Celine Grey shares her expertise in sales enablement and organisational growth from past businesses. We discuss cultivating consultative relationships with internal stakeholders and customers, the value of well-defined processes, especially in onboarding and team structuring for growth. Celine highlights the critical role of leadership enablement and real-world consequences of neglecting leadership competency, including detrimental impacts on brand reputation, revenue, and employee morale. Overall, Celine's insights provide valuable guidance for organisations seeking to scale up effectively and foster a culture of success through strategic enablement at all levels of the sales organisation.

Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with

your hosts me, Matt Best, and Jonny Adams. In this podcast

we'll be sharing insights from our combined 30 plus years

experience and hearing from other industry leaders to get

their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in

modern business. We'll cover all aspects of leadership, sales,

count development, and customer success alongside other critical

elements required to build an effective growth engine for your

business. This podcast is aimed at leaders from exec all the way

down to line managers. Well hello and welcome to the Growth

Workshop Podcast, I'm your host Matt Best and as ever, the

wonderful Jonny Adams. And today we have a really exciting guest

joining us, Celine Grey. Welcome to the podcast. Lovely to see

you.

Thank you.

Hey, Celine, great to see you again.

So Celine, you join us today with with over 25 years

of experience as an individual contributor sales leader, sales

enablement leader for organizations such as Oracle,

Websense, Tableau, Rackspace, pecan, now persona, the list

goes on. But I think what's really interesting about your

story, particularly which we're looking forward to diving into

today is how you've been responsible for driving growth

and hyper growth within a number of those organizations and your

massive three startups to unicorn status is pretty

impressive. So we really look forward to getting into the meat

of that conversation with you. But as is customary on the

growth workshop podcast, we like to kind of start off with a bit

of a more generic question. So Celine did tell us something

interesting about yourself.

Yes, I have a keen interest in cultures and

traveling. So that led me lucky to live in four countries, and

also deliver work in over 20 countries across North America,

in Europe, Middle East and Asia. And as a fun fact, for you, Matt

and Johnny, I have moved house 27 times. That's a lot of

unpacking and packing. And do you know what that made me

really good at?

I have no idea though. No.

Change Management.

God wasn't expected. I think I was thinking

of managing people lifting boxes, or something along those

lines and taping our cardboard boxes. But yeah, brilliant. Love

it.

It takes a lot to move a whole family from one

country to the next.

I'd have to ask what was your favorite country

other than your native France?

Working in Japan was the highlights. I think I

did whiteboard visualization over there. Because they use

manga and visual drawing for everything. I don't know if you

know, but for the Olympic Games, the icons we have were created

from the Olympics in Japan. Wow. And then adopted throughout. But

actually, they don't use it in business that much. But I had a

room full of people I was explaining very, very complex

Salesforce and IBM processes to. So I'm just going to use

whiteboarding stories then and messages in pictures. And that

worked really, really well.

Oh, well, I think I could talk to you more about

your traveling and your experiences, either there

Celine. And I've been looking forward to this episode so much,

because you've been instrumental. In my career, I

was so fortunate to spend, you know, over a year with you

working at SBR together, which was just fantastic. I remember

our trip to Berlin, which was awesome, where I learned all

about Key Account Management from you, you are one of my

heroes, and the people that I aspire to to be when working in

consultancy. So thank you, Celine, for joining. And you

have got, as Matt just described, an illustrious career

of different organizations that you've worked in. And I can just

imagine it's a treasure trove of, of ideas and sort of things

that you've experienced, but just for the listeners, could

you just share a little bit more about the journey that you've

been on, you know, all the way from sort of Oracle Rackspace,

those types of businesses, you know, maybe a little pit stop at

SBR. And then maybe talk a little bit about some of the SAS

organizations just so the listeners can understand a

little bit more about your career.

Yeah, I started a long time ago, I started in

banking. And I really loved that sells relationship I built with

my customers. But the banking environment was not for me, it

was very restrictive. It was not challenging enough. And so I

moved to Dublin and Ireland and started working for some of the

big tech company. And I've never looked back, I learned some of

the best leadership practice coaching practice sales

practice, because at the time, all all of those best practice

of consultative selling came from the US. And then from

there, it led me to live in London to live in the Middle

East and to really explore my carriers as a team lead. One fun

fact was when I was in gateway, we were selling PCs, right. That

was my job in tech. And we had a floor with 450 salespeople, and

then the PC market crisis hit and so you have that call center

that is completely silent. I think this is one of the most

scary thing that I've ever experienced. And so we didn't

get any leads. The phone was not ringing anymore, and we were in

an inbound function. And so I decided to look into ASCII

linens for report of customers that didn't order any PC for

have over two years because then they would the account would not

belong to anybody and they would need you started making money,

right? And then we set up a team. And then you know, you had

the American spirit that enable you to do things. And then from

there moved from hardware to software worked for companies

like websites in IT security, where we were one of the first

company selling SaaS products. So that was exciting. And then

more recently working into sustainability in HR tech. But

as sales enablement leader, I've decided to take a fork in terms

of being a sales director or, you know, leader of enablement

to go that route, I could no longer do both as a sales leader

that's no longer sustainable.

And we're going to dig into that a little bit more.

Thank you. And just to sort of go back, you had had a short

pitstop at SBR. And how do you know SBR? Maybe and what is the

connections are you've got along your career just for the sort of

understanding?

Yeah, I have been a client of his deal at Rackspace

and then also at pecan at normative. And what the SBR

practice brought in to me was that really consultative

approach that I did not necessarily get with some of the

American practice. So I've done you know, solution selling with

Bas worse, and I've done spin training with racket like, and I

am from that dinner ace are slightly younger generation. But

I went through all of these motion, it was still a little

bit pushy, because we have a very different cultural

etiquette in Europe. And the ability for me to be bold, for

example, Websense to implement these practice on Europe and

Middle East, which is what I was looking out for was very

difficult. I mean, I can do so half of those things in the

Middle East trade they want they want on the door. And you know,

France is different, Germany's different, Benelux is different.

And so what I found is, with SBR, we were able to look after

the whole of Europe, Middle East, and Asia with best

practice that had the customer at the center of everything. And

so I was really fond of working with the teams as well, because

you're very talented and smart group of people. But you have an

insight in companies that very, very few people have, because of

the expertise you have in navigating each of these

companies and seeing those patterns, seeing the growth

working in different sectors. But focusing solely on those

revenue teams, that very, very few consultancy again, managed

to gain. So as a customer, when I had that divergence towards

more traveling and working as a consultant SBR was the logical

choice. I didn't approach any other consulting company at the

time when I was looking.

I spent with you though it was sure it was

definitely sweet. And the lessons learned was your

meticulous planning towards enablement was something that

I've taken on that when you plan really well, your execution

actually can just come with it. The other thing was your ability

to help with change. And facilitation. I mean, you're a

wizard at facilitation, and you've got a group of 20 people,

different cultures. And it's been an absolute pleasure. And

I'm really looking forward to unpacking a little bit more

about how you've helped businesses grow. I mean, the

first question that that really curious about and and when we do

these podcasts, we love sort of looking at how our guests

present themselves on LinkedIn articles they write. And for

those that have been listening to the podcast, we had one of

our great friends Dan more on a recent episode. And he spoke a

little bit about his book control influence. And except

for now, funnily enough, looking at your LinkedIn profile, you've

got the banner, which actually says focus on what you can

control. And it's sprung to our mind, Matt and I that we thought

would ask you a little question about why does your banner say

that and what does that mean to you if you don't want to share?

I think as a sales leader, I was very guilty to say

to my team focus on the controllable focus on the

controllable focus on the controllable, right, it is one

of the sentence you hear the most never anybody. When I was a

salesperson explained to me, what does that mean? What do you

do? I really feel for all this, that comes through are still

concerned, we say focus on the controller board on your deal,

you know, especially two weeks before the end of the quarter.

And they're looking at their deal and I don't know. And so,

that focus on what you can control. I'm a big fan of

Dunmore, right? And so the circle of influence is something

we actually train on day three of the onboarding. We give

examples specifically to people of how they can do that, again

to whiteboard showed person, but we really break it down in terms

of you can't control the weather, what can you control

your response? And so it's that ability to be able to be in the

driving seat and say 95% of what happens you know, there is

external I cannot control so what is it that my The focus

should be, and we give them those two little tricks, right?

If there's a stress factor or something that is really

prominent and driving the stress level up, can you control it?

Yes or No? If you can go into it. That's it. If you can't,

what should your response be for this to disappear? And so we

find that people are far more resourceful with giving them

this to question rather than say, focus on the control. Well,

because suddenly, they have all these resources that comes to

their mind, then what is incredibly wise, right is a

wizard, a consultant, an expert, you could listen to him for

hours, this has been particularly defining in terms

of how he's explained those concepts. And you know, how we

can bring those concepts to the younger generation is also

incredibly worried about everything that they do in the

workplace. So providing them with a safe space for them to be

able to do that. So we associate that with actually the first

pancake principle.

The what principle? You're gonna make me so curious

today.

this is the first pancake principle, this is a

principle that first came up on a podcast between Simon Sinek,

Bernie Brown and Adam Grant, right, fantastic podcast, by the

way, if you want to listen to it, and most of us love pancake,

and when we make pancake, the first one is never greed, but we

still have to make it because we want to eat the second and the

third and the fourth that are delicious. And so it's the

principle of everything you make for the first time, it's not

going to be perfect. So you need that psychological safety that

tells you actually, I need to make a first one, in order to be

able to get the second and the third and the fourth. And we

often bring that with those circle of influence, in order to

say to people, that's the first pancake, and that's okay, so now

we have people all over the company going, Oh, by the way,

this is my first pancake, and you listen at it. And so we

listen to coaching call and things like that, but people are

quite proud of the first pancake, which is the way it

should be right?

I love that. I'm now can't wait until February

next year until I get to Pancake Day and start looking at my

first pancake. And I'm curious, we've caught up before and you

know, just to relate a business context around growth, you've

shared to me a couple of times about how you've helped an

organization. By using the control mindset aspect, there's

a great story to share with you do you mind just sharing it to

the listeners around how you helped that business.

It's a large organization now it was not as

large at the time great. I took over a particular market and a

particular country. And when I arrived, we were at minus 40%

year on year in terms of gross revenue gross on a company that

wanted us to track globally at plus 70%. year on year. So the

party is not really good at math. This is 110% gap

effectively. We were late on hiring partnership didn't work.

It was really strange, right. And so when I came in, the first

thing I did is really have that focus on, I can't control the

market. Right. So there's, there's a number of external

elements that were really, really hitting us hard. One, we

had a really strong local competition in that country that

kept going, you know, by French, this is what we do, that was a

bit of a sore, I can control what they say about us, I can't

control, you know, their pricing, I can't control any of

that. The second thing is that some of the bigger competitor at

the time, like SAP, and so on would give the product to the

customer for free to prevent them from coming to buying from

us, right. And so we had all the external pressure that made it

really deflating when you on turn account and you're working

it and you've got some of these economic factors coming in. So

we went back to the drawing board and focused on what we

could really do. And the thing I did is really dive really deep

into the data and look at what we could control and not

control. Is that something in my control? Yes or no? That was

that easy with the data? If it was not pocket? I kind of forgot

about it, because I can't do anything about it, right? And

then once we had this we focused on what would the people need to

do in order to change that data? And so we started looking at the

people behavior. And when you have the understanding of the

data, this is one of my moto, right? Understand data focus on

people, the data doesn't change itself. It's the people who

change the data. But the in order for the people to change

the data, it's not about telling them, it's about leadership and

really holding their hand on that journey, in terms of

understanding why they're here, why it matters where we are, and

if it sucks at some point in time and you're in a sticky

situation, you may as well just be upfront and transparent with

a team. So you can have a critical conversation in terms

of what can be done prioritization, etc. The other

element, which is something I've, I've not encountered very

often, I did a little of an exercise, right? We had an open

floor, and for two days, I set up for a couple of hours a

different time during the day, I set myself up at the very, very

end of that room. I was trying to work out how the team

collaborate with everybody in the circulation of people and I

noticed that people stipulated in every single aisle X set out

in which covered three aisles, right is quite big. So it was

like some kind of island where nobody ever goes to. So my team

used to go out and try other team, but nobody came in here.

It was almost like it's the team that is not successful. We don't

want to mean go. But there was still great collaboration

between the individual people. But leadership didn't come. And

I can control that, right. So I went to see my director and

asked him to come every morning and say hello to my team, one by

one. And so he did. And Wednesday, he came, and

everybody was just very silent. And just wondering what he was

doing, saying hello to everybody individually shaking hands and

all the rest of it, it was just very awkward. And then they all

turn to me within five seconds that you told him to come. And I

was like, I told him to come. Because you need to build a

relationship with him, he needs to build a relationship with

you. And within two days, it was normal, and it became a routine.

So when we look at what we can control, it's not only the sales

behaviors, everything that gravitates towards influencing

people to be doing the right thing, the right behavior,

because this is going to impact when they picked up the phone

and talk to customers. The mindset was very different. And

it was very motivating, because that we had a lot of respect for

that leader, a lot, a lot, a lot. And so it was something

that was quite inspiring, for example, but a tiny thing to do.

And so we did a lot of tiny things. That's amazing. The

amount needed to being able to shift the market within nine

months friend, we also were unplanned with hiring on plan

with partnership pipeline was built. I mean, it's not only the

revenue numbers, you need to see all the symptoms of that were

fixed on the process. It was quite impressive.

You broach the subject, which is your roles and

what you've done in the past on paper. It's like, oh, that

person does that. But there's so much depth that sits underneath

that saline. And Matt, I know you got some some questions to

probably follow up on.

Yeah absolutely. I think something that really

jumps out at me from what you just shared their sleep was just

that there may have been a few first pancakes for some in that

team. But just getting that support, like you say feeling

like they're in control, and they're getting the wider

support the leadership team, I think the other thing she called

out there was it's not massive change. Right? It's not talking

about seismic changes. It's the slight edges. It's these small,

incremental things that you do. And it's fascinating as well,

I'm sure you're seeing this now, in the SAS world, and across

your sort of technology career, I have a similar career in

technology and the evolution into into sort of agile

delivery. And there's a lot to be learned, I think in sales and

go to market revenue teams when it comes to that. And it being

okay to fail, right that celebrating some of those

failures within reason, encouraging people to learn from

that and to develop, you know, that first pancake analogy, I

think it's a really great one. And then finally that that

habit, use the word habit, right. And it's developing that.

As soon as it becomes habit, it becomes quite natural people get

comfortable with it and creating that environment for that habit

to succeed. And then that just self perpetuates. Right. And I

think that's a really, really fantastic point. And clearly a

real world example of rapid transformation through making

very, very small but meaningful changes in the way that the

organization operates. So that is excellent. And you mentioned

at the top, when we were talking about your transition on your

career and going from sales leader to hang on, I can't do

everything anymore. So I'm going to focus on the enablement

arguably more important, right? Because you can reach more you

can have more influence. I think if we asked five people in

sales, what they thought sales enablement is you might get five

answers, right? Very quite quite different ones. What is it for

you what is sales enablement mean?

Yeah, sales enablement, is really supporting

the revenue generation team, focusing on the customers,

acquiring customers that are fit to their needs, and the solution

that they provide retaining those customers and growing that

customer so that you can grow the company. It really is

customer centric and not self centric. A lot of people in

sales enablement focus on the marketing aspect of it also

depends, you know, sales enablement I've been working

for, I've never worked for marketing, but I've worked for

sales ops, I've worked for Reb ops, I've worked for sales CRO.

I've worked for HR. And sales enablement leader worked in many

different function, right? And so everybody's going to have

that slightly different bias, which is a bias towards, you

know, the areas of expertise where this is right. But at the

end of the day, if you build a sales enablement practice, that

is customer centric, is going to be fit for purpose for your

company, for your salespeople, and they're going to grow

quicker, and they're going to have skills that are adaptable

and flexible. Because I operate in SAS startup and scaleup. I'm

always thinking of, you know, you get that big acceleration,

then you get that plateau. And it's really hard, because you

don't have the resources enough until the next you know,

investment round or whatever, and you raise again. And so in

the back of my mind, it's what is the purpose now? And that I

can still skate it when the right time comes. It's a bit of

a Rubik's. cube like you need to look at all the faces in order

to be able to solve it.

Yeah absolutely, and I think, you know, again, just

pulling on one of those threads seeing you know that client

centricity. And actually it's about, you're focusing on the

client and or looking at the team and outwards, but looking

at the client and inwards to the team and what the team needs to

respond to the client need.

Yeah, there's things that raise that look at

customer loyalty, right? I know, it's a little bit of an old

survey other years, but it's probably about six years old,

seven years old, right? And so why do people renew in b2b? And

price comes very low, right? Because it doesn't drive

loyalty. If I come to you for a cheap price, I mean, viewed for

a cheaper price, right? There's brands and feature that comes

second, but the number one driver for people is customer

experience and sales experience. And I often say to the people

going back to, you know, the Circle of Influence CIA? Can you

control pricing? No. Can you control the brand? Oh, at your

micro level? Right? Can you control the features? No. Can

you control the sales and customer experience? Yes, well,

that's, you know, 50%, of why people reuse. So actually, you

are in control of this. But the enablement practice needs to be

centered around the customer. In order for this to happen, not

around the cellar.

This is the Growth Workshop Podcast, right? We're

all about growth, a lot of what you've shared today is about

growth within within businesses. You're one of the growth leaders

for you to enable organizations to scale up and just a guest a

reminder to the audience of some of those unicorns that you've

helped grow, like, what are the levers that you pulled in those

organizations to help achieve that size and magnitude of growth?

So if you look at an organization to grow, they

need to do a combination of four things, right? They need to

expand. And that's geographical expansion, product expansion and

finding new uses for product, which is how our equity became

so big, right? It could be a segment, you know, you move

segment from SMB to mid market, to enterprise, etc, etc, you

move market and so on. So that's an expansion or merger or

acquisition, you also need to acquire clients. But in order to

grow, you also need to retain clients. So that's your second

and third one. And finally, the last one is cost efficiency and

cost reduction. Right. So we heard a lot of growth at all

costs, which when the economy change started, you know, being

very, very difficult for company and they started making a lot of

redundancies. So cost efficiencies, the ability to do

more with the same amount of money. And cost reduction is

looking at my costs and reducing that. So that's how our company

grow. And I think as enablement leaders, we have to understand

that because we are going to be able to enable expansion, we are

enabling customer acquisition, we are enabling customer

attention. And we may be in cost efficiency by making sure that

people are enabled with the right tools and process in order

to be productive and efficient. So companies are looking a lot,

for example, at sales productivity right now, right?

So as revenue team in a SAS world, and startup and scaleup,

you're the forefront of bringing that revenue. And doing all of

this is a reasonable, reasonable amount of pressure to be able to

perform in a short amount of time. And so what it means is

that as an enablement practice, you need to really focus on what

do people need to do in order to be successful right now, that is

still going to be scalable. So that's your competency and your

skills. Are they doing it? Are they doing the right activity?

are they burning themselves out doing A to D that is not

yielding any result? What does good look like? Even what good

looks like is often missing out of a lot of companies, right? So

if we don't have a benchmark, how do you know that you're

going to hit it a bit like trying to play darts without a

dartboard? Right? And finally, what are the tools and processes

that are going to enable your team to be productive, but also

if you know what to do, and you're doing loads of it, and

you don't have a system, then effectively your customer

experience going back to the customer is going to suffer?

Right? So the enablement practice, we need to make sure

that everything we do is fit for purpose in in that aspect. And

it's scalable. It requires sacrifice click on to everything.

And on that point, Celine there's four key levers

there. Thank you no expansion, Where Do We Go segment the the

exploring different segments, acquisition, whatever that looks

like a retention of clients through key account management,

having a well defined your processes to govern that good

quality, customer success, those sorts of things, acquisitions,

sales, building, new logo, business, and then reduction of

costs. Now, I'm curious, is it I mean, there's a lot of things

there, one might suggest that various different parts of the

business is going to have a focus on one over the other. I'm

thinking, you know, CFOs, may be looking at costs, because that's

perhaps easier. And you've got a CCO who's focused on those

middle two, and maybe the CEO who's thinking, Oh, we can grow

through acquisition. If you've looked at those sorts of

businesses that you've helped be successful in this hyper growth.

Were there one or two of those things that you found had the

greatest influence or is it literally down to the

circumstances of each individual organization?

Those are dependent on factors you can't control so

the economy always stays in income. already brought success

story went from five employees to 650 in less than 24 months,

when unicorn in less than two years incredible. And this is

due to a number of things, right. And this is due to a mix

of these things. And it's also growth at all cost. So you

putting a lot of resources, you've got a lot of investment

in order to be able to actually achieve that growth in that

amount of time. Right now, companies are not so much or

fewer companies able to do that, because investors have changed

the metrics that they're going to measure company towards

because of the changing environment. So the environment

in which you operate is very important. The market in which

you operate is very important as well. So what does customer

acquisition look like? Is it transactional? Are you going to

do your product or service? Or are you going to need like

massive sales team? And so one of the challenge we have as

enablement is, you know, first sales organization come to us

with solution rather than problem. So you have to actually

be a consultant and really ask them so that you make sure

you're not solving something with the wrong solution.

I think there's something that I'm really

curious about. So I fantastic sales name and professional that

I know, as well talked about sales enablement, all costs,

when listening to you about growing from oyster from, you

know, five to 650 paths that painted a picture in my head,

I've got a visual of this sort of like, huge growth, this sort

of like bit of a crazy world growing pains, I did paint the

image for us around what that looks like growing from five to

600 and 51st. of all, if you don't mind, you know, Is it

crazy, as exciting? Is it disorganized? Or what does it

sound like was it feel like?

I joined when we were 100, but it still was a

crazy rate. I think it depends on the individual. I love it, I

love the rush of it, I love the ability to be able to have to

perform different tasks, because you don't have a full team you

don't have for resources, and so on. So there's a craziness to

it, you need to be incredibly focused. OIST is a phenomenal,

phenomenal company. And they enable phenomenal companies to

do great things as well and right, you need to hire the

right people. And so hiring the right people, people who are

highly collaborative, really understanding. So oysters got a

great understanding of their ideal customer profile. So they

can go after this rather than waste time in anywhere. They

have phenomenal sales team and people who are spread

geographically, they have incredible ways of working in a

distributed manner. So the way they work, the effectiveness,

the productivity is phenomenal that I've learned so much being

in that organization. And then the focus in terms of

enablement, give you an idea, we hired an enablement team, right

to be able to support that growing organization. And we

built 11 streams of onboarding for 11 different job roles in

less than two months. Wow. That's what it looks like.

So selling is really interesting. And the

reason for asking you what it feels like so I wanted to get a

sense of it through those objectives and sort of get those

senses going for us. How does a business know when they could

deploy a sales enablement function? Whether that's

recruiting them internally? Or maybe using a third party? Is it

a certain size? Is it a certain size of people? Or is it a

certain size of revenue, when they should really be thinking

about a functional sales enablement?

I'm quite partial to have enablement very early,

because it solves a lot of the teething problem for SAS. At the

end of the day, you need to increase the revenue in order to

be able and get your process in order and get all that expansion

acquisition, retention cost efficiency in order. And if you

do not very often what SAS do they hire sales leaders agreed

coach and can cope and take some of that enablement function very

early on when you've got a team of 510 salespeople fast. You

know, it depends again of the complexity of the of the

technology, right? If you have a product that is reasonably

transactional, and you've got some good marketing process

around Did you can get away without having too much of it

depends on the competitiveness of the market, there's a number

of other factors that are going to fit into this. There's a

number of studies and surveys that have proven the ROI of

enablement, in accelerating that gross, the ability to be able to

have less teething problem and also to facilitate that scale.

So that you know, you don't have to rip and replace, I see a lot

of rip and replace in young company where they put something

it's fit for purpose, they rip the whole thing and they put

something else. And only because there's not been any thought

about how could they have put that first process in the first

place? Well, that first skills or training or tool in a way

that didn't need rip and replace. We see that in sales

tech, for example, the sales tech stack is incredible. And we

see a lot of rip and replace tech. And actually, is it that

the tech is not working or is in the tech badly enabled or badly

embedded or not adopted? I was like, oh, it's not working.

Let's rip and replace. And I think enablement in that aspect

really helps with the cost efficient and see of that, but

also the ability to be able to grow the business sustainably.

And just, there's so many questions. It's just too

exciting this and that you bring on another question, it's the

third of our business that we work with is, is through

Professional Services and Financial Services. In my

opinion, SAS have got this world played, it's bringing a sales

enablement leader in you know, we've got an SDR function and a

function, they might have just come out of university, they

need support, CROs running around like a headless chicken,

great. We've got a professional service firm, or a financial

service firm in the middle of bank in London, we've done it

this way. And this is the way that we've always done it. And

actually sales is a dirty word. When should they be thinking

about sales enablement function? And how do they overcome this

sort of sales is fine. And adopting a sales or commercial

function that can enable the business might be valuable?

Yeah, I think I'm always a curious person. So I

just asked them, if sales is a dirty word, and you put

salespeople in front of your customers, are you telling me

you put dirty sales in front of your customer? Is that really

what you want to do? Or no, this is not what I meant, what I

meant, and so that we get on the reframe right? So okay, is it

important for you to grow your revenue? Importantly, tackling

this? How much is that costing you? Or, you know, what is the

cost of acquisition of each of your client. And so suddenly,

you start getting into those muddy waters, right. And also

using, I think, examples of other companies that have

absolutely nailed it. And that word of sales consultants is

exactly that. It's somebody who's got the expertise in

whatever they're doing in terms of professional services, and is

able to diagnose, it's basically a patient lying on the on the

hospital bed, and a surgeon coming in with an X ray. And

saying to the patient, I have fixed, you work in red with

Photoshop. And so what typically happens is, companies have got

an issue, they fix it in one way, shape, or form, and they

photoshopped it. So the underlying issue is still there,

they're not solving the problem, they're throwing money at it,

right. And so when you have a salesperson is acting as a

trusted adviser was consultative was not mind, push themselves

into the face of the customers and is able to go and do a

diagnosis that is going to enable for proper solution to be

able to be done, you suddenly build a lot more relationship or

a stronger bridge in between your company and that company.

And I think most CEO, and my C level executive can understand

that because they out of everybody, these people want to

work with business partners. And so sales doesn't become that

dirty function. And also the ability to be able to

differentiate yourself as a salesperson, I think today, it's

so easy to differentiate yourself because everybody's

doing the same thing. And so by doing something that is

different and elevated, by default, you're going to have

the customers here.

And they can package up the word sales,

however they wish. They can go to client engagement, if they

really want it's all fine. I mean, for me, there are

takeaways there is how as professionals, we can be

consultative to our own internal stakeholders and customers. A

great explanation, Matt, conscious of time and also

conscious of any other questions, right?

I think that was a great question. I think the

thing that resonates really with me the sort of rip it out and

start again, and when do you bring sales enablement in and

joining us to talk to this as well as I think it's an

awareness piece, as much as anything that this capability is

out there. Like you say, it's often an assumption that the

sales leaders, the sales leaders job to define that what the

sales software methodology is, or actually, we'll just take the

stock one from Salesforce as a smart idea. And then we'll just

reorganize our whole organization in that way, or

we'll bring people in and we'll just have them shadow and then

they can be really, really effective. In my experience, you

know, this, there's so many benefits to having a well

defined approach and process. We talk about it a lot. When we

think about onboarding and bringing new people into the

business and new people into a function. Imagine a sales

function with a poor onboarding, program and process. And that's

where, again, sales enablement can help craft the way and

define a bit of a roadmap for what that can look like bringing

people in giving them the right support, hiring to the right

competencies and capabilities, structuring the team in the

right way that's helped facilitate that growth from the

ground up, as you say, and not saying that that's a problem for

us when we're at 200. People will actually do it right from

the start. We don't end up with sticky tape and blue tack

holding our organization together. But we actually get a

well crafted, well built organization and sales function.

I think there's one piece as well, people forget. So

they focused a lot on the sales and the individual contributor

is installed in early stage startup but not leadership. And

so you basically just get this is what I call the role model,

right? Because very often people just get promoted, right? So if

role model relate looks like this, I'm an individual

contributor. I'm one of five people. I have a manager then I

moved a team of 10 I moved to being a team lead and I don't

get 85% of sales managers do not get any formal training before A

become a leader. So we entrust the people who are going to deal

again with our customers, right? Somebody who is going to do the

best that they can absolutely given. But if they've had a

great leader, maybe they will be able to emulate some of these

leadership best practice, maybe in the right context, right?

Loads of maybe, if they've had bad leadership example, for

sure, they will emulate some of those, as well. And so this is

why I call that a roulette, right? Because you don't really

know whether it's going to be black or white. And the

enablement of leadership early on, and the alignment on what

the sales methodology should be, what the messaging should be,

what the cadence of meetings should be, what the activity

looks like, what the competency framework is, what are some of

the tech stack that we're going to prioritize? How are we going

to enable all of these questions are massively important? Our

role is to understand the vision of the sales leader and consult

with them in order to be able to align because we have to align

on what that looks like for them, we're enabling them. But

enabling the leaders is going to be a lot easier because

otherwise you won't get out of it. Right? You just have silos.

I just want to high five you are and I don't know if

we can do that virtually. Well, yeah, I mean, Matt, Matt, and I

and cilia at this is why this, you know, this conversation is

so strong is that what's the consequence, I would imagine to

businesses of not being able to enable the leadership, I mean,

it's multi millions, right? All of these programs typically fail

because leadership haven't been brought on the journey, and not

then enabled to enable their other parts of the business.

Well you see brand and reputation costs, because,

again, those people are facing your customers. When I arrived

in that company, where we were minus 40, plus 70%, the previous

leader, I was introduced to that person, and that person shook my

hand and said, that team doesn't need a mother. Actually, it

didn't, he didn't shake my hand, he wishes to shake my hand. And

to me that that was a very good example of what the team had

been under in terms of leadership. And then I started

seeing from the team, emails that were bold, red letters,

leaders, that is the most atrocious ways of leadership,

right? And neglect from individual and all of that,

right. But that, but then all the screaming and shouting and

all the rest of it. And so, to me, this is a perfect example of

completely incompetent leadership, but then not doing

it as bad intention. I don't think it's a bad attended

person, or at least I don't want to be left to right. I think

it's just badly enable that those people have got to find

the customers. So brand and reputation revenue cost process,

internal hardship as well, for every single one, employee

brand, hourglass, those review. Were not raving in that country

by that. Good, right. Yeah, the cost of hiring. So we had what I

called the revolving door, we hired people fired people, we

hired people fired people hired peep, and then eventually also

one of the metrics that after nine months we managed to

achieve is we had the highest retention of all the sales team

on the floor.

Amazing that there is some phenomenal metrics. I

mean, it's a great debate. I'm just so glad that you picked out

on that leadership enablement piece, just something that we

see time and time again being an error that Oh, no, they're fine

that because they've been recruited because they were the

top performers. And they'll be fine. You know, we can

Yeah, absolutely. And leadership is a lever, right?

It's a multiplier. Because if you've got a team of 10, under

one leader, the influence of that leader is multiplied by 10.

Right. So that works in in both directions. Let's Celine, thank

you so much for today's conversation, as Johnny said,

it's been, I mean, it's incredibly insightful, you shed

so much really valuable insight with us. And with the listeners,

we've thoroughly enjoyed having you it just to capture some of

those key points, right, those four pillars of growth and those

four key levers of growth, rather, that's helped you

enabling those organizations in scaling up and then just talking

about some of those slight edges, right? There's little

things sometimes big but a lot of the times just little changes

that have helped you be successful that our listeners to

this podcast can can surely benefit from So on behalf of

Johnny and I and the growth workshop podcast, we'd like to

thank you for joining us today. It's been fantastic. We wish you

a great rest of your day and look forward to seeing you again

soon.

Thank you for inviting me and you guys. Keep

up the great work because you're doing amazing out there. So well

done.

Thanks Celine, that's appreciated.

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