Steph White [00:00:00]:
Sell it, keep it, and grow it. Second contract, or the renewal contract, is even more important than the first, because getting the second contract, or the renewal, tells you that you delivered on the value that you told the customer you would offer to their business.
Rebecca Reyes [00:00:18]:
Spend time on what makes a great client experience. That means a focus on core skills. It means a focus on outcomes with our clients and not getting too excited by the widgets and the functions and the revs that tech can do, but really focus on the business outcomes that we can drive for our clients.
Steve Watt [00:00:38]:
This is Go-To-Market Magic.
Heather Cole [00:00:41]:
The show where we talk to go-to-market leaders and visionaries about the “aha!” moments that they’ve experienced.
Steve Watt [00:00:48]
And the pivotal decisions they’ve made.
Heather Cole [00:00:50]
All in the name of growth.
Steve Watt [00:00:54]:
Heather, who are we talking to today?
Heather Cole [00:00:55]:
So today, for the first time, we’re actually having two guests on the show. Rebecca Reyes is from IBM, where she leads the Global Enablement Function, and Steph White, who’s the Senior Director of Revenue Enablement for Loopio. We invited two people on this particular episode because we wanted a perspective from both large and small companies to talk about enablement trends, what’s going on in their world right now, and what they’re seeing going forward in 2024. The expanding scope of enablement is one area that we’re touching, and then the second area, of course, is AI and how it’s going to impact both enablers and the sales organizations as a whole.
Steve Watt [00:01:37]:
Let’s jump in.
Heather Cole [00:01:42]:
Steph, Rebecca, welcome to the show.
Steph White [00:01:45]:
Hi. Thank you so much for having us today. Great to see you.
Rebecca Reyes [00:01:49]:
Great to be here, Heather. Happy New Year.
Heather Cole [00:01:50]:
So, so excited that you guys made some time at the beginning of the year to talk about the trends that we’re seeing in enablement. And there’s just so much going on. But when we talked to practitioners and leaders out there, two things kind of bubbled up to the top for us. One of them was the expanding role of sales enablement. Past sales, and this has been going on for years, but now it has become something of a tidal movement. And we’re hearing people saying this is the year where we’re going to actually not just kind of absorb groups here and there, but we’re going to make it an entire strategy. And then the second piece of this is really, of course, AI. How is AI impacting B2B sales, and how is AI going to actually, in reality, make enablers more productive? So we’re going to start out first with that expanding role of enablement.
Heather Cole [00:02:41]:
It’s something that I know you’re passionate about, Steph. So, tell me a little bit about what’s going on in your organization and what you’re looking forward to doing in the coming year.
Steph White [00:02:50]:
Yeah, so first of all, is there anything we can’t do when we’re in enablement? Let’s start there. So I think it’s twofold as we think about our expanding scope. And for context, I went to revenue enablement at the beginning of 2022, so I am well into this model. I think one of the challenges that we start to face, the bigger the scope gets, is how do we manage the increasing priority and the increasing conflict of priority. As we think about we can do more, we can do more, we can do bigger because we can. But I’m going to drop a spicy angle here. Should we? And when we do, what is the best way for us to do that for the business? So when I think about revenue enablement, yes, it is that first touch, and it is thinking about how do we support our demand gen teams all the way through our sales teams and our customer success teams to keep our customers. But honestly, it’s getting so much bigger than that the longer I’m in it.
Steph White [00:03:50]:
And I think that’s where this conversation is going to get really interesting. And I’m looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts about it as well. Because the minute we start thinking about revenue in its largest forms, so getting it, keeping it, optimizing it, profit margins, all that good stuff, the opportunities are endless for what we can do. And the question becomes, what should we do?
Heather Cole [00:04:16]:
So, how do you prioritize? Do you have a formal charter that you’ve actually changed to expand that scope? Is it something that you have to continually point back to? I know charters seem to be like a really boring thing until a year from now when somebody says, why didn’t you do all these things? And you can’t point back to anything to say what was the expectation?
Steph White [00:04:35]:
So how do you handle that? So, I love my charter. You all can knock it. I love a spreadsheet. I love a charter. I love having our agreed-upon mission for I do mine in sales for the year. So what are our goals? When I think about how to prioritize, I would say I learned this one the hard way. When it comes to revenue enablement, I tried to do all the things, and I agreed to measure all the things for my programs and that is not scalable. And as we think about doing more with the same or doing more with less, the way I’m now prioritizing is to get out of the weeds and think about what are our big north stars.
Steph White [00:05:16]:
So rather than what is a specific metric, IE win rate that we want to drive with our enablement team this year, it’s taking one step further back and saying, should we focus on sales velocity as the key priority? Why? Because that encompasses all of these smaller elements and that is where we can start to drive more revenue. So I go back to in terms of priority, what is revenue generating and what is revenue keeping? Because the latter of those is arguably more important for people right now. I do have a rubric that I go through. I said I love a spreadsheet. It’s true. I do weigh our priorities for the half that go into our quarter based on what the business impact is going to be. And candidly, that priority is sometimes a negotiation with our stakeholders.
Steph White [00:06:07]:
Right. We need to be able to go to our c suite and say, okay, would love to do these ten things. In reality, we could do three very, very well. What are the three most important things when I’m thinking about this year and my three most important north stars that I’m going to focus on? Yes, of course. With smaller supporting data leading indicators, it’s sales velocity, SAO conversion, and net revenue retention. So, my charter is built around supporting the direction of the organization to those three north stars. Any programs in place have got to be leading toward those three north stars. Yeah.
Heather Cole [00:06:46]:
And Rebecca, I know you’re passionate about measurement as well. So, when you think about what you’re measuring in the coming year, has it changed at all? Has it morphed over the last twelve months? Are you doing anything differently going forward, or are there specific ones that you think are the most important in the coming year that you need to focus on?
Rebecca Reyes [00:07:06]:
Yeah, I mean, of course, we’re changing, right? I think we’re always changing. That’s one of the things that makes IBM stay around for so long, and a lot of our tech companies stay around, is we’re constantly learning and hearing what’s changing and what do, we need to do. So when I look at sales enablement and our priorities, I always draw a spider diagram and I pull the organization depending on where we need across the spider diagram. So when we started in sales enablement, we really needed to get our narrative right. We worked a lot with marketing, we worked on our storytelling skills, we needed to define who we are. We pulled really hard on that. In fact, we aligned sales enablement with our content team so that we were really close in the narrative and the storytelling. Last year we pulled really hard on skills, especially as we were getting into AI.
Rebecca Reyes [00:07:54]:
We needed to make sure that our field teams, whether you were pre-sales, going out and doing prospecting, new client acquisition, or post-sales and delivery, that you had the skills to help our clients navigate this incredibly changing space. We’ll continue to focus on skills into 2024, but it is on retention and impact. One of the things we’re going to look at more for our sales teams, though, is not revenue. It’s going to be impact to the clients. So are they achieving the outcomes that have been identified, the business outcomes, and that’s going to be really different for our teams, who often focus on the signing of the contract and the sale at the end. I love how Stephanie said the focus on CSMs and their services teams after the fact, that’s going to be a continued shift for us, and I think a reflection of sales enablement and the trend overall for the sales companies to look not just at pre-sales, but as the whole circular experience and making sure that it doesn’t end at the sale. It ends when the client gets the impact of the thing they bought, which means utilization of the product. If I sell it and no one’s using it, I’m not going to get resell, I’m not going to have that NPS, I’m not going to have people wanting to come back or trusting my brand.
Rebecca Reyes [00:09:07]:
So we’re going to be focusing with our sales teams on life after the contract in 2024. Yeah.
Steve Watt [00:09:14]:
Rebecca, given that broad scope that you’ve laid out there, which really does touch an incredible amount of the business, Steph said we have to be careful not to overreach. Right. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. I’m trying to wrap my head around in an organization. The scale of IBM, that must be a giant challenge for you and your team. So when you’re talking about impacting revenue through the entire cycle, and you’re talking about a massive global organization, how on earth do you prioritize and keep that from getting way beyond your ability to deliver?
Rebecca Reyes [00:09:55]:
Well, those north stars are critical, Steve. We have to establish them and agree with our leadership team. I can’t do it alone. If it’s not innate in the management system, then it’s just a program that enablement is running. So we only touch projects that the management system is going to reinforce and reflect, because it can’t just be something my little enablement team is going to do. We are enablers. We will drive and help with a change management strategy with the skills and the programs that deliver that. But it has to live in the business management system.
Rebecca Reyes [00:10:27]:
So one of the very first things that we ask is, well and good, what are you measuring? What’s going to be in your management system? So that I have the reach of my entire sales leadership team, reinforcing those core behaviors we’re driving. And if that’s not there, then we shouldn’t take the work on because it really just would be something. Enablement is driving, and it wouldn’t live.
Heather Cole [00:10:49]:
That’s so important. I think it goes back to what Steph says, like having that scope and that charter aligned to the transformational or the most important things that management is working on and being able to get agreement on that. And it’s much different, obviously in a global organization than Steph, probably in your organization, but it’s still the same concept. I mean, it’s absolutely the same approach. So, with that being said, one of the things that we’re hearing a lot of chatter out there about, too, is Steph, I heard you call it revenue enablement. What’s in a name? There’s a lot of debate over what it really should be called. Just for fun. Sounds like you landed on revenue enablement.
Heather Cole [00:11:32]:
Was it because it’s enabling the entire revenue engine? Was there a reason for that? Or did you decide that that is the term that the industry is going with? So that’s the term that you’re going to land on?
Steph White [00:11:43]:
So it was actually before some of the enablement societies started talking about flipping over as a salesperson coming into enablement, I always thought of sales enablement primarily as new business sales. So, sales, you’re enabling sales, typically, that’s the sales team. So it’s BDRs and STRs and AES, right? It’s that early customer journey revenue. But when we think about revenue enablement, that’s when we start thinking about expansion, retention, price increases, add-ons, all of those other elements which, ya know, when I came in, my first mandate was actually sales enablement. And within 90 days, when I went and I met with my SVP of sales, you do your 90 day plan and a new job. I said, I don’t think sales enablement is actually what you hired me for. I think what we need to start thinking about is beyond just the people that report in our sales.org to how do we sell it, keep it, and grow it? Because, and Rebecca, you started to touch on this earlier controversial comment coming brace yourself, but I would argue the second contract or the renewal contract is even more important than the first because getting the second contract or the renewal tells you that you delivered on the value that you told the customer you would offer to their business, that you had the partnership in place that you promised the customer as part of that initial sale. If you get that second contract, you not only proposed a good solution, but you delivered on it, and you proved your worth.
Steph White [00:13:18]:
So for me, revenue enablement is thinking about how do you get it, keep it and grow it, not just bring it in the door the first time.
Steve Watt [00:13:24]:
That’s so aligned with we had a recent episode with Mark Kozelglow, the CRO of Catalyst, and he talked a lot about the aligning the promise keepers with the promise makers. And that sounds very much in line with what you’re saying, Steph. And I fully agree.
Heather Cole [00:13:40]:
So Rebecca, I know the organization is quite expansive in the roles that you are enabling. Do you have indirect as well? So it’s both direct sellers, and are you influencing the enablement of channel as well, or is that outside scope?
Rebecca Reyes [00:13:54]:
I do. Actually, our mission is even broader than that. So we have enablement for our go-to- market team, which includes our ecosystem and our partners. So, it is indirect. But last year we made the switch to also include the enablement of our clients, which is a pretty significant shift. Really significant, although as I talk to some of my peers, I find it’s not that unique. And a lot of people are thinking around the same thing. It comes down to who are the makers of your content. And if you believe that you have a skill set in helping to develop the skills around your portfolio, then that is not that unique, and you have some duplication in your organization. So it is an interesting road for us to go down, but we’ve really taken instructional design and the skilling around our portfolio that we do for our sellers and made that a make once publish many strategy, where we layer the content differently depending on if you’re pre-sales, if you’re post-sales, or if you’re using the software that we sell. And we believe that there’s a lot of reuse in our collateral and our training, and our best practices, and how we engage.
Heather Cole [00:15:00]:
That is massive. When you think about the number of clients you have and the go-to-market teams, when you think about these different audiences, you’re repurposing content, are you moving it to the lowest common denominator, or are you shifting and customizing what you are doing to the audience that’s consuming it?
Rebecca Reyes [00:15:20]:
It’s the latter. I think people want to learn differently than they did 50 years ago. And I think we have different technologies that help us as well. So we have everything from instructor-led in-person courses to things that are short, you know, little video snips, whether that’s on YouTube or internally in our own. So, I think it’s not necessarily the lowest common denominator. It’s going where people are. And how do you syndicate that expertise and community in a way that’s going to help people learn and engage?
Heather Cole [00:15:51]:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so great topic. I think we’re going to switch gears a little bit here to our second one, and that is, of course, AI now. It’s almost like you can’t have a podcast or predictions of the future or trends without talking about it, but the reality is that it is impacting everything that we do. So IBM has been at it really for about, what, 70 years, Rebecca, and suddenly it’s trendy. And everything from beating the international chess champion years and years ago to even more recently having Watson take on a person doing jeopardy and actually beating a person at their own game. Basically, these are all things that are embedded in the psyche and the products and what it is that you sell at IBM. So we thought it would be really interesting to hear your perspective on how AI is impacting your sales teams.
Heather Cole [00:16:55]:
How are you leveraging AI to make them more productive? Being able to do more, but also being able to do it better? And then the second piece of this is thinking about from an enablement standpoint, are you realizing the power of AI in anything that you’re doing now or anything that you have planned for the coming year? And really just understanding what is your perspective on the impact of it in the go to market space.
Rebecca Reyes [00:17:23]:
An AI fun. It’s gone to be such a topic of conversation that, like, three years ago made people’s eyes roll, and last year became something everyone was talking about and dreaming about and having Chat GPT write you poems that you could put on your parents’ anniversary cards. I mean, it’s just like so lovely. I think if you look at the news and what people are talking about now, we’re kind of coming out of the dream state and the imagination state into the reality time. So, at IBM, we believe AI should be open, empowering, trusted, and transparent. Those last two were nice sound bites last year, but I think people are starting to understand. I need to know what is in the cooker that’s making my AI spit out whatever it’s spitting out, and I need to believe and trust in the things it’s giving me we now know the term that the AI hypothesizes or hallucinates and makes stuff up, but it sounds real good. So you have to really get to a place where you’re trusting the outcome from it.
Rebecca Reyes [00:18:26]:
I think last year was a year of great experimentation and mind-opening. I think my prediction is 2024 is going to be the year we really put it to its paces, and people have high expectations, which is fun. They also have to dream in a practical way. So it’s our opportunity in sales enablement to do both of that, to imagine what the future of the technology can be and to start quickly testing it and putting it into practice so it can stick. You’re right in that we’ve been experimenting with it for a while. At IBM. We’ve had an AI widget, if you want to call it that, built into Salesforce for more than three years, where, depending on what people are talking about as an opportunity, we can recommend the appropriate sales play and collateral that supports that. We’ve had that around for a while, but I don’t really think until last year, our sellers didn’t even want it.
Rebecca Reyes [00:19:17]:
They didn’t trust it, they didn’t believe in it, their minds weren’t broadly open to it. Even though we’re IBM and we make it so there’s that level of belief and desire people want. We now have an AI assistant embedded in seismic actually that we call ask sales and it’s trained on our sales plays. And if you want to know the latest in the roadmap or value proposition, or competitive positioning, you can ask it your questions real-time and it will show you where it’s getting the information and the answer from. So you have the information, and you have a link to where did it get that from so you can trust and know it’s not hallucinating.
Steph White [00:19:54]:
Yeah.
Heather Cole [00:19:55]:
So important. I think ultimately the impact on the productivity of the sellers of getting information real-time, it’s kind of that dream of the real-time enablement that has been so clunky in the past is actually coming to fruition. As you described it as I need answers, I need it now. The quicker I can get the answers, the quicker I can get the answers to my customers and the quicker that they can move forward with whatever they’re.
Rebecca Reyes [00:20:22]:
Doing and also synthesize the information that exists in mountains so that I can take the next step of engaging with my client on the stuff that matters. I think it’s going to change the way we do prospecting. I think it’s going to dramatically change the way we do account planning, relationship strategy. Is there so much that you can now use AI to distill and then let you do your extra work layering on top. So now, the seller should not have to go out and do hours of original research. We can use the AI to say, generate me an account plan. Generate me a prospecting strategy based on what you can know about Mike from public statements that have been made from ten ks. All that good mountain of public data.
Heather Cole [00:21:02]:
Yeah. So it’s interesting. I know the answer is probably going to be both on this, but when you think about the application of AI, are you thinking about making the reps more effective, better at what they do? Are you veering towards? I want to make them be able to do more and be more efficient?
Steph White [00:21:21]:
Yes.
Heather Cole [00:21:24]:
But no.
Rebecca Reyes [00:21:25]:
It is both. I love the idea of productivity. Right. So I think that the chatbot is the easy one, and we have to do it. But I think the real layer of extra benefit we can give in the short term it’s very real. That statement I just made around, I shouldn’t have to give you a blank form to fill in for your account plan anymore. I should give you a pre written account plan based on what I can know about your account, and then you come in with the extra knowledge. So you’re augmenting what the AI can already tell you.
Rebecca Reyes [00:21:54]:
That makes you a ton more productive. And we see that already with a number of other companies playing in this space. But that’s going to be the next three months.
Steph White [00:22:04]:
Sure.
Rebecca Reyes [00:22:04]:
It’s going to come fast.
Steve Watt [00:22:05]:
Steph, your company, Luvio, is very different from IBM, very different in scale and a lot of other things. Where is AI in your worldview and in your roadmap?
Steph White [00:22:17]:
Yeah, so I know we’re a little different. It’s fine. And we all learn from each think. So, a couple of things we have, obviously. Now, for those that don’t know, we have AI in our platform as well. And as we talk about trusting AI, here is the rub where I think a lot of people are either very comfortable or very uncomfortable. How is the model learning? What data is it using? Where is that data being processed, who controls it, all that kind of stuff. As we look at our platform, one of the things that we’ve done in terms of integrating more AI is leveraging the content you have as the basis for learning.
Steph White [00:22:59]:
So when you ask the question through the close connection, it’s leveraging your own content to come up with a new unique response. So, for example, Loopio is typically rfxs, so security questionnaires, rfps, those kinds of documents. We actually use it internally for our sales team through our Chrome extension. So, things like objection handling. I actually keep a lot of that information in Loopio, which means when people are onboarding or being trained on competitive intel, we have entries in there they can type in their question via the extension. How do I respond to this? For our competitor that just came up on a call and in real time, it will search the content that we have and either pull up the actual answer, which is traditional search functionality, or now you leverage AI, where it pulls together what it knows to be true and gives you a custom tailored response so that if I’m on a call with a prospect or a customer, I have that information at my fingertips. And I think Rebecca, to your comment, as you think about delivering account plans and all these things, the beauty of being in a smaller.org for me is it’s all the 1% ways that we can sneak these things in. If you want to get better at writing emails, there is a fantastic AI tool that a bunch of my sellers use.
Steph White [00:24:20]:
Not only does it make you more effective writing that initial email, but you actually learn from engaging with the AI. And that is where Heather, to your question, is it the efficiency or is it the effectiveness? Well, ideally, we want it to do both. We want AI in our tools to deliver the thing faster so that our sellers, or our customer-facing teams, or whomever spends less time creating the first draft. But we also want them to learn from it so that they continue to get better. And AI isn’t their crutch. The email writing tool, or the call summary tool, or the video script tool isn’t the crutch. It becomes a learning mechanism in and of itself, and it lives everywhere you live as a seller. That’s where I get so excited.
Heather Cole [00:25:10]:
So when you’re thinking about what you’re most excited about, the opportunity, you think about the hope and the fear of AI. What are you most excited about for the future of AI?
Rebecca Reyes [00:25:20]:
It’s a hard question. I think there’s a lot it can help us to do to be better at our role.
Steph White [00:25:27]:
I like to say that sellers have.
Rebecca Reyes [00:25:29]:
The best job because they help our clients not just to dream, but to make those dreams become real. I think AI will help us ground in practices that are working elsewhere so we can do that more frequently with our client teams. It sounds so hokey, but even that, Steph just made a comment around writing emails more effectively or better. That’s going to be a learned tool. AI is going to learn from the rest of the sellers in your organization, and it’s going to learn what works well for your clients, which means you’re now engaging with clients in a way that’s going to help you bring to them the best information possible. I really think it’s going to help our clients meet tremendous business outcomes much faster, and I get very excited about that. Kind of a nerd.
Heather Cole [00:26:14]:
Absolutely. And I love it that we are still talking about how are we going to make our reps more effective in helping the customer meet their outcomes. What we haven’t really said is how are we going to make enablers more effective? Which you touched on a little bit. And I think that that’s a huge area of opportunity from the perspective of if we’re better enablers, we’re obviously able to do something, do more, and do it better. Any thoughts on that step?
Steph White [00:26:47]:
But I think there’s some very tactical and operational ways that we can use AI, even from a capacity standpoint. There are some fantastic sales coaching AI platforms out there right now that are starting to emerge where as an enabler, rather than me doing one on one coaching sessions once a week with each of my new hires for the first 30 days, I can actually supplement that human to human effort with an AI tool that allows them to interact with their actual ICP that they’re about to go live with in 30 days. When I think about the possibilities for AI as it relates to enablement, I get the most excited about that piece. How do we use it to complement what we do so that we can focus on what only we can do and we can offload some of the other elements that deliver quality to our reps to give them more attention, more practice, more feedback. But I also get excited. Of course, headcount doesn’t grow on trees. I would love five more people. I can’t get five more people.
Steph White [00:27:56]:
So what are the tools that are going to make my teams faster? Is there something where I can input my favorite training decks or my most effective training decks and click a button and it asks me a couple of questions and says, based on and to the comment about learning from your own content, based on what great looks like for your business and where your sellers learn best? Here is a framework we’re going to suggest that you use as the basis for your next training session.
Heather Cole [00:28:24]:
Yeah.
Steph White [00:28:25]:
How do you not get excited about that if you’re an enablement?
Heather Cole [00:28:28]:
Yeah, and I like to think about it as a really smart intern, you’re going to send them off to go do something and they’re going to look at everything because they don’t know intuitively anything. So they’re going to rely on all these sources. They’re going to bring it back, and it probably won’t be perfect or quite right, but it will be something that you can then start from here, as opposed to starting from here, which is so critical to the productivity.
Steve Watt [00:28:53]:
All right. Moving beyond expanding scope of enablement, moving beyond AI. It wouldn’t be a January episode without a look ahead to the year we are now embarking on. Rebecca, what’s in store for 2024 for you and your team? Perhaps something new that you haven’t done before. Perhaps something that’s gone from the back burner and is coming to become a real priority. What’s something that is going to be a real distinguishing aspect of your impact on your business in 2024?
Rebecca Reyes [00:29:31]:
I mean, I hate to sound boring, but I think we’re at a place where we want to do more of the same in 2024. We kind of got a good thing going in 2023, and we want to really cement that, cement the role of revenue enablement in our sales function. We want to cement key productivity gains. We’ve actually been working a lot on our sales methodology, kind of back to basics on core selling skills. I don’t think you can underestimate some of those traditional honing of your craft and your skill that makes you great at sales. So while we get really excited about AI and we’re going to keep experimenting, we’re going to keep making sure we can get the three-pointer in from the line. When it’s just us, and there’s no one else around, we have to keep doing the basic stuff that makes us great at engaging with clients. So I’m going to be a boring person, Steve, and know we’re going to go back to basics and spend time on what makes a great client experience.
Rebecca Reyes [00:30:28]:
That means a focus on core skills. It means a focus on outcomes with our clients and not getting too excited by the widgets and the functions and the revs that tech can do, but really focus on the business outcomes that we can drive for our clients.
Steve Watt [00:30:43]:
I think that’s a really legit. Sometimes, regardless of our functions and our roles, we’re at risk of chasing shiny objects at the expense of the fundamentals. So, I respect that answer. Absolutely. Steph. How would you answer that question?
Steph White [00:31:00]:
So we actually did that last year, Rebecca. I called it Competency 2.0, and it was amazing because you think about business outcomes. One of my north stars was, I wanted to 2.5 x our SAO conversion rate, and the way we figured we needed to get there was go back to basics like this is about sales. Let’s park product as a priority. Let’s park all these other things as a priority. Sales skills. It was really cool. We were actually able in the first ten months we exceeded our target for the year of increasing our SEO conversion by focusing on sales skills.
Steph White [00:31:34]:
So not a boring answer. That is something I’m going to be continuing into this year too, but we’re actually kicking it up a notch. So it’s going to be 3.0 because why not keep it going with the data points. But we’re really focused on what does great look like for the best deals. So it’s not dissimilar. Big difference in the size of our organizations, but not dissimilar in terms of what success could look like for our teams. I want to hone in on for the most profitable to both the customer and our organization deals. What are the keys to success that need to happen? What leads before that? What leads before that? Let’s really hone in on not just making sure everybody performs in their competencies for their sales skills, but we’ve got what true mastery looks like for the most successful deals.
Steph White [00:32:23]:
In a perfect world, you’re not making 1000 calls, you’re making 500, and you are doing those exceptionally well, and those 500 are converting stronger, and those customers are bigger ASP, and they’re staying longer. That is what I’m focused on as I think about this year. So little the same, little different Steve to your comment, but I want to kick it up a notch, and it’s going to mean making some very deliberate decisions about yes, that was good, but it’s not good enough anymore. So now we’re going to go over this direction and really focus on what it takes to be super successful.
Heather Cole [00:32:57]:
So Rebecca, when you think about, you’ve know, spending time over the holidays, you might be doing some resolutions. What’s your biggest professional resolution for this coming year?
Rebecca Reyes [00:33:09]:
I want to build some of my own skills, make sure I don’t forget that. So I’m going to attend a couple more conferences than I did last year, continue to get out of my little bubble of COVID where we’re recovering and getting back into the life and times. So I’m going to get out there and talk to more of my peers and make sure that we don’t kind of resist the urge to be too inward-looking. Make sure we’re constantly knowing what best is looking like chatting with other peers. So I’m curious to know how our field and our function is continuing to iterate. I want to just stay at the front of that.
Heather Cole [00:33:42]:
That’s a great one. What about you, Steph?
Steph White [00:33:44]:
So it’s twofold. One, I’m a nerd. Rebecca. It’s okay. It’s both of us on this one. I’m going down an AI hole. I’m going to call it. It is a rabbit hole.
Steph White [00:33:55]:
I have started going down in terms of language models and everything else, not necessarily for the business benefit, but because I’m truly excited about what could be coming and what’s possible. So that is my technical professional development goal, my highlight for 2023. And I actually did a post about this. It was the people, the number of people that met in person had one on one coffees with it was incredible. And I’ve set a new goal for myself for that one for this year as well. To be meeting new people, new events, new idea, sharing new conversations, and just growing in new ways.
Heather Cole [00:34:34]:
That’s fantastic. I love to hear both of those along the personal growth aspect for enablers. And by the way, I’d be remiss in not mentioning IBM just announced a ten-hour free course on AI that gives you kind of the history of it, and it goes everything from the ethics to the application. It’s broader than just enablement, obviously, but I started looking at it just yesterday, I think, and it’s a great opportunity if you want to get deeper in it and you want to understand all of those components. I think that it’s a good one and you can find it out on the IBM learning site.
Steve Watt [00:35:10]:
Let’s make sure we get the links to that in the show notes so all our viewers and listeners can check that out. That sounds fantastic.
Heather Cole [00:35:16]:
Absolutely. So, thank you both for joining us today. It was a great conversation, and have a wonderful 2024.
Rebecca Reyes [00:35:24]:
Same to you.
Steph White [00:35:24]:
Thanks for having us. Thanks.
Heather Cole [00:35:29]:
So, Steve, what a great conversation. I love talking to Steph and Rebecca. They always bring fresh perspectives. What were your biggest takeaways?
Steve Watt [00:35:37]:
So many, Heather. But I mean, I think the first one, as Steph said, just because we can doesn’t mean we should. We are doing more. We are impacting more areas of the business in more ways. And this is fantastic, but we risk overextending ourselves and overextending our team and watering it down and sort of becoming a mile wide and an inch deep. So finding that balance where we are going to impact the full revenue cycle, not just sales, but retention and expansion and all these things that can take us into so many places, especially in a global organization. Like, know. I was very sincere when I asked Rebecca, how on earth do you not get pulled way too thin in that environment? That’s a tough challenge.
Steve Watt [00:36:35]:
We can impact so many things, but where do we focus? How do we focus? How do we leverage things like charters and North Star metrics and negotiation and agreement within leadership to make sure that we are focusing on the right areas such that we can really move the needle for the business? That was my largest takeaway from this conversation.
Rebecca Reyes [00:37:01]:
Yeah.
Heather Cole [00:37:01]:
And I think from the hundreds of conversations with enablers that we’ve had over the years, the one thing you can point to for a point of failure is if you are over-promising and then under-delivering. And I love that Steph said went back to the old trusty charter. You have to define what the expectations are, which is great. One of the things that this is revenue enablement isn’t something new. It’s something that’s been talked about for the last probably five years. Whether you’re calling it go-to-market enablement, revenue enablement, or just enablement, it’s that expanding scope. What actually got me very excited was Rebecca talking about how her span of control and her scope is actually going beyond the internal, going beyond the channel, and going to the customers because the needs that they have, the knowledge needs that they have, are so similar to what the reps need, what the partners need. It’s a completely different motion when you’re thinking about that audience and how they need to consume it and their perspective on it.
Heather Cole [00:38:05]:
But there’s so many similarities that bringing these together seems like a natural fit. But it’s an absolutely huge undertaking. It’s not something that you can take on lightly, obviously, and I don’t think IBM ever takes anything on lightly, but it’ll be great to see how they work through that and how it really pans out to move it beyond just those internal enablement motions to getting to the customer and enabling them to meet their outcomes.
Steve Watt [00:38:33]:
That takes me back to our conversation with Paul Norford, Norf, a few episodes ago, when he is blending enablement with evangelism, and he talked at length about how his role and his team’s role is not just about enabling his own employees, but their customers, and how there are tremendous synergies there across objectives and content and delivery and much more. The expansion of the scope, as you said, does go well beyond just expanding within our own colleagues our own firm. It goes out to customers and prospects and partners and the entire ecosystem.
Heather Cole [00:39:18]:
Yeah, so that AI discussion was very interesting. IBM literally has, this is part of their DNA. They have been doing it for 70 years, and they’re like, wait a minute, why is it, why is it happening just now? But their depth of knowledge on it is really incredible. And I think that when you listen to Rebecca talking about AI and the impact it can have on go to market, she still focused on really heavily on how it makes the customer-facing teams more effective and more efficient. And that is absolutely huge because that’s what we do as enablers. But it’s also so very powerful as a tool to make enablers more efficient at what they do, too. And that promise is coming fast and furious. And we as enablers need to understand both.
Heather Cole [00:40:08]:
What is it that is reasonable and rational to be able to be doing now, and what should we be afraid of or a little bit more cautious about?
Steve Watt [00:40:16]:
We are living in exciting times indeed.
Heather Cole [00:40:19]:
So we will get that link for the IBM free ten-hour training on AI, which is actually fascinating. It goes into a lot of the history and the background and how it works at a level that somebody like you and I can even understand.
Steve Watt [00:40:33]:
Sounds good. Sign me up.
Heather Cole [00:40:35]:
Wonderful. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.
Steve Watt [00:40:43]:
And check out gotomarket/magic.com for show notes and resources.
