Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
103. Filling your Sales Enablement Gap with Monty Fowler
Throwing a warm body at "enablement" doesn't work anymore. What does work? Check out this episode with one of my favorite people in the enablement world, Monty Fowler.
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach CRM Co-Founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. I think this is our second or third repeat guest. I'm really excited to have him back. We've got Monty Fowler, the Chief Revenue officer of Aspire6. And we're going to talk about how to fill the gap in sales enablement inside of your organization. And it's not about job descriptions, people, it's about how do we look at this gap and how do we identify what, who, how, when all those journalist questions to get that thing filled. Monty, how are you, great man, good to see you again. You too, I mean. The easy answer is you put a warm body in it and just let them go, but that doesn't really work, does it?
Speaker 2:Well, unfortunately, that's what a lot of companies do, because they view sales enablement or, let's call it more generally, revenue enablement to encompass the whole revenue function.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're triggering me already. Look, we're 20 seconds into this and he's using words I don't like.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's going to be fun, I'll parking lot that for a second, go ahead sir, okay, but when we think about revenue enablement, a lot of companies view it as just an addendum to what they're already doing around new hire training right. It's a way to get the sales process training right. It's, you know, a way to get the sales process where all the stuff is. Where to find the collateral. You know how to use Salesforce or HubSpot. That's the way they treat it and so many times they frame it as hey, this is just another function of HR or the people team, or it's another function of our marketing, our product marketing team, or it this just something one of our sales managers is going to take care of, and that's the wrong way to think about it, and when you're hiring for it, it's almost like it's a pressure release valve, because there's so much stuff that isn't getting done.
Speaker 1:People say, well, somebody has got to do it, let's just go get somebody else.
Speaker 2:That's usually the catalyst where a lot of companies will determine the need for enablement when they go through a hiring spurt, like a lot of companies did in 2020, 2021. And they were scaling up and they're bringing on a lot of people all at once and it breaks right. You have a really bad onboarding experience for your new employees and there's just chaos and at some point that becomes a strategic concern and then usually the revenue leader or the marketing leader or the HR leader has to take on the task of solving for that and, to your point, they go out and they just hire somebody who's a program manager Maybe they've done enablement before, Maybe they come from a more learning and development type of a pedigree or they just tag somebody who's like super unhappy in the product marketing team and go hey, you want to build some training?
Speaker 1:Yeah, or in 2021, maybe there were the BDR. That wasn't very good, but everybody liked him, and so they just gave him a new hat to wear Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right.
Speaker 1:So we're going to go down lots of rabbit holes today. People bear with us, we're going to rabbit hunting. So the first rabbit hole is discipline around hiring. When somebody has an open head count for a role many roles they just want to get it filled and they end up losing rigor and discipline around the hiring process. I think this happens less at the very senior executive levels, but when it comes to manager and director roles, man, if I can get that filled, then I can move on to the next thing, Not good, I would agree, I would agree.
Speaker 2:And you know it depends on the stage of the company, right? You know, early stage companies tend to have a much looser, more feeling or emotionally driven hiring process. They're looking for people who will fit the vibe of the 10 or 20 or 50 people.
Speaker 1:That's why I'm early stage, because I'm very emotional, yeah.
Speaker 2:But then as you get, you know, as you move up and as you take more and more VC money, you know the uh, the number of people who are interested in who you're hiring and why you're hiring certain individuals uh, increases and you have to be more diligent about your process. You know, and I've worked in a lot of series A, B and C, C companies and usually by the time you get to Series B you've got a pretty tight interview and just general hiring process, recruiting process yeah, when you scale, that's where you run into problems, right, Because now if you've got any inefficiencies in your process, it tends to break down pretty quickly. Process it tends to break down pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:And one of the areas that I see companies really skip steps is when they're hiring sales talent. They think just because you've worked for a SaaS company before and that you operated in this mode before, that your skillset, whatever that might be, is going to translate naturally into this next company. And in my experience that's just not true, Unless you're selling a direct competitor to what you sold before and that only solves, for I'll probably have some familiarity with ICP, target personas, the market and maybe the product from a competitive standpoint, but you still don't know anything about the company, you don't know anything about the culture and there's no guarantee you're going to be a fit. And companies who skip the step of doing the culture fit, of really validating the sales talent, they're the ones that suffer 40%, 50%, 60% year-over-year turnover in their sales ranks and, as you know, that is just a gaping hole in your operating expense bucket.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And even if you get that person to work for the competitor, they were familiar with it at that point in time. Well, things change. New entrants come into the market. Formerly indirect competitors become direct competitors, acquisitions happen, and then people get taken out and all of a sudden opportunity opens up. So that's one of the big challenges here is saying, hey, go do what you did there. Well, we're in a different time period. It's probably not going to work Exactly.
Speaker 2:Well, and that has never been more true than right now. I mean, just take a look at you know SDR and BDR talent that's out there and I would say even you know some of the more transactional level sales team members out there in the mid-market and SME space. That world has changed dramatically in the last four years. I mean dramatically. Before it was, hey, you were an order taker essentially and I hate to use that phrase and I don't want to make anybody upset, but I'm talking about it's okay, they were.
Speaker 2:Let's be honest. I mean, if you work for a PLG-focused company, you're taking orders. For the most part You're doing demos and you're taking orders. You don't know how to run a sales cycle. So if you go over to a SaaS company that's got a real enterprise sales cycle, you're deer in the headlights from day one. Unless they've got a great enablement function, they can sort of take you under their wing and teach you how to be an enterprise sales rep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think this is one of the challenges. When you say how do we build enablement and it might be from zero, it might be from where it is today. Whatever it is, there's often the immediate needs of the build and I think I probably shouldn't have used the word build the first time. There there's the we need to build stuff, and then there's the we need to operate stuff, and the challenge is that the types of people that like building stuff, well, as soon as they get done building, they want to move on and build the next thing. So what happens to operating that thing that was already built? Monty raises his hand at that point yeah, I mean that.
Speaker 2:That's me. I'm a builder, I love creating stuff. I do not necessarily like operating stuff long term. I don't mind going through the iteration process like building a better rocket, but once we've got all of our mission goals achieved I want to go build the next rocket. You know what I mean. But that's just me. But I do think for anybody who's going to build any function inside of an organization, but especially enablement, because enablement touches every single person who comes into your organization and is largely responsible for how they present themselves to your customers right, and they are the face of the company. They're all the customer facing roles that enablement primarily focuses on. So if your enablement function isn't doing well in that, you can bet that there's going to be some weird stuff going on in front of your prospects and customers. You can bet that there's going to be some weird stuff going on in front of your prospects and customers.
Speaker 1:And that's a disaster. Weird stuff, right? Okay, so say we're going to hire some people, right? Well, what I'd do first is I'd say, all right, we're going to hire some people. Let's start with who's been here for more than a year in their role and let's go see what they're doing. Let's go look at their pipeline, let's go listen to some of their discovery calls, let's go listen to some of the later stage calls. And if I'm not super happy with that, then A are we just going to bring these new people in and make them like these other people that we're not happy with? Or B why are we hiring people instead of fixing this? Because maybe that's the problem and not having enough people isn't the problem.
Speaker 2:Well, I know, the first time I built out an enablement function, I very much came from that point of view. It was like, hey, let's take a look at, because I was in a series B company at the time we had just scaled up the sales team to like 10 people. We had an SDR team, we had a CS team, we had some SEs on staff, so we had like a fully functioning revenue team with RevOps and everything. And that was a good time to really kind of take the temperature document, a bunch of stuff, and kind of put a stake in the ground in certain aspects of the customer journey. From an internal perspective. That made my job of building out the enablement function relatively straightforward, because I had a really good framing of what I was aiming to do.
Speaker 2:The next time I did it, though, I approached it from a completely different standpoint because I wasn't embedded in the organization. I was new to the organization, right, and I had to take it was currently being run today and I wanted to map an enablement capability function, asset, whatever, to each one of those customer journey stages to make sure that the person inside the company who is executing that customer journey stage is doing all the things that we need them to do, saying the right things, using the right messaging knows how to do their job. As what I call competent and confident, meaning, we validated that they've been trained and they know how to do the stuff and they report themselves that they're confident in their ability to do it and we've seen them demonstrate that.
Speaker 1:When there's an executive on the call, they actually do the thing instead of shriveling.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly so. There are a lot of different ways to build an enablement function, but those are the two ways I've approached it before and going forward, and with any companies that I currently work with, that's the way I would approach it. Hey, let's take a look at your customer journey map and then let's map an enablement moment, let's call it to each one of those discrete customer-facing functions that support the customer journey. That's a much more straightforward way, because in that you capture all of the things you talked about the tribal knowledge, the culture, the voice of your company because all of that stuff already exists. But, to your point, you can either do an explicit exercise of going and figuring out what those things are or, if you've got a good customer journey map where that stuff has already been built and thought through, you can just use that Right Now. The challenge is is that many organizations that I walk into haven't done that work or, if they have done it, they haven't done it to the degree that it really needs to be done.
Speaker 1:It's generally in people's heads.
Speaker 2:It is very much tribal knowledge. Going in and doing a customer journey mapping exercise in most companies, especially once they've got product market fit, isn't very difficult because they've got all the pieces. They've probably never looked at it in a holistic end-to-end way before and if they have, they've probably only done it from a marketing perspective to make sure they had all the bases covered for marketing product marketing, content marketing, all that.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah. And so when you touched on enablement working with new employees one of the risks is, man, nothing is easier than introducing brand new content to people that have never seen it before. So, hey, here's our product, here's our sales process. Or, if they're junior, entry-level folks, hey, here's some sales skills. The risk is that you focus all the energy on that basic stuff that anybody could win at and then, when you get to push comes to shove, how are we taking deals from stage three to closed one? How are we getting the win rates up? How are we getting the deal sizes bigger? How are we shorting sales cycles? Those are harder problems to solve. I think the thing I want to dig into now is how do we ensure that, as we're building the enablement function, we don't become the elementary school teachers, but instead we're pushing people hard. It's like math. What's that math class at Harvard that everybody talks about? Math 31 or whatever? It is the one that almost everybody fails at. I'm not saying you should make everybody fail at, but something that's really rigorous and hard.
Speaker 2:And so you can build those really strong sellers fast, instead of saying, oh, you got to have 20 years of experience to be good at this Cause. I don't believe that my doctor doesn't have 20 years of experience. Yeah, I think again it's what perspective you're coming from in your view of enablement. I think a lot of companies start with enablement 1.0, which is just providing a world-class onboarding experience for their new hires, and that's a worthwhile goal because, you know, in this age of high turnover and really difficult recruiting, it's important to provide a really solid onboarding experience for your new employees, not only to make them feel good about the company they just joined, but also to get them again competent and confident in the role as quickly as possible so that you can start generating revenue with that person.
Speaker 1:Well, especially if you're sorry to cut you off, but especially if you're hiring folks that have a really strong educational background. Absolutely what I love talking about is if you go out and you say we're going to hire people that graduated from high school and that went to college and they might have a master's degree. Well, those people spent 20 years of their life trying to get the right answer. Well, if you're going into a new company and your goal is to get the right answer about everything, you're just going to become a professional student. You're not going to be producing, so how do you get them producing fast instead of slipping into some academic form of their previous self?
Speaker 2:for three or four months. And that's where choosing the leadership for your enablement function I think makes all the difference in the world. Anybody can come in who's got the right background, whether it's a sales background, a marketing background or a learning and development background. If they have good familiarity with your company, with your products, with what the jobs are, they can build a competent enablement function right. But again, it's only going to cover that first base getting people onboarded and getting them competent and confident in the role and productive as quickly as possible.
Speaker 2:But if you hire an enablement leader who comes from a pure revenue pedigree, especially if they've been a sales leader, vp, even a director, director or VP or certainly a CRO, you're going to get a very different outcome in your enablement because their focus is going to be for sure on the first piece, the sales enablement 1.0. But what they're really aiming for and what they want to get to is the efficiencies that you can drive in the organization by having enablement 2.0, which is making sure that you've broken down the things you talked about. How do we ensure accelerated deal flow from first touch to closed one, to referral to happy customer, lifelong happy customer? How do we make sure that every demo we do you know, or three out of four of them, result in a sale right. How do we?
Speaker 1:Or at least not unforced errors.
Speaker 2:Or at least Exactly, exactly. How do we?
Speaker 1:Who cares if they close or not? Deals are not going to close. But don't bumble or fumble Exactly.
Speaker 2:And then another big one that I've seen which is getting a lot of attention right now is you know, a lot of our SaaS companies have moved up market. They've gone from the mid market up to enterprise and even bigger, like global companies, right? Well, as you know, that's a very different kind of sale, right? So all of a sudden you get SaaS people who are having to deal with procurement at a corporate level. Right, you know big multinational conglomerate, like dealing with IBM as an example.
Speaker 2:I lived this at my last company. We tried to do a big deal with IBM and nobody on our team had ever had to deal with procurement like that before. Right, so you got to learn. But then, most importantly, you got to document it and then you got to teach everybody else how to do it, somebody from a sales pedigree, especially a sales leadership pedigree. They're going to be looking at all of those pieces of the pie and saying how can I get this faster, better, more into the heads and, more importantly, into the actions of my sellers and my CS team and my SEs and all of that. So you're going to get a very different end state depending on which type of a leader for enablement you hire.
Speaker 1:So the challenge is how do you get somebody that was a CRO or VP of sales to take an enablement job, given the shift in compensation, first of all, and also the responsibilities, the day-to-day? Or do you really W2 employee and enablement with that pedigree?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think and it's interesting because the company I just left in May, Cantic they had a very evolved view of enablement and it was interesting because they and you were familiar with this they actually created a role for me which was a strategy revenue strategy role which cut across all the different functions in marketing and sales and CS, which cut across all the different functions in marketing and sales and CS. But the output of that strategy role was okay how do we move this into the minds and activities of our go-to-market team? And that's where the enablement piece got snapped onto strategy. Now, because of my previous role, where I had built an enablement function, I knew what to do, but this time it was informed by strategy and it was a completely different vibe all the way down the line.
Speaker 1:Dig us into that. What's the difference between having that strategy piece, which a lot of times enablement says strategy, but I don't believe it. It's tactical. It sounds like this was actually strategy.
Speaker 2:This was actually strategy. This was actually strategy. I had the imprimatur of the CEO and COO of the company to be an actual partner, thought leadership partner, with every one of the department heads across the revenue org. So that was everything from marketing, sales, cs, the system engineering organization, our customer support organization, our product house. I could literally talk to any leader in the organization and do a mind meld with them to figure out where we were misfiring or where we had opportunities to improve, whatever. And then I would make recommendations about process policy, changing tooling, whatever. But again, all of that distilled down to okay, whatever we ended up doing differently, whether it's a process, a policy, a new piece of software or something they need to be trained in, it all ended up on enablement's plate because it had to be operationalized and put into the head.
Speaker 1:Right, so the enablement was the tactical layer of the strategy work that you were doing, exactly.
Speaker 2:And having those two functions merged and under one consistent leadership was amazing, because I was able to be so much faster to solutioning stuff than if I had to do an analysis from what I could see, then go validate those things with this leader or that leader yeah, then earn the right to ask hey, I think we should do this and go through all the politics. I didn't have to deal with any of that.
Speaker 1:Water it down to the point where it doesn't actually work anymore.
Speaker 2:I didn't have to deal with any of that because if I identified that there was an issue somewhere, like one of the first things I noticed is that we were not utilizing our CS team to the extent that we should for a SaaS company of our stage and at our scale. We were missing a ton of upsell, cross-sell, referral business and we had a fundamentally I don't want to say broken, but we weren't paying attention to renewals the way we should. We were like 40, 50% of our deals were late renewals and that's an unforced error for any SaaS company, let's be honest. So I sat down with the head of the CS team and I said, hey, I would like to spend a quarter of my strategy time working with you and your team to figure out how we can do this, this and this. And he bought in. He's like yes, let's do this.
Speaker 2:We put three projects together. We knocked them out in a quarter and absolutely blew the doors off. We reduced churn by like a significant amount, like 50%. We were already very disciplined in terms of churn, but we got it down even lower, but bigger than that. We took that 40 or 50% late renewals and we got it down to like 5%. Wow, yeah, and that drops directly to the bottom line, right. And, more importantly, we were able in the process to teach the CS team how to be better bird dogs for upsell deals, cross-sell and ask for referrals Completely changed the vibe of the CS team and it was probably one of the biggest wins, one of the things I'm most proud of ever being able to work on with somebody, because we set out a very, very bold vision and absolutely crushed it.
Speaker 2:And you know, I give a lot of credit to Matt, the leader of the CS team, who, by the way, just got promoted to VP. Well done, my friend. He just was so enthusiastic and grateful to have somebody at the executive level come down and say, hey, how can I help? And man, he took advantage of it and his team really benefited and the company really benefited. That to me is like the template that's a great positive use case for enablement doing what it's supposed to be doing, making a real difference.
Speaker 1:It's one of the first examples that I've ever heard of actual revenue enablement. I kind of laughed when you said that earlier, because I generally laugh because you don't see it very often where they're really in there and impacting it from the top down, because if you can't go to the head of CS and drive change in quarter, then you're not revenue enabling, you're an analyst.
Speaker 1:I completely agree. I would agree. It's like having a CFO sidekick come in there and give the chief of staff a paper that the CEO might read and then bring it up at the executive meeting. Maybe somebody does something about it. That was a purposefully convoluted story.
Speaker 2:But that was the difference, I think, at Kentik versus my previous role, and nothing. I'm not throwing shade at all against my former leaders at Lobb, because they didn't know what they didn't know and I didn't know what I didn't know about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah they only know what they've seen before.
Speaker 2:Right, I was just a sales leader, that's all I knew. And they said, hey, we need an enablement function, want to build it, and I'm like sure, sounds like fun. But this time around we had buy-in at the need this if we're going to accelerate our growth, and all that. And they really meant it, because they gave me the capability to do what I needed to do and just trusted me to do the right stuff and I had to check when I wanted to spend money and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, it was one of the best experiences I've ever had in my career and it's a template that I'm using now going forward into my new company with our fractional business, because I think it's the right way to do it, and the results were undeniable.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think that I love that. I think that's an amazing story. And you, working directly, your direct boss was who? The COO? Yeah, yeah, working directly for the COO. But the problem is that you don't see that many enablement roles where the CEO, the C-suite's even involved in it. Maybe the CRO, but you're deprioritized because what's the CRO care about? The most Forecast, who runs forecast Ops? So it's one of those things where enablement is the leading indicator of success. Ops is either the in the moment or lagging indicator of success, and the person closer to the board deck it's the more love.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and look, I think across the board, enablement doesn't get the leveling that it deserves. It's treated as a tactical function for many, many companies and again, it's either a snap on to the people team, you know, as part of their learning and development Gross, I know, and that's like it's like hello boomer. Whenever I see that, I'm like who's running your company, you know?
Speaker 1:Yeah right.
Speaker 2:But the other side is, you know, the product marketing, or just marketing in general, tends to get tasked with enablement functions and that literally, literally, stop at demand gen.
Speaker 1:I mean they're never going to go beyond that right, right. So I think that's wild, because what is? What? Is sales enablement have to do with marketing?
Speaker 2:that's a great. Well, I think a lot of people just think most of the content, or a lot of the content, comes from product marketing. But but it doesn't.
Speaker 1:It shouldn't actually Show me a salesperson that's made a bunch of money selling, that says that content is one of the top 10 reasons for their success. Show me that person. They don't exist.
Speaker 2:I would agree, Unless your product is content yeah sure, yeah, whatever.
Speaker 1:I posted a joke last night Cause I was I was working on some stuff. It was like one in the morning I said, uh, the most important thing in sales is page six of that PDF.
Speaker 2:And seeing, how much time the?
Speaker 1:prospect sent looking at it. Gee whiz, yeah the the content stuff drives me wild.
Speaker 2:It's funny. It's funny that a similar thought crosses my mind every time I'm on a demo with a you know a content management platform or something like you know outreach that says, oh we can, we'll show you when somebody clicks on your content, what page they and how long they stay on that page. I'm like, why am I getting excited about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, so you're going to show me if they're real dumb and can't read fast, or if they if they had to go get a coffee while they were looking at page six of the document, I think, for the only place where I see that actually super valuable is for investor pitch decks, because they're often read very quickly. And you're looking at the difference between did they spend two seconds on it or 20 seconds on it?
Speaker 2:That's cool, but did someone Well, that becomes a heat map that's actually valuable for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. I love that. So I don't want to. Anytime we're knocking something, I want to show the positive, that's a positive, but in terms of like, what are we sending people?
Speaker 1:Why aren't we presenting it live and are we having our prospects sell on our behalf? Sometimes you have to, I understand that, but have we done everything humanly possible to enable our sales team to not let our salespeople have their prospects sell on their behalf? Prospects don't know how to sell your product. They've never done it before and I've never been brought into I'm not saying this doesn't exist, but I've never been brought into a company and they said, oh hey, look, we really enable our prospects to sell on our behalf and we do a great job and they have a really high close rate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, the only time I've ever deployed that with any success is when you do live events and you bring actual customers to interface in real life with your prospects. That's an awesome way to get there. I love that. But with your prospects? That's an awesome way to get there. I love that. But again, they're not selling on your behalf. They're just enjoying a great steak, some good wine and telling stories Social proof.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you just have live social. It's a case study that talks and it's fun, maybe.
Speaker 2:Because, honestly, I think if I'm considering a vendor, you know, and I'm going to spend my money with them and they invite me to a dinner like that I'm just impressed by the fact that a CEO or CRO shows up for an event like that. As a customer of that company, I'm considering that's good enough for me. Seriously. That tells me that this is a company that people are deriving so much value from that. They will vote with their time Correct.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because they got invited to other things that night and they didn't come for that.
Speaker 2:That answers all my questions. At the end of the day, I don't care what their experience is with the product, unless it's a bad one, and if it was a bad one, they wouldn't be at the steak dinner, correct?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so just their pure presence tells you all you need to know before a word is spoken.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And it's a lot more fun than just reading a quote in a freaking piece of yeah, exactly, so yeah, the content stuff I don't, I don't love. And so then you're getting in the fractional game which I know you've done from time to time in the past. I think that identifying and fixing things is not a W2 job. It's not, and unless you have the role that you add.
Speaker 1:So if your strategy reports to the CEO, it's almost like you were a Banner BCG consultant that worked for the company. But why hire a W2 person to fix three problems? That seems silliness.
Speaker 2:Well, it is silly, and especially for the kinds of companies that would maximally benefit from getting on some of these bandwagons sooner rather than later. You know, if you're a seed stage company or a series A company who just got your big pile of money and you don't have your go-to-market strategy mapped out already, you need to hit pause and you need to hire a fractional. You do not need to hire a full-time person. You do not need to get a, you know, player, coach, vp of sales who's going to come in and figure it out and document Cause, yes, they will probably figure it out, but they're literally going to be building the plane while they're flying and that-.
Speaker 1:For the first time. Yeah, for the first time right Because anybody who's done it?
Speaker 2:before is not going to do it a second time.
Speaker 1:No one that's really good at being a VP of sales is going to go work for your series, a company at two A's.
Speaker 2:No, that's how you get the title in a lot of these companies for the first time is by saying, yeah, I'll build that and that's fine. But you know, if anybody's ever tried to, you know, even fix a lawnmower while you're riding, it usually crash, certainly an airplane.
Speaker 2:So I recommend that you're better off going out and hiring you know, a fractional who has done it 50 times at 50 different companies in 10 different markets. You know in different vertical industries, because they're going to have a perspective that you could never hire an FTE that you could afford. You know to do that. So you know you're going to get a much better result and basically what you're going to get is the design for the airplane and proof that it actually works like the wind tunnel results, and all that that you can then hand off to a sales director, right, who can execute and stuff.
Speaker 1:So it's a much better and it's as valuable, if not more, to know what not to do in addition to what to do, because companies waste a lot of time on stuff they shouldn't be bothering with, especially in these stages we're going to go buy all these things and do all this stuff. I always say what's your milestone you're trying to hit? Oh, we need 30 more customers. Okay, Well, why do you need eight technology products and four salespeople to get 30 customers?
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly, well and dude. I mean, you're on LinkedIn every day and you see just the I'm trying to be kind here.
Speaker 1:Dorks, you can call them, we call them dorks here.
Speaker 2:Well, they're just some really bad advice, man. It's like especially, you know, I've been, I've been following this whole clay thing that's been going on in this, and all I see in my mind's eye when I hear anybody describe what they're doing with clay is a Rube Goldberg contraption, yeah, contraption that nobody understands how it works, but something magical happens out the end of it. You know, that makes you go oh, that was cool. Yeah, but it just seems like we're over complicating something that ought to be very straightforward, right, you know?
Speaker 1:well, maybe I'm, maybe I'm showing my age, I don't know there's a lot of money to be made in the over complication business, and not just as a vendor, as an employee. Well, I'll tell you if you can overcome. I knew this guy one time. He comes in as a head of engineering and he does two things, three things, three things. He takes over middleware personally. Nothing else works without the middleware. So he now is the single point of failure for the whole engineering team.
Speaker 1:Then he says we need to rewrite these parts of the product so that creates a six month project. Okay, so now he can't be fired. Then he gets a dog and says that he has to take care of the dog on Tuesdays and Thursdays because his wife can't do it those days. So he doesn't come to the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This dude just secured himself the lowest accountability six to nine month period of work I've ever seen in my life. And there is so much money to be made in overcomplicating things and just pushing string and moving things around that don't need to be moved around.
Speaker 2:That's why we don't mess around with clients. We're very direct and kind, you know, and loving way. But yeah, you know, we just speak truth to people and say, hey, this is what's broken. You validated it, you've told us how much it's costing you. Does it hurt enough to do something about it?
Speaker 1:Well, this is the. This is the difference between being external and being internal, is I'm sure, when you're internal, a couple of those gray hairs on your chin stand up and say I'm not BS anymore, I'm going to say what I think, but a lot of people aren't like that.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I've earned. I've earned the right to speak that way to founders, right, they know they. They know, when they invite me in the door, that that's what they're going to get, cause I'm pretty direct, even in the interview process, but, honestly, that's what they need, you know cause what they need, but they often don't get it.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes people tell the truth because they're worried about well, why would I sacrifice? Think about this. You go home, you say, hey, honey, sorry, I lost my job today because I told him the truth. And your wife says well, how are we paying the mortgage this month? Why don't you just not tell the truth next time? That has happened so many times and it creates culture.
Speaker 2:It does. It does and not the kind of culture that you want. You know, I don't know too many successful organizations that are just full of, you know, yes, men and women who just go along to get along. That doesn't work long-term.
Speaker 1:Well, the federal government's pretty good at just growing and getting bigger. That's, that's pretty much it, but I wouldn't call them successful. I mean, they are the largest organization in the history of the human race, that's. There's something to be said for that, probably. But you know once, once the beast gets so large, it has no natural enemies, it becomes its own enemy there's always a virus that's it, that's it, that's it okay.
Speaker 1:So then you, you figure out enablement how to initially approach it. Here's another thing that goes to human nature and people drifting towards their comfort zones. Well, heck, we solved it. You used that customer success example earlier. I go in and I got the renewals from 40% of them were coming in late to 5% of them were coming late, which is phenomenal. We turned the CS people into folks that could do more discovery, bird dog opportunities, et cetera. Well, the natural easy thing to do would be well, let me see if we can polish this up a little bit more. The hard thing would be well, let's go find the other big problem. That's terrible, that doesn't have any easy answers, because a lot of this stuff there's no right answer. How do you motivate somebody in a enablement role to say, all right, now you're stepping outside your comfort zone and you're going to take lots of personal risks to go find the next big thing to do?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's related directly to what their scope of responsibility is from day one, right? So if an enablement function is created to just do good onboarding with the sales team you know, sdrs and down then that's one thing. But you know, if they give the leader the imprimatur like I had, which is, hey, you're a peer to these other leaders across the revenue org and your job is to partner with them and fix stuff, yeah, figure out what's broken and go proactively fix it, and that's a very different framing for enablement. And again, it takes a very different kind of leader and somebody coming from a learning and development or a marketing pedigree, or even just a program manager enablement pedigree, isn't going to have the strategic vision and capability to typically take that on.
Speaker 2:I'm going to your earlier point. So how do you attract somebody who's a former sales leader, a VP of sales or a CRO even? How do you attract them into an enablement function? I think it takes the kind of person that enjoys creating more than operating, somebody who is intellectually curious, natural problem solver, gets excited about tackling big, hairy problems and gets the satisfaction from the result, not necessarily the you know, the big paycheck that should come with it.
Speaker 2:You know, you do make a sacrifice to. You know, in terms of earning potential to be an enablement leader, I would say, versus a sales leader. Now, my last company were they were again. They had a very evolved perspective on the value of enablement, so they paid me at the top of the market but I still made probably 40% less than if I had been a sales leader, and that was okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love the job satisfaction man, because it's not all about. I always say if people are actually money motivated, then why aren't they staying up all night prospecting and selling into Australia? Because they actually aren't.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah, people want money.
Speaker 1:They don't. It's not the thing that you're globally optimizing for.
Speaker 2:No, and I mean and I can only speak for myself, but I know I got to a certain point in my career where, you know, the switch kind of flipped in my head from get all I can for me to to do all I can to help others get as much as they need or want.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. So I'm much more plugged into, as you know, coaching, mentoring, helping raise up that next generation of sales professionals and really helping them do it in a in a in a stepwise, consistently high integrity way. And that's why enablement was such a great fit for me, because now I actually had the ability to actually steer people in the right direction through high quality training, coaching, mentoring, listening, participating in sales calls with them, critiquing their sales calls and really being able to lean in that way. You know, not a lot of leaders have the luxury to be able to do that, but a company that that takes let's just say it's a $400,000 all in flyer on that and they hire the right person. They're going to get so much additional value from that, Uh, especially if they've got a long pedigree in sales and sales leadership.
Speaker 1:I think that's a risk that people are scared of.
Speaker 2:It is, and that's why, again, as fractionals, we try to plug that hole in the most efficient way possible. We can come in and give you the result that you're looking for at a much lower cost and a much lower risk level. And then, once you prove out that the function can get what you're expecting it to deliver, then you can invest in the right person to run it long-term.
Speaker 1:To operate it? Yeah, okay. One last question. I know we're running a little short on time. When you think about frontline managers another same human nature we want to drift towards our comfort zone, but also what's the crisis? And the crisis is hitting the number this month or this quarter. They've got all of those things to focus on. How have you found success creating time, bandwidth and focus for those people to operate some of these enablement activities, whether it's call coaching or training or something that's beyond the day to day coaching or talking about deals?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a big question and we could spend another hour just talking about that. But you know, kind of in a nutshell again, you've got to have the right leadership culture in order to operationalize that. Because everybody's got to buy into the idea that, hey, as a manager, I don't just look at spreadsheets and I don't just ask, you know, inane questions about deals. I'm actually responsible for helping these people get better and better and better, week over week, month over month, especially if things are not running the way we expect them to Right. So getting buy-in from top level leadership that that needs to be part of the DNA of their frontline sales leaders that's job one, Number two hiring the right people You've got to have the right front. I think. Frontline sales leaders that's job one, Number two. Hiring the right people, You've got to have the right front. I think frontline sales leadership is the most important role in any revenue organization because they honestly make or break the machinery right. And having the right person and I had the great pleasure of working with one of these leaders at my last company.
Speaker 2:I'll call him out by name Paul Sansomino one of the finest frontline sales directors I've ever seen Absolutely, stunningly capable enterprise sales rep. He could close any deal Amazing. But more importantly, he would ride shotgun with every one of his teammates and help them get better all the time, and he loved it. He loved it, and that's what you need in a frontline sales leader. So if you've got somebody like that, it almost doesn't matter what enablement is doing in the background, because they're going to be laser focused on getting their squad or their platoon mission ready all the time so that they can just kill it. But if you can back that up with fantastic enablement, the layer of bandwidth that that person doesn't have.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly, exactly. So this way you can aim them and the amount of resource time they have for coaching and mentoring and feedback. You can aim them at exactly the right stuff, because enablement has the view, along with our friends in RevOps, of where we're broken or where we're falling down. Hey, if our demo conversion demo to close conversion is broken, let's figure out what we're doing wrong with demos and let's train the team. And then let's make sure that the sales leader is reinforcing that on every one, on one and every time they listen to a call and give feedback Right.
Speaker 1:That's the teamwork we need. So if you're in an executive role out there and you're looking at your team, you're saying how are the folks working together? Team, you're saying how are the folks working together? What Monty just went through, where you've got enablement with the bandwidth able to funnel things to the frontline manager that has less bandwidth to use what they need to use to address the most impactful problems in the moment that's great teamwork I love it and then having a tool like Coach CRM, you can just pay me afterward.
Speaker 2:Having a tool like CoachCRM really helps because it allows us to share the responsibility between enablement and frontline sales leadership on what needs to be coached, if it's actually coached, what the outcome was and what more we need, and be able to see that at a project level is fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because if you're not coaching, then what are you doing? And I love asking CEOs like how are your frontline managers coaching your teams?
Speaker 2:They're running with the bulls hoping not to get gored. That's pretty much what's happening.
Speaker 1:That's it All right, Monty. Well, thank you so much. How can people get in touch with you?
Speaker 2:Anybody can reach out to me at M Fowler, m F-O-W-L L? E R at aspire sixcom, or you can just find me on LinkedIn, monty Fowler, you can click book a meeting with me, just as an offer for anybody out there. If you're a sales leader, ceo, founder, even a board member, and you feel like something's broken and you just need to talk to somebody, I'll spend an hour with you no charge, listen to you, give you some solid thoughts and yeah, that's just my freebie for today. No coupon code necessary no coupon code.
Speaker 1:Necessary Coupon code is the Sales Management Podcast. Thanks everybody, we'll see you next time.