Ep58 Orchestrating Message Enablement to Co-Create Value with Steve Goas

Ep58 Orchestrating Message Enablement to Co-Create Value with Steve Goas

One thing that we like to do on our podcast is to make this very conversational. And the reason that we want to make it conversational, as we go through a structured format, it can get overwhelming. The things that we’re all talking about are very, very complex. In this episode, the guys are joined by Steve Goas who is passionate about co-creating value in Message Enablement.

Topics:

  • The vision of Message Enablement programs
  • Creating Routes to Value
  • Orchestration across the organization
  • Defining what “good” looks like with Sales

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 00:47  

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 more important, what doesn’t

Brian Lambert 01:00  

Our focus is on you the sales enablement leader and Orchestrator, as a Orchestrator in sales enablement. You have specific characteristics and skills that you need to leverage in order to blend both strategy and tactics to execute. Our goal is to help you clarify what that looks like, provide examples that you can reference as you’re engaging across the organization, and give you the confidence to gauge up down and across the organization. So you can drive the simplification that salespeople need to be successful with their customers.

And on this podcast, we have a special guest. His name, Steve, Steve Goss. And Steve is with a very large financial services company. He’s got a very strong background in b2b content and b2b messaging enablement or Message Enablement. He’s very passionate about sales enablement, as an enabler of the content and the message that salespeople need to have as they engage with their clients and their customers. 

And when you think About the sales enablement landscape that Scott shared in early 2020. We obviously we had Talent Enablement, we had Pipeline Enablement, Organizational Enablement and commercial enablement. Steve, one of our listeners here is in the Message Enablement space. 

Steve and I met at the sales enablement soiree, actually in 2019. We actually hit it off really well. That event is great to walk the hallways with him and just talk about sales enablement and what he was seeing, as he was helping his large sales teams. And he’s been texting and emailing Scott and I ever since he’s been a big listener of our show, and actually since COVID, we’ve had the largest body of post COVID sales enablement research with over 25 episodes and obviously all the state of sales enablement research we did. And Steve’s been involved and digesting all that and he reached out to Scott and I said So that’s how this started. And Steve so much. I just want to thank you so much for being on the show today. And can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and anything I missed in that setup?

Steve Goas 03:10  

Yeah. So thanks for having me. And actually, I just want to tell real quick story about meeting Brian up at the soiree in Boston. So pretty big event, I want to say at least 100 people were in that room, Brian and I were both parts of panels. And at the end of the soiree, when things were winding down, everybody kind of like went into their own groups and went off to dinner. And I really didn’t know who to go to dinner with or what to do. I didn’t really show up knowing people. So everybody had kind of gone off in their own groups. And then there’s this group of like five or six people at the end. And Brian is one of them. So we just kind of get together and say, you want to go to dinner, just us. And I looked at Brian and said, You look like a trustworthy, dude. Let’s do this. And the rest is history.

Brian Lambert 03:51  

That’s cool. That’s great. So did that. Did I meet you first, or did you meet Scott first?

Steve Goas 03:56  

I met Scott would have been a little bit earlier than that as a salesman. Have them in society special event in New York City where he and another founding member were presenting.

Brian Lambert 04:06  

Ah, dang it. I thought I met Steve first, but nope, Scott. Scott knows everybody. It’s amazing. That’s awesome. So anything else you want to share on your background? Steve is awesome. We talk a lot about your role.

Steve Goas 04:20  

Yep. So b2b sales enablement and a large financial services company. We mostly do content strategy, you know, when we think about the world of enablement, how it comes together, you’ve got content coaching, and training, all coming together to help sales sell more quickly. I believe that what we’ve done has bled into all three. But our entry point is going to be content or you know, Message Enablement content strategy. So that’s gonna be a lot of what we’re going to hopefully get into today.

Brian Lambert 04:50  

Great, thanks so much for that. Scott. Bunch of kick us off with real organic conversation here. Bringing the listener on, I love it. When the members of Saturn nation attend and jump on a call with us. So you guys take it away. And what I’ll do is I’ll summarize the Orchestrator attributes at the end. As a recap for our listeners.

Steve Goas 05:10  

Well, actually, Brian, before you hand it over to Scott, do you mind if I just ask you a couple quick questions just as kind of like a way to kind of break the ice here?

Brian Lambert 05:18  

Yeah, sure.

Scott Santucci 05:19  

So one is, are you guys ready to co create some value? Because that’s what I’m here to do with you guys.

Brian Lambert 05:27  

Going for the hard close? Yeah, that’s a given. Yep. Absolutely.  

Steve Goas 05:31  

And to now that I am on inside sales enablement the podcast, does that mean I’m now in the big leagues? Can I tell people I’m a big time enablement person yet?

Scott Santucci 05:42  

We’ll see how the call goes.

Brian Lambert 05:46  

You’ll always, you’ll always be an Insider and that that means you get you do get to hear about things a little bit earlier than others and we invite you to help us out with things and keep the conversation going after the show. That’s definitely part of it. And because one of the things we find on this is we build common experience. And that’s really critical when you’re co creating value.

Scott Santucci 06:09  

Yeah, so I think we can pose that question to Insider Nation and and have them judge themselves and then we’ll give you

Brian Lambert 06:18  

That’s right.

Scott Santucci 06:20  

So that’s awesome. So first and foremost, one thing that we like to do on our on our podcast is as hopefully, you know, we’re trying to make this very conversational. And the reason that we want to make it conversational is if we go through in an analyst format, it can get overwhelming. The things that we’re all talking about are very, very complex. And I love that. Steve’s talking about co creating value because that’s something that we’ve talked about in other podcasts before. So I think somewhere in Chad, Chad’s inner heart is palpitating, so if you know Chad Quinn, he was on one of our other ones. other episodes. But what we’re doing here normally we have a framing story. But let’s let’s frame this out a little bit. 

As Brian alluded to, we’ve done a tremendous amount of post COVID research. And what we’re trying to do is to help our audience make sense out of everything that’s going on with the assumption that when this is when the dust settles, everything’s going to look very differently. So what we’ve done is we’ve done a variety of panels and interviews and several webinars. One of the webinars that we’re going to zoom in right now on is the webinar called routes to value, enable customers and enable customers to buy. And that’s what we’re going to concentrate on and to connect some dots. We’ve already had two sales leaders comment on it. And what I’m excited about is Steve’s been in this spot of working on the marketing side of supporting sales. So it’s very rare that We get this opportunity to have this conversation. So what we’re going to ask them our format is going to be essentially this. I’m going to ask Steve, what are three things that you got away or took away from this so you can compare what his his insights were to Bob Apollo’s insights, or Joe, Joe Hayes’s insights. And what we want you to do is sort of mix them all together and come up with your own plan. Then what we’re going to have is a conversation about what his observations are, how he’s connecting the dots, and then we’re going to wrap it up together. Brian’s gonna wrap it up together to see how he’s exhibiting as a as a Orchestrator. So, how does that sound for you, Steve, you’re ready to get going?

Steve Goas 08:45  

Yeah, of course. Let’s do it.

Brian Lambert 08:47  

And I like that too. And real quick just for our listeners. These episodes are on our website so you can get the episodes that Scott’s talking about. Also, the webinar recordings are on the website too the route to value recordings. 

Scott Santucci 09:00  

And what’s that website, Brian? 

Brian Lambert 09:01  

It’s at OrchestrateSales.com.

Scott Santucci 09:04  

OrchestrateSales.com. So please go and visit that now. Okay, so the first question that I have would be so Steve, what would be three things that you took away from that webinar?

Steve Goas 09:19  

So I don’t know that it’s three things per se. It’s more like one big thing with lots of little sub components. It’s, it’s Productitis, and the role of customer centricity in selling and in business strategy. So what why don’t we go ahead and start with Productitis? I’ll start by saying maybe a little bit of a historical perspective here. 

So product centric selling was really the dominant sales strategy of 20th century. You know, we all know the narrative that goes back to Henry Ford, the assembly line, you know, you manufacture more products, you do it more cheaply as sell more at the virtuous cycle.

Scott Santucci 09:59  

You can have anything any color you want, as long as it’s black,

Steve Goas 10:01  

any color you want, as long as it’s black. Yep. But there are cracks in the foundation. And I think that we would all agree on most of inside our nation would agree that product centric selling is not particularly well suited to the 21st century. That being the case, there’s always going to be exceptions. 

So I hate to be the guy that uses Apple as an example. But in this case, I have to. So I’ll start by saying, I don’t consider them a customer centric company. I believe that they try. I believe that that they create really innovative products really, you know, shiny stuff, they they promote it really well. They have really cool slick commercials with music and celebrities and all that. And they usually kick things off in press conferences that are around this time of year like around September. Um, I’ll give you an example of something that they did that’s not particularly customer centric, which is they didn’t decommission iTunes until 2019. You know, to me that years too late. You know, it was clunky. It was outdated. Just think that that was the wrong approach for that. But look, that having been said their market cap is 2 trillion. That’s amazing. that’s larger than the GDP of a lot of countries.

Scott Santucci 11:10  

Right cue Dr. Evil pinky.

Steve Goas 11:13  

Yeah, yeah. So so it with them, I believe that they’re going to have to start making changes as we get, you know, further down the road. But if I’m them, if it’s not broken, do we really want to go fixing it. And then the other example that I want to use and then Scott, I’ll kind of throw it back to you is BMW. So my father-in-law is a lifelong BMW owner. He has been buying them like one to the next for four decades now since then, since the 1970s. And I’ve talked to him about it. And he has basically said, it is not through my experience in the showroom in the dealerships, with the sales people. You know, with like the virtual tours on the website, it’s really not through the experience. It’s because when I get in there and when I get behind the wheel, it is thrilling. It’s kind of like the perfect blend between a luxury vehicle and something that could also have racing harnesses and could go 170 miles an hour on a race track. So with that, I kind of see the two of them as competing on the basis of product innovation. And our last CEO here at TD Ameritrade kind of said that I believe that there are generally three ways to compete and our CEO before him had the same point of view. So you’ve got product, which is innovation, you’ve got price, which I mean, that could be just a race to the bottom, and then you’ve got the customer experience. That’s where customer centricity comes into where we need to overcome Productitis. So I’ll kind of stop right there and wait for you guys to chime in.

Scott Santucci 12:43  

Sure. So let me let me share some thoughts here. So one thing is, I think what what is challenging for those of us who are b2b which is everybody in insider nation, is we have a lot of these examples of working backwards from cost From a b2c companies, right, so you’re talking about mass market BMW is a mass market, Apple’s a mass market. How do we blend a whole bunch of different individual capabilities into something unique that somebody wants to buy what that outcome is? So part of what we’re what we’re talking about here is I like what you’re where you’re going and sort of challenging who’s actually really customer centered or not. I think what we need to do is we need to bring that conversation into a b2b frame of reference. Me personally, I don’t think we have nearly enough examples that we talk about you, for example, in the b2b space, we’ve used the word persona a lot. Persona is a great valuable tool and label and concept for b2c marketing. I question whether it’s really valuable for b2b marketing when we’re targeting individual roles and stakeholders. I think that what I want us to do is challenge ourselves to use these examples to talk more on the b2b side. And before we get into that, for those who haven’t listened to the webinar, what exactly is Productitis? And why does it resonate so much with you?

Steve Goas 14:15  

So to me, Productitis is basically an inward focus. So you’re focused inwardly on your company, your products and services, less on the customer and their problems and their business issues. And the way that it manifests itself at the conversation level as you just get bogged down in features and benefits, a lot of which is not going to be relevant and it undermines your own credibility, and is going to, you know, hamper your ability to win deals and you know, be successful in a business development role. But the simplest way to put it for me would be inward focus versus focused on the customer, their issues, their problems, their initiatives. One of my favorite quotes from from the last couple of podcasts is “budgets don’t get from funded to buy products. They get funded to, you know, fuel initiatives. 

Scott Santucci 15:03  

Amen.

Steve Goas 15:04  

Yep, so there we go that that says just about at all.

Scott Santucci 15:08  

Perfect. So let’s, let’s unpack this a little bit. One of the things that I appreciate so much about you, Steve, is you’re really pushing the envelope. You’ve got a marketing background, you’re a customer content advocate. What are some of the, what does being customer centered really mean for you in the lens of a b2b organization? Well, first of all, what does it mean? And then second of all, who has the authority to say, this is the voice of the customer Says who?

Steve Goas 15:40  

So to me, being customer centered from an enablement standpoint, means really having what I call your design points in place, it’s really going to be fundamental to customer centricity. So you mentioned personas before. Um, I do think that personas in the b2b world are important.

So personas is going to be one The pains and the problems that they’re having is going to be two. And where they are in the buyers path is going to be three. And these are kind of like our anchor points that ensure all enablement services that we come out with our customer centered. Let me actually pivot back to personas here. Because I agree that they’re valuable, but they are hard to get right. So there’s a difference between doing them and doing them right. I believe having a loose sense as to the role that you’re selling to like, let’s say a, you know, an IT director, Chief Marketing Officer or CEO, whoever, if you just have a loose idea of you know, who they are, what they do, etc, it’s not going to be helpful. 

What is helpful is what’s called the JTBD. So the job to be done. Clayton Christensen talks about this in his book, innovative solution came out about 15 years ago, but you really got to know how do they go about their day, who’s holding them accountable, who do they report to? What resources that they have available, it really goes much deeper and it is very difficult. To create effective personas in the b2b space, and when you do create them, they have to be continuously updated. And that’s done, you know, with the sales folks that work with these types of people. So I don’t disagree that that it’s hard to get it right. But I do believe that there’s value in doing it in the b2b world, as well as the b2c world. 

Scott Santucci 17:20  

Well, let’s pause on that.and discuss it. So one of the things that’s difficult is we use terms often like persona. And there, we you’d agree, there is not a standard set of what a persona is. So if we were to pull and look at the persona work, from company to company to company, we’re going to see a huge amount of variation about how they’re actually building those things. Would you agree with that, Steve? 

Steve Goas 17:49  

Yep. 

Scott Santucci 17:49  

Okay. So what I’m trying to highlight is, here’s what I do know, I know that with sales, there’s more standardization, if you will. Now, there’s some There’s a lot of variation, but their word roles needs different things. So if you’re a solution seller, there’s a slight different terminology but versus a challenger seller or a Miller Heiman salesperson. The point is they have things like the technical buyer, the decision maker, the catalyst if you’re into value selling, there’s all these different roles of how they play in the buying process. 

What’s difficult, is that they have to manage many stakeholders within a company. So one of the things that one of the trends that’s happened is over the past 10 years, we’ve seen an explosion of the number of stakeholders involved. And our observation is these stakeholders their jobs are knowable to your point. What I’m agreeing with you on is maybe it’s just sort of the the thing that I’m reacting to is the sloppiness of this the lack of standards of personas. 

So it’s not the idea of profiling individual buyer types. I think it’s the lack of precision that’s being done to it that I have a beef with. We’ve got to be able to connect the dots between the the roles that salespeople are looking to identify because they’re casting stakeholders as agents to try to, you know, drive the deal forward. They have to be able to find who are the people that are going to be resistant? Who are the people that are going to be activating who are going to be passive who’s a decision maker who’s an influencer all of that stuff. But in order to make it work we have to go one step further today, which is we have to help sales people Orchestrator gain a lot of buying so my, my vantage point on this is these things are knowable. If we work backwards from the jobs that you know, job responsibilities are knowable. You highlighted a bunch of different roles out there that’s knowable. You got to do the research. You should know what their risk factors are, because we need to be able to plot out. It’s very common for security buyers in a technology technical world to have conflict with application developers. Why is that the case because their job responsibilities are so different. So because of their roles, they’re going to be in conflict. If you know that about the role, it empowers the salesperson to manage it better and then manage the executive expertise or expectations. But if we don’t do that, then guess what we’re managing to people’s opinions and feelings. And that’s never what that’s that’s not the most effective way to drive things forward.

So what I like about what you’re saying is that you are being very empathetic with connecting the dots and aware of these dots to be connected. So it just wanted to be clear. Where my what my perspective is when I am critical of quote unquote personas.

Steve Goas 20:56  

Yep. And that’s fair.

Scott Santucci 20:58  

Okay. So go on you have more thoughts.

Steve Goas 21:01  

Yep. So So our three design points, we’ve got our personas, we’ve got our pains, which are business problems. And within pains, we want to make sure that it’s stated versus inferred, because we don’t want to want to have our salespeople getting happy ears and hearing what they want to hear versus what was actually said. And then also within pains, we’ve got financial, we’ve got operational, we’ve got risk. And then from there also is the buyers path. So where are they in their journey, you know, where they are at the top versus the bottom is going to be very different and salespersons job is basically to give them all the information that they need to confidently make decisions to move their way through the funnel. Um, you know, towards the bottom and basically the way that I look at I’ll use a football analogy here is that 

As enablers Our job is not to sling the ball down the field 4050 yards at a time. You know, what we try to do is get first downs and rather than them throwing a bomb down the field and winning the game that way, you know if a team gets a first down on every play that they have, they’re going to win every game. And you know, sales is going to be the same. So as it relates to the buyers path, we want our sellers to give the buyers all the information that they need to move their way down and make confident, you know, decisions based on value conversations. So to me that though, that’s basically the focal point of, of ensuring what we’ve done is customer centric is making sure that personas pains and buyers path are fundamental to everything that we give to sales.

Scott Santucci 22:34  

So let me be a little devil’s advocate here representing the voice of salespeople. So one thing would be, how would you ensure that that content is actually customer focused? I’m resonating with what you’re saying. How do you validate that the material that you’re producing is actually customer centric stick in the first place?

Steve Goas 22:57  

Yeah. So if it’s gonna represent the voice of the customer, we need to have the folks that are working with the customers day in and day out involved. So generally that’s not going to be marketing marketing is kept at a comfortable distance away from the customer. And you know, that’s where I spent the majority of my career up to this point. So I would

Scott Santucci 23:16  

In the confortable distance away from customers? 

Steve Goas 23:19  

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons why I want to go into sales enablement is because you’re closer to the action, right? It’s marketing people are at an arm’s length away. So anyway, my answer to that to that question is you have to look to the folks that are dealing or that are working directly with your customers, your clients, your prospects, the people that are where the rubber meets the road, they’re actually having these conversations, they have to inform whether it’s public facing, or you know, me specifically I focused more on the internal only stuff. And you know, that is basically fueled almost entirely by by sales. I create the framework of what it’s going to be whether it’s a customer success story and competitive battle card button. The magic to make sure that that the customer is represented has to come from sales because a they’re the ones out there selling where the rubber meets the road. And B, they’re the ones actually working with our clients. So they would know. So I would say them Customer Success teams, service teams, whoever is facing off with your customers has to be involved.

Scott Santucci 24:18  

You said a word that I really like. Let’s unpack that word for a second, the magic. So there is if if we asked our sales people to do all the dots connecting, only about 20% of our sales people can really do that to the full breadth of what our capabilities are. So what Matt, what I see that you’re providing here, Steve, is you’re providing the magic of how do we find these repeatable patterns of where our top reps are working at? And how do I work or orchestrate all of the different people inside our company on the back office so that we can pull those those right messages forward. So it’s Yes, salespeople are having magic with those conversations. But aren’t you also doing magic as well in your role?

Steve Goas 25:06  

I mean, I would say yes, you know, my my magic and the value that I have to offer sales from a content strategy standpoint, is kind of bottling the magic from the most successful sellers that we have out there, and then serving it up to them when they need it, how they need it. And that’s going to be through our content enablement platform. Yep. So that I’d say that is really the biggest piece of value that that we provide from a content standpoint is kind of organizing and filtering. You know, the, the wins from the field, you know, the folks that are doing it most effectively, kind of like repackaging some of that, and then putting it into a format, whether it be Seismic Highspot Showpad, there’s a million of them out there and putting it into a content engine like those that will serve it up to them when they need it, which is when the customer needs it. So that’s I think is my value is taking it, kind of organizing it, reshaping it a little bit and then serving it up to everybody in particular to to raise the the B’s and the C’s to be the As.

Scott Santucci 26:11  

Yeah, right. So that that’s what I wanted to capture talking about this stuff is pretty difficult. Because once you start doing it, it’s it becomes pretty instinctive. But how do we explain to other people all over the work that you’re working on? So let me summarize and please check my work here, Steve about because I’m probably leaving stuff out because of how complex it is.

So number one, you have to have a vision of the different stakeholders that are involved in making buying decisions with your products and services. Two you have to organize the information or capture the information about who these roles are personas. I don’t want to debate that I want already established that we have to have detailed knowledge about who those are. Three, we can’t have that information be On an island because salespeople have to connect the dots with that, for you have to work with salespeople, particularly the salespeople that a reps who have already figured out how to sell it and unpack their unconscious competence, which is difficult and upon itself. Next five, you have to work across the company for the different products and services and blend them together to a message that I’m going to use the term outcome oriented, impactful, whatever. Next part is you have to be able to organize it in a way distribution platform, you mentioned technology so that salespeople can access it so that they’re equipped to be able to have those conversations at a moment in time. And you have to do all of this stuff in a rapidly changing complex environment that moves fast.

Steve Goas 27:51  

Exactly right. And something else that I want to add on there, in terms of the value that we can add from the content standpoint is so when we think about ourselves sales or sales enablement, KPIs. So win rates, conversions, deal stage velocity, you know, net new assets, etc. One of the most important things I think that enablers can give sales back into their are to give sales is time back into their day. Yeah. So if they are, you know, creating their own content. So let’s say I’m running my own newsletters, I’m creating my own one pagers, you know, that, hey, most salespeople don’t want to do that, and they’re not particularly good at it’s just not the best use of their time. So it’s like, in a less mature sales group, you can make them do it, but it just doesn’t make sense. You know, we want to give them time back into their day so that you have all the email templates that that you want. You have customizable, one pagers, you know, you have competitive battle cards. Let’s say someone’s going into a meeting where they know that they’re selling against one of our rivals. We don’t want them taking two or three hours scouring the internet, trying to compare us versus them looking for vulnerabilities. You know, we already have that we have competitive battle cars. For all of our rivals that include a rundown of the products and services, what we have what we don’t have. But the magic is going to be in the SWOT analysis we create SWOT analysis is for all of our rivals, where they’re strong, where they’re weak, where the opportunities are, where the threats are. This saves them so much time to be able to actually put time back into their day and spend more time with customers. So it’s like, again, you could have them do it on their own, but ain’t gonna be as good and be, it’s just not the best use of their time. And three, they don’t have enough time to spend with customers as it is just about every sales rep out there will tell you, I wish I had more time to get time back into their day is really, really important. And a way that we do that is through a proper content strategy that runs through our content enablement engine.

Scott Santucci 29:50  

So I want to touch on a couple of things if you have been following our so you the audience, I’m not talking to you, Steve. So you got a nation that is Yeah, you inside our nation. have been following along and you listen to the panel that we had a sales experts, those sales experts rattled off a variety of different requests that they would like to have of marketing. And also, the satisfaction level that they have with marketing is pretty low. None of the requests that they had was patterns. And what exactly those patterns are, what I’d like to ask you guys to do is listen to Steve’s unconscious competence about the patterns of content. And what’s really important that he’s doing a really great job is he’s relating content that we might as I’ve actually had the role of a product marketer before. The way that we structure information and product marketing is one way and again, let’s look at the title product is my first job, right? I want to organize this stuff about what we say and what we do and based on that kind of material, but then let’s talk about what Bob and I had the company About about a structure for an outcome. And in between we’ve got to be able to take the stuff that we’ve got, and ways that we’re working and transform it and serve it in a way that is digestible for sales. This is what I think Steve means by a content strategy is bridging the gap between those things. Is that is that fair? Would you like to add some color? About what Yeah, yeah,

Steve Goas 31:23  

so that’s there. And it’s gonna be a dichotomy between your customer facing stuff and your internal only stuff. So internal only, you know, that could get analysis plays, things that that kind of help identify and magnify a business problem. Competitive battle cards, customer success plays, yeah. I know that this is going to be a dirty word or a dirty term, but product plays there is a right way to to do product plays, and there’s a wrong way to do it. And we can come back to that but that basically covers kind of like our internal stuff, and that’s designed to just fuel and create more great conversations that will further relationships and better have, you know further down the funnel, and then the other side is going to be our customer facing stuff, which is great for follow up in order to create momentum, drive change and actually help bring folks further down into the sales funnel. So I would say a part of it. Another big part of it is how the internal only and the customer facing content sort of pairs together to create a bigger impact than either one of them would individually.

Scott Santucci 32:24  

Awesome. So I think what we’re doing here, I hopefully you’ll agree, hopefully insider nation will agree is we’re co creating value in the way that we’re co creating value. I’m trying to help connect the dots for you listeners, what Steve’s unconscious competence is, and there’s all these terms that we throw out. But hopefully you realize that there’s a lot of depth that we have to get into in the meeting. So we have to balance between being really, really, really, really specific to make sure that we understand the individual piece parts, but then we’ve got to roll it back up to where our executive sponsors can understand what we’re doing. Would you agree that that’s one element of creating value because I want to be able to give the baton to you, too. Because I think you have some thoughts that you’d like to share, where we can co create value differently, but I wanted to deliver on the promise that you lead with about co creating value to begin with. Yes, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Okay. So how about you? Do you have some questions? For us? Some things, some topics that you want to bring up? You mentioned in our in our pre call, you had some ideas that you’d like to challenge or have discussion?

Steve Goas 33:35  

Not even necessarily challenged, but but one idea is that product marketing teams drive product centricity, which translate to Productitis. So I actually don’t even have like a codified answer here. But my question actually, for both to the both of you, Brian, you too, is do we eventually just need to do away with product marketing teams in favor of things like customer segments teams, so friends Rather than being an absolute expert on this product, rather than that you’re an expert on this segment. So I mean, there’s a million different ways that segments can shake out. I mean, at TD Ameritrade, we did it by assets with us. So do we need to eventually get rid of product and marketing rules in favor of, you know, rolls that fit more squarely within an approach of customer centricity? Or did the two of them work together, which I believe is probably the best way to do it, you know, what’s the best way forward so that we don’t have product marketing teams, whether they realize it or not creating Productitis for our sellers?

Scott Santucci 34:36  

That’s a great question. And that falls under the bucket of Organizational Enablement. And also just sort of rolls in general. where we’re at, to be simplistic about it is with b2b, we have two choices. We can continue to go to market, which says what’s the first thing that you design around On your when you go to market is you do your Tam based on product sales. And the classic approach to do is to look at other like product sales, you get data from IDC, Gartner or Forrester, and you do an analysis on your on your Tam or other sources depending on which industry you’re in. And then that sets your Tam or, and then you cascade down a whole bunch of activities and strategies that come from it with your segmentation and you know, your path to market. There’s just a ton of muscle memory around going to market. Yeah, or we have a different choice. We can go to customer. And if you look at say how some of the key accounts are set up, the idea of Tam is just ridiculous. We can get millions and millions of dollars out of individual accounts. We treat the accounts as markets and upon themselves and customers write checks people don’t. I think one challenge that we’ve got is to rethink or to compliment A market approach with a go to customer approach. I think that’s one area that we’re starting to see some pockets of companies to address. But it’s very difficult because you’ve got tons of muscle memory, you have an apparatus of management consulting firms that work with the strategy department on go to market strategies. People just talk about go to market and I don’t really think they think about what, what the implications are. And there’s not enough conversation that’s happening about what’s the what is the experience that happens in the trenches? And those are all the things that you’ve been really highlighting is what is the experience that happens when a salesperson and an individual customer interact? I think that’s one area. Mm hmm. reactions that before I get into other, other other

Steve Goas 36:46  

No, I mean, I think that that it’s a complicated subject, but go to customer over go to market, especially as we get deeper into the 21st century. Absolutely. But I find myself kind of like wrestling with this idea of Do we need to eventually just completely get rid of Product Marketing roles and like, Yes. Is that going to make people’s heads? just explode that just explode?

Scott Santucci 37:07  

Yes, it will make your heads explode for sure.

Brian Lambert 37:09  

Yeah, there’s a lot of hardwiring. I mean, if you look at it from a role perspective, people get certified in product marketing, and there’s a lot of, you know, structure and then there’s a lot of checklists. And Scott and I’ve talked about this before you got it, how would you change the checklist? And how would you change the hardwiring of that that role? But the thing about that is Steve, many roles are in that position in a 21st century system going to customer Product Marketing is probably one of the most hardwired but so is training. Yeah. And, and so you have those two roles that to me, need to be rethought. And and we can go on that in a separate podcast, but yeah, yeah, those those are real challenges. And that’s why one the need for orchestration, because you have to build a coalition to tackle these things. In order to go to customer and to you got to have the executive Lachenmann to even carve off a conversation like this. Because, you know, it’s hard to do, it’s impossible to do a bottom up, it’s just right. I’ve tried it, it doesn’t work, you end up in, you know, hand to hand combat situations, you know, it’s just not gonna work. It has to be it has to go tops down. So that’s why I think the Commercial Ratio is so critical understanding that bringing the right people in at the executive levels to have these conversations and make executives you know, think a little bit differently about these legacy approaches. Because that’s what’s going to be required to move us forward into a go to customer or more importantly, Steve, your point, a 21st century model, you know, that so that’s, maybe those are three or four different podcasts. But that’s my point of view on that.

Steve Goas 38:42  

I mean, I’ve found myself just over the last couple of weeks thinking, you know, if I ran the department, I don’t know that I want to have people that that are that are in marketing that are experts in the products I want to like reassign them to say you’re an expert in this customer segment and then through that you’re going to be an expert in Products X, Y, and Z because that’s what’s proven to be most relevant, most helpful, etc. But it’s almost like you’ve got your a priority and your be a priority. So I’ve been trying to like reconcile this within my own brain. So that’s that.

Scott Santucci 39:11  

What you’re saying is spot on this is these are the conversations that a lot of people are actually struggling with right now. And we need to find a place to just feel the conversation and make sense of it. There’s two other dimensions that I want to share an answer your question, because so the first one is, we have to attack it at the strategy level. But that’s not going to happen overnight. That’s not low hanging fruit. What’s a What’s another low hanging fruit option? So if we want to have executive sponsorship, this is something that I’ve found very effective in engagements. I’ve worked out with big companies. And one of that is Brian alluded to earlier is let’s think about, hey, we’re doing a product launch. But sales doesn’t want to sell products they want to sell value. Mm hmm. Why don’t we rethink this? Why don’t we launch A enabling capability or why don’t we launch an outcome. And then let’s also not say that the launch is done when sales materials are done, let’s are completed. Let’s say that that launch is completed after our first five sales of this new thing.

So that way, we’re all we’re all in this together. And some of these things sound very. The first reaction when you get a group together, is it sounds pedantic. But then when you actually think about how you’d go and do your tasks, you realize, Oh, my gosh, the checklist that we’re using this, we have an updated or one company we’re working with. They’ve hadn’t updated their new product launch checklist in 15 years. Oh, man. And that’s the kind of muscle memory that people just get into action and they just start doing and they don’t ask the question, Well, hey, it’s 2020. Maybe we need to do this differently. So having the discipline to revisit and just make some tweaks to the process is a high yield opportunity. You just have to be able to withstand some pushback and be able to rehearse that. And then I think that so that’s the other thing. And then the third thing is, another angle that’s happening is Nope, once companies get introduced to the idea of go to customer or go to market, they don’t want to pull the band aid off and do their whole because they can’t. You can’t disrupt ongoing operations. So what we’ve done is we’ve made different pockets. So we isolate a pocket that’s of sales teams, marketers, etc. Who can all work working backwards from customers, because part of what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to have everybody being customer centered. When people you don’t want to staff that with people have so much muscle memory and unwillingness to change that Just a slave to sort of that product base. So you segmented out. And you do sub segments within inside your group and you build pots or working teams or things like that. And then what you do is you do need to change the role, the definition of the role of sales people are product marketing in that space, because the language matters. And some of the roles that we’ve seen our outcomes specialist, customer advocate, some people refer to it as a specific role. Let’s say the company’s decided that they want to sell to a CIO, then they then they’re the, the CIO success marketer. And we have to be careful with that success word because we don’t mean the customer success team. It’s Yeah, right. So these are the nuances of what we have to work with to ever work through.

Steve Goas 42:51  

Yeah, you know, as I look at like, you know, a marketing org chart, you know, it’s there has to be an answer for who who owns the customer. Who is the expert in the customer? And if you look up and down your marketing or chart, and if no one clearly owns the customer or customer segments as the expert in them, then you’re gonna have problems and B, you’re certainly headed towards Productitis.

Scott Santucci 43:12  

So you’re spot on, right? And the word here’s an even worse scenario, if every group claims they have ownership over the customer, oh, yeah, that’s even worse.

Brian Lambert 43:22  

Because gonna say is that, you know, are we are we able to say, who’s able to say that they actually, quote unquote, own the customer when we’re talking about selling an experience and an outcome?

Scott Santucci 43:32  

Yep. So that’s why I like so much of Steve, your approach is that you’re focusing on the atomic level items, which are important, but they don’t seem strategic. We’ve got to figure a way to bubble that up to get you that permission so that you’re not just what what’s difficult is being something different inside an organization because the white blood cells will Collect around you. And you’ve we’ve all heard the the phenomenon of a host transplanting or host rejecting its transplant. That happens all the time. Inside companies, it’s even faster inside companies, this space to let something new happen is very difficult. So that’s why we’re really advocating these conversations to think through how can you be successful. You’ve done a great job of highlighting out what those what those items are. And what we want to do is isolate individual topics here and have different podcasts to create more of that. more of that knowledge amongst inside our nation so that we’re all able to succeed together.

Unknown Speaker 44:45  

Sounds good to me.

Scott Santucci 44:47  

So with that, we’re, we’re at the point of where we want to wrap up. So Steve, what are some parting thoughts that we have before we turn over to Brian to summarize what he learned and how to how to put this together into a structure so that you our listeners can be an orchestrator moving forward.

Steve Goas 45:06  

Yeah. So I would say that that that we’ve got cracks in the foundation of product central selling, you know, we’ve got tech advances and the speed at which tech can be either copied or you know, duplicated in some way we’ve got globalization, basically taking away geographic advantages. So let’s say you had the market cornered selling furniture in Buffalo, New York. Well, not anymore because now it’s borderless selling. Yep, deregulation shaking up otherwise stable industries. And then this is the last reason and really this is the only reason that you need it is the customer has power that they’ve never had before. They ask that they buy what they want, when they want from whom they want, and they’re really only as loyal as their next passing when, yeah, so I would say when really out of those four reasons, I really only need number four, you really don’t even need any other reason. So these are sort of the cracks in the foundation. There. Gonna make product centric, selling, thinking etc, not sustainable, moving into the 21st century and really putting the customer at the center of what you’re doing, including enablement services, as a way to do that. And really what’s key to enablement working is enablement needs to stay close to sales because sales, it stays close to the customer. So really the closer that you’re able to stay to the customer and their needs, their issues, their demand, the more successful you’re going to be an enablement, whether it’s content enablement, Organizational Enablement, you know, any the other types of enablement.

Scott Santucci 46:39  

So, I want to add, I think those are great. I want to add one point I think you’ll agree with I will do a lot of work on this on the sales organization and the sales leaders are very interested in modeling their a reps. So by staying close, you want to stay close to the A reps because it’s about a rising tide lifts all ships. You don’t want to be listening to the gen pop salesperson for providing your content because that hits the lowest common denominator. Is that right? core right? Yep.

Steve Goas 47:09  

So it’s the a level performers that the conversations that they’re having the activities that they’re doing their habits, that you really want to kind of spread around to kind of bridge that gap between, you know, a C or a B to an A. and an enablement can help sort of narrow that

Scott Santucci 47:25  

gap. The reason I stressed that point not to call Steve out I know Steve thinks about these things anyway. I like a common misconception that I see in most marketers is they’ll do a survey of the whole sales force and say sales wants this. They go produce whatever that is, and then they get pushed back. That’s like an Edsel. So we’ve had a whole episode on that. It’s a it’s like building abs. So we’re going to build something for everybody and no one uses it. Mm hmm. You need to be really, really clear and dedicated to work backwards from the reps that are doing it and it has empathy that these guys have a lot of unconscious competence. And you have to do you have to be curious and intense and thoughtful all the attributes that Steve’s highlighting here, to be able to really understand that and then be able to connect the dots with all the different content elements and pieces that you’ve got. And then Steve’s got to be able to relate that back to all of the different individual contributors and producing that market or that content. You might have competitive analysis people that you’re tapping into three or four different product marketers who because a salesperson, customers have this nasty habit of not really understanding what your product structure is, they just tend to buy capabilities that they want. They pull the things off the shelf and our salespeople are stuck in the middle, where he might have to deal with branding, different branding people, if you’re dealing with different business units, different brand mechanisms, there. Lots of different aspects that are Go into it. And this is why we’re really stressing this orchestration part. So Brian, why don’t you help us connect the dots of what Orchestration is? And then we’ll let Steve have the last word. And then we’ll be done with our podcast today.

Brian Lambert 49:14  

Yeah, great. This has been awesome guys. And for our listeners, I just wanted to point you to Episode 51 is the one with Baba Paulo, you guys can go listen at. And then 23 is the the Ford Edsel

discussion where if you build something for everybody, it’s not going to work. Then also go check out the website to get the webinar that from a recap perspective on the webinars on routes to value. Sorry about that. So from a recap perspective, Steve’s bringing us today this idea of Productitis from the most recent webinar from Scott and the routes to value webinar and in that in that Productitis discussion, we talked a lot today. about what’s the remedy for Productitis, which Scott calls go to customer. So when I frame out and I take our six criteria of being an Orchestrator, and as you guys remember, we frame this out on our website and also in the podcast. And I use this as a way to digest the discussion because it was wide ranging today in a very specific area. So by that, I mean, it’s it’s very tight to this idea of Message Enablement. We’re talking about Productitis. But we got into a lot of detail, and that can be overwhelming. So I’m going to net it out here. The first attribute of a Orchestrator is to be mission and goal focused. So when you when when Steve was talking about the idea of the top performers, and what does it mean to be close to the customer? In the end, he said, you know, where’s, where’s the focus on customer content? And what does it mean to be customer centric? We have that whole conversation around who has the ability To define what it looks like from the customer perspective and who quote unquote owns the customer, that seems to be an eye and I align it to a very fundamental question about what’s the mission and goal of Message Enablement. And that in how does that going to help tackle Productitis? Where do you focus on product or customer? Right? So that’s number one.

Number two is this idea of driving results by design, not effort. And Steve talked a lot today about getting funded to feel the right types of initiatives and the idea of the detail of a persona and what that looks like. It’s more helpful to focus around what the job is and what the job to be done is, and also who’s holding these customers accountable. And then more importantly, how do you navigate the decision making in their overall journey. And with that, you know, discussion, it’s more about understanding the roles of people and designing out those roles to relieve the burden from salespeople. So they don’t have to figure it themselves.

The third part or the third component here of Orchestrator is this idea of guiding the narrative by confronting reality. We get we Scott, and I get feedback from folks who don’t want to engage in this podcast, because they say it’s too long. And we say, look, we’re spending an hour on a topic that’s really, you know, has a substantive business impact. We’re just kind of getting into these things, and we’re confronting reality. And that’s what we did today. This idea of the, you know, b2b, b2c companies like Apple, you know, Steve talked about and product centric selling. He made a call today and said, there’s chinks in the armor there and product selling, product centric selling, it’s going to go by the wayside. We even looked at how would we redefine the role to something different. That’s more about connecting the information that salespeople need, getting the right types of reps detail from the eight reps to extract that information from them to work across the company. that builds to build impactful messages, right? Because that’s the goal here is something impactful and useful to sales, and then helping sales people get it and find it. That’s that’s reality. And he can’t just wave your magic wand and do this. Somebody has to do the valuable work to do this on behalf of sales. And that’s what Steve talked a lot about today.

The fourth one is prioritizing the right goals at the right moments in the, you know, what’s the role of salesperson, and why do we have salespeople in the first place? And what what’s the role of content? And yeah, there’s going to be customer facing content. And there’s going to be some internal content. And if you’re going to training in a Talent Enablement space, there’s going to be some Talent Enablement content. So what’s the purpose of this content? And what’s the design point of it in order to make sure that there’s precision in that content so you can prioritize the right goals at the right moments, and so can salespeople? The fourth or sorry, the fifth question. At Orchestrator is unlocking energy and creating momentum. And Steve talked a lot about this idea of working across the organization being close to the customer close to sales, these two things being close to the customer being close to sales, I think a lot of enablement. People say I don’t have access, I don’t have access, and I just have to follow best practices. But that’s how you end up with a 15 year outdated product product launch checklist is by following best practices from 15 years ago. Just because it’s always done that way doesn’t mean it needs to be done now. And when you look at what it means to unlock energy and create momentum, it’s around a COVID world conversation, and you got to get close. So it’s an excuse, in my opinion, and I’m injecting to not be able to get close and Steve’s super passionate about that. Maybe give him a call and talk about strategies there. And then the last one is catalyzing change through collaboration. We started out the podcast with this I idea of CO creating value. And on this particular one, as we were going through it, I’m thinking about, oh, I need to send this link to this person, I should send this link to that person, oh, this would really benefit this person I talked to, I found four people in this in this conversation that need to hear this podcast, just by going through it. That’s how much value I get out of these things. And I hope you do too. But the idea here of working with sales, and working with the customer, not doing too sales, not not doing to the customer building together and understanding the purpose of content in the middle of the funnel. There’s so much content at the top of the funnel. Steve talks a lot today about what it means to provide content that translates the customer focused into that, you know, initiative or product speak. Maybe even the idea of driving change, you know, what’s the role of sales people, if they’re not driving change, what kind of content do you have there? So catalyzing change to collaborations the sixth one. And, Steve, I appreciate your discussion today. And how is that recap? Does that summarize what you want to drive home is the the to be an orchestrator thing?

Steve Goas 56:15  

Yeah. And I’ll kind of close by by saying, you know, we’re in interesting times now. So, you know, we’re four or five months into a pandemic. And you know, the role of sales enablement, is really, really important now, and I would say that the time for enablement to help their salespeople graduate to the role of an advisor or a consultant, a guide, you know, a business expert is now and the way that you do that is by leading with value and what sort of underlies all that is how close you are to the customer and their issues and staying focused on them. And actually, Bob Apollo said something that I loved on that podcast towards the beginning, which is stick with the issue. Stick with the issue. go a little bit deeper. Don’t go too Jumping into products way too soon for that. So, you know, it sort of upsets me to to hear that that that some companies are cutting their enablement functions, because I kind of look at that and say, Well, you know, if they’re really fueling more productive sales forces, how is it any different than, you know, getting rid of, you know, a pretty good producer? So

Brian Lambert 57:19  

that’s the thing there is, that might be why they’re getting cut is they’re not being producing productive. So

Steve Goas 57:26  

yeah, and that’s just it. I mean, there should be optics on all these numbers and that then that might very well be it but but my point, my point is, enablement has never had a better opportunity to step up and shine and the way it is by you know, assuring sales to this place where they can lead with value, and, you know, not get bogged down in, you know, features, benefits, etc.

Scott Santucci 57:48  

We have a couple of an announcement that to carry this ball forward. So Steve is is on a pad a couple things. So Steve, I definitely think you now sound like an expert. What does that mean? granted for participation? We don’t there’s no participation Awards on inside sales.

Steve Goas 58:07  

though that was actually gonna be my final question is, is there a participation trophy and a big one a big impressible.

Scott Santucci 58:13  

No participation trophy. It’s whether you co create value or not for our audience. We

Brian Lambert 58:18  

do have these little buttons, but we I can set next time I see Steve, I’ll give you an insider button.

Steve Goas 58:24  

Oh, I remember that from the conference in San Antonio. Yeah. Jealous of the people walking around with with the buttons. Look.

Scott Santucci 58:32  

Exactly. Look at you now. Carry on. What’s great about this conversation is hopefully you will go to orchestrate sales comm or our listeners. The purpose of orchestrate sales.com is to organize all this information. So Brian and Erich Starrett has done an amazing job of organizing all this stuff so that you can connect the dots with all the content. One of the things is as our library is getting larger and larger, larger and we have So many different topics, we need a way to orchestrate orchestration put on. So that’s one thing. The other thing is we’ve got two, two events upcoming that are 100% right down the aisle, or swim lane or whatever you want to do talk about it that are directly related to things that Steve’s talking about here. The first thing is on September 24, at 1pm. We’re having the last of our COVID webinar series. And we’re going to work on putting all of the things together talking about sales enablement, is at a crossroads and weaving that in with pipeline, the Pipeline Enablement mastering the middle. The next topic that we had was the Commercial Ratio, which has been very interesting. To say the least, it’s been a little bit of a controversial topic with some people and galvanizing and transformative for others. We have the topic of routes devalue, which is Our view of Message Enablement which we we’ve talked about here. And then we had the the last one that we did this week, which was around connecting the dots or calculating all the costs and uncovering the hidden costs. We’re pulling it all together and putting a fine tooth comb and giving you guys a direction of where this all heads post COVID with go to customer, customers, markets don’t write checks people do.

So that’s again on September 24. Feel free to find the registration for on Orchestrator sales.com. We thank you. If you’d like to participate, hopefully you found found this very valuable. One thing I think we’re doing a great job of is highlighting the expertise of of our of our participants. I love Brian’s synthesis at the end that’s, that’s around Orchestrator. Hopefully, we’ll be able to turn that into some notes for you to become an orchestrator. But find a way to get engaged, reach out to us. We know that a lot of this stuff is very uncomfortable because it’s new. And that’s really what we want to do with this podcast is create a forum to have these conversations that need to happen. Steve, you did a fantastic job of doing that. I especially like that you came with some questions along the lines, and brought up some really important topics along the way. I’m also really grateful that you allowed us to share with you what your unconscious competence is. It’s really uncomfortable when you’re on the spot getting asked different questions like this, and you did a fantastic job and you provided a great service for the rest. Thank you so much, and catch us on the next.

Outro 1:01:40  

Thanks for joining us. To Become an insider and amplify your journey. Please make sure you subscribe to our show. If you have an idea of what Scott and Brian can cover in a future podcast or have a story to share, please email them at engage at Orchestrator sales.com You can also connect with them online by going to Orchestrator sales.com following them on Twitter or sending them a LinkedIn connection request

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