Inside: Sales Enablement Scott Santucci, Brian Lambert, Erich Starrett

Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com‘s Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.
Mark Twain - the PIONEER of Sales Enablement who empowered a LITERAL customer facing frontline of 10,000!?!!!
On ISEs3 Episode 14, Erich Starrett is out-history-nerded ENTIRELY when he is joined in the Orchestrate Sales studios by Sales Melon's Todd Caponi. Todd is not only an aficionado (and collector!) of SALES history, he is a man on a mission to further a movement towards sales TRANSPARENCY.  This includes authoring a 3x award-winning book (𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘦) and 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳 that just won its second award recently.
Highlights from the episode include...
PAST:
💬 "If the truth won't sell it, don't sell it." 💬 Arthur Dunn, 1921
⌛️ Todd's first Sales Enablement experience at Exact Target (now Salesforce) began when COO @Andy Kofoid sent him to their NEST - New Employee Sales Training as part of his sales management onboarding. It was so ineffective, he left.  A few months later they asked him to rebuild enablement. He had to Google the word.
⌛️ His search led him to Scott Santucci who had a Forrester event coming up in San Francisco. He attended and sat next to Jill Rowley.
⌛️ He also came across (Dr. Ohio) and flew out to do a few day deep dive with him on adult learning. He brought the combined knowledge back and built a successful, scalable Enablement program for Exact Target.
⌛️ Post $3B acquisition by Salesforce his team used the sale e-learning modules, and recorded role plays (back in 2012!) they had built for their internal team to train all of Salesforce on Exact Target. He was given a shoutout by Mark Beinoff himself.
⌛️ Todd's three core Enablement responsibilities:
1️⃣ Amalgamate: identify and align top 5 CxO priorities
2️⃣ Orchestrate: optimize resources, identify the optimal path to enable the revenue organization to drive the five.
3️⃣ Evaluate: Provide feedback and close the loop.
   💬 "(As a CRO) I always felt my Enablement team had a closer eye into the successes, the failures, the struggles, the strengths, the weaknesses of my team before any of us did. 💬
⌛️ Todd's application of transparency enabled PowerReviews to became Chicago's fastest growing tech company from 2014 to 2017.
PRESENT:
💼 As the economy gets tight, as it gets harder to sell,  you need two things: better sales leadership and better sales enablement. However, the knee jerk reaction - which is happening now - is to train leaders less and downsize enablement because "it's overhead."
   💬 "As things get tougher, those investments need to go up, but ironically, they've gone down historically over and over again." 💬
💼 Today, the "as a service" economy means that closing the deal is no longer the peak. It's the beginning.  You need to create long term value for these customers. And that's that long game helps you win the short game too. Simliar approach to Jacco's Revenue Architecture Bowtie at Winning By Design.
💼 The shift from growth at all costs to long term recurring value is history repeating itself. 1914 to 1923. It was the forgotten depression of the early 1920s.
FUTURE:
🤖 The future of sales is two things.
1️⃣ Going back to a service oriented mindset. "Salesmanship is the science of service." - Arthur Sheldon (1911)
2️⃣ Providing better homework for the buyer....

Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com‘s Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.
On a superfun ISEs3 Episode 13, Erich Starrett is joined in the Orchestrate Sales studios by Meganne Brezina, CCMP™. Meganne is not only the Senior Director of Enablement at Seismic, she's published Tomorrow's Enablement for Today's Leaders: The Strategic Guide to Demonstrating Value and Driving Outcomes alongside Irina Soriano.
Highlights from the episode include...
PAST:
⌛️ While carrying a bag for the National Thoroughbred Racing Association (in partnership with John Deere) she quickly learned that hitting four or five dealerships and educating their salespeople how to sell to horse people was far more productive than going directly to 50 farms.
⌛️ Meganne's next stop was Exact Target, which was in the process of being acquired by Salesforce. She moved into an operations role and saw an opportunity to educate the customer facing team about the power of their internal "customer data warehouse" and spoke at SKO. That is when Meghan Gendelman came up to her and said "you need to be in Enablement!" And thus it began.
⌛️ In search of "what the heck is enablement?" Meganne searched the company directory and and up popped Brian Noss and Nina LaRouche (who co-leads the Indianapolis Chapter of WiSE with her today!)
⌛️ Her early experience in Engaging the Revenue Enablement Society was being sold by vendors vs. solving problems in community. 
PRESENT
💼 The the RES has evolved into "such an incredible community."  Meganne and I met F2F for the first time last fall at the 2023 Sales Enablement Society Experience conference in San Diego. 
💼 Position two - that in order to be effective Enablement should be run as a business withing a business - is a big part of why Meganne got into Enablement. 
  👉🏻 She is passionate about Enablement teams being grounded in a charter and mission statement.
  👉🏻 Enablement "requires the orchestration of so many pieces within an organization to bring it to life."
  👉🏻 Enablement built with a North Star driving the practice forward results in tangible business outcomes.
💼 The biggest #Enablement opportunity in present day? Putting forth a proper enablement strategy.
💬 "Getting the executive buy-in for it, doing their socialization across the business, and then start to execute on it. That is the only way we're going to get out of the fire department world and into the fire prevention world." 💬
💼 The digital copy of Meganne and Irina Soriano's new book - Tomorrow's Enablement for Today's Leaders: The Strategic Guide to Demonstrating Value and Driving Outcomes - is OUT NOW and available for free from Seismic's site!  Paperback coming soon. 📚
💼 The concept of the EVC - Enablement Value Chain - was born of Meganne and Irina preparing to go in front of their executives to give a semi-annual report and struggling to connect the dots with the business outcome that their Enablement team drove.
💼 The resulting data and analytics report from the EVC empowered them to secure executive buy in and gain the necessary resourcing to effectively...

Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com's Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.
On ISEs3 Episode 12, Erich Starrett is joined by Dr. Shawn Fowler, whom he originally met when Shawn was VP, Sales Enablement (a true cross-functional #Orchestrator) at SalesLoft, and a gracious host of his first executive board meeting as President of the Atlanta Revenue Enablement Society back in early 2020. Before then, Dr. Fowler had been the World Wide Director of Enablement & Learning for IBM, and is now a Partner in his own sales strategy and sales enablement consulting venture: RevenueReady.
Highlights from the episode include...
PAST:
⌛️ Shawn "stumbled" into the profession working as the first services salesperson for Silverpop - essentially selling desired business outcomes. The SVP of sales, Todd McCormick, announced he was hiring a head of sales enablement and the hiring manager Drew Pronté said "hey, the CEO said that you should probably be the guy."
⌛️ He didn't know what sales enablement was. At the time he was pursuing a PhD in educational psychology so he combined what he learned from working as a sales engineer and as a services salesperson with what he knew about how psychology of learning works ...and he found himself implementing their first ever Sales Enablement program.
⌛️ His first Sales Enablement event was hosted by SiriusDecisions in Atlanta. "I was thinking we need to start something where we do that on a regular basis. This was easily the most valuable thing that I've done in the last six months."
⌛️ "Getting a seat at the table was probably the biggest factor in helping me be successful in sales enablement."
⌛️ Silverpop was purchased shortly thereafter by IBM when he then developed and executed their global expansion go-to-market plan. "I had the opportunity to see what it looks like in a much bigger level. IBM is basically a handful of multi billion dollar companies all put together. And I was part of one of those multi billion dollar companies inside of it. I got to see how these really big enterprise complex sales work, how you have to enable people across multiple different continents."
⌛️ Shaw was responsible for internal sales enablement including customer service and sales engineers and external - partner enablement - as well. "I think it makes a lot of sense, honestly, when you are in that position you have the opportunity to identify and eliminate a lot of the organizational issues that negatively affects your customer and that negatively affect the team as well."
PRESENT:
💼 Dr. Fowler diagnosed a few challenges that Sales Enablement faces today:
🩺 "I think there's not enough sharing of best practices"
🩺 "The quality of sales enablement as a profession has gone down pretty dramatically in the last five years."
1 - A lot of heads of sales are hearing from their investors that they need sales enablement but there was a period of time where I don't think a lot of them really knew what it meant.
2 - Heads of sales aren't always great at hiring enablement. Recognizing talent can be difficult.
3 - There is a lot of fluff. There was a period of time where sales was a lot easier and there's an entire generation of people who are in sales enablement who didn't have to figure out how to build a better machine. They could get away with adding more people to the machine and adding revenue by doing that. With venture capital drying up there's a much bigger focus on productivity. In order to achieve productivity per rep, you have to build a better machine.
🩺 The Doc offers REMEDIES to these

Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com's Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.
On Episode 11, Erich Starrett hosts Bob Perkins, the Founder AAISP, the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (now Emblaze) in the Orchestrate Sales Studios on the eve of the #digitalnow conference in Chicagoland next week (including a special promo code if you have not yet RSVP'd!)  
We begin with his origins in telesales to Inside Sales to forming the AAISP. And from where he first crossed paths with #SalesEnablement in the journey to modern day where Emblaze is partnering with the Revenue Enablement Society for track next week. 
Highlights from the episode include...
PAST:
⌛️ Bob was on the first ever Inside sales implementation of Siebel. "We used to pull out a stopwatch and time how long it would take to pull up a customer record."
⌛️ Bob and Larry Reeves held the first AAISP conference for 50 people in Minneapolis in 2009 using a sound system borrowed from Bob's church.
⌛️ By year two they had 200 and started getting calls from places like Japan, Afghanistan, France begging to start a chapter in their location.
⌛️ The explosion of Inside Sales created a need to scale the training of less experienced reps. Which created demand for Sales Enablement.
⌛️ Bob reflects on how Jill Rowley "The EloQueen" ushered the social selling mix onto the sales scene.
⌛️ In Bob's early experience the SES he talked with Scott Santucci about the similarities and differences between the two organizations.
PRESENT
💼 Sales is improving and growing with technology and with that growth there's need for training. Witness colleges that now have sales programs.
(Can I get an AMEN, Dr. Howard Dover Robert M. Peterson, Ph.D., Stefanie Boyer, PhD💧?)
💼 A behind the curtain look at the continuing evolution of the AAISP into Emblaze as Bob continues his transition from founder-operator to executive board member.
💼 Great salespeople make it about the other person. What does that mean? Empathy. Caring. Attention. Listening more than you're speaking. Those are the traits that winning sales reps carry. (shoutouts to Steve Richard and Dale Dupree)
FUTURE
🤖 The future of sales is being Amazonized. "We all know what Amazon is. It's everything. It's point and click, order, return, customer service, pricing, availability, everything at your fingertips, and sales is moving in that direction."
🤖 Leaders continue to need development. We should not lose an emphasis on enabling sales / revenue *LEADERS.*
🤖 What is the future of the AAISP in it's new incarnation as...

In Episode 10 Dr. Brian Lambert is back in the Orchestrate Sales Studios with Erich Starrett, for part two of a two-part interview.  Dr. Lambert is a Digital Value Architect at Elastic, co-founder of OSC, SES, and co-host of Inside Sales Enablement seasons one and two.
In this segment we pivot from past to present and future, with an emphasis on the impact of AI and the new data = fuel paradigm. Highlights from the second part of our interview:
PAST
⌛️ What is Brian's take on the recent move by primary research companies to shift from "Sales" to "Revenue" and the Sales Enablement Society following suit to Revenue Enablement Society?
PRESENT
⌛️ Now that Brian has moved into the Marketing organization, what is his experience like compared to the Sales or Ops or Talent Enablement functions?
⌛️ How does data collection compare among the functions?
⌛️ What would it mean to truly be Revenue Enablement?
⌛️ In line with recent interactions with @Hilary Headlee, Erich suggests the best first step towards true Revenue Enablement may be for Enablement leaders to engage with #RevOps and Brian reacts to the suggestion.
FUTURE
⌛️ Brian talks about the shift in focus from company to employee to customer ...and now we are shifting towards a data focus. A data centric view. One for which individuals, functions, and entire companies are ill prepared to pivot towards and fully embrace and benefit.
⌛️ A potential new paradigm of looking at data less as a byproduct of doing work and more as a fuel for the digital economy.
⌛️ The promise and potential hurdles of AI for Enablement. 
>>> Understanding, embracing, and tapping into a hybrid human + artificial "collective intelligence."  
>>> Using AI to generate structured inputs that we as humans synthesize vs. outputs that leave the creativity to an unknown artificial third party. 
⌛️ A "future of work" vision where we understand how data becomes information, how that information becomes knowledge, how that knowledge becomes insight, how that insight gets leveraged to make decisions and then how to effectively put AI on top of that to fully leverage what makes the company unique. 
⌛️ There are a series of continuums:
>>> Data awareness: From data aware to data led.
>>> Organizational: From data "laying everywhere" to organized digital mastery.
>>> Enablement: From being an Analyzer to an Orchestrator removing silos and creating the organizational structure of tomorrow
"You have to be a synthesizer of all this information and AI can help you, but if you cannot synthesize this stuff across marketing operations, training, sales, customers, let's not forget, then you're not going to be an Orchestrator."
Please click 👇🏻, subscribe 📲, listen 🎧 ...and 🎙️ join the conversation! 

ORCHESTRATE Sales!

Erich
#RevenueEngine #DigitalTransformation
#AICuriousHumanEnthusiast
#RevenueEnablement
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ISEs3 PROMO CODE for Emblaze DigitalNow Revenue Summit 2024 in Chicago
Hit salesenablement.captivate.fm/diginow24 and it will plug in promo code OSCISE automatically -- for $745 off of the Emblaze DigitalNow Revenue Summit 2024 registration fee! Hope to see many Enablement Insider Nation...

Erich Starrett hosts Dr. Brian Lambert - co-founder of OSC, SES, and co-host of Inside Sales Enablement seasons one and two, back in the Orchestrate Sales Studios, for part one of two.  A treat to have the epitome of past, present, and future enablement back on the property.
And yes, of course he was there at the original founding and one of the ~hundred four founders I'm on a mission to interview over time was right there with @Scott Santucci and the other 99-ish.
And BOY has it grown!  He did a Google search on Sales Enablement way back in 2008 and got a hundred hits. He just did it again in the pre show and ...how about six million!
Brian architected an early "PhD in Sales" building on an organizational behavior degree with an emphasis on sales in his dissertation, and multiple publications in academic journals.  Having also been cited over 200 times he may just be on Dr. Rob Peterson and Howard Dover's heels.
He's been a salesperson with a quota. He's been a sales manager with a team. He's been a sales enablement manager with a team of ~20. And most recently he took on the role of Big Data Value Architect at Elastic, where he is in a marketing messaging role, messaging enablement.
Highlights from the first part of our interview
PAST...
⌛️ Brian's reaction when he first heard the word "Enablement." (hint: it wasn't positive)
⌛️ Brian first crossed paths with @Scott Santucci at a conference an heard him speak about his blueprint. That's where he originally heard Scott share the vision of value architects, communicating value and being orchestrators.
⌛️ When at Forrester, Scott had to do a lot of work to sell this idea that there were people doing "this thing called Enablement." That people where challenging the status quo siloed view and breaking down the walls among sales training, marketing, ops, and other functions.
PRESENT
⌛️ Since corporate silos were born of the industrial revolution, why are they still the status quo and such a massive challenge in a hyper connected digital world where technically silos shouldn't matter?
⌛️ What does it mean to be an #Orchestrator? Why is it important?
⌛️ What if Enablement is not the right home for orchestration?
⌛️ Of the "four flavors of Sales Enablement" set forth at the SES founding, what percentage of each flavor would most who identify as Sales / Revenue enablement be?
💰Pipeline Enablement?
📝 Message Enablement?
👥 Organizational Enablement?
🎓 Talent Enablement?
FUTURE
⌛️ Brian's take on whether or not Sales Enablement will ever become the vision that the SES founders had of a cross-functional strategic function.
⌛️ Was the opportunity Covid presented by accelerating a move from the status quo to digital economy one that has been missed or is there still a hero's call to adventure for enablement?
⌛️ Accountability is not prevalent in most Enablement, or marketing, or operations. Salespeople are grounded in data and accountability. They are the ones that get fired.  When will there be more accountability for the support team?
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