Sales Enablement PRO Podcast

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 Debbi Varela, the author ofPut Me In, Coach, here with us today. Debbi, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Debbi Varela:Absolutely. Thanks for having me. My name is Debbi Varela. I have over 15 years of experience now in the sales enablement and transformation space before it was even really like what it is today. I have been lucky enough to have worked with some of the world’s smallest startups to some of the world’s largest tech companies. After working in these businesses of all sizes throughout my career, I have honestly met some of the coolest and most interesting people. I’ve learned so much about what works, what doesn’t work, why it didn’t work, and what to do next time.

SS:We’re excited to have you here, Debbi. Now, going back to your book, you actually discuss how coaching can create a culture of success for businesses. In your opinion, what are the key components of a successful sales culture?

DV:That is a great question. Funny enough, I actually had just published a blog on my website on this exact topic a few weeks ago. I believe the recipe to create a winning sales culture is really around five key things. The first one for me is really just having a defined vision so everyone understands what their position is on the field or where they fit into the bigger picture of the organization. I just feel this is incredibly important because it gives a sense of belonging and purpose to individuals.

The second one I think it’s a key element that I’m passionate about, which is really around skill, or sometimes I call it action mapping and motivation. What I mean by this is truly knowing your team member’s strengths and their areas of improvement and how to motivate each person. Where will they naturally excel? Where will they need a little bit more encouragement? What’s the best way to encourage them? Are they extrinsically motivated or intrinsically motivated? That makes a huge difference.

The third one I think is super important, which I see time and time again in organizations, is accountability and continuous feedback. That would honestly come in as one of the most important ingredients for a thriving sales culture. Interestingly enough, with many of the companies I’ve worked with, this is oftentimes their biggest weakness. When I say accountability, I’m talking about like, do you manage behavior? Do you as a leader take responsibility or do you blame other people? Do you manage your pipeline and then do you spend enough time on pipeline reviews? Do you have a cadence that you’re holding yourself and your team accountable to? That’s what I think of when I think about accountability.

The next one is really around team building and trust to ensure that your team operates as a single unit. You can see this really play out on the sports team when teammates trust each other and they really know each other. Things just look effortless for them and they just flow together.

Finally, for me, it’s the last one on my list, but it’s honestly just as important, which is celebrating successes and learning from failures. You should celebrate every win, no matter how small it is, because it’s still a win. I feel that setbacks should be reviewed with positive intent, not to blame, but to learn any ball from those.

SS:I love that approach. Especially today in the current environment, why is coaching critical in today’s sales environment and how does it help nurture a healthy sales culture?

DV:I think coaching is absolutely critical and honestly it’s interesting because I think that most people would agree with that statement, but then when you dig into that with the sellers or managers, they have a different response. They don’t feel like they’re getting enough coaching from their managers and managers don’t necessarily feel like they have enough time or even the skills to do said coaching. Typically what I see happen is the managers try, but ultimately find it difficult to get on a regular and consistent coaching cadence with their teams.

In lieu of that, they tend to jump in and rescue the seller during a sales call to show them how it’s done, but that is not coaching. Ultimately that leads to an unhealthy sales culture because that decreases accountability and responsibility on both sides. It also erodes trust and it undermines the confidence of both sides.

For me, if a more consistent coaching cadence was in place and managers were given the skills to coach effectively, then a positive and supportive culture would help to motivate and engage teams, which would then attract and retain their top talent. It would drive performance and deliver better results for customers. Coaching is just a critical factor in creating and developing high-performing sales teams in my personal and humble opinion.

SS:I love that opinion. I’d also love to get your opinion, Debbi, on what a good coaching program looks like.

DV:Absolutely. I believe that a good coaching program has to have a well-defined structure and it needs to provide some type of system, whatever it is, for managers to enhance the skills and performance for the overall effectiveness of just the individuals within their team. For example, it should have clear objectives that are measurable and aligned to the specific skills or the behaviors or outcomes that they want to improve.

One thing I just want to mention is that coaching programs really can’t take a peanut butter spread approach. You have to develop them with the individual needs in mind and there should be some kind of feedback or performance management framework in place to help provide individuals with specific things in a timely manner and also focus on the behavior that can be observed in positive reinforcement as well as constructive criticism. I mean, in coaching, really, the key is continuous improvement. Goals or milestones are established and then also be adaptable to the needs of that individual. Your coaching begins to evolve over time.

SS:Absolutely. Those are great key principles to structure your coaching program. What would you say some common challenges are when it comes to coaching and how can enablement help mitigate those challenges?

DV:I think the most common challenges that I see and hear are focused around three things, which is time, skill, and consistency. With time constraints, managers, just don’t have it. There are just way too many competing priorities. Enablement can help by providing some time management training for coaches, as well as even just like some type of structured coaching schedule.

The next one is about the lack of skills or training, I hear this all the time that managers really want to coach, but they just don’t really know how to do it. I think enablement can offer some type of coaching skills training program or provide them with some kind of organized workshop resources and just offer some ongoing support.

The third one I see a lot is that they will start coaching, but then it just falls off. Just a lack of consistency and inconsistency in coaching across teams always leads to some kind of uneven result. Enablement can help by implementing some kind of standardized coaching framework with cadences and guidelines. They can provide templates, resources, and checklists that will help managers keep that consistency and have that structure that can anchor them to keep it going over time.

SS:I think those are some great suggestions. Oftentimes in sales teams, I think front-line managers really serve as the key coaches for their teams. How can enablement help prepare those front-line managers to be more effective coaches?

DV:I think enablement teams can respond to some of the things we just talked about about the common challenges. For example, if enablement can provide comprehensive coaching skill training for frontline managers, where they focus on things like active listening, effective communication, and giving feedback, that’s often actually very hard for people to do in a way that’s effective for the person they’re giving the feedback to.

Goal setting and all the other essential coaching competencies. Developing a repository of coaching resources, as I mentioned, including guides, templates, and best practices, just so that these frontline managers have easy access to materials that can aid in their coaching efforts, make it a little bit easier for them, because remember, they have so much going on and so many competing priorities.

Offer training on goal setting and action planning. Use things like the SMART goal framework with their teams to create actionable plans to help the plans that they’re actually setting. Then establishing a system for ongoing monitoring and support. If enablement can do some kind of regular check-in with frontline manag

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 Andy Springer, the chief client officer at RAIN Group, join us. Andy, I would love for you to introduce yourself, and your role in your organization to our audience.

Andy Springer: Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for having me. I am Andy Springer, the Chief Client Officer at the RAIN Group. My role is one that each and every day I am a practitioner leading teams in terms of supporting large-scale sales transformations and also working with small, and medium-sized enterprises in terms of upscaling and developing sales skills that are going to shift the dial in terms of sales performance.

SS: Wonderful. The reason that we wanted to pull you on to this podcast is because RAIN Group actually recently released a study that identified some key trends in the current sales landscape. In your opinion, what are the trends that have the greatest impact on businesses and their ability to succeed in the current environment?

AS: Yeah, I would say that the trends that we saw through our research were a significant increase in terms of sales cycles. Opportunities are taking longer to close. There’s more complexity in terms of that. The amount of opportunities that are being led to a loss due to no decision. While there may be significant needs, significant problems to solve, and objectives to be supported to achieve, for whatever reason we’re seeing a lot of no decision being what they lost to instead of competitors.

I think the third one is selling in an uncertain economy. If you look at the post-pandemic world and you look at the political challenges that have impacted the market, you look at the shift in terms of the financial impacts in terms of the post-pandemic inflationary world and then how that’s changed the dynamics of the economy, it’s made it really challenging particularly in the B2B space, but not exclusive to. That uncertainty cascades uncertainty in terms of sellers and how they approach the market and what they are dealing with.

SS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. From your perspective, Andy, how have these trends influenced or created top challenges that sales organizations are facing today? What would you say those top challenges are?

AS: I think it was pretty clear from our research that in terms of when I look at it through the lens of a sales leader and sales enablement space, one of the most consistent challenges that keeps showing its face in the sales space is recruiting and hiring sales talent and the associated challenges with that.

Also, the uncertain economy piece was represented very strongly, generating qualified sales leads continues to be a significant challenge for a lot of organizations. We dive into the skill areas where the key challenges in developing sales skills are relevant in the real-time selling environment. Also, the one which I found unsurprising, but I think some who I’ve spoken to in reflection on the report found surprising, which was the challenge of developing sales managers. Often in the sales enablement space, I see that sales managers are the ones who are most forgotten about. They’re also the ones that are often the loudest in asking, requesting, and demanding skills from their sellers. Often when it comes to developing skills for them to be better managers, it’s something that they’re either left out on, it’s not a focus or it may not be that there’s a budget to focus on developing them.

SS: Absolutely. Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. To that point, especially for our audience, what role can enablement play in helping businesses overcome these challenges?

AS: I think there are three key areas that we’ve really isolated and focused on. The first one is improving sales productivity as a whole. One of the fortunate things that we get to be involved in is introducing productivity thinking tools and ultimately seeking to shift behavior in productivity. Why is that? Well, every organization you go into, whether it’s, you’re going into a sales organization or the sales area of an organization or other parts, everyone says the same thing. ‘I’ve always got way too many things to do and not enough time to do them in.’

When we really focus on the sales organization, what we see is some of the greatest deficiency in skill is not necessarily around how to sell, it is how do I produce more? Everyone has the same amount of time in a week, and in our studies, what we seek to do is often define, well, what top performers in sales and sales management do that others don’t that makes them top performing.

I think one of the things that cried out really clearly was top performers have an incessant focus in terms of the productivity of their sellers and sales leaders inside their organization. and they seek to improve the way in which they focus on productivity before selling skills.

The next one I would say then leads to developing multi-skilled sellers. If you look at the journey that we’re just starting to build here we’ve identified ways to free up time for the sellers so they focus on what’s most important. Then, when we align that with the development of their selling skills in that multi-skill space, we start to see more time focused in the right areas, which means we’re going to start to see an impact on the win rate.

Those two factors are critically important. The last thing I’ve kind of touched on is leveraging our sales managers. I understand that a lot of organizations do a really good job in developing broad-based management skills, and a lot of that links very much to sales managers. We often go into organizations and we see that the management skill and application in the sales area is fairly good. I mean, obviously, there are deficiencies in some areas and industries and types, but broadly we see a consistent level of management skill. What we see as a broad-based deficit in terms of skill is coaching. Sales managers not just focusing on the management aspects, you know, territory planning, pipeline management, those sorts of day-to-day or weekly, quarterly activities including planning and those sorts of things when I’m talking in the management context, but what about the coaching? What are the coaching elements?

If we’ve got increased levels of productivity in our selling organization, we’re training our sellers in terms of the skills that are going to help enable them to perform better. When we combine that with a focus on the development of sales managers to not just manage but to be really good coaches of their selling team as well, and we develop coaching skills within that we see a transformative effect start to take place.

Now the team is operating as a whole and everyone knows their role in a lot of cases, we’re talking critical mass here. I know there’s a lot of people that will be listening to this saying, well, we’re never going to achieve that. With 100 percent of our selling organization, you don’t need to in order to see significant sales performance improvement. You only need a critical mass that is developing the learning and applying this new dynamic in their selling organization to see a significant shift. Often the first measure that we start to see lift his win rate.

SS: Absolutely. You just kind of got to thaw that frozen middle, right? What should enablement leaders be prioritizing in their strategies for the year ahead to help businesses address these challenges?

AS: What I’m seeing get the greatest traction, as I said, is probably the gap in terms of sales manager focus. How do we make our managers better managers and better coaches in order to help drive sales performance improvement? Particularly I see a lot of organizations do one thing really well, right? Selling organizations invest in training their teams.

Now, the one other thing about training is that sellers and sales managers get access to new information and knowledge. That knowledge can have an informative, motivational, and inspirational impact, but we all know that, outside of the virtual training room or the physical classroom, once they have obtained that knowledge, it means nothing without the application of that knowledge.

I think one of the critical areas is if we’re going to invest in improving the productivity of our sales organization, we’re going to develop the skills of our sellers, we’re going to develop the skills of our managers. How are we going to support the application of that learning over the first 7, 30, 90 days and beyond, so that we get the true impact of what we’re seeing?

When we see applied knowledge implemented, and then we see sellers and sales managers effectively held to account for the application of that learning, we start to see the rubber meet the road and ultimately the business outcomes that you’re seeking through developing your people start to show, as we say, the dial starts to shift in the direction that you want it to. That gap in terms of applied learning is a big one. There’s no point in working on those three areas that we’ve talked about without a significant focus on the enablement of that throughout the organization over a sustained period.

SS: I love that. You’ve talked about the importance of frontline managers, as well as I think sales leaders. How can enablement leaders and sales leaders partner to better align their strategies to the top priorities of the business?

AS:

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 Jay Shephard at Bentley Systems join us. Jay, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jay Shephard: Thanks for the invite. I’m thrilled to meet you and spend some time with you. Where do you start? I have been doing this for a while. I started my career 25 years ago selling, and when you start your career in selling you start to pick up some things that seem to go well. All of a sudden I started being asked to do some coaching with new hires that were coming in by my boss. What I found out, Shawnna, is I loved it. It’s a lot of fun.

I thought, is there a career around this? I love selling, but I also love the coaching element. That’s how I kind of, we’ll call it backdoored into this thing called enablement. Specific to enablement, it is an evolving picture, which I’m sure we’ll get a chance to talk a little bit more about.

I’ve had an opportunity to work primarily in the enterprise software space in both sales effectiveness tools as well as software platforms. I started with Bentley in 2023 and really took on a very cool challenge and that was to redesign, revamp, and repurpose enablement to be more of a strategic aligned value add to our CRO. That’s where I am today.

SS: We’re excited to have you here, Jay. Now, a key focus for you at Bentley Systems is really, as you’ve stated in your intro, reframing the way that your organization thinks about enablement. From your perspective, what are some of enablement’s core responsibilities and what is the value that it brings to the business?

JS: I think enablement, the industry, the space, whether it’s in the United States, Europe, or Asia, doesn’t matter, it is in flux. In other words, if you ask 15 people what the definition of enablement is, you can get 25 answers. When it came to coming to Bentley, what we figured out early on was the fact that there is this talented group of people that make up the enablement team, but they were misunderstood. They were almost pushed into a corner and almost like enablement became the department of broken things, as I always call it.

They were an afterthought. It was the last thought, like oh yeah, we better get enablement involved. Well, that’s really not the purpose of enablement, but it was created to be that way based on just general culture and a lack of definition of the value of what enablement brings.

SS: Jay, I know that you created a sales enablement charter, which really kind of focuses on outlining the mission, the goals, the strategy, and the responsibilities of your enablement function. Tell our audience more about this. What are your best practices for creating an effective enablement charter?

JS: I’ll start off by saying the reason I went to Bentley. It had everything to do with the CRO. He wanted to lead a transformation project, initiative if you would, company-wide to drive the strategic value of Bentley Solutions to their end customer. The CRO realized that there were some significant gaps in there, which of course was enablement.

I took this position first and foremost because it was aligned with the CRO. I think that’s really important for your listeners to know. The CRO is critical to the direction, as well as the strategic value of what enablement brings. Knowing that, connecting with our CRO as I did through that interview process, I knew this was an opportunity I wanted to take advantage of.

Knowing that we were going to start from scratch, we went out and essentially asked individuals who were key to the business all throughout the globe, 1, what is your definition of enablement? You would not believe how many different definitions I had. 2, what are the current challenges here? Why are we not winning business? Why are we winning business? For that matter, what are the opportunities? We then used that information to build a charter that was strategically aligned to not only Bentley’s business priorities but also the CRO’s MBOs.

We built it from that perspective and then worked backward. Here are the metrics that we knew that we needed to hit to drive the priorities and the MBOs of the business. How do you design enablement to make that happen? We literally created functions as well as areas of responsibility to help drive those initiatives, those metrics, if you would, and of course, that strategic alignment, which was so critical to the CRO and myself.

SS: Absolutely. I love those. Tell us a little bit about your perspective on how an enablement charter helps to drive alignment with the broader organizational strategy and the objectives of your company.

JS: Since I have been here I probably have had no less than 50 conversations with people asking me, what does enablement do within Bentley? These are Bentley employees. First and foremost, that charter that you’re talking about, the reason it is so important is to ensure everybody’s on the same page in regards to expectations and what the possibilities could be in working with enablement or us working with that particular function of the business. That to me sets in motion a transparent relationship of our capabilities and what it is that we can deliver.

Anything you do when it comes to a charter has to be very clear in communicating what it is that you do, what you’re capable of doing, what your capacity is that you can be doing, and here’s how you are measured.

SS: It’s amazing to achieve that level of alignment. Jay, how are you driving strategic buy-in of this charter with your key stakeholders and in particular, perhaps some of your executive leaders?

JS: Well, first of all, executive leaders are measured just as well as enablement is measured. If we can align our agenda to their agenda, then we are in partnership. One of the first things that I did was I reached out to all of our global leaders and understood a little bit more about what their metrics were, what they were measured by, and really what the gaps were. Once we identified those gaps, we discovered ways that enablement could close those gaps.

Let me tell you something, when you can help someone else achieve their objectives, you don’t have a problem getting a phone call returned. That’s where they knew that I was working towards helping them with their agenda. I can tell you this team immediately got the credibility and the opportunity to drive value far more than they’ve been able to up until that point.

SS: The buy-in that you’ve been able to secure at Bentley is fantastic. Now, since Bentley is in a rapidly evolving business landscape, how do you ensure that your sales enablement strategy remains adaptive to emerging trends and industry changes?

JS: Well, that’s such a great question. Asking it in a different way, it’s almost like the old belief that when you train someone, they’re automatically trained. You never need to touch it again. We know you and I both know, Shawnna, that’s not true. To ensure that your enablement strategy and alignment are real, you have to have a continuous conversation. You have to be able to ensure that it’s not a one-and-done type of relationship.

For me, anyway, I have ongoing, anywhere from between two and four-week conversations with all of our respective leaders across the globe. I also have a similar relationship and frequency of meetings with the CRO. Here’s what we do that I think is uniquely different. I’ve taken my team and we have geographically dispersed ourselves from a coverage point of view. I have, for example, a European lead. I have a US lead. We’re going to be bringing on an Asia pack lead and so on and so on.

Because of that coverage, we now are closer to our customers. We are consistently asking not only in our coaching work that we do with them or the training work that we’re doing with them, we’re constantly getting feedback in regards to what’s missing, what we need to do differently, and so on and so on. We’re not necessarily looking for negativity, what we are looking for are opportunities to improve.

SS: Along with the adaptability of enablement, it’s also important to ensure reps are adaptable to change as well. I know a key way to do this is through coaching, which is an area that you have a lot of expertise in Jay. What role does coaching play in your enablement strategy?

JS: Coaching is critical. In fact, I would even say I put more of an emphasis on coaching and implementation than I do the training itself. Think about this. It doesn’t matter what generation you are in. If you’re millennial, if you’re Gen X, Gen Z, I don’t care. I mean, what’s the newest one now, Shawnna? I think it’s Generation Alpha, but I don’t know if they’re even in the workforce yet.

My point is they all learn differently. Some are attracted to badging, some people are attracted to microlearning, and some people want a dissertation with all the details. Then you got the audio and you got the visual and the kinesthetic elements that go into learning and transferring knowledge. That’s all well and good, and yes, you need to touch on some of those elements, but coaching is where it is applicable. You take that learning and you apply it.

It’s so different from reading a book. I don’t know about you, but I love to read. I’m always reading, but I always have that challenge that ever

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 credibility there. The reason for it is not because I’m brilliant. The reason for it is that you’re coming from the same vocation that you’re enabling. You don’t only talk the talk, but you have walked the talk. People can see it. Whenever you present, they can understand for sure that you have been in the trenches before. This is not a theory. It’s not just words on a page. Coming from that background was really, really instrumental in my success.

Now, the other area is academia as a result of being a part-time professor. Being able to stand and confidently deliver content, I took it for granted. Shawnna, you probably are aware, presenting in front of an audience is like one of the top three fears that people have. All of those pieces coming together and the experiences there really bode well for me in being in enablement and I’m absolutely enjoying the ride.

SS: I love to hear that. That is fantastic. What would you say are some of the challenges that practitioners might face when they’re trying to make a career transition, and how did you overcome some of those challenges as you pivoted into the enablement career?

RU: Wow, that’s, that’s a loaded question there, Shawnna, and we don’t have the time to go over the list, but the truth is, when you transition into enablement, just like any other new role, especially if it’s different from the one that you’re coming from, you will often feel less than, meaning it’s almost like you don’t feel like you are qualified to be there.

That’s a feeling that one would need to overcome with time. So, I struggled with that, which is why I asked my GVP at the time. I was like, why are you asking me to do this? I don’t know how to do this. You know what he said to me, Shawnna? I’ll never forget it. It was in his office. He said, Rodney, all I need for you to do is to teach others what you do and what you do well when you’re in sales. That gave me the comfort level to say “Oh, what I’ll be doing is very similar to what I’m doing today. All I’m doing is really imparting my, or paying forward, my knowledge in this field.”

That really helped feeling less than is one of the areas that you need to watch out for anyone transitioning into enablement. The other one is that there are very high expectations of individuals in enablement. Very high. In fact, we all know that in sales there is always high velocity, right? The expectations are high, and there’s an anticipation that you should make an impact now, and that can cause stress. It certainly can, but of course, as long as you are pacing yourself and ensuring that you’re doing the best you can, working with the resources that you have, ensuring that you’re aligned to the strategic priorities and you have ruthless prioritization, you will certainly overcome.

The demands are high, Shawnna. They’re coming from all over. They’re probably coming from your CRO. They’re coming from the RevOps organization, legal product marketing, et cetera.
Managing all of that can be really challenging, but of course, just like anything else, you will figure it out over time as you work with others and learn from others.

SS: I love that advice. I want to drill into this a little bit. What are some of the key skills that have helped you succeed as an enablement leader? What skills do you think other enablement leaders should look for when they’re building out their teams?

RU: I was fortunate, as I mentioned earlier, to have 10 years of experience in sales, software/cloud sales to be exact. As a result of that background, I wasn’t just enabling because it was on a slide. The content that I was delivering was coming from the heart and the brain at the same time because of my experience. I think people can see through that. People are looking for transparency so that decade of sales background really helped me.

As I transitioned in, and even today, going into my eleventh year, I think I have also shown the leadership skills that I’ve gathered along the way, even when interacting with clients when I was in sales. I’ll give you an example: When I was at Oracle NetSuite, I had fifteen strategic accounts in the northeast of the U.S. Going through that process, we had lots of challenges, but we had to overcome those to be able to ensure that those organizations thrive.

You had to exhibit, on a consistent basis, leadership skills and helping your customers.
It’s the same when you are in an enablement, because, especially when you’re dealing with a global company, people are scattered all across the world. Being able to deal with so many different individuals with diverse backgrounds and thoughts is very important.

I will also hasten to say that exhibiting empathy is key as well in our roles because the sales role is stressful. It really is, and I guess because I’ve been there, I know that. As a result, when dealing with that audience, and when I say sales here, it could be business development, it could be sales themselves or sales engineers, it could be renewals, it could be customer success, those are stressful roles. Executing your job in an empathetic way is very key. Always having an open mind to continuously learn, which is why we’re in this enablement role because we’re supposed to be life-learners.

SS: I love that, and I love the life-learner approach. What benefit do you think organizations can gain from diversifying their sales enablement teams and bringing in people with different or maybe unconventional backgrounds?

RU: It is absolutely powerful, Shawnna, and I’m saying it not because it’s the right thing to say, I’m indicating that clearly because I’ve experienced it. Let me tell you what I mean. I had the awesome p

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 expert around sales. A key thing that I’ve adopted here is in the last financial year, I took over inbound sales and really developed that channel.

Everything that I coach on, I test and I use as a part of our inbound sales program as well. That’s led to great success. It means that we frequently on a daily basis run alongside our partners in a framework that I like to call coach to close. We are working with the client, working with the partner, and ensuring that the tactics and communications, the cadence, and our tools are all adopted as a part of those sales opportunities. We can then give them to the partner and they can use it in other opportunities that they’re working on.

What we’ve seen in terms of our adoption of inbound sales as well as sales enablement means that we’ve actually increased our revenue by that channel by over 93% in comparison to the previous year. We’ve actually qualified and won more opportunities from it as well. Our median opportunity fee has increased exponentially as well. With that, it means that we can give our partners practical tips to adopt within their sales programs rather than the more high-level traditional coaching that has occurred in the past within professional services.

SS:That is fantastic advice in terms of what good looks like. On the flip side, a common challenge when it comes to sales coaching is ensuring that sellers and sales managers are able to make the time for it. It feels like productivity and staying on top of quite a few things are definitely a challenge for folks these days. How do you get buy-in from the sales team and sales leadership to lean into coaching?

RB:I think that one of the challenges for us is, again, because we are in professional services, the partners are everything. There is a power behind what we call the billable hour. There has to be enough time in the day for partners to be able to bill and provide services to their clients as well as sell. I think there are a few pieces to this one.

We’re not going to be able to influence every partner across the firm some of them are already great operators. Really it’s about working with the people that want to work with us as well. Really focusing on from their perspective, tapping into their growth mindset and their willingness to learn and more on the flip side for us is about integrating it into partners every day.

We try to integrate our sales coaching into our pipeline meetings. Everything from our inbound sales, everything from our outbound prospecting, working across the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel with our marketing team. Then, making sure that we support them across as many interactions as possible, rather than only focusing on carving out time for that one-to-one coaching.

SS:I think that is a great way to go ahead and get buy-in from the leadership organization. How can coaching help sellers better engage their clients and deepen those client relationships?

RB:This is probably my favorite question. I think that any good sales tool or anything that you can have in your arsenal will help you be a better provider to your existing clients. Take questioning, for example. We try to create a framework to ensure that we cover not just current questions, but say future and past questions to ensure that we can get the most information and the most effective information to help support our prospective clients, but also our current clients. Even adopting those components will help be able to ensure that we get accurate scoping with our existing clients and make sure that we’re delivering on our promises as well.

SS:I’d love to hear that. Last question for you, Regan. What are your best practices for measuring the impact of coaching?

RB:We measure a few components around everything from the usability and adoption of our CRM. We obviously look at the bottom line, so from a partnership, it is individual partner revenue and service line revenue. Whether they’re in tax consulting or financial advisory, the average days to close opportunities obviously would be dependent on the service line and the products we’re offering.

One of our key focuses, however, at the moment is around client mix. Making sure that when we are winning work, are we winning work with the right type of client that we want to work with? Given its services, there has to be a level of profitability as well. Also, we want to work with great clients that also want to work with us. Also, from earlier stage sales, it’s around outreach activity, the number of opportunities created, also that cross-collaboration between partners and service lines. Really looking to focus on introductions given, whether it’s across our firm, but then also our friends in other professional services like banking and law, for example. The overall engagement, particularly through say NPS scores, as well, because we want to make sure that while we’re growing as a firm, we really focus on delivering against the objectives of our clients as well.

SS:I love that. Regan. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

RB:It was great to be here. I really

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 often It’s the ones that are excelling in their specific roles so if you look at your sales field and you say okay, I have this top 10% and they’re just kicking butt at everything they do. Why is the other 90% not performing as well? Well, we should be leveraging that knowledge those skills, and that experience to help teach the rest of the field.

I think a lot of times we go outside or we use a sales coach. I’m not saying that we don’t need those things. I’m saying that you have a lot of knowledge in your salespeople today, how do you leverage that to give back to the rest of the field? How do you lift those salespeople? Who is that 10% to give them something to work towards? The program was really built around how we take the top salespeople who are interested in growing, who are interested in evolving, who are maybe one day interested in leadership, and how we build them up to help them achieve their goals while also achieving the business goals.

That whole council kind of came together and there were a lot of different facets of it. Not only would the participants be nominated and have to keep a certain threshold of meeting their quota, but they would have the opportunity to take part in special different programs. Those things could be mentorship, mentoring someone who is new in their region, or being a part of our field studies. Once a quarter we would bring them together to talk about what the issues are and get their best practices every different quarter. Every quarter it would be a different kind of subject so that we could gather more information and skill building and then take it from there to put out to the rest of the teams.

They would also be featured on the enablement webinars. They would get some special training as well. All of this bundled together is a way to lift up your people who may want to continue to grow, learn more about the business, and learn more about leading by example. Transferring that knowledge to the less experienced sales reps, or even to those that are just coming into the business, and so we built it as a one-year cycle. You have to be nominated and once you take part in it, you’re basically on the bench for leadership. Then if you want to become a sales manager or some other leadership role within sales, this is a great boost for those people to do so because they’re learning more about the business and about the ways that we need to really focus in different areas in order to be successful.

Of course, one of those is enabling the field. It gives both sides of the coin. You’re getting some people who are really great at what they do to share their experiences and their best practices with your field, but you’re also giving them the opportunity to take on increased responsibility and participate more in the growth of the company as well.

SS:I love that. The other thing that I love about your background is that you have a blended background that incorporates customer success. How has that customer-centric approach to enablement?

MM:That’s a really good question. I would have to say that if you’re thinking about customer success, one of the most important things that’s happening in the industry, especially if you are a SaaS company, but this actually works for all kinds of companies who are providing a measurable service for their customers. The thing that you’re going to see is customer success is where all of those proof points for sales come out. If you’re looking at building a value methodology, which is what the industry is working towards, how do you show value to your customers?

We’re not talking nerd knobs here. We’re talking outcomes and value to your customers. What is the bottom line that that CEO is going to say? Yes, I need that product or I need that service because it’s going to save me money, help my people, reduce my risk, and save me time. All of those things are important to getting to that economic buyer. If you don’t have a value methodology, the one place you can look is your customer success team. They’re the ones that are going to know the success of the customers using the products or services. They’re going to be the ones that are engaging with them on a regular basis. That’s where you can do most of your learning to see where that success is.

For me, customer success is important because that really helps you understand the customers and then it helps you dive further down into those customers to really get that clear understanding to then build. On the front end of the customer life cycle, how do you go about approaching those kinds of customers in the future? When you think about enablement, you take all those learnings and you kind of transfer them into the value methodology to make sure that you’re starting with that at the beginning. What value are we providing our customers? How do we build that to help the sales teams actually understand the technology the service or the product?

You have this ability to really empower your sales teams to have better discussions. They’ll get to the C-suite a lot faster. Your customer acquisition costs will go down. All of those things. Learning from customer success is extremely important. It’s extremely important to organizations because that’s where the customer is having success, and then you can leverage that in the sales cycle to make sure that you’re finding those customers that have those similar scenarios to kind of push that sales

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 enablement exists is to enable a positive impact on an organization.

SS:Absolutely. On that note, what does AI-driven enablement look like?

JK:That’s a good question. To me, it comes down to what are the outputs that we’re doing on a day-to-day basis. I’m going to back up a second and describe something to hopefully shift people’s mindsets around this. In the Industrial Revolution, the thing that drastically changed was instead of having a hundred humans doing an activity, you could have a machine complement those humans and then it ended up being five humans with big machines doing that same activity. I think the same thing is going to happen with all functions. Enablement specifically, the question I’d ask is what are your day-to-day tasks or workflows that you’re doing that could be automated or systematized using AI, because then you’ll be spending more time with your brain and strategy versus creating a deck or one-page or making a training outline or all the things that require kind of the menial stuff.

I mean, I love to create those types of content pieces, but overall, my true value comes from my experience and my mind, not so much from the ‘I have to make this one page that might take me two hours to do out of my day.’ To answer your question, it’s about identifying what you can automate and do better, faster with AI, so you have more time to do the more impactful activities or requirements of the job.

SS:I love that. You gave us one example, but what are some of the key ways that you’ve leveraged AI in your enablement programs?

JK:One in particular is I don’t like to overwhelm my teams with tools. I’d rather keep it simple. So because ChatGPT specifically is kind of one that my team who is international is all heard of, I took them through a process of researching an account and an ideal ICP. From that research be able to take that information and apply it to a messaging framework of talk tracks or emails or LinkedIn requests, that kind of stuff.

It was funny because the two days before, we spent a lot of time doing the manual way of understanding where to go on their website and how to research the company and all the people on LinkedIn and how to understand them. In an hour of training, I gave them all a thread run in a group Slack together, and I sent them one by one a thread on how to research a specific company, how to research a specific role, and how to take all of that, combine it with my company’s unique value prop and put it together to where they would have four or five different emails or LinkedIn messages or talk tracks they could use to a specific person at that company, which would have taken us weeks before they get that kind of information and we did it in an hour. That’s one example of many examples that I do on a daily basis of just trying to leverage and help them learn how to fish faster if that makes any sense.

SS:No, it absolutely does. I have to say though, AI capabilities seem like they’re constantly evolving, especially in the last year. What are your best practices for continuously optimizing your enablement strategy to keep up with this new innovation?

JK:There’s a lot out there. I was reading that there are a thousand plus new tools or companies launching every week, so it’s easy to get inundated or overwhelmed. For one there’s some research time, there’s a lot of aggregators out there. I don’t know if you want me to name any specific tools, but there are several out there that will give you a good summary of all the thousands of tools out there you can research.

It really comes down to the mindset of just going back to automation. What am I doing on a daily basis that could be automated? Is there a tool out there that can help me do that faster? I ask that question with everything we do from what a sales rep does on a day-to-day basis, or what the CS team is doing, or what am I doing, and is there a way I could use three or four tools to be able to get those things done.

Then I’ll work through and I’ll take the time to make sure I can research it because sometimes it does take a little time to kind of experiment with ChatCPT or other tools to make sure that it’s working and has an output that you can actually use. When you figure it out, it’s really easy to scale that and to get the team where they can have the same type of results.

SS:I think that’s fantastic. Last question, Jonathan. How do you think AI will continue to evolve in the next year and beyond? How do you think that evolution will impact enablement?

JK:Well, I know it’s projected over the next seven years that the budgets for AI companies or products are going to be 10 times. Right now it’s in the billions, it’s going to be in the trillions within seven years, which just means this is not going anywhere. I think over the next year, just seeing where we have come since November when ChatGPT launched and all of the tools and technologies have come out over the past 10, 11 months. Over the next year, I would say things are going to be drastically different from the tools that you will use individually to the tools you could use as a team.

How enablement should be thinking about how we can lead the charge instead of being behind? Agai

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 Pavlovian response to learning.

With laughter, you release defenses. You get people to just relax. They lower their shoulders, their facial muscles release, and they’re with you. When people are with you and they feel like you are meeting them where they are, the fear goes away because you’re not lording over them. I use humor more than anything else in enablement and it has served me well for the many years I’ve been doing it.

SS: I think you’re spot on. Humor does alleviate a lot of that held in tension. Beyond that, the learning process can play a big role, I think, as well in helping sellers navigate fear because then it is no longer the unknown. It also helps to build a lot of confidence amongst your sales teams. I know one of your areas of expertise is in multimedia learning. How can a multimedia approach to learning help sellers develop confidence?

JR: I don’t know if you’ve ever read the books by Don Norman, and if you haven’t, do yourself a favor, they’re phenomenal, but Don talks about how cognitive learning by itself, that people only absorb so much information. If we couple new learning with an emotional response, if we associate emotion with it, then not only are people Viscerally responding to what’s happening, but they are also engaging a part of their brain that creates a reflective approach in the future.

That means that they can recall that learning again in the future. When you think about multimedia learning, I always lean into it. I’m going to age myself now, but when I was a kid, we had Schoolhouse Rock. At my age, I can still recite the preamble to the Declaration of Independence because I know it in a song. If you think about when someone tells you something new, and then you also see a picture of it. These things combined create an environment for learning.

We’re engaging people at different places instead of just a singular point of bringing learning to new people in whatever form that takes. My other favorite is storytelling. If I tell you a silly story with a point that makes a correlation between something that you don’t know, that correlation makes the learning.

SS: I love how you’re able to draw that correlation for your learners. If we can double-click into this a little bit, what are some of the key components of an effective multimedia learning experience?

JR: One of my favorite things to look at is called sensory motor synchronization. There’s been a lot of research done on it, but basically, the research started in babies. If we can do something that aligns with the beat of a baby’s heart, or the beat of the intake and outtake of their breath, then we align to the very basics of these babies as humans.

It also works with folks who are further in the ending stages of their life. I spent the early part of my career studying music therapy. I used to work in an Alzheimer’s unit and that’s where I started to align with that idea of the power of music, the power of the beat, and how we can reach people that the brain has literally made them unreachable for us.

One of the key components that I use is helping people align learning with that beat. Think about when you’re looking at a PowerPoint and someone has multiple lines and if you put a little music behind it and it comes out synchronized to that beat, that effect draws people’s attention, people’s attention and they’re like, oh, I loved that part. Look at how that exactly went with that beat.

Things like that are my favorite things to do in training. I’ll put up a picture that elicits that awe factor, like a picture of a kitten, and I’ll ask them, how does this make you feel? People will respond, oh, it’s just so sweet, or oh, look at that kitten. Then behind it, I’ll play the Jaws theme. Now, all of a sudden, this sweet little kitten’s eyes look like it’s coming for me! That idea that we can change the feeling, we can change the scenario of something by combining pictures with stories, and with music, we can control how people come to the table and how they’re going to ingest what we have to offer for them.

SS: That was quite the visualization, I have to say. Last question for you, Jennifer. What is one thing that you’re planning to try in your enablement programs this year? What is one thing that you’d recommend our audience try in their programs that maybe they haven’t tried before?

JR: This year we are actually rolling out what we’re calling Blackline TV. What we found is that our learners were giving us a lot of feedback that, we get too much email, and our LMS sends out email notifications. Our learning development team from HR sends out emails. We send out email announcements. There are emails about new meetings that are coming.

We had to find a different way to reach people in a way that they would again be open to learning something new. Blackline TV gives us this idea, think about the very best movie trailer you’ve ever seen. As soon as it’s done, you think, where’s my $20, I can’t wait to see that movie. Blackline TV is a snippet of different parts of the business. We didn’t just limit it to enablement functions, but we figured that this collaboration, this learning opportunity around the entire business would create not only collaboration between different teams but also reinforces that we are one company as a whole, not separate groups that happen to be part of the same quote unquote company family. That is our big one this year is BlacklineTV.

I would really recommend finding something that is off the beaten path. Something that people haven’t seen before. The beautiful part about this experimental mindset is that just try it. What’s the worst that could happen? Did it

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 supporting the organization through coaching services to protect those investments we’re making, whether those are financial investments from an enablement perspective, or be it that it’s like time, a soft cost investment, whatever the case may be, what’s the most important to the organization, we should be coaching to the sustainment of those investments.

Last but not least is content services. A lot of times we create content and if you look at the research, sales themselves create a lot of content that they use in front of the customer or send to customers. Also, we work with partners in marketing that create a lot of content as well. Wherever the content comes from, we need to make sure that it’s synthesized for sales so that they make the most of that content and they’re not reinventing the wheel or having to edit a lot of that content that is being dispersed. Whether that’s through the technology services that I talked about before, integrated into the CRM, or however they get their content at their organization.

That’s just to provide a perspective of the four key principal enablement services that I feel are most important that we drive from a strategic perspective. Second, let’s agree on a high-level definition of sales productivity. If we can agree on that, it means how we measure how the organization leverages those enablement services I just spoke about to achieve organizational outcomes while reducing the time and costs to acquire new business. No service that I just talked about is more important than the other on its own, it’s how many of these services work in concert to drive the outcomes, to achieve those results that we’re looking for across the organization.

From my team’s perspective, the net on all this is that either we implement these services ourselves or work in partnership cross functionally to improve the efficacy and efficiency when using our sales tech stack as a part of our technology services, or reduce ramp time for new hires as a part of our onboarding to full productivity, or implement and drive adoption of the sales methodology that we might purchase from a methodology provider, or concentrate on the opportunities that will yield the most likelihood of winning or developing our most strategic accounts. That will increase selling time by focusing on those opportunities or on those accounts that matter the most as a part of training services.

What I mentioned about coaching services, keeping our sales skills sharp and reinforcing the most critical programs and initiatives so that leaders and reps know what to focus on. Lastly, content services, whether we create the content ourselves or work in partnership with product marketing as I mentioned before, it’s about providing the right content to the right people at the right time internally so that they can then turn that content into Action or into customer-facing content through customer engagements, and they’re wasting time to find that content that might be outdated, not relevant, or requires a lot of updates from the sales reps as I mentioned before.

It’s often these services working in concert to drive maximum productivity gains as much as possible, and we should always be measuring everything, whether it’s leading or lagging indicators across all these services. Especially at the cornerstone of productivity, whatever productivity might mean for you and your organization.

SS: I love that. I love how crisply you’ve defined what productivity means within your own organization. Now, one way that we’ve seen enablement help enhance productivity is by enabling reps with a sales methodology. Can you walk us through why a sales methodology is critical for success?

NG: First and foremost, you have to read the headlines over the last many years now that buyer expectations have dramatically changed and really sales, I would say more on the, maybe the B2B selling side, that our profession has truly changed and that what those buyer expectations are and the sales skills to keep up with those buyer expectations. It’s truly creating a gap. You can look at research to help show what that really looks like out there in the world today.

Sales reps are having a difficult time keeping up with the exponential change on the buying side, so, in my opinion, sales methodology is one of the best investments a sales organization can make to help close the gap between the buyer expectations and the selling skills to make sure that we’re driving those predictable and repeatable results across the organization at scale. It provides that center line where we can be consistent in how our sales reps prepare for customer engagements through call planning or how they strategize on their most important opportunities, or the region’s most important opportunities, or from a global account manager perspective of the world’s most important opportunities for our organization and how they manage their most important and strategic accounts.

With selling time at a premium, we can all agree that we’re not seeing more and more selling time across a given week, month, or quarter. When you establish a common way to operate. Internally away from the customer, as well as from an external perspective with the customer, a common language that is spoken by the entire sales force by the way of a methodology. Having a common scorecard to evaluate in a very succinct way, the most critical opportunities on the likelihood that they’ll close those opportunities that are worth pursuing the priorities from the organization on the opportunities that we should pursue now or later.

After we look at the higher and higher sales methodology adoption rates that have higher and higher adoption rates of the sales methodology they institute or implement within the organization. Typically high adoption rate is a

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 Rachael McCormick from Vonage join us. Rachael, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Rachael McCormick: Thanks, Shawnna, and thanks for having me here today on Sales Enablement PRO. As mentioned, my name is Rachael McCormick and I’m one of the managers for Vonage’s Global Sales Enablement Team. My journey actually started with a marketing degree. When I graduated, many of the marketing positions I was looking into required years and years of experience, which I think many recent grads tend to find, and instead, I got into sales.

I had success in that role and learned a lot of skills that I still utilize today and incorporate that perspective for enablement. Ultimately, when Vonage acquired the first company I was working with, there were a handful of us who were promoted into an operations role. From there, I found my love and passion for enablement.

As for our team, we focus on selling skills, systems training, and content creation for tenured reps as well as new hires. That being said, we’re also responsible for sales new hire ramp just overall in general. Being that there are only so many of us on the selling skills, systems training, and content creation team, our team tends to work closely with the product and technical enablement team as well. As one solid team together, we support all of our global sales route sales to markets. I’ve been with Vonage for about eight years now.

SS: Rachael, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I’m excited to talk to you. You mentioned you’re responsible for a lot of the new hire processes, including optimizing the ramp process for new hires on the global sales team. Now, in today’s sales environment where productivity is a top priority, why is effective onboarding so critical?

RM: Great question. In general, an effective sales new hire program is critical because it helps acclimate, engage, and retain good employees. If we focus specifically on the impact it can have on sales productivity, the knowledge shared during onboarding, whether it’s product, process, sales skills, or system knowledge, can really boost an individual’s confidence during a time that can be quite uncomfortable for some and simultaneously set them up for success to become a productive team member right off the gates.

SS: I love that. Now if we drill a little bit to understand onboarding, in your opinion, what are some of the key components of an effective onboarding program?

RM: I love this question. I’m going to focus on four components specifically. First, it’s important to integrate employees into the company’s culture and get them really excited about their career choices. A program should really embody the shared values, attitudes, and behaviors that your company aligns with. This specifically gives new joiners resources to also make professional connections. For example, make them aware of the employee resource groups that your company may offer. We work closely with the organizational effectiveness team to actually do this.

Second, keep it engaging by utilizing different delivery methods or formats, which appease different learning styles throughout their entire ramp time. Before COVID, we had all-day in-person training and it was information overload. Our new hire survey scores actually increased by approximately 30% when we moved to a more flexible training because we were able to utilize different delivery methods I mentioned, like live webinars, microlearning, and gamification. We started to present information long-term to help with that information retention.

Third, identify objectives that a sales new hire will need to achieve for effective job performance. You can identify the learning behaviors or techniques that a sales hire will need to execute that support the specific objective. Based on that, you can determine the enablement delivery method that supports the technique. I have an example of that. One objective could be that a sales rep needs to understand how to use a CRM. The behavior they need to execute might be to effectively use the CRM on their own to input leads or create a quote. Then you’d decide the delivery method to help them achieve that, which could be utilizing a test environment or even a gamified quiz.

Lastly, number four, keep it modernized and continuously listen to feedback. Our team likes to joke that sales enablement is like changing tires on a moving car or an 18-wheeler during busy times. We have to keep what is currently running and continuously evolve our programs and content to be up to date while simultaneously keeping into account, feedback from our audience and department leaders for improvement.

SS: Thank you. I think that is a great definition of the key components. What would you say are some of the common obstacles that sellers might experience as they are trying to ramp, and what would you say are some of your best practices to help mitigate those through onboarding?

RM: I’ll start with identifying those three common obstacles that we tend to see. Information retention, which I did mention in the previous response, and then lack of confidence as well, and third is lack of feeling connected in a virtual or hybrid work environment. In terms of information retention, we’ve adopted a model for just-in-time learning so that resources are short, targeted, and at our audience’s fingertips whenever they need it.

To support this, we’ve enhanced our resource repository tools and have standardized this by working closely cross-functionally with different departments, and we utilize the same tools altogether and align on the same messaging. This has been really impactful because, again, we have such a large audience across different time zones. Second, to mitigate a lack of confidence, it’s important to incorporate opportunities for simulated activities to practice. Whether it’s in a system test environment or role-playing sales skills, we really believe that repetition is key and we have a layered approach to that as well.

Lastly, to help new joiners feel more connected in a virtual or hybrid environment, we’ve implemented a buddy program where another sales team member works closely with the new hire to further welcome them, address questions, and help them navigate a new organizational culture.

SS: I have to say I love the buddy approach. It is like an instant friend whenever you enter a new organization. I think the other role that plays a key component in onboarding new hires is often the frontline sales manager. How do you collaborate with sales managers to reinforce the knowledge and skills learned in onboarding for these sellers?

RM: Another excellent question. We collaborate with sales leaders in two ways. First, we have regular communication with them, whether it’s during live calls or written out via collaboration software and weekly sales update newsletters, where we tend to provide updates on existing enablement initiatives, taking in feedback for enhancements, as well as making sure that they’re aware of some of the improvements from an onboarding perspective. This really gives us the opportunity to continuously collaborate.

Second being we’ve launched an enablement program for our sales leaders, where we’ve coached and collaborated on methods and tools that we also use during onboarding so they can continue to reinforce that message. For example, one focus for the sales leader training was data hygiene. We focused on that specifically on the ‘why’ it’s important so that managers can continue that message. We’ve had really great feedback from sales leaders on those resources and the release of these collaborative workshops to help them and their reps be more productive.

SS: I think those are fantastic approaches. I’d love to understand a little bit in terms of metrics or definitions. How do you define what it means for a rep to be fully ramped? What are some of those key metrics or maybe even milestones that you track throughout their ramp-up journey?

RM: We support all routes to markets with various ramp lengths, but on average, I’d say about 90 days. We ultimately break milestones up into buckets, whether it’s product, process, sales skills, or systems. For product, the rep might need to obtain all of their product badges that are specific to their role. For sales skills, the rep might need to submit a mock sales pitch that their manager approves and passes. For processes and systems, the rep might need to attend a training and then execute that process in a test environment to pass. In each one of those buckets, there are different milestones that need to be achieved over the course of those first 90 days or so.

SS: Amazing. Last question for you, Rachael. How do you assess and evolve the impact of your own onboarding programs to continually optimize the ramp time?

RM: Great question. We currently assess by evaluating NPS, so Net Promoter Score. We collaborate with sales leaders on the enhancements by utilizing internal cross-functional focus groups that our wonderful transformation manager actually does lead. As mentioned earlier, we’re really passionate about listening to feedback and hearing from our internal customers on what’s going well and where areas of improvement po