Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com‘s Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.

On ISEs3 Ep15 host Erich Starrett is joined in the Orchestrate Sales studios by new friend Danny Wasserman, whom he finally met F2F at Corporate Visions Emblaze #DigitalNow24 in early April. Danny has done game-changing tours of Enablement duty at top logos including Databricks, Gong! and Tableau.

Q: So how *DOES* #RevenueEnablement gain a seat at the table in "the room where it happens?

And what does THAT have to do with peanut butter, sausage, and Shake Shack?

A: (in part) "whether it's in sales. Or whether it's in CS or it's in enablement, you cannot trivialize or overstate the importance of the intersection between hospitality and the world of business."

Dive in with me and Danny to talk Strategy, Technology, Human Connection, and...

PAST:

⌛️ Danny was onboarded at Tableau at about employee 2k. The IPO had just recently happened, and his first "real" taste of enablement was onboarding with "the truly incomparable" Sarah Bedwell

⌛️ Joining Enablement at after a sales spiff started a bit of a riff. "I was fortunate enough to be within the cocoon of Mother Goose (Nate) Vogel."

⌛️ "My dirty little secret is that I'm an enablement? Dude. You couldn't have captured the essence of how I felt about being a former seller who had sort of taken a bite of the forbidden fruit."

⌛️ Frank Slootman boldly came out and said, why am I going to put all of the customer success on one person?

⌛️ Nate recruited Danny to re-join Enablement forces at DataBricks.

PRESENT:

💼 "If I'm not fighting that hard for my cabinet seat with whatever executive I'm trying to maintain my position with, there's a dozen people behind me that will absolutely eat my lunch."

💼 Per Danny Meyer - American restaurateur and a guiding voice in Danny's career: In addition to IQ, do you have what he calls HQ: hospitality quotient?

💼 "Genuinely what enablement provides is service. And I think if you feel that passionately, if you feel that authentically and genuinely, the beneficiaries of what it is that you're providing will also sense that ...you will not allow or tolerate yourself to serve a mediocre product."

FUTURE:

🤖 Kyle Healy, who's the SVP of Enablement at a insurance company "When we think about AI's place in our profession, do you want to embrace that technology like Iron Man, or do you want to attempt to resist it like Terminator?"

🤖 Potential impacts of AI and technological advancements on the enablement profession

🤖 Necessity to adapt and integrate new technologies while preserving the human element

🤖 Ongoing collaboration and learning opportunities in enablement practices

Please click 👇🏻, subscribe 📲, listen 🎧 ...and 🎙️ join the conversation!

ORCHESTRATE Sales!

Erich

#RevenueEngine #DigitalTransformation #ChangeManagement

#Orchestrate #SalesEnablement

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Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com‘s Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.

Mark Twain - the PIONEER of Sales Enablement who empowered a LITERAL customer facing frontline of 10,000!?!!!

On ISEs3 Episode 14, Erich Starrett is out-history-nerded ENTIRELY when he is joined in the Orchestrate Sales studios by Sales Melon's Todd Caponi. Todd is not only an aficionado (and collector!) of SALES history, he is a man on a mission to further a movement towards sales TRANSPARENCY. This includes authoring a 3x award-winning book (𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘦) and 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳 that just won its second award recently.

Highlights from the episode include...

PAST:

💬 "If the truth won't sell it, don't sell it." 💬 Arthur Dunn, 1921

⌛️ Todd's first Sales Enablement experience at Exact Target (now Salesforce) began when COO @Andy Kofoid sent him to their NEST - New Employee Sales Training as part of his sales management onboarding. It was so ineffective, he left. A few months later they asked him to rebuild enablement. He had to Google the word.

⌛️ His search led him to Scott Santucci who had a Forrester event coming up in San Francisco. He attended and sat next to Jill Rowley.

⌛️ He also came across (Dr. Ohio) and flew out to do a few day deep dive with him on adult learning. He brought the combined knowledge back and built a successful, scalable Enablement program for Exact Target.

⌛️ Post $3B acquisition by Salesforce his team used the sale e-learning modules, and recorded role plays (back in 2012!) they had built for their internal team to train all of Salesforce on Exact Target. He was given a shoutout by Mark Beinoff himself.

⌛️ Todd's three core Enablement responsibilities:

1️⃣ Amalgamate: identify and align top 5 CxO priorities

2️⃣ Orchestrate: optimize resources, identify the optimal path to enable the revenue organization to drive the five.

3️⃣ Evaluate: Provide feedback and close the loop.

💬 "(As a CRO) I always felt my Enablement team had a closer eye into the successes, the failures, the struggles, the strengths, the weaknesses of my team before any of us did. 💬

⌛️ Todd's application of transparency enabled PowerReviews to became Chicago's fastest growing tech company from 2014 to 2017.

PRESENT:

💼 As the economy gets tight, as it gets harder to sell, you need two things: better sales leadership and better sales enablement. However, the knee jerk reaction - which is happening now - is to train leaders less and downsize enablement because "it's overhead."

💬 "As things get tougher, those investments need to go up, but ironically, they've gone down historically over and over again." 💬

💼 Today, the "as a service" economy means that closing the deal is no longer the peak. It's the beginning. You need to create long term value for these customers. And that's that long game helps you win the short game too. Simliar approach to Jacco's Revenue Architecture Bowtie at Winning By Design.

💼 The shift from growth at all costs to long term recurring value is history repeating itself. 1914 to 1923. It was the forgotten depression of the early 1920s.

FUTURE:

🤖 The future of sales is two things.

1️⃣ Going back to a service oriented mindset. "Salesmanship is the science of service." - Arthur Sheldon (1911)

2️⃣ Providing better homework for the buyer....

Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com‘s Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.

On a superfun ISEs3 Episode 13, Erich Starrett is joined in the Orchestrate Sales studios by Meganne Brezina, CCMP™. Meganne is not only the Senior Director of Enablement at Seismic, she's published Tomorrow's Enablement for Today's Leaders: The Strategic Guide to Demonstrating Value and Driving Outcomes alongside Irina Soriano.

Highlights from the episode include...

PAST:

⌛️ While carrying a bag for the National Thoroughbred Racing Association (in partnership with John Deere) she quickly learned that hitting four or five dealerships and educating their salespeople how to sell to horse people was far more productive than going directly to 50 farms.

⌛️ Meganne's next stop was Exact Target, which was in the process of being acquired by Salesforce. She moved into an operations role and saw an opportunity to educate the customer facing team about the power of their internal "customer data warehouse" and spoke at SKO. That is when Meghan Gendelman came up to her and said "you need to be in Enablement!" And thus it began.

⌛️ In search of "what the heck is enablement?" Meganne searched the company directory and and up popped Brian Noss and Nina LaRouche (who co-leads the Indianapolis Chapter of WiSE with her today!)

⌛️ Her early experience in Engaging the Revenue Enablement Society was being sold by vendors vs. solving problems in community.

PRESENT

💼 The the RES has evolved into "such an incredible community." Meganne and I met F2F for the first time last fall at the 2023 Sales Enablement Society Experience conference in San Diego.

💼 Position two - that in order to be effective Enablement should be run as a business withing a business - is a big part of why Meganne got into Enablement.

👉🏻 She is passionate about Enablement teams being grounded in a charter and mission statement.

👉🏻 Enablement "requires the orchestration of so many pieces within an organization to bring it to life."

👉🏻 Enablement built with a North Star driving the practice forward results in tangible business outcomes.

💼 The biggest #Enablement opportunity in present day? Putting forth a proper enablement strategy.

💬 "Getting the executive buy-in for it, doing their socialization across the business, and then start to execute on it. That is the only way we're going to get out of the fire department world and into the fire prevention world." 💬

💼 The digital copy of Meganne and Irina Soriano's new book - Tomorrow's Enablement for Today's Leaders: The Strategic Guide to Demonstrating Value and Driving Outcomes - is OUT NOW and available for free from Seismic's site! Paperback coming soon. 📚

💼 The concept of the EVC - Enablement Value Chain - was born of Meganne and Irina preparing to go in front of their executives to give a semi-annual report and struggling to connect the dots with the business outcome that their Enablement team drove.

💼 The resulting data and analytics report from the EVC empowered them to secure executive buy in and gain the necessary resourcing to effectively...