ISEs3 Ep9: Dr. Brian Lambert Pt 1 – Co-Founder, Orchestrator, and Value Architect

Hello everyone. And welcome the inside sales enablement season three enablement history. And boy, do we have the epitome of past present and future enablement right here with me. Dr. Brian Lambert, and I might take up the first. 15 minutes just introing him and then I'll let him fill in the blanks on anything I missed. So he was of course, the original co host of Inside Sales Enablement. So we've got alumni back. He was also the co founder with me of orchestratesales. com. Personal history and legacy for me. He was the one of the original Sales enablement. In fact, he was number two. If you think about it through the lens of Scott Santucci founding the sales enablement practice at Forrester back in the day. The first person he hired was Brian. So he was employee number two through the lens of sales enablement consultancy. And back then he was just sharing a tidbit with me. He did a Google search on sales enablement back in that 2008 ish time frame and got a hundred hits. He just did it this morning in the pre show. How about six million? So I think we're on to something folks. And so he is unique as well in that when we talk about the flavors of sales enablement, and yes, of course he was there at the original founding and one of the Those hundred coveted four founders I'm hunting down over time was right there with Scott in the other 99 ish. And he does have in fact a PhD in essentially sales and that was by choice. He addressed it through organizational behavior with an emphasis on sales. Did a dissertation or two or three academic journals. He's been cited over 200 times. He's maybe on Howard Dover's heels and he's done a combination of pretty much all of the flavors. He's been a salesperson with a quota. He's been a sales manager with a team. He's been a sales enablement manager with a team of, I don't know, 20 plus. And most recently, and I'm excited to hear more, his current title, Big Data Value Architect at Elastic, where he is in a marketing messaging role, messaging enablement. So all of that said, Brian you would think I didn't miss anything, but fill in the blanks for me before we dive into the coveted seven questions of ISE.

I appreciate it. That's probably way enough about me. It's interesting. I I don't get a chance to really reflect on that. I appreciate that. And enough about me though. I think for me, it's, quite an interesting time. There's a lot going on and I look forward to definitely exploring that. And thanks for having me on the show.

Absolutely. Brian ecstatic to have you here. Question one is almost funny to ask you, when did you first hear the words sales enablement and what did, or do they mean to you, Dr. Brian Lambert of sales enablement,

Yeah, it was probably 2008 ish. The first time I heard it, I was like, I have a people, a lot of people background. So I thought about this idea of enabling others as a negative thing. I like you're an enabler and bad behavior. I did read an article on Reddit that asked somebody posted, Why do salespeople all take drugs or drink too much? And it's quite an interesting Reddit thread, last week. But

We could go down a rabbit hole on that one couldn't we?.

So that was the first time, and I remember looking at who owns the domain name? And somebody did, and I think it was Craig Nelson and you might want to have him on the show and

Yeah, he's done it on very bullet point. You nailed it, man.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, so that's how I first met him and there were a couple of like online portals. Back in the days of wikis, were big and people just pouring articles out and that's where I found it and then I found scott who was at a conference and I heard him speak about his blueprint of sales and Had a really interesting conversation with him there.

That's awesome. So what, was there ever anything other than those two words when you and Scott were talking and he was developing this blueprint? Was it a potential? Hey, maybe we shouldn't use the word enablement or was that the thing that made sense? And you got on board with him? What did that look like behind the curtain?

Oh, yeah. It made sense it because the way we've always explored it is that enablement is, it's a function and it's a function that drives. Sales excellence at the time, we didn't really have everything fleshed out, but it was very robust because it covered everything from, traditional sales training behaviors all the way through to this idea of being a value architect and that's where my title now is value architect. That's where I originally heard that and Scott shared is the vision of value architects, communicating value and being orchestrators, which we didn't use that word. But the concepts that we've worked on now for, 20 years or so as the first conversation we had enablement then was really not the discussion. It was more of the concept to what could this become and let's just call it enablement. And when we were at Forrester, Scott had to do a lot of work to sell this idea that there was a crowd, that there were people doing this because they were traditionally. A siloed view of the people in marketing, the people in sales training, the people in sales ops. And is there really a role? And we spent a lot of time trying to explain to people that enablement really is the first new digital economy role, right? It didn't really matter where it sat and didn't really matter what it was called. It was this idea that was not bound by traditional siloed thinking. And it worked in a way that it helped people communicate value. And the definition of value is completely changing. So that's why you need this role. And that idea is, it really started back in the 2008 timeframe.

I heard you use the word role. I heard you use the word function. In fact, Scott put a poll out. I never, I don't know that he came back and said, Hey, here's what the consensus was, but is sales enablement, a role, a function, a profession.

A process, a technology?

Process? Yeah.

Yeah. My, my take is well, it's one of those things where I've been in it for a long time. And I don't know if it will ever become the vision that, that we had because. I think it is mostly a role in a technology. I don't necessarily see it evolving to the strategic function that we envisioned. And there's a lot of things that point to the fact that it's not making it. But most of it has to do with the fact that the sales enablement folks that I talked to, many of them are not really focused on the same things that sales are from a strategy perspective and a go to market perspective. And the challenge that I have with a lot of sales enablement discussions today is they're not grounded in data and accountability salespeople are grounded in, data and accountability. They're the ones that get fired. I know in the last year, personally, at least 20 salespeople who've been fired for not hitting quota. And they're in organizations that have sales enablement and it's like when do, sales enablement people get fired and that accountability and that focus on the numbers is not prevalent in most enablement quote unquote teams and that's why I don't think it'll become a strategic function.

Without that, if, there's a shot, if we can close that gap and be more metric based because the counter to that is, I would argue from what I've seen and heard speaking of people reaching out to you. The profession, the role, whatever you want to look at it through the lens of is taking a pretty good hit. Yeah. As the economies had its slap or three. And as you and I both, I know vehemently agree. There was such a huge opportunity that COVID presented. And we did the first two seasons the, of the ISE leaned way into that and went through the COVID time. Is that an opportunity that you think has been missed or is there an opportunity to pull up the ship?

So if you use the lands of the flavors, which I think your listeners are familiar with the flavors of enablement, if you were to use that as a shape sorter, triangles and squares and circles. Those flavors are. message enablement, pipeline enablement, there's an organizational enablement, and there's this idea of talent enablement that are all flavors or pillars of quote unquote enablement as a function. And I think most of the sales enablement people would get really sorted into this talent enablement bucket. And then if you look at what they're doing, There's quite a few teams that are really program management. They're basically event planning. So they're event planning, sales kickoffs and sales events, but they don't actually do the training. Like they don't have the skills to actually hold the room. They don't actually do the sales training. So they're really event planners and coordinators of people to show up at events. So talent enablement one. And then two, when you think about talent enablement all the way from the hiring profile to getting people promoted, et cetera, are they getting people promoted? Because a lot of salespeople are getting fired. So talent enablement angle, if I sort everybody into that, what percentage is that? I think it's really high. It's probably my guess is. 85 to 90 percent of sales enablement is really talent enablement. And when you look at what they're doing I don't think they're actually providing that service of what would, what Scott would call hire to retire. So underneath that, if I say 85 percent is talent enablement, there's 15 percent left. Where's everybody else? They're hard to find in message enablement, which is what I'm doing now. I had to, that's a whole other. Area of how do you create sales messaging? And especially when you think about the value of cost of companies and communicating value. And then you have pipeline enablement and most sales enablement that do pipeline enablement close to it are really in the technology space, working on outreach or et cetera, top of the funnel type things. They're not full pipeline enablement. And then organizational enablement how many reorgs or mergers have enablement people actually been involved in? I've been, somewhat fortunate to be in the room where we're actually redesigning a, an enablement function during a merger and figuring out the roles and the processes and things like that. And I just don't think there's many people that have done that. That are in the quote unquote sales enablement space They're in other roles and other functions like go to market strategy, teams, commercial organizations They're considered more of the strategists and enablement's, really the tacticians in, talent enablement or sales training.

Yeah. And those percentages are generally the same ballpark. I hear a 70 to 80 percent talent, a 10 to 15 percent message. And then the rest is some combination of demand and administration slash organizational. But a lot of folks go, why are you even bringing that up? That's rev ops. That's sales ops.

That's it. Yeah, I've been in those conversations too. So if you look at, okay let's forget where people sit and let's forget where they report into for a second. And let's just look at headcount and let's just pull them out of an organization and give everybody an index card and throw it on a table and then have the executive team come in and say, okay, which roles do you think is doing sales enablement? That's where things get interesting because without the org chart and that's RevOps or they're over there. That's an internal lens. But when you take a external lens and say who's responsible for really helping salespeople sell, you're going to end up in a really fascinating spot, which is. Let's say you threw out 300 index cards. And there are people that technically sit in marketing. There are people that sit in rev ops. There are people that sit in, go to market teams. And then there's these enablement index cards that are labeled enablement. There's quite a few people. That help sales people sell that leaders would consider quote unquote sales enablement in that definition. So that's the upside of that we envisioned for enablement was to orchestrate all those resources. But I think what's happening is the org chart is getting in the way and our kind of our siloed thinking of who reports into who and. And all that, and it creates this redundancy, right? That's why you're seeing so many layoffs.

So really, Brian, we've covered off on position one from that founding meeting. Enablement is a strategic approach with different flavors aligned to eliminating the friction in each of those parts of the system. Position two is to me what you just described to accomplish the sales enablement needs to be chartered and run as a cross functional business within a business. And what that means to me, and I'd love to hear your take and again, this, is there a remedy, right? Is there a path forward for sales enablement, revenue enablement, and we'll get to that in a minute. As a profession, It might it be to look at it as exactly that a cross functional business within a business. Where not necessarily everyone has a sales enablement title and definitely doesn't directly report but might dotted line and maybe it's to a CRO that has both marketing and sales. I'm seeing more and more of that. And getting some traction talking to CROs who are like, yeah, I love enablement. And my team is in enablement whether they have a label or not. What's your reaction to that? Is that in line with kind of your thoughts and where you were headed?

As a new digital economy function, the silos should be reorganized. By different types of silos and we should be thinking about the value we're creating. Let's not run around and espouse massive reorganizations. Need to happen. If you move beyond that and say where is the value created? How do we do this? There's definitely room to work cross functionally. And absolutely, we should be doing that. And there's a lot of leadership in that when you do that. And there's a lot of influence that you can wield. It's just, do you have the logic? Do you have the structure? Do you have the discipline? Do you have the presence? Do you have the, Sheevaun would say, the gravitas to do that? And that's where I think things could be a lot better. And I think, for example, what I've done is. I put a lot back out to the community, right? Very few people have actually engaged me on the things that I've put out. I know you have, and we built the whole Orchestrate sales site, but if you look at The product market fit, so to speak of this we don't have it, right? So this, in other words, the things that we're talking about on this podcast are not mainstream. We are, we don't have the mass mindshare. Now we have other groups like Sales Enablement Collective which have better product market fit, which is around more tactics and things like that. So there, there is a whole MBA around orchestration and a whole MBA around enablement. And, if you look at that as course material and a profession who's going to participate in that and want to spend the time, that investment. And that's where I've always. Had in the back of my mind that there's a lot of upside and a lot of possibility. But, over the last, 20 years or so it's been a tough pill to swallow that, that folks don't necessarily want to do that. They don't know what they don't know. They're not curious. They don't want to. If they are curious, it's, it creates a lot of friction for them and others internally to get outside of their traditional siloed swim lanes. These are all things that I've gone through and I know it's not comfortable.

yeah, Brian. You know what? I love talking with marketing hat Brian through the lens of message. Now that's where you're sitting in your world view because. When I hear you say, Hey, Erich, there's not a product market fit necessarily for orchestration. There might be a 1 percent if you're lucky right out there that truly want to embrace that and get that MBA. And the reason why maybe some of these more tactical approaches out there are working Is that's more what the market's hungry for. Is me the things that I can do to be relevant to maintain the job Luckily, I think where those two things meet is what you were alluding to earlier help me Show my value, help me show my impact as a function. And I would argue that's the one place where we have some traction. And I do see a future. The more that we're able to get that foundational. Here are the metrics. Here's here is the foundational charter that includes alignment with executive objectives that are all, if you're doing it right, metrics driven where you can see that value and impact and then elevate and hopefully become even more cross functional even if you have to start at talent.

that's right. Absolutely. And there's a way to do that. It's a bit uncomfortable admittedly, because it's outside of traditional roles. It's outside of what everybody else is saying. And that's where you have to have. This forward lean and you have to, think a little bit differently around what is your value and then more importantly who are you helping and who are you serving? And are you trying to be comfortable and do you view your job as, the nine to five or when it comes to serving salespeople, is it really about. What the organization is telling you they want, or is it really trying to find a way to get the organization, what it really needs? And that's two different things. That's sales, right? There's a difference between what people say they want and what they really need. And that's where I scratched my head. Enablers, which I'm I chuckled that word. Hey, I'm enabler. And I'm like, okay, what are you enabling? And I get back to most sales enablers are not in the numbers. They couldn't tell you what the pipeline activity was and all that. They're not able to get into and view the same day-to-Day reports that managers are, some of them don't even have access in Salesforce. And then you get to we're gonna, we're gonna actually, we need to get outside of our comfort zone. We need the business to do things differently. That's called selling. That's sales skills. That's literally selling. That's what salespeople do. So if you're feeling, boxed in, or you feel like you don't have what you need, go sell it. what salespeople do. That's how innovation happens. That's how evolution happens. And, that's where I encourage folks to really step into and try to make things happen and be a salesperson. Get, closer and actually have you done sales training? Have you taken sales training? Have you actually tried to pitch the solutions at your company? Have you tried cold calling and getting a meeting with somebody? A lot of sales enablers haven't done that. They would rather, unfortunately, they would rather should on people, you should do this, you should do that. And we're over here and let's track your adoption of things and let's track how many things you went to. So we can wield that power and feel good that we got people to show up. And, meanwhile, they miss quota, get fired. And, we're wondering why we're. You know what we're going to be eating for dinner at sales kickoff when we show up. There's this disconnect between reality and what the role could be and should be to me. And reconciliation, I think everybody has to do that. That's something that I've certainly had to do.

We're pretty deep into the orchestration thing, which is a rarity for me. So I'm going to go ahead and go and click deeper. And with you and Scott and the concept of this commercial orchestrator. That is truly orchestrating a cross functional business than a business to in my mind, put a bow around this whole thing. I'll just throw out a what if, and I'd love to hear where it lands with you. What if. Sales enablement was modeling what good looks like in how they, interact with the C suite are able to have the gravitas to get that seat at the table in order to think in cross functional alignment. And by the way, in doing all of that through the lens of how do I empower my customer facing frontline to be able to do the same. If I am modeling internally, Hey, I've been able to, I have a seat with our CRO CIO with even the procurement internally, to learn from what, and that's one of the things that Christopher Kingman was talking about, he's Erich, I spent some time internally. Getting the seats at our own table to better understand how we do things as a company, at TransUnion in his case, so that I can turn around and help my enablement team enable our folks how to speak to those folks, and I'm modeling it, and it's like a three for one. To me, Brian, that's the spirit of orchestration, and as the co founder, I'd love to hear through your lens whether or not That, what you were thinking, when you and Scott the ones that came up with this and Scott, I know did a ton of deep and wide research that I still have yet to tap into. So what is orchestration to you and am I on to something there?

Yeah, absolutely. I believe that orchestration is, and being an orchestrator, it's in the continuum of evolving to a digital economy. Businesses are moving from siloed organizations to eventually some sort of, interconnected web Of an ecosystem, right? So if you step way out and say, look, in the late 1800s, we had silos and that's the industrial revolution. Technically, we're in the fourth wave of that, which eventually will become the first wave of this idea of being a digital economy and a digital era. And that's all happened in our lifetimes, it's been exponentially fast you and I are in the age of we didn't even have iPhones growing up and our phones were on the wall.

With a chord!

with a cord! So the exponential speed of that. And if you look at. Why and I know I'm going to get a little, historical, a little zen, but anytime that there's massive advancements like that there's upheaval. So you end up in the space of social unrest, civil unrest, this happened in every age. It's a repeatable pattern. What we're going through. And when you start looking at the repeatable patterns, you're going to see, businesses having to, their laws are not keeping up with what's happening. That's why, back in the industrial revolution, they put kids in factories. Oops, that's a bad idea, right? The laws were not caught up with factories back then. So that's happening now. So the reason why I'm bringing that up is, If you look around at what we're so attached to, whether it's the school systems or the business, systems those, the elements are not, capitalism, the elements are like the idea of how you organize an entity for example, silos. So let's just pick on silos are from the industrial revolution. I think everybody knows that, but, why is it so hard to get rid of them? It's because everything is built around them and you can't even function from a finance perspective to a product launch perspective, et cetera. But if you look at it, we really don't need them. We're all in a hyper connected digital world The work from home thing, et cetera. where technically silos shouldn't matter. Should they? But when you look at fast forward there, there needs to be eventually a way in which we don't have silos and they don't become the organizing structure. Silos are impeding our ability to communicate value. They're impeding our ability to be productive. They're impeding our ability to actually have a coherent conversation internally. There's a massive challenge with silos that everybody looks the other way on because it's part of the the norm. So that's why orchestrators are so darn important,. When you remove the siloed fabric of a company, they become a new glue that brings people together to achieve, the mission to achieve outcomes and objectives to be a catalyst and to make things happen So it's more about the team that gets created on the fly than it is about where you sit. That's why it's valuable and critical for companies to figure out how to do this and orchestrators are the first through the wall.

Orchestration is dead, long live orchestration. And here's where I'm going with that. What if, and this is total blasphemy enablement is not the right place for orchestration. What if it is? The CRO role, like as a, for instance, where what I'm seeing again, a lot of is. Hey, I want to be a CRO through the lens of now I've got sales and marketing reporting into me. I can help them play nice. I can align everything. I can drive the metrics. I'm leaning more maybe rev ops than sales ops and how I'm got a partner in those metrics. Is orchestration maybe where enablement moves into a CRO, CMO, CSO, strategy, officer?

Yeah, I think it's closer to there today. Sales enablement has been recast as the training. Function and the event planners, if you will of the sales org. So I don't see it suddenly. Like you said at the beginning, there's 6 million pages right now. When you hit it what those are about is going to largely be training and "shoulding" on salespeople and telling them what to do. And and it's going to be about sales kickoffs and new hire training and onboarding, et cetera,.

Which is important. It's just not all of it.

And it is, I'm not going to say it's not important. I would just question how valuable it is to, to the company and to the people in it again, I have a very visceral reaction because I've seen salespeople get fired from having, enablement teams. So if you have an enablement team, then why do sales people get fired? And then where's the accountability But I could also say that from marketing, I could say that from messaging enablement, I could say that for sales operations. So what I'm saying is not, I'm not just picking on sales enablement. To me it's everybody that says they try to help sales. And that's why I think the org charts in the way., we have to figure out how to be orchestrators and be more strategic and figure out how to provide services and less about where we sit on the org chart. So I think that's definitely a, path to, to more value. And so there's, a place for orchestration to step up, whether you're from the enablement lens, a CRO, a CMO. It is a gap. It is a strategic gap that can be filled and can thrive.