Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
84. Measuring the success of sales enablement with Paul Butterfield
Salespeople have quotas and a large % of their compensation is variable. But what about enablement? Paul and I discuss some spicy ideas that he's implemented in the past.
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm Co-Founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. My guest today is one of the top enablement professionals in the world and we're going to dig into some topics, and we decided that this might be a little spicy today.
Speaker 1:Three things we're going to hit on, and then I'm going to let him introduce himself. We're going to talk about how sales enablement leaders inside of organizations should be able to describe where's the team at, what's that mean relative to the goal, what have they identified that the team needs to work on and what's the plan to get that done with no notice, off the top of head, just like salesperson would, with where they're at relative to their goal. We're going to talk about integrating sales enablement and comp plans and we're also going to talk about really being able to understand the gap between where we're at today and where we need to be, both in terms of the tactical stuff that gets done inside of enablement but also skill sets of the people that are on the team. And with that, paul Butterfield, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Hey, Corey, good to be here. Been looking forward to doing this. Oh yeah, and I know you said no commercials, but y'all, I'm also an investor in Coach CRM, so buy Coach CRM.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, buy Coach CRM. It's a good. You know if you good. If you're anxious about your manager's ability to get the most out of teams. There's a gap between your top performers and everybody else Blah blah blah.
Speaker 2:I said no long ads.
Speaker 1:I didn't say no ads, I said no long ads. I always hold-.
Speaker 2:Fair point, all right.
Speaker 1:Language matters. Okay, so, paul, enablement holding them to the same standards and levels of accountability that you hold salespeople and sales leaders. To Tell me about your experience in that world, because I know not everybody does that.
Speaker 2:True. There's a couple of ways I look at that. First of all, if you are I'm going to say, anybody on the enablement team, but especially if you are a leader or the leader of an enablement team, even if you're the leader of yourself, you need to be as tuned in to what's going on in the sales metrics as any of the sales leaders that you're working with At any given time. You should know where and I don't care who you report to I mean, I've reported to CROs. That makes it a little easier, but you really need to know right. Where is the team against goal collectively this quarter? How many reps are tracking to hit under 50% of goal? How many reps are tracking to overachieve?
Speaker 2:You don't need to know all the minutia you got tech for that but off the top of your head you should have a pretty good idea at a high level where the revenue org is tracking, and the reason for that is, to me, it's a mindset. If you aren't staying on top of that, if that's not interesting to you, then you need to get more interested in it, because to me and full disclosure grew up in sales came into enablement late in my career but if you're not constantly thinking about what the gaps are in the revenue and quota, then you're not doing it right. I know I may make some enemies on that but you're not.
Speaker 1:What is the sales leadership's perception of enablement when enablement doesn't have that purview and understanding and a commitment to the metrics?
Speaker 2:They're not taken seriously, and it depends on the organization, I'm sure. But if you don't take the time, think about what we tell salespeople. Corey, let's back up a second. Anybody in enablement is probably teaching salespeople. You know, know your ICP, and you know blah, blah, blah. So guess what? It's the same for us.
Speaker 2:Our ICPs happen to be sales VPs and directors, et cetera, that we work with. But we need to understand their world. We need to be on top of it, and I think a lot of it is. We need to care, and I don't mean to say that not everybody cares, but I've run into people personally. I've talked to enablement that I'm going to guess don't, because they just have no idea and so you're not going to be taken seriously. All this talk about getting a seat at the table and blah, blah, blah that's important. I don't want to dismiss that, but it starts with being taken seriously. As think about when you go in front of a prospect, if you haven't done any research into that company or into what that person does, your ICP, how seriously are you going to be taken as a seller?
Speaker 1:We've got to earn your seat and so enablers, it's the same thing.
Speaker 1:We're not going to be taken seriously and that's how you earn the seat at the table Exactly. And it's about understanding. Yeah, so this is funny. It's like we're building our sales playbook to sell ourselves. So we've got our target market and then our personas. So personas, cro what do they do? What's their pain? How do we win? How do we win their heart and mind and bandwidth and that seat at the table? And then for the second line leader and the front line leader and the people in the sales team, sales ops, what does that look like? What does that look like? What metrics matter to each one of those individuals? And then, most importantly, how do we tie the things that we're doing to those metrics?
Speaker 1:And here's the thing I think there's a confusion around things like ROI. I had a conversation with a guy the other day around ROI and enablement. He said it was a dangerous thing. I said, look, it doesn't have to be bottom line net income dollars. It could be sales methodology adoption, it could be time to ramp. Return doesn't have to be a net income dollar figure. Curious, your thoughts on that.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to get on my ROI soapbox for just a minute.
Speaker 1:Ooh got it Sponsored by ROI.
Speaker 2:For years I've even cautioned sellers about throwing around the term ROI, because the reality is ROI is a very specific set of measurements.
Speaker 2:You know this, and no prospect is ever going to give you all the data to do a true ROI analysis and, in my experience, often what sellers mean when they say that is a business case and an identifiable business, outcomes, right and benefits and things like that, but it's not a true ROI and you'll get away with it most of the time.
Speaker 2:But if you get in front of a CFO or senior director of finance and you start showing them the ROI of what you're trying to sell them, you're going to lose all your credibility. And so my advice to enable folks is the same thing you will not be able to show ROI, so be careful how you use that term. But you've got to be able to show reasonable and consistent correlation with inputs and outputs, and you mentioned this at the beginning of the show. How did you identify the gap? So how did you identify the gap? What did you put in place to take care of that, to bridge that gap? How did you measure it, et cetera. That is what you've got to be able to do, regardless of what you choose to call it.
Speaker 2:But I agree, I don't think you can ever show a direct ROI.
Speaker 1:Well, so I use the word ROI pretty loosely in terms of being what's the quantitative impact on what we're doing?
Speaker 1:and how much effort did it take to get there? Because you can fiddle with the numerator and denominator all day long and get to something approximate. Yeah, so we rolled out new tools Cool. Do people use them as much as we thought that they would? Do they actually the fun thing? Okay, soapbox time. Let me get on my technology. Soapbox for an instance. Well, any software product, I would argue any software product that is not just complete legacy, almost shut down and out of business, let's put those aside. But anything that's actively being sold and growing, if you actually use it, it will have a substantial impact on the business because it's leverage. There are very few, if any, examples where people use it the way that it was supposed to be used and it doesn't create some kind of leverage and exponential. I agree.
Speaker 2:Well-implemented, well-adopted. Yes, I agree yeah.
Speaker 1:So all this stuff where it's shelf, where it breaks down, whatever. I mean, we all know those people that have made their careers out of doing vendor evaluations. Yeah, in lieu of okay, well, these three all work, let's pick one and then let's spend as much effort doing implementation as we do on vendor evaluation. At least Right, right, hopefully substantially more, and measuring adoption.
Speaker 2:And there's always the change management piece which gets overlooked. Yeah, and if you're not thinking about that, you're going to miss as well.
Speaker 1:Exactly so, then okay. So if we're talking about a tool implementation on the front end, we've got a hypothesis we buy this thing, we put it in place. It's going to make this metric go from X to Y. Let's say we're buying call recording software and we think it's going to impact our ability to get consistent next steps out of sales. Conversations Can do lots more than that, but that's one thing that we really want to impact is 90% of meetings. We either want to have a next step that's on the calendar or we want to disqualify the prospect. Well, we're at 50% today. Cool, that's something very specific that we can measure. Now, did the thing get hooked up to the software right? The other software? Sure, probably, because that's easy to do. There's one person in charge of that. Now, are managers actually using it the way that the vendor and us had agreed on? Spend three hours a week, or one hour a week, or look at the summaries, whatever it is. That's where the rubber hits the road and you start seeing the impact.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, there's so much tech. Yeah, there's so much tech, and I think that AI is going to just accelerate this potential problem, which is people too often are still buying it because it's shiny and cool and there's not that level. Maybe they're even doing some good analysis before they buy it, but how are they implementing it? I mean pro tip from my experience and I know this isn't the case in a lot of organizations, but I have owned the tech stack, not Salesforce but when it comes to things like conversational intelligence and an enablement platform and similar things, my team and I have been the recommenders and the drivers of that.
Speaker 2:I've rolled out LinkedIn Sales Navigator across all of Vonage sellers hundreds and hundreds of sellers and so here's my pro tip as part of your negotiating make sure they understand that they've got significant skin in the game and that that implementation is just as much on them as it is on anybody in your company. And part of that needs to be that train the trainer element so that when that implementation is finished, at least someone on the enablement team has got to be up to speed and training and and and measuring that adoption. Because, yeah, I mean not that they're off the hook for it. But if you, if you don't have that level of attention, it's just going to be tough to know, if you're getting your yeah.
Speaker 1:Over the I don't know last 10 years or so, it seems like people don't pay for professional services for most products. Back in the day it was like you buy software, you buy services. That's just part of how it works.
Speaker 2:Well, back in the day, when I was selling software, we'd give away the services to close a deal, but that's.
Speaker 1:Oh, there you go. Yeah, yeah, or or you'd bring a partner in and they they'd do a separate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and why do you think that is that's people not buying it? Because they're just so cost conscious? Or is it because the services haven't been worth it in the past?
Speaker 1:What do you think? I think that it and enterprise are used to paying for services, and I think that SMB and mid market had never paid for services before outside of it. So you put an ERP system in place. Of course you're going to pay for services, but a lot of these things that look easy, they're not really that easy.
Speaker 1:No, even putting I don't really want to mention names but you put one of the lower grade CRMs into place, or you put one of the email sequencing tools into place, or even you put a car recording software that has a bunch of bells and whistles into place, getting it wired up and actually working. So then here's the question who owns that? Is it the vendor or is it enablement? And I think it's wild to expect somebody who's never done something before to make a broad rollout of something successful. So you've got a really bright, smart enablement person, sure, and then you want them to implement this thing that they've never implemented before and make it stick with a bunch of people salespeople who are more averse to change than any other group inside the company.
Speaker 2:Right? Well, that's what I'm saying. You can't. That vendor has got to be on the hook for the success of that and, depending on the tech, you also need to have rev ops deeply involved. You may need to have, if you work in a company that has an internal enterprise services team, need to have, if you work in a company that has an enterprise, you know, internal enterprise services team. Make sure you've got the right players involved as well. And that's because that's a big mistake to make. If you're an enablement person and you start trying to bring in this tech and you haven't lined up all your internal stakeholders, it's not going to go well either, because you can't do it internally. You don't know all the stuff they know, and so you know be thoughtful, be smart about it, but make the vendors sign up, absolutely, yeah but you got to pay for it, because you can't sign a $40,000 software contract, $60,000 software contract and expect them to just do it.
Speaker 1:How does someone in sales or enablement get their team bought into? Hey, we need to pay for services for this thing to make it work.
Speaker 2:Because if you're waiting to have that argument when you're already looking at the price of the software, you skipped a couple of steps. So let's talk about how do you go ask for budget. Right, I won't get into it here. You know I'm a big fan of the Kaplan-Norton strategy mapping and balanced scorecard concept. Used it successfully in the field.
Speaker 2:One of the benefits, though when you have an actual strategy map or something that you go and you have shown to executives, they understand how you're executing and what the outcomes are going to be. When you're going and asking for budget for any of these pieces of tech you're talking about, build that cost, do your homework, build the cost of those services into it because you know you need it, you know why it's reliable. Then, when you're doing your benefit analysis to go ask for that budget that's already baked in, if you wait, if you go sell your CRO, cfo, whoever, on a $100,000 contract but you forgot to mention the $35,000 PS contract you probably are going to have a tough time going back and getting that after they've approved the 100. So that would be my advice there is be thoughtful about it and make sure you're asking for what you need and building the business case for all of it. You're asking for what you need and building the business case for all of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Because that incremental 35K.
Speaker 2:It truly doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, no, but psychologically, you're coming back to the well, when they just barely approved the 100K, and psychologically, you're going to come across as needy and good luck, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's good. I think that I just don't see spending money on services nearly as prevalent as it used to be.
Speaker 2:I mean that's a fair point and I think in my mind it's also there's a differentiation between buying the PS, but in most deployments, once that is up and running, ps is done, they step away. And now you've got the customer success team. And that's where I really put the pressure on them to say, look, give me a good CSM because I'm going to use them, I'm going to lean on them. I'm going to expect them to show up with value-added QBRs every three months. I want to know where my peers are using it, that we're not, whatever it is. So when I talk about them being on the hook, I'm talking beyond just the initial.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the customer success is pushing us to be able to get more out of the product.
Speaker 2:Push us to be better. Right, Because in theory, you know stuff we don't know. You see stuff we don't see. Talk to us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if we're not adopting at the level that we need to adopt, what have other people done to get over the hump? I think this is one of the problems that folks run into is they try to drive their enablement teams to figure everything out from scratch and then it just becomes this ragtag group of people that are doing lots of stuff.
Speaker 2:And I want to make sure I give the proper credit for this because it's, you know, our mutual friend, Siobhan Thatcher, who I've heard talk about for years. There's a big difference between what is enablement responsible for and what's enablement responsible to do, and if you haven't done the legwork to get that understanding and agreement in place, then you're right. You're going to be dealing with that. All you can become the department of random broken stuff.
Speaker 1:So random things, fixing potholes? Yeah, exactly, you're not building bridges, you're fixing potholes, and that's need to be fixed, I guess. But yeah, okay, let's. Let's look at this other topic, which is gap analysis. So I want to look at what's the difference between where we're at today and where we need to be in the future and really being able to diagnose what are all the challenges and opportunities we have given our growth plans, what are all the challenges and opportunities we're going to run into? And then how do we prioritize what we need to get done and who the heck's going to do all that stuff? Because there's going to be a lot. And then there's going to be random things thrown at you in the future that you've got to account for. You can't just swat them back.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, my favorite acquisitions Nobody can see them coming but I can't think of anything that blows up your enablement roadmap any better or faster than an acquisition. And so this goes back to what I was trying to say at the beginning. Corey, when you asked me about sales acumen.
Speaker 2:If you're a leader or enablement person that did not grow up in sales, you and I both agree that you've worked with me on projects that I know you respected right what they did when they named them, but they never sold anything. But the problem is, if you don't invest in learning sales math and sales analysis and pipeline analysis, I don't know how you're going to effectively do that gap analysis. Gap analysis You've got to understand enough to look at a funnel and figure out where stuff is right, where are your deals dropping out, which stages are where you have the most problem with dropouts and then why. I'll just use that as one example, but it's only one, and you've got to know something about sales to be able to have an opinion or understand because if you don't get to the root cause of it, it's great.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, a bunch of our you know our AEs or we've got 60% of our AEs are going to be under 60% of goal. Okay, but if you can't get to the root cause of it, you're not going to be able to fix it. So just, it's just another reason why you've got to have sales acumen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think the analogy I like to use is legal. If you're going to trial, let's say you're Pfizer, our favorite pharmaceutical company let's say you're Pfizer and you're going to trial, are you going to go hire a lawyer who's got a decent understanding of science and chemistry but they've never actually been practicing in that area. They don't even have a degree there. Or are you going to go hire a PhD chemist and bring them up to the speed on the law? Yeah Well, it's going to be way better if you're going to trial without a lawyer in place. Right, exactly Because the skill set of doing everything an attorney does in the context of science is something that can be adapted.
Speaker 1:So the analogy here is if somebody is in an enablement role and they're working in analysis to try to understand what the opportunities are, they're working in project management to try to drive things over the finish line, they're doing teamwork to collaborate across lots of different organizations and stakeholders and things like that, none of that is sales, but they're doing that work in the context of sales, which would be much like a lawyer doing that in the context of a drug organization.
Speaker 2:Well, and where I think that becomes also important is the concept of enablement for beyond just sales. You know, you and I have talked about that before. Right, that was never. I know a lot of people talk about, oh, this is the next evolution of enablement. Well, maybe for some it is, but for some of us, enabling the teams that are adjacent to sales, that are also customer-facing, is not a new concept, and that's where what you just said to me really applies. Is then, how are you doing enablement in context of CS teams? How are you doing enablement in the context of, fill in the blank, the renewals team? Whoever you've got to be able to, you've got to be able to think that way and yeah, so get the product team involved before you.
Speaker 1:That's why I said, like why do you all build a product and then tell marketing about it and then try to figure out how to sell it? Why wouldn't we figure out what we were going to sell before we built the dang thing or acquired the company?
Speaker 2:I, I on my teams not the first hire, because it's a little bit of a luxury hire but within all of my teams we have had a role of someone that was a liaison to the product teams and I have never gone to a product leader and explained why, and we're not there to necessarily even offer an opinion, right. But what we want to figure out initially is when do you have enough of your product solidified that we can start to understand what it is, what problems it's going to solve, what level of enablement it's going to need? And I want to then have somebody from my team that's in those meetings and I've never had a product leader turn me down and in fact they're usually pleasantly surprised that we care they do and whether product marketing reports to product or marketing, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's another relationship that's got to be there. But I'm a big believer in what you're saying. Be there at the beginning, understand how the product is being formed, what problems it's trying to solve. You're just going to be way ahead of the game.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and I think that the misconception folks have in this area sometimes is oh well, that's what product marketing is for. That's not what salespeople need. They don't need data sheets and case studies and big bullies, things. And I'm not saying that's all the product marketing does, but they do a lot of other things pricing and strategy and whatever what salespeople need is sales ready language. They need bullet points, words, phrases and sentences that they can use to do discovery and then do all the other things that salespeople do that I'm not going to list off.
Speaker 1:That's what they need and if sales enablement's involved in that from the early beginnings then, the product training isn't somebody from product, you know the associate director of product management given an hour-long PowerPoint presentation which is just mind-numbing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you know who my favorite trainers are, or presenters are, when it comes to product knowledge.
Speaker 1:SEs, ses.
Speaker 2:I mean, what do they spend their day doing? Figuring, helping customers figure out how to apply products and services to specific problems. Figuring helping customers figure out how to apply products and services to specific problems and I have found that for like onboarding or things like that that they are actually the best presenters for, for getting salespeople to start thinking about products as verbs and not nouns, and that's that's important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Especially when they when they get really good at prioritizing the use cases.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's talk use cases, not features. Let's talk scenarios, not features.
Speaker 1:Man. Some of those features that never get used were the hardest ones to build.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and why did they get built? Who knows right? I mean, sometimes we may know, sometimes there might be customer input, but sometimes it just seemed cool.
Speaker 1:And sometimes it's RDD. Do you know what RDD is RDD? I'm not sure RDD stands for resume driven development. It's something in software engineering where there's folks on the team and they say, hey, I really think it'd be cool if we could do this in React 2 or Angular 2 or whatever, because I think I'd like to learn it. And so then they actually make product decisions in an effort to retain talent.
Speaker 2:A lot of times. Give them interesting things to go build.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then, in the absence of good management and coaching, like, yeah, sure, go for it, let's build that thing that way. And it's because the engineer wants to develop their resume.
Speaker 2:We want to do some. I haven't heard that term before, but I've seen the phenomena that you're describing. Let's go back to product marketing, though, for a minute, because that is another relationship that enablement has got to cultivate. They should really be an extension of one another. When I hear enablement folks talking about being asked to create one-pagers, for example, one-sheets, it's like okay, if you're in a startup, I get it. If you have a product marketing team, why is anybody asking you to do that To your point? That is not your expertise. You should be working with product marketing to make sure that that one sheet, or whatever the training piece is, whatever the collateral is, speaks to sales, speaks to clients and helps sales with the way you're trying to get them to sell. But you didn't go to school to go create that stuff. It's not your core competency. So work together, right, Let them do what they do best. Enablement does what it does best and it's a strong partnership that way.
Speaker 1:Well, my coaching for anybody that's asked for a one pager is you say okay, send me the email bullet points or the bullet points in a slide that's working effectively right now, and we'll see what we can do.
Speaker 1:Radio silence oh well, no, I think it'd just be nice if we had a man, but I'll tell you in my in my older age, now that I have eight or 10 gray hairs oh man, my jokes are not landing. Today, what I've become more accustomed to is guiding people to create more diagrams, and here's why Okay. Guiding people to create more diagrams, and here's why Okay. If if folks are selling over zoom or teams or whatever, it's just so much easier than trying to verbally describe things because we got our sales team out there. You got a hundred people on the sales team, whatever it is, and they're all verbally describing something differently.
Speaker 1:It's a disaster. Some over complicated, some undersell it, and it's just. There's no consistency. So examples might be onboarding, process security, API integrations, specific things like this, but the key is that they need to know specifically what do they bring up, when, how to talk to it not just what it does or anything like that and then ensuring that they're actually using it. Their managers are coaching them around it. So I am getting a little more diagram heavy as I'm, as I'm maturing.
Speaker 2:Whether it's diagrams or whether it's a prompter. There's a number of ways you can do it, but I think, I think that I am agreeing. I agree with you because here's how I'm interpreting what you're saying that your, your, your A players, your, your, your top sellers are subconscious competence A lot of times. They're always going to be successful because, whether they can articulate or not, they have figured out how to go, have business conversations. They figured out how to go. You know, do, do those things.
Speaker 2:We know they need to do, but the vast majority of your sales team are not that, and so they're going to need some level of prescription. They're going to need a way for you to take what A players are doing instinctively and bottle that, so to speak, in a way that they can then consume and internalize, because they're not going to go. They can't go. This is the problem. You see, when you have top sales rep get promoted to a sales leader position, they're gone inside of a year because they can't clone themselves, and that's not what I'm saying we should do here, but find out what are the behaviors, what are the approaches, what is the knowledge that those top sellers have, and how do we get that to the folks that are coachable but need help doing better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was Dolly the sheep, not Dolly the sales leader, dolly the sheep.
Speaker 2:That was the cloned sheep, huh. But I mean, yeah, you can't teach somebody to sell like you, no, well, probably not. And we want them to internalize it. And to me, that's one of the things that's missing with so many of the approaches that are out there is yes, maybe you're more prescriptive, as they're developing that muscle memory or mental memory, I guess, yeah, but at some point, if you are not giving them in a way that they can internalize it and really own it, then it's not going to stick long term.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and I think you hit on the unconscious competence piece, because people go from where they're consciously incompetent where they're no, that's not it Unconsciously incompetent where they don't know what they don't know. Then they're consciously incompetent. They know they don't know, Then they start trying some things out and then they become consciously competent, which is the most dangerous place for a salesperson, because they have to think about everything that they do and they're sitting there and they've got this. Anybody plays golf, For example.
Speaker 2:You're thinking about the same thing you get inside your head on the tee box.
Speaker 1:You're screwed. Oh, if I, I'll tell you what my pre-shot routine is, get my feet. I get my knees bent, butt out back, straight head up left knee locked in left arm locked in right elbow towards my side. Check my head one more time. Look at my line. I'm doing all of these things. I'm thinking about every single one of them. Guess what I shoot? Not as good as you.
Speaker 2:Oh well, you can't be talking to me because that, because that sounds like my, my pre-swing routine and I also have to like don't waggling five times, isn't going to do anything, right no, I don't it's like there's no waggle, but that's another tendency I have is yeah, but then g shambho goes up there and he goes.
Speaker 2:I think I'm just going to cut it over the yard and try to get there in two yeah, yeah, no, no, I um, I'm looking forward to a lot more golf this year, though I will say that so I played.
Speaker 1:I shot a 39 on a back nine the other day. So, yeah, we'll get there one of these days, but I think as long as it wasn't executive course, I'll take that no, no no, not exactly, I'm teasing, oh I hit. I did hit one. I hit. I had a driver off the deck, 265 within three feet of the pin. Nice, that was. That was fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I did something like that at a company tournament once years ago, and the thing that made it so special was it was number one. It was over swamp, so it's over wetlands, which is always, you know, spooks me but number two. The group behind us was like the company founder and cfo and yeah. So like I got some of the the big shots to watch me stick it on the green and didn't do it the rest of the day, but they did, I did when they were watching.
Speaker 1:So yeah, driver off the decks, the pro move. But I think this is the thing when you're trying to get other people to do things you do, even if they're doing what you're doing, if they're only consciously competent and not unconsciously competent. Unconsciously competent is how we are. When we drive a car, we don't even think about it. If they're consciously competent, they've got to think about all these things. It's going to make it harder for them to execute and then, when they see an edge case or a scenario they're not familiar with, it's going to throw them off in a way that would not have thrown the more competent person off, and that's something to watch out for.
Speaker 2:All right. They're also going to come across very stilted. People's BS meters are more finely tuned now than ever and they won't know why you don't feel like you're being authentic. But they'll assume because you're in sales it's because you're hiding something. So don't let the fact that you didn't really practice and learn and internalize this stuff screw you up that way, because you're coming across as fake when you really just aren't comfortable with what you're talking about and I'm new lasts for about six weeks. Yeah, I don't like it, but.
Speaker 1:I hate it after six weeks.
Speaker 2:I agree, I get to play the new card limited. Yeah, you can play it. You get to play the new card limited.
Speaker 1:Yeah, somebody told me the other day like, oh yeah, this guy's new. I looked at his LinkedIn. I was like that dude's been there 11 months, he's not new. No, no, no, okay. Comp plans Salespeople usually have a 50, 50 comp plan. A lot of times. Other folks in the organization don't. They might have a bonus or something to kicker. What have you? What is your?
Speaker 2:So enablement folks need to be on a split like a salesperson, and the higher the level of responsibility and or title, the more aggressive their sales split should be. A little over a year ago I was on a 60-40 split. I was putting 40% of my annual compensation on the line every day, just like a sales rep was. I mean they were 50-50. But for somebody not carrying a quota directly that was aggressive, but I didn't mind because I had confidence that what we were doing was going to ultimately be. Because I was aligned with my CRO, I had a strategy, I had experience, I was confident that we were going to ultimately be. Because I was aligned with my cro, I had a strategy, I had experience, I was confident that we were going to have an impact. And if we didn't, then we'd need to figure it out. And and everybody on my team was on a variable plan as well.
Speaker 2:Now, the more most junior, like a specialist, first time in an enablement role 90, 10 but I had directors that were on probably a 70-30 or 60-50, something like that.
Speaker 2:So the further up in the organization, the more you should be willing to put on the line. And if you're not comfortable with that, I would suggest you examine why, because my guess is that you don't really believe in your heart of hearts that what you're doing is going to make an impact. Now, to be fair, if you're in an organization that won't let you do stuff, that's a little different situation. But otherwise, sales enablement, revenue enablement folks should not go home fat, dumb and happy every two weeks, regardless of whether the sales team is up, down or sideways. We've got to be in that trenches with them. And here's a benefit. I had no problem sharing the fact that my team and I were on a plan like that with sellers of all levels, and it never failed to impress. They had no idea that we were putting skin in the game like that they had no idea that we were putting skin in the game like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great, I love it and I think the key there is.
Speaker 2:You need to be able to actually get stuff done, yeah, and ideally, get measured against your CRO or your EVP of sales. Get measured on that number, yeah. To me that's just again biased. I guess I grew up in sales, but that's just what I've always tried to put in place.
Speaker 1:Well, and I love it because the other piece is there's a huge opportunity here. Going back to one of the things we talked about, which was the assessment of what's going on today, well, if you look at the sales team and they're not setting agendas, they're not setting next steps, they're not doing discovery, they're hard pitching their stuff. They can't close a door. I'm trying to figure out if my favorite analogy is he can't close a door or he can't sell his way out of a wet paper bag. One of those two is my current favorite. If all that's going on and you've got a variable comp plan, that's just all upside.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it is. And I don't think that accelerators and the other things that sellers have in place necessarily need to apply to enablement because, again, they ultimately own the responsibility to get that signature and get that revenue. So just to be clear in case anybody's wondering, but as far as, like I said, your annual comp, yeah, there should be a significant piece of it that is at risk and based on the success of the teams you support.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's a good thing.
Speaker 2:I know that everybody will agree, so I'm looking forward to the comments.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that's fine. I mean, there's lots of companies, a lot of companies don't offer that and would never entertain it, so you can go work there.
Speaker 2:No, no, yeah, they never entertain it. So you can go work there. No, no, yeah, they are, they are. I've worked for companies where, uh, it was like, if you did, their philosophy was, if you didn't carry a quota, you couldn't be paid commission, and so then you had to find another way to still accomplish the same thing. Uh, it just couldn't be as directly correlated back to revenue yeah, sounds like, but if you don't ask, you don't know and I wager. There's a lot of teams out there that have never looked into it.
Speaker 1:And if you want to make more money, one of the best pathways to more money is variable compensation.
Speaker 2:It's true. That's why sales is such a great profession. You'll like this. I had a guy I worked for you know Frank. You remember Frank Malit? Yeah, so he was my CRO at Instructure. For those that don't know him, but I worked for him three times in my career now and I don't remember when it was. But he used to talk to people. When people complain about salespeople being overcompensated and you know why don't I get President's Club he had the best analogy. He said all right, if you are interested in a sales comp plan, I will go with you to your manager and help you get on a sales comp plan. But there's some things you should know. And he said number one starting your next paycheck, it will only be 50% of what you get right now, and to get the other 50% back you have to come into work every day and dance with a bear.
Speaker 1:I don't know where he came from, but that was his.
Speaker 2:And he said and number two, you know those one-on-one performance reviews that you're used to having behind closed doors. Forget about it, because now anybody with a CRM login is going to know exactly how good you are at your job. Now, if you're comfortable with those things, we'll go talk to your boss. But, most people had no idea and he had a way to. You know, Frank Spurs, he could pull that off. But most people had no idea, was my point here. They had no idea that that is the environment that sellers work in.
Speaker 1:It's a different environment. It's a great environment. Paul, thanks for joining us today. Thanks, corey, it's a lot of fun. All right, we'll see you next time. Thanks everybody. Sales Management Podcast we're pushing these out quite a bit, so subscribe Spotify, apple and we'll see you around. Bye.