Selling the Impact of Sales Enablement & World War 1

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 2

Are you using new tactics, but everyone around is "do it as usual"?  You're not alone in the desire to change from within. In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss the challenges they've encountered in positioning and selling sales enablement in organizations. While this may seem easy, the value is the eye of your internal customers. Therefore, translating the impact and promise of the function is critical not only to their buy-in but also to the successful pursuit of the business impact your company expects from your role. Much of what we have encountered in explaining the "features and benefits" of the role come down to how our communications are received by those around us. 

We use a highly disruptive and somewhat somber analog for what it feels like to share the future path forward. The analog? WWI warfighting tactics and how "hard-wired" everyone was to continue to pursue them, even to their own detriment. The generals, the people, the communication, the processes, and yes, even the measures all called for a new approach to warfare, but they just weren't embraced. Why? Because human muscle memory is hard to overcome. Even if drastic and disruptive times, where NEW is required. Luckily for us, we're not in a life-or-death situation, but we are in a time of drastic change where muscle memory is required to change by confronting reality.

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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 Sam Tucci 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

Hello, I'm Scott Tucci.

Brian Lambert 00:34

Hey, it's Brian Lambert here and we're the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking those big questions you should be asking if you want to be successful with sales enablement. Do you have an idea of the value of sales enablement for your company? And are you frustrated that others might not see it? Oh, man, holy cow, am I live in that right now? I was actually listening to our last podcast, Scott and I thought Before he plays on to the next one, or to another one, I think we should pause and reflect a little bit around. What happened. One of the things that he said, in that discussion on our first podcast was, Oh, you know, I went around, and I got buy in from everybody. And then we, you know, we did it. And I said, that's easier said than done. I've found in my own role, that's incredibly difficult. And I think that's the topic of this podcast, you know, how do you go about getting others to buy in to a more strategic view sales enablement? And I want to explore that here in the podcast today. What do you think?

Scott Santucci 01:38

I think it's great. And Brian, as as you know, we like to try to have a leveling story. To really frame this issue out and to me the leveling story here goes back to World War One if you can kind of picture in your head and your mind, a whole bunch of say British or French troops down They're in the trenches with the rifle and the bayonets armed, just waiting for that dreaded whistle to blow to go over the top. And when they go over the top, they have to cut through a whole bunch of barbed wire over no man's land. And then they would just get machine gunned down by Germans in a pillbox. And when you think about that, the strategies there what why did they do that? And one of the battles actually, actually, over a million people died in a battle. It's just amazing. Yeah. And what happened really is that these generals all learned the tactics, and what beat what running a military was using Napoleonic tactics. So, they learned everything about what how to run a military, how to organize a military, what motivation was, what strategies were all based on what Napoleon did in the early 1800s. What they didn't account for was the Industrial Revolution during that Industrial Revolution, a huge amount of things happen. Number one, troops could be brought to the brought to the frontline and trains. Number two, you actually had mass produced foods, you could have much, much larger armies. Number three, the weapons that you had available, you had machine guns rather than at muskets that you had to front load. The altar artillery could shoot miles in advance, poisonous gas, had airplanes, and all of these different innovations but they didn't change their tactics. That's a framing.

Brian Lambert 03:38

Yeah, that's a great story. Thanks. Now hopefully, hopefully we're not eating lunch, but I that's a bit of a morbid story. And you know, I said this in the first one, you know, what does this What the heck does this have to do? with sales enablement. Now I feel like I need to get my my flak jacket on and and wonder what I'm doing in the trench. But I think there's something more to it than and has to do with this idea of the changing times that we're in? And are we equipping ourselves to take the the new battle?

Scott Santucci 04:08

That's right. The reason I like that story is it's not that the generals of the French force or the English force, it's not like they didn't care is that they didn't have the concept of a completely different way. And the reason I think this is a this is a great story is we have to be able to articulate to our leaders the fact that sales enablement is actually a different role, just as pursuing a strategy that's different than what the Napoleonic tactics are. As foreign as that is we have the advantage of having 100 years of hindsight, they didn't have that option then. And this is where we are today. sales enablement, might as well be as new as the idea offering the idea of why don't we not dig in and trenches and why do we Why do we not do For the over the route to a frontal assault, yeah, that's really that's really the point here of, of that story and what the relationship is, that's the big the magnitude of the challenge of the internal selling that a lot of us have.

Brian Lambert 05:16

Yeah, and this is super important for me, because, you know, my background in learning and development, you know, I kind of grew up in there in that field, I grew up in the sales field. And, you know, from a sales perspective, I was a top performer and, you know, any tweaks or improvements that I wanted to make to the system I was, I was met with a, you know, the equivalent of why don't you just shut up and sell more, because you're a top performer, we don't need any ideas. And then on the l&d side, when it became time to not lead with, you know, training speak or frameworks or a bunch of theoretical stuff, it became No, we can't do that because that's all we have. We have to show them that stuff. Because, you know, that's our needs analysis checklist. And if you were to take both of those fields and say, I'm not going to do that anymore, and you take those away, what are you going to replace it with? And that's a bit of a risky feeling it was for me back then. And I think that's the big you know why here is, when you want to make a pivot or make a change like that, and replace it with something else, you're going to feel a little uncomfortable, and a little at risk and a little exposed, and especially if there's a mechanism and machinery around you, or, or ways of working processes, you know, chains of command, etc. And that's why I wanted to double click into this, Scott, because when you look at this idea of selling sales enablement as a role at Forrester, you know, that's a research company, it's been around for a long time, it didn't have brand new roles cropping up, you know, to go out and sell to, and you were able to do that and I think I want to, I want to explore that with you here today. And understand how that how that comes together. So, can you take us back to that time and this idea of Getting buy in Who did you get buy in from? What type of discussions did you have? etc?

Scott Santucci 07:06

Yeah, so first bit of nomenclature. So, when you talk about for certain roles at the time, the idea was a role was more or less like a product. So, it would be you do research, okay dedicated to a role. That's right. For example, one role that's pretty easily identifiable as the CIO, Forrester would do research targeted directly to the CIO and build a variety of different capabilities, subscription research capabilities, even consulting capabilities, and other things to sell to that dedicated role. So, the challenge is the way Forrester was organized at the time. The company was organized into three different business units. There was the IT business unit, of which CIO was one of those but then they had other roles like security officer infrastructure and operations. Then you had the marketing business unit. And that business unit was very focused on b2c foresters excellence, just phenomenal excellence around marketing is very, very, very, very heavy into the customer experience, b2c world. And then the third business unit, the business unit that I was in was a business unit called the tech industry. And at the time, people who wan