In this opening episode of a 3-part series, Roxanna Marazzi of RM Consultancy shares how sales leaders, HR, sales ops and enablement can move from ad hoc training requests to a shared view of performance gaps, capability gaps and role alignment. This is for revenue, sales, and enablement leaders who want enablement to prove measurable impact, not just deliver training.

Hello, and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast.

In this podcast, we'll be sharing insights and hearing from other industry leaders

to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business.

You're listening to part one of a three-part series.

Hello, and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast, with myself, Matt Best, and the

wonderful Dannii Mathers co-hosting today.

So we're thrilled to be joined by Roxy Marazzi today, and Roxy brings over two

decades of leadership, sales, enablement, and operational experience from the likes

of Computacenter, Rackspace, Intuit, WP Engine, and most recently, Salesforce,

and now advises organisations through your new business RM Consultancy.

Roxy, welcome to the podcast.

We're thrilled to have you here today.

Thank you.

Really excited to be here.

Roxy, tell us a little bit more about RM Consulting then.

I created … So I built RM Consultancy based on my

own frameworks and methodologies

that I used as an AE and throughout my leadership career.

So it is a blueprint that has been proven and tested leaders that I'm looking to

work with through the consultancy is not having to figure things out by themselves.

For me, I'm really passionate about building cultures that feel as good

as they perform, so all wrapped around emotional intelligence, and my focus

is working with leaders who wanna build teams that feel good, perform well, and

are aware of themselves as well as their teams, beyond performance and numbers.

Wonderful.

And as is customary on the Growth Workshop podcast, we always ask

that first question, which is, if you had to have or nominate three

people for your personal board of advisors, who would they be and why?

So I would say 100% Brené Brown.

I have been in awe of her and what she represents for a really long

time, and it's helped me through some very defining moments on a personal

level, so I'd love her take on things.

The second would be, without a doubt, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. I just

think her outlook, her determination to get home her the fantasy world that she

was in tapping into different emotions.

When I grew up, I really understood that movie had held so much more than

what I thought when I was small, but I would definitely have her on that board.

And then the third would be a leader of mine from many years ago.

He came from a military background, but he had this humility and acce-

a-accessibility that I was in awe of when I was in, when I was in AE.

And he was respected, he was loved, he was followed.

He made really good decisions for the business that I was in.

And I still admire him to this day.

Would love him to be on the board if I had one.

So yeah, those would be my three, I would say.

Oh, nice.

A really nice mix.

Yeah.

So yeah, someone close to your close to your heart, as it were, who you've worked

with directly, and then, yeah, the Dorothy one's an out- an outsider, but it's the

same- It is an outsider-

sound- … but there's a lot of-

… Matt Best: reasons

… Roxanna Marazzi: psychology behind the Dorothy to keep pushing- Yeah … and,

there is that Rainbow There we go.

Yeah, there

we go.

Brilliant, Roxy.

Look, thank you very much for that.

You've got such a wealth of experience in an, in a whole range of organizations,

obviously primarily in the tech space.

But more recently, of course, in that, in, in enablement, which is

where your new business is focused.

I'm curious, having worked in multiple businesses across multiple different

functions, what do you think are the most important or prevalent pains

when it comes to enablement and any of those challenges you've seen?

And maybe actually at this point, it might be useful to take a few steps

back in time and tell us a little bit about your journey and how that has

informed the answer to that question.

Yeah.

So I was part of the problem as well as the solution, because I started in sales,

so I've done every single sales role.

And then when I went into leadership, I had the same

mentality, which was essentially seeing enablement as a helpdesk.

So imagine going to a helpdesk, fixing your laptop.

It was very transactional.

If I needed something there and then, I would want it to happen.

If you're the loudest, you get heard.

And especially as a leader, if you're performing, you obviously

know what you're doing, so you get into that engine of making sure that

everything is urgent to be heard.

Then when I stepped into enablement, you really understood how much

noise that creates and the friction between looking at performance as

opposed to looking at preference and looking at who shouts the loudest.

Because something that is urgent might be urgent for you, but not necessarily

urgent for the rest of the business.

So the word bespoke stands out, ad hoc.

Now is a good one, especially in a month-to-month business.

I've always been in a month-to-month business, so time is of the essence.

I remember when I was a sales leader, and if I knew that something needed to

be done for the last week of the month, let's say, I would ask enablement.

They'll be asking the right questions, right?

Why?

Who is this gonna support?

Is this gonna move the dial?

Where is it gonna move the dial?

And nine times out of 10, I really wouldn't have the data to back that.

It's just like it felt right, and this is what I know my team needed.

So I wasn't thinking about the company.

I wasn't thinking about… Thinking about the team to an extent, but thinking

about my own needs and what I wanted.

Then when it wouldn't happen, I would create my own program, and I would

push my own program, and I would do it.

And what that created in my team is a certain mindset.

So when you're the talent multiplier in your team, they're now becoming leaders.

They're have- they're having the same mindset as you.

It permeates and it scales.

So what I feel is one of the massive pain points now being on the

other side of the fence is taking enablement as a help desk and not

seeing them as a strategic partner.

They are there to help you find the performance gaps, understand the

capability gaps, role align, so make sure that the role is actually aligned

to what you're looking to achieve, and look at the current performance

and understand where the blockers are, not just to react to everything.

They can't react to everything.

There's a certain amount of people in a team.

And when you're working for a global organization, it becomes a tough,

a, a challenge, an uphill struggle.

Yeah.

And as an enablement leader then and having made that transition, because

you can't, we can't stop sales leaders always think, sometimes thinking about

that, but what do you put it down to in terms of what's the real sort

of root cause of that perception?

I think at the, in the moment here about HR business partners, right?

People we meet often in our roles, but also people that we've worked with and

again, sometimes seen as a sort of, s- the services side of the business, right?

It group functions, all of these different things, all of these

different terms have those connotations.

Is it, does it go right back to that?

Why is it that enablement is sometimes seen in that way?

I think the waters are muddied because there are a few

teams essentially doing the same thing.

They have the same mission.

So you've got HR that is for typically hiring frameworks.

You've got sales enablement, which is all about sales experience, performance.

You've got sales ops, which is around data process the, the engine

that drives facts over feelings.

But they're all essentially trying to help the business do the same

thing, which is generate revenue.

However, they all work in silos.

So you've got HR that are looking at a hiring model which is around fairness

compliance making sure that we are hiring the right talent for the company.

Then you've got enablement that is looking at capability gaps, looking

at manager readiness, but there's no visibility on the people that

we're hiring until we've hired them.

Then you've got the sales leaders that, and I was the same, right?

I've been in plenty of interviews, and I've been the interviewee, and

you do hire people that are like you.

It is a unconscious bias because you're the best and you want them to be the best,

so you look for certain characteristics.

But when those three teams are not aligned, there is inconsistencies there's

no clarity, and there's a whole load of confusion because no one actually

knows what they should be doing or what they should be taking ownership of.

So then enablement dips their toe into sales op, sales ops

dips their toe into enablement.

Hiring gets involved, and look, I put my hands up.

I've written my own job descriptions as a leader.

I've given them to HR. HR sources the candidates based on their criteria Then

I interview them in accordance to what I'm looking for, and then in two years

or in a year, things don't feel right or it is, wasn't clear in the interview

as to, what the longevity of this career path for that particular candidate was.

So if we're not working together, how do we have one source of truth,

one standard, and one process?

It's not gonna work.

It's really interesting what you're saying, Roxana, 'cause I

guess I've had a fairly similar experience where I was in sales, I went to sales

leadership, then went into, to enablement.

So understanding that disconnect and where things go wrong for me was really,

was real, and I had my own views and my own opinions on where that came from.

And I think touching upon what you've said is, you would go to enablement

and say, "This is what I need." And I think quite often the reason why

leaders or salespeople feel like they have to go to enablement to

say what they want is because they don't feel heard in the first place.

And I think the role with enablement is you have to be, you have to be on

the ground with the people, listening to the people, and understanding what

it is that they need to be able to translate that into the wider company

objectives or strategic objectives.

And I often think that leaders feel like it's being done to as opposed

to being done with or through.

Yeah.

And that's where the, the disc- disconnect can happen is, "Okay, this is what you

want me, this is what you want my team to do from a capability perspective. Are

you actually listening to what we've said that we need?" So I think sometimes it

can just come down from the top without being filtered from the bottom as well.

So be interested to hear your take on that.

Yeah, so when I was heading up enablement for EMEA, we had

a cultural nuance piece as well, right?

So how we learned in, or are learning in the UK would be different to the

Netherlands, would be different to Spain, would be different to France.

And when you're working at such a pace and trying to adhere to those differences,

the most important thing is being on the ground, being close to the C- COO, being

in those board meetings, in those QBRs, to understand what the leaders of those

leaders want and what they see, right?

So being way more involved and part of the team rather than being seen

as, these people in a tower that are just making decisions on our behalf

is really getting to the root cause of we don't need more training.

We need to understand what the root cause is.

Is it a capability gap?

Is it a manager readiness gap?

Where are we at with our current performance?

Do we know what that looks like?

And is, sometimes No one actually knows why.

They can't articulate why, but they just know it's a problem,

so they throw training at it.

And gone are the days I feel that enablement can be measured on NPS

scores and satisfaction surveys and, we've got, all of these people, 95% of

people attended our enable- So what?

What have you measured that against?

Have you measured it against conversion?

Have you measured it against close rates?

Have you measured it against moving the dial and making a com- commercial impact?

That is where I feel you would see the difference because you are

singing from the same hymn sheet.

Leaders are tracked by pipeline integrity, by pipe progression,

by conversion rates, by revenue.

It should be the same with enablement and sales ops to a degree.

Yeah, I love that.

It's you're talking the same language a- as the leaders, and I think

that's where the, th- those pivotal change moments happen is if you

talk in their language of, okay, everyone's got pipeline problems.

Everyone wants to increase their average order value.

Everybody wants to increase their win rates.

When you bring it back to those core metrics and you go into the

why, like the biggest piece that's missing, like you see a program being

rolled out, why are we doing this?

Yeah.

W- what's in it for us?

And it's just those simple things that I think when you bring those together,

you really see that gel between all of the different functions, and it's

just the, the, the simple communication strategy, the simple change strategy,

which is all then tied to these bigger levers, which is the lagging

indicators the leading indicators.

I think when those, those pieces are missing, you just don't get

the traction, and then everyone says enablement's a cost center.

Correct.

Correct.

And that, when I moved from sales to enablement, the level of appreciation

Yeah

… Roxanna Marazzi: and respect I gave that team from being on the other

end just thinking, "God, I have to get through that assessment.

I have to get through that assessment at the end of the day, just tick a

box." And I've w- I've done it, right?

I've done it with my teams.

It's like, do I close that deal or do I do this assessment, and we would all

sit in a room, and I would incentivize everyone by giving them an ice

cream, and I'd get everyone to do it.

Like it I did do that.

Not recently, but I've, I have done that.

If I'm doing it, other leaders have done it, and it creates the wrong

mindset because what you're essentially saying is this isn't important.

It's important, but it's not urgent, and it's not gonna essentially help you

in what you need to do, which is your main concern, which is when you're in a

month-to-month business, it's creating and closing pipe, so just get it done

when there is so much more that you can leverage from the enablement team that

if you're act- if you actually understand their role and what they're there to

do, which is a performance commercial engine for you, It would be such a

different landscape to, to benefit from

so part of that is at the leadership level.

So let me and I'm really interested to hear, how you think.

And Dannii, you mentioned bot- bottom up and top down.

There's convincing the leaders of what matters, and taking those key KPIs,

and creating those proof points, and setting a baseline, and measuring.

And then at the end of the year, you go, "We've helped the team to improve

by 20% as a result of these initiatives that we've run." But to a seller on the

ground, how do you translate what they might see as a click click assessment

into something that has meaning for them?

And you talk about like training and what have you, and obviously, we're all

in this business of enabling, enabling organizations and enabling teams.

And there's a degree of we're focused on the outcome.

Ab- absolutely critically important.

How do we-- Or in y- in your experience, how do you help the individual to

connect to that outcome so that they can connect what it is that they're

doing to s- a valuable exercise for them, and then no longer seeing it

as a sort of administrative task?

I think it essentially starts from hiring-

Okay … and who we're hiring.

So for me, and it's one of the workshops that I do, one of the

modules that I do in my framework is around mindset and skill set.

So when you look at a job description or when I've gone into interviews, the first

Have they hit target, and have they hit targets suc- successfully?

That's one thing, but what about the attitude and the behavior?

Attitudes, you can teach behaviors.

You can measure them.

Are they doing the right thing?

Are they hitting their pipeline?

Are they making the- … the right, the, the calls?

But an attitude you can't teach, and this is where I feel the gap between the

capabilities that enablement can see and the areas from a m- manager readiness

piece can see to actually going back to who we're hiring is really important.

Because if you're bringing in a certain mindset, that's the

foundation, I feel, to to an extent.

The second thing is from an onboarding perspective is- The KPIs are one thing,

but the why behind, why is this important?

How does that get you from here to here, and what does that show the business?

So how it's about their brand as well, because we essentially

all-- when anyone takes on a role, I hope they see themselves

therefore, growing with the company.

In somewhere like Salesforce, the opportunity is endless.

So how do you put that into the onboarding process so that they know that this

isn't just a tick box exercise, it's part of their appraisal, it's part of their

career planning, the importance of not just doing it, but why they're doing it,

and what does this say to the business?

And also about them.

Are they taking their career seriously?

So it's about it's about making sure we're hiring the right people to

begin with- … and then managing the behavior but just making sure that from

the get-go they understand the why.

When I was an AE in many years ago, a lot of things were just told to

me "You need to create pipeline."

Fine.

We understand why you need to create pipeline, but the whole conversion rate

piece and the whole how many calls you need to make, you just did it, right?

You didn't think about it, and when you become a leader, you start to understand.

But if you start explaining this from the get-go, they

also feel part of the solution.

They understand why they're doing things, because a lot of people

don't know what they don't know.

You need to make it clear, and there needs to be that clarity that gives them

that confidence that, "All right, I'm actually doing this for a reason. I'm

not just doing it just to tick a box."

I was just gonna say, I was trying not to do a, a shameless plug,

but when we look at our Go-To-Market capability accelerator, the reason

w- the-- when we a-assess commercial teams, we are looking at the capability

but their potential, which really lends to the point that you're talking

about, not just their performance.

But if you don't have that right potential- You might have people on

your team that will never go to the lengths that you really want them to

go to because they just don't have the potential to really want to do it.

So how do you really assess someone's potential?

So it's it's looking at those kind of those three core areas to assess, do we

have the right people in the first place?

Are we hiring for the right people?

And can we really grow the team that we already have based on what

we know about their potential?

And I do see that as being the key piece that's always missing when we're trying to

drive, or when organisations are trying to drive the capability within their teams.

Look at who you've actually got from a potential and an attitude perspective to

see where you can r- are you spending the right time investing in the right people?

That is really difficult to get to that point unless you

start doing those assessments.

Yeah, and that's why I created a hiring excellence

framework, and I've used it, and it's been proven and tested not just

from a performance standpoint, but from are we hiring the right people

aligned to our company values?

Are we aligning the right attitude for the role?

Are we actually aligning people to the right parts of the business?

Someone might think they're a hunter, but they should actually

be a gatherer, and vice versa.

Certain people on certain industries, there's a certain profile.

How do you embed that into your framework and then make that a one source of truth?

Because your company values are not gonna change.

The, the s- the, the market or your industry might change, but the people

that are essentially building that culture, you want a culture that feels

as good as it performs, not just one.

You need to have both.

So starting from hire, from the hiring process I feel is really important.

We'll pick this up in part two.

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Until next time, keep up that forward-thinking mindset.

Goodbye.