Ep48 Strategy, Execution, Orchestration with Joe

The value of Sales Enablement continues to elevate for those who orchestrate across the company to bring together the right solutions at the right time while addressing seller burden.

In this packed episode, Scott and Brian are joined by Joe, a VP of Sales for a Mid-Sized services company that works with some of the largest media companies on the planet. Joe talks about the evolution of selling over the past 20 years and what’s happening the sales right now. Especially, with the impact of COVID, and the complexity his team is dealing with.

Against this backdrop, Scott, Joe, and Brian discuss the perceived value and impact of Sales Enablement.

The discussion includes:

• Peeling back the layers of VP of Sales challenges and situations, so you can gain more empathy
• The perceived impact of Sales Enablement Orchestration
• Tips and ideas on how to role-play sales enablement value

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 Sam Tucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Unknown Speaker 00:34  

I’m Scott Santucci, 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’ve 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 importantly, what doesn’t.

Brian Lambert 01:02  

Our focus is on you the sales enablement orchestrator. As you know, sales enablement, leaders really need to develop a core skill and competency in the area that blends strategy and tactics to stay mission and goal focused, to prioritize the right action at the right moments, to guide the narrative by confronting reality, to take more of a design approach, not just when, through effort to unlock energy, create momentum, and catalyze change. To help us out on this episode, we’re going to bring in a head of sales. It’s Scott’s going to talk through some of the attributes of recent sales enablement initiatives. And this is an important lesson for you guys in a kind of a way to go into the lab and I really want you to listen for the space that Scott creates with this VP of sales, and how he goes about talking through some of the real issues. And as part of that at the end of the discussion, well, we’ll kind of roleplay a little bit of how we might position things Some of these more comprehensive solutions to VPS sales and win together. So with that, I’m gonna hand it off to Scott. And Scott, can you introduce our guest?

Scott Santucci 02:10  

Absolutely.

Scott Santucci 02:12  

We have two goals that were happening here. Goal number one is, how do we start talking about one of the terms that we brought up as stratification? How do we actually bring to life, that gap between strategy and execution for our criticals stakeholders, and in this case of VP of sales, that’s the one thing that’s part one. And that’s what I’m going to cover. Part Number two, what we’re going to get at is, okay, now that you have ideas of what might resonate and not, you’re not in the order, taking business for sales leaders, you’re in the partnership business, Brian’s gonna walk through with you, how he might roleplay out and introduce some of these ideas, and the way that we’re going to bring it to bear hopefully you been tracking along and entire nations been tracking along that you’re aware that Brian and I have been hosting a series of webcasts, webinars, whatever you want to talk about it around a variety of different topics. And all comes from the COVID research that we’ve launched for you, insider nation for our podcasts. We’ve done the most research around sales enablement, sales, execution, sales, productivity, whatever you want to call it, post research than anybody so far on the planet. And we’ve been carrying that forward by having lots and lots and lots of conversations.

One of the conversation starters definitely are these webcasts. What’s fantastic is we’re getting great feedback that they’re very engaging. If you haven’t participated in the one we’re going to talk about which is called up routes devalue in enabling your customers to buy you are, you can go visit inside se comm and get a link to the download recording to hear the same thing. Joe heard. So now we’re at the Joe Joe was one of the participants in that Rouse devalue webinar. Joe is a VP of sales. He’s been a VP of sales for many large, large companies, we’ll have Joe, introduce himself and get us more of that color. But what we’re going to do now we’re in part one, and we’re going to talk about what his reactions are to the content that’s in that in that session around routes to value. Obviously, we’re doing it away that you don’t have to watch the webinar, it’ll probably be valuable to go back and listen to it. And again, the re re enforce what we’re trying to do here, please listen and try to gain empathy first, for how a sales and sales leader may take this content. And then we’ll get into step step number two, what might you do about it with Brian? Now, having said all that, I bet that’s the longest preamble to an introduction you’ve ever had before job, radio. Yeah,

Brian Lambert 04:58  

no, I think that’s the A story from the early 1600s may have taken longer, but I’m not sure. Right.

Scott Santucci 05:05  

taxing them with with that and Other Stories there. And I think you weren’t implying that Joe’s been in sales in hundreds, right? It seems like, right. So with that I’d like I’d like to I’d like Joe, if you would mind to introduce yourself as Joe Hayes. Yeah. The sales leader for quite some time. Please introduce yourself and what your background is and how you got connected with these webinars.

Joe 05:33  

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Thank you, Scott. And thank you, Brian, for having me on your podcast today. Yeah, the My background is I’ve been in media for basically my entire career, which is now 30 years. So I started actually on the auditing side, working at one of the one of the audit bureaus on the media side of the business and then from there, I think the company felt that do less damage in sales than it actually auditing itself. So they moved me into sales. And then from there, I took a job, I was able to get a job as a sales just a regular salesperson within a company called srts, which is 100 year old business that basically connects buyers and sellers of media within an online planning platform. So I work for a company called srts. I’ve been working here for 20 years, worked my way up in the quickly within the ranks to head up the sales. And so my clients are both on the agency side, the largest us advertising agencies, and then also the largest some of the largest media companies that exists within the United States. So, for example, my clients are like Comcast, NBC, Viacom, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, all the way down to a large b2b publications like electrical contractor and so it really runs the gambit. But I have a sales team. I’ve had sales teams both on the agency side and the sell side, within the company that run into the, you know, 2030 people. And then within Nielsen it was even larger. And then once we came over to cantar, which is owned by WP pay, it’s the same amount. So I’ve, I’ve had all the challenges of sales of running a sales organization. But I will say, I started carrying a bag and carrying a territory and worked my way up to managing a team. And to this day, I’m still very hands on when it comes to sales.

So Scott asked, How did I come engage with these webinars? It’s because I’m always on the lookout for for good information. And so when I first started hearing what Scott what Brian Brian was doing with growth enablement. I this was this was of interest to me. So I started listening to a lot of the things Scott was posting. And then I was a lucky enough to join a couple of these webinars, which, which I found, given COVID. And what we’re living through right now, at least on my side of the business on the sales side, to media and agencies, I have found made it my, my, my goal to find the time to join these webinars and I found them very interesting. I’ve sent notes off to Scott telling him and Brian how valuable they are to me. And Scott reached out and said, Hey, Joe, would you mind joining just a quick podcast to talk about the last one we did, which was routes to value. So I hope that helps Scott.

Scott Santucci 08:34  

Yeah, that’s a great lot of great context. And it’s grounding for our listeners and what what we’re trying to do is move to have conversations. It’s one thing for you as an individual person to listen to a podcast or listen to, or participate in a webinar. It’s something completely different to start piecing together how other people see it. And that’s really what we’re trying to do is bring that perspective. So Joe Don’t want to do a lot of framing for it just for our listeners, the the scope of routes devalue is essentially, hey, look, there’s a lot of content that we make available for salespeople. And because we don’t organize it in a cohesive way, it creates burden for our sellers. All the while, we should be working backwards from our customers to do it. What is working backwards from our customers to do it? Well, we got a lot of stakeholders to manage, and how do we visualize all of that. So we’ve developed an approach that we call routes devalue, which basically we start about mapping out or modeling out the customer and their agreement network. Then it goes over to mapping and building a map of your product palette in a way that is more configurable for sales for customers to digest. And then the third part then is to create a value map to help salespeople connect the dots and it’s really that simple. Wherever simple is sales is simple but simple is

Unknown Speaker 10:03  

hard. Yes.

Unknown Speaker 10:06  

And no, I think what you just touched on, Scott, I think even you’d be surprised at how many companies do not operate this way. And I would say later in the webinar, when you really kind of draw this out about working back from the customer, it’s just not done. It’s not. And that’s where I think the real opportunity lies, especially now, given what COVID has done to pipelines, it’s basically decimated them. And a lot of companies I know cantar, in particular, with their new owners, which are paying and just using them as an example, as well as other companies that I call on are all going through the same thing. They’re looking what’s happened to these pipelines and and that they’re, they’re they’re suffering and not a lot of the information being put in there just it wasn’t accurate. And some of it is on the rep but not all of it’s on the route. Yeah, so So you’re, well, it’s easy for you to talk about Scott and build these slides working back from the customer

Scott Santucci 11:09  

is when did you say it’s easy to build slides?

Unknown Speaker 11:13  

I know. Well, it may be easy for you to talk to those slides. Because the experience that you’ve had, um, it definitely resonates with me. Because it’s an issue that I’ve had for a number of years. But it’s not easy when you’re working back from the customer to many companies feel that great. You work back from the customer, you work back from one person. The fact of the matter is you’re not working back from one person. You got to work back from a group a network of people and you got to know where those noes are. And not only that, you got to work internally within your own organization and companies refused to look at that.

Scott Santucci 11:53  

You said yeah, let’s let’s do that. So I don’t mean any disrespect when I say this, I suppose I say this to a lot of people. As leaders all the time, but I think when we’re going through a major period of change, like we are with cut digital, the digital revolution was here before COVID COVID has exasperated and accelerated it and exposed a lot of pain. What really is happening is that sales, the sales function is kind of like canaries in a coal mine. And they’re seeing all this poisonous gas, but don’t have the words or vocabulary to describe it. So part of what I’m going to, what I’m trying to do here is connect the dots of we have some slides that you can go and listen to, and some reactions, but how do we give some texture to this environment that is so inefficient, and so painful, but most of management doesn’t see. And the sales force doesn’t necessarily have the right vocabulary or ways to eliminate it. And we want to highlight these things because we want you as the audience to be able to recognize how do I actually extract out or understand what’s really going on, rather than reading reports what everybody else thinks is going on. So Joe, can you elaborate a little bit on that? Is that fair to call your canary in a coal miner? Is that insulting? I don’t know.

Unknown Speaker 13:12  

No, I mean sales for at we’re always the frontline troops. So canary in the coalmine, I think that’s very true. But I will say, Yeah, you’re you’re right with that. And I don’t take that as an insult, at least. But where the problem becomes is when you’re not communicating the gases in the mind back to your organization, and in some cases, when you do communicate that it falls on deaf ears, so um, so that’s part of the issue as well.

Scott Santucci 13:43  

So let’s walk through what are some what are three highlights that you got from? From this from the conversation around rasa value, what were some three short key takeaways, the cat,

Unknown Speaker 13:55  

the first one, which you brought up on a couple of them now? Product Titus. I love that. I thought you nailed that the first time you talked about it, you continue to talk about it. I now use it when I’m on sales calls to media companies, and now they’ve taken it. So I’ve got to start giving you credit for that we got to start trademarking that. But the fact of the matter is, we all suffer from it. My team in particular suffers from it. I work for an organization that feels that they know better than their clients. So marketing teams feel that they know better. The executives within the company feel the same thing. And all we’re doing is pushing out product. And then it’s left to the sales team to go out and really be carry that load of trying to go into companies, huge companies like Comcast and try and sell a list of 1000 products that that none of them meet what they’re looking for. The needs of what they’re looking for. And, and that that’s part of the problem. It’s a major problem right now.

Scott Santucci 15:07  

What is proctitis?

Unknown Speaker 15:08  

What is it? Well, for me, it’s a, I guess it’s an explosion of confusing and misaligned activities. It’s, it’s marketing, coming to us in a sales team, with the next new shiny fish. And with the instructions of drop everything you’re doing, this is what we need to be focusing on. We’ve had an acquisition, we want to be pushing this out. It’s another division within the corporate umbrella of cantar. And we want to be focusing and getting our clients at least looking at this and buying it. The fact of the matter is, though, is the people that my team is talking to, aren’t even involved in that type of decision making. So we missed the mark continuously. That’s, that’s to me is the product. That’s the definition of product itis.

Scott Santucci 16:04  

So the reason that for our audience The reason that we worked on creating that an identity is because it’s really hard to talk about the poisonous gas that we’re running into. So product Titus becomes that poisonous gas. And it becomes a great talking point, with very little setup you can get get traction, I doubt very seriously, Joe, I mean, I don’t know, I don’t wanna speak for heads of sales. But I just think it’s really unlikely that a head of sales that we’re going to run into in any industry is going to say, Oh, no, we don’t have product Titus at all.

Unknown Speaker 16:37  

Um, I yeah, I don’t think you want I think most of them will say that. Or at least agree to it in some in some, in some degree. I will tell you that on in my case. And in other cases of most of the time that I’ve been in sales, this has been going on for quite some time. And here’s the other thing, how many times can you Keep going back to the same client with a new shiny fish. I mean, after a while, they just say no what they just turned it off. So every time we go back and now with the new shiny fish, to keep pushing it, we’re losing more and more credibility with the few people, the stakeholders within the organizations that we have large, large pieces of business. So think about that too. Because how many times can someone say I’m not the right person for that?

Scott Santucci 17:29  

Right, and then keep meeting it the next time?

Unknown Speaker 17:32  

Correct. I mean, I Scott, I’ve actually had a story where a the largest single piece of business that ever came through the channel at srts was my client. It was it was ESPN at the time. And like anything once people get whiff of there’s large money and there’s a big deal. Everyone wants to own it. Everyone wants a piece of it. So an executive wanted to join me on a call with ESPN. They wanted Go in there, they didn’t care. And I was kind of forced to do this, which would upset me. But that’s the way it is. So being a new guy, I kind of went in there and brought that person along. And the person launch into a new product launch that had nothing to do with the decision making or the budgets that sat with the person across the desk that we were meeting with. We’d left the meeting by the time I got back to my office, there was an email in my inbox, from now an account that had just signed up within the last six months and said, if you ever bring that person back into my office, we will cancel our program.

Unknown Speaker 18:37  

Now, that’s a true story.

Scott Santucci 18:38  

And I, I empathize because I’ve had similar situations myself from my sales world. Look at what bads position you’re in. How do you bring that up to your boss, you know, that executive? And why did they think that they that they’re what made them think that they can go on add value in the first place.

Unknown Speaker 19:03  

Um, I think it’s just because they feel that they’re on an executive level and they got there by making sales. And maybe they did. But the fact of the matter is, by and you bring this up in your webinar, you need you need on your end to be doing your homework about who you’re meeting with, what their decision making is, where is the adult want, where’s the big money set? And if you’re not doing the homework, and this person did it, you’re going to miss the mark every time. And not only that, you’re putting the person who has the relationship at risk at losing that business, because you just felt that at that time, you wanted to have a little checklist off, I went into ESPN and I picked up the shiny new fish. And that’s really all that that at that point. That’s all that executive wanted that and that’s sad.

Scott Santucci 19:51  

Let me I’m kind of play devil’s advocate here with you. This might be on the minds of some of our some of our listeners. Well, Jessica Get your sales reps to do better account planning. How come they didn’t do that? How come they don’t do that? And I think sort of, you know, I’d love to sort of expand that topic here about how much burden is placed on reps, which is another thing about product itis is that when you don’t understand when the company doesn’t understand or have empathy and how complex these conversations are, it’s easy to make statements like that. So what would be what was another topic in the in the webinar that resonated with you, Joe? The

Unknown Speaker 20:28  

other one was, now we’re getting into the parts where, where I feel like I need to know more, I went back and listened to your webinar. Scott, I know you just talked about going in and listening. I would encourage your listeners, even if they were on the call last week to go back and listen to it. But the other thing is markets don’t write checks, customers don’t. Um, if I hear go to market strategy one more time I’m gonna blow my brains out. It just we don’t we don’t look to grow. businesses through the lens of our customers. Um, we, we fell at that. And we have for quite a while now, where all our time and energy is spent on, on developing new products or new marketing pieces. And we’re not going in now, and really taking that same time energy and resource and building a network and agreement at work within our largest, our largest clients, which by the way happens to be where most of our revenue sets. So that was the other one that stuck with me.

Scott Santucci 21:34  

So I’m not on that note, I’m going to be a little a little bit of a devil’s advocate, trying to corral the opinions of many of our listeners. So one part would be why don’t you just provide your salespeople persona, it’s about who you’re selling to. That’s customer focused. And then the second thing is, that clearly is the reason why somebody needs to map out the buyers journey. What are your reactions to

Unknown Speaker 22:01  

Well, I would say this. I’m in agreement with you. I don’t I think personas is a bad influence strategy. I think you need to know who the stakeholders are. And the titles and the influences that they play within these these large corporations, these large entities and personas just doesn’t cut it. So that came up in the webinar. And I agree with you on that. I think it’s too often people talk about the persona. But here we will concentrate on this persona. But the fact of the matter is, when you’re within these large entities, you’ve got a whole bunch of different people that are their responsibilities lie in different areas, and they can very easily put the kill button on a deal. And you miss that. So that that’s one of my answers.

Scott Santucci 22:52  

So my question to you Joe is inside an organization who who do you think would have the credibility to actually map out what accolades from customers, you mentioned, look, if I hear go to market again, you know, I’m gonna hurt myself. But who inside the company would be responsible for doing something different?

Unknown Speaker 23:15  

Well, within within my company, I would leave the salesperson, this house with the person who’s got the relationship who’s going in there doing it. That’s what I’d be looking to. And then and then getting the right people within our organization, the right people to play, but that would take that person would be the orchestrator, the salesperson.

Scott Santucci 23:35  

So how if I’m a sales enablement person, then what’s my job? And how, how would we push back on what’s the job of marketing? Don’t they have a voice or don’t they say that they have a voice of the customer? How do you put these these dots together? I guess, if you will, if you were going to try to say, hey, executive team, what if we worked Go to customer instead of go to market. What would that conversation look like for you, Joe?

Unknown Speaker 24:06  

I think you’d want to work back again from the customer. You’d want to connect the dots of our capabilities, what we have all our capabilities, and presented in a way to the customer and find out what the customer is looking for what they want. And then then work back, go back to marketing, find out what the capabilities are that match back to what the client is looking for. And then give it to the sales rep to map and to go back to the to the customer.

Scott Santucci 24:39  

So so basically what I heard is so the first thing that resonated you the most is the idea of product is because it gives an identity for this invisible problem that you’ve been running with. Right? That’s number one. Yes. Number two is the idea that saying we got to get a lot more precise about who our customers are. The why It owners that we’ve got their relationships that they have with each other. There’s a lot of knowable things that we could model out beforehand that we’re just not. And that would be really, really valuable because there’s a lot of complexity involved in navigating an agreement network.

Unknown Speaker 25:16  

Is that fair? Correct.

Scott Santucci 25:18  

Okay, so then we’re at point number three and then this is our last point before we wrap up and let me turn it over to Brian and how we’ll shift gears. So what was point number three that you got away got out of not got away with I got out of the webinar?

Unknown Speaker 25:35  

Well, some probably have those is the last one was the routes to value itself. To me, where a lot of this where you work back from the customer to the capabilities for the salespeople. where it all started to take shape with me, Scott is the simple visualizations of of having the role chart, the value map and the product. palette. I think at one point in the webinar, you mentioned the fact of, you know, less words, that you have to have simple visualizations to go back, to be able to connect all these dots and for people to understand and to make sense of the complexities that are out there, the simple way to do it the to make those simplify the complexities. But you have a chart where you talk about working back from the executive suite, the VP, and then you work back to the value map. And then ultimately, to a simple product palette. If you remember that you talked about that. And to me, that kind of simplified the complexities of the, of working back from customers to capabilities to sales people. And you kind of bring that out and saying, Listen, if you if you make it easy Easy for the sales team to go to clients customers, and lay out two capabilities that match back to their issues, the problems that they’re looking to solve, the greater the opportunity to land to bigger pieces of business or to grow that business internally. I hope that makes sense.

Scott Santucci 27:21  

Yeah, would definitely make sense to me, you’re referring to slides that I made, but I’m going to try to replay what I heard you say, to connect with, connect with the audience. So part of what’s challenging everyone is when you’re dealing with a complex problem, a lot of us want to put individual slides together to treat the symptom, and the symptom doesn’t solve the problem. solving the problem requires us to take a step back and be holistic. For those of you who remember the being heroic framework. H is a holistic. The challenge is you have to be able to show all of those dots connected in a visual way, with as few words as possible, because unfortunately, you as a sales enablement person might see the same thing, but your words are going to be different than maybe Joe is the VP of sales. And that might be different than the words that somebody in product might say, or might be different than the words that somebody in marketing might see. And one of the things that’s so important is to create an esprit de corps. Listen out fancy sound with that, try to use some French. But you have to create a mechanism for a lot of people to buy in. And I think it’s really important that we do that for sales leaders because of the whole idea of the invisible gas. The product title is the invisible gas. Now, my role as a sales enablement leader for Joe is to go and get that internal buy in. He can be my advocate, he can be my champion, but I have to go and get that buy in because it’s probably going to be too difficult for him to do. Because he’s going to want to relate with specific examples. And he’s going to be met with stone faces from everybody else. And there, it’s not going to be relatable. So another goal that we have to do is to create visualizations to translate the reality that Joe’s running into, to make it relatable so that people can understand first, so that then we can get the opportunity to move things forward. Is that

Unknown Speaker 29:24  

fair? It’s very fair.

Unknown Speaker 29:28  

Because on both ends, you’ve got to make it simple for the an easy for the client to understand, but you also need to make it simple and easy for the people within my own organization to understand, I think you talk to about it as English to English, the friction that comes with that.

Scott Santucci 29:44  

Translation.

Unknown Speaker 29:46  

Yes. So you need you need. Yeah, it’s very tough. But I will say that you’ve done a great, great job in making it for people such as myself to visualize that and make it work. Because without that the complexity of the situation almost prevents you from wanting to deal with it.

Scott Santucci 30:05  

Or even talking about it, like, how would you even talk about it?

Unknown Speaker 30:09  

It there’s, there’s, like you said, lessons more or less talk is more. And I would not have thought of going the visual route. On the routes to value I would have thought you would have seen in something I created, or our marketing team would have created would be a lot more word, Scott. And that’s what you missed that English. That’s what that friction comes from English to English translation. And while it may hit with one or two people on our client side, it’s not going to hit with the multitude over there. It just wanted.

Scott Santucci 30:41  

Yeah, let’s let’s take the word. So an English word is data. How many people in that executive in that in those agreement networks that you run into? How many different perceptions of data are you going to run into? And you’re talking about data, lakes and data, data data? Yeah. But what are the perceptions? How many different ways Can people perceive that one concept or one word?

Unknown Speaker 31:02  

Absolutely. Each person probably within within our clients would have a different idea that and then what about this? What about the people that have been burnt on the IT side by data, or swimming in data that you already know before you’ve even gotten there? So because they’re like, I’m not going to invest in another data solution. It’s not it’s just no way.

Unknown Speaker 31:27  

People have PTSD.

Scott Santucci 31:33  

And then some people have completely different perspectives of what day it is. And if you’re selling an integrated set of capabilities that are data driven, it makes it really, really hard to land the adult wallet contracts if you can’t get people on the same page.

Unknown Speaker 31:47  

Yes.

Unknown Speaker 31:49  

It absolutely right, Scott. And then I would say the last thing to talk about was being in sales and still going out there and talking to clients. The other part that really hit home to me that kind of piggybacks off the routes to value was the real life examples that you used. Because it’s one thing to talk about something in a webinar. It’s another thing to use real life examples of where it’s worked. And let me tell you something, I could sell that internally within my own organization. But the one thing they’re going to ask for is great. That’s awesome. Where are the examples? Show us that show us the real life examples where this has worked. And so I’m piggybacking off the routes to value but to use them as real life examples really resonated with me, because I know with that, and with some help, because again, this is new to me. It’s enlightening, and it’s where I want to go. But I’m going to need those real life examples to sell that.

Scott Santucci 32:48  

So that’s a great segue here for our orchestrators. So, part of our goal here as I stated earlier, I want to give you the point of view of providing new ideas to two sales leaders to adjust challenges that they’re experiencing in this digital slash COVID world. Well, now what we’re going to do is we’re going to shift gears here. And we’re going to take the, you know, the learnings that we’ve got how that’s interesting, you know, interesting point. Now we’re going to start say, ask you guys to internalize this. And think about your the role of the orchestrator. How are you going to get buy in for everybody to help Joe out? And now we’re going to turn over to Brian, he’s going to play that role. So Brian, tell us what you’re doing here to help develop the muscles, the orchestrator muscles that we’ve decided to pivot to to make our whole podcasts about.

Brian Lambert 33:39  

Yeah, absolutely. And fascinating conversation thus far. And, to your point, Scott, there’s this need that many orchestrators have to begin to action this and the challenge is, is massive, but there’s also a lot of common ground and that’s where I want to start here. So that’s, that’s my first tip or my first idea of orchestration is, you know, find the common ground. And I want to unpack that a little bit here as we start positioning ways that orchestrators might be able to help the VP of sales. But first I do want to pause and just kind of recognize that this conversation is already most likely quite different than than usual conversation with a VP of sales. Just the fact that we’re talking about things that are more in the root cause challenge space such as product Titus, how do we define what it means to actually you know, quote unquote, work back from a customer which means understanding all the roles understanding how customers make decisions, how understanding the various processes and procedures and really getting a lot of empathy for the customer side of the sales conversation, you know, that the so just with product itis What does that mean? What might be getting in the way have our own company, and then going outside the company and say, you know, when our salespeople are having conversations, how might we work backwards? From those conversations? We’re already in a bit of a different space for for some of our listeners who, in a VP of Sales discussion, or more about, you know, here’s the list of things I’m working on. Here’s what we’re going to get done this week. Here’s what we’re going to get done next quarter, what do you think? Great. I’m out of here. Let’s go, go, go, go go. So I just wanted to pause and recognize that this discussions a bit more top down and also more about that, what it means to communicate value, which is great, which is where orchestrators need to be when you think about what it means. And so with that, if I were to position this, I would, I would actually repeat the history. So we didn’t have a history story at the beginning of this podcast, but if we play the tape a little bit and rewind on what Joe said, Got him at him being curious about some of the things he put on LinkedIn, also him engaging around your content, and look and look at the power of the visuals that you’ve put in front of him through this, this process, I would leverage those to start positioning these concepts. I already know in my world that me bringing these up, it’s going to be incredibly difficult. And you’ve already hinted at how much work it is to position some of this stuff and create some of these visuals, and they’re already working with somebody like Joe. So why wouldn’t I use those, you know, so, instead of me trying to carve out a new discussion, I probably would be in the space of Hey, I went to that webinar. You know, and Joe, what I would ask you is if you go back three or four months pre Scott in a sales enablement person came to you and said, You know, one you guys you should you should go to this video should come to this webinar gels go together, how would you respond and then to what if What if I brought some of these visuals to you with Scott’s talk track with that and effective as well?

Unknown Speaker 37:07  

Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say if you’d come to me at the beginning of the year, Brian, and said, Have this this new way to look at things, you know, talking about commercial ratio, the different things that you wouldn’t have happened. Because back then I thought I had all the answers or you think you have all the answers and then things change and, you know, pipelines blow up or whatever, but I thought you would have gotten me what I will say would have grabbed my attention. Absolutely. And it did out of the gate are some of the visuals. Some of the verbiage commercial ratio has grabbed my attention? product, Titus Absolutely. has grabbed my attention. Strategy Session. So I’m trying to think of some of the things that have have always grabbed my attention. grabbed me early. Because product Titus is something I’m living through. So connected with me immediately. So in answer to your question, I don’t think out of the gate, you would have gotten me. But if you’d sent me an email, or a quick little snippet video, or posted something on LinkedIn, and I was following you or someone that I follow liked it, and I’d seen it, I would have engaged with it, because I’ve been known to do that in the past. But it was Scott’s LinkedIn communication that grabbed me at first.

Brian Lambert 38:32  

Yeah. And if you so just on those three, like product titles, that’s this idea of it’s a big complex mess that you are having to deal with. And so that resonates, which is a good entry point for me is, you know, how do we start managing the complexity a bit more? What are you what are you feeling internally as far as support and alignment? Another one is this gap between strategy and execution that we talked about on the podcast Which is blending those together, you have to, you have to operate in a space between strategy and tactics by blending, strategy and tactics, that those those things are overlapped. They’re not separate and exclusive. So you feel that on a daily basis with you, it’s hard. It’s hard, you recognize Oh, that’d be, that’d be a good place to enter in, as well.

Unknown Speaker 39:20  

And, and I would think the commercial ratio, although that needs a little more explaining on the visual, commercial ratio, when you really get down to it, you start thinking about sales and marketing and revenue growth. And you’re like, holy, yeah, whatever. Ah, we’re not doing we’re not we’re not revving this engine the way it should be. And it’s because I think sometimes you, you get that systems failure from product itis on that contributes to the costs. But I would say to everyone on who’s listening on the podcast, if you really want to engage, engage with sales leaders right now. My gut tells me that if you’re going to resonate, get get people to react quickly. Go with product Titus as your lead.

Unknown Speaker 40:03  

Okay. And then in that, in our listeners can can get the visuals, which is if you picture it in your mind if you haven’t seen it, it’s a big huge dirt ball, a big blob of black with a bunch of detail in it. So the closer you look, the more you see, see things in it like products. But when you first look at it, it looks like a big inkblot or dirt ball or I think somebody wants called it a furball.

Brian Lambert 40:32  

There are other other names for it too. So I just want to picture that in your head. And yeah,

Unknown Speaker 40:36  

yeah, I would say this too, is that one thing about sales people. You know, you can use all the different analogies you want. But you know, at the end of the day, we’re all in the trenches together. We’ve all fought the same fight. And I’d be hard pressed to think that you’re not going to an agreement on product tightness at this point. So I think that would resonate with a lot of people and score points.

Brian Lambert 40:57  

Yeah. Because what that leads to what But the second thing is if so if I have that kind of an entry point with you. The second thing is to really frame it out and to emphasize and what you and Scott were talking about was these things that are, you know, loosely aligned to what, what some call seller burden, you know, the burden on sell sales and the burden on the salespeople to have these conversations. So this big, huge blob of product, Titus. If that’s not managed by the company, the salespeople have to manage it, for example. So there’s a lot of burden in that. And that’s something I think, as an orchestrator, we can unpack with you and and be curious about,

Unknown Speaker 41:39  

right? Absolutely. The more you can take that weight off of my team’s back and my back, the better. There’s an old saying in sales, I guess is sometimes you hear it. You take the grief and you share the glory. It’s the same thing. Everything seems to fall on the back of salespeople. Always has I think it’s more of these days. But the more you can come in to try and offer a solution to take some of that, that burden weight off the sales, you’ll get people, people will connect with people definitely on the sell side.

Brian Lambert 42:17  

Yeah, and especially if the person that orchestrator can relate to you and also get in the foxhole with you and do with you, and not do to you, right? That’s the thing that I, I constantly harp on it in these roles of sales enablement. It’s not about doing to sales, it’s about doing with, with sales, and to the canary in the coal mine comment that Scott had, if you guys are literally falling dead in the mind. And everybody else is tone deaf to that. That’s, that’s gotta suck. And so from an orchestrator perspective, having you know what is happening in the trenches, what’s, what’s going on from the foxhole, or in the coal mine and trying to unpack that. to empathize and then give it given an identity, and then maybe provide some solutions or recommendations about how to do this together and test new things. Right?

Unknown Speaker 43:10  

Well, I would think, yeah, I think once you get the buy in on the product, Titus and you get agreement there. I think you then you didn’t think about, okay. So how do we work back from the customer, because if you get agreement that this product is being driven from the company, or it’s being driven, being driven by the vendor, once you get the agreement on that, then I think you can also get them to focus on Hey, maybe maybe the other way is to work back from the customer. And then you can become more of that. That consultative type of a person trying to work with a sales leader and not be that that I’d be open to, because let me tell you something. The minute you see how complex it is to work back from the from the client, because it’s not just one person you’re dealing with multitude of people there. You’re going to need help, especially if you haven’t done it before. So there’s another opportunity for your for your group.

Brian Lambert 44:06  

Yeah. And to the discussion earlier, if I say, Well, you know, just go to the go to the share, drive or go to slack and download the personas and you’re good. That’s not what you want to do. And that’s not what orchestrators do. But yeah,

Unknown Speaker 44:18  

and that’s, uh, so one thing I’ve learned from listening to Scott, you know, pre personas I

Unknown Speaker 44:27  

hear you’re walking in a minefield with that.

Brian Lambert 44:30  

But yeah, it’s not specific enough. And it’s not detailed enough to tackle the product, Titus.

Unknown Speaker 44:35  

And I think, I think the minute you give agreement to pro personas, you’re then playing to your own company. You have now it’s easy for them to say, well, then you don’t need this because we’re covered because they

Brian Lambert 44:46  

do the work because you’ve agreed to all the answers. They’re right around the pager, about you know, loopy Larry or whatever his name is. Yeah. So now, so we framed it out a bit and now I think you know, from an orchestrator perspective, when I engage in the problem discussion or the idea of what’s really happening, and I’m empathizing with the burden, and I’m talking about product itis with the VP of sales, there’s different places that I could go as an orchestrator. So, in the original research, we framed out these areas, these sandboxes, or these domains and flavors of sales enablement, such as talent enablement, and pipeline enablement, organizational enablement, messaging enablement, commercial enablement, those where it was where areas of scope that now I can bring into this conversation and the routes to value webinar that you’re reacting to Joe was was actually on the heels of a webinar where Scott was talking about, you know, moving the middle in the middle of the funnel, so that was moving in the middle was a pipeline enablement webinar, this routes devalue is more in the messaging enablement space. So by reacting to that I can now as an orchestrator, start scoping. We’re not talking about talent enablement. We’re not talking about, you know, role profiles of salespeople and what it means to onboard. Because I’m getting, you know, Joe to unpack product, Titus. I’m not talking about organizational enablement and simplifying a bunch of workflows and processes within I’m talking about and he’s reacting to this webinar, which is, which is a messaging enablement discussion.

So that’s, that’s the scope here of this. And again, in that scope, then, you know, what kind of offers or solutions might I have as an orchestrator? And the interesting thing about this, and I’m just trying to connect dots for our listeners is in the message enablement, space post COVID, middle of the funnel, there are not a lot of answers. If you’re going, Hey, I got an off the shelf. You know, I read a blog on that. Here you go, Joe. That doesn’t exist right now. You just heard Joe talk about how different This world is. So, you know, Joe, how do I as an orchestra Come in, do I come in with all the answers and say, here’s the 14 things we ought to try? Or is this more of a consultative sale that I need to take with you?

Unknown Speaker 47:09  

My advice would be more of the consultative because I think if you come in with the approach of here’s 14 things, it’s almost too much. It’s hard to get your hands around that. I would kind of say you start with a series of sprints, and earn their trust that way. You know, if you get the buy in with product tightness, and it leads into the messaging part of it and getting in early to clients, you know, help them create a vision and all of a sudden, they immediately start to see how that’s working for them, how sales are increasing, pipelines are growing. They’re better conversations with clients. And that leads to the next series The next time you do and I just think that always works better Brian, because if you come in and just Especially to us selling to a salesperson, you just think like, dude, you’re trying to sell me a lot of stuff right now. And that’s just too much. You got to find the one thing that works and then capitalize on it and build the trust that way.

Brian Lambert 48:13  

Yeah, and my last point on this, and then I’ll bring Scott back in. But this this piece here where we’re at here, this is a it’s a Greenfield, it’s a white space. It’s a creative space. It’s a, let’s figure this out together space, I don’t want to. I’m not implying that there is a ready made answer, by any means. But I think by getting in the foxhole and saying let’s figure it out together, let’s take a bite of the apple together or one piece of the elephant at a time. Now we’re into a space of how do we partner together? How do we work together? What resources do you have? And what resources do I have? What capabilities do you have? What capabilities Do I have what what’s your point of view? What’s my point of view, and that’s where real collaboration and what we’ll We talked about on the previous podcast synthesis comes in. And I think that’s the technique. And that’s the solution here is the ability to partner in the foxhole to figure it out quickly, through perhaps testing and learning, prototyping, design thinking things like that, as opposed to here’s the answer. Let’s try this. Because quite frankly, a lot of the answers that are that codified are going to be pre COVID. Jump to the answer. You know, we’ve done that before, probably anyway, to be honest with you. So to me, what what I would be selling as an orchestrator is, look, I don’t have all the answers. But I do have resources. I do have a lot of frameworks that I’ve been exposed to. Let’s let’s go through some of these. Maybe design sessions or some sessions here, what I would call figure it out meetings, that we can develop some sort of roadmap and sprint cadence around. In fact, Joe, you know, the webinar that Scott had, he had that in there, and maybe we start with that. How might we take That roadmap that he put together. And what were those Sprint’s look like and figure it out together?

Unknown Speaker 50:06  

yeah and and and how do you measure the results of that because the other way for me to get buy in from those above may is they’ll only sign off on those types of Sprint’s and then they’re going to want to see the results from it. But the more results we can put up and show that come from it. The bigger dollars I could get I can get to commit to it. Yeah. I’ll say this, Brian, and I don’t want to I don’t want to go over here. I was respectful of people’s time. But I will. I’ll tell you a quick story and then we can get to Scott. about why, why this? This last webinar was so why it resonated with me so much, especially on the routes to value is that recently we had a CFO come in and speak from from you know, the world worldwide WP came in gave a presentation and and I’ve referenced this once before but basically the guy flew in from Europe This is pre COVID and gave a presentation about the biggest accounts within WP pay and cantar. And it went up there he did you can tell he spent his did his homework did all this time and energy and came in and said basically, every time we sell one product into our biggest accounts, the average sale size is $250,000. Across thau 1000 clients, let’s say when we sell to these, this is two of our divisions or two of our products within our client, it jumps to a million dollars.

Fast forward, you know a million but once you sell four of our products into our biggest accounts, it’s like two and a half $3 million. So you can see the increases here. And so the whole thing focus of this presentation was to talk about being client centric, how we need to focus on the client, that though we go in there, and we have a strategy for the client, everything was about the client. And because you could see the numbers, the CFO knows what those numbers are. But the fact of the matter is, there’s no strategy within the sales team that goes about how what is the game plan for Johnson and Johnson? What is the game plan for Microsoft? What is the game plan for Google, and our biggest clients and the because the fact is, there isn’t one. So the CFO does all he can tell you exactly what the numbers are. But the fact when it comes to sales and the strategy and the execution of it, it doesn’t exist. And and that, that’s why the timing of some of this is so important right now, the sales leaders because they need to figure this out, and they need to figure it out quickly. And so, so that’s just a just a little story. I’d like to share with you guys because the timing of this stuff is important to a lot of people.

Brian Lambert 53:06  

Yeah, that’s awesome. And I think it’s great words of advice. And Scott, I’d love you to come back in and share your thoughts. And also recap, the final piece that I would have is right now. You know, we’re all human beings, and we may perceive our value to be the stuff we produce, or we may perceive the value of what we do based on where we sit in the org chart, or who we work for, really, in in a time like this, the value is is created by what’s between your ears, your brain, and humans love to solve problems and this is a great problem solving time. So, you know, free your mind kind of thing and, and tackle these these root cause challenges, understanding that you may not have all the answers and also the way that you know, the way you’ve approached it before may not work in the new and there’s an opportunity and And I think that’s what this, this highlights here into Scott’s point that he shared earlier. If not you then who? Who’s going to help orchestrate and lead this to help sales leaders be successful? So, Scott, what thoughts do you have on that? And do you think, you know, you want to highlight any other development points or concepts to our audience?

Scott Santucci 54:23  

Yeah. What I want to highlight is, there’s, there’s this really interesting thing what happens is when you start having conversations, and first of all, what makes a conversation a conversation is what Joe and I had, we were just sharing information back and forth. And to piggyback on what you said, Brian, value is co created. It’s not between one person’s ears, is between the ears of many other people when you can be curious and figure out what the real problems are. And what I’d love to share with insider nation, what we’re what we hear from you as listeners, is how come our companies don’t value our role more? How come they don’t value me more? How come I don’t have more resources? Well, we’re telling you, if you if we’re a show you listen to, we have data on all these webinars that we’re doing. Number one, if you’re not joining in the webinars, it’s interesting because we’re getting an increased amount of VPS of sales and CMOS that are participating in our webinars. And that’s interesting. Why are Why are we drawing their attention? And you’re not participating in that does an opportunity for you to learn? Number two, what’s the element that that Brian brought up? Our state of change is in a state of change, it requires a complete mindset shift.

So instead of showing up and saying, I have to have the answer, or I have to know everything there is to know about commercial ratio. Well, we’re in the process of figuring out one of the games We’re going to have is another VP of Sales like Joe and he really appreciated the the introduction to the commercial ratio. Brian and I were on a sales enablement society, webinar or actually post crossing the, what do we call it? sales and it was at a crossroads, the very first of our webinars. And one of the one of the sales leaders felt luckily felt comfortable enough. And he challenged us and said, Hey, what’s the roadmap gonna look like for for this commercial ratio? I buy it, I get it. Give me the game plan because I’m gonna have to sell this internally. So this is a very direct question. He was delighted to see two webinars later, we had a whole one dedicated, and a lot of work went into it. Why? Why picked up the phone and I called canol. I said, canol what we need to make a roadmap. And he said, Yeah, I’m hearing the same thing from from the portfolio companies as we roll this out. So we just started collaborating, throwing things together is great. quickly as possible, and then it creates more slides and more things to build on. The only way that you’re going to be able to take advantage of that is if you are engaged, and engaged means being sent synthesizing information, instead of analyzing information. And Brian, we had a podcast with Brooke, around that very, very topic. So the point that we’re trying to make here is the purpose of the reason that the purpose of why we’re doing the things that we’re doing is because our job is to help create the environment for insider nation to elevate your job. If you want to elevate your role. If you want to be more important, you’re going to have to learn some of these techniques, and we can’t spoon feed them with you because things are happening so fast.

So what we recommend that you do is engage if something about this webinar or sorry, podcast, does it make sense? Call us or send us an email say that doesn’t make sense because what’s going to happen is Is you learn by the questions, we’re going to have some more podcasts around the commercial ratio. There’s a whole bunch of questions that people have there, we’ve been able to get Brian and I’ve been able to get three or four other of our listeners together to have chat sessions. These are all the things that we need to do. We need to learn from you about what dots we need to connect, you need to get engaged because you can’t just sit there and expect to slide up a sheet of paper over to a over a head of sales. And you don’t want to be order taking from heads of sales. And frankly, I don’t think the heads of sales want you to be what, what comes out of their mouth is what they’re saying to be exactly created in the exact words that they said. I think they expect some thought put into it, and that you’ve, you’ve you’ve put those things together. Is that true, Joe?

Unknown Speaker 58:50  

Yes.

Scott Santucci 58:52  

So you have a lot of opportunities here. The issue is you can’t be treating this like it’s a standard role. You can’t be saying Well, I’m following The Kirkpatrick model, and this is the way it is, and this is the inputs that I need. And you sure as heck can’t be saying, That’s not my job. Because ultimately, this is no one’s job. And that’s really the problem and it creates the opportunity for you to elevate your role and be an orchestrator. So those are, those are my thoughts on the pack on this podcast. What we recommend you do, go and listen to more podcasts, visit inside se comm to find the podcast that you want to listen to maybe listen to them more often than not have a conversation with somebody find somebody in insider nation to have a conversation with them about these topics, but don’t get into how are you doing it? How are you doing it? How are you doing it? Be more curious, who needs to be involved? How are you getting the buy in from from your sales leader? How are you translating the dots between the initiative that you need to do and, and the work Sprint’s that you need to get going and how do you manage that into an orchestrated project? You’ve heard Kathy talk about those things. You’ve heard Doug talk about these things on our podcasts, read, listen to them. And another thing to do would be find some of the microsites that we’re producing. And give us feedback on how to make it easier to find, obviously, engage in dialogues on LinkedIn with topics, say, Hey, I don’t get this, what are you talking about? Or do you mean this? Or do you mean that engagement is critically important? And the last thing is go to insight SC comm learn about what the research processes that got us here so that you have that as a foundation and watch and participate in some of the some of the webinars. Brian, you have any final thoughts or reactions to the to the summary?

Brian Lambert 1:00:41  

Yeah, that’s great. I love it. Absolutely. Definitely. He said, and I also want to thank Joe, for coming on. And let me try to sell to him. I think what we did is unpack it a bit of a sales process and also uncover the reality that we’re both in the same boat. So people like Joe, put it down. On the same same way idea.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:03  

You know, that’s the big takeaway for our audience from that, that perspective. So thanks so much, Joe for

Unknown Speaker 1:01:08  

Yeah, I would only say two things. Number one, thank you for having me. Number two. Really, thank you for having me. But also, thank you for what you guys are doing. I don’t think you hear that a lot. It’s, it’s, maybe it’s from one salesperson to another because you’re helping. You’re helping to orchestrate what we do, what smart sales people should be doing, which is looking at things through a different a different lens, because we need to. So you’re helping at least in my case, you’re absolutely helping. So thank you for that. And number two to Scott’s point. one takeaway, I would tell everyone, we live in a world of immediacy. If you have a question, you have to raise your hand. You’ve got to get your you’ve got to push things out. You’ve got to answer you got to be taken. Lead on because it I can tell you just from my own experience in sales, people respect that now, the quicker you can get back to people, the quicker you get more of that thought leadership positioning out there. People respect that. And it gives you a definitely a competitive advantage out there for others. So just think about that what Scott’s saying is absolutely right. Go listen to these webinars. Go engage in LinkedIn, go into social media, do some podcasts, engage with your customers? Ask them questions go back and forth. It’s the best way to build relationships.

Outro 1:02:40  

Thank you. 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 sp.com. You can also connect with them online. By going to inside se.com following them on Twitter or sending them a LinkedIn request