Revenue Enablement Society - Stories From The Trenches

Ep. 62 - Recorded Live at the SES Experience - Stories of Personal Evolution

• Paul Butterfield • Episode 62

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Who doesn't love a great success story? 

This year the Sales Enablement Society Experience was held in San Diego and the theme was "The Enablement Evolution". For this episode I had the opportunity to sit down with 10 different Revenue Enablement pros and listen to their stories about personal and career Evolution. They shared great ideas that were new to me and I'm sure you're going to enjoy listening to them just as much as I did!

Thank you Mike Simmons, Sheryl Buscheck, Jill Guardia, Amy Levine, Chuck Marcouiller, Fiona Simpson, Michael Galvin, Michelle Dieschbourg, Sandy Robinson and Laura Meister.

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Speaker 1:

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. Get 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:

Welcome to another episode of Stories from the Trenches. Last week, we were all in San Diego for the Sales Enablement Society Experience. The theme this year was the Enablement Evolution. There were so many great breakout sessions. Thank you to everyone who prepared and delivered those. We had amazing keynote speakers, and so thank you to all of you as well. The other thing that we got to do was sit down with 10 different practitioners and talk to them about points of evolution in their career or, in some cases, how they the way they practice sales enablements evolved, or how they've seen the profession itself evolve. I took a lot away from these stories and I really enjoyed hearing them. I'm confident you will too. So here they are.

Speaker 3:

Hi, I'm Cheryl Busheck and I'm currently Director of Enablement Programs at Juniper Networks. I love talking about evolution and specifically career evolution and growth in all the right ways, because my own career has been a very long and winding road. I'm a huge believer in understanding yourself and what you have passion in and moving towards what brings you joy and passion. My career started with a very technical role in IT and I decided what I loved about that role and shifted into a technical training role. From there I moved into a couple of different directions. I landed in product marketing for a lot of years because marketing was where all the budget was and they seemed to have the most fun. I really wanted to move into a role where I had a top line impact for the business. I spent a lot of years in product marketing and before there was a role called revenue enablement sales enablement I was doing exactly that as a part of various product marketing teams. I felt a real connection to being able to work with the field and I really focused on programs and campaigns and assets that helped sales be successful for real. I really cared about that and that was ultimately how I ended up in enablement All of my background in IT product marketing. Technical training gave me a lot of the foundational skills that I needed to succeed in enablement. Honestly, I've always cared so much about people and people's success. It really drew me in. Once I landed in a true label enablement role, I knew this was where I needed to be.

Speaker 3:

I've had several different jobs in several different companies. I have grown my career. I hit a VP level and I did make In evolutionary decision after my VP role just got chopped for cost reasons. I made a strategic decision that I wanted to work for a certain type of company and I didn't need to run everything to be happy and fulfilled.

Speaker 3:

So my most recent evolution was I decided to take a step back and own one piece of a larger enablement team at a larger company and I could not be happier that I did that. So grew my career to the top and from there I had to make a decision to take a step back so I would find some work-life balance, I'd find happiness, I'd still have fulfillment and I'd still have a lot of challenging things that I could do for the company. That again brought me back into helping our field teams be successful. So my career has been a model of evolution in various ways and I think if I left you with anything, it would be try everything when your young and career, try different roles, see what you enjoy and find what you're passionate about and makes you happy and fulfilled.

Speaker 4:

Hi, my name is Michelle Dieshberg and I was the go-to-market enablement director at Active Campaign, some marketing automation platform. My evolution into sales enablement started from product marketing. I started as a product marketing associate and really love the idea of messaging and positioning and figuring out how to talk to our customers, and I got a job at a sales enablement platform and as a product marketer. This was so exciting to me because they I was talking to other product marketers who were buying the sales enablement platforms. It was started more about content management. So to me as a product marketer, that was the dream come true.

Speaker 4:

I tried many times in my past to consolidate all the content for the sales teams that I was working with, and it was always hard. Everyone was saving things on their desktops or in their own Google Drive. Nothing was centralized, and so to be able to work for a company that was centralizing that content and helping product marketers and sales teams be more efficient, find more content, spend less time editing content, was so exciting. That company was also the first place where I met someone whose job was to be in sales enablement, and this blew my mind. As a product marketer, I had to do the sales enablement functions.

Speaker 4:

I had to train the sales team on the content that I was creating and it was always, unfortunately, sort of an afterthought.

Speaker 4:

There were lots of other programs and things that I had to do, and so pushing the content out to the team was sort of like pulling teeth. I would roll out a new pitch deck and people would roll their eyes or still use the thing that was saved on their desktop because they were comfortable with it. And seeing the sales enablement practitioner at this new job, being able to be more of a translator, to really speak to the sales team and to get more understanding and see their success, was transformational. That is where my evolution into sales enablement began and my next role after that company was a sales enablement role. I started as a sales enablement manager, senior manager and as an individual contributor and slowly over the last three years built a team. We were a team of four towards the end of my tenure there and to see the evolution from product marketer to sales enablement practitioner has been really fun, and I love talking to other sales enablement practitioners and really seeing the growth on the sales team and see them be more successful.

Speaker 5:

Michael Galvin. I'm currently the global sales enablement manager at IntelSat. My journey, or evolution, into sales enablement began about 15 years ago. I had carried a sales bag, a quota as a sales manager and a sales leader for 10 or 12 years and decided that it wasn't quite as fulfilling for me as I had expected. But I didn't want to put that experience to the side. I met with a career coach and we looked at some of my strengths and weaknesses and determined that leveraging my sales experience and helping other sellers become more effective and efficient would be a good use of my skill set. I began the journey from sales person to sales enablement professional.

Speaker 5:

I dabbled a little bit in the early phases of sales enablement.

Speaker 5:

It was more focused on sales training and development, spent some time there, evolved back into some more direct selling roles as a sales manager for two and a half or three years, and then I had an opportunity to become a part of a best practice sales organization, more or less in sales operations, for three and a half years, after which I had the opportunity to lead a sales operations group at a small startup.

Speaker 5:

That really got my foot in the door, as far as you know really developing a role in a group and then was approached by my current organization, intelsat, to stand up their sales enablement department.

Speaker 5:

So I'm currently a team of one and looking to grow that. But we've had some huge success and really leveraging the networking, the opportunities that are afforded us through organizations, through LinkedIn, through just connections I've made through my sales career, through sales operations, sales training, development. That networking has been a huge part of my career development and evolution and got me to really where I am today. Without those connections I don't think I'd be as successful as where I am today. We've been able to develop a sales enablement charter, again leveraging some of those connections and some of that experience and really evolved into implementation, ongoing strategy, as well as maintaining the current success that we're showing, really working on developing ROI communication, showing the worth of sales enablement that it's just not an afterthought any longer. It's really a vital to succeeding as an organization and becoming a best in class sales team to be successful in our industry.

Speaker 6:

Hey there everyone. It's Jill Guardia here, as Paul said, and I am the SVP of Revenue, enablement and Operations at a company named Thought Industries, and my story is actually about the role that I'm in right now. That role took me out of retirement. Some of you know I did a brief stint as a retiree about nine or 10 minutes long and then I took this role because it was, and is, a great role to end my career with in terms of full-time employment. I came in to build out an enablement team and really that's one of the things that I've had some opportunities to do throughout my entire career, but in this particular one, I could use all the experiences from all my other jobs and I was reporting right to the president of the company, so it gave me a lot of insight into how the company ticks, how the sales organization is structured, how we put together territories just everything you can think of. So I jumped at this opportunity. Shortly into it, I was given the operations team as well. So now I am running enablement and operations, which is also just a crazy opportunity to have, because you get to see how things tick and as you're looking at how those things tick, you start to put together the pieces on the enablement side. So it's such an interesting sandwich to be part of. And then finally, in this particular role, they gave me the business development team as well, so that I have literally no experience doing other than serving and supporting that organization.

Speaker 6:

And here I am now running it, and for me, the insight and the story to be told is this is all about enablement. Every single day I get to work on enablement, putting together the tools, process, systems, knowledge and leadership for an amazing group of people, and supporting, in particular, the business development team has given me really the oversight into seeing how people build their sales career in such a different and exciting way. So what's the story here? The story is don't cut yourself off too short in terms of deciding on your retirement. Leave yourself open to options, and sometimes you get to explore things you hadn't planned. I had no thought in my mind that I was going to be running business development, and here I am running enablement operations and business development and getting to see so much about how a company ticks, how people work together and putting success together at every single turn. So it's super exciting and reach out to me if you have any questions.

Speaker 8:

I'm Laura Meister. I am the Senior Revenue Enablement Manager at Salesloft, based in Ann Arbor, michigan, and my enablement evolution the one that I think is most interesting is how I evolved from an enterprise seller into an enabler, and it really came down to some soul searching. There was a time as a seller that I found I was way more excited and vigorated, inspired by helping my teammates doing things like building a quote generator. I was a mentor to a lot of new hires. Someone spent a lot of time with people.

Speaker 8:

I served on our Toastmasters committee and I just found that those moments, those times in helping people get better, were so much more exciting than even closing the big deals. And that's where I said to myself, like, how do I get better? Or how do I do this, how do I turn this into a job so I can feel this way all the time? And that really led to me starting to ask some questions, meeting some awesome people at the organization I was at the time. I was fortunate that organization really highlighted leverage, which is about how can you 10X yourself across the company. So it was enablement was built into it, but I really identified with that and it made me yeah, just made me happy and brought a lot more career satisfaction at times than closing a big deal.

Speaker 9:

Hey everyone, amy Levine here. I wanted to share a story about early in my career, how I made some significant changes, but also very authentic to myself, and how it helped my career get to the point where it is today, where I've led and designed it to where I wanted it to be. When I got out of college, I thought that I was going to become an interior designer. I went to school for business and art and I ended up in a Fortune 50 company on a global productivity team of about 200 folks. What I learned that I needed was to not have my butt in my seat and just do the work behind the desk. What I learned is that I needed to meet people face to face. However, they were my customer, and so we had multiple buildings on one long street in Hopkington, massachusetts, and I would leave regularly to meet people as much as I could in person. And I realized also that I was more productive if I took a break and got some sunlight or a long lunch and left around three and then turned my computer on after dinner.

Speaker 9:

The productivity that I figured out intentionally and with my intuition really helped me be the best and make the most out of my days and I ended up ironically winning an award on.

Speaker 9:

It was a changemaker award at this company on how we redefined productivity in the global productivity team and I think the best thing that I was able to do is just follow how important it was to me to focus on what I needed to focus on with work, meet people in person and be able to have some flexibility in my schedule based on the measurements and the output I was giving. That led to this company incubating a startup. They asked me to run enablement at their company and over time we really built this culture of productivity from a way that was most impactful for each of the people. So I think the biggest learning that I found working at this global productivity organization, at a Fortune 50 company, is that they didn't have it yet, they hadn't figured it out and it was like a 20, 30 year old organization multi-billion dollars and so really, if you're thinking that you can do something better, more effective, more efficient, just start doing it and if it shows measurement, explain why and how later.

Speaker 10:

Hi, my name is Chuck Markleier. I've been the VP of Revenue Enablement at a Frigida company called Freight Waves and now I'm starting a new adventure as the founder of a sales consulting partial revenue enablement consulting company called SAS Enable, and I guess my evolutionary process that I would like to share is really the story of taking a chance on something different. When someone comes and asks you for something to try something. You probably know a lot more from your experiences than you even give yourself credit for, and the story that I like to share around that is about two plus years ago, a former CRO of mine, forest, reached out to me and said hey, would you like to make some beer money? And I said well, what do you mean beer money? He says, well, I've got a company that I think that I'm advising that from one of the venture partners that I'm doing that could use your help and enablement, and I go what do you mean? He goes you'll know it when you see it. So have a conversation with him and my first reaction was well, I don't know if I could do consulting I'm better in the field and doing this kind of stuff but strategic advising I haven't done much of that and I got on the call with Spencer, the CFO of the company, and started to have a conversation with them and I recognized right off the bat is I knew a lot of stuff that really could help these people and just through the conversation I was able to quickly diagnose some of the problems that the leadership was having, some of the organizational problems that they were challenged with, and I was comfortable rolling up my sleeves and helping them put process in place and put coaching for their leaders in place and strategy and verticalization and all the things that I had taken for granted, that I had developed over my years in sales enablement.

Speaker 10:

I have a 30 year career in sales, sales leadership and sales enablement that I was able to deploy and put right into place and it was able to.

Speaker 10:

For me, the evolutionary process was recognizing that I do have the skills and that I do have processes in place that people really can value to move from that transactional, tactical kind of enablement really to the strategic enablement and companies these days really want that combination of someone who can see the processes and advise them and yet at the same time get down in the trenches and actually do it. Sit side by side by the leaders sit with the reps in the trenches and make these things happen, and so the advice I'd give someone who's looking in their career is take notes of what you're doing but recognize that the experiences that you have actually do translate and have value as you go from one company to the other. So my evolutionary process has been to be able to go from the head of sales enablement in the field in companies to now taking those skills, wrapping them together and putting it in a way that I'm comfortable going to other companies advising them in a fractional sales enablement way.

Speaker 11:

I'm Sandy Robinson, senior Vice President of Revenue Operations at POTRA. I've been in the sales marketing revenue operations world in sales leadership positions for I don't know 20 some odd years. I won't get into the details of exactly how long, but I really got my start, interestingly enough, teaching martial arts. I was really into karate and blame it on the movie the Karate Kid, but it was something that I always wanted to do and I ended up getting my black belt and chempo and teaching and learning and as you go through the ranks you learn how to teach, and I ended up working there and managing a school and learning all of the skills that are really sales skills that people learn as they go into the sales world. And so I just had that kind of foundation of training, teaching people, and it really really was like an evolution to where I am today, starting with the Karate Kid From there, running around in PJs. It's lots of fun, but I really wanted to make some money and so I traded in my bare feet for a pair of heels, got a job and inside sales and it was. It was okay, but I kind of felt like I was chained to a desk and my boss was like you know, you really, I think, would be a better fit for outside sales. So I started an outside sales world, made my way up into the manager ranks and at the time actually, I was a sales manager for Dish Network and when we traveled the policies several I won't say how many years ago were like two to a room, but I was the only female on the team so they had to change the company policy for me. So it was just a little kind of funny thing there about some of these early roles that I had. But I really enjoyed the flexibility of being out in the field.

Speaker 11:

When I was at Dish Network I was always training our agents on how to sell Dish Network. So in some format, in every sales role that I had, there was some level of having to teach, having to enable myself create materials and apply them. So that really led to sales leadership roles. And you know, as technology evolved and things evolved into sales operations, I had a great mentor named Sharon Schoffner-Meier who said you know, hey, you're really great at this sales leadership thing, you should think about the sales ops thing. And from then I don't know it was like 2012, went into the sales ops world doing comp plans, territories, training. We rolled out the Challenger sales method and sales operations eventually kind of evolved into really what I was doing. We called it sales operations, but it was really supporting the full buying journey, which is what we think of revenue operations today.

Speaker 7:

I am Mike Simmons, the founder of Catalyst Acts, and I help people in businesses find clarity in the chaos so that they can simplify execution and achieve the results they want. Enablement is a powerful term for me and, from a journey perspective, the mistake I made early on in my career is I thought that enabling others was telling people what to do, showing people how to do it and being very prescriptive in the approach. And what I've realized over the last number of years is the importance of asking questions as a way to guide and coach people and have them understand what they want to do, how they want to do it and where they want to go. So, from an evolution perspective, it was important to evolve from telling people what to do and showing people what to do to guiding people in a direction with the questions that I ask. And we, as enablement professionals, will get better at serving our customers, both our internal and our external customers, when we ask better questions in context.

Speaker 12:

Hi everyone. I'm Fiona Simpson. I am a sales enablement leader as well as the host of the enablement amplified podcast, and one of the evolutions I've had in my career is learning what sales enablement was. I started off in the world of customer success, customer support and one day I got pulled into sales enablement, kind of by accident. I evolved from not just a typical account manager but into someone who was always delivering more value to my customers, talking about other products they might not be using. And our sales team started to get their claws into me and say you really need to come and teach our team on the sales side what you're doing. And as those conversations evolved, another one of my colleagues had moved across to the sales team. He was starting up a team for sales enablement and said hey, I want you to come join me and I had no idea what sales enablement was. I wasn't sure if that meant I was going to be selling and how to quota and getting commission and all those things. I didn't know if I was going to be doing technical products conversations. I had no idea and so I took the leap and I joined the team and found out that sales enablement is really my home.

Speaker 12:

I love, love, love to sink my hands into something, to become an expert on that thing, and then turn around and teach it to other people, and one of the reasons I love that so much and really where my career has taken off in the way that I work with all of my stakeholders is when I turn around and do that teaching.

Speaker 12:

I end up learning even more. I end up seeing things from new perspectives. I end up finding where I maybe had gaps in my process or what I could have included to be a more complete education for whomever that person is that I'm working with or that team, and so the evolution for me has been not only discovering what sales enablement is, but that it is really my, my strong suit of skills. And then the very best part I have to say, especially because we're here in San Diego and we're all together, is that not only have I found my skill set, but I found my people, and so being a part of a community that not only celebrates each other and builds off of each other, but comes together to share our knowledge. Just like we love to do with our sellers and our teams, we do the exact same thing with each other. So that's been my evolution.

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 s-e-s-o-c-i-e-t-y area.

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