I recently sat down with the 4 newest members of the Sales Enablement Society Board of Directors to talk about the evolution of Sales Enablement and the Sales Enablement Society itself. Del Nakhi, Gail Behun, Mary Beth Hanifer, and Chris Kingman share their experiences, passions, and talk about the SES initiatives they're each leading. You'll hear Del talk about engaging members with compelling content while Gail is on a mission to strengthen our community. Mary Beth is leveraging her extensive experience in sales and enablement serving as our secretary, and Chris is working on a thrilling project with Johns Hopkins that you won't want to miss hearing about!
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I recently sat down with the 4 newest members of the Sales Enablement Society Board of Directors to talk about the evolution of Sales Enablement and the Sales Enablement Society itself. Del Nakhi, Gail Behun, Mary Beth Hanifer, and Chris Kingman share their experiences, passions, and talk about the SES initiatives they're each leading. You'll hear Del talk about engaging members with compelling content while Gail is on a mission to strengthen our community. Mary Beth is leveraging her extensive experience in sales and enablement serving as our secretary, and Chris is working on a thrilling project with Johns Hopkins that you won't want to miss hearing about!
Please subscibe on Apple, Spotify or Google.
Welcome to the Sales Enablement Society Stories from the Trenches, where enablement practitioners share their real-world experiences. Get the scoop on what's happening inside Sales Enablement teams across the global SES member community. Each segment of Stories from the Trenches share the good, the bad and the ugly practices of corporate sales. Enablement initiatives learned what worked, what didn't work and how obstacles were eliminated by corporate teams and leadership. Head back, grab a cold one and join host Paul Butterfield for casual conversations about the wide and varied profession of sales enablement, where there is never a fits all solution.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Sales Enablement Society Podcast, stories from the Trenches the only, as far as we know, completely bias for us community-based podcast, where we bring together enablement professionals from all over the world. We talk about common problems and how we're solving for them, and we also try to draw out some unique things that others are experiencing and how they're dealing with those, to maybe give us all ways to think about broadening what we're doing and how we're impacting the teams that we serve. Before we jump in, I want to make sure and thank our friends at Alleggo for sponsoring this episode. One of the common problems that we face as enablers is struggling to get the sales teams we support more efficient and improving time to productivity. With Alleggo's modern revenue enablement platform, marketing, sales and enablement teams get on the same page and have continuous improvement available. You can break through all the noise and deliver the buying experience that the buyers today demand. I would say you're sellers too. They want a modern, clean approach to their enablement. Faster RAM for your reps, more revenue for your business in less time. See how it can work for you. You can check it out live at Alleggocom.
Speaker 2:I am excited now to introduce you. This is a bit of a different format for us. We recently had four new board members join us and we've brought everyone together and we're going to have a conversation. I'm excited we're breaking a little bit of new ground. I'm going to briefly tell you who they are and then they'll each introduce themselves a little bit. We've got Del Nakai, gail Ban, mary Beth Hanifer and Chris Kingman. Why don't we start off with you, del? Just a little bit about yourself and what you're doing on the board with SES.
Speaker 3:Sure, my name is Del Nakai and I'm the founder and CEO of a new company called Lead to Catalyze. My focus for the SES, which I'm really excited about, is building out content and engaging our members with new voices and really focusing on ensuring there's really standards across the board with how we're operating and how we drive impact at our companies.
Speaker 2:I'm just going left or right across my screen, gail.
Speaker 4:Thanks, paul. I am the director of sales and aimment for Genover Square. I've been in the sales and aimment space about 10 years and I've had the privilege to volunteer on the conference the last two years before I joined the board. My passion for SES is really around community building and our ability to strengthen this evolving profession through community.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right, we're going to talk more about that in a minute. Mary Beth, let's hear from you.
Speaker 5:Hi, I'm Mary Beth Hanifer and I have been a volunteer with the Sales and Amablement Society since 2017, and I've been in the sales and aimment space since before it was called Sales and Amablement. I've been in roles that have evolved from one thing eventually into enablement as we know it today, and also the secretary on the board.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 6:And Chris. I'm Chris Kingman, global head of digital enablement for TransUnion and founding member of Sales and Amablement Society, and I joined the board a couple of months ago with the specific focus on bringing the project with Johns Hopkins to life.
Speaker 2:Yes, and very exciting. So first, thank you for everyone. Everyone that you've just heard from have just jumped in with both feet and the progress and the things that they're accomplishing are just phenomenal. Watch, gail, you started to go down this road, the road of why you're so passionate about being part of SES, and all of us are here because we've been passionate about SES for some time, some years but when you join the board, that is definitely leveling up in terms of the amount of time, talent and energy that you're bringing to SES. So, since you introduced the topic, maybe just a little bit more on why your decision to join the board and why you're passionate about the work that we're all doing.
Speaker 4:It wasn't even a decision to join the board. I was so honored and excited. I think I said yes before Bill finished the sentence of asking me to join, so I was really excited. I think the Sales and Amount Society plays such a critical role in our industry, especially right now, because we are in an evolving profession. We're in a profession that doesn't have tight swim lanes and black and white definitions.
Speaker 4:Thank you, as a community, we have an opportunity and a responsibility to start adding that type of structure, start building that type of community to make this profession as powerful as possible, and I didn't see any better vehicle than doing that, besides doing that with SES. Ses, as a community, is member driven. It started with 100 people in our room saying, yeah, we're here and we're going to do this together. And to Mary Bess Point, people have been doing this for years under different titles, but really had the opportunity in 2017 to bring together and start to codify those ideas. And now it's really important to even evolve that curve and I wanted to have a voice and an opportunity to be part of that process, both with my Chicago network directly and with the national and then a global footprint too.
Speaker 2:Mary Beth, apparently you were enablement before. Enablement was cool, so I would love to hear your perspective. Why are you on the board? What are you excited about?
Speaker 5:I'm so excited to, as Gail said, it's taking your volunteerism to a new level and being able to give back to the community that I feel has given so much to me. When I first learned about the Sales Enablement Society in 2017, I had just come out of a company where I'd been there for over 20 years, and so I had a very what I call the bubble around me a view of what enablement was and what it looked like. And so to come and meet this community of people and to learn from other practitioners, learn about college programs and sales, and to learn about vendors and just the research analysts and the fact that everybody came together in the Community Sales Enablement Society from all of these walks of life it just it was just amazing to me, and so I started volunteering and learning, and I mean I just everything that's happened good in my life from a career perspective and personally these last two years has been a direct result of, you know, being part of this community.
Speaker 2:So love that. Thank you, del. You're the most recent member, and then I've got a special question for you, chris, and tie us all together, so be ready.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm similar to Mary Beth and that I've been doing this before. It was a thing, so over 15 years, and I really only found the enablement community within the last couple of years, and what I know is it would have been amazing to have the support when I was just starting out and I want to be able to give back and really help the community as we're evolving to Gale's point, to set them up for success, especially because we have enablers coming from so many different walks of life and so many different backgrounds.
Speaker 2:Right, Chris. So you were in the room where it happened and would love your perspective from why you got involved then and then bring us into why you're involved so heavily today still.
Speaker 6:Sure, so I was. I was involved at the LinkedIn stage when it was a group and there was a lot of talk and posts and things like that, and when they decided to put something together, the first reason I went was because it was within driving distance. If that was out of state I would not have attended. So I was very fortunate that they all decided Florida was the place to be. What drove me to attend? I had this feeling that like I needed to be there. You know, like there's this thing, there's a lot of buzz.
Speaker 6:I see this term enablement a lot, but you know I don't have my arms wrapped around it, but a lot of people are committing to coming here and people who you know they had a very big presence on LinkedIn. They had a lot of good things to say and more importantly for me was a lot of people were talking about a lot of the things I was doing or the questions I had, like what do you do about this, what do you do about that? And I just wanted to know. Like you know, I think, just like everyone else, I was kind of figuring it out in real time as my organization sort of expanded into enablement and I thought, you know what, maybe this could be something that's going to help propel me. Why am I here today? And kind of what's kept me engaged?
Speaker 6:I think I've always tried to be active in society, you know, and volunteer where I can.
Speaker 6:And, similar to everybody else's point, I just feel like I've reached the point in my career where I can give back and if I can save somebody a couple years or, more importantly, a couple headaches by giving them some guidance or some, you know, some hard game knowledge, I'll say I don't want to point to expertise, but I think there's value in that and certainly that's a lot of, a lot of the value I've gotten out of it is just meeting people who have been doing it before. It was a thing and then, you know, sharing their expertise and knowledge, and maybe it is. I think it's overlooked, but there's a lot of value in just networking and connecting with folks and talking to them and learning even something from somebody for 15 minutes. And so my goals are to expand upon that with the college program is just increase awareness, increase adoption, get it out there in the broader, you know, academic sphere and really, like you know, put another lens on enablement, get open more eyes to it and help more people.
Speaker 2:I think everyone would agree that this has been a transformational year. I don't think that's too strong a word for the enablement community in good ways, but, frankly, also in very challenging ways, ways that I mean. Anybody who was a hiring manager in the previous 12 to 18 months before last fall was with knows the number of recruiting calls and the sometimes crazy numbers are being thrown in enablement and then it was almost as if someone flipped a switch and and things turned in the other direction. So and I'm whichever one of you is wants to jump in on this, but would love to have a discussion about the challenges that we're experiencing as a community and either what role that that SES is working to play in supporting those challenges, or maybe even some things that that you think we should. We should be thinking about either one. I want to go first.
Speaker 6:I'll go first.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 6:Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. It does feel like a switch was flipped right, like all of a sudden a lot of our peers are saying you know, I'm, I'm part of the next round and my tech startup decided they needed to let go of folks. My perception is to the uninformed sales enablement is a gamble and it's very hard if you don't have the right conversations or the right value propositions. You're effectively asking for budget to gamble on this idea of enablement right, rather than the inverse of do it and prove it works and then get the funding. And I just my. My two cents are my.
Speaker 6:My opinion is that a lot of folks, a lot of folks, went with the gamble first, instead of you know somebody taking out a side of their plate and maybe it didn't work, maybe it didn't pan out, but it's very easy to take bad enablement and the label it as an operating expense and cut it from your you know, your budget as a society. What are we going to do about? How can we help that that? There's a couple things. One, the jobs post. I think it's critical. You know it's great it's. It's better than the job sorting functionality of LinkedIn itself.
Speaker 6:Linkedin doesn't recognize enablement as a category in its jobs thing which maybe, maybe we put a board member on just that, indeed doesn't recognize it as a practice or a career and so just pulling what is it's like 50 jobs maybe is hugely impactful. And then another thing I think that we're we're now just working on is and Paul and I are just working on is and Paul and I are just working on and I have just started these conversations but expanding our partnerships with folks outside right, looking at other organizations that are sales focused and saying you know can enablement benefit you and your members right, and in increasing the access to enablement resources so organizations might be able to engage with enablement practitioners without investing that money. And so they can, they can validate and they can test and they can see hey, this might be worth it instead of a blank gamble.
Speaker 2:Gail, your hand was up.
Speaker 4:Chris made such a great point. Thank you so much. And I think, to piggyback on that, I think there's been a lot of what I've been calling buyers for more on the part of our CROs and our VP of sales. They bought into the idea of enablement. They bought into it heavily.
Speaker 4:We've seen organizations that went from a function of one to a function of seven or eight very quickly and then just as quickly didn't see the immediate ROI, didn't really understand how enablement could affect outcomes, just looked at programs and have gone hard in the reverse.
Speaker 4:And so I think, as part of SES, our goal is also to help bridge this conversation from sales enablement to the CROs, to the sales leaders, to help them understand how to build scalable, repeatable, responsible enablement programs that are there for the test of time. I mean, I have always said as an enabler, we are here for the long term. We are not a quick fix, we are not a band aid. We are here to build the practices that build sustainable businesses. And now we have to focus on building sustainable enablement practices in our own worlds and I think if we can do that and influence that as a society, we're really a resource for our members and to our companies, the CROs and the VPs of sales, because they're going to get better outcomes from their enablement partners when they have a really good opportunity and understanding of how to leverage these teams.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I can build on what Gail was mentioning in terms of enablement is not a quick fix. So that's something I focus on a lot, which is change management, and I have so many opportunities to talk to members of our community because they reach out to me and say, hey, I'm going through these different initiatives, how do I manage all of this change? And I've also talked to so many people who were laid off at least a dozen who went through the interviewing process and it gave me a lot of insight into what's going on. And what I'm observing is a combination of responsibility, part of it on our end and in terms of enablement, and part of it in terms of our stakeholders really understanding how to leverage enablement. So what I'm seeing is enablement is oftentimes brought into filling gaps, especially in terms of revenue leadership, whether it's based on capacity, time, skill set, but what is missing is really understanding that revenue leaders still play a really key role in any initiative that we help to lead in terms of coaching, reinforcing, holding their teams accountable to it and the way that SES can really help with this.
Speaker 3:And what we're working on in terms of the content initiative is having content dedicated to addressing not only the needs of our community in terms of enablement, but also sharing this with our stakeholders, so with CROs, even CEOs, and addressing exactly how to build an enablement function, where to place the enablement team, how to define enablement in a way that sets them up for success, which ultimately sets the company up for success. So there's just a lot of opportunity there to help educate and we're also seeing a lot of newer people coming into enablement. That to Chris's point earlier. They can stand on the shoulder of giants. So many of us have done this for so long that we've learned by mistake and in some ways, newer folks to enablement. They don't have the ability to make those mistakes. They need to hit the ground running. So with some of the content we're going to be building, that is really meant to help them as well.
Speaker 2:That's a great observation we all did have when we came into enablement at various stages in our career a lot more of a honeymoon period than most people are going to get now.
Speaker 5:Mary Beth, take a step, building on Gail and Gail and Chris, especially that honeymoon period, and we have the newer enablers and when you look at the job descriptions that are out there for enablement, the kitchen sink is getting thrown at it.
Speaker 5:Basically, as far as you have to be everything and they're wanting one person that can be. In the past would have been four or five people's different functions and it's all in one. So it's also, I think, what we're going to be up. What we can offer our community and our members, and especially our newer folks that are newer in their careers, is how to approach all those different initiatives from a change minimum perspective, but also how to address those strategically and so that we're not just viewed as something tactical. I mean, yes, there are tactical steps somebody would take in initiating a program, but how to change your thinking and be more strategic and have those strategic conversations with the leaders that you're supporting. So I think that's a key differentiator of our community and I think of what we're starting to offer as a board and as an organization build out our programs to serve our members.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right, I want to shift gears. I don't want this to be too much of a commercial, but we got to talk about the SES experience in San Diego. So in about 30 days, maybe a little more, we will all be there in San Diego. And going back to 2016, 2017, I wasn't in Florida for that first meeting or involved in the LinkedIn groups before, but it was shortly after that that. At the time, I was doing some work with Jill Rowley and she's going to let me know, and I was like, wow, this is cool, there's a tribe. So very good, now fast forward. There are a lot more options for folks in the enablement community. So what is different about the SES experience and why should people really give it some serious consideration again? When there are so many choices, anybody want to start off on that one, mary Beth.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think the real key differentiator of our experience is it's for practitioners, by practitioners. We are there for our community and when we review the speaker submissions, we are looking and balancing the different themes and the roles of the folks that are submitting, and they're you know where they are in their journey as well is for what they're offering to bring and share with our practitioner, you know, with other practitioners. So I think that that real key thing there has always been, you know, for practitioners by practitioners, and oh, my goodness, it's what an amazing opportunity it is to be with your community of practitioners and also, at the same time, we have our partners who are there helping support us through it, and so it's an opportunity to meet with those folks face to face as well.
Speaker 6:Since Mary Beth stole everyone's answer, I will say that's why she went first. Yeah, yeah, the benefit for me and I've been, I was at a lot of the earlier conferences, did a lot of digital ones and then I missed the last one due to a hurricane. But the benefit for me and it's always been the benefit for me is you have to think about where you are in your enablement career and the reality is, unless you've been to three or four organizations, like if you've been doing it at one place for a good amount of time, you really only have one flavor of enablement. Like enablement looks one way to you. The real benefit for me is meeting people at different organizations or within different industries and understanding how they do it and understanding the problems that they face.
Speaker 6:The greatest learnings I get are sitting down with somebody who does enablement outside of the tech industry, who approaches a problem that maybe I've already solved or maybe I'm just now becoming aware of and hearing what they did about it. It's even if that's a 20 minute conversation over lunch and then a LinkedIn connection. You know you can reach out to that person a year down the road and say, hey, you said you did this thing. This is now a priority for me. It's initiative. Can you tell me how you did it? And I've done that a handful of times and 100% of the time people like, absolutely, here's my calendar, let's talk about it. The easiest way to get ahead in enablement is to have the frameworks and have the answers, and at that conference is where you're going to go get them.
Speaker 4:Absolutely, and we're live and it's in person and it's practical, and all of those things come together to make the experience so critical. I will sound a little like a commercial, because I get to, because I get to work on the conference. It's October 2nd through the 4th. It's San Diego. We've got 30 plus sessions, we've got hackathons, we've got workshops, we've got hands on, we've got amazing keynote speakers. And, to Chris's point, this is the one time of the year you can take two and a half days out of your life, off of Zoom, and be in a room with real human beings who are doing what you're doing and solving the problems and facing the same challenges, and that energy will sustain you for the other 361 days of the year.
Speaker 4:And we need that, especially now that so much of us have gone to almost full Zoom or working virtually or not. We can't sit shoulder to shoulder with our salespeople. We can't break bread as often with our leaders and enablers. For the most part, a large part of our community that attends the conference are solo practitioners or a team of maybe one or two, and so that's. The other advantage is that we build community, because that becomes our team. So many of us are working alone or working with small teams. That conference is a place to start to build your virtual department, and there are so many times I go out to Connections and say I'm building a framework, I need help, I'm building this, I need help, and that community is 100% there and the conference is the place that you can make and bridge those connections in a real live, human, non-zoom setting.
Speaker 2:Non-Zoom setting. That should be the headline. That's our tagline.
Speaker 4:That was Zoom.
Speaker 2:As the conference chair, I want to ask you just kind of an add on to that. It's not the SES annual conference or something similar, it's the SES experience and that name I know you were involved in choosing and it was very intentional. Why experience versus whatever else we could have called it?
Speaker 4:Oh, because experiences are memorable. I spent the first 20 years of my life working in conferences and events and I still have a passion for it. We can talk, we can teach, we can learn, but when we experience, it sinks in at a much deeper level. It becomes part of who we are. You will remember experiences long after books that you've read or movies that you've seen, or even conversations, because experiences are what moves us as human beings. And being able to create an experiential space where we can bridge connections, where we can have live workshops, that's the passion behind SES. It isn't, and it's never intended to be a talk down session. If it was, we could just do it on Zoom. We could get a lot of great talk, but in the reality of we've encouraged a lot of hands on a lot of opportunities for workshops. We want you to come away with notebooks and a pen and actually write things down and make it stick in your brain, because you're experiencing it and that's an exciting opportunity for SES.
Speaker 2:And I know that as part of and we've had you have some really great help in the selection committee. I know we had a maybe even a record number of people submit abstracts for presenting this year.
Speaker 3:Naring that down could not have been easy.
Speaker 2:But I believe one of the criteria was that workshop interactive experience that you were all looking for in their abstracts, so that it wasn't going to be talking at them at the audience. True.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's absolutely part of the criteria.
Speaker 4:We always look to make sure we have a handful of new practitioners who have never spoken with us before.
Speaker 4:It's really important that we shuffle voices and we hear from community members that are new to our space. We really promoted the idea of workshops. We actually have a workshop space specifically for the hackathon and for some other workshops that will be happening, and we look for diversity of topics. Even when we get multiple topics on the same track, we look for how is this practitioner going to speak about metrics or about measurement a little bit differently. We also look at where do we have practitioners that maybe come from larger organizations who are going to bring one viewpoint, where they have a team of 20 enablers versus people who are solo enablers and they're DIYing it all, and so that mix and match really allows an audience, an attendee, to come in and pick and choose the tracks and the sessions that are really going to resonate with them and where they want to learn from. Maybe they're with a really small org and they want to see hey, what would it be like if I?
Speaker 3:went over and joined Amazon.
Speaker 4:And they can learn from those practitioners. So that's the goal of the tracks is to give a lot of diversity, a lot of hands-on opportunity and a lot of community building.
Speaker 2:Thank you, and that half hour flew by. So, chris Marybeth Del Gail, thank you for bringing your energy and your talents to supporting our global enablement community, and thank you for the last 30 minutes and spending some time out of your day with us. I also want to thank our audience, who invests time with us every other week to tune in and listen. And finally, I want to thank Alleggo. We are a nonprofit, for those that may not be aware, and we definitely are dependent on the kindness of our friends, and Alleggo has consistently been one of those, and we appreciate it. So we'll be back in two weeks with another guest and new content. In the meantime, stay safe.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining this episode of Stories from the Trenches. For more sales enablement resources, be sure to join the Sales Enablement Society at sesocietyorg. That's sesocietyorg.