ISEs3 Ep15: Danny Wasserman – Gong! Tableau and Databricks

Hello everyone. And welcome to inside sales enablement, season three enablement history. And in our studios today, I think might be one of the few human beings I've met on planet earth that can out caffeinate me I just had a chance to see Danny Wasserman live and in person at digital now in Chicagoland. And he put on a show that was a sight to see. Such an amazing career that he's had in and around enablement. So many hooks into the things that. I believe in and know that enablement can be, he epitomizes and shared a lot of the peak behind the scenes. He and Nate Vogel have been following each other around for a minute. That goes back to Tableau where he did everything from sales readiness, To being the global sales methodology, lead strategist, and then headed over to Gong where he was ultimately the director of go to market enablement. So he's, he's got some killer street cred and now he's taken on a new adventure at Databricks, which you might've heard of, they're doing quite well now with Danny on board. About four months under his belt.

Yeah, the only thing that I need to, for the record, correct is, you know, following Nate Vogel is an accurate statement. Nate Vogel following me would be an inaccurate statement. That guy leads from the front. There's nothing about either my style or my demeanor that would inspire someone like Nate to want to follow me, but I could very much vouch for the fact that I stand on the shoulders of giants, both on Nate's shoulders, but then all the logos. You just mentioned and for the momentum and the buzz and the hype and cache around Databricks right now, I can claim absolutely zero credit for. So just lucky, lucky to be a part of that.

So Danny, we've got you here in the studio. I'm curious with someone with that kind of a history with those kinds of logos sales enablement, when did you first hear those two words? What do they mean to you?

Yeah, so I had always worked in startups early stage. I've been a small company guy through and through, and I was a co founder of one. I had tried my luck at a few others, and my first taste of what at the time felt humongous was Tableau, when I joined back in 2015 or 2016 at about employee 2000. The IPO had just recently happened, and that was my taste of enablement was going through a onboarding program that was spearheaded by the truly incomparable Sarah Bedwell. Another person who deserves to be enshrined in the great halls of enablement professionals. I think Sarah stood head and shoulders above anyone else that I had experienced in a sales training capacity. And I think for the next two years, I'll be honest, I really thumbed my nose at the profession. I think that I put my head down as a seller. I was on a warpath as a gunner, as an alpha, as an utterly neurotic control freak. Formulaically, sales was a perfect place for me because there was no voice telling me to stop working. And I was positively reinforced from being that tenacious in what I achieved and what I made. And along the way, I kept feeling like, God, I think I have a better hold and handle on how to be successful in this profession than the counsel and the advice I'm getting in the beginning of my sales career. It's hard because you want to take in all these opinions and some of those can be competing. Some of those can be contradictory. There can be conflict in what you're being told to do. And you want to pay respect and homage to supposedly the authorities on what you should be doing. And I just found while Sarah being the exception, most enablement I was getting felt pretty fluffy or self evident. And I think as such, enablement amongst some of us in sales was pretty poor. And stigma stigmas follow people. And I think the adage, right, those who can't do, those who can't teach. And I say that somewhat tongue in cheek because that haunted me as I continue to find success in sales and was being asked to moonlight as a facilitator for one course in our onboarding for new hires. And I loved it. I loved it so much. I've always wanted to be a teacher, but I knew a teacher's salary Was never going to foot the bill for my lifestyle or some obligations. I felt compelled to meet namely Sending kids to college debt free. So for years, I was so reluctant to even entertain a call from nate But as time went on I realized wow, okay. Here's this guy. I think he's a little You know different in his approach to how he does this. He's so savvy with people And this was sort of a long You Drawn out courtship between him and I so much so that the tipping point truly the reckoning Was at month end I was in a knockdown drag out fight with my best friend on the sales team over a thousand dollar spiff and I was Slandering his name cursing everything about him because he beat me in the 11th hour. He's still a sheisty mother But no i'm just kidding. I remember driving home and I remember thinking this isn't who I want to be A thousand dollars should not get in the way of any relationship, let alone mutate me into this person I don't want to be. And that's really when I think the tables turned and the scales flipped. And I started seriously entertaining this with Nate and that was what eight, 10 years ago, three companies ago.

I do enablement, right? that's such a great story. And look, look where and, and how visible you are today. And so speaking of enablement becoming more visible and I'll say getting our act together, the Sales Enablement Society, now Revenue Enablement Society, when or did the Sales Enablement Society come into play for you?

I think it's funny that you talk about, Oh my God, my dirty little secret is that I'm an enablement. Dude. You couldn't have captured the essence of how I felt about being a former seller who had sort of taken a bite of the forbidden fruit. And people actually cautioned me before I left like, dude, no one's gonna take you seriously anymore. You're out of the clubhouse. You're out of the locker room, right? You're just a consultant now. And there were definitely times I felt that, but I think it was because of my experience as a former seller. It was whether it was the haunting fear of being pegged that way was either both motivating or terrifying that I never want to get anywhere close to being pegged that way. So I came out swinging. I came out with spice. I came out with, I think pretty, I'll use the word again, tenacious approach to do enablement as if I was still a seller, what would captivate me? And think having a pretty ruthless bar for any content that was associated with my name had to be ruthless I mean not just riveting but you wanted to be dripping on every last word and it was backed by citations and science and numbers. And to your point now we're having our time in the sun Because of some of the tech that's come out in the last few years that gives us a leg to stand on So it wasn't always so hunky dory. I mean there was some doom and gloom and enablement and if you didn't have a leader like nate who had the ear Of the king, whether it was the CRO of leadership, it was a dogfight, an uphill battle to garner a shred of mind share legitimacy. So again, when I say I stand on the shoulders of giants, I was fortunate enough to be within the cocoon of Mother Goose Vogel. And I think now the playing field has been leveled thanks to tools like gong. Or again, I don't want to be like the gong fanboy. Gong is one of many solutions that give enablement a much more scientific backdrop to fall back on the recommendations they're providing. But yeah, man, like only until probably the last 24 months have I sort of proudly stood up and banged my chest and said, yeah, I'm Enablement and this is freaking cool.

It's like, it's a biblical thing, but there's this whole conversion of Saul to Paul. I love how you went from sales enablement sucks to I'm the king of the sales enablement world! And in fact, I loved your presentation, fighting for your cabinet seat, everything you just said, like that's so perfectly embodied. And it's a story I'm going to be borrowing from shamelessly and giving you all the credit. But along the same lines, when the sales enablement society was founded back in 2016, the hundred ish folks that were there landed on three things. And the 1st 1 was that enablement is not just talent enablement, but there are at least 4 flavors of it that they started off from the ground floor, which were talent, of course, but then messaging and marketing enablement. And administrative sales ops, revenue operations. And pipeline enablement and they broke those out into different because there are different strategic elements and there are different parts of the internal executive suite and revenue engine that you have to have that seat at the table in order to effectively be able to enable, which was position two. In order for enablement to be effective, it has to be run as a cross functional business within a business. And then the third, was that enablement. Hey, we're here in a room. We're putting a stake in the ground this is a thing we're building a global society. What are we evolving from to? And, it was like, well, there are CFOs, there are CIOs that evolved from, you know, smaller jobs. What about chief productivity officer? So the idea that we're elevating the profession to something. Your presentation about fighting for your cabinet seat seemed to be grounded in some of those concepts, which of those resonate with you?

Yeah For sure, man. I think that even the audacious aspiraitons from the onset of the society were day there will be a time where we no longer think that a chief productivity officer in that role is novel or that that would be atypical. But that becomes commonplace as we legitimize the place for learning in the workplace. And I think that, as I alluded to, I'd love to teach. You know, I spent my summers as a camp counselor, then as a guide. So there's been this educational component and bend to my life for as long as I've been working. And yet, we can all appreciate that teachers are grossly underpaid. So if you have this passion to teach, but also feel the burdens financially of what it means to live in today's society, you can't pencil out those, you know, Those math equations. How I got to enablement was an accident, but it was again, I, I talked to so many folks who are trying to get out of sales because of any number of destructive forces that come with that, the burnout, the anxiety, they're just no longer passionate about it. And everyone looks to enablement because you're adjacent to revenue. So you tangentially feel the excitement of that. But you don't have the weight of quota. And not to say that there isn't piles that come with our job, too. Don't get me wrong, like, every job you have to shovel so I don't want to, paint this as hunky dory, like, Oh, we've made it to Oz or the Promised Land. I sit in the Garden of Eden, Drinking Evian every day. That's not the case. But I do believe sometimes people struggle with trusting the process. That if you're passionate about what it is that You are doing the success and the opportunity, the financial, maybe not leisure, but the depressurization of some of those pressures will alleviate over time. So long as you continue to use your passion as the barometer for how you make decisions, because you can't inherently turn off that passion or excitement. That will presumably beget success, which will then beget hopefully some of that sense of satisfaction. Back to your question about the society's sort of inception and its pillars. Yeah, I think you have, different personas within enablement that you think rather than it being a one size fits all, that that helps at least shape specialization in the profession that then yields more legitimacy. I think instead of four, I think about it is three. There is a persona within the profession that is a facilitator, someone who is a theatrical thespian because we've all sat through presentations where it is worse than watching paint dry. And time is money for all of us, but especially in sales. So you really appreciate someone who can breathe, not just life, but excitement into what the hell it is they're talking about in a riveting, compelling, captivating story. That skill set will set you apart, even if it's not your own content. How do you as an actor, actress, Bring that to the workplace. Could not have predicted that there would be a time and a place and value for that. The second persona I would say, I think you alluded to it, was sort of this more administrative or operational role. Enablement as you get bigger, take on incredibly squirrely, rat's nest problems. And are you the type of person that leaves no stone unturned and the granularity of the minutiae that you want to obsess over so that all the trains Leave on time and that we're under budget and finishing early. That's a really Necessary sort of pm skill set. And the third I would say is more of for anyone who's a godfather fan Is the tom hagen consigliere type, you know You didn't stay in sales or sales leadership because you had to be front and center But do you love pulling on strings as a chief of staff strategist? And I think somewhere in that third persona, you blend a little bit of each of those other two, but I have seen people make wildly successful careers out of just being niche in one of those three buckets. So when you were talking about, hey, like enablement can't just be a paint by numbers, peanut butter smear. I think those are the types of personas I advise people. What's going to fill your cup? What's going to unlock the best parts of Erich or Danny or Jane Doe, and if any of those speak to you, then trust in the process and follow your passions and enablement.

Well, you've definitely found your calling Danny. You can own a spotlight like no other, and really appreciate you coming on the show to, share some of that talent and wisdom with the audience. So, in october of last year, a new historical milestone in that the Sales Enablement Society shifted to revenue enablement. I'm curious, especially with the logos you've represented, the passion you've had, the, I can't even imagine how many enablement professionals you've interacted with. What does that shift mean if anything mean to you in those words, sales enablement to revenue enablement.

I think it speaks to a few things, right? With the pervasive shift to subscription, You know, there's a lot of debate. Should there be a customer success function? Should everyone own that? You know, Frank Slootman boldly came out and said, why am I going to put all of the customer success on one person? And I think that revenue comes from a variety of different angles and sort of stereotypically sales being more of a newer incremental role. Revenue generating function and CS if we use that genErichally speaking as a renewal function Well, all of those people need to be better not because again, they're bad at their jobs But because it's just so damn competitive and the pace of change is such blisteringly fast That I would say Everyone can continue to up their game and we now have the tools where you can capture your game footage, analyze it at scale no less as opposed to in silos or in isolation of one individual and actually draw some more scientific conclusions about how are we going to make everybody better. And so much of I think the interest in being part of this tech scene is the upside of being an equity shareholder. We all have a vested interest in holding ourselves every day to a higher bar. So moving out of sales to revenue, I think, not only covers end to end that cycle, which also then includes, you know, the niche specialization of the BDR, SDR, XDR function at the tip of the spear with prospecting all the way end to end cradle to grave to renewal. It can't be a one size fits all. So I love that we're revenue. As part of my talk that you heard at digital now, I also think that because of the tech that's specifically geared at our world, the lines blur even further into operations, right? We were pretty discreet five, six, however many years ago. Ops were the people that were the analysts that told you what's happening underneath the hood. But they can never actually capture how are things going? Or why are they going that way? Simply just more what's happening. And I think now when we talk about sales enablement to revenue enablement, it's end to end cradle grave. All those personas plus the ability to actually hold court. With not sales operations, revenue operations. I think that same transition is taking place on that side of the aisle.

For those that, that weren't there this was, All through the lens, maybe you get a little bit of a background on what you meant by fighting for your cabinet seat and being in that room where it happened and how that room changed. What is that room where enablement happened? What did it used to look like? What does it look like today? What should we be doing in the present as enablement to get us there?

No doubt. I left sales because I was toying with the idea of getting my MBA. Right. And I thought what nobility comes with an MBA from a school that prides itself on having prestige. And then I'll be happy. And then I'll feel intelligent. I didn't. And I did sales for a while and I looked and I said, I want to be in that room that you're speaking of, Erich. I want to be in the tent. I want to see how strategy is hatched or show me how the sausage is made. And don't just show me at some point in my life. I want to. I feel that my fingerprints are all over that sausage, and that sounded oddly so forgive me. But you get where I'm going. Enablement was a way for me to cut corners. And get there faster and to try and pony up to the people that do have a, I think, really, you know, typical standard seat in that entire process in the room. And as time has gone on the margins for error in any role have become compressed to being razor thin. And there's a stat that looks at. The average tenure of a CRO in today's day and age is 19 months. So I hate to militarize what it is that we do in sales because that feels as cliche as calling it sports. But yeah, we're battling against competition. So in prepping for my presentation, I used the analogy of a sort of war cabinet. Dating all the way back to the 1800s where it was first used in England, but it was first actually published and discussed in literature in 1916. So, for those historians out there, that's World War I. And, Lloyd George, who was Prime Minister at the time, was trying to think about when there's so much complexity in my job as Prime Minister. I need some advisors. I need counsel so I can bounce ideas off of them. And initially it was suggested that he have a handful of advisors. Let's start with three. And very quickly, that burgeoned to being unwieldy and out of control, where it got as high as 23 people in his war cabinet. You talk about being absolutely paralyzed by the analysis and democracy of maintaining some sort of understanding of what 23 people are telling you. It's impossible. So, Churchill, famously, for acting decisively and assertively, he looked at that and said, This is bull.... So he brought it down to four. And I think about, I want to be in that cabinet war room. I want my fingerprints on the sausage that we got to stick with that bit. Now it's too good. And if the equivalent. In this analogy to Churchill is the CRO. What am I doing to fight and using that term operatively fight for my opinion to rise above a lot of other noise. And that's not me slandering or poo poo what other people are attempting to do. Everyone's intentions are pure. But there's only so much mindshare. There's only so much time. There's only so much money to invest in certain projects. I got to fight to legitimize what it is that I'm suggesting. And I do think that being competitive and as a former seller, that has served me immeasurably well. Because I think I bring that, where I started in sales, that tenacity to enablement, because if I'm not fighting that hard for my cabinet seat with whatever executive I'm trying to maintain my sort of position with, there's a dozen people behind me that will absolutely eat my lunch.

Couldn't agree more. I love the analogy right down to the sausage making,

Yes. All of the sausage making is consensual. No HR violations were committed in making enablement strategy.

Right? So some of the things you shared about what got us here and what's going on in the present, arguably, and a lot of camps that won't get us there is. The status quo. Proposing the same things that repeat themselves over and over again. Do you have any present day recommendations? And then, we'll get to the future on how some of these folks can maybe, drop some knowledge bombs on how maybe they can mix it up a little bit and get outside of the box.

The status quo is warm, it's fuzzy, it's familiar. Not to accuse anyone of being a one trick pony, I think that it's only natural psychologically that we would feel shackled whether we realize it or not, to what's worked in the past. I'm guilty of that, right? As the, sort of, sales methodology guy at Tableau, I rolled out Corporate Visions, and, I love them, but you talk about what worked historically in enablement. They have phenomenal thespians who facilitate their content and these aren't slouches either. They're brilliant people. There's a lot of intelligence in how you bring that content to life and it can all withstand the pushback and the scrutiny and the skepticism of the most cynical and grizzled of sellers. So they've got a great product and that worked really well when we first got a taste of it and the viral nature in which it spread was largely based and predicated on the success of how they brought that content to life, and how it was able to go from a pilot of 40 people to eventually over three years, taking that to 1600 people globally was again how we brought that to life. So then transitioning to gong and sort of saying, we have this awesome thing that we did. Let's apply it and drop it in here, right? There was a lot of, well, who the hell are you new guy who just got to Gong? You have no idea what our DNA makeup is. You have no idea what's worked in the past. On what basis or grounds can you make that suggestion? There was a lot of, you know, outsider looking in, hypothesizing, we think we've got your silver bullet that you need. There wasn't a lot of, I would say, welcomed reception to that initially. So if I was going to rest on my laurels and just sort of force CVI down Gong's throat, it would not have been a tasty meal. And I think what it took was evolving when I got there to really analyzing their status quo with their own technology to, I think, not introduce a new theory that their status quo was faltering, but put numbers to it and then in a guerrilla kind of way have pockets of people that were pressure testing my hypothesis with CVI's why change to create a measurable, concrete, distinguishable Contrast, which earned me the right to then go and float this in front of the CRO. That it wasn't a he said, she said, hey, just trust me. I've done this before, but it was like, here's the numbers. We have meaningful signals from this pilot of CVI. Are you willing to go all in and all in with the understanding that Gong will hold me and CVI accountable. And I think that that's a really important distinction, Erichh, that we also need to really pay tribute to, which is Five, ten years ago, CVI would come in with their amazing thespian facilitators, or Challenger would do the same, or Miller Hyman, or Richardson, or whoever, and you would pay a king's ransom to have them roll it out, and then they would vanish with no accountability. And what's awesome is, yes, they are all still that phenomenal and theatrical and fantastic and facilitating, but Gong, or whoever you're using for your nut sales intelligence, Or your conversation intelligence, but your revenue intelligence should be what actually holds them accountable if you're signing a multi year contract with them. If you're seeing that adoption is faltering, why is that? Is that because your people just need to be reinforced? Or are people actually using it, they are adopting it, but it's tanking your win rates, or it's decelerating your sales cycles? Shame on them, whichever IP vendor you went with. And now it can't be a, he said, she said, you've got the numbers from your revenue intelligence tech stack to tell that to them to either demand a discount or even a refund.

So as we shift to the future, it sounds like you see a big opportunity for this culmination of where the enablement profession meets technology, which I've heard these two letters, a, I, a lot recently what, what does that future look like to you?

Yeah. So I'm contending with that in my own skillset right now is how do I reckon with. Is AI displacing me? And that's a real, I'll use the word, fear.

Yeah.

I can distinctly remember exactly where I'm sitting when I hear Kyle Healy, who's the SVP of Enablement at a insurance company. So Kyle, if you're listening, thanks again for this. I quote you all the time. He said, When we think about AI's place in our profession, do you want to embrace that technology like Iron Man, or do you want to attempt to resist it like Terminator? And we all know how that ended. And where I'm going is I cornered a function with an enablement very quickly as a former seller that had everything to do with how do you whip through an account plan research process with both surgical precision and efficiency, because those can be really paradoxical. And I came up with my own methodology that I've trained hundreds, not thousands of sellers on. How to do that at scale. And yeah, it's not, I would say, in any way revolutionary. It's going to all the usual suspects of 10Ks and LinkedIn and whatnot, but I've done it enough times to know that it holds water. And yet, AI is very quickly making that methodology obsolete because you can go to Databugger or Finlistics. Or LinkedIn sales navigator has the account IQ now that gives you a baseline understanding of coming up with what is the point of view, the distillate, the synthesis from your account plan research. A lot of job security and competency that I brought was all tied up in me teaching this course. For years and I need to get to a place where I'm not trying to bury my head in the sand from all these tools that are coming up automatically with points of views. I need to figure out where do those fall short and how can my human oversight supplement and compliment what they provide. I'm not irrelevant. I'm not obsolete. But if I refuse to actually study what's out there to know then, how to tune with the human oversight or the finesse, the last mile of that journey. Then yeah, I think I've already forfeited. Because sooner or later, they're just gonna get better and better. If I'm not staying current with what's out there, then my one trick pony status quo of today will make me a victim tomorrow,

Danny, your pony has a million, three tricks. What's this one trick stuff, but I love, I love what you shared. And one of the kind of hashtags that has evolved in my mind is AI curious, human enthusiast, and it's, it's along lines of what you just shared. I would argue there's no cloning Danny. That's for sure. And I see such a great opportunity as I hear you saying to shift the administrivia to the AI, but lean into your given gifting and let that shine. Be it in the spotlight or be it synthesizing the synthesis, right? There still is that human Element. So maybe share on a final note, wherever you'd like to land the plane. What do you see through that vein? What is your encouragement for this listening audience? If you, my friends want to be part of the elevation of sales enablement with all of the additional tool set you have. And if you also want to be in the room where it happens, what's next?

Man. Oh, what's a another episode right there, dude?

Well, let's do it! Here's the trailer.

exactly. I think that where my head goes, sort of, if you want to be in the room and you're excited about where we're elevating collectively as a profession, elevating the notion of enablement, I want to leave people with this idea that whether it's in sales. Or whether it's in CS or it's in enablement, you cannot trivialize or overstate the importance of the intersection between hospitality and the world of business. And I think this is sort of a, perhaps curve ball that I'm throwing you, but stick with me here. One of the like virtuoso, I would say guiding voices in my entire career, is Danny Meyer. Danny Meyer if you don't know the name is ordinarily thought to be the most successful American restaurateur in our country's history and his first restaurant in New York City was Union Square Cafe in 1987 and he has since gone on to open dozens of restaurants most of which Have when he first cut his teeth Anchored more into the fine dining space. And if you looked at the top 10 restaurants in New York City each year, you would ordinarily see at least a handful that were within Danny's restaurant group. But what really made him a, at this point now, billionaire is that he also started Shake Shack. So we all know that as a global brand, but that's not where he started. Why think about referencing Danny with where this is going is it was so counterintuitive. I like that word a lot because I think that it's those counterintuitive moments and enablement. I can remember counterintuitive lessons or parables that CVI would tell you that whoa, oh my God, that's so illuminating. Danny looked at how hospitality was run that generally at that point in time in history, it placed employees at the lowest rung on the ladder for prioritization, and it put investors and then customers and then vendors ahead of them. He said, that's bull! We should prioritize our employees first, and then everything else will follow that. If our employees feel loved and feel valued, then not to again, quote, trickle down economics, but then. Sort of this virtuous enlightened hospitality will unfold. And where I'm trying to land the plane is that in enablement, I do believe that this is a service business. And you could make the argument, but sales and customer success, and like ops, it's all service. Sure, but genuinely what enablement provides is service. And I think if you feel that passionately, if you feel that authentically and genuinely, the beneficiaries of what it is that you're providing will also sense that. That it's not lip service, it's not insincere, but also you will not allow or tolerate yourself to serve a mediocre product. And I think that there's a lot of mediocrity out there. And you could say, Oh man, why would I ever want to join that? Or you could say, if that's the baseline in the bar, there are lots of us that are trying to elevate. And that's not an accusation. Like I just think that historically we haven't been given the tools or the mindset or the legitimacy to actually want to take huge pride in what it is that we're doing. And again, I think that that's probably where I want to land. Do you feel what Danny refers to in his book, setting the table? In addition to having your IQ, your intellectual quotient, do you have what he calls HQ and hospitality quotient? You talk about the unexpected, never in the tea leaves that I see as part of this job, that my affinity for hosting A dinner party would then translate to hosting an off site and what that has done That's not in the conventional job description of enablement, but because we're in the service business That has also elevated me to being in the room and that those skills that maybe you trivialize All of a sudden are like whoa, but actually That is a very relevant, applicable skillset that comes in this whole mishmash that is enablement as well. So Erich, I don't know if that's where you want to go, but that's where at least attempted to crash the plane.

I, that, that plane is flying higher than ever. I thank you so much, Danny. I know you're crazy busy. Good luck on your world tour. You're about to jump back in on, and thank you for all that you've done and continue to do to elevate the profession and to share your passion and your service, like you were just sharing. It does not surprise me at all that you have a penchant for throwing a dinner party and I'd love to be at one, one day. I'll even hop on one of those planes. So thanks again for your time, Danny.

This was great. Thanks, Erich! Erich

Awesome. My pleasure, brother.