An Enabler Is a Good Thing — in Sales
Today, on the Market Dominance Guys, you’re invited to join Chris and Corey, and their guest, Roderick Jefferson, the CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates, a sales enablement consultancy firm.
This trio of sales gurus outlines the why’s and how’s of providing sales teams with the information, training, content, and tools that reps need to successfully engage buyers throughout the buying journey. This is known as sales enablement. Sounds like a pretty simple follow the blueprints process, doesn’t it? And yet, as Robert informs us, if you ask ten people what sales enablement is, you’ll get a multitude of answers.
Chris and Roderick discuss this quandary, and more specifically, how the pandemic has impacted training and overseeing sales teams, now that each rep works from home, physically away from their manager’s watchful eye. Roderick relates this problem to that of an orchestra, whose conductor is missing.
Like so many other things now, sales enablement must be fine tuned to this new situation. In order to orchestrate and conduct a sales team, so that each rep plays their part, and uses the provided resources in a collaborative manner, a major change must take place in how they’re managed.
If you’re a follower of the Market Dominance Guys, you’ll know that this episode will have you nodding along with the opinions of Chris, Corey, and their guest, and jotting down notes from their insights. Stay tuned. They aim to help you dominate your market, in this episode of Market Dominance Guys, called “An Enabler is a Good Thing, in Sales.”
Corey Frank (02:19):
Well, welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank, and the sage of sales, Chris Beall. Today, Chris, we have yet another guest, I think. And our booking agents finally found time to get on the calendar with. In fact, I think he’s probably the only guest we’ve had that can say they have a lifetime achievement award from anybody. Right? Well, actually I got a lifetime achievement award from Luby’s Cafeteria, but Roderick has one from selling power that he got.
Corey Frank (02:49):
And so, Roderick Jefferson, the sales enablement OG of all OGs is with us. We’ll talk a little bit about it, but sales enablement at Oracle, and at Salesforce, and at Marquetto, and way back even to Siebel. In fact, I think you did sales enablement before it was even called sales enablement, right? [crosstalk 00:03:06].
Roderick Jefferson (03:06):
I did. As far as I know, I’m the guy that actually created the nomenclature sales enablement. Oddly enough, there’s one other guy that claims it. He could have it maybe, who knows.
Corey Frank (03:16):
Well, we have the right guest for the Market Dominance Guys then today, certainly, Chris. But I am curious, before we start though, Roderick, and we talked about this on the phone the other day, is when you get a lifetime achievement award, is it assumed that they put you out to pasture, and there’s no more content coming out of that grape of yours, and there’s no more good ideas? If you do happen to create anything that’s good, that’s fresh, that’s new, what do they call that award then?
Roderick Jefferson (03:41):
You know what they say about assuming? So we’re not even going to go down that route. Let’s not assume anything. I think if there’s anything else, maybe it’ll be really cool to have something named after me. Other than that, who knows?
Corey Frank (03:54):
Like a Lombardi trophy. There you go. Perfect.
Roderick Jefferson (03:56):
Like the Lombardi. Kind of like that, yeah. The Jefferson.
Corey Frank (03:59):
Chris, do you have an award named after you, by chance yet?
Chris Beall (04:02):
Even my children aren’t named after me.
Corey Frank (04:08):
Well, that’s good. I think I’ve known Roderick for almost as long as I’ve known you, Chris. So it was great. And Roderick was one of the first clients that I had, that actually took my call before the pre 27 seconds. He took a cold call from me and actually bought something from me. And he hasn’t been able to get rid of me in 15, 20 years, or however long it’s been.
Corey Frank (04:27):
So it’s great to have both of you guys on the Market Dominance Guys here, Roderick. So I appreciate you taking the time with me and Chris. Since we do have a short amount of time, I just want to jump into this concept of Sales Enablement 3.0. I hear some guy wrote a book on it, right? So you just released your worldwide bestseller. They’re making it into a movie, I hear.
Corey Frank (04:46):
But Sales Enablement 3.0, when you told me that, I’m a little panicked. Because I barely mastered sales enablement 1.0, let alone 2. I completely missed 2.0 and right into 3.0. So maybe you can talk a little bit about what is sales enablement 3.0? And what did I miss?
Roderick Jefferson (05:04):
Yeah. I don’t think anything’s been missed. And that’s exactly why I wrote Sales Enablement 3.0, is the fact that we have been doing the same things the same way, for 20 plus years that I’ve been in sales enablement. And I was looking at things from a new set of lenses, like all of us now with COVID.
Roderick Jefferson (05:20):
And I’ll say the best thing that’s happened, personally, to come out of COVID, is the fact that … It’s done two things. One, it’s separated the practitioners from the theorists in sales enablement. And, secondly, it has made all of us get comfortable with being uncomfortable. We now have new technology. We’ve got all this great innovation around us. But we’re still running programs the same way.
Roderick Jefferson (05:42):
Then comes COVID. Guess what? You can’t do that. You don’t get to go stand in front of folks anymore. You don’t get to build that rapport out at dinner, or having cocktails, or out playing golf. Some do, but most don’t get to do that.
Roderick Jefferson (05:55):
So I was really looking at what are we going to do different, and how are we going to do it different? But more important … And both of you guys know me, I’m about the why. Why do we have to change? Well, the first thing that came to mind was we’ve got to stop being seen as a cost center. We’ve got to stop being seen as the fixers of broken things, and broken people.
Roderick Jefferson (06:11):
And so the thing that came to me was you train animals and you enable people. We literally have to get to the point to where it’s not just about training, it’s really about enablement. It’s those five Ps: the programs, the platforms, the processes, and the people, that all just jump out at me.
Roderick Jefferson (06:27):
Here’s the problem with sales enablement, big problem I have. And I love my vertical. I love my space. But we’ve gotten away from realizing that we actually are about people. We’re about getting people bigger, faster, and stronger. So, at its core, Sales Enablement 3.0 really comes down to taking an innovative approach, focused on increasing sales productivity, through what I call a systematic approach to support the content, the tools, and the people, to drive increased revenue.
Roderick Jefferson (06:55):
So when I wrote the book, I wrote it as a blueprint. Because I wished I would have had this as I was coming up the ranks. I’ve been fortunate to do every role inside of sales enablement, from coordinator, to program manager, to owner, all the way up to executive level. So the book will actually provide folks with a blueprint, that’ll help them to navigate the twists and turns that ultimately lead to designing, deploying, measuring, and iterating a world-class sales enablement organization, not just program.
Corey Frank (08:03):
Chris, to you, over the years, running and leading entire organizations, let alone sales organizations, what have you kind of seen … We’ve talked about this a couple of times on the Market Dominance Guys, particularly alignment or misalignment between sales and marketing, and training and hiring, etc.
Corey Frank (08:21):
But what are some of the more advances that you’ve seen in the sales enablement 2.0, 3.0 world that we’re living in, that adds to what Roderick is saying, that would’ve made the life certainly easier 10 years ago, 20 years ago, versus today, where you have these types of blueprints available?
Chris Beall (08:38):
Well, necessity is the mother of pretty much everything, and certainly mother of invention and getting it real when it comes to things like sales enablement. And sales enablement is broad enough that anything can drift in there, right? So you can have a big old, bright sun in there, and then you can have a little planet out there circling way, way far away. And you go, “Oh, it’s all sales enablement. It’s a big house.”
Chris Beall (09:00):
But, to me, it’s always been like this, if it doesn’t address the bottleneck in the business, you shouldn’t be investing in it. And one of the challenges I’ve seen, it’s not just sales enablement, but everything it’s about getting better, is everybody wants to be important. And if everybody wants to be important, that means everybody wants to have their thing be something that needs to be improved. But most things don’t need to be improved. There’s one thing that needs to be improved, it’s the bottleneck.
Chris Beall (09:25):
And if you don’t take step one, and go find the bottleneck, you’re just messing around. You’re just putting people to work. It’s like, “What are you doing?” “Well, I’m grading the side of this road.” Well, does the road ever need to be built? That’s somebody else’s problem. I’m busy grading the side of the road, because somebody gave me a … Back when I used to work at McCormack Ranch building that thing, some Hungarian dude was yelling at me, and I had a rake and I had a shovel. And he said, “Chris, shovel you the concrete.” Well, I shoveled the concrete, my friend.
Chris Beall (09:52):
That’s what I did, right? Did it make any difference? Was there any why in it? Who knows? Because when you operationalize why … You operationalize why by finding the process bottleneck that responds in this way. We make it bigger. We make stuff go through it faster at the same quality, we get more out the end, revenue. If that’s what we want, it’s revenue.
Chris Beall (10:15):
And sales enablement, because of COVID, has finally had to face the necessity of being more relevant and addressing the bottleneck. Because the bottleneck conveniently moved, in a moment, to a new place, which was communicating with your sales people how they’re supposed to do their job. Because it used to just eat it up by osmosis out on the floor. And now suddenly there ain’t no floor. So now it’s like, “Oh, we actually have to do this thing.” Now, it’s still hard to figure out what you’re measuring when you do that thing. But at least you had to do it. And that’s necessity. So I think that we’ve had a really interesting transition.
Chris Beall (10:55):
You’ve always been a systematic guy, Corey. I could go out on your floor and I could see systems. I could walk out there. And I could say to the person with me from ConnectAndSell, “Look at that. See what those five guys are doing over there? I guarantee you, they do that every single day, that five right over there. Because this is a Cory Frank shop.” So that’s what happens, right? You’ve always done systems. But, for most people, they don’t do systems. They just let osmosis do its job, and then they want to take credit.
Corey Frank (11:25):
Tim Ferriss handles the Titans. It’s funny, Chris, we were just talking about that with the team over at Youngblood Works today, said very … He interviewed Seth Godin, and talked about that very thing that you and Roderick are talking about, that departmental goals or vanity metrics, Roderick, which I’ve heard you talk about many times, right? Chris and I talk about that.
Roderick Jefferson (11:44):
Butts in seats and smiley sheets.
Corey Frank (11:45):
That’s right. But, those departmental goals, those are for average organizations. But top tier organizations have systems in place that are replicable over time. And how many different ways can you attack a territory? How many different ways can you hire a sales rep? How many different ways can you go to market? There’s a handful. There’s not an end amount.
Corey Frank (12:09):
And so after years and years of sales in the digital world today, I think that, if you don’t have a system, even if it doesn’t work, it sounds like you’re missing out, if you are stovepiping or tiering your organization into these different fiefdoms, marketing, versus sales, versus recruiting, versus training, retention team, account management team, etc, without a system to get them a snug … And I think you used the analogy of an orchestra, which I’d like Roderick to kind of describe all this, correct?
Roderick Jefferson (12:40):
Yeah. It’s collaboration. It’s communication. It’s orchestration, which, standalone, sounds like a lot of fluffy marketing terms, but it’s not. And I’m going to dig deep … But I want to double tap on something that Chris said earlier, is we don’t do enough of finding the why at sales enablement folks. And we’ve got to go deeper on that.
Roderick Jefferson (12:58):
And to the point around the vanity stats, yeah, I believe there are two different types of metrics when it comes to sales enablement, one that enablement influences and impacts, and then another set that we own. On the sales side, the pieces that we influence are the typicals of average deal size, collateral frequency, deal velocity, pipeline creation, and velocity quota attainment, time to revenue, all those.
Roderick Jefferson (13:21):
And I’m going to say this directly to my sales enablement folks that may be listening, stop saying that you drive revenue unless you carry a bag. You do not. You influence and you impact revenue. The things that we own are the things like the accreditations and certifications, the needs analysis, the programmatical bills, the tools, the processes, the programs, those things, and sales.
Roderick Jefferson (13:42):
And then, on the success side, a whole other set of metrics that some claim we own, and I don’t believe we do, I think we impact and influence, adoption rates, annual recurring rates, customer churn rates, red account reduction, those kind of things. And so how do you come about understanding how to get those metrics right, and who you need to work with? That’s where the orchestration piece comes in, that you were just talking about, Corey.
Roderick Jefferson (14:06):
And it’s literally the analogy of we’ve got all of these different pieces to an orchestra. You’ve got strings, woodwinds, percussion, brass, etc, that come into play in trying to do the right thing, and make this incredible orchestrated sound. Now, let’s now akin that to the lines of business. You’ve got sales, sales enablement. You’ve got marketing, product marketing, engineering, product management, etc. And they’re all trying to do the right thing for the customer or the prospect.
Roderick Jefferson (14:33):
The problem is they’re stepping over each other. Sometimes they’re playing sour notes. They’re just a bit off. Until one person or one organization, the orchestrator, which I believe is sales enablement, steps up, taps the stand, and now all of that chaos becomes a beautiful sheet of music. That’s what enablement does.
Roderick Jefferson (14:50):
And something else you said earlier, Chris, that really resonates with me, and that is there are so many different definitions of what sales enablement is. And I think if you ask 10 people you’ll get 12 answers. And I don’t know that any of them would be wrong. The problem is enablement does not have standard nomenclature, similar to what PMI has for project management.
Roderick Jefferson (15:11):
And that’s kind of the goal of sales enablement society is to put that all together. I don’t think we’ve hit that target yet. I think we’ve hit all the spots around it, but I don’t think that target has been hit. So what we’ve got to do is understand what sales enablement means in your given company, based upon the maturation cycle of where your company is today, and also what the goals are of where you’re going.
Corey Frank (15:32):
Chris, with a weapon like ConnectAndSell, you have a front row seat, oftentimes, of people who … Their mindset, their goals, their heart may be in the right place, but implementing a weapon like ConnectAndSell flushes out all these misaligned enablement pieces in an organization, does it not?
Chris Beall (15:55):
Well, yeah, down to a certain point. Not all of them. Really, all ConnectAndSell is generally used for is to create discovery opportunities. It has other uses. But you have to be so sophisticated to make use of those other uses, that they all look like one-offs to me. They’re fun to look at. I go, “Oh, how pretty?” But I don’t go off and tell somebody to try it. It’s like, “No, really? I don’t think so.” Oh, chasing down people who went dark before the end of the quarter. Okay, some guys use it for that. Great.
Chris Beall (16:24):
But I like the ones who go, “You know what? We got 250,000 folks in this market. We want to talk to 137,300 of them in the next three years. We want to set appointments with and hold those appointments with 62,150 of them. And we want to do that over this fixed period of time. We want to convert 18.7% of those to first deals. And we want 9% of them to turn into deals after a year or so, when the timing’s finally right. Therefore, let’s talk to a whole bunch of them. Therefore, let’s not qualify on first calls.” There’s all a bunch of therefores that fall out of it.
Chris Beall (17:04):
What’s funny about ConnectAndSell is the 10X. Because the 10X is weird. I mean, 10X’s are really, really not comfortable to wield, right? They’re not. It’s like, “Hey, I’ll give you a sword. It’s 10 times more powerful. Let me show you how to use it in the house.” Well, I don’t have a house anymore. And now I’ve got to go live somewhere else. That’s not much fun. So you got to be careful with something this fast, and you got to make sure you’re applying it to where it can make a difference.
Chris Beall (17:29):
And the big thing I’ve seen is that most people don’t know what would make a difference. They really don’t. What they do in their budgetary process is everybody raises their hand, says, “I want some.” And then the assumption is everything makes a difference. And everything doesn’t make a difference. It just doesn’t. Right now, only one thing can make a difference. And the hardest thing to do is to go find it.
Chris Beall (17:52):
And when you got something as fast as ConnectAndSell, you either find it, or you wrap that Ferrari around a tree. Those are the only two possibilities. And it’s really quite dramatic. So we get to see that quick, violent bifurcation between aligned situations, or aligned enough, that you’re actually doing something for a reason, that is you’re going to move a real needle. Or whether you’re just doing it because somebody said, “I want more. I want more. I’m like The Little Mermaid. I want more.”
Corey Frank (18:20):
Is there one department more than another, when Robert talks about the different pieces of the orchestra in an organization, that you’ve seen Chris, over the years, that needs to embrace, albeit reluctantly so, this concert strategy more than another? In other words, I’m used to working in an independent arena, and everybody else supports me.
Chris Beall (18:43):
Well, it’s sales. I mean, sales is the land of the lone wolf. And we take people into sales development roles, and say, “The only reason you have to do this job is so you can be a lone wolf someday.” I mean, we do that. We literally do that. We say, “This job sucks, but if you do it for a while, we’ll let you go lone wolf it up, and you’ll have a lot of fun. And then you can just do things your way. You can reinvent sales. I mean, after all, it’s a discipline that’s only a few thousand years old. Maybe you’ll come up with a new flavor of it that’ll knock everybody’s socks off. You be the person.” So I just think it’s really interesting that there’s this whole sales and marketing alignment problem, that I think I mentioned once maybe on the show.
Chris Beall (19:25):
I talked to John Neeson way back when, founder of SiriusDecisions, co-founder. And I asked him, “John, what’s the maximum conversation coverage you’ve ever seen on inbounds? Somebody’s generating the inbounds, marketing’s got them coming in. What’s the maximum percentage you’ve ever seen spoken with at one of your clients?” And he just said, “9%.” Long pause on my side. I said, “So, John, does that mean 91% of all marketing budgets are wasted, because sales doesn’t bother to talk to the leads?” Long pause. He says, “Never say that to anybody.”
Chris Beall (19:58):
You didn’t hear it here, but marketing generally will do their job within parameters. And their job is harder than is right, because they’re trying to take a stew of information out there, publicly available information, and turn it into some kind of a list of folks worth talking to. I mean, really that’s what it is, right? Sales tends to approach the job like this. Eh, I don’t like that one. Why? Well, I assume it’s no good, because it looks kind of like this other one I didn’t like. That’s where the variety shows up first. And we encourage it, and fan the flames all the way through the sales process.
Roderick Jefferson (20:31):
Chris, you’re absolutely right. And, for so long, it’s been the nomenclature of sales is the sun. And the further you get away from the sun, the colder it gets, which there is some truth to that. But, at the same time, I love what you were just saying. Too many times in my career, I’ve seen where marketing says, “We give so many leads to sales, and they never do anything with them.” Sales in turn says, “Yeah, you give us leads, but they all suck.”
Roderick Jefferson (20:56):
And I’ve asked one question, and that question is, have you guys ever actually sat down at the same table and defined and agreed upon what a sales or a marketing qualified lead actually looks like? Long pause, to use your words. And the answer is, generally, why would we do that? We know what they need. And sales says, “We know what we need.” Yeah. But have you actually ever told each other what those are? Generally the answer is not yes.
Chris Beall (21:23):
Generally, the answer is not yes. And what’s really interesting … And, Roderick, I come from a weird background, right? I’m a physicist who used to build big software systems. That’s what I did for a living, right? So here’s how I build big software system. I draw a big circle on a whiteboard. I draw a line. I’m going to do this from your perspective. It comes out from the right-hand side. It’s got an arrow on it. I put a little stick figure at the end of it. I say, “Here’s what we’re going to build. Here’s its only output it’s allowed to have.”
Chris Beall (21:47):
Right now, in our minds, we’re only allowed one output. No compound sentences need apply. There’s somebody that’s an actual human being somewhere on earth, nowhere else. They got a title, they got a job, they got responsibilities. And then I put a little dollar sign over it, goes, “When one unit of this output goes to this person, how many dollars are saved, or how many are made by them, or the organization they’re responsible for?” That’s a why on a system. Real simple.
Chris Beall (22:14):
Then you ask the key question, which is what is the minimum input … What are the minimum inputs required to make one unit of output? How good do they have to be? Now, if you can answer that question in sales, you’re golden, right? You’re golden. Sales is a system that produces an output, called a deal. Somebody makes money off the deal. What are the minimum inputs, and are they available. That’s what nobody asks, are they available?
Chris Beall (22:40):
So sales goes, “Well, I want inputs that I want it to be good.” Well, what if good’s not available out there? That is, what if the information required to get past what you’re getting right now isn’t available? Well, you got to finish it. And that means, among human beings, you’ve got to talk to somebody. So my suggestion would be this. They should get together, just like you said. But how about if they got together with 20 perfect prospects, one at a time?
Roderick Jefferson (23:08):
Absolutely. That’s step two. They’ve got to get past each other first. Right? Then sit down with that perfect prospect together. Yeah.
Chris Beall (23:17):
But do they do it? No. And I think the reason is politics. When you come right down to it, budgetary politics, rules, organizations. Somebody gets the money, right? So if I say that I need you, then I’m implicitly saying, “I need you to get some of the money that’s coming to me.”
Chris Beall (23:36):
And that I think is the big problem that keeps … I think that keeps sales enablement from being appropriately at the table, more than anything else. Because it’s like, “Well, we already how much money there is. So now we’re kind of done.”
Roderick Jefferson (23:49):
Yeah. That’s like trying to go to a client after the hour, and P is already written. A little late now.
Chris Beall (23:55):
That’s a great example. A little late now.
Roderick Jefferson (23:58):
Yeah. A little late now. Thanks for the input. But it’s already in ink.
Chris Beall (24:02):
Where’s the CEO, is my question. You want results as a CEO, why aren’t you at that meeting?
Roderick Jefferson (24:09):
Oh, great question. And, as a sales enablement practitioner, that’s one of the things that I always push for. And that is we cannot have sales enablement initiatives. We have to have sales enablement woven into the fabric of the company. And that only happens from the top down.
Roderick Jefferson (24:23):
If this is one of their top three or top five initiatives for the year, then you get movement, because you’ve got some wood behind the arrow. But if it’s sales enablement saying, “I need you to do this,” or in some cases, “It would be really nice if you kind of sort of maybe might think about doing this,” then you’re not going to get anywhere. Because now you’re a nuisance, and you’re bringing no value.
Roderick Jefferson (24:44):
The value comes when it comes from C-level down, and they say, “This is the direction we’re going. And in order for us to hit these success metrics, it requires that each of you communicate, collaborate, and orchestrate together. Now, go play together and figure out how it’s done. And if you can’t figure it out, then I’m going to have to jump in and help you figure it out. And that’s not going to be nearly as pleasant of a conversation.”
Chris Beall (25:06):
Yeah. Well, there’s a fun one there, which is … And this nobody will do, but I like to throw it out there, because I do it out of probably personality disorder, or some other illness that has not yet [crosstalk 00:25:17].
Roderick Jefferson (25:16):
Your crazy idea of fun, Chris?
Chris Beall (25:18):
Yeah. I got a funny idea of fun, which is, when the CEO goes and sells, and sells real deals, just like everybody else, little ones, big ones, not swoops in on the big ones, but actually sells, sources new deals and sells new deals, you find out what sales enablement needs to provide in a hurry. Because that poor sucker needs what he needs, or she needs, and that stuff’s going to happen.
Chris Beall (25:41):
And then the question is how do you keep it from being idiosyncratic? How do you keep it from being a one-off for the boss? But if you can take that information back, which is like, “Wait a minute. I got one, right?” That happens to me all the time. I finish a process, part of a process. So I sell a little bit. And I finished part of the process.
Chris Beall (26:02):
And I go to put that information in the CRM, and there’s a required field I don’t know the answer to. In fact, I don’t even know what it means. I literally do not know what it means. And when I asked somebody, they say, “Oh, we always put X in there,” whatever X is. I said, “Well, why do we do that?” Well, because that way the required field’s filled in, right?
Roderick Jefferson (26:21):
Then required becomes relative.
Chris Beall (26:23):
Right. And I think we have a lot of stuff like that, that if the CEO is selling, you find out in a hurry that there’s a lot of things we ask salespeople to do that are utter nonsense. And then we don’t provide them with stuff that is utter-esence, that’s the essence of getting the job done. So have the CEO sell, that’s my recommendation, Corey.
Corey Frank (26:49):
Have a company of all former CEOs, and they become the sales organization. That’s it, right?
Chris Beall (26:55):
Poor guy doesn’t have to sell forever, but I don’t like CEOs just selling big deals, the swoop swoop. I just hate that [inaudible 00:27:01]. If I’m going to do it, my thing is give me little ones, give me the trash, throw me the stuff nobody else wants.
Roderick Jefferson (27:08):
Because can’t set an example by being a super closer, right? If you only come in and swoop in on the big ones, then you really have no idea what it takes to close those. And, to your point, if the internal pieces actually talk to each other, beyond just the CEO, right?
Roderick Jefferson (27:22):
And I think that’s another one of the key values of true sales enablement, is that we’re what I call the translators of dialects and languages. So we’ve got to be able to speak marketing, product marketing, engineering, HR, etc. As an old sales guy myself, and I’m back here, I loved going out. And miss those pieces of being able to go out with sales folks.
Roderick Jefferson (27:44):
Because I could go and listen to 10, 12 prospects, customers, and come back and say, “Hey, product marketing, marketing, loved the company pitch. But we get the slide seven, one of two things happens, either no one uses it, or I’ve heard it described 10 different ways. Can you either smooth that thing out or get rid of it?” Then I can go to product management and say, “Hey, I’ve had eight different prospects asked for the same feature. How do we get it moved up on the release cycle?”
Roderick Jefferson (28:09):
Then I go back to sales and to HR and say, “Folks, what I’m realizing is we’ve got our ICP, our ideal client or customer profile nailed. What we really lack in is we don’t know what our IEP is, our ideal employee profile. Because we’re not in a different maturation cycle, and we’re still hiring like it was yesterday. So what we need really is to look at and identify and address where we’re going. Maybe we need a more senior person. Maybe we need to go and hire folks from different verticals or different companies, or even the BDRs, SDRs. Let’s look outside of those top 10 schools that we always go and look at, and we’re not getting what we need. If we keep hiring the way that we did, we’ll get to the edge of the chasm, but we’ll never get across.”
Roderick Jefferson (28:52):
Now, bear in mind, you’ve got to have a little level of credibility to be able to say these things. But if you don’t say it, then you’re a theorist. You’re not a true self enablement practitioner.
