Ep23 Who Is the Customer of Sales Enablement & the Ford Edsel

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 23

Sales enablement leaders work at the intersection of sales leadership, marketing, product, and operations to help engineer and elevate sales conversations. 

As Sales Enablement pros work across these stakeholder groups they often experience very high expectations, leading to challenges and friction if not handled well.

If you are a sales enablement professional, you know there are a lot of people to serve. You also know that they aren’t all your customers, and you can’t treat everyone who wants something the same. So, the question is, how do you parse people out? Who do you listen to?  

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

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. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:34

I’m Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.

Scott Santucci 00:49

Together Brian, I’ve worked in over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives as analyst, consultants, or practitioners. We’ve learned the hard way what works and maybe more importantly, what doesn’t.

Brian Lambert 01:03

That’s right, Scott. And today on this show, what we’re going to discuss everybody is, who is the customer of sales enablement? That’s right. It’s a kind of a Zen question, but who is our customer? And as usual, we’re going to start with a centering story. Give our episode of scene. So, Scott, what do you have for us?

Scott Santucci 01:22

Well, I feel like I’m going in a way, way, way forward machine here with a story that starts in 1958, not 1858, if you’ve been listening to our our show. In 1958, the executives at Ford got pretty much religion on this, this new thing about market research. So, if you’ve been following maybe watch madman and you realize that, you know, the advertising industry was really starting to evolve in the late 50s and early 60s, and that’s actually a true thing. And they started doing market research. And the executives at Ford got this great idea. What if we did market research to design a car? Makes sense, right? So, they surveyed lots of users or lots of cuts or users, that’s a modern term, lots of customers about what they want to see in a car. And they design this car based on this feedback of all these people, they’re going to get massive market share because they made sure that they got every type of person involved from older people, people with families, single single people, people want to have people who wanted to, you know, a family environment, took all that information. And they designed a car for everybody. And they roll it out expecting marriage is going to clean house and dominate market share. You know what the name of that product was?

Brian Lambert 02:57

Was it the Edsel?

Scott Santucci 02:59

It was the Edsel yeah, and the Edsel claim by 1960. By 1960 they pulled it from the shelf. So, it’s just a two-year life cycle, which is not a long time for any kind of car. And they invested so much money that in 1960, they reported a loss of $250 million on that initiative. $250 million. That’s a lot of money isn’t it, Brian.

Brian Lambert 03:29

Well, I’m sure in 1960, it was.

Scott Santucci 03:32

Well, it made a lot of money for today, I mean, losing $250 million. No one’s gonna write that one, write that in a statement. That’s what they’ll give you. Let’s put it in the frame. Let’s frame it out, though. In if that were today, the scope of that failure would have been $2.2 billion dollars, without the headlines that would have on msnbc or what we’d be here to talk about the huge catastrophic failure before?

Brian Lambert 04:02

Hmm. Well, gee, that’s, that’s interesting because they did the research and they probably saw the huge market opportunity, built the car that hit all the customer feedback and had a colossal failure. So that’s interesting. And what do you what do you think? What what why that story with regard to who is our customer?

Scott Santucci 04:28

Yeah, so what is so white right? What does that have to do with anything? The reason it has anything to do with why we’re talking about it and the theme for today sales enablement? Who is your customer? is because when Ford the Ford executives designed the Edsel for everybody, they actually made it for nobody. And that’s really what we’re finding a lot of is a lot of people. There’s a bunch of definitions about what sales enablement is or isn’t. There’s a lot of terminology that people keep debating at the end of the day, if you’re not really clear on who your customers are, and servicing, it doesn’t really matter.

Brian Lambert 05:11

Yeah. So, let me let me pop quiz are our nation, insider nation? Pop quiz. I’ll give you three seconds to answer this question, Who who’s the customer of sales enablement? Let’s answer that question Who is the customer sales enablement? And I’m willing to guess if you’re like most people, you’re probably saying sales, or you’re running down a huge list of people that you talk to or work with. So, you know, Scott, what do you think is that the right way to think about it is the first group that comes to mind are the people you’re working with on a day-to-day basis?

Scott Santucci 05:51

Right, so the words the functions called sales enablement, of course sales is our customer, right?

Brian Lambert 05:57

That’s right

Scott Santucci 06:00

I would beg to differ. Your customer is the person who gives you money.

Brian Lambert 06:05

Period. Yeah, you’re a second. So, okay, so are you so a customer in business is somebody who definitely gives you money, I’ll give you that. Take your wallet out by your ice cream, you’re a customer of that ice cream place. Um, in this case and sales enablement, you’re saying the same thing literally, that’s not that’s not a analog. That’s a, that’s a literal statement.

Scott Santucci 06:31

Your customer is the the person who’s who’s the department or whoever is giving who’s funding your department or funding you if you’re a one man show. If you’re a one-man band, your customer is whoever’s paying your check. Who you serve, may be salespeople. But a salesperson isn’t going to write you a check. They’re not your customers. Your customer is the person who’s giving you the check. So, you have two variables here you have what your customer wants. And then you have the way that you’re going to give them what they want. You service, the Salesforce. So right there you have you might have, you might be at odds with different people. And it’s important to think about why my customer is the person who’s giving me the money, who I serve is people in Salesforce.

Brian Lambert 07:30

Yeah. So, this is good. So, let’s, let’s, let’s kind of pull this out. Right. So, you’ve got two buckets. And let’s just say the whole entire group is, you know, people, and we broke the people into two groups. One is our customer, and that’s who gives us the money. And I think that would be good to understand that because sometimes that money is centralized, and you just given a budget. So, we were probably let’s, let’s make sure we talked about how do we know who that customer is and then the second bucket I’ll just call it stakeholders, you know, CFC stakeholders and customers. And the stakeholder bucket is the folks that we work with marketing, product sales, salespeople, our stakeholders, even, you know, the impacted groups. And I think there’s a lot of impacted groups, it puts us in sales enablement. In a rock between a rock and a hard place. Basically, you have all these, you know, competing inputs, different priorities, different asks from from both groups, stakeholders and customers. And I, I can see where you’re going with this. Because if you lose sight of who’s in what bucket, you may take different types of action. And then sometimes, and I’ve seen this, in the folks that I’ve talked to, sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the most service because they’re the loudest, is that really want to be serving is the person who’s got the loudest opinion?

Scott Santucci 08:52

Does that put you in a spot or where you add the most value?

Brian Lambert 08:55

That’s right. That’s right. So, what do you think about that cost? buckets. stakeholder bucket?

Scott Santucci 09:02

Yeah, let’s go yeah, let’s go through some scenarios. There are, I think we identified three or four classic places where a sales enablement department can report into. Yeah. And let’s, let’s talk through, like, if you report into who you report into is your customer.

Brian Lambert 09:25

Okay, okay. Yeah, so what about, let’s say, marketing, if you report into marketing, that senior VP CMOS, your customer, that who would be the people we serve are the stakeholders that we’re working with?

Scott Santucci 09:44

Right, so if if you are reporting to the CMO, and you’re the head of sales enablement, why do you report there? What is it that he or she wants? He or she wants to be able to improve how the company is delivering messages through the sales channel to be able to be differentiated. So, who do you serve? You serve one, the people who have messaging inside the marketing department to make it more sales accessible. That’s one person you serve. You may even serve the product people to make it more translate translatable. You might be serving product launches and how to get the word out to sales. You also are servicing salespeople. Since your remit in that area probably won’t include training. So, you are servicing information about your products and services and about differentiation. So, you are servicing salespeople by helping them with the information required for a launch where the information to differentiate or some some messaging that’s who you’re servicing and how you’re servicing them.

Brian Lambert 11:04

So, if I’m a sales leader, and I come to you and your reporting in the marketing, I say, you know, hey, you should really take over that sales kickoff, you know, you’re better at it. What would be your answer?

Scott Santucci 11:17

Well, I would say, are you going to give us funding for that?

Brian Lambert 11:22

Right, because it’s out of your scope. Right now.

Scott Santucci 11:24

It well, it’s, it’s that is not a service that my customer is offering that’s outside of the marketing span of control. So, I’d say let’s go talk to our boss. So, I would go talk to my boss, the CMO. And I’d say, look, this is a great opportunity it’s a great platform for us to provide a foundation to deliver lots of messages, we should do this. And they would say that makes a lot of sense that’s great because it’s part of your mission. You’re right. It does give us a better platform. We should do it. Then we got we negotiate and say what do we want for in exchange? So, what are you going to give us? Are you going to give us the budget for it because we’re not going to pay for the whole budget for it? You You already have a budget for sales kickoffs. So, let’s use your budget, let’s use your resources.

Brian Lambert 12:18

Right. So, send us the money plus two people or whatever. Yeah, right.

Scott Santucci 12:22

Yeah. And we’ll, we’ll happily do it.

Brian Lambert 12:25

Okay, let’s go to the next one.

Scott Santucci 12:26

Yep.

Brian Lambert 12:28

Let’s see a sales op. So, if I’m reporting it Ops, I’m a sales leader, a sales enablement leader reporting to ops and I’m probably, you know, working on the kickoff or sales process work, maybe even, you know, forecasting, pipeline reporting, stuff like that.

Scott Santucci 12:48

Okay, so these are again, each of these scenarios by the way, a disclaimer, each of these scenarios are going to be different. We need to make sure you’re clear on what it is that each each one of your customers want. But let’s, let’s say a classic VP of or head of sales operations, if you’re reporting there, they’re probably looking at a bunch of functional capabilities that they need to have they need to possess. So, for example, it is very common that a sales Operations Group is going to look at the functionality of the sales force and what the capabilities are, whether we have the right skills and the right talent to be able to execute the sales model. Okay, so what they’ll say is, you know, what, we need a talent pillar or talent component of that. We call that sales enablement. And I expect you as the sale, they probably won’t say that. They’ll just describe, you know, you know, what we’re looking for, but this is what your job is to do is to make sure it’s clear what’s expected of you. What is the service, what does the customer want, but really what what they’re looking for is probably adoption of the sales methodology that they’ve that they’ve worked on with the VP of sales. So, who am I servicing, I am servicing the I am servicing the sales managers and the sales leadership on first educating them on that sales methodology, how it works, how they can, how they can make it work, and then providing training for that? I might also own very specific tasks, like new hire training, but maybe even managing kickoffs, and we talked about the sales kickoff before I might manage those. So, I could I am servicing the sales force through that lens.

Brian Lambert 14:46

Yeah, and all that is to be to be determined discussions would happen then obviously, that would get documented in the charter and socialized so everybody understands. who your customer is of sales enablement? And then to who you’re servicing and who you’re working with and the stakeholders impacted, including dependencies, I would say like, what are you dependent upon? What do you need from people to pull off your, your services? And what’s that working relationship?

Scott Santucci 15:19

And let me reiterate why this is so important. why it’s so important is because let’s take the sales kickoff, for example. If you are in this role in your report in a sales operation, you’re going to feel obligated to make sure that all the content, all the kickoff stuff is all organized, all well done, etc. So, you’re going to take on a lot more extra work. If you say my job is managing the kickoffs, and you can delineate roles and responsibilities and say, Hey, marketing, you need to get us this material a week before and it needs to be in this format, and we’re going to roleplay how we present it then you spend less work and you’re putting the work on to the people who are plugging into it. Obviously, you can’t say that to your CEO who’s going to show up at the last moment, you know, with their content. But that’s how you manage that by saying this is what my remit is, and this is what my focus is, and my focus is on the head of sales operations.

Brian Lambert 16:20

Cause they’re my primary customer.

Scott Santucci 16:22

They are they are my customer period. Yeah. Now, you’d have to be conscious about who their customers are. Right? Those are yours, they’re secondary, so you know how your services fitting into an overall plan. But especially if you talk to stakeholders that are outside of your, you know, daily remit, they’re going to want to know how it all fits together, so you should be aware of it. But it’s just this intentionality and focus is really important in terms of establishing roles and responsibilities and more importantly, your workload, the quality of work that you provide, and the resources that you get

Brian Lambert 17:00

So where does the VP of Sales fit in these scenarios? If you’re working under marketing and Ops, and those are your customers, what’s the what’s the role of the VP of sales, then the sales leadership?

Scott Santucci 17:13

Well, then the VPS in terms of the CMO, the CMO is the one who should pair up with a relationship with this VP of sales. I might be an account, we might work it out to where I clear the account manager role, you know, a liaison, but I should always have meetings with both of those together. Always. And sort of facilitate it is not my responsibility to build the relationship there. It’s my responsibility to help the VP of Sales beat VP of Marketing have a better relationship there. My job is to make my customer, the hero. If the VP of Marketing is going engaged with the sales leaders, then that’s what needs to be done. If he or she does doesn’t want to work with it with the sales leaders, we didn’t make that clear. It’s our job to make sure that our customers are successful. So that means we might say we you need to participate, let me get you prepared let me give you you know, some of that feedback. You don’t want to be in unnatural spots. Same thing with a with a with the head of sales operations. Here’s the feedback that I’m going to give you. Let’s rehearse beforehand what our messaging is. How are we going to tackle it? What’s my role? What’s your role?

Brian Lambert 18:30

Yeah. So that VP of sales is then what is that a the the beneficiary of the work that you’re doing as a stakeholder it’s not it’s not a customer. Because you’re if you’re the CMO is the customer is the VP of sales, you’re the benefit beneficiary.

Scott Santucci 18:48

I am in service of right so the value that the VP of Sales gets from New Hire training. He’s a that’s the benefit that he gets out of it. Everybody in our organization gets the benefit of the new hire training that I’m doing, say and if I’m reporting to have a sales op, sales ops, the customer is likely the VP of sales. So, we got a different, a different, a different situation to sort out, though I am responsible for providing capabilities that my boss, the VP of operations provides back. Gotcha. It’s important, you know, you know that, so you don’t start thinking that you’re like, the king of everything, and then you get out of alignment with your with your boss. It’s not good.

Brian Lambert 19:39

Right so what

Scott Santucci 19:42

What’s another scenario, where would it what you know, what’s the situation if the VP of sales is?

Brian Lambert 19:47

Yeah, let’s do that. What’s the Yeah, we didn’t, we didn’t marketing we did ops would have been reporting to the VP of sales.

Scott Santucci 19:54

So, by reporting to the VP of sales, what is it that he or she’s looking for, they’re looking for anything that’s going to make, help them make their number. So, under that, under that expanse, there might be, what I would do is I would do a baseline analysis and and understand all the different variables. I wouldn’t just launch in a training, I would say Mr. VP of sales, we’re going to, I know you have some ideas of what we want to accomplish, we’ll tackle some of those short-term goals. But we know that we want to have a strategy moving forward. Maybe we have too many reps. And that’s actually causing us problems. Maybe our biggest problem is in sales quotes. And that’s the primary effects, maybe our primary challenges and the lack of differentiated messaging. We can’t just keep assuming that it’s sales training. Let’s find out where the low hanging fruit is. And then I would do an assessment, because anything that I can do to help him or her meet the overall number and show what what it takes and to pull down short term wins and consequently progressive wins because they’ve got a, you know, very limited window to produce results. They’re going to be open for. Yeah, yeah, like that. So, who do I serve? I serve the Salesforce as a whole. I serve the sales leadership. One way. I serve the managers another way I serve the salespeople another way. Yeah. And I

Brian Lambert 21:35

You would serve the different regions differently as well.

Scott Santucci 21:38

Yeah, these distinctions are really important because we all want to get the attaboys you know, and, you know, we want to be the heroes for the for the salespeople in the trenches, but if we’re not, if that’s not part of our remit, then we’re always going to be in constant conflict. Our our boss is going to say was not really looking for you to be the champion of the salespeople, like the The Lorax of the salespeople, that’s not really what I hired you for, when I hired you for is to help us meet our number.

Brian Lambert 22:10

That’s right. And I accountability of the budget to my, my customer, the CEO. And this is what I signed us up for what are you doing?

Scott Santucci 22:20

Exactly. And we could debate to we’re blue in the face about well, here’s how sales training helps. And here’s how this helps a

Brian Lambert 22:28

The person in the hallway and this is an email I got; they really need that help.

Scott Santucci 22:32

Yeah. And that that might be true. But if you can’t make the overall it might not be the low hanging fruit. Man, you need to be really careful about what it is that you’re doing really intentional what you’re doing and make sure it is valuable to the customer that you’re serving.

Brian Lambert 22:50

Yeah, yeah, I like that because that’s critical and obviously, and we’re in a value-based business and we’re talking about the service Providing we have stakeholders and customers. Right? And quantifying the impact is definitely part of this discussion. And we’ll talk about that, you know, some more in future podcasts. And let’s let’s talk about then how do we figure out what’s what’s going to be the most valuable approach? Like, what, what is value here? What does it mean to be valuable? And I think we have to figure out what these goals and challenges are, what problems are trying to solve, and really focus in on the customer and the audience, those that we were serving the stakeholder groups. And, you know, the key is to ask them, what’s working. And you know, I’ve talked through the last couple of weeks about, you know, what works and what doesn’t. This, this idea of what works is an interesting discussion point, because I think there’s so much out of LinkedIn, and there’s so many things coming in my inbox on what doesn’t work and feedback. We get all the time on what’s broken? or What should we be doing differently, or you have a typo on your website or whatever. You know, these are these are easy items for folks to, to point out. But I find and you and I have talked about this, it’s really hard to get people to talk about what works.

Scott Santucci 24:18

Yeah, it is. And let’s, let’s frame this on a situation, let’s say here’s the scenario, right? The scenario is you have just built a new sales process. Okay, so this is not uncommon, actually it’s very, very, very common with all the sales transformations that are coming into their company companies are investing in a sales process, which is, Hey, this is these are the steps that we know that we’re going to do, and or for how we change the way that we introduce information and our capabilities to our customers. Okay, so let’s define that as a sales process, a methodology of how to do a sales process or how to sell is a methodology. But let’s say we brought out a new sales process, right? We’re going to go through this sequence of events, we’re going to include these these people, blah, blah, blah. So, what’s the service that we provide? We work for the VP of sales. In this case, I’m going to do do something discrete. We work for the head of sales operations. What service do we provide?

Brian Lambert 25:20

Yeah, that’s a good one. Yeah. Because is it is it reporting services? Is it adoption services? Is it training?

Scott Santucci 25:29

it well, and adoption of what? Right? So, let’s say that it’s the adoption of the sales process? Are can we get our sellers to follow the sales process? Right. That is our primary mission. Right. So, we need to figure out then how would we go about doing it?

Brian Lambert 25:53

Yeah, that’s what it does. And that’s a broader view then, which is why I like the stakeholder language because When if that is the the primary goal in the charge provided by the customer, our customer, we want to drive that outcome, we have to think outside our silo pull that off.

Scott Santucci 26:12

Right? Right. So, the first thing is, so I’m going to assume that the sales methodology has been designed. So, the first thing is we need to introduce it to the Salesforce. We might call it training, I would advise us to call it introduction. The reason that I say that is if if our remit is what it is, we want it to be adoption, we need not what happens if you say, training people assume you have that one event, you know that one time that week or that day or whatever, you know, whatever time you’ve been given to cram as much information as possible to make sure that they follow that that sales process and are you gonna bet you’re either there’s 365 days in the year and you take five days out to train on the sales process 360 degree days other. Are you going to bet that that’s going to be adopted because you roll out a training class? I wouldn’t bet on that. So, I’d say we, I’d say, step number one is we’re going to make people aware of this new sales process, and we’re doing it through some introductory courses. Step number two is we’re going to spotlight people who are really using it, you know, find the 20% of the people who are really using it. So, we that’s where we go to what works, who are the people really religious about this process? And let’s get them talking. Step three, we’ll keep asking them more details about specific steps in the sales process that they that they like, and we’re going to share. We’re going to create a sales, podcast, or sales rap session, we’re invite people to hear, hey, here’s specifically how that sales process works to help me get meetings with CIOs or CFOs are whomever the C level target is. And they just have that as a topic because this is what works. And then people will model what works. Then the next thing that you do is say, hey, how do you have how do you handle this objection? They’ve agreed to explore further and then they say, Well, how do you help? So, we have a podcast just on where people who found examples of what works to answer that question. And we keep that focus on what works. And guess what you’re going to find at the end of the year to finally work. It works. That’s right. So, but the challenge then is focusing on what works and coming up with with the language for is important. And I think that that really goes to how we frame our job is to drive adoption at the sales process, really have many tactics available to us. And these are the ways that we’re able to do it.

Brian Lambert 28:55

Yeah, and that’s good and for a lot of reasons that and one that that really pops to mind here is if you take that approach or when you take that approach, it gets you out of the, you know, this is the way it’s always been done. Muscle memory, you know, we’re rolling out a sales methodology. So, let’s do the standard, you know, do our training, put it on the team site, send the email, just like everybody else.

Scott Santucci 29:23

And then complain that salespeople aren’t doing it.

Brian Lambert 29:25

Right. But if you’re like, Okay, what’s what’s the outcome here? We’re going to call it adoption. What do we mean by adoption? And these things, these questions might be, you know, out of out of the norm, but it shouldn’t take, you know, more than a couple hours to define the design point for these things.

Scott Santucci 29:44

I think, yes, I think you’re right. I think we need to be thoughtful because we’re trying to provide value. And we’re trying to provide an enabling capability, the capability that we’re enabling in this case is the sales process if that’s our assignment, so we got to stay focused on that, because the company has invested time, energy, and resource on it. Right? If people are adopting the sales, that’s the sales process and results stink, then you can say there’s something wrong with the sales process, but not the adoption program. Yeah, however, only 20% of the salespeople are following the sales process, guess what you have, it’s going to be perceived that you haven’t done your job. So those are those are, you know, very clear, clear things. Then the next question that you’re going to ask is, it’s pretty easy to measure the, the perceived success of a training program, you can say I had this people go through the course they rated, they rated the course, you know, pretty well. Boom. That’s how we’re gonna evaluate performance. But that’s a metric of number you know, quantity, how many butts in seats and then the Other than other metric is a metric of custom of the people who are taking the course. So that’s going to motivate you to make it as easy and likeable and lightweight as possible. But it doesn’t there’s no correlation to whether or not they’re actually using the sales methodology or not the sales process or not. And that’s what your assignment is your assignment is to drive adoption of a sales methodology not be popular. Right? So, you need to say, here’s how we will measure adoption. And here are here’s why the sales managers are important to that. Then you can say, here’s my sales manager program.

Brian Lambert 31:42

Right? And I think you know, the, the rub on this, that we need to be prepared for is, let’s say, somebody spent three months on the methodology or even longer, and then they’re like, okay, we’re done. So, let’s start training next week. And if you are the, you know, person or function responsible for adoption you got to push back on that you’ve got to learn how to have that conversation that says, look, you know, I know you guys are done with it. I should have probably been involved in the whole entire process here but from an adoption perspective, we can’t start next week. And here’s why here’s the adoption program. You know, and you had to have that conversation and you got to interrupt that inertia. Hopefully, you’ve got the relationships where you’ve been involved in the whole time you spent three months on the adoption plan. Well, they’ve spent three months on, you know, the build, and you’ve given input into that, you know, Mm hmm. So, I think there’s, there’s a reality of, hey, we’ve got the initiative here, time to roll it out, go and you don’t want to be in that spot. Right. So, let’s, let’s talk about how we don’t get in that spot. Let’s talk about, you know, some some underlying themes here. I’ve taken some notes and you and let me give you specific takeaways. First, I would say, you’ve got to understand the purpose of your department. And you must be extremely clear on that purpose. And that includes the customer, and those whom you serve. That’s the first point. The second point here in all of this is, your role must be clearly defined in order to establish and manage expectations. And that’s, that’s in two buckets that we talked about the role of your customer, and the role of the people you serve. And those those people you serve, we call called stakeholders. And that ties back actually to our stakeholder management series in the chicken Hawk episode. And then the third thing I would say is you’ve got to define your services in a way that’s tangible and clear. The services that you’re providing on the behalf of your customer, what you’re funded to do, and then also the impact of those services to the roles you serve. So, Scott, that’s my three things is, you know the purpose of your department, your role must be clear. And then you’ve got to define your services. What do you what do you think of those three?

Scott Santucci 34:09

I love it. I think that let’s add some color to this. So, a lot of people say, Hey, I really don’t need to do that, because it’s clear what’s expected of me because it’s in my job description. That’s not true. Your department is different than your job description. So, the reason that you need to be really, really clear is that the more you understand, what is it that you are looking at accomplishing? You can’t just ask, I need more clarity, I need to know you need to be thoughtful about it and say, okay, the thing that I’m doing is this, the goal is that so why is it that I’m doing this what is the what is the mission? What is the primary purpose? And then that’s who you’re customer you want to make sure it’s clear so that you don’t get micromanaged, you’ll get a lot of tasks involved. You say these are the programs that we’re going to do. The second thing is be really, really, really clear to whom you serve those steps that your, your boss isn’t gonna think through. And the more you can say, look, we have this department here, this is how we activate that group or, look, we have different salespeople sit different types of salespeople, do all of them need the sales methodology training, or the sales process training the example we were using before? Is that what do you mean? Of course they do. So bdrs need that. Maybe we need to modify it for the strategic accounts versus the new businesspeople. Oh, yeah, you’re right. Good point. Good point. And then you could say we can roll it out right now for the new businesspeople. And then we’re going to do a staged rollout to the strategic accounts people and then we’re going to do a modified version to the BDR and then you can say, Here’s sort of our release schedule. And here’s what it looks like, then you are very clear that the value that you’re providing is targeted at each of those roles. So then back to your roles. It’s really important, your role isn’t just your job description, your job description is there, for the most part as a, these are the ways that we’re going to manage your embryos, and you know what’s important. But you should be able to influence over time, each quarter if you have quarterly business reviews in the leg. So, the more you understand what the purpose of your department is, the more you’re going to be able to manage your roles. And then the more you’re going to be able to clearly articulate the roles of your people, and then the roles of your customers. So, you know what, what levers to pull. And that’s why stakeholder management is so critically important. It’s just, it’s really making sure everybody’s getting what they want, which is what the theme of the chicken Hawk episode is. And lastly, you need to define the things that you’re doing in terms services, not tasks, the task is going to invite, you know, lots of detailed things inspection. And then maybe you have done a lot of tasks. I’ve seen many, many, many sales enablement leaders do get a lot of great feedback on training programs that they’ve rolled out and end up getting replaced because the Salesforce as a whole isn’t adopting the sales methodology, the sales process who gets blamed for that? The sales enablement leader. So, think about that in terms of services, which training is a component Oh, but you might have adoption programs, you might have real lightweight things that you can do, like a sales rep forum where people can call in and also includes providing videos and also includes sales, sales, coaching, all those things are under an umbrella service.

Brian Lambert 37:52

So yeah, love it. And I think you know, for our listeners, go back replay that. You’ve got a bit of a checklist there. So, Scott That’s really good. And I know we’re running out of time. So actually, I want to just recap those three. And then let’s take us out. First, make sure you have the purpose of your department very clear. Second, your role has to be clear so that you can manage expectations. And third, define the services that you’re providing. And with that, everybody appreciate your time. As always listen to us on insidese.com send us a note, drop us a line. We’d love to hear your feedback. also continue to provide topics and volunteer we’d like to get more listeners on the show. So, thanks so much. On behalf of Scott, thanks so much for your time, and we’ll see you on the next one. Take care everybody.

Nick Merinkers 38:41

Thanks for joining us. To Become an insider and amplify your journey. Make sure you’ve subscribed to our show. If you have an idea for what Scott and Brian can cover in a future podcast or have a story to share, please email them at engage@insidese.com. You can also connect with him online by going Insidese.com following them on Twitter or sending them a LinkedIn request