Emblaze DigitalNow:  Inability to Elevate Conversations to C-Suite

One of the biggest gaps for our Customer Facing Frontlines is the same gap that many #RevenueEnablement practitioners suffer ourselves…

The inability to elevate our conversations to meet eye-to-eye with the C-suite.

In life we are relegated to “the level we most sound like.” And if Enablement professionals don’t have the strategic approach and skill set to garner a seat at our own internal executive table, then how can we legitimately assist our sales teams in accomplishing the same?

It was encouraging to see the first topic of the first official Revenue Enablement Society track, orchestrated superbly by Corporate Visions‘s own Paul George at Emblaze #DigitalNow24, focusing on that very subject:

How the ability to “speak CRO” is crucial for driving transformative change within our own organizations *and* in the customer’s boardroom.

Props to RES panelists (and recent ISEs3 podcast guests) Christopher Kingman M.S. and Gail Behun as well as Tony G. of MICHELIN Connected Fleet, Tim Harris of Uniphore, and Daniel M. Smith of TransUnion for your participation and insights. A few highlights:

“What good would look like: drop me into a client meeting and I would have a hard time figuring out who the salesperson is because my (CRO) client and the salesperson are having a business conversation. They’re talking about their P&L. About how they make money. The product is the afterthought. So as I look at my enablement team, I sit down and say, okay. This is where we need to evolve our model.”
— Dan Smith, VP International, Head of Sales Specialists & Revenue Optimization

 “From an enablement perspective, we have to understand fully the numbers that move the business. What are those numbers and how do we own and influence them?
…if (the CRO is) telling me we have a problem, I have a problem because I’m probably not gonna have a job much longer. I have to be proactive and enablement as a practice grew out of sales training, grew out of a reactive function.”
— Gail Behun – President, RES

“Anything cross functionally that goes in front of the sales team goes through the enablement team to get to sales. Whether it’s a product team, solution team, engineering team, etc. it goes through the lens of enablement.”
— Tony Gomez, Senior Dir Sales Development

“I think you have to look at leading indicators. I think it’s great to align to revenue numbers in those targets, but when you look where enablement sits, I think you have to also really, really drill into what are we doing to track what’s changing right now from what we’re training on.”
— Tim Harris – Dir of Product + Growth

We have a HUGE opportunity to #ElevateValue – as a profession *and* for our customer facing front lines.

Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know – join the convo!