Why do sales leaders undervalue their enablement teams? With all the conversations and opinions about how to measure and demonstrate business impact are Enablement teams actually gaining credibility? Jerry Farr, founder of Sales Excellence Advisors, joined me recently and shared his unique insights on why sales leaders might still be undervaluing their enablement teams and how Enablement leaders and teams can flip that perception.
Jerry Pharr is a veteran sales enablement & operations leader at high-growth, tech companies. At varied companies like Outreach and Redis, he's architected and implemented a unique approach called Behavior-Centered Enablement, which is a systems-driven blueprint for delivering sales excellence at scale. He now coaches other enablement and operations orgs to improve sales performance by incorporating this framework. Jerry is one of the original founders of the Revenue Enablement Society, and is an advisor to multiple tech startups on their GTM and revenue operations strategies.
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Why do sales leaders undervalue their enablement teams? With all the conversations and opinions about how to measure and demonstrate business impact are Enablement teams actually gaining credibility? Jerry Farr, founder of Sales Excellence Advisors, joined me recently and shared his unique insights on why sales leaders might still be undervaluing their enablement teams and how Enablement leaders and teams can flip that perception.
Jerry Pharr is a veteran sales enablement & operations leader at high-growth, tech companies. At varied companies like Outreach and Redis, he's architected and implemented a unique approach called Behavior-Centered Enablement, which is a systems-driven blueprint for delivering sales excellence at scale. He now coaches other enablement and operations orgs to improve sales performance by incorporating this framework. Jerry is one of the original founders of the Revenue Enablement Society, and is an advisor to multiple tech startups on their GTM and revenue operations strategies.
Please subscibe on Apple, Spotify or Google.
Welcome to the Revenue Enablement Society Stories from the Trenches, where enablement practitioners share their real-world experiences. Get the scoop on what's happening inside revenue enablement teams across the global RES community. Each segment of stories from the trenches shares the good, the bad and the ugly practices of corporate revenue enablement initiatives. Learn what worked, what didn't work and how obstacles were eliminated by enablement teams and go-to-market leadership. Sit back, grab a cold one and join host Paul Butterfield, founder of Revenue Flywheel Group, for casual conversations about the wide and varied profession of revenue enablement, where there's never a one-size-fits-all solution.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Enablement Society Podcast, Stories from the Trenches, the only podcast, as far as we know, that finds practitioners from all over the world, all sorts of backgrounds, and brings them together to talk about the work they're doing, the innovative things that they are working on, sometimes things that didn't go so well and what they learned from it, which can be just as valuable. I'm excited to introduce you to today's guest. Many of you know him, or at least know of him. Welcome to the show, Jerry Farr.
Speaker 3:Hey everyone. Well, thank you so much. I'm humbled and honored to be here.
Speaker 2:So, jerry, you and I were talking for a few minutes before the show and you're a long-term enablement pro, but you're currently working with your own consultancy that you've called Sales Excellence Advisor. Maybe just take a minute and fill us in on some of the work you're doing.
Speaker 3:I'm a recovering seller. I was an enterprise full cycle seller for about six years and then an enablement leader for about nine years, and last summer I made the official transition to kind of hang up my own shingle and do my own thing, and I'm on a caffeinated mission to help equip enablement and operations teams to build enablement programs that are measurable.
Speaker 2:I like that. A caffeinated mission, very specific Almost brings to mind. I don't remember the Blues Brothers movie.
Speaker 2:We're on a mission, we're on a mission, we're on a mission, we're on a mission, we're on a mission. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, exactly so you're on a caffeinated mission, all right. So, as I'm sure you know, no one gets off the show without taking the Jimmy Kimmel challenge. For those that haven't heard us before, that simply means that, through Jerry's amazing network, he has offered Jimmy Kimmel's show because Kimmel decides to retire, and so, jerry, you can have anybody you want on the couch for your first episode. Who's going to be there and why?
Speaker 3:Well, I'm going to be very selfish because this person means a lot to me, but there are probably like four other people out there who even know who this is. There's a guy named Towns Van Zandt, so he was sort of a regionally famous musician and songwriter in Texas through the kind of 70s and 80s and he wrote a lot of songs you've probably heard of that were recorded by other people like Willie Nelson and that sort of thing. But I'm just a sort of a songwriting geek and I'm just floored every time I kind of listen to and read his music and he has a great life story, lots of ups and downs and struggles and addictions and that sort of thing, and I just would love to kind of hear him tell a story.
Speaker 3:And my son is a fellow musician.
Speaker 2:Oh you really. Yeah, he's really an influence. Yeah, as a fellow musician, I would watch that and I've made a note to go to Spotify and check him out, because I don't know how I have not heard of him. Because I'm also a big music geek, I'm curious. I don't know how common the last name Van Zand is, so it's probably a stretch, but my first thought is I wonder if he has any relationship to the Van Zandts from Leonard Skinner. Yeah, I looked into it and also really good songwriters.
Speaker 3:As best as I can tell, the answer is no.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, okay, good, then I don't need to Google that. Yeah, all right. So let's get into the topic today and this is one that I think a lot of people are going to benefit from or, at least, hopefully, think of things differently, and let's start off with the sales leaders. How do sales leaders, if they're honest, perceive the value of enablement?
Speaker 3:So I love this question. I've been really fortunate over the years to become not just colleagues but pretty close friends with a lot of sales leaders like going to dinner and having drinks with her friends, and so they're willing to share things with me that they probably wouldn't otherwise. And I've had conversations with three different sales leaders over the years who I'm very close personal friends with, and all of them had said something to the effect of Jerry, love you, love enablement. I like what you guys are doing, good at doing your job. But the truth is I would never go to the CFO or to the executive team and share the results of enablement initiative because they just, for whatever reason, they wouldn't feel comfortable sharing that sort of thing. So I think the answer to the question is most sales leaders have ambivalence. They're ambivalent about their naval teams.
Speaker 2:Let's unpack that. There's a lot there and especially, I think, as you said, that they they about. They like them as people. I think they're doing good work, but they clearly don't see them as Business partners in the literal sense, right, they're not driving business results or they're not participating somehow in that. So, yeah, what have you seen or what have they shared with you that the typical problems are? Where's the gap? Because my guess is those enablement folks probably don't know, don't realize.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean. So I went through and I've I've done and failed in a lot of ways, a lot of in many ways that most enable people have trying to Draw a line between my teams, enable initiatives and then outcomes they care about. So I'd be banned by doing the things that Millie, kind of early in their career, enablement people do, which is focusing on the learning outcomes. Look at the number of people who showed up, number of people who liked it and whether number of people who passed the quiz or the certification, whatever. And what I found is that, not surprisingly, most sales aters don't really care about that. I mean, they care enough to like give you a key to when the numbers are good, okay, nice job, but they it's not gonna affect their jobs at all. So I really care about that.
Speaker 3:So then I later transitioned to that thing which also a lot of enablement leaders once are into the role for a number of years Try to do is do that alignment and correlation to business outcomes. So the attainment, win rates, average contract value, average sales cycle link, all those sorts of things which the sales leader absolutely does care about and they're important to the business. But if you, as an enablement leader try to start making the case that your enablement initiative, initiative on business value messaging or a new methodology or whatever new thing is, you try to make the case that that thing had an impact on the win rates or attainment, whatever. They're not gonna believe you. They're gonna, you know, if not outright laugh at you, just kind of go, yeah, okay, right, and so that's the thing is. It's not believable. There are too many other factors, they think yeah, but then that's that.
Speaker 2:That's why I want to ask. So I mean, I spent more years leading sales teams than I have enablement and I've been enablements for 11 years, I think now, and I absolutely agree with what you said. As a sales leader, I would not have cared at all. Enablement didn't exist during most of my leadership career, and and and. So when I moved to enablement, coming straight from leading a sales team, to me it was just like, yeah, I, I don't know what enablement is. This is 2012, but I know what I don't want. I know what Didn't work, you know, in the past for my teams. And so Now, fast-forwarding to something else that you said. So we're totally in alignment on that. Let's really get into that statement that you made just now, because there's a lot of chatter and talk In the enablement community and and there's one phrase that I really think people need to stop using I think you'll agree with this and that is ROI. Oh, it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2:I mean to me. I don't even teach sales reps use ROI because they're going to. Yes, you can establish a business case, you can establish a gap, you can establish impact with real numbers of theirs, but you're never going to have the information needed to do an ROI analysis. So stop saying that. And Same thing when I hear enablement people say it, it's it's like folks that right there is gonna sap your credibility because there is no way you're doing that. Yet how often do we see that Mm-hmm in the way that people are talking? So help, help, help educate all of us. So we're again. We're agreement on the ROI. Yeah, you're saying that even the correlation people think they're doing may not be sticking or may not be resonating.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I've talked to some people in really big enterprises who have data scientists who are doing really sophisticated regression analysis and Looking at, okay, correlating impact and that kind of thing. And yet, okay, what I hear from them is that even their sales leaders are like rolling their eyes at that. It doesn't pass the sniff test. They just don't. It doesn't feel right to the sales leaders. They're probably not gonna understand the regression, regression analysis anyway, but it doesn't feel right.
Speaker 3:It feels more right to them that the the more likely cause of the improvement in win rates and that sort of thing is probably the change in Territories or that new product feature release or the new marketing cam. There are dozens other things they would point to that are probably much closely correlated to impact than an enable program. Now you know the reason. They think that it's probably some psychological, sociological thing that I don't fully understand. But what I know is I I don't think I've ever in my Nine years in enablement, in six years as a seller, encounter the sales leader Yep, who just would immediately believe that sort of argument that the enablement team had that direct impact, even correlational, on the business outcomes. So you know.
Speaker 2:I have a theory on why you may be experiencing that again, just my own experience growing up in sales. In sales we often have that view of until somebody sells something, nobody gets paid, and which I actually don't have a problem with. But but it's a very sales centric view of the world and because sales is difficult, because you are digging and mining hard for every deal, it might be difficult mentally or emotionally to attribute that that may also be happening because of some sales training. That's just a theory. I have no idea. Yeah, but I yeah.
Speaker 2:I think so what should?
Speaker 3:we be. Yeah, yeah, go ahead, I just want other thing and then I'll go back to the other question. Yeah, yeah, I think their their personal experiences with sales trainings probably haven't been great. That's true.
Speaker 2:So why should I believe these other people are having that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm sure you, like me, have sat through your fair share of what am I doing here trainings in your career, absolutely yeah. Yeah, so your next question like so what to do then? Yeah, so what's? What should we be doing? What should the name of leaders be doing? Because even those that feel they've evolved in your world view, your point of view, probably haven't, or at least not the way they think they have.
Speaker 3:What do they do Well? So I think if you try to measure, talk about learning outcomes, they don't care. You try to talk about business outcomes, they don't believe you. What to do? Yep, my view is focus on the middle ground in between and focus on behavior change our reps actually doing things in real life, in interactions with prospects and customers, that that show that they're doing the things you wanted them to do, that you're an enable program was was focused on in Kirkpact. In Kirkpatrick terms, this is sort of like level three Okay Evaluation are they actually? Do you mean favors?
Speaker 2:Some of our listeners may not be familiar enough with Kirkpatrick to know what level three means.
Speaker 3:can you just so Kirkpatrick was probably in the 60s or 70s when he did this, not really sure, but is it? Adult learning theorists very famous, wrote a bunch of books on how to measure the impact of trainings and he has sort of five different levels level one, two, three, four, five and first one I actually don't remember the names right now off the top of my head, but the first one is like Did they, did they like it? And the next one is did they show mastery? Like did they pass an assessment or quiz or something like that. And the third one is did they apply it? Actually do the things. And eventually you get to the fifth words like ROI and that sort of thing.
Speaker 3:Okay, but so thanks, my view is a name what leaders are best advised focusing on that, that middle ground, the behavior change, the application, because it is the one thing that you both have. It is important to the business, maybe not as important as when rates entertainment, but it's important to the business and you have a strong case that you influenced it. It's attribution. How can you get attribution for your efforts? So, and when I say behavior change, I'm not talking about Did they go do that? Take that training online, did they go access thing in your LMS.
Speaker 3:What I'm saying is in interactions with prospects and customers, like customer facing things, what they do and I think part of the reason very few enable or think about it this way is it takes a knowledge base, a skill set that very few enable people have, which is you have to deeply understand how, what different things are captureable with data, what sorts of activities are captural and how. You have to understand what is a different tool stack you're using and what data points are captured, how, where are they stored, how can you report on them and those sorts of things. So simple things like every email sent and received, every meeting scheduled and attended and held, and then using conversation intelligence to analyze what happened, those sorts of things. If you use a tool for sending quotes or sending proposals, those things likely log data, log activity data somewhere. Whatever tool you have almost guaranteed it has a way of capturing the activity that reps are doing in their engagements with prospects and customers. So that, for me, is the way you measure the most direct impact of your programs.
Speaker 3:Whatever your goals were of the Enable initiative, let's say reps were doing this thing, this sort of behavior that we didn't want them to do. We want them to do this other thing instead. And how can I measure the gap between those two things? They were doing this, now they're doing this. How do I measure that?
Speaker 2:One of the reasons I'm such a huge fan of conversational intelligence is because to me it's an unprecedented way to capture behavior at scale. Yeah, I mean, you've been around long enough to remember the days where you are just, you know, randomly trying to listen to Zoom recordings or, before that, you know, just joining calls and you just never knew what you're going to get. But he certainly didn't have it any kind of analysis at scale. So do you agree with me on that? Is CI part of your tool bag? Oh, 100%.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's tough to do a lot of what I talk about without that. Yeah, okay, and honestly, even though sales technologies and conversation intelligence, those kinds of tools have been around for seven-ish years, it's only in the last few years where you've really been able to capture the data I'm talking about. So I'll give you a kind of tactical example here. Let's say that you work with the leadership sales leadership and discovered that multi-threading is something that your sellers need to improve on. They're not multi-threading very well.
Speaker 2:Okay. No, you're talking about multi-threading in their accounts. Yeah, in sales cycles.
Speaker 3:In sales cycles. Okay, you're working on a deal, are you engaging with just one buyer or do you have lots of buyers involved in that discussion? Are you engaging with all the people who are involved? Okay, so we're saying the same thing. Then, yeah, got it. Yeah, okay, so multi-threading there. And so you look at what are the reps doing or not doing. That suggests they're not multi-threading. Well, well, the easiest thing to look at is in your CRM, looking at the number of contact roles attached to that opportunity. Okay, they're not doing it. All right, fine.
Speaker 3:But you can also look at, let's say, in calls throughout that sales cycle, is the rep ending those calls by saying, hey, why don't we invite so-and-so to the next one, like proactively inviting people to the next call? And that's something you can measure, like the percent of calls throughout a sales cycle that were you asked to invite other people. But you can also look at throughout a sales cycle. Let's say you had seven meetings and sometimes you had one person, sometimes you had three people, sometimes you had seven people on the call. What's the number of people on the customer side who actually spoke, actually engaged in that call? That's another indicator of multi-threading. Then you can do something similar, or just emails? What's the number of people on the customer side who actually replied to threads during a sales cycle, right? So yeah, this is by no means an extensive list, but I'm just throwing out a handful of examples of ways you can measure empirically indicators of multi-threading in a sales cycle. And so, if you do that, you've said, okay, here are the behaviors that reps are doing or not doing, and we want to. We want them to do these other things Instead. We want them to end calls by making recommendations to add that to people. We want them, during calls, to know how to engage all the people on the calls. We want all those sorts of things, right?
Speaker 3:So you do that sort of initiative and then, in terms of measuring, it's I pretty much defined what the measurement is. Let's look at the average number of contact roles on an opportunity and see if that changes over time. Look at the average number of calls during a sales cycle where the rep asks to invite other people to next call. Let's look at the average number of people on the customer side who actually speak during calls. Let's look at the average number of people who reply to email threads during a sales cycle.
Speaker 3:Those like four different metrics right there and pretty much everyone would agree that those maybe not an exhaustive list, but a pretty good list of indicators of multi-threading. You can measure that. You can create a dashboard that shows each of those things going up and to the right. And if you go to your sales leader and say, hey, we agreed that multi-threading is something we want to get better at, we're going to do this training and coaching kind of program and here's where here are the metrics we're going to look at For behavior change and then fast forward three months we're going to see if those things have gone up and to the right and then, three months later, if you see those things going up and to the right, pretty much anyone is going to believe that you had an impact on those, that you influenced those four metrics going up and to the right.
Speaker 3:Now is that thing going to change the business, that those four metrics are going to improve the business? I mean, it's not going to change the world, but that right there showing you developed an initiative and had an empirically measurable way to show that you made a difference in the behavior. You do that three times, five times, 10 times, you start to earn the credibility that when you do something, reps use it and incorporate it into their conversations and engagements with customers and eventually people will not laugh at you when you try to say that your team, comprehensively, over a lot of time, had an impact on the win rates and attainment and those sorts of things. So that's my point of view is you start by on individual initiatives focusing on behavior change metrics and then eventually you earn their credibility to make the case on the business outcomes.
Speaker 2:So what you described makes a lot of sense to me and I do almost the same thing, but for me and my programs, those have been our leading indicators, because you know, but we still looked at lagging indicators, like some of the ones you showed at the beginning, and it was a mix of both. But you're saying that really it should be just or mostly. What to me, are leading indicators?
Speaker 3:So I on the enabler team, I would certainly also be looking at changes in attainment, win rates, those sorts of things. But I'd be very cautious about presenting to sales leadership saying, hey, look how we improve win rates. I would sort of couch that in terms of, hey, look at these behavior change metrics that we focused on and we all agreed that these were important. We moved the needle. Look at these things going up and to the right, and before I make the case that those things had an impact on these win rates, I would like to propose to you that you allow the enabler team to do this other initiative focusing on this other set of behavior change and to kind of make the case. Let me do these other things first because I just want to keep earning the credibility before I start making the case on those lagging indicators.
Speaker 2:Got it. What about the role of frontline sales leaders in your model, jerry? Where do they fit in and how do you account for their contribution to that behavior change?
Speaker 3:Love that question. So my whole, I've said behavior change probably a dozen times already and Anybody who knows anything about drinking game now official yeah, anybody who knows anything about behavior change will tell you it doesn't happen overnight, it's not gonna happen with a single training and and enable folks I'm sorry to break it to you, but we really don't change behavior that much the way it way early greens is in the conversations they have with their, their frontline managers, in my sort of model, my framework, the way it would work is we would design this initiative around, you know, for example, the, the multi-threading, and we're gonna we reps were doing this, we want them to do this instead, and here the Dashboards we're gonna use for it. Um, then I would go try to get the commitment from sales leadership to say, hey, we do this and we're focusing on these specific behavior change metrics. Can I ask you to have the frontline managers and incorporate in their one-on-ones with reps talking about those particular things and Literally showing the dashboard that we created for them in their one-on-one, saying, hey, you're doing great on Adding contact roles, but you're not really ending calls by inviting other people.
Speaker 3:Next call, let's talk about that. Something like, okay, okay and so the case I make to sales leader is hey, we're gonna build this initiative and I'm Commit to you work, we're gonna try to change, move the needle on these metrics. But I need your commitment as well. I need your commitment to hold your managers accountable for doing okay that additional coaching conversations. It doesn't have to be long, it can be like a five minute, seven minute thing during their one-on-ones Over the course of, you know, a month or two or something like that. But if that, if that doesn't happen, that reinforcement directly by the manager, you're very unlikely to be successful at this.
Speaker 2:Oh, I absolutely agree. That's one of the first lessons I learned in my transition over to Leading. Enablement is, you know, my best hope was to be an influencer, but nobody worked for me anymore. You know, they, they, they were gonna do it because I thought it was a good idea, no matter how Well it was designed. So any pro tips on getting the frontline sales leaders to lift up their heads and Listen and collaborate and then do what you need them to do, because in my experience that can be tough. I mean, they're chasing a number and that's always gonna be top of mind for them totally so.
Speaker 3:The way I've been successful is enable initiatives emerge out of some need. Someone is going to someone and saying, hey, we need to focus on this, whether it's me enablement leader going to sales leader saying, hey, we're noticing this, we'd like to do something, or sales leader saying, hey, me, do this, what. In regards to how that happens, if I kind of come back to the sales that are saying, hey, here's what we propose to do about this, I Come. One of the things I carry with me is an agreement. We have found this problem, we want to do this about it and we expect to get these results and this is what we're gonna do. But I need you. I need your commitment to hold your managers accountable and to ensure that they are. They are going to have these conversations during that, and so I Really get like any in, not signed, but in an email thread. Yes, I agree, we're gonna do that. Not sign in blood, I'm not signed in blood. So get that sort of commitment. And then you do have to make it easy for the manager. You have to make it easy.
Speaker 3:Okay, so I literally create a dashboard that is just for this initiative. You're going to this one place and in that dashboard I'm showing a leaderboard how different who's doing well on each of them. I'm showing a benchmark. What do we want them on each of these Metrics? And I show a trend line. You know how are things changing, month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, whatever it is.
Speaker 3:So again that, and I give them sort of a A talk track or framework when you're having your conversation with the, with the rep, here are the three, four, five, however many things like your agenda for that meeting and here's how you, here's how you begin the conversation, here's how you, you know, here's the link to that dashboard and, by the way, here's so what to. Here's how to make sense of those metrics. Here's what this particular metric means and sort of in okay and can translate it for them into language that makes sense for them. So it is sort of Enabling the managers to have those conversations. Now I try not to make a huge deal of it. I don't. I don't like to think of it as like this is our Coaching framework or something like that. I just like here's a tool for you to use during these conversations to make it seem sort of low-lift.
Speaker 2:This has been, I think, a powerful episode. Thank you. Thank you for coming. You know well, life probably prepared you For this, but you clearly, you know, did some other preparation as well, so we appreciate that. Before I let you go, would love to have you drop some knowledge on everyone that may or may not be enablement related, and it's that you've been given that gift of time travel. You can go back Anywhere in your life, career or not, and coach some younger version of yourself, but you can only do it for one topic. What's the number one thing that you wish you'd understood earlier, don't?
Speaker 3:Make a goal for what you want to be when you grow up. Okay, if you try to set a goal for what you're going to be when you're up, you're going to be wrong, because you're not going to be one thing. You're going to be 12 things.
Speaker 3:Your career is going to evolve. I've had four different careers, so I just think it's an unrealistic expectation in modern days to think that someone's going to be doing one kind of thing for the rest of their lives. So don't get caught up in. Oh my God, I don't know what I'm great at, what I'm going to be when I grow up. Don't worry, there are going to be lots of things. Just find something that you're good at right now that someone will pay you to do. That's it, and then it'll change your career.
Speaker 2:That's legal. That's legal. Yeah, that's legal. Yeah, let's be really clear here.
Speaker 3:You're good at it. They'll pay you and it's legal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's funny. I saw a meme once about you just reminded me of you know that talked about if we all grew up to be the things that we thought when we were young, the world would be full of more astronauts, fighter pilots and firemen firefighters. So there'd be a lot of firefighters out there. Yeah, A lot of firefighters out there and veterinarians, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And oh, I actually did that one. Yeah, I forgot about veterinarian. Okay, well, jerry, thank you. Thank you for your time, appreciate you being here. You're awesome. Paul, thanks so much. Okay, and everyone, thank you for investing another half hour of your time with us. We appreciate you. Keep listening and we'll see you again in two weeks.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining this episode of Stories from the Trenches. For more revenue enablement resources, be sure to join the Revenue Enablement Society at resocietyglobal e societyglobal Group.