Hello and welcome to OrchestrateSales.com's Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.

On Episode 5 Sales Enablement Society Fore-founder and Entrepreneur Craig Nelson joins Erich Starrett in the OSC Studios to go in the wayyy back machine to a coffee shop in 1998 when he registered the domain Sales Enablement dot com and remembers wondering "do I reserve it for one year or three?"

He breaks his journey down into three generations of Enablement history:

• Gen 1: Centralized Sales Content Thing (2003-2013) 
• Gen 2: Content Packaged with Training, a Sales Thing (2013-2023)   
• Gen 3: Sales Execution Across Buyer Journey, a Sales & Customer Success Thing (2024 - ) 

Please take a listen (and subscribe to!) the podcast to hear about all of the above, and so so much more.

Let's Elevate Enablement TOGETHER!

Join in the journey at OrchestrateSales.com/podcast

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Erich Starrett (Studio Mic): In season three, we hop in the enablement

time machine and take a look back with those who had a role in or

contribution to enablement history.

Then pause in the present to address a few modern themes and finally shift

our focus to the future and what it may bring for enablement teams.

On today's show, our time machine is going way back, well before

what is now the seven year anniversary of the founding of the Sales Enablement

Society to the even earlier days before those two words, sales and enablement,

together were even really a thing.

They were just in their beginnings.

And the guest to take us back, sales enablement pioneer Craig Nelson, who

takes us all the way back to 1997, when Craig was a director of sales

engineering, enablement, using the word back then, and operations for NetIQ

all the way up through 2003, where he led sales engineering, sales ops,

and global training organizations, and was responsible for enabling

the All customer facing roles.

He's been doing it since the beginning.

, then in 2003, he began his own company as CEO and co founder of iCentera, which as

you may have already heard mentioned by Sales Enablement Society founder, Scott

Santucci, in the first episode of season three is a company that provided a sales

enablement SaaS solution that scaled to over 150 customers and to profitability.

And in 2011, Isentera was acquired by Kalidus Cloud.

I never, how do you, how do you say that?

Well done CallidusCloud..

You got it.

I got lucky and ultimately SAP.

We've all heard of that one and I can say three letters Since then

You're a roll, Erich.

yeah, hey, I'm on a roll man Since then craig has both led global

enablement training and operations for SAP themselves As global VP, probably through

that acquisition and started up even a few more companies, of which I will hand the

mic to Craig in a minute to let him speak.

But in that process, Craig played a role in pioneering the sales

enablement market, creating two U.

S.

patents for providing intelligence centers for marketing and sales.

Just to name a few.

Why not?

So, Craig, enough out of me.

Let's jump into the first question, and you can fill in the blanks on anything

I may have missed as we travel to the past, then present, and then the future

through your sales enablement lens.

So, let's start with that.

, when did you first hear the words sales and enablement

and what do they mean to you?

So, Erich, uh, thanks for having me, first of

all, and thanks for teeing it up.

It's kind of fun to hear, the memory lane.

Interrupt me at any point.

Whenever we come across something where you're thinking to yourself,

you know what, we actually learned something from that.

That's why I go back in time, right, to not repeat mistakes.

If there's something I say that sounds like a real learning point

and kind of a juncture in enablement.

Let's stop and go down that road

because to answer your first question, we were using the term

sales enablement in the late 90s.

. And the company was a company called Mission Critical, merged with

NetIQ, and we were going for it.

We felt that we'd be able to scale that company from 50 to 500 reps.

That was after going from five to 50 reps.

So, we kind of went through the been there and done that of the growth

of the sales organization direct.

We went from no channel partners to thousands of channel partners.

We looked at sales enablement as the secret sauce.

I'm doing that in air quotes here.

And when somebody would ask, how are we going to do this?

We're going to hire another 25 reps.

Are we going to ensure their success?

Well, that's today's sales onboarding.

How are we going to ramp another 1000 partners?

And not have a contribution rate of 10%, but maybe, 50 percent that

weren't just taking the paper, but actually doing the selling.

So we felt confident myself and a couple of other founders of the company called

iCentera, which little known fact , Erich iCentera stood for Intelligence Center

for a New Era of Marketing and Sales.

Oh, I love it.

So there, there's actually some meaning behind that.

The idea of that was we felt confident that this was for real.

We registered, the domain sales and avid.

com in 98.

Uh, I still remember sitting in the coffee shop, uh, Erich, the question

was, do I reserve it for a year or three?

You didn't want to, to outspend, right, what you were willing to invest time

wise, but I went for three and, and, you know, happy that I did because over

the coming years, each of the companies that we worked with, didn't see us as a

word or a definition, they, they saw us as a discipline and for those that I've

had a chance to, to work with over the years, you mentioned Scott Santucci, I

remember connecting with him and Brian Lambert, out in, Northern Virginia at

their offices there and, and it went from a, a two hour meeting to, the balance of

the morning and lunch because we had that same passion that was, I would say 2007,

2008 . So this is before the SES, and I remember even way back then wondering.

Is Dreamforce going to do it for us, or maybe we should have our own home?

Right?

And then Scott was , that passionate person that was out promoting enablement.

So you registered sales enablement.com in 1998.

Like what was, were other people saying that?

Or was that in the iCentera circles?

Was that Salesforce related?

What solidified that enough to hit go on go daddy?

I think , the term just kind of made sense.

I remember getting a lot of grief from people that said,

you realize that's not a word?

And, uh, and, and so, you know, I said, well, somewhere in Great Britain, it is.

I'm, I'm, I'm certain of it.

So, one of our co founders was , from London.

And, so the, the more important part, if we get past the term sales enablement,

, we went out and test marketed the idea, Erich, , and I found a company

called Ventaso, if you really want to go back in time, Tim Reister, Ariel

I was going that's Riesterer!

I remember going to a show in San Francisco and they had a booth

presenting this Ventaso technology.

And what it did, I can still remember it because it really made an impression

on me with that, it assembled content on the fly specific to a particular proposal

or whatever was needed by the sales rep.

I looked at that and I said, it's about time.

Right.

There's something that, you know,

CRM was there, right?

Siebel and pivotal and all these old technologies before salesforce.

com,

so the question was what salespeople actually need to be better.

I saw them, I saw the Savo group.

Not necessarily talking about the term enablement or the technology

then they weren't using the term sales enablement, but it

was doing sales enablement.

Capabilities.

And that was the more important part at the time.

Talking about, CRM isn't enough for sales success.

More was needed.

Once you go out to the market, I think in a sense that other people are thinking

about it, , late nineties, , that gave us the energy and sort of the passion

to, to launch our own companies.

And, you know, firsthand launching companies, it's a bit of a risk.

Yeah, I've heard of that risk.

That's such a helpful snapshot in time.

Because I hear SAVO discussed in those early days, late

90s, um, and Ventaso for sure.

it's just interesting to step back in that time space with you when Craig

Nelson, registered SalesEnablement.

com, a great piece of enablement history.

You were influenced by the Siebels, Pivotals, which is fun to say those

out loud now, whatever 20 plus years later, and SAVO and Ventaso.

So those were the core, you were inspired by to go down the

iCentera with your partners.

Yeah.

And the question was, what was missing?

And I think we have learned the old fashioned way that sales

onboarding, which is pretty common today in terms of use cases.

Wasn't as common back then, but we felt early on that, it was less of a art, more

of an art and a science selling was, so there was things that we could repeat.

We felt from the very beginning that the one week sales onboarding, remember

those in person sales onboarding.

out at corporate, we, we, we learned very early

thick binder, of course.

That lot of dead trees.

Yeah.

we always wondered how far those binders made

it from corporate, right.

To home.

We felt about half of them made it to the airport.

So, we felt early on that there was more to it, things like continuous

learning , and then you launch a product and you're back to the drawing board.

for the first decade, you know, one of the big conversations is what's the term?

What's the definition?

But I think more importantly, how does it work with CRM and other technology that

was sitting on the desktop of the rep?

That's a great snapshot.

And you'd broken down with me beforehand that you'd put the early days of

sales enablement in a couple of buckets.

I believe you called generation 1 kind of from 2003 to 13, which is where

we've been hanging out for a minute.

Centralized sales content

. As you move from 2013 to present generation two was content

packaged with training and it became more of a sales thing.

Can you talk a little bit about why you chose those headlines and how

that plays into what you just shared?

Yeah, the early days we, , 2003 launching iCentera,

2005, six, about 30 clients.

These were small companies that, in a sense, couldn't afford an intranet,

I'm really going to date myself here.

couldn't afford some kind of discussion forum.

And we were bringing that to small business.

not unlike what salesforce.com was doing.

And when we came across them, we felt, there's, there's a

great go to market partner.

We also found another company at the time, Eloqua.

And we felt that if you were to, combined up, we, we felt it was a dream team,

CRM, demand generation, sales enablement, but those three combined would be

something special to an SMB, which is trying to make a name for themselves.

That's where we focused, but for the first five years, when we looked

at our deployments, so many of them were a content store for sales

pitch decks for maybe brochures, a couple of customer facing things.

And a single source of truth was a positive term, and we, felt

pretty good about it, single source go there, you get the latest,

but the first decade, it was really hard to, to see these

clients just take advantage of it as a central place to store.

So that's why I call it, you know, a central content store thing

it wasn't a educational thing, training thing at that point or

coaching thing, but it needed to be.

And that's where I see in about 2011, 12, 13, some of the players we know today that

are in market with enablement solutions.

They began to embrace this idea that when you deliver the content, deliver

a bit of training, deliver a bit of coaching, you know, deliver something

so that frontline person can do better on the first pass, can improve over time.

I see the segue from it being a content thing to a sales thing

over that first 20 year period.

I love that you brought in, , Eloqua.

, Jill Rowley has come up on pretty much every single one of these, and in fact,

she's one of our guests in season three.

You had also mentioned a, a combination of a connection with her and the current

CEO can you share that with the audience?

Yeah, many years ago, when I was talking to the, CEO of

Eloqua, he said, look, let's do a partnership, let's use one another's

technologies and really begin to differentiate from the major CRM players.

You remember back then, Siebel is actually the main CRM player.

Salesforce is wanting to, you know, beat them at their own game.

And they were working with companies like us, so yeah, we went to market together.

We formed alliances.

There wasn't the SES at the time.

Tim Reisterer, might smile about this.

American Marketing Association.

It was his firm , and Eloqua and my firm at the time that, that said to the

AMA, you know, let us go to your, your client base and let the marketeers know

that we're going to take your content.

We're going to bring it to the frontline.

We're then going to get discussions going, ratings going.

We're going to look at, , not just the sales pickup, but the

customer pickup on your content.

We're going to tell you what white papers are needed and

which ones should be disposed.

I'd say this is a, a big pitch for the SES if it wasn't for this network,

the enablement industry could have went south, at any point it could

have been, gobbled up by, by one of these major players and been less

a discipline, more of a technology.

But, it really was a combination of us.

Going to market together our clients were asking, you know,

why wouldn't you come together and deliver, a SaaS solution combined.

So that's what SaaS did for us.

We were able to combine our solutions , we got together at Dreamforce as partners.

I remember talking to people like Jill, she was very social and

online and, being able to learn what she was learning from clients.

Cause in the end, that's what we're all trying to figure out what's next.

I love how you brought that all together.

It is a strong story of how much of a role vendors had in

evolving, , sales enablement.

, and Jill as the social selling queen , helped y'all get the word

out in many ways you just combined so many incredible stories into

one in a way I've never heard it.

So question two how, when, and where does the then sales enablement society.

And now as of a couple months ago, revenue enablement society, and we'll

talk about that in a little bit fit into your timeline and professional journey.

Yeah, I'll pick up on the point about working with

Brian and Scott Santucci because they gave us vendors at the time real

energy, to say this thing is for real.

when I heard from Scott a number of years later, that There was going to be

a get together right down in Florida, enablement professionals, most of us

made it down there on our own dime.

We went down just to see what was going on and where it was headed.

I think it was an important meeting because, you know, some of the people

we had worked with over the years, did a lot convey the disciplines.

I'm taking sort of a walk down memory lane from a technology standpoint,

Erich, talking about the tech vendors.

But there was all of these other content players, system integrators,

we've worked on deals with some of the largest Accenture and some of the

others with these deployments, they were, full on enablement deployments,

but for many, they weren't full on enablement deployments and they

were used as a content store, right?

It's a central place for, you know, your marketing material.

Well, that's just not enough.

And we felt that sales enablement society was going to bring it to the next level.

And you think about all these roles showing up in companies, one of our

worries early on was we were going to be pigeonholed as sales trainers,

as opposed to something strategic.

So to, to me, the SES over the years has really done a great job of

saying, this is not a sales thing.

It's not a marketing thing.

It's a company thing.

Some of our early clients, I'll give a shout out to Thomson Reuters.

I remember the first division using us over there.

, it was a small division, tax and accounting, and they just took off, and

then another division, and then another division, but with each one of those

divisions, they, they positioned it, not as a central place for marketing

content, they positioned it as that next thing to launch a new product.

To launch new sellers, partnerships.

I think SES did a great job of promoting the role, the discipline.

Pretty much each quarter we have a local user group here in Twin Cities.

I'm in Minneapolis.

Shout out Lori Gross

she did a great pitch, , at her last, , meeting,

you know, Jessica Ryker and Jocelle.

I mean, they, they've really taken the Twin City chapter to the next level,

it's going strong, it's nice to have these local chapters Erich because

then you can , have a beer and talk about things in less serious, mode

That's where it happens, right?

And what a great crew you just named in the Twin Cities.

It might be cold up there, but you're keeping warm with

those beers and enabling folks,

Yeah, , each one of those companies, , Erich,

they're the passionate companies.

They believe in this discipline.

They have a group, . That's responsible for enablement.

Many people that go to these local chapters, they're it, right.

They don't have a group.

They're the enablement person.

And then they're the ones that I think benefit greatly by seeing these teams.

I'm really interested when you talked about going to Palm

Beach in, November, 2016, you said, we, and you've been telling a great story

about all these interwoven and, going back to the late 1990s, who was the

we that you headed to Palm Beach with?

I don't know that everybody made it to Palm Beach

on that particular meeting.

But if you look back Tamara Schenk throughout this entire journey.

She's been one of those that you're thinking to yourself, I wonder about

customer enablement if that's going to be the next thing, , who do I

think of, I think about calling Tamara and she's got such a great balanced

understanding of the discipline and the people and the human element.

She was one of the individuals that we worked, over the years with

Joe Galvin from Sirius Decisions, when you said walked on memory lane.

If you go back to the early days of the demand gen waterfall, then

you had Joe over here at Sirius Decisions talking sales enablement.

A lot of people that were your go to, to test an idea.

Because the enablement discipline, one could argue, 20 years,

why aren't we further along?

That's an important question a lot of people have asked over the years.

If you look all the way back to 2007, eight, that was a

breakout year for us, Erich.

Not because of the siloes in the companies.

These companies suddenly need to get better at selling.

We, need more compelling events in history, I think, to drive enablement

when you go to that next level, enablement becomes a company thing.

That was the discussion at that meeting that was down there in Florida, how are

we going to make sure the discipline is for real and the role respected so that

we had a seat, you know, seat at the table not just the, sales QBRs, but the

company, BRs and the Partner QBRs.S, we had to be in those meetings, be because

we didn't want to be some afterthought.

We wanted to be, at front end of the strategic thinking and then from that,

put into place a discipline of enablement.

You just nailed it.

And you've used the word so many times throughout this, but strategic, a

strategic function, not just doing, doing, doing, fixing, fixing, fixing.

Fixing sales, putting out the next fire.

And so exactly that point, question three is your relationship

with the founding positions.

My cards are on the table.

I'm a big fan of the three that you and your 99ish fellow fore-founders of the

sales enablement society put together as a cross functional group of all different

walks and industries and areas of focus.

I'll start with position 1, that sales enablement is a strategic

approach to eliminating friction across the commercial process.

The subset to that there are different flavors of enablement.

There's a message enablement in marketing.

There's talent enablement in onboarding, the sales operations side of things.

And the, delivery aspect of it and the entire customer

life cycle, just to name a few.

A discipline that has alignment with each of the corporate functions.

And if you didn't strategically address the friction in each the

whole thing could fall apart.

It wouldn't be orchestrated,

what did that mean to you at the time?

And where are we now?

To sort of regroup your generation, one first 10 years of

enablement, a lot of focus on centralizing marketing material and, and sales content.

Generation two was a combination that, and training that was good.

, but it wasn't great.

when we think strategically and we think about one of the big

inhibitors of enablement success.

It's been the silos within companies

when you look at some of the deployments and you see sales training

handles the new rep here, and then management handles them here, don't

we all manage the success of reps,

all these silos that were in place.

It was really getting in the way of true enablement.

If you really want to think strategic, think about becoming part of the

planning process for the next 3 to 5 years within your company so that

when you're scaling sales, expanding into new markets, think enablement.

How is enablement going to play a role?

When when your company makes a decision, and it's usually a conscious decision

to grow, not just organic, but also through acquisitions, think sales

enablement or now revenue enablement.

When you think about launching new products, launching partnerships, and

don't even think about doing partners without having partner enablement.

shift the mindset from, enablement being an afterthought, Oh no, we better get

the training squared away for the new sales organization, that new product.

No, it should be at the front end of planning.

So the strategy, the company has for the next three to five years, enablement

should be in that conversation.

So through the lens of those corporate silos.

Do you feel like certain silos are being addressed better than others?

Where's the opportunity?

, Craig Nelson: early days, we had about 150 deployments in the end

with our commercially available SaaS platform, , and there was no doubt if

you could align sales and marketing to get this discipline going in the

company, that was your first opportunity.

And historically, and maybe even still today, those two groups.

You went to them and say, let's do sales playbooks.

Well, we don't do sales playbooks, flash forward now 20 years.

And the group does do playbooks.

Now the question is, are they used?

I think today as we think forward about revenue enablement, generation three,

let's say, and we think about the broader, all customer facing roles, just like

sales have been using CRM, customer success has been using some CX products,

but it's still not enabling their success.

So we should be thinking about that.

So those silos are pretty firmly in place between sales and services.

They don't necessarily don't like each other.

They don't know each other.

What's interesting about sales and marketing is they may not like each

other, but at least they knew each other.

They might not have agreed in their positioning on certain things and what

work needed to be done, but they knew each other, but sales and services

don't always, especially if you're doing the work through channel partners.

So how do we bridge that gap?

Right?

In a service world, if you don't bridge that gap, the term we use many

years ago, land and expand, right?

You land that new opportunity.

You make them successful.

You know, you expand.

If that handoff doesn't take place and it's not repeatable and you're not doing

things like wind loss reporting and you're not doing things like taking a

look at, what are the first 30 60 90 days,

something that that was mentioned the other day from a client , Why wouldn't

every one of our clients be referenceable?

And that should be the goal.

So I think there's plenty of opportunity there.

Every customer should be a reference.

And of course, I've got the sales hat always on Erich,

every customer should buy more,

and tom Pisello, you know, the ROI guy, when you go from pre to post

and making sure that value isn't just pitched value is realized.

And that too is a discipline, not just a technology.

So ultimately I think the name of the game is, how do you break those barriers

down and have the company thinking it's a company thing, enablement,

not a sales or a marketing thing.

Love that.

And, from the beginning throughout this, you've used the word partners.

And, as I'm sure you're well aware, Jill Rowley's new focus,

nearbound is surrounding the customer and how do you do that?

Partners who already have a relationship, right?

And I think there's a newfound interest in enablement and that being

a silo that goes from forgotten much like CS to in the spotlight.

So position 2, that sales enablement needs.

to be an effective, strategic, cross functional business within

a business in order to accomplish the mission of enablement.

Any further thoughts on that?

You already reinforced it a bit,

think the one thing , we learned with our strongest

deployments, companies that, that understood it wasn't just technology

that they had to have a process.

And then there's always this great debate, I'm like, I don't care which

sales process you pick, just pick one.

If you have a process thing, have a content and then have the people, when

you had a champion within a company that understood that it was people

process content, then technology, those were our strongest deployments.

These were people that were not afraid , to ask in to that, QBR

meeting , and if they were perceived as being the sales trainer and

they'd say, why would you be here?

Because as you're selling, we're going to be helping you get better.

I like that business within a business, if they felt it was a

business, they would attend various meetings across the organization.

Ultimately, it wasn't just the scorecard is the technology being adopted it was

a, what impact are they having, our clients, not just being landed, but also

expanded and are they being successful,

We also had a couple of clients that over the years.

For as fast as they were building content, they were retiring content.

They kind of got it, right?

More wasn't more.

So you always look for that person that wanted to build a business,

but want to do it in a smart way.

Those are the best deployments.

Those are deployments that, a decade later, they were still in play.

Those are the deployments that stopped and thought like a business.

Who are our key stakeholders?

What do they want?

And if I help this silo get what they want, will they understand if I bring

them all together cross functionally to nod their heads in the same room?

I don't know.

Maybe a center of excellence.

Right?

So maybe can you talk about those concepts

? Craig Nelson: Yeah, I think, with ice and terror, right?

Intelligence center, we felt that if you could get more of the organization

bought in to the discipline.

There's been those companies we've come across where the, executive team felt you

were either in sales or enabling sales.

It might be a little bit of a stretch for, for some businesses to think about, but I

think now that we're in more of a customer centric world, why wouldn't you work with

sales and partners as part of your routine to understand the inflection points that

are in the field where you're learning,

a lot of companies talk customer centric, but once the last time did a

ride along and listen to the client and it wouldn't be a ride along in person

today, it's more in web conferences, doesn't matter, by the way, it's, it's

really understanding, great discovery.

Some disciplines are still for real, right?

Question based selling, you know, ask a lot of great

questions and learn from clients.

Yeah.

And then go to the next town and learn from a different client.

I think more and more today, it's building that center of excellence.

I'm back, leading sales and we're looking at one vertical at a time, but the

first question might be, is that in that vertical that you're doing really, really

well in, where you have clients , who's the best out there, who are the people out

there we can go to market with or go to customer, that understand that market,

because a genErich question is good, a question to that specific vertical, be

it healthcare, manufacturing, financial, you know, great set of questions,

great content, great messaging, but you really have to go to the thought

leaders in that respective place, right?

That vertical, that market,

one of the things that we've learned over the years that, selling on the West

coast was different than the East coast.

Which rest assured is different than it is in Minneapolis, St.

Paul.

So it's just different.

And then you go abroad to Europe and it was different there too.

In the end it was, more of a consultative conversation.

The hope being is that, and I do think that more and more people are talking

about go to market partners and selling through them, learning about who they're

connecting to because they've got the credibility and you most likely don't.

So why wouldn't you reach out?

But it's an investment of time and it's also a bit of a strategy call.

Do you want to hire all these roles or do you want to, work with

partners and go to market together?

It's a different approach.

So position three, by design.

If you're promoting and elevating a function, it's elevating to something.

So the aspirational state that was position number three was that

sales enablement would evolve to be chief productivity officer.

What are your thoughts on the evolution of enablement?

Is it a role in the C suite

? Craig Nelson: I'm not concerned about the title of the role, uh, as

I, as I would be the passion of that individual who's leading enablement

within their respective company, being able to reach the right people.

and be able to overcome some of the obstacles that, that the

company is putting in front of you.

It's one thing to say, you're going to be customer centric.

It's something very different to, do ride alongs and then with

this information we gather from the field, actually do something

,, it's good to have that, executive title.

But I think most importantly, it's the better you understand the market

you're selling into you , that's one of the things with enablement

early on, we had some big ideas, but the clients weren't ready for it.

Enablement maturity, Right.

I love the term that's got coined many years ago, random acts of enablement.

And when he said that, I'm like, finally, somebody put a term on something

where we tried to nail down for years.

Usually somebody that's, somebody who's super passionate that's able to step up

in these meetings and say, all right, before we recruit another hundred

partners how do we do with the last 100

Right.

Yeah.

And I like what you said earlier, too, about a strategic function.

And I'll add a little bit to that.

An organization looking through the lens of cross functional enablement

when there's an economic downturn, it's not the first function to go,

and let's, let's talk about today, you know, 2024,

I'll go back to my, my earlier positioning around what enablement

is, if you're thinking about retaining clients, think enablement.

The selling organization, a lot of companies have reduced that

group as well to me, that's a bit of a beginning of the end.

You know, that's, that's your lifeblood of your company.

But right now, maybe enablement is going to be making sure your customer

success organization , make sure they're enabled, make sure they understand,

not on an annual basis when they come to the renewal, make sure they

understand week by week, month by month.

Are these companies taking true advantage of our solution?

how many deployments have you gone in to look at after a couple of years

and they're just not that far along.

why wait, right, for that annual review?

I'm saying something that I think most companies have already figured out.

If you can't keep these clients and expand them, It may not

ever be profitable revenue.

There's a real reason to retain because those same companies will be buying again.

, and you've got some credibility within that organization.

Hopefully that, CS professional is still there with that relationship and

you're proactively coming into them.

Giving them customer stories.

Giving them ideas on how they can do better.

You're bringing ideas to them.

And what I hear there is not only is the customer service and

delivery team landing the desired business outcome that was promised by sales.

Why?

And how is it promised by sales?

The entire sales ecosystem was strategically set up to have a consistent

value message that everyone from the BDR initially in identifying the opportunity,

and then the salesperson and bringing it home and landing in those couple desired

business outcomes that resonate with that client, then the customer service is

landing those desired business outcomes.

This is one Jacco over at Winning by Design . I went through his

Revenue Architecture course and what they landed on is impact.

recurring impact.

And I think that's the perfect way to put it landing the desired business

outcome, seeing the impact, ensuring the client realizes the connection of

what they've been bringing to the client and how it relates to that impact and

continuing that relationship and looking for new opportunities to drive impact.

and, customer centric.

What does that mean?

A company has a sales process.

Why wouldn't you have a buyer journey?

, it only makes sense.

And then why wouldn't those two come together?

Where are, decisions formed on, is that vendor any good?

Interesting enough.

There's some surveys that say it's during the sales process,

Did you make it easier for them to learn about you?

Did you make it easy for them to buy from you?

Are you thinking about sales execution where it's not, three

weeks till a proposal sent out?

Are you personalizing it for that particular buyer?

So let's say you nail the front end of the cycle, Erich, then you got

to nail the back end of the cycle.

And if you don't do the back end of the cycle, again, you might land and

have the unprofitable deal in place.

They don't even want to keep.

Salesforce taught us a lot about that in the early days of, isn't a winnable deal,

are they going to keep it?

Are they going to expand,

now the question is, if you look at customer enablement and CX.

It's the experience of the seller.

It's the experience of the partner.

It's the experience of the buyer.

That's increasingly going to matter, I think, in the next 10 years.

have you made it easy for them to, to buy from?

And have you made it easier for your sellers to sell?

They'll stick around.

it's interesting when we were interviewing sales reps, five, 10 years ago, they

were saying, do you have enablement, ? Are you thinking about our success?

What's like, all right, we finally have arrived, right?

They now know that.

Why would they want to come in and draft all the materials they knew they needed?

Well, it's already there.

I think today, if we look forward, it's got to be a company

thing going to summarize here.

, you got to look at that entire journey.

, you've got to cut out the friction.

You really got to think about the experience of the seller, the partner,

the buyer, , not just the financials, because that experience, it will matter.

It's what differentiates companies.

There's a whole slew of new A.

I.

companies coming around the corner.

That's what's fun about this industry.

We know they're coming, but what they better do fairly quickly is find a use

case and a business problem to solve.

And then find a, go to customer, go to market strategy that aligns.

Because the best technology, as we've all figured out, doesn't always win.

Especially if it's an empty shell, right?

Without enablement attached.

Yeah,

. Craig Nelson: believers.

We're believers, Erich.

But yeah, if you don't do the enablement part, you know, it's just a big idea.

And what did you say the other day?

the ideas are for free, you just put them out there.

Dreaming's free ideas are free and you can turn

them into impact if you do it right.

As you know, the Sales Enablement Society, at the time, announced

at the Global SES Experience in San Diego that they were evolving to

become the Revenue Enablement Society.

Curious, your reaction to that announcement how

does that land with you?

Yeah, I'm glad we're ending on this because there's

many crossroads and people have written about this, over the years.

I think right now that the fact that enablement is a profession isn't seen as

a, standard role within these companies and a standard discipline is an issue.

And I think Making this about revenue, not just a sales thing,

is going to give us that seat at the table that we've longed for.

I think it's going to put into perspective, hey, the enablement team

should be part of the planning cycle for companies, once you're revenue.

So, short answer is, absolutely.

I think this is long overdue, Erich, in my opinion.

, that it become revenue enablement, but for those companies that think of

enablement as all customer roles should be enabled, they've already been doing this.

I think this opens up, more conversations.

It opens up a journey now that we can tackle.

It's not going to be any one company, in my opinion, that's going to tackle it.

It's going to be a collection of companies.

It's kinda funny, we always wanted to be, you know, the single source of truth.

There's only gonna be one data store.

I haven't seen it yet, you know, nobody still have stuff up on

YouTube and LinkedIn and you name it.

So, certain ideas, ultimately don't fly.

But I think certain use cases.

Once across the organization, once pointed at enabling revenue and repeating

success in revenue and profitability, I think this discipline is going to

be here, beyond the next 10 years

where we're testing the market today is, is going out to the field and asking

that question, " how big a deal is the customer enablement customer experience?"

That that's part of our sort of list of questions we asked.

And how can we make a, not just a better environment for sellers and partners,

better environment for the customer during the cycle of buying and deploying.

I hear a resounding yes there.

, it makes sense because where you started was talking about enabling the

entire customer facing frontline, let's shift from focusing on sales on the

front lines to everyone who touches the customer, making sure we're including

customer service, including partners, including sales overlay, if that hasn't

been done to date sales engineering.

And that's what you've been naturally doing for more than a decade or

two, right, which is beautiful.

So we've been in the past.

We've landed in the present, a good bit, everything that you've been talking

about that we've need to focus on the customer and the impact and an additional

emphasis on customer success, that's the here and now in this current economy.

What about the future?

You shared generation three, which is 2024 and beyond.

And I think the headline you shared with me was sales execution

across the buyer journey.

A sales and customer success thing.

Whereas Gen one was marketing and getting everything consolidated,

single source of truth.

Gen two let's enable the Salesforce, get sales and marketing working

together with that value message

and three being sales and customer success coming together in alignment

with marketing Where are we headed?

That's a great summation and also kind of summarizing the years.

Most of the ideas that I've talked about today, if not all of them

have been tested in the field at a local chapter SES meeting.

With a client.

And what we're testing out in the market today is how do we

enable the entire buyer journey?

how do we leverage technology,

the technology you have today it's how do we use the analytics and all the

behavioral understanding of the sellers, buyers, and customers during selling?

You're not waiting to the end of the quarter to see, Hey,

what content made a difference?

You're looking at your platform for enablement day to day to see who's selling

what, where, what products are working.

What's not, you don't want to wait until after a quarter, after a year to say that

new company we acquired isn't selling.

And here's why you want to see during execution, what's happening.

So I think there's going to be a tremendous amount of analytics

that now are bubbled up.

You can use your AI engine to go through it.

Most of us are using AI daily to sell, because it can be

leveraged to take a thousand leads down to a hundred that matter.

To take, a thousand lines of, messaging and take it down

to the 50 words that matter.

So I think AI is going to play a role, but I think more important, it's , , you

want to understand the sales people, the partner people and the customer every day.

That's the execution part and execution would fit underneath revenue enablement.

And, , it doesn't stop when the sale is completed.

It never ends,

one last story for you,

We went to a CRM show in 2002, we purposely got a

booth next to the Siebel booth.

We spent three days at a CRM show, trying to figure out, how are we going

to add value, and then find a set of go to market partners, and we're there

sitting at the booth and the Siebel people kept coming over saying, all

right, who the heck are you guys?

What is this enablement about?

And, because they were in sales, they got it.

On behalf of the audience, thank you for your time, your insights.

And for being not only a forefounder of the society, but

the guy , who got sales enablement.

com.

You can find me up on LinkedIn under Craig Nelson.

, I lead today a company by the name of Triptych, and I lead marketing and sales.

. I love it.

It's a discipline enablement that we see at the core of our work here.

, Erich, thanks for inviting me today.

It's been fun to go down memory lane,.

So look him up.

And continue to be on the cutting edge of sales enablement history being made.

Thanks so much for the time, Craig, excited to keep in touch and have

you back one day soon in the future.

Yeah.

I look forward to it.

Thanks, Erich.