Sales Enablement PRO Podcast

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Pam Dake, senior director of global sales enablement from Accela, join us. Pam, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your title, and your organization. Pam Dake: Thank you so much, Shawnna. My name is Pam Dake, and I am the senior director for global sales enablement here at Accela. Accela, just to provide you with a little bit of information, we provide a platform of solutions that help state and local governments build strong communities, help businesses grow, and deliver citizen services. Our SaaS offerings offer a way to level the playing field for our small and medium governments so that they can be better enabled small agencies and take advantage of big city technologies, if you will. SS

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Helen Cummins join us. Helen has a wealth of experience leading global sales enablement organizations. Helen, I would love for you to introduce yourself to our audience. Helen Cummins: Well, sure. Thank you. My name is Helen Cummins and I have a sales and marketing background, and for the past 10 years, I’ve been leading global sales enablement teams within the tech industry. Prior to that, I was leading product marketing, and then at the beginning of my career, I was focused on actually selling to the larger financial services accounts in Toronto. SS: Well, I’m excited to have you on our podcast today, Helen, so thank you for joining us. One of your areas of expertise is changing man

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Devon McDermott, VP of global sales enablement at CM Group join us. Devon, I’d love for you to introduce yourself to our audience. Devon McDermott: Sure. My name is Devon McDermott and I am the VP of global enablement at CM Group. If you’re not familiar, CM Group is a portfolio of marketing technologies. Some of our brands include Sailthru, Campaign Monitor, Liveclicker, and Vuture, and that’s to name a few. The global enablement team at CM Group is a very small but mighty team, and we support enablement efforts across all of our brands with a focus on internal sales and customer success teams and some of our customers. SS: I’m very excited to have you on this podcast, Dev

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. I’m excited to have Lena Chudasama. Join us today. Lena, I’d love for you to just introduce yourself, your title, and your organization. Lena Chudasama: Sure. Hi. Thank you for having me. My name is Lena Chudasama and I work at Taboola. My role is a sales enablement lead for EMEA, so the European, Middle East region. I’ve been at Taboola for about six years and I’ve been in this particular role for around one year so far. SS: Well, I’m so glad to have you join our podcast today. you had mentioned that one of your main responsibilities at your organization is the design and implementation of onboarding programs for sales and account management. Now, when designing an onboarding curriculum, where do yo

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I’m excited to have Jennifer Lopopolo, director of global sales enablement at Poly join us. Jennifer, I’d love for you to just introduce yourself, your title, and your organization. Jennifer Lopopolo: Yeah. Great. My name is Jennifer Lopopolo and I work for Poly. I joined the company about three months ago. I lead the sales enablement, sales and field enablement, practice here at Poly. SS: Excellent. And you also recently participated in a panel at the Sales Enablement Soirée in San Francisco, and you mentioned the importance of putting processes in place to align on KPIs with other departments. Why is it important from your perspective for other departments to have visibility into sales enablement deliverables and

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Yarun Nahar, the senior manager of sales enablement at Rackspace, join us. Yarun, I’d love for you to just introduce yourself, your title, and your organization. Yarun Nahar: Sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Yarun Nahar, and I head up sales enablement across EMEA at a company called Rackspace. SS: We’re really excited to have you here with us today. In fact, I saw you speak at a sales enablement event recently. During a panel, you mentioned that it’s important for sales enablement professionals to focus on three things at any given point in time and really communicate those priorities. Why, from your perspective, is prioritization important for sales enablement? YN: Sure. Right no

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Gretchen Sleeper join us from Cisco Systems. Gretchen, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your title, and your organization. Gretchen Sleeper: Sure, of course. My name is Gretchen Sleeper, and I work for Cisco Systems. If you don’t know who we are, we’re the worldwide leader in networking for the internet. About 85% of all internet traffic travels across Cisco Systems. My role at the company is to design, deliver, and manage the sales enablement automation platform that we call Sales Connect. It is built for our internal customer-facing roles and all of our partners globally. We have a really small team, small but mighty, on the biz side of about nine, and access to a larger

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Robert Koehler join us from Compass. Robert, I’d love for you to just introduce yourself, your role, and your organization. Robert Koehler: Thank you, Shawnna. A bit about myself – first, I have over 20 years of sales experience having worked in the financial publishing and high-tech industries all the way from a three-person startup to being employee number seven to big companies such as HP and IBM, and SaaS companies such as LinkedIn. I’ve delivered sales performance improvement programs in over 20 countries. I think the most challenging program I ever delivered included a sales training done with simultaneous translation in Seoul, South Korea to a hundred sales account managers. Today, I

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Robert Koehler join us from Compass. Robert, I’d love for you to just introduce yourself, your role, and your organization. Robert Koehler: Thank you, Shawnna. A bit about myself – first, I have over 20 years of sales experience having worked in the financial publishing and high-tech industries all the way from a three-person startup to being employee number seven to big companies such as HP and IBM, and SaaS companies such as LinkedIn. I’ve delivered sales performance improvement programs in over 20 countries. I think the most challenging program I ever delivered included a sales training done with simultaneous translation in Seoul, South Korea to a hundred sales account managers. T

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Giorgia join us from Lever. I’d love for you to just kind of give us a brief introduction to yourself, your role, and your organization. Giorgia Ortiz: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I am the global director of sales enablement here at Lever. We are a talent relationship management company and we pride ourselves in really providing the software platform that encourages and enables a best-in-class experience both for companies and candidates looking to join a new company. So, happy to be here with you. SS: So, at the Sales Enablement Soirée, you talked about an initiative in which you identified four competencies that are indicative of what good selling looks like for your salespeople

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Katherine joining me from SessionM. I would love for you to just introduce yourself, your title, and your organization. Katherine Dolphin: Hi Shawnna. Thanks for having me. My name is Katherine Dolphin and I am a senior sales enablement manager at SessionM. SessionM is a customer data and engagement platform headquartered in Boston, and we were recently acquired by MasterCard as of November 2019. SS: Well, congratulations on that. You also recently participated in the Sales Enablement Soirée. At the event, you said that you think customers today expect salespeople to know them better than they know themselves. So, how can sales enablement help sales reps meet those buyer expectations? KD: Yeah. So

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Wynne Brown join us. I would love for you to just introduce yourself, your title, and your organization. Wynne Brown: I’d love to. My name is Wynne Brown. I’m the senior director of global enablement at Seal Software. My role encompasses sales enablement, but also all the other flavors of enablement, including internal, customer, and partner enablement. So, we brought together all of the various enablement functions under one team so that we could really reuse content and do the best we could possibly do for all of those audiences under one umbrella. My company, Seal Software, is the global leader in AI contract analytics. All that’s very fancy to say that we use AI-powered learning t

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Nieka Mamczak with us. Nieka, I’d love for you to just introduce yourself, your title, and your organization. Nieka Mamczak: Hi, thank you for having me. I’m Nieka, and I am the sales enablement and productivity manager at Udemy. SS: Excellent. And you focus on enabling many types of customer facing roles there, including ADR, sales managers, and customer success. So, in your opinion, why is role-specific sales enablement important? NM: Yeah, so great question. I think there’s two things that come to mind right away as it relates to that. So, first and foremost, if each role contributes something unique to both the sales funnel and the customer journey. In order to ensure that

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we are here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Bill Parry from Redwood Software join us. Bill, I’d love for you to just introduce yourself, your role, and your organization. Bill Parry: Well, thank you very much. I would be happy to. I am here at Redwood as the director of enablement of an amazing company that specializes in process automation and robotic software and some really fantastic stuff in the financial world. For me, I am just a poor kid from Northern New Hampshire living in Texas. The first half of my career, I started in the U.S. Coast Guard. I spent the majority of my time studying training, training development, process improvement, human performance, instructional design. My last three and a half/four years in the Coast Guard

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I’m excited to have Darlene Samer, the director of sales enablement at Yelp, with us. Darlene, I’d love for you to just introduce yourself, your title, and your organization. Darlene Samer: Fabulous. Thanks so much for having me today. I currently am the director of sales enablement for the multi-location space at Yelp, and as many of us know, Yelp is a primary platform dedicated to connecting people with great local businesses. What I do there is I run a fabulous team and we are focused on everything from the moment our new reps walk in the door with onboarding to continuing education right through to sales leadership work. At the end of the day, my goal is to bring together my team and connect with all sorts

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we are here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today we are joined by Peter O’Neill. Peter, I would love for you to just introduce yourself, your role, and your organization. Peter O’Neill: Hi Shawnna, and thanks for inviting me. Well, I’ve been in the IT and marketing world for more than 38 years working in various roles at HP, META Group and most recently 12 years at Forrester Research both as an industry analyst and Research Director. I was RD for all of Forrester’s work around B2B Marketing which included sales enablement. In fact, I would claim to be one of the first analysts to promote the concept of sales enablement. With my colleagues, I wrote several reports between 2012 and 2014 which defined the role, responsibilities and even anticipated which technologie

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m joined by Jenn Haskell from Monotype. I would love for you, Jenn, to just introduce yourself, your title, and your organization. Jenn Haskell: Absolutely. Thank you, Shawnna, for having me. My name is Jenn Haskell. I am the global sales trainer and sales enablement person here at Monotype Imaging. Monotype is based out of Woburn, Massachusetts, so right outside of Boston. We’re a global organization and we’re actually known for two parts of our business. We have typography — selling fonts and types, that’s actually our business. We also have a technology that allows companies to collect and curate user-generated content, and then use that for different promotions, marketing mailers, adver

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I’m excited to have Kristen McCrae with us from Intuit. Kristen, thanks so much for joining us. I would love for you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself, your role, and your organization. Kristen McCrae: Absolutely, thanks so much for having me today. I’m Kristen McCrae, and I work on the sales enablement and performance team here at Intuit. SS: So glad to have you. So, you and I met at the Sales Enablement Society’s annual conference recently, and you had a presentation where you talked about having a data-driven mindset for sales enablement. In your opinion, why is that so critical? KM: It’s such a great question and I think the answer is a little bit tricky, but when I was thinking about why data-driven enableme

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I’m excited to have Emily Garza with us from Fastly. Emily, I’d love for you to take a minute and just introduce yourself, your title, and your organization. Emily Garza: Thanks, Shawnna. As you said, my name is Emily Garza. I work at Fastly, a leading-edge cloud platform, and we help our customers deliver the best online experiences possible to their end-users. Currently, I am the director of account management but also started at the sales enablement function here at Fastly. SS: Emily, you and I have worked together a lot on the Sales Enablement Soirées that you’ve participated at in San Francisco over the last few years, and a lot of the conversation often revolves around the pre-sales world, especial

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I’m excited to have Jake Spear join us from ringDNA. Jake, thank you so much for joining us. I would love for you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself, your role, and your organization. Jake Spear: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you, Shawnna, as well and also to the whole Sales Enablement PRO team for having me on. It really is an honor. So, about myself. As Shawnna said, my name is Jake Spear. I joined ringDNA back in February of this year as the senior manager of sales operations. For a growing startup like we are, what that means is that I kind of do a little bit of everything. So, everything from working with the sales reps on onboarding, training, and deal strategy to all the stuff that is behind the s