Panel 2: Sales Experts - Forecasting the Future of the Sales Enablement Profession

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 34
This is the second panel discussion where leaders dissect the research data points from the State of Sales Enablement study being led by Scott Santucci.
Fielded in March 2020, the study data-set ended up with over 100 responses! There were so many open-ended responses that a "guest analyst" program was created to help sort through the massive amount of data.
In this episode, we enroll the help of sales leadership. Question: What if your sales leadership called you in for an "Account Review" of your sales enablement efforts? How would you answer, and how would you explain your teams ongoing value to the organization, the specific initiatives adding the most value, and the upside potential (forecast) of your sales enablement efforts?
Well, buckle your seat-belt, our special guest analysts cull through 100+ responses and provide their take on the Future of Sales Enablement.
Our guests are:
- Skip Miller, CEO of M3 Learning
- Bob Apollo, CEO of Inflexion Point Strategy Partners
- Steve Crepeau, CEO of True Sales Results
To view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/
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 00:02
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
I'm Scott Santucci.
Brian Lambert 00:35
I'm Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders.
Scott Santucci 00:40
So hello inside our nation. As you know, our mission here on inside sales enablement is to give you the information you need to be successful in your role. Having been in the space for a long time, we've identified where big gaps are and resources for you and we're bringing them to you As part of this process, we have started doing a variety of COVID response activities. One of them is we had a five part series, leveraging the insights from Dr. Howard Dover, Kuunal Metha, who's a principal at private equity firm TCD. And then Lindsay Gore, a top sales executive at Microsoft, and her role was to keep us all honest. So that was a great, that was a great series. And coming from that we had a very interesting conversation about what private equity firms are seeing and their frustrations with sales and marketing in general. And then really what the role of sales enablement is that of course, cause Brian and I get to get concerned or curious about what the state of sales enablement is, and we launched a study. The study has a variety of different parts. The first part was doing a survey. So we conducted a survey, our goal was to get 25 responses because our survey was very q&a oriented, open ended text, we wanted to get the words from you of what you're seeing in your own words. Rather than having you react to what we think the words that you should be reacting to. We wanted to get 24 Films completed forms completed in a week. So of course, we set the goal at 50. And what did you do inside our nation? What did you do? Well, you got to 70 responses in one week. Today, we have over 100 responses. And that wasn't an easy survey if you took it. And if you're listening, you're probably one of the people who did. So that creates a high quality problem. The high quality problem with so much of that information is how the heck are we going to analyze it? And I'll tell you, there's a being a former Research Director, one of the things that you want to look for is where you put bias in. And when you have, when you have data, one of the things to look out for is where is the researcher or the analyst bias coming in, and I didn't want to do that. So I reached out to People who are experts in their fields and ask them for their input. So we've gotten a great response from from members of our panelists that we'll talk about here. But great response from over 25 people who are participating in our guest analyst program. That includes the CEO of seismic and the CEO of sales hood, if you know Eli, and includes SBI. As you know, salesbenchmarkindex is helping us out and given us an input. We're getting feedback from a variety of different sources that maybe you wouldn't think would would provide it and it's amazing how are communities coming together? In order all of this is leading up to if you can go to our website, inside se comm and log in. You can register for our findings meeting that's going to be on May 19. Do I know what the findings are going to be yet? No, we're still we're still analyzing. So I'm feeling a little bit nervous about that. But I think if you guys hype it more and make it more pressure point it'll be better quality for all of us. So having said that we're in the stage now where we're doing panels. And we're bringing some of the interviews together and we're looking for common trends in these conversations. Last week, we had we released our panel with sales enablement experts. If you know, Tamra shank, Mike Kunkel and Josie Mashburn. That was a fantastic one. And I'm delighted, just super excited for for this one right here. Now a little bit of a qualifier. One of the things that I've learned as a researcher is when you do interviews, you want to make sure that you don't share your opinions. And these three individuals will say I had more color and the email to send out to them, these three individuals because they're so skilled at sales pulled me into the conversation and got me model about what I think too. So I'm going to work really, really hard to make sure I don't put too much of my finger on the scale, but I'm publishing out that these guys are super expert at what they do they have conversations for a living and teach other people how to have valuable conversations. So this is going to be a Trump a Will's, am I a better researcher? Or are they better conversationalist? We'll see. So the competition is afoot. Now what I'd love to do right now, we're going to introduce our panel. So just to remind everybody of our format. I'm going to go through an introductions part, then we have three sections of conversations to go through. And then Brian is going to take over and wrap up and summarize where we found agreement on. So to start off with Skip Miller, Skip is the person that I know the most. So Skip has his own sales, training and productivity consultants, and he's had it for many, many years. I'll let him tell you who it is and what they do. But what was interesting is how did I meet Skip? So Skip and I met each other when he was hired at Forrester, while we were building the sales enablement practice to basically provide sales Enabling training to our Salesforce. So that's a tough spot to be into when you've got published research and we don't really do any things that scripted. And then he's got his own point of view. And then there's a lot of questions. Well, should we be listening to skip? And you know, why? What about our research, and it was really great because immediately we aligned on some key points and there was really no problem at all. So that's one of those things where I don't know whether it's more credible for me or more credible for him or we're both equally insane whatever the case is, that's how I met skip and I'm super delighted to work on this because I've been trying to find a way to work with skip ever since and this is this was a good way to get started. So skip, would you like to introduce yourself to our insider nation?
Skip Miller 06:45
I'm happy to, and it was a pleasure to work at Forrester. We there was record growth and record opportunities there. They were hiring a bunch of great people and, and the organization had some great leaders. So it was it was kind of fun to slip in there and work with you as you were develop. in that system enablement, sales enablement and stuff. So, I mean, that was, you know, 6789 years ago, you know, we still both keep in contact with a number of people from back there. And so if we do this for a living I live in the West Coast Southern California. So a lot of sass companies we do business with, you know, people, you know, small startups like Tableau and zoom and ringcentral and stuff all the way up to big companies like Google and stuff, but we try to do small and medium sized companies and get them when they're at that point where they're too big to be small but not big enough to be big and try to get them over that that hundred million dollar hump. So that's what we do and we have a good time there.
Scott Santucci 07:38
Awesome. So introducing our next panelist is Bob Apollo. Bob Apollo has a also a sales consultant improvement organization called inflection point. And I got to tell you, the first time I saw that name, I always love that maybe it's because I've got a little bit of an engineering me and I just love that concept. But, Bob, I've known about for a long time. I've seen him post and every time he posts on LinkedIn, it shocks me a bit because like, man, he's saying it in the exact same language that I'd say it, how does he know the same language that I've got? So I was always curious, but I never really had a chance to to engage with them. So finally, we go
Information
- Show
- FrequencyUpdated Monthly
- PublishedApril 30, 2020 at 3:00 PM UTC
- Length1h 9m
- Season1
- Episode34
- RatingClean