Ep46 Orchestrating Cross-Functional Enablement with Cathy Rowell
Welcome to the Inside: Sales Enablement Podcast Episode 46
There is a whole class of leader working in the gap between strategy and tactics, to blend together the right programs, actions, and processes to achieve outcomes — often with people who don’t report directly into them.
In this episode, we’re joined by Cathy – a sales enablement leader working in her company to bring together groups of people to drive outcomes.
In this engaging discussion, we discuss:
- The value of orchestration to the sales organization
- Working with line managers who have the resources
- Enrolling people to achieve an outcome
- The difference between orchestrating teams and individuals
- The blend of strategy, process, technology, and information
- Examples of orchestrating people and groups
- The differences between project management and orchestration
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 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 00:33
I’m Scott Santucci.
Brian Lambert 00:34
I’m Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.
Scott Santucci 00:48
Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants or practitioners. We’ve learned the hard way, what works and maybe what’s most important, what doesn’t.
Brian Lambert 01:02
Thanks, Scott. And on this show today, what we’re going to do is we’re actually going to go back a couple months and we’re going to talk through the state of sales, Nyland research but more importantly, the the findings presentation.
Scott Santucci 01:13
Wait only a couple months last podcast, we went back to 1217. Oh, no.
Brian Lambert 01:18
I know, I shouldn’t say we’re going back at all, because Dallas is nothing for you. That’s right, it feels like forever ago in a way because we’ve been actually producing a lot of content podcasts panels, we had our one year anniversary celebration, we’re now in season two. And but what I wanted to do Scott is actually bring a listener on we have Kathy that’s going to join us here. And what I wanted to do is just talk through the findings presentation, because not all of our listeners were on that. And the reason why I want to do that is it’s it’s the executive summary of what’s happening in the sales enablement space, and more importantly, where it’s going. So we’re not going to recap all the panel discussions in all that listeners can listen to that. But more importantly, how does this land from a sales enablement leader perspective, like we have on the show here today? And how is this being internalized in action? If at all, right, because the findings in and of themselves are great, but how do people process it? And what do they do with it? So I’ve got Kathy joining
Scott Santucci 02:22
me here. Before we do that, let’s just remind our listeners. So what is Brian talking about? What the research. So in March, we had a panel COVID panel where we had Dr. Howard over could all meta, meta and Lindsey Gore. And from that, we launched a survey. We did a survey and we had over 100 hundred people 100 sales enablement practitioners respond to that survey we recruited and by the way, you can go to our site to look at what the research process was. We had 43 we deputize 43 analysts, so to speak, to help us out, we ran six panels, and then produced the first of a series of webinars that we’re doing to unpack all the things that we learned. And that was a that was the first one, which was the findings of all of these things, I guess partial the findings, because we’ve had, we’re getting ready to do our fourth webcast. So Brian, go ahead and take it away and go ahead and introduce Kathy.
Brian Lambert 03:24
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve got Kathy on. And Kathy has been somebody that I learned from a lot via LinkedIn. And she’s chiming in a lot around the inside sales enablement, content in the state of sales enablement research that Scott just alluded to. Her name’s Kathy rollin. She’s with nectar. Hi, Kathy, how you doing?
Unknown Speaker 03:44
Hi, Brian, I’m good. How are you?
Brian Lambert 03:46
Good. And for the last two months, we’ve been going back and forth on LinkedIn in a variety different ways. And I thought it’d be good to just have the public conversation. So I appreciate you jumping on the call with us here and processing together. What you learned.
Unknown Speaker 04:02
Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Brian Lambert 04:05
Sure. So um, let’s go back a couple months ago, we had our inside state of sales enablement research. So Scott presented that. I just like to open it up with you. What did you take away from that? And what kind of resonated with you as you were processing that content?
Unknown Speaker 04:24
So I’ll be honest with you that the webinar happened at a time when I was buried, missing that happens right to all of us in our day to day jobs. So I didn’t have a chance right away to kind of absorb everything from the webinar. And I went back Scott posted something on the sales enablement society. Board discussion board and, and I was like, Oh, yeah, I should go in. I should go back and look at that. So I actually went back and looked at all the materials that that Scott had and you had pulled together The big thing all of a sudden, I had an aha moment. And it was around that you all have finally put a title to something I’ve been doing or felt like I’ve been doing for a really long time. And that was the Orchestrator title. Like, that’s, that’s brilliant. Because this is something I feel like I’ve been kind of doing for a long time he both here at nectar, and in a previous role, right in, in previous life at different sales enablement roles, where it’s not always about the tactics and, and getting everything, doing things and just sitting around and getting that right, but also about the whole strategy and, and marrying the two together. So all of a sudden, it was like, Wow, you guys finally like let me know what I did. I literally that day, went on to my LinkedIn profile and changed my headline to include Orchestrator.
Brian Lambert 05:56
Wow. That’s, that’s amazing. And that’s great to hear. Actually humbling to hear. So I appreciate that. And it’s it’s one of those things where you go through it, you just, you do the findings, you publish it, you don’t know quite what the impact is. And one of the things that’s interesting here is, you said your sales enablement, professional and you’ve been in this sounds like you’ve been in the space for a while. Why didn’t it? Why don’t you compare and contrast a little bit the sales enablement, title role versus the Orchestrator title and role? Why? Why does one resonate perhaps a little bit more than another? Or give me some insight into the difference between the two to you?
Unknown Speaker 06:36
Yeah, so I think, sales enablement, right, has kind of gone on this growth path. And we’ve all tried to figure out what is it? What is in it? How do we define it? Scott, and you and others have done a great job of saying what sales enablement is. But if you went out and at one point, if you went out and talked to 10, different sales enablement, professionals, you’d get 10 different answers about what it was. And, and not any of them were wrong if they were just different. And so I think you having a title of sales enablement, depending on your perspective was a question about what it is that you actually were responsible for. And so I’ve always been kind of a broad strategy person and been able to kind of see a bigger picture. And so to me, when I someone said, oh, we’re going to do sales enablement, I said, well, it’s not just training. It’s not just content. It’s not just this, we have to look at the whole, right, what what from the whole makes a salesperson successful. And it’s much broader. And there’s many more things than just those things that make it the whole, and then it kind of morphed from there. And I started growing back, because then it wasn’t just the salesperson because there’s other people responsible for the success of the company. And the revenue generation. That’s your channel, where I have a particular focus today is on our channel partners. And then there’s the channel and then it’s like, Well, yeah, but it doesn’t really stop when the order comes in from the customer. So there’s this whole holistic thing.
So I think, I feel like sales enablement might have pigeonholed a little bit for me, and Orchestrator was a much better way I actually moved away from my sales enablement title a little while ago, I went to strict enablement, because I have responsibility across the revenue chain. So I took sales completely out. And then I changed it again last year. And I said, Well, that’s not exactly even what I’m doing. Because I’m really responsible for the efficiency of our channel and our sales, to get the customer to success. So it just it resonated. The other thing that resonated a lot was it’s about being able to work across different functions, and work with people who don’t report to you and make them all successful, right to be successful together. And to be able to work across that and, and meet a common goal. So there was a lot of it that really kind of stuck in my head.
Brian Lambert 09:21
Yeah, so I’m hearing the, the sales enablement, title and role felt a little bit restrictive in a way and probably because of how people communicated or how the market was receiving as a training role.
Unknown Speaker 09:35
I think it was a perception, right?
Brian Lambert 09:38
Yeah. And then it sounds like your charter or your remit was broader than that pigeon holing if you will, or that step boxed in, right. So you thought about dropping sales and just being enablement and just enablement was something that you did actually, it’s, he said, and then from that perspective, it’s it became about this broader picture. which we’ve dubbed the the ecosystem view. And we’re actually going to have a podcast soon around that. And then And then the final piece that you’re talking about, which is obviously really intriguing to me. And actually what we’ve been chatting back and forth around on LinkedIn is this idea of working together with people to achieve an outcome and a goal together. Whether or not they report into you or not, I’ll throw that in there, right? Because that’s implied that you don’t have to have the headcount reporting MTU to be an orchestrator. In fact, it’s part of the role of orchestrators to not have the headcount actually reporting into you. Right. So what what, what do you think about that as a part of the role, this idea of working with others to achieve that outcome? And goal? And and then what have you, what have you seen or taken away from the last couple of months, that’s perhaps struck a chord with you around this idea of I’m an orchestrator.
Unknown Speaker 11:09
So, you know, I have lots of experience working with a cross functional teams that don’t report to me. And, and it’s, it’s an interesting thing, and I think we’ve had this conversation on a little bit on LinkedIn, right? So you have the people with a bigger challenge, when you have that is you have your tree huggers, people who are like, Oh, no, this, this piece right over here, this is my piece, and you can’t touch it. That’s the way it’s going to be. So try and and, you know, get those people to see what the broader picture is, and, and come to a consensus. And it’s it, when you put it in the context of the benefit not only to them to their departments, and more broadly to the revenue and the company, then they’ll start to see and take ownership around that. And it’s, it’s when they start to see that piece of it that’s really enlightening, and they become much less of a tree hugger, and they want to participate more.
Brian Lambert 12:11
So what’s it What’s a tree hugger? A tree hugger? In Kathy land? A little bit?
Unknown Speaker 12:18
Yeah, the tree hugger in my world is the someone who’s on a team and is like, just holding on to the way things have always been, or they don’t they just want to do their little piece. They put their blinders on, they’re hugging the tree, like, nope, this is the way it is. When you can’t take it, you can’t touch it. Right? Touch it. Leave my tree alone. Yeah, exactly. Don’t touch my tree. I’m lucky where I’m at now that I don’t have a lot of tree huggers, I have a few. I don’t have a lot. So that’s really good. It’s really nice, right? So if you think about a channel, and you you try to orchestrate around that you don’t just have your training team and the channel account manager, you also have to think about, okay, who are the support, people are going to take those calls, who are the professional services, people who are going to be involved, who’s the marketing person who’s going to work with the channel partner to co market and get all of that marketing strategy pulled together to come to market together. So that’s one of the things that I actually built into our onboarding program for our channel is to have this cross functional team assigned to every channel partner that we have a contract with. So they all understand who is this partner? What are they trying to do? What’s our partnership about? What are our joint objectives? How are we going to get there? What’s my role in supporting that? To get us to success? So I’m lucky here, I haven’t always been that lucky. I’ve had some pretty hard tree huggers in the past.
Brian Lambert 13:52
So do you get do you actually call them that in the group?
Unknown Speaker 13:55
And they have not? I actually, it actually came to you or chatting on LinkedIn. I was like, Ah,
Unknown Speaker 14:00
yeah. I don’t know if they would like
Unknown Speaker 14:03
they would not. definitely would not.
Brian Lambert 14:07
So I don’t want to encourage our listeners to start using that
Unknown Speaker 14:10
know it. But it’s a characteristic, right. And I term it as, as a not great characteristic. We want those people to be more open and to participate in that team. And
Brian Lambert 14:19
yeah, and the reason why I say that is I’ve made the mistake more than once to come across a bit judgmental to others that don’t report to me. And it’s not fun to deal with the aftermath of those things. So with with the Orchestration angle on this, it’s really an interesting space to operate within. Because you would think that saying, we have a goal, we have an outcome, let’s go let’s roll together would be fairly straightforward. But what you’re alluding to is when we say that there’s a certain cognitive bias perspective, and in some ways, hard wiring around way things have always been done. So that’s where, to me what we also talked about on LinkedIn, the idea of influence and relationship building. You said, Look, this has to be factored in as part of an orchestrator, the ability to persuade and negotiate and influence and build relationships to drive outcomes together. Why do you think that that’s so prevalent and required? And why is it a bit difficult to have folks that are really smart, and they all want the same, the same goal, they all want to achieve it. But it requires a skill set, like what you have to get folks to row together.
Unknown Speaker 15:44
So I’m not sure why it’s so hard, I think inherently people all want to do the right thing. And I have, I have trouble with people not feeling empowered, that when I go into these situations, and you know, we have a cross functional team, I want them to be empowered to, to go and do the right things. And a lot of people don’t know what to do with. So, so that’s when you need to kind of take a step back, and you just sit with them and say, Okay, so what, how can we make this work? What listening to those team members is really critical, just like it’s critical to listen to your customers and to listen to the salespeople you’re trying to enable and to listen to your channel partners. It’s just as critical to listen to those team members to find out, you know, why are they not feeling empowered? Why do they want to can choose to do things the way they’ve always been? And how do we move past that? How do we work together? So it’s really an important thing for an orchestrator to be able to have those conversations, like we were just talking about, build those relationships to get them pointed, so that we are all rowing in the same direction so that we can get to the desired outcome? You know, I don’t know, I don’t understand the psychology of why everyone or not everyone, but a lot of people don’t feel empowered when they come on to those teams. But some of them are there, because they’ve been told to be there. So that’s part of it. They didn’t choose to be part of that team. They’re being told to be part of that team. So I think that’s definitely a part of it.
Brian Lambert 17:26
Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack in this, this space, right. So you’re by the nature of this discussion, we’re not in strategy only. And we’re not in tactics only we’re in a translation of or combination of strategy and tactics together, which is what orchestrators live in and what they do. And when you’re engaged in the work of pursuing an outcome together, what you’re talking about is a bit of the phenomenon that exists that I’ve seen as well, which is this. Look, we can be super creative as we, as we tackle this outcome, what ideas do you have? And sometimes, I don’t know, people might say, I don’t know what to do, or I don’t know how to go about it. Or why don’t you just tell me what you need me to do? So I can go do it? Is that what you’re talking about?
Unknown Speaker 18:19
Yeah, if that’s, that’s absolutely right. And then the other thing you have to be prepared for as an orchestrator is that if you ask them, how we get there, and what they think and how we may be more creative and innovative, you need to be able to listen to that. Because it might not be what you’re thinking. But you need to be able to be open minded enough to pay attention to it, because it might be something that’s worthwhile.
Brian Lambert 18:50
Yeah, so yeah, that’s exactly where they may not have the words I’ve seen. This is where, well, that’s a really good point, somebody is actually asking what, what I think so let me think about that. And it ends up in this a bit of a you’re wandering through the woods, and you end up getting to the point down the road. So you have to have patience, right? Well, because they may not have the words to actually talk about these things. So there’s the patience, and and then also some guidance, right? Because as an orchestrator, you’re living in the ecosystem view, you see things you connect dots, so being able to provide the bed breadcrumbs, or nudge people along without giving them the answer. But then when they do want the answer, being able to say, Okay, here’s what my recommendation is, right? But you also bring up another piece, and it’s this idea of you say when they get brought on the team. So let’s talk about this orchestrating teams now. Because the, one of the things that I’m finding in the space is okay, I’m an orchestrator. And then if I were to flip it and say, What are you orchestrating Some say I’m orchestrating an outcome. Some say I’m orchestrating a process. Some say I’m orchestrating a bunch of technologies together, weaving those together. I’ve heard people Say that I’ve heard people say and orchestrating people, obviously, which is what we just talked about. But you’re alluding to you’re actually orchestrating teams, I believe, is that correct?
Unknown Speaker 20:11
Yeah, but, yes, but the team is driving to an outcome, right? or potentially a change in process, or implementing some new piece of technology. There’s there’s always some outcome that you’re driving towards with that team. I so I think orchestration can be orchestrating a team, but it can also be orchestration. What you just said we could be orchestrating a strategy or an outcome or something else.
Unknown Speaker 20:45
Or it could be a combination thereof.
Brian Lambert 20:47
Yeah. Yeah. Especially, I mean, that’s a totally I’m tracking. It’s so just my, my piece on that is, what I think you’re saying is, you know, when you look at an outcome, it’s not just one and done answer there. There are multiple ingredients, I’ll call them, when so the ingredients are obviously people process technology, information, sometimes, right. And then there’s this idea of who’s doing what with that you’re alluding to, and then I’m trying to draw out, which is, who’s producing what towards the outcome. We could produce that as individuals, but because we’re orchestrating, it’s when those people come together, and produce together and achieve that together. It’s that togetherness, ie a team, right, that that we need to drive to. And I think what I want to do is say, what is Kathy’s? What’s your depth? What’s your thought about? I orchestrate a bunch of individuals, versus I orchestrate a team outcome?
Unknown Speaker 21:47
Yeah, I don’t want to orchestrate individuals.
Unknown Speaker 21:51
I think, you know, you orchestrate a team. And because people work better together. And the outcome is better. I think, when you have multiple people providing input to that outcome, there are times when you can’t get to an outcome without multiple people working on it. I think it needs to be a team and you and you work together as a team, you fail as a team, you succeed as a team, you drive as a team. One of the things that I was really conscious of when I did a big software implementation and enterprise company at a virtual team of over 100 people. None of them reported to me cross functional. And we had a deadline, very tight three months, get it done, if to roll it out to 17,000 sales people in three months. And you know, that everyone knew what the outcome needed to be. And were there fights on the team internally, when we got there trying to get there? Yes, absolutely. But in the end, you know, we succeeded as a team, I, I tried to tell them the whole way through that this was not Cathy’s project. This is our project. This is, you know, somebody that’s going to benefit the entire company. So to me, I don’t, I don’t think it’s orchestrating individuals because then you have, you know, one person doing one thing and another person doing another thing, you need to orchestrate people as a team.
Brian Lambert 23:23
Yeah, so that makes like the visualization here, I can see people on a call working on Kathy’s discussion, and she says, Look, it’s our team, and you did your hand with us together. Right. And so that took that piece of orchestrating the team. What What, did you have any? I don’t know the word disconnects with line managers. So the reason why I’m bringing this up is when 100 when these people are on the team, and they’re all working together. They’re also reporting into because it’s matrix organization.
Unknown Speaker 24:03
Yeah. They had a janitor.
Brian Lambert 24:05
Yeah, they had their day jobs. So did any anything you can share there with, orchestrating at that level, the manager of these people or making sure the managers are supportive of the outcomes you’re trying to drive?
Unknown Speaker 24:19
Yeah, I mean, the managers become a little bit of your stakeholders, because you’re using their resources to get the project complete. So a little bit they become stakeholders. I mean, if you have challenges, sometimes you need to go to the managers and drive that. I didn’t have a lot of challenges with the managers or the day job kind of pieces because it was a pretty strategic initiative that we were driving. And you know, people realize what the significant impact would be at the end of, of the project, including the managers but they become part of that. Extended stakeholder team. I think that’s the other thing that you need to think about when you’re talking about orchestrating a team. You’re not just orchestrating the team was driving the outcome, you need to orchestrate up as well and orchestrate to the stakeholders. Because now, you can imagine if you have 100 people on your team cross functional all over the world. That’s a pretty big stakeholder list at the top also who have expectations and need to know what’s going on.
Brian Lambert 25:30
Yeah, and stakeholder management and communication and providing, providing visibility into what’s happening, because on a strategic project like that, the manager is going to come in annual review time, Hey, what did this person accomplish, right? So it’s better to make sure they’re in the loop along the way, for example, that’s super tactical, but I can see what you mean there and managing that communication. And then so when you look at, we’re kind of painting a 360 view, right? You’ve got a team, the team doesn’t necessarily work directly for you, however, they’re all in the team together to drive this outcome. So we’re orchestrating a team that orchestrating a bunch of individuals, the team has been chartered to drive an outcome together. And everybody’s aware of that the managers that that quote, unquote, own the people are aware of it. Everybody’s rowing together. In that, and along the way, what’s happening, it sounds like is this communication is coordination. There’s visibility into progress. You know, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. So if this isn’t right, but there’s this idea of, we’re achieving something together, and it’s not a black box.
Unknown Speaker 26:37
Absolutely.
Brian Lambert 26:39
So in that view, when you look at triangulating, and, you know, managing all that, is this a How would you What would you say the differences between Orchestrator and a I don’t know, project manager that?
Unknown Speaker 26:53
Yeah, that’s a good question. So a project manager, and because I’ve done project management as well, and, you know, project manager, good project manager will have orchestration capabilities. But even from a project management, you’re really driving a timeline you’re driving, it’s less about kind of the whole relationship piece. With a project. If you’re doing strict project manager, it’s less about the relationship and more about driving to the timeline thing. What are your needs, right? Your project plan, your work breakdown structure exactly,
Brian Lambert 27:31
is our standard reporting. And we and that’s what progress is, is checking things off on write the plan.
Unknown Speaker 27:39
So you think more of a, I think of a project manager more as a, if you want to put in your your vernacular, and Scott’s vernacular is a Dewar. Right there, they’re tracking the doing. an orchestrator is really focused on kind of the holistic relationship with that team of people. Mm hmm.
Brian Lambert 28:01
And, and bringing together process and like we talked about process, right knology capabilities, roles for visibility? And I think what I would say is it, let me try this on, because what pops into mind if a project manager is providing visibility into the doing? Does an orchestrator provide visibility into the progress of the outcome pursuit for pursuing an outcome within Orchestrator? Does Orchestrator provide visibility into that progress?
Unknown Speaker 28:28
I think an Orchestrator is focused more on the strategy. Right? And, and definitely on a progress and how does that relate to the strategic outcome? And a project manager is not necessarily focused on what how is this strategic they they don’t care, they have a project, nothing, they don’t care. That’s not accurate, but they have a project they’re tracking to that project, the strategy is not relevant to them, or as relevant but a an orchestrator is focused on that strategy and how this whole effort is going to impact that strategy going forward.
Brian Lambert 29:05
Yeah, and, and I would probably venture to say, as well, how it lands in sales or how it lands in the growth teams. Yeah, marketing sales service channel, right. So there’s a there’s an adoption angle of this too. I think when I compare and contrast with you, kind of project management doing Yep. I’ve seen that seen that. There’s also this aspect of we’re done. We’re not really super awfully concerned and project land about adoption and life, you know, getting it in the bloodstream of sales, making sure that this is useful. It’s more about we got it done in my past experience.
Unknown Speaker 29:41
Yeah, absolutely.
Brian Lambert 29:42
So you know, when you orchestrate an outcome, and you help the team achieve that. What’s the role of adoption in that? Or do you bring that in? Is it are you when you is the outcome Never really achieved, I guess is what I’m getting at when you look straight against an outcome, or is it learning
Unknown Speaker 30:05
outcome ever achieved? Is the house ever finished? Yeah.
Brian Lambert 30:10
Okay, that’s what I’m what I’m drawing. And the reason why I went there is on projects, you’re like, Okay, we’re done. Roll up the scroll. Yeah, buddy disband, we’re done with our project, because
Unknown Speaker 30:20
this is where I’ll go back to a conversation I had with Scott right? A little bit ago. And we were talking about the next piece that kind of resonated with me out of out of the webinar was around this rapid sprints and creating rapid sprints. And I said to Scott, well, what doesn’t everyone do that? And Scott said, No.
Unknown Speaker 30:44
No, he didn’t say like that.
Unknown Speaker 30:47
So he said, I wouldn’t be surprised. I know, he said, I would be surprised about how, how few people did that. So I also have some background in Agile Project Management.
Brian Lambert 30:59
Right? So you know me.
Unknown Speaker 31:00
So if you think about your outcome being done, or your house being done, my house has been done forever, but it’s never done. And, and the same with some of these kinds of strategic outcomes that you’re driving to. They may be what you consider done. But there’s always an iterative process, because something changes, your strategy changes, you add a new product, you your pricing structure changes, you change your partner program, something somewhere changes, and it’s going to impact whatever it is that you are considered, considered what you have considered done. And so you need to be agile enough to be able to pick that back up, pivot with whatever that change was to now make it done again. Yeah. And your ads, you’re going to come? You’re going to iterate on that as many times as necessary when you have these changes thrown at you.
Brian Lambert 32:03
Yeah, so it’s a an ongoing incremental improvement as a continuous improvement angle of Orchestration as well. Correct is what I’m yeah, yeah. So anything else on that? Because I’d love to see this. We would, I would love it. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about the webinar and how this all spawn. But any other questions around unpacking Orchestrator? Because that’s what we’re doing here? Where we ended up?
Unknown Speaker 32:29
Yeah, no, I don’t, I don’t think so. I think you know, I’m really excited to have to know what it is I’m doing and that there’s other people out there like me. So that’s awesome.
Brian Lambert 32:42
Yeah. And you birds of a feather flock together. Some more now, back. So when you saw the webinar, it’s how many times did you listen to that state of sales enablement webinar, or go through the slides? And you said, you came in a little bit after it was actually launched, but he listened to the recording. you consume that? And what was the process like in digesting that?
Unknown Speaker 33:09
So I, I didn’t listen, I didn’t attend the webinar, when it happened. I had to go and listen to the replay. And, and then, kind of, like I said earlier, it just kind of got brushed aside because of life and things happening. And, and literally, when Scott posted something, I was like, Yeah, I need to brush that off. And I went back and I and I read it. And I read it. I thought okay, and I kind of digested The next day, I literally went back and looked at it again. And because it was important enough for me to try and digest everything that I had heard and understood in there. And I’ve now I so you send me the slide. Yes, yesterday before we started this, this recording again. And I went through them again. I was like, Oh yeah, I forgot about XYZ or, you know, these other things. And so I’ve been through them probably three or four times to be able to go back and say, Yeah, I need to I need to remember about that. And, and I’ve used parts of them when I talk to other people about the difference between a door and an orchestrator. And I specifically pull out and I love the jars, right for the newars all the different jars and everyone has a focus task. And an orchestrator is kind of orchestrating the whole the whole process and the people and so I’ve pulled those things out. So it’s been really good to have that to reflect on and to go back to and the whole webinar series building. So you know, with the Commercial Ratio webinar and some of the other webinars that have fallen out of this. Yeah, that’s been really helpful also, to be able to go back and refresh.
Brian Lambert 34:56
Yeah, I think this is helpful. I’ve seen this too, and it’s like, you What I’ve found is the podcast market really teaches people a certain formula, a podcast equals, you know, 30 minutes. It’s a guest speaker, it’s rah rah, whatever. I mean, there’s a formula that it seems like everybody’s adopted. And we don’t do that here on our podcast. So we’ve had feedback around Well, you know, you’re not like everybody else. And some hate it, some love it, etc. But on the on the webinar itself, when you look at what that is, and how it’s revealed itself three or four times, what you’re doing here is you’re helping our listeners learn how to consume. On one hand, the burden is on us and Scott to create something that’s digestible. But on the other hand, it’s up to the listeners to engage and get out of it, what they what they can. And it’s this this challenge, because on the show, and in the webinar, we’re driving towards the future of sales enablement, which is going to put people outside their comfort zone, and we’re trying to push people into, but like you said, the clarification, right, and clarifying what people actually do. So in a way, we’re providing a real, we’re actually just holding up the mirror. And it’s not, you know, Scott, that’s complicated, or the show that’s getting into deeper topics. It’s actually we’re showing reality and reflecting reality. And and that’s a little bit of my soapbox, but what I’m hearing you say, is this idea of multi digesting the but the bits and getting out of it every time. Would you recommend that? That others do the same?
Unknown Speaker 36:40
Yeah, I think I mean, that’s what worked for me, right? But I’m also I have, it’s crazy, my daily stress level is high, my task burden is high. And Trump to try and find the time to be able to do this and digest has been difficult. And so that’s what works for me is to be able to go back when I need to, and to be able to look at those things. And and then, you know, jump into conversation. So you’ll see that I’m pretty active on LinkedIn sometimes, right? And then for a while, Brian, you don’t hear from me. You can tell when Cathy’s like focused on other things. So that’s what works for me. And I think, you know, everyone is different. But I, if you have a chance to go back in and look at something again, it will refresh it. Definitely refresh your memory. And you may get another aha moment out of it.
Brian Lambert 37:31
Yeah, that’s great. And I’m gonna bring Scott here in a second to kind of recap this. But let me ask you something, Kathy, on the, the delivery of this, right, so over the last two, two and a half months here, we’ve had what I would consider some pretty groundbreaking research, obviously, I’m biased a little bit. But there’s also it’s a it’s a large volume, and it’s pretty meaty, it’s it’s, to me, it’s one of those things where it really is impactful. Do you think there’s a anything we could be doing from the spirit of continuous improvement to help with the digestion piece? Is there a different way to deliver this is the, you know, podcast ideas or webinars a better vehicle? Is it any thoughts you might have on things that we could be doing to improve?
Unknown Speaker 38:16
Hmm, I like the webinars.
Unknown Speaker 38:19
I like that I can go back right. So I’ll be honest with you the whole Commercial Ratio webinar, as best I had done my calculator out, I was like, this is really hard for me to digest in the moment. So I’ve had to go back to that one too, and try and get my non mathematical accounting brain to try and figure out the Commercial Ratio. And that’s,
Brian Lambert 38:41
that’s it for our listeners. That’s it Commercial ratio.com if you want to see what she’s talking about,
Unknown Speaker 38:46
yeah, thanks. So so I think for me that that works. I think Keep up the great work there. The podcasts are great, too. I actually in preparations very sad not to have a Marco Polo story, because I just went and listen to the last one. Before they recorded this one.
Brian Lambert 39:03
Go to sleep tonight, actually is my thing. I said, I don’t think you need a story for this one.
Unknown Speaker 39:07
Marco Polo. I was very sad not to have a Marco Polo. Sorry, but I These are great, right? So they’re digestible. When I have time, I could go and listen to them whenever so I like it. I don’t I don’t know that I have feedback. I guess the one thing I will say is keep pointing, pointing to them from places we’re at. So LinkedIn is a great place. I’m pretty active there. Keep pointing at them from the sales enablement society discussion groups, because if I see them multiple times in my face, then I’ll remember to go and see them.
Brian Lambert 39:41
Yeah, and just the reminder, PS Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. That’s helpful. Right. So thank you. Thank you for that. So Scott, I’d like to bring you back in and we covered a lot of ground there I was I was really engaged there and took a lot of notes on my side. But I’d love to hear your recap. And any thoughts you might have around unpacking where we ended up here was unpacking Orchestrator a little bit, which is awesome to me.
Scott Santucci 40:10
Yeah, so one of the things that I want to highlight. So Kathy mentioned, sort of office side, we had a brief conversation. And she said, she really liked the spreads and said, that’s kind of obvious and said, well, it’s not obvious. And I think that’s really what’s the value of about what we’re trying to do here is what I have learned, having done keynote presentations for, you know, from the time at Forest or or, you know, you do your delivery as a management consultant, and you leave. There’s a lot of information that whoever’s producing the, the output can glean from. So what I learned the most from is I go and talk to the keynote presentation presenters. And I asked them, What did they think of the reactions they got from the audience? Because it’s really difficult to pull all this information together. So part of what I’d like us to figure out how we can go about doing it is if we were to make a database of each of the different slides, you know, and just sort of imagine that as rows, and then going across the board columns. It’s really interesting, what resonates with different people. So what resonated with Kathy is, was resonating with a lot of people who are around the Orchestrator part, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that the Orchestrator stuff didn’t resonate at all. But the Commercial Ratio message really resonated, or the whole idea of the sales enablement landscape resonated. And I think what’s really fascinating is, if we want to be orchestrators, we have to be much more aware of what resonates with other people, even though it’s the same material that we’re all all presenting to.
So I’d like us to get sort of a cadence going, and I’ll ask our insider nation audience to help us out. When you listen to this. What were some of your takeaways? And how can we tell more stories there, I mean, I’m really thankful for Kathy, it takes a lot of courage to come on and to say, Hey, here’s what I think about this thing. I don’t really know what you want, you know, but it’s a conversation. And part of what we need to do is, I believe, in order for us to orchestrate, we have to learn more about each other, we’re all human beings, first and foremost. And the great thing about human beings is we’re all different. It’s, so the more we can learn from different people, the better off we’re going to be. So we’re going to keep trying to do that. So what we try to do in our, in our webinars, we’re going to keep doing more of those, they tend to be popular, we have a lot of work, you know, a lot of work to do is we learn from these, but we’re gonna keep doing the the chat session. So, you know, Kathy, if those of us who don’t, aren’t biased to math first, like, I know you’re a you’re a journalist. So you like the words and you like the engagement first, um, I went to a tech school, I’m a numbers guy first. So when you when we’re talking about something like that, we want to have a chat session, we want to have conversations, but then you go can go back and listen to it later. We’re trying to find more ways to share all of this information because it’s got to be among and fit together, or orchestrated. But then how do you pull out the woodwinds? And listen to that? How do you pull out? You know, what the what the strings do to fill that out? So those are some of the reactions that I was getting from listening to you and Kathy’s conversation. Does that resonate with you guys? Is that what do you what are your reactions in that?
Unknown Speaker 43:40
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, so I’m, like, I feel terrible. I can’t do math without a calculator. But I just the way it is. So I, you know, like those are, those are things that we need to, you know, own up, and we know what our strengths are, we all need to understand what our strengths are, and where we can focus and help our teams and and move the whole strategy forward for for our companies and, and looking at sales enablement as a whole and looking at the whole landscape, you know, I have certainly some experience in one place, and I don’t have as broad experience in others. And I think this is a great forum for everyone to learn from each other from that perspective.
Brian Lambert 44:22
Yeah, absolutely. And I would say also on that is, I’ve learned a lot through this conversation around, you know, how you define your team matters. So the perspective that if somebody believes the team is themselves, which I’ve seen, I’ve bumped into some of those people. Yeah. I’ve also had people say, Well, my, my team is my department. I’m in XYZ department. That’s my team. When he when we’re when we’re talking about the team is we’re driving an outcome together. That was that was really insightful because to me, there’s a big difference. Between, I’m on a team to drive an outcome versus I’m assigned to marketing. And I’m in the marketing department. And there’s a lot of language around team that’s used. And it’s not clear what team people are talking about. So this idea of among this idea perspective, understanding that we’re all humans and how people perceive things off and drives, how they act and how they engage is critical. And that’s a great point, Scott around this idea of having more empathy for that, and bringing people together and inviting them in.
Scott Santucci 45:33
Well, here’s another thing that really resonates. So Kathy was talking about sort of people being on a team that may not want to be there, I like to call them the voluntold. And that is, any matrix organization is going to have that. So to in order for us to move the needle as salesmen own professions, we have to work across the organizational met matrix, which means we’re going to be dealing with a lot of people are voluntold. So some of those people think the way that you’re doing it is stupid, and they do it completely differently. Some of those people are completely checked out, they could give a rat’s ass about the thing that they’re voluntold on, and they want to just do their day to day job. Other people really want to participate, and but they want to be liked by their teammates pays for, you know, rather than so we have this deal of a mass of humanity. And what’s interesting enough is that’s one of the design points that lead to when we founded the sales enablement society. That was one of the design points is how can we get a community of people who are all volunteers to build things, and look at all the things that we built?
So I think maybe what we could do is we could learn from some of those experiences, like how do you set up principles and be principle driven, because that’s important. You have to set some authority. But it’s, whenever you say the word authority, people immediately start twitching, because they think command and control and you’re going to act like Trump on me. No one wants that. So you’re gonna run into all of these different, different variables. And I think we need to do a lot better job of being more aware of how work actually happens. And really breaking those things down. And I think that’s something that we we need to do a better job on our podcast, help highlight what those differences are. And so that I think these things really resonate a lot with men. That’s, I also liked what Kathy said about empathy. First of all, you’re if you’re in the business of orchestrating people, then you’re a manipulator, right? That’s awful. People don’t like that. But you orchestrate a team for what to get to an outcome. So like a composition that a musician puts together, Beethoven, that’s already figured out. But still, there’s a lot of conducting that needs to happen for that music to be heard. Not horribly, like, you would go to elementary school and here, you know, Beethoven’s Fifth would be horrifying. But how it should sound requires a lot of orchestration. So I think there’s a lot of things that we can start really thinking more deeply about, about what this means what our role is. And the more deeply we’re able to think about it, I think the more able were, the more we’re going to be able to communicate with the business results are, and then see how that concept connects to the math of what the Commercial Ratio is, and bring these two these these fields together.
So I think what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna wrap this this up and start, start moving forward, and find more ways to communicate inside our nation, what we’d love to do is when you get a chance, so we’ll do the assumptive, close, when you get a chance to listen to any of our webinars, please reach out to us and say, Hey, I’d like to do I’d like to be as courageous as Cathy and share my feelings of how I reacted to it to help the dialogue going, you can see we’re not going to, you know, pull you outside. Well, you got that that was completely wrong. That’s not what we meant. And then your next opportunity is on July 21. At 1pm. Eastern time, we’re gonna be talking about routes to value, what routes the value, how do you get a whole bunch of product information together in the lens of customers? So basically, it’s the sheet music, if you will, how would you comprise the sheet music and how would you orchestrate all that messaging to provide economic value to executive level buyers? That’s what we’re going to cover. Thank you so much, Brian, last thoughts.
Brian Lambert 49:39
I can’t wait to see the reaction of the the inside donation to the sheet music of rats to value that the idea of organizing product to how customers need to buy is sorely needed. So I look forward to hearing from the insiders on that.
Scott Santucci 49:56
Yeah, we’re definitely gonna tackle Productitis head on so that was Another very popular thing Kathy of Commercial Ratio was really popular in that. First one Orchestrator, some people like the platypus so much they’re considering getting tattoos. I have no idea what that’s about no value judgments. That’s super cool, though. I wish we could make money selling March.
Brian Lambert 50:19
We’re working on it. They are. Yeah, we’ll just gonna leave that there. But we may be able to buy a visor with a platypus on it. That’s all I’m gonna say.
Scott Santucci 50:32
Sweet. And with that, we’ll wrap up. And please keep engaging because the more the more we’re able to share the how all of us look at things differently, the better off we are all together. And that’s really the common theme of people are better together than they are individually. Thank you so much, Kathy, for your time. Thank you, Brian, for hosting us and doing it. Thank you insider nation. We’ll see you next time.
Outro 51:16
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 at inside s e.com. You can also connect with him online by going to inside s e.com. following them on Twitter or sending them a LinkedIn request.
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