JOIN us for Episode 17 where, in anticipation of finally meeting each other face to face at The Sales Rebellion / Dale Dupree's inaugural Totality the following week, ISE Season 3 host Erich Starrett gets WAY into the W.E.E.D.S. with THE Irrepressibly Optimistic Stu Heinecke. Dive into the world of competitive advantages and growth strategies with THE "father of contact marketing." From the importance of adaptability to leveraging internal and external collaboration, this episode is a must-listen for those looking to enable business success.

• The concept of "unfair" advantages and how to create them.
• The role of CWOs - Chief Weed (Growth!) Officers - in focusing on growth and revenue.
• Using weed strategies for business resilience and opportunistic growth.
• Real-life examples of innovative disruption techniques with contact marketing.
• Marketing success stories and upcoming insights from Stu Heinecke's upcoming (early 2025) re-release of "How To Get A Meeting With Anyone."

Don't miss out on these invaluable insights that can transform your business approach! Duck your head into the Orchestrate Sales Studios and take a listen.

JOIN US at Totality! Only a handful (literally!) tickets remainin... https://www.thesalesrebellion.com/totality/

Competitive Advantages:

• Discover how to create those "unfair" advantages that your competitors just can't match (legally, of course! 😉).

Surviving and Thriving Amidst Chaos:

• Learn how to not only survive disruptions but turn them into your biggest growth opportunities, following lessons learned from weeds.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work:

• Understand why collaboration, both internal and external, is the secret sauce behind thriving businesses.

Self-Disruption Tactics:

• Get inspired by Amazon's disruptive mindset and see how self-cannibalization can lead to innovation.

Weeds Strategy for Business:

• Explore Stu's unique analogy comparing business strategy to the relentless growth of weeds – resilience, collaboration, and adaptability. And that is JUST the beginning!

Did you know Leonardo da Vinci was one of the O.G.s of contact marketing? That he was commissioned to craft a horse head lute to be used as a gift to secure an essential royal meeting? Talk about using art (and your (horse's) head) to get ahead in business!

ABOUT STU:

Stu is a bestselling business author, marketer, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist.

His first book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, introduced the concept of Contact Marketing and was named one of the top 64 sales books of all time.

His latest release, How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed, lays out a complete model for explosive business growth, based on the strategies, attributes, and tools weeds use to grow, expand, dominate and defend their turf.

He is a twice-nominated hall of fame marketer,

Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center author-in-residence,

and was named the “Father of Contact Marketing” by the American Marketing Association.

He lives on the beautiful Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, Washington. (A favorite destination from Erich's childhood!)

Mentioned in this episode:

Visit us on the Orchestrate Sales Property

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ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

GTM AI Academy. The only AI curriculum curated by Enablement for Enablement ...and the entire cross-functional GTM team. Don't get tangled up in all of the...

Join Erich Starrett in the Orchestrate Sales Studios as he interviews Jonathan "Coach K" Kvarfordt on the transformative power of AI in Enablement. Delve into Jonathan's insights on evolving the role of enablement professionals and the strategic impact of AI.

• Jonathan's journey from survival-focused to strategic thought leadership in sales enablement
• Active involvement in opportunities to improve Enablement
• The formation and goals of the RISE initiative for research-based enablement insights
• The role of AI in feedback, coaching, and automating administrivia
• Future of enablement with AI and the necessity for adaptation and innovation

We can't wait for you to listen to this episode and harness the power of AI to elevate your enablement game. Jonathan's insights are not just enlightening but will truly redefine how we look at sales enablement’s role in the future.

Don’t miss this in-depth discussion on the future of Enablement!

1. Jonathan’s Journey: Discover how Jonathan transitioned from a survival mode to becoming a pioneering figure in sales enablement, learning from industry leaders and engaging with professional organizations.
2. AI in Feedback & Coaching: Learn how AI tools like Momentum are transforming feedback processes, making coaching multilingual teams more efficient and strategic.
3. Philosophical Shifts in Enablement: Jonathan challenges the traditional reactive role of enablement, advocating for a shift towards being proactive strategic partners within organizations.
4. Strategic Use of AI: Get insights on how AI can automate routine tasks, freeing up time for more creative and impactful enablement activities.
5. Future Vision: Jonathan introduces the RISE Initiative, which aims to clarify enablement roles and responsibilities using data-driven insights. This initiative involves thorough research and academic collaboration to define what good enablement looks like.

Did you know Jonathan discovered AI’s immense potential even before ChatGPT became a household name? His early adoption of generative AI tools has paved the way for groundbreaking applications in enablement, from crafting precise feedback to creating competency models that require minimal tweaks!

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

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GTM AI Academy. The only AI curriculum curated by Enablement for Enablement ...and the entire cross-functional GTM team. Don't get tangled up in all of the random vendor driven offerings in your feed. Learn AI from a globally trusted source - Coach K - Jonathan Kvarfordt Their bundle "Enablement AI Mastery" includes BOTH the core "Generative AI Foundations" course AND "Enablement AI Mastery" specifically. Each course has a value of $599 individually, but Coach K is offering them as a bundle with reduced pricing. AND as a listener of the Inside Sales Enablement podcast, if you "ACT NOW" you can use code "ISE30" to get an ADDITIONAL 30% off of the entire thing. You will also receive FREE access to the GTM AI Tools Demo Library. Coach K has done the demos so you don't have to and offers his straight shooting opinion through an Enablement lens. Go to www.gtmaiacademy.com and enter code ISE30 TODAY and elevate your AI Enablement game!

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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.

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

Mentioned in this episode:

Join Orchestrate Sales' ISE Podcast Insider Nation!

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ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

GTM AI Academy. The only AI curriculum curated by Enablement for Enablement ...and the entire cross-functional GTM team. Don't get tangled up in all of the random vendor driven offerings in your feed. Learn AI from a globally trusted source - Coach K - Jonathan Kvarfordt Their bundle "Enablement AI Mastery" includes BOTH the core "Generative AI Foundations" course AND...

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...

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 Episode 12, Erich Starrett is joined by Dr. Shawn Fowler, whom he originally met when Shawn was VP, Sales Enablement (a true cross-functional #Orchestrator) at SalesLoft, and a gracious host of his first executive board meeting as President of the Atlanta Revenue Enablement Society back in early 2020. Before then, Dr. Fowler had been the World Wide Director of Enablement & Learning for IBM, and is now a Partner in his own sales strategy and sales enablement consulting venture: RevenueReady.

Highlights from the episode include...

PAST:

⌛️ Shawn "stumbled" into the profession working as the first services salesperson for Silverpop - essentially selling desired business outcomes. The SVP of sales, Todd McCormick, announced he was hiring a head of sales enablement and the hiring manager Drew Pronté said "hey, the CEO said that you should probably be the guy."

⌛️ He didn't know what sales enablement was. At the time he was pursuing a PhD in educational psychology so he combined what he learned from working as a sales engineer and as a services salesperson with what he knew about how psychology of learning works ...and he found himself implementing their first ever Sales Enablement program.

⌛️ His first Sales Enablement event was hosted by SiriusDecisions in Atlanta. "I was thinking we need to start something where we do that on a regular basis. This was easily the most valuable thing that I've done in the last six months."

⌛️ "Getting a seat at the table was probably the biggest factor in helping me be successful in sales enablement."

⌛️ Silverpop was purchased shortly thereafter by IBM when he then developed and executed their global expansion go-to-market plan. "I had the opportunity to see what it looks like in a much bigger level. IBM is basically a handful of multi billion dollar companies all put together. And I was part of one of those multi billion dollar companies inside of it. I got to see how these really big enterprise complex sales work, how you have to enable people across multiple different continents."

⌛️ Shaw was responsible for internal sales enablement including customer service and sales engineers and external - partner enablement - as well. "I think it makes a lot of sense, honestly, when you are in that position you have the opportunity to identify and eliminate a lot of the organizational issues that negatively affects your customer and that negatively affect the team as well."

PRESENT:

💼 Dr. Fowler diagnosed a few challenges that Sales 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."

1 - A lot of heads of sales are hearing from their investors that they need sales enablement but there was a period of time where I don't think a lot of them really knew what it meant.

2 - Heads of sales aren't always great at hiring enablement. Recognizing talent can be difficult.

3 - There is a lot of fluff. There was a period of time where sales was a lot easier and there's an entire generation of people who are in sales enablement who didn't have to figure out how to build a better machine. They could get away with adding more people to the machine and adding revenue by doing that. With venture capital drying up there's a much bigger focus on productivity. In order to achieve productivity per rep, you have to build a better machine.

🩺 The Doc offers REMEDIES to these

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 Episode 11, Erich Starrett hosts Bob Perkins, the Founder AAISP, the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (now Emblaze) in the Orchestrate Sales Studios on the eve of the #digitalnow conference in Chicagoland next week (including a special promo code if you have not yet RSVP'd!)

We begin with his origins in telesales to Inside Sales to forming the AAISP. And from where he first crossed paths with #SalesEnablement in the journey to modern day where Emblaze is partnering with the Revenue Enablement Society for track next week.

Highlights from the episode include...

PAST:

⌛️ Bob was on the first ever Inside sales implementation of Siebel. "We used to pull out a stopwatch and time how long it would take to pull up a customer record."

⌛️ Bob and Larry Reeves held the first AAISP conference for 50 people in Minneapolis in 2009 using a sound system borrowed from Bob's church.

⌛️ By year two they had 200 and started getting calls from places like Japan, Afghanistan, France begging to start a chapter in their location.

⌛️ The explosion of Inside Sales created a need to scale the training of less experienced reps. Which created demand for Sales Enablement.

⌛️ Bob reflects on how Jill Rowley "The EloQueen" ushered the social selling mix onto the sales scene.

⌛️ In Bob's early experience the SES he talked with Scott Santucci about the similarities and differences between the two organizations.

PRESENT

💼 Sales is improving and growing with technology and with that growth there's need for training. Witness colleges that now have sales programs.

(Can I get an AMEN, Dr. Howard Dover Robert M. Peterson, Ph.D., Stefanie Boyer, PhD💧?)

💼 A behind the curtain look at the continuing evolution of the AAISP into Emblaze as Bob continues his transition from founder-operator to executive board member.

💼 Great salespeople make it about the other person. What does that mean? Empathy. Caring. Attention. Listening more than you're speaking. Those are the traits that winning sales reps carry. (shoutouts to Steve Richard and Dale Dupree)

FUTURE

🤖 The future of sales is being Amazonized. "We all know what Amazon is. It's everything. It's point and click, order, return, customer service, pricing, availability, everything at your fingertips, and sales is moving in that direction."

🤖 Leaders continue to need development. We should not lose an emphasis on enabling sales / revenue *LEADERS.*

🤖 What is the future of the AAISP in it's new incarnation as...

In Episode 10 Dr. Brian Lambert is back in the Orchestrate Sales Studios with Erich Starrett, for part two of a two-part interview. Dr. Lambert is a Digital Value Architect at Elastic, co-founder of OSC, SES, and co-host of Inside Sales Enablement seasons one and two.

In this segment we pivot from past to present and future, with an emphasis on the impact of AI and the new data = fuel paradigm. Highlights from the second part of our interview:

PAST

⌛️ What is Brian's take on the recent move by primary research companies to shift from "Sales" to "Revenue" and the Sales Enablement Society following suit to Revenue Enablement Society?

PRESENT

⌛️ Now that Brian has moved into the Marketing organization, what is his experience like compared to the Sales or Ops or Talent Enablement functions?

⌛️ How does data collection compare among the functions?

⌛️ What would it mean to truly be Revenue Enablement?

⌛️ In line with recent interactions with @Hilary Headlee, Erich suggests the best first step towards true Revenue Enablement may be for Enablement leaders to engage with #RevOps and Brian reacts to the suggestion.

FUTURE

⌛️ Brian talks about the shift in focus from company to employee to customer ...and now we are shifting towards a data focus. A data centric view. One for which individuals, functions, and entire companies are ill prepared to pivot towards and fully embrace and benefit.

⌛️ A potential new paradigm of looking at data less as a byproduct of doing work and more as a fuel for the digital economy.

⌛️ The promise and potential hurdles of AI for Enablement.

>>> Understanding, embracing, and tapping into a hybrid human + artificial "collective intelligence."

>>> Using AI to generate structured inputs that we as humans synthesize vs. outputs that leave the creativity to an unknown artificial third party.

⌛️ A "future of work" vision where we understand how data becomes information, how that information becomes knowledge, how that knowledge becomes insight, how that insight gets leveraged to make decisions and then how to effectively put AI on top of that to fully leverage what makes the company unique.

⌛️ There are a series of continuums:

>>> Data awareness: From data aware to data led.

>>> Organizational: From data "laying everywhere" to organized digital mastery.

>>> Enablement: From being an Analyzer to an Orchestrator removing silos and creating the organizational structure of tomorrow

"You have to be a synthesizer of all this information and AI can help you, but if you cannot synthesize this stuff across marketing operations, training, sales, customers, let's not forget, then you're not going to be an Orchestrator."

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

ORCHESTRATE Sales!

Erich

#RevenueEngine #DigitalTransformation

#AICuriousHumanEnthusiast

#RevenueEnablement

Mentioned in this episode:

Visit us on the Orchestrate Sales Property

https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/

ISE Listeners Get 30% Off of GTM AI Academy!

GTM AI Academy. The only AI curriculum curated by Enablement for Enablement ...and the entire cross-functional GTM team. Don't get tangled up in all of the random vendor driven offerings in your feed. Learn AI from a globally trusted source - Coach K - Jonathan...