Paul Norford [00:00:00]:
If you look at the word evangelist and where it stems from a storyteller of good news, you’re someone who promotes, who embodies, who breathes life, telling the good news of a company that I work for. We do it. Service management, cybersecurity to evangelize that story to people who just think, well, actually, it’s just it it’s a lot more than that. It’s actually quite exciting. Me as evangelist, all I do is I tell stories. I get paid to tell stories, as it were.
Heather Cole [00:00:32]:
This is Go-To-Market Magic.
Steve Watt [00:00:34]:
The show where we talk to go to market leaders and visionaries about the “aha!” moments they’ve experienced.
Heather Cole [00:00:38]:
And the pivotal decisions they’ve made.
Steve Watt [00:00:41]:
All in the name of growth.
Heather Cole [00:00:46]:
Steve, who are we talking to today?
Steve Watt [00:00:48]:
Oh, this is going to be a good one, Heather. Paul Norford. Better known as Norf. Norf is the VP of Global Enablement at Ivanti and he’s also their chief evangelist. And I’m really interested to dig into, really understanding, is this two different roles? Does he have two jobs? Is this one job where does evangelism and enablement come together and what can we learn from his experience?
Heather Cole [00:01:16]:
Great, let’s jump in. Norf, welcome to Go-To-Market. Magic.
Paul Norford [00:01:23]:
Thank you. It’s great to be here, it really is. Thank you for the opportunity.
Steve Watt [00:01:27]:
I’m so glad to have you here, Norf. And I would be remiss if I didn’t start with asking you about, your know, your birth certificate says your name’s Paul, but everybody knows you as Norf. What’s up with that?
Paul Norford [00:01:43]:
So basically I’ve always been called Norfy as a kid, and you know when your parents are supposed to write your name on the inside of your shirt? Mine never got the memo. And curiously, I am from London as well, so this is a bit of a play on words, Norf London, but I got the name Norf because I was in a previous role. I think it was like late nineties, and at this particular point in time it was the perfect storm. So our EA, who was there, literally had seven Pauls around her at this point. Her boss was called Paul, her husband was called Paul, she had a brother called Paul. There were two Pauls in the team and two extra ones. So, of course, you can imagine this unfold. She looks around to her boss and says, “Paul,” all seven of us whirl around and say, “Yeah.”
Paul Norford [00:02:28]:
And at this point she’d had enough. She threw a pen on the table and said, right, all of you get up, I’m sick of this. And we all sat there and laughed and know this is a great joke. And she said, no, all of you get up and line up against the wall. And of course, she put the fear of God into us. So we all lined up against the wall almost in high order, and she just went down the line and said, right, I think Boss Paul was first Paul, you’re Paul husband. Paul was there as well, and for some reason he was called Gus. So she said, you’re Gus, went to another guy called Paul Watts, and he, of course, was called Wattsy.
Paul Norford [00:03:00]:
And then she looked at me, she was a little bit smaller than I was, looked up at me, pointed a finger in my nose and said, You’re Norf. And then just carried on down the line. And that’s where the professional version of Norf was born. And I think it’s a great brand and I really enjoy wearing it.
Steve Watt [00:03:17]:
That’s so great. The best nickname, the best brands are not self assigned, are they?
Paul Norford [00:03:22]:
Correct. Exactly.
Steve Watt [00:03:24]:
She laid that on you and you embraced it.
Paul Norford [00:03:27]:
Absolutely. Roll with it, right? Just roll with it.
Steve Watt [00:03:30]:
Love it. Another thing that I learned about you that I thought was pretty interesting is you have a background, or at least you had a burning desire for a career in radio. Tell us about that.
Paul Norford [00:03:43]:
And this is a perfect segue because some people have said, “Norf, you’ve got a great face for podcasts,” so it’s great that I’m here. But the point of that is, as I was growing up, there were three things that I wanted to be as a kid. The first was a helicopter pilot, and I couldn’t do that because I had to wear glasses and I had asthma, so I couldn’t get in through the military route. So I thought, well, let me go down to the next one on the list, and that was to be a radio presenter. So I spent ions learning my craft and I actually ended up working at the UK national radio station Radio One. And I was there back in the day, I think it was 1993 that I was there. And I was there on a month’s training course. But before that, I spent a long time working in volunteer radio.
Paul Norford [00:04:25]:
So I did special event radio stations. I literally put radio stations together, took them apart, did outside broadcasts, all of those things, and learned the craft of using my voice without the need to use my face. And I say that and we’ll come to that later on. It’s down to those three ways that humans communicate our nonverbals, so our body language, the tone that we choose to use, and the words that we wrap that tone around. So being a radio presenter taught me how to leverage those last two elements. So I tried to get into radio, couldn’t. So then went to my third option, which was being an engineer and using both the skill of being able to articulate my words, tell stories, and engineering has probably made me, I would say, relatively dangerous, but I’m not sure about that.
Steve Watt [00:05:18]:
Well, you’ve managed to weave, I guess, two of those together in your current career. I’m not really sure if you’re also functioning as your company’s helicopter pilot, but you’re definitely weaving together the showman, the radio personality together with the engineering and the technical chop. So, sounds like you’ve found a good path, which leads to the first real area that we want to explore with you. You are Chief Evangelist and VP of Enablement at Ivanti.
Paul Norford [00:05:53]:
Yes.
Steve Watt [00:05:53]:
I’m really interested. Heather is going to have a lot of questions for you, more about the enablement thing. I want to dig into the evangelist thing because this is still pretty new. There’s not a lot of people with that title. There are a few now. There’s a few, but you are definitely a leading edge of the wedge in that. Let’s say you are one of the first to have that title. What does that really mean and what does it entail in terms of the work that you do?
Paul Norford [00:06:24]:
Great question, and thank you for that. I think if you look at the word evangelist and where it stems from, it’s from the biblical definition of evangelist. And if I were to boil that down into just a few words, it’s a storyteller of good news. Okay? And if you were to take that out and drop it into the secular world so rather than it being the good news of Jesus coming to earth and saving humanity, it’s more around the secular piece of telling the good news of a company that I work for. It so happens that I work for I used to work for Ivanti Wavelength, which is the supply chain division. And when I joined Ivanti Wavelength, I joined as their chief evangelist. And if you think about the evangelist role, telling good news, it literally is a storyteller. But you’re someone who promotes, who embodies, who breathes life into, in my example, Ivanti Wavelength.
Paul Norford [00:07:28]:
But now I’ve moved across to the mothership, as it were, which is the big Ivanti. And we do IT service management, we do cybersecurity, and we make sure that you can do your work wherever you are in the world, gain access to your company documents both at rest and in flight, and to evangelize that story to people who just think, well, actually, it’s just it it’s a lot more than that. And it’s actually quite exciting in terms of what we’re doing. So me, as a Chief Evangelist, all I do is I tell stories. I get paid to tell stories, as it were.
Steve Watt [00:08:06]:
Is this thought leadership by another name? I mean, a lot of companies are investing in thought leadership. There’s also a lot of talk. In fact, we did a whole episode recently about influencer marketing. Are these different names for the same thing, or is there something unique in your mind about what makes an evangelist different from a thought leader, different from an influencer or anything else we might choose to call it?
Paul Norford [00:08:29]:
Sure, I think that’s a great question. Certainly in my mind, when I was issued the title of evangelist, I feel the title of evangelist is almost all of those things together. So as an evangelist, I’ll help influence you, for example, to buy from either Norf London, or buy from Ivanti, or buy from the story, or buy into the thought leadership concept and notions that I’m talking about that we wrestle with and discuss. It may also be that I’ll help influence you to either buy or not buy, or to influence you to have a further conversation with regard to what we’re talking about with regard to a big topic, let’s say cybersecurity, for example, and how that may impact you, Steve, as a person, but you steve within your company. So a lot of it comes down to the notion that people buy from people, but you’ll find that people buy more from those that add value to what they do. And to pull the thought leader lever, to also pull the influencer lever for me, all ties back up into being that evangelist. You asked me a question a little bit before we actually started recording, and I would actually say the evangelist piece is probably something that was born out of a want for me to show that I do more than just what a job title is. So, for example, a friend of mine is an enablement leader.
Paul Norford [00:10:12]:
He leads enablement for me. I feel that I do that, but there’s so much more that I do as well. And the term evangelist for me captures it perfectly.
Heather Cole [00:10:24]:
So from that perspective, I think it’s rare that you see people actually say, I lead an enablement organization and I evangelize as well. I’m chief evangelist. And I guess that brings us to kind of that transition of when you’re thinking about what it is you evangelize, what it is you influence. Are you influencing a point of view or are you influencing your company and what you provide? And I think I know the answer.
Paul Norford [00:10:52]:
Okay. What’s the answer? Heather?
Heather Cole [00:10:55]:
I would say it’s a point of view. So it’s a point of view that leads directly back to what it is that you’re selling in the best case scenarios, I think, but you may see it differently. So what do you think?
Paul Norford [00:11:06]:
I would say it’s all of the above. All of the above. So not just influencing the technology and where that is going, not just creating thought leadership around what we do as Ivanti, but also those adjacencies also think about. Certainly for me, I have one eye on the technology and the company, but I also have an eye on the people as well. So I’m a huge people person. And if we think about generations so strictly speaking, I am Generation X, but I think like a millennial, and there’s a subgroup between Gen X and millennials called Zennials. And that’s kind of me in a nutshell. I think the dictionary definition is having an analog childhood but having a digital adulthood.
Paul Norford [00:12:02]:
So for me, it’s not just about the technology, it’s about people using that technology to its greatest advantage. And how it helps them. So to answer your question, it’s not just the tech for me, it’s also the people.
Heather Cole [00:12:17]:
Well, I think from the perspective of understanding where you’ve come from and your past, you’ve got an engineering past, you’ve got experience in radio and you’re an enabler and you’re an evangelist. All of those things put together. Most enablement don’t formally see themselves as evangelists, at least externally, but they might be doing that internally to try to get the entire go to market team, all those customer-facing roles, to get excited about what they do, the stories that they’re telling. But you do it both, I think it sounds like, internally and externally people situation.
Paul Norford [00:12:55]:
Yes, correct. I don’t know whether you would call me an outlier. I’m not sure, would you?
Heather Cole [00:13:03]:
Possibly.
Paul Norford [00:13:06]:
So the one thing that struck me is when it comes to enablement and enabling our teams, it’s certainly down to the team that I am responsible for to enable our sales organization because we’re a B2B company. What about our channel? How do we enable our channel? So one of the things that I looked at and kind of dialed into quite quickly is if our enablement is good enough for us internally, why can’t we use it for our external channel partners as well? And if you think about our channel partners, when they’re selling for Ivanti, they’re an extension of our sales team. So why can’t we enable them at the same time? And that’s the view that I hold, and in fact, that’s the view that our team holds as well. So when we develop enablement content, we actually develop it for our partner community in mind, and then we almost make it we call it kind of additive enablement, where we add the internal elements to what we build, but we build for our partners, we communicate for our partners and then add the internal elements afterwards.
Steve Watt [00:14:12]:
It sounds like that might be a real critical part of where these seemingly two disparate things of enablement and evangelism actually bridge that divide, is in that partner community, you can’t assign training to partners the same way you can to employees. It needs to be more of an enticement and the multimedia approach you bring, the human voice and the personality that you bring make people want to consume this content as opposed to, oh, this has been assigned to me and I have to. It sounds to me like that might be a critical part of your success. Am I getting that right?
Paul Norford [00:14:52]:
And you’ve hit the nail on the head, Steve. And one of the words that we used earlier bring in now the influencer side of it. So actually, if I can create content in a way that it’s going to be really enjoyable. Think about it. We’ve got YouTube on our doorstep, we’ve got TikTok, we’ve got Instagram on our doorstep. Why can’t we create enablement content that’s like that? Even though it’s for our companies. So I’m looking to challenge that status quo. But if we look to create that content in a way whereby we can influence our channel partners and our channel community to consume that content tick jobs done.
Heather Cole [00:15:33]:
Yeah. So we used to call that part of enablement. It’s enablement, but it’s enablement with a bigger budget and bling.
Paul Norford [00:15:44]:
Entertainment, right?
Heather Cole [00:15:46]:
Yeah, exactly.
Paul Norford [00:15:48]:
Yes, agreed. But actually, to be fair, a lot of what you can do with a smartphone and half decent lighting and audio is quite astonishing right now. It really is.
Steve Watt [00:16:02]:
And it’s quite the setup for anyone who is listening to us on a podcast channel. You’re missing Paul’s background, which is very I said at the outset, I’m having studio envy. You look like an absolute pro there in your setup. And I know that’s not just for show. I mean, you are creating a lot of videos, you’re doing a lot of this kind of thing.
Paul Norford [00:16:26]:
Yes.
Steve Watt [00:16:27]:
How important is the production side of things? How important is it to go beyond just pointing your phone at yourself while you go for a walk or something like people do recording videos in their cars? You’ve put some effort and some money behind the production values. How important is that?
Paul Norford [00:16:47]:
Sure, for me it’s very important. And I say that for a number of reasons, one of which is during COVID and I’m sure you had the same as well, we were delivering a lot of content in person, then all of a sudden we had to pivot to do it online. If you then parallel that with the content that’s out there on YouTube, if you’re expecting enablers who spend X amount of their time on YouTube to then pivot and consume enablement content that frankly the content is great, but the delivery is a bit not sure. I saw that as a gap and I thought, well, okay, how do I do this? I can’t afford a 550,000 red Komodo camera plus all the lenses and all the gear that goes with it. There has to be a way that I can up my game for a fraction of that price. So I started to look into the basics of camera, lighting, audio and I came up with an acronym. And the acronym is S.L.AC.C.A. — not that I’m calling any of you slackers.
Paul Norford [00:18:00]:
No, that’s not the case at all. And it simply stands for space, light, audio, camera, clothing and accessibility. It’s making the content good enough so it stands up against the likes of YouTube and TikTok videos and all of those other elements. It’s still enablement content. But my challenge is why can’t it look like that as well? Why can’t it have a high production value as well? So all of this is super important. Super, super important.
Steve Watt [00:18:31]:
Slacker, that’s going to stick with me.
Paul Norford [00:18:33]:
Slacker.
Steve Watt [00:18:33]:
Slacker with an A slacker for accessibility. Love it. Hey, Norf, how do you measure the impact of your evangelical motion or that part of your job, or do you measure it, I guess would be the first thing. And if yes, how do you measure it and how do you tie it to sales outcomes and marketing outcomes and maybe talent acquisition outcomes? Anything else that matter to the firm?
Paul Norford [00:18:59]:
Great question. Two great questions. Do I measure it?
Steve Watt [00:19:02]:
Yes.
Paul Norford [00:19:03]:
How do I measure it? Depends how many podcast invitations I get, actually. Steve, Heather no, I digress. Do I measure this content? Absolutely. If I think about what we do in terms of our enablement effort, there’s a lot of time, energy and effort that goes into creating our enablement content and creating the pathways that we build in our LMS and our content management system that we have. There’s a piece around, can we create content and is that content consumed? Yes. No. How long have people spent in that content? Can we measure that in terms of time, in terms of how many people have gone through it? Yes, we can do that. A lot of these things you find are I call them the so, by way of example, you’ve invited me onto the show and we met at an event, which was the SES event in Atlanta last year, which was phenomenal.
Paul Norford [00:20:06]:
You’ve then done some background digging on me because you thought, actually, we’re putting a podcast together, it’d be great to get that UK Norf guy over. He was great. But then you did some digging and you found some YouTube videos, you found me on LinkedIn, and I’m constantly pushing content out there. Subliminally. I’m sure you may have been thinking at the back of your mind, actually, I remember this guy because he did this and he did that. So for me, putting together evangelist content doesn’t necessarily help you close quarters, but it helps with mind share and it helps with those intangibles of connecting like minded people together to start to talk about things like how do we get a good podcast together, what things do you need, what ideas have you got? Actually, Heather, I remember you last year, you talked about this, that and the other. Maybe I’ll get you in. And it’s pulling together the community that have different perspectives to be able to create something that’s more than the sum of its parts.
Paul Norford [00:21:10]:
So to briefly answer your question, do I measure this effort, this evangelistic effort? Yes, I do. We measure it using time, using the resources that we have, but also the intangibles, the human to human conversations that we have, just like we do now.
Heather Cole [00:21:28]:
Yeah, that’s a really interesting point and I think one of the things that enablers are often struggling with is the only way that you can get the resources is if you can measure it and to think about what those are from that perspective. But going back to thinking about if I’m an enabler, most of the people that we see out there are evangelizing what they do in enablement, not the story for their company. Is that a mistake?
Paul Norford [00:22:02]:
I would say yes. And the reason I say yes is people tend certainly I don’t and I’ll speak for myself here, I don’t remember a stream of numbers. I’m not good with numbers. But if you tell me a story, because I’m visual, I visualize each of the clips in my head as you’re telling me that story. Once you tell me that story and you’ve added in things like, for example, using your voice, so there’s pitch, there’s power, there’s pace, then you start to add in a bit of color using emotion, I’m more likely to remember that story and tell it back. And if I’m likely to remember that story, then a piece of you has gone with me. If you’ve given me a stream of numbers, it will go in one ear and out the other. So for me, telling stories is something that we absolutely need to do, not just in enablement, but also in sales.
Paul Norford [00:23:04]:
And one of the things that I’m seeing more and more and more is how do we get our sellers to tell really good stories?
Heather Cole [00:23:13]:
How do you get your sellers to tell really good stories?
Paul Norford [00:23:19]:
One of the things I do is break a story down into its component parts. And sometimes you have to start at the end and work backwards. But if you can put whatever you’re trying to articulate into their world, into the person’s world that I’m speaking to, they’re more likely to latch on to that story and to resonate with it. And this is where some of the skills and the attributes of being an evangelist really come in. And by leveraging video, it allows and audio to that extent, it allows enablers and it also allows evangelists to scale.
Steve Watt [00:24:05]:
I’ve heard you speak about the importance of relevance together with relatability. Yes. I think the concept is kind of obvious from those two words, but maybe you could give us a little bit more guidance on how you evaluate your own performance and say, am I being relatable? Am I being reliable? And then perhaps to then echo Heather’s question, how do you help others get better at relevance and relatability?
Paul Norford [00:24:34]:
A lot of it would come from you, Heather. And you, Steve. It’s about my audience, right? If I don’t have any relevant information to share with you, I’m not really adding a lot of value to what you need to. And if I know my audience, if I know who I’m connecting with, I know the things that we want to discuss. If I know them. Great. I can talk about it and add value from my perspective. If I don’t know about it, then I can go and do some research.
Paul Norford [00:25:03]:
But I’ve got time to pull those elements together. So if I’m not relevant, if I’m irrelevant, as it were, then actually I’m not adding value to what you do. Back to the point I made earlier, people buy from people, but people buy more from those that add value to what they do. So a lot of it stems from adding value in being relatable and being relevant. Absolutely, yeah.
Heather Cole [00:25:28]:
So switching gears a little bit now you mentioned that you enable the channel partners, you enable internally, but you also enable internally not just traditional sales but also technical sellers.
Paul Norford [00:25:42]:
Yes.
Heather Cole [00:25:42]:
So you’re the revenue enablement guy before revenue enablement, you’ve been doing this a while within Ivanti, so you’re kind of the patient zero.
Paul Norford [00:25:52]:
Yes, absolutely.
Heather Cole [00:25:56]:
What lessons have we learned from all of these? Different, as you said, audiences that have to tell stories slightly different and you have to tell your story to them slightly different. And technical sellers especially is one that if you’ve been doing traditional enablement of field sales, enabling technical sellers and technical resources is a bit different. What can you tell us about the differences in that? And what is your perspective on looking at the individual roles as either audiences or what their needs are, what the outcomes need to be? And how do you think about that?
Paul Norford [00:26:34]:
Great question, Heather, and thank you for asking that. Traditional sellers we have a handle on, right? It’s around looking to invest in them, to change their behavior. We know our buyers have changed, so how do we keep our sellers, dare I say, relevant to their buyers to add value to our buyers business? We can talk about that day in, day out. That’s what we do. That’s table stakes. Enablement technical sellers is a bit of a different beast. Because they’re technical sellers, they think very differently. And because they’re technical sellers, certainly some of the technical sellers that I’ve had the opportunity to work with, they’ll come at a particular problem a very different way.
Paul Norford [00:27:22]:
And for me, I’ve spent a lot of time just watching and observing what they do. One of the key things for me was just spending time riding shotgun with an Se or a technical sales engineer, whatever you want to call them. But just spending time with them and just watching what they do once you have an idea and you can see what they do. For me, a lot of it is just around those incremental improvements. How can we get them to up their game very slightly in order? I suppose it’s back to that increasing by 1% over 360 days. You then increase your output by 37%. For me, it’s that incremental increase. You can give them the technology, they’ll play with it, they’ll break it, they’ll put it back together.
Paul Norford [00:28:11]:
And then if we can teach them the art of telling a technical story, which is very different from telling a sales story, watching what they do, improving what they do by 1% each time, that way our technical sellers are then able to scale, because then they can teach their other technical sellers how they’ve improved, therefore raising the tide of all boats. One of the things that we have done with our technical sellers is we’ve shown them how to this was in the previous company, we’ve shown them how to create a technical demo using some of the gear that I’ve got in this room. So camera, lights and microphone, and how they would tell that story using the medium of video. A lot of them have kind of looked at it and gone, well, yeah, I can do that. Then when it’s played back, maybe they can’t. So how do we increase the impact of what they create? By giving them the tools to tell a great technical story. So a bit of a long winded way of saying we treat them like sportsmen, we watch all the elements that they do and then improve here and improve here to overall increase their effectiveness and their performance. But a lot of it is really down to giving them the tools that they need to go off and make it happen, but then observing what they do and changing what they do very slightly.
Heather Cole [00:29:43]:
Yeah. So I think you make a really good point there because sometimes it’s a little intimidating for enablement to come in to somebody who is so technically relevant and competent and saying, how can I possibly improve on this person? And by the way, well, not all the time, but sometimes they have a little bit of an ego about being smarter than you.
Paul Norford [00:30:03]:
No, they don’t. No, not at all.
Heather Cole [00:30:06]:
Engineers can be that way.
Paul Norford [00:30:09]:
They can I speak from an engineer’s perspective as well. Yes, you’re right.
Heather Cole [00:30:14]:
Absolutely. But that’s a really good point because you compared it almost to an elite athlete where you’re watching game tapes and you’re saying, you did that good. But here’s how you could be great and being able to watch themselves and others and how they interact, just like you would on a game tape and be able to say, just tweak this little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more.
Paul Norford [00:30:33]:
Absolutely. Also, all of the enablement that we put together comes from an element of trust. Right. Our teams have to trust what we do because we are their coaches. Some of them will say, I don’t need any coaching, thanks very much. I’m good. That’s okay. They’ll come back when they need it, whereas others will be, I’ve got blind spots.
Paul Norford [00:30:58]:
I need you to help me. So we are constantly investing into our teams from an element of trust as well. So I think that’s a really good point.
Steve Watt [00:31:07]:
One final question for you, Norf, before we let you go.
Paul Norford [00:31:09]:
Yes, sir.
Steve Watt [00:31:10]:
You know a lot of people, you’re pretty well connected in the global enablement community. What are some people missing? Where are the gaps when there’s struggling enablement functions? What are they missing? What would be your words of wisdom for them?
Paul Norford [00:31:29]:
That’s a great question. That’s a really good question. I. Think I’m a big fan of the number three. So I’ll give you three things, one of which is community. And I mentioned the word adjacencies earlier. So we have swim lanes, we have riding lanes, whatever you want to call them. One of the things that I’ve asked my team to look at is, I know we’re really strong in our swim lane, but where are our adjacencies? How can we expand our swim lane into those adjacencies? And it may well be this podcast, for example.
Paul Norford [00:32:03]:
So it may well be the adjacency from audio could be moving to video, right? So that’s an easy step to make when you go from video, how do you move from video to lighting? So if we look at our swim lane, see what we’re strong at, but look at our adjacencies, so that’s certainly one thing. Two, I would say sometimes measurement isn’t everything. How do we try different things? How do we fail that first attempt in learning? How do we get back to being childlike? Not childish childlike? How do we spend time honing our craft of enablement and in those adjacencies? So I’ll give you an example of failing. One of the things that I do is I’ve set out 2 hours every Friday as my Sts time sharpen the saw. If I don’t invest in me, I don’t stay relevant. I don’t stay sharp. So I have to invest in me in order for me to continue to invest in my team. So, first attempt in learning, I’m trying to learn something new.
Paul Norford [00:33:14]:
And then the third thing I would say is look at what’s going on outside of our sphere. Have a look at what’s going on. Let’s say, for example, you’re in cybersecurity, okay? What’s going on in the retail space? What’s going on in the education space as a whole? What’s going on in the financial space? If we have a look at these, you may call them disparate areas. What are some of the thread? That the common threads that we can pull out in all of those areas. AI is an easy one. So how do we tackle the notion of AI? So, for me, those three elements, if we’re missing anything, let’s stop and think about our swim lanes and those adjacencies. Are we spending time investing into ourselves? Are we spending time failing? And then thirdly, let’s have a look at different industries to see what they’re doing. Because we may be able to port some of those elements into the industry that we’re in.
Steve Watt [00:34:20]:
Fantastic guidance. I love it. Scribbling some notes while you’re talking. Norf, thank you so much for joining us. It’s such a pleasure to speak with you. You bring not only a whole lot of experience and wisdom in the space, but a whole lot of energy. I love it. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Paul Norford [00:34:37]:
Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Heather. Great to be with you.
Heather Cole [00:34:42]:
I love talking to Norf. Probably because he has such a unique perspective and the way he brings things together.
Steve Watt [00:34:52]:
Absolutely. I agree so much, Heather. He’s a really interesting person across multiple levels. And even after we got off the air, he and I were chatting some more. And I was like, are those lightsabers up there in the corner of your studio? And he’s geeking out on Star Wars. I mean, he’s just an all around interesting guy, but he also really shines a light on some areas that we really ought to be paying more attention to. Wouldn’t you say, Heather?
Heather Cole [00:35:24]:
Oh, Absolutely. I think one of the points that he brought up was and we were very curious about, which is how do you combine the enablement role with an evangelist for the company? Because most people that are evangelists and are in the enablement role are evangelizing how to do better enablement as opposed to being evangelists externally for their company. And he had a really interesting link, didn’t he?
Steve Watt [00:35:50]:
He did. I went into it with one of the lingering questions in my mind is, is this really two jobs? Is. He a chief evangelist and an enablement leader. And it’s just one guy doing two jobs. Or are they more woven together? I suspected they would be woven together, but I wasn’t quite sure how. And I think when he started talking about enabling channel partners, I think that’s where the “aha!” was for me. It was like, oh, I get it. Because you can’t demand their attention.
Steve Watt [00:36:23]:
You can’t demand their time. You have to earn it. So you better be more interesting, more entertaining, more valuable. And I think that’s where enablement and evangelism probably start to mesh together is when you go beyond your own employees. Right?
Heather Cole [00:36:43]:
Yeah. It’s immediately clicked with me because I did so much work with channel enablement when I was at Forrester, and like I said, the budget and the bling. And how do you take that internally? And it actually forces you. Like he said. He starts the program by making it appropriate for the channel partners. So you make it snazzy and flashy and something people want to engage in, and then you bring it inside and make those modifications that make it more internally focused, which, frankly, had not heard that concept with a lot of people. Most of them either have two separate organizations or they start with the internal stuff and then modify it for channel.
Steve Watt [00:37:22]:
And I have to imagine that starting with that audience whose attention you need to earn pays off, because it’s just going to be better. The end product for your internal users is going to be better because of where you started. So yeah, with you there. Another thing that jumped out at me is when he said measurement isn’t everything. Or you can’t measure everything. We’re learning a craft here, and we’re making mistakes and we’re trying new things. And that really landed with me because that’s a conversation I have with a lot of people in my area of specialty in social selling. There’s a lot of people who truly believe or want to believe that everything is discreetly tangibly measurable.
Steve Watt [00:38:12]:
And I always disagree that of course there’s things we can measure, and let’s measure them. Yes. But there’s also some things that we really can’t measure. And if we only focus on the easily measurable things, we’re not really going to do some of the things that could potentially be most impactful. So I really appreciated when he was talking about that.
Heather Cole [00:38:36]:
Yeah. The example he gave of being at a conference. And frankly, our organization, many organizations measure conferences by the number of leads that you tangibly get. And we know that that is not the true value of these conferences. I think everybody knows that. But it’s the one thing you can point to, to measure. And he made a really good point about it’s, about the connections that you make, the perspectives that you get, and the awareness that it brings to the company overall.
Steve Watt [00:39:02]:
Absolutely. And the new relationships you form, the existing relationships that you nurture and take to higher levels. And then, as often happens, people get invited onto podcasts, people get invited to speak at SKOs, people join networking groups where they get together once a month and they jump on a zoom call and a bunch of peers at various companies come together. And these things start and are often nurtured at events, as you said, yet they don’t show up in badge scans or in leads.
Heather Cole [00:39:38]:
Yeah. And finally, I think the whole thing about you will squash innovation if you try to measure everything, because people will be afraid to fail. And I think he made a really good point with that, is know at the cost of what you are, squelching the innovation because people will only do what they can measure. And I think that was a great point.
Steve Watt [00:40:02]:
Absolutely. I’m so glad we had Norf on.
Heather Cole [00:40:05]:
Me too. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.
Steve Watt [00:40:13]:
And check out gotomarket-magic.com for show notes and resources.
Steve Watt [00:40:27]:
Want more conversations like these, but live and in person. Join us at Shift. Shift is the annual conference for go to market leaders in San Diego this year. It’s October 23 to the 26th, and it’s going to be fantastic. Go to seismic.com/shift for registration and more information.
