Sales Enablement PRO Podcast

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Emily Drew from Salesforce join us. Emily, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Emily Drew: Hi Shawnna, I am absolutely thrilled to be here today first and foremost. My name is Emily. My role is senior director for the world’s largest job title coming at you, the Global Sales Leader Excellence Program which I can dive into a little bit later with you. I’m originally Irish as you can hopefully tell from the accent but based just outside London and have a pretty varied background. I started off doing a little bit of teaching abroad in Asia, transitioned into sales and marketing roles, and then I found my true calling in the world of enablement and coaching about seven years ago and that’s led me to my current role at Salesforce. For those that don’t know, Salesforce is a pretty profound CRM solution and I’ve been working there for the last number of years.

SS: We’re very excited to have you on the podcast today, Emily. As you mentioned in your introduction, one of your areas of expertise is leadership enablement from your experience, working with different leaders across your organization, what are some of the qualities that make for a great leader?

ED: That’s a brilliant question and I have two responses because I think some leadership qualities are role agnostic. Regardless of whether you’re a sales leader or a BDR manager or a supervisor in a supermarket, for example, that is a really important success. Those are things like being visionary, being a great listener, being a great coach, having the ability to have great empathy, and having the ability to engage with and build strong relationships with others. Those are some of the leadership-agnostic ones. For sales and solutions, more specifically, this is a question I spoke about a lot with my peers as we introduced the concept of leadership enablement for sales leaders at Salesforce and as a result, came up with this sales leader excellence model. This involved the creation of three key pillars that constitute greatness in a leader in the sales space and they are one, my personal favorite, being a great talent multiplier, so investing and understanding, developing your people, and establishing psychological safety. The next one is a business leader, so that’s all things, pipe gen, forecasting, execution, and being and knowing how to flex those in different ways as you move up the leadership ladder. Lastly, being a trusted partner. Being able to engage with influence, gained the trust of your customers. I think it is really important to have those broad leadership qualities as a leader, but when your sales or solutions leader you need those extra nuances and levels of expertise as well.

SS: I think those are absolutely key components that make up a great leader. I love those. How can leadership enablement help leaders across the business really harness these characteristics to more effectively lead their teams?

ED: I look back to 5 or 6 years ago when we didn’t have this in place and what the world was like, certainly at Salesforce, and it was very, very different. What I always think about is you can’t be what you can’t see. We were asking our account executives or people who are under leaders to do things and act in a certain way and be a certain way, but then they were kind of looking up and saying, well my leader doesn’t necessarily do things in that way or thinking that way or coach me to act that way. I think when you enable, I use this analogy of the life jacket when you’re on a flight and you’re a parent, you’re supposed to put your life jacket on first and you then are set up to be safe and take care of your children, for example. So in the case of the leader if you set them up for success and provide them the ability to become excellent at what they do and equipped to better coach and enable and encourage their teams that has just such a waterfall effect and enables everyone beneath them to see greatness in action to aspire towards that level of greatness and everyone’s on the same page and able to work towards being ever more productive.

SS: I think that’s phenomenal. Now, what does leadership enablement actually look like in practice? What are some of the core components of leadership enablement programs that you’ve deployed?

ED: Another great question. Shawnna, you’re on a roll. First of all, I mentioned it earlier, but you need to define what you’re aspiring towards. That sales leader excellence model that I spoke about, creating a robust framework to define what the great competencies the aspiring leaders to work is first and foremost because then you can develop all of the enablement programs around that and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing at salesforce. We defined what great looks like across those three pillars and within those three pillars, there are many, many different competencies and all the programs tie back to that. An example of a big program I’ve been involved in is overhauling or essentially we’ve been creating an onboarding journey for our leaders and some of the ways that are a little bit different maybe from enablement we might have done with ICs, is that it’s very, very interactive and engaging. When new leader joins the organization, they go through some of the more standard workshop activities and lots of online learning but that’s supplemented by them being given a coach to work with 1 to 1 on a biweekly basis to help see them through their entire onboarding journey. That culminates at the six-month mark in their journey where they present on a panel, sort of a capstone event, where they reflect on their six months in leadership, they relate it to that model and how they’re exhibiting greater excellence across all of those key pillars and it’s a really good opportunity for them to demonstrate all they’ve learned all they’ve gained, how far they’ve come.

Another part of the onboarding journey that’s been important is the provision of mentors. Using another program, like the Leader Excellence Academy, we take our most talented top-performing leaders and have them act as mentors to our new starters so that their coach, their mentor, all the standard enablement, and they’re also brought together in coaching circles to discuss, debate, reflect on the most pertinent topics that arise when you’re a new leader. Stuff from how you drive pipe gen efforts as a leader, how you engage with your customers when you’re elevated from an IC to a leadership role, performance management, and having a safe space to explore that is great. I think with leader enablement you need to be a bit more hands-on in one way with the coaching element, but you also need to be a bit more hands-off in other ways, in less death by PowerPoint sessions for them and more allowing them to learn from their peers as well as from more talented leaders. I think the onboarding program has been a huge one and the coaching program of which I’m a part. We established a whole coaching practice for leadership whereby in every region there’s a coach assigned to work 1 to 1 with those new leaders, in need leaders, our leaders of leaders, and to help them not only heightened their self-awareness to become better leaders but also to guide them through and towards excellence on that model that I referenced earlier. That’s been a huge one.

The one I’m most excited about because it’s my it’s become my full-time job is our Leader Excellence Academy and what that encompasses as I sort of touched earlier is we take our top 10% of leaders at various levels and we take them through this year-long program that is all designed to prep them for their next roles. If they’re in the first line, we prepare them to move to the second line. Lots of training, investment coaching, and in turn they help us and our mentors and enablers for the wider organization, and that’s been an absolute game changer because its peers teaching peers, there are levels of credibility there that could never have been possible before, and it’s allowed us to scale. We’re not a huge enablement team, so to have this wealth of people bought into helping and supporting has been amazing. There are some other great programs and experiential learning which I’m less involved with but are working well and it’s basically taking people out of the business away for a few days to somewhere we call the ranch and doing lots of really hands-on practical application of learning. It’s working well but quite different from what I’ve done historically when I worked primarily with ICs.

SS: Absolutely those programs do sound amazing. Now, leaders are often very busy when it comes to their schedules and I imagine it can be difficult to convince them to make time for their own development and learning. How have you gained buy-in with different leaders to make time for enablement programs like these?

ED: I have to tell you if I rewound around three years ago, I was really struggling with this. When I didn’t have a role that was solely focused on leader enablement and I would run an ad hoc leader training event

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

Today I’m excited to have Jeromy Proulx from Humana join us. Jeromy, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jeromy Proulx: Hi Shawnna, thank you for having me. I’m Jeromy Proulx and I currently serve as the head of sales technology and transformation at Humana. We’re a leading Fortune 50 healthcare organization that provides a number of different products and services to help people achieve lifelong well-being. In addition to my responsibilities at Humana, I also serve as an adjunct faculty at Northeastern University, a top 50 research institution in Boston Massachusetts. My career started in sales and marketing across several different industries including consumer packaged goods, investments, and insurance products, before stepping into sales management, execution and enablement roles over the last several years.

SS: Fantastic. Well, we’re excited to have you here Jeromy. I noticed that you also actually teach as a professor at Northeastern University and one of your areas of expertise is around project management. From your perspective, why are project management skills so critical for enablement professionals?

JP: Thank you for the question, Shawnna. I believe project management skills are imperative regardless of what role you serve to an organization, but more particularly within the sales enablement space. My focus in the classroom has been on the intersection of common waterfall project management skills and agile project management skills that have become more prevalent in the workplace today. These are skills that absolutely transcend both disciplines, such as being an effective communicator, the art of negotiation and influence, general time management, and risk management skills, just to name a few. If you think about it, these are also critical skills to being a great enablement leader. Whether you’re focused on training and development activities or enablement tools and technology, you will undoubtedly have to use project management skills to deliver value to the organization. Over the last decade, the emergence of agile project management has created greater alignment in my opinion with the enablement space as you think about some of the core principles and agile methodologies.

SS: I think that’s fantastic. You talk about this a little bit, but what are some of the key principles of project management that you found most essential to your role, particularly leading sales technology and transformation efforts?

JP: One of the first agile principles centers around the rapid and continuous delivery of value. Whereas traditional project management methods would focus more on a big bang that could take several months to get to. In the sales enablement space, it’s all about the value of delivering to field-facing roles. If you have the ability to deploy practices, test, learn, and iterate, that is way more effective than doing a significant amount of work only to find out you missed the mark in the end. Agile inherently promotes this fail-forward mentality and teams which ensures that you achieve the desired impact as efficiently as possible in your work. By taking this test, learn and iterate mindset, you hit three other agile principles, simplicity is essential, regular reflection, and continuous excellence promotes agility. As an example in action, if you are tasked with building a 90-day sales onboarding program, rather than go build out all 90 days in detail, you would break down the work into minimum viable program elements that would allow you to get some feedback, incorporate that feedback and enhance the design. That might mean focusing on the first 30 days, or even smaller increments to understand what are the right things for a rep to know to improve ramp or time to market.

SS: I love that approach. Now when it comes to implementing new tools in your tech stack, what are some of your best practices for managing that process?

JP: This is a great question and I think there are two parts to this answer. First, is the project management side of implementation, and the second is the change management components. When implementing new tools, there was some advice I received from a leader a few years back as we worked through a pretty tough transformation and merger of two companies. She always used to say for every project it is imperative that there’s clarity on scope and that everyone operates with a sense of urgency. That’s not really earth-shattering advice but it’s a good grounding factor whenever you’re working towards bringing new capabilities to your sales partners. Having clarity on the scope means you’re crisp on what the new tools are intended to do, who your impacted audience is, and ultimately your path that gets you to that objective. Without a clearly defined and documented scope, you’ll end up moving the goalpost for the project and driving an increased risk of going behind schedule or more adversely, over budget.

When it comes to a sense of urgency. I trace this back to the aforementioned points on value. The quintessential saying in sales time is money, the more time you take to implement a tool ultimately means time lost when the value could have been delivered to your end user.

The second part of this answer is the change management components that support the delivery. We often get sucked into the project plan for the development of these capabilities and overlook the most important part, which is how we generate excitement and desire with the end users. Don’t discount how important this is having great change management, go-to-market or operational readiness plan can make an incredible difference in driving a successful tool or technology implementation. People often think of change management plans as being a communication plan, and while communication is absolutely a major component of the change management plan, it’s not the only thing, it’s about managing everything from the why we’re giving this awesome tool to you, to how you manage resistance and provide reinforcement as individuals move through the change curve. There’s a ton of research that points to, you know, nearly two-thirds of implementations failing due to the inability to manage behaviors and drive adoption. Two-thirds is a lot.

SS: Absolutely, it is. As you mentioned, one challenge that can arise is driving that adoption, especially amongst reps who may be resistant to change. How can enablement practitioners overcome this challenge to help sales reps navigate digital transformation?

JP: I’m a big believer in the adkar model for change management and every go-to-market or operational readiness plan should address each element within that model. Adkar stands for awareness, desire, knowledge, assessment, and reinforcement. While there is no one component of the adkar model that’s more important than the other, I want to focus our conversation on desire as executing well in that stage is the best way to manage rep resistance right out of the gate. Think of desire as either the carrot or the stick to quoting that often used idiom. In the enablement space nearly everything a team will deliver is an effort of making reps more efficient and effective in their job with the carrots being more time, more sales, and ultimately more commission in their pocket. To take that a bit further an approach I’ve used several times is to designate a pilot or change champion group. They get to be a part of the sausage making if you will and ultimately lead the change in their respective roles as you start to inch closer to deployment.

A dear friend of mine and author of The Snowball System, Mo Bunnell, described this approach well. It’s called the red velvet rope approach. When you bring a certain group of people inside the red velvet rope, they feel that exclusivity, that special treatment that not everyone is getting, and in nearly all situations, they become your biggest supporters. Inversely, those that are outside of the velvet rope start to hear that positivity from your change champions and inherently develop a sense of excitement and desire for the change. If you do this well, you’ve likely captured the hearts and minds of 90% of the group. Now for the remaining 10%, this is where the preparation for your front-line managers with a plan to handle objections and resistance becomes important. Research shows that when it comes to talking about the impacts and importance of changes, they don’t want to hear from the enablement team or even the executive leaders. Over 70% of the recipients of change want that detail to come directly from their front-line leader. So ensuring that you equip sales leaders to handle those conversations and potential objections is very important.

SS: Absolutely, I like that adkar model. Now, beyond adding new tools, what are some of your best practices for ensuring the long-term efficiency and effectiveness of your existing text stack to help drive up productivity?

JP: In today’s world of sales enablement there are so many tools and technologies that can drive productivity and I think a lot of people inherently go to we need another application or vendor to solve X problem when really that pro

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

Today I’m excited to have Aurore Pautet from Malt join us. Aurore, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Aurore Pautet: Thank you, Shawnna. I am Aurore, the sales enablement manager for Malt, a French marketplace specializing in freelancing. I have been in sales for six years, starting with the Expedia group and then moving to Malt. Now, I am in charge of the onboarding, training, animation, and knowledge of 150 sales teams in 5 countries.

SS: Impressive. Now you mentioned that your experience is really around sales training and coaching programs. I’d love for you to walk us through your design process for creating a new program.

AP: Sure. The design process is really different according to your goal, your audience, the topic, and the importance. Through my diverse experiences, I tested different formats, such as coaching sessions with live use case partners, roleplay with the manager, online training made by our own sales teams, shadowing, elevator pitch, etcetera. The choice of the design is really linked to the topic and the volume of information to assimilate. The last innovative formal training that we did was, for example, to train our sales teams on our competitors. The goal was not to describe all the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors by listing them because it was too difficult to assimilate and memorize. That’s why we organize competitors’ debates. This works as an example of functional training and at the same time, we had a well developed flow with the level of acting, of course. That’s why the design is really according to the topic and the volume of knowledge that the sales have to assimilate.

SS: I do love that approach. Now in your opinion, what are some of the key components of effective training and coaching programs, and what are the core elements that practitioners should include?

AP: First of all, you need to understand the objectives of the training. Usually, when you create training it is because you identified a lack of knowledge and a real need for your sales. Then, with that clear content, you can identify not only why, but also how it can be useful for sales. What I also like to do is a short test of comprehension, just to make sure that everything has been well assimilated. Without any hesitation, I think that the Q&A part is the part that you can’t exclude from any training. It is important to remember that what is clear for you is not always clear for your audience. That’s why the Q&A allows you to clarify all the doubts or misunderstandings. If you don’t do the Q&A, I can bet you that you will need to set up a second run to clarify the training. Those are the clear components of good training.

SS: I absolutely agree. What are some of your best practices for aligning your training programs with the real-world needs of reps and how are you able to fully understand the needs of your team for that?

AP: I have three pieces of advice. What helps me in my day-to-day is my past experience as a salesperson. This is a real added value to my job now because I’m able to identify some gray areas and how to address some topics to this population. Sometimes when you are disconnected from the sales teams you can have a lack of actionability in your training. Actionable content is key, this is my first piece of advice. The second one is leaning on the previous one. You need to be close to the sales team by always being with them. By being open to their questions and participating in meetings, you can identify what their needs are.

To start, try to always be available to the sales team and make sure that they know you are available. Of course, sometimes it can be a heavy workload, but in the end, it is worth it. By being solicited by the sales team, you can identify the lack of knowledge and you can fix it rapidly and spread the knowledge to the rest of the team. It also creates trust where the salesperson can come to you for help rather than being afraid when they do not know something. These are my three pieces of advice.

SS: I love those three points. I think that those are spot on. Now, to the needs of your team and thinking and putting yourself in your rep’s shoes, how do you drive adoption and engagement by reps in a new training or coaching program?

AP: I think for us the secret sauce is really to employ some salespeople in the organization of your training. First, for example, I identify with the managers where there is a lack of knowledge and where additional training could be useful. Once done, I identify the best person who is skilled on this topic, and with their help, I will build the training. This person will contribute to the content and above all deploy and present the training to the rest of the team. There are a couple of reasons why we do this. Mainly, it is to create more commitment as the other salespeople on the team are curious to go to the training of one of their colleagues. Also, we can ensure the training will be actionable and directly linked to the business issues as a salesperson has been comforted with this topic previously. Our secret sauce is really to employ a salesperson to deliver the training to the others.

SS: I think that’s a really fantastic approach to driving adoption and engagement. For reps who may need extra support to sharpen their skills, how can enablement help support their continued learning beyond the completion of a training or coaching program?

AP: I think this is a magical thing in enablement. From a well-defined global strategy, you can free up some time to hold specific 1 on 1 coaching and follow-up. For example, we have set up a sales onboarding process and spread it over six weeks. With some online tests each week on our learning management system, we can make sure that the new sales reps master the key topics. For example, if we identify that one of the salespeople didn’t correctly master the CRM or finance process, it is no problem because I can take that person into a one-on-one meeting and offer them specific training to fix it. At the same time, we can have a strategic plan for the rep to self-coach, with of course the help of the manager. If we set up correctly, we can split the time to have more focus and one on one coaching with the sales reps who need it.

SS: I love that approach to helping them with that additional coaching. Now, the last question for you, in a rapidly changing industry, can you share some best practices for keeping your coaching and training programs up to date and relevant to your reps needs to be?

AP: To be honest, that’s really the hardest part since processes can change quickly and often. My advice would be to be close to your peers of enablement from other companies within your industry to get some insights. Be close to all the different teams within your company so you can always be aware and up to date on all the planned changes. I think this is key, you just need to be really curious about other new training ideas. Curiosity allows us to be up to date.

SS: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

AP: Thank you.

SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know we’d love to hear from you.

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

Today I’m excited to have Richard Giorgi from Swiss Re join us. Richard, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Richard Giorgi: Thanks for having me on today. I’ve been in sales enablement and sales ops roles for over a decade now. I started out in direct sales as an account executive but after I finished grad school I made the jump to Sales Ops and Sales Enablement with a bit of marketing sprinkled in as well. I currently lead sales enablement in the Americas for a company called Swiss Re and we’re a global reinsurer. Essentially we allow insurance companies and other risk transfer providers to insulate their own risk by seeding a portion of that risk to us. In the most basic sense, we are insurance for insurance companies.

SS: Well, Rich, I’m excited to have you here on the podcast. You are uniquely positioned within your organization as a leader in sales enablement that’s reporting through marketing. From your perspective, what are some of the key intersection points between sales enablement and marketing?

RG: Aligning sales and marketing is something that I’m really passionate about. My first post-sales role was actually called Sales and Marketing Associate and I think we’re seeing it more and more today as companies shift to this revenue enablement and revenue ops nomenclature. The idea is that it’s not just sales and marketing being exclusive to each other, but they really need to be aligned and work together. Marketing is driving leads but sellers need the right content for things like follow-up. If a prospect doesn’t end up buying, the old way was for a salesperson to just nurture that prospect over time. In my first sales role I had lists of people who I had spoken to and it was my job as a salesperson to every now and then just send an email or make a phone call, but now you want to kick that back to marketing to help drive top of mind awareness.

Thinking about things like MQLs, measuring MQLs just really isn’t sufficient anymore. Those leads need to be connected to revenue somehow and ultimately sales is still a steward of the brand in the market. It’s important during onboarding to ensure that sellers understand this and they don’t have to create their own content from scratch that could damage the brand or cause confusion in the market, but someone needs to pull that all together and kind of be a referee, so to speak, between sales and marketing. I think that’s where sales enablement can play its most important role, at least in my experience. Ensuring anything that goes to sales is filtered through enablement. The marketing teams and the product teams are very clear on the needs of the sales teams.

SS: Absolutely, I agree. Now, how do you go about driving alignment between the sales enablement and marketing efforts within your organization today?

RG: As you said in the introduction, I’m pretty lucky that I report to marketing, so that’s a big help. Interestingly, marketing here also reports even higher up into strategy and I love that because it helps give me a bigger picture of the business. Strategy touches everything right from go-to-market initiatives to back-end processes, so having that picture of the business allows me to foster better alignment by ensuring that the enablement processes we put in place, support the most wins or the business goals of each team. In the past, in other companies, I’ve also reported up through marketing, but in some cases, I’ve reported up through sales, and sometimes what ends up happening with sales enablement or sales operations or any of those sales support roles, when they report to one or the other, there ends up being a pretty clear bias towards the people that they report into.

If you’re reporting to a CMO, you’re handling more marketing operations and maybe more lead management and things like that, whereas on the sales side you might be pulled into more of the CRM issues or process and methodology and things like that. Being in the strategy team overall allows me to kind of stay in the middle and really do what I like to do and foster the alignment that way because ultimately I’m not really beholden to our head of sales or our head of global marketing or something like that. I have that strategy team that’s giving me a bigger picture of the whole business.

SS: Absolutely. Now you’ve already touched on quite a few areas of potential impact, but what would you say the impact is of alignment between sales enablement and marketing on the business?

RG: Increased revenue and better customer experience. That’s number one and number two, but also hopefully less churn in the ranks and happier employees because they’re doing what they were hired to do which is sell and achieve their own target earnings and not have to create content or search on SharePoint sites are looking for whatever they need in all these different places and having a good understanding of which of their clients or prospects are being marketed to.

Just speaking from experience, when I was in a sales management role so much of what we had to do we had to create ourselves. It makes it difficult to do the things that you want to do, which is being in front of your customers. If you’re constantly searching for things, constantly feeling like you have to write your own content, that’s an impact on revenue and that’s an impact on all the goals that you want to achieve because you’re out there doing other people’s jobs, so to speak. I think sales enablement, being able to align marketing and sales opens up the sales team to do what they do best and what they were hired to do.

SS: Absolutely. On the topic of business impact as you said, your core responsibilities are really around driving revenue growth across the region you support and improving the customer experience. What are some of the key ways that enablement can impact revenue growth?

RG: Enablement exists in my view to make the lives of sellers easier, but also to enable that customer experience. My goal is to ensure that the right seller is speaking to the right prospect about the right solution at the right time. If any one of those things is incorrect or off, it could compromise closing the deal. Ensuring those things are as correct as can be all have an impact on revenue, we don’t want people speaking to companies that we can’t do business with. We want sellers to be able to ascertain the right product or solution that will benefit the customer pretty quickly and we want to make sure the timing is right and that we’re internally aligned.

I can give you an example from the side of a potential customer. This is a true story. When I started at Swiss Re we were in the market for a sales enablement tool and we went to a few different companies one of those companies first had a mid-market rep helping us. Now normally that wouldn’t matter to me as long as the person knows what they’re doing, but for them, I guess it did. When they learned more about Swiss Re they clearly moved us to an enterprise rep based on our company size and our company revenue and everything. We’re clearly an enterprise-level prospect. So step one, it is important to have internal alignment and understand your prospects so don’t split your teams by company if you can’t execute. Now I’m retelling our challenges to a new rep, meanwhile, their competitor has a sales engineer joined from the outset, answering my questions and sending me clear pricing. All in all, it was a much better experience and it was no doubt supported by a strong sales enablement team. One team ends up losing an enterprise-level sale worth six figures in ARR because their teams just weren’t internally aligned. Again, that alignment means so much in terms of impacting revenue.

SS: Absolutely. How can enablement leaders correlate their programs to revenue targets, what are some of the core metrics that you track today?

RG: This kind of goes back to understanding the business goals and being very in the know in terms of revenue goals broken down in some cases, all the way down to the individual seller. In a company that I was at prior to Swiss Re called Spectrum, selling our managed services products was a huge priority and how much quota relief came from managed services sales could affect a seller’s commission. We set up a very intensive program around managed services, a cadence of emails from our sales enablement tool, lead lists and CRM, both prospects and current clients who fit our customer profile, pricing incentives, and all of this aligned with marketing in a larger campaign around these products. We could say this is a lead that you’re receiving from marketing, here are all the companies with all the prospects on all your current clients in this list, and here’s what you can do and speak about when you call on these companies. In that way, two of the biggest metrics that I track today, are our conversion and deal velocity. I want our programs and the tools we invest in the training that we provide to help sellers close more deals, but I also want them to close those deals faster

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

Today I’m excited to have Rehmat Kharal from Harness join us. Rehmat, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Rehmat Kharal: Thanks for having me, Shawnna. My name is Rehmat Kharal, a lot of you probably know me by Rem. My current title is VP of Go To Market Strategic Enablement. I’m also a mother of three originally from Toronto Canada, but now reside in the Bay Area and am working for a fantastic startup by the name of Harness.

SS: I’m excited to have you here. You were recognized earlier this year as one of our women making an impact in enablement and as a very accomplished enablement leader and woman, I would love to start off by learning in your opinion, how women in enablement can support each other in growing their careers and achieving professional success?

RK: That’s a really great question and honestly, I feel like enablement is still a very new career that people have entered into probably in the last 10 years or so. It used to be very male-dominated. I would say in the last maybe three or four years there are a lot more females who are entering the enablement space and females who are entering the enablement leadership space. I would say the biggest way that women can support each other is by honestly learning and asking questions and being there for each other. If you’re an enablement leader and you lead a team and you have other people on that team, you should be a mentor to everybody regardless of gender, but if there are females on that team and they have questions about growing in their role and their function, first of all, they should be very open in asking those to their leader and second, there are a lot of different forums that I’m actually just becoming aware of now that are for women. There’s an organization called WiSE, Women in Sales Enablement, and being part of those forums and just having very open, candid conversations about what it means to be great at enablement and how to have a career in that space.

SS: Absolutely. In a video you shared on LinkedIn, you talked about how you personally have been able to work your way up the ladder and get a seat at the table. In your career, how have you been able to prove the value sales enablement provides so that you could earn that seat?

RK: That’s a really good question as well. I mean listen in any role you have to understand the importance of your role and function and how it plays a part in the overall success of the company that you work at. I honestly think that is step one. If you just think, you are just on the enablement team and that you are just an individual contributor and what I do doesn’t really matter, it’s funny because there are a lot of people who do think in that way, you’re not setting yourself up for success. When you’re able to prove your value and I don’t mean proving constantly having to prove yourself because I think that’s that’s a whole other topic, but proving your value in the sense of if you are somebody who’s working on building out internal enablement content or you are running the LMS tools for the sales organization, being able to show the impact of your work and how it is affecting the overall goal of the company, I’m going to dig into that a little bit, if the company’s goal is to make sure that the reps are ramped in X amount of time, how is your LMS tool that you have put together that you are very deliberate about what the UI looks like and what the paths look like for new hires and even current sellers to be going through, if you can show that impact and say because I built this LMS out deliberately in this fashion, we’re able to shave off 10 days, one week, 10% 15% off of ramp time for new sellers and increase productivity by 10 or 15% whatever it is of existing sellers, you’re proving value. You’re showing value to the entire organization by doing that.

Understanding that regardless of what your role or function is on the enablement team, I’ve always said, if they have enough budget to give me a job to sit and be a part of this team, I have to show my value and show that I can not only can I do my job well that I know otherwise I wouldn’t be hired for it, but how is it actually impacting the overall goals of the organization that I’m supporting. I think honestly that’s how I’ve been able to move up in my career. It’s very metrics-driven, proving the value, so I mean, again, using the different metrics whether you’re building an LMS system and proving value there or if you’re building a FED practice enterprise, being able to show that because of this onboarding program that I introduced to the FED sellers or commercial sellers, we were able to convert deals so much faster or convert them from the different stages in the sales process so much faster.

I honestly think that’s the way you move up the career ladder in enablement, quite frankly in anything right, is if you can actually prove value, it’s not just, “I’m really smart, I’m really good at this,” it’s about whatever I’m working on, it’s actually having an impact, not just on my direct team, but it’s actually having an impact on ARR or ACV for the entire company.

SS: I think that’s phenomenal. In this rapidly changing industry, can you share some advice for professionals who are trying to seek executive buy-in?

RK: I think this is a really hard one for a lot of people that are in the enablement space. The way that you’re going to really get that executive buy-in is if you’re a part of the conversation that’s being had behind closed doors and not an afterthought. What I mean by that is depending on who you roll up into, for myself, I roll up into our CRO, and be able to be a part of those closed-door conversations that are talking about strategy, numbers, and how we’re going to get there, by having that level of insight it actually helps you build out the enablement strategy to map the strategy for the entire company. Listen, if you’re brand new in your career or brand new in your job at this company, getting that executive buy-in from the very beginning can be very hard and it is something that you need to be able to prove over a course of time.

Let’s just say you have a history of climbing the enablement ladder and are now joining a company, you can actually show what you were able to accomplish in past roles. If you were able to reduce the ramp by so much if you were able to actually show how sellers are able to move from the hardest sales process, conversion of moving from a prospecting phase into discovery and taking that discovery, converting it into a first meeting, I think those numbers are always the lowest for every company, but if you can say the numbers were 20, 30, and 50% and I was able to change them to 50, 60, and 80% at the other company, you’re going to get the ear of the executive. If you just go in there with ideas and thoughts, not so much.

If you can prove it with the numbers and what your track record has been, I think that makes a really big difference. Again, if you don’t have a track record, this is the first time you’re in a seat and in this role, it’s about being a really good listener getting invited to those closed-door conversations, listening, and then building your overall enablement strategy around the strategy of the overall organization.

SS: Do you have recommendations or best practices around how to stay plugged in on those top priorities of the business and how can this help enablement leaders to continue to position themselves as strategic partners to executive leaders?

RK: I think saying plugged into the business is all about establishing relationships with the broader ecosystems. Establishing relationships with your marketing counterparts, your customer success counterparts, and with your engineering counterparts. It’s funny because a lot of the time from an enablement standpoint, we’re not really having conversations with product and I think that’s a really big miss. Having those conversations with product to understand what’s coming down the pipe, what the product road map looks like when a beta release is coming out and when that’s going to translate into a gradual or full GA release, these things matter. The reason I kind of start with the product side and building out those relationships is to listen, you’re going to have a lot more buy-in, you’re going to be able to work better with the rest of the ecosystem and understand what the top priorities of the business are is if you’re part of every single one of those conversations. Without there being a product to sell there is no business, but if you’re brought into the product timeline and the road map, that gives you a better idea of what kind of enablement you should be building around it.

If you’re brought into what the marketing campaigns are, it gives you a really good idea as to what’s being pushed and what is the priority for the company. Hence I’m gonna build an internal enablement program around it or use those marketing campaigns to drive users to my

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

Today I’m excited to have Sidd Hora from super.AI join us. Sidd, I would love for you to introduce yourself and your role in your organization to our audience.

Sidd Hora: Thanks for welcoming me to the podcast and I’m happy to talk about sales enablement tips, tricks, and operations. About me, I work at super.AI, which is an enterprise-based company. We provide AI-based API’s to enterprises for automating day-to-day tasks and transforming their unstructured data into structured data. I work for the team as Senior Sales Operation or you can also say enablement or marketing. I’ll be helping the team put the processes in place, putting the onboarding plan in place, and onboarding the new salespeople, account executives, SDRs and BDRs.

SS: Fantastic. Well, I’m excited to have you here today. Now you’ve mentioned that you value being able to balance both conceptual and analytical thinking. I’d love to start there. Why are both of these things essential in enablement?

SH: Of course. I read this on the internet when I entered the sales operation and the enablement world about this AD approach which is to analyze, design, develop, implement and evaluate I found this approach super amazing and super successful because it follows both conceptual thinking and also analytical. For me, I would say that every sales operation and enablement reader should follow this because it takes both approaches together so whenever I get a new project on my plate I just don’t run after and start doing the task and start delegating the responsibility, I prefer to stay back and understand the project before getting into and doing the actions. I want to understand the why behind the project, I want to understand why we are doing it, what is the purpose behind the project, and how it will be impacting the organization, the team members, and the KPIs.

I feel like both are really important because you have to take a step back and understand the basics, like what is going to be like to ask and how you’re going to like it, and then get into the analytical thinking. That’s why I feel like this AD approach really focuses on board, it tells you that they could take a step back, brainstorm a little, put a mind map, put a flow chart in the process, and try to understand what’s going around, try to interview the people, then evaluate that’s where the data and analytical thinking comes into the place. After gathering all that information together you have a good approach, a good level of understanding to start working on the task and now start working on things like how the project would be in place, how can we complete the project, and what is going to be the responsibility, the delegations and all that.

SS: Fantastic. I do love that approach and I think it’s well known in the space enough but it’s a fantastic reminder for those in sales enablement. Now how can an analytical data-driven approach to enablement programs really help to even drive innovation?

SH: I think data is really important because data makes it easier for you to take the action. Data is there to tell you that, okay you know it’s a solid point to understand what is going right and what is not. I feel like when you’re creating any processes, when you’re creating the enablement programs and all data does help to achieve you better and build better processes in place, build better enablement programs, onboarding plans, and everything. One example would be to have a good tool in place because everything can be measured especially but it’s not always optimum and not easy to scale up. Having a nice enablement program in place really helps you gather those insights, gather those KPIs and data so that you can take that data and then build or improve the process around there.

One example would be when you have an enablement program in place, you get to know certain insights on the market. That’s really important. Those insights will help your marketing team to improve its marketing strategy. For example, when salespeople are sending blogs and marketing collateral, when you’re sending it through a proper enablement program you can get those certain KPIs in a place where the marketing team can benefit from it to understand okay what marketing collateral is basically getting more engagement for that particular persona. It helps reduce the cost, it helps accelerate the sales cycle even further. That’s why I would say that the data-driven approach in the enablement program really helps innovation in a lot of perspectives on the marketing front then also like another front as well.

For example, when you have a proper enablement program in place, this particular salesperson is really successful. You have the data around that, you can take the key insights around why this particular salesperson is more successful than the others. We believe in equality. We believe that everybody should be pushed around the common objective. Of course, a healthy amount of competition is necessary but that’s the same amount it’s also important to develop other people. When you see the other salesperson on the enablement for being really great, we can take the key insights from there, put it into the enablement program and make the modules, make the program better and give it to the new onboarding employees and also the existing one so they can do better in the process.

SS: I love that, that’s a fantastic approach. Now you also share that, you developed a process improvement roadmap and a KPI initiative that reduced costs and sales cycle time. To start this is incredible. Can you share how you were able to achieve these results?

SH: Of course, I’ve mostly worked for startups where there isn’t enough data or where there’s no data at all or no process at all. My mindset has always been team first so I really take that approach when I’m developing processes or putting the KPIs in place and everything. The second thing which I take into consideration is cost should be reduced and the process should be totally optimized in a way that we can reduce the sales cycle to the least. When I get on board whenever it comes to like new processes, I try to interview the team, I try to interview the stakeholders involved in that process, and try to understand what exactly is the pain point. I try to leverage the tools out there then if you have already put tools in place, then it’s time to try to leverage the tools to understand the data. Then, we can also use that tool to make the process better. For example, with a CRM there are so many great tools on the market nowadays to have a data different approach or like an approach where you can really improve the processes and reduce the cost.

One of the examples I can give you is I was previously working for a FinTech company and it was always very rigid to change the processes. The processes were very Orthodox, it’s super difficult and the cost is usually higher when it comes to those processes. One of the processes was that whenever we are onboarding a prospect, we send them a contract physically, the prospect needs to sign it, send it back to us, and then we need to put it into the file. I know it’s so much time, but where exactly it’s written that we need to really have a physical contract in place, why can’t we use some e-signature now? A lot of these institutions have allowed having e signature in place so it helps us reduce the cost there because if you think about it, having any other e-signature tool in place is usually cheaper than sending a document to the prospect around the world and then getting it back because you have to have that cost to the company and then also if you think about it we also take into the cost considering the amount of time the employees spending on that process.

There are so many things to take into perspective and that’s why you have to leverage and that’s where the AD approach comes and you have to analyze it and try to understand what exactly are the pain points and how you can remove those pain points either by automating it, either by communicating better and everything. I try to automate that process. I like to counter-question the stakeholders, I asked them why we need a physical copy and not a digital copy. It’s equally recognized by the government, equally recognized by the regulating body, and all that. It automatically reduces the sales cycle if you think about it because that’s one example I gave you was like sending it by post and waiting for the prospect to sign it coming back, imagine two weeks on average I would say a good amount if the address is correct and all that, but when you’re sending a digital copy it can be done within seconds. It automatically reduces the sales cycle in that particular stage which may be named as getting the proposal signed.

Also, I’m a huge fan of customization, I’m a huge fan of automation, and I’m a lazy person so I’ll try to automate a lot things as possible. I try to implement automation wherever I feel that we require the automation, it will reduce the cost, and will also reduce the sales cycle time. One example would be whenever we are in the entry stage of the sales process and we usually are customizing the proposal or the slide

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

Today I’m excited to have Lauren Metheney from Blend join us. Lauren, I would love to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Lauren Metheney: Hi Shawnna, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. I’m Lauren Metheney and I’m located in Chicago, Illinois. My background is primarily in tech sales. I started my career as an account executive selling for about three years and then I was a sales manager for almost six years before coming over to my current company, Blend. At Blend, I’ve been here for about 4.5 years now doing sales enablement and operations. Just to give some background on Blend, we are part of the financial technology industry or a lot of folks refer to it as FinTech for short. We are a cloud-based banking platform used by banks, credit unions, and independent mortgage brokers and we streamline their workflows as well as transform the experiences for their customers.

SS: Fantastic. Well, Lauren, I’m excited to have you here with us because on LinkedIn, you talked about your passion for coaching and how that was really a key factor for your career pivot, which you just talked us through a little bit from sales to enablement. How did you develop your passion for coaching?

LM: I’ve always enjoyed helping others both personally and professionally. It’s very rewarding for me to see individuals learn, grow and succeed as a result of my mentoring them along the way. After a couple of years as a seller, I had the opportunity to start mentoring other sellers as a team lead. It was like a player-coach type role where I still had my own book of the individual business, but I was also responsible for managing and mentoring a small team. It was that particular experience where I really discovered that I truly enjoy coaching other sellers and as a result helping them achieve their goals as well as mine too since I had my own personal goals. Actually, for the next five years after that I spent managing sales teams and it was a great challenge, I learned a lot and there were some great team memories of course along the way, but after a while, I was looking for a change and took a step back to think more about what I wanted to do and what I enjoy most about what I’m currently doing.

I was wondering how I can do more of that — so coaching, mentoring, and helping others. That’s what really got me excited about work each day. That was interesting because sales enablement at the time as a career was fairly new or at least the role itself was fairly new, and the definition of sales enablement definitely varies between companies, and it actually still kind of does today. With that, I started networking with some folks that I knew in the sales training space or ones that I knew that had recently moved over into a sales enablement type role. I just wanted to learn a bit more and so just speaking with them, I quickly realized that’s what I wanted to do. Fast forward a little bit, I landed over at Blend, which is obviously where I’m at today as their first enablement hire and of course, the rest is history from there.

SS: I love that. Now, in your opinion, why is coaching so important in sales today?

LM: Yes, so to me it’s important because whether you’re brand new to sales or have been doing it for 20 years you can always be better. A great example is back when I started selling, people still made a ton of cold calls, which I know is almost archaic these days, which sounds crazy, but folks would still make a ton of cold calls and prospects would actually pick up the phone or even on a very rare occasion return a voicemail. There was no such thing as networking tools online where you could message a prospect or other emailing tools that you could send out your prospecting emails to try and schedule calls. There was no real automation type of thing back in the day and so today it’s just much different than it was 10 years ago and even it was more different 20 years ago, so that’s one thing.

While that’s just one example of why it’s important, it’s always good to get feedback from your peers, managers, outside sales coaches, etc to get those different perspectives and so I encourage all sales folks to have some sort of regular cadence scheduled to get that feedback. It’s funny, I have to mention because my husband is actually in tech sales as well, and he’s been doing sales for 10 years but he’s always soliciting my feedback so I’m even coaching him at home each day, that’s what it seems.

SS: Oh goodness, you can never leave work behind when it comes to coaching. Now, what is enablement’s role in coaching within your organization and how do you partner today with sales managers to effectively coach reps?

LM: We have a few different what I like to call coaching phases within Blend. The first of course is the onboarding which is for new hires within the sales organization. There’s not a lot of true coaching going on here, however, it’s more training on how to use the various tools and such. Sales enablement also likes to be a part of the new hires and provide mentorship and make them feel like they can come to us as resources and we want them to be able to give us feedback, not just on the onboarding process, but also just how their first few months at Blend are going and we just want to make sure they’re comfortable and thriving in their new roles.

So the next phase I’ll call structured sales coaching. So we use the specific sales methodology at Blend and while a lot of folks have used something similar in other organizations, we want to make sure that everyone uses it the same way we do within our sales organization. There are specific trainings on the methodology which involve role plays, feedback, and all that good stuff, and then as part of that we practice it in our day-to-day, and we provide additional coaching and feedback. So the sales managers actually play a huge role in reinforcing the methodologies and their conversations with their sellers throughout the deal cycles.

Then, the last phase which I would say is ongoing, just like the sales methodology is, is the training phase. So whether it’s training on a new product, brushing up on existing products etcetera, we have many different formats in which we can train. Some are structured sessions led by saying a product manager for example or even modules within our learning management tool.

SS: I love that. I’d love to dig in because you have again as we talked about a background in sales, both as a rep and as a manager and how has that informed your approach to coaching as an enablement practitioner?

LM: It’s interesting because one of the reasons I wanted to pivot into enablement is at the time I noticed a lot of enablement folks did not actually come from a sales or sales management background as I have. A couple of my mentors and former sales trainers came from a sales background and I was able to connect with them on a deeper level at work than others because they understood what it was like to be in sales. They’ve carried the bag, they’ve done it themselves, right? So that’s why I love what I do because I know what it’s like to be in the position of the people I’m coaching and they know I understand where they’re coming from. In addition to that, I help create operational efficiencies for our sales org so I’m working with folks that don’t have that sales point of view and it’s really cool to take lead in creating those different processes that I know in the end will benefit our sales org, so they can do their jobs better while giving the internal stakeholders what they need as well.

SS: I want to shift gears a little bit, what are some of the key metrics that you track today to understand the impact of coaching and to help optimize your programs?

LM: From a coaching and training perspective as it relates to sales methodology and such, we look at are the reps constantly following the methodology for each deal and for the deals where the methodology is used, how long was the deal cycle, and what are the win rates for those. Then, on the other side of things, for the deals where there was no methodology or the methodology was inconsistently used, what do those cycles and win rates look like? Also, another huge factor that informs who we coach and what specifically is why we lose deals. There are all different types of factors, but in some cases, there may be trends with a certain rep where we identify there are areas where they can be coached to increase win rates, whether it’s product knowledge, methodology, engagement with the prospect etcetera.

We also, of course, have insights where we can coach reps on their calls as well. We can learn if they’re talking too much, what kind of questions they’re asking, and also how they are asking those questions, how they handle objections, and so on. We work with the managers to leverage these insights so they can track progress as we coach the sellers. I could go on and on about different metrics, but one more that stands out is the quality of the deals. There are all kinds of sellers out there as we know and every dea

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

Today, I’m excited to have Chris Neal from Blue Prism join us. Chris, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Chris Neal: Hi Shawnna and thank you for inviting me. I’m Chris Neal and I am the director of global sales enablement at Blue Prism. I’ve been with the company for about three and a half years. We have a team of eight people to do sales enablement for a sales force of around 500. I oversee the global programs and am excited to be here to talk about those today.

SS: Fantastic. Well, we’re excited to have you here as well. Now, one of the things that I know you’ve referenced in the past is really around how to make enablement programs successful and in order to do so, rep engagement is absolutely critical, but I think getting that engagement can often be easier said than done. In your experience, what are some of the common challenges that you’ve experienced in getting reps to engage in enablement programs?

CN: Yeah, a good question to start, it can definitely be a challenge. I’ve seen it before and I’ve run progress before they have done really well and reps have been really engaged and there have been others not just in Blue Prism but in previous roles as well, where you really struggle to get engagement. For me, it comes down to two things. It’s about awareness and communication. So they have to know what the program is, how to get engaged with it, and what the expectation is on them, so they can’t use the excuse that I didn’t know about it. That’s the basic one.

The more critical one is alignment. If you’ve got an enablement team with a review from headquarters about what you need to learn this month, if that’s not aligned with the goals that your first line manager has for you as a sales representative for that month or that quarter, then there’s a conflict you’re being pulled in two directions. You’ve got your direct manager measuring you on one thing and a corporate sales enablement team saying you’re going to be measured on something else and that’s where you can get a challenge. So for me, it’s mostly about working with sales leadership all the way from Chief Revenue Officer down to first-line managers to make sure that the initiatives and programs that we develop and run are as aligned as possible with what field teams need in order to be successful.

SS: Absolutely. How have you overcome some of the challenges so that you can encourage higher engagement?

CN: The best way to do that is to consult with sales leaders from the get-go. As soon as an initiative is conceived and you’re thinking of building something, we need to bring sales managers along for that ride, along that journey. Let’s say the Chief Marketing Officer has a new set of messaging and they want everybody in sales to learn that new value proposition presentation for example. That’s important, and I’m sure if you had a conversation with a sales leader, they would agree that it’s important, but if you don’t talk to me about it in the right way and then position it in the right way, it can come across as a demand from HQ, that, as I said before, doesn’t directly align with what people are needing to do out in the field. So, it’s important to start with why, I keep going back to the Simon Sinek book, “Start with Why.” Let’s start with why we’re doing this and what we’re trying to achieve and how it’s going to help everyone, not just enablement, but sales leaders and sales reps themselves. Let’s make sure everybody understands that and then build that into the cadence so that by the time we roll out the program, the rep is hearing about it and being driven to do it, not by a corporate sales enablement team, but by their direct manager.

SS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Now, you mentioned that aligning with what matters most to your audience can help improve the effectiveness of enablement programs. Now, when you’re developing a new program, how do you ensure that it’ll both be relevant for your reps and also make it easy for them to consume to reduce maybe some of that complexity?

CN: Yeah, good question. So, take the first part of that question first. How do we ensure that it’s relevant? I think this comes down to how you introduce it because quite often an enablement initiative or it might be a training course or it might be an assessment or something like that is coming from a group or department in the company, like a product management function or something like that where the presenter or the subject matter expert delivering the training is not necessarily looking at the big picture of why this is important for sales. So if you just record something or you just put something out there and you put it directly in front of the SME, it’s not always easy for them to join the dots and see that relevance for themselves. So, a good job that sales enablement professionals can do is to bookend that presentation or that training module with some scene setting. So, I would go on and I would explain to them that we understand the challenges that they face, what it is that they are being asked to deliver for the company in terms of revenue, and position what they’re about to see in the context of that and talk about how it’s going to help them and then we’ll come back on at the end and kind of summarize what they just heard and relate it back to their role. So that helps them see the relevance, even though the meat of the presentation itself may not. That’s part one of your question.

The other one was about how we can make it easy to consume to reduce some of the complexity. If we’ve got an initiative or a program we want to roll out, then what we do is there’s a number of ways you can do this, and the platforms are all over the place. There are digital sales enablement platforms, there are all kinds of platforms you can use to host multimedia material. We use one of those and what we do is we break it up. If it’s learning a solution from beginning to end, including how to position, how to present who the competition is, which personas to talk to etcetera. We break that up into individual modules to make it a bit more bite-sized so that we’re not asking them to take a whole day out of the field to learn, we’re asking them to do like 30 minutes a day. Something like that, and then as we go along, we have a little mini-assessment. So instead of saying, do this six hours of self-study and then take this huge exam, it’s 30 minutes and a five-question test or 40 minutes in a four-question test. And at the end, we could even do something like a video pitch back where they actually present back and their manager gets to see that.

SS: I think that’s phenomenal. Now, what are some of your strategies for showing reps the whole picture though, from maybe the beginning of your enablement program so that they can see that smooth path to success?

CN: There’s a couple of things here, one of which we’re already doing and another one that I would like to do that we haven’t done yet. The one that we’re already doing, again I’m not mentioning product names here, but we have a sales enablement platform that all of our reps have access to. We can basically draw a pick of all of the things available and present it to them in a way that’s easy for them to navigate and browse around and that enables them to kind of see the big picture when they go in and then they double click here, double click there and they dive into the specific product or the specific service offering that they want to learn more about. It’s almost like an online encyclopedia if you like. That’s the thing we’re already doing.

The thing that I think would be just as useful, but I’ve never quite managed it yet, is if you work for a company that has a number of products that it sells, a portfolio of products rather than just one thing that they sell, then what’s really useful, because if you have multiple products and then next week we’re doing a training on Product A and the week after that we’re doing training and Product B, and the week after that we do training on Product C, that can get kind of overwhelming and confusing for them because they don’t always necessarily know how A relates to B relates to C and how they all fit into the bigger picture. So the thing I’m talking about here is what I call a solution picture and you can think of it almost as an infographic that shows the whole world of what your company does and what it sells and how it helps customers. Each product and piece of the jigsaw would be a small item on that infographic, and that way, if you’re doing a training on Product B, firstly, why are you training Product B? Because version two is coming out and it’s improved over version one. Well, what are the improvements? And so you end up with showing the big picture and then zooming in on Product B is one of the capabilities and then talking about how the new features change the overall picture of what we’re selling and if it doesn’t then we probably don’t need

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

Today, I’m excited to have Joseph Tonye from Ivalua join us. Joseph, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Joseph Tonye: Sure. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I’m really happy to join this session with you today. My name is Joseph, I am a director of sales enablement for the EMEA region. I just joined a company called Ivalua in Paris. I have a background in sales, channel sales, partner relationship management, business development, and also sales enablement. I have had the opportunity to work with various companies in France, Ireland, and also Cameroon in Africa and across different industries, various fields going from sales, SaaS, cloud computing, recruitment, and now procurement.

SS: We are excited to have you join our podcast, Joseph. Just one of your areas of expertise is enabling channel sales teams. I’d love to talk about that a little bit. What are some of the unique challenges that can arise when you’re delivering enablement programs to sales reps who may be from external organizations?

JT: Yes, I think it’s a very interesting question because you might face many challenges working with channel partners. I think one of the first reasons why you might have challenges working with channel partners is the fact that you’re not part of the same organizations. If you represent a vendor and you have to work with sales teams from various partners, you’re not part of the same organization, so you need to talk to them, you need to create close collaboration and relationship with them, but you’re not part of the same organization, but at the same time, you need to be part of the same team because you will have common objectives, common goals to reach, and the same challenges and issues to address together. I think the main challenge here is to make sure that you can build collaboration and relationships with the partners, and make them feel that show part of the same thing, but at the same time you need to be aware of what is their approach to the market, what are their habits, how do they address the market, the customers that they have, what are their priorities?

All these challenges need to be addressed at an early stage. I think this is not a situation where it should be partner versus vendor, but at the same time, you need to understand the mindset and the organization you’re gonna work with. One of my recommendations here would be to first understand the organization by talking with the external stakeholders. The main stakeholders that represent these partner sales teams, so you might have to work with alliance managers and partner managers. These are the people who build and maintain the relationship with the vendor that you all represent. The first step here is to gain their confidence, and their trust, and make sure that they understand what is the outcome of the program that you want to implement. This is the introduction, you need to make sure that you align on the same objectives.

For example, in the cloud space, I had to work with a partner but this partner already used to work with different cloud providers, so I had to understand. We had to create a joint business plan together because I was in charge of business development and sales enablement at the same time. I was a channel manager. The objective of the joint business plan is to create some KPIs, objectives, and common goals, and then they can understand the value, and why they should resell your solution because if it’s beneficial for us, it’s going to be beneficial to everyone.

Then, after getting the approval from external stakeholders, the main point of contact, I think what is very important here is to gain attention and interest from salespeople. The sales reps directly, because this is all the people who will face the customers. One of the challenges here is the fact that they don’t have much time to spare in general. I mean, salespeople are very, very busy. They might have conflicting meetings. Sometimes you might face challenges in scheduling some meetings with them because they are not available. Sometimes they might also be more reticent because maybe they used to work with another vendor, and they already have a close relationship with them. They all used to sell a specific solution and they might not understand your product which comes as a new product or new service. They might find the project of your dissolution complex which can be another challenge. It’s not just about some challenges, but these are a few examples that I can mention.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. You went through a lot of the ways in which you overcame those challenges, but how have you overcome specifically the challenge to reduce the complexity of channel enablement?

JT: I think the key here is to be able to get to know each other first because if you don’t know each other if you don’t know the people you’re gonna work with, it’s going to be very, very difficult to be able to create a joint business plan and all the key actions or the sales enablement programs that you want to implement. Create proximity with partner sales teams. You can use the main stakeholders, such as the managers of the sales team because first they can open the doors and introduce you to the team which can be more effective since they already know their teams. They can help you identify who all the champions are, like the sponsor in these teams. They might have one or two sales reps that have an influence on the rest of the team and they can easily spread the message within the organization. You can use these champions in order to spread your message within the team and make it easier to come up with new sales enablement programs and make it easier to start and initiate the directions with the whole team.

With proximity, there are many examples. This is something I’ve done in the past, we used to organize on-site events at the office. It’s a good idea when you want to create proximity because they can visit the office, they can have a drink with you or lunch. It’s like an informal introductory meeting where you can get to know each other and gain trust and confidence from these sales reps. Like I said before, I think in order to overcome these challenges, you need to make sure that partners understand the value of joint collaboration.

As mentioned earlier, from my experience, sales enablement is not just about content management or maybe training or coaching. I’ve worked with sales reps and business developers and they have an objective at the end of the month or at the end of the quarter of the year, they need to reach a specific goal, close a certain number of deals opportunities, and need to understand what is the value of your products? Is it valuable? Is it beneficial to them? Is it going to help them close opportunities to generate more revenue and maybe more sales? I think it’s very important to make sure that everyone within the organization understands the value of this joint collaboration and anticipates the blockers. Once you have created a plan together, you understand the partner goals, you have your own goals, and you are aligned together on these goals, you can then add the sales enablement problems or initiative that you want to lead because you can present this as a tool that will have them reach these goals.

Finally, I would say what I’ve done in the past, I’ve also scheduled weekly sales meetings, and monthly operational meetings, and these meetings are very important because this is where you can propose new initiatives. So for example, if you have a meeting in the first week of the month and you see that there is a need for salespeople to better understand the product or maybe there is a need for them to better understand how to use a reseller console, for example, you can then introduce or propose new ideas initiatives to these partner alliance managers and they will help you implement the solution to the problem. Then for the implementation of the programs, whether it is about sales, how to manage a sales cycle, or how to manage importance, I think for every problem that we have tried to implement in the past I would always prepare a session in advance. A preparation meeting where we can scale together, I’ll have the alliance managers, I have some regional sales managers and we can discuss together what would be the best topics for their sales reps. What would be the priority? They can give insight and give ideas, they can propose some initiatives, and getting validation and getting a recommendation from the partner organization is valuable because once you start implementing a sales enablement program you do it not because you want to do it, but because you got some advice, recommendations, and insights from the partner in the first place.

SS: Absolutely. Now, in addition to your background enabling channel sales teams, you also have experience as a channel manager and business development manager for channel sales as you had mentioned earlier. Through that experience would have been some of your key learnings about how to build effective partnerships with channel sales teams and how has that helped you shape your approach to channel enablement?

JT: Thanks for this question, because sometimes when we think about the partnership

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

Today, I’m excited to have Joseph Tonye from Ivalua join us. Joseph, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Joseph Tonye: Sure. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I’m really happy to join this session with you today. My name is Joseph, I am a director of sales enablement for the EMEA region. I just joined a company called Ivalua in Paris. I have a background in sales, channel sales, partner relationship management, business development, and also sales enablement. I have had the opportunity to work with various companies in France, Ireland, and also Cameroon in Africa and across different industries, various fields going from sales, SaaS, cloud computing, recruitment, and now procurement.

SS: We are excited to have you join our podcast, Joseph. Just one of your areas of expertise is enabling channel sales teams. I’d love to talk about that a little bit. What are some of the unique challenges that can arise when you’re delivering enablement programs to sales reps who may be from external organizations?

JT: Yes, I think it’s a very interesting question because you might face many challenges working with channel partners. I think one of the first reasons why you might have challenges working with channel partners is the fact that you’re not part of the same organizations. If you represent a vendor and you have to work with sales teams from various partners, you’re not part of the same organization, so you need to talk to them, you need to create close collaboration and relationship with them, but you’re not part of the same organization, but at the same time, you need to be part of the same team because you will have common objectives, common goals to reach, and the same challenges and issues to address together. I think the main challenge here is to make sure that you can build collaboration and relationships with the partners, and make them feel that show part of the same thing, but at the same time you need to be aware of what is their approach to the market, what are their habits, how do they address the market, the customers that they have, what are their priorities?

All these challenges need to be addressed at an early stage. I think this is not a situation where it should be partner versus vendor, but at the same time, you need to understand the mindset and the organization you’re gonna work with. One of my recommendations here would be to first understand the organization by talking with the external stakeholders. The main stakeholders that represent these partner sales teams, so you might have to work with alliance managers and partner managers. These are the people who build and maintain the relationship with the vendor that you all represent. The first step here is to gain their confidence, and their trust, and make sure that they understand what is the outcome of the program that you want to implement. This is the introduction, you need to make sure that you align on the same objectives.

For example, in the cloud space, I had to work with a partner but this partner already used to work with different cloud providers, so I had to understand. We had to create a joint business plan together because I was in charge of business development and sales enablement at the same time. I was a channel manager. The objective of the joint business plan is to create some KPIs, objectives, and common goals, and then they can understand the value, and why they should resell your solution because if it’s beneficial for us, it’s going to be beneficial to everyone.

Then, after getting the approval from external stakeholders, the main point of contact, I think what is very important here is to gain attention and interest from salespeople. The sales reps directly, because this is all the people who will face the customers. One of the challenges here is the fact that they don’t have much time to spare in general. I mean, salespeople are very, very busy. They might have conflicting meetings. Sometimes you might face challenges in scheduling some meetings with them because they are not available. Sometimes they might also be more reticent because maybe they used to work with another vendor, and they already have a close relationship with them. They all used to sell a specific solution and they might not understand your product which comes as a new product or new service. They might find the project of your dissolution complex which can be another challenge. It’s not just about some challenges, but these are a few examples that I can mention.

SS: Yeah, absolutely. You went through a lot of the ways in which you overcame those challenges, but how have you overcome specifically the challenge to reduce the complexity of channel enablement?

JT: I think the key here is to be able to get to know each other first because if you don’t know each other if you don’t know the people you’re gonna work with, it’s going to be very, very difficult to be able to create a joint business plan and all the key actions or the sales enablement programs that you want to implement. Create proximity with partner sales teams. You can use the main stakeholders, such as the managers of the sales team because first they can open the doors and introduce you to the team which can be more effective since they already know their teams. They can help you identify who all the champions are, like the sponsor in these teams. They might have one or two sales reps that have an influence on the rest of the team and they can easily spread the message within the organization. You can use these champions in order to spread your message within the team and make it easier to come up with new sales enablement programs and make it easier to start and initiate the directions with the whole team.

With proximity, there are many examples. This is something I’ve done in the past, we used to organize on-site events at the office. It’s a good idea when you want to create proximity because they can visit the office, they can have a drink with you or lunch. It’s like an informal introductory meeting where you can get to know each other and gain trust and confidence from these sales reps. Like I said before, I think in order to overcome these challenges, you need to make sure that partners understand the value of joint collaboration.

As mentioned earlier, from my experience, sales enablement is not just about content management or maybe training or coaching. I’ve worked with sales reps and business developers and they have an objective at the end of the month or at the end of the quarter of the year, they need to reach a specific goal, close a certain number of deals opportunities, and need to understand what is the value of your products? Is it valuable? Is it beneficial to them? Is it going to help them close opportunities to generate more revenue and maybe more sales? I think it’s very important to make sure that everyone within the organization understands the value of this joint collaboration and anticipates the blockers. Once you have created a plan together, you understand the partner goals, you have your own goals, and you are aligned together on these goals, you can then add the sales enablement problems or initiative that you want to lead because you can present this as a tool that will have them reach these goals.

Finally, I would say what I’ve done in the past, I’ve also scheduled weekly sales meetings, and monthly operational meetings, and these meetings are very important because this is where you can propose new initiatives. So for example, if you have a meeting in the first week of the month and you see that there is a need for salespeople to better understand the product or maybe there is a need for them to better understand how to use a reseller console, for example, you can then introduce or propose new ideas initiatives to these partner alliance managers and they will help you implement the solution to the problem. Then for the implementation of the programs, whether it is about sales, how to manage a sales cycle, or how to manage importance, I think for every problem that we have tried to implement in the past I would always prepare a session in advance. A preparation meeting where we can scale together, I’ll have the alliance managers, I have some regional sales managers and we can discuss together what would be the best topics for their sales reps. What would be the priority? They can give insight and give ideas, they can propose some initiatives, and getting validation and getting a recommendation from the partner organization is valuable because once you start implementing a sales enablement program you do it not because you want to do it, but because you got some advice, recommendations, and insights from the partner in the first place.

SS: Absolutely. Now, in addition to your background enabling channel sales teams, you also have experience as a channel manager and business development manager for channel sales as you had mentioned earlier. Through that experience would have been some of your key learnings about how to build effective partnerships with channel sales teams and how has that helped you shape your approach to channel enablement?

JT: Thanks for this question, because sometimes when we think about the partnership we think that the approach can be the same with different partners, and what I want to say here is as a channel sales manager, I have to work with different partners in d