ISEs3 Ep13: Meganne Brezina CCMP™ – Seismic

Hello everyone and welcome to Inside Sales Enablement Season three Enablement History we have in the studios today. A person that started out selling tractors in my neck of the woods, Salina, Kansas, even knew the place. John Deere tractors to be exact, which is cool in and of itself. You still have any of those hats laying around? I'd love one. I'm just, maybe you could have a giveaway for our audience, such a hip brand for might be the only cool thing about my childhood was being associated with John Deere, but she's been a lot of places since then. She actually was on the customer advisory board for Lessonly before that Salesforce. And then Lessonly, as I'm sure everyone in the listening audience knows, was acquired by Seismic. And so she's gone on a journey from salesperson to being salesperson. As senior director of enablement at one of the enablement platforms. So with that, Meganne, I'd love to hand it over to you to fill in any gaps and just say hello to the crew

Thanks, Erich. And I appreciate the opportunity to be here and have a conversation with you today. The enablement community is such a special place and I'm so proud to be a part of it and to share a little bit of my story today. It's a very unlikely story. I had completed a postgraduate certificate at the university of Louisville in equine business. And through those networking opportunities found my way to the national thoroughbred Racing Association who has a very deep partnership with John Deere. And so as a seller for the NTRA, I had my territories across the United States and Canada. In fact, lived in three different cities as I moved with them as my territory changed. And it was my responsibility to promote this program and sell the equipment to racetracks and horse farms. What I learned very quickly in that time when I was traveling to these places was I hit my quota a lot faster when instead of going to 50 farms over a two day period, I would hit four or five dealerships and educate those salespeople in those dealerships how to sell to horse people. I've been riding horses since I was six years old and I have a very deep affinity for the industry, the community, I know these people very well. I know what use cases they have and how the John Deere equipment could help solve those problems for them. So it's very much a solution sale approach, which has really served me well in my capacity here at Seismic. I frankly got tired of traveling my last trip. I took with them I was on the road for three weeks Living out of a suitcase and it was a lot and I was at a time in my life where I needed And wanted to be home. I was newly married wanting to start a family And so I came back to indianapolis, which is my hometown And there was a little digital marketing company. You may have heard of called Exact Target. And they were in the throes of the acquisition process with Salesforce already. I jumped on board in an account support role, which was great. I was customer facing. I really got into the, or dip my toe rather into what the software industry was, because coming from a sale, which was a tangible, hard product, making that transition to a cloud software company was an adjustment. And so this role really enabled me to learn the intricacies of what that buying process and what the customer life cycle looked like. So I rode the wave with Salesforce for a while did an operations role for them for a little bit and eventually found my way to the enablement space.

So when did you first hear sales enablement? What do those words mean to you? And was it when you were out educating folks about the finer equestrian arts or when along the journey?

I think at that time, Erich, I didn't know what enablement was. I was doing enablement things when you think about educating on personas, educating on that solution sale, but I didn't know what that was. When I was at Salesforce in an operations role, they had rolled out something called a customer data warehouse, which was great, super helpful. I was interested in how all of the tools work together in the data, but my first thought was, we have to teach people how to use this. And so I brought that idea to my manager at the time and she got me a spot on the sales kickoff agenda. And so I got up in front of 300 or 400 people and talked about how they could use this CDW for their uses as their, researching account planning, whatever. Went great. I had a good time. I came off of the stage and Meganne Gendelman, she might not even remember this. She's now a marketing leader at Salesforce, but she came up to me and she said, what are you doing in operations? You need to be in enablement. And I'm thinking, what the heck is enablement? I don't even know what this is. And I came back to the office the following week and I typed in enablement into our company directory and up popped Brian Noss and Nina LaRouche, who I am both in very close contact with to this day, Brian and I meet for coffee every month and Nina and I Co lead the wise chapter here in Indianapolis. But I went to go to them and I said, what is this enablement thing? And so they really educated me on what it was about the purpose of it. And I remember talking to Brian's, especially. Him talking was like that is my jam. That is where I need to be. That is my world. And so my career then progressed from there. And that's really where I have found my calling and where my skillset has really thrived.

What a great story. So you learned about sales enablement and what I would argue is the piece of software or not software it's in the cloud. I remember when that was a big deal and Salesforce changed everything. You learned about it in the mothership.

I suppose I did. Yes.

That's awesome. Love that history. So what about the society itself? I know WiSE, which is awesome. And thank you for your service in Women in Sales Enablement. What about the sales enablement society? When did you first hear of the Sales Enablement Society or did you?

I did. In fact, I did. In fact, I just looked this week preparing for this conversation. I joined the sales enablement society in April of 2018. So it's just about six years. And I was a very frequent, shall I call it a lurker? I read everything I could get my hands on in those community boards and I would post occasionally. But what I found really interesting in that experience, Erich, and this will come back later in the conversation that I would post. But the first people that would respond to it would be people who are trying to sell me something and that was, that has changed that has evolved.

Interesting. That's important.

it is important because I remember what those emotions and what those feelings looked like. And I'm very intentional about how I engage with other people. Practitioners in my current role because I remember what that was like when you're really just trying to get to the heart of I have a problem to solve. How do I put together a mutual action plan template? For example, how do I figure out the negotiation levers I need to educate my teammates on? All of those things, and it was not the response that I was looking to get originally. However, the community has evolved so much. I attended where I met you last fall, the conference in San Diego, and it's just, it's such an incredible community. And we've been so fortunate to see the enablement community blossom and grow in these past. To call it 6, 10, 12 years with the advent of groups like Women in Sales Enablement, which I'm heavily involved in Sales Enablement Collective, the Enablement Squad, you name it, it's a wonderful community where people can really find their find their community.

I think you were even doing something a little bit with Sales Assembly as well, right?

I am. Yes. They reached out so I can connect with practitioners who are very much in their early stages and to help them scale and grow their practice and paint the picture of what that transformational practice can look like.

That's awesome. You're serving on all fronts. So you missed the early days of the Sales Enablement Society when they founded in 2016, but you were there pretty close to the beginning. It's interesting, the original founding positions of the Sales and Enablement Society, aren't even listed on the Revenue Enablement Society site at this point. So I'm curious, I know you had a little bit of a time to look at those three, do any of those resonate with you still today?

Absolutely. Number two. two was really what attracts me to the enablement space. And there are three things in that statement, Erich, that really get me. Number one is this idea of the needs to be chartered. And I think about that charter as the mission statement, as the grounding for any enablement practice. I'm consistently amazed at the number of people that I speak to that don't have a charter, or they say, Oh, I'm just too busy. I can't get to it. And 9 times out of 10, dare I say 10 times out of 10, these are often the practices that are in the business of having to put the fires out, as opposed to proactively preventing the fire from starting in the first place. The second piece of this is all around the cross functional business aspect. Enablement is a team sport. Enablement takes a village. Any enabler who's going to go off the reservation and do their own thing will not be successful because it requires the orchestration of so many pieces within an organization to bring it to life. The third piece that's really compelling here is this idea of a business within a business. So just as you said about the charter being that North Star or that piece, it's really driving the practice forward. I have to control what I can control within my business. And if I am doing a good job of that, we should be seeing the business outcomes on the other side in the larger context of that organization. So this second position is something that intrigued me to even enter into the enablement society or the enablement community. And it's something that continues to motivate me even today after now, I've been in the space now for over 10 years. So it's something that's really critical and really important.

And if I may, if anyone has proven their passion for the space, it's someone who has actually written a book about it, right? And so you are officially a part of enablement history. It's on the library shelf. So really exciting. That's only in the last really, what, three months.

It is. And in fact, I just got my paperback copy in the mail for final review. So we'll be publishing the physical book here in the next couple of weeks. But I appreciate you saying that. I think when Irina and I sat down to write this book, there were only, dare I say, 10 or 11 books on the market that had the word enablement in the title. So we're very happy to contribute and add to that lineage.

That's awesome. That concept, the enablement value chain diagram that you have I'm excited to explore that further, because I think in that lies a lot of the DNA of exactly what we're talking about in position two. Can you unpack maybe just that a little bit further?

Absolutely. So Irina and I sat down. This was about, gosh, this has to have been almost three years ago. We sat down and we were about to go in front of our executives to give a quarterly or semi annual report. And we were looking at it and said, man, we have done so much great work. But we were really struggling to connect the dot with here was the business outcome that we drove. We had documentation of the metrics that had improved, but it was really hard for us to hang our hat on and say, we were the ones that did this. And I think many practitioners struggle with us. And it was through that experience that the EVC was born. So essentially what we were able to do over the past three years was take that experience, build out a robust analytics program that we now use to drive all of our decisions. We also use it to drive a lot of our cross functional partnerships because the data is something that everybody in the business can align behind. It doesn't matter if we're talking to field leaders, if we're talking to operations, teammates, product marketing, it doesn't matter. That data is truly that central force that all of us can align to and unpack what the gaps are and align action items behind it. The next step is being able to secure executive buy in. Using this data and analytics report to help us secure the necessary resourcing that we need in the organization.

If I'm hearing you correctly, all of the verbiage you're using is, this is what we built to do what we do. This is our Seismic champagne on how Seismic does Seismic on Seismic.

Yep. That's exactly right.

There seems to be such a great opportunity for you to tell that story clearly in the book, but there's a difference between that and actually getting out and walking alongside some of these practitioners. How are you bringing that book to life in the community? And how might folks be able to engage you in that aspect?

Sure. Absolutely. So this book is really about enablement strategy. We are extremely fortunate to have the Seismic enablement cloud backing us in our enablement practice. And so we are able to do everything that we need to do. I can look at how the initial enablement engagement translates to behavior change that then translates to business outcomes fluidly. Very easy for us to get there. So this book is really about the enablement strategy piece. Does it come to life with Seismic? 100 percent. Is our door always open to talk to other practitioners about how they too can bring this reality to life, no matter what they have in their tech stack. Absolutely. This book is really also about giving back to the community, Erich as well.

I love that. So back to being informed by your first experience at the sales enablement society, as you shared was a full on vendor assault, right?

That's exactly right!

You're like, I'm making the world better. If there's a vendor in the space Seismic among the top of them, but I'm not coming at you with my logo on my chest. Yeah, it's there. But what we're here to talk about is elevating the profession. I love that approach and I applaud it wholeheartedly. So is that also then, is part of your model, some of the approach to training as well, or is it more about that core blueprint?

This is really about the strategy. We do get into the tactics in terms of the how there is plenty of content available out there on how to facilitate best virtually or how to create a content governance process or whatever. So we don't really go there. In fact, In this book, we talk about that there is a bit of pre work that needs to happen before you crack open this cover. We assume that you have the necessary business acumen to have conversations at the executive level. We are assuming that you have been in the enablement space for a while and you understand the importance of things like a customer life cycle. For example, so it is very, it's much more of a strategic focus, but we do get into the tactics. In fact, we have 26 downloadable templates and pamphlets and outlines and everything to literally take this EVC and implement it. If a reader goes through this chapter by chapter, there should be no excuses for not implementing the EVC in the book because we even provide things like a gap analysis to give you the roadmap of where you need to begin this journey.

Outstanding. What a great service. I'm looking forward to digging into it more deeply. I believe that folks can go to the Seismic site or even from your linkedin profile, download the ebook. Can you tell us a little bit about that? And also when can people get their hands on a hard copy?

I'm so glad you're asking. So in order to get the current book, it is available digitally. You can go to Seismic. com and download it for free. Or if you prefer to have it on your Kindle, you can also go to Amazon and purchase it there for the ebook, the digital version. If you are old fashioned like me, and you like to have paperback books that you can highlight and, fold, dog ear the corners, that is going to be coming out. I believe in the month of May. I'm sure that Irina and I will be blowing up LinkedIn when it does come out because we are so excited and so proud to share this story with the enablement community.

Outstanding. We'll be shouting from the rooftops here on the podcast as well. So keep us in the loop. If you would. Recently, and we touched on this a little bit earlier, but it was a pretty big deal. And last October, I believe we were darkening the same hallways, brightening the same hallways. I've never liked that phrase. I'm like, what about brightening? When the announcement came out that we as a society, sales enablement society, we're moving to revenue enablement. Again, notice that you have just enablement on your profile. What are your thoughts and maybe even some experiences around your clients and some of the folks that you're consulting agnostically outside of the platform and what you're seeing in sales enablement versus revenue enablement.

Erich, last October on the last day of the conference, I was sitting on the second row in the front, second seat in. And when Paul announced that they were changing from sales enablement into revenue enablement, I literally jumped out of my seat and threw my hands in the air because it was so validating. There, yes, there have been a lot of us in this space that have been servicing the full go to market team for years. And it always felt alienating for it to be sales enablement because there's so much more to do in the enablement space than simply focus on our teams who are in the buying journey. So I was thrilled to see that evolution. Absolutely thrilled.

And so by the way, I was right behind you. You're the lady that was jumping up in front of me. I was

That was me.

It's awesome. Now we've connected the dots officially, but along those same lines, what I heard was, Hey, Erich, I jumped for joy because it's not just a sales focus. Now we can encompass these other areas of the business. What are those other areas of the business that you've been thinking about for a long time hey, y'all, when we say revenue enablement, we're also talking about groups, A, B, C, D, E what, who are those groups in your mind? Maybe some of the folks in sales enablement are still missing them.

So I view the idea of enablement as anybody who is customer facing, anybody who is customer facing deserves to be included in an enablement strategy because we are here to service the events that are happening along the customer lifecycle. Customer lifecycle does not start and end with the buying journey. It doesn't stop at the first signature. In fact, that's the first of many milestones that you should be expecting from your customers. And so the validation of moving from sales enablement society to revenue enablement society is what I hope will be a good nudge for folks who might be still practicing buying journey only to be expanding their horizons, to looking at the value journey. I think it was Gartner that talked about how teams who have enablement support on the value journey are something like 70 or 80 percent more likely to hit their cross sell targets. And in a world where it's, we all know that it's more beneficial from an economics perspective to retain the customers you have, as opposed to acquiring a new company or a new customer. So why aren't we enabling those teams who are servicing customers? Like it doesn't make any economic sense either. So the evolution of the space, and I've seen this in my time too, I started with SDR enablement. That was my little narrow remit. And now here we are, my team is servicing everybody who's customer facing. So there, there certainly is an evolution. There certainly is a reason behind it. And it does drive business outcomes.

Great take. So this is where we generally shift into the present, which were already there, right? You're talking a lot. And in fact, a little bit about the future when the hard copy comes out. Anything else in this moment in time where we have this revenue enablement move, what are the, maybe top couple of things that you think Enablement folks listening to the podcast should really be taking advantage of and leaning into in the present.

Great question. So there are a few things that I think people need to be leaning into. Number one is this idea of strategy. I talked to my team a lot about the difference between being tactical and being strategic. Both have a purpose in an enablement practice, and you can't have all strategy people or all tactical people. You've got to have a good mix. But I think this idea of truly putting forth a proper enablement strategy. We are way past random acts of sales enablement. A lot of people are living that reality, but in order for this industry to really thrive, more and more practitioners have to step behind this role of building out a proper enablement strategy, getting the executive buy in for it, doing their socialization across the business, and then start to execute on it. That is the only way we're going to get out of the fire department world and into the fire prevention world. That's what it means.

Going from in case of emergency break the enablement glass to bring enablement in early and often, So there isn't an emergency.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And give us the autonomy to say no or to say yes, but you need to wait six months for these reasons, right? The other thing I think people really need to start focusing on is this idea of change management. I am very interested in this field. I earned my CCMP last year, so I'm a certified change management professional now. I was so curious about this space, I wanted to learn more. This is something that is becoming more and more of a conversation piece. Del Nakai and I talk about this on a regular basis. Hi Del. Where we, it's really important that The enablement team are the ones driving transformation in the organization. And whether that's something tactical, like a new field in Salesforce, or that's something more robust, like a product launch, if a practice does not have a dedicated approach to the way that they manage change, It's going to fail or it's not going to be as good as it could be. And so I think this idea of focusing on a change management strategy, which frankly is probably going to look a little bit different at every organization, depending on your players, the size, the maturity, there are a lot of factors that go into that. But I think focusing there in concert with your enablement strategy will pay dividends if it's done correctly.

great. And all founded in having that baseline blueprint and charter, right?

That's correct.

One of the things that's come up a good bit of late is in fact, coming out of, I was a digital now last week in Chicago land this whole idea that we need to elevate the value conversation. And one of my big a-ha's is if you, as an enablement practitioner, don't have a seat at the executive table, which I think you and I would agree that a big conduit that is building and getting that executive sponsor, the business, but what your experience. What's the percentage of enablement folks that you feel like really have the gravitas borrowing from Sheevaun of a seat at the executive table and maybe in general as well, the opportunity for sales to address. That same issue and how they're approaching the C suite out in the real world, because a lot of those same Forrester, Gartner, you name it reports are coming back and saying the executives don't feel like the folks that are showing up are speaking their language.

Let's unpack that one a little bit, Erich. I think from an enablement perspective, the number of practitioners who have the gravitas or have the credibility to really have that seat at the table, it has grown in recent years. I'm really happy to say that. However, I do think that there is A large opportunity to bring up the rest of the 80, 90 percent of the community to be able to activate in that way. Sadly, when you look around with the way the market conditions have been, many people have been affected by layoffs and that kind of thing in recent months. And that is that's hard. That's really hard for all of us to see, but I do think that there are more resources available to help people lift their enablement practice up, but it's not just on the shoulders of the enablement practitioner. It's also a responsibility of the CRO. The CEO to understand truly what a functional enablement practice can look like and to know the value it can drive. I think there's still some education that needs to happen there. And the second part of your question was around how we can level up our field teammates to speak that executive language. And I think Sheevaun has actually done some work on this as well with Dr. Steven Timmy. Around financial acumen and educating sellers on how they can take advantage of the available resources that they have to develop a point of view to bring insight to that executive level conversation. No executive will show up and have a conversation about a feature dump or, Hey, Mr. Erich CEO, tell me what your top priority is this year. They're not going to sit around for those conversations, but they will stick around for those conversations when a seller can come to them and say, here is my observation. Here is my hypothesis. Can you gut check me on that? Can you correct me on that? What is your perspective? They're much more likely to engage in that way. And I do think that there is a big opportunity for our selling teammates, anybody who is customer facing to have that ability to have those conversations.

Couldn't agree more. So we've covered the past, we've spent some good time in the present, and we've peeked into the future. But let's maybe open it up to land on, what do you see the biggest opportunity going forward? And if it doesn't involve AI in some way, shape, or form, I think the listening audience might be disappointed.

That's a subtle hint to talk about AI.

It's just, it's funny, the future, and it's that's actually the present, right?

Yes it is. Isn't it amazing? The productivity gains are just it's just phenomenal. I was actually listening to a call with our VP product. One of our product VPs here at Seismic, who's focused on the development of AI and he made the most interesting comment where he said. I don't even go to Google. I never go to Google anymore. Everything I do is in an AI tool because where I used to go to Google to get code and I, I'd put it in and I'd have to sift through content. Now I ask, name your AI tool. Now I ask AI the code and I have it right away without all of that sifting. And just organically in that one single example, the productivity gains that just, Go through the roof on that. I think we're in a moment now where we're trying to figure out how to harness those productivity gains. We're still in education mode, no doubt about it. I think about my sellers and the simple prompts of what you can use when you're just preparing for your initial call with a prospect, for example, like harnessing what that needs to look like. But then also teaching people what is the best use of your time. After you have gained that time back, what are those other revenue generating activities that you should be leaning into? I think it's that moment of education that we're in now. But when I think about enablement, enablers and the leaders in the space, AI will, it'll fundamentally change everything that we do. But. I think some of the things that we already have in place, like this idea of an enablement value chain, only get enhanced and further evolved with the use of AI. So I think there are already some things in place that are scalable, that are standard, that can adapt and evolve with the expectations that are in the space now. It'll just further be enhanced by AI.

10 years from now, what are your thoughts on the enablement profession? And what will it take us as a community to get there? And maybe we can land on that.

10 years. Boy, you're really asking me to get the crystal ball out here.

You know what? The pace we're going two and a half,

Thank you. Yep. I was just going to say that, 10 years ago, I don't even know that you and I would have been having this conversation, right? So who knows what will happen in 2034? But I think in the next couple of years, I think we will start to see practices really leaning into data and analytics much more than they have in the past to drive their decision making processes. Layered with that, this idea of AI to make those data driven decisions, A, much faster than they have been before, but B, also having the ability to make decisions in real time. This idea of launching a campaign, launching a program, and then waiting six months to see if anything's happened with it? Done and gone and dusted. As we think about the future of a I practitioners are going to have the ability and frankly, they already do today to make these decisions in real time so that they can course correct in real time and make those adjustments to gain more progress against the goals that they have.

And your book all the stuff you're giving back to the community. I like our chances in two and a half to 10 years on out there, Meganne, for sure.

I'd say say so!

To everyone in the audience, make sure you like and follow and get the book. Whether your penchant be PDF or Kindle or Dead Tree coming soon to a distributor near you, right? Final word, Meganne, it's yours.

Oh, Erich. Thank you for the opportunity to be here to all of my fellow enablement practitioners. One of my favorite things to do in life is to brainstorm challenges and figure out solutions to those challenges. So please reach out. You can always find me on LinkedIn and I hope to see everybody at the RES conference in Chicagoland this October.

Great way to land the plane. That's awesome. Thanks so much for your time, Meganne, for your service in the RES, and in WISE, and for the book. And for giving back to the community in all of those ways. So great to have you on the show. Hope to see you again soon in Chicago. If not before

Thanks, Erich. That was fun!