To start, President Chuck Marcouiller shared our mantra: “The Sales Enablement Society exists to create a saloon environment where the best sales, marketing, and enablement minds get together to learn, debate, and enlighten each other through jointly developed experience.”
SES Seattle aims to elevate the position, enlighten each other, and expand our networks. For this meeting, the focus was on best practices, so we did a few rounds of “best practice speed dating.
The “speed dating” rounds were quick and consisted of sharing a best practice, learning a best practice, and then switching to a new counterpart to get as much different insight as possible. It was a blast to learn about all the other companies represented along with the tools/practices they are leveraging to enable their teams. In the middle of the round, I was introduced to Cambi DeFoor from Payscale, and when I told her that I was from Highspot, she laughed and told me how she was just talking to another person about Highspot as a best practice. I was ecstatic to hear that and loved hearing the feedback firsthand from a wonderful customer!
When we came back together as a group and shared some of those best practices, an interesting analogy came up revolving around infomercials, and their relevance to sales (specifically technology sales).
The first that came to my mind was Shamwow — that “miracle” chamois that was a big deal a few years ago. We all remembered Shamwow, and Patrick from Puppet began to discuss about why infomercials draw and hold attention. Infomercials tell stories in a way that makes a connection you’ll remember. They often show how the things you use today don’t work (usually in a parody) compared with how the advertised product is far superior, which helps the audience makes an emotional connection.
Often in tech sales, we are guilty of talking about new releases and features but forgetting to show how it relates to the person we’re pitching so they don’t make a connection. To sell more faster, you must make an emotional connection.
We then switched gears and talked about training, specifically the use of videos as it relates to training. While we debated on topics such as length of videos, how often those videos should be (daily, weekly), if those videos should be mandatory or optional, we all agreed that analytics are critical to improving training and testing is the best way to ensure mastery of content.
Sean Berwald helped us close the meeting with a problem for the group to help solve: Do acronyms save time or waste time through miscommunication or interpretation?
While the group initially didn’t like the use of acronyms, we eventually agreed that they can be helpful and save time, based on the right context and right audience.
Due to summer coming up, we decided to reduce our meeting frequency to every other month, with social meetings thrown into the mix as well. Our next meeting will be on Wednesday, July 19, 2017 from 4 to 7 p.m. Pacific at the Oxygen Learning headquarters (if you missed the very first meet-up, this place also has an amazing view with a large outdoor deck) and it will be part meet-up, part social with a full bar and lots of networking opportunities.
What are your thoughts? What does sales enablement mean to you? Do acronyms save or waste time?
Guest blog post written by Matt Gonn, Sales Enablement Manager, Highspot
