ISEs3 Ep8: Bob Kelly – Sales Management Association

Hello, everyone, and welcome to ISE Inside Sales Enablement, Season 3, Enablement History. And today, I'm excited to have in the Orchestrate Sales Studio, a man that knows a lot about the past, present, and future of sales. With a side of sales enablement, we're going to see what he has to say. Mr. Bob Kelly, who is the founder and chairman going since 2010 of the Sales Management Association, the only global cross industry professional association for managers. focused in sales force effectiveness, He's also an adjunct faculty of the Goizueta. I've never had to say that loud. Oh, how about

Pretty good.

All right. Business school right here at Emory

University here in Atlanta. Goizueta was Roberto Goizueta. He was CEO of the Coca Cola company in the 80s.

there we go. And there's some history, Coca Cola here in Atlanta. I believe in fact, there's about to be history made on March 12th and 13th the 2024 Salesforce productivity event will be hosted on that very same Emory campus by Bob himself. And I'm sure we'll be hearing more about that. Bob, anything else I missed out in the intro before we dive into a question or two?

Thanks for plugging the conference. It's March 12th and 13th. So the business school is hosting it for us and we normally have an event at least once a year. This is one of the first times we've done that in the spring. So hope you can join for that. I would also just let your audience know they can learn more about the conference from our website. Salesmanagement. org. And you can learn about the conference there

outstanding. And don't worry, folks we'll circle back and give that to you again at the end if you missed it. So for now, Bob sales enablement. fiercely curious. When did you first hear those two words? 2010. We're going back to on my books, the society itself didn't come into being really until 2016, but the words have been around for a minute. When did you first hear them? What did they mean to you? What do they mean to you?

where was I when I heard those magic words? That's what you want to know. It's difficult to understand,, when a new term comes along. Just how bad ish or long live it'll be. So I do have a little bit of history about this term sales enablement, and this comes from a conversation I had a few years ago with the person who I would call the Abner Doubleday of sales enablement, and that's John Aiello at the time he was at a firm called Savo Group. Savo Group was a firm really at the headwaters of this idea, sales enablement. John and his partner Drew Larsen. Now this is in the late 90s, early aughts. They were running a company that was essentially doing marketing consulting for B2B sales organizations these guys are really good marketers. They were creating really good content and they were a little frustrated that it was sometimes difficult for salespeople to find this stuff. And at the time that they'd created a system for distributing content, they call it sales asset management. This is the precursor this is the bronze age equivalent sales enablement.

Yeah. I think Craig was calling it that at the same time.

yeah, it's good that you mentioned him because his firm iCentera was also active around the same time. In fact, Aiello acknowledges that. The folks at iCentera may have also been using this term, but they got some funding in 2004, raised some capital, and coincident with that, they decided they need a more, they needed a more highfalutin name for this stuff than Sales Asset Management, and they adopted the moniker. sales enablement at that time. I'll give you some perspective on what I thought that was It was chiefly a solution for marketing. The people that bought sales enablement were marketing. It was mostly solving a marketing problem. That problem was Marketing was creating content and sales may not have really been making good use of that content. So this solved a problem for marketing that was related to the sales organization's uncertain agency. We can't really control what the sales force is doing with our stuff. We think a lot of it is going to waste. Sales enablement was grounded in this distribution problem, getting content where it needs to be. This is a big problem, especially in large companies with many, thousands of products those were the humble roots of sales enablement, as I recall. And that was in the early 2000s. And then since then, I think it's come to mean a little bit more.

So then from there, what about the society, the sales enablement society, and maybe even in the interim? I always go back to the 2008 is to me the middle when Scott Santucci and in fact, we just spoke with Brian Lambert. That episode will be coming out soon as well. I think Scott was the guy definitely put the stake in the ground over at Forrester and then Brian was his first hire. And that clearly is our legacy here at Orchestrate Sales. Brian and I started the site. But was there a bump in there when you went, Oh, this thing's become official?

Yeah. I remember when the sales enablement society came along, I always found it. You know a little intimidating. I'm not really the society type I you know, I assumed you guys were like eating like cucumber sandwiches, and having high tea over there

Pinky's in the air. Love

so I was a little put off by that, but I think you know, my my General impression of these kinds of organizations is that they tend to have a center of gravity one of two kinds I mean they're either focused on creating content and new practices they're create, they're focused on networking and the more social elements that is getting people together, collaboration fraternization within the industry. And I think from what I've, I know the society has been really good at that second thing.

From a involvement perspective, what element does enablement play in your business?

Yeah, no it's an important topic for our audience. Our audience is a little more I guess general their interests are a little broader than sales enablement, but sales enablement is certainly or, the kind of. Associated issues of, learning and development or content management are things that are relevant to our audience for sure. We tend to be more broadly sales effectiveness focused, or sales management focused. but we have sponsors in our organization we call them underwriters. They sometimes co create content with us. And we've had over the years. a number of vendors in this space, including the the folks at Brain Shark, for example, for a long time, or High Spot, or Seismic I so we've participated in the, in those ways, learning what those solution providers have to say sometimes to our audience. And also, we do our own research in areas related to what you guys call sales enablement and, try to stay current in that way.

I spent a little bit of time on the site, and I was very pleased to see that you do in fact have a sales enablement button as a subset of your search. I think it was 12 or 15 pages of content I'd love to hear more of a peek behind the curtain, and again, for the benefit of the audience, what might the value be of being a member if you are an enabler? Of joining officially becoming a member of your site and coming out to the conference?

Sure. That's a nice question to ask. Thank you for thinking about it in that way. We are called the Sales Management Association. We try to take the most broad approach possible for getting at the issues relevant to running the sales force. My appeal to a lot of people who have a niche focus IN sales support or helping sales forces is to learn about the bigger, broader issues affecting sales leadership, sales governance. And I think this helps us greatly in the mission to support the Salesforce. Sales organizations and sales leaders have to rely on a lot of corporate functions that don't always have the content domain expertise around sales and sometimes simply don't understand the peculiar issues that affect the sales organization. So for sales enablement folks, especially those that might be creating training or. Working on collateral it's important to understand what those big issues are. We try to, put our arms around a very diverse membership with that basic proposition, learn about the big ideas and get a broad understanding. A liberal arts education about what it means to work and to manage the sales function. there are a lot of issues confronting the sales force right now. One of them is the enormous amount of change happening. How do organizations build adaptiveness into their capabilities? Do we have the, the management competency, for example, to lead change in the organization? Do we have the ability to change and adapt sales process or value propositions in a way that can effectively adapt when buying preferences change or markets change or the stuff we sell changes. These are really big issues that matter a great deal to sales leaders right now. I think an enablement person has to be. on the very leading edge of how do we help our organizations adapt. Also, what it means to help people learn and develop in sales organizations is changing. Enablement as a function, has led the way in that area in many respects.

If we go back to the founding of the sales enablement society, they talked about there being 4 flavors of enablement,

I think all those areas are important. the danger is getting hung up on the semantics when I hear that four part charter charter of sales enablement, the question that occurs to me is. Is there anything that is not included in that definition of sales enablement? And I really don't think there is. So this is a problem. A sales leader will look at this maybe in the context of we've got to double down on sales enablement. And they'll say, first of all, what is this word enablement? Is that a word? I don't know about this. What is it specifically? And is there a direct connection between The investments and activities of people in this area and their expected impact in the business in a direct way. So that's a criticism of sales enablement that I have that its too overreaching in its scope and definition. Only because it's poorly defined

I'm part of the problem. Here's what I mean by that is that what enablement really has gravitated toward is the talent portion of that. Going back to, the roots of the sales enablement society. Their vision for the role was much broader and it included all of those areas. There are still some of us speaking that language, the orchestrating a cross functional business within a business Position number two was that it needed to be chartered and run that way but what most folks gravitated towards was really the training And the enablement of the sales force, but not getting into those other areas. So there is a little bit of attention even in the community where folks like me are going man There's still this huge opportunity To orchestrate a dotted line. That's important. Cross functional business within a business that is metrics driven. Starting with a charter and strategy that is metrics based that is founded in dials that you can watch, that the executive team is in alignment with and almost more importantly, that are leading with the value that your company can bring to that client. And as those dials are moving internally towards delivering that value, the dials are moving externally because you're actually providing value to the client. And you've aligned that revenue engine, right? So what I talk about and i'm excited about is the idea of an orchestrated revenue engine. Is that 100 enablement? No, it's a cross functional dotted line. And in fact, it might be With a CRO, CMO, Chief Strategy, or Chief Sales Officer, either of the CSOs at the head of that. I love that you called that out, and I hold myself accountable to being part of the problem. But to your point there needs to be that definition, there needs to be that stake in the ground. So thank you for pointing all of that out. What I would like to turn back to you and say is, So Bob, what does good look like? Is there room for sales enablement? And what would that look like?

honestly, despite, my sort of quibbles with the name and everything. I don't really care what you call it. I think let's get down to the essential value that the idea brings to the table I would put that in two broad categories. One is the, the efficient distribution of content, the collateral, et cetera, the distribution problem. I think the technology associated with sales enablement can help this solve this problem. Helping people find things, also getting things to people, which is different. It's more pushing as opposed to asking people to pull it when they need it. It's getting things to people in context, where when and where they need it. The more important thing is developing salespeople. We use this term now, development, and we use it because we resist the term training. It's not as a great term. Training now brings to mind, like jamming people in a room and making them listen to a lecture. I'm a journeyman educator too. So it's interesting to me the similarities in, selling and teaching. There. equally challenging, I think. we now know the limitations of simply trying to fill people up with knowledge. We don't do this anymore. and in education, by the way, we call this flipping the classroom, where you get people to learn stuff on their own, and then you bring them together to solve problems in the classroom as a, give them something to do that they're on the hook for, that they can't do unless they ask questions and make them learn that way. Developing salespeople, it's very similar. We can give them this information. We can even push it out to them when they need it. But to really have them develop skills and applied knowledge, we have to observe them and we have to coach them. And this means, objectively looking at them, watching them, making judgments about them diagnosing root cause issues associated with shortcomings and how they're performing, having assignments and things we can prescribe to them to help them improve, judging that improvement, monitoring that, and doing all this in a way that is collaborative and customized to that person. And this is what is ideally done, not by sales enablement, but by sales management who has authority and who has accountability for the performance of that person Not always. In fact, it's a problem for the firm. It's not a sales enablement or sales management problem. so I see sales enablements role is supporting that essential management function. I would like to see, sales enablement at making better managers that should be the charter. Change it to something like that. we're going to make management better at developing salespeople.

Bob in my observation One of the biggest gaps has been that sales managers a lot of times are brought up into that role from an individual contributor, and I just heard you say that sales enablement. 1 of the biggest opportunities is exactly that to close that gap. What is being done right in that respect? And what could sales enablement be doing better? If that is the sweet spot of sales enablement.

Yeah. So that's a great question. one of the things that I've seen that is really effective is to rotate management candidates in and out of sales effectiveness roles. Whatever those may be called. So you might have a, first line sales manager whose promotion and a larger company is into sales operations, where they learn about process and, back office technology issues and incentive comp design and performance management issues. Or you might rotate them into a training role or sales enablement role where they're, actually, accountable for those responsibilities. That's one idea. Rotate people around, get them experience in doing some of these different jobs. In general, though, I think something at a macroeconomic level is happening in sales organizations that makes it more important to develop salespeople. Maybe it's a few things happening. One of them is that the traditional function of sales management, a nanny function, of supervising, making sure people are doing the right things in the right spots, it's largely a problem we automate now. So this has at least in theory, freed up some capacity to focus on more substantive things like making the sales organization better. Another maybe bigger issue is that this is labor market economics. A lot is being made right now of layoffs in the tech industry. But if you look at the overall economy and across all sectors, employment is actually very robust and many organizations are having trouble holding on to the best salespeople and attracting the good new talent One way they do this is with places that are nice places to work in and so companies that develop people are better places to work and a more discriminating labor pool can make judgments. Based on that criteria, they can say, I don't have to take the first job that comes along. I'd like to work at a place. Where I'm going to get better and more marketable in the role. And we see that, developing people and creating nice places to work for salespeople is an emerging vector of competitiveness for sales organizations, and they're thinking more about it. Layer on top of that, the issue of the sales organization has to change our research shows on average, large sales forces reorganize every three years. And often that's in response to this fundamental need to change how the sales organization delivers value. And so we have to be adaptable and we also have to make people better in our organization. So this idea of sales enablement's role in helping develop people, I think is more important than ever. And maybe more strategic than ever.

Bob, I feel like we've done a really good job covering enablement history and we talked a good amount about the present. I know with your event coming up next month in your present, you're thinking a good bit about the future, that event and. I can only assume some of those topics are about the future of sales, the future of sales management. Can we maybe land on telling us what folks can expect to learn about how they can be in the present here in Atlanta at that event and learn about the future and drive additional productivity in themselves and their teams.

Yeah. Happy to. So there'll be four major tracks. The first is a sort of general and it is sales leadership's new priorities. This is an opportunity to acknowledge those things that we think are emerging areas of importance for leadership. Another is, we're calling it Bold Futures in Sales Technology, and this is really an opportunity to acknowledge some of the hand wringing and pearl clutching around AI, especially the generative language based AI. Then we'll have two other sections. One is competing on sales talent. This is a place to talk about the challenges that many organizations are having in attracting new salespeople at, in certain sectors and also holding on to, the top sales talent, which is, under siege in many firms. fourthly, we'll talk about transformation. Managing really a better term is leading change. In sales organizations, what's management's role in that? Where are the areas, sales organizations see themselves changing and how do firms adapt to those demands? We'll have a few great speakers. We'll have a President of Corporate Sales at UPS. We'll have a Senior Vice President of Performance Effectiveness at Cox Communications. We'll have Senior Leaders From a couple of other Georgia companies Great Dane let's see, we'll have some folks from Schlumberger, from Asea Brown Boveri, ABB a number of other industrial firms anyway, that's all I can think of at the moment, hope you can join us.

Bob, thank you so much for that and for joining us. And again, folks you've got to get out salesmanagement. org. And I'm very pleased to share both in partnership with Bob here on the podcast, but almost more over on the Technology Association of Georgia here locally, of which I'm a proud member for a decade or three. Has teamed up with Bob to offer up a promotion code, which is being part of the TAG family. And it doesn't, if whether you're here in Georgia locally or coming from overseas, T-A-G-F-A-M is the promo code you can plug in. And Bob, tell 'em a little bit more about that. Do they get a little knock off the price or

They do. Yeah, you say, so that lowers the registration cost for you from $895 to $4.95. The code is TAGFAM.

Awesome, Bob. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks TAG for being part of our extended family and Bob for being right here in Atlanta and leading the charge to elevate sales management enablement and sales management specifically. Great to have you on the show Bob.

Thanks so much for having me, Erich. Really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Pleasure.