Episode 205: Catherine Young on Driving Digital Sales Transformation Sales Enablement PRO Podcast

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs.

Today I’m excited to have Catherine Young from Worldline Global join us. Catherine, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role and your organization to our audience.

Catherine Young: Thank you, Shawnna, I’m so excited to be here. So my name is Catherine Young as introduced already and I am the director of sales enablement at Worldline. I work for a particular go-to-market division so I’m very close to the front line and I’m helping the salespeople sell by the usual sales enablement tricks of sorting out the contents, the data, the training, the communications, the CRM, the whole gamut. It’s a really fun place to be.

I’ve been in sales enablement since 2014 when I joined Xerox and I was a global sales enablement lead there and that was a bit more of an HQ role, so it’s fun to come back to the front line, but the other interesting thing is in my whole career I’ve realized, I have always operated at that interface between technology and humans and so that’s been the theme that’s run through my career.

SS: I’m very excited to have you join us today. Now, Catherine, I’ve known you for a while and one of your areas of expertise is driving digital selling transformation. In your opinion, how has digital selling evolved, especially in recent years, and why is it becoming increasingly important for sales organizations today?

CY: Yeah, I think digital selling has always been and continues to be about connecting with people, learning about them, what matters to them, and helping them, and by doing that you nurture your deep and strong relationships. This continues even through evolution. So, the sort of fundamental principles remain, but what is changing I think is that seven or eight years ago digital selling was a support to the face to face selling. It was used well by both business development representatives and account managers, but usually in the interim between the face-to-face encounters. Of course, during the pandemic, we didn’t have that face-to-face bit, we only had the digital engagement with prospects and customers and influences. Now that we’ve left the pandemic and we’re moving into a hybrid world, I think that digital selling has become equally important to in-person selling.

I think one of the reasons it’s becoming so is because digital-first is the new normal. We mean that in both the sense of the younger generation who are coming through into the buying positions that are digital natives, so they’re going to go digital-first. Even the other generations, everyone in the buying community uses the internet and social networks to educate themselves and they will gen up on everything to do with your products, you, your company, and your competition and they do all this before they even want to have a sales conversation. For salespeople to actually connect with buyers, they have to be online. I think it’s just the compulsion to be a digital seller has become greater than it ever was, but if they do that, then the seller becomes a beacon by sharing their knowledge, guiding their buyers, and creating two-way conversations and they will be successful in selling so they can emulate some of that face to face stuff that they used to do using digital selling techniques.

There is a wonderful statistic that floats around in the sales enablement world about the fact that 74% of buyers choose a company that first adds value. It’s increasingly important for our salespeople to be online in these digital spaces. Being engaging and helpful because that’s where they’re going to add value and therefore they will get the sale a bit further down the line, if we don’t, then it’s simple, one of your