Why 75% of Sales Deals Fail (And How AI Can Fix It) | Vanessa Metcalf

Speaker A: The strategy in the people, which often end up being your enablement folks, but also the technology that can fuel the strategy in the people, meaning your enablement software. That's where I think this matters. So for a very long time, uh, enablement has been seen, or should be seen, as the glue between those different functions. Welcome to Revenue Insights. We're joined by revenue leaders from some of the highest growth companies. Together we explore how they built their revenue teams, the journeys they've been on, and the lessons they've learned along the way. Revenue Insights is brought to you by ebsta. We're an AI first revenue intelligence platform designed to help you close more deals, retain more customers and forecast better. Enjoy the podcast.

Speaker B: Hello everybody. On today's episode of the Revenue Insights podcast, we are thrilled to have Vanessa Metcalfe, the VP of Global Revenue Enablement at Showpad, joining us. With, uh, over 18 years of experience in sales, sales enablement and strategic operations, Vanessa has a proven track record of building and transforming teams, driving revenue growth and enabling organizations to thrive in a fast paced environment. She's passionate about leveraging data, AI and customer first mindset to craft enablement strategies that deliver tangible results. Today we'll explore how Vanessa's approach to sales has shaped her career and the impact it's had on the businesses that she's worked with. Welcome to the show, Vanessa.

Speaker A: Thank you so much, guy. That was such a nice introduction. I don't think I even wrote that for you. So thank you for that and pleasure, uh, to be here. Thank you for having me.

Speaker B: Well, let's jump straight in, Vanessa. So, um, you've had an impressive career across various leadership roles in revenue enablement. Can you share a bit about your journey and what inspired you to pursue a career in sales enablement?

Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. So I started out, I think, as many of us, in revenue enablement, sales enablement, whatever you might call it, some folks are actually moving away from that term completely and moving more into go to market strategy or revenue productivity, efficiency, et cetera. So, uh, I know that word has, uh, different meanings for different organizations, but, uh, I started out, as many of us in that space, space do, uh, which was by carrying a bag. So I was in sales for a little while, loved it, uh, rose to the race pretty, pretty quickly, made the PE clubs, et cetera, um, but kind of quickly felt like maybe there's something more here and I wonder if there's a field that's adjacent to sales because I loved the world, uh, but I knew I didn't want to be in it for forever. And it was around that time that I started hearing the words enablement in the hallways for the first time. And of course at that time, especially in Canada and in series BCD companies, kind of smaller startups or scale ups, uh, it wasn't as established. Right. The roots just weren't there yet. No one really knew what enablement was. Um, but I was very curious about it. And so I did all the googling I could do. And at that time, even there wasn't a lot of enablement communities to go and learn more about this new profession. Um, I quickly kind of found out a thing or two, met some folks that were pioneers, uh, and were in enablement before it was called enablement. And, uh, realized, yes, that's exactly what I think I'm looking for. And just so happened was fortunate there was an opportunity at my current company going back several years now, uh, and I was able to move into enablement for the first time. Back then, uh, our company was going through a period of very rapid growth. And so I think this is where a lot of enablers get their start, is in onboarding. Right. So you're running these cohorts back to back to back to back all day long in person boot camps. Right. And teaching them all the fundamentals of the business. Uh, and then my enablement kind of jury, I guess, blossomed a little bit from there, definitely outside of onboarding, more into leadership roles, getting across all the major enablement pillars that you do. Right. So everything from moving away from just onboarding into continuous development, uh, skills and competencies, methodology, leadership, enablement and coaching, so on and so forth. Um, there was a pit stop in there that I should mention, which is from sales to enablement. I zigzagged over to sales leadership for a little while, uh, and I was super grateful for that experience because it helps provide empathy for what a frontline leader goes through every single day. And that, of course, is a very, very challenging gig. Uh, and I think it allowed me to build better rapport with the group that is, I consider that one of the most critical stakeholder groups when enablement is thinking about who are our customers. Right. Uh, enablement is not so far from sales. We are still in sales. It's just that our customers are internal, not external. So bit of a zigzag career journey. My last company, I worked for one of the leading LMS solutions out there called Docebo. Uh, most of the time there was spent leading enablement, but I did do a short stint leading revops as well, and now I'm with the uh, leading enablement software company called Showpad, uh, and here I'm running enablement for an enabling company which is a very, uh, meta existence.

Speaker B: Excellent. Well, um, what an amazing journey. It's an incredible process to go through. And I hear you. I think, um, enablement just wasn't a thing a decade ago. Um, and uh, I think the whole go to market motion is starting to become a lot more data driven and a lot more mature and businesses now that don't have this data driven approach, um, to enablement and uh, rev ops are really falling behind quickly behind their competitors. And in a world where there's just so many different tools to use. In fact part of the job of enablement is actually restricting people down to making sure they're using uh, the right tools, not just anything, uh, that comes along 100%.

Speaker A: The tech stack consolidation that uh, a lot of organizations right now are being mandated top down from their CEO or from their board to go ahead and execute. Enablement is often the one that is figuring out the strategy around all of that and figuring out what tools make sense to continue investing in. How do we drive better adoption? Right. From a change management perspective. And then I think it's clear to everyone you can't just have the adoption of the tool. That's table stakes. Every executive is going to expect that that's there, even though we know it's not. Especially when we think about the peanut butter spread of the amount of tools out there. I think the average according to one of the analyst firms is, I think it was Salesforce, uh, 10. And I think that's on the conservative side. Right. Um, but you think about, okay, adoption is table stakes. We're still not getting adoption with every single one of these tools, which is actually the tools that you purchase end up doing the opposite thing. Right. Of the reasons why you buy them in the first place. And so enablement's uh, there to really drive adoption with those right tools which might need to be right sized. Uh, and then not just adoption, it's kind of crossing the chasm into value. Um, and that's something that we're super passionate with our own tool with Showpad, but certainly with our tech stack as well.

Speaker B: This episode is sponsored by Mailtrap, an email delivery platform built for product companies that send at scale, go for high inboxing rates. Try today at Mailtrap, uh, IO. Let's talk about value. So one of the key challenges in enablement is demonstrating the impact on revenue and business growth. So what metrics do you use to measure the effectiveness of the enablement efforts? And how do you tie these metrics back to tangible business outcomes?

Speaker A: Yep, you bet. One of my favorite questions, because it's, uh, at least for a long time, it was quite a mystery to a lot of enablement practitioners. And I was actually just on a podcast last week talking about this exact same topic. And I think it comes down to this. For a very long time, enablement folks, myself included, were told, show your impact. You're here to drive revenue. You're here to create sustainable behaviors. Right? And those behaviors are the ones that drive performance. The performance is what drives the revenue. Okay, great. We want the seat at the table. We want to prove impact. But there was less conversation. And this is why I'm grateful for podcasts like yours and other thought leaders that are out there. Um, because it's finally starting to be demystified. And we've done a lot of work on this exact topic at Showpad as well. For me, what it comes down to is it's super simple. You want to be able to demonstrate impact on a initiative or program level and then have those initiatives and programs ladder up into your impact at the functional level. Right. Of your business unit as an enablement team, as a go to market strategy team, whatever you call yourselves. Um, and so the idea with the ladder bucket, right, is you want to think about sort of your collection of big enablement bets is what I always call them. So that might be decreasing ramp time through your onboarding program. It might be improving win rates or conversion rates, just tighter execution through your sales methodology. It might be improved customer experiences with real quantifiable outcomes to go along with it, through some changes to things happening on the post sales side, especially if you're a revenue enablement team and not just sales enablement. So maybe there's tweaks you're making to the business reviews. Maybe there's. We talked about value earlier, value realization, right? Maybe there's different metrics you're bringing forward to a customer to show the exact ROI they're getting out of your solution, so on and so forth. Those could be considered some of the big bets, right. What I like to do internally is map all of those big bets next to one singular kind of North Star KPI. So we have a few, and I think these look different organization to organization. I don't like to be prescriptive around this, uh, question because I think it very much depends on what is the business after. Now naturally, that's going to be the same thing in a lot of different businesses, right? We need more revenue, we need faster time to close, we need new hires to ramp more quickly. But hey, you know, don't just decrease the ramp time. We have to make sure the, the effectiveness is still there. Um, and we want to increase our win rates, right? That's often. And of course retention on the post sale side, those are kind of like the same four or five metrics that every business is after, but sometimes the way those shake out looks a little bit different. Uh, so for me, one of the ones that we look at is we want to see a certain percentage of our reps over a certain percent of their quota attainment. That's one of four that I'm after. So what I like to do again on the functional level is look at that collection of my big bets, my programs, I call these like the Excel change management efforts and map them against that specific KPI to show how enablements output has influenced this particular KPI over time. Then of course, if you think about the first bucket on the program initiative service solution, again different words, uh, depending who you ask, you can look at this across. I have like a three, three step framework for your program level metrics. The first is your sort of user reaction and adoption. And I know it sounds obvious, but a lot of enablement teams are still caught up in this level one, which is the smile and nod test. Did people attend, did they like it? Right? What was your internal sort of like NPS score on the thing? Did they complete the course, did they view the playbook, et cetera, et cetera. All metrics that you can get from your enablement software. Of course that's not enough to actually make the case for an attribution system, right? That this output had something to do with this lagging indicator KPI that your executive team cares about. So the next step for me then is application. Is the behavior there, right? So you taught the thing, you put them through the program. Hopefully. The enablement, by the way, was not just like, go attend, ah, this 45 minute webinar, go sit in this hotel room for 48 hours and now let's hope that the knowledge is stuck and the behaviors are starting to emerge. That's not a good strategy for enablement. And that's why psa, right? Like enablement is not just training and that's why you need technology to actually fuel your, your enablement kind of operating system. But for me, the level two is that behavior, right? Does it stick? And where do you, how can you prove that it has stuck. So can you shadow calls? Can you look through your CI tool if you have one, and check out uh, what some of your trends are. Can you collect some anecdotal information from your ICs and from your sales leaders? Um, so that's level two, right. Knowledge transfer is there, but then over time we want to understand did the behavior actually stick and do we see that on a continuous basis across a large portion of the population. Right. Not just one or two in your sample size. It has to be statistically significant. And then if you've done one and two, you are in the best chance of success for level three, which is being able to prove all of that next to some sort of actual revenue KPI that you could have a conversation with your executives about, you could have a conversation with your board about. Um, so I think focusing on the big bets and getting through that level one through three framework on the program or initiative side and then having a collection of those that you can use on your functional or business unit side, right, to look at the aggregate or cumulative impact of your enablement team. That's the way I look at it. Bit of a long winded answer, but uh, there's a lot there.

Speaker B: No, I love that. And you know, we talk the same language but the, I think all too often people get caught up in the, in the forward, uh, in looking forward and trying to have a positive impact. And actually um, what we found was it's really important that we properly benchmark what's happened in the past. Um, you might be in a business that's got a kind of a cycle based on the time of year. So you know, we want to make sure we're comparing this Q1 to last Q1, um, or you might be in a, you might be breaking, uh, you might have certain uh, new revenue streams that are, um, that we don't have a track record for, but we've got others that we do. We might be having different, uh, uh, go to market motions in different geographies and really getting under the skin of the benchmarks that have happened over the last 12 months. Uh, uh, it's like anything, you invest that time in getting that um, that infrastructure, right. Getting that benchmarking and the clarity around what's actually taken place in the past so that you understand if you've actually had a positive impact or not. So um, now I absolutely buy into that. We recently launched our own, what we call revenue insights as a service which is a, ah, plug and play, uh, uh, kind of report that we can deliver back to our customers. And the first report we deliver goes back 12 months and it shows, it's effectively an audit of your whole go to market motion. Um, and for us what we found is that uh, to have an impact, uh, you need a combination of four things. Uh, you need data, insights, technology and change. And while we solve the data challenges and we deliver the uh, insights and the technology, we're not change agents. Um, and so you need that sales enablement, that rev ops function, uh, or growth consultant that's really understanding, uh, what those benchmarks, they're able to use those benchmarks to actually drive the right behavior and understand what, what are those top performers doing differently to everybody else and how can we make it super easy for everybody else to follow what those top performers are doing? Um, because the one while salespeople really can be very difficult to train and to get them to work your way, when you show them in kind of picture format how they can win more, suddenly, you know, that gets the change that you want. And if we can make it simple for them to understand and take away all the admin burden from their responsibility because frankly salespeople aren't very good at it anyway. Um, all of a sudden they blossom. Um, and you see very quickly the salespeople that are open to change are able to very quickly start having similar outcomes to what the a players have been doing now for a while.

Speaker A: That's right, yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. I think to the latter part of what you said. A phrase that we are using internally at chopad is like we want to automate everything except the best parts of selling. And the best parts of selling require a human right. So when we think about CRM automation and some of the admin work you mentioned there, I mean some sellers are better than others, but I've never met a single seller that absolutely loves to spend their time that way. And if they do, maybe sales isn't the right fit for them anyways. Um, so it's all about how do we give some of these sellers more time back in their day to focus on the right thing, how do we feed them the right signals to know who to go after and then how to actually go after them and affect in an effective way and then automate a lot of that process throughout the whole sales funnel.

Speaker B: Yeah, I absolutely buy into that. I think we do a benchmark report every year and we saw that the top performers are spending nearly 50% of their time customer facing. And we know that relationships drive Revenue, right? So the more relationships you build, guess what, the more money you make. But the B players are spending less than two hours a day and they're just being busy on stuff that's just not moving the bar. Um, and then when you add to that that we know that about half of all sales processes end with no decision at all and then half of the balance end with a close lost outcome. So only 25% of the deals that we're working on, roughly speaking, depending on the organization, end in a positive close, uh, one outcome. And we also realize that the deals that close lost spend twice as long in process as the deals that close one. And so we find ourselves with the salespeople spending less than 15% of their time actually on opportunities that are going to lead to a positive outcome. And so from my perspective, I look at that and think, my goodness, there is such a big opportunity here to have a big impact on sales. And it feels like the very last or the whole go to market motion, in particular sales is the last department to be data driven to really kind of adopt this kind of much more consistent approach to how they should run and scale their operation.

Speaker A: Yeah, I hear you and I think it's high time for a change if organizations are not leaning into that. I think there's several examples of people who are doing it fantastically well that are actually like blazing the trail. Right. Um, but we think about it, uh, the silly analogy I always use, which is weird for a non sports fan, but you think about sports in the 70s or 80s, they were operating mostly without analytics and insights and intelligence to tell them how to conduct the game. Right. I can probably hear my partner laughing at me right now because I'm not a sports fan, but bear with me. Um, we think about modern day sports. It's everything, right? It decides how to run the plays, who should run the plays, what players you want on the field, when you want them on the field. Right? What plays you should run in the face of this particular team and some of their, you know, custom plays, you compare that to sales, it's not so different. We have a sea of insights and analytics available to us that will help our business, businesses run a little bit more smoothly. The problem is I think the volume when I say C, I think people are actually drowning in that sea. So enablement in operations, I think do play a role here as well, to help executives to help their VPs or senior members of their revenue team, uh, as well as the FLMs and ICs too, understand which of these Insights make most sense for you to go and run your plays with. Right. Uh, and part of that is replicating the performance or the behaviors of your top performers. But I also think we're entering a little bit of a new frontier within sales. Right. We are learning what it means to be an AI first salesperson. So what I think we will see with that is possibly for some folks, the ones that were hitting club two, three years ago, that were bringing in a great majority of the revenue, et cetera, et cetera, those possibly might not be your top performers of the future, especially if they're not leaning into, you know, ways to automate some of their workflows, ways to work more effectively using some of those analytics and insights, leaning into their enablement, their development, their learning that's available to them, et cetera. So, interesting new era I think we're entering with sales. But I, I couldn't agree more.

Speaker B: I had a really lovely quote a, uh, couple of weeks ago and, um, you know, between you and I, Vanessa, we probably got, you know, 50 years of experience in this space. I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to question, you know, that we, we both have a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge in this, uh, in this. None of us have sold in 2026.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: None of us have sold in 2027. So there is still so much to learn and the market's changing so quickly. Um, I've got so many other questions I want to go through with you, so, uh, let me keep going and.

Speaker A: Yeah, please.

Speaker B: Uh, I want to ask you, um, one of the challenges we see time and time again is alignment between sales, marketing and success. So how do you ensure that alignment and to execute on a kind of cohesive and effective enablement strategy across all the teams?

Speaker A: Age old question. Right. And I think this is where having, uh, the strategy and the people, which often end up being your enablement folks, but also the technology that can fuel the strategy in the people, meaning your enablement software. That's where I think this matters. So for a very long time, uh, enablement has been seen, or should be seen as the glue between those different functions. Why we have a very unique vantage point. And this is as long as enablement is running effectively. Right. I'm not talking about the enablement teams that are cranking out the trainings and creating the content. That's not strategic, proactive enablement. So I'm talking about enablement done the right way, of course. Uh, and if it is, I think the function and the people within the function have a very unique vantage point on what's happening within the business. Why we are very close to the field. We often act as the voice of sellers and sometimes we get to the, the obstacles that the seller is encountering perhaps even before the sales leader does. Because we are obsessive about their coaching, what's getting in their way of success, listening to their gong or um, you know, choose your CI tool, listening to their calls. Um, we are obsessive about working with the frontline leaders to deliver better coaching etc. And so we have a lot of these uh, data points both from the field but then also the objective data points that are showing up you in our performance trends throughout your data strategy and you look at that. But then you also are a cross functional partner to teams like marketing. Right? And when I say the field I'm including both sales and CS in that. Especially if your remit is to run enablement across the entire customer journey. That doesn't just mean acquisition. In fact more and more important actually is to focus on the post sales portion uh, of the customer journey or the, the funnel. Because especially these days with an economic downturn, right. There's more value there protecting your base and knowing how much more likely that base is to upsell to try a new product to stay with your company because there's actually loyalty there. Right. That matters a lot more and it's increasingly so. Um, then, then maybe the cost of acquisition for a net new customer.

Speaker B: In uh, the 2025 benchmark report we saw that 52% of new revenue last year didn't come from new logos, it came from existing customers. Right? So we're now generating more new revenue from our existing customers than we are from the new logos we're signing each year. And that's it.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: But we're not investing uh, in the same way in success as we have been in sales. So and I think um, there's a big opportunity there to lean into the existing customer base 100%.

Speaker A: And of course enablement is just one of those places that you can invest. But it's really important actually that we over rotate. I think this is a correction that needs to be made because to your point a lot of investment uh, has been made on the pre sales side. Whether that's marketing, whether that's you know, events, et cetera, et cetera. But that includes enablement. And so it's time for that kind of transformation for equal, um, minimally equal. If not maybe like I said, a bit of an over rotation on the post sales side. So absolutely agree with you there. To round up my answer in your first question, I would say that's what allows us to be a unique but critical player in the mix of creating these bridges between sales and cs. Uh, the field. Right. So your go to market, customer facing quota bearing teams and marketing as well. We have to make sure that marketing gets enablement as a reinforcer, a multiplier of what they're putting out there. At the same time, you want to make sure enablement is also a bit of a vetting mechanism, not just for marketing for any player. Right. The competition for the field's attention is as fierce as ever, especially when we think about how hard selling in this economy is and how hard it will continue to be, uh, to your point, if none of us have done it in 2026. So that's what I would say. We need to be the bridge between those things and we need to make sure we're helping each of these teams future proof as well.

Speaker B: And do you see that? Enable. Enable who, who does enablement report to? Do you have individual enablement, uh, specialists reporting to sales marketing success or is its own department that reports up to CRO? What are you seeing working?

Speaker A: Got you. So this might be the easiest question that you asked me all day. Uh, enablement needs to report into whoever is responsible for revenue. Why? Because we are a reflection of that. We too are responsible for revenue. That is our entire purpose of existence. The second enablement is not directly tied to revenue. That's when you can see disproportional uh, emphasis on maybe content creation or driving marketing efforts forward. I've even learned of some um, enablement teams that are reporting into HR or finance. Right. Which is a very interesting setup. So uh, that one I think is tried and tested. I don't think it's contested anymore. With the amount of enablement, uh, teams that are out there and the lessons learned, it has to report it to revenue. Now the way this works looks a little bit different organization by organization. So like the size matters and then the setup of the organization matters as well. We have some very large customers where enablement is decentralized either by customer segment, by region, whatever the case may be. So I think whether it's centralized or decentralized is another part of the question. Uh, and sometimes it'll report into like a strategy or operations or growth or for a lot of our customers there's a unit, uh, called Commercial Excellence which oversees enablement and operations and strategy and sometimes things like compensation, pricing, etcetera. So the setup always looks different. If you look at more sort of mid market scale up companies, it's very easy. It should just be a direct line to your CRO. Um, so I think it has to be directly connected or a very close dotted line to revenue. But certainly enablement shouldn't report into marketing, to hr, to finance.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I definitely buy into that. I think one of the biggest challenges is that um, more often, not. More often than not, but at least in a lot of examples we see that the CRO isn't really the CRO, they're really a VP of sales. And that can cause real challenges because the VP of sales is just interested in signing new logos, uh, while the CRO is interested in lifetime value of the customer and making sure they're the right mogos that actually serve the business. And I'm not sure it's necessarily the CRO's fault, but they end up um, in this, they get the title and then before you know it they're being asked to focus just on um, almost carrying a bag themselves. Um, and I think businesses really need to have that discipline and bringing in a, ah, CRO is a strategic role and it needs to have that overall responsibility across the board. Uh, otherwise you're just not ready for the croft.

Speaker A: Yep, agree, agree. Nothing to add there.

Speaker B: There we go. Good. All right, uh, so as we look ahead to 2026, how do you see AI transforming? Go to market strategies and what role do you think AI will play in driving more efficiency and uh, effectiveness and go to market operations?

Speaker A: Sure. So many things there. And I would also be curious your perspective too, guy. Um, so I think first let's answer the question of like how do we see AI transforming? A lot of what enablement has done, there's, there's so many. We could do a three hour podcast on this alone. Right. But a few things that come to mind for me is like first of all the enablement teams that are still stuck in legacy enablement. And legacy enablement being defined as event based, fully training to the point of like internally they might be called sales trainers, right? Um, content specialists, they run the SCO, they run the event that's 48 hours in the hotel and then hope that all their sellers go back to their home offices and, and know the new things, understand the new strategy, have the go to market motion down, that those days are done. I think they've been numbered for a long time already, but they are absolutely done right now. And especially with AI as kind of like the catalyst here. There is no more excuse for the enablement to be that way. Right. Event, um, based training alone, it needs to become continuous, it needs to become data driven and it needs to be less based on gut feel of uh, what the field needs, right. Based on effective go to market strategies and more based on what's actually going to work. Back to our point of the analytics that are actually driving the revenue, right, the plays that you're creating to turn your B players into your A players. Um, I also think enablement will absolutely need to move away if you're still stuck in this um, one size fits all approach. And it's not data. You're not using data to understand who needs what and when do they need it. This is where like a competency led enablement team really uh, ends up being advantageous because you can understand not just uh, you know, we're going to run this negotiation enablement program and we're going to do it for everyone. I mean that's maybe a bad example because everyone tends to need enablement like that, but not presuming that it's the same thing for everyone and having real data and predictive data to understand who needs what, what is everyone's skill gaps and how do we approach and attack some of those skill gaps before they show up even in the data and certainly before the customer would actually feel them and we start to see that come through in the deal. Um, so I think, in short, I mean all of that I think relates to the go to market strategy, effectiveness, right? If enablement can start operating in some of these ways, that's fundamentally going to change the way a sales team, a CS team, your whole go to market motion will execute.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think uh, I buy into all of that. I think the lens I try and look through when I'm thinking about AI driven tools or technologies or techniques, um, is really whether this is going to increase or decrease the amount of minutes our sellers are spending in front of and building relationships with our prospects and customers. Uh, and I think, you know, for me that's the acid test. I think we um, I think salespeople need to be spending as much of their time as possible, customer facing and engaging, adding value, building those relationships. And I think where AI can help in particular is taking away any admin burden around that, but also as you rightly said, identifying where the challenges are. One of the things we introduced as part of our onboarding now is if a customer's, let's say using a gong or any other, uh, kind of call intelligence, we're able to go back through the last year's worth of call recordings and reapply uh, AI to extract whatever methodology using, let's say they're using Med Pick. So we can go back and we'll find that this set of sellers are really good at the Med, but really bad at the pick, um, or certain, uh, not very good at identifying the critical event that needs to happen for this event. And guess what? These sellers are losing lots of deals late stage. But it turns out it's not a late stage problem, it's a qualification issue. Um, and by using AI, I couldn't sit through a thousand hours of calls. Um, uh, but our engine can give me an output that tells me right, here's your leaderboard of sellers and here's how they're performing against this particular methodology. And this is the impact when they qualify the customer to a 9, uh, their average sales cycles are 40% shorter and they've got a 30% increase in win rates. Uh, but when they miss out critical event, or when they can't identify the economic buyer or the number of stakeholders is only three instead of seven, uh, then the win rates drop to single digits and AI is able to crunch through so much data and give us that visibility. And so our job is to top and tail that. Right? We need to make sure that the AIs got the right data to analyze in the first place. So fixing that data and one of the things we really focus on with our relationship intelligence product is really trying to make sure that the data is something that we can rely and trust uh, in the first place. Um, and then on the other side it's the interpretation of that so making it super easy and kind of turning into pictures that everyone can buy in and go uh, ah, that's why I keep losing those late stage deals. It turns out I'm not, I'm skipping through that stage two of the, of the sales cycle, for example.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's like what is a data point without it being distilled into an insight that people can take action on. And if people don't understand the aggregate impact of some of these data points and then what to do about it? And that's where enablement comes in, right? You can have a lot of data points that tell you many different things about your organization, some good, some bad, some ugly. And if no one is taking action and creating the programs that will fundamentally change that behavior, then what does it matter anyways? You can have all sorts of data that tells you all Sorts of different stories. You need those change makers, change agents, as you mentioned earlier guy, to create the programs that are actually going to shift the dynamic and create these uh, performance levers for your business that allows organizations to get to that next kind of stage of growth and scale. And so the other thing that I think about when I get asked a question similar to the one you asked with like what is AI going to do to enablement to sales leaders, to sellers themselves and how does all of that translate into the way we go to market? I think about first of all, where are we all draining time right now, right? What are the business problems that we actually could see solve through automation, through AI? And so you think about an enablement team, just example that comes top of mind for new hires. Most enablement teams are spending a lot of time with new hires. And by the way, keep spending time with your new hires. It's not like AI is here and then you get to disappear and AI does all the work. That's a fundamentally bad strategy. Right? That's a bad use of AI. But what it can do is can it help you automate some of the role plays, let's say that you're using to uh, get some field assurance that this person's ready to go, give them their book of business, get them on site, et cetera. So that's one place for sales leaders. They should, I think this is a chronic issue actually, but they should be spending a lot of time in coaching. So is there parts of the coaching program that uh, AI can automate, not replace, but automate some of it. There's still, I mean we need human coaches, not just AI coaches. Right, but that's another place. And then you think about the sellers themselves. They spend too much time on non meaningful tasks. Even if you are a top player and you have that balance. To your point earlier. Right. So we think about CRM automation. Haven't met a single seller that loves to update Salesforce and really deeply cares about their Salesforce hygiene. But also for our sellers that are, you know, looking to prepare and add value to their customer interactions, be them virtual or in person. The old way is there's a lot of time spent looking for the right things. So Showpad just recently introduced this thing called AI powered search. It's going to dynamically scan every single thing that's in your enablement software, be that a document, an faq, a uh, video, right. And give you the answers right there. It'll actually build AI based versions of FAQs, which I don't know about the other enablers listening to this, but I spent a ton of hours building out those sorts of uh, pieces of documentation. So a lot of that helps alleviate this admin burden. And then we think about how can AI or agents actually help people that are in the field. Right. And that's something that I think we're going to see continue to change as well. Right. We've done a lot of virtual selling over the past few years. More and more people to your point, relationships still win deals, humans trust humans. And so getting back to those in person conversations matter to meet all of your stakeholders throughout your buy in group. But as we're doing that, sellers need an assistant. And now that we have AI, guess what? Everyone gets to be a boss. Everyone got promoted. Your new employee is your AI agents. And so using these agents in your favor, especially for field sales reps to prepare right before you go on site to engage during your presentation, uh, or during your discussion and then kind of be able to put into AI this is how it went, this is the notes, these are the actions I need to take. And then having AI actually do the follow up and help you execute. Right. In an autonomous way. The difference between genai and agentic right there in an autonomous way, execute on some of those actions. That's where I see it going. And that last part in particular for sellers is something that Showpad is deeply passionate about and is kind of working on right now.

Speaker B: It sounds very exciting. Yeah, I mean we really are in a market that's changing so fast at the moment. Um, I think one of the interesting points that you just raised, um, is we need to, you know, we can bring the horse to water but we, but we can't make them drink.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: We need, we, we need them to, to action that change. And, and the number of times I mentioned that we do this, this reas report Revenue Insights as a service report and the first report goes back a year and we present back this audit of the whole go to market motion, showing where the strengths and weaknesses are and what they need to prioritize. And enablement's like going to the gym, right. You can't just do it once and something you've got a six pack and you go again next year. It's an iterative process and it's about small incremental wins and they all start to land on top of each other and all of a sudden the whole business starts running faster as everyone's doing things in a much more consistent format. Um, and we see time and again we'll deliver the same report three months later expecting to see that they've identified, they've taken the change, the recommendations and they've effected change. And almost every single time in the first three months they come away going, this is great, we absolutely are going to make these changes. And of course three months later we go, oh by the way, nothing's changed. Uh, and only at that point is that the penny drops where they go. Okay, now I understand that actually just looking at the data isn't enough. We need those enablement people to take this and actually action and m move it forward. Uh, but it's such a great, it's such great value for money because this isn't just about increasing the win rates from 12% to 20%. This is about increasing growth. And ultimately if we can increase growth within an organization from single digits to 20, 30%, all of a sudden we've doubled the value of the business. Um, and so getting this rev ops or enablement space, right, and investing the energy in it and that combination of data, insights, technology and service will change. When you bring it all together, something very special happens and it happens really quickly, um, because everyone's bought into this kind of data driven approach and ultimately the sellers want to make more money. Um, and if you can make it easy for them to understand how um, then they start to change their behavior very quickly.

Speaker A: One of the things that I was thinking there is like how the transition I think will happen of like in the past sellers would be like I don't have time for this enablement thing is very periphery. There's not a lot of urgency. I have a quota hit to hit, right? Don't bother me. Um, and so I'll, I'll rearticulate this. I just want to get the thought out which is like that's starting to change, right? We're seeing top performers. As long as they see the data to understand like this thing is going to help lead to better outcomes, then they're more likely to do it.

Speaker B: I absolutely buy into that. I think we've had many examples where we've had a rev ops function that been banging their head against a wall for two years. And we come in and show them the data, uh, which they already knew but we turned it into pictures that everyone can understand and get behind and real kind of really focused, easy to understand kind of metrics presented in picture format. And what happens is suddenly the C suite buy into it. And now it was their idea. Even though the rev ops teams and the enablement teams have been banging on about it for years and all they've had really from the C suite has been kind of lip service. Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely do that. And then of course nothing changes. Um, but when you start showing the data, uh, suddenly they understand that, look, if you qualify better, you'll lose less deals at late stage. And all of a sudden because you're showing them the data, they buy into it and now it's their idea and they're running away and everyone's bought into the change. And at that point it can happen very quickly.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. And enablement, by the way, is there to show them how. So there's a difference between someone being bought into something and willing to do it and them having the skill to do it. So it's really important that enablement leans into not just the what but the how. And like we were just talking about Guy, I think that's another shift that we're going to start to see. Right. Is in the past you might have had a lot of sellers who think, like, not right now, I can't do that. I can't invest more time in this enablement thing. I've got a quota to hit. Right. Like, uh, I'll get to this later. I think again, as long as enablement is done in the right ways, we are starting to see the data back up. The fact that if a seller, uh, invests their time in this specific enablement program, whether that's a qualification, program, negotiation, whatever it is. Right. And that's leading to better measurable outcomes for some of their peers, we don't really have to take a stick approach. We don't even need a carrot. People will just go to the place where they need to take the enablement program and develop themselves on their own, just organically. And so we see that internally as well. Right. Folks that do more enablement and spend more time, in our case in Showpad, of course, we drink our own champagne. Right. They are the ones that have higher outcomes from a quota attainment perspective. So I think as far as like enablement value perception, that is starting to change amongst sellers as well. Which is a really exciting time by the way, to actually see that shift happen, uh, in the, in the profession, in this domain.

Speaker B: Yeah, I buy that. Absolutely. I think, um, the space is moving really quickly and I think the uh, sellers that adopt this stuff are the ones that are moving with it and are winning more. And I think uh, it's an exciting time to be doing ah, this stuff. So, uh, only just now really is the data available, and it's cheap to process, and we can really kind of pull the insights that we need to drive the right behaviors and the right outcomes. Um, and if we can help sellers make more money, everyone wins and everyone feels good about it.

Speaker A: I was just going to add one more thing there real quick. I know we're probably coming up on time. I think that ultimately, if you were to boil down enablement's purpose for existence, that's one of them right there. We need to make sure that we are ramping our new hires so that they get to success. And when they get to success, we need to keep them at success. Because ultimately for most businesses, more tenor, right? Like more tenor in your business from sales reps equals more revenue. Most businesses have that sometimes good, sometimes bad problem to have of, uh, most of your revenue coming from your top 20, 30%. And so the idea is getting your new hires to success, getting them up, kind of the career path and journey that your company has hopefully carved out for them, and then seeing those benefits and keeping them in your 10 or bucket of sellers.

Speaker B: We saw a really interesting trend. Uh, we had a customer that was working three very different geographies, and rather than roll out to everybody, we picked one. And all of a sudden everyone else started to see their numbers increase and now they was. They were craving the work that we'd done. And, and so, uh, picking the team of early adopters, getting them excited and showing them, getting better results, suddenly everybody else wants to be on that journey as well. So that, again, you don't have to use the stick anymore. So, uh, uh, very exciting. Vanessa, I've really learned a lot and really enjoyed having you on the show today. Thank you so much. If the community wants to get in touch with you, how do they go about doing that?

Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, y'. All. Uh, I will answer all the messages. I'm on there quite often. That's probably the easiest way. But, Guy, this has been such a pleasure, really fun connecting with you and talking through some of these big, meaty topics that are, uh, facing us right now. Uh, and I really appreciate you having me.

Speaker B: Thank you so much, Vanessa. And, uh, yeah, looking forward to paths crossing again soon.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Take care. Cheers. Thanks for listening to Revenue Insights from ebsta. If you want to learn more from some of the brightest minds on how to predictably and efficiently grow revenue, then subscribe to our newsletter. We'll deliver actionable insights straight to your inbox. Go to ebsta.com newsletter see you soon.