ISEs3 Ep12: Dr. Shawn Fowler – RevenueReady

Hello everyone, and welcome to Inside Sales Enablement, Season Three, Enablement History. And on today's episode, I am so excited to have Dr. Sean Fowler himself on the show. He is an Atlantan I met him through sales loft who was actually an incredible sponsor of the sales enablement society way before I was even a part of it and they're near and dear to my heart as a company and They, not only put on an amazing conference rainmaker back in my earlier days Where I learned so much from sean and his peers and the amazing people that they attracted but they also hosted our first executive board session when I became president of the sales enablement society. So Sean, you and sales loft are a part of my enablement history, and I thank you for that. And I'm so glad that you are in my present and hopefully future as well. So

That's awesome Erich. Thank you. I'm happy to be here today. Be here today.

Dr. Fowler was the worldwide director of enablement and learning for this little blue chip company called IBM back in the day. That technology mecca, which informed him, I'm sure, landing at Sales Loft and being the vice president of sales enablement. And now is a partner in revenue ready. Sean is one of the few folks that I've met that truly, embodies this idea of enablement orchestration. Seeing how he interacted with everyone in the company, he truly ran a cross functional enablement business within a business at sales loft, which is one of the three founding positions of the sales enablement society. And he had folks assigned doing different flavors of enablement within the company. And he's been a part of elevating the profession from his days back in IBM, whether or not enablement was a thing. Sean, I'm going to hand the mic over to you. Finally. Thanks for being patient and letting me wax poetic for a minute

Yeah, man. Thank you. I'm really excited to be talking to you today.. RevenueReady is it's been a long time in the making. I first had the idea for the company before I joined SalesLoft. Actually, if SalesLoft had not offered me a job, I think I probably would have started the company then. But I don't think I would have been As good at it. So remedy ready is basically a sales strategy and sales enablement consulting company. We work primarily with B to B sass organizations, typically series a to B and then on up. We've got some public companies who are customers as well. And we basically are trying to. Remove the risk of sales execution from your company strategy. There's a lot of reasons a company can fail. Sales execution should not be one of them. So that's what we focus on.

And what about revenue operations.

We do lightweight revenue operations. Like we've got some reasonable rev ops jobs. You have to be good at enablement. I think, you have to really understand the data, how to pull the data, which data is right for which situation, things like that. But when it gets beyond light revenue operations, we pull other people in. Typically we stay in our lane.

Makes a lot of sense. Question number one, Sean. What do the words sales enablement mean to you? And when did you first hear them?

Yeah, I answered the second part first. I started my entire career was an accident. That's the first thing to point out.

Sounds like my life. I love it.

I was a, I was at a company called silver pop. I was doing I was doing training. So I got hired to be a to train customers, to be on the customer training team, and I mostly got hired to do the technical parts of the training process because I have a programming background. So I was handling like the API training and stuff like that. Like the nerdier stuff. And I done that for a couple of years, went into sales engineering. Really enjoyed sales engineering. At some point they decided to hire their first services salesperson. So I became the first services salesperson. I had a quota that was just services I had to attach to, new logo deals. And really leveled up a lot as a salesperson during that brief period of time, because when you sell services, you are literally selling outcomes. That's it. That's all you can sell. So you have to really get deep on understanding what their desired goals are, why they can't reach those goals right now, and helping to paint the picture of what it's gonna look like once you help them become successful. We had a newer SVP of sales. And he announced in a meeting that he was hiring the head of sales enablement. I was actually coaching a friend to maybe apply for that role. And the hiring manager drew Pronte. One of the best managers I've ever had. He came to me and was like, Hey, the CEO said that you should probably be the guy. So are you interested? I applied. I didn't know what sales enablement was. I didn't know it was a thing I had to put together a presentation for like how I would handle the sales enablement role at the time I was getting my PhD in educational psychology. So I just took what I learned from working as a sales engineer and as a services salesperson and combined it with what I knew about how psychology of learning works. And put it together, got the job and then had to figure it all out as I went along at the time. That was 2013 probably is when I got started.

So that is pre sales enablement society post Forrester definition, starting to officially see it clearly as a position and a function or else it wouldn't have been posted for you.

Yeah. Shortly after I took the role of silver pop. It was pretty clear to me. I didn't know what I was doing it. I remember we had a contract with Serious Decisions, who is, I think they're owned by Forrester now. So at the time it was just Serious Decisions. They focused primarily on marketing. And we had a contract with them and I had the opportunity to go to a sales enablement event in Atlanta. There were other sales enablement practitioners there, and it was incredible because there were other people, some of them knew things I didn't. Most of us were all trying to figure out the same thing. Serious decisions, had some ideas around it. It was like super useful. And I remember leaving that event. And thinking I think we need to start something where we do that on a regular basis. This was easily the most valuable thing that I've done in the last six months, you know? But I was trying to get a PhD at the time. I had two small kids, had a full time job, like I had, a lot of stuff going on, but I was happy that they were just other people who were dealing with the same problems that I was, and they were trying to find a way forward. It was useful to meet other people who are doing the same things. Most of my mentors were actually people that I worked directly with though. I've been fortunate to have had some really good bosses at Silverpop. My boss, the head of rail ops and enablement was Drew Pronte. And he reported to our SVP of sales, Todd McCormick, both of those guys, I think had gone through both PGI and career builder, if I remember correctly. And so those were really good sales organizations. If you're in Atlanta, there was a period of time where most of the people that you knew were probably part of that diaspora, and so

That is a doctor word, diaspora. I'm going to have to look that one up afterwards. I love it.

Getting a seat at the table was probably the biggest factor in helping me be successful in sales enablement. I had bosses who gave me a seat at the table early on., Todd would pull us both in and be like, Hey, here's what I'm seeing with the team. What do you think's going on here? And we would look at the data and we would talk to the management and we would try to figure out what the solution was and we would try stuff. And I didn't understand how things operated at that strategic level. Until I got into that role and the fact that I got to sit there and at first I didn't provide much value candidly. I could give them context based on my experiences in the field, which I had a lot of, but I didn't understand the physics of sales, right? And I learned all those things from working with them. And then we were acquired by IBM and I had the opportunity to see what it looks like in a much bigger level. I was part of a business unit that it's IBM's basically a handful of multi billion dollar companies all put together. And I was part of one of those multi billion dollar companies inside of it. Our business unit was, and I got to see how these really big enterprise complex sales work, how you have to, Enable people across multiple different continents. By the time I left, I was responsible for both internal sales enablement and partner enablement as well. And the partner ecosystem is really important if you're at IBM. And so you have to really distill down what those value propositions are for the different products that you have, who the personas are from the buyer perspective, what the challenges are that they solve to make it clear to everyone. What they should be looking for and how to tell the most effective story.

Great backstory, what I just heard you say is you're actually the first person on the show that has said, I was doing partner enablement. We'll get to a minute, the shift from sales enablement to revenue enablement, but part of that is encompassing partners for sure, which I've always seen part of it and customer service, but you were doing it all the way back to IBM.

Yeah, even in the first role at silver pop, I had both new and existing sales under my purview, right? So I had the new sales team, like the AEs, the SDRs, the sales engineers, but I also had the account management team, the CS And I think it makes a lot of sense, honestly, when you are in that position where you've got both, you New sales and existing sales. You have the opportunity to identify and eliminate a lot of the organizational issues that negatively affects your customer and that negatively affect the team as well. So I like having that opportunity.

Agreed. And in the pre-show, we were talking a little bit about how important it is to have either A, failed yourself in approaches and or B, been the at a place or walked alongside others who have been through a failure convert it to wisdom, and that's where good enablement comes from. Through that lens. It sounds like almost natural presupposition to do those things that a room of 100 people were just starting to think about and I would argue still aren't being fully executed in enablement today. What led you there?

There's a few things that we could unpack there. I'll start with the, what led you there? Like most of everything that I've learned how to do, first off, when you talk to anybody who's been doing enablement for a while, almost everybody does the same thing. The reality is there's a handful of things that work, and we all make enough mistakes until we figure out those things that work. The problem is, I think there's not enough sharing of best practices, candidly. That's 1 thing because. When you figure out what works, you have other people who are just other companies, other CROs, other heads of enablement who are trying to figure out the same thing, solve the same problems. And most of them go through and make the same mistakes that other people have already made. So that's a pretty common issue. There's a second factor here, though, that I think is interesting. I think that the quality of sales enablement as a professional has gone down pretty dramatically in the last five years. In fact, I think the quality of sales enablement has gone down as it's become increasingly prominent because You There's a few reasons. Number one is I think a lot of heads of sales know they need sales enablement. They're hearing from their investors that they need sales enablement. But there was a period of time where I don't think a lot of them really knew what it meant. And over again, even now we'll talk to heads of sales who are looking to hire a head of sales enablement or their only sales enablement hire. And we're like, Hey, what do you want them focused on? And they really have one or two projects in mind. But then when you ask what you want them to do after that they're not sure they have immediate needs of things they want done, but in an ongoing basis, they're not quite sure what that should be right. If the CRO isn't clear about what they want the head of enablement to do, and the head of enablement's not going to be clear about it unless they've done it before and they know what they should be focused on and they can earn that credibility with the CRO and the rest of the leadership team. And that's a big, if that requires a lot of things that you have to have done in order to be in that position. The second thing is I think heads of sales aren't always great at hiring and enablement. Ahead of sales probably was an SDR, probably was an AE, probably was a manager, was a second line manager, right? They've done those jobs before and they've hired for those jobs, probably dozens of times, sometimes hundreds of times, they maybe hire two, three sales and people over the course of a lifetime, like that's so recognizing talent can be difficult as well. And then there's a final factor, which is I think there's a lot of fluff. Sales is never easy, but comparatively there was a period of time in the mid to late 2010s where there was a ton of venture capital at play. So lots of people were hiring, it was easier to get results. There was a good economy. There were a lot of frankly, SaaS companies who were just all buying stuff from each other. And so sales was a lot easier. And I think there's an entire generation of people who are in sales enablement, who didn't have to figure out how to build a better machine. They could get away with adding more people to the machine and adding revenue by doing that. And now venture capital has dried up a lot. People aren't hiring as much. There's a much bigger focus on productivity. Productivity per rep in particular, in order to achieve productivity per rep, you have to build a better machine. And I think that's the thing that everyone really needs to be focused on right now. It means you really need to understand the market that you're selling to. It means you really need to understand where the friction points are, both for your customers and for your internal teams. And you really need to figure out how you optimize every step in the process. And that takes a Domain expertise that takes background knowledge, and it also takes strong organizational and communication skills so that you can affect the change management that's required to get results.

That was phenomenal. So to read that back a little bit, there's not enough focus on strategically thinking about the cross functional revenue engine. That first position that they're a are different flavors of enablement and be that it to be effective. It needs to be run cross functionally, and they didn't use the word but and strategically. So there's kind of two sides of the coin. And neither side is in good repair. Meaning the folks who are hiring for enablement don't necessarily know what that role does strategically other than tactically coming in and doing a project or two that has a beginning, middle, end, and is fixing something. And number two, you don't have the talent pool that has that ability going back to chief productivity officer now that we need productivity per person. And it's not just. It's not just throwing additional heads at it. Ramping those heads up as quickly as possible, which is also an element of productivity, but it's a there's a lot more strategy in creating more from less than just bringing in more so that does that land about right?

Yeah.. And I I feel like I'm dogging on sales enablement practitioners. I'm not, I don't think people are bad necessarily. I just think that they didn't have to be good. So they didn't learn how to do some of the hard things that you have to do to really build a better machine. I think that two years from now, the people who are still in sales enablement will be pretty damn good at what they do because they will have had to have figured it out, right?

I'm with you. What I'm hearing is not negativity per se, it's opportunity.

Yes. That is a great phrasing.

Thank you. There is opportunity here. One question in your current business, how do you address the, we'll call it the buyer side of sales enablement, right? How do you help your current clients and maybe that will inform some folks out there listening who are CRO CMO, even chief strategy officer. We've got Tim Reister over at corporate visions is a CSO with enablement reporting to him, which is one of the interesting implementations I've seen of enablement. How do you get your clients up to speed to address that need and harvest that opportunity?

there's a couple of things. When it comes to like the customer journey and how customers buy and eliminating friction for them. One of our most common initial projects with customers is a customer journey workshop, because if you haven't really sat down with all of the major stakeholders involved internally, And intentionally designed to process, you probably have massive gaps in what we uncover over and over again is especially during the handoffs, Everybody thinks somebody else is doing something and nobody's doing it. Or they think somebody else should be doing something and there's not agreement on that. Or there's a whole bunch of data that's needed for one part of the process that's not created by the other part of the process. And so you have these moments where there's a lack of alignment or a lack of insight that occurs throughout the entire process that negatively affects the customer. And so you have these situations where let's say I go to a web form and I'm reading about these like value propositions essentially that can solve the problems that I have. I fill out the web form and then I get a response. And somebody calls me six times while I'm in meetings. And finally I pick up and I'm like, Oh, this is great. Yes, let's talk. I would like to solve this problem. And then I have a conversation and they're like, what's the problem that you have? Okay let me ask you some pretty demeaning questions about whether you're important enough to It sounds like somebody's saying are your mommy and daddy home? And then, they're like, okay, it sounds like we can definitely help you. Let me put you on the phone with somebody else who can help you. That sucks like now I, like I just filled out a form Oh, let's schedule something. Let's go. Like, why do I have to talk to? And then you hop on the call with the AE and let's say the AE does a fantastic job and they show you a great demo and they figure out what your projects problems are and they help you prioritize. All that stuff and the deal closes and then you get introduced to somebody else. And you have to have all the same damn conversations again, all the same As a buyer. This is what will really open your eyes. I spent years as a buyer. And I was like, this sucks. This sucks. This sucks. Like all the different things that I felt as a buyer made me a much better salesperson, but what it was like to go through those steps in the process. And so we really pay a lot of attention to what happens during the transitions. And a lot of what we focus on, we do these workshops, Is creating the disagreement that is required for actual agreement and creating a safe space where we can moderate those disagreements and come to a conclusion that I don't know if you're familiar with the Patrick Lencioni stuff, Disagree Commit. Like at some point, whoever's is making the call in the room has to make the call. There's going to be disagreement, but everybody understands why that decision was made and everybody's committed to walking out and executing. The steps necessary to bring this desired customer journey into reality. It's a workshop typically, right? Like a two day. Yeah.

A role play on steroids. It's a flavor of whenever someone comes to me with a problem, I'm like, great, bring it, but bring a solution or three, at least the beginnings of it, it sounds like that's the same kind of thing you do in that room is we're not going to get it perfect, but can everyone nod their head that this is the path forward. Back to this idea that there's opportunity for enablement, How do I? Sean get up to speed in a way that I can come in and pick up where you left off And be that strategic sales enablement revenue enablement partner in perpetuity. Is there, what does that look like other than failing a bunch learning and, actually trying to meet that bar of not just ramping up a whole bunch of people, but taking what I've got and bringing more productivity.

Yeah. So there's a couple of things we focus on. Number one, we document everything that we do and we do. We do like a playbook playbooks are great. I understand. I've written so many playbooks in my life. Almost somebody reads the playbook, but it's useful to have it because sometimes you do have to reference stuff in it. So the people can just take a quick look, like a cheat sheet. This is what I'm supposed to do at this stage in the process. This is the way it works. And if it changes, you have to update it. So we work on creating governance. For change, usually when we do these projects so that there's a process in place by which people can actually make changes. The second thing, and this is actually the most important thing is we build as much as possible, the best practices directly into the process. So that as you execute the process, you are actually improving the process as well. And it takes time to do that, but it's really important. The third thing is we involve the managers and the reps in the creation of the processes themselves. This is very often what happens is you have these top down approaches to a sales process or a top down approach to messaging or a top down approach to negotiation or skill development or whatever you want it to be, right? And it falls flat. It falls flat for a couple of reasons. Number one, When you do it top down, a lot of times you don't actually have the tactical information you need from the field to make good decisions, to design a good solution. In fact, a lot of times you haven't correctly framed the problem. And if you haven't correctly framed the problem, you're never going to find the right solution, right? So we make sure we involve managers and reps in the problem framing and in the solution process, because that's going to give us a much better picture of what's actually happening and what the real problems are. It's going to give us a much better solution. Plus. When it's time to roll that solution out, we've already had all the holes poked in it. We spent weeks having meetings where people were poking holes and we're iterating and we're iterating. So it's a really good product that those people are now going to champion. Those people help design it. If you get the right people in the room, you've got really powerful champions who can go out and get other people. To adopt it, the managers are already aware of what's going on because they help shape it. Plus we do extensive manager training before we ever roll anything else out. And then we do manager reinforcement training. So we create these methods, these avenues for reinforcement as part of the project. So that for the next month or quarter, there's going to be people who are actually working to drive adoption of those changes. And the reality is the project itself, the intervention itself is usually about one fifth of the amount of time it takes to get results. The other four fifths is all the stuff you do before the project and all the stuff you do after the projects to create alignment, to get buy in, to design a really effective intervention, and then to actually do the reinforcement that's required to drive real change.

We've got a listening audience here of enablement practitioners. Is it a, "and we recommend getting a sales enablement professional" at the end of that if they don't have someone on staff. Or is it a, pretty much we've given you the engine you need to maintain, just keep doing what you're doing.

A lot of our customers have existing sales enablement staff, right? It's just, two or three. And for this project, you need, three or four more for six months, like that's the reality is there's certain pieces of infrastructure that are really heavy to put in place. Or you need to move quickly to get these changes in place and your team doesn't have the bandwidth to do it. Like those are the most common situations we get involved in. If we are working with someone who doesn't have sales enablement at all, usually there's a chief of staff or a head of rev ops, or somebody who is a manager who we use as our primary point of contact, who's the change agent internally in those situations. But we pretty much always recommend that they hire someone to own an enablement over the long term, because if nobody owns it, it's not going to get done.

Outstanding. And therein lies, I think the answer to my question, which is. Hey everybody out there in enablement land if you feel woefully unequipped to do all of those things that dr Fowler is sharing bring on RevenueReady because you're going to be part Seriously, you're going to be part of that team that the best way to get trained is to walk alongside He and his advisors at revenue ready and learn alongside them. And then you do that in perpetuity, right? That would be the answer. There's not a secret place to go off and study or at least currently a place to go and interact and get those best practices.

I think you should design our sales pitch, Erich! Yeah. This is actually an important thing to talk about though, because I've been in this situation before as a head of enablement. It's hard to get headcount. It is very hard to get headcount, but the reality is your boss wants results. Like the company needs results. And one of the things that I think a lot of companies are realizing right now is because things are, I've gotten harder to sell. Your ability to thrive as a company depends directly on your ability to change. To effectively manage change. The companies that make it are the ones who can accommodate the changes as they evolve in the market, they have change management functions built in to their strategy and that's what sales enablement really is. Sales enablement is the change management arm of revenue." That's what it is. And if you don't realize that you're never going to hire the right people. You're never going to give them the seat at the table they need. But if you do realize that, then whenever you have to change pricing or your competition got better or whatever it is you have to accommodate, you've got this ability to evolve quickly and rapidly and roll with the punches.

Sean, you just took the words right out of my mouth. Sales enablement, revenue enablement is the change management of the revenue engine. What you and your team come in and do, what a good solid RevOps team does from the ground up, but Hillary Headlee over at Insight Partners, and informed by her having run, at zoom, both rev ops and sales enablement, right? And now she's doing it for five, 700 companies. That's what good looks like. It's that incubated in a well thought out strategic cross functional engine where all the seats of the table are represented. And then having an enablement professional who can take that. Be a change manager and be the bidirectional voice of that entire engine out to sales out to now partners and to customer service and back in. And that's the important part. And a lot of times that back end part's not happening. And another opportunity I see, and I'd love to hear your thoughts for Sales or revenue enablement is getting in the trenches, right? So you can be the voice of sales and the customer and bring that back in and now you're really cooking, right?

It's nice to be in the industry for a while because you meet a lot of people and I end up talking to a lot of like people who are newer in their careers or like mid career. Who are getting their first kind of, I'm the only enablement person opportunity is where I'm the first head of enablement opportunities. And something they ask a lot is what should I have this interview with the CRO, it's my last interview tomorrow what do you think I should focus on? And the thing I always say is the first 90 days, like really, you really need to think through what you're going to do in your first 90 days. How are you going to structure your first 90 days? And one of the things that I've always focused on whenever I've joined a company is I need to being in the top 10 sales reps, I need to learn enough that if I need to go sell this, I can go sell it. I understand the market. I understand the product. I understand the problems solve. I the competition does. Cause if you can't do that, why should anybody listen to what you have to say? That's just the reality. Like you need to be able to go have the, you don't have to be the best, right? But you should probably be in the top 10 to 15 percent if you had to be.

And back to role play man If you can legit spar with the top 10 of the company You're going to provide such an amazing service, it's getting out on the court with those better than you, making you better and you making them better.

And if they have a Gong or a SalesLoft or a Clari I guess Chorus Clari, whatever, if they have that you have no excuse not to be able to do that. That's straight up. Like you can sit there and listen to the calls that the best sales reps made. You can listen to the calls that people wash. You can listen to the calls where you got the, you can listen to all that. And if you do two a day for a month, you can go a long way towards really understanding what works and what doesn't.

Awesome sean. Let's shift to the move from sales enablement to revenue enablement You I'm curious what that means to you.

First thing is I don't know how much I care about the name change because I think sometimes people just use different words to sound different. I do like the idea of sales enablement truly being a revenue enablement. But there's a good way and a bad way for that to work out. The good way is that they actually have a seat at the table. They're involved in the diagnosis of the problems and coming up with a strategy and frankly, prioritization. Prioritization is really one of the keys to success in enablement in that they can actually help solve straight up revenue problems, not just sales problems, but it means that you need to be resourced so that you have people aligned to both of those leaders. If there are separate leaders, that's super important to me. The bad way is it just slowly evolves into L and D I don't have anything against L and D. I started my career in L and D. But that's not what sales enablement is. That's not what revenue enablement should be. And I see a lot of companies where it's revenue enablement in name, but it's glorified L and D and I don't think that's the best use of enablement.

and back to those founding flavors, they're stuck in talent development only and not thinking strategically?

A lot of times they don't have the domain expertise to help shape the conversation either in that situation. You're just creating a bunch of trainings that nobody ever takes or they take it while they do their expenses, like that's not going to move the needle. Cool.

Wrapping up here. I would love to hear Dr. Sean Fowler the future. Give us, we'll give you the final word. Where are we headed? You mentioned earlier that you can see over the next couple years, those who are really embodying this spirit of a cross functional sales or revenue enablement role. What do you see about the future? What are those opportunities for our listening audience?

I would hesitate to forecast any farther than three or four years out, honestly, but I think there's increasing recognition of the role of enablement in change management and increasing recognition of the need for an explicit change managing function in organizations. So I think at least in more successful companies, that's what what enablements going to be seen as right? I think one of the things that's going to incorporate is increased focus on frontline managers on both the new and existing sales side of the house, because the reality is everything lives or dies for the frontline manager. If the frontline manager cannot effectively execute the change, or if they're not bought in, or if they don't understand clearly why they're doing what they're doing and how it aligns with the company's strategy, it's not going to work and you're literally wasting your time. You're wasting everyone's time to try to do anything unless they're bought in and equipped to be successful. I think people are beginning to see that and I think there's going to be a shift, frankly, from the field to frontline managers in terms of resources. Those are the two biggest things I think are going to happen.

I think AI is going to evolve and facilitate some things. I know there's a lot of AI coaching and stuff like that. I don't love it. Candidly, but I think the power of artificial intelligence to comb through, for instance, the thousands of minutes that are produced on a weekly basis in gong or sales loft or whatever, and distill that down into insights or into moments that everyone should take notice of can be really powerful when it comes to training, coaching, and identifying what works great place to land, Sean. Thanks for all that you've done for the profession, for Atlanta for that matter specifically. Maybe we can even get you out to a Revenue Enablement Society meeting here and have you wax poetic on some of these things and help people better understand the opportunity.

Only if there's beer afterward.

Yeah, absolutely. For sure. That wouldn't be face to face without a beer at the bar. Any final words you'd like to share, Sean, on your way out the door here in the orchestrate section?

This was just wonderful. It was a fantastic opportunity to talk to you, Eric. I really enjoyed it.

you too, man. Great to see your face. And I'm so excited for our listening audience to benefit from this. Appreciate your time and we'll see you soon

Thanks a lot, man. Take care.