Letter to Sales Enablement Society National Meeting Attendees

The Sales Enablement Society Inaugural National Meeting is almost here!

It’s hard to believe our Sales Enablement Society first National Meeting is fast approaching.  The excitement from the peers we’ve connected with is extremely high. In August, when we decided to open our local DC group up and investigate what a national group would look like, we decided we should expand nationally.  At the time, we had 57 members of which about 25 attended our meetings regularly. So, after deciding to have a national meeting, we set success targets. We initially set our goals to grow to 500 members and to connect with at least 50 people in our National Meeting.  We thought it would be amazing if we had 250 members and 25 attendees. We thought we’d be able to speak to each person attending and provide context.

Well, here we are a week out from our first National Meeting. We have 700 members and close to 100 members attending our meeting.  Keep in mind; people are coming from all over the country, to Palm Beach Florida (a hard place to get to) for a meeting that starts on a Friday, the week before Thanksgiving.  How did our members connect with us and find out about the meeting? The main driver for membership came through conversations and postings via LinkedIn.  Honestly, this is amazing and in some ways presents some challenges.

Namely, we’ve set an objective to have a working meeting with break out groups and rapidly generated materials created by the people coming to the meeting. Getting 100 really smart, passionate people on the same page to have a highly productive working meet requires some pre-work. This plan will provide you with all the details you need to participate fully in our National Meeting and pre-meeting networking opportunities.

Inaugural National Meeting Level-Setting

What is our objective?

To create a mission, charter, operating model (for how we will work), high level roadmap for our society, and the first 100 days action plan. 

How are we going to do it?

We are going to have a series of time capped working sessions where groups of 5-10 members will work on an issue and share their recommendations.  Time will move fast, so we are going to need to stay on schedule and keep our focus.

What is the end deliverable?

We will have a large electronic document with all of our work products organized in order for us to agree upon and sign a contract together for the Sales Enablement Society. This will confirm we agree on the contents of the document, we followed a legitimate process to get there, and we are all going to commit ourselves to drive the agreement together. 

How should you prepare?

Please assume your perspective of sales enablement is not radically different than you peers but may be different as well.

Please note that we want all members to have a great experience at the meeting. We ask that any and all vendors attending the meeting refrain from participating in lead generation and selling activities with members. Please be extremely aggressive if you feel someone is trying to “sell” you. There are a handful of people who have consulting practices (myself included) that add value to our community. However, solicitation will not be tolerated. Please help us police that by being direct. We are prepared to ask abusers to leave the meeting. 

When you are in the meeting, please do not say things like “you should do X” – we get a ton of ideas about what we SHOULD do. Remember you are a member of a volunteer only organization that has no budget.  Also, that thinking implies distance. YOU are part of the society. So, think like “we should do X, and I can help by ____”.  

Please make sure your LinkedIn profile has “Founding Member” status on it.  We are going to check to make sure we all have that. It’s important for many reasons.

Please come with the expectation that our goal is to find low hanging fruit areas of agreement and not debate details or specific word choices.

What we are going to cover

The first half of our meeting will be focused on reviewing: 1) our story and vision 2) our position on running sales enablement as a business within a business and 3) our aspirational role. We will provide short briefings for each of those three topics and have working groups to offer suggestions for how we will contextualize and version control them moving forward.

The second half of our meeting will focus on how we make our idea come to life and run our Sales Enablement Society to benefit all of our members. We will, as a group, create an inventory of either goals we want to accomplish or challenges we will need to address. From there, we will create working groups of 5-7 people who will work together to define that issue and then make short and long term recommendations.

There will be four (4) pre-set workgroups focused on different issues:

1)   How will we operate?  We have a parent group and local chapters, how do we determine roles of each group? How do we create ways where each chapter can operate with flexibility but also with enough structure so it can be shared and build upon from other chapters? How do we incorporate virtual members and support topics?

2)   How should we influence the market? The current landscape of sales enablement is confusing, noisy, and driven by the self-interest of companies trying to sell things rather than to solve a complex business problem and help sales enablement professionals be successful.  How can we weight in on that? Should we rank vendors? Should we create a group that defines common terms and standards? 

3)   What is the member’s experience? We have a lot of traction –but not a lot of clarity about specifically what you get or what a member should do. How do we take all of the ideas about what our Society should do and define what that looks like more tangibly?  Many people want best practices, so how do we determine what a best practice is? Who is going to do the work to document and define it?  How do we create common language across our community so we can connect with each other more easily? Do we think we need to collect dues or be volunteer driven? Do we want to include suppliers in our community, and if so, how do we police “out of hand” solicitation?

4)   How will we be communicating what’s happened to the members who were not there?  We’ve asked one of our members to serve as the “Voice of Members” and create a read out for us about what expectations people have who are not able to join us. This group will be focused on creating a deliverable to the 600 other people who are founding members of the society that were unable to join us, that provides full transparency about what was done and why some decisions were made. If you are a student of history, think about this as an effort of “the federalist papers”. We are going to need to provide rationale for the decisions we’ve made and have a communications strategy so that our members (current and future) understand our choices, buy in to them, and act upon them for the benefit of the whole community. 

We will assemble all of the outputs from all of the workgroups into a master electronic document and then conclude our meeting by having each member sign our charter, demonstrating a commitment to making this work.

Preparation

What we are looking to accomplish is unprecedented; how many organizations do you know that were formed from a meeting of people who self-selected to be there? It is very exciting, but also daunting. Having learned a collaborative decision-making process through trial and error over the last 8 months – we’d like to share some thoughts to help you come prepared.

1)   Focus on the rule, not the exception.  Obviously details matter. Every single person in the room understands that. However, we are not going to get anywhere if we try to find reasons why an idea won’t work.  There is amazing power for us to just find areas where we agree.

2)   Come with an open mind. We have a lot of people who have strong opinions about exactly what sales enablement is – and we all have different lenses. So, how do we agree on what it really is if we just want to defend our positions?

3)   Look for unconscious competence. One common theme that binds us all together as a community is that we’ve all been asked to fix something that’s broken. We are a community of VP’s of broken things. There are things each of us do that we don’t think are a big deal (or think are completely obvious) that are actually unique. Let’s focus on trying to find that in each other.

4)   Please avoid judgment language. Everyone involved in the sales productivity ecosystem is frustrated. Let’s seek to understand “why” not to blame. Why are we frustrated with marketing? Why is finance frustrated with sales? Why are people frustrated with sales people? We learn a lot more by asking questions than by trying to get people to conform to our own view.

5)   Admit what you don’t know. This is a safe place. The more you learn about sales enablement, the more you realize what we don’t know.  We need to get to brass tacks in order to make our space more clear. Please accept that the people in the audience might have more experience in something than you do and this is a great thing. Our companies make us defensive, we shouldn’t be among us.

6)   If you are bought into an idea (like challenger sales or a specific method for creating content, etc) please speak about what you see in plain speak and avoid the jargon. We want to get to a place where we are talking about specific, observable things. Concepts are great to help come up with ideas, but can actually slow down collaboration among strangers because they invite debate.

7)   It will be hard, but try to think outside of current organizational boundaries. Nothing ties us up in knots more than the organizational blame game. The problem our profession exists to address is cross-functional in nature. The more we focus on the problem, the clearer the answers will become. With clear answers, then you can influence organizational issues.

8)   Realize there are different altitude levels in your company and among your peers. We have a lot of internal selling to do as a profession and that means we have to sell up, across (to peer level roles) and below (to individual contributors). A common problem we have across our community is overwhelming executive leadership with too much detail way too quickly without context. Please be aware also of the level of your peers. We need to be able to understand and listen to each other regardless of the level (i.e., title) you have in your own organization.

9)   Please go to our web site (sesociety.org), read our past work on the “Knowledgebase” page, and share comments via LinkedIn. It helps other attendees to see where you are coming from and it helps you formulate your thoughts more clearly.

We realize this is a long note, but if you take 30 minutes to read and spend a few minutes here and there between now and next week, we are all going to benefit from your investment in time to come prepared. We look forward to welcoming you to Palm Beach for a dynamic and engaging meeting that breaks ground on the elevation of the Sales Enablement profession.

Sincerely,

Scott, Brian, Jen Marie, Nicole, and Rahul