Sales enablement is likely something your company drives for you. But if you want to be at the top of your profession, is there danger in assuming what they are providing is all you need to be absorbing?

Time and time again, self-enabled growth is what sets apart that top 1% of performers. And right now, an opportunity like never before is presenting itself–to adapt and evolve as a top sales professional in the next normal.

On this episode, Luigi is joined by Roderick Jefferson. A founding father of the Sales Enablement movement, best-selling author, keynote speaker, and current Vice President of Field Enablement at Netskope, Roderick fills this episode with unmissable insights.

Find Roderick on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and check out his new book Sales Enablement 3.0.

Follow Luigi on LinkedIn.

RingDNA is a recognized Gartner cool vendor that makes rev ops possible. Find them at ringDNA.com

What separates the top sales performers from the rest? This is a question and a journey that I've been on for a number of years. And what I've found that separates a top 1%, the absolute high performers, the ones that continue to produce results day after day, week after the week, quarter after quarter, and the ones that exceed target and continue to be the ones that everybody else is chasing is actually a very simple thing that they do that's different from everybody else. The relentless focus on self development. Now you might be listening to this going, what are you talking about? The relentless focus for self-development the one common characteristic that I've seen across high performers across a variety of different industries across the world is it high-performers have this incredible desire to learn and an incredible desire to seek feedback and find ways that they can improve every single day.

And that is what this week's episode is all about. We're diving into the realm of enablement. We're talking about sales enablement, and you're probably going, what the hell? Enablement somebody. My organization's responsible for enablement. And this is where you have a great opportunity because enablement today is crucial, right?

If you're running an organization, you need to have a strong enablement team to onboard, to coach, to develop, to nurture, to embed and continue to embed the skills required for sellers to be the best they can. But the reality is the enablement teams are stretched. They have so many people they need to cater for.

And the data shows us that most sellers are only getting coaching once every 12 weeks. And when we think about that, that's not enough to move the needle. Coaching has a direct improvement. It has, it can enable you when you do coaching on a regular basis to move the needle in the right direction. So what do you do if you haven't got access to.

Oh, you don't have access to enable them at all because your organization has an invested in someone to help you from a coaching and development perspective. And this is where the opportunity sits for sellers today. This is where the opportunity sit in your own hands is that self-development that enablement.

You can find yourself. And that's what we're talking to Roderick Jefferson about today. Who's kind of one of the founders of the whole enablement sales enablement initiative. We're going to talk about what sellers can do. To enable themselves to be the best they can be. And again, this is one of the key differences that will separate you from the rest.

It's finding ways and finding content and finding ways to apply that content in real time. And then taking a learning from that, figuring out what worked, what didn't work. And then again, continuing to apply that methodology of enablement. That's fundamentally what enablement is, right? It's about using the skills that is required. And using it in real time and then learning and building off that. So you continue to increase your capabilities.

Revenue operations is much more than words in a job title. It's a movement that is transforming sales, marketing, and customer success teams into high-performing revenue drivers. RingDNA is a recognized Gartner cool vendor that makes rev ops possible by driving improved operational efficiency and revenue capture from sales, marketing, and customer success. Trusted by the top companies across the globe RingDNA night offers a complete sales engagement, conversational intelligence, and revenue intelligence platform for Salesforce customers. Learn how we can transform your results@ringDNA.com that's ringdna.com.

This is going to be a cracking episode. Enablement for me is, is such a critical part of the process. And again, you've heard me talk about this previously that I want to be in control of my own destiny. And for me, learning is, is an absolute privilege. And it's such an incredible opportunity that we have because when we can learn from both the positives and negatives, it can improve our skillset.

It's an enabler. So enjoy the episode, dive deep takes notes and remember training with that application is simply entertainment. And although we all want to be entertained, one of the reasons why you're listening to these podcasts is to help you be the very best you can be.

Welcome to the show Roderick!

It's it's continuing to grow as a movement. But before we talk about that, can you tell us a bit more about how you started in the world of sales and sales enablement?

I actually, so I went, I finished up uni and needed to get a real. And fortunately my girlfriend at the time, her parents and her family worked at at and T, so they said, we can get you a sales job. I'm like, well, I've done retail and I've talked a lot. So I think I could probably sell something. And so I went in as a BDR.

So I've got a lot of love for BDRs. That is one of the hardest jobs in the world did well. There got promoted to a, he went to president's club. A couple of times, he didn't got promoted to sales leader and promptly turned. I know everyone thinks I'm crazy, but it's because I love the process of selling more than I did taking down big deals.

So what I did was talk to my VP into a regional training role by saying this, what if I could get people up to and ramped into a quota faster? What if I could get more people at quota? And what if I could send more people to president's club? So you have a hard time coming up with budget and he said, you do that.

And you've got a new job and I shook and I said, thank you. And I'm now. I want it to stay close to sales, but I didn't want to have to carry it. Yeah, but I never want to lose that, that absolute touch of being in the muck and mire would say, so that was the first one. And it took off from there. I've been blessed to have an incredible, incredible opportunity at some great companies.

I've run sales training at Siebel systems, Network Appliance, eBay, HP, Oracle, Salesforce, and Marketo. And then I realized, I think I'm getting a little too ivory tower. Got this crazy wild idea to go out and become a consultant. Did that for three years. Now, I'm back in house and I'm the VP of field enablement at Netskope, a cybersecurity company.

So I looked at sales as a process. Right. So I started creating these. Kind of basic rudimentary templates so that I can scale and not have to essentially recreate the wheel every time. And so what I did was an early on, I figured out the key to self. Is not selling, it's actually having conversations. So I'll give it to at and T they do a phenomenal job of an eight week long onboarding process.

And in that process, there was a couple things that stuck out with me. One, it was discovering qualification is about asking the right questions. Getting the right answers. And it's also when I say right questions, it's questions that will lead to a deeper understanding of the prospect and what their pain is not asking questions just so you can move the sale.

The second thing that I got out of that, that sticks with me to this day is have a conversation don't give a presentation, no one wants to be sold to. And the third piece that, that I've gotten along the way that started there. You know, we do a great job in discovering qual of asking what's the pain points what's going on?

What are the key initiatives going on right now? But I've realized over time. There's one question that gets left out. That is an absolute game changer. So here's my top secret. So Mr. Mrs. Customer, by doing business and partnering with my company, what will that mean for you personally to get them out of the doghouse?

Will it give them a higher profile in the company? Will it get them a promotion? But you leave that piece out and you only get half of the picture.

And if we think about selling, you know, often the biggest competitor that we have to deal with is not the competition. It's them just maintaining the status. You know, maintaining the status quo is because the pain of change is too much and we just keep things out. It is. So that intrinsic motivator is key.

And I love the fact that question goes di dives deep into that. I think for, for most, you know, when we look at sales is evolving quite fast and, and I'm of the belief Roderick that if you think about it, sales really hasn't changed much the philosophy of selling, but the way in which we now need to engage with our customers, Absolutely, but we've had, so, you know, when I first started in sales in order to get information, it was actually quite hard.

You have to order a book, wait for it, to come in the mail, go to a bookshop right .Now we're now in a world where you can get so much content at your fingertips. Why is it that there is still a massive trust gap between buyers and sellers. We've seen the reports that showed 70, 80% of buyers still don't trust sellers, lots of sellers are still struggling to create their own pipeline, but we still have some fundamental issues occurring in our profession when we're limited with so much information and content and learning what a cell is doing for this to continue to be a problem.

And on top of that, selling has never been as personalized as it is today. Look, we're inviting each other into our homes. Now you don't have the opportunity to go out for the cocktails or to go play golf or to take them out to a ball game or. So you have to now sell what you have to sell the experience that this prospect can only get by working with you and your company.

There are too many people trying to sell products, trying to sell solutions, trying to sell platforms, newsflash prospect, and customers. They don't buy products. They don't buy solutions. They don't buy platforms. What they buy is. The opportunity to take away the pain that they're dealing with. So if we take it from that angle, right, and we say, I'm going to work with you.

I'm going to ask you a question. I'm going to then understand your pain. I'm going to diagnose the pain because I only get to play a doctor on TV, so I will diagnose your pain. And then finally, I will give you a solution for that pain. And sometimes it's aspirin, sometimes it's, Biken sometimes it's an extraction to stop the pain, right.

Yeah. I think the reason they don't want to deal with salespeople is we get to that edge, but we just don't step off the cliff. We do all the diagnosis, but we don't say, okay, I've seen this before. We're not hoping this works on your dime. You're not a Guinea pig. We have references, which I don't think people use enough.

We have testimonials of people that look just like you, that had this same level of whether it's minimal or acute pain. I can let you talk about. Don't just take it from me, listen to them and how we help them solve that pain with the diagnosis. If we did more of that and we added in that personal piece, and that's another piece that gets left out, we only want to talk about the business, right?

What's the event. How do we create a compelling event? You can not create a compelling event. Not today. It's just not possible. So if you go back to that personal piece and understanding what's in it for them, Rather than just trying to close a deal that you can, so you can go ring the bell or put something on the board, your entire sales approach changes.

Right. The fact that

Right? Like we are seeing. The evolution of sales is becoming a sexy SAS has made it a really sexy place. Totally. But what can sell is do to change. So if they're, if they are listening to this going, you know what, hands up Roderick that's me. I've been out there not diving deep enough and just trying to sell and, and, and, and book an appointment or, or, or sell and get my quota.

What do I need to do to make that change?

I need to know them better than they know each other, but sell with your heart. Why? Because there has never been a time in the history of this world where selling. Empathy, humanity and ETQ has meant more than it does today. People have access to information. They're not expecting to come in and overwhelm them.

They're expecting you to listen and then again, diagnose and then provide a solution. The second thing I think we've got to change is it has to start with the first line manager and we have to get away from managing and move to leading first and foremost, because think about it. The rubber meets the road with that first line.

What's important to my leader is imperative to me. And if I want to step into their role, I'm going to do, and I'm going to say exactly what I see them saying, because it got. I need sales leaders to listen just for a moment. I need you to own the adoption, the execution, and the positive modeling of what you want your people to become.

The only, the only leadership example I took in was the latest that I had that were really bad. Right. Like, and so I obviously didn't want to model that behavior. But again I made it one of my own sort of missions in my career was that I owned my own learning. And one of the things that I find Roderick is that there's a lot of sellers, especially because I'm training and coaching hundreds and hundreds of them is outside the realm of their own company of what their own enablement and delivers. They're not doing anything themselves. How important is it for sellers to own their own enablement and just don't do what's required and tick the box at work.

Not your manager, not your CEO, not the board, not people around you, because no one has the best interest in your career that. And then I will now align this to a sports analogy. Let's talk about football, right? No team just goes out and plays football on game day. What do they do? They work out. They make sure they hydrate.

They make sure that their, their physical fitness is in place and they practice games are not one on game day. They're one on every other day that leads up to game day. So it was the same thing. Now I'll acquaint. You can't just assume that you're being fed by enablement. They're going to give you everything.

You need to know, know, read books, talk to subject matter. Experts, go and have lunch. Even if it's virtual lunch over zoom with the absolute rock stars that are in your industry. Now here's one that most don't think about. We all have a strict. Network on LinkedIn, reach out to the sales folks that you see that resonate with you in your network that are not in the same industry as you and ask them questions around what made them successful. And more importantly, what did they do that didn't work well so that you don't step in those same holes?

As in your role as enablement, how ho like how much effort do you go in understanding the customer set the buyer persona?

We'll call it selling motions. The problem is if it doesn't begin at the buyers. And you don't adjust to the way that they buy. Who buys is it a buying committee? Is it an individual? Do they have me buying season? Right. And if you're talking about things like federal government, et cetera, but you've got to buying season.

So you've got to understand when it's important to them, because at the end of the day, if we don't have prospects, we don't have. So it should start this way. Start up high at the buyer's journey. Then under that buyer's journey, you talk about the sales methodology, then the sales process, then the selling stages, then all of the assets and tools that you get from marketing product marketing.

And then at the foundation of all of that is enablement. We are the concrete that holds the entire house. But without those other components, we don't exist. So we all have to work in concert to make sure that we are always focused on the buyer. First, second, third, fourth, et cetera. Because when you lose sight of what's important, it's really easy to get arrogant and say, Hey, they need us.

I can't believe their company exists without our XYZ product. And you know what they're saying? I could care less about your product. I don't buy products. I don't buy solutions. I buy solutions to my pain.

They're a huge electrical sort of distribution business. So they, they sell various products to the. Manufacturing industry and a whole range of industries and the sort of CMOs reached out and said, Hey, we need to chat about a playbook. And I sort of asked him sort of what's, what's motivated you to inquire why the playbook.

He said, well, actually, because our whole sales force part before COVID was a coffee and donut Salesforce. Oh yeah, absolutely. We would visit our, our customers with coffee and donuts and have a chat and take orders. You guys, what we've seen is our cust, our salespeople haven't been visiting our customers and our customers are buying just as much as they were before.

Our customers obviously don't need that anymore. We need to change the way in which we engage with our customers, right?

Yeah. And by the way, virtual, selling's not going anywhere. At all right. Even, even when we go back, there will always be a virtual component. So I think there's kind of four things to keep in mind. And in this virtual world, that's shifted, first of all, we've got to teach our sellers how to build rapport inside of their own cohorts differently than when we used to, you can go to bootcamp, you can get to know each other, you can have cocktails and things of that sort you can't anymore.

So it's now incumbent upon the sales leaders and the enablement. To make sure that every one of the virtual engagements that you have from onboarding to continuing education to leadership, coaching has three components. One that it's interactive, two that it's engaging and three it's edutaining because look, our mind spans are getting shorter and shorter.

It's not edutaining. What are you doing? It's virtual. You're inviting me to multiple. So that's one, the second piece is you've got to help all of your sellers to build a virtual community different than before. You know how you'd go, go in into a new company. You go through onboarding, you go through boot camp and you've got that cohort because unlike when you were in uni, right, and you had your, your first second, third, fourth year, well, the same thing happens in sales and we all kind of grow up together while you've got to figure out how to do that and maintain that in a virtual environment.

The third is, and we just talked about it. You've got to figure out how to fight virtual fatigue. Zoom fatigue is real. I'm on eight, nine a day. I've gotten to a point now where I will send a a meeting request with no zoom link and it freaks people out. And the reason that I don't have a zoom link, I know.

Can we just talk on the phone and just talk? Yes. I don't want to be on camera. I just want to have a conversation.

And the issue is the level of customer support that is expected by our prospects and our customers has not dropped it's gone up.

From an onboarding perspective, I actually think sales professionals need to be, need to be creating that same experience for their customers because yeah. How do we now differentiate in a world where I can jump on zoom? You can jump on zoom as a seller. Like how do we differentiate? Yes, we can all send a video message. We can all like. We've got to

And there was moments in my career. I thought, have I kind of hit that hit the ceiling where in this particular vertical or this particular role, I've got nothing to learn. And I hate that feeling because it's like, my growth is now stalled.

What I've loved about this last 12 months, it's it look, I've, there's been some days of kicking and screaming. Right. But what I've loved is I feel like now I'm in a whole new world of learning and on back to the days where I was just a sponge, you know, learning off others, seeing new things. And again, I think this is where self enablement is what's going to separate the top 1% from the rest.

Right. If you don't do that, then you won't seek out opportunities. To grow and become better and more well-versed in more of a consultative seller. And we talk about that, but I talk about it differently. Right? I talk about it kind of from four different angles. One is in order to move from selling to helping.

I think you start with focus. And when I say focus, I'm talking about focus, your energy, your goals, and your deliverables on things that you can impact. That directly aligned with your customers, excuse me, your customer and your company's goals and focus on that customer experience. We talked about everything else outside of that is just.

The second piece is I say unite. And I know it sounds like an odd word, but let me give a little color to it. Relationships, as we know, are the backbone of success for sales, right? And as I said earlier, there has never been a time where leading with humanity, empathy, and E Q has meant more than it does.

The next word I'll throw out is adjust. I want sellers to pivot, to delivering deeper value around improving their own discovery and qualification skills. Focusing on helping their prospects increase profit, reduce costs, mitigate risks, and most importantly, drive business outcome focused conversations around helping your customers adjust to this virtual.

This is hard for them to get away from the bits bytes and bots. Don't talk about your products. They don't care what you name your solutions, focus on their experience. And if you stay there, you're always going to find a way to win. I'm not saying you're going to bat a thousand. No, one's going to close every deal.

And the final piece is to my sales enabled. I need us to incorporate. And what I mean, there is commit to designing, building and incorporating an innovative customer experience into your go to market strategy in order to differentiate your company, as the clear thought leader in your space.

He rejects, he says the 1%, or take a meeting with other sellers that talk to me about outcomes and my business actives, everybody else talks to me about what they do. The features he goes, I don't need that, but what are their outcomes? Yeah. And we, and I think now more than ever before, even though we're in a virtual environment, unfortunately we're busier than what we were when we were in the office.

Right. We actually backing up, I see back to backs, zoom, cause we go with it more time. Now we can, we can fit in more things and we've got...

Now, the other thing that I've noticed Luigi is I'd love to see sellers do more AB testing of their. This will help you one to understand the ICP, right? The ideal client or customer profile beyond just what marketing or product marketing gives you, try different messaging. And please don't do what people have been doing early on in COVID what I mean. And that is, you know, I feel for where you are. I hope all is well with you and your family. That was great. At first it feels disingenuous now.

Be authentic back to our, our friend, Larry be authentic because people know, and we all know when we're being sold to right, but try messaging from two, three different angles and see what clicks and what resonates. See, what's getting you call backs. See what's getting you in the door. See what's getting you appointments and conversations until that point. Don't go in to give a presentation. Don't go in and throw up a bunch of. Right. Go in and ask questions first, earn the right to then move the conversation forward.

It's like we walk in and say, instead of saying, Hey, would you want to go out on a date? Hi, my name is Roderick. Will you marry me? How crazy does that sound? But that's what we've been doing in sales.

I am not going to leave that up to my marketer to do on my own. Prospect and, and I'm going to own that. I'm good because I, it allows me to see what's working. What's not. And so I think, again, this is where I said the evolution of selling is going to that next level is we are evolving and adding that marketing element into our skillset.

And again, sellers that can embrace this opportunity, you know, that complex problem solving. A B testing, copywriting, ICP, etc, researching. They are the ones that are just going to flourish. And regardless of what happens from an automation perspective, they will separate themselves from the crowd.

So I think this is an incredible episode Roderick that I want every seller who, who listens to me to listen to this episode, obviously, but I think there's a lot of golden takeaways.

The second piece is. When you were A/B testing, figure out what works, but don't stick just to those two. You have to constantly evolve and you said it best. What gets our attention? We've got about eight seconds to determine whether or not I'm actually going to look at your email.

So one make sure that you have an intriguing subject line, not something that that's corny or ridiculous. Right. And that seems to be coming more and more lately. And the second piece is most people are reading their emails on their phones. Don't send me a long diatribe. If I have to scroll past the crease, I'm not reading your email.

I'm not going to, and today with the way cybersecurity is, I'm not clicking on a link. So sending me a link will do nothing for you. Hey, we've got this great testimonial click here. Like no. No, I don't know where that Link's going to keep it simple, keep it concise. And I always keep it to three components when I'm writing an email or when I'm speaking of whatever it may be, what do I want them to think? What do I want them to feel? And finally call to action. What do I want them to do? And you can do that in a hundred words.

So this is amazing Roderick and I think again, just going back to what you said pitch slapping, you know, the the pitch, nobody likes to be thrown up on immediately when they can. And I, I'm lucky I'm getting it constantly, but I'm getting like keeps a crypto people, you know, of yeah.