Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com's Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.
On ISEs3 Episode 12, Erich Starrett is joined by Dr. Shawn Fowler, whom he originally met when Shawn was VP, Sales Enablement (a true cross-functional #Orchestrator) at SalesLoft, and a gracious host of his first executive board meeting as President of the Atlanta Revenue Enablement Society back in early 2020. Before then, Dr. Fowler had been the World Wide Director of Enablement & Learning for IBM, and is now a Partner in his own sales strategy and sales enablement consulting venture: RevenueReady.
Highlights from the episode include...
PAST:
⌛️ Shawn "stumbled" into the profession working as the first services salesperson for Silverpop - essentially selling desired business outcomes. The SVP of sales, Todd McCormick, announced he was hiring a head of sales enablement and the hiring manager Drew Pronté said "hey, the CEO said that you should probably be the guy."
⌛️ He didn't know what sales enablement was. At the time he was pursuing a PhD in educational psychology so he combined what he learned from working as a sales engineer and as a services salesperson with what he knew about how psychology of learning works ...and he found himself implementing their first ever Sales Enablement program.
⌛️ His first Sales Enablement event was hosted by SiriusDecisions in Atlanta. "I was thinking we need to start something where we do that on a regular basis. This was easily the most valuable thing that I've done in the last six months."
⌛️ "Getting a seat at the table was probably the biggest factor in helping me be successful in sales enablement."
⌛️ Silverpop was purchased shortly thereafter by IBM when he then developed and executed their global expansion go-to-market plan. "I had the opportunity to see what it looks like in a much bigger level. IBM is basically a handful of multi billion dollar companies all put together. And I was part of one of those multi billion dollar companies inside of it. I got to see how these really big enterprise complex sales work, how you have to enable people across multiple different continents."
⌛️ Shaw was responsible for internal sales enablement including customer service and sales engineers and external - partner enablement - as well. "I think it makes a lot of sense, honestly, when you are in that position you have the opportunity to identify and eliminate a lot of the organizational issues that negatively affects your customer and that negatively affect the team as well."
PRESENT:
💼 Dr. Fowler diagnosed a few challenges that Sales Enablement faces today:
🩺 "I think there's not enough sharing of best practices"
🩺 "The quality of sales enablement as a profession has gone down pretty dramatically in the last five years."
1 - A lot of heads of sales are hearing from their investors that they need sales enablement but there was a period of time where I don't think a lot of them really knew what it meant.
2 - Heads of sales aren't always great at hiring enablement. Recognizing talent can be difficult.
3 - There is a lot of fluff. There was a period of time where sales was a lot easier and there's an entire generation of people who are in sales enablement who didn't have to figure out how to build a better machine. They could get away with adding more people to the machine and adding revenue by doing that. With venture capital drying up there's a much bigger focus on productivity. In order to achieve productivity per rep, you have to build a better machine.
🩺 The Doc offers REMEDIES to these challenges.
💼 Shawn shares a sample dive into RevenueReady's Customer Journey Workshops and parallel playbook creation approach.
💼 The power of a bottom-up approach, involving Sales Managment / the front line in the problem framing and in the solution process. A top-down only approach lacks the tactical information from the field needed to correctly identify and frame the problem, make good decisions, and design a solid solution. It also increases adoption because the front lines were involved in shaping it.
💼 In order to succeed you must both design an effective intervention, and then execute the reinforcement required to drive real change.
💼 "Sales (Revenue) Enablement is the change management arm of revenue." WGLL shoutout to Hillary Headlee who exemplified this at Zoom, having owned both global Ops AND Enablement ...during the height of Covid! And now she's doing it at the global Advisory Leader, Growth Team @ Insight Partners
for 500-700 companies.
💼 Interview advice for Enablement: Focus on the first 90 days through the lens of the CRO. Have the attitude that you will onboard as if you are planning to be in the top 10-15% of their sales team.
FUTURE:
🤖 There's increasing recognition of the role of enablement in change management and increasing recognition of the need for an explicit change managing function in organizations. At least in more successful companies, that's what what enablement is going to be seen as.
🤖 Increased focus on frontline managers on both the new and existing sales side of the house, because the reality is everything lives or dies with the frontline manager.
🤖 AI is going to evolve and facilitate some things. The power of artificial intelligence to comb through, for instance, the thousands of minutes that are produced on a weekly basis in Gong or SalesLoft or whatever, and distill that down into insights or into moments that everyone should take notice of can be really powerful when it comes to training, coaching, and identifying what works.
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ORCHESTRATE Sales!
Erich
#RevenueEngine #DigitalTransformation
#RevenueEnablement
#AiCuriousHumanEnthusiast
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