Inside: Sales Enablement

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:

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.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Hey, and I'm Brian Lambert. And we're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions that you may be wondering about sales enablement. Are you frustrated that maybe something's not quite right? Do you believe that sales enablement should be adding more value than it really is? In this podcast? We're going to talk about today, something that's very near and dear to my heart and that's training and learning. So, Scott, what do you have for us?

Scott Santucci 01:01

Thank you, Brian. And as always, we try to frame out the topic that we're discussing by bringing other examples to the table so that we have better insights and better perspective to discuss it. I have the great fortune, or if I were a 12-year-old, rewriting many, many, many reports over and over and over again, the misfortune of having an educator for a mother, and my mom has worked in developing curriculum and learning for many years and has all kinds of masters and in training, and she's an educator, through and through and through. Well, one of the things that's interesting is we all know, the curriculum for students, and the curriculum for adult learning has gone off into different different branches. And one thing that's being exposed to all of that information, you know, you hear a lot of things. And one of the things that I'm particularly attuned to, is this whole idea of the K through 12. state of educating our children. In the United States, we spend the most more than any other industrialized country in the entire world on spending per student. Yet if you look at Test Scores and results, we're down towards the bottom. So, the question is, what are we getting for all that money? And where is it going? And that tends to be a hot topic and a lot of different reformers and perspectives about how we improve education.

Brian Lambert 02:38

So, Scott, that's great, as usual, great facts. Great story. But, you know, in the corporate world, I don't have very many high schoolers that that work here. So, what does that have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 02:51

What is that? Right? So I love that question. And what does that have to do with anything? Why are we talking about that? Well, the reason that we're talking about that is often get the opportunity to have one on one conversations with CEOs. And the reason that I'm they're having that conversation is, of course, they're concerned with the productivity of their Salesforce. So, my first question is, well, how sure are you that it's the effectiveness or it's the quality of the reps? Have you looked at, say your products and services? CEO answer is always Well, we've done a lot of research into that. That's a good question. We've gotten Bain McKinsey or some external person to validate their their corporate strategy. We've got great feedback about our products and services. We feel we feel fantastic about it. It's not our products and services. like okay, well, maybe it's have you thought about that. It's your messaging and marketing. Well, we actually did a brand audit, the branding that we came out with is it brand new and we really like we really like where we are with our branding and positioning. Our marketing department is generating tremendous amount of leads and those leads aren't getting followed up by the Salesforce. And it's very frustrating. We've got a lot of metrics and indicators from our marketing department about what what kind of messaging is, is involved. So, we're pretty certain it's the Salesforce. So, then my next question is, okay, well, if it's the Salesforce, then Have you been hiring the right people? Maybe maybe what you've been doing is been hiring the wrong people all along. So, the answer is, well, of course we hire the right people. We always, were really good about hiring best in breed, we hire with competitive salaries, we've got a great hiring process in place. And then I asked for sort of a follow up question around that which is, are the people who are still involved there two years ago. So, in other words, all of the new recruits that you have that comprise them the bulk of your Salesforce, are they all the same people? Yes. They're the all, they're the same people. So basically, my summary of that Brian is, and I say this to CEOs as well, let me summarize what I've heard. Your products are great. Your branding and positioning is great. You're hiring all the right people, yet somehow you have the wrong Salesforce today. Is that correct? And the CEO says yes. And then my question back to him is, are you looking at what you're doing? Because it seems like you're manufacturing the wrong reps? And then I'd be quiet. And then when, when that happens, it's always Uh huh. I never really thought about that. And we have a completely different question. Rather than launching into what kind of sales training program Do we need to put in place or how do we hold salespeople accountable, etc.

Brian Lambert 05:59

Yeah, that makes sense. And it's an interesting way that you put it here. Are you manufacturing the right reps? So, I have a, I have a people background and that concept of manufacturing reps is is something that the traditional l&d folks might rail against, but what do you, what do you mean by that? And what, what kind of dialogue do you have about this concept of manufacturing reps?

Scott Santucci 06:25

Well, really what I mean by that is just like, there are people who are really looking at how do we improve the overall school system? Maybe the system that we have for sellers is is antiquated. And that's really the point. And what I don't mean to say, what I want to make sure is really clear to everybody listening. I'm not anti-sales training. I'm extremely pro sales training. I'm extremely pro skill development. I'm extremely pro seller. I think the question that I'm that I'm trying to ask is, is the sum of the parts Working, and what does it look like? And I think in order for us to really examine that question, I think nobody would be better to help us explore that, then then you Brian, if you don't know, Brian, one of the things that you may notice is when you look at his email it says Dr. Brian Lambert. So, what are you a doctor in and how do you go about getting a doctorate?

Brian Lambert 07:24

Well, to answer that, specifically, on the transcript, it says, PhD in organization and management. And when I started that, what that was was organizational design, organizational teaming, operating models, etc. But I was a practitioner at the time, and I looked for a degree program where I could study sales. So, I wanted the context to be sales. So, as I went through the entire five-year process, as you know, when I had my my ethics class, I did sales ethics. When I did marketing, I did marketing plus Sales when I did my management content, it was about sales management. So, I studied sales the whole time. And as you may know, Scott, there really are no PhDs and sales. So, I tend to think that I'm probably one of the few that's actually studied at the PhD level this thing called professional selling.

Scott Santucci 08:18

Excellent. And for those of you who don't know, what I want to do is also put this in context. I've had myself a tremendously huge learning curve on all of the sales, training and learning and development, vernacular and terminology. I myself have been a consumer of sales training courses, some of which I've hated, and some of which I've liked as a salesperson. I've been a purchaser of sales training, to sales training programs as the VP of Sales and Marketing, some of which I've liked, and some of which I've hated. And now I'm in the business of actually designing some sales, sales training programs of which I don't really follow the tradition. No playbook. But what's important is let's start to understand a lot of these terms and where do they come from these disciplines, how they're being applied today in this in this in this modern world. And I think a great setup for that is before Brian joined the team at Forrester. So past podcasts we've talked about that. Brian actually was in a role at at the time it was called, I think it's ASTD. And now it's ATD. What is ATD? What is that?

Brian Lambert 09:32

Yep. It's a great organization. It's the world's largest professional society for training development professionals. So, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, they have an annual conference where they routinely get 10 to 15,000 people. It's the the Association for for trainers.

Scott Santucci 09:51

And that was started with like in the 40s. Right?

Brian Lambert 09:53

That's correct in the 40s. And as you know, Scott in the 40s, there was a lot of work to industrialize. Training and Development. And so, it is born out of that industrialization, standardized testing, etc., and moved in through a series of steps through, you know, skill development competencies testing, etc. and then into workforce planning, workforce development, workplace education, and now what they're calling talent development.

Scott Santucci 10:20

So, when you worked at ATD, what was your role? What did you do?

Brian Lambert 10:25

I had two primary roles. The first one was looking at the strategic direction of the organization, how could it better serve? What was becoming more of a segmented view of the quote unquote, trainer? So, what did that look like? What type of communities would be established etc.? And then with my background, I was a seller I've been in sales management, sales training, I stood up what is now the sales enablement community of practice, which was the first one of its kind in the organization,

Scott Santucci 10:57

So, I need to understand this a little bit more that's a that's a that seems like a lot of inside baseball for me at least. Maybe the rest of you who are listening can really understand it. So first you said as somebody who only really cares about sales training, I gather that there are other kinds of trainers in in ATD helped me understand that a little bit.

Brian Lambert 11:22

Right. So, this is this is a it's a great question. First, when you look at the umbrella of training, it's this idea of helping individuals get the right skills and knowledge to be successful. When you work, look at that. And juxtapose that against today's workplace. There are many different specialties and at the time, you know, this is 15-20 years ago, workforces and workplaces were becoming more and more specialized. So, what I was doing, in essence was looking at the different types of audiences that different types of quote unquote learners and looking at There's specialized needs from a, you know, job skill perspective. Traditionally, l&d people trainers tend to not engage sales teams. And in fact, one of the things that I had begun prior to that was this idea of I want to be the the trainer to the sales trainers. I don't want to necessarily be a sales trainer. I want to help those who do it because why is it that internal to most organizations, the sales training organization was outsourced to vendors. Why wasn't training supported by these folks called trainers that tend to work on leadership development, for example, or customer service, or soft skills or all these other things, but selling and that's, that's where I went to,

Scott Santucci 12:48

let me break this up a little bit, because I'm trying to track so for our audience members for myself, trying to learn about where all these different sales enablement functions report to sometimes they report him to l&d functions. Sometimes they don't, sometimes they're in competition, finally competition with the learning and development organization. So, part of the first thing that I want to understand is Brian, are you saying, am I understanding you correctly by saying that where the learning and development space started out sort of the legacy was there's a central learning and development function that provided adult learning to all functions like a, like a service, the shared service group, that the learning and development function would provide it to manufacturing, to marketing to sales or what have you? Is that correct?

Brian Lambert 13:42

Yeah, that's correct. And it's ebb and flowed and became a from a centralized to federated model and then back and forth. Sometimes it gets distributed into the operations. Sometimes there's a centralized leadership development function and organizations since the 1940s. have been trying to crack that code on how do they make their learning development teams more relevant to their-

Scott Santucci 14:04

The second thing that I heard you say, was as a representative for an entity that's focused on learning and development professionals, you were curious as to why so much of the sales, sales training was being outsourced and by being outsourced, I'm assuming you're meaning it's companies or contracting firms like Sandler or Miller, Heiman or Richardson, or whomever to come in and do the sales training for the Salesforce. Is that correct?

Brian Lambert 14:42

Yeah, that's correct. And because of that, they the the trainers that I was working with the l&d professionals seem to want to abdicate that responsibility to to these vendors. And I couldn't quite understand why that was.

Scott Santucci 14:56

Gotcha. So, at that point in time, what I understand that your your telling me is that what you did was started to say, Hey guys, let's start to build some competencies around what it would take to bring in house more of this sales training. So as a result of that you did a lot of surveys, you got a lot of research, you collected it because you wanted to be more or less the trainer of sales trainers. Is that correct?

Brian Lambert 15:24

That's right. And the fundamental problem I was trying to solve was to, to bring more relevance and impact of this this thing called Learning development slash training to the customer focused revenue generating employees of an organization. In other words, I had heard, and I believed in that, that trainers and l&d professionals could have a strategic seat at the table. But the only way to me that they would be able to do that would be to drive revenue and not be so much of a cost center but an investment in where the organization needs to go there by linking people, salespeople to the business strategy. And if we didn't go there as a profession, I don't know what we were doing.

Scott Santucci 16:09

But this is pretty insightful. For me. One of the things that I have been exposed to is prior to prior to join Forrester and some of the work that I've done in the past would be you know, working with a big company like Unisys, and Unisys having a university function of which underneath it had a dean of a sales University. And what they would do is offer ASTD. This was at the time ASTD certified people to work with us on training programs. And the difficulty was, they had very rigid approaches of how to go about building those training programs that didn't map to the business requirements that we were we were trying to do. That was my my personal experience. What experience? Where does that come from? What what's what's really the goal here? And where did these tools I think the I think one of the methods they were referring to is ADIE, what's ADIE? And why was why was that being discussed with me in the sales leaders at at Unisys.

Brian Lambert 17:19

So ADIE is an acronym for a traditional fundamental workflow, that corporate l&d professionals would go through to build custom training. So, it stands for basically, an analysis, you analyze the job and skills, you just find something, you develop something you implement, and you evaluate. So, it's kind of a, you know, continuous improvement model. And a lot of, you know, trainers are taught that there are also other versions of it, but the point is, is that there's a, basically a challenge that needs to be addressed and you would go through and build stuff to support it. So that's, that's ADIE. So, to add answer that question specifically, the the challenge is that ADIE and all of the models for l&d are kind of predicated on two fundamental principles of adults. One is that the jobs are clear. Right? So, if you have a clear job, you can go out and build skills to it. So that's the one fundamental thing. The second fundamental thing is that because the jobs are clear, the the scope of those jobs are well known to everybody else. So, you can build skills, and everybody knows what these people are supposed to be doing, whoever they are customer service, whatever. And so, what I was really perplexed by in my own work was, well, the sales role, it appears to be clearly defined, but boy, it's not the more you understand it. And also, we are going through a transition in business and in the broader landscape, that roles are...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 4

SPECIAL EDITION: Inside the Sales Enablement Soiree Boston June 2019

The Sales Enablement Soiree is a series of events, hosted by Shawnna Sumaoang and the team as Salesenablement.pro. The first event, which premiered in 2015, was held alongside SalesForce.com Dreamforce and brought together 200 attendees. The next year, the number grew to 600. By 2018, attendance soared to 1,200, highlighting the booming appetite for advice, expertise, and collaborative ideation on the topic of sales enablement. This year, the event came to the east coast as well, and 250+ attendees attended the inaugural east coast event in Boston.

Didn't make it? Don't worry! Brian attended to gather insights, learn from, and engage with practitioners, thought leaders, consultants, and solution providers in the space. He was able to gather information and conduct a special assignment to collect key insights to share with our podcast listeners. Listen now to hear Brian's debrief with Scott as he shares his takeaways and insights from this very special event. 

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

Intro 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 Sam Tucci 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.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I'm Brian Lambert. And we're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions that you should be asking if you want to be successful with sales enablement. On this podcast, we rethink, reframe and revisit sales enablement topics. And in this podcast, it's a special edition.

Scott Santucci 00:54

So what is this special edition and how do we frame it out? So, this is the part where we normally frame things and the idea We had is, as Brian and I go to events, what would be wonderful is for the people who weren't at the event to have a deeper, so we're going to do a debrief. And last week actually yesterday, Brian was at the sales enablement saw Ray in Boston. And one of the things that Brian did is participate in a panel. So, my first question is, Brian, what was your panel? What was the topic and what was who else was on it? And what was the discussion?

Brian Lambert 01:26

Yeah, so great event. Picture 250 or so people in a room in Boston, at the Ritz Carlton. What we what we covered Scott was the idea of a charter and why is a charter important on the panel, but myself with the sales enablement society kind of moderating is, you know, non-biased etc. And then, with the folks on the stage, there were six of us. One was a sales enablement director from Mike Keeley was his name. We had Jill Guardia from the director of sales enablement from tri net.

Scott Santucci 02:06

We had Joe.

Brian Lambert 02:08

Yeah, Joe. She was great. Everybody was great. It's a super awesome. I think from from a flow perspective, we really built off each other and it was great. We had Susan Seminoff from monster. She's a VP of global sales enablement. Alex McKenzie. He was great because he's a sales director. So, he's a recipient of the charter and you know, somebody who would benefit from it. So, he brought that, that sales leader perspective. And then from lucid chart we had Brandon is the Director of Sales operations from one of the vendors there. It's a great mix.

Scott Santucci 02:41

Excellent. So, what did you guys talk about and what were some of the, some of the takeaways?

Brian Lambert 02:46

So, the topic of a charter is interesting, because if you search on Google, everybody's got a, you know, uptake on a charter and actually, Scott, you and I are the first ones to say you know, 2010 or so that having a charter is important. So, for Eight or nine years, this idea of a charter has been floating around in the sales enablement space. And it's interesting because there's no, you know, one structured format or specific template. And I think I get asked that a lot, you know, what's the template for this? And what we did on the panel was not necessarily focused on the contents of said, charter, but the the results that you would drive with a charter, so why charter? What's the purpose of it? What are the things, some of the things you do with it, etc. And the key takeaways from the discussion that we had was, you have to have a charter, no matter the size of your remit, you either need to have a specific set of tasks, activities or specific scope, or a specific set of outcomes to drive. So that was the first finding the second finding Scott was it. Everybody's at a different stage in their evolution of gaming.

Scott Santucci 03:55

Can I interrupt you real quick?

Brian Lambert 03:57

Yeah, sure.

Scott Santucci 03:58

 Let's go back to the issue. About the charter. So, I'm trying to imagine, imagine our listeners and knowing full well that boy have been a pretty big advocate about talking about charter. It is a boring topic for most people. How in tuned was the audience to talk about a charter?

Brian Lambert 04:22

Well, lucky for us, we were in a great time slot, which was the first panel of the day. But what we did was we framed out across the six of us, the lifecycle of a charter. So, picture, six, six people that have either benefited from or built charters. And, you know, the idea of going from, hey, you know, what should we put in it all the way through to adoption that unfolded in front of the eyes of the people in the audience. So, we had very specific questions that basically build a charter in front of the audience and the key that's one of the first comments from the audience. It was, wow, this sounds like this sounds like professional selling, you know, you guys identified an outcome, you identified a need, you had a point of view, as this, you know, unfolded across the stage, then you had to get buy in, there's multiple stakeholders and you had to sell the sizzle, etc. Right. So, it's, you know, it was really striking to the first audience member that the having a charter is much like, you know, being a salesperson and selling the value of your function. Mm hmm.

Scott Santucci 05:25

The reason that I'm going to advocate here, so I've tried to play a little bit of devil's advocate and going, Oh, god, what do we want to talk about a charter, but in the maybe the fourth or fifth sales enablement society meeting that was actually before was the sales enablement society meeting was just the local Washington DC meetup group way back in 2016. We actually had a meeting around a charter. Remember that?

Brian Lambert 05:53

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Scott Santucci 05:54

And basically, for those of you who weren't there, they are audience broke into two different camps. Some were saying, why are we doing this is ridiculous. I'm just gonna follow the form and template that's given to my company, what a waste of time. And the other half are saying, Are you ridiculous? The charter is the most important thing to be there. And Brian Murphy, remember what Brian Murphy did, he took the computer away from me. And he got on Google. And he searched, he pulled up the Magna Carta. And he said, Guys, this is what a charter is. Nothing could be more important. And he, you know, being a historic historical buff, it was a way to delineate the power away from the king, to, to the servants, and it was the foundation of actually the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and all these other wonderful things. So that is somebody who had a very strong, passionate plea. And did you hearken any of that any of that story on the group?

Brian Lambert 06:57

Well, we didn't because when we only had 30 minute It's and there are six of us. And the goal that, you know, from the design and experience was to go through the process and the importance of it. But you know, people had a choice to make around. It's important, certainly through that discussion. And I think it definitely landed in the space of, it's critical. And there are critical components that need to be covered such as delineation of power, such as you know, who were the kings, and who are the, who are the constituents, such as, you know, what's our specific set of activities and actions, what do we stand for? And then the idea of who do we socialize it to when how and build it? You know, one of the things that did come out at the end of it was this idea of kind of the coalition of the willing folks to actually enable or activate the charter.

Scott Santucci 07:51

So, what's one reason somebody who's living should build a charter?

Brian Lambert 07:56

Well, I started the group off with anybody, anybody a boy scout out there. And I know that puts a, you know, 40% of our audience in that group or so, because a lot of sales enablement are women. But when you look at the idea of the lifesaving merit badge, if you go with me for a second, in the life saving merit badge, they teach you something counterintuitive. And that is when you're going out to a drowning person, and you're swimming out there, you don't go anywhere near them. And the reason for that is in a state of panic, they will grab onto you and he'll both go to the bottom. Mm hmm. So, there was this aspect of certainly, you know, tongue in cheek a bit of survival. But more importantly, it was this idea of sometimes he right in his sales enablement. And as you coined a long time ago, Scott become the VP of broken things and he goes straight to the bottom. And so, you need to be able to delineate what are the critical items, what are the must have actions, and where are you going to draw the line based on your Current resources etc. So that was highly, you know, visceral to people they empathize with that. Certainly, the audience members that I talked to, on the break, some couple of them have been, you know, overwhelmed with the amount of assets and expectations that they have from various stakeholder groups.

Scott Santucci 09:19

Gotcha. So, let's do some rapid fire here. So, give me three things. I'd love to know three takeaways that you got from all the other sessions. So, we got a good wrap up or a good understanding about the panel that you were on and what you were talking about with a charter. So, you know, you were there. What were some, what three, three, Brian, thoughts that you got from that?

Brian Lambert 09:45

Well, I'll give you one that that is maybe not as super positive, but it's this idea of, we're still a bit in redefining, unfortunately instead of moving forward and also So, because of that, there's a lot of, I think, this idea of declaring things on people. So, you know, from the stage or from the groups, you know, saying things that are certainly maybe levied with an expectation that everybody understands. And like, for an example, we're going to, we're going to talk about, you know, scaling, readiness. somebody in the audience said, what do you guys mean by scaling? And what do you mean by right readiness? You know, and I high fived him because that's a great question. So, you know, instead of declaring, here's what scaling is, and here's a readiness is being being more curious. So, this idea of let's not, you know, declare things on people let's let's be curious and make sure we're talking the same thing was a big, big theme for me as I walk through. The second is this idea of everybody's working on something and that sound might sound You know, Brian your genius. But when you look at all the somethings, and you put them all out there is it is overwhelming when you have 250 people are working on something different, yet they're all interrelated. And boy, there are a lot of choices that you can be making. So, the sheer volume of stuff being worked on is is incredible to me. So that was the second. The third one was, you know, I just I just love sales enablement people were down to earth, we tell it like it is we walk up to each other like we've been lifelong friends. We didn't even know each other in the past. I met Evelyn, you know, through one of the people that sat at the table with me and she's like, Oh, I bumped into Evelyn and she brought her over and Evelyn, I both live in Charlotte. And we actually ended up on the same plane home. So, you know, this the connections that are built through putting yourself out there? A lot. I'm curious, tell me about you. I have a question for you. Yeah, it was awesome.

Scott Santucci 12:03

Excellent. So those were some three, three great takeaways. Let me tell you what I inferred from it. So that you can correct me if I didn't get a different got a different understanding. So, your first point about we're still redefining what I what I talk about that is, we still don't have enough of a clarity that people feel like they've got, you know, keep redefining and keep redefining and keep redefining the definition isn't good enough. Right. Do I understand that correctly?

Brian Lambert 12:36

Right. And Forrester actually eat me might not know this guy, but Forrester actually got up and said, you know, here's our, here's our new and updated definition of sales enablement. Little did she know that person in the audience was sitting there, they put out the definition, you know, 10 or 11 years ago with you set out for us to redefine it. 10 years apart was a bit surreal, but yeah, so that's exactly what I'm saying.

Scott Santucci 12:59

Jeez, that's interesting. Well, we can have a whole different thing about talking about that definition. I really wasn't prepared for that. The second topic that you brought up is people doing stuff. Um, is when you talk to folks and all the different activities that they're doing, are they clustering in any pockets or anything that you can see any prioritization? Because I think, at least from my perspective, it's very difficult to, for profession to move forward. If every tactic everything out there is sales enablement, we don't put any kind of categories how do we how do we how do we how do we as a profession share information with each other?

Brian Lambert 13:45

Right. So, I didn't see any of that. I think if you took everybody individually, they they probably have some sort of individual prioritization and bucketization. There there, there are likely to be some defaults there. For example, this is what my sales VP wants me to work on, right? So, kind of that level of prioritization. The other the other piece of it is that there is an assumption that everybody's working on the same thing, like one of our sessions was playbooks. So, with no real setup or context of what playbooks are it launched into, here's how you do them, etc. And I guess thinking back on it, same thing with a charter. You know, I spent a lot of time explaining why we should at least explore that, though, when it came to playbooks it was, you know, we should we should all be doing this. And here's why. And I think there's an interesting juxtaposition there of what must haves versus nice to haves, and then who's determining the path forward? And I think there's it resonates with individuals, leaders, sales enablement, leaders, that they're kind of in control of their own their own destiny in that regard.

Scott Santucci 14:57

Interesting. So, in Then the third, the third topic was sales enable people. And, boy, we don't really need to talk about that if you are listening to us passively, and you don't go to your local chapter meetings and in sales enablement or you don't engage with folks online, you're really missing out, because one of the best things to do is to talk to folks, you might not agree a lot. But when you actually talk to another human being, and try to understand where they're coming from, you're going to learn a lot more than trying to peruse the web and look at definitions and all of the people's outcries of specificity. So, I think that that point is great. And I think it's fantastic that it's my understanding Brian, that's at the event, the soiree that's a free event right and it's spot it's sponsored by vendors is that's that's correct?

Brian Lambert 15:55

That's right. And you know, a hearty thanks to them. It's it was free. And the food was good. They were they were, there was food at the breakouts. And I know the story is happening after dreamforce this year and, and they talking about having 1000 people or more at that event. So yeah, yeah, great, great job by the vendors that supported that and appreciated talking to them as well.

Scott Santucci 16:20

That's another thing as a sales enablement professional, it's definitely be grateful for the resources that people are paying Sure. The vendors that are providing that, that information definitely would like you to think of them. But they don't need to do it the way that they're doing it. They could just be pounding you through LinkedIn bombardment, like every other supplier. So, keep that in mind for the vendors that are engaging you the right way, and be thankful for it. So now we have this one last section. It's a special assignment. So, one of the things that Brian and I did was before going to the set session, we try to come up with a set up a little bit of fun thing, a special assignment, let me frame out the special assignment. So, the question that that we came up with was, how do we get clarity around sales enablement? So, it is a guess a little bit related to defining it. But it's, it's this way, if, if sales enablement, when you put those two words together, they mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. So one way to think about that is when somebody says sales, what do they mean? Do they mean an individual sales transaction transaction, sales managers, the Salesforce revenue? So how you answer that question is one area just scoped? And the second question is, enable sales to do what based on your definition of that? So, it's always interesting question that I get, because I find people are all over the place. I'm really curious. So, we had we sent Brian out there to Boston asked that same question. How many people did you get a chance to talk to you and what did you learn by asking that question?

Brian Lambert 18:00

Asked 10 people, what do you think of sales? What What comes to mind? And what does enablement mean? So on the question of what do you think of...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 3

Do you believe Sales Enablement is a function and profession? In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss the challenges they've encountered in living and driving transformations. In today's evolving business landscape, Sales Enablement leaders are often asked to transform from within. Whether it's new programs, new tactics, or even new organizational structures, Sales Enablement leaders and their teams are often "first through the wall." Being in that position, means you're trusted. The strategy is entrusted to you. People and resources are entrusted to you. Your credibility matters.

We talk about the evolution of bookkeeper to CFO and what that meant to finance -- and its implication to sales enablement leaders. While many believe that sales enablement is a task or technology, we know that sales enablement is a function that translates strategy to execution. To tackle strategic and tactical at the same time, you have to be purposeful. To be purposeful, you have to be thoughtful. Listen to Scott's story about how he got into Sales Enablement and how structures and outcomes are critical to success with the C-Suite. 

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:

Intro 00:03

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 Sam Tucci 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, this is Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Hey everybody, Brian Lambert here 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. And in this podcast, we're going to talk about trying something new and more importantly about being transformative. You know, sales enablement is a transformative role and a lot of us get hired to Do transformational work. And there are a lot of people talking about the transformative benefits of sales enablement. But what is transformation really mean? What does it mean to be a leader in these transformations? And to me, it all boils down to Are you a person that executives can trust to take the company or take the department or take the vision and make it a reality. And we talk about doing something new like that, you've got to be credible in how you go about it. In other words, people have to put their futures, their direction, their ideas, their processes, even their products in your hands. And to me that credibility has to be earned. And not just given because you have a title. And Scott, that's what I want to talk about today is this idea of credibility, and where that comes from in this role.

Scott Santucci 01:50

So as always, we'd like to frame things out with with a story. I'm going to tell I'm going to leverage a little bit a little bit of the ideas from Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens, as you probably know, is an author at the turn of the century, really talking about issues dealing with the cutover from an agricultural to an industrial revolution. There's really two ideas that he's, he's famous for. Everybody knows the tale of two cities, and specifically that wonderful quote, it was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was an age of wisdom. It was an age of foolishness. So, we have that have that one. The second thing that I want to bring up and we'll promise we'll tie these these ideas together is Charles Dickens also wrote A Christmas Carol. And if you remember A Christmas Carol, and you remember Tiny Tim, tiny Tim's dad is the job of tiny Tim's dad was a bookkeeper. And that bookkeeper was the one that Ebenezer Scrooge treated so so roughly. And I think that the big idea here is could you imagine today a CEO treating their equivalent of their bookkeeper, their CFO, the same way they treated tiny Tim's Dad? And the answer is, of course not. So, what's changed since then? That's really sort of the framing the framing key idea.

Brian Lambert 03:21

Yeah, and I like that because certainly if you look at the CFO view, there's they're deemed as credible. But then that took some time right to go from tiny Tim's dad, bookkeeper to CFO, but there's there was a journey there that unfolded as that role evolved. And I think there are absolute correlations here to the sales enablement function. Sure, it might take some time, but the role can be elevated it can be seen as a strategic partner to the to the C suite, and it can drive you know, a more professional relationship with a lot of various groups inside the organization. And, and with customers. And Scott, one of the things that I know, we've talked a lot about, and, you know, we go way back is this idea of sales enablement, you know, and what it means. And no, we're not going to define it here. But what we're going to do is I want to outline this idea of, you know, sales enablement can be a process, it can be a platform, it can be technology, it could be jobs, etc. And one of the things that I know you have a visceral reaction to is, you know, your approach when you talk about this as a system, and its interrelated parts, it's holistic, there are a lot of moving parts, and people call you academic. So, why why why does that bother you so much? To be called academic.

Scott Santucci 04:49

Well, I didn't know I was going on the couch. But if

Brian Lambert 04:55

If we're going to go on a TinyTim journey to, you know, can't just wave our magic wand and I'll be strategic

Scott Santucci 05:01

Right.The process of getting there is actually way quicker. But I think the reason that the I react so strongly to people call me theoretical or academic, is really the story about how I got into sales enable in the first place. And this isn't a pretty story, by any way straight way, shape or form. But it's a real story. And it started out when I was a sales rep at a company called Mehta group that's now part of Gartner group. And that way, even way back then our biggest competitor at the time was Gartner. And as a sales force

Brian Lambert 05:40

This is in the 90s. Right?

Scott Santucci 05:42

Late 90s, early 2000s. Right, so I was a sales rep in the late 90s. And, you know, really what we would have to do is we literally competed for the Gartner budget. And that's no winning proposition if you're competing for the Gartner budget against Gartner. That's a tough, tough, that's a tough sell. So what we learned, the more successful reps and at the time I was the top, the top rep in the company. We learned that you didn't talk about Gartner, you didn't talk about syndicated Research Services or anything like that you position yourself as differently. And one of the one of the ways that we worked on that was to develop a concentrated on building really value added relationships with with CIOs. And the idea really was I was selling you insurance, decision making advice, and you're gonna make a lot of decisions. And I have access to a lot of people who have lots of different conversations to help you hedge that hedge those bets. And as simple as that sounds, that's a lot easier than talking about all your deliverables. So, in order to sell this, you actually have to have conversations with the right right folks. And I was brainstorming with the one of the CIOs that I had a relationship at Johnson and Johnson Pretty big company. And I had he and I had to come up with an idea. Wouldn't it be great to hear what's on the mind of other CIOs in the area? So, I said, well tell you what I'll do. I will invite a lot of a lot of CIOs get a nucleus of folks here. And we'll have an event I'll bring in some of our analysts, we won't charge anything for for it. What I need you to do is host it and help me out because I don't have any budget. Just the Mirror, mirror salesperson. I don't have any budget. They said, hey, that's great. We actually have this amazing conference centers probably could imagine what a conference center Johnson Johnson look like. And I've got a good relationship with the marketing department. Let's get them to help help create flyers. So, who wouldn't want Johnson and Johnson's marketing department to work on your on your own flyer? So, I talked to

Brian Lambert 07:55

Your sales rep at the time you're like, this is gonna be awesome.

Scott Santucci 07:58

Yeah, exactly. That Johnson and Johnson work on my marketing materials. So, I was excited. And I'm thinking what a great prospecting event this is going to be, I'm going to be able to invite my prospective customers that weren't giving me the time of day to a exclusive Johnson and Johnson event that's powered by, you know, my company. And the only thing that I needed to do was get a high rez copy of our logo. So, I called up our VP of Marketing at the time, she answered, and I said, Hey, this is what I'm looking for. This is what I'd like. And she said, Well, I'm not going to send it to you. And I said, What? I laughed because I thought she was kidding. She said, No, I need to know what the what the material is because I need to decide whether or not our brand should be associated with it or not. I said it's a Johnson and Johnson event. How do we not want our brand associated with Johnson and Johnson? See, I don't know what the subjact matter is. And it was just such a pain in the butt. All I needed was the logo. So, I said, keep in mind I was in my late 20s. At the time, I probably said some things that my older self was embarrassed by, so we'll edit those out here in this story, but it was a bunch of not nice things. And I hung up on her. I said, as I was hanging up on her said, I'm gonna make sure you get fired. So, it was sort of

Brian Lambert 09:25

Also not recommended

Scott Santucci 09:28

sort of pettiness of how how I got into

Brian Lambert 09:31

This is a a young young Scot Sam Tucci in the 90s. Everybody,

Scott Santucci 09:34

right, thank you for reminding that but it'll help it'll help say how unpragmatic OR, or NOT pragmatic, how unacademic getting into this was.

Brian Lambert 09:48

That's good point. Yeah.There you have it all started with a logo

Scott Santucci 09:54

And a friction with marketing and we ended up having this event. And the event was incredibly successful as part of my master plan to get the VP of Marketing fired. I made sure to invite some of our some of the leaders who were on our executive committee to attend this event.

Brian Lambert 10:15

So, when you say successful, what do you mean the event was successful?

Scott Santucci 10:19

Well, because first and foremost, number one, my CIO client at Johnson Johnson was elated, because we were able to bring 120 different executives, VP and sea level from throughout New Jersey, there and he was expecting maybe 10. So, to get that diversity to build that, build that footprint, he was just blown away. And then as far as how it was successful for for me personally, I wrote the equivalent of my entire quota for the year there on the spot during little breaks in here and there because people are just so blown away by the connections and the value I was able to create as as a salesperson. So, fast forward, the executive committee members were all talking about it and how come more or more the reps don't do this. So, I used that buzz, and you're, you know the way that you have as a as a top rep, you don't really realize it until you try to start using it. So, I called Bernard up and Bernard was our CFO. And I said, Bernard, I've got some time as at what 300% of my quota. I've got some time. I think we're wasting a lot of money in our marketing budget. And I'd like you to help find it out. And of course, he took me up on that, because most CFOs think that they're wasting money on marketing or sales and marketing in general. So, we spent a day whiteboarding out, whiteboarding that out and he said, I want you to present this today. The Executive Committee next month.

Brian Lambert 12:01

So, before you go there, now I'm going to I wasn't there, but I'm going to project here, you can correct me if I'm wrong. But for you to take that action, I don't think because I've known you for a while. I don't think you were you were you were being vindictive, so to speak. I think there's a piece of you being competitive here. But you know, I think I want to explore the flip side of this is, you probably saw a huge market opportunity. And you probably also knowing you kind of put the whole event on your back and did a lot of the work yourself. And all you asked for was a little bit of help, and you didn't get it. And so that really probably pissed you off. So so are those two things true here? Or, you know, what was the what was the impetus for wanting to take the marketing actions that you did?

Scott Santucci 12:49

Well, I I took the actions with the CFO, and I'd be I'd be lying if I didn't say I was mostly vindictive. So angry that I just asked for a little bit of help. And my feeling was he just

Brian Lambert 13:07

You just asked for a logo, right?

Scott Santucci 13:08

Right. I just asked for a logo well, yeah, I just asked for a logo. And it just was the straw that broke my back of all the sales prevention that I felt we were running into a you know, there's there's other stories too, like having a having some of having policies created because I sold went over list too much. It so one of the services that I sold our average deal size or average subscription price was 17,000. I started selling these things for $30,000. And I was told by it. Yeah, and then you put together 120 person conference as a sales call. Right. So, the you know, I just wanted a little bit of help, right and just constant self-prevention drug. Not so I think I think if I were really honest, it was mostly vindictiveness. Was it all? at that one individual, the VP of marketing? No, unfortunately, as the leader of, of all of that stuff, it's a it's a figurehead. And the meeting with the CFO was really how do I create a business case? To get the executive committee to look into this stuff?

Brian Lambert 14:30

Sure.

Scott Santucci 14:33

However, hindsight being 2020 and having a lot of space behind that, it was, I think a little bit of it was the CFO taking some advantage of me because I made he had an axe to grind with the marketing department too. You know, it's it's sort of like a political slash business case. The CFO has a great way of Just talking about the numbers. So, when I presented to the executive committee, we presented all these numbers about, you know, the cost and productivity, you know, problems and like, and after presenting it, he verified all the numbers for me,

Brian Lambert 15:15

Was it basically saying that there was a lot of money being spent without a lot of, you know, impact or what was the big sound?

Scott Santucci 15:23

Yeah, I think we can get to get into more about metrics later. I mean, a moment was part of our plan will be to go through some of the reports and one of the reports we'll cover is the hidden cost of sales enablement. But it really was, look, we're spending a tremendous amount of money that has literally no utility to sales, literally none. And it's, it's not an issue of budgets. And, you know, we spent this amount of money on events or this amount of money on collateral, etc. It just has no utility whatsoever. And on top of that, because it has no utility, and it's the information out there, it actually detracts from my ability to do my job. So, for example, I shut off in my in my CRM system, access to the corporate marketing department to my key accounts because I didn't want the information they were sending out to get to him. Because all of it all that did was compare us to Gartner. And going back to the original story, I didn't want to be compared to the Gartner budget, because once somebody says that, then you get delegated to the lower-level minions and my access to the CIOs who had all the money was squashed. So those were those were the cases that were made at the executive committee. in that meeting, they asked me to leave. And 10/15 minutes later, they asked me to come back and I was looking forward to hearing what they had to say and they said, You've got a new role. Here, your job now is the VP of product marketing and management, and you're going to, you're going to fix all these things that you brought up to us. Go Go figure that out. So it's like, oh, geez

Brian Lambert 17:11

So, is that what you? Was that what you were expecting?

Scott Santucci 17:13

No, no, no, no, at all. It wasn't what I was expecting or what I what I was looking for. It was, um, I just wanted. I just wanted action to be taken so that this could be fixed for me.

Brian Lambert 17:29

Yeah.

Scott Santucci 17:31

So that's what I was told I was I was doing the first thing that I did. I said, I, Bernard, you know, let's, I need to build a baseline. And then the, so we built a baseline first and I built the relationship that said, moving forward, you're going to present out all of my metrics moving forward, just so they're credible. So, this is the help that I need. And I think this is really where I learned to build great relationships with the finance department they want to help, actually a lot. And so that that was helpful. But the first thing that I did was for the first three months, all I did was collect information. So, there's a lot of pressure, go do this, go do this, go to this, go to that. And I said, I'm not going to do any of that until I have a strategy. And you guys all see the magnitude of the problem that we're dealing with. So, I interviewed that we had six different sales regions. Each of the sales regions had their own view of what's and their own sales processes. We had 17 different business units, all of who said, selling is easy, you only need to know these five things, you know, multiply that by 17, and it gets over gets overwhelming. We had a massive amount of collateral there was a belief by our CEO that any monkey could sell this stuff. So, you know, because the product was so good. that those were the things that we're dealing with. And I presented that as a readout. And

Brian Lambert 19:06

How long was that process, by the way?

Scott Santucci 19:08

just doing that analysis, I'd say about three months. Okay. And it was really...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 2

Are you using new tactics, but everyone around is "do it as usual"?  You're not alone in the desire to change from within. In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss the challenges they've encountered in positioning and selling sales enablement in organizations. While this may seem easy, the value is the eye of your internal customers. Therefore, translating the impact and promise of the function is critical not only to their buy-in but also to the successful pursuit of the business impact your company expects from your role. Much of what we have encountered in explaining the "features and benefits" of the role come down to how our communications are received by those around us. 

We use a highly disruptive and somewhat somber analog for what it feels like to share the future path forward. The analog? WWI warfighting tactics and how "hard-wired" everyone was to continue to pursue them, even to their own detriment. The generals, the people, the communication, the processes, and yes, even the measures all called for a new approach to warfare, but they just weren't embraced. Why? Because human muscle memory is hard to overcome. Even if drastic and disruptive times, where NEW is required. Luckily for us, we're not in a life-or-death situation, but we are in a time of drastic change where muscle memory is required to change by confronting reality.

Join us athttps://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/to let us know what you think, collaborate with peers and sign up to be notified of new releases, updates, and news.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 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 Sam Tucci 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 Tucci.

Brian Lambert 00:34

Hey, it's Brian Lambert here and we're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking those big questions you should be asking if you want to be successful with sales enablement. Do you have an idea of the value of sales enablement for your company? And are you frustrated that others might not see it? Oh, man, holy cow, am I live in that right now? I was actually listening to our last podcast, Scott and I thought Before he plays on to the next one, or to another one, I think we should pause and reflect a little bit around. What happened. One of the things that he said, in that discussion on our first podcast was, Oh, you know, I went around, and I got buy in from everybody. And then we, you know, we did it. And I said, that's easier said than done. I've found in my own role, that's incredibly difficult. And I think that's the topic of this podcast, you know, how do you go about getting others to buy in to a more strategic view sales enablement? And I want to explore that here in the podcast today. What do you think?

Scott Santucci 01:38

I think it's great. And Brian, as as you know, we like to try to have a leveling story. To really frame this issue out and to me the leveling story here goes back to World War One if you can kind of picture in your head and your mind, a whole bunch of say British or French troops down They're in the trenches with the rifle and the bayonets armed, just waiting for that dreaded whistle to blow to go over the top. And when they go over the top, they have to cut through a whole bunch of barbed wire over no man's land. And then they would just get machine gunned down by Germans in a pillbox. And when you think about that, the strategies there what why did they do that? And one of the battles actually, actually, over a million people died in a battle. It's just amazing. Yeah. And what happened really is that these generals all learned the tactics, and what beat what running a military was using Napoleonic tactics. So, they learned everything about what how to run a military, how to organize a military, what motivation was, what strategies were all based on what Napoleon did in the early 1800s. What they didn't account for was the Industrial Revolution during that Industrial Revolution, a huge amount of things happen. Number one, troops could be brought to the brought to the frontline and trains. Number two, you actually had mass produced foods, you could have much, much larger armies. Number three, the weapons that you had available, you had machine guns rather than at muskets that you had to front load. The altar artillery could shoot miles in advance, poisonous gas, had airplanes, and all of these different innovations but they didn't change their tactics. That's a framing.

Brian Lambert 03:38

Yeah, that's a great story. Thanks. Now hopefully, hopefully we're not eating lunch, but I that's a bit of a morbid story. And you know, I said this in the first one, you know, what does this What the heck does this have to do? with sales enablement. Now I feel like I need to get my my flak jacket on and and wonder what I'm doing in the trench. But I think there's something more to it than and has to do with this idea of the changing times that we're in? And are we equipping ourselves to take the the new battle?

Scott Santucci 04:08

That's right. The reason I like that story is it's not that the generals of the French force or the English force, it's not like they didn't care is that they didn't have the concept of a completely different way. And the reason I think this is a this is a great story is we have to be able to articulate to our leaders the fact that sales enablement is actually a different role, just as pursuing a strategy that's different than what the Napoleonic tactics are. As foreign as that is we have the advantage of having 100 years of hindsight, they didn't have that option then. And this is where we are today. sales enablement, might as well be as new as the idea offering the idea of why don't we not dig in and trenches and why do we Why do we not do For the over the route to a frontal assault, yeah, that's really that's really the point here of, of that story and what the relationship is, that's the big the magnitude of the challenge of the internal selling that a lot of us have.

Brian Lambert 05:16

Yeah, and this is super important for me, because, you know, my background in learning and development, you know, I kind of grew up in there in that field, I grew up in the sales field. And, you know, from a sales perspective, I was a top performer and, you know, any tweaks or improvements that I wanted to make to the system I was, I was met with a, you know, the equivalent of why don't you just shut up and sell more, because you're a top performer, we don't need any ideas. And then on the l&d side, when it became time to not lead with, you know, training speak or frameworks or a bunch of theoretical stuff, it became No, we can't do that because that's all we have. We have to show them that stuff. Because, you know, that's our needs analysis checklist. And if you were to take both of those fields and say, I'm not going to do that anymore, and you take those away, what are you going to replace it with? And that's a bit of a risky feeling it was for me back then. And I think that's the big you know why here is, when you want to make a pivot or make a change like that, and replace it with something else, you're going to feel a little uncomfortable, and a little at risk and a little exposed, and especially if there's a mechanism and machinery around you, or, or ways of working processes, you know, chains of command, etc. And that's why I wanted to double click into this, Scott, because when you look at this idea of selling sales enablement as a role at Forrester, you know, that's a research company, it's been around for a long time, it didn't have brand new roles cropping up, you know, to go out and sell to, and you were able to do that and I think I want to, I want to explore that with you here today. And understand how that how that comes together. So, can you take us back to that time and this idea of Getting buy in Who did you get buy in from? What type of discussions did you have? etc?

Scott Santucci 07:06

Yeah, so first bit of nomenclature. So, when you talk about for certain roles at the time, the idea was a role was more or less like a product. So, it would be you do research, okay dedicated to a role. That's right. For example, one role that's pretty easily identifiable as the CIO, Forrester would do research targeted directly to the CIO and build a variety of different capabilities, subscription research capabilities, even consulting capabilities, and other things to sell to that dedicated role. So, the challenge is the way Forrester was organized at the time. The company was organized into three different business units. There was the IT business unit, of which CIO was one of those but then they had other roles like security officer infrastructure and operations. Then you had the marketing business unit. And that business unit was very focused on b2c foresters excellence, just phenomenal excellence around marketing is very, very, very, very heavy into the customer experience, b2c world. And then the third business unit, the business unit that I was in was a business unit called the tech industry. And at the time, people who wanted to buy people wanted to influence the it buyers, the vendors etc., would buy Research Services for their analysts analyst relations. So, the tech industry group was the least understood the three different groups, it was just called tech industry. At the time, there was no such they weren't thinking about b2b marketing or anything like like they did today. And one of the, the, the roles that they had already defined is ones to explain where analyst relations, marketing strategy, product, product management and product marketing. So, here we come, I'd join those selling, they'll sit and there'll be to be selling etc. There we go. Keep in mind, right. This is tech industry only. So, there was no there were no sales roles. Any kind of sales role there were write wants, there wasn't demand Gen or anything like that. Those were the roles at that.

Brian Lambert 09:50

And I think this is important because you're going to come waltzing in here with this. Hey, guys, I've got an idea. And I think a lot of our sales enablement listeners probably have the same Have idea or vision? Right? So I think there's parallels here.

Scott Santucci 10:04

Right? So just as the generals in World War One had a view of how things should work, that's where what I was entering into. So, the first thing is, the overwhelming majority of focus is on market and marketing. So, the first bias that you have to overcome is sales. People just do what they're told. And, you know, that's a, that's a bias shared by a by a lot of marketers. So, you, you have to build that case, right. The way that way it really worked is I basically made a vision document and an outline. And in that, in that vision document, I was able to get the person who I reported at the time, you know, Brad, and he really liked that. It was a great way to to go about, but we had to sell that vision, just to really, really hard just to explore open up the space to explore the idea of the possibility of maybe potentially creating a new role. And since the company hadn't really created any new roles, there was no protocol for how you create a new role.

Brian Lambert 11:21

So on that, was that one of those things where you do it as a project, if you will, and you invest time and you, you know, hunker down with your PowerPoint deck and build slides, or Oh, god, what was your idea of building this vision?

Scott Santucci 11:35

Well, the first part was just having a vision and then talking about it with somebody who's friendly, well, you're not really pitching an idea or anything. So, the role playing that with with Brad would be, well, you know, what about this or what about that scenario? Or why would we be any different than anything else? You really had to come up with a thesis if you will,

Brian Lambert 11:59

Using the company as construct, right? So yes, yeah. How's that different than marketing? Or here's what they're gonna say here. When you bring that back. Why is it called sales enablement? That's weird.

Scott Santucci 12:10

At Well, yeah. And then there's a lot of other things too. Like, how come no one else is doing this?

Brian Lambert 12:16

Oh, right. Nobody else is doing it.

Scott Santucci 12:18

You know? Yeah, that's right. We have no other competitors who are doing a sales enablement.

Brian Lambert 12:22

There must be a reason

Scott Santucci 12:23

Right. So why would we do that? And isn't sales enablement? Just what the people in Product Marketing do? Hmm. Yeah. So then you have to go Oh, my gosh, we have to we have to educate how would we educate that but then you got you can't use the word educate?

Brian Lambert 12:43

Right because this is a research company with a lot of people from a great great pedigrees, if you will, you know, and you don't you can't run around telling everybody you're gonna educate them and insult their intelligence. Right, right. It's actually I've tried that before and it doesn't work.

Scott Santucci 12:57

Now. backfires So you have to, you have to create curiosity around it. So, then you have to, you have to develop your idea. You have to create curiosity around it. And then one way to create curiosity around it. Now keep in mind at this point in time I, my role where I worked, I was a analyst in the marketing strip market Strategy Group. For market strategy and things like that, I said, I think I'm better served in this sales enablement piece. And I would try to define the sales enablement coverage area, it would be in conflict with market strategy group as well, how would we create a space for me to actually publish this kind of this kind of content? So, in order to prove that there actually was a market because the first response is, well, we don't see these kinds of roles, how many of them out there are there? What could we sell to them? them, and no one else is doing it. So why would we do it? So, in order to create that initial demand, I said, Well, I have a country club here in Virginia. I will go and recruit people to participate in a meeting. And you guys come and watch these, these people participate. Well, who are you going to get? What level are you going to get? I'm going to get VP level people, like, Oh, come on VP level, people aren't going to come for a full day meeting, etc. And sure enough,

Brian Lambert 14:34

This is part of the vision right? You're not trying to sell them research. You're trying to get this figured out. So, you're gonna invite these folks

Scott Santucci 14:41

I'm trying to buy the space to have them not have them. Be more curious about the potential of what sales enable could be. Not say we need a role when you do it right now, because that was too It was too far ahead of where Where they were?

Brian Lambert 15:01

Yeah, that's another thing I want to call out this idea of, it would have been really easy to say, Well, here's our first report, let's put it out and start selling it. You know, but that's not what you did here, because you wanted to make sure that there was a market that these folks were going to actually participate. And also, you know, hate to say sound cliche, but you're trying to be customer centric. You're trying to be outside in.

Scott Santucci 15:26

Yes. And it's very hard to be outside in, in any kind of company. Right. So, I would say that it wouldn't have been easy to just write a report on on sales enablement, because you have an editing process that you have to go through. And in that editing process, the questions are going to be Why will the role care, which is a actually a great thing that Forrester does for a quality control check. But if your audience is different than how do you nuance it, so so that was, that was really the challenge. We had this meeting, the engagement level was tremendous. We had 50% of the audience were marketers, and 50%, or sales leaders. What I wanted to highlight was, look, the reason that other functions other companies aren't covering the sales enablement space is because there's a huge gap. And if we only look at covering the roles that exist today, not maybe skate where the puck might be, might be going, we're going to be just rehashing the same old, same old.

Brian Lambert 16:35

So, when you said there's a gap, what kind of things did you hear back?

Scott Santucci 16:39

Like, yeah, I think that's definitely a topic for a whole nother whole nother podcast. But the way that the way that we did it in a way that I like to facilitate is instead of putting the burden on the audience to come up with a draft and have them react to it. So, things like the future Friction points would be what messaging for example, what what is what is messaging? And it didn't come up that way. But the point of view from marketing was that we build fantastic content. And the salespeople don't use it. How are you as a sales leader, we're going to make sure that the salespeople use that content.

Brian Lambert 17:22

So what as an example is two different perspectives. Right?

Scott Santucci 17:26

Well, that's that's the perspective of the marketing lens, right. And since we, since Forrester at the time, and so many people from the marketing background, they're like, yeah, of course, that's the answer. But since they're not getting feedback from the sales organization, the sales leaders, feedback was, well, the content that you provide us is completely off the mark. It is it's not conversational. You're not targeting specific stakeholders. It it doesn't fit with how we work. And basically, our sales engineers are other subject matter experts have to spend so much time redoing it all that we're pretty much creating custom content. And the marketing point of view was, yeah, that custom content off brand. The feedback from sales is Where'd you come up with a brand anyway, the brand positioning has nothing to do with the customers that we're engaging with. He said, wrote this back and forth until you start to illuminate. Look, we're actually talking about two different sides of the same communications coin. marketers are looking at things from an aggregated standpoint and sellers are looking at things through a very micro standpoint. How do you how do you bridge the gap between those and asking it that way? Change the complete tone of both the sales leaders and the Marketing Leaders. And the...

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 1

Do you feel like a modern-day heretic inside your own company?  You're not alone. In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss their advice and point of view about the critical nature of selling the sales enablement role internally. Scott shares his exciting experiences in a well-known research company and what it was like to create a shared vision for the role, what those many conversations looked like, and how the process unfolded. 

Much of what he encountered was the same thing that you -- a modern-day Galileo -- will likely encounter. Learn from his experiences in talking about a new way of thinking about the value-add of the sales enablement role to better support sales leaders and their teams. 

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:

00:02 intro

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 Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

00:34

Hello, this is Scott Santucci.

00:36

And I'm Brian Lambert. And we're 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. Are you frustrated that no one seems to know what sales enablement does? Or what it is? Do you sometimes feel that something's not quite right? And do you believe that sales enablement should be offering your company a lot more impact? But you just don't have permission to tackle it. In this podcast, we're going to explore how challenging it is to do something different in business today.

Scott Santucci 01:09

You know, Brian, in 1633, Galileo was condemned and convicted by the Catholic Church for technically vehement suspicion of heresy. And was sentenced to basically life imprisonment till he died nine years later. What was his big crime? The big crime Galileo had was he made the observation that the earth actually revolved around the sun and not the other way around. And that challenged a lot of conventional theology at the time, and there was a strong, strong, strong negative reaction. And the reason I bring up that story is its human nature to stamp out something new or a new idea that buys it conventional wisdom.

Brian Lambert 01:56

So, what are you talking about Scott? Right, you just hit us with the Galileo story. Which is awesome, by the way, a great piece of history. But what what are you trying to say? Are you trying to say that we're Galileo's and sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 02:08

What I'm saying is in a lot, and a lot of cases, the information and the evidence dictate a different way than what you're doing with. And many people within the sales enablement space feel like they're heretics inside their company. They're told that, oh, you're just a sales trainer, or sales enablement. We've been doing that for 20 years or 30 years or whatnot. Yet, the role keeps growing and growing and growing. So, this idea of being a heretic really ties into human nature, those in power when confronted with a lot of complexity and change, hold firm to the things that they do know, which puts those of us who are in a role that's expanding and growing, to have to sell those people in a completely different way like Galileo dead in order to be avoid being labeled a heretic.

Brian Lambert 03:03

Yeah, that's a good point. Because much like Galileo did, he had to Kitt, you know, convince people share ideas with them, tell them something new. And you know, there's a lot of friction there. And he had a choice to make. And if you go, if you fast forward to today, you know, we both talk to a lot of sales enablement, professionals that are new to the role, trying to stand up the role, etc. And when you look at what's going on, there's a lot of turnover and churn in the role. There. I've certainly seen a lot of friction between sales and training, between marketing and sales, and even trying to get funding where people say things like, well, that's just an overhead roll. Why do I want to do that? And, you know, I feel a little bit like Galileo, sometimes trying to explain the value out of the promise that I see in sales enablement.

Scott Santucci 03:52

So, you're right and to really unpack how difficult it is to actually sell in an entirely new role. Let's think about a lot of the different friction points. There's friction points between sales and finance, for example, whose number is it? Is it the product number to the product? and business units number? Or is it the address geographic sales team is is they're the one with the number. What's the role of marketing? What's the role of sales when it comes to sales, messaging and the like? What's the job of a product marketer? In a world where we're moving away from products? What do we do with with with sales, training and sales leaders in the role of sales, management, all of these different variables, they're all happening today? And it creates a lot of friction to what we're looking at. Looking at today in terms of roles, so what we're going to cover in this second section is really how do we understand what those friction points are? How entrenched are they, and what does it What does it look like?

Brian Lambert 04:54

That's great, and I think I want to take our listeners back a little bit in history here. Since we're on the Gale Galileo theme, let's go back in nine or 10 years, you know, you were instrumental in creating, or at least starting the definition of the role at Forrester Research, which is one of the most prestigious research companies in business today. And I'd love to unpack that with you. Can we go there we talk a little bit about what you did at Forrester?

Scott Santucci 05:22

Sure, I think one thing to do is we got to go back 11 years ago, 2008. Everybody can go back into their wayback machine and remember what the world was like in 2008. We were in a very, very dire time in our economy and a lot of confusion was happening and a lot of scared people, myself included, were happening but the time what was going on within Forrester is like every business is organized and foresters was at the time organized around research around roles. So, the idea of, Hey, we have this subject matter around sales enablement, what does it look like? I certainly felt strongly that sales enablement needed to be its own role. The reason I felt strongly for that is I built a role before. In my past, I've been a VP of sales and marketing. And I saw a lot of a lot of conflict prior to me joining Forrester and I had that strong opinion. The difficulty was when you bring up sales enablement, the way that Forrester was organized, first with a heavy bias towards marketing, no coverage, even to this day, no coverage really around around sales, not not at all, not a role level. There's a little strong bias. So more or less the point of view was with sales enablement. That's really just Product Marketing, which there was a role for. I pushed back on that and said, No, it has it includes these element elements of go to market. And I said, Well, that's really market strategy then and let's stick it there. And I said, No, that that doesn't fit there. And we had a lot of conflict. So, what I want to do do his first put in a box, how difficult it was to really get forced or to do that. And of course, there's a market leading company. And at the time, there was no other sales enablement coverage. I think at the time IDC had some content that they were repurposing from their own research to buy as training materials that they call it sale and I have one, but there was no role or no dedicated research function around the role. So that started out.

Brian Lambert 07:31

Yeah, let's unpack that a little bit. Right. So, you have you know, this idea of, you know, your vision, your past experiences saying, we should have a role around this. There's a dedicated scope that you see in your mind. There's a there's some functional attributes that people in this role should be executing, they should have certain skills etc. There should be a roll. But what you're bumping into is, well, let's put it here. Let's let's put it there. Or isn't it Just as an adjust or is this what you're talking about kind of, uh, you know, people trying to make sense of what you're saying. Is that is that how that came across to you? or?

Scott Santucci 08:10

Yeah, very much. So, I think in terms of hindsight, hindsight is always 2020. Right? The, the vision that I had in my head was really the evolution of a bookkeeper. All the way to a CFO roles change and evolve over time. And if you think about the Charles Darwin, Christmas Carol, the tiny Tim's dad was actually a bookkeeper. Could you imagine in 2019, a CEO trading their CFO that way, but times change, roles evolve based on changing market needs. So, I always had that in the back of my head, but I don't think I did a very good job of communicating.

Brian Lambert 08:47

That's, that's interesting, right? You take that as a given. You know that that roles are going to change, and roles are going to evolve, and it's happened in every space. If I think back to it's not just in you know, the bookkeeping stuff. Marketing's gone through the same transition and other functions have to what why? Why do you think it was so hard? Or what? What did you hear about? Or what questions Did you get with regard to this idea of sales enablement against the context of the changing business landscape? But do people get it?

Scott Santucci 09:15

Well, I think I definitely I don't think people get it. So, the first step that we did when I started socializing it socializing this idea, and I was, frankly, dumbfounded by, by the feedback that I got from all these very, very well accomplished experts who have lots and lots and lots of data points, as you could probably imagine. But the first the first thing was I was surprised about the pushback. So, I suggested Why don't we get some executives, CEOs, or not CEOs, VPS of sales and CMOS together and write out a definition of what they think sales enablement is and get them to discuss it. So no one really wanted to sponsor that idea. So, I said, you know what, I'll recruit it myself. Well have it at my country club in Virginia so I can pay for it. So, I had to I had to offer all these things while while I was a forester employee. And I thought that was going to prove the case. We got a variety executives together. This is where

Brian Lambert 10:14

Why do you think that was important, though? Well, it wasn't, why not just write a definition and publish it?

Scott Santucci 10:20

Well, the reason that I didn't write a definition at all was because no matter what I wrote, was going to be counter minded counter measured by somebody else saying, No, that's not true. And I have data that says sales enablement is really this because why? Because it's always been this way. It's always been part of the product marketing. List. Look, here are all the deliverables that product marketers must do. That material is sales enablement.

Brian Lambert 10:49

Yeah, I remember from my research it was it's part of the four P's you know, as its placement, they just talk.

Scott Santucci 10:56

Yeah. Then you go to the training people and say well sales in a month. There's always been these kinds of things. And people getting more and more sophisticated on it. And that really was never my experience. When I was a VP of sales and marketing. I thought all of that was way too tense and, and not focused on where we're going. So, what I wanted to do is instead of projecting my viewpoint, get a variety of executives together, because we wanted to say should this be a role and really highlight the tension? The other side.

Brian Lambert 11:28

What were some of the companies that you got, like, you know, are you talking fortune 500?

Scott Santucci 11:33

Oh, yes. Right. So, they were all fortune 500 companies. So, some some at the top of my head, who were at the table. IBM was at the table Siemens, Sun Microsystems that you know, this is before they got acquired CSC a variety of Xerox companies like that, so we had about 20 of those companies and 10 of them 10 of the members 10 of the participants in In this meeting where sales leaders, Chief sales officers, and then the other half were CMOS, so we had this conversation. And I thought that the outcome that we arrived at which was what the definition of sales enablement was for Forrester, which I'm sure we're talking about in another podcast. And I had executives from Forrester participate that they would see the see the engagement, and I thought game over right. You know, here we had real market validation highlighted a need, but really what companies Yeah, fantastic companies a lot of debate a lot of conflict between between it, which to me is that highlights that I need to research this more. But really what happened was, all that did was create some sponsors. So apparently, what I didn't know at the time, Forrester has this process, this strategic process that they go through a deep dive process to assess the health of an individual role, and they need to make sure that that as an economic market cap associated with it, or opportunity associated with it. So, what we had to do is we had to actually survey on interview and collect data, primary data, statistical data, not what I would call wisdom, type data through a conversation, that we just had some stats to show how many seats we could sell, what kind of research agenda we would need to have. yada yada, yada.

Brian Lambert 13:30

So, so this is interesting. So, you saw a vision, I'm gonna pull everybody together, you figured out how to do that, by the way, which I think is great, you know, you funded it. But these folks off traveled on their dime to come out all this buzz and excitement. You guys leave there you think, okay, I can start researching it, but instead it turns into now we have to figure out how this is going to link to our strategy, right. So how do we what type of products how are we got to sell these guys, etc. And they may have changed their process. Now. This was 11 years ago, but at the time You know, it needed to be linked to the strategy. And I think, you know, from what I'm hearing is, here, there's this is this is important because it sounds like you had to constantly get what, you know, the proverbial buy in along the way every step of the way.

Scott Santucci 14:16

I think and this is kind of fast forward now to 2019. I think this is what all sales enablement leaders are struggling with, which is there's always another hoop. So Oh, yeah, it's like first, number one, let's get our customer feedback. So we collected a lot of customer feedback about the trends, you know, getting the chief sales Officer of HP, for example, in the same room with the Chief Marketing Officer of Xerox and then arguing out about where it is, and then flipping that argument around, and then illuminating the fact that they're really talking about a gray area that nobody owns.

Brian Lambert 14:55

Yeah, when so when you say arguing as a researcher, you don't mean fixed Cops you mean to be crane? passion, passion? It sounds like right, right? I just want to make sure that people understand that you're not fostering, you know, this the hostile work environment, work environment. It's putting people in the hexagon. But, um, but this is this is important as well, the second piece of this to me is this idea of a debate. And it's going to be an intelligent debate, because you're talking about Lincoln a roll of business strategy. And I think if you fast forward to today, in 2019, sales enablement, professionals are going to get into those types of debates, right?

Scott Santucci 15:34

Well, they should or else what's going to happen is somebody else's preexisting idea of what sales enabling is, is going to shape it and your opportunity to impact the rest of the company is diminished from from that reason, so, Okay, got it. So basically, just within Forrester though, think of it this way. So, I want to prevent the circular looping that goes on with some of the stuff, but we had very senior level people who are our customers speaking on their behalf of what they were looking for. Some of the executives saw but how do you collect that sort of subjective feedback? And then how do you communicate it up to actual decision makers because there's so many people involved in deciding that we're going to add a new role at Forrester, for example, that we got enough sponsorship to say, Okay will allow you to go through this deep dive process. So, the frustrating part is, as a former salesperson, all of those executives who are willing to buy right then in there a service that we wanted to wanted to offer. We had to wait another nine months to go through this deep dive process. And in this deep dive process, we interview, and we had the people who weren't us, the Strategy Team within, Forrester interviewed a segment of folks. we plotted it out, we took feedback that we had, we created a framework, an organizational framework, we identified different stakeholder roles that we would target our research for all of those other things, that was the groundwork that we had to do. And in order to do that, to launch, actually a sales enablement role, so that was all the work that we had to do before we could even hire you to join our team back then.

Brian Lambert 17:33

Yeah, I was gonna say I appreciate all that work, because that's what got the funding for my role in this idea of an analyst joining you, right? That's right. Yeah. So that so if we stay there on the the precursor of that nine-month period, what other kind of friction Did you run into?

Scott Santucci 17:51

Well, the the friction really gets into. A lot of people don't want to spend time to talk about the definition of a term particular When people have strong opinions that they know what that term means. So, for example, if you have folks who don't want resources diverted away from say the role of product marketing, or away from the role of strategic marketing, those people are going to argue a lot to prevent those resources from getting diverted. The same problem that would be inside your company, or anybody's company, is the second you bring up a new role. The argument the pushback that you feel you feel like Galileo, you feel like you're being heretic, but really, the core functional problem that you're dealing with is one of resource. And no one's going to say, oh,...