Ep40 What Being HEROIC Looks Like with Hang Black

Ep40 What Being HEROIC Looks Like with Hang Black

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 40

In this episode, the guys interview Hang Black, Head of Global Sales Enablement at Juniper Networks and Insider Nation Member. Her mantra Earn It. Own It. Evolve It. As applied during COVID: Embrace the hard of this ….”

She talks about her application and use of the HEROIC Leadership Framework and her journey to establish her charter.

On this podcast you will learn how she is using the elements of HEROIC to blend her passion for engineering and sales to find her purpose with a modern approach to sales enablement. Her mantra: Embrace the hard of this. You are out on leading the edge. You must be relevant to sales. Learn what it means to be relentlessly relevant by applying the HEROIC leadership framework.

  • Holistic: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts
  • Engineered: How the parts best fit together
  • Reality: How the parts behave
  • Ongoing Operations: Continuous and sustained improvement
  • Impactive: How you message to your community of stakeholders to drive action
  • Collaborative: Process to factor in multiple perspectives required to drive cohesion.

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Intro 00:02  

Welcome to the inside sales enablement to podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert, as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:32  

I’m Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35  

I’m Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. This podcast is focused on helping you be successful overcoming the complexities that you find in your own company, so that your salespeople can have more valuable and relevant sales conversations, and your company wins in the market. If you’re an enablement, leader, looking to elevate your function, expand your sphere of influence, or increase your impact. You’re in the right spot. And today on this episode, we’ve got a special guest, we’ve got Hank black, and this is in response to the heroic framework that we published in an earlier episode.

Scott Santucci 01:14  

Welcome to the show.

Hank 01:16  

Thanks so much for having me. I want you to know how much it means to me to have thought leaders like yourself, introducing me to frameworks and thought processes and I particularly resonated with your heroic framework.

Brian Lambert 01:29  

That’s awesome. How did you guys meet?

Scott Santucci 01:32  

Geez, I think it was at a sales enablement society meeting in San Francisco, on a panel hang asked a tough question about metrics. I think, I think we’ve gotten along swimmingly ever since. And I think that’s really how we got here. We got introduced and connected.

Hank 01:48  

Yes, I did ask you about metrics. Specifically, how much of a portion GMA did companies spend on sales enablement? I think I got a funny look from you.

Brian Lambert 01:56  

I bet. Scott, love that question.

Scott Santucci 01:59  

Oh, that was about a funny luck. The answer was 15.9%.

Hank 02:04  

I think it was more than you were surprised that somebody would pick up on that particular metric. Yes,

Scott Santucci 02:09  

exactly. That’s the right question to ask. Anyway, so what we’re going to do here is hang mentioned to being her own framework. So we introduce that as our part five of our COVID series, we had a follow on conversation with Brian applying it. And then what we want is to put more color on it, because it’s a very impactful framework, just to remind everybody a little bit level set. It started out I think, maybe 1011 years ago, when we were at Forrester, we had a hero conference. We got experts, some Mitch Liddell represented the age. And we’ll go through what these things mean, later, we, we had Ken Powell, representing the he, Carol Stella, the reality based, we had Oh, for operations, operation, ongoing operations by Daniel West, who’s who’s at Oracle now, all these different parts, and we added two other elements to it. So AI is impactive. And then C is collaboration. So that’s our framework. Now, like every hero story, there’s an origin story. So let’s get to know a little bit about hey,

Brian Lambert 03:16  

yeah, I love that setup. so far. I’m wondering if she got bit by a spider or something in a secret lab or something?

Unknown Speaker 03:24  

Well, to start, I have to start from the beginning. I have a chemical engineering degree. And I had asked my parents if I could go into business. And they said, Absolutely not. You’re Asian, pick one engineering lawyer or doctor, subject engineering, which I happen to love. I started work at 19. As an engineer, I did that for nine years. And then I went over to marketing for about 10 years, and then I went over to sales. So it is interesting how you will still gravitate towards what you love. I found that at some point in my career, I was very, very broad, because I was just exceptionally curious. And I wanted to learn everything there was about product marketing, I wanted to learn everything there was about product management. And so I went through product management, Product Marketing, and then over into central marketing and then over into sales. The interesting thing about each of those roles, engineering, marketing and sales is none of them has the deep respect for each of them that they should. And it wasn’t until I landed into sales that I really understood how all three of those combined. It was sort of magical, having been in corporate, though at that point only for been in the business 15 years and I’d only been with two companies. I ventured on my own had my own company. I then consulted for about 30 different companies doing everything in sales and marketing consulting, sales, Ops, marketing, Ops, field marketing, sales enablement. And then I just learned that tilted towards enablement, because if you think of traditional enablement as training, there’s the teacher side of you. And then if you look at where modern enablement is going, there’s a revenue operation side.

So I like to think of sales enablement as business minded teaching. And it was magical. I got connected to the sales enablement society where we met Scott in San Francisco at Autodesk. And the questions that you were asking really connected me to the business within a business. And that began my journey. And I then focus my consulting company mostly on enablement. and ended up taking a job, I went back to technology, which is my love. And I stood up a program from scratch at a at a company called gigamon. And I got recruited out of there went to the larger company called eight by eight. And then that’s where I had a global team that did everything sales, SC channels, and then I got recruited out into Juniper Networks where I am now where I’ve got sales and technical enablement for sales and services, which is collectively about 4000 people. And it’s been the biggest challenge that I’ve had, but the most gratifying because it is extremely complex. So I always say I went into engineering because I like solving complex problems I and I like numbers. It turns out, I went into sales, because I liked numbers of dollar signs in front of them.

Scott Santucci 06:29  

Awesome. And now you’re in sales enablement, fixing complex problems that impact a lot of people’s dollar signs.

Unknown Speaker 06:36  

That’s right. And it’s not just sales anymore. It’s above and beyond, which is an absolutely exciting time to be in enablement.

Scott Santucci 06:43  

Excellent. So that’s the backstory, the origin story. So now what we’re going to do a setting, so bring us up to where you are Juniper, right, but before COVID.

Unknown Speaker 06:52  

So we have been humming along. When I came in there, there are certain things about enablement, that is just critical in core, make sure you have a good onboarding program, make sure you have a good ongoing program, and then you build the excellence around it, which is industry best practices, learn what you can from the industry, from the analyst from your peers, and move forward. With COVID, what I found was any resistance that there was to change melted away, immediately, all the all the red tape, and all the all the I would call it speed bumps to evolution disappear because everyone had to pivot. And that’s sort of my jam. That’s what I love, which is change management in times of crises. So at this point in COVID, we’re actually hiring more people in, we’re innovating much more quickly, we’re activating projects that have been on the back burner for months, we’re taking this pause, and to do what I would say, Lindsay had mentioned it before, which was to evaluate, are we doing the right things? And are we doing the right things, right? My CRL has given me a lot of bandwidth to go after I tell him 25% of my job is running in front of chains and tell him to stop. So let’s make sure that we’re doing the right things effectively and doing less better.

Scott Santucci 08:23  

So that’s pretty courageous to run out in front of a train. And that’s one of the things that we’re talking about a lot. With the being heroic framework. We like that model, because you have to be courageous, and it’s a way to help help you think it through.

Brian Lambert 08:37  

Yeah, and this is Brian, I think it would be really great to hear how you’re applying it that Jennifer thing?

Scott Santucci 08:46  

Well, first of all, being heroic, how does that resonate with you? as an individual? What does it mean? Because some people are telling us us kind of corny or cartoonish?

Unknown Speaker 08:55  

Well, it’s both it is corny, and it is awesome. So they’re not mutually exclusive. It’s easy to remember, but it’s very, it resonates very well. So, ah, as you said, was holistic. It’s a sum of all parts. And I think you have to start with a mission. I think that was something that I learned very early on in enablement, especially through this society. And each of us can have a different mission that is developed within the context of the company that we’re in. So my particular mission is we’ve heard it for years people processes and tools, but what are the enablement words that we build around that for myself, I developed an elite sales team to accelerate revenue growth by equipping sellers with relevant content, consistent process and effective technology. That’s a little bit of a mouthful, but if content isn’t relevant, then we’re just throwing stuff out into the ether. If we add technology, it should be meant to accelerate revenue growth and not be additional time. So, so one of the things that I do is I’m a big fan of the medic framework as well. And I make sure that I have a champion in every single group, whether it’s Product Marketing, Product Management, field marketing, in my organization, my sales organization in my services organization, I make sure I have a champion in each organization. And it’s a continuous delivery and feedback loop so that I’m making sure that every person has a voice, and we’re all collaborating together.

So one of the things that came up in the panel that we had of sales enablement, practitioners, which Yvonne dug, and imaging was this idea of learning from each other that that’s, that’s a key part. It’s hard to be holistic, if you’re just dictating to different groups, it sounds like that’s something similar to what you’re doing here is building relationships of representatives of different organizational functions that touch the sales organization. Truthfully, enablement is the can be kind of scary. When I came in to Juniper a little over 16 months ago, I was a powerful force of one person. And in order to bring people along, initially, you’re inserting yourself and there’s this fear of Oh, my gosh, she’s gonna take over my job, who is she this brand new person. And the way I have positioned the conversation is, look, I’m here to help you do you better? Let me do what I do well, and we’ll figure out how we can work collaboratively together. I don’t actually need to own any or all of the process. But let’s build the framework together. And what happens when you have that conversation is then you start peeling off a racy, you know, no one can do it all. So then you peel off a racf. You do this, you do that let’s all specialize in the things that we do well individually, and put it together as a program.

Scott Santucci 11:59  

So how do you handle the the feedback? We’ve often heard pushback, as I certainly advocate exactly what you’re talking about, when you talk about races? That takes too long, we have to go now, how do you how do you rationalize that with a holistic perspective?

Unknown Speaker 12:15  

Well, you can’t do it without executive sponsorship. And I believe every single person that you’ve had on the show is that executive sponsorship. So when you have that backing, but then at least you can come in with voice. And again, it has taken me a long time to learn to speak in a way that I can resonate with the other organizations, I’m here with you, for you. And our goal is to help sales, everyone has the best intentions in place. But what is it that we can if we outline everything that needs to be done, when you look at it, I tell them, I don’t need to own any or all of it. And then you look at the massive work that’s in place. And then you say, but you know, I’m happy to help you take some of it on, people are happy to. And then at some point, when when there are people who are unwilling to move forward, what you’ll find is 98% of the companies will willing to evolve, and there are 2% of antibodies. And what I found has worked well has been just make sure you build a great product. This is the formal train, if you want to do informal things on the side, fine. But if you can prove adoption of what is in the programmatic framework where everyone has a voice, everyone’s building together, the adoption engine is 60%. To begin with 70%. And one of the metrics that I personally love is, over time I look at my programs that deliver six months later, they’re increasing in adoption. So meaning the same content that I delivered six months ago, where it had 60% adoption in the first three weeks. I look at it six months later has 82% adoption. Why is that? It’s because it’s its content of value, it resonates and people go back to it and reference it when it becomes relevant in that moment of time in their sales cycle.

Scott Santucci 14:06  

Excellent. So then let’s go into E engineers. So as you react to the E part of being Iraq,

Unknown Speaker 14:15  

so engineered, I love that with my background, and I know that you and Kunal have talked about being design thinkers, systems, thinkers, it’s about how all the parts fit together. I love the Ford making enablement leaders take an approach to their craft. It’s not about just taking orders and doing what other people say they need, but building with them. What do you need Shivani in your last podcast talked about being Mission Control, you’re accepting flight plans, you’re evaluating flight plans, and then you’re accepting them. So those are those are programs that are in flight, you’re also landing planes sunsetting programs that don’t work and then taking off planes make designing and designing products and service. services that are going to be the evolution of enablement. So a very thoughtful process end to end, where you are adding strategic value with your stakeholders versus just creating what you think is good for people or even worse, taking what other people have dictated for sales and producing it.

Scott Santucci 15:18  

So how would you respond when somebody if somebody were say, he engineered? Oh, gosh, you’re gonna over engineer this? or How would you react react to that?

Unknown Speaker 15:27  

Well, I think it flows very nicely into your reality base, there’s only so much time to engineer. And you also have to be productive. So you’ve got to, you’ve got to build a plane while you’re flying it and the plane actually never lands, you’re you’re designing for capacity, you’re designing for rerouting. So you think of a plane that’s always flying? Where’s it going? It goes to where it needs to go at that moment of crisis of COVID is actually a wonderful time for for for enablement leaders, to flex their muscle to show their innovation and creativity, to show their ability to skate to where the puck is, as he like to mention with a Wayne Gretzky.

Scott Santucci 16:13  

Awesome. And so you you went right into the reality based, what does that mean to you?

Unknown Speaker 16:19  

So, reality mate base means you have to start with where you’re from, you can’t start with an ideal state, you can’t start with Well, if these are the conditions that I have, if if only the rest of the world will tilt to me, this is the awesome product I can create. You have to start from where you are sellers know all the time that they have to start the conversation with where their customers are. So for us, our customers are our salespeople, our sales organization, the C suite, where are we today? And where do we need to go. And if you’re impatient, like me, that’s actually very, very hard to do. That is probably the worst, that’s probably my Achilles heel is operating within the reality that I’m in because I think that I expect that everyone should be able to innovate and move at a at a pace that is probably not sustainable for a very large organization or for an organization is simply not ready for it. reality based is starting where your customers are. And for us, it’s sales.

Scott Santucci 17:23  

So what’s interesting about this, starting where you’re at, where you talked about holistic and having a strategy, how do you morph those two together? It’s interesting, a lot of people have difficulty that they think it’s either one or the other. If they either start where you are today, or start with a with a big plan. It sounds like you’re doing both. How do you rationalize those two?

Unknown Speaker 17:48  

So I can recall the last few jobs that I’ve interviewed for, and people would ask me, what’s your 30 6090 day plan? And I would say, Well, I don’t know. But here’s what I would do. First of all, I need to lay the patient on the table. And I need to triage I need to fix what is absolutely, I need to remove the any cancers. And then I need to look at the patient and say, Okay, what do we need to triage? What do we need to fix? What do we need to replace what in what what has to stay in flight while we’re fixing and while we’re building new projects, so if you go back to design thinking, it’s all about need space, and where where do we want to be in the future, not right now, but six months from now, and I need to build for six months from now. Otherwise, we keep getting trapped in and I see it a lot. We keep getting trapped in the triage phase, the I’ve got a lot of content. And that’s why you call it brave. I feel it that it’s necessary to get in front of trends and say stop. Because most of the time, if you’re an effective leader, and you have the executive backing behind you, you can actually stop in front of the train and get the train to stop and start getting people focused on again, doing the right things and doing the right things, right.

Scott Santucci 19:05  

So brave though is doing the things that needed to be done is actually doing them a lot of people don’t do the things that need to be done. So I’m gonna say it is brave. And we can argue about that you want but it’s my show. And

Unknown Speaker 19:17  

you can call me brave all day long. I like coffee.

Scott Santucci 19:20  

All right. So let’s let’s move on to Oh operations. Tell us tell us about this.

Unknown Speaker 19:27  

And operations is a tough topic. For me it is my least favorite topic because I think enablement is often overlooked. People, a lot of enablement. Professionals don’t tend to operationalize their craft and when I say their craft, it’s specifically I put it in the framework of their craft and not their job because it can be it’s a difference between being tactical and being strategic operationalizing best practices operationalizing innovation, how do you take the product that you have, and make sure that it gets better by continuous evolution, and knowing when to call it a day and say, Okay, this process, this program has served its purpose for the time that it has. And now, puck is somewhere else, it’s going to be somewhere else. And I need to operationalize. I need to operationalize my program. Now.

Again, what’s scary about enablement for other professionals for other areas of the organization as well, I just want to get my information out there. But if you can ensure them that the program that you build Guarantees the best adoption, you can tell them look, salespeople have good, I forgot what the metrics are Scott, but it’s a certain number of hours, I think it’s like 12 hours a week that they’re just looking for content, they’re looking for the right tools and processes and content to help them move the needle. If you can tell them that, look, this engine that is maybe 30 to 45 minutes of a seller’s week gets the most attention and adoption and has very good feedback. People can create other engines, they just know that this is the one that that gets has the most impact. And, again, I’m sorry, but I’m leading you to your next letter already. So

Scott Santucci 21:30  

look, it’s our framework. Right. So it’s our next letter being impacted. impactive. Tell us about, tell us about that. It’s just a placeholder to let the audience fall along.

Unknown Speaker 21:42  

Yes, absolutely. So being impactful, and in operationalizing impact. I think that’s an interesting concept. That’s an interesting concept. If you operationalize impact, and you’re creating a business within a business, you’re adding value by doing the right thing, freeing up the efficiency of organizations feeding into enablement, the last panel that you had talked about, well, how do you convince an organization that they should invest in me because I’m going to produce less? And why should they pay for less, and it’s about is that less better? Does that less free up efficiency and time, sellers time can be counted in minutes, especially on the SDR virtual sales side. But as they move up the ladder, their minutes are very important, because the minutes every minute is a is a is an increasing dollar value per minute. So if I can help frame it in a conversation where I’m freeing up the efficiency of organizations, feeding enablement, meaning marketing, meaning corporate finance, and freeing up their time to not create material or enablement, that doesn’t resonate, that doesn’t get adoption that doesn’t even get eyeballs, over 67% of information that is sent to sales doesn’t get viewed at all. And trust me, I was one of them. I loved as a product manager, I loved writing my 50 page, white papers, it was very heartbreaking to know that nobody read them.

So if I can tell people don’t do that, do this, spend your time curating instead of writing a 50 page white paper spend the same number of hours creating for 12 minute modules that are going to get consumed by 80 to 100% of the population. Hell yeah, most people will veer towards that. And now they can still do their own. But again, they’re doing it eyes wide open with full awareness that it’s it’s going to be, it’s going to be less adopted. And that’s actually okay. Again, if you think of flight plans, you’ve got the major commercial liners, and then you’ve got private jets, and those are all useful in the right framework. And then on the sales side, the efficiency is even more important as far as consumption and can not just consumption, but practical application, we’ve got to look at how we measure impact. Do we want to measure output of how much content and training we produce? Do we want to measure number of minutes on the platform? Or do we want to measure practical application? How much has how much has this pre call plan been used? How many times has it been downloaded and used effectively? How many deal reviews have been done with this particular opportunity framework mission that we’ve released. So the practical application and how many deals were one and closed and close bigger with the practical application of what we’re delivering? For me that’s impact and definitely for the sea staff when they look at those metrics that’s impacting them.

Scott Santucci 24:44  

So want to highlight a couple things. One of the things going back to the engineering part, unfortunately, many sales enablement practitioners tend to be intimidated by the math part. You growing up in engineering, love it. So this is where that’s an area you end up And can really geek out about, but I loved what you talked about about the impact being time. It’s really easy. If you’ve got discipline around your math, to figure out how to prioritize what’s impactful, because you can calculate it, it’s pretty straightforward. It’s what is the value of the time spent. And on top of that, we don’t want our salespeople wasting time with tire kicker customers, we want them spending more time with the people, the adult, the adult money. And as simple as that sounds, it requires some calculations, because many people in the organization don’t think that way. So in order to be able to create impact, it sounds to me hang that you’re leveraging your engineering background to to be able to make sure that the impact of less gets communicated. Is that right? care to comment on that?

Unknown Speaker 25:53  

Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it’s so engineering. It’s not just the learning of the science of their particular field, whether it’s civil, chemical, mechanical, electrical engineering, engineering is about learning how to think and solve problems. So if you married that, with my learning, and sales, which has been so rewarding the last 10 years or so. And I look at my sales training, and I look at defining your champion, your economic buyer, and one of my favorite parts of my job right now is doing do reviews, there was literally, we did nine hours of deal reviews last week. And at one point, because we’re on zoom calls now and everybody’s watching your every movement.

We had about 40 sellers on the call and somebody said, Hold up, pings entire body language just changed in the sales leader asked me, he said, Hey, you look like you just swallowed a loss, what’s going on? And I said, Look, you have no economic buyer, no champion, you have no metrics, who are you qualifying with? How are you ensuring you’re going in the right path, the whole point of these deal reviews, is to understand is just as important to qualify in as it is to qualify out this deal isn’t real, I think we should move on. And that freed up the sales leader to have me be the the the bad guy and the heavy and they’re the heavy all the time. But they get to have an outside force to say you know what, you’re not spending your time the right way. For the sales team, it was valuable to understand. Okay, I need to move on. So when we when sales enablement as regarded as minutes Savers, then we become impactful as the partner and I’m not telling them, I’m not dictating them, I’m giving them a perspective. With my experience, I’m being a consultant within the sales organization.

Scott Santucci 27:47  

Time is the only thing you can’t ever get back. That’s right. And so to value it is is huge. A couple things to inside our nation to highlight, it takes courage to actually say, No, I didn’t swallow be, I think this still stinks. That takes courage. And if you have discipline around that, and consistency, and a consistent framework, you can do that. I think the other point that Hank mentioned, it is not good, in my opinion, for the VP of sales to always be the bad guy. The VP of Sales needs to be the coach and needs to be the guy that’s helping people along. And who likes to who likes to have meetings with people that do it do too much of the bad guy. So I think that there’s two kinds of insightful moments there. And I think that gets us to see collaboration. Tell us about collaboration hang.

Unknown Speaker 28:46  

Well, um, recently, I’ve created a TED like talk, and I call it Ted light, because it’s super digestible. And I’ve delivered a couple of times in including at dreamforce. But I call it my personal leadership mantra, which is earn it, own it, evolve it. And you’re right. In another podcast, in a previous podcast, you had mentioned that inclusion is in the enablement conversation is not about ind. It’s not about inclusion and diversity. But it’s about bringing people along my last sales leader prior to this when I talked about bringing people under the tent. So we’re simultaneously doing building and designing. So one of the most threatening thing as an enablement leader to come into, people are worried that you’re going to kill their baby. Yeah. And you have to tell them, I’m actually not here to kill your baby. I’m actually here to evaluate what we need to do as a program and how we do it together. And again, going back to the metaphor of Mission Control, I’m not just landing the planes, but we’re capacity planning. We’re redesigning its existing infrastructure, and then we’re designing for the future new solutions in anticipation of new traffic patterns.

So when you bring pm And Product Marketing and field marketing along and say let’s do this together. I am not the smartest person in the room. In fact, I don’t like being the smartest person in the room because then there’s nowhere to learn from. You get everyone’s feedback. And then you tell them, I’m going to give you a, I’m going to give you a feedback loop to the best sellers, the best essays, the best services, personnel, and they are going to become your ambassadors. Once we win them over, we validate and win them over, then you will have an engine where other sellers, other services members will say, look, these people go to club every year, I want to look like them. So collaboration is all about having the vulnerability to confess No, I don’t know at all, and letting other people have the space and the comfort to be vulnerable to say, Yes, I don’t know it all either. I can’t do it all either. And you work together. It sounds a little Kumbaya, but ultimately, we are better together. That’s

Scott Santucci 30:57  

I couldn’t agree with you more on that. I think that there’s a another element to that is once you just say, Hey, I don’t have all the answers. So instead of focusing on the things that we don’t know, why don’t we collectively focus on the things we do know, that doesn’t sound like Kumbaya to me at all. That sounds like good, old fashioned when we work together as Americans. It’s the melting pot. And that That, to me, is exciting, not Kumbaya all at all.

Unknown Speaker 31:25  

Oh, thank you for that. And I have to say the most difficult lesson that I have learned is that courage requires vulnerability and vulnerability is exposing everything you don’t know. And everything and giving people accolades for what they are better at than you. And bringing them into the house and saying, hey, this, we can actually build something quicker, better, we can do less better together, and we can make impact better sooner together.

Scott Santucci 31:57  

That’s so resonating with me, because we added the IMC after my personal experiences with the sales enablement society, we accomplished a lot more when I lead off our meetings with, we don’t know what we’re doing, but we’ll figure it out. And what’s interesting is how much pushback I get well, of course, we have to know what we’re doing. It’s like, but we’re in the figure out business, how can we possibly know what we’re doing? We haven’t done this before. So let’s just put that aside. So that just resonates with me so much. And I’m I love to hear people who have the courage to lean into vulnerability. People have the courage to talk about vulnerability in an activating way, and not a shameful way. And, you know, I love the whole idea of we’re better together. So that’s, that’s awesome. So hang put us all together for us, like how did you get here? How do all these things to do what does this have to do with COVID? Well,

Unknown Speaker 32:53  

I would say that the enablement community has grown quite a bit my learning in enablement, my, my loop, you can call them successes in enablement in creating programs that are that are impactful to the companies that I serve, has all been part of continuous learning from my peers. I listen to your podcasts and other sales podcast, I commune. In other circles where I’m learning from I listen, I attend as many zero conferences as possible. So I know not only what my CFO cares about, what what other CIOs care about. And as far as COVID comes, has come along, it’s actually, I think, enablement, professionals and leaders specifically can attach to this moment of change where we probably have more voice than we ever have before, to have a seat at the table to drive change management by innovation. And I want to quote Canole Mater who is on your first COVID podcast, I believe, where he said, You know, this is a moment to act with urgency instead of waiting to witness I so love that phrase. I’m always acting with urgency. But this is a moment for us to actually capitalize on it. It’s a little bit opportunistic to, to use this platform in this time to move enablement forward in a way that shows that we have a meaningful strategy to drive impact and revenue for our companies. Excellent.

Scott Santucci 34:33  

So what advice would you give somebody starting out all the things that you sound very intimidating? How would you get started in the process of being heroic and then we’ll wrap up

Unknown Speaker 34:45  

and I will have to say, I will admit enablement is hard. And you have to step into it knowing that it’s hard You can’t step into it thinking okay, I don’t really belong in sales. I don’t really belong in marketing. enable it sounds like you know, something cool that I can Easily step into, I would say no, be prepared for it to be hard because our job is to make things simple. And to convince other people that it’s simple. So I don’t know that I have a good answer about, you know, not intimidating people, I think you should be prepared for it to be hard. That being said, you can also prepare for it to be to drive a lot of adoption and mindshare and to have voice if you can prove that you’re very relevant. So my advice would be become relentlessly relevant. get really good at what you do learn. Learn what it takes, learn from your peers, learn from CRS learn from the analysts. Look at best practices, there’s the good thing about the sales enablement, professionals, we’re all teachers. So we’re all very willing to learn and willing to teach each other as well.

Brian Lambert 35:55  

Wow, Hank, this is Brian. And what a great, great way to wrap this up. I just wanted to jump in and provide some synthesis of what you talked about. And I’ve got five points that I wanted to recap. And the first one I just, I really resonated with the takeaway that you gave right at the beginning, with your origin story, do do what you love, and you found a way to gravitate to doing what you love, that sense of purpose, that sense of ownership, that sense of vision is ingrained in you. And that that helps you be heroic, to have that foundation. So I would encourage our listeners to find your strengths and to leverage your strengths as you become a sales enablement leader, especially to the C suite. The second one is your definition of modern sales enablement, that modern sales enablement is about being a business minded teacher. And much like our other panelists, as we’ve been discussing the state of sales enablement, they talk about two way learning, learning from each other, understanding the perspectives of others, not to persuade them to help them get the win. And that’s the second piece here is understand that your business minded teacher, able to learn from others and also able to help others be successful.

The third is, and this was throughout the whole entire discussion, but you have a mental model that you’re using to collect inputs, to vet those inputs, to look for insights, to make decisions to set priorities, and to be strong in in your scrutiny that you get as well as your ability to articulate and that comes from having a solid mental model about how do you think about a sales enablement? All of our listeners that have listened as you have I mean, you’re quoting, I think I counted five, six other episodes. Clearly, you’ve been listening to a lot of our shows. And that’s the real win for Scott, nice to hear you using the shows and these frameworks and these items that we’re talking about to build your own mental model. Things like you know, thinking about sales enablement, as a business within a business, understanding the critical core, and the best practices view, understanding stakeholder management, taking the takeaways from Kunal and Lindsay and shavon. These items help you build your mountain your model, and that helps you be resilient, under under scrutiny and pressure. So that’s the third is have a mental model about how you think about sales enablement. The fourth one is have a plan. And that plan should incorporate both strategy and tactics. It’s not one or the other, as some saying sales enablement, it’s both. And you’ve got to be both strategic and tactical. And that ability that you have to understand the plan, and understand what the sales organization needs, as your customer allows you to be both strategic and tactical. And I really, really love what you had to say there around that it’s the fourth takeaway is have a plan to be both strategic and tactical. And then the last one that I just love is this, this idea of you’re a time saver. And you’ve even said not only a time saver, but because time is precious, you’re a minute saver. If you can shave minutes off of the amnesia, if you can save sellers minutes of time. That’s that is value added. And that is what salespeople need to be successful today, especially with so many sales people spending so much time in administrative internal meetings. So that’s my fifth takeaway is be a minute saver.

So there you go, everybody That’s the the takeaways from having to do what you love be a modern sales enablement leader. Think about your your mental model for sales enablement. Have a plan to do the both the strategic and tactical. And then think about time. And time is precious time is our most valuable resource can be a minute saver for sales.

Scott Santucci 40:23  

Excellent. So that’s the wrap on our being heroic framework. Thank you so much Hang Hang black, who’s joining us from from Juniper? If you haven’t had a chance to do this before, this is the third part of our being heroic iraq framework. We’re strong believers here on inside sales enablement, that you can’t really do sales enablement, unless you’re running it from a leadership standpoint, we’ve heard that from our sales leaders standpoint, when we publish. By now we will publish our executive sponsors standpoint, please try to find ways to model these behaviors. Being the hero being heroic framework helps you learn that we want to thank hang for sharing her stories about how she’s a hero so you can model those behaviors. And please, continue to listen, drop us a line give us some ideas on how we can make it more impactful for you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 41:19  

Thank you for having

Outro 41:20  

thanks for joining us. To Become an insider and amplify your journey. Make sure you’ve subscribed to our show. If you have an idea for what Scott and Brian can cover in a future podcast or have a story to share, please email them at engage inside s e.com. You can also connect with them online by going to inside se.com following them on Twitter or sending them a LinkedIn request.

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