This episode I have the opportunity to sit down the new RES Executive Board President Gail Behun. She opens up and shares her thoughts and observations about:
Gail Behun is a seasoned Sales Enablement leader, currently serving as the Director of Revenue Enablement at LivePerson, a global industry leader in AI-powered solutions.
With an extensive career spanning high-growth SaaS companies, Gail has honed her expertise in sales and marketing roles, processes, methodologies, and business practices. Her approach to enablement is centered on building high-performing teams and ensuring comprehensive employee learning and development. She thrives on connecting the dots innovatively and pioneering new initiatives in enablement, learning, sales, and operations.
Gail is not only committed to advancing her organization's goals but also to the broader enablement community's growth and success.
Please subscibe on Apple, Spotify or Google.
This episode I have the opportunity to sit down the new RES Executive Board President Gail Behun. She opens up and shares her thoughts and observations about:
Gail Behun is a seasoned Sales Enablement leader, currently serving as the Director of Revenue Enablement at LivePerson, a global industry leader in AI-powered solutions.
With an extensive career spanning high-growth SaaS companies, Gail has honed her expertise in sales and marketing roles, processes, methodologies, and business practices. Her approach to enablement is centered on building high-performing teams and ensuring comprehensive employee learning and development. She thrives on connecting the dots innovatively and pioneering new initiatives in enablement, learning, sales, and operations.
Gail is not only committed to advancing her organization's goals but also to the broader enablement community's growth and success.
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 to another episode of the Revenue Enablement Society Podcast, stories from the Trenches, the podcast where we bring together practitioners from all over the world. We talk about what they're working on, the innovative ways they're doing things, and we also talk about things that aren't going so well, because there's a lot to be learned from that also. Today we have a special guest. A couple of reasons. Number one she's a repeat guest. She's the only person that's been on the podcast three times. I guess you're a three-peat guest, a three-peat guest, please welcome Gail Bann. Gail, welcome to Stories from the Trenches again.
Speaker 3:Thanks, this is so much fun. Let's do it every week.
Speaker 2:Every week. All right, we've had Gail on previously, but in different capacities. She's joining us for this episode as the new president of the executive board of the Revenue Enablement Society. Congratulations on that, gail. Before we get into some of that, you got to take the Jimmy Kimmel challenge, because nobody gets to skip it. You ready? Yep, I'm ready. All right, jimmy Kimmel announces his retirement through some unknown connection. You are offered his show. You can have anybody as a guest on your first episode. Who will you invite and why?
Speaker 3:This is such a tough question. I think my original go-to and I think I actually said the first time I was on the podcast was Barack Obama, so would love to meet him. But I've also just always been a really big fan of movies and the entertainment world in general, and so I would probably have to look in the cinema world and bring in a director or a storyteller that would move me, and I think partially because we are so moved in our society by the world as it's depicted in film and television and I think those storytellers are powerful, so I would probably have a whole lot of filmmakers on and enjoy working with them and learning from them as well.
Speaker 2:That would be an interesting show, especially if you had, like you said, a couple on at the same time, so you could also get some exchange going between them.
Speaker 3:So all right, yeah exactly Exactly.
Speaker 2:Well, let's get into it. As I said a few minutes ago, you are getting your feet planted as the new president of RES and you've been in the enablement game for a little while. So just your collective perspective what are the biggest challenges facing the enablement profession right now?
Speaker 3:Such a great question. I have been in for a little while. I came from a background of trade shows, events and conferences and I got involved with the society honestly just to volunteer on the conference because I kind of missed working on conferences. So I really never anticipated that I would be invited to the board at large and then have the opportunity to take over as president. And I think it's a really critical time because the challenges facing enablement right now are big existential challenges.
Speaker 3:We saw historic layoffs last year. I don't think anybody in the profession didn't know someone directly that had been laid off. We had whole teams, you know nine, 10, 15 person teams that were all laid off at the same time and a lot of that was due to the lack of buy-in from the C-suite on what that revenue enablement can do for an organization. Part of that, I think, is that revenue enablement professionals aren't always great at speaking CRO, at being able to land the landing around outcomes rather than talking about program goals or number of people who have been certified in a program. Ultimately, our value is moving the bottom line needle in outcomes, and so my big focus is on this challenge of empowering our members to showcase more value internally, to have these really tough, powerful conversations with their executives around the power of enablement and to show ROI not just on a programmatic level but truly as a revenue professional on the bottom line revenue for the entire org.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't think I could agree any more strongly that the critical nature of that and I mean the good news is there's a lot of people talking about it and have been for a while now, and in the time that I've been in enablement that's a relatively recent thing. The challenge that I've seen and would love to get your reaction to is you have a lot of people talking about it, but not a lot of people have had the chance or there hasn't been enough time. That's passed. They've had the chance to really do it for any length of time and so there's still challenges in navigating and figuring that out. Agree, disagree.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. And I think if we looked at a maturity model for enablement because we use maturity models every day in our work there is such a wide span of maturity, from programs that are very immature, that are very task driven, to programs that are incredibly mature and show the value in those outcomes. And RAS is a peer to peer community. That's what we're built on. We're built on taking people who are on one end of that maturity spectrum and taking people who are on the other and helping them connect and build that bridge to their skills together. We are not here to be the teachers, we're here to be the bridge between that community and that's why I've said it's never been more important.
Speaker 3:When we had our conference last year and it was a tough year for a conference, if you can imagine we still had a great attendance and amazing conversations about this. These were topics that were talked about in sessions, in hallways, over breakfast. We know our chapters are talking about it. We know that, as we partner with the enablement squad, these are discussions in hackathons. These are the conversations we want to be able to continue to bridge.
Speaker 2:So you said an interesting phrase learn to speak CRO and there's got to be a few listeners, if not more, that are wondering what does she mean? How do you speak CRO? So I'm not no time here to teach someone how to do that, but maybe just go a little deeper on that and help people understand what that is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you. I think we've talked a lot in enablement over the last couple of years about metrics, metrics, metrics. I always quote this ill-fated article that's called the 36 metrics you should be measuring right now, and I hate it. I truly hate it. I think we as a profession got into the weeds on metrics for the sake of metrics and how much information we can share and show without really understanding how those metrics moved the bottom line number. So I look at the four key drivers for revenue as the drivers that I want to make sure that we're mapping to.
Speaker 3:So I look at the sales velocity equation. I say number of opportunities. Now revenue enablement. We're not top of funnel. We can't change what comes in the top of funnel, but we can change how those leads are qualified or disqualified, how they're engaged, how we can teach our outbound sellers social selling. Those are all tools in our toolbox to affect the number of opportunities. I look at deal value right, and this is where we are teaching multithreading, where we're teaching bundling, where we're teaching lack of discounting, how to produce the amount of discounting right.
Speaker 2:That is what I'm saying. One of my favorites to measure, yeah. So let's baseline our average discount percentage and then watch it go down.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. I look at overall win rate and for me overall win rate is overall sales skills. Do our sellers have the right skills? Do we have the right frameworks? Do we have the right methodology and the sales stages that they can move things through effectively to get to win rate? And then the length of sales cycle. A lot of that is about teaching urgency and teaching efficiency. Are our systems efficient for our sellers? All of that adds up to sales velocity. So when I talk to a CRO about a program, I say this program will affect our deal value because we are doing X, y and Z. I'm not going to tell them that we're certifying on this part of the product suite. I'm not going to tell them that 80% of our attendees finish the program. He doesn't care. They only care that CRO only cares that we can say hey, here's how we've increased deal value To your point, here's how we've reduced discounting. So that's speaking CRO. It's nailing only the numbers and getting rid of the fluff.
Speaker 2:Couldn't agree more. I don't know who first came up with that phrase smiley sheets, butts in seats and smiley sheets, because I've heard it a few different places. But yeah, they don't care, that's not what they're interested in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and really we discredit ourselves by using vanity metrics. When we report up that we had 80% completion on a certification, that doesn't move the needle and it actually disqualifies the value of what we're doing. Because it's a vanity metric, they don't care.
Speaker 2:As a former sales leader myself, the other part of it that I would have thought of is it didn't move the needle and there was an opportunity cost because my sellers were not selling while you had them doing this thing. That didn't move the needle. So it's yeah, and so, like you say, it does erode at credibility over time. Let's talk about the conference for a few minutes. As you said, it was a rough year. It was an interesting year for the conference.
Speaker 2:Maybe right now is a great time to do another shout out to our sponsors, because that difficult year you just described for the folks in enablement impacted our sponsors in the same way, with enablement leaders getting laid off guess what they're not buying, fill in the blank and yet they still showed up in numbers and supported us. So thank you. Thank you for that everyone, but otherwise, with the conference, in fact, there was an individual there. You probably met them too. I won't share names because I don't have permission, but they were the leader and their whole team were let go even as we were there in San Diego.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, it was, it was, it was rough.
Speaker 2:It was a tough year. We had.
Speaker 3:We had made a commitment to the community that we would support the community. We provided discounted attendance for a lot of people. We were able to get folks who needed the connection point, needed the community, at a significantly lower dollar value and we want to continue to do that this. You know we're still riding out the storm. It is getting better.
Speaker 3:I will say a second to thank you to the sponsors and I think our sponsors got a lot out of it, even though it wasn't direct buying power. They were hearing from our members, they were hearing the difficulty that we were having and they were giving us suggestions on how do I get move forward this initiative to get a piece of tech stack, to get training when it's harder to get budget. I think our partners have absolutely risen to the ROI challenge. They have given us great reasons to continue to build forward. I know personally, working with a couple of the partners from the conference, how they've been able to help me move the needle and get adoption on programs where the budget was limited. But the ROI is huge and so we've never been handed budget like it's free money. We've had to fight for every dollar always.
Speaker 3:Now we have to fight a little harder, but those partners are helping us be really good warriors and I think for the attendees of the conference, just being together, being in a room of people who are fighting the same fight, who are fighting the same challenges, hearing from people whose programs have not been cut or his programs are growing, and understanding what they are doing to make that possible, was also really powerful. I mean, it was a rough year but it was also a great year for a lot of people. We got back in person after COVID. We had more in-person scows, we had more in-person trainings, we had more in-person onboarding. So it was moving us in the right direction and it was important foundationally.
Speaker 3:And I know that by the time we roll the conference around later this year and I'll give you a little preview it's going to be real close to Halloween, so bring your Halloween costumes by the time we roll it out this year. I'm very confident we're going to have a very different energy. We're going to be back in a rebuilding phase but, more importantly, we're building more as strategy leaders, as really respected members of the teams rather than just doers, as we say in the profession. We don't want to be the fixer of broken things, and I'm hearing from more and more leaders in enablement that they're having more of a voice, more of a seat at the table, more opportunity to move the needle strategically and ultimately, that's the best thing for our profession.
Speaker 2:Would you say that was the biggest takeaway from the conference for you, or was it something else?
Speaker 3:I think the key learning for me from the conference was people really wanted to workshop and get their hands dirty Right, and so we're going to move to doing even more hands-on demos, hands-on workshops. At the conference, we have the opportunity to attend virtual webinars and read white papers all day long. We don't have an opportunity to be in a room with each other and really workshop stuff. And the sessions that where people took out a piece of paper and a pen and wrote things down and scribbled on sticky notes and were doing a hackathon those were the most powerful sessions at the conference. So we want to double down on that, because we know you can get content anywhere. You can read blogs all day long, but it's nowhere more powerful than when you take that and bring it to life together.
Speaker 2:And apply it. You just heard something, you had thought about it that way before and then you get to, you know, apply it with another, with a group rather of folks, and at least speaking for me, my style of learning, that really makes a difference if I can go and actually do something with it instead of just hearing about it. That's exciting to hear. It be be interesting to see the nature of some of these. You know new interactive ways of For conference attendees to spend time together. As you, as conference chair, you had a front row seat to the Topics and the themes that were were presented in the conferences. Did you see any, any sort of themes, I know? I mean I know that we don't duplicate topics per se, but just in general, as you're working the speakers, any, any themes or anything. Interesting observations I will laugh.
Speaker 3:So Two years ago we had probably 12 to 15 submissions around metrics and measurement. Last year we had two and we had over 10 submissions on building your career, polishing your resume, interview skills, how to be, how to get the land, the job. So big shift, obviously Again. I anticipate this year will come back towards the center a little bit more. Measurement is always a topic that we're talking about, but I think people, especially this last year and I think will as well this year, are really looking more about their own contributions to their career, not just to their job. And you know if, if the mass layoffs were a wake-up call, it's a good wake-up call. It's a reminder that we have to do the best work of our lives for ourselves. It's never gonna be for a company, it's never gonna be even for me. It's not just doing it for our. Yes, I get so much value out of this my own personal value, and I think it's it's allowed us to refocus and remind about that and I Anticipate seeing more content around that as we move forward.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about our yes in 2024. With so much going on in the enablement space, with All the priorities that the job already throws at you, why is it relevant to make the effort to be involved with our res in 2024? What's what's what's in it for for our members from your perspective?
Speaker 3:What's in it for our members and what we you will see us kind of blow out of the water this year is the peer-to-peer component. While the conference has been that natural touch point, we've worked really hard over the last year to massively rebuild our chapter strategy to give you a local network to go and hang out with and have a drink and do some local activities with that chapter strategies really important. You need to be able to see people on the regular that are doing your job in your area, that are fighting the same fights, and so we've got some great chapters around the country that are doing amazing work and we have a board member that's committed to just Working on building out those chapters and getting them stood up in the strongest way. You're gonna see us bringing webinars out on a much more frequent basis, like once a month, and once a month in America and once a month in a Mia. Why? Because it may, as a really great growing market and needs a lot of Support and directive, and in America we want more touch points. I want more opportunities to hear from this community. I want to do fireside chats where we bring in people and hear what they're fighting. I want to do webinar workshops where we, you know, send a survey ahead of time, and work shop workshop through things Once a year at the conference. It's not enough, you know, and not everyone has the the time or the budget to come to the conference, so we need to bring that content out to our man and out to our community. You're gonna see us supporting and co-opping, co-working excuse me with the enablement squad on the hackathons. We're evolving those for next year. So more cities, more content, more takeaways from the hackathons.
Speaker 3:And the other thing is, in fact, my point of speaking CRO, the enablement society, is partnering with an organization called in blaze, starting this year.
Speaker 3:You'll see a press release coming out shortly about it and in blaze is a leading association for sales leaders. We need to bring our communities closer together and in blaze offers us the opportunity to collaborate with them on what are our sales leaders seeing and looking for from us and what can we do to make sure that we're bridging that gap. So those are huge moves that we're making this year. We've got additional touch points going out with our enablement events that'll go out this year and then, above all, it'll come together at the experience. So it's a collaborative project. It's a lot of work. It's bringing together different communities and different people, but every time I talk to members, every time I talk in our community, there is so much excitement, there's so much need. People are calling up saying, okay, what's the next thing? I got to talk to my peers, I got to get contacts, I got to get content and we're looking to fill that with the chapters.
Speaker 2:I've always felt like the chapters are the heartbeat of RES and I mean, that's how I originally even know. I take that back. Jill came back from Palm Beach and told me about this, but I joined and it didn't really mean a whole lot until a Salt Lake City chapter fired up. Then all of a sudden it became real and it's like oh, this is right. And so here we are several years later. So yeah, I can't remember offhand the name of the individual who actually took the initiative to launch our chapter here locally, but always been grateful for that. That's talking about the chapter, probably a good segue into how do people get involved. It might be worth mentioning reminding everybody that we are nonprofit. Everybody, with one exception, is a volunteer, and so we need people to get involved, but also there are some great reasons for them to get involved.
Speaker 2:You want to talk about that for a few minutes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we love that. We are 100% member driven and every time I go out in the community and I say, hey, can I find a volunteer who might be able to help us? I get tons of hands up. So I love that. To get involved with your chapters, you can come into the RES website and you'll find your chapter information. You can email us at any time and if you find out there isn't an active chapter in your area, let's talk about launching one. As I said, we've got a board member that's committed to doing this, to creating chapter leader packets of information and content that our chapter leaders can use on a regular basis. We know it's hard to spin up a chapter we all have day jobs but it's incredibly rewarding. So we want to be part of building those chapters out.
Speaker 3:We'd love for people not only to come to the conference but apply to speak Again. 100% of the speakers at the conference are in this community. They are practitioners. They're doing this all day long. So please take a chance and apply to speak at the conference. We had 91 applications last year. I'd love to see double that and we commit that at least 10%, and usually closer to 15%, of our speakers are first-time speakers. They've never spoken with us before. We want to hear emerging voices. We want to hear new ideas and the conference is a great place to bring those forward. As I said, we're going to be doing webinars. If you have an idea for a webinar that you'd like to do, reach out. We'd love to hear it and be that voice.
Speaker 3:And the last thing is participate in our social media campaigns on LinkedIn. Linkedin is our only vehicle for communication. It's where we talk to the community. You'll start to see more regular social media posts from LinkedIn. Participate in those discussions. It's an easy way to get contact with the community and then from those discussion points, very often I will comment on something on LinkedIn and someone else will comment and I'll reach out to that person and say, hey, I really like your ideas. If you have a minute, let's get on a call.
Speaker 3:I made a joke a few months ago on LinkedIn that I talked to two strangers a month. It's actually not a joke. I probably talked to more than that. I share my calendar like people used to share business cards, but those short interactions with literally total strangers are the most powerful way of building my personal network, of finding people to be involved in RES.
Speaker 3:I'm a big fan of the ABC. They always be connecting Jill Rowley quote that I say all the time and I'm always looking to connect you to somebody that's going to further your career goals or have a good conversation with you. I had somebody reach out to me yesterday and say, hey, you like working on Skow, right? And I said, yes, skow's my jam. And we brainstormed for half an hour on some sessions that she was looking to do and it was great. I'm so excited for her and for her conference. And if I wasn't available, I have 10 people I could send her to to say, hey, I don't have bandwidth right now. Reach out to and blank. And so that's how this community continues to grow.
Speaker 2:I love that you've invited people to share feedback with you directly. Is LinkedIn your preferred way for people to connect with you, or OK?
Speaker 3:Yeah, tag me on LinkedIn anytime.
Speaker 2:And I know from experience, you're easy to find. You're very active there. So yes.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, before we let you go, I want to give you a chance to drop. It might be enabling, related, we'll find out in 30 seconds, but drop some life knowledge on us so long time. Listeners of the podcast know what's coming next. You've been given this gift of time travel, but you're only allowed to go back and talk to some younger version of Gail and you're only allowed to teach or coach yourself in one area. What is that the biggest thing you wish you'd understood or knew earlier in life?
Speaker 3:Ah, that's such a great question.
Speaker 3:I think when I was on the pod the first time I said I would tell myself to slow down because I'm always in a hurry and I'm still always in a hurry.
Speaker 3:But I think I would go back and remind myself, especially in college, just to have faith in myself. It really took me until I was in my 30s, when I got my first job selling, that I gained a lot of self confidence that I'll figure it out. There's nothing this world has said, has sent at me in the 52 years I've been here that I haven't been able to figure out. And it was a good reminder of the community last year when there were so many layoffs that you know what you got to have faith in yourself, your abilities to rise, your community and just take a deep breath. There's a lot of drama out there, and most of it is what I call, say, almost fire. It's short term drama, it's a big burst and then it fades away, and so just have a little more faith that things are happening the way they're supposed to and you'll come through the other side.
Speaker 2:That's great advice, thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for again I know there's a thousand things RES related and started a new job. What? Six months ago, maybe, not even that, quite yet three months ago, right, yeah, so you got a few things going on right now. So thank you for taking the time and bringing your energy and your thoughts.
Speaker 3:I will be excited to get this out for our listeners and for them to enjoy it, appreciate that, and I look forward to meeting with more of them and seeing them in local events and at national events and bring your voice in. Res is incredibly open to ideas and we have plenty here from you.
Speaker 2:And I also want to thank all of you who have invested half hour with us. Again, we do this for you. We wouldn't be here doing it without you, so we appreciate that. If you are listening for the first time, you can subscribe to us on Apple, Google or Spotify. We encourage you to do that and watch for episodes the other barring holidays the first and third Tuesdays of every month. So stay safe out there. We'll see you in another 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. That's resocietyglobal.