September 10, 2025 • 45 mins
This Week's Episode:
In this episode of Software Sales Simplified, Matt & Kevin engage with Meredith Golden, a seasoned sales enablement leader. They discuss the nuances of sales enablement, the importance of having a sales background for effective training, and the challenges faced in implementing enablement programs. Meredith shares her journey from sales to enablement, emphasizing the need for alignment with business priorities and the role of AI in enhancing, rather than replacing, the human element in sales training. The conversation highlights the critical skills needed for aspiring enablement professionals and the importance of understanding the sales process to create impactful training programs.
About our Guest - Meredith Golden:
Meredith Golden is the Senior Manager of GTM Enablement & Acceleration at Aircall. Drawing on a career built in enterprise, mid-market, and transactional sales, she brings a front-line understanding of what it takes to win in the market. She has a proven track record of sales excellence and applies her expertise to leading Go-to-Market strategy and execution, orchestrating key programs that drive sustainable business growth.
Where to Learn More About Meredith:
You can find Meredith's profile on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/goldenmeredith/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Software Sales Simplified
01:41 Meet Meredith Golden: Sales Enablement Expert
04:03 The Transition from Sales to Enablement
07:33 The Importance of Sales Experience in Enablement
11:11 Understanding Different Sales Roles
15:11 Building Effective Enablement Programs
18:02 Aligning Leadership and Field Expectations
21:20 Understanding Team Dynamics in Enablement
24:24 The Role of Product Enablement
25:25 Aligning Sales and Product Marketing
28:10 The Importance of Early Involvement in Training Development
29:15 Leveraging AI in Sales Enablement
32:17 Balancing AI and Human Expertise
38:57 Transitioning into Sales Enablement
42:15 Key Takeaways for Aspiring Enablement Professionals
45:33 See You Next Week!
About Software Sales Simplified:
Visit us at: https://www.strategicsalesoptimization.com/
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Send us your questions at - Sales@stratsalesllc.com
"What is a Sales Engineer?" - Education Series on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxuHbkRfIWtVj_Hg1GYBIg-o5M-icJLn0
Get Your Copy of "Winning Faster"!
Available Here:
https://www.strategicsalesoptimization.com/move-book
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
Welcome to software sales simplified move to success
weekly podcast for software sales professionals who want to
sell better. Whether you're a seasoned pro or
just starting out, make our podcast your home for insights,
developments and news from the world of enterprise software
sales. My name is Kevin donville.
I am being joined today by my illustrious colleague and good
(00:29):
friend Matt Long. How you doing today Matt?
How's your weekend? I'm doing great, Kevin.
Thank you. Fantastic.
Good to hear. Matt and I have over combined 50
years of experience in software,enterprise sales, services and
deployment and we're happy to behere with you today and with our
guest. Matt.
Quick question for you, have youever had someone try to teach
(00:50):
you something and they clearly knew less about the subject than
you did? Is that ever ever ever happened
to you? Does that count the last time
you tried to teach me something?Walked right into that.
It it has happened before, I I will you not being included in
that conversation, but. That's totally fine.
(01:12):
But yes, it's it, it's a very frustrating thing.
And having had a little bit of experience on the on the world
of being able to teach people sales and software and all all
kinds of things related to that,it can be very, very
frustrating. And to talk about how to do that
right and be more successful outin the workplace.
(01:33):
We've brought on a very special guest with us today, Meredith
Golden. Meredith, how are you doing
today? I'm doing great.
I'm glad to be here. Well, it's really great to have
you now. Matt and I have had the
privilege of working with you before and you right now are
leading enablement at the organization that you're at
right now, which is called Aircall.
Is that correct? Yes, I'm leading the sales
(01:55):
enablement in particular. We have a little bit of a
surrounding enablement work withus, but I'm leading the charge
with everything sales related. Absolutely.
And that's an important distinction, right between just
general enablement and sales enablement are two very, very
different things. And a lot of organizations
unfortunately end up kind of munging the two of them
together. I worked with you in that
(02:16):
capacity before. So I'm very familiar with your
credentials and your expertise, Matt is as well.
But if you would be so kind, share but a little bit of that
with our listeners. Take a moment, take the floor
and kind of tell everybody who you are, what you do and where
you do it. Of course, you know, I, I say, I
like to say that I do enablementnow, but really at heart I'm a
(02:38):
salesperson. I was in the field for over 10
years in various sales roles andcapacity before I moved into
enablement. I actually started out more in
traditional sales like enterprise rent a car and phone
sales sort of approach. But I moved into the tech world
about 8 years ago now and I joined as an SDR because it was
(03:01):
my first entry into software sales and it was a totally
different motion and a completely new world for me.
So I wanted to get a really goodfoundation first before I was
given a huge book of business and expected to go sale.
I moved up into the AE role though, you know, within a year
I moved up into that enterprise AE position and spent about four
(03:24):
years in the field at our last company together where I was
really part of the foundational sales team, like really
exploring the region for the first time kind of in an
unproven market and learned a lot while I was out there.
But I made the transition to enablement because I felt in my
role as a seller very underserved by the training that
(03:46):
we've received or the material that was produced.
And I felt that it was really important to have a sales
perspective more upstream in that development and in that
like strategic positioning. So that's why I I made the
transition. That's interesting.
That's a, that's not an atypicalpath that a lot of folks take,
(04:08):
especially if you're in the sales engineering role, then
Matt and I come from, it's a pretty common one.
But to go from SDR to Rep to going off into the sales
enablement world, is that a common path that you've seen
other people taking? I think it's less common than I
realized at the time. And honestly, I think
(04:28):
historically enablement maybe has a connotation of where
sellers go to die. Like, you know, it's, it's not
always been seen as the place where really high performers go
because they want to stay at sea.
They want to be, you know, making that Commission.
For me, I felt like my time as aRep was limited.
(04:54):
I didn't see myself as an AE like in my future career and I
also didn't see myself moving into a sales manager role.
I just wasn't calling to me in the same way that enablement
was. And I really, I mean, sorry, go
ahead, Matt. No, I was just going to say IA
lot of people step into a sales management role because they do
(05:16):
want to kind of coach and managea team, but the enablement is a
little bit different. There's a there's an education
and teaching component to that that can't be fulfilled with
sales manager, but there's so much more in salesman.
A lot of times it just gets downto tell me your forecast is the
old coming in, which is not the same thing, right?
No, but you're exactly right. I mean, the coaching aspect is
(05:37):
what was really calling to me and it's what I've always been
drawn to. Even as a seller, we were, you
know, constantly sharing best practices and sharing new
tactics with each other. And I always had such
satisfaction when I'd see something work for another one
of my teammates. And the reality is sales
managers are expected to do a lot of coaching, but like you
(05:58):
said, there's so much that they're inundated with that they
rarely have the time and it is the first thing to be dropped
off of their To Do List. So I think enablement can
actually play a really strong role, especially if you're
really aligned with your sales leaders and what they're trying
to accomplish. Then you can take on that role
of coaching the reps and have just as much of an impact, if
(06:19):
not even more of an impact in that skill development than a
frontline manager might. Yeah, I totally agree.
I mean, the analogy I think I would use is the difference
between approaching the problem that or that or the challenge or
the value that sales enablement is trying to deliver.
It's like a, it's like the difference between being an
handyman and being an architect or a Carpenter, right?
(06:43):
The manager is trying to in the moment as a, by product of what
they're doing on a day-to-day basis, try to win still better
best practices and execution. When you're in sales enablement,
you're on the hook for delivering that tracking.
It's it's effectiveness and really building a plan in a
(07:03):
program that's going to last formuch, much longer, right?
Yeah, exactly. And if you don't have the
ability to kind of see the bigger picture and see how that
program is affecting the sales team and affecting the sales
managers, that kind of setting yourself up to fail right from
the get go. So having that experience and
(07:24):
that wherewithal like the understanding of the sales org
and that perspective of your actual and audience, I think is
truly valuable. Now you were pretty high
performing salesperson as you said.
I mean you, you set a lot of records, you, you made a lot of
thresholds. Was there a person inside of
(07:44):
sales, the leadership or inside the organization in general that
was supportive of what you were trying to do or were there was
there a little bit of pushback when you said you wanted to make
the change? It's funny you ask because I
kind of had two different approaches or two different
reactions to it. When I first posed the potential
(08:06):
to move over to enablement, it was actually something I was
developing before we had an enablement team.
So at the time, the company had kind of that startup culture of
like, you see a problem, create a case and solve it.
And I was kind of in the midst of creating a case that we need
an enablement team and we need adepartment to better support our
(08:29):
sales org. And that's when they hired our
VP of revenue operations and enablement.
And I immediately went to him and I said, hey, I want to join
your team. I'm really eager.
There's all these problems. And he immediately was like,
great, I'm two days in, give me some time.
Like, yeah, we're not going to fix everything right off the
bat. Like got to get my feet wet.
(08:50):
You know, we need some like realenablement professionals as
well. So come back to me in a year and
let's see where things are within that year.
I had my best year as a seller. I, you know, outperformed my
team. I was, I think I was the highest
performer on the East Coast at the time.
And then we had a transition of our sales leadership and our
(09:11):
sales leaders came in and it satdown with me because you know,
they kind of wanted to hear fromsome top performers.
And when I said that I was interested in moving into
enablement or into a different type of supporting coaching
role, he was extremely supportive of that move because
he had very intensive hiring plans coming up.
(09:33):
And from his perspective, he wanted someone who had been in
seat and successful selling exactly what it is for selling
in order to train these new hires that are coming in.
So he was really supportive and my direct managers as well at
that time were really eager to see me move into a role that
they knew I was gunning for for over a year.
(09:53):
So at that point, and of course,our VP of Rev OPS had gotten his
feet wet. He had a couple other team
members on board by them and they were before, you know, a
little bit of growth and expansion.
So the timing actually worked out really well.
That's outstanding. And yeah, I I was on the
periphery for a lot of those conversations inside the
(10:15):
organization and you were very well respected as a seller.
And the perspective of having someone with your chops getting
into the sales enablement space definitely was resonating with a
lot of folks inside of the organization.
But why do you think that is thecase?
Why do you think that? Because I personally have a very
strong opinion on it. I think that people have.
(10:36):
If you're going to be in sales enablement, you have to have
walked the walk. Why do you think that that is?
What's your personal opinion on that and why do you think that
good sellers make great enablers?
I think part of it, I mean, if we're being honest, the first
part is just the credibility that it lends you with your
audience. Sales people are tricky at
(11:00):
times, and in order to sell to aseller, you need to be a good
seller. You know, some people would
argue that sales people are the easiest to sell to.
That has not been my experience in the past.
And ultimately, when you're creating enablement, you're
trying to sell them on a new motion, on a new behavior, on a
new technique, on a new process.So you really have to go at it
(11:24):
with that kind of attitude that a salesperson might have.
The second part is just that being in that role and really
understanding all the nuances ofwhat they're tasked to do.
It goes much farther than just, you know, hitting your quota and
running deals or or having discovery meetings.
(11:46):
Like there's so much minutia that goes into the a ES role
that's not understood a lot of times from outside of the
revenue work. And a lot of times the
enablement isn't always in the revenue work.
It might be training or programscoming out of product or product
marketing or field marketing. And without, again, that
seller's perspective, a lot of times it's just not meaning the
(12:07):
field where they are. And so having that understanding
to translate it kind of into thesellers, What is the word I'm
looking for? Translate it into the seller's
language is just a necessary part of launching a a training
program. Yeah, I think it's that's a
rarity though, because usually top sellers don't go into
(12:28):
enablement, right. And it's been very rare that
I've actually had real sales people that have walked the walk
giving enablement. Now that being said, Kevin, you
kind of asked the question. I jokingly answered, did anyone
try to teach you something that you knew less than you all the
time? I mean, it's like, you know,
just because you are a good seller or good in a certain area
(12:50):
doesn't mean that you're a good trainer or teacher.
You know, we've seen that time and time again when top sales
people get promoted to a management role and they're
horrible. It's just like, you know, if
it's skill set, they have the knowledge, but they don't know
how to apply it differently to their team to get the best out
of each individual person, etcetera.
Right. So, you know, I I've been in
(13:11):
cases where you know, you can learn a lot from someone who's
articulate, well trained and knows how to deliver information
in a structured format that people can understand.
Having someone who's actually walked the walk and can fill in
all the nuances and all the subtleties of a sales process.
That's gold right there. No unintended, but but it's like
(13:37):
that. That is really a rarity.
But I think that that's when it's ideal, right?
But you could. I think there's there's benefits
to both sides when you look at it.
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Like, by all means, I'm not saying that you have to be a top
seller to be a strong enabler. I've seen other folks come in
and really understand the Oregon, be able to launch
(13:59):
programs. But at the same time, I think
having that experience just lends you that extra set of
credibility. And it might like, shorten the
time it takes for you to actually demonstrate value to
your audience if you know what it is they're really looking
for. And do you feel like you're
experienced having several different positions in sales
(14:20):
also helped you in enablement? Oh yeah, I, you know, there's
clear differences in what an SDRBDR might need as opposed to
an AE, as opposed to a solutionsengineer, as opposed to ACSM.
And even having the a ES perspective and like being an
audience member before stepping behind the scenes kind of by
(14:45):
understanding what actually matters to those different
roles, it's a lot easier to streamline the actual content
development and say, you know, this belongs with this audience,
this belongs with that audience,This needs to go to everyone.
But I think having as much role specific tailoring as possible
also helps that material then land with your end audience.
(15:06):
Again, just having that a littlebit of that experience helps to
make those adjustments as necessary.
Right. And when you don't have that
experience, then is it incumbentupon the enablement team to talk
to some key personnel in each ofthose roles, right, Just to
really understand what's going on?
Because I, I'm not seeing that awhole lot.
I, I do feel like a lot of my training has been pretty not
(15:27):
generic, but just universally across the board.
This is how to sell. But like you said, there's the
what you need to know at each role is so different, so how do
you mitigate that when you don'thave the experience?
If you don't have the experience, you really have to
rely on your stakeholders, on your audience to be part of the
content development or the program development.
(15:48):
Ultimately, I think that should always be part of the process of
any sort of initiative you're putting forward.
You need to have the right buy in from your senior stakeholders
and executives that were focusing on programs that are
going to move the needle. But then you also need to have
the buy in from the people that you're trying to affect their
(16:10):
behaviors. Because if you don't have their
buy in, introducing change to anaudience that's not ready or
prepared or willing to accept itis going to completely derail
any program that you're trying to watch.
And so if you don't have the experience, it is even more
critical to get that understanding from, you know,
(16:30):
your BDR manager or your, you know, frontline managers that
are in the thick of things everysingle day to make sure that
you're going to meet the field where they are and that you're
going to integrate into the systems the way that they're
using them today. So do you do you you're you're
talking about things that can really get in the way.
If you don't take those steps asyou just and done the
(16:52):
foundational work in the research upfront, your
enablement program can really falter.
Are there other pitfalls that you see that can really get in
the way of getting that enablement program launched
quickly and effectively? Yeah.
I think, you know, like we just said, making sure that you're
integrating any training into the daily operations of the
(17:17):
team, whether that's a system ora tool that they're using,
they're not able to adopt your training, then they're not going
to use your training like, so that's the first part.
You have to have an action plan of how this will be really
implemented into the team. The other, you know, kind of
taking a step back again, one ofthe bigger areas I see is
(17:40):
setting the right expectations with your stakeholders from the
very both in the field and the senior execs that you're trying
to get there by and in alignmentwith.
A lot of times I see enablement and I act in this way.
We're a facilitator between what's happening in the field
and what the executives are seeing.
(18:02):
They might come in expecting huge advances on, you know, our
MRRARR or reducing our deal timeto close or whatever.
You know of those key leading metrics are that they're looking
at from the top down. The reality of it is we can say
we're going to try and impact all of these metrics, but if we
(18:24):
don't have an understanding of the leading indicators like the
behavioral changes that we're trying to affect first, then
there's no real way to then tie it to those overarching KP is
that we're trying to manage fromthe top down.
Makes sense. Makes sense.
So if that's the case, so like you're sitting there saying
(18:46):
those expectations with leadership, what happens if
leadership in the field are not on the same page?
How does that affect your ability to build and launch a
successful enablement program? It's always a ocean pole.
I would say there's there's always going to be executive
priorities, top down priorities that the org wants to achieve.
(19:08):
Our job and enablement is to seethose priorities actioned and
improve those high level metricsthat we're looking at.
And part of our job is also to recommend the best plan to do
so. As an enablement leader or
manager, you really need to be conscious about the programming,
(19:31):
like the different types of programming that you can
provide. It's not just like run a
training program for 45 minutes and then call it a day.
That's not enablement in my mind.
It's much more involved. And you really, you know, I'm
trying to like make this connection, but like by being
(19:52):
able to tie in what's happening in the field back to the
executives. Sorry, I'm like losing my train
of thought here, but it's like. It's OK.
We we've been doing this for a while.
It's so easy to happen. And then you suddenly realize
I'm halfway through my answer and I don't remember the point I
was going to make. Yeah.
I'm like, I don't know where I was going with this, but I had,
(20:14):
I had a point and it just like floated right out of my head.
Well, let me ask you a question.I think we laid it.
Maybe this will tie it back in, but when you're looking at
enablement, there's a bunch of different types, right?
There's a new seller coming on board, needs to be enabled, and
that's what we mostly think of, right?
Is that right? How do you get someone up to
(20:34):
speed as quick as possible on the product so they can be
affected in the field? And then you have the, you know,
the product releases that are coming out and then you have to
train the team on that. That's usually like a 40 minute
session and we're all in there. You get 3 minutes asked
questions and then here's the material, go sell it, right?
Which is not, not a thing. So I think there's a balance.
(20:54):
And then there's just the ongoing, you know, how do you
continue to refine your skills, whether it be product or market
focused or just sales in general, right?
So enablement to me is just so interesting because it touches
so many aspects of professional development and success.
Where do you spend most of your time or where you have you seen
the most success when you're or how do you kind of put all these
(21:17):
things together, I should say, into a successful program?
It's a good question. And I'd say it probably depends
First off on how the team is setup.
Like if you have, like we talkedabout before, kind of the
surrounding enablement roles to lead product enablement or to
lead a skill, an onboarding program.
(21:39):
Like a lot of times there's a dedicated onboard aid specialist
on an enablement team. So some of that responsibility
may be divvied up. And especially if you're an
enablement leader, like that's an important aspect to think
about the roles on your team andwhat, what like competencies you
need and what areas you really need to focus on to in order to
(21:59):
like fill those roles on your team.
But if you are kind of either a solo enabler or you're on a team
that's role specific, you're kind of you've kind of got your
hands in all the different pies.You're working with products to
translate it for sales enablement, you're working with
product marketing or field marketing to drive some, you
know, additional inbound lead generation and things like that.
(22:23):
So for me, it's really importantto always be connected with your
sales leaders and their priorities and to ensure that
what you're prioritizing or programming is going to align
with them because ultimately they are.
I mean, most of the time if you're, you know, enablement
(22:43):
teams under product marketing orunder a customer education org
or something, you might have different senior stakeholders.
But for the most part, I'd say most enablement folks report at
least some way up to a chief revenue officer.
And ultimately their needs and priorities are what you're
serving or what you're focusing on.
(23:03):
So whether it's product related or skills related, sometimes
you're the one that has to delineate the two and say, you
know, we're not doing good discovery, but it's not because
they don't know the product, it's because we haven't give
them enough skills training on it.
We haven't focused enough on ourvalue orientation around it.
So let's focus on that aspect and not so much on the product,
(23:23):
right? So it's up to you to kind of be
prescriptive and identify what those necessary interventions
might look. Like it's interesting that you
said it rolls up to the CRO and I guess it's sales enablement.
So yeah, that makes sense. But I'm most of the product you
know, so the product person alsoisn't in charge.
Is that is that a separate trackor is that also rolled into
sales enablement? That also depends on the org.
(23:47):
Sometimes, like the product enablement team is living in the
product org. For us, we're actually on the
same team, but we handle things quite differently.
So like our product enablement manager, for example, does all
of our product training, including our customer facing
training as well like our customer education portal.
So sometimes, again depending onthe word, your product enablers
(24:11):
or your technical enablement team might be more focused on
solutions engineering or the support cord.
So it really just depends on howthe company and the team is
ultimately set up. Yeah.
It's interesting that you said that because I could think for
our product marketing that I've experienced in the past, a lot
of times it's just a kind of a feature dump, right?
(24:32):
It's like here you go and but it's like no positioning on how
this is valuable or how you get to use this in your next sales
cycle. And that's certainly filters out
over time. And then you have sales meetings
where you're trying to figure itout and stuff like that.
So it makes sense to me that if it were under one org, you'd
always have that sales. How are you going to apply this
to the market, not just what is it, what does it do, but what is
(24:54):
the value of this that we can actually drive forward to win,
win business? Yeah.
I think if it's not part of thatdevelopment process, it's
certainly should be. And I, I'll be honest, like I've
seen it not be part of it. And that's when the training
falls flat. Like in the field when they come
out and they do a big feature dump and the reps are left
(25:14):
wondering, OK, what's the positioning?
What's the use case? What is the problem that I'm
solving? So for me, if that's something
that I'm not a part of that development, if I'm an audience
member, let's say, but I realized that this is the
material that's hitting my team that I'm supporting from a sales
enablement perspective, then it does become my job to go in and
(25:38):
intervene because what they're delivering is not meeting the
requirements for the team that I'm supporting.
So in those cases, it might become necessary to step in and
involve yourself, let's say, if they're not proactively
involving you in that process. But I think it's all about how
you approach it. It's you're not trying to call
their baby ugly, you're trying to help them ensure that their
(26:02):
material is resonating with their audience because they're
going to be held to the same metrics that we are and that the
field is. They're going to be held to
their product attached rates andtheir ultimate revenue that
they're impacting and driving aswell from the marketing side.
So we all ultimately want the same things.
It's just a matter of how it's being delivered.
(26:23):
Yeah, these days with delivery is an important thing, right.
And, and to your point about being aligned with what the
sales leadership wants you to doand what, what needles they want
to move and how that can cause some friction.
If that does not align with where product marketing maybe is
coming in with their views of how to articulate value, how to
(26:46):
articulate positioning. And then you know from being a
seller, you're in that unique position of knowing that's not
how you would want to say it. I get your value that you're
telling me, but let me translatethis into salespeak.
Have you had experiences before where that reaching across the
(27:06):
aisle has been challenging And and if so, how did you address
that without any names? Yeah, You know, it's I think the
biggest challenge, not maybe notthe biggest, but the more
reactionary like times that it comes up is when we're at
(27:29):
deadline and we're launching this training tomorrow and we
come in and say, hey, you know, this isn't going to resonate.
Well, I've just spent two weeks putting this whole training
together. You're coming in at the last
minute. What do you expect me to do?
I'm not going to stay up all night.
So it's all about the timing andlike making sure that you're
part again. I feel like I'm repeating myself
(27:50):
that, but like being part of thedevelopment process and not just
roll out I think is really critical.
And that's where I think a lot of times, oh, we're looping them
in as we're ready to launch the training.
So we did our job. We looped in enablement.
No, we need to be in much earlier in that process.
And so that what you're developing for the training is
(28:12):
going to meet my expectations and the expectations of our
audience. So the biggest recommendation I
can give is to just get in thereas early as possible, but that
may not always work out. So it's a little bit trial and
error. You can't always expect that
it's going to go perfect the first time.
So take your learnings if the training goes off the rails or
(28:36):
it doesn't meet your expectations and figure out how
you can improve it the next time.
That's the only thing you can dogoing forward, and that's what
you should be doing all the timeanyway.
Yeah, wholeheartedly agree. So from that perspective, I know
that you got a lot of of tricks in your bag that you use for
being able to track that effectiveness.
One of the ones that a lot of people are using these days,
(28:57):
both as a learner and as a teacher is artificial
intelligence, AI tools. Everybody seems to be using it
across the board to accelerate everything these days.
How is that helping or hinderingthe enablement effort and what
are your tactics in in that scenario?
I think there's time and a placefor AI to be used.
(29:19):
I think as much as it can be used from an automation
standpoint, like automating workflows or tasks that are
really mundane and that aren't really a value add to your day
but need to get done. It's part of the process.
You've got to do it. Sure, let's figure out how we
(29:40):
can automate some of that or useAI to, to do some of this.
Where I see it becoming too muchof a crutch is when we're using
AI to replace something like coaching or deal reviews or even
forecasting at an, you know, in an extreme example.
But there's I'll give you one, one specific example to use.
(30:04):
So AI scorecards, all scorecardsare very popular.
Now whether it's gone, whether it's attention and like any
number of tools have this ability.
But what happens when we are relying on the AI to generate a
score for all of our reps cards and the managers then aren't
reviewing the calls, they're notinvolved in the deals.
They're just looking at the scores and saying, great, this
(30:26):
Rep is doing wonderful. This Rep is doing not so good.
So let me focus on this Rep without realizing that AI is
often generating a lot of false positives or false negatives and
it's not really that reliable just yet.
And more so I'm seeing even repsrely on AI to do the account
(30:47):
research, to fill in their salesforce fields, even that like
automation workflow that we're talking about.
But then when they're asked a question about their deal, they
don't know it well enough to talk about.
Exactly, Yeah. So you can't use AI to replace
your expertise and your ownership of your opportunity
and of your territory and of your team as a sales manager.
(31:10):
That's not what AI is meant to replace.
It's meant to enhance, and it's meant to ease all of that
process. But if you rely on it too much,
you're setting yourself up for failure.
Yeah, I think one of the tenantsI always had with, you know,
computers or AI or anything, it's like, what are they good
at? They're going to processing
large amount of information, distilling it down for you,
(31:32):
right. I could see where if you have
all these calls recorded from anenable perspective, being able
to go look at across all those and understand what are where
the gaps, what are missing, whatare they miss speaking about?
You know, where are the missed opportunities?
And then rolling that into your enablement program would be
super valuable. But then then you get to the
(31:52):
next level where it's like, well, let's create the content,
We'll use AI to help create the content and then get a little
bit more, you know, touchy ground because or not, not not
as firm footing, right? Because it's like you don't know
what it's spitting out there. So it can help you some things,
but some scrutiny. So I imagine, you know, are
there other areas where you findAI super valuable and other
(32:13):
areas you just need to watch outfor other than the scorecards
that you mentioned? Yeah, I would say one of my
favorite AI tools that I've justrecently started using is Gamma.
It's a deck creation, which is great for me because I love
things to be visually intriguing, visually
interesting, but I'm not a design professional.
I'm really bad at it. Like I can put colored bubbles
(32:35):
on a slide all you want. That's about as far as I will go
personally. So having something like Gamma
is really useful because I'm giving the prompt, I'm giving
the content, and I'm saying thisis how I want it stylized.
This is what I want on the slide.
The difference is that I have tobecome a subject matter expert
in whatever it is that I'm giving to Gamma.
(32:57):
I'm not. You can't rely on AI to generate
the content and then generate the deck because then when you
go to deliver, you are no longerthe expert in what you're
delivering and you're just usingAI generated content.
And you will lose credibility asan enablement professional very
quickly with your audience if they start to see like, you
(33:17):
don't know what you're talking about, you don't know our
product. You're just copying and pasting
our high spot or Confluence pages into GBT and using that as
a summary. That's just not going to cut it
if you really want to make a difference in, in my opinion.
This deal has 6 fingers on it. Right.
But it's and even having the ability to review, you know, the
(33:39):
the end results and be able to say, well, this isn't accurate.
This is accurate. I want to double down on this.
There's there's only so much youcan rely on the AI.
How much of your experience as aseller do you think really comes
into play? They're like kind of bringing us
back to one of the original subjects we were talking about
in our session today. How much about being a seller
(34:02):
who's been in the field, having to make the message do you think
factors into your credibility asyou're redesigning the stuff
that's coming out of AI? How much of that comes into play
do you think? Are you asking well?
Does my experience as a seller improve my use of AI editing
and? No, your ability to take
(34:26):
messaging AI happens to factor into this.
But like you're taking that stuff out of confluence.
You know, you're taking the stuff off the shelf that's been
given to you as opposed to beinga person who's an education
based sale sales enablement person, right?
You don't know the product, you know the space of the industry,
but you're an educator. So now you're taking all these
assets and you're putting them out there.
(34:47):
In your case, you're a sales person.
So you can apply that I and thatfilter, but I'm also adding the
concept of an and now it's beingfiltered and manipulated by AI.
How much of your ability to the the salesperson in the room,
looking at that critically, do you think factors into making
(35:09):
really good content? Then we're using AI tools.
I think it factors in the same way that it would factor as if
you were looking at an opportunity, kind of like
reviewing it and saying what am I missing?
What is going to prevent this deal from closing and being able
to take a step back and see the bigger picture and be able to
(35:31):
identify what's missing, I thinkis a really key piece.
Because AI, whether you're usingGBT or Gemini, it's only going
off of what you're feeding it. So how can you tell you what
you're missing unless you also give that context of everything
you need, which like people aren't doing like realistically.
So being able to step back and see the gaps, I think is
(35:54):
something that AI isn't going tohelp you with as much as that
natural sort of sales acumen might.
From the experience of working the deals of meeting with
customers and speaking with executives and really
understanding what gets a deal from A to B, what will get this
training from A to B. Like I, I don't know if that's
(36:17):
making sense, but I, I think just seeing the holes is, is
where I would say. Yeah.
That ability to critically look at it, I think is key.
There's no substitute for experience at the end of the
day, because that's the that's the acid test that you can apply
based on what you know does and does not work in in the field.
And AI hasn't really worked on an algorithm for that yet, to
(36:41):
the best of my knowledge. Well, I mean, one of my favorite
prompts now is. What am I missing from this?
What have I forgotten? Right?
Asking the AI that and just see what it comes up with because
the sometimes it really finds some things that's Oh yeah, I
need that. But you need to ask.
It's not going to tell you, right?
It's like, so again, it's havingthat critical thinking or just
(37:03):
why? Why is this or what?
What else could this be? Or what would what does that
mean? Right?
I think those are skills, sales skills, right?
That are really invaluable across all aspects of life.
But even with your AI prompting chats.
Yeah, and I mean it. The prompts in the chat will
only have as much context as yougive it too.
(37:24):
So how much context can you really load up into the GB TA
lot? But enough.
I don't know. We'll see.
Well, that's where being good steward and designer from the
concept of you knowing what has to happen from being having that
experience factors into the quality because you know it's
garbage in it's garbage out. But if you're putting in good
(37:46):
factual perspective on the frontend, like you're saying, end
product is going to be better because the A is got much, much
better content to work with. And maybe it's my engineering,
it's my prompts. I'm not a good DVT prompter,
I'll be honest. But that's something for me to
work on in the future. Yeah, I don't think you need to
(38:08):
necessarily be an expert. I think you're, you're the
career path that you've walked inherently gives you an
interesting perspective from that.
So I think that when you're asking the questions of from any
tool that you're using, you're asking those questions, I think
from a very healthy and constructive perspective for the
people you're going to turn around and enable.
So I, I applaud your approach. I think it's a smart one.
(38:32):
You've had a very interesting career, very interesting path.
And there may be some folks thatare listening to our, our
episode today or going, you knowwhat, that may be the next big
thing for me. I think maybe going into sales
enablement might be exactly whatI need.
If someone was going to go do that today and they were in the
(38:53):
chairs that you've been in the past, what would what advice
would you give them? I would say the first thing you
need to do is understand where the company's priorities lie.
And the reason I say that is because a lot of times for
people I've I've spoken to who have made the transition from
(39:14):
the field into enablement, myself included, a lot of times
we go into it thinking about howI would want my role to be set
up. What would that perfect world
look like? What are all these functional
pains that are getting me down that I want to fix?
I want to take on this project. Ultimately, a lot of that is not
(39:38):
highly impactful work. If you go in trying to solve all
of the functional pains, you overload yourself with too much
to do, with not enough impact. And our job as an enablement
professional is to have and drive the biggest impact
possible. So you really have to understand
(40:01):
how business priorities translate into, I feel like I'm
going down the value pyramid, but you have to understand how
those business priorities translate into the initiatives
and what programs that you can support those initiatives
through so that you're always aligning with the corporate
objectives. That's really understanding that
(40:23):
value thread I think is really critical.
To being a successful enablementprofessional.
Outside of that, one thing to lean on like from your field
experience is discovery. Every time you're scoping a
project, you're conducting discovery.
And it's such a crucial skill that I see underutilized with
(40:47):
like internal teams, like we always talk about discovery with
external customers, but we don'treally talk about it in internal
projects and scoping. And it is such a crucial part of
the project development to make sure that you have all of the
right things that you need outlined and that you're going
to put forward a program that can meet like we were talking
(41:10):
about earlier, meet the expectations and set the proper
expectations with your stakeholders.
So lean on your discovery and understand the value thread.
That would be my my 2 recommendations.
Great skills to be developing. They're going to you be useful
in all kinds of contexts as you go for.
I could not agree with you more and and having been sitting
(41:33):
second share with you on a few of those conversations in
organizations, I can say that your skills are probably second
to none with respect to being able to get to the bottom of the
mystery. What do we need to solve?
How do we need to solve it? Why do we need to solve it?
Always a very interesting conversation when you're
engaged. Yeah, Meredith, what was that,
(41:55):
especially internally? Oh, yeah, especially, and
probably I'd say more. That's a very interesting
observation that you made, and Ithink it's poignant.
And I've kind of want to double down on that or double click on
it, as people say these days. Your observation is keen in the
sense that you are solving a problem for the organization.
(42:16):
That's why sales enablement is there.
It's to make the sellers more effective.
And taking the tactics that you use when you're trying to
understand what the customer is trying to achieve and applying
that internally to your own organization, I think is a key
observation and a key tactic anyone should be using in any
strategic role inside of the organization.
(42:37):
So hats off to you for that observation.
So if I were going to sum up what you're your work, your
pearls of wisdom in today's session, definitely I'd say that
that is right up there at the top of the list.
That plus making sure that you're aligned with the
executives, that you are attacking the things that they
want to be able to attack as quickly as possible and reaching
(42:59):
across the aisle to the folks that are leading the effort on
other sides in doing that early and often.
I could not agree with you more.I think that those are fantastic
pearls of wisdom and I'm very happy that you shared them with
our audience today. Meredith, we do need to wrap up.
I would love to keep chatting, and we probably will after this
(43:20):
because we always do hit send tofind an opportunity to chat.
But I do want to say thank you to you for coming on.
It was fantastic to get this perspective.
To your point, not a lot of people have done this and it was
wonderful to hear your journey, your perspective, and your
observations and how to make your role more successful for
folks. Thanks again for being on here.
(43:41):
It's always great to talk with you, my friend.
Anything you'd like to share before we wrap up?
Not, not other than it's been really interesting to me.
I've never been on the enablement team per SE.
I've been on the receiving end of it a lot.
And so it's interesting to kind of delve into this and just hear
I think really critical and under appreciated role across a
(44:03):
lot of organizations. But I think one that's getting
more eyes on it and more and more awareness across teams as
to how critical this is to your success and your GTM motion.
So thank you for coming on and sharing that with us.
Thank you for having me. It's been very wonderful to chat
with you both, Meredith. Meredith, if people want to
(44:25):
reach out and connect with you, what's the best way for them to
reach you? If someone is like pursuing this
career path or is looking for some advice and wants to
collaborate with another enablement leader, how would
they reach you? You can reach me on LinkedIn,
Meredith Golden at Aircall is where you can find me, and my
user link is Golden Meredith if that helps at all.
(44:46):
But you can always feel free to connect.
I accept almost everybody reaches out, so it'd be
wonderful to expand that. And we'll certainly put that in
the description of our episode. So folks, if you want to reach
out to Meredith, please do so. She's wonderful to chat with.
I can speak to that wholeheartedly, but that does
bring us to the end of our episode.
(45:07):
We want to thank you all for coming in and spending a little
bit of time with us and once again thanking our guests for
having her come in and spend time with us.
If you would like, please go to our website, take a look at some
of the services we have to offeror buy our book and share our
that where we share our methodology with you.
But with that having been said, thank you very much for coming
(45:28):
in. Come back and join us again here
next week and until then, be well.
Welcome to software sales simplified move to success
weekly podcast for software sales professionals who want to
sell better. Whether you're a seasoned pro or
just starting out, make our podcast your home for insights,
developments and news from the world of enterprise software
sales. My name is Kevin donville.
I am being joined today by my illustrious colleague and good
(00:29):
friend Matt Long. How you doing today Matt?
How's your weekend? I'm doing great, Kevin.
Thank you. Fantastic.
Good to hear. Matt and I have over combined 50
years of experience in software,enterprise sales, services and
deployment and we're happy to behere with you today and with our
guest. Matt.
Quick question for you, have youever had someone try to teach
(00:50):
you something and they clearly knew less about the subject than
you did? Is that ever ever ever happened
to you? Does that count the last time
you tried to teach me something?Walked right into that.
It it has happened before, I I will you not being included in
that conversation, but. That's totally fine.
(01:12):
But yes, it's it, it's a very frustrating thing.
And having had a little bit of experience on the on the world
of being able to teach people sales and software and all all
kinds of things related to that,it can be very, very
frustrating. And to talk about how to do that
right and be more successful outin the workplace.
(01:33):
We've brought on a very special guest with us today, Meredith
Golden. Meredith, how are you doing
today? I'm doing great.
I'm glad to be here. Well, it's really great to have
you now. Matt and I have had the
privilege of working with you before and you right now are
leading enablement at the organization that you're at
right now, which is called Aircall.
Is that correct? Yes, I'm leading the sales
(01:55):
enablement in particular. We have a little bit of a
surrounding enablement work withus, but I'm leading the charge
with everything sales related. Absolutely.
And that's an important distinction, right between just
general enablement and sales enablement are two very, very
different things. And a lot of organizations
unfortunately end up kind of munging the two of them
together. I worked with you in that
(02:16):
capacity before. So I'm very familiar with your
credentials and your expertise, Matt is as well.
But if you would be so kind, share but a little bit of that
with our listeners. Take a moment, take the floor
and kind of tell everybody who you are, what you do and where
you do it. Of course, you know, I, I say, I
like to say that I do enablementnow, but really at heart I'm a
(02:38):
salesperson. I was in the field for over 10
years in various sales roles andcapacity before I moved into
enablement. I actually started out more in
traditional sales like enterprise rent a car and phone
sales sort of approach. But I moved into the tech world
about 8 years ago now and I joined as an SDR because it was
(03:01):
my first entry into software sales and it was a totally
different motion and a completely new world for me.
So I wanted to get a really goodfoundation first before I was
given a huge book of business and expected to go sale.
I moved up into the AE role though, you know, within a year
I moved up into that enterprise AE position and spent about four
(03:24):
years in the field at our last company together where I was
really part of the foundational sales team, like really
exploring the region for the first time kind of in an
unproven market and learned a lot while I was out there.
But I made the transition to enablement because I felt in my
role as a seller very underserved by the training that
(03:46):
we've received or the material that was produced.
And I felt that it was really important to have a sales
perspective more upstream in that development and in that
like strategic positioning. So that's why I I made the
transition. That's interesting.
That's a, that's not an atypicalpath that a lot of folks take,
(04:08):
especially if you're in the sales engineering role, then
Matt and I come from, it's a pretty common one.
But to go from SDR to Rep to going off into the sales
enablement world, is that a common path that you've seen
other people taking? I think it's less common than I
realized at the time. And honestly, I think
(04:28):
historically enablement maybe has a connotation of where
sellers go to die. Like, you know, it's, it's not
always been seen as the place where really high performers go
because they want to stay at sea.
They want to be, you know, making that Commission.
For me, I felt like my time as aRep was limited.
(04:54):
I didn't see myself as an AE like in my future career and I
also didn't see myself moving into a sales manager role.
I just wasn't calling to me in the same way that enablement
was. And I really, I mean, sorry, go
ahead, Matt. No, I was just going to say IA
lot of people step into a sales management role because they do
(05:16):
want to kind of coach and managea team, but the enablement is a
little bit different. There's a there's an education
and teaching component to that that can't be fulfilled with
sales manager, but there's so much more in salesman.
A lot of times it just gets downto tell me your forecast is the
old coming in, which is not the same thing, right?
No, but you're exactly right. I mean, the coaching aspect is
(05:37):
what was really calling to me and it's what I've always been
drawn to. Even as a seller, we were, you
know, constantly sharing best practices and sharing new
tactics with each other. And I always had such
satisfaction when I'd see something work for another one
of my teammates. And the reality is sales
managers are expected to do a lot of coaching, but like you
(05:58):
said, there's so much that they're inundated with that they
rarely have the time and it is the first thing to be dropped
off of their To Do List. So I think enablement can
actually play a really strong role, especially if you're
really aligned with your sales leaders and what they're trying
to accomplish. Then you can take on that role
of coaching the reps and have just as much of an impact, if
(06:19):
not even more of an impact in that skill development than a
frontline manager might. Yeah, I totally agree.
I mean, the analogy I think I would use is the difference
between approaching the problem that or that or the challenge or
the value that sales enablement is trying to deliver.
It's like a, it's like the difference between being an
handyman and being an architect or a Carpenter, right?
(06:43):
The manager is trying to in the moment as a, by product of what
they're doing on a day-to-day basis, try to win still better
best practices and execution. When you're in sales enablement,
you're on the hook for delivering that tracking.
It's it's effectiveness and really building a plan in a
(07:03):
program that's going to last formuch, much longer, right?
Yeah, exactly. And if you don't have the
ability to kind of see the bigger picture and see how that
program is affecting the sales team and affecting the sales
managers, that kind of setting yourself up to fail right from
the get go. So having that experience and
(07:24):
that wherewithal like the understanding of the sales org
and that perspective of your actual and audience, I think is
truly valuable. Now you were pretty high
performing salesperson as you said.
I mean you, you set a lot of records, you, you made a lot of
thresholds. Was there a person inside of
(07:44):
sales, the leadership or inside the organization in general that
was supportive of what you were trying to do or were there was
there a little bit of pushback when you said you wanted to make
the change? It's funny you ask because I
kind of had two different approaches or two different
reactions to it. When I first posed the potential
(08:06):
to move over to enablement, it was actually something I was
developing before we had an enablement team.
So at the time, the company had kind of that startup culture of
like, you see a problem, create a case and solve it.
And I was kind of in the midst of creating a case that we need
an enablement team and we need adepartment to better support our
(08:29):
sales org. And that's when they hired our
VP of revenue operations and enablement.
And I immediately went to him and I said, hey, I want to join
your team. I'm really eager.
There's all these problems. And he immediately was like,
great, I'm two days in, give me some time.
Like, yeah, we're not going to fix everything right off the
bat. Like got to get my feet wet.
(08:50):
You know, we need some like realenablement professionals as
well. So come back to me in a year and
let's see where things are within that year.
I had my best year as a seller. I, you know, outperformed my
team. I was, I think I was the highest
performer on the East Coast at the time.
And then we had a transition of our sales leadership and our
(09:11):
sales leaders came in and it satdown with me because you know,
they kind of wanted to hear fromsome top performers.
And when I said that I was interested in moving into
enablement or into a different type of supporting coaching
role, he was extremely supportive of that move because
he had very intensive hiring plans coming up.
(09:33):
And from his perspective, he wanted someone who had been in
seat and successful selling exactly what it is for selling
in order to train these new hires that are coming in.
So he was really supportive and my direct managers as well at
that time were really eager to see me move into a role that
they knew I was gunning for for over a year.
(09:53):
So at that point, and of course,our VP of Rev OPS had gotten his
feet wet. He had a couple other team
members on board by them and they were before, you know, a
little bit of growth and expansion.
So the timing actually worked out really well.
That's outstanding. And yeah, I I was on the
periphery for a lot of those conversations inside the
(10:15):
organization and you were very well respected as a seller.
And the perspective of having someone with your chops getting
into the sales enablement space definitely was resonating with a
lot of folks inside of the organization.
But why do you think that is thecase?
Why do you think that? Because I personally have a very
strong opinion on it. I think that people have.
(10:36):
If you're going to be in sales enablement, you have to have
walked the walk. Why do you think that that is?
What's your personal opinion on that and why do you think that
good sellers make great enablers?
I think part of it, I mean, if we're being honest, the first
part is just the credibility that it lends you with your
audience. Sales people are tricky at
(11:00):
times, and in order to sell to aseller, you need to be a good
seller. You know, some people would
argue that sales people are the easiest to sell to.
That has not been my experience in the past.
And ultimately, when you're creating enablement, you're
trying to sell them on a new motion, on a new behavior, on a
new technique, on a new process.So you really have to go at it
(11:24):
with that kind of attitude that a salesperson might have.
The second part is just that being in that role and really
understanding all the nuances ofwhat they're tasked to do.
It goes much farther than just, you know, hitting your quota and
running deals or or having discovery meetings.
(11:46):
Like there's so much minutia that goes into the a ES role
that's not understood a lot of times from outside of the
revenue work. And a lot of times the
enablement isn't always in the revenue work.
It might be training or programscoming out of product or product
marketing or field marketing. And without, again, that
seller's perspective, a lot of times it's just not meaning the
(12:07):
field where they are. And so having that understanding
to translate it kind of into thesellers, What is the word I'm
looking for? Translate it into the seller's
language is just a necessary part of launching a a training
program. Yeah, I think it's that's a
rarity though, because usually top sellers don't go into
(12:28):
enablement, right. And it's been very rare that
I've actually had real sales people that have walked the walk
giving enablement. Now that being said, Kevin, you
kind of asked the question. I jokingly answered, did anyone
try to teach you something that you knew less than you all the
time? I mean, it's like, you know,
just because you are a good seller or good in a certain area
(12:50):
doesn't mean that you're a good trainer or teacher.
You know, we've seen that time and time again when top sales
people get promoted to a management role and they're
horrible. It's just like, you know, if
it's skill set, they have the knowledge, but they don't know
how to apply it differently to their team to get the best out
of each individual person, etcetera.
Right. So, you know, I I've been in
(13:11):
cases where you know, you can learn a lot from someone who's
articulate, well trained and knows how to deliver information
in a structured format that people can understand.
Having someone who's actually walked the walk and can fill in
all the nuances and all the subtleties of a sales process.
That's gold right there. No unintended, but but it's like
(13:37):
that. That is really a rarity.
But I think that that's when it's ideal, right?
But you could. I think there's there's benefits
to both sides when you look at it.
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Like, by all means, I'm not saying that you have to be a top
seller to be a strong enabler. I've seen other folks come in
and really understand the Oregon, be able to launch
(13:59):
programs. But at the same time, I think
having that experience just lends you that extra set of
credibility. And it might like, shorten the
time it takes for you to actually demonstrate value to
your audience if you know what it is they're really looking
for. And do you feel like you're
experienced having several different positions in sales
(14:20):
also helped you in enablement? Oh yeah, I, you know, there's
clear differences in what an SDRBDR might need as opposed to
an AE, as opposed to a solutionsengineer, as opposed to ACSM.
And even having the a ES perspective and like being an
audience member before stepping behind the scenes kind of by
(14:45):
understanding what actually matters to those different
roles, it's a lot easier to streamline the actual content
development and say, you know, this belongs with this audience,
this belongs with that audience,This needs to go to everyone.
But I think having as much role specific tailoring as possible
also helps that material then land with your end audience.
(15:06):
Again, just having that a littlebit of that experience helps to
make those adjustments as necessary.
Right. And when you don't have that
experience, then is it incumbentupon the enablement team to talk
to some key personnel in each ofthose roles, right, Just to
really understand what's going on?
Because I, I'm not seeing that awhole lot.
I, I do feel like a lot of my training has been pretty not
(15:27):
generic, but just universally across the board.
This is how to sell. But like you said, there's the
what you need to know at each role is so different, so how do
you mitigate that when you don'thave the experience?
If you don't have the experience, you really have to
rely on your stakeholders, on your audience to be part of the
content development or the program development.
(15:48):
Ultimately, I think that should always be part of the process of
any sort of initiative you're putting forward.
You need to have the right buy in from your senior stakeholders
and executives that were focusing on programs that are
going to move the needle. But then you also need to have
the buy in from the people that you're trying to affect their
(16:10):
behaviors. Because if you don't have their
buy in, introducing change to anaudience that's not ready or
prepared or willing to accept itis going to completely derail
any program that you're trying to watch.
And so if you don't have the experience, it is even more
critical to get that understanding from, you know,
(16:30):
your BDR manager or your, you know, frontline managers that
are in the thick of things everysingle day to make sure that
you're going to meet the field where they are and that you're
going to integrate into the systems the way that they're
using them today. So do you do you you're you're
talking about things that can really get in the way.
If you don't take those steps asyou just and done the
(16:52):
foundational work in the research upfront, your
enablement program can really falter.
Are there other pitfalls that you see that can really get in
the way of getting that enablement program launched
quickly and effectively? Yeah.
I think, you know, like we just said, making sure that you're
integrating any training into the daily operations of the
(17:17):
team, whether that's a system ora tool that they're using,
they're not able to adopt your training, then they're not going
to use your training like, so that's the first part.
You have to have an action plan of how this will be really
implemented into the team. The other, you know, kind of
taking a step back again, one ofthe bigger areas I see is
(17:40):
setting the right expectations with your stakeholders from the
very both in the field and the senior execs that you're trying
to get there by and in alignmentwith.
A lot of times I see enablement and I act in this way.
We're a facilitator between what's happening in the field
and what the executives are seeing.
(18:02):
They might come in expecting huge advances on, you know, our
MRRARR or reducing our deal timeto close or whatever.
You know of those key leading metrics are that they're looking
at from the top down. The reality of it is we can say
we're going to try and impact all of these metrics, but if we
(18:24):
don't have an understanding of the leading indicators like the
behavioral changes that we're trying to affect first, then
there's no real way to then tie it to those overarching KP is
that we're trying to manage fromthe top down.
Makes sense. Makes sense.
So if that's the case, so like you're sitting there saying
(18:46):
those expectations with leadership, what happens if
leadership in the field are not on the same page?
How does that affect your ability to build and launch a
successful enablement program? It's always a ocean pole.
I would say there's there's always going to be executive
priorities, top down priorities that the org wants to achieve.
(19:08):
Our job and enablement is to seethose priorities actioned and
improve those high level metricsthat we're looking at.
And part of our job is also to recommend the best plan to do
so. As an enablement leader or
manager, you really need to be conscious about the programming,
(19:31):
like the different types of programming that you can
provide. It's not just like run a
training program for 45 minutes and then call it a day.
That's not enablement in my mind.
It's much more involved. And you really, you know, I'm
trying to like make this connection, but like by being
(19:52):
able to tie in what's happening in the field back to the
executives. Sorry, I'm like losing my train
of thought here, but it's like. It's OK.
We we've been doing this for a while.
It's so easy to happen. And then you suddenly realize
I'm halfway through my answer and I don't remember the point I
was going to make. Yeah.
I'm like, I don't know where I was going with this, but I had,
(20:14):
I had a point and it just like floated right out of my head.
Well, let me ask you a question.I think we laid it.
Maybe this will tie it back in, but when you're looking at
enablement, there's a bunch of different types, right?
There's a new seller coming on board, needs to be enabled, and
that's what we mostly think of, right?
Is that right? How do you get someone up to
(20:34):
speed as quick as possible on the product so they can be
affected in the field? And then you have the, you know,
the product releases that are coming out and then you have to
train the team on that. That's usually like a 40 minute
session and we're all in there. You get 3 minutes asked
questions and then here's the material, go sell it, right?
Which is not, not a thing. So I think there's a balance.
(20:54):
And then there's just the ongoing, you know, how do you
continue to refine your skills, whether it be product or market
focused or just sales in general, right?
So enablement to me is just so interesting because it touches
so many aspects of professional development and success.
Where do you spend most of your time or where you have you seen
the most success when you're or how do you kind of put all these
(21:17):
things together, I should say, into a successful program?
It's a good question. And I'd say it probably depends
First off on how the team is setup.
Like if you have, like we talkedabout before, kind of the
surrounding enablement roles to lead product enablement or to
lead a skill, an onboarding program.
(21:39):
Like a lot of times there's a dedicated onboard aid specialist
on an enablement team. So some of that responsibility
may be divvied up. And especially if you're an
enablement leader, like that's an important aspect to think
about the roles on your team andwhat, what like competencies you
need and what areas you really need to focus on to in order to
(21:59):
like fill those roles on your team.
But if you are kind of either a solo enabler or you're on a team
that's role specific, you're kind of you've kind of got your
hands in all the different pies.You're working with products to
translate it for sales enablement, you're working with
product marketing or field marketing to drive some, you
know, additional inbound lead generation and things like that.
(22:23):
So for me, it's really importantto always be connected with your
sales leaders and their priorities and to ensure that
what you're prioritizing or programming is going to align
with them because ultimately they are.
I mean, most of the time if you're, you know, enablement
(22:43):
teams under product marketing orunder a customer education org
or something, you might have different senior stakeholders.
But for the most part, I'd say most enablement folks report at
least some way up to a chief revenue officer.
And ultimately their needs and priorities are what you're
serving or what you're focusing on.
(23:03):
So whether it's product related or skills related, sometimes
you're the one that has to delineate the two and say, you
know, we're not doing good discovery, but it's not because
they don't know the product, it's because we haven't give
them enough skills training on it.
We haven't focused enough on ourvalue orientation around it.
So let's focus on that aspect and not so much on the product,
(23:23):
right? So it's up to you to kind of be
prescriptive and identify what those necessary interventions
might look. Like it's interesting that you
said it rolls up to the CRO and I guess it's sales enablement.
So yeah, that makes sense. But I'm most of the product you
know, so the product person alsoisn't in charge.
Is that is that a separate trackor is that also rolled into
sales enablement? That also depends on the org.
(23:47):
Sometimes, like the product enablement team is living in the
product org. For us, we're actually on the
same team, but we handle things quite differently.
So like our product enablement manager, for example, does all
of our product training, including our customer facing
training as well like our customer education portal.
So sometimes, again depending onthe word, your product enablers
(24:11):
or your technical enablement team might be more focused on
solutions engineering or the support cord.
So it really just depends on howthe company and the team is
ultimately set up. Yeah.
It's interesting that you said that because I could think for
our product marketing that I've experienced in the past, a lot
of times it's just a kind of a feature dump, right?
(24:32):
It's like here you go and but it's like no positioning on how
this is valuable or how you get to use this in your next sales
cycle. And that's certainly filters out
over time. And then you have sales meetings
where you're trying to figure itout and stuff like that.
So it makes sense to me that if it were under one org, you'd
always have that sales. How are you going to apply this
to the market, not just what is it, what does it do, but what is
(24:54):
the value of this that we can actually drive forward to win,
win business? Yeah.
I think if it's not part of thatdevelopment process, it's
certainly should be. And I, I'll be honest, like I've
seen it not be part of it. And that's when the training
falls flat. Like in the field when they come
out and they do a big feature dump and the reps are left
(25:14):
wondering, OK, what's the positioning?
What's the use case? What is the problem that I'm
solving? So for me, if that's something
that I'm not a part of that development, if I'm an audience
member, let's say, but I realized that this is the
material that's hitting my team that I'm supporting from a sales
enablement perspective, then it does become my job to go in and
(25:38):
intervene because what they're delivering is not meeting the
requirements for the team that I'm supporting.
So in those cases, it might become necessary to step in and
involve yourself, let's say, if they're not proactively
involving you in that process. But I think it's all about how
you approach it. It's you're not trying to call
their baby ugly, you're trying to help them ensure that their
(26:02):
material is resonating with their audience because they're
going to be held to the same metrics that we are and that the
field is. They're going to be held to
their product attached rates andtheir ultimate revenue that
they're impacting and driving aswell from the marketing side.
So we all ultimately want the same things.
It's just a matter of how it's being delivered.
(26:23):
Yeah, these days with delivery is an important thing, right.
And, and to your point about being aligned with what the
sales leadership wants you to doand what, what needles they want
to move and how that can cause some friction.
If that does not align with where product marketing maybe is
coming in with their views of how to articulate value, how to
(26:46):
articulate positioning. And then you know from being a
seller, you're in that unique position of knowing that's not
how you would want to say it. I get your value that you're
telling me, but let me translatethis into salespeak.
Have you had experiences before where that reaching across the
(27:06):
aisle has been challenging And and if so, how did you address
that without any names? Yeah, You know, it's I think the
biggest challenge, not maybe notthe biggest, but the more
reactionary like times that it comes up is when we're at
(27:29):
deadline and we're launching this training tomorrow and we
come in and say, hey, you know, this isn't going to resonate.
Well, I've just spent two weeks putting this whole training
together. You're coming in at the last
minute. What do you expect me to do?
I'm not going to stay up all night.
So it's all about the timing andlike making sure that you're
part again. I feel like I'm repeating myself
(27:50):
that, but like being part of thedevelopment process and not just
roll out I think is really critical.
And that's where I think a lot of times, oh, we're looping them
in as we're ready to launch the training.
So we did our job. We looped in enablement.
No, we need to be in much earlier in that process.
And so that what you're developing for the training is
(28:12):
going to meet my expectations and the expectations of our
audience. So the biggest recommendation I
can give is to just get in thereas early as possible, but that
may not always work out. So it's a little bit trial and
error. You can't always expect that
it's going to go perfect the first time.
So take your learnings if the training goes off the rails or
(28:36):
it doesn't meet your expectations and figure out how
you can improve it the next time.
That's the only thing you can dogoing forward, and that's what
you should be doing all the timeanyway.
Yeah, wholeheartedly agree. So from that perspective, I know
that you got a lot of of tricks in your bag that you use for
being able to track that effectiveness.
One of the ones that a lot of people are using these days,
(28:57):
both as a learner and as a teacher is artificial
intelligence, AI tools. Everybody seems to be using it
across the board to accelerate everything these days.
How is that helping or hinderingthe enablement effort and what
are your tactics in in that scenario?
I think there's time and a placefor AI to be used.
(29:19):
I think as much as it can be used from an automation
standpoint, like automating workflows or tasks that are
really mundane and that aren't really a value add to your day
but need to get done. It's part of the process.
You've got to do it. Sure, let's figure out how we
(29:40):
can automate some of that or useAI to, to do some of this.
Where I see it becoming too muchof a crutch is when we're using
AI to replace something like coaching or deal reviews or even
forecasting at an, you know, in an extreme example.
But there's I'll give you one, one specific example to use.
(30:04):
So AI scorecards, all scorecardsare very popular.
Now whether it's gone, whether it's attention and like any
number of tools have this ability.
But what happens when we are relying on the AI to generate a
score for all of our reps cards and the managers then aren't
reviewing the calls, they're notinvolved in the deals.
They're just looking at the scores and saying, great, this
(30:26):
Rep is doing wonderful. This Rep is doing not so good.
So let me focus on this Rep without realizing that AI is
often generating a lot of false positives or false negatives and
it's not really that reliable just yet.
And more so I'm seeing even repsrely on AI to do the account
(30:47):
research, to fill in their salesforce fields, even that like
automation workflow that we're talking about.
But then when they're asked a question about their deal, they
don't know it well enough to talk about.
Exactly, Yeah. So you can't use AI to replace
your expertise and your ownership of your opportunity
and of your territory and of your team as a sales manager.
(31:10):
That's not what AI is meant to replace.
It's meant to enhance, and it's meant to ease all of that
process. But if you rely on it too much,
you're setting yourself up for failure.
Yeah, I think one of the tenantsI always had with, you know,
computers or AI or anything, it's like, what are they good
at? They're going to processing
large amount of information, distilling it down for you,
(31:32):
right. I could see where if you have
all these calls recorded from anenable perspective, being able
to go look at across all those and understand what are where
the gaps, what are missing, whatare they miss speaking about?
You know, where are the missed opportunities?
And then rolling that into your enablement program would be
super valuable. But then then you get to the
(31:52):
next level where it's like, well, let's create the content,
We'll use AI to help create the content and then get a little
bit more, you know, touchy ground because or not, not not
as firm footing, right? Because it's like you don't know
what it's spitting out there. So it can help you some things,
but some scrutiny. So I imagine, you know, are
there other areas where you findAI super valuable and other
(32:13):
areas you just need to watch outfor other than the scorecards
that you mentioned? Yeah, I would say one of my
favorite AI tools that I've justrecently started using is Gamma.
It's a deck creation, which is great for me because I love
things to be visually intriguing, visually
interesting, but I'm not a design professional.
I'm really bad at it. Like I can put colored bubbles
(32:35):
on a slide all you want. That's about as far as I will go
personally. So having something like Gamma
is really useful because I'm giving the prompt, I'm giving
the content, and I'm saying thisis how I want it stylized.
This is what I want on the slide.
The difference is that I have tobecome a subject matter expert
in whatever it is that I'm giving to Gamma.
(32:57):
I'm not. You can't rely on AI to generate
the content and then generate the deck because then when you
go to deliver, you are no longerthe expert in what you're
delivering and you're just usingAI generated content.
And you will lose credibility asan enablement professional very
quickly with your audience if they start to see like, you
(33:17):
don't know what you're talking about, you don't know our
product. You're just copying and pasting
our high spot or Confluence pages into GBT and using that as
a summary. That's just not going to cut it
if you really want to make a difference in, in my opinion.
This deal has 6 fingers on it. Right.
But it's and even having the ability to review, you know, the
(33:39):
the end results and be able to say, well, this isn't accurate.
This is accurate. I want to double down on this.
There's there's only so much youcan rely on the AI.
How much of your experience as aseller do you think really comes
into play? They're like kind of bringing us
back to one of the original subjects we were talking about
in our session today. How much about being a seller
(34:02):
who's been in the field, having to make the message do you think
factors into your credibility asyou're redesigning the stuff
that's coming out of AI? How much of that comes into play
do you think? Are you asking well?
Does my experience as a seller improve my use of AI editing
and? No, your ability to take
(34:26):
messaging AI happens to factor into this.
But like you're taking that stuff out of confluence.
You know, you're taking the stuff off the shelf that's been
given to you as opposed to beinga person who's an education
based sale sales enablement person, right?
You don't know the product, you know the space of the industry,
but you're an educator. So now you're taking all these
assets and you're putting them out there.
(34:47):
In your case, you're a sales person.
So you can apply that I and thatfilter, but I'm also adding the
concept of an and now it's beingfiltered and manipulated by AI.
How much of your ability to the the salesperson in the room,
looking at that critically, do you think factors into making
(35:09):
really good content? Then we're using AI tools.
I think it factors in the same way that it would factor as if
you were looking at an opportunity, kind of like
reviewing it and saying what am I missing?
What is going to prevent this deal from closing and being able
to take a step back and see the bigger picture and be able to
(35:31):
identify what's missing, I thinkis a really key piece.
Because AI, whether you're usingGBT or Gemini, it's only going
off of what you're feeding it. So how can you tell you what
you're missing unless you also give that context of everything
you need, which like people aren't doing like realistically.
So being able to step back and see the gaps, I think is
(35:54):
something that AI isn't going tohelp you with as much as that
natural sort of sales acumen might.
From the experience of working the deals of meeting with
customers and speaking with executives and really
understanding what gets a deal from A to B, what will get this
training from A to B. Like I, I don't know if that's
(36:17):
making sense, but I, I think just seeing the holes is, is
where I would say. Yeah.
That ability to critically look at it, I think is key.
There's no substitute for experience at the end of the
day, because that's the that's the acid test that you can apply
based on what you know does and does not work in in the field.
And AI hasn't really worked on an algorithm for that yet, to
(36:41):
the best of my knowledge. Well, I mean, one of my favorite
prompts now is. What am I missing from this?
What have I forgotten? Right?
Asking the AI that and just see what it comes up with because
the sometimes it really finds some things that's Oh yeah, I
need that. But you need to ask.
It's not going to tell you, right?
It's like, so again, it's havingthat critical thinking or just
(37:03):
why? Why is this or what?
What else could this be? Or what would what does that
mean? Right?
I think those are skills, sales skills, right?
That are really invaluable across all aspects of life.
But even with your AI prompting chats.
Yeah, and I mean it. The prompts in the chat will
only have as much context as yougive it too.
(37:24):
So how much context can you really load up into the GB TA
lot? But enough.
I don't know. We'll see.
Well, that's where being good steward and designer from the
concept of you knowing what has to happen from being having that
experience factors into the quality because you know it's
garbage in it's garbage out. But if you're putting in good
(37:46):
factual perspective on the frontend, like you're saying, end
product is going to be better because the A is got much, much
better content to work with. And maybe it's my engineering,
it's my prompts. I'm not a good DVT prompter,
I'll be honest. But that's something for me to
work on in the future. Yeah, I don't think you need to
(38:08):
necessarily be an expert. I think you're, you're the
career path that you've walked inherently gives you an
interesting perspective from that.
So I think that when you're asking the questions of from any
tool that you're using, you're asking those questions, I think
from a very healthy and constructive perspective for the
people you're going to turn around and enable.
So I, I applaud your approach. I think it's a smart one.
(38:32):
You've had a very interesting career, very interesting path.
And there may be some folks thatare listening to our, our
episode today or going, you knowwhat, that may be the next big
thing for me. I think maybe going into sales
enablement might be exactly whatI need.
If someone was going to go do that today and they were in the
(38:53):
chairs that you've been in the past, what would what advice
would you give them? I would say the first thing you
need to do is understand where the company's priorities lie.
And the reason I say that is because a lot of times for
people I've I've spoken to who have made the transition from
(39:14):
the field into enablement, myself included, a lot of times
we go into it thinking about howI would want my role to be set
up. What would that perfect world
look like? What are all these functional
pains that are getting me down that I want to fix?
I want to take on this project. Ultimately, a lot of that is not
(39:38):
highly impactful work. If you go in trying to solve all
of the functional pains, you overload yourself with too much
to do, with not enough impact. And our job as an enablement
professional is to have and drive the biggest impact
possible. So you really have to understand
(40:01):
how business priorities translate into, I feel like I'm
going down the value pyramid, but you have to understand how
those business priorities translate into the initiatives
and what programs that you can support those initiatives
through so that you're always aligning with the corporate
objectives. That's really understanding that
(40:23):
value thread I think is really critical.
To being a successful enablementprofessional.
Outside of that, one thing to lean on like from your field
experience is discovery. Every time you're scoping a
project, you're conducting discovery.
And it's such a crucial skill that I see underutilized with
(40:47):
like internal teams, like we always talk about discovery with
external customers, but we don'treally talk about it in internal
projects and scoping. And it is such a crucial part of
the project development to make sure that you have all of the
right things that you need outlined and that you're going
to put forward a program that can meet like we were talking
(41:10):
about earlier, meet the expectations and set the proper
expectations with your stakeholders.
So lean on your discovery and understand the value thread.
That would be my my 2 recommendations.
Great skills to be developing. They're going to you be useful
in all kinds of contexts as you go for.
I could not agree with you more and and having been sitting
(41:33):
second share with you on a few of those conversations in
organizations, I can say that your skills are probably second
to none with respect to being able to get to the bottom of the
mystery. What do we need to solve?
How do we need to solve it? Why do we need to solve it?
Always a very interesting conversation when you're
engaged. Yeah, Meredith, what was that,
(41:55):
especially internally? Oh, yeah, especially, and
probably I'd say more. That's a very interesting
observation that you made, and Ithink it's poignant.
And I've kind of want to double down on that or double click on
it, as people say these days. Your observation is keen in the
sense that you are solving a problem for the organization.
(42:16):
That's why sales enablement is there.
It's to make the sellers more effective.
And taking the tactics that you use when you're trying to
understand what the customer is trying to achieve and applying
that internally to your own organization, I think is a key
observation and a key tactic anyone should be using in any
strategic role inside of the organization.
(42:37):
So hats off to you for that observation.
So if I were going to sum up what you're your work, your
pearls of wisdom in today's session, definitely I'd say that
that is right up there at the top of the list.
That plus making sure that you're aligned with the
executives, that you are attacking the things that they
want to be able to attack as quickly as possible and reaching
(42:59):
across the aisle to the folks that are leading the effort on
other sides in doing that early and often.
I could not agree with you more.I think that those are fantastic
pearls of wisdom and I'm very happy that you shared them with
our audience today. Meredith, we do need to wrap up.
I would love to keep chatting, and we probably will after this
(43:20):
because we always do hit send tofind an opportunity to chat.
But I do want to say thank you to you for coming on.
It was fantastic to get this perspective.
To your point, not a lot of people have done this and it was
wonderful to hear your journey, your perspective, and your
observations and how to make your role more successful for
folks. Thanks again for being on here.
(43:41):
It's always great to talk with you, my friend.
Anything you'd like to share before we wrap up?
Not, not other than it's been really interesting to me.
I've never been on the enablement team per SE.
I've been on the receiving end of it a lot.
And so it's interesting to kind of delve into this and just hear
I think really critical and under appreciated role across a
(44:03):
lot of organizations. But I think one that's getting
more eyes on it and more and more awareness across teams as
to how critical this is to your success and your GTM motion.
So thank you for coming on and sharing that with us.
Thank you for having me. It's been very wonderful to chat
with you both, Meredith. Meredith, if people want to
(44:25):
reach out and connect with you, what's the best way for them to
reach you? If someone is like pursuing this
career path or is looking for some advice and wants to
collaborate with another enablement leader, how would
they reach you? You can reach me on LinkedIn,
Meredith Golden at Aircall is where you can find me, and my
user link is Golden Meredith if that helps at all.
(44:46):
But you can always feel free to connect.
I accept almost everybody reaches out, so it'd be
wonderful to expand that. And we'll certainly put that in
the description of our episode. So folks, if you want to reach
out to Meredith, please do so. She's wonderful to chat with.
I can speak to that wholeheartedly, but that does
bring us to the end of our episode.
(45:07):
We want to thank you all for coming in and spending a little
bit of time with us and once again thanking our guests for
having her come in and spend time with us.
If you would like, please go to our website, take a look at some
of the services we have to offeror buy our book and share our
that where we share our methodology with you.
But with that having been said, thank you very much for coming
(45:28):
in. Come back and join us again here
next week and until then, be well.
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