Steve Watt [00:00:00]: This is Go-To-Market Magic. And for the final episode of our first season, we’re doing something a little bit different. We’re taking a look back at some of the great guests and really interesting episodes that we’ve had the pleasure of putting together over the past year.
Steve Watt [00:00:51]: We start out looking at sales and some of our guests who are sales leaders and are bringing some real insight and innovation into that area. Then we shift gears and we talk about customer success and the broader go-to-market strategy and execution. And then in the final segment, we go deep into enablement. In each, we give you a taste of just some of the really excellent insights from these guests, and we hope that it’ll inspire you to go deeper and listen to those episodes in their entirety.
Heather Cole [00:01:27]: So this is the perfect episode for you. If you’ve only listened to a few episodes or if you’re joining us for the first time, this will give you a taste of some of the great podcast episodes that we’ve done over this past season. Let’s get started now with sales.
Steve Watt [00:01:45]: Our very first episode was about modern sales excellence, so let’s start there. And let’s start with our very first guest, Sam McKenna. She’s founder and CEO of Sam Sales Consulting, and she is an absolute wealth of experience and insight into being really, really great at sales. We talked about her approaches to prospecting and discovery and brand building and so much more. Let’s hear what Sam had to say about discovery.
Samantha McKenna [00:02:16]: We either talk about ourselves for 28 minutes or we kick it off in the wrong way. Two ways. We either start down a firing range of questions that we have that are super selfish and all about us, right? How many licenses do you have? How many employees do you have? When does your contract expire? Whatever. Are you the ultimate decision maker, figuring out bant, all that jazz? Or we started by saying, Steve, excited to talk to you with a flat, non-excited face. Tell me a little bit about what interested you in taking this call today. I feel like that question, and most reps are like, that’s what I ask. And I’m like, don’t do that anymore. I feel it’s also just condescending.
Samantha McKenna [00:02:55]: Like, you’re like, Steve, you’re welcome. For me giving you time today, tell me about how I can help you.
Heather Cole [00:03:02]: Sam talks a lot about how we should really structure those calls and how we should do them differently. The other piece of what she talks about in this episode is, how do you go into that call? How do you get those calls to begin with? And part of that is doing your own discovery before you even get on the call so you can have a more meaningful conversation when you do get that opportunity.
Steve Watt [00:03:24]: Absolutely. And a more human conversation. I think a thread that runs through everything Sam teaches us is to be more human. And she takes issue with that robotic approach, not only in discovery calls, but in many calls where people show up, there’s no banter. They’re kind of coldly saying, do we have quorum? Is it time to begin? And then here come the slides. She also takes issue with discovery as interrogation, where it’s just because I, the seller, have 20 things that I want to learn about your situation and your readiness to buy, and you get nothing from it. And that’s not a good experience for a buyer. And I just think that throughout this entire episode, she shine a light on a wide range of places where we can be more interesting and more human and ultimately more effective.
Steve Watt [00:04:19]: I really, really enjoyed this episode.
Heather Cole [00:04:21]: Me too. And this is really, if you’re interested in a way of approaching both prospecting, discovery calls those first interactions that you’re having with your prospect or your soon to be customer. Hopefully, you need to listen to this episode and understand that this is actually a more comfortable and easy way to go about this whole process, especially at the front end of the sale.
Steve Watt [00:04:42]: Absolutely.
Heather Cole [00:04:43]: So, keeping with the theme of sales, we went deeper into modern sales excellence when we talked to David Fisher, otherwise known as D Fish. He’s the global social selling lead at SAS, which is a huge analytics firm, and he’s helping their sellers really rise above the noise. On LinkedIn. His area of expertise is social selling. But unlike a lot of people who are out there talking about how individuals can become better social sellers, he focuses on how to build enterprise-grade social selling teams with the capability that you need for a large company. He actually rejects the notion that social selling is about building a huge following. Listen to his take on this, you.
Steve Watt [00:05:23]: Said most people have about 250 people. They need to influence. Everything beyond that is bonus. They don’t need huge reach, they need relevant and targeted engagement. They need the right people to see them. And in a world where most LinkedIn gurus or whatever are telling you how to build this massive following and go viral and all this, you’re coming at it in a really different direction. Tell us why. The idea that we need large reach and that we need to have a huge audience is really predicated on the idea that we have an offering that is very transactional, that is.
Steve Watt [00:06:00]: And it’s actually why the LinkedIn gurus often say this, right? Because they’re trying to get people to buy their course, try to buy their book, come by my online community, and numbers matter for those individuals. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. Most sellers have, hey, you know, they can get a handful of deals a year, maybe a little bigger than half full, depending on their product and their solution. That’s a win. Some sellers, if they get one good deal a year, they paid the bills and then some. And so that’s why I do think this idea of having to have broad reach, there’s value in it. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to pursue for most sellers.
Steve Watt [00:06:37]: For most people who are trying to do work on LinkedIn, it’s just that next level, that’s not even the second level of connections on LinkedIn. It’s like the 250 or so personal connections at maybe you don’t know really well, but you kind of know. Those are the prospects, those are the customers, those are the people that you have to be in front of regularly, and those are the people that you have to influence. And yeah, it’s a different approach than, hey, why don’t you have 15,000 followers? It’s like, get a thousand followers and make sure that they’re the right people, the ones that you can move business forward with. That’s such a great point that he raises. I mean, a lot of people really get over rotated on this notion that they need to build a huge following on LinkedIn. And it’s intimidating. It’s keeps a lot of people from getting into the game because they don’t think it’s attainable.
Steve Watt [00:07:26]: And I really think that this is a message that individual sellers and sales leaders and enablement leaders really need to hear and internalize and share within their team. It’s not about going viral. It’s not about building this massive following. It’s about being seen, heard and understood by the right people.
Heather Cole [00:07:47]: Yeah, and it really takes a lot of the pressure off getting out there. When you think about really only needing to reach a few hundred people who are the right people that you want to hear this message and you really can’t force it. You need to find the ability to reach the people that want to hear the message. And it doesn’t have to be thousands upon thousands. You don’t have to go viral. And in LinkedIn, that’s so important because it’s such a smaller audience we see than we see in some of the larger social platforms.
Steve Watt [00:08:15]:
And he talks about a lot more in this episode as well. I strongly recommend this episode for anyone who’s focused on social selling. He talks about data is not enough. He talks about the fact you cannot measure everything that you need to measure what you can measure. But there’s other aspects of this that you can’t measure. And if we insist on only doing the things that we can easily measure, we’re going to miss half of the opportunity. Here he talks about finding the stories that begin to emerge as your sellers get good on social and sharing those stories far and wide. He is an absolute wealth of experience in this area, and this is a must listen episode for anyone interested in social selling.
Steve Watt [00:09:01]:
The next sales focused episode featured Seismic’s own Toby Carrington. And we talked about how to effectively bring senior executives into the sales cycle, when and how and for what purpose. And of course, every organization does this to some extent, but it’s often ad hoc, ill timed, transactional in its approach, misunderstood by reps and more. Let’s hear what Toby had to say about that. What do you and other senior leaders bring into these sorts of conversations that the salespeople can’t? There’s a universal truth that when one team is selling something to another person, they’re a domain expert. When we talk about enablement solutions or we talk about the current state of coaching and training and how teams are looking to sort of optimize their go-to-market, we have domain expertise. And so a lot of this is about insight sharing, peer to peer sharing, understanding what their colleagues might be doing. And there’s simply a different level of relationship and ability for someone with a role like mine to be able to talk to my peers, my colleagues, my, you know, sort of people with a similar role in our prospect or client organizations because we, and I also engage at that level with others.
Steve Watt [00:10:28]: And so I think there’s a lot of peer-to-peer insights that can be gained. There’s a lot of sort of best practice sharing that indirectly happens through that, through that process, which is simply a different level of engagement.
Heather Cole [00:10:41]: One of the things that we see is a big mistake of reps as they pull on the senior executives to only talk about the product or why your company or what the differentiation is. Talk a little bit about when you think the best time to be pulled in is and what it is that the value that you have in a sales cycle itself.
Steve Watt [00:11:00]: So, I think there’s a lot in that around timing as well, because an engagement for senior executive, if it’s a Hail Mary, if it’s right near the end of a cycle, if it feels transactional, is never very successful. Right? Sometimes that serves a purpose in terms of reassurance or something like that towards a prospect, but honestly, it’s much better when done earlier, when we are in fact not really talking about a deal or in particular, especially not a particular product or something like that. So I would say the majority of the conversations I have, if they’re focused on Seismic and our organization, it’s about our organization and how we work with other organizations to deliver them value on the outcomes that they’re looking to deliver. It’s certainly not feature function oriented.
Heather Cole [00:11:51]: So Toby talks about being able to relate peer to peer with the person that they’re talking to. And I think that’s one of the most important things that Reps can do, is make sure that they have the right person aligned to the right person and that the conversation has meaning as far as best practices in what those folks are doing and not focusing on how do I move the deal forward by having the senior executives sell or have this senior executive come in and close the deal?
Steve Watt [00:12:19]: Absolutely. I’m sure that a lot of sellers think, all right, here we go. I’m going to bring in the heavyweight closer and this deal is as good as closed now. But that’s not what Toby’s doing and that’s not what others in his sort of role should be doing. It’s a much more strategic, relationship based insight delivery, peer to peer bonding exercise. It’s not just the next step in closing this deal. And I think he was really clear about that. And another thing that I found really valuable is he talked about his criteria.
Steve Watt [00:12:58]: I mean, we asked him about his criteria for when to step in and how does he protect his schedule. And I loved his answer because it wasn’t what I expected. I thought there was going to be a materiality gate, let’s call it that. He would only get involved in deals of a certain size. That wasn’t his answer at all. It had much more to do with how well prepared that rep was and how he was set up to be a valuable addition to the process.
Heather Cole [00:13:29]: Yeah, this is a must listen episode to anybody who either wants to or has struggled with getting their executives involved at a deeper level and a more meaningful level and making it easier both for them to have those conversations and have it be a better customer experience for your prospect.
Steve Watt [00:13:45]: And his final point? No Hail Marys. He said, don’t ask me to come in in the 11th hour in a failing deal to try to save it. That’s not how this works. Great ups.
Heather Cole [00:13:58]: So we’re going to shift gears a little bit here and talk about a broader go-to-market strategy and specifically customer success. We had a conversation with Sangram Vajre. Sangram is one of the pioneers of account based marketing and anyone who knows anything about ABM knows who Sangram is these days. He’s really focused on a broader go-to-market motion and he talks to us about what it takes to go far beyond paying lip service to cross-functional alignment and impact. And he talks specifically about the role of CS. Let’s take a listen.
Steve Watt [00:14:29]: You said CS needs to get better at teaching their customers to tell an ROI story. Most or a lot of CS teams, at least those that I’ve seen, get stuck at the product feature level. They’re experts in the product. They’re not necessarily particularly seasoned in the business. How do you get over that? I mean, is that a training function or how do you really help your CS team to become true business advisors who can lead that ROI conversation?
Sangram Vajre [00:15:06]: What’s really important for a CS person is to understand the reasons why that individual bought that particular product and what goals they had, and keep on it. Keep on it a lot of times because the point of contact changes, because priorities change. People just forget what the rules were when they started and they haven’t really adjusted to it. So by the time the renewal comes, either the point of contact person is completely different or their goals have completely changed and nobody has taken the time to look at that. And even furthermore, because most CS people are a much more of a serving mindset, they’re all about, hey, I’m there for you. I’m right there. They’re more about responding back. They need to get out of that mode and actually recognize themselves as partners.
Sangram Vajre [00:15:51]: And I’m here to make you. I’m here to really get you promoted. That’s the mindset they need to have as a CS leader. And when you start thinking about like, my job is to make this person get promoted, that will mean that my job is to make this person’s job better, faster, easier. So a lot of times I’ve seen CS people create executive decks for them say, hey, this is what you need to present at your next this is how you should show the overall value, not just of my product, but the overall value of what you do in your organization. That requires a lot of strategic thinking, which is why I’m so bullish on the fact that the companies that will really focus on NRR, their top set of customers, keep them, retain them and accelerate with them, they’re going to be the ones who are going to come out there not only surviving, but thriving.
Steve Watt [00:16:37]: Wise words from Sangram. He brings so much experience into this space and I think it’s worth emphasizing that this is an up leveling of the customer success role. This is really building better careers for CS people over and above the fact that it’s delivering more customer value. This is helping CS professionals and teams to become true business partners, deeply aligned with the outcomes that their customers value. And not just focusing, as is the case in a lot of firms, not just focusing on product use.
Heather Cole [00:17:16]: And this is something where, you know, the term is used a lot, buyer enablement in new sales and new deals, where you’re trying to go further up the pipeline. This is buyer enablement when it really counts, making it sticky. So how do you up-level the CS conversations and the CS interaction motions to make sure that they are talking about the ROI, make sure that they’re talking about how they’re making the customer and also your champion successful.
Steve Watt [00:17:46]: Absolutely. Another part of this conversation with Sangram that was really insightful, I believe is around alignment. Everybody talks about alignment, sales and marketing alignment, sales, marketing and customer success alignment. Easy to say, hard to do. I put that question directly to Sangram. How do we move beyond lip service to alignment and how do we make it real? I thought that he was going to say everyone needs to report up to one person, you know, chief revenue officer or someone similar needs to own all of this. That’s how you get the accountability. That wasn’t his answer at all.
Steve Watt [00:18:21]: His answer was focused on a North Star metric. It was focused on net revenue retention. It’s focused on everyone getting aligned, on how we deliver on that key metric. And that’s how you make alignment real. I thought that was really wise guidance. Next up, Mark Kosoglow. Now this was a high impact episode if ever we had one, he came in like a bull in a China shop with some powerful perspectives and it’s backed by a lot of experience. He has led large sales teams focused on outbound selling, focused on customer success, and a whole lot more.
Steve Watt [00:19:01]: He is an expert in this space, and he really got us to question our over-reliance and our over-focus, and our over-investment in new client acquisition.
Mark Kosoglow [00:19:16]: Most revenue leaders grew up in the perpetual software license model or were mentored or taught by people that grew up in that model. And they brought that model to the SaaS model. And it looks like this grow at all costs. That’s what we just left for the last ten years. Send more money, top of funnel, get the mangen to get more leads. I need more SDR, send more emails, get me more deals. That was what that is a perpetual license software mentality. Those are the rules of perpetual license software.
Mark Kosoglow [00:19:49]: The rules of SaaS are very different. If you give recurring impact, you get recurring revenue. And we suck at getting recurring impact because we spend all of our time as revenue leaders talking about the top of funnel and not the right side of the bowtie post-sales. So once you help people explain that that’s what’s going on, that’s a problem. And in 1999 was the very first csm, and guess what csms were used to doing? Support. Guess what most csms still do? Support.
Steve Watt [00:20:21]: Reactive.
Mark Kosoglow [00:20:22]: Got a chance.
Steve Watt [00:20:23]: Reactive inbound support.
Mark Kosoglow [00:20:25]: That’s exactly right. We gotta change it. So that’s like some of the arguments that I can put in front of a revenue leader that I think other people need to put in front of revenue leaders and be like, listen, we need to start being, stop being crazy and putting money and time into something that’s over optimized. There’s not much value in spending time with it. You’re not gonna increase it by 10% anymore. You’re gonna increase it by 0.1%, a 10th of a percent versus you can get a 10% increase in your retention rates by doing small little fixes because the fruit is just so low hanging and those csms are running around with their hair on fire most of the time.
Heather Cole [00:21:00]: I love this episode for many reasons, but Mark delivers a passionate perspective in a way that really sticks with you when he talks about the difference between recurring revenue versus recurring impact and how we want one, but we’re not very good at the other, which causes the two to come together. It’s a very practical advice and he’s very passionate in the way that he delivers it. He also has a conversation with us around the bringing together of the promise makers before the sale and the promise keepers after the sale and how you need to think about those in a continuous line and how that works. To me, the conversation that we had was broad reaching and very practical in the way that he presented the information.
Steve Watt [00:21:46]: That step staircase approach that he talked about to value delivery really stuck with me. And time to value is something that everyone knows is important, but we usually misconstrue that as time to all the value. How long is it going to take to get to all of the value of what I just bought? And we’ve all seen these long and painful implementation cycles where it’s been a year since the contract was signed and we’re still not up and running, and people are questioning things. Some people have left the organization, and other people have joined, and they don’t even know what we bought or why. And you get in this quagmire of failure to deliver value. And Mark gives us a really practical approach to how to piece that out. As he says, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? And he breaks it down into small incremental value delivery that delights customers. I mean, it drives retention, it drives upsell, it drives cross-sell and it drives customer satisfaction.
Steve Watt [00:22:52]: I have gone back and listened to this episode several times and I always seem to learn something new from Mark. Yeah.
Heather Cole [00:22:59]: So if you’re interested in understanding that entire go-to-market cycle and also a different way of thinking about how do you make your products sticky and how do you even leverage the psychology behind that incremental impact, this is really a great episode to tap into. So we’ve talked about sales, we went deep there, and we talked about the broader go-to-market motion, especially CS. Now we’re shifting to our core as people think of it as enablement. One of the guests that we had on is somebody that I know and love, Dave Lichtman. He specializes, and he’s one of the only firms out there that specializes in recruiting enablement leaders specifically for enablement position positions. He came to us with some interesting perspectives, and one of them was around how you should be thinking about as a leader hiring an enablement leader, what you should really be looking for. Let’s take a listen.
Dave Lichtman [00:24:01]: I think my biggest coaching to them would be start to think about the complexion of the team differently. And I would start to say thinking about a hybrid enablement function. When I say hybrid, I don’t mean work from home, work from the office hybrid. I mean ftes and hyper-specialized contractors who you bring in there for discrete jobs, discrete projects that they do, because my thinking is that type of approach, it’s a whole new way of thinking about enablement as emotion, and it unlocks a lot of doors.
Steve Watt [00:24:39]: I love that general contractor model, as Dave puts it, the idea that the enablement leader does not have to have deep expertise in every little element of enablement. They need to understand the business needs, they need to understand what has to happen, and then they need to be able to identify the right talent to deliver on that. And sometimes that talent is going to be a full-time employee. Sometimes it’s going to be, as he said, a hyper-specialized contractor who comes in to do a particular job, just like the contractors bringing in the plumber, bringing in the electrician, bringing in the carpenter, bringing in the waterproofing expert. These are not necessarily full-time jobs. And bringing in that absolute expert at the right time may be the path to tremendous success.
Heather Cole [00:25:36]: Absolutely. And you know, I love that perspective because it really builds the perspective of being an enablement professional, not somebody who specializes in a particular sales methodology. You know, you are somebody who is the leader of the enablement process. And part of that also pulls into what we talked about in this episode, which is charter. And nobody ever says, hey, I love doing a charter. It’s my favorite thing to do. And the most important thing is you need to have it before you regret not having it. Because a year from now, when that leader who brought you in with all these grand goals says, why haven’t you done X, Y and Z? And you don’t have a charter, you have nothing to point to.
Heather Cole [00:26:20]: So, David talks a little bit about why you absolutely have to have one, even if it doesn’t seem like the most important thing on your list right now.
Steve Watt [00:26:28]: Now, our next enablement guest is Paul Norford. Many of you know him as Norf. What a fascinating guy. He brings so much energy and so much creative thought to this space. It was an absolute pleasure speaking with him. And where we really started was he calls himself both an evangelist as well as an enablement leader. And so we questioned him. Is this two jobs or is this one? If it’s one, how do these things work together and why? Let’s listen to what he had to say about that and more.
Heather Cole [00:27:04]: Well, I think from the perspective of understanding where you’ve come from and your past, you’ve got an engineering past, you’ve got experience in radio, and you’re an enabler and you’re an evangelist. All of those things put together. Most enablers don’t formally see themselves as evangelists, at least externally, but they might be doing that internally to try to get the entire go-to-market team, all those customer facing roles, to get excited about what they do, the stories that they’re telling. But you do it both, I think it sounds like internally and externally, people situation.
Paul Norford [00:27:43]: Yes, yes, correct. I don’t know whether you would call me an outlier. I’m not sure. Would you?
Heather Cole [00:27:51]: Possibly.
Paul Norford [00:27:53]: So the one thing that struck me is, when it comes to enablement and enabling our teams, it’s certainly down to the team that I am responsible for to enable our sales organization, because we’re a B2B company. What about our channel? How do we enable our channel? So one of the things that I looked at and dialed into quite quickly is if our enablement is good enough for us internally, why can’t we use it for our external channel partners as well? And if you think about our channel partners when they’re selling for Avanti, they’re an extension of our sales team. So why can’t we enable them at the same time? And that’s the view that I hold, and in fact, that’s the view that our team holds as well. So when we develop enablement content, we actually develop it for our partner community in mind, and then we almost make it. We call it kind of additive enablement, where we add the internal elements to what we build, but we build for our partners, we communicate for our partners, and then add the internal elements afterwards.
Heather Cole [00:29:00]: So when I heard Norf talking about both enablement and evangelism in the same breath, I thought, how can this be? This just doesn’t compute in my head. Something doesn’t feel right here, which is one of the reasons we had him on the show. We wanted to do a deeper dive. We thought it was an interesting topic, but it became really clear that if you start with the channel partners, the partners that are outside your organization, and you’re developing enablement from the outside in, it makes total sense that you have to have both of those roles in the same person.
Steve Watt [00:29:34]: Yeah, you can’t mandate their attention. You cannot demand that your partners consume your enablement content the same way that you can internally. You have to earn it. And that forces you to be better. It forces you to be more entertaining, more innovative, more interesting, more compelling. In many ways. That was a real aha light that went on for me, listening to Norf talk about this.
Heather Cole [00:30:04]: Absolutely. And so if you are either now enabling your channel partners, you want to hear an interesting perspective on it, or if somebody is asking you to now you need to expand your role in scope into this area. This is a must. Listen. Really good information to give us.
Steve Watt [00:30:19]: He also had some good insights into measurement. I check it out for that reason as well. He talked about the fact that you really can’t measure everything, and you have to be okay with that because otherwise you’re going to fail to do some really important things. A lot of wisdom in that episode from our friend Norf.
Heather Cole [00:30:37]: So next, we talked to Juliana Stancompiano. That name may sound familiar to you. She is the CEO of Oxygen Learning, but she’s also the ex-president of the board for the Sales Enablement Society, now known as the Revenue Enablement Society. So she has been ingrained in the enablement industry and function for quite some time, both as an insider and an outsider. Her organization helps enablement organizations do learning better. And we had her on the show to talk about the role of AI specifically in the learning function. Let’s take a listen.
Juliana Stancampiano [00:31:16]: I think that from my perspective, the who knows the content best is always the SME. And typically you have the learning person who knows learning really well, and they pull content from this me and then create the learning. If they have either access to the SME content through AI, they could do that still. And I definitely think the reverse is possible with if the SME has access and the right ways in which to talk to the AI to build it, it can help from that perspective because they’re going to know the content and what they want somebody to know and be able to do out of it versus the learning person, to your point.
Heather Cole [00:31:58]: So that’s interesting because part of those SME’s, especially in the enablement space when it’s customer-facing roles, are people actually doing the job. And for a few years now, there’s been this drumbeat around peer-to-peer learning. You learn from the people who are doing it really well, but the people that are doing it really well can most times not do much more than a video from a learning perspective. So that opens up a lot of possibilities of making it really super simple for high performers to, you know, be able to kind of do a brain dump and have that become something that’s meaningful learning.
Juliana Stancampiano [00:32:35]: Yeah, I think as long as they can do the brain dump, I think sometimes that’s the hardest part for the smee. Right. And that’s where we ask a lot of the questions. It’s like, how do you do this? How do you do that? And when you start asking those questions, they’re able to explain it to you. I think there are a lot of content smooth in other areas, though, that have a lot documented about what they do and how they do it or how they foresee it happening right within the company. And that’s where it’s going to be the easiest to pull. But I think in a lot of the customer-facing roles, it can be. There’s a lot of unconscious competence and people that have a harder time explaining to you what it is that they do because they just do it very naturally.
Juliana Stancampiano [00:33:17]: And so having somebody that can interview and tease out what that is, that can be put into the learning or put into the AI is going to be really important.
Steve Watt [00:33:27]: This was a real mind expanding episode for me, not just talking about what’s possible today with AI, but what’s going to be possible tomorrow. And she talked a lot, as you heard in the clip, about this idea of how do we capture that institutional knowledge, that unconscious expertise that lives within, in so many of our people, and how do we get it out and get it into other people’s hands in an easily consumable and usable way. Because today that’s hard in a lot of ways. It’s hard for the subject matter expert to be able to bring that out in useful ways. It’s also hard for the learning and development and enablement professionals who are not experts in that space to really understand what’s the most critical aspects of it. And if AI can step in there and play a critical role, that can be game-changing.
Heather Cole [00:34:30]: It absolutely can. And so much of what we’ve seen AI focus on in the learning space is how do you make it easier to create lessons? So how do you dump a bunch of stuff in and make a lesson out of it? Or how do you do an auto summary or create those quizzes, which is great. It’s how do you make the enabler’s job easier? How do you make the learning professional’s job easier? But the big thing is how do you make the learning content better? And what Juliana focuses on in this episode is how do you use AI to get better, deeper information, to take stuff that subject matter experts know but they don’t know how to articulate? How do you get that into a place where it can be articulated in a meaningful way to your learners? She also talked about the balance between not going too fast into AI and hoping that it’s going to do everything for you, but getting started fast. What can you do now? What are the low-hanging fruit pieces that you can get? And that was a really interesting conversation that we had as well.
Steve Watt [00:35:32]: Absolutely. There’s a ditch on both sides of the road we can drive into one ditch if we run headlong into AI without strategy and without guardrails. But there’s a ditch on the other side of the road that we can veer into if we’re sitting back and we’re afraid to take action and we let our competitors get well ahead of us. So she had some good insight and guidance on how we stay in the middle of that road and don’t veer into the ditches.
Heather Cole [00:35:58]: Don’t get run over and don’t get thrown into the ditch. Right?
Steve Watt [00:36:01]: That’s. That’s right. Yeah. Really, really good episode, for sure. So glad we had her on.
Heather Cole [00:36:09]: So we just covered the highlights from season one in sales, the broader go-to-market, including customer success and, of course, enablement. If these were interesting to you, we encourage you to listen to the entire season.
Steve Watt [00:36:22]: Find us on YouTube, find us on the podcast platform of your preference.
