Stop the Sales Enablement Scavenger Hunt

Drew: Hello, renegade marketers. If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. I'm Drew Neisser, Penguin-in-Chief of CMO Huddles. Every 10th episode, I interview myself. Why? Because it's fun, and y'all seem to enjoy it too, so that's kind of cool. It's also the one interview where the guest gets every question in advance and still manages to wander off topic. Hmm. Today's topic is sales enablement, and I want to start with a deliberate provocation. Stop enabling sales. Yeah, I'm gonna repeat that. Stop enabling sales. I hope I have your attention, 'cause before every CRO listening hits the stop button, I'm not suggesting that marketing abandon sales or hide the pitch decks or cancel your subscription to Seismic. I got nothing against Seismic. I am suggesting that we stop treating sales enablement as a content service. I'll repeat that. Stop treating sales enablement as a content service. For years, marketing has gotten in the habit of producing decks, battle cards, case studies, playbooks, lots of training materials, and repositories. Sales asks for the material, marketing creates the material. The material gets stored somewhere, and then sales asks, "Where is that thing?" AI actually gives us a chance to build something better. We learned that extensively in the huddles this month on the topic. Sales enablement is becoming a system that gives sellers trusted intelligence when they need it and helps them prepare for specific conversations. They learn from buyer reactions, and improve the way companies sell. So the big idea for this episode is simple: stop enabling sales, start engineering sales effectiveness. And there are kind of three ways to judge whether we're succeeding. Can we help sales win faster? Can we help sales win more often? Or can we help sales win bigger? And those aren't ors, but it certainly helps to focus on one of them, if not a couple. All right. So we're gonna start in this big area of rethinking sales enablement, and we're gonna start with a basic problem. What is wrong with the way most companies have traditionally approached sales enablement? And maybe we can answer this question. So, Drew, why do you want CMOs to stop enabling sales?

Penguin Hat Drew: The problem with it is the phrase sales enablement has become too closely associated with just making stuff, producing stuff. Sales asks for a deck, marketing makes a deck. Sales asks for bar- battle cards, marketing makes a battle card. You got a custom, you know, got a presentation, a big one. Sales asks for a custom presentation or a one-pager, and then marketing will make three versions, um, because nobody can agree on what, what, which audience it is for. So before long, marketing becomes an eternal production studio responding to one-off requests, which drives everybody crazy and throws the whole department out of whack, and it may be helpful, and yes, I'm thinking of, of you, Kelly, hopping and making, you know, making sales your best friend, making sales love marketing. But it's not the same as improving selling. One CMO in our huddle said, "We can supply a lot of information, but we just can't rely on the salesperson to go find what we think they need and then use it in the ways that we believe they should." And that really gets at the heart of this thing. The question is not whether marketing produced the asset. The question is whether the seller became more effective and whether the buyer moved forward. So CMOs are already influencing all the aspects of it. We've got customer intelligence, positioning, messaging, competitive insight, proof points, brand, and pipeline. Those are not merely content ingredients. They are part of the selling system. So when I say stop enabling sales, I mean stop defining the job as fulfilling requests. Start helping engineer sales effectiveness.

Drew: So what's broken here? What are we trying to fix, and, uh, why do we need this, and why do we need it now?

Penguin Hat Drew: Thank you for asking that question. The traditional model asks just too much of the seller. We assume that they know the content exists. We assume that they remember where it lives, and that they can find the newest version, and that they'll understand how to use it. And then we assume they'll use it at the right moment. That's a lot of assumptions. So meanwhile, the seller has about 20 minutes, uh, before a meeting. Now, hopefully they've prepared a little more in advance, and they want answers to five practical questions. Allow me to go through these. Who am I meeting? Easy question. What matters to this buyer, this company? Which competitor is likely to come up? What proof should I use? And what should I ask them? They're not thinking, "Gee, I wonder where- whether page 37 of the healthcare playbook might help here." One CMO put it plainly, the asset library is fuller than it's ever been. And yeah, you got a lot of content out there, but that doesn't mean that sales is better enabled. It may simply mean there is more material to search, and AI is making this worse, or could make it worse, because now we can produce even more content. Oh, you need that deck for this thing? Boom. Oh yeah, no problem. We'll create it. So AI has solved the production problem before most companies solved the usefulness problem. We gave sales a library when sales really wanted an answer.

Drew: Okay, speaking of answers, that was a good answer. I'm gonna give you credit for that one, like eight and a half or, or so. I guess the next question would be, Drew, are battle cards and content libraries becoming obsolete?

Penguin Hat Drew: I'm gonna waffle a little bit, so I'm gonna get that out before you criticize me for this. The underlying information in battle cards and content libraries is not obsolete. We still need approved messaging and competitive intelligence and customer stories, really good customer stories, please. Product information, objection handling, and proof points. We need all of that stuff. What is becoming obsolete is the expectation that salespeople will manually, or have to manually, search through it, and we know what happens. When you create it, they don't find it, they don't use it. One CMO described being, building sophisticated self-updating battle cards from competitive research and sales transcripts. The intelligence was strong. So far so good, but the hard part was getting the sales team to use it, and this is what she said, "A year or two ago, everybody was like, 'Please give me a battle card.' Now they're like, 'I just wanna be able to talk to the AI and get my answer.'" So that's the big shift. The battle card may still exist underneath the system. The seller, though, should not have to go and hunt for it. Think of it as a giant library with lots of books. No salesperson wants to go in the library. So battle cards are not necessarily dead, but hunting for them should be.

Drew: All right. If the answer is not another folder or repository, another 42 pa- page, page playbook, what should companies build instead? I mean, what should replace the traditional content library?

Penguin Hat Drew: Wow, you're really asking some really good questions. So the answer is a sales query layer. Let me repeat that, a sales query layer. And you guys are, "What the heck is a sales query layer?" Well, I'm so glad you should ask. The seller should start with a situation, not the name of an asset. They should be able to say, "I'm about to meet with this company in this category. They use this competition. The CIO is concerned about XYZ, the CISO is concerned about this, and the business leader cares about time to value. What should I know, what should I ask, and which proof points should I use?" The system, this layer, this intelligence layer, should then pull from approved sources like CRM data, customer stories, competitive landscape, call transcripts, product information. It's like a whole brain, thought leadership, guidance. And we saw several versions of this in the huddles. This is not me imagine- imagining stuff. One organization built a Gemini-based system that could give sellers customer logos, the case studies that they had, uh... Oh, I'm actually quoting somebody. Let me read it carefully. The customer logos, the case studies we had in that category, the pitch deck, and the battle cards through Gemini. Another put Copilot over Seismic so the sellers could ask questions rather than search the library. Another built an agent inside of SharePoint because, as the CMO explained, we built it in a home they were used to, and that's what really matters. The best destination is not the shiny new platform marketing wants to build and everyone to visit. It's the place where sales is already working. If everybody's in Slack, well, think about creating the, the portal there. The seller describes the problem, the system finds the answer. That's what we're looking about in sales enablement.

Drew: Okay, another good answer. You're getting good at this. Okay, let's... Are companies really transforming selling, or are they just doing old work faster?

Penguin Hat Drew: In truth, right now, it's a lot of both. We are creating a lot of stuff faster. We got decks faster, research faster, uh, follow-up emails, translating materials, the battle cards, all of that is going at the speed of light, and those are useful. But one CMO captured the concern when she said, "It feels like it's kind of just the same, only repackaged and faster." And that's not where we wanna be, folks. That's the challenge. If every competitor can produce a decent battle card in 20 minutes, the battle card is not an advantage. The more interesting question is what a seller can do now that was previously impossible or too expensive. For example, can we give every seller access to a technical expert on every call? And I'll talk about that in a sec. I mean, we, we know from 1mind's, uh, experience, they've got this, guy, Nigel. He's a technical expert. He sits on every call. And so a salesperson doesn't have to say, when a technical question comes up, have to say, "Well, I'll call our technical guy." 'Cause you know there are never enough sales at, engineers who can answer those questions. So by putting a technical exp- expert on every call, you get to resolution faster, and you get a higher close rate as a result. Another question: Can a system listen during the, a meeting and surface the right question or proof point in real time? I like this one. Again, I do think it has some risk because now you might be reading something that a bot wrote, and so you really gotta be careful to make sure that it feels human. One sales enablement leader described a tool where a little bubble will pop up, and it will give you the answer to the next question. Again, I think this is helpful, but I am worried that it's gonna remove the human from the sales process at that moment when we really need a human. Can we prepare a seller by reading the CRM history, past emails, meeting transcripts, and account activity without asking the seller to spend an hour doing it? I think that's really important, and I just want you to think about that a lot. A faster battle card is an efficiency. A seller who can answer a technical question immediately has a new capability. CMOs should begin with the selling problem, not the AI tool.

Drew: All right, thanks, Drew. That was, uh, that was fine. You, you did fine on that one. A little waffly, but you did it. So how do CMOs allow self-service without creating brand chaos? And this, this is a real question.

Penguin Hat Drew: Because there is, you know, there's the fear that you're gonna just, they're, everybody's gonna create everything and it's not gonna align. So this is where the CMO's role really becomes important. Sellers are already using AI to generate emails and decks and competitive comparisons, and they're doing it kind of rogue, um, because it's really fast and because they have a job to get done. And telling them not to use AI is unlikely to work. So the better approach is to make the approved path easier than the rogue path, right? So if they could just do it themselves, they're gonna do it themselves if that's faster. But if you can create something that is just as fast and approved and has better content and works, you'll have a chance of succeeding here. So marketing needs to provide current messaging, approved sources, voice guidance, templates, strong examples, and clear rules about personalization. But again, if the brain has all this information, you don't have to worry about policing as much. One CMO made a, this point that I thought was really important. Just because you have access to the tools doesn't mean the responsibility shifts to a different organization in terms of who owns those messaging frameworks and talk tracks. So in other words, y- even if they're creating their own materials, you have to organizationally have a way, and as CMO, you can, weigh in here. Another organization kept the presentation template fixed and allowed AI to insert relevant logos, testimonials, customer stories, competitive information. As that CMO explained, the template was the template that everyone used, so because it was so easy to customize. And that feels like a good balance, at least for now. Sales should be able to personalize the message. Sales should not have to invent the message, and frankly, go off message. The goal is sort of this, maybe it's an oxymoron, controlled flexibility, not 400 personal versions of the company story.

Drew: Okay, I get it. We're gonna move on now to this third area. The system can be technically brilliant and still accomplish very little if sellers do not use it, trust it, or change their behavior. So let's talk about adoption and learning, and maybe just, why is adoption so difficult?

Penguin Hat Drew: Yeah. Every marketer can tell you that it's really hard to get folks to change behavior. This is just human nature, and it's a behavior problem before it's a technology problem. Think about it this way: sales are paid to sell. Salespeople, that's what they do. They are not paid to admire marketing's new information architecture. Every extra login or destination or prompt library or training or whatever creates friction, so the intelligence needs to live where sales already works and appear at the moment it is needed. So again, think about it. Where are sales spending their most time? I mean, maybe this has to be ultimately served up through sa- God forbid, through Salesforce. Peer stories are the next really critical part of this thing. As one CMO said, "Adoption comes best from anecdotes from peers." He described a salesperson saying, "I was in the car outside the client. I pulled it up," meaning a document, "and looked at it. Then the exact competitor question came up in the meeting." That story will change behavior faster than a dashboard showing increased platform usage. Salespeople trust other salespeople. This is really important, so you need to find early champions. You need to capture their stories, showcase them being successful. Let them show the rest of the team how the system helped. The best tool is the one that the seller remembers to use, and if sales has to stop selling to find the enablement, the enablement has not enabled.

Drew: Ooh, getting into it now. What can marketing learn from recorded sales conversations?

Penguin Hat Drew: Oh, I don't know, this is probably, everything is a good answer. I think you can do better, yeah. So what's amazing to me is what's happened with, um, as a result of Gong recordings and Clari or Qualified, you pick it, and this is probably one of the biggest opportunities, I think, for CMOs. Recorded calls reveal the language buyers use, the objec- objections that they raise, the competitors that they mention, the questions sellers ask, and the places where the company stories break down. And I have to share this amazing thing that came up in one of the huddles. So we were listening to Gong calls, and we started to do some deep dives on analytics, and we noticed that whenever we talked about this, our platform, not just the product they were looking for, our sales close rate jumped 1.5 percentage points just by talking about the platform and not just the one product. Think about that. That little insight came from just listening to calls better. So yes, feeding these transcripts into AI can save a lot of time in terms of pulling out the core themes, but then you need to understand and think through, and this is where marketing comes, gets really good, the messaging and the outbound motions. So a sales enablement leader described using Gong to ask, "What kinds of reactions are customers giving us? What kind of objections are we getting?" Again, all of this is about a real-time feedback loop. Marketing provides intelligence to sales, sales uses it in conversation, the buyer responds, marketing learns from the response, and you have this wonderful virtuous circle. So if you don't have a system like Gong or Qualified listening to the calls, really want you to think about, um, and look at the math of recording these, or figure out another way of doing this, so that you're getting this real-time feedback, 'cause it is the way to improve your messaging, the content, the co- coaching sometimes, and sometimes the product, all of which are gonna help you close faster, close bigger, or close more often. Marketing has spent years pushing messages into sales. I think now marketing can finally listen back at scale.

Drew: All right, we got a few more questions. If every seller has AI, what will create a real advantage?

Penguin Hat Drew: Yeah, it's a, it's a concern. I mean, I, I do think early mover matters right now, so yeah, don't wait. But every serious sales organization will have account research, automated summaries, competitive intelligence, meeting prep, and follow-up assistance. I think those capabilities will become table stakes. It's not taking a big risk by saying that. The advantage will come from what the seller does with the information. Can they listen? Can they ask a question that makes the buyer think? Can they understand the customer's business? Can they connect an insight to a real problem? Do they have judgment? One CMO in our group reminded us, "Our buyers are still human." Another CMO said, "What's going to set you apart is having a better question, having a better understanding, having a better on-your-feet example, that real-time moment." So that is a very bright future here. AI can handle more of the mechanical work. The seller has more capacity to be, be curious, empathetic, thoughtful, and useful. So great sales enablement does not give sellers more to say, it helps them know what to ask. So when everybody, uh, has artificial intelligence, I think human intelligence is gonna become, humanness is gonna become more valuable.

Drew: Time to get to the CMO's mandate. What should CMOs do right now, and how should they measure success?

Penguin Hat Drew: Start with one revenue outcome. Do you want to help sales win faster, for example? Or do you want them to win more often, or do you want them to win bigger? That framing came up repeatedly in the huddles, and if you can do that, it allows you to focus on, for example, one source of friction. Maybe the account research is taking too long. Maybe technical questions delay the deal. Maybe the competitive information is stale. Maybe leads are not being followed up quickly enough. Maybe new sellers take too long to ramp. But one workflow, and, and you can then build one workflow around that moment. Build it where sales already works, feed it trusted intelligence, keep humans responsible for the judgment, and then test it, uh, with a small group of sellers. Then measure whether a buyer or the deal moved. The primary measure should be things like sales cycle length, win rate, average deal size, stage progression, rep ramp time, and time spent selling. Uh, that's a lot of measurements, but the real thing is, again, we were focused on, are we winning more, for example? One CMO argued that the easiest one to affect and control is the amount of hours that your sellers spend selling. And to me, this is really the light bulb moment. There's been research, I think, don't quote me on this, but like sellers spend 20% of their time selling and 80% of their time doing other stuff, whether it's research and so forth. So if you can help them get, sell 20% of their time to 25% of the time, you have dramatically changed capacity, and hopefully that will show up on the bottom line. So let's not begin with another platform. Let's begin with a selling problem. Do not measure what sales consume. Measure what the buyer did next. In other words, we're not measuring what content they used. What did the buyer do next? And keep returning to the central idea. We're not gonna, we're gonna stop enabling sales, and we're gonna start helping engineer sales effectiveness.

Drew: All right, Drew, let's bring this home and wrap it up. You've been going on a long time. So what do you want CMOs to remember?

Penguin Hat Drew: Well, thank you for asking, Drew. We're gonna move from content production to selling outcomes. The goal is not more stuff. The goal is to help sales either win faster, win more often, or win bigger. Two, we're gonna replace the content maze with a query layer, layer, somewhere where the s- where the seller is already there and they can get a trusted answer, which may include a deck or a sales presentation or a script or an answer. Three, we're gonna build around seller behavior. We're gonna put intelligence where sales already works and deliver it at the moment of need. Four, I got that with my hand, protect the brand without blocking personalization. I think this is really important. Give sellers approved sources that then they can customize with sensible guardrails. Five, turn sales conversations into customer intelligence. I covered that pretty much already, but use it to find a way to improve messaging or coaching the salesperson, or content that it maybe is missing, product decisions, and the buyer experience. Number six, use AI to create better human conversations. Find those opportunities to help your salespeople listen stronger, to be curious, to be empathetic, to be judge- you know, to have good judgment and develop better questions. That's where the real advantage is gonna come. Yep, in the humanity.

Drew: All right, Drew. So I think, um, let's, I'm gonna summarize now. So here's the assignment. Pick one, win faster, win more often, or win bigger. Then find one point of friction standing in the way, build one workflow around that moment, test it with a few sellers, listen to what happens, measure what the buyer does next, then improve it and scale it. That is how a CMO stops enabling sales and starts helping engineer sales effectiveness. Until next time, keep those renegade marketing caps on, and strong.

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Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!