Sales Enablement Society Update: The Society Goes National

Society Update

• Since September, we have grown from 30 members in Washington DC to close to 500 internationally
• We are in the process of launching local chapters in: San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and the UK
• We’re incubating local groups in other locations such as: Toronto, New York, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Atlanta, Tampa, Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, Houston, Dallas, and Australia.
• Our local meetings (we’ve had 10 total so far) are very passionate, energetic, productive, and informative
• We have a website and a LinkedIn group that we are working to integrate and grow

What are we?

• We are a legal, non-profit entity dedicated to advocate for advancement of sales enablement professionals
• We are completely driven by volunteers
• Our overarching mission is to elevate the profession of sales enablement from Director of ’Broken Things’ to the Leader of Sales Productivity.
• Our strategy is to define an aspirational vision for our role, baseline where we are today and then create a roadmap for how we evolve the profession.
• Our driving focus in on really understanding the needs of our members and creating programs designed to make all of their experiences both positive and productive. 

What’s our philosophy?

• We’re trying to build an organization different from any other so our model is very flexible.
• We believe in creating a positive environment to allow us all to challenge our beliefs and finding areas of common ground (we are getting out of the “defining sales enablement” debates and really focusing on contextualizing it).
• As part of our focus on a positive environment, we are building a culture forced on uncovering each of our unconscious competence (things we do really well individually but don’t really know we do it well) rather than what we don’t do well (we have our own companies and everyone else to tell us that).
• In order to accomplish that objective, we’ve been developing a meeting format that forces us to debate issues and drive to a conclusion – but without putting any one person on the defensive. (It’s going to be a while before we learn how to explain this well.. we just know it’s working)
• We are focused creating and publishing foundational concepts – think of them more as guidelines not standards (we think standards can get too dogmatic and can stifle innovation – our space is emerging so we want to enable innovation by sharing things where members has reached consensus)
• We want to have a light weight organizational structure with a corporate or central group that is in service of both local groups and individuals. There is a lot to balance here – how do we keep local groups from forming their own opinions on one end; how do we keep the central group from imposing its views on everyone.
• We are focused on designing to the experience of each member. As simple as that sounds, organizing to that is incredibly hard as people understand the word “experience” very differently. 

What have we been doing?

Right now, our primary focus is to build our community.  Our members are asking a lot of great questions we just don’t know the answers to yet. It’s very difficult to create a master roster or clear way to communicate across all of our members. We realize there is strength and quality in numbers and we need to find new ways to add meat to the bones of our positions, but do so with discipline so that we don’t create more noise. 

What positions are we taking?

Creating positions. Our meetings to date have been focused on coming up with a position. A position is “The Society’s” point of view on a given topic. We’ve taken a few already:

• Sales enablement has four flavors (talent, messaging, demand, and administration)
• All of those flavors roll up to sales productivity – as such, we believe our aspirational role should be a leader of sales productivity spanning all four of the flavors
• Because sales enablement is a cross-functional discipline, you must run it as a business within a business to be successful. 
• The “product” you offer is a suite of enabling services focused on obtaining a measurable result (IE providing a training class is not an enabling service – the service is when the results of the program are obtained)
• The “customer” of our services is sales leadership.  We are measured by the aggregate productivity of a sales force. Sales managers are responsible for the performance of individual sellers.
• Our Boston chapter has taken a first stab at defining our future state role - sales productivity leader.

Why the national meeting?

• This is an open meeting for people who agree that sales enablement professionals should step up and take a more active role in defining the future of our role.
• We need to make some decisions as a community – so we are going to asking people to come to help us define the direction of our society and figure out important questions about where we go from here.
• We need to meet each other and not listen to presentations – we need to talk through the issues and get consensus on our direction so that when “the society” speaks – we have authority and credibility behind our positions. 
• We need to determine what our key objectives are as a community, determine what resources are required to advance them, and then figure out how we will fund them.
• We need to agree and define a culture so that we can replicate our spirit and the formula of success that works.
• We need to be able to hear the key issues and use our collective wisdom to solve them.

Who is coming to the national meeting?

• So far, 56 people have volunteered to join us at the national meeting. If you’d like to join us (Its free, you just need to get to Palm Beach), click the link here.
• If you are registered, please RSVP. Meetings cost a lot of money and they require a lot of planning. We are all volunteers so please help us out by telling us: when you will be arriving and leaving and where you are staying.   (We are also trying to plan a post meeting dinner / happy hour that will be amazing).
• We have VP’s and Directors from marketing, sales operations, sales leadership from large enterprise organizations to smaller firms.
• Industries represented include: technology, financial services, manufacturing, and life sciences

What are "founding partners"

We are looking to build a community and a profession and we need help. We are fortunate to have been contacted by leading providers in the sales enablement space looking to help us have an effective national meeting. These providers are helping us with resourcing, logistics, and figuring out how we take the big step into an organization with a lot of influence. So far, these founding partners include:

• Oxygen Learning
• Seismic
• Showpad
• Callidus Cloud
• Savo

What are we going to accomplish? 

• Provide an overview of the positions we’ve taken so far, break into groups and flesh them out, and determine what needs to be done next so our members can take advantage of them.
• We are going to define “what you get” as a member of “the society” and also define more specific ways for all people to volunteer.
• Our chapter presidents (all are coming) are going to determine how they will work with each other and themselves to make sure we don’t diverge.
• We will brainstorm on problem areas, break into working groups, and come up with resolutions for them
• A clear call to action for our whole profession.
• We are going to document what we learn and all of the delegates will sign a document putting into action what we find.
• After the national meeting, members who join  will no longer be able to call themselves “founding members”

If you are coming, how can you get prepared?

• Please read the published articles. This is ground we’ve covered before and we need to keep pushing forward. We don’t want to go back and debate past decisions since we have so many we need to make.
• Please take the time to write some comments to the articles that resonate with you. Do you strongly agree - say it. Strongly disagree – say it too.  Writing it down will help you shape your ideas and that will allow us to cover more ground as a group.   It might also trigger some thoughts.
• Please be active on social media leading up to it. Post questions or thing you are excited about. Imagine you are sharing ideas with friends you have not yet met but will have after November 18th.
• Please list yourself as a “founding member” on linkedin. All National Meeting attendees will be given a new title you can put on LinkedIn – reserved ONLY for people who join. It might not be a big deal now, but image how cool it will be to have evidence you were on the ground floor of a movement? 
• Please accept the fact that your view of sales enablement might be different than people who are equally as smart as you. Be open for debate, be open to learn.
• Please come willing to be honest. Be honest with what you want to get out of this personally – no one is going to judge you, we have to confront reality.
• Please prepare your story. How did you get into SE, how did you learn about “The Society” and what have you done in the space.  It’s going to feel like you are bragging, but we are learning is these personal stories create connections. 
• Please share questions and or ideas by commenting on this post. There is no way I am going to be able to respond to you between now and the meeting (I am completely overwhelmed by the interest; have to prepare the materials for the meeting, and I have to do my day job).  I wish I could, I love talking to people about this material.