they act to apply to their job. So, they’re obviously getting paid for what they know and what they can do. And high school students, I think apply their knowledge to maybe a task or an assessment, but I think both of them are building on foundational knowledge and then helping them to connect the dots in order to build on that for future enhancement or skills, or maybe even a promotion or increased job responsibilities.

SS: I think you’re spot on. So, in addition to your background and teaching, just to pivot a little bit, you also have extensive experience in product marketing. In fact, your current role you’re responsible for both enablement and product marketing, which is a lot of responsibility let me just say, coming from a marketing background myself. So how do the responsibilities of both intersect and differ?

SF: I think in both respects that they are at its core, kind of a hub for being that intersection between product sales and marketing and those respects, they are very similar. I can think of using that kind of hub situation to accomplish more than just one goal, especially when it comes to supporting multiple teams. So, going back to that empathy feeling that I have for a customer understanding for instance, if you understand how your customer or prospect is either consuming a product, or what is their understanding of your offering, both sales enablement and product marketing roles are similar in that as a big picture thing, how is a prospect perceiving or messaging during their journey? It’s an example of that.

So, if you have a really good understanding of your product messaging, if you’ve already got an understanding of what your sales messaging is, then you can really identify in both scenarios how to best support that prospect. And with that comes your enablement activities for sales. I would say the second part of that is having feedback loops for your product and marketing teams. So, in both cases as a product marketer, I can take those sales conversations and go back to the product team and help them identify where these messages are landing well with our customers or prospects. The second part of that is, like I said, being a hub of the intersection of product marketing and sales, keeping that line of communication open so that when sales conversations happen, we can provide feedback loops back to product and marketing. At the same time, sales can also request specific marketing collateral that they are needing in order for a specific maybe campaign to land better with prospects.

So, it’s sort of making those cross-functional connections happen. Along those lines, I think it’s similar to keeping engagement with external audiences as well. So, how can we make sure that our customers are getting the right information in customer newsletters? Or what can we learn from when last interviews from our customers and what are the industry report saying that we can leverage? So, it’s using all of that customer knowledge and intel also keeping in the back of our mind what our competitors are doing as well. A lot of those things to me are relapsed. So, it just depends on what it is I’m doing at that moment, whether it’s a sales enablement activity or product marketing activity that sort of resonates with whatever knowledge or data I’m using or reporting I’m using at that moment.

SS: Absolutely. In closing, how do you balance wearing two hats and effectively delivering initiatives for enablement and product marketing?