Interviews with sales enablement industry leaders, sharing best practices, strategies, and words of wisdom.
In case you missed it, here are part 1, part 2, and part 3 of the Sales Enablement Chronicles interview series. For this edition of The Sales Enablement Chronicles: Insights from the Inside, I interviewed Roderick Jefferson, CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates.
Roderick Jefferson Biography:
Roderick Jefferson is the CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates. He has 20+ years of sales leadership and is an acknowledged thought leader and keynote speaker in the sales enablement space.
He is also one of the founding members of the Sales Enablement Society. Roderick is a member of several Advisory Boards, including Capella University, Autobound.ai and Selleration Inc. Prior to Roderick Jefferson & Associates, he held a variety of executive leadership, sales, sales enablement, operations, and customer experience roles for Marketo, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Salesforce.com, 3PAR, Business Objects, NetApp, PayPal, Siebel Systems, & AT&T.
Q. How do you define sales enablement at your organization?
A. I always begin by stating that, “Learning is a marathon, NOT a sprint”! Enablement is one of those funny things… If you ask (10) people for a definition, you’ll probably get (12) different answers. We define sales enablement as breaking the complexity of the buying & selling process into practical ideas through scalable, repeatable, and measurable practices that lead to decreased speed to revenue and increased productivity.
At the end of the day, We help get sales teams into the right conversations in the right way. We are the translators of dialects and language that must learn to speak sales, marketing, product marketing, product management, engineering, etc. Go out into the Field to meet with prospects and customers… then come back and reverse engineer that back into internal “speak”!
Q. What are your top sales enablement priorities for the year?
A. We help clients design and implement clear, actionable, and engaging sales enablement strategies. We are focused on partnering with some of the most innovative companies, globally by utilizing cutting-edge technologies designed to decrease time to revenue , increase sales productivity and deploy scalable reinforcement coaching strategies. We have a combination of the most experienced people in the business and most trusted solutions in the marketplace. The results are time bound and metrics focused – your sales professionals will be equipped with the strategy, resources, and skills required to drive sustainable, scalable growth.
Q. What advice would you give companies that are building their sales enablement strategy?
A. Don’t look at Sales Enablement as a cost center, sales scribe or sales support. We are here to partner across the organization to ensure clear communications, collaboration and orchestration. Whether you’re building a sales enablement function or have an existing team, don’t be afraid to work with an experienced, seasoned sales enablement consultant. We don’t have a “horse in the race” or any political biases so it’s very easy to be objective! We are an external partner with a “different set of lenses” that is only focused on improving efficiency & execution within your organization.
Q. Do you have any best practices for aligning internal go-to-market teams?
A. It all begins with a cross-functional needs analysis across internal lines of business to determine alignment, misalignment and collaboration opportunities. The focus is on creating organizational structure recommendation designed to maximize communication, collaboration, and orchestration across the GTM team(s).
It also ensures that the GTM teams are aligned around enablement processes, programs & tools with the goal of influencing and reporting on revenue generating metrics. At the end-of-the day we help clients design and implement clear, actionable, and engaging sales enablement strategies by ensuring that our clients are Equipped, Empowered, And Eager To Lead Change That Lasts.
Q. What books are you reading?
A. Books that I’d highly recommend are Creating Togetherness by Jeff Davis, Selling From the Heart by Larry Levine, Beat the Bots by Anita Neilsen, and The Transparency Sale by Todd Caponi.
For more information on setting your organization up for success with sales enablement, download The Ultimate Guide to Sales Enablement.
