Ep18 Manage Up & Across: Deploying SE Technology with Amy Benoit

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 18

In this episode, a listener (Amy) calls into the show to discuss managing disparate workgroups globally. The great thing about Amy is she has a marketing operations background — and considers herself a sales enablement practitioner. Because she has a marketing operations background, she has a broad, yet practical view of what sales enablement deployments look like. 

Her biggest challenge? Managing up. 

As someone who helps sales sell, the experiences Amy has experience in

• “Connecting dots” across a variety of stakeholders including business units, marketing ops, sales ops, sales enablement, and sales leadership

• The idea of “governance” and what it means to ensure the various stakeholders have a say and protect the brand

• The feedback loops using analytics and voice of sales data

• Participation in the governance conversation

• The idea of “taxonomy” and what it can mean to a variety of different stakeholders

• The regional/global view of enrolling others in country

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 00:33

I’m Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I’m Brian Lambert is a sales enablement insider. Our podcast is 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 00:47

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

Brian Lambert 00:59

We like to think our podcast is different, and our listeners are telling us that it’s different. And we use a conversational format to help share the experiences and only people who’ve been there and done that can provide, as we’ve been pushing the envelope in the profession for over a decade. And today, everybody, I’m pretty excited about this episode because we have a very special guest. We have Amy from a large matrix organization. She’s actually in marketing operations. And she’s joining us today in response to our podcasts that we’ve been having on stakeholder management. So hi, Amy, how are you?

Amy Benoit 01:35

I’m well, how are you?

Brian Lambert 01:37

Great. Thanks so much for joining us. I know we had one quick conversation and we’re throwing you on here. But we’ve done two episodes, we did an episode 13 we did a chicken Hawk episode and that, that got quite a lot of buzz on LinkedIn. And then as a follow up to that four episodes later in Episode 17. Scott and I walked through a story that I had around Managing stakeholders and a large fortune 50 company. And you reached out to us based on those two podcasts. And Scott, you know what? I’m bringing her on here today. You haven’t even talked to her. And we’re gonna put you on the spot.

Scott Santucci 02:14

I love it. That’s great. So, you and Amy go way back then, huh?

Brian Lambert 02:20

That’s right. But But she’s part of the insider nation. And we should consider family but she’s coming after you. And I say Here we go. So

Amy Benoit 02:31

nicely.

Brian Lambert 02:32

That’s right here from Pennsylvania here. So so, um, I really appreciate Amy, your background and how you’ve been involved in sales enablement. And one of the things that that was cool to hear from you is how you’re passionate about helping salespeople be successful. But I’d love to hear from you. Why do you want to join us on the on the podcast today?

Amy Benoit 02:56

Well, you know, I listened to that fantastic podcast episode about humble chicken Hawk, and I thought, oh my goodness, this is part of my world, I am tasked with just executing something that is very large and trying to figure out how to collaborate and get that buy in from all of these different stakeholder groups because as chicken Hawk found out, you know, everybody wanted something. And so, I, you know, my heart went pitter patter a little bit because I could totally relate. And then I was so excited that you however many out it was like three or four episodes later, you kind of, you know, you broke it down a little bit more and went into that whole stakeholder management piece because it resonated with me, it’s critically, you know, important in our organization. And I like could really appreciate how the level of effort that went into putting together the plan. And then of course, you have to operate the plan. And some of the trailing points there, as you were leading the discussion was, you know, how do you really more effectively manage up? And I think for me, I was like, Huh, that’s a great question. Because while we and our you know, in our organization are charged with the same, you know, managing down, across and up, I would love to hear your expertise on how do you more effectively manage up.

Scott Santucci 04:35

Excellent. So, what we’re going to do now is we’re going to move into a section of our podcasts. So, if you followed along, this is very much like the conversation, Brian, that we had with Beth, but air quotes, but we’re going to do some speed date consulting. And this is just a conversation between Amy and myself. Brian’s going to pick it up and say what does this mean for Less than or so, Amy, when you talk when we talk about what expertise we have, I need a little bit of information about what it is that you’re trying to manage in the first place. Right. So, what if you could give me a scope of the business problem that and what your remit is? I’d really love to get some context on that.

Amy Benoit 05:20

Sure. So, I am tasked with essentially leading the strategy for our sales enablement portal. And we are a unique organization and that that portal actually sits in our marketing office, you know, our Mar tech stack. So, I’m engaging oh my goodness, every day with sales. You know, that’s, that’s Sales Users, sales leaders, marketing stakeholders, Product Management, legal sales, support and so on. And one of the things that I find challenging is as well I get a lot of people who kind of understand what we have to say in See the value. I also want to, like get to a point where I have more aligned conversations with some of the leadership team. So how can I make sure that we’re embedding some of those valuable metrics and learning points that tie back to our corporate imperative with our leadership team, so that they then you know, it’s never a good point to say, you know, that they’re gonna put a management down style, right? We always want that groundswell of users and people adopting our portal. But I really want to pick your brain and understand how it is best to engage with senior leadership. What are the things that resonate with them and how can they then cascade that information back down to their teams, so there’s a circular loop?

Scott Santucci 07:00

Yeah. So, let’s start there. So, you said something that you’re responsible for the sales enablement portal that’s part of the MAR tech stack. So, I assume you’ve made an investment already.

Amy Benoit 07:13

Absolutely. Yeah. So, we’ve had an investment. We’ve been operating our sales enablement portal for about five years now. And that’s been funded on the marketing side.

Scott Santucci 07:25

So, let’s go back to one of the things that’s really vitally important. So, in terms of in terms of story arc, and I feel at I feel a bit handcuffs since I don’t have a whiteboard. But if whiteboard, what I do is sort of imagine a story arc, right? And the story arc starts with why and then now, so why did the did this investment happen? And that’s really where I want to start off with Because if I understand why, then I get get to now. And then we can start figuring out the different messaging. So, if you can give me what was the business driver that made the investment? And, you know, you don’t need to tell us how much the investment was, but it was it was it significant? Was it little? How many people were involved? How, how much went into that?

Amy Benoit 08:23

Sure. That’s a great question. So, it was a significant investment. And, but I will say, you know, we started more with a proof of concept, and then grew adoption from there. But really, you know, one of our driving factors as to why was, you know, twofold. We really wanted to have a place that was the source of truth for content. And we also really wanted to streamline and kind of shave off that time it takes for sellers to get those resources, kind of you know, get their business. airings and facilitate those conversations with their prospects and clients. So, looking to, you know, reduce the amount of time in process that it would take, you know, for a seller to get that kind of competency and, and direct conversation and also provide a place that people thought of as the source of truth. I will say, you know, we have driven he continued to drive towards, you know, those goals and, and have had success for sure. I think sometimes, you know, where we’re headed now is, you know, other technologies come into play. And we want to continue to kind of point out the value and point out the connectivity between our platforms, that how can we ensure, you know, leadership is really continuing to connect those dots? Yes. So, what I would also imagine to just what you my last context question, before we get into it, I would assume that, so the audience doesn’t know what company you’re in, I know what company are in. So that’s a little unfair. But I would assume that the amount, you have lots of products, you have different sales teams. So, part of the benefit of using an outside provider to provide a technical platform is to help provide, you know, connecting across all of that information. Is that true? So, part of the difficulty or not the difficulty, part of the complexity is that you’ll have each one of your sellers can configure different different products and services together, they can configure different conversations together based on the complexity of the accounts that they’re selling, too. Is that is that accurate? That is accurate. I mean, we do have them very expansive product portfolio. And, you know, being a part of a matrix organization and operating in 17 countries, we do follow some internal structure where we have sales teams obviously aligned by channel but also, you know, teams aligned to industries and capabilities. So, we have a lot of information to manage, and being able to have that central location that not only allows me access but allows us to see what’s being used and allows those who are producing the content to ensure that the most current on brand legal compliant piece of content is accessible, that’s how you know of high importance to us. So there, you know, by nature of where I fit, you know, interacting with all of these things. Different groups, and we’re kind of like sitting at the hub of it, you know, there’s a lot of importance placed on being able to not only streamline the processes, but you know, facilitate best practices as it relates to content. And, you know, provide a through our platform, that level of governance and kind of, you know, taxonomy in the sense of how that content is served up and aligned based on different regions and different industries and capabilities.

Scott Santucci 12:36

Yeah. So let me give a really simple framework here that will help drive our, our conversation. We have a challenge of communicating up, across and below. You’re asking us about up right so we’re going to just concentrate on. So, if you’re following along in the bouncing ball. One of the challenges in order to do that, however, is you can’t Only skewed adjust up. So, what I’m going to talk about here is apparently I am very much focused on on children’s children’s stories. But think about this as the Goldilocks condition, right? We have all the lights goes in the dad’s bed is too big. kid’s head is too small. You know, the middle one is just right. So how do we find the Goldilocks condition about managing information? And how we arrive at that is sometimes we start out too abstract. Because what we want to do is we want to find the simple, but the most basic, simplest design point. And then we can get to detail because we have so many different people who want their thing right now at this moment, and how do you balance between the two? So, what I’ve learned is that when talking with executives, I start with the abstract, the or what might seem too abstract. Which is too simple. So, one way to think about this is a platform like you’ve invested simple or too abstract, is I like to think about this as sort of like cable, a cable set box for sales. This is getting dated, right, I’m gonna have to come up with a different analogy as everybody moves to most digital, the cable set box for sales, where we can provide lots of programming, and that each individual seller can tune into the network programming that’s available for them. And then you can work with all the other content suppliers who have their own shows, or have their own channels, different product, marketers might have their own channels. And of course, like any network, there’s going to be FCC rules associated with things for standards in the like, you have compliance, that chapter factor too, because what, what what decencies in so is that in terms of that model, does that work as a starting point?

Amy Benoit 14:56

Yes, that works. And I’d like where you’re headed. With that, because you know that that’s kind of, you know, what we have driven towards. So, I’m, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how that can be more effective.

Scott Santucci 15:14

Right. So the reason that I share that is typically what happens and this is a story in general, I’m not saying this is the story that’s happening inside your company, but story in general is there’s a lot of momentum to get something like this going, and and each person who funds this because I doubt, maybe the funding got picked up by marketing, but I doubt very seriously marketing was going to advance forward unless they had support from sales, different sales, sales leaders, and I’m sure there was other people that had to chime in on it as well. Maybe it had to get bought in so there’s a lot of cooks in that kitchen, and everybody’s got very specific expectations. And so, you go through that process, and that helps get it started. And then you know, as it goes, On, what happens is people give feedback on maybe the design of the tool. So, if we use our cable set box analogy, we’re going to get feedback on, hey, you’re scrolling bar of how you communicate what what programming is available. Why don’t you modernize it? Or this particular show sucks? fix that. Or I want reporting, I want analytics on how many people are using this or what their clicks are. And can you tell us about you start imagining if you’re a network business, like a cable provider, start imagining all of the different information that you can have. And soon you are just spent time talking about all these deliverables and we’re offside of managing the expectations. Why did we find this uh, this network in the first place? So, what I like to do is kind of go back and always make sure that for the key stakeholders and the way that I like to envision this is that you’re Running a business within a business and the business that you’re running, you’re operating is this network, right? The cable set box, you are the cable provider for your company company x. And as that cable provider, you have a as a business within a business, you have investors. So, who are those investors? And what is it they want? So, I think we need to get back to what what is it that you’re doing that can always add value to say the CMO. And maybe we can identify where the CMO is, are there issues about where we can bring branding in the trenches? Or is it an issue of where we can start communicating differentiation, or we can start seeing better connection points of all the sum total of all marketing, Product Marketing, for example, and the value there not just clicking into each individual click point. So, I’m going to I’m going to pause there. And then let’s think through what are the ongoing value drivers that the CMO wants to provide to the rest of the company? And how does your business within a business help make him or her successful? Because I think if we start there and get really discipline and think about five things, then we can move on to a different stakeholder like a sales leader of a particular, I’m sure you’re organizing verticals, or geographies, or things like that. So yeah, so let’s just concentrate on the CMO since that’s where the budgets happening.

Amy Benoit 18:35

Sure, so definitely, you know, on brand on brand content, compliance content, you know, so so ensuring that content is reviewed and updated within a specified cadence. Being able to support new Product initiatives, that’s another important area. So that we have a way to bring in that information and communicate that out to our users. So, a little bit of a, you know, internal columns perspective. And really, you know, and I guess the other thing that I haven’t mentioned, you know, were under a, some different technology transformations. But you know, our end goal is to eventually connect our sales enablement portal to our Salesforce instance and serve up that content to our seller so that they don’t even have to look for it, you know, in essence, kind of shaving off more of that process time for them to be prepared. So, we we also, you know, carry that on the side of the marketing house. So, you know, that is very important to us from a measuring what works, what’s getting used, what works. That these teams can go back and refine their budget. Yeah, and produce content that resonates.

Scott Santucci 20:08

So, let’s, this is great just to start off with, right. So, you’ve mentioned a variety of different value drivers. We don’t have the time to go into that. But here’s how I’d like you to think about it. So, the CMO, you hit you have two ways to give updates to him or her, right? One way is, hey, I’m getting a lot of complaining about X, Y or Z and we can just start imagining all start rolling our eyes about all the complaints uhm product marketers think that oh my god, I got to do all this tagging. Why can’t I get my beautiful material out directly to the salespeople? I don’t have to do all this process stuff. And then salespeople’s uh, you know, you got so much stuff in here, all of this noise. So how you handle that kind of feedback, customer support feedback, we’ll call it it you know, using business Within a business construct, that’s one thing, if we’re only doing that, the only value that we’re offering is how quickly we’re responding. So, what we also have to do is we have to have a different cadence, and say, here’s how we’re aligning to your goals. And here are some things that we’re learning. So, for example, if you want to be on message that was on brand, how do we create an architecture that says, here’s the master brand for company x, then how does it chunk down into different combinations of what can be sold? Because it’s likely that many marketers or many product people or other content suppliers are operating independent of the brand? So how do we how do we create our content? How do we leverage our content management platform to give the CMO visibility on a compliance to brand or not and then also who that in whom the CEO CEO CMO would need to go talk to, now we’re having a value-added proactive conversation, and you have a lot of that data to be able to demonstrate it? So, you’re taking advantage of the platform information that you’ve got to help the CMO execute better.

Amy Benoit 22:19

Alright, that’s so glorious. And, and I’m, and I’m making a few notes as you’re kind of, you know, covering off on that, and I very much agree. And, you know, I like to think of, you know, we are very much a data organization. So, when we do bring forward, you know, certain and, you know, pain points or whatnot, we do really try to back it up with either the quantitative or the qualitative data. So, using that data to kind of bolster that value added conversation is is definitely definitely resonates. And you talked about, you know, like the different, you know cadence when you speak of that, are you are you speaking of, you know, just making sure that there is a set cadence by which you know, these conversations are taking place, or what can you elaborate on that a bit? A little bit more about that one?

Scott Santucci 23:25

Yeah, so I’m trying to be I’m trying to be simple. So, let’s make sure we capture step number one sort of the value add, right the value. Hey, here’s a value that I can do if on brand is a super big problem, or goal for you. Here’s what I can do. One of the challenges that’s common, it’s not just us, many businesses have this challenge is how do we stay on brand across a giant network of capabilities? Right, it’s a hard problem. And a lot of people don’t don’t to dress. So, part of what you need to do is say, if the reason I started with the metaphor of the cable set box is you lead with that, and you just create some space. Because the urgency is I want data, I want data right now. But you’re going to need to design out what kind of data that you need to look at, you’re gonna need some help to plot out you know what that looks like. To say the first goal here is, and this is a challenge a lot of folks have and engaging with executives is they can get intense. But the intensity doesn’t mean they’re not open to different ideas. They’re intense, because they got a lot of things going on and saying, I’m trying to work on this. We’ve invested in this platform, this gives us a new capability. I think we could do, here’s an idea. All I want you to do is buy into the idea, then I’ll go find people on give you something to react to, then I’ll give you something to react to. And then we’ll put it into data. So that’s that’s, that’s really sort of the steppingstone of why it’s always good in my opinion. To start with a simple concept that you can log into, and then say, alright, here’s where we go from there. Now the second part, then, would you we talked about cadence, what I would consider what you do now, now that you’ve done that mapping, what I would say that you’re in the business now have is one of the things that you’ve added as your product set as business within a business of Amy, is now you’re providing insights to the business, data driven insights. You’re now you know, you can be like a Gartner or Forrester for your own stuff inside your own organization. That’s pretty cool. So, by providing those insights, say, hey, I need to get I need a monthly or whatever update with you to provide these insights on how we’re doing. And then what you what you should always do is, let’s say you get an hour to do that. Maybe carve out 15 minutes and ask what other kinds of insights like that to what you want? Just shut up. Just listen.

Amy Benoit 26:06

Yes. So, I’m listening to what you’re saying. And it’s funny because, you know, we, I think you’ve answered one of the questions that was bubbling up, we do provide the insights and we do provide the monthly insights, but it’s always been and a, you know, whatever email delivery to you hear the insights, but really, it sounds like getting it. And I find this so true. And you can disagree with me by getting people in a room, getting people in a room, sometimes, you gather so much more information on how to move forward and what’s important to them. So really that ability to come together and and maybe if we can’t accomplish it monthly, but having that quarterly like let’s take a little bit of a deeper dive into the insights that we’re providing you and ask you what other insights would be helpful to carry these other conversations forward would be another way for us not only to maintain, you know, just open line of communication, but to continue to get that evolution of, you know, what is the larger enterprise interested in? Because we all have our imperatives, right? You know, we have our imperatives and what we’re working on ties to those. But we know, too that over time, those the shape of those change, would you disagree with that?

Scott Santucci 27:35

Well, there’s there’s two things. So first of all, no, I definitely don’t disagree with what you said. What I do want to highlight is it’s my experience, that when I am engaged as a consultant, when I asked say, somebody like you, oh, we’re providing insights, and then I asked the receiver of the insights are these insights? Well, not really. So, my my question would be, how are you defining what an insight actually is? And I know that sounds deep thinking and everything like that. But it’s really important because the word is used a lot, but is it driven? So, the reason that I concentrated on insights to drive brand in uniformity or clarity or impact or whatever, I really want to make sure that it’s really crystal clear on insights, because you may be providing insights of content consumption or whatever, I don’t know what what insights you’re providing. But if it’s just mapped to insights, for you, the CMO on brand, compliance or usage or even evidence that’s working versus evidence is not working. That that feedback loop of that can tenuous feedback loop is something that’s challenging, because getting that kind of clarity is difficult because you haven’t had this capability before. So, I would really make sure that we’re really fixated on insight. My instinct is, my gut reaction is, if you were providing those kinds of business insights, you would already have a cadence already, because they woud say give me give me updates on that. So, you can be probably providing insights on consumption or insights of use. But are you providing insights on the execution of the brand and how the field is absorbing it or what messages are resonating? Maybe that’s not the kinds of insights you’re providing. So, I think I think really getting crystal clear on what that looks like, is something that might be a good value add. And I know that probably what might be going on your head it’s gonna be going on the head of A lot of other folks, well I don’t have time for that, you know, I’m pulled in all these other different directions. And to me, this is, you know, gets back to business, you know, stakeholder management 101. all stakeholders created equal. The people who fund you, aka the CMO, I think that’s where you said is is your funding. Well, let’s make sure that that person is super, super, super, super, super happy. Because if you get pulled in to make other investments, they’re going to know that you’re going to be able to deliver on it, rather than maintain what are exists already. Does that distinction make sense?

Amy Benoit 30:38

It does. And I like where you’re headed as you were breaking down the insights a bit more. Because you know, you are correct. We have been able to deliver insights, you know, that relate to consumption. You know, basically, you know, what we call like content, freshness or relevancy. But I think that there’s some opportunity how you said about insights on execution, you know, of the brand. And that could be another way that we can reframe how we do some of our quantitative and qualitative, measuring in order in order to bolster those conversations. So that that would give us another way that would resonate on the marketing side of the house. You know, as far as insights and keeping that line of communication open and making sure that we’re providing information that essentially you know, that individual can carry on up, you know, all the way up to the CEO, you know, talk a lot about marketing and I have to say, we do have, you know, a pretty good supportive marketing organization. Of course, I sit in it, so, you know, help me out help me understand on sales leadership side outside of you know, kind of pointing to the streamlining of processes, you know, helping to ease that burden of the seller has to seek information. What are some of the things that really, you know, kind of lock in on making sales leadership out? Oh, I get it. And this is why, you know, we think we should continue to engage with this tool, or we should connect these tools together, we don’t need to go, you know, separate business unit by business unit and seek other sources of technology or whatever it may be, talk to me a little bit about that, because that’s where I’m really kind of yearning for is making sure that what we’re communicating back to them and leaving that line of communication open really is a value.

Scott Santucci 32:53

Right. So, it’s on the bouncing ball along for stakeholder management number one is always want to make sure I’m securing my RB chat or power base right so that’s why I started with marketing that’s where our money’s come right. But now you How do you become a value-added weapon, or you know, whatever value-added resource for the CMO to drive more alignment with with sales leaders. So, what I would do is concentrate on different VPS of sales. So, if you’re like, if you’re like most large companies, one of the most people would want to say, oh, the Salesforce, there’s no such thing as the Salesforce, you have many different sales forces plural. And depending upon how well aligned you might have even multiple sales forces within a geography so for example, it’s not uncommon for a business like yours to say, hey, here are in our price sellers and our enterprise sellers are organized by verticals. So, the first question I want to know if I were you is a the vertical leaders do they all agree on a standard sales method? I want to talk to the sales operations person to the sales operations person’s gonna want that to be the case so that they can do their data, whatever. But the reality from a content standpoint is probably not so much. So how do we go to those different sales leaders and just understand how they see the communications process? And the way that I do this to help help frame frame my frame my head the way that I would have all these conversations, Amy, when I when I do it is and I don’t publish this to them. I have it in the back of my head is there’s only five things that sellers need to do. And no matter what you’re selling, you need to access the right people. So, I think about in terms of the content, the sale, the programming that we have, what do we have information about the stakeholders that that vertical team, maybe a vertical might be automotive right? So, we have an automotive vertical team where we’re selling the breadth of our services to a large, large dealers and things like that. Who are the different cast of characters involved in? Do we have information about it? Do we have one’s the center of truth, that’s one category, then there’s nothing. And then what that might do is that might inform a lot of other things that that sales leaders do, which is whitespace analysis, segment eight, you know, microsegmentation account planning, there’s a lot of ways that the content could be further refined and produced and fit into those other things. And as you start doing your analysis, Amy, every one of those things has their own tool, right you have your own tools for account management, that may or may not be reside within Salesforce. You may have your own tools or own processes about how you do whitespace analysis, etc. So, there is content that exists inside your company, whether it’s in your platform or not that you can organize in such a way. Because the tool that you use is pretty flexible. You can organize it in such a way that it can fit into those parts. And I talked to the head of automotive bc because some sales leaders are really strategic, and they want to concentrate on the the whitespace analysis. Other sales leaders are more tactical. So, they’re wanting to want to know, hey, how does this help us have closed business at the end and value calculators in the like? So, if you can come up with a standard model that helps them provision the content based on sales, realities, common sales, people’s realities, what it does is it helps make it far easier for them to consume the content. And then if it’s far easier for them to consume the content, then then you can have the conversation about do you need all these other tools? So, what you’re what you’re doing is you’re you’re meeting them where they are, and then by taking that Thorn out of their palm they’re going to be a lot more coachable. And then you’re going to be able to share with them. Wow, there’s a whole bunch of other tools that we got, do we really need all this stuff? Or can we handle a lot more of it through this content repository? And I think that your challenge is going to be how do I, and this is something that, you know, in terms of stakeholder management, a key challenge is how do you give things identities internally. And the key identity that you’re going to have to have is the when a salesperson says content, they mean something completely different than a marketer. And having clarity about exactly what that means. The more you can make that clear, the more you can provide those connection points.

Brian Lambert 37:44

And this is Brian, that actually might actually be a good a good follow up podcast topic, what’s what is content?

Scott Santucci 37:52

But also, how to make it clear for sellers, right. Yeah, your timing is great because I was trying to say we need to start wrapping up, But I think we could go on for, you know, four hours. Amy

Brian Lambert 38:03

Yeah, this is great because it’s, it’s a relevant conversation and I like how we are, you know, talking about unpacking the managing up piece and I just wanted to jump back in because I’ve been listening intently and I wanted to, to recap kind of what happened here. And then I’ve got, you know, three key three key takeaways for our listeners. So, you know, that was a lot of content and listeners, you guys can go back and and listen to that and but to summarize what happened here, you know, Amy, Amy came in she’s large matrix organization and her background in marketing operations. You know, we started with a brief conversation about the, the marketing tech stack and the marketing stack and from a bouncy ball perspective, if you follow the, the bouncy ball in the conversation, there was a really robust discussion around what why why was there a need for a platform investment? You know, significant investment over time? It’s a source of truth. And, and now now, where Where’s Amy? And if you look at that journey that Scott, you know, he shared the story arch view, the fundamental fundamental challenge, as Amy articulated it was this idea of connecting the dots. And there’s a lot of complexity there. So, you know, in her role to facilitate best practices, one of the things that she challenged Scott on was this idea of how do we communicate up. And how do we, you know, actually, in this role, provide the right type of visibility and have the right kind of conversation and in that there are some simple concepts. So, you know, you know, Scott shared this idea of, you know, from an executive lens, it’s always better to start with something that’s a little bit too simple or too abstract. And he talked about this, you know, the Goldilocks condition, and how do you get it just right for them at that level and using the concept Have a cable set top box. And that actually was a good metaphor for discussion around, you know, what, what’s the role of the content? What’s the role of the user interface? What’s the role of analytics? And then obviously, what’s the role of, you know, the FCC or governance in that that case? So that was a good conversation. And overall, I’d say, from my perspective, they’re, they’re here, the big three takeaways. One is really to understand and actually spend some time on articulating what business you’re in. And, um, you know, it’s easy to say I think we’re in charge of this platform where we work with these these folks. But what’s the value-added service being provided, and Scott uses the concept of a business within a business, what is the business within a business and in this case, it’s providing set top box conduit to connect the dots. And then also, that obviously there are a lot of moving parts in that including content and then the second big, big, big piece of that is once you understand and can maybe visualize what business you’re in, you have to establish some sort of beachhead up with the executive team, not all stakeholders are alike. And in this case, the chief marketing officer, the CMO is a critical stakeholder. So how do you shift from a reactive message to something proactive? That’s the second thing, establish some sort of power base, if you will, or be Chad with the critical stakeholders top down, not the noisy ones coming bottom up, if you will, making sure that understanding that not all stakeholders are the same. And then once you have that, established that that beachhead established that power base established, then you know stakeholder one on one going across the organization in this case, where we ended up with this idea of reaching out across the aisle so to speak, or across the geographies and regions to the VPS of sales. Provide provide with the set top box capabilities are or the business limited business value add in this case, insight and visibility from the sales leadership perspective. And, you know, I think through all this, you know, Amy, and Scott, what I heard was, you know, stakeholders are people too and all have their own individual goals and objectives. And it’s, it can be easy to save the sales team or the marketing function or the technology. But there are people involved and one of the ways that we can do that is never think about that is to go back. And I think our listeners go back to Episode 10 with the New York City Police Department episode on how to simplify around what sales really needs, what their objectives to drive sales, because because those are universal, and then think through and factor in the people component. So that’s my, that’s my recap. And you know, back to you, Amy, that was a recap for the listeners. What are your reactions to that, to that recap and what’s your take on that and then and then moving forward, you know, what’s thoughts do you have about actioning some of this starts internally?

Amy Benoit 43:01

I thought that was a great recap I you know, for me, I think it is just persistent. Taking a look at the value-added resources that will help that drive that alignment with sales. I mean, we certainly have open lines of communications here. So really kind of maximizing that taking, you know, a step back from some of the the day-to-day tactical work and getting back into those discussions. I you know, it came up at the end and I do agree wholeheartedly. I think this would be a fantastic discussion point for one of your other podcasts, but that deeper dive to really understand what does a salesperson mean by content because, you know, we are speaking, we think we’re speaking the same language sometimes, but you know, when we break it down, it’s almost like a you know, you’re in a marriage right? Is someone saying one thing and the other one’s saying the other thing you think you’re in violent agreement. You’re actually not. So, I think, yeah, unpacking that further in a future discussion would be like, fantastic. And then you know, just for me personally, really going back and you know, we’ve worked with different sales leaders, but going back to some of these different vertical leaders within our organization, and I don’t want to get into the nuts and bolts of how the organization is organized, but really kind of understanding each of their sales methodologies so that we can maybe draw out some commonalities and be able to execute potentially on that first. So really facilitating those discussions, looking for some of the commonalities where we can help serve and using that as a starting point. You certainly can’t accomplish everything, but it is helpful to have a starting point.

Brian Lambert 44:54

Well, we we appreciate you, Amy in the insider nation and you know, bringing this this in and dropping this challenge on the table and definitely consider you part of the family. And hopefully, through this discussion, we’re a little bit part of your virtual team. And we would love to hear the ongoing discussion and be part of that and hear any updates on, on how this is going for you. So, feel free to stay in touch and, and, as always, you know, thank you for your time and to the rest of the insider nation thanks so much for tuning in. If you have a challenge, something specific that you’d like to tackle with Scott, and I feel free to reach out at in engage@inside.com. Also, we’ll see you around. Hopefully you’re going to the sales enablement society conference coming up in October 2019. We’d love to see you there. And then also, you know, from an ongoing perspective, let us know what you think we’re listening and also, if you want to be part of insider nation, not everybody can do it. Give it a try. We’ll see you next time on our next episode. Thanks.

Nick Merinkers 46:03

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 to insidese.com. following them on Twitter or sending them a LinkedIn request.