Ep21 What’s the $%@# Problem? Moneyball and The Focus of SE

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 21

If you are a sales enablement practitioner, you are likely pulled in a lot of different directions.  You might:

• Be frustrated you are called a “training” function inside your company 
• Struggle to get the right resources 
• Have a hard time balancing your inbox (and your team’s workload) 
• Experience conflict with other departments 

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

I’m Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

I’m 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 00:48

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

Brian Lambert 01:01

On this podcast we use a conversational format to help share the experiences that only people who’ve been there and done that can provide, as we’ve been pushing the envelope in the profession for over a decade. And today on this show, we’re going to discuss if you want to be clear what sales enablement is, stop trying to ask what the definition is, and focus on the problem that you’re trying to solve for your company. Scott, you usually start us out with a centering story. What do you have for us?

Scott Santucci 01:31

So, Brian, this one is just for you. For those of our listeners earlier, we did a chicken Hawk episode where we actually used to multimedia, and I’ve got a movie clip, another movie clip. You’ve been asking for it. Maybe the rest of insider nation has been asking for it. Here it goes. Tell me the movie. Tell me the scene and tell me why it’s relevant. Okay, Brian.

Brian Lambert 01:55

I’ll try.

Scott Santucci 01:57

You have no idea what it is, right?

Brian Lambert 01:59

Right.

Scott Santucci 02:01

I guarantee you, here’s my bet. I guarantee you, you’re gonna love this clip. I guarantee it. Ready?

Brian Lambert 02:10

All right.

Moneyball 02:12

Trying to solve problems like this. You’re not even looking at the problem. very aware of the problem. Okay, good. What’s the problem? Look, Billy we all understand what the problem we have. Good. What’s the problem? The problem is we have to replace three key players. Nope what’s the problem? Same as it’s ever ever been we’ve got to replace these guys with what we have now. What’s the problem Berry. We need 48 home runs 120 RBI. The problem we’re trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there’s 50 feet of crap. And then there’s us. It’s an unfair game. Now we’ve been gutted, organ donors for the rich are Boston’s taking our kidneys Yankees taking our heart and you guys are sitting around talking the same Oh, good body nonsense. Like we’re selling jeans. Like we’re looking for Fabio. We are the last dog at the bowl. Se what happens to the runt of the litter? He dies. Really, that’s a very touching story and everything but I think we’re all verymuch aware of what we’re facing here. We have a lot of experience and wisdom in this room. Now you need to have a little bit of faith to let us do the job of replacing Giambi. Is there another first baseman like Giambi? Oh, not really? No. And if there was, could we afford him? Then what the f are you talking about man? If we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there. That sounds like fortune cookie wisdom to me Billy. No, that’s just logic. Who is Fabio? He’s a short stop. All right.

Brian Lambert 04:05

Who is Fabio?

Scott Santucci 04:07

So, what’s the quote? Mr. Lambert?

Brian Lambert 04:10

What’s the problem? What’s the effing problem? It’s Moneyball the scout scene. I love that scene.

Scott Santucci 04:18

I told you, I know, my podcast partner. So why why do you think that this is relevant to our topic today about focusing, making sure that if you want clarity about sales enablement, and your department and your function, you got to first focus on what problem we’re solving. Why do you think it’s relevant?

Brian Lambert 04:40

Much like the Oakland A’s baseball team, in that scene, the world has changed and applying legacy approaches, using gut feel and applying what’s worked in the past isn’t gonna work anymore today.

Scott Santucci 04:58

I love it. So, you’re going to take over my job here as the setup guy.

Brian Lambert 05:04

What’s in it for me? What the heck are you talking about?

Scott Santucci 05:06

Right? What am I talking about? So, what does this have to do with anything and everybody else? And you’re exactly right. Every business that we’re in, where we have to face the reality, and the reality is that we’re in a digital economy. And in a digital economy, every single one of our companies has a new business strategy that we’re rolling out, which requires massive, massive, massive coordination between product marketing, and sales. And the way that I like to think about this is the people who are going to win in this new economy, in this new digital economy, they’re the ones who are the digi-tellers. The losers are going to be the ones who are told. Who is a digi-teller? Netflix is a digi-teller. They have had a vision about how people are going to use mobile and streaming media and were able to convey that message to their customers. And they told blockbuster and blockbuster wasn’t able to wasn’t able to catch up or compete and went out of business. Lots of people are doing the digitelling. More people are being digitold, we don’t want our listeners to be — we want our listeners to be the digi-tellers, not the digi-told. And that’s really what we’re here about is that we think the sales enablement can be a critical role to help companies do that. But to manage that process, however, you got to make sure you’re focusing on the right problem. Yeah, that’s really what we’re talking about.

Brian Lambert 06:42

Yeah, love it. And, you know, if we’re going to be digitold, you know, we’re sitting around the scout room table and we know these things to be true, Scott that all salespeople are short attention span and coin operated, so we know what problem to solve. You know we need to give them more bite sized chunks faster, and flood them with as much information as possible as fast as possible. So, they’ll be successful. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Scott Santucci 07:09

Well, Brian, if that’s your mindset, then you are on the digitold heap. Really what it comes down to. So, let’s, let’s break this down and what’s driving this? So, what’s driving this is an observation that Brian made back at the sales enablement summit. So, Brian did this really cool exercise with the audience, and I want to make sure we don’t lose it. So, Brian, the exercise that I’m referring to was the one where basically you got the insight between individual contributors, department leaders or transformative could you could you walk us through what that exercise was and what you were trying to accomplish with it.

Brian Lambert 07:51

Right. Yeah. So, during my talk, I asked I said, based on the discussions you just had, we had two-minute discussions with partners there in the in the audience, you know, how many of you are building things out? How many of you are running programs and how many of you are leading a strategic function 65% or so were individual contributors building out is kind of solopreneurs, if you will, about 30% we’re running a department or a program, like new hire training. So, they were the new hire training team, or they were the playbook team. They, they had a program and that’s how their department was defined was, you know, that those are the folks that have, you know, the portal, the platform or the or the playbook, etc. And about 5% were leading a strategic function. And that’s, that’s the rundown. How does that jibe Scott with who you’ve been talking to, by the way?

Scott Santucci 08:48

Well, so that jives I have a slightly different lens, but it definitely fits fits yours. I think the I think there’s a lot of room in the middle and that middle definition but what I have seen from my experience in the sales enablement society and participation at the at the Conference Board, I basically say that the overwhelming majority of current sales enablement practitioners are sole individual contributors. No doubt. And most of those are new to that role. However, what’s interesting and what prompted this segmentation discussion was there, there has been a lot of people talking about different definitions. So, as we did in our last podcast, Episode Number 20. We talked about our position why the why the debt what what was the rationale behind the definition of sales enablement that I published and Brian peer reviewed in and other people contributed to why we wrote that lengthy of a bit of a definition and what was it for. And it’s really the purpose was to provide a platform for a role. And what’s been interesting is we’re hearing a lot, maybe it’s because we’re doing the podcast, and we’re targeting more of a strategic view of sales enablement, and I don’t know what the reason is. But both Brian and I are getting a lot of people talking to us about how valuable that old definition was. And we think it’s kind of interesting that the Forrester had the first definition of it. And they have since published another new definition and now they also have a serious, serious decisions definition of what sales enablement is. So, we have lots and lots and lots and lots of definitions. What we’re here is to not really debate the definitions. We’re here to help provide you clarity. So, we wanted to we want to talk about what those problems are, but the connecting point and I want to see if you see that too Brian the connecting point was the people who resonate very positively with the definition that we published, all fit either into the transformative or department level category. Yeah. And the people who are in the individual contributor role. Do not like it a lot. Does that jive with with your experience?

Brian Lambert 11:25

Yeah, definitely. You know, I’ve heard everything from that definitions too long. And, and, you know, you can’t achieve the definition that you’re talking about where it’s a strategic ongoing function until those executives and invest more

Scott Santucci 11:40

“Those executives.”

Brian Lambert 11:41

Yeah. And I think I’m interesting. I’m cracking open my email because today, about four hours ago, it says, Hey, Brian, this is an email from somebody that’s listened to the podcast that just dropped yesterday, so less than 24 hours later. Hey, Brian, I listened to the podcast on The Securities Act and the foundation elevate the profession. It really got me thinking about my approach to sales enablement. And where I currently am now, and how I should tackle sales enablement, if I get a new role, so she’s thinking about a new role. And she’s actually interviewing, and I really wanted to talk to things. I want a fresh start. And given that there’s a merger and reinvention in my current company to be successful, it may be too late to do that here. But I would love your thoughts on if I move. So, in other words, this, I believe I read between the lines, that podcast kind of struck a chord with, you know, the ship is set sail a little bit where she’s currently at, but boy, wouldn’t it be cool to apply that in a future organization? I didn’t share that with you before Scott. But I think that’s relevant to the conversation, you have two ways to approach it. Oh, that conversation that that definition that Brian and Scott are talking about, it’s too long, or holy crap. I can really think about it as a strategic execution function that executes the business strategy. And I can, I could set it up that way if I lead.

Scott Santucci 13:10

So first of all, number one, I really appreciate that because you threw me threw me a surprise. So, one of the things that we’re trying to do in the podcast, I’m going to get you the next one that we record. But we try to throw each other some things that we’re not, we’re not anticipating. So that was that was fantastic. And I think you’re right. I think that the purpose of what we want to get into right now is, let’s, let’s be realistic here. No matter what definition you use, first of all, there isn’t consensus within the market that there is a common definition. You agree with that, Brian?

Brian Lambert 13:50

I agree. Yeah.

Scott Santucci 13:51

So, if there is no common definition, using other people’s definitions as the be with all in with all is a fool’s errand just just come come to the point right now. Okay, so then what does that mean? What it means is that you as an as a sales enablement professional have to own what the definition is inside your company.

Brian Lambert 14:17

Yeah. I get it.

Scott Santucci 14:18

So, let’s talk about strategies that way.

Brian Lambert 14:21

Yeah, like it. So, in other words, let’s stop worrying about the 14 definitions or however many there are, I don’t even know I just made that up. And whatever one you pick, the importance of that in the language you use and how you approach your role and your function. And then how that might, you know, show that my enact inside your own organization. That’s a great idea. Yeah, I think I got some stories we can, I can tell there too.

Scott Santucci 14:49

That’s great. We’ll choose a framework to follow first, right? So, the first point is, no matter what definition you have, and no matter what, even if it’s, you know, published, you know, desk of God, people are still going to disagree with it because you put the word sales and enablement together and very few people are going to agree. So, the issue that is pick a definition Do you like that matches to your vision, but then you have to socialize it. And the first thing that you have to be able to socialize, shouldn’t be, hey, here’s the role, you should make sure you socialize. Hey, do we agree on a problem?

Brian Lambert 15:27

Hmm, yeah.

Scott Santucci 15:28

And the reason that that’s so important is that most sales enablement roles start as VPS of broken things, you inherit you inherit a mess. And in order to articulate those things, not everybody, there are so many different little messes around that are that exist all over the organization, you’d probably want to be able to organize a bunch of them. So, depending on how you frame the business problem that you’re trying to solve is going to attract the altitude level you know that that people pay attention to it, it’s going to determine who your executive sponsor is, it’s going to determine what budget you’re going to get. It’s going to determine how much teeth you can ask for and compliance. And it’s gonna, it’s going to set the tone of whether you’re viewed as a strategic function, or a tactical one. So, in order to do that, we’re going to concentrate on that first step, which is a problem. And everybody can say, oh, here’s a problem. But inside a company, there’s a big difference between what you see as a problem. What other people see as a problem. And also, are you really treating a symptom of a much larger problem? Not through problem solving.

Brian Lambert 16:43

Yeah, I like a lot because much like a ship that leaves the port and set sail, you know, if it’s one or two degrees off from that initial launch, you could miss the whole country. Right? And I think That’s what’s coming to my mind. Scott is depending on how you think about your role or define it, and come out of the gate with it, and how you think about framing it out, could determine where you end up. And that’s logical, right? So, if you ended up somewhere you didn’t intend or perhaps didn’t end up where you want it to be. It might be because you started off with the wrong trajectory. Yeah, which is the importance of a definition from the concept of what problem you’re going to solve.

Scott Santucci 17:31

And also, what Northstar What’s our Northstar. Yeah, how do we set our bearings? So, here’s, here’s a scenario I’m going to give a scenario to start off with that I hear from a lot of the listeners, so a lot of our listeners who go and are looking for jobs. Tell me that, number one first, the job descriptions that they run into are all over the place. Mm hmm. And then the second thing is that when they go and interview for those jobs, often I’m told well, they don’t know what sales enablement is? Hmm. So, what’s your take on on those observations? So first first take is that situation?

Brian Lambert 18:09

Oh yeah, it’s it’s funny because I’m laughing because that’s exactly where I wanted to go his job descriptions and how people are hiring. So, I think we’re having a mind meld or something. That’s why I’m laughing. But yeah, the so Yeah, totally. And actually, I reviewed about 50 of them, I found about 10 of them were copied and pasted across four different industries. So that’s, that’s interesting to think about is, yeah, like this, this definition sounds cool so let me copy and paste it there you go that’s who we’re hiring for. So, I totally agree and one of the things that pops into my mind is, you know, in that interview process, that might be a good time to actually educate folks and have this definitional conversation.

Scott Santucci 18:49

Well, so yeah, there’s two parts right. Let’s start first with the job description itself. So, for our listeners, if you’re looking at a job description, we tend to think of these things as ironclad. But let me give you more insight about where they come up where they come from. job descriptions also need a body of evidence and a foundation to work from. If we accept that there’s no common definition of sales enablement, then these job descriptions are either being written by consultants, or by human resource analysts who are interviewing sales leaders, or whomever is is paying for the role or doing the market research. Exactly. Yes. So let me give you an example. An example of that is when I was still running the sales enablement society, this topic came coming up. So, I said, hey, let’s take one of these job descriptions. Let’s call the company Why would we call the company was called the company and see if we can figure out what the origin of this job is. Why would we do that? I don’t know. Why wouldn’t we do it? Let’s just figure it out. So, call them up, got the head of Human Resources. They were excited there. We thought that to be recruited, I said, Well, where’s the origin of this role? Because they had a lot of language in the job description brought about six sigma lean, you know, expertise. And you know, they were curious how come they were getting a lot of applicants? Hmm. So where did you get the Six Sigma leenane? in here from because it was underneath the banner, right? There was an example of a detailed bullet underneath the example of operational efficiency. He said, Well, I got that from interviewing the head of the head of sales, the VP of sales. Oh, okay. Do you mind if I talk to him? Why would you do that? I’m just curious about, you know, did he use a six sigma here as a hard actual requirement? Or was he using it as a representative example? And the human resource persons was? No, that’s what I want to ask. So, I asked the head of sales, and he said, I don’t know. I just put a whole bunch of keywords in here of things that I think I think I need. I’m really looking for somebody that can solve these problems for me. And I said, well, let’s talk about what these problems are. Maybe we can recraft what this job description looks like. And it’s very easy if we just start asking some questions. So that’s a common scenario is what is the source of these job descriptions?

Brian Lambert 21:19

Yeah. Yeah. I like it. And there’s, there’s that aspect. And then there’s the aspect of, you know, the expectation, right. So, what did you find when you asked why? What were some of the things that he said he was looking for? Do you remember?

Scott Santucci 21:35

Well, I do. So really what it was was he was delighted that I was asking why VR to begin with? Yeah, delighted. And he said, more or less, I know something’s wrong with our overall performance, but can’t really pinpoint it. So, he was using a lot of specificity just to see if he could attract conversations. So, I said, you know, what do you know about this segment signaling said Well, I just I’ve heard about it, but I heard it was a it’s a process for operational efficiency. And I definitely want to have better productivity. I said, I got it. So basically, you’re looking for somebody who’s going to look at the numbers and also to be analytical and also practical he said yeah exactly. So well, if you put a spec in here, about six sigma, and you’re going to get people with Uber, Uber Uber degree of precision, oh, I don’t want that. Well, you’re using this as a represent example. You can see how people would misinterpret that. Right? Yeah. So, these are this, this, this, this role becomes too difficult without any framing. So, it’s like, why don’t I just hire some trainers then? I said, oh, don’t do that.

Brian Lambert 22:48

Yeah. Well, yeah, that’s a good point. And I know somebody who’s gone through five or six interviews and, and the same thing played out and early interview screeners right. If you look at the interview process, they don’t like that question. Oh, do you want to ask me that? I’m trying to figure out if you’re qualified to do what the bullets say. So, it’s an interesting discussion and I think for our listeners, it’s important to plant those seeds. But you know, you may have to go through the hoops to get to the hiring manager, but have that discussion at the hiring manager, because it’s going to go back to what’s the expectation, the expectation that you’re an individual contributor, is the expectation that you’re going to take over one of the programs and run it as services around are you going to be building out at par with him and her him or her on the strategic functional aspect of, you know, the Kokoda market. And those are important distinctions that may not show up in the job description that would in a conversation.

Scott Santucci 23:46

So, let’s shift now to the people that are in the roles today. So, one of the key buzzwords that we’re both Brian and I are seeing everywhere is sales onboarding. Onboard onboard onboard onboard. Brian, what’s the problem for onboarding?

Brian Lambert 24:06

Well, what problem are we trying to solve with onboarding?

Scott Santucci 24:10

Well, yeah, that’s there’s just a lot of stuff about onboarding and asking it purposely open ended.

Brian Lambert 24:17

Well, now I want to ask you questions to hear zero in on it, maybe that’s the point of asking it like that, instead of jumping to, well, here’s my plan, here’s how I would do it. And, you know, here’s how I would show up. And, you know, it’s really important to have facilitators that have these certain skills, you know, head down that path, that probably wouldn’t be very prudent in an ambiguous role in a in a shifting economy and a shifting, you know, business strategy view of your digital versus digital, jumping down a path where everybody might actually agree, but as far as, you know, a knee jerk reaction, they wouldn’t fight it, but might not be what they really, really want. Yeah.

Scott Santucci 24:58

So, the reason I pick on onboarding is I want to tell you a conversation that I had with actually three operating partners and private equity firms. And all of them have talked to me about best practices and sales enablement. And how do you do onboarding better? And I said, Well, what what is the business problem you’re looking to solve? Let’s start there. Well, we need to see a faster time to value. What do you mean by time to value? Well, what what we mean is that there are investments that are made in our in the sales force, and we want them producing more quickly. What does production look like? Well, that’s a good question. We don’t really have a standard definition of what production looks like we expect our portfolio companies that had the sales etc, to know that, okay, so basically what I gather is what you want is to accelerate or collapse that the time it takes to be productive, whether it be a new hire, or whether it be to add to the change of a rep as as you’re rolling out a new sales site, sales, sales training program, or you’re trying to roll out a cross selling initiative. Yes, absolutely. How are how do you find your portfolio companies responding to that? It’s really challenging. We’re, we are resisting the urge and actually, we find that we need to be a lot more prescriptive about exactly what we want. So, we define representative examples like onboarding for new hires. And here’s a kit of what it should look like. So, you’re saying that kit, you don’t want to implement it exactly. You’re saying this is what’s in our mind’s eye about what we what we think should be included. But you’re open for somebody who has expertise to make it better? Absolutely. You’re right. Gotcha. How is it executed in your portfolio companies? Oh, they just execute to the letter. And it’s very frustrating for us because they lose focus on what the real goal is, which is time to value. So, here’s an example of in a conversation about figuring out what the real problem is. The problem is not, we need to roll out a training program by Thursday. The real problem is, how do we make investments so that we accelerate the time to value from all of our reps to actually being performers. So, there’s a big difference between the scope of what things look at what the project looks like, and it might sound like semantics, but in terms of context, it’s completely different.

Brian Lambert 27:40

I think that that’s why that’s why we like that, that games, you know, go go talk to folks, you know, at conferences at the sales, nail society meetings, even your peers, you know, say, I’m in sales enablement. You know, what do we mean by sales here? And what do we mean by enablement? Now that that can get to what the expectation is and what people think you should be doing. But it also gives you an opportunity to perhaps reframe, which is important. And you know, just to recap, you know, the world of work is changing. It’s a convoluted space, it’s ambiguous, and there’s opportunity in that folks are trying to make sense of the world around them from recruiting, to even, you know, portfolio, private equity funds and companies and you know, they’re giving it a shot. You can either take that as a mandate a directive, or you can have a conversation to make sure that you’re on the same page and that you have the same, you know, vision and alignment and asking questions around. what problem are we trying to solve? And where where did this roll come from? And what do you mean by, you know, onboarding? These these should not be lightning rods to get you fired. And then nobody nobody’s gonna die if you ask those questions. And I think many of our listeners may be a little bit afraid to ask those, because it’s just a given that everybody knows what those answers are, but you know, Scott and I are here to tell you that it’s not a given. And it’s because of the times that we’re in this multiple definitions of the same word, for example, value or platform, or cloud, or customer. So have those conversations. Is that a good recap, Scott of where we’re at here in the podcast?

Scott Santucci 29:29

Yeah, I think that’s a great recap. And I would, I would say that, you know, to add to what your point was, if there is not consensus around a definition of sales enablement, it’s your job to create that clarity. The way that you create that clarity is to help people agree on what the problems are and to prioritize them. You should have ideas you should not be the one that says these are the problems and here’s how you prioritize them. You should let your executive sponsors do that. That way you get, you get buy in and permission to be able to tackle those things. So, sort of be really, really clear on us. Step number one is pick a problem. Uh step number two is really challenge yourself. The problem that you are addressing is it really is in fact, a problem? Is there a problem that you see? Or is in fact it really just a symptom of a bigger problem? How do you find that out? Then the second thing too, is once you get clarity, you can have a clear conversation around what that problem is. Find out who agrees that it’s a problem. Because if you don’t have consensus that that is the problem that you are addressing and therefore what your role exists to do. You’re going to have a mighty difficult time managing tons of people’s expectations and your gonna go running back to air cover for your boss to protect you all the time. And that’s going to get unbelievably exhausting both for you and and your boss. Yeah.

Brian Lambert 31:10

I feel like so I love those. I love those steps and I want to I want to breathe some life into this Can Can I toss this scenario your way? Of course. Let’s let’s say that there’s a new sales enablement leader who has been enrolled for 120 days. And their sales leader comes to him and says, Listen, you know, the QBRs are coming up. We need to make sure that those are flawlessly executed. Is everybody lined up? And Is everybody ready? And we need to make sure that we have a full agenda. And we need to make sure we document what everybody’s action items are. So, what is the definition of sales enablement there?

Scott Santucci 31:52

Well, what I would say is that what’s happened is that that particular individual Hasn’t defined the scope of the role. And basically, what happened is probably the head of sales went to the sales operations person. Sales operations person said, I’m too busy doing X, Y and Z. Well, guess what? You’ve gotten spillover administrative duty duties to that individual, the business problem that they’ve got is that they are at, you know, frankly, they’re at extra capacity to be able to handle overload administrative duties that this head of sales ops couldn’t get to.

Brian Lambert 32:31

Yeah. And that’s, that’s a real scenario, by the way.

Scott Santucci 32:35

That’s common. This is why the title or the right and the sales enabler is the head of broken things. You have that title. Why do you get the Why do you get your inbox filled up? One most sales enablement leaders tend to be very eager. Okay, I’ll help I’ll help and two the other challenge is that as they, as they do that, they don’t have any scope. So, I as the head of sales, don’t know that I’m cutting into other plans or other thoughts that you’re working on or whatever Master Master strategy is you haven’t given me a vision of what you’re building to. So, I’m going to say I guess that you are my, my resource to unclog things. And I want to make sure that I unclog these things with the qbrs. And if I have some discipline about how we do it, then I’m going to have a good inventory of records and I’m going to be able to problem solve that way. I don’t think of you, Brian is as the de facto person as somebody help problem solve with me. You’ve just reconfirmed for me that you are my administrative assistant. Mm hmm. So, I’m going to treat you that way.

Brian Lambert 33:47

Yeah, I’ll give you another situation. Okay. Purposely on the well, I’ll let you judge. So, I was gonna say on the other end of the spectrum, but that leads the witness a little bit which is what I did. Well, so hey, we know we’re changing our go to market. we’re evolving our platform. We bought three companies were stuck on messaging. Our board wants to know what the plan is.

Scott Santucci 34:16

Well, what I do is those are all a collection of symptoms. We need to first organize those into a common problem. So, what are these? What are these events? These, I guess what I would do is I come complexity factors. We have multiple complexity factors. One is the business is changing its business strategy. So, we have to change our go to market. Two is we’re moving from an old model into a platform selling a platform, which also is hard. We’ve also we’re also integrating three different companies. The reaction would be, well, shouldn’t we break those down into different initiatives but unfortunately, it in order to execute a platform sale, we have to communicate to customers holistically. So therefore, somebody must be responsible for it. And in the organization today, if you would do an organizational raci analysis, this touches every function, it touches product, it touches finance, it definitely touches sales, it touches marketing, and it touches human resources. But no one group owns it. It’s a pure cross functional problem. So, therefore, because no one owns it, because this is a problem with many tentacles, and we must simplify it. The business problem that sales enablement must address is exactly that. We must simplify the complexity so that we make it easier for our customers to buy and our sellers to sell that is the problem.

Brian Lambert 35:49

I like it. So, there’s two examples. So let me close this out a little bit here. I’m going to just briefly recap and then Scott if you have any final final words and then you can take us out. But let me recap what I think we did on this call. Right? So first, what we did was we talked about creating a definition that aligns to your vision and your overall remit. And also enrolling leadership in that and having those conversations, those why conversations to ensure that you can have an influential voice in how you’re perceived, and how you’re quite frankly, resourced, for example. So, there’s implications to that to this idea of making sure that you understand the difference between reacting to symptoms versus problems and thinking more deeply about perhaps root causes that might be tackled in an ongoing way, for example, versus just reacting to a symptom. Three, you know, borrowing from our stakeholder management push that we’ve had on the podcast, I believe We’ve also highlighted here, then the need for top-down alignment and the need to communicate. I mean, we haven’t talked about it specifically. But to do something like this, where it’s saying make sure you have alignment, make sure you enroll others there’s a huge stakeholder management application to making sure that others agree with your definition. So don’t create it in your own head. Don’t create it on your own computer. Others must also agree with it. I would say, what do you what do you think about those, those three key actions for those listening?

Scott Santucci 37:34

I think they’re spot on. I think any practitioner who doesn’t want to be an individual contributor and wants to get out of the inbox mailbox, must listen to all of the episodes that we had around stakeholder management. This is both simple and complex at the same time. You need to you need to do your work and get prepared for it.

Brian Lambert 37:59

Absolutely Thanks a lot, Scott. And thanks so much for those of you chiming in, you know, to have the real time feedback on these episodes is great. So, keep that coming. As, as you can hear, we’re using that on these podcasts. So, you know, this is about you as part of the insider nation and your success, more than it is about what’s gotten I think, obviously, our point of view comes from years of experience, and but obviously, part of that experience comes from engaging with folks like you. So, through these conversations, we really appreciate that keep us on our toes challenged us and, you know, obviously, put out the word to others to have them listen to the podcast, and let’s get our community bigger. If you’re at the sales enablement society meeting in a couple of weeks, we’ll see you there and we’re actually going to be podcasting right on the spot. So perhaps you can make it on our show. Thanks so much, everybody. We’ll see you next time.

Nick Merinkers 38:59

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.