Sales enablement is supposed to help sellers perform better. But too often, it becomes another silo.

Another function. Another internal process. Another team competing for attention, budget, and a seat at the table.

That is the problem Dave Brock names in this conversation. Dave is the author of The Sales Manager Survival Guide and CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. His view is simple and direct: sales enablement works best when it is treated less like a department and more like a set of shared processes that help salespeople perform at their highest level.

That changes the conversation.

Instead of asking whether sales enablement deserves a bigger seat at the table, Dave asks a better question: what do sellers actually need to create better customer conversations, and who in the organization is best equipped to help?

Sometimes that help comes from sales managers. Sometimes it comes from marketing. Sometimes it comes from HR, sales operations, training, content, tools, or leadership. The point is not to build another function. The point is to remove friction so sellers can do the work customers need them to do.

We also talk about why marketing needs to move beyond being seen as the “leads people,” why sales and marketing should operate more like a basketball team than a handoff process, and why many SDR models create a bad first impression with senior buyers.

Dave also brings the conversation back to empathy. Not empathy as a soft idea. Empathy as caring enough to understand the customer’s world. Their problems. Their pressures. Their goals. Their buying process. Their reality.

If your sales enablement work is adding complexity instead of reducing it, this conversation is worth revisiting.

Dave Brock is the author of The Sales Manager Survival Guide and CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. He works with sales and marketing leaders to solve difficult problems, improve sales performance, and adapt to the way modern buyers actually buy.

In this episode, Dave and I talk about:

00:00 Introduction to Dave Brock

The best sales enablement work does not start with the company’s internal structure. It starts with the customer.

Who are they? How do they work? What do they care about? What pressures are they facing? How do they learn? How do they buy? What would actually help them move forward?

Then you work backward.

That is where sales enablement becomes useful. Not as another layer of internal complexity, but as a way to help sellers and marketers meet buyers where they are.

Brian Carroll: Hello everyone. I’d like to welcome you to today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Podcast. This is Brian Carroll. I’m pleased to have Dave Brock with us today.

If you don’t know Dave already, Dave is the author of The Sales Manager Survival Guide and CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. Dave and I had a lively conversation a few weeks ago while we were out in the D.C. area. I really enjoyed his perspective and viewpoint and learning from him. I wanted to bring his thinking to you.

Dave, welcome. Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Dave Brock: Brian, thanks so much. I really appreciate the chance to continue the conversation we started in Washington, and I appreciate you inviting me to this.

By background, I actually started out as a physicist in my career and ended up going to the dark side of selling. I sold mainframe computers for IBM for a number of years, went up the food chain, went to EVP of sales, and became CEO of a number of technology companies.

And now I run the consulting company. We really help our clients solve some of the most difficult problems in sales and marketing and deal with the new buyers that there are. We have a collaborative approach in helping really outstanding people solve really, really difficult problems.

Brian Carroll: I’d love to hear your perspective. What right now do you feel is the biggest trend you see affecting your work in sellers today?

Dave Brock: Well, clearly, it’s the convergence of a number of things that we see in the marketplace.

It’s the new buyer. Everybody is changing the way they buy, and learning how we engage these new buyers through marketing, sales, and customer experience is critical.

At the same time, we see tremendous transformations in business and business models, whether it’s the digital transformation that virtually every business is undertaking or just all business models being displaced with new business models.

We have some of the classics of Airbnb turning the hotel and lodging business upside down, Uber turning the taxi and limo business upside down. We see these new business models occurring, driving real stress on customers.

And then the final thing is just overwhelming complexity, between the rate of change and the amount of information we’re [inaudible] with every day. Most of the people I’m meeting are really struggling with at least one of those three things. I see it really impacting virtually everybody.

Brian Carroll: I can relate to those challenges. I think just talking about complexity for sellers and marketers, I was having a conversation with someone earlier and it’s just overwhelming, the amount of tools an average salesperson uses or a marketer uses.

It also creates challenges around collaboration, that internal collaboration. I wanted to ask, how do you get internal collaboration working to address these problems, these challenges, and help improve sales performance?

Dave Brock: The easy answer is break down the silos and start talking to each other. It’s easier said than done.

The thing that we see is a lot of the issues we face in terms of internal complexity and internal collaboration are just people being well-intended, doing their jobs, but somehow their jobs aren’t aligned with each other, or there are things about their jobs that cause them to be in conflict with other people.

Simple things like aligning roles and responsibilities, aligning metrics, some classic value stream types of analysis.

I just had a conversation earlier today with a marketing executive and his top management team. We were talking about what’s the value proposition they create for sales, and sales is the downstream customer of theirs.

I think again, we have to rethink our working relationship, rethink the classic business process re-engineering of our workflows, our roles and responsibilities, and really get some alignment in metrics so that we realize we’re all on the same team, with the same end goal.

Brian Carroll: That’s helpful. And something that’s really come to age recently is sales enablement. I just wanted to ask, what’s the role of sales enablement to help achieve this?

Dave Brock: I think I’m on the wrong side of some debates on this. I look at sales enablement as more a set of processes and a set of activities than I do a function within the organization.

If you look at what sales enablement processes are supposed to do, they’re supposed to help maximize the salesperson’s ability to perform. And so you look at that and say there are a whole collection of things that we can do to do that.

The first is the frontline sales manager and their role in coaching and developing everybody on their team to perform at maximum capability.

But then these frontline sales managers need a lot of support in a lot of areas, whether it’s tools and technology, whether it’s new programs, whether it’s people selection and performance management, whether it’s training, whether it’s content, and so on.

So you start looking at seeing all these things contribute to enabling the salesperson to perform at the highest level possible.

Now, who does those things? It could be all over the place. It could be marketing that’s doing some of these things. It could be HR that’s working on a lot of the talent management types of things. It could be sales operations, or it could be people in the sales function.

So I think the discussion around sales enablement is more powerful when we look at what are the things that we need to do, and then look at who in the organization can do those most effectively and most efficiently.

Brian Carroll: I like how you talk about it, because I think often, when I talk about enablement, I often am looking at marketing and sales.

But as you’re talking, it’s bringing in the finance team, the human resources team. So it’s a collective effort, not just one single group or department. That’s the whole point you were saying earlier, about bringing down the silos. Am I understanding that correctly?

Dave Brock: Exactly. Exactly.

I got engaged in a debate not long ago about how sales enablement earns a spot at the CEO’s table. To me, that was one of the most ridiculous debates I’ve ever seen.

We now have sales enablement executives that not only want to have a spot at the chief sales officer’s table, but now they believe they should have a spot at the CEO’s table. The CEO’s table is getting pretty crowded with a lot of people who want a spot there.

I think it gets away from the point of what we’re trying to do. And I think it actually starts building more barriers to collaboration and working. We’re building another silo and another set of functions competing for attention and corporate resources.

Again, I tend to like to look at [inaudible] as more processes and workflows, and what are the things that need to be done. And then we look at who can do those most effectively.

And if it’s a sales enablement organization, well, that’s really powerful, but we shouldn’t overlook the other parts of the organization.

Brian Carroll: I wanted to ask, we spent time talking about sales enablement. Marketing does have a really important role in helping raise the level of performance for the sales team.

As you and I were in D.C., we talked about how often marketing is looked to as the leads people. We need to think more beyond that, in terms of how they can impact efficiency and effectiveness of each person.

How do you think marketing can help raise the level of performance of sales?

Dave Brock: I think we have to change our mindset from marketing being the awareness people, the create-interest people, the leads people, the demand gen people, and so on and so forth, and look at the entire customer buying journey.

And look at what that is, and who can contribute to that.

We have the traditional feeling that marketing does demand gen and lead gen and tosses those over the wall to sales. And sales immediately rejects all of them as being bad and tosses them back. But we separate these processes.

I think modern sales and modern marketing is very different. I like to look at modern marketing and sales as kind of like a basketball team.

On a basketball team, every person has their defined roles. You have a couple of guards, you have a couple of forwards, you have a center, and you practice plays, and everybody tries and plays those roles. You get really expert at that.

But then in the game, you’re very agile and nimble and adapt to what’s happening with competition and what’s happening with the game.

I think we need to look at marketing and sales more like a basketball team. What are our roles? What are our responsibilities? What are the plays that we execute? Who executes those?

But I think we have to be very agile in working with each other and saying, “Who’s the person that should be taking the shot right now? Who’s the person that should be bringing the ball down the court?”

I look at marketing and sales as not the sequential process where marketing gets the leads and gives them to sales, and sales takes care of everything throughout.

But we work together in the demand gen process, and we work together in the buying process.

There’s a huge amount marketing can bring to the party with qualified opportunities, whether it’s case studies, whether it’s proofs, whether it’s tools, whether it’s content relevant to where the person is towards the end of the buying journey, and those kinds of things.

We really need to look at it as an interrelated and integrated set of processes.

Brian Carroll: It makes a lot of sense, what you’re talking about.

I think the challenge is that marketing and sales often are doing the same things. They might have different words for it. For example, marketing may call it lead generation, or inbound sales might call it prospecting, social selling, etc. They’re doing the same things.

As I’ve talked to salespeople, they often are feeling they’re succeeding despite marketing, not because of it. I was talking to someone trying to build his own pipeline. He was getting leads from marketing. They weren’t helping. He was prospecting, trying to figure out how to cold-call, etc.

Let’s talk about how salespeople are prospecting today. Do you think we’re getting it wrong? How should we be thinking about the customer first impression and why?

Dave Brock: I do think we’re getting a lot wrong about prospecting.

One is I don’t think enough salespeople are prospecting. Most everybody I talk to is opportunity-starved, but we have a lot of these mindsets and mentalities that say, “Well, it’s marketing’s job to get those leads. And if they aren’t getting the leads, then there’s nothing I can do. Or it’s the SDR’s role to take those leads and qualify them, or do something with them. And then my job is just to take those great leads that the SDR gives to me.”

I think the first thing we do is we have to change salespeople’s mentality and say, “Marketing is going to do everything they can to get you the right kind of leads and the right kinds of opportunities. SDRs are going to do everything they can. But if the volume isn’t sufficient, you have to go out and start finding business yourself. You have to prospect. You have to generate new business.”

You might go to marketing and ask them for help in doing that, maybe giving you a specific program that you can execute as well.

The other thing too is I sometimes think we get our prospecting models, and particularly the SDR-driven type models, a little bit backwards.

I think we do a disservice to SDRs.

Most organizations, the SDR is an entry-level job to selling. They do something that most salespeople would refuse to do, which is to call people they’ve never spoken to before and prospect them.

It’s a really tough job.

But one of the disconnects we have is we have these poor SDRs often calling on C-level people.

I get SDRs calling me every day. I feel really sorry for them, because they’ll call me and say, “We believe we can help you improve your business.” And I say, “Cool. What am I doing wrong? How should I be improving my business?” And they’re floored. They don’t know how to carry on that conversation.

They shouldn’t be expected to.

If they’re brand new to selling, why are they calling me, a C-level executive, albeit of a small company, but a C-level executive?

We’re matching the wrong people up with the target audience. As a result, we’re creating terrible first impressions.

If somebody calls me and they can’t have that powerful, engaging first conversation, I’m going to have a negative impression both of that individual and of their company.

I think we’re missing huge amounts of opportunities by not having the right people.

I wrote an article about a year ago saying, “Maybe we need to get some of our most talented senior-level salespeople being SDRs.” If they’re creating that first impression, and if our target persona is this C-level person, then those are the people that have the best capability of creating a very, very positive first impression and opening up far more opportunities than a brand-new SDR without that experience base.

Brian Carroll: I love that suggestion.

It reminds me, before I was called an SDR, that’s what I started as at 23. I was on the phone. I was calling C-level people, 23 years old. There was very little training, advice, coaching. It was on the job.

Later, I started a company helping people do that. I worked for a company where I was CEO. I made calls with the team who was on the phone, and the whole point was to learn, to see what they were experiencing, to understand.

I think what you’re talking about is really a great transition into talking about this idea of empathy.

That’s the hard part. How can somebody who doesn’t have experience connect with someone else and understand their perspective and feeling?

I wanted to ask you, how can sellers be more empathy-based with their approach to customers?

Dave Brock: I think there are a number of things.

First of all, what empathy is about is caring.

You’ve got to really care about your customers, whoever those customers are. If you’re only in business to say, “How can I get an order?” you’re never going to be successful at all.

You’ve got to care about your customers. You’ve got to care about their success in achieving their goals.

If you’re driven by that, it changes your whole orientation and your process for engaging the customer in the conversations you have.

That shouldn’t be a do-good or [inaudible] kind of mentality. The only people I’m going to engage are people who I know have the problems that I can solve.

I’m not wasting my time calling on people, engaging them, and caring about them and their success if they don’t have the problems that I can help them solve.

It is very focused on calling the right people that we can do some things with. And then it’s understanding who they are. It’s kind of sitting behind their desk or being able to walk in their shoes.

There are a whole number of ways you can do that.

I used to joke, I used to sell to the large money center banks in New York City. To learn about banking, you hang out where the bankers hung out, and they hung out at Harry’s at Hanover Square.

I’d learn a lot by just talking to them over a beer about what their businesses were, what their dreams were, where their problems were, which enabled me to connect much more effectively with those people in business.

Here we’ve got to start hanging out where our customers hang out, whether it’s discussion groups, whether it’s trade shows. It’s really learning about where they live and what they worry about every day.

It’s asking questions. It’s getting engaged in those conversations.

I think along with caring is curiosity. If you have those two attributes, you’re going to figure out what the customer is about. You’re going to figure out how to engage the customer. You’re going to figure out how your products and solutions might serve the customer and help them.

Two fundamental attributes: caring and curiosity.

Brian Carroll: That is terrific.

I really liked how you brought it together in terms of meeting those elements, then immersing yourself in the world of your customer, going where they are.

It’s interesting, as I was listening to you, I don’t know that the marketers who are reaching out or making that initial impression have actually been able to get in the world of the people they’re hoping to influence and help, to drive change, to work with them through their journey.

I would say that what you shared you did as a salesperson, we need to do that in marketing too: get in the world of the customer and observe.

From that, we’re going to have the empathy, or to put it another way, we’ll have the intuition.

Our empathy is our marketing and sales intuition to know how to best move forward and what some of those opportunities are.

Dave Brock: It’s really funny how some of these cycles go, but I remember maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when there were a lot of initiatives around voice of the customer and understanding voice of the customer.

When you looked at the way a lot of those initiatives were implemented, marketers would go out and live with the customers. Some of them literally would live for several weeks with the customers and sit and observe them in their jobs and all.

Getting marketers out and treating the customers less as an intellectual exercise or an analytic exercise, but getting them out and actually visiting the customers.

Spending a few days watching them work, talking to them not about what we sell and whether they like these things that we sell, but talking to them about what they do, what they feel, and how they think.

And then bringing that back in and saying, “Now we know the customer, and we’ve seen where they live. How do we take that information and best leverage it to engage them where they’re at?”

Brian Carroll: Fantastic.

We have time just for a few more questions. I was just going to ask you, do you have any other actionable advice around this for those who want to either help improve sales enablement or their sales team’s ability to ultimately improve their own performance?

Dave Brock: I think it’s a little bit counterintuitive. It may sound simplistic, but we don’t do it.

So many of our initiatives, so much of our thinking is driven inward-out rather than outward-in.

We have our products and we have our services. We think about what we want to do and how we want to bring those to market, and so we develop all our launch programs, all our marketing programs, all our sales programs from an internally based orientation about what’s most effective and what’s most efficient for us.

Usually when we execute those, we find we’ve missed one thing: we’ve forgotten about the customer in that whole thing.

What we do that may be most effective and efficient for us may not be effective or efficient for the customer.

So generally I find the fastest way to the best and most effective solution is to always start with the customer and work your way back in.

Who are they?

Where are they?

How do they work?

What drives them?

What do they care about?

What are their dreams?

And then when they get into buying motions, how do they buy?

How do they self-educate?

How do they learn about things?

Trace those things back in to design the process that meets them where they’re at, rather than trying to force them to find us and meet us where we’re at.

Brian Carroll: Dave, thank you so much.

What’s the best way for our readers and listeners to get in touch with you or to find out more about your work and get access to other resources?

Dave Brock: Well, thanks for asking that.

They can follow me at my blog. It’s partnersinexcellenceblog.com. I publish virtually every business day. I tend to try and have a proactive point of view.

I’m very active on LinkedIn. People can reach out and follow some of my content on LinkedIn or reach out and connect with me, or connect with me over Twitter, davidabrock.

Brian Carroll: Thank you again, Dave, for being with us today.

For our listeners, we’re going to have all these links for you, including the link back to Dave’s site on the B2B Lead Blog. Check back for additional updates.

We thank you all for listening. I hope you found this helpful.

Dave, I always learn when I speak with you. I know our readers did too. Thanks again.

Dave Brock: Thanks so much, Brian. It’s a real privilege.

Brian Carroll: All right. Thank you.