Getting Sales Enablement Right to Increase Results with Dave Brock, CEO of Partners in Excellence

Summary: Sales enablement is intended to help raise performance, but many efforts have backfired due to departmental silos. And now there’s a growing gap between what salespeople need and what they’re getting to improve performance.<br> For example, Corporate Visions recently surveyed 500 B2B marketers and sales professionals that 20% of organization content creators “just do what they think is best” with no overarching structure at all. And just 27% of organizations are content that focuses squarely on customers and rather than their own story.<br> And all the tools and technologies meant to help boost sales productivity are now are slowing things down.<br> What’s the bottom line?<br> Salespeople are getting overwhelmed and slowed down with increased complexity, just like the customers they’re selling to.<br> That’s why I interviewed Dave Brock (<a href="https://twitter.com/davidabrock">@davidabrock</a>), author of the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Manager-Survival-Guide-Lessons/dp/0997560207">Sales Manager Survival Guide,</a> also CEO of <a href="http://excellenc.com/default.htm">Partners in EXCELLENCE</a>. Dave’s brilliance is his focus on practical simplification. And I’m excited to bring his thinking on sales enablement and what can be done to raise sales team performance.<br> Can you tell us a little bit about your background?<br> Dave: Brian, thanks so much. I really appreciate the chance to continue the conversation we started in Washington, and I appreciate you inviting me to this.<br> By background, I actually started as a physicist in my career and ended up going to the dark side of selling and sold mainframe computers for IBM for some years. Went up the food chain to more senior management roles, then left to become EVP of sales for a technology company as part of a turnaround, later held VP of Sales or CEO roles in several technology companies.<br> And now run the consulting company – we help our clients solve some of the most challenging problems in sales and marketing and deal with the new buyers. We have a highly collaborative approach in helping really outstanding people solve really, really difficult problems.<br> What is the biggest trend you see affecting your work and sellers today? <br> Well, clearly, it’s the convergence of some things that we see in the marketplace. It’s the new buyer. Everybody’s changing the way they buy, and learning how we engage these new buyers through marketing, sales, and customer experience is critical.<br> At the same time, we see tremendous transformations in business and business models, whether it’s the digital transformation that virtually every company is undertaking or just older business models being displaced with new business models.<br> We have some of the classics of Airbnb, turning the hotel and lodging market upside down or Uber turning the taxi and limo business upside down. We see that the new business models occurring are driving real stress on customers.<br> And then the final thing is just overwhelming complexity, just between the rate of change, the amount of information we’re deluged with every day. Most of the people I’m meeting are really struggling with at least one of those three things. I see it impacting virtually everybody.<br> Brian: I can relate to those challenges. I think just in talking about complexity for sellers and marketers, I was having a conversation with someone earlier, and it’s just an overwhelming number of tools an average salesperson uses or a marketer uses. It also creates challenges around collaboration, that internal collaboration.<br> How do you get internal collaboration to improve sales performance?<br> Dave: The easy answer is to break down the silos and start talking to each other. It’s easier said than done. We see a lot of the issues we face regarding internal complexity, and internal collaboration is just people being wel...