Ep34 State of SE Panel 2: Sales Experts
Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 34
This is the second panel discussion where leaders dissect the research data points from the State of Sales Enablement study being led by Scott Santucci.
Fielded in March 2020, the study data-set ended up with over 100 responses! There were so many open-ended responses that a “guest analyst” program was created to help sort through the massive amount of data.
In this episode, we enroll the help of sales leadership. Question: What if your sales leadership called you in for an “Account Review” of your sales enablement efforts? How would you answer, and how would you explain your teams ongoing value to the organization, the specific initiatives adding the most value, and the upside potential (forecast) of your sales enablement efforts?
Well, buckle your seat-belt, our special guest analysts cull through 100+ responses and provide their take on the Future of Sales Enablement.
Our guests are:
- Skip Miller, CEO of M3 Learning
- Bob Apollo, CEO of Inflexion Point Strategy Partners
- Steve Crepeau, CEO of True Sales Results
To view the research method, visit https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/research/
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:
Intro 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
I’m Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders.
Scott Santucci 00:40
So hello inside our nation. As you know, our mission here on inside sales enablement is to give you the information you need to be successful in your role. Having been in the space for a long time, we’ve identified where big gaps are and resources for you and we’re bringing them to you As part of this process, we have started doing a variety of COVID response activities. One of them is we had a five part series, leveraging the insights from Dr. Howard Dover, Kuunal Metha, who’s a principal at private equity firm TCD. And then Lindsay Gore, a top sales executive at Microsoft, and her role was to keep us all honest. So that was a great, that was a great series. And coming from that we had a very interesting conversation about what private equity firms are seeing and their frustrations with sales and marketing in general. And then really what the role of sales enablement is that of course, cause Brian and I get to get concerned or curious about what the state of sales enablement is, and we launched a study. The study has a variety of different parts. The first part was doing a survey. So we conducted a survey, our goal was to get 25 responses because our survey was very q&a oriented, open ended text, we wanted to get the words from you of what you’re seeing in your own words. Rather than having you react to what we think the words that you should be reacting to. We wanted to get 24 Films completed forms completed in a week. So of course, we set the goal at 50. And what did you do inside our nation? What did you do? Well, you got to 70 responses in one week. Today, we have over 100 responses. And that wasn’t an easy survey if you took it. And if you’re listening, you’re probably one of the people who did. So that creates a high quality problem. The high quality problem with so much of that information is how the heck are we going to analyze it? And I’ll tell you, there’s a being a former Research Director, one of the things that you want to look for is where you put bias in. And when you have, when you have data, one of the things to look out for is where is the researcher or the analyst bias coming in, and I didn’t want to do that. So I reached out to People who are experts in their fields and ask them for their input. So we’ve gotten a great response from from members of our panelists that we’ll talk about here. But great response from over 25 people who are participating in our guest analyst program. That includes the CEO of seismic and the CEO of sales hood, if you know Eli, and includes SBI. As you know, salesbenchmarkindex is helping us out and given us an input. We’re getting feedback from a variety of different sources that maybe you wouldn’t think would would provide it and it’s amazing how are communities coming together? In order all of this is leading up to if you can go to our website, inside se comm and log in. You can register for our findings meeting that’s going to be on May 19. Do I know what the findings are going to be yet? No, we’re still we’re still analyzing. So I’m feeling a little bit nervous about that. But I think if you guys hype it more and make it more pressure point it’ll be better quality for all of us. So having said that we’re in the stage now where we’re doing panels. And we’re bringing some of the interviews together and we’re looking for common trends in these conversations. Last week, we had we released our panel with sales enablement experts. If you know, Tamra shank, Mike Kunkel and Josie Mashburn. That was a fantastic one. And I’m delighted, just super excited for for this one right here. Now a little bit of a qualifier. One of the things that I’ve learned as a researcher is when you do interviews, you want to make sure that you don’t share your opinions. And these three individuals will say I had more color and the email to send out to them, these three individuals because they’re so skilled at sales pulled me into the conversation and got me model about what I think too. So I’m going to work really, really hard to make sure I don’t put too much of my finger on the scale, but I’m publishing out that these guys are super expert at what they do they have conversations for a living and teach other people how to have valuable conversations. So this is going to be a Trump a Will’s, am I a better researcher? Or are they better conversationalist? We’ll see. So the competition is afoot. Now what I’d love to do right now, we’re going to introduce our panel. So just to remind everybody of our format. I’m going to go through an introductions part, then we have three sections of conversations to go through. And then Brian is going to take over and wrap up and summarize where we found agreement on. So to start off with Skip Miller, Skip is the person that I know the most. So Skip has his own sales, training and productivity consultants, and he’s had it for many, many years. I’ll let him tell you who it is and what they do. But what was interesting is how did I meet Skip? So Skip and I met each other when he was hired at Forrester, while we were building the sales enablement practice to basically provide sales Enabling training to our Salesforce. So that’s a tough spot to be into when you’ve got published research and we don’t really do any things that scripted. And then he’s got his own point of view. And then there’s a lot of questions. Well, should we be listening to skip? And you know, why? What about our research, and it was really great because immediately we aligned on some key points and there was really no problem at all. So that’s one of those things where I don’t know whether it’s more credible for me or more credible for him or we’re both equally insane whatever the case is, that’s how I met skip and I’m super delighted to work on this because I’ve been trying to find a way to work with skip ever since and this is this was a good way to get started. So skip, would you like to introduce yourself to our insider nation?
Skip Miller 06:45
I’m happy to, and it was a pleasure to work at Forrester. We there was record growth and record opportunities there. They were hiring a bunch of great people and, and the organization had some great leaders. So it was it was kind of fun to slip in there and work with you as you were develop. in that system enablement, sales enablement and stuff. So, I mean, that was, you know, 6789 years ago, you know, we still both keep in contact with a number of people from back there. And so if we do this for a living I live in the West Coast Southern California. So a lot of sass companies we do business with, you know, people, you know, small startups like Tableau and zoom and ringcentral and stuff all the way up to big companies like Google and stuff, but we try to do small and medium sized companies and get them when they’re at that point where they’re too big to be small but not big enough to be big and try to get them over that that hundred million dollar hump. So that’s what we do and we have a good time there.
Scott Santucci 07:38
Awesome. So introducing our next panelist is Bob Apollo. Bob Apollo has a also a sales consultant improvement organization called inflection point. And I got to tell you, the first time I saw that name, I always love that maybe it’s because I’ve got a little bit of an engineering me and I just love that concept. But, Bob, I’ve known about for a long time. I’ve seen him post and every time he posts on LinkedIn, it shocks me a bit because like, man, he’s saying it in the exact same language that I’d say it, how does he know the same language that I’ve got? So I was always curious, but I never really had a chance to to engage with them. So finally, we got we got this. And I was like, maybe this is my opportunity to reach out with Bob. And we had our we had our interview, and it was just so delightful to just be so aligned and not even know each other and have different backgrounds. That was I was really engaged and enlightened by that. And I think that that’s something about the power of social media and how you can build connections if you listen and pay attention to people. So with that, Bob wants to share a little bit about yourself and introduce yourself to insider nation.
Bob Apollo 08:47
Sure, and I very much appreciate the insight or the the invite. Thank you, Scott. I equally have followed you for some time. You know, I think you have reputation for being the Godfather or one of the godfathers of the sales enablement movement, although it’s always been a bit of a puzzle to me as to whether that refers to parental or mafia practice anyway.
Scott Santucci 09:14
I think I like the mafia part because that’s cooler.
Bob Apollo 09:17
There we go. So I also run sales effectiveness consultancy. It’s b2b focused. It, uh, I think our sweet spot is typically scale ups, you know, post startup pre corporate, who we’re trying to build something repeatable and truly scalable. And, yeah, I chose the name inflection point because there is probably a bit of the engineer in me, because if I look back at the work we do, it’s probably as much focused on creating systems as it is developing skills. Of course, they’re both important, but systems that guide Practice rather than impose, rigid and inflexible process.
Scott Santucci 10:06
Excellent so then our last one, and the person that I know the least, is Steve Crepeau. So here’s how I got to know Steve. I can’t remember what the post was, or what it what it what it was about. I don’t even remember the topic. But I posted something. And Steve blasted me, just blasted me. And I love people who have strong opinions and can back it up. So I engaged him, and he wasn’t. The other thing that I love are people who have the power of convention to backup if they’re going to bless somebody to tell them why. I think that’s all you can ask for today. And frankly, I take that as a sign of respect, not as something that’s, that’s a jerk. So I love that kind of that kind of dialogue. And it turns out, we actually agree to some hot words I guess or hot terms that that we disagree with or had different ways of saying the same thing. So obviously, I thought this was a great opportunity to highlight how diverse of opinions that we’re looking to bring in. And frankly, I have no idea what Steve’s gonna say on this. And that’s another thing I’m excited about. So Steve, take it away, introduce, introduce yourself, and who you are. Sounds great.
Steve Crepeau 11:24
Brian and Scott, first and foremost, thanks for the invitation to participate in this panel. Let me echo the sentiments of skipping Bob super excited to kind of debate and brainstorm here with with this elite pedal, and perhaps on the Simon cowl of the pedal. I don’t know that I blasted you, Scott, I would refer to it as an animated healthy debate. And you earned a tremendous amount of respect because you defended with great conviction and with facts, your perspective and opinion and I think that’s why we’ve gotten along fabulously for the last four years, but it did start off in under rather auspicious beginnings. I will admit to that. So I don’t know, right? I think it’s great. It’s, by the way, just just just for the record, since this is gonna go out to millions and millions, maybe 10s of millions of people. I never subscribe to the theory of disagreeing with someone or trolling publicly, it’s always I’ll challenge a thought in a private exchange. That’s the only way I do that. So if you remember was through LinkedIn messenger. I think we don’t I think we’ve melted down LinkedIn messenger that Friday night. So in short, I’m Steve crepeau. I’ve been in technology sales the enterprise for 30 plus years as a sales leader, leading sales teams selling technology solutions. I’m the founder and CEO of a company called True sales results. We’re a management consultancy, we focus exclusively much like Bob and Skip we have very similar ideal customer profiles based on what they heard fast growing b2b sales organizations that are looking for ways to improve their performance. So we work with our customers and help help them learn how to engage, influence and sell more effectively to their customers.
Scott Santucci 13:00
Thank you, Steve. So we’re now into our into the body of our show. So we have three questions and their segments. So set the first segment question is, having looked at the survey findings, were a few things that stood out for you. And I’m going to ask skip to answer this question first.
Skip Miller 13:20
Interesting the nature of the survey and having a market research background, I spent years working at data quest and Gartner it was it was interesting on the subjectivity part of it because I’m used to, you know, zero to zero to 10, or a B to really being more objective. So reading through the subjective part was was quite interesting for me, actually seeing what people had to say, not just you know, ranges, which was really, really interesting to see, especially the stock market question and the US sales enablement people if it’s on a rise if it’s on a hold of It’s a decline the different variables of this. So that was interesting.
Scott Santucci 14:04
At some, what did you take away from that?
Skip Miller 14:06
That life is a bell curve, and the top performing sales today, but organizations are doing really well. Most are the middle trying to figure it out and there’s some that suck.
Scott Santucci 14:16
Gotcha okay, Bob, how about you, having looked at the survey findings? What are a few things that stood out for you?
Bob Apollo 14:24
Yeah, very interesting. I think one of the questions that struck me straight away was the sort of variety of responses to the question. If sales enablement, were to write a letter to shareholders, describing how you performed and what you’re going to do next year, what would you say? And there was a tremendous, I think, range of different responses, including some who simply responded. That’s a tough question. You know, I think it’s a question that needs to be answered. I think when I look across the questions generally and the responses, you know, we heard about this idea of being somewhat of a bell curve. I think at least parts of the community are not yet performing as they and others would wish. I think the sort of elements of immaturity, maybe even schizophrenia, in that in the community, almost implying that, you know, they’re still on a bit of the quest for a purpose, and yearning for respect. And that certainly fits in with some of the observations I’ve made of members of the community. There is this bell curve, but many of them are still, I think, struggling to earn the respect that they wish they had.
Scott Santucci 15:51
Steve, how about you? What are the highlights of what you took away from looking at the survey findings?
Steve Crepeau 15:56
So a few things that stood out to me was the coalescence In the freeform comment response around why sales enablement is on the rise, there seem to be a strong consensus that sales is complex and hard and only getting harder, which dictates the need for more effective sales enablement. But what I found interesting is if you compare and contrast the freeform comments around why sales enablement is on the decline, for the most part, those responses are quite diverse and all over the map. I was surprised that not one person said that a target their target customer should be an investor. If sales enablement was a business. I was really surprised that only one person replied that the product function was a competitor to sales enable because in my experience, often Product Marketing and or the Product Management Group metals and interferes with sales enablement. Frequently there’s there’s this inherent power struggle over who who kind of owns enablement, field enablement, and unfortunately, Too often the sales enablement group loses and kind of is relegated to a kind of a junior role. I loved the shareholder question absolutely loved it. It seems that a lot of people really struggled with that question there were there a number of individuals said, I don’t understand this question. I would have to like write a dissertation. So catch up with you later Scott on it. And, but it didn’t surprise me because in my experience, sales enablement, quite frankly, tends to struggle with developing a clear and compelling strategy for the business in the first place. And that results in them committing what I refer to as random acts of enablement. I think a lot of us do, and really being viewed as a tactical strategic function. I would say in closing, my favorite response was a proc was the reply to what question Should we have asked, which was the last question, and the single response that really stood out to me was this question was a shitty interview question. Now, that was my favorite response for two questions for two reasons. One The person actually went on to answer with a question they would have liked to see next that wasn’t. So they contradicted themselves. And the second reason that I love that response is I asked that exact question at the end of every discovery conversation I have. So it’s at least there’s one dissenter a month out there in the audience that those are kind of my key takeaway, Scott.
Scott Santucci 18:20
Awesome. You can’t resist but look for the outliers. Right, Steve?
Steve Crepeau 18:23
Look, gotta love the outliers, those rebels.
Scott Santucci 18:26
Awesome. So with that, so Skip, I’ll go back to you. What did you take away from hearing your peers?
Skip Miller 18:32
Interesting. So the sales enablement folks, right, in my role, being a former VP of sales and stuff and so on, that what they’re supposed to do is enable and you got in Silicon Valley anywhere from 10 to 60% Cost of Goods Sold regarding sales. I mean, the sales teams are expensive, and low performing ones perform poorly and high performing ones perform very well and enablement supposed to enable that resource. To maximize its return. I mean, you look at companies like a zoo who just are on fire, and the products are good product, you know, and Eric’s done a good job there. But that sales team is just on fire. So we know what our sales enablement people doing to not let themselves get beat down by marketing or product marketing. These are people who are supposed to enable that asset to the company to grow farther and not just look at technology to do it. So you know, it’s its leadership, its organization, its technology. So I took away that these people are thirsty, they’re looking for for ways to get better at what they’re doing. And that’s why I think you got such a great response rate on your on your survey.
Scott Santucci 19:45
Interesting insights. Bob, how what were your reactions to your peers?
Bob Apollo 19:50
Yeah, so just picking out the sort of discussion about the role and responsibilities I do think there’s so the clue is in the night. The sales enablement is in the business of doing is to enable the sales process. And I think that sometimes there’s an over emphasis on the technology aspect of it. And there’s no doubt that technology can facilitate sales enablement, and not quite enough on the whole process of what does best practice look like. And to the point that we’ve discussed in previous conversations, actually reaching out to the sales people who are performing well, to try and work out what it is that they’ve managed to master and help repeat and replicate it.
Scott Santucci 20:47
Gotcha. So I’m gonna I’m gonna have a question for all of you guys after this. To get sort of a theme. Steve, what did you hear from your your peers under this under this question, would you take away from skip?
Steve Crepeau 20:59
Well, I think we have We took away very similar insights, we may use slightly different words to describe kind of what the key takeaways and what we found interesting in the in the responses. But But I think, you know, at a 50,000 foot level, it’s clear, I know sales enablement is it it’s an infancy. You know, there’s there’s, there’s this huge opportunity to position themselves as strategic leaders get a seat at the C suite table. But that’s got to be done through execution. And they’re struggling and you see it with all of these sales enablement, forums, where so much time is spent on you know, how do you define sales enablement, and in terms of the conviction and the strategic value that you’re bringing to the organization, you should know that you shouldn’t be defensive about it. There should be no groveling to stand up and lead and I really think this is a tremendous opportunity right now to do that.
Skip Miller 21:53
So I’m gonna jump into Scott real quickly and yeah, go with Steven Bob just said, you know, the latest data that I was seeing says, you know, If you’re not prospecting like crazy for your third quarter, the third quarter funnel is gonna be down the tubes. So everybody, so all the numbers I’m prospecting are up, people are starting to prospect, they don’t like it, they call it outbound. And the response rates are down. So whereas enablement to sit back and take those numbers and sit back and say, Okay, guys, it looks like sales knows they got to fill their funnel, but how they’re going about it, they’re pitching product or their email sock or they’re getting one email every other week and going on prospecting, you know, where’s enablement to kind of help that whole function? These are perfect times for enablement to step up to the plate, and work their way as Steve just said to the C suite, but get a hold of the problems, because I think they missed the ones who can see the forest from the trees here.
Scott Santucci 22:44
Yeah. So I think there’s a theme here that I want to get you guys to react to. I think it’s pretty easy for all of us to understand where we’re coming from. Because I think in general sales people speak in terms of relating to past experiences. Having been on the hot seat, you know what’s like to get yelled at by your customer, I’ve been, you know, having to balance the million things that you got to do today while also making sure you hit the annual number. But there’s not a lot of really great vocabulary for that. So when we try to articulate here’s what I need to get help, whether it be enabled or whatever you want to call it, the people who don’t have that empathy, try to zoom in and put a box around it and say, okay, skip, I get what you’re talking about. You want me to train people to do this thing. Or, Steve, I get it. You want me to give you this kind of product brochure but only have three bullet points on it. Or Bob, I get it, I’m going to produce a really rigid scored carded sales, sales methodology. But because these things don’t weave into how people work, they become almost random acts in upon themselves. Is that fair? Is that what I’m hearing from you guys?
Skip Miller 23:54
I hate to interrupt again. But I’m interested in enablement, doing the pre work taking all the data and saying okay, here are the trends that we see for the second quarter, and the results probably should be three bullet points or this data, the other, let’s all talk about it. But they got to do some of the upfront work to find out, you know, where they should plant the flag rather than just sit back and be reactive?
Bob Apollo 24:13
It seems to me there’s a very important role to identify the patterns, the underlying patterns. Exactly.
Scott Santucci 24:21
So give me more on that. Bob, what is a pattern? Like? How would we make a pattern tangible to people who don’t know what patterns to look for in the first place?
Bob Apollo 24:31
Well, you know, I think one of the things that it’s really useful to focus on in identifying patterns is to try and make a straightforward distinction between activities and outcomes. I think there has been a habit certainly on the marketing side, not sure it’s quite as embedded in sales enablement to measure success in terms of activity levels, but particularly in today’s climate, it’s incredibly important. We think in terms of outcomes. So what do I mean by an outcome? Well, of course, the ultimate outcome is getting an order from the customer that results in revenue. But there’s a bunch of incremental outcomes on that journey that either represent the sales funnel and the pipeline moving forward, or going round in circles, that the sort of patterns I’m particularly interested in, what are the things and who’s doing it that have the effect of achieving better outcomes rather than going around in you know, in circles? And if we understand that, if we seek it out, how can we just find a way to kind of bottling it up making it easy for everybody to do the same thing?
Scott Santucci 25:52
Got it. Thank you. There’s something that you said there about activities versus outcomes. And Steve, I’ll get back to you in a second. Skip. One of the things that we talked about in our interview is, if the sales leadership is maybe overly focused on the quarter, maybe that that myopic lens sales enablement needs to be skipped skating out ahead, a few quarters ahead. It isn’t confronting this. This difference between being activity driven versus outcome driven a key success factor for sales enablement, function.
Skip Miller 26:26
Results equals frequencies and competencies. So doing a lot of good things or a less of bad things equals results or is you know, about outcomes or revenues. So right now, you know, everybody’s so focused on making the second quarter in the sales world. I mean, that’s their job. You know, the third quarter pipelines third quarter funnels, we think are 20 30% down. So what are they doing now to do better in that area is a great question. sales leaders have got to make the quarter and yeah, they shouldn’t be looking at third fourth quarter but is the same An evil man is trying to fight it back to Bob’s point, right? You know, what patterns are out there? What trends are out there that I can actually make sure we’re working on. Now some of the third quarter comes, we’re not all saying surprise.
Bob Apollo 27:13
But you know, to give a couple of examples, you know, let’s say the organization had the discipline to create ideal customer profiles. Almost certainly those ideal customer profiles will have changed in the light of current events.
Skip Miller 27:28
Back to your point, we think sales cycles are being cut in half, because right now, everyone’s getting to the C suite, which we call above the line below the line, but everybody’s getting to the other line buyer. I listened to a call the other day and the CEO goes, this is great, and the salesperson goes super. So let’s do a p OC. I’m sitting there going, what do you do with the seat? So their typical buyers, the beloved, like buyers are waiting to hear what decisions the above the line buyers, the C suites making and if we have access to the C suite, we have to blow up the pattern of past sales cycles and come up with the new norm because the new norm is going to sit back and shoot the old norm in the foot. If you think about
Steve Crepeau 28:11
the fact that sales enablement, really a PeerMark, a paramount part of their charter is to help the sellers understand the customers at a deeper level. And you know, I don’t have to recite the data in terms of how many stakeholders are involved in a complex b2b solution, decision evaluation and technology decision, but it’s up to 10.6, etc. Most sellers have experienced working closely with a handful of stakeholders, that’s their comfort zone. So all these new parties are being brought to the table. They all have their own agendas, their own agendas, their own priorities, their own individual and kind of functional requirements. So what sales enablement really should be doing is focusing on providing frameworks and insights into what makes the customers tick all these different stakeholders. So you can tailor your discovery questions into better discovery, which leads to better sales strategy, which leads to better conversion rates and shorter sales cycles. If you really understand your customers, it’s all about you think about enterprise selling, now selling large ticket technology items to lock fortune 1000 companies, it’s all about establishing trust, and the seller that’s going to win that opportunity is the seller, that wins the trust of that group of stakeholders and ultimately earns access to power through the C suite. And the way to earn trust and establish credibility faster than your competitors is truly demonstrating the customer. two things. Number one, you understand the world much, much more deeper level than the competitors do that are just selling products and features. Secondly, you’re bringing commercial insights to the to the table. Bob talked about it. I love the whole great salespeople sell business outcomes, right? They don’t sell features, they don’t sell products. Those are Don’t feel so services. Those are things that go on a statement of working in a contract. Once you’ve agreed on the solution to the customers problem that delivers that commercial insight that they didn’t know about, that they’re striving for. That’s, that’s what we’re salespeople. If you really focus on arming your sellers, with that knowledge, that depth around the customers, you’re gonna have a lot more successful customer conversations that are taking place today.
Scott Santucci 30:22
Excellent. I’m gonna we’re gonna move on to our next segment. So that we have, we actually get through all this because I think we can see that there’s a lot of pent up insight that our experts want to share. But we need to get, we need to get through this. And I think we’re probably going to invite these guys back for another one of the if they’ll have us. So the next question I’m gonna ask you at first, Bob, the next question is, what was your favorite question in the survey and why? The favorite question?
Bob Apollo 30:53
Well, it’s a simple one, actually, because I think it speaks volumes. That was the one. So who is the customer of sales enablement? I think it was instructive. There were a whole variety of answers in that. And that’s almost basic, isn’t it? You know, if we have to perform a function, if we’ve got a task and objective, who is our customer? for it? I think there was better clarity about that. I suspect some of the other issues that we’ve been discussing, would be resolved.
Scott Santucci 31:31
So you’re hitting on. I love that. I have a saying sales is simple, simple as hard. A lot of people overlook the fundamentals, I think, is what you’re saying. And if we were to be more clear on our fundamentals, maybe a lot of things will sort themselves out
Bob Apollo 31:46
and focus on getting the basic things right. Yeah. You know, perhaps be more tactical than strategic, then we might have aspirations to be strategic, but let’s earn our corn, but really doing the tactical operational performance improvement stuff well.
Scott Santucci 32:08
Excellent. How about you, Steve?
Steve Crepeau 32:11
So I actually I think I cheated and kind of pre answered this in the prior question. But I love the letter to the shareholder question. When I first started selling 300 years ago, coming out of the cave, we were, we were selling the enterprise and literally sold the fortune 1000 and I had to buy one share of stock in each company that was in my territory by sales territory. They’re all fortune 1000 companies, and I had to read the annual report and look for a strategic initiatives. But I always started with the shareholders, the chairman’s or the shareholder. And, you know, it’s usually very concise, but it lays out the strategy.
This is what we’re going to be focused on. And smart sellers, to this day, look at the chairman’s letter to the shareholder and see where is their strategic initiative that we can help genuinely aligned to and support and do it help them do it better and differently than alternative approaches to this. So why like I just I love open ended survey questions because reading the individual responses, it always provide glean insights that you simply will not clean from a multiple choice question answer is laid out in the percentages. So what it what it kind of reinforced and validated to me is that looking at the answers is that the sales enablement function, again, struggles with strategy, and as a result, it’s get stuck at a tactical kind of reactive mode. And obviously, that’s never good.
One of my favorite quotes is from Sun Tzu in his writings captured the art of war. I just love this. if you’ll indulge me the quote goes as follows. A strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. And I think it’s profound but simple and really, what I love about this quote is to be successful. As a sales enablement leader, and as an ex VP of sales, you have to have a good strategy and execute the proper tactics to implement that strategy. So you need a balance of good effective strategy with effective tactics and execution. And that’s when you get sales success.
Scott Santucci 34:17
Awesome. Great, great insight Steve. How about you Skip? What was your favorite question? And why?
Skip Miller 34:23
Well, I think they’re both Bob and Steve said really good stuff there. I mean, tactics without strategy is kind of silly and, and you definitely want to know who your customer is. Outside of the, you know, do you think we’re on decline on hold or an increase? If a sales professional doesn’t know who their customer is, or can’t really sit back and define who their customer is? All the worst going to go for not me, who’s your customer and really get a good definition and clarity around that from all parts of the organization is square one. So I mean, I was I first when I first saw the questions. I was stupid. And then you look at the the responses and you’re like, wow, these people are really torn 17 different ways from from Sunday. So it shows a lot of chaos and confusion is.
Scott Santucci 35:12
And so I didn’t get, which was the stupid question and skip?
Skip Miller 35:18
The ones you thought I should know.
Scott Santucci 35:19
That all of my questions are stupid, obviously. I thought that was more dumb.
Skip Miller 35:25
I thought it was who is your customer? Because you sit there going, that’s an obvious answer. But then you sit there and look at all the answers going, geez, you got to have some leadership and direction here. Let’s go. So that was the one that was crying out for the most help, which was interesting.
Scott Santucci 35:39
So one of the things that I took away so all of you guys are big advocates of being both strategic and tactical, but it’s making sure you pick a few tactics that match to your strategy. Is that Do we agree with that?
Bob Apollo 35:55
Absolutely.
Skip Miller 35:56
Yeah.
Steve Crepeau 35:57
Hundred percent
Bob Apollo 35:58
As my old mentor at HP used to say do a few things well, but you got to do the right things well.
Scott Santucci 36:05
Yep.
Steve Crepeau 36:06
That’s always the trick figuring out which is the right thing.
Scott Santucci 36:09
That’s it. What so what’s interesting is my experience over 10 years of trying to advocate for strategy is met with a lot of hostility by sales enablement, professional saying, Well, I don’t have time for that. I don’t have time for that. I don’t have time for that.
So how would you How would you basically the point is, maybe skip being in the role of a head of sales is very frustrated with something. Skip talks to me as a sales enablement person, professional in a animated frustrated state like all of us in sales have done before. And then I think that’s the is the sales enablement, professional think these are the 10 commandments coming right from right from skip. And if I don’t do these things right now I’m going to get fired. So I’m just in this tactic Storm so therefore I can’t even I’m not allowed to be strategic is is more the zone that I get? Do you guys get those get that feeling or understand this this this gap between being too tactical versus too strategic and let’s let’s bring some color into that because I think it is a critical problem universally all of you guys saying we need to be strategic and pick the right tactics yet the overwhelming majority of sales enablement people in the community reject strategy.
Bob Apollo 37:31
Yeah, and I think what ends up happening is they sort of apply elastic plus when a surgical procedures actually required and get stuck in that loop.
Steve Crepeau 37:41
I’ve been on both sides of the table in that exact uncomfortable conversation, you’re referring to Scott, where I’ve been the VP of sales, and then I’ve been a sales manager consultant trying to help facilitate one function trying to help that chief revenue officer improve selling performance. And I think the key to That blended strategy and tactics that we’re talking about. I think there’s complete alignment amongst all of us is that this is where there’s an opportunity for a strong sales leader to shine. And by that, I mean, they manage up well. Yeah.
So you know, the VP of sales is frustrated because they’re getting slammed by the CEO and the board because they didn’t make the numbers. Not enough reps are hitting quota is taking too long to ramp up new reps. You know, we know all the pain points. We know the leavers that VPS of sales are constantly frustrated and thinking about how can we do better? How can we materially move the sales needle to the right, and so what I see a strong sales enablement leader capable of doing is managing up.
In other words, kind of talking down the chief revenue officer with confidence and calming them down in terms of look, let’s let’s let’s pick one strategic thing per quarter that we’re going to work on. And let’s start with what we think will improve sales performance the most is that discovery in the sermon as Skip said, with the COVID-19 maybe we need Have an all hands on deck short term strategy around how we’re going to create pipeline because we’ve got a big gap there, right? So So pick one thing per quarter. If you think about it, think about the the anachronistic sales kickoff meeting where we get everybody together in a central location to Vegas, etc, that may have come to a crashing halt. We may be doing zoom sales kickoff for the rest of our respective sales skills. But think about a sales kickoff how much money these companies are investing. And what I see happen all the time, that’s a mistake is they try to throw in the train and train on everything the product that everybody gets.
What happens is there’s just way too much data thrown at the sellers. You know, everything blurs, they don’t remember a thing instead of saying what’s the one thing we want them to learn for this year, that’s going to help us sell better and more effectively that we have ever and so I think it’s that focus and kind of managing up where strong sales enablement leaders are masterful and intuitive at kind of letting the VP of Sales kind of believe that that was his or her strategy at the end of the day, not not me telling you what you should do.
Bob Apollo 40:10
I tell you, having observed a few really good leaders in similar positions, that is such a fundamentally important quality, that ability to, to manage up and I think if I think about then communicating down or across to the sales organization, just to pick up on something there. You know, our role is to simplify the sales people’s lives not to overwhelm them. Again, it comes back to doing the few right things well with the support of the management.
Skip Miller 40:45
And to use it you both set it right to what outcome so in the fourth quarter, what’s the outcome the team needs, you know, don’t don’t work on tech. Every year we go on a vacation and he really got to go hiking or go bicycling or Gotta go do something. So I don’t know if I should train on the bike if I should train, you’re walking hills and mountains. I mean, let’s figure out what the outcome you want is, then I know how to train it. Unless you guys have the sales data and the sales leaders agree on what’s the outcome we want not just make the revenue, what are the things that are going to cause us to make the revenue based upon all this new stuff that’s happening? less access to power, no more face to face calls, you can’t really prospect at conferences anymore. With all these new things, what’s the outcome we want? Then? I can figure out tax.
Bob Apollo 41:33
Yeah, by the way, outcome plus a real awareness of what the obstacles are, that stand in the way of that outcome.
Skip Miller 41:40
And we’re still learning those because three months ago, two months ago, you’re still making face to face calls and flying all over the globe. So, you know, quick, quick actions to your I just said the other day I said, you know, make a decision. You know, if you’re 80%, right, take the 20% you’re not right, get 80% on that, but just don’t sit around. To say, let’s make a decision on that, like next week. You can’t wait for next week.
Scott Santucci 42:04
This is great. This could be a whole nother podcast and upon itself. One last or last question. Actually, I throw something out there. There’s this term that I’ve used a co created with some of my clients, and I want to see if you guys react to it. It’s a discipline called stratecution. You have to be both. You can’t be just a strategy hat and you can’t just be an execution hat. Is that corny?. Does that work for you guys? Or does that help describe what we talked about? What do you think?
Skip Miller 42:32
Corny corny.
Scott Santucci 42:34
Skip says corny.
Steve Crepeau 42:37
Skip, candidly, it’s corny, but I’ll accept it because it does work with what we’re talking about. So that’s true. In lieu of a better a better phrase, I’m okay with it.
Skip Miller 42:50
He already gave me a black and white just a corny or not you elaborate. So thank you.
Steve Crepeau 42:55
You’re most welcome, sir.
Bob Apollo 42:58
Yeah, I mean, it does want it It’s it says what it does, you know, doesn’t it? And it is corny.
Steve Crepeau 43:07
Come up with a new one, Scott.
Scott Santucci 43:08
I guess I guess my threshold for recording this is way higher than y’all will move on and Scott’s gonna reflect on that he’s gonna have a couple of drinks tonight look in the mirror and go keys. What have I done with? Okay, last question, and this is the doozy. And Steve, you get to answer it first. What do you see is the future of sales enablement from here?
Steve Crepeau 43:32
Okay. I’m going to use a dreaded dreaded term. I’m extremely bullish on the opportunity for the future of sales enablement to aspire to and actually achieve that C suite strategic level perception within the business. Now it’s the opportunity so what is sales enablement, in my not so humble opinion need to do to take advantage of this opportunity? I go back to some of the wonderful research from CSO insights. That I’ve been following since I know one of the co founders quite well very trailer.
He actually trained me on solution selling training. I won’t give the year because Barry will be mad at me if he listens to this podcast, but I’ve been participating all their studies. I think they’re the Platinum standards on camera was great last week. But what I would say is, you know, when you looked at the global b2b sales talent study, that CSO insights did the thing that just struck me square in the eyes as a longtime sales leader, you know, sales enablement consultant is only 16% of the leaders survey. were confident that they had the talent on their existing sales team to be successful make their numbers, this was pre COVID-19 only 16%. So that means 84% of the sales leaders out there, don’t believe they have the sales talent to be successful put up the numbers that they’re tasked with producing as a chief revenue officer VP of sales.
So what I suggest to you is Unfortunately, there’s going to be a glut of sales talent and sales, leadership talent, the likes of which I will have never seen in my 30 plus year career. I really view this as kind of a once in a career tsunami. The question that I challenge sales leaders and sales enablement leaders is, are you going to exploit this opportunity with this glut of talent that will be available, looking for new opportunities, and be strategic, you know, reveal yourself as being strategic by retooling and upgrading your existing sales team? So that questions asked from you next year, you say, we’re 86% confident that we have the right sales talent on board to be successful.
So that’s my long winded over caffeinated answer, but it’s something that I’m very passionate about because, you know, you have a certain percentage of sales leaders and sales enablement leaders, unfortunately, that had that bunker mentality because what’s happening out there right now they’re, they’re, they’re paralyzed, you know, it’s freeze everything do nothing. Well, the strategic leaders are going to see this is a once in a career opportunity. And they’re gonna they know there’s going to be great. They can upgrade their sales leadership, they can upgrade their sales reps, they can invest in their sales middle class with better sales enablement content and training so they can sell more effectively. That’s my over caffeinated spiel.
Scott Santucci 46:16
Gotcha. So I’m going to, and I’m going to do this for all of you guys, because I want you to be able to just say what’s on your gut instinct, and then I’ll replay back what I heard, give us a headline, what I heard from Steve is, I see a tremendous opportunity to modernize our approach to talent, that the way that we’ve done it in the past, needs modernization for what you know, for lack of a better word, and we need to rethink how we go about doing it. Whoever can come up with that. Combination of strategies and tactics to be able to do it is going to position companies or their their customers are their clients into a part where they can be competitive, competitive differentiation.
Steve Crepeau 47:00
That was articulated better than and more eloquently than I did. But that’s exactly that’s exactly what I was trying to say. Yep.
Scott Santucci 47:07
Well, that’s, that’s my job. You guys give me the insight and I just spit it back out. That’s all I do. That’s my value added life. Okay, perfect. So the next person who gets to give us their view of the crystal ball, skip dust off your crystal ball here, plop it out here and tell us what you see. What do you see the future sales going from here?
Skip Miller 47:26
echo Steve, right. I know very generous with the csma ca stuff and so on. If I’m only happy with 1516 whatever percent of my sales team, what do you do fire the 84% You’re an idiot. I mean, you can train them well, if you’ve got that big big bell curve of people that get it organized. You give them their marching orders, you didn’t train them, you didn’t put them on a mission you didn’t teach them listening skills and and and you know sales cycle control skills. And then you know, shoot the sales leader. You know, the sales enablement people should sit back and Say the bell curve is our job to flatten out so that we can get more people that we feel confident can do the right thing.
Do you have a sales process? Does everybody follow it? Or is it just a wall chart? I mean, the sales enablement, you just can’t sit back and say I got 60% natural sellers and the rest of the parable, you know, what’s the organization do it and I think sales enablement takes the lead on that it says, Listen, guys, listen, you know, you’re not going to do onboarding in three days, okay? It’s not going to happen. So we got to, it’s going to be a battle between the two to make sure that the outcomes where the business is we’ve got 86% of people, right. So sales, it was gonna take the short term and the long term lead here, not just because if I ran across a sales leader is that I already have 60% of my sales people that are already good. I’d find the sales leader. The only people should be that little Canary on the on the shoulder, but also the voice of where we got to go as well. So that’s where I think it’s gone. Gotcha grid notches by Oh, here’s the latest coolest technology to give us data. We can feed Salesforce, and then we don’t know what to do with it because that’s when I looked in the rearview mirror anyway.
Scott Santucci 49:05
Alright, so let me try to put words in your mouth that outward doesn’t fit. Okay, so yep. So, according the world, according to scamp, is that the future of sales enablement is to be analytic and productivity driven. The business value that they offer to sales leaders is managing that bell shaped curve. The manufacturer, the ongoing manufacturer of more productive talent in order to drive sales outcomes.
Skip Miller 49:37
Sales is such a huge expense to the business line. Somebody’s got to maximize you just keep keep throwing money away, so yes, exactly right Scott.
Scott Santucci 49:44
Awesome. Okay. So, the last one, you’re our anchorman our man from across the pond, Bab Apollo, close us out here, bring out your crystal ball and tell us what you see is the Future sales enablement?
Bob Apollo 50:01
Well, I want to build on what we’ve just heard, because if it is true, and it seems to be true, that many organizations have something of a sort of 8020 balance between really competent performers and the rest, I think one of sales enablement, greatest contributions can be to work out how to move the middle, I think in most sales organizations to pick up the bell curve point, there’s a small percentage 10 20%, who are outstanding salespeople, I actually believe it’s not just raw talent. I think some of those top performers, at least from my experience, are simply good learners. They work out what works and do more of it. They work out what doesn’t work, and do less of it. And I think sales enablement, I’ve got a terrific opportunity to engage in understanding what the replica Couple positive behaviors of the top performers are and find ways of progressively introducing the middle the mass middle of the sales organization, to tactics, strategies, knowledge, you know, enablement that will allow that middle of the organization to move towards the right of the bell curve. But it requires a genuine curiosity into understanding. So what is it that makes the top performers tick? Where are the things that are replicable, as opposed to just raw talent?
Skip Miller 51:41
And how can you take your eight players and make them a plus too? I mean, that’s the huge gem in the gem in the diamond field.
Bob Apollo 51:47
Well, actually, I think if you do work out those patterns, there does seem to be an effect that the A players can get even better because some of what you’re doing is to eliminate the obstacles that are you know, they’ve managed To work around, but if you could take those obstacles away completely, they’d be even better.
Steve Crepeau 52:06
First, just just respond to that. I concur 1,000% of what you just said, I call it investing in the sales middle class. And that is where you can truly move sales needle to the right, the fastest and the most profound. There’s some studies out there, again, around complex b2b sales. And they said, Good coaching, good training. For the top 15% of your performance, you’ll only improve performance by about because they’re already great at what they do. To your point. They’re naturally curious to what I call perpetual students of the game. They’re great learners, right?
And they never satiate that thirst and quest for more knowledge about how to sell more effectively and obviously how to maximize their commissions. That’s what makes them great, great coaching, great training. If anything, we’re going to try to kind of capture their tribal knowledge and propagate that should have that with with the with the but the bottom 50% interestingly enough of your sales performers Great training, good coaching only moves the needle somewhere between three to 5%. That’s a personnel issue, right? But here’s this beautiful thing called that middle 60%. Right? If you think of the sheer numbers, the quota involved, but good coaching, good training can do when you focus on that middle class truly focus and and and commit to helping them get better at selling, you can move the needle as high as 20 to 22%. So it makes a material difference in your performance.
Bob Apollo 53:31
Imagine if sales enablement, so part of their role as first level sales management enablement, you know, the coaching skills, the the disciplines, the tactics and techniques that would equip them to do that sort of coaching. I mean, that feels to me like it moves the needle as well.
Skip Miller 53:49
Good organizations that I’ve been associated with their sales enablement people, they have a number of them that came from first line manager or not coming into enablement so fully agree fully agree.
Scott Santucci 54:00
Okay, so thanks a lot guys, you’ve made my job of summarizing Bob statements almost impossible. So I’m gonna really try. I’m gonna try to do that. So let’s just recap how difficult the summation is. Not only did Bob not give us just his opinion, he summarized, Skip and Steve’s, then you guys had a group conversation. So I’m going to try to get back to.
Skip Miller 54:25
So what do we need you for?
Scott Santucci 54:27
Exactly. Unfortunately, my audience needs to have that wrapped up in summarize, so that’s that’s it’s not this isn’t about you skip. This is about everybody else. So any rate? All kidding aside, everybody knows we’re all joking here. I think you can tell by the tone. So I think here’s what I’m hearing you say Bob, what I’m hearing you say is that the future of sales enablement is a function that really concentrates on optimizing the system creating balance by concentrating on you knows, I think we’ve established that that bell shaped curve, doing analysis and finding the few things that have the biggest impact at that at that moment in time.
Bob Apollo 55:11
I have long believed that a systems approach a systems thinking approach is incredibly helpful in this sort of role. Absolutely.
Scott Santucci 55:20
So you agree?
Bob Apollo 55:22
I’d be foolish not to.
Scott Santucci 55:29
That’s funny. All right. So with that, I’m going to turn the call over for for our clarifications part with Dr. Brian Lambert, Mr. Lambert, tell, ask our clarifications and summarize each of the sections please.
Brian Lambert 55:45
Yeah, sure, guys, this has been fun to listen to. And I don’t know about you listeners. There’s this is a this is definitely chock full of information. So I’m not going to add any analysis to this share my opinion, what I’m going to do is really summarize what I’ve heard. And I’m trying to get it into three. And if you saw my notes right now, you would not be able to decipher them. But I do believe I have three themes that I’ll get skip and Bob and Steve to weigh in on. I don’t need any further clarification. But what strikes me here and this is where I’d like to get some thoughts. You guys are all very hard wired in the sales space, and you’ve been sales people, sales managers, sales enablement, consultants selling, selling is in your DNA.
And what I when I’m looking back at my notes and what I’m feeling like leaving this meeting is I really just witnessed and participated in an account review and a sales strategy discussion for for top account, so to speak, you know, it started out with theme one, where you know, Scott asked, you know, what was your favorite questions, etc. But if you listen, listen to what you guys say. I would summarize it as that there really was the account review. You talked in terms of who’s winning, who’s losing? How do we move the curve? How do we get to our shareholders? How do we do our opportunity planning, focusing on the message? We look for outliers, discovery questions or critical things like that. And it fundamentally came down to what are you selling? What’s your approach? What are you selling? And that was really theme.
One is that enablement needs to do the pre work that enablement is, is sales and really understanding what you’re selling and, and treating your internal organization as an account. What you guys just did was, for our listeners, you did the account review on the first half of this and you started asking questions that sales enablement, leaders, if they’re the reps need to be thinking about and you ask some tough questions like What are you selling and who are your shareholders and do the pre existing work do you really Research and you know what build trust. That’s what you guys talked about is you’ve got to build trust and bring insights to your sales leadership team. So how are you going to do that? And if you guys were doing that account review on sales enablement leaders right now, you know, how would they answer that. And that’s the coaching that you guys gave in the first part of this to me, and so then let me go to give you the second theme here and show it in that spirit or that that vein of you doing the account review on sales enablement, leaders, you basically your third, your second theme was, you got it, you got to do the right thing as well. In other words, you’ve got to be focused on what your opportunities are.
So if you’re in this vein here of doing an account review, you moved into kind of an opportunity planning discussion. What is the difference between what we’re selling strategically versus what we’re selling tactically? What’s how do we balance fundamentals and innovation? And and, you know, how do we work towards the outcome? How do you not provide just band aids to people But needs surgery, it was one of the examples that Bob gave or, you know, skip, you talked about what new discussions need to be required in order to position, you know, sales enablement being helpful. This is this is again back in my sales days what my sales leadership would do with me to say, look, you know, are you looking around every corner? And are you turning over every rock? And I think you did that just naturally because of your sales lenses.
But the real litmus test of this is, if you have done the work, and you have done the research and part one, are you able to go to your customer, you know, pretend sales, leadership’s the customer here and say, I have the plan. Here’s my recommendation, I synthesize what’s going on. I see some patterns and here’s what we need to do. And having that confidence and having that clarity, as opposed to Hey, boss, what do you want me to do? And I think that was skipped and Steve, you guys are riffing on so that all comes back to having that confidence, understanding how you Going to pursue opportunities. And then interestingly enough, you know, the pep talk at the end been in a lot of a lot of sales meetings, sales reviews. And you know, first one, is your sales strategy or your account strategy? A second one, why are you selling and how are you going to do it? You know, and then the third one is well, based on everything we’ve said, the opportunities out there, man, what are you doing?
You know, only 16% of leaders have the talent they need. That’s an 84% opportunity says sales manager, Steve, get out there Look at all this opportunity that’s out there. Kind of get your stuff together and put a plan together and and sell it right this career tsunami is upon us. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen. Escape said you’ve got to be analytic and productive. You got to focus on 8020 This is the sales manager pep talk to sales enablement to me at the end. So I felt like I was in a back in my my day in a sales meeting going what’s your account? What do you sound like? Let’s talk about this. Are you thinking this stuff through? And then you know, they’ll slap on the back type of thing or the high five, go on, look at the opportunity. You can you can get that new house you wanted if you do this, right.
So that’s what it felt like to me. And it ended with flattening the curve like that, given the time we are on skip said that sales enablement leaders should flatten the curve, and but it’s the productivity curve of talent. And then you guys talked about when you do these things, right, just like in sales when you do these things, right. And you’re able to establish these relationships, you’re able to clarify what you’re selling, you’re able to be positive and paint a picture about what’s possible, then you can tackle bigger things and that’s where this you know, systems conversation came in. So to me, it felt very much like a sales call. So I went ahead and went through all three of them. So you guys could see what I was tracking, but I’ll.
Skip Miller 1:01:53
I used to have a plaque on my guest that said besides revenue, would you want to talk to me about so I need a sales enablement Who’s going to be a partner with me to make sure that we’re have the same outcome and visions, and the potholes that they see are different to the potholes? I see, rather than be waiting for instructions from on high to tell me what to do. So I think you said a very, very well. Yeah.
Bob Apollo 1:02:16
It kind of seems to me if we are aligned around that critical outcome, then where are the obstacles that are stopping us getting there? And how are we with the sales team eliminate those obstacles? And I do think that sales enablement should think of themselves as not just facilitating the sales people want the sales managers and that’s at least as important.
Brian Lambert 1:02:44
Great, thanks.
Scott Santucci 1:02:47
So we’re going to wrap up with we’re going to ask each of our participants, what’s one thing that they learned from today, so we’ll start with you skip, what’s one thing that you learn?
Skip Miller 1:02:58
The Bob and Steve were pretty People. No I was just constantly nodding my head when they were saying what they’re saying. The best enablement people are the ones who are proactive walk side by side with the sales leaders act as first line managers act as coaches and, you know, sees the obstacle, see the objectives and the obstacles in front and they come at how to overcome those obstacles potentially in a different way than sales manager does. So it was a very good discussion on you know, creating a new second half of the year vision for sales enablement.
Scott Santucci 1:03:36
Excellent. Bob, what did you learn?
Bob Apollo 1:03:39
I think firstly, it was reassuring that as you when you set the scene at the start of this, that, you know, we’ve got such common perspectives on both the the issue but also the fact that the issue can be sold, with the right focus with the right discipline and To pick up a word that was used just a few moments ago, with the with the right clarity, you know, there is clear opportunity and hope, the sales enablement to emerge from this with stronger reputation if they do those things well.
Scott Santucci 1:04:21
That’s great. Steve.
Steve Crepeau 1:04:23
So so let me echo Skip’s sentiment. I’m from Massachusetts, I went to college in Boston. I lived in Boston for 12 years, and we have an expression as Bostonians. I would refer to Bob and skit as wicked spot if we were heading if we were in Boston talking about these two. So I mean, what was really refreshing for me and enlightening for me is they brought some perspectives to the table that I thought were extremely interesting. I think there was definitely a lot of commonality in the way that we view the world and the respective lenses that we’re bringing to the table. And I was just comforted. Like, like Bob just mentioned and reassured that you know, There there are some really smart people out there that are seeing the problems that they have to see it the same way that I am but but also see you know, offering up solutions to this opportunity not just kind of struggling and feeling paralyzed like the deer in the headlights chisel What do we do? There is a clear strategy and path to success for sales leaders are just great hearing from from bobbins get out of their experiences and their thoughts. It just was it was very reaffirming for me.
Scott Santucci 1:05:27
Excellent. So with that we’re going to wrap up the show so insider nation I think we got the we got the theme here is at least we’re smart enough on this show to bring wicked smart people together. And please, please stay tuned and watch for watch out for more panelists. So we this is our second second panelist review. Moving up towards our webinar where we’re going to present the findings. Please if you haven’t done so already, go to www.insidese.com register register for that webinar, you’re not going to want to miss it. We’re going to try to put these this information into slides that you can share. having conversations about things. One thing, putting slides in front of CEOs is something completely different. How do we take the insights that are shared by a lot of different people and put them into a structured format that you can show on a slide, to be able to have a conversation to get permission to do these things that’s that’s a topic all together.
So with that, I thank you so much Skip, Bob, and Steve, you guys were a fantastic panel. This was very exciting to me, and insider nation. Please stay tuned and download more podcasts and stay tuned. If you get a chance if you’re in either. If you’re in the Bay Area or out there in the UK, please look up either Skip, Bob, or Steve to look for help maybe sounds like a lot of them can really help you with developing a sales coaching program and moving the middle please reach out Take advantage of their recess. Thank you very much. And with that we’re a wrap.
Outro 1:07:06
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 them online by going to insidese.com following them on Twitter or sending them a LinkedIn request.
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