Sales Enablement PRO Podcast Sales Enablement PRO

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I’m 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 Rodney Umrah from Forcepoint join us. Rodney, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Rodney Umrah: Thank you so much, Shawnna. I am delighted to be here. My name is Rodney Umrah, and I’m the global head of enablement at our go-to-market organization here at Forcepoint.

SS: I’m excited to have you here. Now, I know that you’ve shared that enablement found you rather than you finding it. Tell us a little bit about that career journey. Why and how did you transition into the enablement field?

RU: I’ll take you back a little before I get to the transition because that will help to inform why that experience was so interesting to me. I was born on the lovely island of Jamaica, Shawnna. I’m not sure if you have been there before, but that’s where I was born. I went to the University of the West Indies and I studied computer science. I was fortunate to be hired right out of school by IBM. There’s a gentleman who did that, and I don’t know how I can pay it forward to him, his name is Carl Foster. He’s still my mentor and friend today. He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.

While being at IBM, there were 366,000 people in the organization. That was the largest IT company at the time, but it was like a university really, and I learned a lot. That’s where my true professionalism was honed. I migrated to Canada, that’s where I live now, and I was in technical roles between IBM Jamaica and IBM Canada, but I always wanted to be in sales. I transitioned from technical roles at IBM to sales, specifically software sales.

Now, a little bit of context, Shawnna, is that my mother is actually a teacher and my brother is a professor. I used to do that part-time, I was a part-time professor myself, so, as a result of that experience, enjoying the IBM experience, and doing well, I said I wanted to transition to Microsoft. I spent about eight and a half years at IBM, then over to Microsoft. I was there for five and a half years and then moved over to NetSuite. This is where, now, your question comes in, Shawnna, which is a transition. I was doing well in sales at NetSuite, going to club every year and especially leveraging my manager at the time. He was very instrumental in my success.

My GVP or Global Vice President of Sales, invited me into his office one day, and just asked me the question: are you interested in leading enablement? Now, the truth is I didn’t know what that term meant, enablement. I was like, enable what? I didn’t know because I was used to the term training. He asked me to speak to the leader of that organization because the GVP wanted me to lead enablement for his organization. As a result of that, the rest is history as they say, because here I am 10 years later and really, really enjoying it. I’ve been all over the globe, Shawnna. I was in Australia, the Philippines, Europe, across the US, Canada, you name it. I just have a great passion for the enablement vocation.

SS: I love that career journey, and I’d love to understand more about how you think that your non-linear career path and your background in roles, spanning sales and academia, have helped you in your role as an enablement leader.

RU: It certainly did, especially because I came from a sales background. It was, as I said, my group vice president who saw it in myself and also my manager. At the time, my manager asked me to do some best practices training with the team that we had at the time and it kind of grew and so they saw it and I didn’t.

As a result of having the sales background and then being able to enable sellers, there is instant cred

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I’m 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 Regan Barker from Grant Thornton, Australia join us. Regan, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. 

Regan Barker: Absolutely, Shawnna. It’s great to be here. My name is Regan Barker and I am the head of sales and sales enablement here at Grant Thornton Australia. Part of my role is to work closely with the business on their sales activity and sales coaching. Grant Thornton is an accounting audit and consulting firm. We have six offices across our beautiful nation and seven service lines. We sell over a hundred products and services across 11 industry specializations with about 170 partners and 1,300 people. 

SS: Thank you for joining us. We’re excited to have a guest on the podcast from the Australia region. Now, one area of expertise for you is coaching. I’d love to start there and understand why sales coaching is so important. 

RB: Great question. I think for particularly working in professional services, slightly different from more product-based businesses, our partners are the owners of the business. They’re also the experts and they’re actually the product. For me, coaching and advising our 170-odd partners is pivotal. 

In Australia, we have an ever-changing landscape across the business, regulation, and market pressure. We need to ensure that our partners and our people have the confidence to cut through the noise and really provide essential insights around business operations, regulatory change, and emerging issues for those businesses and senior leaders to make sound business decisions. Helping our partners in their activity helps them be more efficient as well as to be able to make sure that they’re talking to the right people around the right insights as well.

SS: Absolutely. From your perspective, what are some of the key components of an effective coaching program, especially in today’s sales landscape? 

RB: I think for effective coaching, it’s really about meeting people where they are. Most sales programs are based on supporting sales operators, our partners are the owners, and service providers, they’re the team leaders. They have to run the billing, run the client programs, absolutely everything. Our effective coaching has to be integrated as a part of their everyday life to make sure that it is effective and efficient. 

When I say meeting people where they are, really it’s about understanding their business, how it operates, what the sales cycles are, whether it’s heavily compliance-driven and you’ll be advising an organization and their CFO, for example, on a regular basis or cyclical basis versus some of our financial advisory experts that are heavily transactional. Meeting them where they are, both in how they operate, but also in terms of their own capability as well, some of which are extremely effective sales operators and others may be more introverted. It’s really about giving them confidence.

One of the pieces that we try to focus on is just focusing on one skill or development area at a time. Fine-tune that, making sure we find our efficiencies, and then as they build that confidence and capability, then we move on to the next area to help fine-tune something else, another skill. 

SS: I think those are absolutely key components to effective coaching programs. In your experience, what does good coaching look like? In other words, what does it take to be an effective sales coach? 

RB: I think the most powerful tool you can have is to also be a practitioner. In professional services, obviously, I’m not going to be a tax expert, I’m not going to be an auditor, but what I am is an

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I’m 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 Marja Moore join us. I would love for you to introduce yourself to our audience.

Marja Moore: Thank you, Shawnna. Hi, everyone, my name is Marja Moore, and I am in the Seattle area. I have most recently worked at companies like SAP, Concur, and Infoblox. Right now, I’m taking some time off to explore some new adventures, but I have worked in everything from marketing to business development to sales enablement and value methodology building. I have a diverse background in many industries and I use all of that to inform how I go forward with every new role, especially with enablement. 

SS: Wonderful. I’m excited to chat with you. There was something on your LinkedIn profile that caught my eye. You mentioned that you lean toward being a human-centric leader who is also focused on data-driven outcomes. I’d love to understand from you, why are both sides of this coin important as an enablement leader. 

MM: I would say it’s an important thing to have for any leader. First of all, we’re dealing with humans every day. You need to know what’s going to compel people. What’s going to get them to do what you need them to do, not only perform in their roles but also in the organization? How are they expanding their view? How are they becoming greater than what they were before? Understanding who you’re working with, whether that be people on your team or people that you’re trying to enable, you need to understand their values and what makes them tick is important.

I think every enablement leader will say, you always have to give them what’s in it for me. I think this is true for literally any leader you need in order to compel somebody, you’re going to need to know who the human is behind it. That’s important to me, not only knowing the people that I help lead, but those that I help enable. What are their needs? What compels them? What gets them to do the things that we need them to do, and how does that make them feel? 

On the other side of the coin is the data, and that is really driven by the need to say, okay, we see a hurdle, what does the data tell us? I think all business data is important because it tells you a story. How you interpret that story may differ, and it may tell people different things. For me, it’s important for me to look at the data, not only to help lead in the right way but also to help innovate and grow in the right way. Whether that be growing people or growing the business, the data is important, but the human element of it is always there.

You need to make sure that you’re looking at both in order to make the right decisions. Data is only part of the story. The humans that interact to create that data or make that data are also important. Going behind the data to see what that looks like from a human perspective is important.

SS: I love that. I know on the human side, one of the ways that you focus on this is by developing a sales council to support your enablement strategy. Tell us about that program. What did it entail and how did it impact your enablement strategy? 

MM: This goes back to that human focus part of it. What we learned from interviewing a lot of our sales personnel was that we were hearing things like, we need more experts, more SMEs teaching us. We need a better way to actually understand what we’re supposed to be doing. To me, that human element of people coming to us saying what we need is a data point. You take that human element and that data point and you say how do we fix that for me? 

There were two things. One, you always know that people in your organization are trying to move up or trying to better themselves, and ofte

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I’m 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 Jonathan Kvarfordt from Simetrik and the founder of GTM AI Academy join us. Jonathan, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. 

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Shawnna, I’ve been looking forward to this. Thank you for having me on. As a big fan of the organization and podcast, I just want to say first off, thank you. I am currently the head of revenue enablement and product marketing at Simetrik. I do everything with revenue enablement teams, sporting partners, CS teams, sales, and business development. The other hat I wear is product marketing. I currently have a team of five content writers and designers all they do is your basic content creation from websites to one-pagers, white papers to all things content, which is a lot of fun. I’m loving the first month and a half of craziness. 

SS: Love that. On LinkedIn, I noticed that you mentioned you’re passionate about empowering leadership in the age of AI. What does that look like to empower leaders in this rapidly evolving era, especially as AI becomes more prevalent? 

JK: I think that a lot of people are either confused, afraid or just unsure or trying to figure out if it’s really even something they should focus on in the first place. For me, I want to make sure I can help educate and number one, give confidence that it is something they can not only focus on themselves but also help their team to do so they can do things better, faster and less expensive, or more efficiently. I also want to make sure that they’re able to hopefully have some confidence in where we’re going in the direction of technology. In my opinion, this is the next leap in what we’re going to be experiencing as humankind is all the automation and efficiency that will happen as a result of AI technology.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. For our audience, specifically when it comes to enablement, Jonathan, why is AI an important topic for enablement practitioners to pay attention to?

JK: Oh, I could go on for a while for this one because I’m actually really passionate about enablement specifically. On a side note, I am part of a core group of people who I have been working with over the past year and we are all business consultants from various industries. We have all been talking about how to use AI. We’ve been masterminding and collaborating on it. None of them are in the go-to-market or enablement space like I am. I have a little bit more unique views as opposed to them.

One thing they keep bringing up is how they want to start consulting businesses on how to adopt what they’re calling AI training. I was like, okay, tell me what you would do in that scenario, and they just said, okay, well, we’d go in and teach them about tools and how to best use them and how to impact revenue. I’m like, wait a second, that’s what enablement does. In my opinion, I think that enablement specifically should be leading the charge on not only using it in their own workflows but also helping the entire org become AI-powered. 

One more note with that is that in this last year, I know a lot of enabling people specifically have had challenges with providing or at least showing their value. At least that’s something that people have told me about, they’re just not sure how to show the value of what enablement can do. One way I think they can help expedite that process, both subjectively and objectively to show the impact of what we can do is using AI as the mechanism to show what enablement does on a day-to-day basis, but also to help the rest of the team do what they do better. That’s, in my opinion, the essence of why enablem

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I’m 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 Jennifer Ryan at Blackline join us. Jennifer, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jennifer Ryan: Absolutely. My name is Jennifer Ryan. I’m the director of global sales enablement here at Blackline. I went the long way around to find my way to enablement. When I was a solutions consultant, I was a customer success manager. I’ve done IT support, I’ve done customer training. I’ve done all of these things, and my senior VP of sales came up to me and he says, you keep circling the barrel, but until you understand sales, you can’t understand business, so you have two choices. You can go into sales enablement, or you can go into sales. I chose sales enablement.

SS: I love that. Now, you also describe yourself as someone who specializes in navigating fear and leaning into trying new things, as you just alluded to in your introduction with all of the various experiences that you’ve had throughout your career journey. How have you applied this mindset now to your role in enablement?

JR: When we think about enablement, the whole goal, whether we’re selling widgets or we’re selling software, we are asking people to change. When we ask others to change, that means that there’s something in us that has to change. As human beings, we are emotionally driven. Change is very difficult for us. It’s always steeped in the fear of the unknown. I use this idea behind being experimental, being okay with trying something, and failing because the magic is in the quote-unquote failure.

The idea that failure is negativity is horrible, it’s where all of the magic comes from. Think about science. How many things were discovered by accident because someone just tried something and what was a failure for one thing became something else? I apply this mindset to the folks in enablement that while you might be afraid to try something new, that while you might be resistant, there is absolutely nothing that you should be afraid of and just trying.

SS: I love that mindset. Now, that all being said, the sales environment has undergone a lot of change in the last few years, and change can cause fear for some folks. What are some of the common challenges that can arise from giving into fear?

JR: What I see most often that comes out of that fear mindset, and if we even think about all of the information that’s come out of Gartner and this idea behind buyer enablement, this idea that it’s not so much about us as the salespeople, but more about what the buyer knows about themselves. There’s a lot of fear of loss of control in the sales cycle. There’s this idea that historically we’ve gone in discovery and we’ve peppered questions and now it’s, how do we coach a buyer into answering those questions for themselves that we lead them instead of tell them?

That’s scary because you don’t know what’s coming. You have to be agile and you have to use your active listening skills. Those are not muscles that we always flex. Some are very good at it, but others struggle. When we struggle and then there’s the looming quota, those are all very fear-inducing instances in sales.

SS: I love that. What are some of your best practices to help sellers overcome fear though, through enablement efforts?

JR: My favorite practice to alleviate fear is humor. When you’re laughing, our bodies release serotonin, and dopamine in our brains. It’s almost like we’re drug addicts if you will. I don’t mean to use that term loosely, but we are subject to that release in our brains, and when we associate that with something new, something that we’ve learned, we have a Pavlo

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I’m 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 Nicholas Gregory from Qlik join us. Nick, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Nicholas Gregory: Thank you so much, Shawnna, for the opportunity to speak to you and to speak to your audience here. My name is Nicholas Gregory. I started my career in sales after university. Specifically with a cybersecurity company called McAfee about 15 years ago, where I was given an opportunity to fulfill a very personal and professional goal of mine to work in Latin America, which is a different conversation for a different day. Nonetheless, the powers that be at the company, knowing my aspirations to work in Latin America, tap me on the shoulder to be a new member of a new global team of sales consultants placed regionally across the globe to deploy what we would call ‘enablement services today’ in a globally consistent manner.

I was brought on to that team to lead their Latin America efforts from a sales enablement services perspective and that’s where I found myself in enablement. Since that time I’ve led a regional, and most of my career now, global sales enablement teams for technology organizations such as Symantec, Veritas, Sabre, and Couchbase. Currently, I’m the global head of sales enablement and effectiveness at Qlik, and we’re a business intelligence, data analytics, and data integration company where we help organizations to better understand their data, whatever that might mean to them, to run their business and help turn their data into action.

SS: Well, Nick, we’re excited to have you here joining us with your wealth of experience. One of the things that caught my eye about your background was the focus on improving sales productivity, which I think is the ultimate goal for most folks in enablement. In your opinion, what is enablement’s role in helping to drive productivity for the business?

NG: Enablement’s role in improving sales productivity is very multifaceted. To answer, first, I’ll speak to what I feel is important to share with the audience, which is my opinion on what are the four key principle enablement services that enablement should provide to the organization itself. that we’re working for. This is from an end-to-end strategic discipline perspective. Those are four in this order. Technology services, so that is, we may not own the sales tech stack or most of the sales tech stack, but we train on those particular tools, let’s say, or in partnership with whoever might own those tools, whether it’s marketing or other parts of organization, and also in some cases, we own part of the tech stack as well, where we are from an admin perspective, but we’re here to train on those tools, no matter where they reside and who funds them on how to be more efficient and effective with those tools. Whether it’s a conversation intelligence tool, a prospecting tool, whatever the case may be, or your CRM whatever the case may be, we’re here to help support being more effective.

Number two, training services. We can’t forget where we came from in enablement. We’re born out of training, but that is a key component to the four services, training services. That is your onboarding, methodology, product training, business acumen training, industry training, and everything in between.

Number three is coaching services, which is a critical component and often doesn’t get funded as much as it should with organizations today, especially in this changing buyer-seller landscape. Any of the investments we make that are imperative for the organization, be the actual organization itself or the sales organization, we should be suppor