S Y N O P S I S
I had the opportunity to attend and participate in the 2nd Annual Sales Enablement Society Experience (SES2018). Calling it a conference does not do it justice, it is an Experience of engagement and sharing of insights. It is not an event that you sit back and just take it in, you are consumed and participating, whether you choose to be or not.
Wait a minute, you are a Marketer, what are you doing at a Sales Enablement event? Growth Marketing!
Great question. As a Marketer, I view the role as one in lock step and the same team with Sales and one that supports the growth of the organization. The more Marketing becomes part of the same team, the greater the rewards to customers, our organizations and us personally as Marketers. Sellers are taking on too much as the market and customers evolve. Marketing can benefit from understanding more about the life of their Sellers and more importantly, going back to basics and understanding the customer and the outcomes they seek.
Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell
them what they need well before they realize it themselves.
– Steve Jobs
I can honestly say that I haven’t been as mentally challenged as I was during my 3 days in Denver at SES2018. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect:
- Would it be heavy enablement training?
- Would it be heavy sales?
- Would it be heavy with technology suppliers?
- How much marketing would be present?
- How outside – in would it be over inside – out?
In order to get the most out of the experience, I asked myself two questions before I left on the adventure:
Why are you attending?
What do you expect to get out of the experience?
I had spent a great deal of time becoming acquainted with the society and the previous event, I had attended a couple of meetings and had a little research on the attendees. I know, I’m an analyst at heart and was preparing for the trip and what I would both contribute and receive from the experience.
The Society has grown in just 2 years from nothing to:
- 20 active chapters
- 15 countries
- 5000 members
- 2 annual global experiences
- All volunteer driven and no bank account
I am privileged to be a colleague of Scott Santucci and would participate in the Enabling Growth Experience Room. So what is an Experience Room? It is a room with the premise of a topic, walls covered in brown paper, subtopics added to the topic on the paper as you travel around the room. The expectation is to stop and provide individual reactions, conversations and insights to each of the subtopics around the room by writing on the paper and adding sticky notes.
Every few hours, we would make updates or iterations to the conversation as it evolved with insights from the attendees. The attendees represented every constituent you can imagine:
- Improvisation Consultants
- Growth, Sales and Marketing Consultants
- Executive Coaches
- Authors
- CEOs
- Entrepreneurs and Investors
- Senior Executives and Leaders of Sales, Marketing and Enablement
- Sales Professionals – Highly Successful Sales Professionals
- Academia Leaders
- Industry Analysts
- Media Publishers
- Enablement Trainers and Practitioners
I have seen and used what I call Brown Paper walls to document processes and collect artifacts to the process. This would be the first time I see one to engage and draw insights out of such a large and varied set of attendees. I would gain enough comfort to take attendees through the room and discussion and it would change based upon the bias of the audience on tour. Here you can see a video of Scott describing the Experience Room.
ITERATION ONE – DATA, DATA AND MORE DATA: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOU?
The first group to take a spin around the room during Iteration 1 – Tons of data, not a lot of prescription, led by Scott Santucci, included:
- Keynote speaker, Antarctic Mike
- Dr. Howard Dover – University of Texas at Dallas
- Tamara Schenk, CSO Insights Research Director and Co-author – “Sales Enablement”
- Mark Kopcha, President & CEO – Revegy, Inc.
- Kunal Mehta, VP of Sales Strategy & Operations – Druva
- Bill Ball, Director of Learning and Development – DISYS
- Heather Cole, Service Director of Sales Enablement Strategies – SiriusDeicisions
The group ebbed and flowed for 2.5 hours consuming the data and discussing insights. Talk about a mentally exhausting conversation. Over the course of the experience I would continue to speak with other CEO’s, Analysts, Sales Executives, Authors and even a few other brave Marketing leaders.
The morning keynote and this discussion would take us to a last-minute run to grab what was left of lunch and a standing nibble, while continuing the conversation. Intense first morning and it never let up! I loved it! Check out Scott describing the Experience Room and his Keynote on Growth to get a flavor of the experience.
The premise discussed was, “Growth is created from the pursuit of what’s possible”. This is a theme I embrace growing up with a father who didn’t accept Can’t as a proper response to anything. I’ve often led product meetings with a little blue sky thinking of all things possible and conclude with what can we get done, by when, to meet our customer’s requirements. That is what we did with every tour of the room and depending upon the make up of the group, the conversations and insights obtained varied. Maintaining open and inclusive collaboration was the toughest activity of the tour facilitator.
INSIGHTS SHARED
The key to organic growth for organizations will not be the same tactics that led organizations to where they are today. Customers have changed, their expectations have changed, and we have entered a time where the product is a utility. The value to be derived is from the organization that partners in co-creating solutions to the growth outcomes of their customers.
Your goal must become helping your customers define and execute an outcome-based solution, just as we need to perform inside our organizations. It requires change with an agile approach to implementation. Akin to Fixing the airplane in flight.
There were many points discussed across the subtopics around the room:
- CEOs search for growth – CFOs apply mechanical measurement
- Co-creating outcomes with customers – what’s happening today is broken
- Who is the customer? How to model, map and match tactics to customer desired outcomes
- How do we sell value? Find your selling outliers, they know what is working
- What are the conversations to have with customers
- Work the agreement network with the customer, help them help you
- Process of What’s Possible – Create curiosity, the story and gain the buy-in
- Key attributes: Alignment, Strategy Enablement, Know your Segments
- How do you fix the plane that is in flight – short term tactics and long-term strategy
Iterations of the Experience continued for two days validating and evolving prescriptions for organic growth. The speed to evolution of the prescriptive services could only have been achieved at an event like this with the wide variation of roles and perspectives. At the end, I was sad to see it end. However, I am enthusiastic to carry forward the experience, perspectives and engage with the larger network that I gained during these three days in Denver.
LET’S WRAP THIS UP
This Experience was one of the most thought provoking and insightful experiences I have encountered in quite a long time. In preparation to be able to absorb and engage as fully as possible, I did a few things:
1) I reviewed all of the content and videos from the 2017 experience.
WHY? Understand the society network and it’s members
2) Read these books:
The Chaos Imperative and Radical Inclusion by Ori Brafman
WHY? The society network is based upon the imperative and the author became so interested in the growth of the society’s network, he spoke at the first experience. Often times, fresh perspectives come from including unusual suspects. I would come to know that the facilitators of the Growth Experience Room were all unusual suspects and we were brought together to facilitate the discussion knowing our bias would be a strength for one conversation, however, we would be more open and insightfully unbiased during the rest of the conversations.
Designing for Growth by Jeanne Liedtka
WHY? To enter facilitation of the Experience Room with an open thought process and the premise of starting with What’s Possible. Tomorrow’s solutions will not be delivered with thought processes of the past.
Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses “No, But” Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration by Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton
WHY? Force myself as a facilitator to edit my language to be more inclusive and foster open collaboration. Until I read the book, I had no idea how many times I found myself starting with But…. It’s like saying, um, and, etc. while speaking. I may have to wear a rubber band and snap myself to force the habit. This was the bias and skill our improv facilitator brought to the room. Listen to Kristy West discuss the topic in this short LinkedIN Post. This is a habit that seems small but carries a powerful punch in collaboration.
Sounds like a lot of prep for a 2.5 day conference, right? It was! It was well worth the time to gain an understanding of:
- How and why the society grew as it did
- How the society formed and operates
- How to think differently for growth
- How to collaborate more effectively
The Yes, And book is written from lessons of The Second City team, yes, improv for business. I know this sounds like the wildest idea of the whole experience and it was refreshing to meet and add Kristy West, Founder of BraveSpace, to my network.
Kristy was the initial keynote speaker and she opened the experience with a Rock / Paper / Scissors contest with 300+ attendees. Yes, it really happened and was over in 10 minutes or less. Kristy was also part of the Growth Enablement Experience Room, we had many “unusual suspects” supporting the experience.
As I reflected on the Experience and the trip, I gained so much more out of the trip because of the due diligence to make the most of 3 days with so many intellectually insightful individuals that I was privileged to connect with during the event. It also provided the opportunity to practice, validate and be curiously inspired.
TAKE AWAYS
This is a tough one to take down to a succinct list as my new friend Gehard Gschwandtner practices so well (he is a long time publisher), there were so many. I didn’t expect to meet so many senior intellects across roles all proactively driving change and growth in their organizations. Two of the most unique points of reflection were:
Envious of the students at several universities that are building sales and marketing curriculum aligned to today’s world
Improvisation to drive inclusive collaboration
These two were the unexpected and unusual experiences of the event that I embraced and enjoyed. The expected insightful conversations to address were:
- Organic Growth and the pressure point it is becoming as organizations have squeezed cost to the point that functions that would fuel growth have been eliminated
- Organizations measure the tangible and it is the intangible that will drive growth – we must work to illustrate business growth through the intangible
- Progress and impact will be made by adopting a short-term tactical plan and a long-term strategy
- Customer outcomes are the new value driver
Here are a few recommended resources to review:
#SES2018 Content – still a work in progress
Read the books noted previously
Keep checking the Sales Enablement Society site as content is added regarding the Experience. Remember this is a staff of volunteers who did a better job of collecting the valuable content on video than I’ve seen many professional event organizations perform.
This was an experience well worth the trip to engage with the brightest minds in the industry addressing the tough challenges of organic growth in their organizations and for their customers.
This is a spark of a movement started by ~300 of the most talented individuals in the market.
Back to my opening questions as I prepared for the adventure:
Why are you attending?
1) Obtain a first-hand perspective and connect with the members during the experience that I researched through the previous years’ experience footage.
2) Participate, engage and be a facilitating member of the Growth Experience Room.
What do you expect to get out of the experience?
1) Garner insights in a compacted time frame from the widest variety of perspectives in the industry.
2) Practice my own skills as a facilitator and gain new skills from other intellects in the industry.
3) Get Uncomfortable!
The most unusual experience, meeting a cousin! Yes, it happened. As I was participating in an Iteration of the Experience Room, a man indicated his mother’s maiden name was the same as my last name. We discussed ancestry a bit and discovered that we do come from the same clan and shared information so that I could connect with his mother.
Be open minded, inclusive, collaborative, customer outcome focused, design for growth with agility and continue being comfortable with the uncomfortable! Denver’s Bear has the right right approach – outside looking in!
Growth comes from the pursuit of what’s possible – Chase what’s possible!
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Now I ask you: How are you pursuing what’s possible for growth?
Share your comments below or connect with me!
A related post:
Outcome Marketing: Engage – Influence – Experience
Photo credits: Flickr, Denver Convention Center Blue Bear, Steven Gerner (CC BY-SA
