Heather Cole [00:00:00]:
This is Go-to-Market Magic.
Steve Watt [00:00:04]:
The show where we talk to go-to-market leaders and visionaries about the aha moments they’ve experienced.
Heather Cole [00:00:10]:
And the pivotal decisions they’ve made.
Steve Watt [00:00:13]:
All in the name of growth.
[OVERVIEW]
Heather Cole [00:00:17]:
Hi, it’s Heather and Steve here with a special edition of Go-to-Market Magic.
Steve Watt [00:00:21]:
On today’s episode, we’re going to dive into some of the hottest topics and the most pressing questions about enablement that we heard on the ground at Shift. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Shift, it’s Seismic’s annual conference that brings together go-to-market leaders from around the world.
Heather Cole [00:00:41]:
From AI innovation to building credibility on LinkedIn. This is the Pulse of Enablement, directly from the industry’s movers and shakers. Let’s dive in, Steve.
[EPISODE]
Steve Watt [00:00:53]:
Everywhere we went at Shift, we’re hearing about AI. Heather, I’m sure you experienced the same thing. I mean, it was not just the keynotes. It was not just the breakouts. It was the hallway conversations. It was the cocktail hour conversations. A lot, a lot of talk about AI.
Heather Cole [00:01:13]:
Our friend, Stephanie White at Loopio is a super advocate, and we had a conversation with her, where she told us what she was thinking on AI.
Stephanie White [00:01:21]:
What I’m most excited for is how it’s actually going to make enablers more powerful and more impactful than we are today. We’ll be able to scale faster, connect with our teams more deeply, and ultimately help deliver more to our customers. That’s what’s getting me excited right now. The more ways that we can integrate it into our daily workflows, with our tools, and our processes, the more opportunities, we have to find those 1% better moments.
Steve Watt [00:01:47]:
Here’s one place UPS believes AI can really help.
Speaker [00:01:51]:
The main place that it’ll show up, at least in the next few years, is going to be helping the seller focus on the customer. Removing tasks that will take their time away from the customer, and help them prioritize the right opportunities and the right customers to engage with, at the time that they’re in.
Steve Watt [00:02:10]:
A lot of it was very positive, a lot of excitement. But there was also a real undercurrent of concern, don’t you think?
Heather Cole [00:02:17]:
Oh, absolutely. As I was listening to these conversations, and we were listening to the subject matter experts about it, it was very clear that there’s this tremendous hope that everyone has for the power of AI. But then there’s also this kind of underlying fear of the things that can go wrong, the things that can happen with it.
Steve Watt [00:02:37]:
What did you find to be the most critical and the most actionable ways in which we can leverage AI in enablement?
Heather Cole [00:02:47]:
Yes. So, I think it boils down to kind of categorizing it, as a frame of what it can do for both the enabler, and also the customer-facing roles. When we think about it, I like to think about it in terms of it helps you discover things easier, it helps you discover the right things faster. It helps you find those things really quickly, in a way that’s better for both enablers. But also, for those customer-facing roles, like reps who are trying to get to the right stuff to use with their specific sales situation immediately. And AI is really great for that.
The second piece of this is helping to actually create product, create presentations, and documentation. For the enabler, it means that you can create descriptions from a lot of disparate components that you’re trying to tie together for a play. For a rep, it means that you can create a presentation, it knows where to pull from and what to get, which slides, which components into the slides, that makes sense for your specific situation, that specific opportunity, with that specific persona, in that specific industry, and being able to really hone in on what is going to work in this situation, and what hasn’t really worked in the past, and maybe present the stuff that really is going to make a difference.
Steve Watt [00:04:05]:
So, efficiency and productivity per rep was obviously a big part of that.
Heather Cole [00:04:11]:
Yes, it definitely is, because it can help the reps prepare faster. They spend so much time actually preparing for meetings, and following up from meetings, and very little time actually in front of customers. Depending on who you listen to, it’s somewhere between 20% and 25% of their time is spent in front of an actual customer having a conversation. The rest of the time, the whole rest of the time about, except for some admin, really serious non-customer facing admin stuff, is spent either preparing for that meeting or following up for that meeting. So, the biggest area of opportunity for any productivity, for sales and customer-facing roles, is that preparation and that follow-up piece of it, for sure.
Heather Cole [00:04:58]:
Here’s what’s top of mind for Bank of America.
BOA Speaker [00:05:00]:
I’m hoping that AI will be able to streamline the processes and the work, especially for our bankers to be able to prepare for meetings, bring materials together quickly and easily, and better serve our clients and prospects.
Steve Watt [00:05:20]:
So, we’re taking a lot of the manual work out of the pre and post-meeting. We are freeing up our talented reps to maximize the amount of time they spend in customer conversations. But then we’re going beyond that, right? We’re also analyzing what’s working and what’s not working and providing some much more nuanced coaching and enablement than we ever did before.
Heather Cole [00:05:46]:
Yes. And the fun thing about this is that now the capability exists not just to guess at what’s working, but to actually know. So, for so long the actual conversations that were being had with the customer were things that enablement and marketing, and the go-to-market organization had very little view into, and now the ability to do that with conversational intelligence tools such as meetings.
We can see and hear and know what is going on behind the curtain there. And that gives us such – the layer that it gives us from an AI perspective on what is actually being, how it’s actually being received? What are they spending their time? And what is actually interesting to the customers we’re talking to? Not just how many times a particular side was downloaded or used. But did it actually work?
That piece of it is hugely important to the accuracy of being able to say, “Hey, sales rep, we think you should use this slide, not just because marketing says so or not just because it’s been downloaded a bunch of times, and not just because it happened to be in a presentation where the deals were one. But we actually know that the customers like to see this. They spend more time on, and you have better conversations when you use it.”
Steve Watt [00:07:00]:
Yes, I think one part of it that I’m super excited about is it goes even further than that. It’s the way we’re speaking. The way we’re engaging with people. Our tone, our pace, our use of filler words, our asking of intelligent questions, our active listening. All of these things coming together. The formality or more casualness of our tone, on and on. I mean, you can see what’s already available, and you can see where it’s going to go. The ability to really understand what our top reps do differently. I mean, what an incredible coaching opportunity, and what an incredible opportunity for reps to up their game, their own game, obviously, but for the organization too.
Heather Cole [00:07:47]:
Absolutely. Just about every sale, especially the complex ones, but just about everyone, in B2B, is a team sell. So, if you have a team sell, sometimes you’re walking in, and you and I both do this in our roles. As you’re walking into the middle of a buying cycle, and you don’t really have a good understanding of what’s happened before that.
The ability for AI to take the salient components of all the conversations that have been had before, and say, “Here’s what happened in this meeting, and here’s what the follow-up was. Here’s what happened here, and here’s what we think about that.” The ability to take those summaries and quickly get up to speed in a team selling environment, again, huge productivity gain, and also, you’re not pissing off your customers and your buyers, because you’re not asking them the same questions over again. You know where they are, you know from their own words, extremely powerful.
The second part of that, just preparing for those conversations, but the automation of the follow-up to them, to be able to – the platform is listening. They understand that you mentioned all these things. You said you were going to follow up with this. And then it’s telling you not only what to do, but it’s also suggesting content for you to do it. Eventually, the power of this is also to say, “Hey, this rep really fell down when he was talking about pricing. He immediately was talking about reductions. We need to give them training and suggest some learning over here as well on maybe what she should be thinking about differently.”
Steve Watt [00:09:17]:
That’s super exciting stuff. Now, it wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops with AI. I picked up on at least three areas where people were concerned. What about you?
Heather Cole [00:09:28]:
Yes, I definitely did. And I think those three areas, let’s see if we’re aligned here. I think it’s about trust. So, are you getting back? Is there hallucinations going on here? Because that hallucinations thing is a big thing that’s blown up all over the Internet. I used ChatGPT and it lied to me. Well, of course it did. It’s looking across, a lot of sources of information that may or may not be accurate.
The second one is really the risk. If I’m putting information into this platform, into the system, and it’s learning, what are you doing with my proprietary information? Then, the third one is, what do you think it is, Steve?
Steve Watt [00:10:05]:
Well, I think we’re aligned so far. Third one is, am I going to lose my job? All the incredible technology. This is wonderful. Am I just digging my own grave, so to speak here, as AI advances? Is there going to be a tremendous shedding of roles here? We all care a whole lot about our firms. We care a whole lot about our customers. But at the end of the day, we also care about our own careers and our own future. And I think that sometimes people are a little reluctant to talk about that. So, let’s talk about that. I mean, are our own jobs at risk here?
Heather Cole [00:10:47]:
Well, I think the overwhelming sentiment for anybody that was talking about AI, both the experts, and the enablers, is that there’s never enough time in the day to get everything you want to get done or what your CRO or CSO is asking you to get done for an enabler. So, there’s always something more to do. You’re never done as an enabler. The chances that this is going to replace you is pretty slim.
There are two quotes that I love that kind of encapsulate this like ChatGPT and large language models are not going to be the one that replaces you. It’s the people that know how to use them are the people that are going to be taking your jobs. So, you really have to know how to use the power of this technology and embrace it.
The second quote that kind of explains is, one of the top experts in this in the world is a professor at Berkeley, who, essentially and I’m paraphrasing here, essentially was asked, “Is this going to replace all these jobs? And should I use AI to replace roles in my company?” He said, “Well, if you employ a lot of psychotic six-year-olds that are prone to fantasy in your force, then yes, absolutely. These large language models can replace your employees today. But the reality is, it is a starting point, it is a tool, it is a partner, it is a co-pilot, it’s all of those things. But it doesn’t have to be something that’s replacing jobs. It’s something that’s making you more productive and more efficient. Because frankly, you can never sell too much and you can never enable too much. So, the chances that it’s going to massively replace these roles, is pretty slim.”
Steve Watt [00:12:19]:
All right, Heather. As we wrap up on AI, what are one or two things that you think are absolute critical takeaways for the audience?
Heather Cole [00:12:29]:
So, I think part of this goes back to those three components. The first one being, can I trust what I’m getting out of it? And there’s a reason why this new component that you’re starting to see as actually capability, which is the co-pilot. Co-pilots are being launched, integrated, and announced for a lot of the different MarTech and sales stack. And that co-pilot piece of it means that it’s there alongside you. It is a starting point.
So, can I trust what’s coming back? Yes. If you’re pointing it to information that you trust from your organization, and from vetted external sources, sure. But it is not a pilot. You still need to read, you still need to approve, and you might need to edit certain pieces of it. So, you have to be the one to validate.
The second piece of this around the risk part of it, which is where’s my data going? You need to know, which is why the use of public large language models as a tool for your customer-facing employees is probably a risky thing to do, and you don’t know where that information is going or how is it going to be used. The better way to think about it is capturing that information, using it within the platforms that you have, and knowing where that information is going, and working with all of your providers to make sure that you understand how they’re using your data.
Steve Watt [00:13:53]:
And I would just add on the more personal side, and the career management side. Get in there and start playing around. Don’t think of AI as something that happens over there, as something that those people do on our behalf. It’s something that we’re all going to be doing. You think about all the different things around mobile communication and digital communication. They have become part of everybody’s job, and AI is going that way. So, I think it’s really critical, that regardless of our role, we get in there and we start playing around, and we don’t need to be experts yet. Maybe in time, we will be. But for today, we just need to not be afraid and we need to not be completely on the outside looking in.
Heather Cole [00:14:42]:
Absolutely. If you haven’t embraced it yet, you’re probably behind the curve. So, it’s something that enablers – when you say you don’t need to be an expert, it is easy these days, to get the type of information that you need to be at the very least competent, but also know more than the people around you so that you can have a meaningful conversation when it comes to what is your AI strategy going to be in enablement.
So, another really hot topic that we were hearing was around social selling, and some people prefer to call it social engagement, because maybe you’re not actively selling on, say, LinkedIn. But Steve, I know this is an area that you’re passionate about. Tell me what you were hearing out there.
Steve Watt [00:15:28]:
I am passionate about it, Heather, indeed, whether you call it social selling, social networking, social reputation, building, employee advocacy, or anything else. I’m not the only one who’s passionate about it. Madison from Experian had some interesting comments on that.
Madison Glass [00:15:44]:
Experian is a big proponent of LiveSocial. We’re really trying to grow the adoption with it. And we’ve had a lot of feedback from our sales users that they are actually using LiveSocial to not only build their brand on LinkedIn, but to also use it for growing and gaining leads to then sell to.
Heather Cole [00:16:03]:
So, Steve, why is this something that enablement, specifically, should care about?
Steve Watt [00:16:08]:
Because enablers have a real opportunity to lead. Some of the most successful social selling programs that we’re seeing are being largely, if not entirely led by enablement. Sometimes, a great partnership between enablement and sales leadership. The number of times I’ve been in a conversation where someone has brought up social and someone else says, “Oh, you need to go to talk to marketing.”
I think those times are changing. I think we’re recognizing that marketing plays, of course, a critical role in corporate brand marketing on social. But the human side of it, of enabling and empowering thousands of your people to really show up and speak up on social in positive ways, to build their reputations, to build their networks and their relationships, to build trust at scale. It’s really powerful. I mean, as a seller, you can’t blow up people’s emails every day. If you do those things, people are going to put up walls to keep you away. But you can be seen on social every day. You can be heard, you can be understood. You can start to pull people towards you.
Heather Cole [00:17:21]:
So, Steve, one of the things that I see enablement’s core responsibility is, is to make the role of the sales rep specifically easier, and to make them look good in front of the customers. When I have a sales rep reach out to me and try to sell me something, where’s the first place I go to go figure out who this person is?
Steve Watt [00:17:43]:
You go to their LinkedIn profile. And in most cases, it’s not very good, is it?
Heather Cole [00:17:48]:
No. I really do rely on that, as many buyers do to understand who this person is, and are they really somebody that can help me? The last thing I do is, I make sure that they’re not trying to actively sell to me on LinkedIn when they don’t know me. When we say social selling, talk a little bit about that.
Steve Watt [00:18:14]:
It’s so much more about social reputation and relationship building, rather than selling on social. It’s when you do these things right, it leads to your ability to sell, rather than coming at it with a short-term, immediate transactional approach.
Let’s start where you said about the LinkedIn profiles. Most sellers’ LinkedIn profiles are awful. They really are. They’re boring lists of where they used to work. In some cases, it’s even worse. In some cases, they are brag sheets. “A 140% quota attainment for four years running. I’ve been to President’s Club three years in a row.” These are not things that your buyers want to hear. Instead, think about your LinkedIn profile as a buyer-facing asset, as something that in really human authentic terms, explains who you are, who your firm is, who you serve, how you serve them, what kind of outcomes you help your customers achieve.
Now, when I go check out on LinkedIn, I’m going to be far more likely to be willing to engage with you. So yes, profiles are the absolute foundation of getting it right. But then, you got to go beyond that, and you’ve got to start sharing some content that signals to your buyers, and your intended future buyers, that you understand their world you care about their world. You’ve got something to say about their world, and that you’re not just the cheerleader for your firm. You’re not just a Wi-Fi extender for your company who only re-shares your company’s content.
That’s the second big trap that I see sellers falling in. One is the bad profile, and two is they really do look like a Wi-Fi extender for marketing. If they share anything at all, they just quickly regurgitate a marketing post. It is so much more authentic and so much more interesting for buyers if you share more of a balanced diet of content, that is some of it is your company’s content. Yes, absolutely. But it’s also industry content. It’s content from news media. And perhaps, it’s some content that you are creating yourself, that educates, and inspires, and helps your intended audience. That’s how you rise above the noise. And that’s how you become the seller that they actually want to talk to.
I love what Tyler at Proofpoint had to say about being human on social. It is so critically important.
Tyler Murphy [00:20:47]:
Some of the things that we’re talking about are how we can take all of the content that Seismic brings to the table, and really allow people to give it to their employees so that they can be humans on social media, so that people want to follow them, so that they’re interested in them as a person, and not just reposting their corporate content so that they’re really thought leaders.
Steve Watt [00:21:09]:
I always remind sellers, that for every stakeholder that you hope to talk to, will 100 other salespeople want to talk to them as well. What are you going to do to be different? What are you going to do to rise above that? And being far more buyer-centric and far more human in your social presence gives you a tremendous leg up.
And enablement can help to bring this mindset, and these sorts of skill sets and the tool sets that support that. Enablement can lead in those areas, and it can have a profound effect on the company.
Heather Cole [00:21:45]:
So, it’s interesting because in their quest to bring insight and to bring information that a buyer wouldn’t have necessarily on their own, and to get better and better at that, sometimes there’s a fear that they’re going to go over the edge. And compliance becomes a little bit of a challenge or an issue. Talk a little bit about that.
Steve Watt [00:22:09]:
That’s a very real concern, especially in a regulated industry. It’s honestly much, much less of a concern in technology and other non-regulated industries. I mean, we already trust our people on the phone. We trust them on emails. We trust them to go to conferences and talk to people. We trust them in all sorts of ways. We need to realize that social is not fundamentally different from that.
But in financial services, in regulated industries, it is. It really is different and it does present real risk for the firm. And the good news is that doesn’t have to stop you. There are tools out there, some of which we are partnered with here at Seismic that can do an incredible job of creating the sort of guidelines or guide rails that keep your people safe, keep your firm safe, and keep people out of trouble, while still enabling them to be active and human in their engagement.
Heather Cole [00:23:05]:
Just to wrap it up, if I’m an enabler, I know my reps are out there. Maybe they are just being extenders. Maybe they’re posting things, maybe I wish they didn’t. How do I get started? What are the first steps that I need to help reel this in and become more of a resource and potentially, also, become somebody who is managing this process.
Steve Watt [00:23:27]:
I think starting with mindsets, as I said before, is always critical. A lot of enablers and others in this space make the mistake of jumping straight to tactics and tools. That’s not the road to victory here. You really need to start with the mindset. What I usually do is I start with helping sellers to really appreciate how busy and noisy their buyer’s world is; How much outreach they get, how often their phone is ringing, how many emails they’re getting. And really getting them to realize that if those are the only tools in your kit, you’re just adding to the noise. You’re not rising above it, and get them excited about the possibility of becoming more of a magnet. A magnet that’s going to pull the right people towards them at the right time and in the right ways.
That kind of creates the motivation to do more. And then we kind of move into the skill sets around building better profiles and thinking through a good content strategy of what to share, and when, and how to share it. We really talk through how we’re going to rise above the noise, build those reputations, and build that network, and then celebrating success. In every firm, there’s already a few people who are doing this really well. Every firm. It’s usually a small number of people, but find those people, celebrate those people. Take them from the shadows and put them centerstage, so to speak, and find their stories. As your program grows, find more stories.
The stories I’ve heard from my Seismic sales colleagues are tremendous about firms they’d been prospecting for two years. Never managed to get a meeting. Then they got good on social. Now, they’re getting those meetings. About the relationships they’re building, the referrals they’re getting. Oftentimes, people exclusively focus on data, and as important as data is, I think it’s a big mistake to stop there. There already are stories within your firm, about people who are achieving great things on social. Find those people, find those stories, they’re going to be the foundation of a growing movement.
Heather Cole [00:25:43]:
That’s great advice. And I also, for those enablers who think, “Well, I’m not quite sure this is my sandbox or my cup of tea,” I also see it as a tremendous area, those who are really good on social are also learning as they’re gathering the types of information they might want to share. They’re also very hooked into their prospects, their prospects company. What are they saying? What are they doing? So, they can have more meaningful conversations. So, if you get your reps really good at being on social and leveraging it as a tool, you’re also giving them real-time information flows that are coming in to them, in a way that you as an enabler, could never do, at scale at such a personalized level to their territory, to their customers, et cetera. So, it’s a huge, real-time, in-the-moment, learning tool for them as well.
Heather Cole [00:26:38]:
We hope you enjoyed this special edition of Go-to-Market Magic. Thanks again to everyone who joined us at Shift, especially those who shared their insights for this episode.
Steve Watt [00:26:48]:
And if you like this, there’s a lot more for you. Go to gotomarket-magic.com for past episodes. We dig into AI, enablement leadership, marketing leadership, sales leadership, and a whole lot more.
Heather Cole [00:27:04]:
And if you’d like to hear more episodes like this one, tell us about it. Leave us a note on the website, Seismic’s YouTube channel, or on LinkedIn. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.
[OUTRO]
Heather Cole [00:27:17]:
If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show on YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.
Steve Watt [00:27:22]:
Check out gotomarket-magic.com for show notes and resources.
[END]
