Adriana recently moved from a sales enablement role to one in product enablement. Join us for this discussion to figure out why that matters and how enabling product can have a massive downstream impact on sales.
Adriana recently moved from a sales enablement role to one in product enablement. Join us for this discussion to figure out why that matters and how enabling product can have a massive downstream impact on sales.
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host. Coach CRM co-founder, corey Bray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. I'm excited. I'm here with Adriana Romero, the senior manager of product and cloud enablement at Open Text. She's just had an interesting career change. Tell us about it.
Speaker 2:It has been interesting. Corey, thank you so much for having me here. I recently left the world of sales enablement where I had spent seven years and I decided to make a switch to the engineering and product side and it was a very interesting turn of events. But I have to say that it's been a beautiful, beautiful change and the fact that so many things that I did in sales enablement I can bring them here, like there's so many things, structure wise, that can work on either side of the business.
Speaker 1:What's the biggest difference between the salespeople and engineering and product folks?
Speaker 2:Of course, it is the whole time between us.
Speaker 1:Nobody else is listening.
Speaker 2:Nobody else is listening, just like you're 10,000 followers and they've been very interesting, right. I see it as the difference of the salesperson is the person you have to push everything Please learn this because you needed to sell. The engineer is the person who wants to learn more than what they can take, like you finish something, a program, a training, a session, a seminar and the question they ask is now what, like? What is coming after this? Which is very interesting to see that difference, because in the sales enablement world, you're trying to say how can I make this shorter and micro and so they can read it, and it's important. Totally different on this side.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the point of this is not to knock salespeople. The point is to tee up the topic of our conversation today, which is inside of a company how do we figure out what to build next Exactly? There's a lot of talk about early stage startups and customer discovery and lean cannabis and all that type of stuff. That topic is well explored. The problem is that culture gets dissipated when you grow. You work at Open Tech. How many employees do you have now?
Speaker 2:Like I don't know, over 20,000 people, Over 20,000 people and you're thinking about.
Speaker 1:How do we figure out what to build next? Talk us through broad strokes. What does that process look like? And then let's dig into some of the nooks and crannies of it.
Speaker 2:So it's very important. One thing, so the people who are building the product right, it doesn't matter, as you said, if you're in a startup. You're in a bigger and established company and I think the bigger you get, the more important this has to be. You can't lose the pulse of the customer. What does the customer want? Right? It is very important that the people who are building the engineers, the product managers, everybody who was involved in the process of building the product understand why things are important for the customer.
Speaker 2:It's like any type of product that you build, from a phone to a piece of software, to a shoe. If I am here building in a vacuum and just thinking about what I believe the person is going to need and I don't go outside and ask what do you need in this shoe? Do you need it to be functional? Do you need it to be comfortable? Do you need it to be fashionable? Am I building what the customer needs or am I building what the market is going to need? So that creates a very important, I would say, task for us in enablement to really make sure that those connections are made within the company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because if you're just a little bit off it can be disastrous. Yes, and I remember a long time ago I was working at this company and we had forklifts this is a long time ago and we needed to buy a new forklift. We were looking at all the specifications, the whole booklet of all the different things that it does, and I think the thing cost $150,000 or something like that, oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And there was one thing on the forklift that wasn't thought about, and that was how thick is the tip of the fork, because the things that it had to pick up are these steel plates, and the tip of the fork was thick, and so it would not go into the pallet Couldn't pick up the plates.
Speaker 1:So this is the most powerful machine that you could possibly get, and it couldn't actually do its job because that one little thing was off. And if you've got a company that's got 20,000 people, I can't imagine what your code base looks like. It's insane.
Speaker 2:Exactly, it is insane, and you know, I think that that is where, when you see any kind of successful company or unsuccessful company in the tech world or in otherwise, it is where those misalignments start to happen. But those misalignments can create gaps that are huge, Because as soon as what happens with the customer, as soon as the product doesn't serve you, it's like this is a bad experience and I'm not buying this again. Like it's interesting how the human brain works in that sense of I bought this with an expectation. I thought you had listened to me and what I needed, but now that it doesn't work, I will cast the entire experience net on the entire company for one. That little thing, which is very interesting, right, we see it in reviews. In how many Amazon reviews you see of people saying I don't know the mug that I bought, this didn't fit my finger, so I'm gonna give it one star.
Speaker 1:Is it a fault?
Speaker 2:Yeah, consumers right.
Speaker 1:Consumers are the worst.
Speaker 2:But it will taint the other. The next person will do so. Let's talk about the software world, right? The software is nowadays it is your hammer, it is your screwdriver, it is the tool that you use to work, it is your pen, it is everything. So if the tool doesn't make it easy for you to do exactly what you need to do, more and more we're gonna have a resistance to use it, like when we started using software. And I wanna talk about myself. 25 years ago, when I came into the workforce, I was okay doing things very manually in an Excel sheet or in a CRM that was, I don't know whatever existed before Salesforce right A gold mine, a gold mine maximizer, you know, not to date myself, but yes, I did use them.
Speaker 2:But nowadays would we put up with those constraints? No, because we know that you know these softwares can do better. So what you know, you would say what is the role of enablement in this? Well, making sure your teams are enabled to understand. So, just like the sales enablement person needs to make sure that the sellers kind of understand what's happening in that world of product development and how the process happens and how are they doing, and even understand how we fix things, we need to turn around and do the same for the world of the people who are building the product. What is our go-to-market strategy? What are the things? What are people use this product for? Why? Because maybe you're a developer developing one feature of an entire massive product, but maybe that is the feature that I don't know 75% of your target market actually needs, and if you kind of underestimate the importance of that feature, it will show at the end. So it is important to make that.
Speaker 1:So how do you get the person right in the code to understand what the customer does?
Speaker 2:You have to explain it to them. So I'm gonna give you an example. As you know, at one point in my career I was in a company that sold enablement software right, and I remember clearly I was the enabler for that team and the engineering team told me we do not understand enablement. Like, what does an enabler do? What is this? Is this training? Is this just coaching? And I remember having a moment of oh, we haven't told the engineers, Like I've not shown them what I do, what is my world. So I remember taking two hours because we ended up having a two hour conversation.
Speaker 1:You went into the cave, you went into their cave.
Speaker 2:I went into the cave, you know, I dressed up appropriately, I was prepared for everything.
Speaker 1:Put on your hoodie. Put on my hoodie.
Speaker 2:As you can see, now I'm in a very engineering mood, like I have even the university of Waterloo hat on.
Speaker 1:She's wearing a hat. She's wearing a hat to teach her to everybody. She has her engineering outfit on.
Speaker 2:Of course, and it's Friday, right, come on.
Speaker 1:Actually, I wrote this joke one time because I do stand up and I have very few clean jokes, but one of them is appropriate right now. I said in COVID it was cool because a lot of the sales people became more like the engineers. Exactly Well, they didn't learn how to code, they just started showering four times a week and wearing basketball shorts every day.
Speaker 2:Exactly, I mean the uniform when I'm working from home. It is leggings and very comfortable clothes, and there you go. The good thing is, I can actually translate it into the office because I am amongst the engineers. So why not Part of the curve? Let me tell you, when I wear my NASA shirt, that's the I wanted to?
Speaker 1:Do you have a? Do you wear crocs with a dog on your lap?
Speaker 2:Never Come on, never. She has a line people.
Speaker 1:There's a line I draw a line.
Speaker 2:I am Latina and there's a line there that if not my culture, my heritage will come and chase me, because I'm doing that.
Speaker 1:So I learned something today Latinas do not wear crocs.
Speaker 2:No, so anyway. So I went into this session and I basically I had like my deck, this is enablement and this is what we do. But then I told them now let me talk to you about how I use the product that we build, and I opened up our product and I said this is easy because this, this is difficult because of this, and I allowed them to ask me questions Like but why? And I loved it because it became kind of a discovery process which they went deep and at the end of the session they said thank you.
Speaker 2:Now we understand why, when our customers come and tell us we need this button here or we need this to do it in one click instead of five, why it is important for what you do. So when you put the engineering team in front of the person and you have the user in your company, we don't even have to go outside so much to the customer. You will have the user, you will have finance right, you have legal, you have sales, you have product. The user of your product exists within your company. So go to that person and ask them how do we do your job? And give that information to your team. It is very important, and it's also very important for the engineering team to understand. Why are sellers always so stressed Like? What is this, you know? Why are we stressing about the quarter or the feature or the like? Why is there such a worry?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, here's the fun experiment. You can say All right, so give me half your paycheck and I'll give that half back to you if people click on the buttons you built.
Speaker 2:Exactly, that's a good one.
Speaker 1:That's what it is, I think the only reason salespeople are stressed is because they think they make their on-target earnings and they might make their on-target earnings and they've got car payments, house payments, kids things, whatever, and it's tough and engineers are sitting over there with their base salaries and their equity.
Speaker 2:It is. And, believe me, I've done sales and I have. You know, it's funny because I I tell people the journey. I said I am an engineer, I'm a systems engineer, that's what I went to university for and then I moved into the world and I did business analysis and then I moved into sales. So I do understand the big difference between both of them and there's a reason why I'm not doing sales anymore. One of them, what you just explained, you know A don't want the quota to. I like to know what am I earning All at once.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's the business casino, as I say.
Speaker 2:You know, and I think I got to that point where I said no, no, no, I like it. There's a thrill and it's exciting, and I know I can do it, but let's, let's get some stability. I knew what I was giving up for, what I was getting, but, to your point, it's making, it's making each other understand what they do and what is the function and why it is important. And at the end of the day, it comes down to the user what, why is this what the user needs or wants?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so how do we help the engineering team understand the future state? It's one thing to say. Here's what the product does today, here's how the users use it. How do we bridge the gap between what it does today and what we need it to do in the next, in the next iteration?
Speaker 2:I think it's very important to have a team of leadership that has a clear strategy of where they want to take the product and that that is really well communicated within the engineers and not only communicated of. You know, I want the product to be. I'm going to go back in time. Hey, we're going to go from on-premise license to cloud right. When we did all that movement, it's like why is that the future?
Speaker 2:There always has to be a why answer in everything that you do, because you're speaking with a very smart group of people who will always want to understand the why in a deeper sense, like, really tell to me and explain to me why this is important. So if you not only give them the strategy of this is where the company is going, tell them why the company is going that way and this is how we want you to kind of move in that direction. So I think that I always tell people don't communicate with others, and especially in enablement. It is very important starting on page, you know, on chapter five of the book Always start on the epilogue. Like let's start sorry in the prologue, let's start at the beginning of the book.
Speaker 1:Not even chapter one, the prologue, the prologue what came before that.
Speaker 2:Start in the prologue, go to chapter one, run them all the way to chapter five and now you know what you need. And that applies for both, corey. It applies to sales enablement as well, which is one of the things that I always try to make sure that in every program, especially in everything that had to do with onboarding, and when you were launching a program for a new product. Let's start on that prologue. Where did this story start? Right? It's exactly the same thing. When you are enabling salespeople, you have to tell them why we are selling this. Now. Where did this idea come from? How are we going to make this happen? And this is the strategy that we built.
Speaker 1:Same yeah, that's really good. So imagine that we're in a world somebody listening to this as a sales leader. Their engineers don't have any contact with them. They might talk to product marketing. That's the closest they can get. What's something that a sales team can do to help the engineering team understand better what the customer actually does, what the customer wants and what the future could look like?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm pretty sure nowadays a lot of people are recording their sales calls. Right, I would actually be. I hope so, I hope so.
Speaker 1:Well, you don't need to pay $175 a month to do it, either it just comes with your software.
Speaker 2:Exactly Like I would suggest.
Speaker 2:If you are not recording your calls and I understand there are some countries that have some issues with this but if you can record and I remember doing this recording the calls in an MP3 file.
Speaker 2:This doesn't have to be that fancy because people have a barrier of oh my God, that's going to be so difficult. No, record your calls and those calls that are good. When you have a good discovery call, when you get that customer that's like this is the person I was building this product for, take that discovery call and then tell the engineers hey, we have some bits and pieces from this call, but I want you to listen to it from the customer, not from me. Get them to listen to the customer. Here's an interesting thing If I give a call to another salesperson, most likely they will not listen to it or they will put it in 2X and just breeze through it while they're prospecting or filling out the CRM. But if you give a call to an engineer and you tell them I need you to listen to this, they will listen to it. They will listen to it from A to Z and they will completely get what your customer is talking about and come back to you with follow-up questions.
Speaker 1:In my experience, Exactly they will.
Speaker 2:They will come back with follow-up questions, which is great. That's what you want.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome. So it sounds like they're thirsty. Mm-hmm, it's funny. I said that she took a sip Just exactly as I was, you know taking my influencer mug and just you know, kicking a sip. Your influencer mug. That's great.
Speaker 2:Somebody told me the other day oh, you were influenced because you have this, you know this mug that everybody has on Instagram and I'm like. Well, yes, because it carries 30 ounces of water and I know I'm hydrated throughout the day.
Speaker 1:There you go. I was influenced from my Chick-fil-A cup because I was on a heater at the poker tournament last night and I got to bed kind of late. So I woke up this morning and I was like I need an iced tea and some chicken minis, so I went to Chick-fil-A.
Speaker 2:I love that. That is your breakfast Chicken minis and an iced tea.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's great and the great thing about chicken minis. So I just lost 50 pounds. We haven't seen each other for a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Not fishing for compliments, but I just lost 50 pounds and what I realized is that chicken minis and an iced tea from Chick-fil-A is only about 350 calories, which for a guy that now weighs 215 is not hardly any calories. So it's okay, I can eat it this morning.
Speaker 2:Yes, you know everybody, Cory Bray, the new fitness influencer.
Speaker 1:I love it, hey, but just so you know, get the four count minis, because when I was overweight I was getting the 10 count minis.
Speaker 2:Oh, I like that there is a reduction. Go, this is good, all right.
Speaker 1:So the first for this they want to learn. They do they want to know about the customer. Yes, and the other thing is I mean, it's less relevant in a company of 20,000 people, but if you're in a company that has 50 people, 100 people, 200 people, the engineers have a substantial equity stake in the business.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and they want the company to be successful. Right, you need the company to be successful. So here's a process I did when I was in startups and I had all this you know great technology that allowed me to record calls. I would actually add as listeners my subject matter experts in the company. So in some of the companies that included product product marketing, engineering, especially the lead engineers, sometimes they'd even include finance and sometimes that included legal, just because for me it was important that these people listen to the calls. So when I, as an enabler, I was going in and enablement friends, if you're not listening to your team's calls, take some time every week and listen to your team's calls. It is important. You might not be able to listen to all the calls, but always pick, always pick different people every week and always listen to calls. Put that thing in 1.5 or 2X and listen to your calls. I would actually make notes in those points of the calls where I said this is important for finance to listen to, or this is important for engineering, and I would name the person and say listen to this portion that I had just highlighted for you, because this is important for what we're building for the next iteration, or this is important for the features that are coming, or when I heard a theme that was recurrent, I would say I know that there's features that are going down in the list. I think, with what I'm hearing, it should go up in the list and that is the way that you give it to them and you give them that feedback right. So that is one of the other ways that you, as a sales leader can actually have that interaction with engineering and if you have an enablement person in your company, get that person to actually do those interactions. I have said that in all the functions that as enablers, do besides the typical ones, build the strategy, the content, make sure the boxes of the trainings are happening, make sure that the content is there. There's such a big glue effect that we have and that glue effect, or that bridge effect, is making sure that sales and all the rest of the people in the company, especially the people in the company that we need to interface the most, that those bridges are there and they're built and there is a two-way communication, because you will need the two-way communication, as you were telling me.
Speaker 2:You spoke about product and how to enable people in the sales team about new products. How do we keep that conversation going? How do we make sure that that flows? So it is a very important part of the enabler. So and if you have in my case I'm the enabler on this side and there's enablers on the other side of the company make sure you talk, make sure you know and you exchange and you say, hey, you know what, I'm building this and I'm going to teach this or I'm going to get people to do this program that has these pieces.
Speaker 2:Do you have any content I can use? Like I openly asked that question to sales enablement, let me use your content because I want the engineers to see what the salespeople are seeing in this realm of subjects. So do that. If you have an enabler, that is. I would say that's even more important than to go deep in the content building. The content building is there. You have subject matter experts. You can get the content from any other piece in your company. Make sure that you build those relationships internally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. I love how you said that subject matter experts. I was just on. Justin Michael and Julian Nimchinsky had me on the hype cycle games right before this.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's so funny.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that came up was around this guy said you can't hire a middle manager marketer because they don't know the product in the industry. I said, well, their job is not to know the content, their job is to facilitate getting it out of people's heads. And that was something that we dug into there. And then the other thing that you mentioned around the sales and product alignment. Anybody that wants to dig deeper into that, check out my interview with Christian Palmer on the sales management podcast. We go deep into product and sales alignment. I've got a question for you.
Speaker 1:This just came to mind. You said the sales enablement team, that other folks should go in and listen to the calls. Is there a role for a call analyst inside of an organization that can act as someone of a traffic cop? And it's not somebody that's just doing it for one group, but it might be somebody that looks at it for coaching purposes, for methodology adherence, for thinking of things for the product team, for finding zingers and one liners that marketing can use and then they can sort that out. And this person can leverage some of the AI and transcription tools that their job easier, but it's still a individual that analyzes and synthesizes information and then sends up snippets to different folks. Thoughts on that.
Speaker 2:I completely agree, and that could be depending on the size of the enablement team. Right, it could be the enabler that's doing it and you function as that traffic controller and, to your point, you make the software work for you as much as you can. Or if you have a team and one point in one of the companies. I had a team. We were three people and each one of the people in my team would be dedicated to a specific area BDRs, aes, account managers. They were in charge of being that traffic control, of saying what were the trends that we're listening to, that we needed to do maybe a retraining or reinforcement, who needed coaching on something, what were the things that we're listening that we should send to product or marketing, and what were some great quotes and also even things that they were talking about that would be important for customer success.
Speaker 2:Right, basically the account managers. When they had the conversations to do upsell hey, I'm just having this issue and your customer success or customer service team is not helping me. Hey, we need this right now. I completely agree, there should be a part of enablement that should be looking into the calls. You've been doing this, yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really good If they, because it's all there and companies already have business intelligence analysts. They have business intelligence teams. This is unstructured data. Yeah, and because of the structured data and you can, you can make it more structured with technology.
Speaker 2:You can, and the technology I mean when people talk it's so interesting, right, because everything now is AI and AI is going to replace me and whatever the AI work for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like it's so interesting, I'll prove the hype right, prove the hype right, because I don't know anybody that's been replaced by AI. Yeah, even though people are saying they're going to be, and until that happens, until I have a friend. What is it that? If it happens to someone you don't know, it's something. If it happens to somebody, oh, if you, that's, that's what it is. If it happens to your neighbor, it's a recession. If it happens to you, it's a depression. Yes, Exactly.
Speaker 2:Is that the old saying? I think so. So I would say this technology comes to elevate us, right. It doesn't come to replace. Yeah, maybe there's a function or something, but it's like the industrial revolution, yeah. So we're doing things by hand. Now we have machines that do things for us, right? We're not producing two pairs of shoes, we're producing 2000.
Speaker 1:And we're not upset that you and I aren't farming right now. It's hot outside.
Speaker 2:It is very hot really, and it's a and I live around farmlands and, believe me, every time I'm driving I say bless you, because I could not be doing this. But they also have equipment that help them farm. We're not farming like we were farming in the 50s, right, or in the 1800s, Like I see the equipment these farmers have and I'm like, wow, this is insane. It's insane.
Speaker 1:It's borderline fun to watch.
Speaker 2:It is, and I believe when I drive from here to my office, it's all farmlands and I get stuck behind these beautiful, you know equipment and I'm like what do you do? You look like a spider. You look like a, like a, like a transformer. You know it looks like a transformer. I'm like what? What's going to happen here? Well, let's think about how these AI tools and the sales tech staff can help you, and that this is one thing, corey.
Speaker 2:Another piece of advice for sales leaders, for the enablement leaders out there the AI, the technology, the coolest thing that can exist will never let let's do this again never be able to determine your process. If you don't have a process and you don't have a way, the tech is not going to figure that out for you. The tech is just going to spit things that you tell them to do. Let's. Let's use this example of the conversational intelligence. Right, if I don't tell the conversational intelligence tool what I need to listen to, it's going to spit everything to me. So we need to really understand our process.
Speaker 2:The amount of times I read in communities or in LinkedIn posts or in the Slack communities how do we better use this conversational insight? Because people do not understand how to get the value. And I say because you bought the piece of software without having a process in place first. Do you know what your team needs? Do you know what you need to look for? Do you know how to go in and I'm going to sound like an old programmer. You know, put the parameters of the software to actually make it work for you. And that doesn't happen because there is a disconnect between tech is going to come and solve my problems? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Tech is going to hear to help you and elevate you. You solve the problem with the process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. It's like when people run intern programs and then their interns don't do anything because they don't actually give them a job description Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes.
Speaker 1:Because they think they're going to learn by what Osmosis? Yeah, okay, this is a great analogy. So basically, the tech is just a bunch of interns.
Speaker 2:It's your choice if you actually get it to do something or not 100% and that works with every piece of software that you have in a company.
Speaker 1:It's not going to build your good process because the intern is like oh wow, this is so fascinating. Okay. So tech is an intern. Okay, I like this, let's roll with that.
Speaker 2:Tech is an intern. It's true. You don't give them direction, you don't give them a process, you don't tell them what they have to do. They're going to be like lost puppies Same thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're going to go around, sit down and say well, you know, it was another day, I just sat here, did nothing and earned my money. No, Like no.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to get some coffee?
Speaker 2:Get some coffee, have a chat, go for a nice lunch. But then comes the issue of oh, but we have all this tech stack and we really don't see an ROI. Is it the fault of the tech stack or is it the fault of you not having a process? And I always told people that have you built the process to really use that properly?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So then, as a sales organization and an engineering organization, how do we work together to make that adoption process easy for our customers? Because if you just leave it up to the sales team, then they're just dealing with what they got. What can the engineering folks do to make sure that implementation goes smoothly, that customers get activated and it's easy to use over the course of time?
Speaker 2:So that's an interesting one, because the engineers really don't use the product, if we think about it.
Speaker 1:The engineers build it Well. So I'm talking about enabling the customer Exactly, yeah, good.
Speaker 2:So that's a great idea, either of in the customer success section, right, and that you call them. We have called them many things Implementation, specialist customer success. However, you want to call professional services.
Speaker 1:The person that gets the customer set up and running.
Speaker 2:That person is very important and if you have an enablement person for that set of people, sometimes it is the revenue enablement right Person who's doing that, because there is a customer success enabler for that group of people is making sure that those people are the. Remember Tom Hanks and Big when he tested all the toys? Of course, of course, thank God, I'm not the only one that's that old?
Speaker 1:I'm way older than I look. I just have all my hair.
Speaker 2:It's so funny because sometimes I cite these 80s movies and people are like what I remember saying in a sales floor once, you know, like in Pretty Woman, and somebody looked at me and said what is Pretty Woman? I'm like, okay, we stopped this conversation here. Your homework is to watch Pretty Woman, we'll chat on Monday. So, anyway, the whole idea is that these are the people that have to play with it and see how the customer is going to use it. They have the customer use cases. They know how the customer's business work. They need to understand how to really use it so they can come back and say, hey, I'm seeing an issue or I'm seeing a problem, or let's help our customer.
Speaker 2:Go beyond the technology. The best people or the best companies where I have, you know, worked together to implement any piece of software have been the people where the customer success says in the first two or three meetings, we're not going to even touch the product, we're going to talk about how you work today and where do we need to do the changes. So you have to be a business analyst in a way right to really kind of understand the process or build the process with a customer. And this is not new when I started my career we call them consultants. But now I look back and I say I was a business analyst. I would go to the company physically because it was, you know, we were installing in servers in the company and I would like go and I would shadow their process and I would say this is their process.
Speaker 2:This is where our technology does. Where are the gaps? What do they need to change? What do we need to change in the software? So that was the time when we were doing a lot of, you know, a lot of coding for the customers and how do we make this work for them, where you manage all the change management and all those things. That's the mindset that you need to bring to this part. And then that connection point helps Not only the engineers kind of understand how to build it, it helps the salespeople when they're actually in front of the customer and doing a discovery process. Because if you as a salesperson understand the process of I don't know, let's say we're selling any part of the sales stack, it's like let me ask you the questions that are going to get me where I need to get you and then I know if the solution is going to fit you. I call it the business analysis kind of discovery type.
Speaker 1:I love it, yeah, and I think if a lot of people did that, they wouldn't have software that they didn't use. Exactly, that's a great topic. Yeah, a couple of things. If you're in sales and you're wanting to dig into this a little bit more, there's a couple of books that I love. One's called the platform revolution, okay, and one's called inspired. Those are really great books to understand. How do you actually go about building a product that people want? There's a lot of really fascinating topics in there. Interesting, and what it will do for a salesperson or sales enablement individual is. Now you've got some more context around how are products built and what's the theory on that side of the house. It'll help you communicate things better back to the sales team. So if check out those books and see if they're interesting if you're listening to this Exactly- and there's always.
Speaker 2:You know, now that we're going into books, I think it's always important to draw even from other industries and understand the success and the fails and what happened. It's interesting because I find myself recommending to people to read shoe dog, and the reason I tell people to read shoe dog it's because A it's very you understand, you live the story Like, you know the brand, you kind of get it, but you don't know all the things that happened before. Right now you have a pair of Nike's and you know what a Nike is. Yeah, it was magic. No it became huge.
Speaker 2:No, it was not magic. And you see the process of a product development so close in there and it's so relatable because it's a shoe. Yeah, and I say to people, if you read that book and you kind of understand where it comes from and how the products failed or really, like you know, took off, you kind of can translate and go to your industry and say, okay, how do I kind of look at this that way. So I would say shoe dog to add to that one.
Speaker 1:I love that and here's one of the things I've noticed there is a career path. A lot of times folks talk about going from sales to sales management, to sales leadership and things like this. There is a clear career path to go to chief operating officer, to president and to CEO, and where that breaks down is where folks don't understand some of the things that are going to happen, where folks don't understand some of the things that we're talking about today. So giving yourself access and insight into these other teams across the organization helps you pierce through that glass ceiling that is sales leadership and into the COO, president, ceo type roles. Otherwise, you end up as a person that might be a little disgruntled and I don't know, I'm not. I'm going to stop there, but I could say something that I'm not going to say.
Speaker 2:To be honest, I am a person that doesn't have a linear career. What would have said I was going to be doing enablement for products and engineering at this point in my life? Like nobody, nobody. I would have never predicted this. I would have never predicted to go into enablement. I would have never predicted to go into sales, like many of us, right, but the important thing is I think you know it's understanding that the more you kind of have a knowledge of concept of things in your company to your point will allow you to say is this a career path I would like to explore? Right, and especially people in sales get very tight into the way. From a BDR, I'm going to be an AE. From an AE and many sales manager, no, there's so many other possibilities for disappointment.
Speaker 1:I'm going to own real estate by the time I'm 30. I'm going to have three kids and they're all going to be boys. You're just going to be upset. It's not going to work.
Speaker 2:It's so bad. So give yourself the flexibility and and I'd say this to people I mentor especially I mentor a lot of immigrants where when you move and you're an immigrant, you have to make a lot of decisions around your career. I might be making some changes. I lived it. It's been 17 years in this country and I had to do some moves and some squeezing ins to find where I wanted to go. And. But you need to have, you need to be moldable and you need to be curious and learn and you nobody can teach that to you. That's something that you have to want to take. But I would say, get that curiosity and get it out there and then explore those areas right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that big world out there. Lots of things to learn, never, never shortage.
Speaker 2:Oh, my God never.
Speaker 1:Well, this has been great. Anything you want to plug or ways you want people to reach out to you.
Speaker 2:Well, if you want to reach out to me, I'm always available in LinkedIn so you can go to my profile. It's very easy. At linkedincom, slash n slash, adriana dot Romero and I connected with Corey. He will tag me. Just, you know, add me and I'm happy to chat a little bit more about that experience. And you know what I'm doing and how I'm building this to better kind of communicate these two worlds.
Speaker 1:You are the first person I met that's gone from sales enablement to product and engineering enablement your trailblazer.
Speaker 2:I'm a trailblazer, I'm getting there.
Speaker 1:Are we going to get a book out of this?
Speaker 2:We never know oh there we go. We never know.
Speaker 1:Speaking of speaking of books, I've written eight books. If somebody wants a free book on Kendall, type my name, corey Bray, and Amazon. Tell me which one you want. Send me all the free stuff at coach CRMcom. I'll flip it over to you. And if you're struggling to get the most out of your team and you're worried that your sales managers aren't coaching as good as they could, check out coach CRMcom. We've got a free version so you don't have to go beg the CFO for cash here in July 2023. You can go hop on that free version coach CRM and we'll see you next time on the sales management podcast. Thank you so much. Thank you.