Revenue Enablement Society - Stories From The Trenches
The Revenue Enablement Society's "Stories From The Trenches is where revenue enablement practitioners share their real world experiences. Get the scoop on what's happening inside revenue enablement teams across the global RES member community. Each segment of "Stories From The Trenches" share 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 GTM leadership. Sit back, grab a cold one and join host Paul 'Norf' Norford, for casual conversations about the wide and varied profession of revenue enablement where there is never a one size fits all solution.
The wide and varied profession of Revenue Enablement ensures there is never a one-size-fits-all solution to be successful. Amidst constant change the journey to successful outcomes is never the same. Learn from your peers and gain insights on topics like:
-Building strategies and metrics that correlate back to revenue impact
-Gathering requirements to identify stakeholders
-Gaining buy-in and executive sponsorship
-Aligning with sales leaders
-Facilitating cross-functional collaboration
Revenue Enablement Society - Stories From The Trenches
Ep. 71 - Peter Ostrow - Maximizing The Effectiveness of A.I.
Get ready to accelerate your revenue enablement success with insights from Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, Peter Ostrow.
Recently Peter joined me to unpack the potential of AI to transform Revenue Enablement efficiencies and results. If your Sales Enablement budget is like most the team is understaffed and underfunded while juggling competing priorities.
Listen now to hear how you can use AI tools you already own to maximize their impact on every facet of your enablement programs, from RFP analysis to tailoring pitch-perfect emails.
Peter Ostrow is currently VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester B2B Sales. Peter capitalizes on 20+ years of revenue growth leadership in sales enablement, sales talent management, and operational expertise. Prior to joining SiriusDecisions and Forrester, Peter was a VP/Research Group Director for the Aberdeen Group, where he founded and was Principal Analyst for the Sales Effectiveness Practice, as well as overseeing research in marketing, customer success, field service and human capital management disciplines. Prior to his analyst work, he was a long-time B2B sales rep, manager, and enabler.Since 2020, Peter has served on the board of directors of the Sales Enablement Society, the largest and only nonprofit organization dedicated to the sales enablement profession.
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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 everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Enablement Society podcast, stories from the Trenches, the podcast where we bring together practitioners and experts from our field from all over the globe. We talk about the innovative ways that they're getting things done. We talk about what they're working on and sometimes even the things that didn't go so well, because there's always a lot to be learned from that. So we want to welcome you and also welcome our guest for this episode we have with us from Forester Peter Astrow. Peter, some of you may know the name because he is a member at large of the RES Executive Board. Peter also is VP and Principal Analyst at Forester. So welcome Peter. Maybe introduce yourself a little bit about what you're working on.
Speaker 3:Thanks, paul, I appreciate the time to spend with you. And what is this? The 498th Stories from the Trenches episode or something pretty close to that? At least the 498th take. Yeah, it's been a great series, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So, as Paul mentioned, I followed up a long career in B2B selling, sales management, enablement and ops. With coming to this side of the equation, where I don't really do anything, I just tell people what to do, it's a great gig. I recommend it highly. I live outside of Boston. We've got some piles of snow outside from the storm this past weekend. We've got a lot of questions about the future of Bill Belichick and those will all be resolved one way or the other by springtime both the weather and our once awesome Patriots' capabilities here. Fun fact, paul In college I was a member of what I think to this day is the only ice skating pep band in the world.
Speaker 3:That is a fun fact. You and I have known each other for quite a long time and I think it's the first one time I've sprung that one on you. I think it is. What instrument did you play on skates? I was in the Brown University band initially on clarinet and saw that the percussion folks were having a lot more fun and drinking a lot more. So I made that transition. My roommate, senior year, was the bass drummer. Someone would skate dragging the bass drum behind them and he would skate behind playing the bass drum. I mean you won't find me on YouTube, but you can certainly YouTube Brown University ice hockey band and see the shenanigans that go on. That sounds worthwhile.
Speaker 2:I will do that, but for now we're going to play the Jimmy Kimmel Challenge. Are you ready? All right, so later this year Kimmel decides to retire. Through your connections, you are offered his late night show and you can have anybody you want as your first guest. Who did you invite? Who will you invite and why did you choose them, living or not?
Speaker 3:living.
Speaker 2:Living or not living?
Speaker 3:Barack Obama.
Speaker 2:All right, I think it's the first time that he has come up. Michelle's been mentioned twice that I can think of, but why President Obama?
Speaker 3:Two reasons. One I want to find out if he's going to become the new president of Harvard University, because that's been floated around. And number two, just very honestly, paul, my mom and dad, george and Ina Ostro still kicking at 92 and 89, raised my siblings and me with what I consider to be a pretty high bar of class, ethics, morality, and I think President Obama demonstrated in the public sector at least as much of that as any famous person I've ever paid attention to. Nobody's perfect, but I'd love to have him for a guest show guest.
Speaker 2:I would love to, if I was on that show with you, would ask him about hot boxing, as Barry Obama back in Hawaii back in the day, because he's talked about that, he's referred to it. I guess I should say I'll bet there's more stories there than what he has shared publicly, so need to get him on that show. All right, so let's talk about AI. There's a topic nobody's talking about but, in all seriousness, as you and I were preparing for this, one of the things that I would really am looking for talking with you in that you brought up in San Diego at the RES conference, which has been a few months by the time this airs and that is that there's a lot of excitement about AI, but also a lot of fear, or at least concern, and that maybe we're not, as a profession, not being as proactive as we should be. Did I get that right and you want to elaborate on that for me?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you and I have had many conversations about this, and I'm not just saying that to Panda. We literally have had conversations at this and our board, our board memberships, have overlapped with that happening. Enablement is too often a reactive function. It's too often the folks that we throw a bunch of other stuff at because we can't figure out who is going to take care of it. That tends to not only dilute the effectiveness of enablement, because they become more of a jack of many trades instead of a master or a few, but it also downgrades the view people have of them. They're just going to do this extra training, they're going to run this extra sco event, and if enablement deserves, let alone wants, some sort of a seat at the grown-ups table of decision-making, there needs to be a way in which they become more of a leader inside the organization, and you and I know this. Anybody can be a leader, doesn't matter what your job title is if you have no people reporting to you. The same goes for functions, and the interesting thing about enablement is vast majority of folks in the space. From what I see with my customers, our customers, and, frankly, what I see even from the customers of all of the enablement automation vendors is they have yet to really do much with it.
Speaker 3:Hardly anything in the enablement space, and I feel like it's just analysis, paralysis. Well, we don't know what. We're waiting for someone else to tell us. What is the security? What is the privacy? The fact is, 95% of the folks who are in our community, who are listening to this already, are paying every single month times 50 or times 500 or times 5,000 reps for their revenue. Enablement automation technology it's there. It's integrated with your CRM. You're hopefully seeing people use it pretty well. You're already paying for brand new generative AI and relatively new AI capabilities and, like so many apps that we use as consumers, you're not getting everything you're paying for, and so that is a great opportunity to go to the vendors and say, hey, you now have generative AI and AI capabilities and I think I'm already paying for them. We need to step up our relationship and show me what I can and should be doing now.
Speaker 2:So when you said a minute ago that there's not enough being done with it, you're referring to the practitioners, not the platforms.
Speaker 3:Platforms are all great. We took a look at all of them last summer and they're not all quite at the exact same level of maturity and advancement, but even the least advanced of them are doing they've all done things with AI for a while right? Ai is not smart, ai is just a lot faster and a lot more of manual labor. If it's a matter of figuring out which asset is right for this seller in this buyer situation at this stage of their deal, in this market, with this skew, in this geography, that's just manual taxonomy automated by AI. The generative piece has enormously bigger you know perspective and possibilities and they've all brought them, even the least of them, to a really nice place.
Speaker 3:It's really. It's a moment. I refer to it as equivalent to the Y2K moment. Some of our audience won't know what we're talking about. Those who do recognize that Y2K was a moment 25, 27 years ago when we kind of got our you know what's out of our you know what's. We stopped worrying about our individual silos and budgets and we all said, wow, we collectively capital W need to fix this or address this. Gen AI is really the first technology innovation that's that big and that broad since that time.
Speaker 2:Interesting observation. I love what you said Covenants ago about not being reactive all the time, and I absolutely agree with you. It's. You know, if that's how you choose to operate, you will become a dinosaur or luxury quickly. And so, in fact I talked about this recently on another podcast the fact that, in my experience, too many folks in the enablement profession continue to be waiters, as in a restaurant. People ask for stuff and you bring it, as opposed to challengers and yes, I'm, you know, challenger with a capital C. And just that mindset, right, that mindset of that I think you're espousing, which is understanding the needs of the business, proactively, going out, identifying gaps, and in this case, we're talking about. We're going to talk about how do you use AI to show a lead, take a leadership position in your company and using it. So, what are the biggest things? Are, you know, the enablement folks listening right now? Let's start with what should they be thinking about? They're nodding vigorously, they're excited about what you're saying. Where to start? What should they think about?
Speaker 3:Good place to start would be number one. Think about replacing your interns, or the equivalent of your interns, but not your sellers. So what do I mean by that? That's a little bit mysterious. If you think about the easiest part of your job, paul, or my job, or an enablement professionals job, what's the stuff that you can do when you're tired at the end of the day, just fine Versus the stuff that you really need to be bringing your A game for the parts of our jobs, whether it's content creation, course creation, coaching, whatever it might be in enablement that you could bring an intern or a fairly junior level employee in, teach them a few things and they could probably do a reasonably good job right from moment five, if not moment one. Those are things that AI can probably do for us. The time savings that all of us are starting to recognize are achievable with foundational and maybe foundational to intermediate level complex tasks is great time to replace. What we don't want to replace is the high performance, nuanced, professional, on-the-field, judgment-based capabilities of our best B2B sales people. So that would be point number one for things we should know about and be thinking about. Number two would be to have Peter admit that the things he's been saying for years about keeping enablement at an arms length from the IT department are no longer appropriate, and I will take a dive on that one. Enablement technology, like any line of business technology, is usually best implemented with a bit of a distanced relationship from the folks in the technology space, because they normally want to own and build and buy all the stuff on their own and they don't always get what we're doing out in the field. Enablement's always been like that. That's why all of the vendors in our space sell to the Chief Revenue Officer or Sales or Revenue Ops or Sales or Revenue Enablement, not to IT. They may sell to marketing, but they're not going to sell to IT. Now.
Speaker 3:This second point is about being more willing to understand and become more expert on data lake quality. This would be the single point I would want folks to take away. A good generative AI solution points at something. Chatgpt points at the entire Internet. Our own in-house forester and all companies probably have this by now. Version of ChatGPT points at everything on the Internet, but it doesn't allow us to put confidential stuff on there. The generative AI solutions that we already have from these enablement automation providers are going to be pointing at our own artifacts, our content, our PowerPoints, our PDFs, our spreadsheets, our lists, our private stuff, and making sure that we understand how important the quality of that data lake is, that things are up to date. That is going to become a much more important competency for enablement leaders, because it's a brand new one than it ever was for any enablement leaders in the past.
Speaker 2:You're talking governance, peter Governance, or is it something?
Speaker 3:more. It is governance married with awareness. I don't think we need for enablement folks to go back to school and stop enabling and start getting a PhD in data science or in global governance and economic policy, but they need to be more aware of those limitations and expectations than they once were In your experience.
Speaker 2:does that also include that awareness and the things you're talking about, especially with the content and the data lake, as you called it? Enablement is that enablement plus product marketing, enablement plus someone else?
Speaker 3:Yeah, Y2K time.
Speaker 2:Should that live for you.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah, I don't care that much where responsibilities live. It's one of the advantages of being an analyst, Paul you just tell people what to do. You don't really care whether they get it done or not. I'm mostly joking, as with Y2K, where organizations came together and said we, Capital W, have to be able to do this. Addressing AI and most of our organizations has become an organization-wide initiative. Then we all retreat to our own little fiefdoms and our own little departments and our own little budgets and our own little egos and we're like what are they going to do about it? What are we going to do about it? It's inevitable. It's an ingrained in Western business culture that we think that way. It's important for someone to do it. My pitch to our audience is for enablement to take one of the leading voices, in that it doesn't matter who ultimately executes, but if you're a leading voice in it, you are leading and people will follow.
Speaker 2:So we talked about what they need to know, what they need to understand, what they need to learn, but now it's time to put into action what do they need to do Right Beginning? It's early in the year. People are thinking about this stuff anyway. What's your advice?
Speaker 3:This is a dramatic change in competencies. We spend a lot of time helping our enablement customers upgrade and uplevel the competency maps for all of the selling and other customer-facing roles that they support. What does someone need to be good, great or amazing at? Or which competencies do we buy when we hire, build, when we onboard and promote, when we ever board around the skills and the knowledge and the process pieces to be great at my individual contributor or managerial job? So those competencies evolve over time as we change what we sell, to who we sell it, how we sell it.
Speaker 3:When there's a global socioeconomic crisis, a big industry thing happens technology, innovation, legal ramifications, mergers, acquisitions. This is another very important competency, and what I'm referring to is pretty much prompt engineering. We've all, hopefully by now, played with chat, gpt or similar tools and we've started to figure out how do I communicate with this enormous pile of data in very easy English in order to get the most out of it. It's not hard, but to be able to do that efficiently will help add the only currency that matters to be-to-be sales professionals time. We know, for instance, that high-performing organizations REPS spend 12% less time looking for searching for modifying content than REPS in low-performing organizations. Everything enablement should do should be about two things Helping folks adapt to the winning behaviors that the company wants them to move toward and save them time, and they work with REVOPs on the latter piece. So the skill set is super important, both for enablement as well as for the sellers.
Speaker 3:And then the other thing I'd say is to always be thinking with them. What's in it for me, for your customers? I believe I know we've had these discussions that the customer of enablement is the sales force or the entire revenue team. Whoever faces your customers, they are our customers because they're the people that we interact with. Of course, the outside customers are their customers by default. Those folks, of course, are writing the checks. But our customers what do they need? Internal customers, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:They want us to help them with their efficiency and decision making. They want us to tell them what to do and how to do it. They want us to give them content, answers and insight, and by gum. They don't want us to give them a hammer in search of a nail. Hey, everybody, we're in luck. We just bought some artificial intelligence. Yeah, we bought it. It was on the fourth aisle, four down at Stop and Shop, next to the cookies, and now you're all going to consume it. We don't want to see that. So the opportunity to create things, evaluate things, learn things and understand things is enormously increased by these capabilities. You know and I don't think there's probably a lot of folks listening who need to know more tactically what you and I mean by all of those phrases We've all played around with it, yeah, and we should keep playing with it. The easiest thing for anybody who's never done it, who's listening to this, is just go to chatgpt and just start playing. It's so easy you can't break it.
Speaker 2:Can't break it. Can't break it. Yeah, no. So you mentioned earlier, if you have any of the enablement platforms, you probably are paying for AI you haven't used so low hanging fruit. Go talk to your CSM at the vendor, Find out what you've got and start figuring out ways to lead inside the company by using it. You're already paying for it. So you mentioned that number two You're talking about actually get your hands dirty with it. Open up chat gpt account, play with it, mess around with it. That sort of thing.
Speaker 3:What else Find like-minded leaders inside the organization who are also playing and toying around with it. There are, in most of our companies, rules and regs that says attention, everybody. You know it's like banning TikTok, right? No one gets to use this without our permission because we're still figuring out what our coverage is. That's fine, but you know what we are already using every single moment the revenue automation tool, and it's already pointing at all of our documentation. It's pointing at our battle cards, it's pointing at all of our objects. We just want to continue having it pointed our objects but to gain better insights from it. You know I've got a couple of quotes and I'm going to look on one of my slides here because it's easier to just sort of share them than to remember what they are.
Speaker 3:The things that we talk to folks about, the capabilities either now or very short from now, include things like hey machine. Here's a PDF from my prospects website and our company's product list. Write me an email linking our most appropriate products to their most pressing needs. Or look through our internal artifacts to tell me which of our competitor services are most like or unlike ours. Or turn this email message into a social media post targeted at CTOs. Or compare this digital sales room with these six other digital sales rooms and tell me which assets are most and least often consumed by our buyers.
Speaker 3:Or listen to this meeting recording and tell me who the economic buyer is. Or watch this recording and tell me what my body language was good and bad. Evaluate me, rate me. I mean speaking of that. There's one little widget that's on the market now where it can be right in the corner of the screen and tell me if I'm speaking too slowly or in a monotone, or it can tell me if I'm behaving in a little bit of a threatening way, right, or if I'm being very closed off. The biometrics capabilities, well beyond conversation intelligence, which we all are familiar with, are pretty impressive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've also heard a cool use case of having AI analyze an RFP. Oh, yeah, so we have not seen A lot of times they're large, they're boilerplate and it's easy to miss stuff in them and anyway, this is another use case where I've seen yeah, I still Different response teams using it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I have childhood trauma of thinking about RFPs that I had to respond to in the past, or young adult trauma. Yeah, and those are tough. Those are really tough. What's interesting is yeah, you'll also find additional stuff that you could learn where we do the research that participates in some of your research. What are we trying to do? All right, did you ever own a radar detector for your car? Yeah, still do.
Speaker 2:Okay, I don't bother anymore.
Speaker 3:Yeah, when I was a radar detector owner, it felt like the same companies were selling to consumers this capability. Then they would sell law enforcement that capability. Then we had to catch up and we'd have to sell by this and it was just like you know, iphone 95, right, they just keep selling it to us. I feel like AI has got that capability with buyers and sellers. We don't have research yet on specific buyer behavior utilizing AI.
Speaker 3:What's to stop us right now from saying, hey, go out and examine these five different offerings, based on their website, based on their G2 rating, based on the Forester Wave, based on the Glass Door, based on whatever, and tell me the strengths and weaknesses of all of them, given my particular needs? If there's not an, I don't know anything about the world of procurement. I mean, I don't know if anybody wants to. You know, when I grow up, I want to be a procurement. We need probably not, but you got to. We've got to assume there's companies out there that are that have been. There's companies that sell to procurement. They're going to be selling these tools. So it's the radar detector. Over and over and over again.
Speaker 2:It'll be like the Cold War. I mean, we've got sales methodology workshops. There are procurement methodology for lack of a better phrase. Workshops have been for years. A lot of companies have figured out this is a cost. Excuse me, it could be a profit center, more of a profit center. Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 3:And if there's any-.
Speaker 2:Training them to effectively negotiate, bonusing them on, you know, discounting that they receive, and yeah, it's a whole industry It's-. Oh, yeah, I guess if they don't realize that.
Speaker 3:And for all the procurement weenies on the call who've I've offended, I recognize that for companies like Walmart and their supply chain and Amazon and their supply chain and things like that, now, these are enormous cost savers and all of us who have ever been through any kind of a riff or anything like that know how important it is to have that stuff at hand. As a sales professional, you know, not a fan, for all the obvious reasons, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's. It's interesting analogy with the, with the speed or the radar detectors and the technology they're selling to both sides. So we're coming close up on time and I want to leave a couple minutes for you to drop some knowledge on us, life experience knowledge. So, to wrap up, what else would you, you know, would you admonish our listeners at this point? Hopefully they're getting more comfortable or excited about the idea of digging into AI. What's the last thing you'd leave with them?
Speaker 3:I would implement and execute on AI as not its own initiative. Just the way we say to folks if you are going to buy insert revenue enablement vendor product here, please, please do not go to your Salesforce and say, hey, everybody, welcome to January of 2024, go this year. We're going to recognize this, we're going to award that and, everybody, we're going to be implementing ACME software or we already did.
Speaker 3:That just that's just the perpetuation of the perception of enablement as the peddler of tools. If enablement, if I don't see enablement as the people who are going to get me to my number, enablement should all be fired. I just literally agree. The only thing that matters to me as a seller is my deals right now. So your AI initiative should be tucked into Things that you're going to do to make my life better.
Speaker 3:Hey everybody, we've been hearing some things about productivity. We've been hearing things about findability, searchability, skill sets, introducing at SCO 2024, acmevision 25,. I'm not a creative person, so you brand your initiative about better sales, learning, better sales, content management, better this or that. What are we doing in the C&D initiative? We've heard from you and we're going to be doing A, we're going to be doing B, we're going to be doing C. Then, by the way, once we've done those things, we're going to automate it with some new stuff that we purchased. Don't worry about the provenance of it. Trust us. Don't be the peddler of technology. Be the greaser of the skids to get me to my number. That's the whiff of that matters to your customers. If the AI initiative is anything but that, then don't bother.
Speaker 2:I'm listening to you and I think this is how at least hopefully enablement teams are teaching and coaching sellers to sell. You really just use what you're hopefully teaching others to do. If you have a seller that goes out and just starts spouting off product features and that sort of thing without really any business acumen, it's not going to be a great discovery and it's not going to land well. I think what I hear you say is the same thing. If you just start spouting off features oh look at this, look at this, look at this you don't position it, you don't tie it back to things that you've heard, problems that you helped identify, all of that makes all the difference in the world.
Speaker 3:We've got tons and tons of activity right now in our research about measuring enablements capabilities. It all boils down to did you change my behavior in the way that my bosses up the food chain want it changed and did you give me more time to do my core activities? Ai fits beautifully into both of those it does. But with great AI comes great responsibility.
Speaker 2:All right, before I let you go, I would love to have you just share just some personal advice, if you don't mind. You've been given the gift of time travel. You are allowed to go back, but the only person you could talk to is some younger version of yourself, but it can be anywhere on that continuum. You can only coach yourself in one area. So out of all the things you've learned in your career, in your life, what's the biggest thing you wish you could go back and help yourself understand sooner Make more dad jokes.
Speaker 2:Okay, make more dad jokes.
Speaker 3:I caught you flat footed on that one. You know what you did.
Speaker 2:Well, I was waiting for a dad joke, because normally I don't get out of a conversation with you without I know. I know, this is the outlier so far.
Speaker 3:Yeah, all right, we'll do one. Then Roman walks into a bar and says I'll have five beers.
Speaker 2:Nice, very nice. I had to think about that one, but not too badly. Some of them are tougher, all right. Well, peter, thank you Really, appreciate your time, appreciate all the energy and effort that you put into helping our profession working with the RES board, and appreciate you being here. Thank you to everybody else who's been listening. We appreciate you investing another half hour or so of your time and please continue to do that. You can follow us on Apple, google or Spotify, and we'll be back in two weeks with another episode.
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.
