Inside: Sales Enablement

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode #14

One of our listeners, Rachel, shared her companies view about sales management and the difficulty managers have in transitioning from being a top-performing rep to sales management. 

Sales managers have to live in two worlds, traditional "management skills" and also sales productivity contribution. Sales Enablement leaders looking to implement sales coaching need to be clear about their focus and intent. What can sales enablement leaders do to add value?  

Joe Gibbs won Super Bowls 3 different quarterbacks. How? He coached to a system, encouraging people to be themselves, and focusing on outcomes.

There are a lot of people talking about front-line sales managers and having them "go coach more." As much as that's been discussed, sales coaching hasn't really taken off. 

The guys talk about:

- What is sales coaching - the difference between sales coaching activities and sales coaching programs

- Unleashing the value of coaching, by embracing the sales leadership perspective

- What are the attributes of successful coaching programs?

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Scott Santucci 00:01

Hi, team, this is a What is that? So, what is a What is what is that? So, what I'm trying to do is create some structure and curiosity around some servers, certain things and some concepts and explain them and help make them relatable, explain why and whatnot and provide some texture around what's going on, what are some of the things we've got? They are super simple. The difficulty is there's a learning curve to get to simple, and then a comfort factor about applying. And a lot of this has to do with ambiguity, and why we need to produce lots of things to make things accessible. So, I'm trying to what is that? What do you think about what is that? Is that the right title? What should I call this series? You tell me because this is for you, you got to give me feedback. Okay, so one of the things that I think we all understand and can appreciate is that there are many silos involved inside of business. And they create lots of friction, which cancel each other out. And there is a need for Orchestration. I'm hopeful that casting you guys and in specific roles, what's fascinating is behaving in silos instead of operating and roles. What is that? What that is, is a massive amount of muscle memory that we have to create tools out visualize, that holds us in silos, we are prisoners of silos. And we think that we think we say, examples or symptoms of thinking in a silo. I don't know what marketing's doing. You don't need to know what marketing is doing if you're doing your role in our operating model. Or if you need to know column but ask them. There's nothing preventing anybody from doing that. Other examples of being in silos, I mean topics, you can generate your own topics, you you have your own, your job is to figure out how to make your role or the span of things that you can contribute to fit. And what we're all experiencing is this, either a lack of an operating model, or let you know, lack of clarity. And what we need to be able to recognize is all these things are VOCA related. We were clearly not prepared for the speed of V. We continue to use words like business outcomes, yet we haven't defined what makes business language versus nonbusiness language. So, we haven't made that tangible for other people. So, we're going to continue to struggle in uncertainty. So, we have uncertainty. Complexity is what's interesting is what makes something simple for one person is complex for something else. It feels complex learning something simple. So, there's a lot of paradox. If you look at the if you study complex systems theory, one of the things that is associated with complexity is paradoxes. Don't assume things are conflicting. Question it because it's probably complexity. And then finally, of course, ambiguity. Why do we have to have lots of slides because ambiguity is the thing that people hate the most, particularly in business, they can't stand it, they can accept the speed. People have recognized the complexity, that's something that people have tools over. It's the total fuzziness, and fog of ambiguity. And unfortunately, ambiguity is why there are so many friction points on the left. And, you know, the only way to overcome ambiguity is to create things to make things less and less foggy and to have patience as as we bring it along. But that's ultimately a key element of Orchestration. Now, one of the things around Orchestration is that Orchestration to Orchestrate across many departments requires an operating model. So not only do you need to be able to orchestrate yourself, but you have to orchestrate orchestrators. So, each of the different cogs have to be orchestration engines and upon themselves that have to tie together to overall orchestration. That's the role of being a catalyst. And that means there are rules that the other cogs have to follow. When those cogs don't follow those rules, they spin off out of control. Now, some of the cogs want to know how they fit into everything else. And what happens is too much time gets spent talking about the operating model and the philosophy of things and not doing so there's this balancing act that we need to learn how to establish and that clients are going to need you'd have to just establish the phenomenon that we are experiencing happens inside our clients. There is a reason we're organized. I'm going to repeat this. Stay in your roles and question your roles and why you're organized. Don't try to keep coming up with reasons to not be in your roles. The reason why is we have to simulate our clients’ experiences, it's the experience stupid to be able to appreciate what an operating model is. So, we can at least have the bedside manner to talk them through it. While we create the space to create the actual physical artifacts, we can't say things like muscle memory, that's not a tangible, concrete thing. And just because we've all experienced, and we use words, that means stuff to us, they don't have meaning to other people. So here are some examples of operating models. This is from IBM. I'm not going to talk to it. I'm just going to make observations. Here's one around the it operating model. Hint, notice the word capabilities over here, capability service, rigid service management on activities across functions. What its capabilities mean, here. Over here, let's zoom in on here. This is from Bain McKinsey. Look, what they're saying is the operating model is the gap between strategy and execution. Hopefully, you have seen often that we've talked about the blend between strategy and execution, what is the organizational thing that makes it happen? It's an operating model. But operating models are too new for people, or too conceptual, too theoretical, they're architecture driven. So, I've learned that particularly in the sales and marketing space, where the muscle memory that we have, there is too much activity. So, we have the balancing act, right? It seems contradictory. On the one hand, we're not doing enough, but yet we're criticizing people for doing activity without thinking. But we're thinking too much that we've got analysis, paralysis and not producing, then when we produce, it's not the right thing. So, all these different seemingly conflicting variables are experienced, even when you go try to introduce an operating model. Operating models are the key to success for any digital transformation, because what operating models do is cut between strategy and execution. And one of the things that we're going to talk about is, operating models have had their heyday in shared services organizations that are very functional, oriented, like legal, but they are introducing them breaks down because you don't have the vocabulary of only legal or the vocabulary of only human resources. What you're doing is you're cross pollinating across the vocabulary between sales, marketing, human resources, finance, and this English-to-English translation problem kicks in that English-to-English translation problem is huge, and colossally huge, and we need to do a whole lot more work of written bringing it to fruition and making it concrete. Now, that's not the purpose of this video, it's just sort of set up things, criteria for success, if you will.

Scott Santucci 08:14

But what is a business within a business? Why did I share all those other things? What I've learned is the easiest way to get people to think about a business within a business is to get them to think about their their function, as a company within a company, and what company are you? We use that metaphor in the, in the research, we have a lot of material to make this really, really concrete, I mean a ton of material, all we need to do is force ourselves to apply it, all that material and make it more concrete and connect the dots with what we're actually experiencing ourselves. What are we experiencing ourselves? It requires a lot of discipline just to stay super focused and say so what are we? What kind of entity is a sales enablement function? What kind of entity? What kind of service are we providing is growth enablement? What kind of slide am I producing? What is my role? How do I add value? The basic questions have to get answered. And that clarity allows you to operate. So, the business within a business construct is very simple. It's been developed over years and years and years. And it's very simple, but it's basically saying, who are your investors? Just like any other business, a business has investors, right? Then a company has its infrastructure. So, if your ups part of your infrastructure, your trucks, your fleets, the computing infrastructure, the buildings, physical infrastructure, all of that is infrastructure. And then in between, they have business processes a business has processes, where they convert inputs into outputs. And in between is where value is created. That's where value is created. That is how it works at its most simplistic way. So, the, the arrow represents a business process, which you can define at any altitude level that you want the conversion of inputs to outputs this conversion process. The more you do this, the more valuable you are. And it rests on top of infrastructure of which investors are paying for. So, investors are paying for this infrastructure. And what they really want are people who convert inputs to outputs valuable and add value. Okay, so now let's frame this out through the lens of Jen. So, Jen, is trying to figure out how she's adding value we can comment with, with subjectivity that she's adding value, but we don't have any objective measures to communicate if she's adding value or not. And that creates ambiguity. And any kind of ambiguity creates anxiety. What we have to do is police that place that out, so the way that we help that we're helping guide her on the organizational part. The other thing that she's got is I've got she's got a lot of people working for her, how are they contributing value? I hopefully, hopefully we all are experiencing probably the same dilemma, at least can experience on the on the hand of her own team. What how do we contribute? Everybody wants to add value. But do we know how all the piece parts fit together? Are we just blurting in and not understanding the situation, what the operating model or the business within a business construct does is allows us to lay out all the variables to start thinking through how the dots get connected? And in any business, that process there's going to be that group that converts the supply? You know, the suppliers are the input sources of input in a business. So, the suppliers have a manufacturing process might be the chemicals and all that other stuff, how it gets mixed together into something valuable, like maybe, maybe paint, and then it gets out to customers, it gets distributed customers. So, these that those are all clear processes in the digital world, what this process looks like we need to map out, it just isn't mapped out in a knowledge worker way. But we have the ability to say, Okay, let's put a box. And every one of these boxes represents a scope. And so, for Jen to continue to add value. So that's, that's her right here. She's gonna need investors, she gets funding from something, there is an expectation associated with the money that she gets, we're giving you money to do what in return, we get what.

Scott Santucci 13:07

So, think about the value proposition that we're trying to work on. Hi, I'm Jan, I want you to give me more money, that's investors. In return, I'm going to give you less stuff, you're not paying for a whole bunch of punchless things. As a result, you get better return. That's a really hard business proposition. Where inside the world, have you experienced somebody selling you that? Wherever you bought that before? So, it's hard to empathize. It's easy to conceptualize. It's hard to empathize. And this is why we have to do a lot better job of making things tangible. And the way we make things tangible is through slides, but the slides must be situationally aware, which means empathetic, we have to walk in the shoes. In your case, you need to walk in the shoes of me. Are you asking questions about what I'm experiencing? Your client isn't Jen, I am your client. Look how hard it is to get your head around anybody's head around who customers are. I'm going to flesh this out more. And there are many podcasts that we've got Brian and I have done to help flesh this out. But here's, here's the scope. Okay, so this is Jen in the middle. She's got her enablement operations team, we have to figure out what needs to go in scope to be able to deliver the most value. So, like any business, what what's the first thing you think about as any business while the business is what services that you offer? So, what services does Jen offer? Well, before we start thinking about the services, we could say, well, she does kickoff that's an activity. She has sales training. Is that a service? Is sales training a service, or is it an activity? How wired are people to just doing activities? And how immediately do we want to blurt that out? So, if we want to, if we want to go through the service part, like any business, you want to be able to establish the expectations with your investors. And the most basic form that businesses do is step number one, they write a mission and charter statement, you know, why do you exist? You need to write that out and flesh that out in order to get investors. Right. So, what does that look like? Well, then the next thing is you need to establish an executive committee, or a board of directors or some group of people in Jen's case, so the mission and charter statement is something that we need to work on, and we're going to fine tune. But she but it's pretty easy to identify who's paying, what budgets are, who are paying for her services. So, what that does is allows her to start connecting the dots between services versus expectations of people who aren't paying for something. This gets it this kind of decision making or discipline, as a word, again, helps create the foundation so that she can push back, it provides the foundation. So, who where are all of the sources of money? And then maybe there's other departments that she wants to include that she can stitch together to provide other services? Well, who would be those wallet owners? And how do you make the argument to move some budget resources to your budget resources? Okay, so then what you would need to be able to do is say, Okay, well, the quid pro quo, if this is the budget that I've got, and this is the things that I want to do, and these are the people involved, how will you evaluate my success? What does success look like? What are my success indicators? Are they measurable or not? Are they subjective? Or not? How do you create that kind of construct? So as a frame of reference, the value equation is a success indicator of a valuable conversation. In other words, a service that a customer that a salesperson gives to a customer, okay, now, given that, given that basic, hopefully, these these building blocks are in place, and by the way, hopefully, you guys are following here, there's a ton of detail on each one, and we establish or build up the details from there. Okay, so then what you would need to do is, if you want to run this overall department of services with success indicators, mission charter, you're gonna have to have a vision of what you're doing. And this is a big gap that a lot of people have coming up with a vision. So, for example, if you are an architect, what's your vision of how what services you're providing? To me, your executive committee of one, your suppliers would be detangler, clarity, etc. Every what success indicators have you co created to create? Alright.

Scott Santucci 18:16

So, these are the this is sort of structure. And this is where things start, you get to start really thinking and being thoughtful, how am I going to connect the dots? What is my responsibility? What is my accountability? accountability is a huge factor in making an operating model work. And in businesses where we're so associated with my value is on what I produce, rather than my value is what I enable, then it gets it gets really fuzzy. This is why it's incredibly important to have a consistent cadence, about establishing what your success indicators are. and managing expectations, talking through expectations. The only way that you're going to do it is just talking it through. So that's why you create a a feedback loop based on these indicators. Okay, now, it's likely that you're not going to have a one services company, you're going to have to have a portfolio. So, we have a portfolio of services that we offer, we offer clarity services, detangling, services, architect services, capability, services, concept or services. So, we're, my ability to manage the expectations of the whole part, if I'm Gen is dictated by the service portfolio and the vision that my of how well people are orchestrating in those in those groups. We have to be able to empathize with that, because we're going to have to be able to guide you through that because for Jen to be able to execute on some of the things that we're doing. She's gonna have to do this too. So, this is why things become self fulfilling prophecies if we don't produce them. We don't, aren't able to capitalize on the opportunities, we don't have to solve the problems, we just have to make slides and make things more and more clear. And make sure that what we're doing is we're interacting and engaging, engaging, engaging, engaging, not just doing and assuming. So, these are all things that are common challenges associated with an operating model. But using a business within a business model helps illuminate this stuff and gives guidance of what we should be doing. And what should be expected of somebody who's running a service portfolio, for example, okay. I did this wrong. Shoot, I did this in order, or so. Here's the service portfolio. The next thing that you're going to need to be able to do, or Jen's gonna need to do is, how does she steward How is she a good steward of her company's...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 13

Sales enablement is a cross-functional role.

You have to work positively with: salespeople, sales managers, sales leaders, sales operations, various HR functions, IT professionals, finance professionals, product marketers, field marketers, customer success professionals, sales engineers, product leaders, and manage expectations from the c-suite. 

How do you do it?

It can be manageable when the breadth of your remit is focused solely on onboarding. However, if you don't have a framework and toolset - you can submarine yourself quickly without a stakeholder management strategy. 

In this episode, Scott Santucci and Brian Lambert introduce the idea of a cartoon to introduce the simplicity of the core idea around stakeholder management and we connect it to a famous quote from Zig Ziglar "you can get anything you want in life if you help enough people get what they want"  

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

Hello, I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I'm Brian Lambert. And we're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to helping sales enablement leaders understand the big questions they should consider in order to be successful with sales enablement. In this podcast, we reframe, revisit, rethink and confront reality in sales enablement. And on this podcast episode today, we've got something pretty special, but I'm I'm not sure what it is Scott, frame it out for me. What do you got?

Scott Santucci 01:04

Thank you, Brian. And thank you everybody for joining our show. As you know, this is the part of our show where we frame out the topic or the theme today, this theme that that we're using, actually, we're going to go a little multimedia and try something different that we've never done before. I'm going to play you a clip. It's runs about a minute and 10 seconds. I'm going to comment a little bit along the way and see what you think. So, five bucks if you know who this is, or you know, buy a beer when I see you sometime. That is a little chicken Hawk. And that is one of the main characters and Foghorn Leghorn. So, the person talking now that's the dog. The dog is the arch nemesis of Foghorn Leghorn. So, he's just run in to another character in this little, tiny story. It's a cat. This character is a mouse. He's come out of the barn. All right, that's it.

Brian Lambert 03:14

That's a good question. So, so what will the cheese want? Got? No, just kidding. First of all, I don't know if the listeners can hear that. But it's pretty cool story. So, you may have to turn that up and you have my permission to hit the rewind button for a minute and listen to that again. The second of all, I don't know how you have time for all this to come up with this stuff. Are you watching chicken bog and Foghorn Leghorn for hours on end looking for clips there What?

Scott Santucci 03:42

Actually, when I was a kid, watching that, for whatever reason, I just remember some of the cartoons and this one stuck in me, because when I was getting sales trained, and I was listening to my Zig Ziglar tapes, Zig Ziglar has this quote. That just resonates with me at my core is quote, and I think anybody who knows what Zig Ziglar is, if not Google and learn all about it. He says, you can get anything in life that you want as long as you help enough people get what they want. And for whatever reason, I needed to have a way to connect the dots between those two. And so that's really how I get the this Foghorn Leghorn cartoon to me, epitomizes all of the challenges that we're dealing with sales enablement.

Brian Lambert 04:34

Yeah, everybody wants something different. Actually, I would add another component to that, you know, that the chain there, right, I need a bone, I need some cheese. Everybody's got a different need. But on the sales enablement side, you have to kind of orchestrate that all together into one outcome or one solution, right.

Scott Santucci 04:53

So, the way that I the way that I think about it into you know, put some, I feel like now we're in English class and trying to determine the meaning of Walt Whitman or some poem. For me, the chicken Hawk represents all of us sales enablement people and going from just a super eager Yay, I can get the dog a bone. But what is it that we want? And ultimately the end of this cartoon it's, you know, seven minutes it's way too long to play a clip like that is he ends up getting the plan from the dog because he gets that he gets the cheese to the mouse the mouse gives the bone or gives the fish that he caught with the cheese to the to the cat a cat gives get get it tells him how to get the bone and it gives the bone to the dog, who ultimately gives him the plan on how to get Foghorn Leghorn. So little chicken, chicken Hawk can eat that big, big, big, ridiculous Foghorn Leghorn. So, the point of this is, we sales enablement professionals. Like the little chicken Hawk, in the sense that we start off with, what is it that we want, we want to have a measurable impact. Now what our impact is, is different for each of us. But depending upon our company's scope and appetite, how strategic that we want to be, but at the end of the day, what is it that we want, you can get anything in life that you want, when we want big chickens for dinner?

Brian Lambert 06:26

And we want to help people, right? I mean, the mouse needed help the cat needed help the dog needed help, right? We want to be able to help people. So that's part of that to the chicken Hawk story to me was, not only did he want to get his own outcome, he actually was considering the needs of others. I'm not sure if that's what you meant as well. But I think I see that and sales enablement people all the time was is trying to be helpful.

Scott Santucci 06:49

That's right. And that's the second part. The way that you get what you want, is helping others get what they want. And the part that I like the best that resonate with me the most in this cartoon is when it goes, everybody wants something,

Brian Lambert 07:05

And they want something that they want something I think that was Zig Ziglar himself.

Scott Santucci 07:10

That's true. He also says that maybe Zig Ziglar his famous quote was inspired by watching, because Looney Tunes came out before Zig Ziglar. So yeah, who knows? Whatever it is, it's a universal truth. The user universal truth is that you are better you can get more of the things that you want, by supporting others what they want. Now to make this business focused, he because we don't want you to, quote, Foghorn Leghorn inside your company. This is just meant to make, make some of these big ideas, simple, but there's a term that maybe you should embrace. It's called stakeholder management. And really, that's one of the one of the critical success factors that all sales enablement leaders must master. If you're going to to keep your job and also continuously add value. So that's really the key. The key point that we're talking about here is stakeholder management, the importance of it, how stakeholder management helps you sell the value or the function of sales in a more and internally, and how challenging it is.

Brian Lambert 08:19

Yeah, like it. And, you know, little known fact, though the word cell is Icelandic. It's spelled like SJ e Ll, so our global audience could tell me how to pronounce that, like Val, or something like that. But a lot of our listeners may not know this, but the word sell actually means to serve. So, to your point, Scott enablement, who are you serving? Who are you helping, and this is a profession built on serving others and providing some sort of outcome to a group of people who are also serving others to provide some sort of outcome and it's an important profession, but yet from a stakeholder management perspective. Everybody wants to bow not only today, they wanted it yesterday, and everybody has their own needs. And you get into this I, you know, I've seen it before. And I've been in been in a role where this happen every day is a new request. And it's hard to serve people in that. What do you what do you think about that?

Scott Santucci 09:17

I think you're right. And I think that's one of the things we had a we had an episode. I think it was episode number seven, we're back on and we brought up this issue. But let's start to make this more real before we start making act academic. So, we're starting out with a cartoon. The nothing is less academic than that. But now then we bubbled it up to stakeholder management. Oh my god, the academic alert is way high. Let's talk about why you need these. It's why you need these things and why you need these tools. So, insert any Chickenhawk, any sales enablement practitioner like any of us, you've heard the stories from earlier podcasts. Our first two podcasts were about selling sales enablement, internally. The third podcast was how I set up a sales enablement function was heavy on on selling internally. Let's just break this down very simply, who are our constituents? To whom is it that we're enabling? And it's a very difficult topic topic. The sales members within the sales enablement society don't agree on what the definition of sales enablement is. We've commented before Brian for when we were at Forrester, we produced the first version for CERN upon itself has come up with a different version, elapsed time frame 10 years still debating about the definition of sales enablement. That's a circular wheel that doesn't add any value. Let's talk about your company inside your company. Who is it that you're trying to enable? Are they individual salespeople? If so, what's the bone they want? Is it the sales managers? If so, what's the fish? They want it? Is it the VP of Sales So what's the cheat that they want? And then in order to give them those things, we have to go into what is the CFO want? Because ultimately, we're going to need resources, right? We're going to ask for headcount or ask for for money. So, what is the CFO or finance organization want?

Brian Lambert 11:20

Yeah, like this, because visually, you can categorize by these big, big items, you know, then you can say, what kind of what kind of cheese, you know, cheddar, Colby cheese, what kind of fish is it? Right. And these are questions that you can ask your stakeholders without assuming and I think that's, that's important. Being a chicken Hawk and all

Scott Santucci 11:41

that's right. And it becomes more complex as our businesses get more complex because we're trying to solve, solve universal problems for our clients, or bring them commercial insights or whatever we want to call them, rather than just selling a product. Okay.

Brian Lambert 11:56

Yeah, so before you go on to that, sorry to interrupt but by Are we making this? What would you say if somebody said okay, now now you guys are getting crazy? You're making this too complex. You went from a cartoon. We're one click into this and this is this is getting too complicated. What would you say to that?

Scott Santucci 12:13

That's the reason you got a job. The reason the role sales enablement has emerged is because somebody got tapped on the shoulder and said, Brian, this thing's broken, fix it. The things that are broken, are really the sales system, the sales engine, however you want to put it, your sales machine coming apart at the seams, because you don't have a execution fabric to connect the dots because your your company is organized in a bunch of different silos. With a ton of specialists. They're really smart in their own own areas. But none of your customers care about any of that stuff.

Brian Lambert 12:51

And you're getting handed broken things. It's not like they're all put together. I don't know if you've ever had to build something for kids and it exploded upon opening into A bunch of little piece parts, like Legos. Yeah, that can get kind of complicated.

Scott Santucci 13:05

And it can get very complicated to when when you open the package Christmas Eve night and you're putting together the kit putting together those those toys when you lose the instructions. Yeah, that's the thing. You don't have instructions. Yep. Others have instructions. This is a brand new, this is a relatively new role. There isn't an instruction manual. So unfortunately, this is you. The good news is you have a job, and you have a job in a function, that there's a lot of upside to if you can get it right. The con of that opportunity is guess what? You've got to confront the complexity of putting the jigsaw pieces pieces together. It's just it just goes with the territory. Sorry. If you know if you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Brian Lambert 13:52

Yeah, and I think that's why we're seeing that more and more roles in sales enablement. And then to the evolution of the role to be more, more strategic, in other words to take a purview of broader set of pieces. And, you know, that's a whole separate show. We'll talk about that. But back to the topic of being the chip Chickenhawk here. Remember that story from Elizabeth when when that one podcast who confronted reality where she was talking about what the sales managers wanted, and there was this, this friction, and we kind of coached her up on you know, you can't have that friction. What would you say about that? Productive friction and, and the the bringing together of people and where they're rubbing the wrong rubbing elbows and how how that relates to, you know, stakeholder management because to me, it's not all gonna be happy, you know, cartoon, it's gonna get messy.

Scott Santucci 14:48

Well, I think if you watch this cartoon, the little chicken isn't happy, right? Everybody wants something. Yeah. That's your dilemma. So that even that that that premise, isn't isn't true. But really the key point is, it's really getting at the heart of what enabled means. Enable doesn't enable could mean I give you what you want, and just give everybody what they want but then there's no quid pro quo. In order for me to do something for you I need something in return.

Brian Lambert 15:21

Yeah, that's a foreign, but that's that. Okay, first of all, you might be the first person that I've heard talk about that in a public setting about what are we getting back as enablement leaders? Because I've been to a lot of meetings, I've been to a lot of events. I've talked to hundreds of sales enablement people, nobody's nobody's asked, you know, what should I be asking for? What's my quid pro quo, they all they, although, however, have a challenge with resources, getting a seat at the table, you know, having a strategic partnership with sales, you know, they tend to talk in terms of the outcomes that they want. So, are you talking about that are you talking about something more tactical, a meeting cadence with others is a quid pro quo? are you what are you talking about with the ask for sales enablement can be more.

Scott Santucci 16:09

So really, I'm going to be simple about that. I know you know, we want to go in to start talking about what we're doing. But let's just make sure we're really clear on what it is I'm talking about. You only have a limited amount of budget, you can keep asking for more budget, you can keep asking for more resources. We both know that the way that you get it, that's probably you're never going to get enough resources that you asked for. You're going to want to own more things, but you're competing with other departments that want to own things. None of that's a winning strategy. The winning strategy is to look look at the deck of cards that you've got, and say based on what we've got, here's what I can do for you. The quid pro quo comes from other people granting you things take to get get having them give you or agree to give up ownership. things. So, for example, we can start that the scenario with Beth was she's, she's viewing the sales managers and the sales managers are viewing her as competitive. Well, the first thing is, let's make clear, how do I help you? Me a beat meal as a bit? How do I help you as a sales manager? What is it that you want? If I can give you x? What are you going to do in return for that? And they can say, well, that's just what I expect. But that's not who Beth who pays Beth's checks? Who writes Beth checks? The VP of sales, or the director of sales in this case is the one who writes the checks. That's the that's the one she has to make happy. So, in other words, she has to get permission, gain permission. So, I'll do this for you. You'll do this for me. And because we've done that together, both of us win at sales 101.

Brian Lambert 17:53

Yeah, and I know for a fact that that approach works, we actually in my enablement role took over additional headcount and even had a new function for a while we took over function based on that, because, you know, our leadership was complaining about a lack of service, we said we can provide it. But to do that, we need the headcount of those, those people cut over to us. And it was simple. Okay, make sense.

Scott Santucci 18:19

So, let's put this into more concrete terms, right, so some of our listeners, so we're gonna, we basically Brian, and I think think of the world of enable in three stages of maturity. stage number one is a highly reactive world, which unfortunately, most of us are in right now. Stage number two is a managed world. And stage number three is an adaptive world. And you have to be able to accumulate enough of these favors and be able to accumulate enough of the another of the piece parts in order to, you know, move up that value ladder. But let's talk about something a lot of us are doing right now, which is onboarding. Now we can take the point of view that says onboarding as I develop the program and then you can say, Well, I trained all the reps and throw your hands up and say, you know, it's up to them now look at all our scores that we add. But if at the end of the day, the time from New Hire to productivity, if that metric is small, you haven't really enabled sales, you haven't given anybody anything except made a bunch of deliverables. So, one way to think about that would be, hey, in terms of onboarding, what do sales managers want? And you can ask them, but you know, you can get really clear, one of the things that sales managers want are some sort of predictable performance,...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 12

Sales Coaching -- the definition matters. Especially with regard to enablement and Sales Management

There is A LOT of noise in the market today about "sales coaching" 

The question is, does it help sales managers become force multipliers, or is it a source of conflict? 

In the episode, the guys use a role-play (Scott based on feedback he's heard from many different sales enablement leaders and Brain-based on research he's currently doing on front-line sales managers).  

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

Hi, this is Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to helping leaders understand the big questions they should consider to be successful in sales enablement. On this podcast, we like to reframe, revisit, rethink and tackle reality in the sales enablement role. Scott, why don't you frame it out for us today.

Scott Santucci 00:57

Sure thing, Brian. And thank you very much for everybody listening, that's a great introduction, Brian. One of the things that we're going to be talking about here today is the fuzzy world, the gray area of sales coaching, and the difference between frontline sales managers and sales enablement and to give that some color, the the way that we're going to frame it out is I'm tell a little bit of story about the Hubble Space Telescope. And if you are a science nerd like myself, you're appreciating the wonderful images that we have shoot, they even took a photo a couple months ago of actual real life black hole. It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. But the story that of starting out wasn't so great. When the Hubble Space Telescope was first released and brought out of the space shuttle had a problem. It actually couldn't focus on, on anything really. And the problem that had is like most complex machinery, there were different teams. One team was focused on doing calculations using the metric system. Another team was focused on using the standard system. And you can think, oh, what a bunch of idiots. But I think no one in their right mind would call somebody who works at NASA literally a rocket scientist, stupid. The issue is when things get complicated, it's very, very, very, very, very, very easy for people to lose sight of, of clarity, particularly lack of communications and the like. So that's, that's what we're talking about. And, Brian, your thoughts?

Brian Lambert 02:41

Well, I would say we don't have the standard coaching system and the metric coaching system or maybe we do but when you look at that, Scott, what's what's your point as it relates to sales coaching?

Scott Santucci 02:56

My point on that is very simple sales. People are smart. Sales Managers are smart, sales enablement. People are smart, and VPS of sales are smart. Let's assume everybody in their roles are smart. It is very easy for us to sit there and call and think other people are not able to do one thing or the other. But maybe we have a bigger problem, which is a lack of clarity. And that's really the keystone of this. So, what we're going to do in this conversation is like most sales enablement, professionals, every single one of us has our own lens, our own perspective. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint that a little bit. And we're going to, we're going to roleplay this out and say for the sales enablement people who are saying, hmm, I've read a lot about frontline sales coaching. It's a great force multiplier for us to do. I'm going to provide coaching services coaching for our reps. And the reason that I'm going to do that is because we have to demonstrate value, right? I mean, let's let's let's cut to the chase, we have a fuzzy role. Most of the organization doesn't most of the rest of the organization doesn't really understand what we do. But I have so much out of humanity communicated so much expertise and talent around sales, training and sales coaching, that I'm going to get in that game because I'm not seeing frontline sales managers.

Brian Lambert 04:32

So doesn't know. I would say, don't do that.

Scott Santucci 04:37

What How can I not do that? Brian, I've got all this talent. I've I've done all this training. Look at the feedback scores I get when I actually do courses, my feedback scores are through the roof. Why are you telling me not to do it?

Brian Lambert 04:49

So, I didn't know you're gonna go there. So, this is totally, you know, unscripted, but I would say I'm having a visceral reaction to you taking on the frontline manager role. So, in other words to be more clear, if you're in a sales enablement function and you want to provide coaching services, you should be providing that to from my managers and helping them coach not doing their job for them. Because in today's world, in my opinion, the role of a frontline manager is to drive productivity of their team. And that's their job to coach their people, not yours.

Scott Santucci 05:22

Wait, what are you talking about? Brian? That sounds semantics coaching the frontline sales managers versus their people at the end of the day, the the salespeople aren't able, without reinforcement of the training that we've provided on let's say, we're rolling out challenger. Companies made a huge investment in that we don't have reinforcement in it. It's gonna it's it's gonna die on the vine. I know it, you know it, no one's really concentrating on reinforcement, so I need to do it.

Brian Lambert 05:54

So, I'm laughing because you must have been on the receiving end of a lot of this type of discussion because for people that know, Scott, there's no way he would just say, he does what you just said. So, I'm glad. I'm glad you clarified this as roleplay. So, I'm a listener. Yeah. listener. So, um, but I would say, Okay, um, in that view, then what's the purpose of the manager? Specifically, right? So, I framed about the admin side. And, you know, the role of a manager is just like any other frontline manager, the approving vacations, admin time, expenses, etc. On the productivity side, though, that's the challenge, you know, because their sales managers, they're responsible for, you know, pipeline forecasts, you know, closing deals, etc. And so, when you look at the role of the first line manager, there's not a lot of clarity there. And I think there's a lot of assumptions is what,

Scott Santucci 06:46

Well wait a second, Brian. I don't need to read their job descriptions. I know that their number one job is to help drive performance to their reps, and they're not providing performance coaching to their reps. I sit on all those the court the qbrs. I hear I hear it, they miss the qualifying opportunities left and right. They need help I need to provide a forum.

Brian Lambert 07:11

Well, have you asked them what help they need? To me unleashed

Scott Santucci 07:17

I've been doing this for 20 years. I don't mean to ask to help. When I see when I see in a cube er, and I hear the conversations happening. And I see the holes in the in the pipeline. I gotta act. Yeah, we don't have time.

Brian Lambert 07:31

Yeah, I would agree that you have to act. But one of the things that I would ask you to act on is understanding the role specifically, and, more importantly, driving that clarity across the organization. Because you're making a lot of assumptions by acting to fill a gap that you may want, you may not need to to somebody else, maybe

Scott Santucci 07:52

I was a frontline sales manager before.

Brian Lambert 07:56

Well, that was before not not today where customers have evolved. Solutions are a lot more sophisticated. And quite frankly, the demands on a sales managers time are exponentially higher than when you did it before. And also, I believe that the role has as more from individual manager driving individual deals, to creating team outcomes with an entire team of people. And to think that you can waltz right in there and start telling people how to close more deals. Not only are you going to perhaps undermine the authority of the frontline manager, right, you're also perhaps going to set back sales numbers, because you're not involved in it every day. It's a little naive to think you can walk into a sales process today and drive better results than somebody who's involved with five eight people on a daily basis. I mean, what are you talking about? Why would you even want to do that? Doesn't matter.

Scott Santucci 08:56

Wait a second. I'm the one who trained them all on our newest Sales methodology. So, I'm the I know everything there is to know about challenger, everything there is our reps aren't following the methodology. And I am in a unique position because I trained everybody on this. I'm in a unique position. How do I What do you mean? I don't know. I know because I know challenger.

Brian Lambert 09:22

Yeah. And you you can line up behind the 47 other people that know their widget that I want the sales manager to help roll it out from marketing from product from the CRM team, from the analytics team, from HR from talent acquisition, from product number 37. From the finance people to the operations, people that want to talk about quarterly read forecasts, etc. And to think that you know, you can come in as a sales training bias and say, you know, I taught your people I know better than than you do, on how to manage perhaps sales cycle, how to handle a sales call, how to prioritize time, and and coach people how to prioritize time, how to renegotiate the trade offs on a daily basis on on these demands is not right to me, I would say redirecting that energy to go do something into the, you know, broader team view or the system view is way more valuable. For example, you know, sales managers have the hardest job of anybody in the in the business world today, because of a lot of the pressures that they're under, who's helping simplify what's coming at them. And then with regard to coaching, and talent in general, for example, I think he could spend a lot more time understanding what type of talent you know, sales managers need to get from the recruiting team, for example, there's a lot of frustration there. You know, if you want to teach somebody challenge or go teach the talent acquisition folks, what salespeople are trying to do. You know, I think that would be a great use of your skills as a trainer. But to take over the sales managers job and coach their people on behalf of them is is to me insulting. I wouldn't appreciate it if if my team

Scott Santucci 11:17

Okay, so we're going to end roleplay So Brian, how'd I do?

Brian Lambert 11:22

Well, I'm pissed off right now. Yeah. So that was great. You know, I think

Scott Santucci 11:33

Why pissed off?

Brian Lambert 11:34

Well, it's what is well, I have a visceral reaction because it's real, right? I had a sales manager call me I think a week and a half ago going, Oh, I just unleashed, you know, a whole a whole tirade on my town acquisition team. And I told him, they were screwing up. He didn't use that word. Because it was expletive laden. You know, my whole sales team because they need to get their stuff together. Right and you know, it’s frustrating to be a sales manager today. And nope, if you look at it the reason why I'm having a an emotive reaction to this kind of you should you as a manager should go do XYZ. I one was never asked by you, will it be helpful to when I started actually sharing what I believe should happen, you kept, you know, arguing with me. And that that I think is is frustrating for sales managers to be in that position.

Scott Santucci 12:33

And that was, that was that was pretty heightened. And, you know, the purpose of that is we hear a lot of these kinds of feedback. And the purpose of this show is or this particular episode is to understand the situation more holistically. So, taking a step back, let's let's break down this problem. The frontline, what actually is the role and responsibility of a frontline sales manager If you were to look at this like a Venn diagram, you have two Venn diagrams coming together, you have one, they are a cog, for lack of a better word in the sales machine. So, when you think about the sales leader working with human resources and finance, they have to put together a structure their department, and in that structure, their department, there's a there's a term called span of control. And they set a metric of how many reps report to whom. And it's a very mechanical viewpoint and lost in that shuffle. The job description of a frontline sales manager gets overlooked. So, it is not uncommon for many variations of a frontline job description to exist inside a company and somehow that gets baked into somebody's job performance and what that was, so that's one side of it. The second side of it is I have not I have yet to meet and I'm going to ask you, Brian, a frontline sales manager that doesn't feel a heck of a lot of responsibility. Heck, they're paid their most of their salary is variable, and it's based on their team's performance. I have yet to meet a frontline sales manager that isn't interested in helping their salespeople be better. Yeah, that's right. Have you ever met a frontline sales manager that isn't interested in that?

Brian Lambert 14:25

They wouldn't be in the job.

Scott Santucci 14:27

Not for long, right. Right. So, the question that then is, you have two competing forces. You have one force, which says this job description what we're asking of you as a frontline sales manager is unclear. And then secondly, you've learned how if you're probably if you're a frontline sales manager, you're at least a year or two away removed from the field, maybe even longer. So, you probably don't know everything that's going on. In terms of techniques, the techniques that got you here to where you were may be different than the techniques that work today. And you probably aren't as empathetic as you could be about the change that, you know, last year, two years ago, you're asking your sellers to sell a whole bunch of volume to minion level buyers. Now you're rolling out challenger or whatever, sales methodology. And now you want your sellers to go call sell commercial insights for God's sakes to business executives.

Brian Lambert 15:33

Yeah and 12 to an 8.4 to 13.1 by buyers, right?

Scott Santucci 15:40

Yeah. So, it's something has to give. And if we, if we in sales enablement want to partner and leverage and be a part of the frontline sales manager, we have to realize that they're under so much pressure. They don't have a lot of vocabulary like what you said before with that. They don't have A lot of our vocabulary describe these things. And these are the these are some challenges. So, let's get into some prescriptions now for what kind of sales enablement leader do to navigate? So do Brian, do you and I, what is it? What is our position on coaching as a thing, a business within business a service that sales enablement provides? What's our position on that?

Brian Lambert 16:27

Well one, I would say do not provide that service to reps. If you're going to provide coaching services provided to managers, and start with to your point, having clarity on the first line manager role, and ensuring if you do the interviews, do the needs analysis, whatever your name is for it, that there's clarity across not only the sales management team, but the HR team as well. That that'll be the first thing.

Scott Santucci 16:54

Yeah, so let me piggyback on that. So, I'm speaking to you directly as a listener. If You believe that your greatest contribution to your company is to provide frontline to provide coaching directly to reps. You are not a sales enablement professional. You are a sales coach. Call yourself a sales coach and be a sales coach and recognize that's what you are. For the rest of us doing sales enablement, we're doing broader things than that

Brian Lambert 17:27

Well, isn't coaching underneath the enablement umbrella Scott? I'm gonna flip it back on you.

Scott Santucci 17:32

Well, sure. That's what I'm saying. If that's how you're defining what you're what you're adding the most value in, then you're not a force multiplier. Yeah, that multiplier would say, Okay. I'm so confident in my ability to coach individual reps. I'm going to teach frontline sales managers how to coach their reps. So, the service that I can get the best multiple out of my time is if I can get let's say, we have 100 reps out of out of my time I can coach maybe 10-20 reps, you know, let's say, or I can coach 20 sales managers who can coach their eight reps. Where am I going to have a greater return on my investment? I can build the same kind of similar kind of curriculum that I know how to do. And I can create a common language that currently doesn't exist, just like we say, with sales. The benefit of a great sales methodology is that we have a common language amongst our sales force. We don't have a common language across our sales managers. Without that common language, it's going to be very difficult for me to get feedback on other programs that I could do.

Brian Lambert 18:43

Yeah, that's a good point. I think less than 5% of organizations. I can't remember who put that research out. But they said that less than 5% have actual standardized, if you will, sales methodology and even to me coaching methodology coaching, right? Yeah. And I would even say if you take sales coaching to some sort of one, one page picture, that would be helpful. What is sales coaching? Because it's a conversation or is it a philosophy? Is it a task? Is it a process? Is it a methodology? What is it? And I think there's just a lack of clarity, not only on the manager role, which we both talked about, but the second point I would make to be successful in enablement. Here is, is what is sales coaching? And how would you define it so that it can scale? If you're not able to define it, so to speak, if you're not able to give it an identity, delineate it from a methodology versus a philosophy? Because the first perspective, pushback you're going to hear is from sales management, oh, I'm constantly coaching. It's...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 11

Many sales enablement leaders are responsible for some (or all) of their company's sales kickoff. When it comes to adding the right value and ensuring a return on investment, it's important to view the kickoff from the lens of your customer -- the sales leadership team.

In this episode, Brian and Scott revisit some research Brian did while he was at Forrester, and shed color on what we've learned since then about the good, bad, and ugly of sales kickoffs and what executives are getting for their investment. The key finding of the research?  

There are 3 reasons why sales kickoffs exist. To launch, improve rep skills, or evolve the sales team. Find out more by listening to this edition of Inside Sales Enablement.

This podcast will help you rethink sales kickoffs.

•  Does your company create an overall plan with a planning cycle starting in August, or do you do most of the work in December or January? 
•  Can you quantify the economic value of the sales kickoff? 
•  Do you have a 30-60-90 plan post kickoff? 

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here joined the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions that you may be wondering about, especially if you thought something might be wrong or something might not be quite right. And I got to ask, you know, are you getting the value out of sales enablement? And are other people seeing the value of sales enablement that you would expect? In this podcast, we're going to into a specific time tangible activity that many organizations are involved in. And that's the sales kickoff. Scott, what do you have for us?

Scott Santucci 01:09

We're actually recording this. This episode. This is our episode number five. We're recording it after our first episode has been released. So, I wanted to share a little bit of feedback that we've gotten from some of the people who've listened to our first episode. And then of course, I'll let you let you share some of it too. So, one of one of the elements of feedback that I've gotten is that folks really like the color the way that we're describing it in the banter that Brian and I have and and the format. One of the requests that I got was, Hey, you know, the background and the history is really important. It's always great to know where we're coming. Can we talk about some more tangible, not tangible, that's not the way that was phrased more things that I'm dealing with in the trenches right now that will help me be successful? So those are those were two of the feedbacks, what we'd love for you to do is keep sharing feedback with us. Do you agree with that feedback? What feedback would you add to it? How can we improve to make this a better experience for you? Share your thoughts with us on LinkedIn, call Brian or I, or better Email us at engage at insidese.com. Brian, what what are some of the feedback that you've received?

Brian Lambert 02:31

Yeah, I shared this on one of our drives, drives home, we tend to call each other at the end of the day when we're driving. And one of the things that I was hearing was this idea of, you know, rethinking, and hey, I hadn't quite thought about that before. So, I had somebody shoot me up, you know, shoot me a message on LinkedIn and be like, Hey, that was a great way to think about it. These stories, you know, Galileo, really interesting and made me think differently. So, there was this rethinking piece What we're going to do today, you and I talked about when you got that feedback with something that that folks might be more involved in, it's this idea of, of revisiting. So that's the second thing that that I took away. And the third one is, both of you and I have developed the technique. And I was at a thought leadership conference last week at Stanford. And it has to do with this idea of reframing the problem. And somebody came up to me after the events and said, Hey, you know, the way you're framing this out, is completely different because you're actually focused on the customer. So that's the three Scott rethinking revisiting reframing, and those are basically going forward here guys, the the three that we're going to go with, so we'll have different episodes where we either reframe something today we're going to revisit sales, kickoffs and some research that we did a while back, and then the rethinking piece which we are helping folks move forward in a new way of working and the new reality that they're facing. So, let's talk a little bit about Scott moving forward here, how to revisit and let's revisit sales kickoffs.

Scott Santucci 04:05

Yes. So, to put this into perspective, when we're reframing something that's giving background or asking you to take a step back, when we're revisiting something, what we're going to do is first we're going to hold ourselves accountable and break down and critique some of our past reports, to eventually critique other people's reports and other people's information and revisit some of the research that's been out there. And then the last one here is let's rethink, and today we're rethinking sales kickoffs. So, to frame this out, what was interesting is why would why would you even tackle sales kickoffs? You guys are the knock or the pro depending on how you look at it. You guys at Forrester were really strategic. Why in the world were you covering sales kickoffs? And what I want to do is let you understand a little bit of perspective, again, more than inside baseball. When you're an analyst and at at the time, it really depends, you might want to ask other analysts how many inquiries that they get ask them questions about inquiries, because that's really the one of the big driving forces of the research agenda. And at the time, when we were at Forrester, our department, our group was maxed out on inquiries. We had inquiries, when we were we had some of the highest inquiry loads of the entire company. And one of the one of the trends that that emerged was a lot of questions around sales kickoffs, interestingly enough, and I was very curious about it, because the questions that we were getting asked, were all over the place. So here we have same rolls from similar sized companies, asking about the same topic from completely different ends of the spectrum. And for me, the one that Character characterize this, make it to a research one of our research meetings to discuss what we're going to talk about was one of the inquiries we got from Novell. And that particular individual had shared with me that they had done an audit and analysis of return on investment and that they got a negative return on investment of their sales kickoffs, when they factored in all the travel time, the opportunity cost of lost sales time expense of all the glitz and glamour. And what they've decided what they decided to do is to go to a completely virtual experience. And as a researcher, I try to resist my initial reaction having been a salesperson my whole life, how in the world am I going to go and have tequila shots with my peers?

Brian Lambert 06:48

I was wondering the same thing or go karting or

Scott Santucci 06:51

Right, it, where am I going to get those interactions to build the culture, but then I just thought about it and what we what we did is we introduced this, that this topic and we assigned this topic to Brian to, to carry out. So, what we're going to do is we're going to ask Brian Tte first question, which is, how did you go about doing the research to figure out what our position might be on sales kickoffs?

Brian Lambert 07:17

So, we because we have such a high volume back then I had a, I was keeping records and, you know, as any good salesperson, you want to be able to tailor what you're doing and what you're saying and also build relationships with folks over time. So, I basically went through my records and found that indeed, I had actually talked about sales kickoffs, and, and how, brainstorm sales kickoffs and come up with ideas, etc. So, to move forward on Okay, what is perhaps the challenge that folks are facing? Or, you know, to the big question of how much of a return are we getting? What I did was I engaged through my relationships as an analyst with at least 10 companies, you know, companies like Cisco Or HP, Informatica Symantec etc. and asked about, you know, found found that the folks that were involved in planning a sales kickoff and or executing the sales kickoff, so kind of on the supply chain side, if you will. And then I also talked to the individuals that were recipients of that, that service, so sales managers and salespeople to try to get a 360-degree view of this experiences that was being created.

Scott Santucci 08:30

And to add to that experience, one of the one of the traits is as a Forrester analysts, you're often at least I was often, and I know, Brian, you, you went to several yourself, asked to participate and hired to speak at at sales kickoff. So, we have the experience of being immersed in the situation as well. Now, just so you're following, I still have a little bit about the researcher in me. I hope you notice that there's a bias at the point in time at Forrester, our research group was focused specifically on the tech industry. So, we didn't do a lot of research in other industries and other groups. So, this is information that has a bias to the tech industry. But Brian, what were some of the things? What were some three level? One of the one of the findings in that analysis that you had is there's really basically three types of goals of what a sales kickoff is about, is that right?

Brian Lambert 09:31

Yeah, that's right. And to get to those three goals, you know, wading through at all, you know, different expectations, different needs, different objectives for sales kickoff, there's different time horizons. Some folks would plan for a year other people would plan for 30 days. And but where all came together was basically three outcomes or three key objectives. The first one was as a sales organization or in support at a sales organization. We're going to help our sales team take a different tack or go in a different direction. That was one big area of focus. The second key outcome or objective of a sales kickoff was, we need to get started. So, we're going to initiate something new, such as a new product, the new focus from the executive team, etc. And then the third area was we need to fine tune, we were doing well. But there's some things that we want to tweak things that we need to adjust as we get in tune with our customers. So, we're going to go in a completely different direction we're going to work is one. The second one was we're going to take it first step and get people started on a path. And then the third one is we need to elevate or transform or fine tune, either the skills, the processes, the models, approaches, etc, of our existing team.

Scott Santucci 10:46

But let me add some color to that because I got after this report, I was I started paying very attention, very close attention to the sales kickoffs that I was involved at and what my role was as a keynote speaker, so let me add some stuff. Learn what Brian said. So, the first example was what Brian?

Brian Lambert 11:05

The first one is, hey, we're calling an audible, we're making a hard right turn, we're going in a different direction.

Scott Santucci 11:13

So, the way that I've interpreted that is basically the business has a new strategy. So, take for example, net app. In, you know, the 2013 timeframe is, oh my gosh, we got to move to cloud, or a lot of a lot of tech companies move into to a cloud-based business. So, CEO comes in talks about their business strategy, aligns it etc. And that's one element. Brian, what's number two?

Brian Lambert 11:46

The second one is we're going to help our sales team kind of get started on something. So, in other words, we're going to ask them to start doing something new.

Scott Santucci 11:56

So, the way that I've interpreted that I think a lot of us can appreciate reshape this that's introducing challenger sale or some new new sales technique or based on some of my experiences at the Alexander group in management consulting, rolling out a new coverage plan or source or something like that. So, we're going to go about getting started. So, you can kind of imagine what the flavor is there. And what questions and the attitude of the Salesforce is in both of those buckets. Brian, what was number three?

Brian Lambert 12:29

The third one was this idea of a sales team. You guys are doing some great things. However, comma, pause, we need to fine tune. So, we need you to start doing some things specifically. We need you to stop doing some things specifically, and we need you to fill these gaps.

Scott Santucci 12:49

What resonates with me there is having participated in a few sales kickoffs on that one. Immediately, I'm drawn to the readout the head of sales, who is sharing data about pipeline and forecasting, and talking about how many, how much of the multiple do we have in the forecast and how much of how much behind we are and what we need to do to accomplish that, etc. So, it's basically a call to arms, we're behind on missing a number, or we're behind on some of our clarity, or we're not doing these particular things pretty well. And it's a rallying of the troops and a very clear message is delivered about what we want to do to improve those, that would be my color of those three buckets. So, Brian, my next question to you is if we think about the goal for each one of those three things, what is the structure of a sales kickoff? So how do people structure these things? Are they all going to wear Novell did and Experiment with delivering this all online? Or how do they use their time and, you know, are their breakout sessions curriculum? What's the what's your what does it look like?

Brian Lambert 14:12

Well, what I've what I found back then, and I, and I believe it's still true today, given the conversations that I've had recently is, first, there's this choice of how much in person time do we want to have with the salespeople? So, in other words, when are the tequila shots at hand? When do we need to have everybody show up? And how much you know, team building and how much quote unquote fun Are we going to have? And how much time will that be allocated? If the question comes back that we don't need to get together and we're not going to do that fun stuff. It tends to go pretty quickly into something that's a little bit more remote because I think the bias has been that these kickoffs are about knowledge transfer, or quote, unquote, you know, telling the troops and so that's the first thing is how much face to face. Do we really think needs to happen if it goes on the other side where we need to have the face to face, we want to look people in the eye, we want them to pause their activities for a minute, take a step back and get re engaged, then it comes down to what's the best way to manage that in person experience? And there's some there's some, I think some cookie cutters there which has to do with you know, a group session at first and then some breakouts either by region or product, some knowledge transfer that needs to happen along the way and then you know, that kind of a lining up of different internal groups who want to you don't have access to the sales team.

Scott Santucci 15:38

So, to add color to that, so my involvement in sales, kickoffs has been, you know, sort of all over the place. In some cases, I've been asked to be the whole facilitator of the whole thing to keep everything together. other cases just show up and be pretty and deliver the message

Brian Lambert 15:57

Thats hard for you I know

Scott Santucci 15:59

Yeah, very hard, requires a lot of makeup and in some props deliver the message that we want you to do in this box and go away and shut up. So, air, it tends to be all over the place. What I what I do notice is that the composition of a, I asked a lot of questions about the agenda. Maybe it's because of the background of a researcher. But I see a, you know, a lot of breakouts that don't necessarily make sense. They don't, they don't map to the flow. So, give you an example. I was doing one kickoff, and I'm going to not name the names of the companies because I don't want to embarrass anybody. But the CEO was very insistent, and very, very clear that we're entering into a brand-new business model. We're selling to completely different buyers. And what was interesting was after the CEO left and everybody said, Yep, we understand it. The conversations were all about how do you get better at targeting the existing people that they're selling to More or less the whole agenda from from Eric ranging from, how do we have better? How do we prospect better to our current patch? How do we let's roll out new playbooks that we're going to do and let's certify the salespeople on what those playbooks are? Let's introduce the new analytic program that we're rolling out. Let's have it let's hear from marketing about the new lead generation process and how we're going to go and fill those things. And I'm listening, and I'm participating in each one of those and taking notes. And at no point in time, did any of those acknowledge the fact that the CEO is asking them to sell to a completely new buyer completely new. And so essentially, what the result of that sales training program was, people thought they were doing the right thing, you know, checking the box, but all of it was in direct opposition of what the CEOs goals were. And I see that time and time and time again, because how our sales how our sales agenda is put together. So, Brian, what based on your research, how did you find sales agendas were put together? Is there structure to it? Is there one person who has say in it? How do they get set up to be focused on a business objective?

Brian Lambert 18:17

Yes, that's a great question. And in the two-tier story, Scott, this is interesting, right? Because it pans out or plays out almost every single time. You know, if you believe a sales kickoff is for communication purposes, that's going to set up a whole bias for the whole entire experience. However, if you look at a sales kickoff as a way in which to equip sellers to be successful against...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 10

Are you: 

• overloaded by your inbox?
• concerned with the myriad of things being asked of the salesforce? 
• Worried you might be contributing to the chaos? 

How would you like to move from being highly reactive to how you are enabling revenue growth, to being more proactive? 

In this episode, Brian Lambert & Scott Santucci discuss practical applications of using five (5) sales objectives to help diagnose root cause problems and then prescribe more integrated programs that move the needle.

Highlights in this podcast

1) How do you apply the 80/20 rule to sales enablement? 

2) What are the five (5) universal sales objectives (and how are they NOT a sales methodology) 

3) How companies who follow this disciplined approach have win rates as high as 70% 

4) Understand then for yourself first, and then figure out how to socialize them internally 

5) Good conversations about strategies on socializing the ideas inside your company. 

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

Hi, I'm Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions that you should be asking if you want to be successful in sales enablement. You know, Scott, we're surrounded by lots of information. There's a lot of ideas on what we can be doing on a daily basis. And quite frankly, there are a lot of choices that we can be making in sales enablement to be successful. One of the things that I wanted to do on this podcast is this idea of focusing on what matters. And when it comes to what matters. It's often the little things that can get us the most traction. Scott, can you frame that out for us?

Scott Santucci 01:16

Sure, Brian, Malcolm Gladwell published a book, and I think it was 1999 or 2000, called the tipping point. And in that book, he talks about a lot of stories about how change happens. And one in particular that I think's relevant is one about the New York City Police Department. And specifically, back in the early 80s, New York City, believe it or not had a lot of crime. And the crime was out of control. There was a whole bunch of strategies to do that. But the New York Police Department followed a strategy that seemed pretty strange. And the idea was any little thing. Stop it. So, for example, and they saw somebody drunk on the street, they didn't give them a warning. They put them up and they detained them when any graffiti went up on the on the subways, they cleaned it off immediately. And just by doing these very little things, guess what happened? crime in New York City declined 60 some odd percent. And that's a dramatic change. And that strategy became adopted throughout the country as we saw a massive decrease in crime across the United States.

Brian Lambert 02:28

As usual, Scott, that's a great story. But what does that have to do with sales enablement? Obviously, we're not going to be arresting people. What are you talking about?

Scott Santucci 02:37

Well, I like these framing, framing conversations to help us think a little bit differently, but really what it matters, and what we're talking about here is how little things make a big difference. And that where many of us are as sales enablement professionals, is the inbox seems like it's killing us. We're overloaded by all these different activities. And is it really moving the needle? And how do we actually start figuring out where to focus on the small and a few?

Brian Lambert 03:11

Yeah, that's a great point. There's so much stuff, right. So not only the inbox, but meetings. I don't know about some of our listeners, but it feels like I'm strapped to my chair all day long every single day. And the idea of any whitespace or the you know, working through anything, is just tough because I'm always responding or fighting a fire or handling some sort of issue or, you know, if you have a staff, you've got people write vacations, somebody else sick, somebody got hurt, etc. So, you know, there's so many things that we can be doing the question that you're posing, which I love is, you know, what should we be doing? You know, Yeah, great question. And

Scott Santucci 03:51

if you don't know me, I'm a big fan of using math. I'm very mathematical and the way I think, and this is really what we're leveraging here is the 8020 role. And you know, since this is inside sales enablement, the 8020 rule is a is a principle developed by an Italian mathematician, really observing that 20% of the choices lead to 80% of the outcomes. And this phenomenon has come up over and over and over again. So, it's studying that mathematical principle or the statistical principle. And while we're at Forrester, when we had a whole bunch of different data points, one of the things that I did is applied back and I tried to look for look for different patterns, and for simplicity, and really what we ended up coming up with or reduced down sales, no matter what kind of sales that you're doing, whether you're inside sales, whether you're strategic account sales, whether you're a geographic salesperson, a vertical salesperson, no matter what no matter what it is that you're selling. There are only five universal objectives objectives, you must meet only five

Brian Lambert 05:01

Yeah, that's great. So, I'm sure we're gonna go through these five. But let's, let's, let's pause before we do it. What's the difference between objectives as you're defining here? And the concept of activities or actions or quote unquote, priorities?

Scott Santucci 05:17

That's a great question. For me, it's pretty simple. I can accomplish a task or a goal by doing a million things, or one thing. So, what happens is that in a lot of cases, we over prescribed sellers, a whole bunch of things to do. And then they feel obligated to do all those things when they can get creative and just accomplish that objective one way or another. What mat- you know what matters is, if you if we were to use a different analogy here, before we get into the details about sales, it matters that you score the touchdown. Doesn't really matter how you score the touchdown. It matters that you get the first down it doesn't really matter how you get the first down. Now, obviously in those sports, you have to do plays and make sure your blocking assignments are achieved, etc. But at the end of the day, you hit the first down, you make the first down, you keep the drive alive, you score the touchdown, you score points, end of story, black and zero, are black and white one and zero, it's binary. And that's really the the idea here is what are the five binary things that are ones or zeros that we can know we either did or we didn't do so that we can communicate to everybody else that sales is actually an awesome game. There's no such thing as an expected value or a weighted a weighted goal or a distributed outcome or any of the other math that that we tend to be applying to this, this pipeline game. It comes down to ones and zeros. So, what are the ones and zeros that we need to we need to check off in engineering or manufacturing sales pipeline?

Brian Lambert 07:02

Yeah, I love it. And I've certainly used at 20. I've used these five objectives. And they do they do netted out and I love, and this is important, I think for the listeners, as it was for me this binary nature ones and zeros and what pops into my head? Scott, I know we've talked a lot about this movie but it's Moneyball, right? So, you know, we can we have batting averages, we've got, you know, all you look at all of the score sheets on a player, you've got all this all these numbers, and Billy Beane and Moneyball said, you know what our job is to get on base and getting on base and getting a base hit as binary, you either do or you don't. And you built the whole team around that. That's the same thing here is the binary nature of these five objectives. You either help sellers do it, or you don't. So that's awesome. Let's, let's hear what they are. Why don't you walk us through those?

Scott Santucci 07:53

Sure. Before I walk you through those. What I'm going to do is, Brian, you're throwing me for a curveball. You didn't bring up money. balling our prep call, but I'm going to roll with it. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to toggle back and forth between Moneyball and and these five sales objectives. So, I'm going to go through the five sales objectives really, really quick first, and then we'll talk about each one, there are only five things, five things, that's it five things that any salesperson needs to do. The first one is know who your target audience is. The second one is to be able to have at get access to that particular person. The third thing is to have a successful meeting with that person. The fourth one is to create a shared vision or a buying vision or whatever you want to call it a shared vision of success with the client. And the last one is to present to them a business case that they accept and frame this out the target and at the end of the first one, knowing your target is your on deck, you're getting ready for hitting the gaining access is getting on first base, having a successful meaning is getting on second base, create a shared vision is third base and creating a business cases home, you've scored a run.

Brian Lambert 09:15

Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, obviously, if you don't do them in that order, you know, it's not gonna work. And also, you either did it or you didn't. That's binary, like we talked about. And another thing that this does, Scott, you know, in my role I deal a lot with, for example, l&d professionals or trainers. And I'm thinking that this helps with is, you know, not dealing with the outliers. So, we've talked at 20 these are the 20 that we want to focus on this is the these are the principles or the objectives that cut through a lot of the noise. But if we're if we're losing sight of that, or perhaps, you know, not as disciplined as we as we need to be on the on the base, running and getting on base, and then the first second third You know, and then home. And we focus on other things like the weather conditions or, you know, whether the suns in our eyes or what we're eating for lunch. Just kidding. You know, but but there's a lot of distractions through the inbox, etc, right, so you can lose sight of the game and the objectives and in the l&d space, I've spent a lot of time, you know, saying, okay, those are things that we could be doing we Yes, we could spend time on making sure that the elearning is better, or Yes, we could be spending a lot more time on the assessments or whatever. There's a lot of things we could be doing, but what should we be doing to help sellers, in this case, get on first base, and does that really matter? And I think that's a critical piece of this whole concept.

Scott Santucci 10:47

And let's let me go through let's go through each of them with a little bit of color. So as basic and as simple as that sounds, and this is one of the phenomenon that I've encountered. When you bring something Simple to people they rejected. But what they want is something simple. It's this whole, what simple is a very paradoxical conversation. But let's talk with just target audience. Who are you selling to? Who do you want to sell to? In most cases, I get an answer like, well, we want to sell it a large enterprise companies or to the mid market. And when I asked more specifically, like, who is the wallet owner, that you're targeting? Who is your primary stakeholder? Very few companies can actually answer that question. And so right from the get-go, we're not really focused on people. We're focused on sort of generalities.

Brian Lambert 11:49

Yeah, and then also because, you know, this is our on-deck piece, right. So, you know, I oftentimes get well, you know, at first, we try to go to this All, but then we need to over you know, be in a different role and they start talking about, you know, a bunch of people instead of the specific entry point into the account or the specific wallet owner, that should maybe talk to you first.

Scott Santucci 12:13

Right and, and it's, the entry point would be the gaining access point, right. And the goal here is really to say, who is our ideal stakeholder that we want to be communicating to, it's unlikely that every seller all the time is going to get access to that person. But the reason going through this exercise is so important. If we just apply a little simple math here, a CIO, if that's who we're trying to target, their budget and access to funding might be 100 x more than an individual user. So, the reason that this is very important, is because we want to make sure that the efforts that we're doing is targeting individual people who have buying authority. And that buying authority tends to be higher level people. Obviously, we don't want to try to think everything that we need to do, we need to call them a CEO. That's ridiculous. But that's why I've actually really spending the time to figure out who your target is, is incredibly important. In most cases, companies that I've worked with very large, well known smart individuals don't have that information, or they don't have that agreement on who they're who they're targeting. So that creates a lot of problems for Problem number two, which is okay, now that we're at bat, we want to get access to somebody. So, in the game, getting access to that somebody let's think about the workflow of a regular salesperson. They have a whole key of different leads that they're that they're given. In many cases, we've always heard that salespeople don't fall but leads I myself when I was a salesperson, chose to not follow up on the leads. I was given for marketing, because the level that they were at were so far low level a I'd be restricted to people who maybe had a $20,000 budget and I was trying to sell with people with lots you know, with with adult money, or, or b it was gonna make me start a campaign way low and then the work that I'd have to do to navigate all the different stakeholders up to the person who can make a decision was making the job of me selling much more difficult. So, the goal of the of the gain access is how do we actually gain access? And then if you can imagine all of this stuff, do we have the right call scripts for doing that? as a salesperson, I'd love to roleplay out with other sellers like techniques done on press day for it. How do we do that if we're not clear on who it is that we're targeting, in terms of the demand generation or the handoffs or the content or the collateral or all of the different activities, by the way, it's exploding now with email and social media and outreach or Reference programs, all of the different things just to get a meeting is great, but I need to get a meeting with somebody. So that's, that. That's all of the activities. And to your point about being distracted, there's a lot of distractions just getting on first base.

Brian Lambert 15:15

Yeah. And also, in today's world, you know, there's, there's so many there are so many platforms, but there are also a lot of, you know, point solutions. So, you know, what's your thoughts, Scott, on what we're selling, you know, the solutions that we're selling, or the product that we're selling as it relates to getting access, right? Because, depending on where and who the specific who the sellers are going after, you know, for example, CIOs may not care to engage in a conversation about something that's super tactical. So, you know, they're gonna ignore you

Scott Santucci 15:50

The way that I think about this simply 8020 rule, so this will happen at you know, a percent of time. Of course, somebody listening here is going to be able to find an exception but Let's concentrate on the rule not not the not the outlier. If you think about it this way, if you're prospecting, you should probably never talk about your products. If you have inbound stuff going on and they they're bringing up products, well, then it's okay to talk about products. It's kind of that easy.

Brian Lambert 16:19

Yeah. Makes sense. So, when it becomes what, you know, that challenge that the that you're talking to up to that person about needs to be about the challenges that they're having, not necessarily your products. That's right. How does that help get a successful meeting?

Scott Santucci 16:34

Well, we have to have access first, so that they will agree to meet with us. Now, obviously, on a phone call, if you get them at the right time, you might be able to move into that first meeting. But realistically, you're probably going to want to set that up and schedule it out. So, in the first in the first access, you framed out a particular issue. Now we're having our first meeting. And I don't know about you, I remember myself as the seller, I don't know if anybody else is listening to this is carrying a bag or have heard this from any anybody who's is carried a bag. You go into a meeting and you walk out, and you think, dang it, I wish I would have just brought up x y&z and that goes into the preparation. So really the goal of base to get back to your Moneyball analogy, Brian, in a successful meeting, it's, let's pre let's already have an idea of the common business objectives that they've got, and map different ways that we can initiate or help them explore it. That's very knowable, especially if we already know who the stakeholder is. We shouldn't put all that burden on our reps. And we sure as heck shouldn't try to do that all in a pitch deck. Because a pitch deck is the biggest red flag to an a to adult money wallet owner, they say I'm not gonna spend time with this particular individual Because they are not going to be able to help me solve my problem, they're just going to be able to regurgitate some really slick, slick materials.

Brian Lambert 18:09

Right. And and in the idea of a successful meeting, sellers today can probably make the assumption that there are more people involved than, than this one buyer that there's there's probably a network of folks. So, you know, if you're if you're in a PowerPoint mode, you won't be able to tailor because when you walk into the meeting, you actually may have multiple, as a seller, you may have multiple people in there, or you need to have a sequence of meetings to string it all...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 9

What can you do to help unclog the sales funnel? 

Most companies focus either at the top of the funnel (leads and prospecting) or the bottom (negotiating) but the real opportunity is to break down the sales pipeline into five (5) customer-verifiable objectives and then focus on what can be done to make it easier for sellers to accomplish them.

In this episode, Brian Lambert & Scott Santucci zoom into challenges of losing to no decision. In their typical, tell it like it is style, unscripted style - the go from a scene in the movie Beaches, connect that to buyer research, and then go deep into tackling a big problem inside MOST companies - losing to no decision.  

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement professionals Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

Oh, I'm Scott Santucci

Brian Lambert 00:36

And I'm Brian Lambert, and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions you should be asking if you want to be successful with sales enablement. In our podcasts, we help you rethink, reframe, and sometimes even revisit how you're going about your sales enablement role and function. In today's podcast, we're going to rethink specifically, we're going to rethink pipeline acceleration strategies. And we're going to take a double click on the buyer side of the sales conversation. In our last podcast, we talked about the five sales objectives. So that means today we're going to talk about something very specific to buyers with regard to those objectives. And Scott, why don't you frame it out for us?

Scott Santucci 01:24

Sure thing, Brian. I don't know if you know this, and I probably might lose my man card by sharing this but no boy. I know. I had the level set it that way. Actually, literally lost some credibility, but I've learned earned it back again when I've shared the story. But have you seen the movie beaches?

Brian Lambert 01:47

No. I think my mom might have tried to get me to see it. I never saw it. So why don't you tell us all about it.

Scott Santucci 01:54

Okay, well, in beaches, and for all the women out there. This is for you. In the movie beaches, Bette Midler's character is a self-absorbed actress. And she has a scene with the with the male love interest, where she's going on and on and talking about how great she is. And she says, Oh, look at me. Enough about me. Tell me what you think of me.

Brian Lambert 02:24

I love it. And I, you know, if ever if anybody wonders how scripted we are, there you go, because I had no idea what he's gonna say. And then I have to legitimately say, what the heck are you talking about? What does it have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 02:38

Authenticity. Right, Brian?

Brian Lambert 02:40

That's right. So, talk about it

Scott Santucci 02:43

What am I talking about is if we look at so one of the things that Brian and I had access to we put together this survey, and actually a bunch of interviews of executive buyers? And we did this every year for four consecutive years, when we were at Forrester, we asked executive level buyers, we had a big survey, the entire survey was mapped to all the five sales objectives that we talked about. So, we know exactly what are the techniques for each one. And the data about how well buyers thought sellers were performing is just off the charts, plural, 11% found their sales, there's their interactions with sellers valuable when they asked about sellers being prepared for calls. And maybe 67% felt that they were prepared about their products and services and then down in the 20s for about their role understood their company, things like that. But one of my favorite, my favorite question was, what's the agenda? What do you think? As a buyer, the agenda of the seller is for your first meeting.

Brian Lambert 02:48

right. I remember that.

Scott Santucci 03:56

Yeah. And the agenda is more or less 86% about the company and only 14% about the buyer.

Brian Lambert 04:07

And that in this case, it's the the seller’s company. It's all about the salesperson’s company or the seller, not the buyer.

Scott Santucci 04:16

So, for me to sum up where we are in the state of sales and buyer alignment, that beaches quote just resonates with me big time. And what we're going to do here is really zoom in on one of the biggest challenges is how would we use this information and the five sales objective information to manufacture and unclog or pipelines?

Brian Lambert 04:42

Okay, that's great. And, you know, one thing's for sure. We don't want to show up and say, you know, that's, that's it. That's enough about me, tell me how awesome I am. Right? So, we can guarantee you that's not going to be the approach here. So, when you look at the objectives, then we're This is a so let's frame this out a little bit, Scott. You know, we're not talking about specifically getting access, then this is this is a little bit more in the middle, perhaps the first meeting, creating shared vision, you know, in the center of the, the objectives here, right?

Scott Santucci 05:14

Well, what I'd like you to do, and what I'd like everybody to do is or if you're, you know, on the treadmill or in a car, something like that, I want you to have a mental picture of a funnel. Right, got that in your head a funnel? Yep. So, if we take those five sales objectives, we probably think, Oh, you know, Target, we have actual contact names of the specific people that we want to do. Oh, access, that's people that we've, you know, we've got first beginnings with and then we have successful meetings and then we have shared vision and then we have close, and it looks like nice and neat, like a nice little funnel, right? Right. That's probably what we think. Well, guess what, when you actually do the analysis and breakdown and do the four Except you will. Most b2b sales organizations pipelines do not look like funnels, they more look like bowl constrictors that've eaten a pig. And when you have when you're a salesperson, you have so many opportunities in this in those middle stages that you're talking about stuck. Throwing more opportunities at you or more leads at you just isn't going to cut it, the issue is you have to find the work to be able to do it. And in that middle zone that that pig, if you will, but the boa constrictors eaten really, what's what's happening here is a large portion of those deals are going to be lost or gonna be lost to India. I notice Asian Incorporated, that the customers just sort of timeout and it's a tremendous amount of burden. It's a trend mess, amount of waste a tremendous amount of effort on it. And that's really what we're gonna be talking about right now.

Brian Lambert 06:53

Yeah, this is great. So, you know, listeners, this is one of those things, especially today that I think Especially if you're not in a bag carrying or sales management role, you may hear this cliche sounds like a cliche Oh, we lost to no decision or, you know, no decisions a problem. But so yes, but there's a lot more to it than that I like the the analogy here of the boa constrictor. So, on this podcast, we're going to double click into that and and talk about some variables and some factors as to why this happens, what it looks like and things we can do to be successful and unclogging the boa constrictor, right. So that's that's the, we're gonna dive deep on that here and not gloss over it. So, Scott, what do you think some of the reasons are? companies are losing to MDI, no decision Incorporated.

Scott Santucci 07:48

Sure. Well, we're going to talk about is why it happens, how to prevent it, and we're going to close with some steps to fix it. But so, let's talk about why it happens at three, four, actually, for reasons or main reasons that this happens. The first part is if you think about that journey song separate ways world worlds apart, values in the eye of the beholder. We don't get to decide what a value proposition is our customers do. And when we're losing a no decision, what it is, is that we haven't really thought through all the different variables for all the different buying executives involved. Second reason is maybe keeping with the song, the song theme a little bit, you've lost that loving feeling. After that first meeting, after that first meeting, and you know, it just went really well. You were really on point delivering your your commercial insight. Your stakeholder is going to go home and they're going to start feeling uncomfortable. And the reason that they're going to start feeling uncomfortable for actually they probably don't really know why it's just in their gut. But what they're doing is they're perceiving personal risk. If you haven't given given your client a path of how this is going to go, they're starting to think through. Do I have the right political capital to do do with this? Am I really going to do it so that it starts to get fuzzy? And as it starts get fuzzy and you're not you don't have an engagement plan is saying, here's how we're going to lay it out to your different stakeholders. What happens is over time, that person just sort of fizzles out if you can't get the momentum going, the political risk and the capital that that particular executive has, has too much time. So now you're in this going dark phase. In the going dark phase, if you do the if your sales reps are doing, hey, I'm just calling to touch base. You're making the problem worse, not better. And the difficulty is those sellers know doggone well they shouldn't be doing that. They just don't have any other alternative because the company hasn't researched it or given them a mechanism to talk with other sellers for the last part then is the client can't really envision the outcome. And when I say the client, what I mean is a sponsor that you've talked with, or also the people involved in that buying decision. They just can't get their head around. How are they going to get started? What do they need to do? How are they going to get their get done? What's your role going to be? What's their role to be? So those are the four most common reasons why this unravels. And the thing that's so unfortunate is these are such easily addressable problems if you just talk about and get people to talk about it, but they just don't!

Brian Lambert 10:42

Okay yeah, I agree. So and, and I want to, I want to double click into these and, you know, spend some time here but let's, can you net out the four real quick I was I was taking mental notes here and I came up with about 20 things that we could talk about in this because there's a lot in so I want to make sure our listeners you know, who might be going through this going holy crap and thought about it this before, give us the four netted out again, just a summary and then go into

Scott Santucci 11:12

Separate ways worlds apart. Our sellers or our sales teams don't have enough empathy to understand what's going on inside our client’s business. Number two were not proactively bringing up to the, to the sponsor what their personal risk factors might be. So, when they think about it the next day and they have that pit in their stomach, and they don't know why they're feeling that way. Just seems too risky. Yep. Three, what happens when you start to go dark? Either you haven't laid out a good game plan which by the way should be done for all reps to be able to leverage not put off on the backs of salespeople to come up with what those game plans are, but they just don't have that game plan and and the only thing that they have to do is, Hey, I'm just calling to touch base. And the last one is, you have packaged up your solution in a way that's about you. Not in a way that is about your clients. So, they can't envision how they're going to be successful. You haven't packaged up their outcome for success. You passionate about what products and services you want them to buy. So yeah, difficult for them to figure out what they're going to do next.

Brian Lambert 12:33

Yep, this is great, because, you know, let me let me add some color to this because, you know, Scott, we've talked with our with our listeners about my background, and where I'm at one of the things that I want to throw in on this discussion is me being a, you know, in a fortune 50 company, I get a lot of sales calls. And I was actually running the numbers last week and I think I think because I like to take sales calls over the last four or five years I probably have done, you know, been on the the buy side or being been pitched 250 times or so. And that's not those are those are just me trying to be you know, researcher, because half the time I would have just said no or ignore them. But this idea of so number one values in the eye of the beholder. I'm in a sales enablement role, and I'm in a very specific one, my LinkedIn profile is very specific. Right now, I have no idea how anybody's hit me up with this idea of you know, lead gen and SEO website design, I don't get it. Right. So, they're completely wrong zip code. Number two, when they do talk to me, I swear it's all about them, which is your number four, but it just they slapped me in the face with my number two, they don't understand how risky would be to even bring somebody in nor the amount of paperwork it would take and the amount of political capital it would take to actually have a conversation with people, it's massive. I mean, it's, it is it is incredibly difficult for my for me to bring vendors into my company without taking political arrows, but more importantly, you know, I got a call in favors half the time to get stuff done. So that's number two. Number three is when I go dark, this idea of Hey, I'm just checking base, can you afford this email office? so and so? It's just like, you know who I'm not your secretary, I don't work for you, you know, like, help me help you, guy, and come on, man. Seriously, and no, I'm not gonna do that. So, I'm not gonna respond, because I don't want to be a jerk. And then I already talked a little bit about it, but I actually had a person last three weeks ago, and I said, you know what, I think we can probably figure this out. So, I think I could help you on your value. I think I will probably be, you know, be able to take some political risk on by having two steps because on another podcast earlier, we talked about this idea. Just what's the Next step, I said, Okay, fine, I can help them get to the next step, but I'm gonna have to work with them probably over the series of six meetings or so. And then, you know, let me engage with them proactively and, and do this. And so, I start this, let me help you process and the very first thing they hit me on is, you know how this thing integrates with Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook. I'm like, I'm not what the hell I'm not even in that zip code, either implementation. Do you guys not realize what we're doing? So, on the buy side, this is just like, they're trying to do the tango. I'm trying to do the waltz. I don't know. Right? And I'm like, I actually had to say, well, you guys just do what I say. And go read my LinkedIn profile. I'm going to shut this call down. We're going to talk again, let's set it up right now. But you got to go read about my company and LinkedIn before we continue, this is a waste of my time. And so lucky, you know, they did that but it's this is a real thing. And the disconnect is massive. And I have a lot of empathy for salespeople are trying to close that gap by themselves. So, when you look at those four things Scott, what do you think, from your perspective, are some critical items that we should be considering as sales enablement, professionals?

Scott Santucci 16:13

Let's piggyback on that last element that you said about empathy for sellers and just can't Can you just do what we say? Let's talk about reducing your risk. So, the first thing that you can do, right, here's a, here's a prescription that you can do is actually organized out and anticipate that your stakeholders So going back to our five sales objectives, why is it so important that you're really clear on who you're targeting? So, Brian only cares about himself specifically, but guess what, there are other people like Brian who have similar roles. So, you can model out that and know, here are five common risk factors that he's got. One is the ability to execute and the ability to execute isn't necessarily just you it's whether he's gonna he's got enough internal Byron or or his team can can follow this through. The next one is how much political capital is he willing to spend it he actually already said that already. It can you envision the benefit realization and when when will happen? What will they be Kenny articulated to all the other people about what you know what you're going to do? What's the opportunity cost in play here? In other words, he's going to spend time with you. Or is he going to spend time doing something else? And then, you know, ultimately, what's the cultural fit, you're going to have to work with inside his company and work with a lot of different people. If you don't have that fit? It's going to be very challenging. So those are that's really the summary of reducing his personal risk. Brian, you have any comments on that?

Brian Lambert 17:50

Yeah, totally makes sense. And what I ended up having to do in this specific scenario is say, Listen, I will agree to get to the next step with you. And then that Step is actually internal to my team with this other function. That's my peer. That's all I can commit to. But we're so far apart, even me bringing you that next step is going to take a lot of work. I'm probably looking at three or four hours with you guys. And I'm willing to do that, are you? And, of course, they said yes. But I'm like, No, you guys literally have to work your asses off to get the next step. And there's not gonna be a close there. I'm just literally talking about the next step. And I don't even know what's going to happen after that. Are you sure you want to do this? But I don't know many buyers that would say that right with you.

Scott Santucci 18:36

Exactly. And they don't know because they don't know they're probably not even going to take them up on that offer so that the seller doesn't even get that chance. So that gives us the right point number two, prescription number two, help your seller communicate what's in it for him to specific groups. So, Brian, you and I both know it remember Zig Ziglar right....

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 8

Scott Santucci and Brian Lambert tackle decision-making in times of rapid change. Unintended consequences are a common variable when some humans make decisions where other humans are a big element in the success of that plan. In hindsight, its easy to say "why didn't they just...." but human nature prevents people from asking some of the right questions at the right time.

They guys use an interesting story about problems the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge encountered. When they built the bridge back then, the followed "what they always knew". And their beliefs actually made the problem worse. Their view of the challenge actually made the cure take longer. How did they figure it out? Well, It took looking at the problem from a different perspective to finally come to a simple solution. 

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

Hi, I'm Scott Tucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions you should be asking if you want to be successful in sales enablement. Specifically, we rethink reframe and revisit specific sales enablement, principles, topics and trends. And today, we're going to reframe specifically we're going to reframe the approach to enabling headcount versus enabling productivity. In other words, saying it again, enabling the headcount versus enabling to productivity. And I know that may seem a bit intellectual. So, Scott, why don't you get us centered here with a story?

Scott Santucci 01:14

Sure. So, I don't know the story is really going to help with the contrast between enabling to headcount or enabling to productivity, but we'll get there. But in in terms of, you know how to think about this stuff, what I'd like to do is go back to 1869. And in 1869, George Roebling, had this idea of building a suspension bridge across the East River. It's now known as the Brooklyn Bridge. That was the first steel wire suspension bridge of its kind. And in this day, this Gilded Age this era of almost anything is possible building you know, trains, cross cross country, telegraph. All these explosion of innovations and in the huge explosion of innovation and value during this peak of the Industrial Revolution, everybody was doing something new. And they went out to build this. This Brooklyn Bridge. Now, unfortunately, during the construction of this bridge, they ran into unforeseen problems. And specifically, when they were laying down the base at the bottom of the Hudson River, there, their first group of workers started to get sick. And at that point in time, they couldn't figure out what it was. They just assumed it was the drinking habits at this point in time, the Irish this is these are all true stories. So, I'm not I'm not being racist. These guys were super racist at the time, so because they kept getting sick and stalling production. What did they do? They went and got another group of people, Germans, they got didn't work out. So, they got another batch of people recently freed slaves. That didn't work out. They got sick, too. They said, Hey, you know, the Chinese did a great job of building out, building out the railways, let's bring them in. They brought them in. It didn't work either. So, throwing all of this effort, all of this energy, time and time again, they just couldn't figure out what happened, what was happening, what was going on. And really, what what, what they ended up doing is doing some medical analysis to figure out what's going on. I mean, we've got to get this fixed so that we can get this bridge built. There's a lot there's a lot on the line. We said we're going to build the first steel suspension bridge in the world and dadgummit we need to figure it out. So that's it. My 1869

Brian Lambert 03:54

I like it. transported.

Scott Santucci 03:56

Exactly. So really what happened? What What What was going on? What was preventing all these people perpetually to get sick? Well, it turns out, what was happening is the people were being submerged to such depth in the Hudson River, that they were getting decompression sickness. What we now know is the bends. And anybody who's seen any any movie with scuba diving knows about the bends. It's it's ubiquitous everywhere. Well, they didn't know what it was, because they've never had an experience where they had to put people under that under the water at that depth before to where they could run into decompression sickness. So, the the moral of the story here is they thought it was one problem. They threw bodies and activity over and over and over again getting more and more people sick and many, many dying from this condition. When in reality, there was a much simpler approach that was safe. That was wouldn't hurt anybody and to build these decompression tanks? Oh, you know, along the way. So that's, that's my framing story.

Brian Lambert 05:07

There you go. And so, you know, this is interesting, because in that story, you know, like you said, throwing bodies at it. One that's a bit, obviously inhumane. So that's obviously part of the challenge, but it's also pretty expensive to constantly do that. And, you know, you basically at some point, it sounds like in that construction process, realize that doing the same old thing over and over again, that isn't changing anything. And now, okay, at some point, there's a tipping point to say, maybe there's a root cause. Right. So, is that your point in telling that story with regard to sales enablement? Scott, what do you say?

Scott Santucci 05:50

Yes, so the reason that I'm the reason I'm sharing that framing story, for where we are today and the topic that we're going to get into further point number one, this when did that story take place? It took place during the Industrial Revolution when you're resetting and trying incredibly new bold things. Where are we today? We're doing the same thing where we're actually in the midst of a digital transformation where we're going through the same kind of big changes that were going on in the 1860s 1860s. The 1890s as insane changes they went through today. One contrast.

Brian Lambert 06:35

Yes, so stay in there real quick. So, I don't like that. I don't like that level of life and death change here, Scott. What would you say to that? I want to keep doing what I've always done.

Scott Santucci 06:48

No, he could do that. Or you could look at when adjusted for inflation. Every single one of the robber barons are, are more valuable than any of the super rich people that we know of today, every single one of them. So, the amount of explosive wealth and they explosive standard of living and the huge amount of lifting people out of poverty, all of the benefits that happened all were a result of these massive changes. And really it comes back to you could look at it as the future is bleak. AKA the, you know, industrial revolution that's bad. It's sort of the Frankenstein view of the road.

Brian Lambert 07:33

Going to work and nasty factories and get dirty

Scott Santucci 07:35

Right, or we still people in New York still revere that brooklyn bridge that was started in 1869. It's it's that contrast it's it's really depends on on how you look at it. Where would we be as Americans or where would we be as Western cultures without railroads, ourelectricity. Some of the basic things that we for without gas without combustion engines. So that's that's where we are today. Where would we be without the internet? Where would we be without mobile phones? Where would we be without what we're being able to do right now record a podcast this podcast would not be available. It's a it's a

Brian Lambert 08:17

Just think of all the millions of people listening right now.

Scott Santucci 08:19

Yeah millions, right.

Brian Lambert 08:22

All right. So, what's your second point? So, I wanted to.

Scott Santucci 08:25

So, the second point is when you go off into that Brave New World, sometimes the way that you think about solving problems isn't you're gonna run into unforeseen challenges. And sometimes you need to take a step back instead of just throwing activity and bodies at it. Maybe you need to take a step back and rethink it.

Brian Lambert 08:43

Like that. And that's an important analog for today. It because when you take that story, and you look at sales teams, you know, in the last 15 years, 10 years, somebody even say five years organizations sales leaders executives have been attempting to throw salespeople at their customer experience strategies or throw money at their digital strategies to look for skilled workers. I don't I don't have the number in front of me. But I read you know, a couple weeks ago that there are still 10s of thousands of jobs left unfilled, that are considered new economy jobs, digital transformational type of jobs. So there there is a gap in the ability to execute on these and when you throw bodies at it, the symptoms are going to rear their head. And I think when you frame out the the beginning of this podcast, when I said this idea of enabling to headcount versus enabling to productivity is what you're saying here through the opening story, Scott that that we've been throwing salespeople as headcount to, to the strategy

Scott Santucci 09:59

Yes. There's some, you know, there's a macro trend that's actually disturbing about our overall economy. And for the past 10 years, we've actually seen a decline, not an increase a decline in worker productivity. So why is that? And then you can factor in, let's, let's investigate the, you know, the overall work the workforce and all that other stuff. That's sounds like a political discussion. But when you zoom in, and start asking the question, how productive are our sales forces today? Are they more productive than they were 10 years ago? And there's a lot of ways that we can answer it. Uh, what I wanted to do is really talk about one specific company for which I have lots and lots and lots of data. I think we could shed I think we could shed light on that instead of going macro or instead of going back into history, we know talking about one specific

Brian Lambert 10:55

company. Yeah, let's do that. So, we've got as a proxy for this idea of tackling this issue, one specific organization, so maybe, you know, we'll start with, tell us a little bit about the sales team, the organization, and then what what transposed. And then I assume, through this discussion that we're going to be able to provide our listeners with some action items as well. I'll come up with three, you'd come up with three and we'll, we'll be able to provide a path forward to tackle this same type of discussion in our own organizations. Yeah, so let's do that. And then so tell us frame it out a little bit for us around this one specific organization and their sales team.

Scott Santucci 11:35

Okay, so let's let's go through the case study. So first, what is the company the company I'm gonna take the names out to protect the protect the innocent, but it's a $300 million company that is moving from selling a variety of security products in a you know, in hardware form to move into providing cloud-based subscription services. So that's that's basically what they were. So that's that.

Brian Lambert 12:07

So, let's do our first check. Is that indicative of a, in a shift in the revolution? Right, from industrial to knowledge work? Is that a massive shift?

Scott Santucci 12:16

Well, it is a, it's a massive shift in terms of saying we're selling physical products, old economy, to new economy, digital economy to a subscription based, you know, cloud based, cloud-based business model. Yeah, a lot of companies are going through this shift, some have gone through it earlier, rather than later. So, you know, everybody goes through it through a different way. But it's a common factor. And it's something that, oh, yeah, duh, of course, we need to make it but when you sold a physical thing, and now you're selling, moving to selling a subscription, there's a lot of changes associated with that.

Brian Lambert 12:50

Yeah, not only the business strategy, but the business model and how revenues recognized the way teams you know have to work together the actual solutions themselves, and how in Obviously, in what we're going to get to hear how those how those are sold,

Scott Santucci 13:03

Yes, how sellers actually behave and what they think they're selling and to whom they think they are and to whom they are actually selling to. So, the situation was the year before I was involved, the company had done some analysis and business analysis that pretty much every but every company does, and I'm oversimplifying it, it's way more way more detailed than that. But like most companies, in order to come up with a compensation plan, you build a low end and a high end in terms of target, and you set a threshold level of your bookings per rep target. And the reason that you do that is you do that to calculate different, you know, obviously, to define the role of a seller but you also do it to set the compensation thresholds. And what they recognized was in their, in their opinion, too many of their reps were below 80% threshold. So, what is 80% threshold? In this case, it's 80% of hitting quota. Okay, so far too few reps, how many we're not hitting what we're not hitting the 80% threshold is not important, what's important, but it was a lot, it was more than more than 60%. What's more important was how they were looking at it. So, in order to improve the performance of the average rep, you know, to get more of those reps up to the 80% threshold, which they were comfortable with. What did they do? Well, they looked at two things number one was the turnover and the overall turnover the Salesforce with 25%. And that checks with about industry averages or whatnot. So, it's not it's not a problem and they didn't investigate that. Then what they did is they did did you know sort of the classic let's survey the sellers and see what they need. Let's talk the salesman. And see what they need. They came up with a whole boatload of activities that they needed to do. And they spent over 500,000 out of pocket and then a whole bunch of other energy and resource to build that set of activities. They rolled it out in the kickoff. And you know, what happened throughout that year? Well, throughout that year, not one single new rep hit the 80% target threshold that you might as well have not spent that money, because literally, nothing changed nothing. So obviously, we're going were they This is where I enter the story and the conversation is, what more activities should we prescribe to the sellers? And my point was, all right, look, if you did all that work, there should be a relationship between activity and performance, right. So, we should probably figure out why that performance didn't happen. In other words, Let's not throw more bodies at you know, in the case ons, let's actually investigate what happened. So, you know, that takes some doing but by framing it out this way that I was able to, you know, persuade them to, you know, go through with our engagement. And what we did is that let's do a baseline, I call it a baseline analysis and simply put, what we're going to do is we're going to put in, we're going to examine, first we're going to categorize sellers into tiers of performance. And by performance, what we mean is their overall total bookings not not revenue per rep, but but but by booking bookings per individual. So of course, you know, we had some HR rules, and you know, that we had to follow to make sure it was blind and not and not that. And I think the biggest problem that we ran into Brian is this company was so comfortable tracking sales performance by quota and by product that we actually had to do a lot of data reengineering, we'll call it to actually get out the contract value. And part of the difficulty through this exercise was guys that I only care about the level of activity the seller does in order to get a contract. Because the contract is ultimately what all this effort is for. And this the customer chooses to put in that contract what the terms are.

Brian Lambert 17:36

So, this is one of those things, right? sales is simple. And then you'd like to say you know, simple as hard. Yep. And I like to say hard is doable, but you have to, you have to do the work. This is an interesting so if i if i at the risk, and I'm just going to give this an example here to breathe some life into it. I had a call with like a sales enablement intern like two weeks ago. And she was saying, Hey, you know, when, when people go online and they, you know, you know, want to attend our events, they put in their information, and we can't even cross reference that into our accounts. And that's, that's an example of a disconnect in from lead gen into, you know, an existing account via. And those types of disconnects are all over the place. And what you're bringing up here is an interesting, you know, potential disconnect that you're tackling on the front end, which is sales drives, bookings. And there's activities related to bookings. So, what type of questions Did you get on that? And why was that hard? Who is that hard for?

Scott Santucci 18:38

What was hard for the sales operations team because the sales operations team has worked out how to report to the CFO, and the CFO was interested in product sales, because the company is interested in driving product sales, not services sales. So, what you know, since we that's all we care about why would you look at things differently? And I said, I don't know, I just want to figure out whatever is required to sell a contract, who knows, maybe some salespeople are selling services along with the products, because they think the selling those services help sell those products. So, if they, if he took that away, maybe they'd have a harder time selling it. I don't know, I just know that there's a level of effort required to get a contract. And I want to start with measuring that which means I'd like to have this kind of data please. And back and forth,

Brian Lambert 19:35

That doesn't cross-reference into products at all

Scott Santucci 19:38

Right. So basically, what it ended up having to do is I took I said give me the you know, I went and got went...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 7

Want to learn from others in the Sales Enablement Space? 

One of our listeners, "Elizabeth" connected with Scott via LinkedIn. A few messages over LinkedIn later and we decided to do a special podcast to see to us (Scott and Brian) on the spot.  

This is a live, unrehearsed conversation reviewing Elizabeth's situation and talking through some ideas for how to address it.  We summarize action items, define the next steps, and get Elizabeth's feedback.  

Some of the topics discussed include: 

• How Elizabeth got into sales enablement in the first place 
• working with sales managers 
• determining the difference between sales managers and sales enablement 
• how to use the 'business within a business" framework to help bring clarity 
• how to bring marketing into the conversations 
• how to move from a reactive to a proactive state 

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

Hello, I'm Scott Santucci.

Elizabeth Connor 00:35

Hey, I'm Elizabeth Connor.

Brian Lambert 00:37

And I'm Brian Lambert. And we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to helping leaders ask the big questions they should consider in order to be successful with sales enablement. In this podcast, we're going to rethink, reframe, and revisit the sales enablement function and role to clarify so you can take action, lead others and ensure success. And today, we actually have a special format. We're calling it tackling reality. And I'm super excited about it. Scott, why don't you frame it out for us?

Scott Santucci 01:07

Sure thing, Brian. Remember the episode that we had when we were doing the debrief of the Conference Board meeting? When I was in Atlanta?

Brian Lambert 01:17

Yeah, Yes, I do. And I remember I called you and you didn't answer.

Scott Santucci 01:21

Yes. I didn't answer not because I was ignoring you're being a jerk. I think that you implied a little bit in the last. I didn't answer because I actually was engaged in a LinkedIn discussion, a God's honest truth, who links a LinkedIn back and forth with Elizabeth at the time, and I just didn't pick up because I was really engrossed by it. So, Elizabeth, who's joining us today, had reached out and connected to me on LinkedIn and said, Hey, listen to your podcast, I wanted to connect. I shot back. Thanks. You know, what do you like about it? Baba, bah, we got to talking. And the idea came up, why don't we confront reality, and address her issues live on the show? So, we've changed her name, her name isn't really Elizabeth. Her company will, you know will change we're going to protect the innocent. So, she's going to be able to talk to us and we've never met before. So, we're doing this live for the first time. Isn't that right, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Connor 02:17

Absolutely. Yeah.

Scott Santucci 02:19

So why don't you tell us a little bit about how you came to our podcast, and you know, what you liked about it? What was the impetus to to reach out and then share was this why the heck are you here? Why are you doing this? This seems kind of crazy.

Elizabeth Connor 02:34

Well, what I actually loved about your podcast is there was nothing that sugar coated, any of the experiences that anyone goes through. So, what I've come across a lot is that a lot of the sales enablement, blogs and things like that are just the old positives, but there's nothing about the real day to day, and the challenges that you do face when starting in this role.

Scott Santucci 02:58

Excellent. And then what made you decide, like, who actually decides to do this? I mean, just if you're listening, this is a total stranger who's agreed to get on a podcast to talk about the challenges that you run into. So, I want to know a little bit about like, you like, why are you doing this?

Elizabeth Connor 03:16

So, I mean, I've been in sales for a long time, more more years than I care to admit. I absolutely love just speaking to people and shaving those experiences. And moving into the enablement away from the actual sales rep role. That is a very big main shift. And you're not speaking to as many people you don't have the same support around you as a team of 10 sales reps to be on one sales enablement. So, I'm sitting going you know someone speak to me.

Scott Santucci 03:50

Great, well, well, well, we'll talk and basically your voice is going to be heard, and maybe there's somebody else or hopefully, there's more people out there that are just like you. So, what we're going to do now is we're going to do the way that we set this up in our in our email is, what we're going to do right now is what we're calling speed date consulting. So, we're gonna go through rapid fire. We're going to learn a little bit about Elizabeth world, what some of her challenges are, and some of the reality issues. I'll I'll interject with questions. We'll go back and forth really quickly. And Brian will wrap us up.

Brian Lambert 04:23

Yeah. Just one quick thing, Scott, if I could add Elizabeth to, I would say, we want you to challenge us. And you know, you're not in the spotlight. Here we are. Right. So, if you know through the course of this, you want to push back, you want to ask why we're asking it. Or if you you know want to redirect that's that's your prerogative, right. So, Scott and I are the ones here that are on the witness stand, if you will, or working through this, not you this is a safe place for you. And let's just you know, have a real conversation like you said.

Elizabeth Connor 04:57

Cool, absolutely.

Scott Santucci 04:59

So, with that Elizabeth, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? What kind of company you've got, just give us the basics, please. So

Elizabeth Connor 05:08

So, since I went into sales of kinda, sold most things, and including what they were classes, the difficult ones, advertising, office supplies, and then into it and no working in the SAS market. So, I've kind of done face to face on the phone, demos, I've done all the sales jobs. And I had experience doing training, I thought, no, that's great, I want to go. And in establishing that training enroll, we actually discovered it was more of a full-on enablement role we needed within the company.

Scott Santucci 05:43

Gotcha. So, tell me a little bit about the business problem that you thought you were addressing with the training role.

Elizabeth Connor 05:48

So, we grew very, very quickly. And I know that's a positive challenge that a lot of companies face. But what happened was, we grew so quickly that we had all these people in place, and nothing to actually onboard them or train them in our products to do ongoing coaching. We had no one working on marketing on collateral. We had no sales training, collateral nothing. And it became over cutting issue with the rep saying we need training, we need training, we need training.

Scott Santucci 06:21

Got it? And then when you say it became a full-on enablement role. I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily say there's a huge consensus about exactly what the scope of enablement is. And where does it start and stop? From your viewpoint? What does that full enablement role look like? And when you say, Wait, who's wait.

Elizabeth Connor 06:40

And so, when I say we was the whole sales team, because I'm still a rep at the time, but for me, there's the whole there's the process, there's a documentation, there's, as you're communicating that properly to the team, there's tracking that the content we're giving is actually working. And it's not just going out there to float about in the ether. It's actually good customers, it's helping with the conversations, it's helping with a value proposition. And we had none of that we were everybody battling against the sales team. And by moving into a training capacity, I started going, whoa, we actually need that. I mean, he thought from marketing when he thought from support, we need that from our success team. And that's how we ended up more of an enablement role, because it was agreed you can speak to everybody in other departments. Here you go.

Scott Santucci 07:35

Gotcha. So, to put words in your mouth, spit out what doesn't fit. What you start out training, because the belief is, our reps really don't know what they're doing. I'm oversimplifying. So, we go in and get them to look at what we're doing. And oh, by the way, we need information from product, we need information from marketing, we need information from customer success, and we don't need it the way that you're giving it us. We needed it in a different kind of way.

Elizabeth Connor 08:03

Exactly, we discovered it was a much bigger challenge than we thought it was when we started drilling down, and I was trying to find the content and find the collateral to train the team in. So that was kind of grew from there.

Scott Santucci 08:17

Gotcha. So, I think most people in a SAS environment can relate to that. So, tell me where you are today. And in our speed day consulting, what what can you challenge us with to see whether we can help you or not?

Elizabeth Connor 08:29

So, here's the biggest challenge we've had. So, we've got all the sales team hoppy, they've got their quarterly training plans, they've got me they can come to for collateral requests, and they know all that's going to be done for campaigns and stuff. The issue I have is not with them. It's actually with the management of those teams. So, the they're, they're younger, they're less experienced in the work environment. And they keep trying to take parts of my job. And you start feeling quite territorial, and it becomes quite a conflict. And then as the more experienced one, I keep thinking, I've got to take a step back and go, No, we can deal with this. And it actually ends up making me more wind up. So, the whole dealing with the managers who I'm in the same team meetings with is the real challenge.

Scott Santucci 09:29

So let me speculate a little bit here to see if this is if this is common. I have run into situations where managers might say, look, the reps that work for me are my responsibility. I'm in charge of developing them. You are not. And you're and I'm kind of very, very much paraphrasing what you're doing is getting in the turf in space that I'm responsible for. And I wouldn't do it the way that you're doing it. I want him to do it this way. Is that about right?

Elizabeth Connor 10:09

Yeah. So, they'll sit there and go, you need to train my reps. Okay, great. What training? Do you feel your reps need to put training or coaching? And do your reps want? I don't know. You just have to shame them. Yeah. All right. Okay, well, we'll come up with a plan, great, then it comes to onboarding. And you've got manager going, I'm having nothing to do with onboarding. And then the manager comes in and says, No, I want to do the onboarding. Mm. You know, you've got that you've got another manager, if he's going ahead and schedule in training, away from what you've planned, then your reps going to spend a lot of times in training here. And it's not me, but I'm the one that gets the negative feedback.

Scott Santucci 10:56

Right.Gotcha. Okay, so too, you know, in the speed day consulting, boom, I've clicked in on a couple things. So, number one, let's talk about expectation management, in a role like yours, and I go back to the first time that I created a crater role. Managing everybody's expectation is really difficult. When I first started, I actually had four different sales regions, one of the sales VPS of the sales region hated me. It's like, Okay, well, I just won't do anything. I want delivery services for him. Step number one is, let's think about our, our function as a business within a business, right? You're the president of that business, and you can choose who to service or not service, you just have to make sure that the people, your investors that people were paying for your salary, and your and your department are happy with the overall results. So, let's start there. Let's talk about what overall results to whom do you report to? And what is their expectation?

Elizabeth Connor 12:02

So, I report to our sales director, nine, he's very much of the opinion, he has said to me so many times, your role was critical. You need to push back on the managers. But then, and the other word that on the other side of that he'll see, you know, but you do have to accept you do have more experience than them. And you're sitting kind of going, I don't know what to do here. Yeah. Because obviously, he's gonna look after all of us. We're all his direct reports. But you're sitting looking at monitors and can let me do my job, and you won't have to do my job.

Scott Santucci 12:43

Yes. So, I think the first thing is, if we go level up to managing expectations, we need to we need to something clear that says, here’s where sales enablement starts and stops. And here's where frontline sales management starts and stops. And I think so for example, if our frontline sales manager, I might be really high on development. And I'm going to call the things that I'm doing developmental training or training, because what the hell is just the word, right, we all use the word. But it might be different, like you might be providing performance or capability training. So, I think if we could get really clear and say, all right, let's, let's delineate roles and responsibilities. The scope of what we're doing for sales enablement is to equip it is to raise the aggregate ability of all the individual reps, so that they are conversant to talk to the customers that we're that we're dealing with. They're able to speak at the right altitude level, they're able to position our capabilities in a business, business-oriented way. And they're able to navigate all the internal stakeholders required and be able to work with the internal resources that they need to like, that's my job. And where I started where I stopped. The individual sales manager is responsible for the actual performance of the team. I'm sales enablement is evaluated on the aggregate like the overall salesforce, not anyone in particular individual. And that way you make it clear that the sales the sales manager is responsible for the individual seller, but you are responsible for the overall environment of which selling operates in that might be one way to make it to make it clear. That's that's step one in terms of scope. Does that make sense?

Elizabeth Connor 14:41

It does but once you've set those expectations, if there is then someone who does go ahead and schedule something that should be in an in the enablement space. Do you let that go on and send the message to the team of oh, well, it's okay? We can go to our managers or do you actually say to that manager? No, you need to counsel that and that has to come through me.

Scott Santucci 15:04

I think the way that I prefer to handle that is if you click on the business within a business service, you escalate that to the sales director, and and ask and then that way they can ask, is the quality of the service that you're providing to that manager? Who does that? Is the quality of the service that's being provided? Not to your standard? Is that why you're duplicating this effort?

Elizabeth Connor 15:31

Makes sense.

Scott Santucci 15:32

And then that way, you're not in the position of yes or no, it's, if you're providing a service, and that sales manager doesn't think that they're getting the right service, they should have the they should have the ability, because they're responsible for performance, also, they should be able to go around that. And then that way, you have a more or less, it's like a contract, just like you would want with your with your customers to be able to have a good get, it's the same thing. And that way, you can escalate in a positive way. And it shows that you are an assert your your service oriented. So, if if the thing that I'm providing isn't adding value, and that's great. What that's probably going to do is put more of the burden on the sales manager to ask, hmm, am I really duplicating effort, because this is time out of calling, this is time out of the field. And the other thing is, maybe you quantify a thing that I'm a big fan of doing that is to or Elizabeth, I need to sound European that way, is quantifying time, it is using time as a metric. In other words, we have our reps, each seller generates X number of dollars of bookings per hour. And that you will use that as a metric for meetings, we use that as a metric for anything that's timeout, if it's $500 per hour, is this is taking them at an hour out worth $500 or can we solve this problem somewhat something different, use that as your form of currency, because then you can or dollars, sorry, pounds, pounds, euros, whatever to form a currency. But you use that and that way you can work the other way too, if the sales manager is is requesting those resources, well, that's timeout, and that those resources, you know, also belong to the sales director, they're not only the responsibility of the sales manager, they belong to everybody. So, if they're making a decision to take people out of the field to duplicate time and material, and there are five other managers who aren't doing it, then that manager is going to get the level of scrutiny and just ask the question, why. And if they have a good reason, then great, you should incorporate their feedback and make your your training program better. If not, then they're going to they're not going to be able to defend their action.

Elizabeth Connor 17:55

And from the training point of view, that makes complete sense. What happens more on the whole working with the other teams, though? Where, you, you're working on some thought you're working on certain collateral for one of the teams. And you know,...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 6

What's going on in the Sales Enablement space -- specially with companies looking to evolve their sales strategy?

In this special edition, Brian Lambert catches up with Scott Santucci after a two-day Council Meeting of Sales Enablement Executives.

At the beginning of 2018, the Conference Board received requests from its members (large businesses) to form a council to explore the emerging role of sales enablement in order to establish the foundations for developing and running this new function. The group is invitation-only and works to create insights based on the practical experiences of its members. Members include leaders from large companies representing diverse industries including financial services,high technology, business services, hospitality and manufacturing. 

Scott Santucci serves as the program director of the group (on a contract basis). Through the process of norming, storming, and forming - the group is developing new ways to gain insights from different industries.  When you look at the forest from the trees, new patterns begin to emerge.  What we are learning is that for B2B sales, the sales execution problems that Intercontinental Hotels Group and Microsoft are far more similar than they are different.  Regardless of your industry, the practice of B2B selling is similar.

1. You need an overarching "one company" value proposition that is more detailed than your brand, but less specific than products 
2. Your company is organized into product-based silos, but you need to bring a different, integrated, and more consistent experience to customers
3. You have many different stakeholders involved in a sale - there are "buyers" who give you a hunting license and then "buyers" who drive usage
4. The challenges sellers have navigated the 'agreement networks' within large companies is easy to explain through experiences (in the readout to executives we performed a 10 min skit to illuminate the challenge) but hard to conceptualize is traditional management consulting readouts, metrics, and charts. 
5. The solutions to fix these problems are actually simple when you follow design thinking concepts, work collaboratively across organizational silos and focus on the actual experience of customers. However, explaining the approach sounds excessively complicated and far too risky based on managements comfort level with traditional projects.  In addition, because the solution required cutting across so many different organizational functions, identifying an executive sponsor and gaining the funding to even start a pilot program can be challenging. 

The council is still forming and deciding what concepts to share, how to test insights and ideas the group comes up with, and how to publish its findings. Here are things it's agreed to so far.

• The emerging role of sales enablement is a by-product of the digital transformation of our economy
• The value of the function is unique compared to other functions - it creates value by eliminating things 
• The council believes that for sales enablement roles to add value to their businesses, they must be organized as cross-functional groups 
• The council has embraced a "business within a business" framework to provide the foundation for this new role 
• The council has also developed a review process to develop insights and then methodically test those ideas within the member organizations

To this end, the membership as adopted the midwest mindset of "show me" when reviewing the various claims, reported data, and various "best practices" advanced by industry experts and management consultants. Our members have engaged virtually all of the management consulting firms, read reports from industry analysts, and are evaluating most of the technologies provided. The group has decided to focus on sharing its experiences with these groups and what results (or problems) they create.

The #1 thing our members have learned is they learn from each other through actual experiences (working on team exercises or case studies) and in the meeting June 17-18 in Atlanta, the council was hosted by Intercontentinal Hotels.  In this meeting, IHG openly shared its business challenges (all council members are under NDA) and other council members broke into groups to provide a readout of findings and recommendations to IHG business leaders. 

 In this session the guys cover:

• How the Conference Board was founded 106 years ago during a changing economy and how that relates to today's digital economy
• What exactly IS a council - who is it comprised of, why, how does it work? 
• How is the idea of 'sales enablement' forming and taking root in large enterprise organizations? 
• How do you set up a working case study and what was the agenda and format of the meeting?
• What were some of the lessons learned

Topics include:

- The concept of "stratecution" - how important it is to blend strategy and execution 

- Using a "letter to shareholders" format to sell the vision and promise of sales enablement internally 

- Why creating b2b value propositions is so much more challenging than you think it is 

- How do the concepts of customer loyalty and experience blend with a value proposition 

- Why creating a new tool kit for how to drive programs is so important and what industries can learn from each other 

- The importance of getting many groups together and why overcoming "English to English" translation is such a key to success 

We realize this is a long episode, but it is jam-packed with the collective insights of companies who are driving sales transformation and innovations from within their companies. It will be a while before these ideas crystallize into 'best practices' or programs you can buy off the shelf so this will give you the opportunity to hear what's on the mind of other executives seeking more proactive ways to address the revenue generation challenges facing their businesses. 

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode #5

Everyone Agrees Sales Training is Important- So why the friction between sales and L&D?

In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss the role of people.  Sales Enablement is a people profession and sales enablement leaders are focused on human behavior and skills of sellers (or as CEOs often say "manufacture their reps." The challenge for many "classically trained" L&D professionals lies in balancing the hyper-specialization and needs of the seller with the desired by executives to run as a shared service function. Sometimes the L&D function and people within it aren't often set up to support Sales.

This creates a fundamental question: Why is so much sales training outsourced? Why are sales processes off-limits to the training function? And when sales enablement equals training, why is it considered tactical delivery?

If training organizations aren't comfortable engaging strategically on developing talent, or aren't deemed "valuable" by executives that's a problem. Brian & Scott talks about his journey to tackle this gap and enable the trainers to close the gap to sales teams through research, processes, and outputs. Why terms like ADDIE and rigid L&D approaches don't resonate with other groups including the CEOs view of "training."

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

SPEAKERS

Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Nick Merinkers

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Brian Lambert 00:34

Hi, this is Brian Lambert.

Scott Santucci 00:35

And this is Scott Sam teaching and where the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to helping leaders ask the big questions they should consider in order to be successful with sales enablement. In this podcast, we rethink reframe, revisit the sales enablement function and past ideas and best practices. Around the role to clarify so that you can take action, lead others and ensure success for your company. Today we have another special edition on previous episode our previous episode was well received that was the episode where we did a trip report where Brian was at the sales enablement soiree in Boston. Before I before I asked Brian to frame out our trip report and how we're going to do this, I do want to mention one exciting, exciting input. And I'm gonna ask our listeners to share. So first and foremost, if you haven't reached out to Brian and I send us a send us a note and connect to us on LinkedIn. And I had a great I had a great correspondence with someone from from our show, and she reached out and said, Hey, I love your show. I love how raw it is and I, I said, well, what's going on in your organization, we got to change guiding, and we're exploring an idea of doing a show to put Brian and I on the hook to see whether or not she can give. We can give live feedback on the show, without ever really meeting her to help navigate some of the challenges that she's gotten her SaaS company. So, I'm looking forward to that. What do you think of that, Brian?

Brian Lambert 02:21

I think it's great. And we might want to change the names to protect the innocent sounds. All right.

Scott Santucci 02:26

That's right. That's why I didn't say her name or anything like that. In this episode, normally, I'm the one who frames out frames out the podcast, but this one since I'm the one doing the trip report, and I'm holding back on Brian about what what to share. Brian, why don't you frame us out?

Brian Lambert 02:45

Yeah, sure. So everybody, I left Scott a message and he had shared that he was going to Atlanta to have a big meeting around sales enablement strategy with with some executives, so I called him and said, Hey, you know, I'd like to hear about it. He didn't call me back. So that I finally got him on the phone later that evening. And I said, I'd love to hear about it. And he said, Well, why don't we do it on the show? So I'm just as in the dark as you all are, and we're gonna kind of take a look at what you did. Scott, I'm really intrigued by it. So let me first ask you, it makes sure I understand what it was. And then I'd love to dive into what happened and what the outcomes were.

Scott Santucci 03:24

Does that sound that makes that makes perfect sense and always a good, good level set to start off with what you know.

Brian Lambert 03:31

So you had said, In preparation for this meeting that it was with the Conference Board, and you were, in your role, leading a council of sorts, and you had had success throughout a series of meetings with the Conference Board members and this one was an interesting one, because you're pretty excited about it got me excited about it, because it was doing a deep dive on a specific challenge that one of the members is faced including working together through a day and a half session culminating in some sort of, I believe, executive readout to his executives that would be coming in cold to get the readout. Is that right? Do I have that? Right?

Scott Santucci 04:16

You do have it right. And I think I think what's helpful, at least this, this would be helpful for me is ask a few, you know, get a few questions answered and level set. So, question number one, what is the Conference Board? Question number two, is was the meeting with the Conference Board? Or was the meeting with the council and set this question number three is what the heck is the council anyway? What the heck are they doing? So let me let me go through those three questions. Question number one, what is the Conference Board? So, I'm sharing this with you, I needed to know this information myself. I was recruited by the by the competition. To the Conference Board to start up a sales enablement Council. So, what does that mean? What's the council all that stuff I didn't really know. And this is how I've processed that information. The Conference Board started 106 years ago 106. And how it got got its start was back in the industrial revolution. If you kind of remember your history, their labor and management didn't really get along. And if you're familiar with your European history, it led to lots of revolutions. And the industrialists here didn't think that was good for business. So, what they decided to do was get some labor and some leaders from at&t, and Ge, and you know, some other you know, big companies like that, and they worked out labor challenges, and in this in this meeting in this council that they formed, they created the eight-hour workday, no kidding, the eight-hour workday really engine. It started out with the Conference Board. It's an American invention. You're welcome France. And eight-hour workday was the birth product, the very first result of the Conference Board. So since then, it's gotten companies together. multinational companies together, so it focuses exclusively on big companies to solve complex problems and they form these councils, and these councils are run in a very open way. We follow certain rules that we have but each program director runs this. We are not paid well. It's it's very it's very it's a very part-time part-time job. But that's that's basically what it is. So, you the Conference Board recruits the council's the conference that the member the the program director, in this case, myself sets criteria for what it is that we're looking for, like what kind of type or diversity or you know, things like that. They gather the gather the members together and they start having meetings, and the members are responsible for it. So, in a lot of ways, it's like a homeowner's association. The builder starts it, but then turns it over to the members. And really, my job is to facilitate or set the structure for it. So that's so far what the sales eight what is the Conference Board? And what is the council? Is that clear so far?

Brian Lambert 07:31

Yeah, the only thing I would want you to clarify is, you know, you're talking 106 years old, you know, industrial revolution stuff, and it feels a little stodgy to me, but then we're talking sales enablement. Right. So, tell me a little bit about why they went into it. And, and then as you said, in one of your questions to frame it out, who are some of these people that you're meeting with?

Scott Santucci 07:52

Yeah, so that's a good question. So, the stodgy part is actually really interesting. So, as you probably can imagine, I forgot another element of the Conference Board. The Conference Board also produces a lot of consumer index data. So, if you go if you were to listen on Wall Street and when earnings calls come out, and I talk about consumer confidence and things like that, the Conference Board does all that data also. So, they have a huge amount of economists etc. And it's a nonprofit organization to us. So, it's a very unique, interesting thing. So back to the hundred years. Episode, what the reason that I like that story is 100 years ago, we were going from a we were transforming from an agricultural based way of thinking about how to run business to an industrial revolution. And we had a lot of we had a lot to work out about Management Science and, you know, span of control responsibilities and all those other things. And what's interesting is here we are at the cusp of the digital economy, and we're running into the same kinds of things. So, there are, you know, 80 other councils that focus on things ranging from librarian tactics, literally, to CFO councils

Brian Lambert 09:16

in the Conference Board,

Scott Santucci 09:18

In the Conference Board, right. All of these different little, little councils. And what happened was they started getting demand for, hey, what's the sales enablement stuff? We don't we as big companies hear about it a lot. We're really unclear what that looks like. Let's set up a council for it. So, what we did is, uh, you know, I, I was recruited for it, you know, that I'm pretty well known and guess in the space. And I said, I'd love to do that. That's right up my alley, and we recruited people for it. So basically, I used a maturity model at that time. Assume three different phases like Phase One is, are you in a reactive state? phase two, are you in a manage state? And phase three? Are you in adaptive state? And I had other criteria for it. We can talk about maturity models later, we recruited people in stage two that wanted to get to stage three.

Brian Lambert 10:17

Okay, so you targeted that specific Lee. And so, one, that implies that there are people in a managed state, which I'm glad to hear, without a counsel and you wouldn't have a meeting. So that's a win. Yep, the profession. But before we go too much further, Scott, you know, some of our loyal listeners that have known this a long time might say something like, Hey, you guys, you know, at Forrester, you had a council too. So, are you are you just retreading the old Council and well, you know, redoing everything over again? And you know, are you guys going to advance this or what? What would you say to that?

Scott Santucci 10:54

Well, I would say that the economics is just everything. This is different. So, Forester, I think the fee to participate in the council was, you know, between 50 and $75,000 a year. And with that, you know, myself, you our team, we are we produced research also and had these had these council meetings and had, you know, had outputs. At the Conference Board. There are very lightweight deliverables. The fee is much, much, much less between $10,000 and $15,000, depending upon you know how many services the company has under

Brian Lambert 11:42

If people mention your name, do they get a discount?

Scott Santucci 11:47

I had to get invited first.

Brian Lambert 11:49

Oh, it's invitation only

Scott Santucci 11:50

it is invitation only? That's correct. So, you have to you have to invite and you got to go to the you can go to the website and apply and you know, the app application process happens and I'm not part of that. I just get on the phone after they go through the...