ISEs3 Episode 12: Dr. Shawn Fowler, PhD

“Sales (Revenue) Enablement is the change management arm of revenue.”

On ISEs3 Episode 12, I am joined in the Orchestrate Sales studios by Dr. Shawn Fowler, PhD whom I originally met when he was VP, Sales Enablement and #Orchestrator at Salesloft, and a gracious host of my first executive board meeting as Pres of the ATL Revenue Enablement Society at the turn of the decade,Dr. Fowler had been the Global Director of Enablement for IBM, and is now a Partner in his own sales strategy and enablement consulting venture: RevenueReady.

Highlights from the episode include…
PAST:
⌛️ Shawn “stumbled” into the profession working as the first services salesperson for Silverpop, selling desired business outcomes. Todd McCormick announced he was hiring a head of enablement under Drew Prante.
⌛️ His first #SalesEnablement event was hosted by SiriusDecisions in Atlanta
⌛️ “Getting a seat at the (CxO) table was probably the biggest factor in helping me be successful in sales enablement.”
⌛️ Shawn was responsible for internal sales enablement including customer service and sales engineers and external – partner enablement – as well.

PRESENT
💼 Dr. Fowler diagnosed a few challenges that Enablement faces today:
🩺 “I think there’s not enough sharing of best practices”
🩺 “The quality of sales enablement as a profession has gone down pretty dramatically in the last five years.”
🩺 The Doc offers REMEDIES to these challenges
💼 In order to succeed you must both design an effective intervention, and then execute the reinforcement required to drive real change.
💼 “Sales (Revenue) Enablement is the change management arm of revenue.” WGLL shoutout to Hilary Headlee who exemplified this at Zoom, having owned both global Ops AND Enablement …during the height of Covid! And now she’s doing it at the global Advisory Leader, Growth Team @ Insight Partners
for 500+ companies.
💼 Interview advice for Enablement: Focus on the first 90 days through the lens of the CRO. Have the attitude that you will onboard as if you are planning to be in the top 10-15% of their sales team.

FUTURE
🤖 Increasing recognition of the role of enablement in change management and of the need for an explicit change managing function in organizations.
🤖 Increased focus on frontline managers on both the new and existing sales side of the house, because the reality is everything lives or dies with the frontline manager.
🤖 #AI is going to evolve and facilitate some things. The power of artificial intelligence to comb through thousands of minutes that are produced on a weekly basis and distill that down into insights or moments can be powerful when training, coaching, and identifying what works.

#RevenueEnablement
#AiCuriousHumanEnthusiast