ISEs3 Ep2: Scott Santucci Pt2 – The Birth of the Sales Enablement Society
Welcome to Inside Sales Enablement, Season three, where we take a leap into the enablement time machine and…
> Take a look back with those who played a part in enablement history.
> Pause in the present and hit on a few modern themes
> And then shift our focus to the future and what it may bring for enablement teams.
Hello and welcome! I’m Erich Starrett. I started out as an ISE “Insider Nation” devotee of Sales Enablement Society founding father Scott, Santucci, and trailblazer Dr. Brian Lambert. I then collaborated with them to build OrchestrateSales.com, the global home for the podcast and related resources for Enablement Orchestrators and sales enablement history.
Why? Well as a sales enablement history nerd with a passion for the continued elevation of the profession. I see it as the Sales Enablement Smithsonian and, more specifically, an opportunity to serve you – the global enablement community.
Together, we will revisit the wisdom of the treasures therein as well as uncover some new ones with a series of special guests, which may even include you.
The foundation of cross-functional and enablement orchestration was established in the three founding principles signed into existence by the hundred-ish fore-founders of the SES back in Palm beach in 2016, for which this week in the studio is the seven year anniversary.
So in celebration after a year of hiatus, we’re knocking the dust off the orchestrate sales.com property.
In the first episode we had Sales Enablement Society founding father Scott Santucci as our special guest, focusing on before the SES and how it almost didn’t even exist.
Today, Scott rejoins me in the orchestrate sales studios, as we land alongside the a hundred-ish, fore-founders in Palm beach, back in November of 2016, where, and when the Sales Enablement Society officially began.  
Transcript
Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you? Your company? Other functions? The market? Find out here. The Inside Sales Enablement Podcast starts now.
Erich Starrett:Hello and welcome to inside sales enablement. Season three, where we take a leap into the enablement time machine and take a look back with those who played a part in enablement history. Pause in the present and hit on a few modern themes, and then shift our focus to the future and what it may bring for enablement teams. Hi, I'm Erich Starrett. And I started out in the inside sales enablement audience, listening to sales enablement society founding father Scott, Santucci, and trailblazer Dr. Brian Lambert, and then collaborated with them to build orchestrates sales.com. The global home for the podcast and related resources for enablement orchestrators and sales enablement history. Why? Well as a sales enablement history nerd with a passion for the continued elevation of the profession. I see it as the sales enablement, Smithsonian, and more specifically, an opportunity to serve you the global enablement community. Together, we will revisit the wisdom of the treasures therein as well as uncover some new ones with a series of special guests, which may even include you. The foundation of cross-functional and enablement orchestration was established in the three founding principles signed into existence by the hundred-ish forefounders of the SES back in Palm beach in 2016, for which this week in the studio is the seven year anniversary. So in celebration after a year of hiatus, we're knocking the dust off the orchestrate sales.com property. In the first episode we had sales enablement society, founding father Scott Santucci as our special guest, focusing on before the SES and how it almost didn't even exist. Today, Scott rejoins me here in the orchestrate sales studios, as we land alongside the a hundred ish, four founders in Palm beach, back in November of 2016, where, and when the sales enablement society officially began. Scott. but let's get in a time machine and head to Palm Beach. So back to the article, thinking through how we keep the organic nature of spreading whatever it is we were doing, but also trying to find a way To have strength in numbers, I was inspired by the Continental Congress the colonies used in 1776 that ultimately led to one of the most unusual documents, the Declaration of Independence. We resolved to have a meeting where we'd invite delegates representing all of the flavors of our community and put it out there on LinkedIn. Given the emergent nature of the role, we decided we're going to Build an organizational model completely in support of our members experience and designed for growth. In other words, we're not going to build silos and go down the path more chosen that's broken. Going back to that point in time, you ended up landing in founding positions. Before I dive into those, anything you'd like to say about the Continental Congress, how that landed in that outcome, and is that what you envisioned from the beginning?
Scott Santucci:Okay, so If we know our history, our founding fathers made the Declaration of Independence, then they fought a very long war, they won their Declaration, they won their independence, they created this government under the Articles of Confederation, and then they created a Constitution. design of how to organize would be more akin to the Constitution. We're not there in that story. We're in the hey, how do we get A group of delegates from different states together and convene to decide whether or not we're going to declare independence and declare independence from who for what. So this is step 1 and all the prerequisites before and why would we even do this in the 1st place? That's not how you do meetings. That's not how you set up groups, so if you go back, I said, okay, I'm willing to put my political capital in my high paying management consulting job with a bunch of other stuffy management consultants to carve out space in this really stuffy thing to get 20 people there. Let's work backwards from that from what that experience needs to look like to make that a good good event. Our goal was to get 20 people there. We're going to double down on the social media lessons learned that I never would have learned if I if Jill Rowley didn't challenge me and we didn't compare notes afterwards. I had to first figure out how to explain this meeting to the management consulting people and see whether or not we could get a room. what would that cost us. How do I prevent it from other partners they're using it to try to pitch, how do we give it that distinction? How do we set up what the things are and how do I help people realize that? Okay, we have to work in a lightweight. Creative way, but these are business people that are going to be really annoyed if we don't, be buttoned down to, how do we balance those particular things? So that got really stressful. But along the way we would put things out and there were two key incidences that I thought were pretty unique between September and November. So people are like what's the agenda? It's I don't know. How am I supposed to know what the agenda is? I don't know yet. You're either going to come or you're not going to come, right? So he says, what does the meeting? And I said, I don't know, Terry. It's going to be this and this, and we're going to cover this and it's going to be this kind of format. I'm going to run it just like the sales and the ones that we did at Forrester. And Okay. I'm in. Okay, cool. And that was from, he was going to fly in from amsterdam. Think of the commitment that guy is taking and the fact that he's doing it and he has to explain why he's going to do it. And he doesn't even have an agenda.
Erich Starrett:I'm having empathy for you thinking, wow, this guy's doing this and I don't know what's going to happen, but you put all the cards on the table. You did not overset expectations, people trusted you and wanted to be a part of that experience. And they made the bet.
Scott Santucci:But I think that the thing is that it's the shared risk. That's important, right? Be aware that some of the people here are flying in and they're taking some risks to anybody who was in that 100 or are involved in that we're taking some degree of risk. there isn't a button down approach. This is brand new. Jen Marie did a lot of work to, organize it. Nicole did a lot of work to support it. Raul did a lot of work. We had a special role for Jen Burns that I'll talk about later. I love her role that she had in that founding meeting. We invited Gerhard see what happens but I think where it really got a lot of momentum, and this is something that maybe you could broker this. Okay. I've begged for years for Bob Britton to just talk about this one little issue. He said, Hey, I like what this is. It's the land of misfit toys and it about it. And what that did is it validated a lot of the things that we're doing. And in that moment he was just being Bob, being designed or engineered or whatever. And the spike that we had in activity was huge. So we went from a situation from, worrying about whether 20 were going to be there to suddenly we've got 40 people who are committed Now I'm having conversations annoying the hell out of the events people at AGI. The room that you were going to give us isn't big enough. Do I have to cap attendance? Then we go from were goal was 20 we get to 40, then we're at 50. We got to change venue again, who's going to get who's going to feed these people, all these expenses and people are getting anxious as hell. What kind of signage do we need to have these? This is the feedback that I'm getting on the On the AGI side, should we escalate it to the management team? Then we get to 75. We had a hundred people show up thE other thing too, is that the conference.. Some people were flying in early that night, Some people were in there for the sales enablement thing. And some people were, we're here for, the AGI thing. And the crowd of people that knew me from Forrester, it was a different vibe than the. Sort of a corporate vibe of a management consulting firm. I'll let you imagine those differences there. Shouting. Hey, Santucci so what happened is that Brian arranged for everybody to meet beforehand for a breakfast beforehand. So people came in, with a really great attitude. And how we ran that meeting was I first gave a presentation, maybe I can find that that was about 20 minutes that just went through, here's the history. And then we had three positions that we took. There's the North star is the VP of productivity. The 2nd, 1, is that we recognize that there's a lot. Of flavors of it, and we need to be inclusive of the flavors, not stomping them out. Is in order to make it work within a, the latticework of a, of an organization, it's got to be set up and managed and run like a business within a business. ANd I think that was by far the most popular topic among among those groups. Zero debate about the definition because since this is a about a vision and a North Star, there's no debate what happens with definitions is they become grounds to exclude people. My turf. This is what it is. Absolutely. And when you debate that all you do is argue. You don't, you don't create consensus that way. So none of that was occurring. It was, this is a position. Do you agree with the position or don't you? Yes or no. And debate it, argue it because we're going to put it on paper and we're going to, we're going to take a position here that the hundred of us are representing all the people who aren't there. So that's how that meeting worked. The first topic was, if we do this, what will our mission be? And then had a draft. For people to react to, I learned from that example that I shared with you about the VPs of sales on one side and the VPs of marketing on the other side. Give somebody something for people to react to rather than a clean white sheet of paper. Each table, I think there are about eight tables there, had to come up with a position for each one of those different parts, and then argue their position or state what their reaction was to that position statement, and then we would say, okay, what about these elements do we agree, and then whichever table had the best one, we sent them out in the room to write it up, Moved on to the next topic. So the format was in each one, it's like a gate. It was a mini agenda within an agenda. Hey, here's the frame of reference. Here's how we got here, then here's the first topic. What would our charter be? I didn't come up with it, the 100 people in the room came up with it.
Erich Starrett:Everyone's DNA was in it. was in it. Yeah. I love it.
Scott Santucci:Yeah. Each table had their like a tournament, right? Each table reacted to it. Each table talked about it. We all agreed. And then then we assigned one table to go write it up. We also had people meeting outside to say,, how would you set up chapters? What would that look like? Daniel was out there cause he already got told he was going to be a chapter leader, but Jill Guardia was there. Carol Sustala was out there. If we did it, what, how would it, how would you make it work? So the main topic were these three positions. So the next position was, Hey what are the flavors? In other words, what's the scope of sales enablement? We had some discussion there we talked about different viewpoints, how we in Virginia were being welcoming of marketing people, product people, anybody who had a hand in driving more sales, anybody we wanted to welcome as part of this discussion, we didn't want to exclude anybody. We didn't want to say one group knows more than the other. And the guy who runs the technology marketing leaders group, Mike lock in front of everybody, one person by himself, and he scolded everybody from being not inclusive of marketers enough. And I'm like, amen, brother. I agree. This is too heavy on sales mechanics or whatever. We're never going to build an inclusive group. If we don't have more tentacles to be inclusive or even the word choices to make people that way. I love that he challenged everybody on that and he was 100 percent right. So what do we do to accommodate these particular views? Is it reasonable that anybody's going to be able to be the VP of sales productivity, which is what the end state goal was. Are we going to be able to promote and elevate the role if we don't have the ability to work among and within an organization? Of the hundred people there, I'd say 40 of them were VP level folks, major corporations. And none of them thought that's doable. You can't make this a function that you wall off so well because You can't connect into the matrix of how big corporations are organized. You have to be a fabric. You can't be a silo. We had some tough times. We had one guy stand up and say. Hey I disagree that we can be the VP of productivity. If we put that out there, I'm going to get fired. That's when I thought Robert Peterson shined the most. He basically said, so you're just going to basically say that all organizations have to be organized the way that they're organized this way forever. That doesn't make sense. You can change your organizational structure. That's in your control, right there. There's the value of having an academic in the room. Because if somebody in a corporate environment won't ever think they can talk that way, but it's ridiculous to think that you can't ever change your organization because you can, it's in your control. And by the way, in that moment, Sheevaun said, I'm going to do that. I want to do that role. That's going to be my role.
Erich Starrett:And she proved it.
Scott Santucci:Yeah. She, and she's proved it right. She said that in that room right there. And another person that really was exciting to me around that space and time was Chris Kingman, and he challenged us all saying, you guys are a bunch of old people. He didn't say it this way. Okay. I'm just paraphrasing.
Erich Starrett:You have creative license, Scott. Go.
Scott Santucci:I do get creative license. But clearly everybody knows if you're listening to us, I'm bragging on him, right? Of course. Yes. But he says, Hey, you guys are a bunch of old people. You're not representing the voices of any millennials. I'm like, damn, you're spot on. He's exactly right. How do we create more room to have those voices heard?
Erich Starrett:What about were there key players that spoke out in the sales enablement is a cross functional problem and to be successful should be run as a business within a business?
Scott Santucci:I talked about Mike challenging everybody you're being exclusive. You're not factoring in marketing. I very much agreed with that. I think after that, the discussion about business within a business had so much energy. Each table had their own spin on it. And each table had their own way of talking about it. That was additive. In group public environments, it gets presented as one way and people debate how that won't work. But what happened in the room was this is a great foundation and on, on this foundation, I can change this out or swap this in, but I can still make the foundation work instead of it's an answer. It's an architecture. And because of this architecture, this allows me to do these kinds of things. And with people with a large span of control is really helpful. So the debate wasn't debate. It was, yeah, and you could do this and we could build this on top of that. And this structure has to be here and you have to bound it this way because of these reasons. It's not a creative debate to let everybody have their own answer. It was because this is a architecture, the boundaries create the things to enable success to happen. If we embrace the constraints of this, it allows us to do way more. If we keep tweaking it and debating it 80 ways to Sunday it's worthless. So I wouldn't say there was any one. It was so collaborative. If anything. I had to be really mindful to to stop the conversations and say, so what do we agree on? What will we publish? Because we still had to write up, the things we agreed on. Then before we go, everybody has to sign this document. So we made this thing in the back that everybody had to sign. And I also had a rule. It must be unanimous. Oh, that's great. Whatever we agree on, we have to document. That's why people in the room went and documented those things. We assembled it together. Then we have to read it out. We have to have a unanimous agreement. But before we do any of that, we have what my favorite role was. I mentioned Jen Burns. Yeah. Jen Burns role the entire time wasn't really to participate. It was to take notes for people who weren't there. Her job was to challenge all of us collectively from the point of view of people like her, in the room. And I, I just think it's a stroke of genius because Jen's a little bit cynical. Anyway, you'd never know it meeting her, but she is, and to give her this kind of cynical role to challenge us and be combative, and she was so great. It's you guys said this and this, what the hell does this mean? And she was, she played the role perfectly and I was like, these are all great points. Do we agree that we're now just speaking our own language? Let's answer her questions. They're legitimate questions. Let's answer them. And it was great because it made things even tighter, which facilitated the, okay, let's go through. Have we been thorough? Did we do this? Did we do that? Did we do this? Do we unanimously agree on these things? And we got unanimous agreement. Great. Now what I'd like you to do is based on that, go sign that document because you guys all did it and that you're assigning this, you're committing yourselves to making this work. And that was the meeting.
Erich Starrett:That's phenomenal. I would love for the museum to have the signed document and the Jen Burns notes, the bad cop notes.
Scott Santucci:But we have some pictures of one of my favorite pictures is Jen's with the microphone sort of challenging us.
Erich Starrett:Scott, what a neat peek into the room where it happened literally. Do you feel like they apply today?
Scott Santucci:We did publish, what the rules were for the meeting and people were expected to read periods. So would I say. That meeting format is applicable today. 100%. Would I say giving people pre reads and having well documented rules before meetings? Absolutely. I think that's important. And the forcing function of saying, we're going to accomplish these things and no one leaves until they're done. I would say having a gated process to follow definitely is something that is is very important. And then you could say, what were the outcomes on the three positions? Are the three positions still valid? I think the point is just like you would critique. Okay. The Declaration of Independence says nothing about how the country is going to be organized. It basically just says, hey, king, it's silly that you have power. We think that power, we think God gives us the power. And we think that the, that a good ruler is at the consent of the governed. And these are the reasons why we think you're a tyrant. And because of that, we break up. That's... That's the gist of what the Declaration of Independence is. When those people signed it, they were committing treason. What happens to you in 1776 is you get drawn and quartered. So by signing it, they're signing their death sentence. These people came to a meeting where thEy didn't know what to expect. Some people from their time, some people made the risk of of doing it, and they signed their names to something they had the courage We created the right environment so that the debate could occur. They argued and they allowed the best ideas to emerge.
Erich Starrett:The formalized. Three positions of the society.
Scott Santucci:This group of people in relation to the topic of sales enablement are saying these are our positions so I would say that the sales enablement society is built on those three positions. Those three possessions are the founding bedrock of what the sales enablement society was built upon. One, you're going to promote and elevate the role with the end destination to be the VP of sales productivity. Two, there are four flavors of sales enablement that have to do with friction points between human resources and sales, marketing and sales. administration and sales and finance and sales. So these friction points exist. The only way those friction points can be resolved is if you look at it through a business process lens, not a departmental level. lens Position number three. The only way to do that. Is if you're building competencies based on running your department as a business within a business said differently, what does it mean? It doesn't mean sales enablement is the head of training. It doesn't mean sales enablement only means this and it excludes that sales enablement isn't defined as a charter department and you declare victory with a budget. No, you have to build a charter, you have to run it as a business within a business, you have to always find more ways of adding value, you have to find more ways of any more money, you have to find more ways of satisfying your constituencies. tHat's the contrast. That's the bedrock of which the sales enablement society was built upon organizational structure, the concept of an experience, all of that comes later. 100 people, 40 of whom were from VP titles in huge companies. 60 from a variety of other subject matter experts that you can go and trace down, who those people were that sales enablement, we take these three positions.
Erich Starrett:What a great legacy, Scott. And one that there's such opportunity to still, it's still so relevant today. What do you see next as the founder and father of the society? And how would you encapsulate all of that? As the walk away this is how we can benefit from it today.
Scott Santucci:oKay. So what I would say is. I'm not really caught up in the founder of sales enablement or anything like that. What I am is focused on solving a business problem. The business problem is this companies B2B companies spend an exorbitant amount of money on sales and marketing. They're not getting the return on that. They focusing more and more on activities and activities and getting further and further focused away from customers. The growth potential for any business is to understand their customers. Understand what their commercial experience is and design their system accordingly. Given that if people were practicing, because I've been practicing each of those foundational principles, what does productivity look like? In order to have that conversation, you have to have lots of debates with operational people and finance people. You can't just immediately just walk up and say, here's a document from Gartner or somebody and says, here's what it looks like. Give me stuff. I believe that there are some great metrics the building off of that idea, I co created with TCB, this concept of commercial ratio. Anybody can adopt commercial ratio. I a hidden cost model to help demonstrate quantifiably, verifiably, and objectively what. sales productivity looks like. It is not subjective. You can debate all you want to about individual sales people or whatever. None of that moves the needle. So in terms of the bucket of what sales productivity looks like there's been a lot of great work that's done around that. We can create space to have those conversations and share what those lessons are. The next bucket I think that people have gotten so focused. On defining a job and a department and who owns what, that the idea that sales is a team sport, if you want caught revenue, that's great. But revenue you have to factor in a lot of accounting factor that in that growth is a team sport is lost. That most people are no, it's about the MQL and sales won't do this and marketing won't do that. None of that is helpful. The basic facts are, is that what you do with your product has a lot to do with sales. What you do with finance and how you measure things and how you set up your organization has a lot to do with sales. How you deploy your Salesforce and how do you simplify what you're doing has a lot to do with sales and the role and responsibilities that you cast and whether or not you have marketing people actually in the trenches doing things, or whether they're just making stuff on the sidelines has a lot to do with sales because, to customers, they can sense the misalignment. 80 ways to Sunday sooner or later. They're going to opt it, opt out if, and they have so many other choices. Then the third bucket would be running as a business within a business. That's not rocket science. Somehow people take it rocket science because they worry about whether they're writing the perfect charter statement or not. Or they worry about all of these things that don't matter and they're not paying attention. They're not right. They're not envisioning it like they're eight years old and setting up their lemonade stand, what matters? What kind of lemonade are you making? Do you have two scoops of sugar in it? Or do you have or do you have people making so many different variations of lemonade, you have no idea how to keep track of your inventory? Do you, do you get the lemonade out to people on time? Do you follow up and feedback with them? Or do you just assume because it was a hundred degrees out and they're going, Oh, thank God for this. That they, they think your lemonade is awesome. Maybe when it's 80 degrees out and no one's there, maybe it was because of other other conditions. So there's all of these basic, simple things that people just ignore that if you're running your group as a business, one of the business, you, you can be not only adding more value to the business, but you can also be identifying functions that aren't adding value to the business and, acquire them. You can actually do hostile takeovers and things like that. There's so many things that you can do if you're running your department as a business with a business. If you're just taking orders from people and saying, I want to report to the head of sales or I want to report here, I want to report there because they get me you put yourself at risk. So I think though the wisdom and the power of those three positions. By staying constantly focused on building out from them is a gigantic opportunity to constantly doing what I observe that's happening is a constant reinvention of, name changes, or we call it this, or we've always called it that and constant disagreement. You get nowhere. You don't look serious to, to, to CEOs. You become on the chopping block for every CFO. And I know these things because I'm having these conversations at the executive levels. So I think that the opportunity really is these are foundations to be built upon. They're not just statements out in the world that hey, people aren't ordering that up. That's not the way you build things. In 1776, nobody thought that a group of 13 colonies were even going to win the war. Let alone be the biggest economic power in the world.
Erich Starrett:And the battle continues seven years later, Scott. Thank you so much for being a catalyst for all of this and for your time today. It's super meaningful to hear you, especially on this anniversary every time I speak with you, I uncover new fascinating tidbits of enablement history that inform such a huge opportunity that still exists today. Three foundational positions. A gift that you and the collective group and the collective wisdom have given the world. Maybe we can frame it up on the way that you and the group. Framed that first experience around exactly that the experience that it's everything there were seven Es of experience. I believe that were the foundation for that first global meeting. That followed up about a year thereafter. Would you consider that to be the key element of that next meeting as the three founding positions were in this inaugural Congress?
Scott Santucci:Yeah, I think just like the country had to figure out they had to fight a war. Let's not just gloss over. Oh, Declaration of Independence. And then there was the Constitution. Along the way, a whole bunch of people who were volunteers. Somehow George Washington to keep everybody together and keep them fighting. Somebody had to provide that, Thomas Paine gave him great things of what they're fighting for. And they did the impossible. Then they had to figure out how to govern themselves. There was a point in time that some of them were willing to accept the king of Germany to run them. They couldn't run themselves. And of course that caused people to just lose their crap. That's what led to the constitution. So it's part of, it's part of like really understanding how things work. And how human nature works. Okay. The declaration that was great. It was a great event. Now, what do you do there and follow up from that? What are all the battles that happened between, that was November 16th. What about the next big event? It's what can this group of sales enablement people accomplish? Can they accomplish growth objectives? Because that's what we set out to do in 2017 is say, okay, given these things, let's prove this group of people can do that. So how do you set up a charter with the whole goal of running yourself like a business within a business, embracing the constraints that were told to us are really empowering, and then setting up an organizational model to achieve growth objectives that no one would sign up for beforehand. The next topic really should be an understanding of why the charter for 2017 was set up the way it was set up because I just fundamentally do not believe people understand or appreciate why the things were done the way they are, how they were set up 100 percent to practice and build upon the foundational things that were set out in that meeting. So I think that's way more important. The principles are secondary. Organizational structures are secondary. The goal is what are we trying to prove here? What's our purpose? What are we trying to do? And we're trying to demonstrate in front of the entire world, we're going to do an experiment just like the United States is a big experiment. It's the way they talked about it, 1776 or whatever. We set ourselves up as a big experiment too. Can a group of people come together and drive a growth agenda? And the answer is yes. That was exceedingly successful based on the specific stated goals that were set out. What was accomplished during what period of time with no money only volunteer resources and part time work, Understanding those mechanics is far more important than what the principles were and everything like that.
Erich Starrett:Got it. So would you call that body of work, then the constitution? And do you feel like you accomplished the constitution or is that still to come?
Scott Santucci:I don't know.
Erich Starrett:Fair answer.
Scott Santucci:what I would say is our founding fathers had the history that there were two things that you had to do in order to get the Constitutional Convention going. One, you had to figure out, did the law exist in the first place and why would you do it? In other words, what is our purpose? If we're going to convene, what purpose do we have? Everybody had an equal vote. So how do you get agreement on what do you want to do in the first place, Step two then is what is the construct that you put together? What is the organizational structure? Our founding fathers, the first part, there was no precedent in history to sort out. But the latter part they used models Like Madison, who had the Virginia Plan that most of it is built on, studied a lot of other, he studied the Roman model, he was very influenced by the Florentine Republic he made some corrections and some adjustments, he talked to his buddy Thomas Jefferson, who's very much anti anybody to where they get the checks and balances. And they argued vehemently to where no one group would have more power than the other. Because they knew that they wouldn't be able to get buy in from everybody else. They had all that precedent. We had precedent from other things to steal from. But the big issue was how do you go from having that meeting to, okay, why should I listen to you and how do you get volunteers to do anything? And then how do you model out the exact problems that you wanna exist to solve in the first place? So what I would say is there's probably two parts. Part A, how do you define how do you move from a state that isn't working to a state that's workable and give it an identity when nobody even knows the vocabulary to talk about it? Just like. How in the world would you come up with a constitution when a constitution didn't exist? And there was no basis on how to do it. And you had 13 colonies acting like their own, they were printing their own money. They were all more or less their own individual countries. How do you get them to agree? That's one problem. The second problem then would be. How do you construct it? I would say those are the two biggest missing pieces that are the most inclusive to the entire sales enablement story.
Erich Starrett:And still being defined and built as we speak. So it sounds like the answer is, we aren't at constitution as of yet.
Scott Santucci:I Would say that the Constitution did exist in 2017. I would say that post that people have chosen to not, if you don't follow the law if you don't set up the adjudication process to evaluate things if you don't put cases in front of the Supreme Court there's the Constitution doesn't work. I would say that's what's happened. THere was a constitution. I don't know what the name changes and things like that, whether any of those things have been changed or whatever, or where we just go to corporate bylaws and think that you can just check checklist corporate bylaws and think that's the same thing. I don't know, but I do know that it's directly related to the concept of running a business within a business. When you set up a business, you don't just do checklists and say, okay, we're a thriving company. I would say categorically, there was a constitution that was followed. There was a power base established that was followed. It did work. It worked exceptionally, exceedingly well. And I would say in my observation it's not being followed, discussed, thought of. It's been ignored. And I think these are the same kinds of problems that prevent sales enablement entities from thriving inside their own companies, it's like a meta problem.
Erich Starrett:And it sounds to me like a meta opportunity, Scott.
Scott Santucci:Correct.
Erich Starrett:For the society to further solidify and regain authority.
Scott Santucci:Yeah. Or it could just be like it could be for just a group of four people that, want to do it. It, it doesn't need to be for the society. Anybody can say, I want to dedicate or learn more about the founding principles. You got to go through the battles and that's what the debate and the cross referencing and the challenging does is it turns an idea into something solid, it transforms an idea into an executable insight. And then when you have stories about how it works, then it becomes real.
Erich Starrett:Scott, I have an "ask." I would like to raise my hand to consolidate all of this. I would love to get those additional pieces of information if you can find them. My ask is the opportunity to present those to you. Let's call it the constitution and to take a look at what would it look like whether it's 4 people or 400 right to reinvigorate what occurred 7 years ago and, get a little bit more of the secret sauce, the things that happened behind the scenes, a lot of which you've shared today, and maybe fill in some of those blanks and have something that can be offered out to the potential "we.". Is that a collaboration you'd be willing to do with me and to share that history and create the opportunity?
Scott Santucci:Sure. I would say that a good idea might be, let's start with from colonies to continent, continental convention to declaration of independence.
Erich Starrett:Okay.
Scott Santucci:Get those things down. You don't know that but you're mixing too many things with the declaration. There's so much there. Saying, here are the foundational elements, these three things. Just because they're three and because they're stated simply doesn't mean they're not super powerful. There's tremendous implication in each one of those three individually and then collectively. Understanding the strategic importance and impact of those things is a really big deal. A big opportunity.
Erich Starrett:You have my curiosity and I'm excited to, I'll say unpack each of the three and join you in that journey.
Scott Santucci:Awesome.
Erich Starrett:Scott, thanks so much for your time again and happy anniversary.
VoiceOverGuy:Thanks for joining us to become an insider and amplify your journey. Please make sure you've subscribed to our show.
Responses