ISEs3 Ep10: Dr. Brian Lambert Pt 2 – Co-Founder, Orchestrator, and Value Architect

Hello and welcome to inside sales enablement. Season three, enablement history today, Dr. Brian Lambert is rejoining me in the orchestrates sales studios for part two of two. He is a co-founder of orchestrate sales.com. One of the original hundred-ish four founders of the sales enablement society. And it was cohost of inside sales enablement, seasons one and two. And now back to season three. Part two of two with Dr. Brian Lambert So let's shift gears to this simple pivot. That's also complex, of course, from sales enablement society to revenue enablement society, right? And even in and around that same time, you had both Gartner and Forrester shifting more towards revenue over sales enablement. There's also a trend from sales ops to rev ops from chief sales officer to chief revenue officer. What are your thoughts on that move and what does what is the difference to you between sales enablement and revenue enablement and what is the relationship between the two? Or is does only one stand alone?

Yeah, I'm definitely in the sales enablement space of the two, obviously with my history and also, Scott and I had a lot of discussions about that. And, I definitely fall on to his side of the camp, which is revenue as a term sounds cool. But when you look at what revenue means, it's outside of sales conversations. It has to do with really, quote unquote, channels of distribution and revenue streams. And that's where I really have a problem with revenue enablement because I don't see sales enablement people and sales enablement teams impacting the sales conversation. Revenue stream. And now they're going to take on the revenue streams, plural, which is really, if you think about it it's direct selling, which is salespeople. It's also indirect it's channels, it's partners, it's, there's a huge revenue stream cloud called, cloud marketplace. Where a lot of technology gets sold and, AWS is marketplace. Are you going to take that on and enable that? Are you enabled? What are you enabling? So it sounds cool, but when you think about it, it's all the revenue streams is really the definition of revenue and, there's an sec regulation. And policy around revenue recognition and all that other stuff, you end up in a finance space that most people are ill equipped for and you're in a strategy space that most people are ill equipped for. To me it's going to it's going to accelerate the hyperbole and it's going to accelerate the, the inflation of perception and that will make the bubble pop sooner. In my view because we were, we're not equipped as a profession to do that. Look, as somebody who kind of sits in marketing right now, they're there while I don't but I moved over. Marketing in general is way more rigorous than sales and sales enablement is one of those functions that's not really rigorous compared to their marketing peers, compared to their operations peers. Sales enablement's more of the organic function. And I just don't ever see an organic function becoming the revenue stream enablement group when they can't even agree on what is sales enablement.. I have a hard time believing that all of a sudden everything's going to gel because I've been on the front lines of getting people to gel for 20 years and it just isn't panning out.

yeah. And you have empathy for, as we started out with all of those different functions and roles you've been in those boots.

And yeah, and I think there's, when you look at the discipline and the rigor, the precision, the metrics, I think it's really coming down to a lot of where's the data and do you have data to back up what you're doing? And most enablement people don't realize that they're. They're pretty much outgunned by a lot, every other function from a data perspective. And there, and other functions are very rigorous around the data that they're collecting.

So if I may challenge you I understand where both you and Scott are going when you really take a very literal, like academic, let's look at the word revenue. But when I'm interacting with folks and ask, the everyday enabler what does it mean to you? What's the difference between sales and revenue? It's oh it just means that we're picking up partners. We're picking up customer service and we're enabling them as well. So through that lens, what I like about that is if you get away from, you're absolutely correct for the folks who go, Oh, revenue, if you take it, if you really look at it, that's not what they're doing and there's not the capacity for it, but if what is actually happening, whatever you label it is enabling is working to expand to better serve. And provide value to metrics based assumed, and trackable to encompass partners, which is a soapbox I've been on to better encompass managers, which is I, you and I were completing each other's sentences on that a long time ago, but managers of sales, as well as managers of customer service and partnership managers, and to have a more cross functional. Orchestration, essentially, hopefully, ultimately that goes beyond just sales. I like that, and it feels to me like it's trending more towards And elevated future for enablement.

Sure. And my advice would be, look at revenue from an income statement perspective. So get in your company's 10k, look at its reporting if you're publicly traded, look at how the beans are counted, make sure you're comfortable with the revenue streams of your organization how profitable are you how much income are you, profit are you generating, where's your income coming from, what's your largest and most profitable. Area of the business. All of those questions you should be asking. Not just taking on a function. For example, I was talking to somebody with a sales name and title and I said, Hey, is your company profitable? Oh, yeah, we're super profitable, blah, blah, blah. I was like, oh, that's funny. I looked at it. You guys are losing, 300 million a year. Is that profitable to you? They just don't know. So I would just advise people if you're taking on This type of role and these are the impacts that you want to have. You've got to get into the business. And that's my point from the very beginning if you don't understand the numbers and you're not empathetic to salespeople and you carry that forward to this idea of revenue enablement, then you're not going to be in the numbers and you're not going to care about the revenue because you don't understand how the actual revenue. Works.

Got it.

So before you take that word should mean something to you, just like sales did. So I just saw in both of those areas that the business acumen wasn't there, like you would find in other functions. And I would encourage, Revenue enablers or sales enablers to, to definitely understand how the money works and figure out what your accountability is in that, um, you should know when people are leaving the company and why, and if they're getting fired for quote unquote revenue performance, you should not look the other way that's you should call them and hit them on LinkedIn and you should apologize,

learn from it.

I've done that. I have reached out to managers and reps who have been fired. And I said, Hey I let you down. I feel like I didn't do enough to help you because if I did, then you'd still be here and that's on me.

I love that accountability. That is such a shining example of it. Brian, what a great best practice. So Brian, I'm all about solutions. I know you are too, and all about strategy. It sounds to me like through the course of this conversation, there's a huge opportunity for sales enablement professionals to embrace this idea of revenue. And have this stake in the ground of how profitable is my company? What are the numbers that underlie all of that? And this is a conversation I've had just in the last four or five months with Hilary Headlee actually who is, when I think of rev ops, she is my global go to person. And she's put out some really I think compelling frameworks around RevOps recently that I think sales enablement could sit on top of. And where I'm going with that is what if starting with reaching out to your RevOps counterpart and helping them. Or what working with them in tandem to maybe create a partnership of, Hey, I really want to break down the wall and learn about revenue, your revenue operations. How can we work together so that I'm taking your baseline, what you're looking at and how you're integrating and aligning with the C suite. And can we work together and partner? And if you were me, how would you build the enablement programs do you see opportunity there as maybe a path forward?

Yeah. Ultimately, if sales productivity is important, to drive revenue or to drive sales, transactions, et cetera, then to me there's natural fits all over the place. One of those is definitely revenue operations, because to me, Okay. If you look at productivity, what you could end up with is a relationship like what you're articulating where sales enablement or revenue enablement or whatever is the idea of helping people be skilled and effective at what they're doing. And then sales operations is more about the process. And efficiency side of things and you end up with both and that's productivity. And that, if you can both agree on what number you're moving that, that could be a, quite a powerful combination.

Awesome. Great, Brian. So we've talked a lot about past and a good bit about the present. What about the future? We talked a little bit about what could be if a couple different things were tweaked. I'm fiercely curious to learn more about what you're doing through the lens of AI as someone who Has been in the shoes of sales and ops and sales management and now marketing my assumption is, and by the way, if y'all out there haven't liked and followed Dr. Brian Lambert, he's started a series just in the last month or so, I believe that's been in and all around AI through this vast and differentiated lens where he has empathy for all of these different roles and has been keeping a finger on the pulse of digital transformation and digitization in this new economy. So Brian, can you maybe talk about what as the future and why you're personally investing so much time, not just yourself and research, but in sharing that with the community?

Yeah, sure. I appreciate that. Thought is back to the historical context, this idea that it was organizations first in the siloed thinking. So, I believe that, and I shared that story, those stories about silos are a problem. So if you look at the phases of focus, just loosely at, in, in the view of organizations trying to communicate and capture value, they started out with this lens of, the organization is most important. And let's be process driven. And that's the siloed view from the late 1800s. Lately in the last 40 years or so it's become, employee centric. So we had organizational centric. Then we went through an employee centric piece where, employees are first employees first in, in that view and along the way of an organizational construct and an employee construct of putting in organizations first and employees first there's always this debate of where does the customer go? In that view. I believe the customer has informed customers informed the organizational view and then customers informed the idea of employees first. So they've always been there hand in hand. When you look at the digital economy. What I firmly believe in now where things are heading is we're going to end up in a data centric. Focus. So organizational focus is giving way to employee centricity and employee focus. And over the next 50 years, what we're going to see is a data focus, data centric view and paradigm. So what that means to me is the future. Is in understanding the data, everything will be digital and digitized and ones and zeros are going to be flying around. But when you look at where things are heading, you have to know who's creating what data and knowledge and information. Where is it and how do you get your hands on it? So let's take a I as an example. That sounds really cool. And it sounds really super awesome because you and I can go on our employee centric view and we can hit, chat TPT and ask it questions. What should scare people? And what does scare leaders is. You can't even do that in your own company. So how how would you go to your own company and get access to all of that internal private data? And that's in a way that's secure and that you have access to, but then how would you capitalize all of that intellectual property to go create value for somebody? When are you just going to hit the trillions of website pages and that's going to be valuable? What about our company? Why do we exist? And the company is there to create some sort of value and that's all in your internal intranet and all of the charts and graphs and, slides that everybody's been creating. But you can't even access that with chat GPT. You've got to as a company moved to this idea of that, that stuff matters because you've spent trillions of dollars, billions of millions on it. And yes, there's intellectual property. But if you look at data less as a byproduct of doing work. And as a fuel to the digital economy, most companies are woefully unprepared and most roles are woefully unprepared as we've explored here with this sales enablement role. So I think we're going to be in a data first, digital first paradigm and those that understand how data. Becomes information, how that information becomes knowledge, how that knowledge becomes insight, how that insight gets leveraged to make decisions and then put AI on top of that, that's the future of work. And so that's where I think enablement is heading is almost this digital enablement space where you have this fusion of. Of artificial and human intelligence that I call collective intelligence. I think we're way too much artificial and not enough human intelligence. We need to have a blend of both of human and artificial into this collective intelligence view that says, data is not just a by product of doing work. Data is a fuel and we need human aspects to that and that type of enablement. Is really at a data level. So how do, what data do we need to drive the income statement? What data do we need to drive these revenue streams? What data do we need to equip people with? And what information do we need to give them? What knowledge do we need to give them? But it's all digitized AI is on top of it. So we move away from coordinating a sales kickoff physically to how would you coordinate that in a virtual environment without having sessions? For example, or how would you take the idea of a coaching conversation and figure out what type of coaching conversation you should have based on the data that's available to you? As opposed to your own, experiences, how would you blend that with real data? So there's a digital first world coming, and I think most people are not thinking about that from a. Now perspective, they're thinking, AI is cool, but if you don't understand how data works in your company and how knowledge becomes power and how knowledge becomes insight at a digital level, then I think you're going to be in a spot where the value that you're creating is a bit redundant because it can be done by super fast intelligent chat bots. the thing that's really fascinating to me is, I could have a worker, an AI worker that I brainstorm with on my chat GPT. And I can brainstorm with my AI partner easier than I can brainstorm with the humans that I work with sometimes.

Cause they like to interrupt. Like I do

no, it's not that it's it's

part of it.

not there's this this human blend of, that's important. And the thing about a computer is it's, it has this ability to be structured and logical that I like. So when I have it, when I ask it, what is sales I don't get the, you know, this huge discussion around it. It is, what is sales? It'll say, exactly what it is. So it is a lot more clear than this, than humans are on things like that.

And if you ask it, if the company's profitable, it's going to tell you exactly and bust out some numbers that are publicly available.

right, so then it becomes, so this is why this is important because in the evolution of being organizationally designed and then human centric. If we move to a digital centric world, then it's not just a nice to have. There's real meaning to that. It doesn't not just a cliche. Then you start thinking about where is the data created? Where is it generated? Where is it housed? How does it move around? How do you protect it? And then how do you give people access to what they need? So that they can ask questions like that to get the answers that cut to the chase. I chatted in you. The chat just now. What is sales? I got three paragraphs back and I can move on. I don't end up in this debate about what is sales.

Perfect. Just plug in. What is sales enablement? We have a definition. We can all move on, Brian.

Yeah. And that's the thing. That is the bits and bytes world that we're heading towards. Some point, we have to agree on things that really matter. So like the debate should be in the space of how do we drive more profitable relationships? That should be a debate. But should we really be debating what is sales enablement? Like that's where I think getting to the digital first world makes a lot more sense to me. It's more binary, so to speak.

Insert shameless plug here for digital now conference in Chicagoland in April, to land the plane, Brian in fact, one of the things that I've come this simple phrase, I like simple learned that from you and this other guy. But that I am a a I curious human enthusiast and what I mean by that is I'm fascinated by all this stuff and I see it as a huge opportunity for enablement for sales to shine. What if we can offload all of that administrivia to the robots to do those things succinctly, tightly give us a bunch of ideas, but then make it our own and add that human element. And I'm hearing that's a large part of what you're saying. And part of the reason I'm enjoying the series is I'm looking at it through that lens of how can I learn from Brian, what those things are that can, first of all, the mindset to help change the way we're doing business in a positive way and be part of that trend, but also to optimize my time. And not fear AI, but lean into how my humanness is exactly the differentiator and by the way, it's getting all the other crap out of my way if I can leverage it effectively.

That's right. Yeah, and if you think about it the there's two, two lenses of the future, I think on the human element, there's. Are you aware of the data that exists? That's the bare minimum and a lot of people aren't even aware of what exists for data. And then there's, are led and informed by data on the other end of that spectrum? So there's data aware to data led on one continuum. And then on the other continuum, there's the organizational view. And that's, how how are you leveraging data? So are you able, are you just understanding what's there or are you actually driving some level of mastery and changing the world around you because of it? And when you look at that, you need to be very data driven data led, but you also need to be able to wield it. And I think that's the biggest challenge I've had with enablement is we're aware that we have data laying around and we're aware that, people that data is important. Just like we're aware that we're in a digital economy and we're aware that, we all have iPhones. The challenge is, okay how do you wield that awareness? And I think you have to go on a journey of maturity. You have to mature your digital literacy. You have to become more of a digital master, not just digitally aware. And then your organization also has to view data and information as an asset, not as a waste by product. I think that's how most companies view it is the stuff we create along the way that we slough off as we're doing business. It's actually quite the opposite. That's where all of your value is and your competitive advantage. That maturity has to get there too. So there's a lot of room to be more data led and more of a data master, if you will, that, that really can differentiate you in the digital economy.

Brian awesome insights. As we wrap up and land this thing, what parting shot would you share with the audience? We love a call to action and something where folks can decide if they want to go from what to what and two things really. And you started to get into one of them. What is the opportunity? Or is there one if the listening audience really does want to elevate enablement and have an enablement future? What does that look like? And the subset is what is that one thing other than and follow Dr. Brian Lambert and read his articles. That is an actionable thing that enablement or anyone in the listening audience can really sink their teeth into to take advantage of this powerful new tool.

I think the parting thing I would give is. If in the world of from what to what, there's really two things. One is the idea of that you move from being data aware to being data led, and, probably five phases to that. So I think most people are data aware, they're aware of the data exists. But are you able to wield that data so that you have, I think that's one continuum and that's one from what to what. The other from what to what is thinking about your role and I would move from this org chart view and free your mind kind of thing and unplug from matrix and think about your role as. An analyst on one end where you analyze things to an orchestrator on the other. Orchestrator is not just a label. It's a new role in the digital economy that, it is the role of orchestrators is to create the organizational structures of tomorrow. When you remove silos, orchestrators are more valuable. Most people are analysts, they analyze things and then but orchestrators are, you're creating value through the interconnected networks and, getting, how you get things done is really manifest in the actions you take and the results you get. That's the other one is moved from being an analyzer to an orchestrator. And one way to look at that is, what are you using your chat GPT for? A lot of people that first got into it. I know I did was I was trying to get it to produce things for me. But a weekend I'm like, I'm not gonna, why would I outsource my creativity? Why would I outsource my outputs to this thing that I don't even know who owns this thing, this is early on. Why don't I turn it around and use. The AI as a way to give me inputs. So instead of generating outputs for me and copying, pasting them, let me use it as a way to get structured inputs to my thinking so I can synthesize. Being a synthesis is different than being in an analyst. So on the continuum of being an orchestrator, you have to be a synthesis first, you have to be a synthesizer of all this information and AI can help you, but if you cannot synthesize this stuff across marketing operations, training, sales, customers, let's not forget, then you're not going to be an orchestrator. So I think that's the, from what to what on that is your role. Moving from analysts to, maybe integrator event planner type person to synthesis of synthesizing across all these functions what needs to happen and then orchestrating that.

From analysiss as a individual to synthesis as a cross functional business a business.

Yeah. And then the final piece is how you're able to wield that as an orchestrator, right? Like orchestrator is the, it's the future to me when you remove silos that's what I've tried to, because then you, you end up orchestrating an ecosystem.

I'll let the mic drop on that one. Dr. Brian Lambert. Thank you for being here. Thanks for all that you continue to do. And again, folks like and follow and gain wisdom and put it into action. Go from what to what, don't just listen and sit on your butt.

Thanks so much. Thanks, everybody.

Thanks, Brian.