Ep24 Shift from Reactive to Proactive Sales Enablement

Ep24 Shift from Reactive to Proactive Sales Enablement

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 24

Right now, growth is anyone’s turf. Growth can be aligned to the sales department, the marketing department, business operations or the strategy team. Everyone “owns” the customer, and very few people have the answer when it comes to creating sustainable impact and success.

Today, only a few organizations have more strategic sales enablement capability aligned to the growth. The ones that do fold them into commercial operations or report directly to the CEO. While many Sales Enablement leaders aspire to become the Go-to-Market partner of the CEO, the reality on social media is quite different.  

The key question: Why are you here? Why does Sales Enablement even Exist?

Looking at the blogs, content, and discussions, there is certainly a big gap between the aspiration of Sales Enablement and the reality faced by many in the role. Transformation is happening in many sales organizations, but sales enablement is often a tactical “get stuff done” aspect of tactical decision making.

In this episode, the guys as a great question: “Are You Providing Strategic Sales Enablement or Are You the Land of Misfit Toys?” 

The answer to this question will determine your impact and success including:

  • allocating resources to projects you believe are most important.
  • defining who you report into
  • balancing the completion “fast tasks” with “strategic ongoing business impact”

That current state “island” of sales enablement is chaotic… it’s reactive. It’s where all the misfit initiatives are inherited by the VP of “broken things” end up.

In this podcast, you’ll hear actionable approaches and real-world examples on how to balance the short-term with the long-term impact required to support transformations. Using examples such as onboarding and training, the guys talk about the strategies you need to help sellers get what they need to be successful.  

They will also share the discomfort many people have in being strategic (hang in there when you’re listening!). The reward: Throughout the podcast, you’ll learn how to do WITH sales, and stop doing TO sales.

As Jack Welch once said; “Control your own destiny or someone else will.”

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

Scott Santucci 00:34

I’m Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:36

Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast 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 00:49

Together, Brian and I have worked on over 100 different kinds of sales enablement, initiatives as analysts, consultants, or practitioners. We learned the hard way what works and maybe Maybe what most important, what doesn’t?

Brian Lambert 01:03

In a previous episode, we talked about who the customer is of sales enablement. And we answered that as the person who decided on your role and invested in it. Your department often exists based on a challenge as someone in your organization wants to address and how you scope it matters. And today we’re going to talk about why you’re in this specific situation that you’re in. And we’re going to compare and contrast the different situations in order to help you move forward in next year’s 2020. And also take action in a way that makes most sense for your organization. So as usual, we start with a centering story to give our episode a scene. So, Scott, take it away from here.

Scott Santucci 01:46

So, we’re recording after Thanksgiving, so we thought maybe a holiday theme would be would be very appropriate. And what holiday what Christmas holiday story wouldn’t be great without a whole conversation about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Brian Lambert 02:02

That’s right, lay it on them.

Scott Santucci 02:04

Here. Here we are at the sales a day wood insiders podcast and we’ve talked about things like mendeleev and his periodic table. We recently talked about the Edsel. We’re talking about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. And you know the story about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. He’s tired of just being viewed as a as a parlor trick. So, him and Henry the elf, the elf, or if you remember, he’s the elf that doesn’t want to help. He wants to be a dentist. So, they go off to just on their own journey. And they run into, they land on an island, and that island is the island of what? Ah, it’s the actually the land of Misfit Toys. The land, that’s right, the land of Misfit Toys. Yep, thanks. And they run into that line. His name’s King Moonracer.

Brian Lambert 03:02

I didn’t know that.

Scott Santucci 03:03

You didn’t know it was King Moonracer?

Brian Lambert 03:07

Is that the point of the story? Not just kidding.

Scott Santucci 03:09

Thats the point right to educate you on on Christmas tales. Actually Bob Britton. I wouldn’t be surprised if he would send you send me a note. Because he, he likes the king King moon racer reference. But really, what is he the king of he’s this land of Misfit Toys. And there’s all of these toys that aren’t good enough that were rejected by Santa to get to give toys to kids. And one of them. Like one of one of these toys that’s particularly funny to me as a kite. And it’s Miss fitness, is it, is afraid of heights.

Brian Lambert 03:45

That’s right. And you know, when I first watched this, you know, I was not creeped out at all of this children’s tale.

Scott Santucci 03:54

Right so there’s all these different methods and King moon racer unites them and you know brings them together and makes them find meaning and the like. So that’s, that’s our story.

Brian Lambert 04:06

Wow, that’s interesting. So, what effect does that have to do with sales enablement? Are you saying that we’re misfits or we inherited misfit toys?

Scott Santucci 04:16

Well, it’s a story that that resonates. So, this is how does it relate? There’s two reasons. So, for those of you who don’t who don’t know, Brian and I, were, were involved at at Forrester, way back in as early as 2008 started my sales at a one research carcass. And back then, um, you know, there was a whole bunch of what is sales enablement? There were a lot of definition for it. Now, we probably have way too many definitions that were probably at the same. I think we were probably more clear about what it was back then. But a metaphor we use this metaphor a lot to describe the role. And really the role is, you know, the head of broken things. You are King moon racer of your own organization, you’ve been inherited, you might have inherited her a little less, a lot of those early sales enablement professionals would inherit things that maybe the marketing department wanted to touch. Things that sales managers didn’t want to touch, things that sales VP didn’t want to touch, and things that sales operations didn’t want to touch. So wonderful things like simplifying the CRM system, or selecting new technologies to use, because vendors will come in and make, you know, make make briefings or, you know, fixing you know, various other broken things like the price configuration management system, things like that. So that’s, that’s really the Nicholas and the second reason that that, that maps is many of the people in the sales enablement side of which, you know, Brian and I were very instrumental and started actually, you know, Nico and Brian, up in February or in January of 2016, saying, hey, maybe we should start our local area networking group, and a lot of people who are really some of the first members of the sales enablement society really looked at that as a, that is also a metaphor. And we’re a collection of people who are trying to get together to figure this stuff out. So those are what those are ways that uh why why it matches.

Brian Lambert 06:23

Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, since that time, it continues. And maybe they’re not broken things, but they’re the land of maybe cool and cutting-edge things such as, you know, ai driven coaching or role-based applications for learning, right? So, not only have sales enablement, leaders, maybe inherited broken things, but they’re, they’re piloting some cool stuff too. Right? So, I don’t know what what island that is, but I like the metaphor because in both both situations these are items that that are maybe one off or a little bit outside the norm. Business as usual in both Yeah.

Scott Santucci 07:07

Yeah, maybe it’s sort of it’s the island of broken things are you exist to fix problems and Island shiny things is your your job is to help us figure out how to take advantage of it, you know, enable it, right? activate it. Either way, you’re outside of the mainstream. And as we all know, the mainstream, the standard operating procedure is pretty aggressive. You know, pretty pretty. There’s a lot of culture that goes around that and being outside of those those two windows is can put you in a tough spot.

Brian Lambert 07:38

Yeah, exactly. And it’s also a tough spot because of the nature of the transformation that many companies are going under. I think when you look at growth today, and what companies are doing to drive new business models, new revenue streams, evolve their platforms. Become become more of a, you know, all inclusive, one stop shop for technology and bring new capabilities to market growth, it really becomes the mandate and it’s it’s almost anybody’s turf. It could be products turf, marketing’s turf sales, obviously and the CEOs really trying to drive and pull these different level levers and one of the levers that he or she is pulling is this idea of sales enablement, as as a growth driver, however, you know, Scott, you and I have both talked about this. We don’t see that an awful lot. But where are those folks are doing it and becoming the other side of the go to market, you know, the execution side of go to market. They’re pretty busy, and they’re not hanging out at these conferences that many people are going to, and they don’t necessarily want to hear from vendors about the strategies that they should be engaging in to drive the go to market forward. And there’s a big gap between what I would say the aspiration is and what they’re tackling versus the reality that’s unfolding out on the internet or the web or even in job boards or sales enablement society postings, etc. And I think that gap, I would say is really around, you know, why are we here? And I like the misfit toy analogy because it really gets to the question of why are we here? What do you what do you think about that?

Scott Santucci 09:23

So, I think that’s great. I think what you’ve done is have provided a great landscape. So first of all, in the overall market, we all know, sales transformation is happening in the overall landscape. Then within your company, these things are happening, whether they’re being actively discussed to where you can see it is a different story. But if you’re a sales enablement professional, you’re probably stuck in the Hey, I’m in the I’ve got the bright shiny toys and I’ve got the broken toys and I am really struggling, struggling or trying to make carve out a niche or add value in the audience. Operating rhythm that our Salesforce is in right now. So, the challenge that that creates is it creates a situation where, if you’re a sales enablement professional are probably thinking, hey, a lot of the stuff that you talked about Brian is interesting, but I can’t afford to think about that stuff that sounds too theoretical to strategic. I got a I got to keep my nose to the grindstone and just execute. That’s a gut reaction that we typically hear another reaction that you might be feeling sort of like when you go home from work and wonder, you know, did I add value today? At am I being valued? Go home and think about, you know, talk with your talk with your spouse about whether you should get a raise or not, or you know, whether or not you can go ask for next round of funding next, next next year. All of these different questions that you got going on in yourself and you just don’t know. Why don’t you know, why are those things clear? You don’t know, because you don’t really have control of managing expectations of what your department is. And maybe you think you do, because you think it’s really, really, really, really, really clear my clarity my wall is very specific. It’s clear on my mbo’s, and all I have to do is execute those mbo’s every quarter. And I show that I’m hitting those mbos every quarter, I’m valuable because somebody else has defined what that value is. But the reality is, is that many, many sales enablement leaders talk to us. Is this a common theme? I wonder if you you run into this to Brian, is that many sales leaders I talked to say I’m really frustrated. The company just thinks that I’m just a trainer. And sales enablement is so much more. Yeah, that’s right. Just like a trainer. Yeah,

Brian Lambert 11:51

I’ve seen I’ve heard that. But I’ve also heard you know, if the executive team would find us more, we could do more. And I think you’re spot on between this this area of, you know, super tactical, I get stuff done, versus the handful that are, you know, helping figure out what to do, you know, figure stuff out strategically, what are we going to do here. And then there’s the get stuff done crowd in the middle is this gray area and you get kind of buffeted around by the forces, you know, it feels like you’re maybe on a, you know, on on a ride there, and it’s in that ride of your life. You know, things start coming up, like you’re pointing out, Scott, and, you know, how do you get control of that? How do you enter into the rhythm of the business and drive as a valuable partner?

Scott Santucci 12:40

Yeah. So, you have, we’re going to use a case study here. And Brian and I are going to solve two different ways, but there’s really only three choices that you have. So, this is the good news, right? The good news is in the world of complexity and all the swirling dervish that we’ve just talked about, you really only have three choices. Right, so here they are choice number one, you can decide or believe, whichever it is you can decide that the way that you personally are going to add value to the company is say yes to as many as many people as possible. I am enabling your success, they’re coming to me because they’re asking me for, I gotta say, yes. Completing the tasks at a high quality. You know, we make sure that they’re done well, they have the right polish. We get them on on getting them done on deadline and maybe your internal brand as I get shit done. That’s choice number one. Choice number two, you can do the things and then wait with choice number one, really, the whole idea is if I keep doing more of that if I keep working hard, obviously somebody’s gonna value our department, expand our scope and you know, give me a raise, and give me the resources that I need to do more. The second scenario is, well, I want to I want to take more than that and control my hand, so I want to plant the seed. So, I’m going to do everything that I’m doing in number one, you know, concentrating on getting stuff done. But I’m going to take some of these reports that I’m seeing, and I’m going to start sending them off to people, I’m going to start positioning my department, and I’m hopeful that these reports will allow a VP of sales to go wow, this sales man was way more than than training or, wow, I had no idea how complicated your, your, your function is, I should give you a promotion or what will you know, whatever, whatever your goal is. That’s scenario number two. And scenario scenario number three is to campaign more proactively go and start talking to the individual department leaders. Talk to them and give them insights about challenges that they’re running into and help them see what the real problems are let them let them dwell on it and then let wait to ask for your you know, how you can help, and you know really illuminate and elevate the elevate the function.

Brian Lambert 15:14

So those are those are three areas so number one if you’re following along as the gets to get stuff done. Two would be sending up reports and data to help in you know, drive or

Scott Santucci 15:25

Well, I wouldn’t say data, I would say external reports. So, number three is you’re providing insights, that’s your own data, your own analysis.

Brian Lambert 15:33

Okay. And number two is maybe external thought leadership reports, etc. Yeah. Okay, gotcha. So, and then there’s pros and cons to each of these and but what we’re going to do before we get into that is tell a little bit of a have a situation that our listeners can participate in. So, we’re going to use onboarding and the reason why we’re gonna use onboarding is a lot of people are engaged in that in some form or fashion. And then one and then and then number two is if they’re not engaged in it now, they probably will be at some point. So, we’re going to use that as a way to have a shared experience here. And what I’m going to do is, I’ll be I’ll be, you know, in camp one to get stuff done crowd in basically talking about tasks, etc. And the Scott will be talking about, you know, area three about being more proactively managing and defining the value contribution to the function. So, from an onboarding perspective, you know, let’s just say we we have a program already, and that program is a two-week boot camp, we have regularly scheduled classes, and the ask is, by by the management team, sales managers as well as our bosses to look at how we shorten it and then also have We add different skills to it. So that’s the, that’s the simple scenario. Is that good with you, Scott?

Scott Santucci 17:07

Sure. Okay.

Brian Lambert 17:09

So, I’ll be reactive guy, my reactive guy, what I’ll do, and how I might action is, I would do a bit of research, I would figure out trends, figure out through my own experience, what, what I might want to do to provide some, some topics through elearning because everybody else is doing it. I would build a bulleted list of what we’re going to do. And then I give it to my boss and ask for permission to go and once I got it, I would go do that. And then then I would communicate what we’re doing to sales. And I would make sure that the salespeople managers are aware of the changes that are coming. Something like that. And I do that within 90 days. Because that’s what my value is. I get stuff done.

Scott Santucci 17:59

So, here’s how I would tackle it practically. The first thing that I would do is I define terms. So, this is a step that I know a lot of people hate to do. But I would define specifically, what does an onboarding person look like. And I would define it in such a way that it was measurable. So, I’d have some sort of scorecard of what actually constitutes an onboarding person. The reason that I want to do that is because I’m going to be evaluated on the success of the onboarding program. And I don’t want to he said she said debate afterwards about whether it works or not. What I what I know is because this is a step that I go through with a lot of clients, I know there isn’t a defined spec. And people because it’s undefined people have their own expectations for it. So, for example, a sales manager’s expectation might be they’ve just gone through the course. And they can they know, they know how to work some of the basic functions, but I don’t train them up on how to sell. And then a sales leader might think it’s time to time the quota is is when somebody is in the onboarding process. And then if our sales cycle time is, say, nine months, it’s unrealistic for me to be held to a spec of, you know, nine months because there’s interactions with with sales managers and like so I first wanted to find, define the term that I’d want to analyze. So that’s number one. Then once I’ve got the definition of the term, and, you know, clarity of what it is, I want to do data, and the data that I want to collect is a big fan of baselining. So, the next thing that I would do is I baseline I’d say, given this definition, how long did last classes take to become onboarded? And I’d go through the data of all all the different past classes, I find a way to say this is class one, class two, class three. And I’d simplify it because you can have so many different batches, simplify it, you know, to a year, and figure out what that what that metric is. And you do a readout of that method metric, just that one metric. And that readout would be sort of informal, sort of, Hey, you know, I’m learning Massa, I’m interested in your input in this observation. And you’ll, you’re gonna find that you probably don’t have enough of the right data to do it. So, publish that, that to actually collect it. But you’re also going to find that, in many cases, because the clients that have done the, the time, the expectation that management has of how long that takes is a lot shorter than what the reality of the data says. I’ll give you one example, one example one client, we did this through the management expectation was 12 months and all of the data, the best class was 24 months to get to a metric of on boarded. So now you’re like, wow, because then what that does is step number three, it allows you to evaluate the program. So, you mentioned the cases that we currently have a program. Well, that’s muscle memory, the way we’ve always done things. In my experience, what is the composition of that program? That composition is individual product market managers want to have space in the onboarding program so what’s in our in our scenario, it’s a it’s a week. So, I have to allot time for individual product managers to talk about their products. We have allot time for the benefits people to talk about the benefits because this is new hire onboarding, right? So, we want to provide benefit training. And then, of course, we’ve got a huge slosh it’s lap time because their sales operations people want to make sure that everybody knows how to to use the CRM system, so we probably had a half day dedicated to, you know, learn how to use Salesforce.com. And along the way, we would pull all these things together, we mix in some mixers, we meet the meet the management, maybe we come in and, you know, meet executives. And as a result of that, what are what are people prepared to do? They’re not really prepared to perform or to or really do anything. So, they get released to the, to the sales managers, and now it’s now are those people have gone through that course? Are they on boarded or not? What do they do? So, then I’d say, based on the metric that we’ve agreed on to Step number four, based on the metric that we’ve agreed upon, what should the curriculum look like and do a gap analysis between the current curriculum and what the curriculum should look like? Now you have to make tough decisions. And say, because and the reason that I’ve done the analysis stage is shop that allowed and included sales management beforehand is because they have context. So now I have some support to be able to push back and say, Hey, the benefit training and the CRM system training and you know, the culture training, we’re going to move all of that just in time. And we’re going to make those modules, we’re going to use elearning for that. And we’re going to make that just in time available, because a salesperson is only going to really pay attention to what the benefits packages when they need to execute the benefits package and make that make the choices. So, let’s make that information available there. And the second thing is, you really only learn how to do the CRM system when you actually have a real opportunity. So how do you do that? How do you move those things just in time? Then the next thing is in terms of product training, and the like. We’ll we’ll simplify that we won’t have individual product heads, as to provide it. We’re going to concentrate on You know, helping our reps, get first meetings, you know, get get opportunities going and building pipelines. So, we’re going to redo the whole course, to be a lot more about the buyers that we’re doing within those scenarios. And say this is where our program is going to be and invite participants who can talk like customers. And we’re going to do a lot of roleplay around that and make it really, really fun. And then we’re going to have a very specific role, you know, for our executives and say, this is what we want to address. This is the culture that we want to, you know, when we get off and one of our objectives are and put all those pieces together so that we can have a scorecard at the end of measure what the results look like. That’s how I tackle that.

Brian Lambert 24:47

All right. So here in folks if you’re still with us, this is this is an interesting phenomenon, and I see it all the time. A mine was one minute, you know, Scott’s was was 10 minutes. Mine was in the the mainstream bloodstream of what everybody knows and what everybody feels. And it felt like hell yeah, probably to people, like, that’s exactly what we should do. Let’s go. And then here comes Scott’s right. And it’s like, wow. It’s so different. You know, it’s, it’s 900 times longer 900% longer one. And, you know, he’s saying stuff that we don’t talk a lot about. And I get uncomfortable with that, you know, this might be what you’re hearing here in the car, for those that are still with because, you know, I’ve seen it in the past where people can’t hang 10 minutes to talk about onboarding and that’s really what just happened, you know, and it’s proactive approach. We spent 10 minutes talking about a proactive approach to onboarding. And there, there are two reactions, those that love that discussion, Scott and those that want to, you know, reach through the their device and strangle you right now. And I wanted to highlight that because I purposefully went a minute on mine, and I don’t even know if it was right to be honest with you. I don’t know if people would agree with it. I really don’t care because I’m taking action in 90 days. And no matter because I’ll be on to the next thing. But with yours at 10 minutes, you know, you’re going to open yourself up for discussion because of the gap you’re creating around being proactive. And I think this is the the challenge with the individual role, but also the challenge with the function because it can feel a little sideways to the mainstream. And what I would suggest is people go back and re listen to the proactive one because my guess is they couldn’t they couldn’t digest Scott’s 10 minutes. And they may have to listen to it two to three times but we’re only talking 10 minutes. And we’re only and we are talking about Proactiv, which everybody agrees is important. What’s up with that? Right. So, I don’t know, Scott. I just wanted to call that out. Because I loved your five steps, you know, one to find what it means to be on boarded. Two what’s the expectation and leadership three, team three is how we’re going to evaluate what what it is and what good looks like. And then four is make some decisions around what, what it should look like and how we’re going to architect it. And then five is what are the trade offs, you know, and that makes a heck of a lot of sense. Mine was like, gather input, create a list of topics, get an approval from my boss, and get it done in 90 days. Right?

Scott Santucci 27:51

Yeah, you can, he can still do all the steps that I shared in 90 days. Also. It’s just been

Brian Lambert 27:57

Yeah, I don’t know. Man. That seems so hard. I’m just kidding.

Scott Santucci 28:01

It’s not that hard. Yeah, no, no the the steps aren’t hard. It’s being disciplined. And it’s, it’s really just the the bedside manner of shopping the idea.

Brian Lambert 28:16

Yeah. And it’s also, you know, you talked about muscle memory. They nurture the muscle memory of the internal managers and leaders, that 10 minutes of space that you just occupied with the sales enablement folks on the listening, those, those folks would have to go and occupy 10 minutes of time, with sales leaders, sales, you know, their bosses, etc. And if they’re not comfortable doing 10 minutes, nobody else is going to be comfortable listening to them or working with them for 10 minutes. And if they can’t do 10 minutes, how are they going to tackle the root cause, you know, challenges to drive outcomes. And I think that’s the difference between playing a misfit toy and being, you know, asked to do get stuff done versus figure stuff out. And I would say it’s a difference between reactive and proactive.

Scott Santucci 29:12

So, here’s, yeah, I think here’s what’s an interesting observation is I like what you said about 10 minutes. I don’t have 10 minutes and no one’s gonna pay attention for 10 minutes or whatever. Guess what? That is the problem that your salespeople are dealing with right now. If you want to be, I think that if you want to be a effective sales enablement leader, you’ve got to be really, uh, you got to put yourself in situations where you can be very empathetic with what the real, you know, the reality that your salespeople are dealing with. And if you’re like most companies, and you’re, you know, offering a new capability or new products that that’s, you know, transformative in nature, you’re gonna have to be able to do that anyway, I think so. You’re gonna have to be able to you you have to empathize with that. Because no matter what project that you roll out and what it does, if it’s not addressing those issues, how do you balance? Like, for example, how do you bring up a commercial insight? There’s a lot of talk in challenger sale about, oh, you have to have a commercial insight. And you do a lot of training on a commercial insight. How do you actually bring up a commercial insight, or customer who doesn’t have the 10 minutes to give you? It’s sort of the same thing. Here’s a commercial insight about how to how to tackle sales operations, or sales, sales, onboarding, here are the steps that you need to get through. There’s this here’s sort of the structure and by doing this, it allows you to be transformative. But you don’t want to take the 10 minutes, you know, to digest and learn it. How are you going to take advantage of it?

Brian Lambert 30:51

Yeah, and we said this podcast purposefully, that way, right? We were trucking along. Everybody’s on their treadmill on their ride, you know? On the inside or nation train, you know, boom, we’re hitting onboarding, boom, boom, boom. And then here comes Scott with Let’s be proactive. And it’s like gumming up the works. But it shouldn’t. Why is that? Yeah. And to your point, there’s a lot of things like that, you know, not only, you know, what is a commercial insight, but, you know, I have yet to understand what a buyer journey is a persona. We’ve talked a lot about this, these are over generalizations of reality that salespeople have to deal with. So, we just, we just gave a little 10-minute dose of reality. And I think there’s a choice that people need to make and it’s going to reflect in their function. Are we going to fit in and do the mainstream reactive work? Or are we going to elevate the function elevate the role? And that really gets to why are you here? And uhm

Scott Santucci 31:52

Well, let’s talk about post that so I’m okay so you can criticize me on the 10 minutes and that was a lot of detail and a lot of stuff. Let’s talk about after. So, let’s say you Brian, you’ve executed executed your thing. Let’s assume it goes, Well, what next? How are you perceived as being valuable?

Brian Lambert 32:12

What’s the next thing? And you know, that’s that’s about it. What’s the next thing? With the least amount of headache. Because that was a little bit of headphone, no headache, and nobody complained about anything. So, we’re on to the next one feeding the beast. Yep. Actually, let’s feed the beast globally. So how can you get on a plane for the next six months?

Scott Santucci 32:33

Yep. So, if that’s really your your remit is going to be pretty much centered around sales off sales, onboarding. And it might include maybe technology selection, you know, the care and feeding and the tweaking of the technology system and constant constantly improving with that, that onboarding funnel focuses is that sales enablement is that going to help you change your focus, or the perception in the inside of the company that you’re just training? Because what does everybody else going to see?

Brian Lambert 33:10

The answer to that is no. I mean, everybody’s going to see you as the onboarding person, you’re actually going to be reinforcing in hardening that expectation. And you’re going to be the king or queen of onboarding. And that’s all you’re gonna get boxed in. Yep.

Scott Santucci 33:28

In that situation. So, let’s, let’s give the alternate situation. I rattle out those steps. I’ve been through this, been through this rodeo many times with with many clients. Let me give you the other side of that ledger. Let’s go back to because you actually did the work to come up with the data. Now I have insights. those insights aren’t external insights or reports from you, Forrester, Gartner, whatever that are executives aren’t gonna read. They’re actually real data. about our company. And because I’ve challenged people’s conventional wisdom, I have lots of credibility. So, who do I have credibility with? I’m building credibility with the sales, or the CFO and the sales leaders. So, then they come to me and asked me, what should I do next? And then I’ll say, Well, let me put together some analysis to figure that out. Don’t just answer. And then they give you the time, and you come back with some thoughts and say, I’d like to read this out to a variety of different people. So, what you typically find, and this is common, right? So, these are very, very predictable things is that the inbound class of the there is commonalities about the class. So, if you’re running an onboarding program, you learn a lot about all the new hires, where they come from, what their expectations are secret. left a lot of information about what competitors are doing other sales organizations doing etc. So, you can mine all that and provide information. The second thing that you can do is you can say, you know what, um, you can make observations about how all over the place that the classes are. So, for example, some people might hire very transactional people, some people might hire very strategic people and say, here are our observations of our incoming class. Which do you which type do you think is the spec that we’re looking to hire for for our future success? And say, the answer is probably we don’t know. And say, well, I’d be happy to take that on and say, before onboarding, maybe we need to look at being more proactive and figure out what kind of talents that that we’ve got and how we’re doing our hiring processes. I know that this and then you follow the same approach, and you’ll find the same kind of incompleteness of data. And then another thing that you can say is look in order to to collapse this, here’s our definition of when a onboarded. Rep is. And then here’s, here’s when, here’s how long it takes to get somebody to quota. This gap in between isn’t covered? Shouldn’t this be the responsibility of frontline sales managers? Don’t say it is the definition, get people to buy into that. And then say, I’ve noticed that we don’t have a frontline sales coaching program. I’d like to promote, I’d like to provide that. So, you can get acceptance on both of those, then you get to go put together a proactive budget and say, this is the headcount resources that I’m going to need to execute it. And these are the steps that need to go and you’re getting get the funding to do it. So, you’ve expanded your footprint now from just onboarding to now you’re helping the hiring process and the coaching process. You might as well get your identity of saying I’m manufacturing the hire to retire process and I’m scaling it and make it more efficient. That’s gonna attract the attention to your seat. Yeah. Yeah, those would be ways to leverage though the work that you’re doing to concentrate on communicating what those results are, and provide information to many, many, many stakeholders whom are very interested in what your successes.

Brian Lambert 33:56

Yeah, and I will say, as somebody who’s implemented, you know, more proactively, that this works. And, you know, I want to give you some tips here in order to wrap this up. The proactive approach is definitely what executives notice, especially the outcomes or the outputs of that a more proactive approach. To do that, you know, to do what we did here, you know, first, I would say you’ve got to practice being proactive. Try outlining things in terms of three to five, actionable, top-down phases are chunks of work that need to happen and see if it makes sense to and then shop that around to leaders and ask them if that makes sense so as an end-to-end approach to thinking about an issue, and in that discussion, you’ll you’ll start understanding root causes. The second thing is you got to embrace this uncomfortable, this discomfort of being more thoughtful and and and that pause we put into the podcast here where we get a pattern interrupt, you know, using neuro linguistic programming. You know, we basically pattern interrupted you, guy into the mainstream, then you hit it with something proactive. And for many people, my guess is you couldn’t even process what Scott was talking about, go back, re listen to that. And then also, you know, make a commitment to being proactive and being uncomfortable at first in that to get through it instead of just, you know, rejecting it. And then the third thing is, is when you look at this, I would test your talk track out and not expect it to be easy. If you can’t get 10 minutes of people’s time, you’re going to have trouble in your role, you’re going to be an individual contributor in your role. So, if you can’t get headspace, you know, for 10 minutes, that’s going to be an issue. And as jack welch said, you know, control your own destiny or somebody else will. So those are the the four takeaways from this episode here. Hopefully, we made you think and hopefully we’re going to help you be more proactive in 2020. Scott, anything you want to share before we go?

Scott Santucci 39:33

No, that’s a that’s a great wrap up I just say that you know, the benefit of being proactive is that you can do a lot better job of setting and managing your setting and managing expectations about what sales enablement is inside your company. And what what to expect from your department.

Brian Lambert 39:56

All right. Thanks, everybody, as always, for listening Please continue to give us the feedback. We’ve heard from many of you over the last few weeks, especially with regards to our latest episode on, who’s our customer, continue to give us that feedback that helps us make our show better also continue to give us topics that you’re wrestling with the one that we talked about today, why are we here, something that you guys have approached us with, and hopefully this was helpful. And then also reach out to us if you want, what we call it, think it through, buddy, you know, Scott, and I like to talk in this proactive space. So, if you want to talk stuff through reach out to us, and we’re happy to do that, and thanks so much for your time. We’ll see you on the next episode of inside sales enablement.

Nick Merinkers 40:42

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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