What is the Sales Enablement Society?

Holy Crap, I Don’t Have any Friends!

Last year, I took my family to Cancun for a week before New Year’s. Lying on the beach, I learned something about myself.  I am a total geek about sales enablement. It is a fascinating subject because its: new, complex, poorly understood, attracts people from all disciplines, and you get to work with sales people a lot (which having been a salesman a lot of my life, I love). 

Ah ha #1: I need to connect with more people and brainstorm about this big challenge

So, I started thinking about who I’d want to collaborate on sorting through all of this mess with.  Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of people I thought about either knew me from speeches I gave or reports I wrote; but few knew me or why I am so passionate about this topic.  When I went to go look them up, they live in different places around the world. I like to debate, collaborate, whiteboard – it’s hard for me to do that on the web.

Ah ha #2: find group of like-minded people to connect with

So, how do I do that? Well, I got an idea inspired by my friend Jill Rowley. I decided to put myself out into the digital world and write a Linkedin article expressing my desire to start a community. Simple right? I thought so too… but on January 16th I sat staring at my computer screen and I had a big debate with myself about sending this post that I had written. 

As silly as it sounds now, I was nervous about sending it. Having grown accustomed to a lot of clicks on posts, presented to so many on different stages, and quoted by many people – I thought I had established myself as a thought leader in the sales enablement space. Arrogantly (and honestly), I was worried about hitting the send button because in my mind, I was deciding to exit the marketplace I helped create and go small…. I worried about damaging my brand. I caught myself in that conceit and I reluctantly hit publish.

 Panera Sandwiches, Let's Be Honesty - its the Cookies

As of today, only 568 people have read it (I think only 120 read it in January) and I was accustomed to 5,000 to 15,000 views when I would post at Forrester, so by that metric my fears were founded.  But a very interesting thing happened.

I thought having 5 people say “hey that sounds good, I will meet you there” would have been a success. I called my good friend and former Forrester colleague Brian Lambert to make sure he’d show up – so I really was only looking for 4 people.  What happened?  We had 16 people show up in a crowded office at BackOffice Associates.  Cindy Zhou (who was then the CMO there) offered her office for our meeting and we gathered together in her firms office space. Our meeting was clumsy, a little awkward, but fantastically energetic and turned out to be amazingly productive.

Since then, we’ve had several meetings, covering different issues, experimenting with: topics, points of view, subjects, formats –you name it.  We’ve had ups and some downs trying to get this group off the ground while figuring out what our group actually was. I’d first called it “The DC Area Sales Enablement Networking Group” (A brander, I am not). 

 A Happy Hour and Great Contributions

One of the things we were all interested in was developing relationships with members so we could meet with one another over drinks and talk through issues with other people we know are struggling through the same complex situations.

Lisa Pinter hosted one of our meetings in DC and while our attendance was off (I guess the lesson learned is if your members mostly live in suburbia, don’t have meetings at 3pm on Friday downtown) we had a tremendous time at the hour hour(s) after. Lisa, Nicole Obrien, and I came up with a killer movie idea – ask them about it. It’s a riot.

We’ve had a lot of fun and great individual contributions to helping our group grow. Pat Mustico participated in one meeting and asked a lot of “so what” questions (If you know him, you'd say - "yep, I can see that") and he’s been influential in helping us establish our unique format to ask the hard questions.  Institute for Excellence in Sales founder and published author, Fred Diamond has been a great connector and tremendous adviser to us for evolving our group. This brings us to today.

We are now “The Sales Enablement Society”

Effective today, our group is officially “The Sales Enablement Society” ("The Society for short) and is a volunteer-run, not-for profit organization. We are the only group in the world solely dedicated to the elevation of the sales enablement role and the creation of standards for our profession. 

When I sat down and tried to think of all of the things we’ve accomplished in seven months with all volunteer work (I think it bears repeating) I was amazed:

• We’ve debated, defined, and taken two official positions. 1) in order to run sales enablement right, you must run it as a business within a business. You customers are sales leadership. 2) What you provide are enabling services that should be focused on driving a tangible, measurable result. 
• Last week, Rahul Gupta launched a website for us that he created – It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?
• Our members have written 18 very  solid and thought provoking articles made available for free on LinkedIn (compare the quality of these outputs to research firms – and we’re only going to improve)
• Seismic has featured three of us so far on its podcasts, we hope to see more
• Nicole O'Brien, the former VP of Marketing for Dimension Data has guided our communications and started working on establishing our brand
• Former business consultant turned sales enablement enthusiast Jenn Marie Jacobers has been helping to establish our operations
• Brian Lambert has helped us officially file as a nonprofit entity (so we are a real, legal thing).
• We’ve received requests to start local groups in:  Boston, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Austin, Houston, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angles, Denver, Toronto, and London.
• Today our local DC chapter has 81 members; with about 25 who regularly attend our monthly meetings.   
• We’re having our first National Meeting on November 18th (more on that later)
• Our membership includes: Former Sales Enablement Research Directors from Forrester and Sirius Decisions, The Founder of the Institute for Excellence in Sales, The former and current Sales Enablement leader for ATD, and three published authors. (Where are you going to get that firepower let alone to get them to agree on contributing to something bigger?)

All of this with 100% volunteer support (did I mention that?).  It is incredible.

Why Should YOU Get Involved?

Let’s face it. Being the Director or VP of broken things isn’t really a great career choice is it?

 You see so many problems happening inside your company, but you don’t feel like you can do anything about it. You’re working your butt off, constantly reacting to fire drills, and questioned about the value you offer. You think you should be paid more, but your management doesn’t really appreciate or understand what you do. If you do interview, you are realizing the expectations and salary level of that new job aren’t what you are doing in yours.  When you try to find “best practices” to either do your job or elevate your function you mostly hear noise from tons of vendors trying to sell you their tool or theories that no one has actually implemented and can walk you through what it took to achieve those results. 

If that describes you, get involved and help us bring clarity to the role. Participate in setting standards and defining best practices. Collaborate with us by adding your meat to the bones we are developing and share our work with others. Help be a part of elevating our profession from the tactical afterthought it is to the strategic role it should be. After all, a rising tide lifts all ships.

What are the Membership Requirements? 

Right now, membership is only open for sales enablement practitioners. The best way to get engaged with us is to find us through the linkedin groups (look for sales enablement society). As we grow, we will develop more sophisticated forms of administration.

 If you join before our national meeting (November 18th), you will be able to refer to yourself as a “founding member” on your linkedin profile.  Think about how valuable that would be for you when three years from now our group is the leading authority on sales enablement. You’d be able to say you were on the ground floor to make that happen (making you very marketable).   

What is Expected of You?

When someone in the society posts something on LinkedIn, you are expected to:

1.  Like it
2. Write a description about what it means to you and share it
3. Strongly encouraged (but not expected) to comment on blog posts
4. Make connections with other people - especially if you don't know them

Why? If we are going to elevate the profession, we all need to work at it and get involved. Please reach out to us and get engaged. 

Founding Member Brian Lambert wrote up why "The Society" is important... if you want more information, click here.