Modern Sales & Marketing: Automating Alignment and Empowering Buyers

Speaker A: Hi there and welcome to the Engage Sales podcast. Top sales professionals are firmly focused on putting sales enablement and human experience at the core of their organization. The growing importance of understanding the buyer and their journey is crucial as engagement insights are increasingly proven to improve the sales process, the human experience and ultimately profitability. For over a decade we've helped some of the world's biggest brands engage, unify the sales departments and help enable tracking and analytics into buyer behavior through our industry leading conference and online digital media. To find out more, visit engagesales.com hi there everyone.

Speaker B: I hope you're keeping well and welcome to today's episode of the Sales Engagement Example of Excellence podcast. I'm your guest host Phil Hobden and today I'm joined by Luba Reynolds, Managing Director Sales Enablement and Effectiveness at Sales Expand. So hi Luba, how are you doing?

Speaker A: Hi. Fine. I'm quite grateful to be uh, on your podcast, um, and explore interesting topics of um, making the sales more efficient of very tough times uh, on the market for junior.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: And the sales in general.

Speaker B: Well look, it's good to have you here so welcome to this episode of the podcast. So Luba, do you want to tell the audience a little bit more about you to start your background um, and what Sales Expand does?

Speaker A: Okay, I've got quite a complex background but to be honest quite simple to me because I've always been in tech. So um, I'm originally computer science scientists who instead of finalizing my PhD in a later date, uh, decided to join management consulting firms to basically implement uh, technology in those days was SAP golden technology and work across multiple companies, multiple enterprises and multiple countries, um, uh, putting those technology working um, for months and months on the customer side and then moving more into cell selling solution and then uh, while I had enough uh, moving um, from one customer to another. So basically during my life on a plane and even met my husband on a plane from London to Munich. So I decided okay, maybe you need to settle on the life and then actually move in more in a stable work. And I found the uh, sales enablement on those days it's called learning uh, and deployment for um, services for global business services ah, at IBM. Uh, and that was the first times when we actually focused on how to engage with sales and how to actually bring some training and some impact, uh, immediate impact on the sales and consequently actually done quite well on there. So even bid us uh, by the sales results uh, that we have in UK by implementing specific programs and boarding sales effectiveness account management negotiations on and moved them in software sales, uh, IBM business analytics, uh, they didn't sales enablement there. So I was quite early um stages of enable and I was part of enablement society that a few years ago people tried to basically establish a profession of sales enablement. What it is sales enablement quite uh, fascinating. And then I now run my own company called uh Sales Expand. So focusing basically on sales strategy, sales expansion uh for innovative tech companies, predominantly startups and scale ups.

Speaker B: So I want to ask one question before we get started. I want to ask you what is, what's the common misconception about sales enablement? Because I think if you ask 20 different businesses on what sales enablement is you'd probably get 35 different answers. Right. So if not more. And that's just right. So, so I'd love to hear from you what the common misconceptions are about what sales enablement actually is. And then kind of from your perspective you know what sales enablement should be.

Speaker A: Uh, I may start from your second point if you wish. Uh yeah, 100% misconception for me. Uh sales enablement and people in the sales enablement need to be right hand of uh revenue functions to uh, increase revenue results, help to increase revenue results. That's for me number one goal for sales enablement. Uh in reality what it means you have to work with the product teams to understand what product they're bringing. You have to work with the marketing team to understand what has already been pitched to the customers out there. You have to work absolutely with the sales leadership. Right. To understand how sales selling it, what's happening, what is right. You need to probably onboarding for new people. So you need to do some training on the demand program to improve those results. All of these strategic things. But basically it's alignment uh to the go to market strategy of being there and how we get the best way of there. So helping sales to be there. For me I see sales member in being right hand side of a sales leadership and salespeople in general helping them to sell. So misconception of that coming back. So it's basically different uh variants of what sales enablement does. Right. Uh if we're actually talking about sales enablement, sales enablement is aligned to sales because is making sales better. Why it come up uh on the market it basically started within the tech companies. The reason being the tech company they don't have manufacturing generally they don't have a logistics. Right. Uh, so how to improve the results within a tech company you either improve a product or you improve the sales or you improve both. So effectively you have to focus how to improve sales. Right. Therefore sales enablement is basically on improvement sales uh, including process trainings, all of these components. Right. Uh and that's a lot of collaboration. So people sometimes coming from a different background and when, when I was part of sales enablement society in us we kind of people spend a lot of time just to figure out what sales enablement job looks like. And there was a lot of deep thinking coming in. Basically people trying to create a job description. Sales is dynamic function because you know market are different can change uh the product you bring in uh can change uh the sales results can change uh the team sales teams can change. So it's always dynamics within the sales. So sales name by definition need to align what are the current needs of sales. And that's a misconception that is kind of a stable. You need to do onboarding or you need to do training or you need to do like a weekly days. There's a misconception of many people coming from, from a learning background that learning is typically given or learning and knowledge management giving you um, equipping companies uh, with a kind of long term uh learning uh opportunities to get the results right. Sales enablement, it needs to give people money back in their pockets and money to the sellers in their pockets. I called it digestive training uh on the wallet. So uh, salespeople don't like training in general. So they see it's time off from the sales fields and from the targets they need. So something that you can provide, you have to provide something in a way that can easily articulate to the customers and understand it, apply to their accounts and, and get results out of that. So uh, it's very much result oriented in comparison with learning and knowledge but it all has to be dynamic and aligned to strategic company needs. So it's not just opportunity to speak to CRO, it's opportunity to understand the global um, go to market strategies, alignment to that and where we are. So yeah it's a bits and pieces right. It's a dynamic uh and it's um, aligned to overall goals for sales and it's a uh, it's organization for sales improvement rather than just training. Training is one of the ways of doing it but not necessarily the only one.

Speaker B: And clearly you know, and we'll talk about it a bit later but technology has a massive impact within sales enablement. Now something it's interesting like so we've kind of talked about what sales enablement is and um, the misconceptions something I want to dive into. And then we'll start to talk about kind of break down sales enablement a bit more. But one of the things I want to talk about is what are the mistakes that businesses make when, when trying to go about sales. And because you've seen it from, from big corporates through to kind of, you know, I'm assuming smaller businesses and everything in between. So you'll have that good experience. And I can talk you through an example of a. When uh, we talk a little bit more about digital deal rooms later. Um, I'll talk you through a little bit of experience I had. But be really interested to see what people get wrong when kind of first initiating sales enablement. Because I'm guessing a lot of firms go oh this is going to be really easy. We can put this in really quickly. But actually by not delivering it right, probably never get the benefit out of it as quickly as they could.

Speaker A: Uh, I think there is a lot of emphasis now on sales velocity and alignment to sales velocity and to the metrics. I would warn that you have to be. It's right. So you have to basically look where we need to improve, you know, sales. But sales sometimes is very tricky. You need to understand how sales operate within that company. So if for example you're looking on the metrics like decrease sales cycle. If you ask a salesperson what's the best way of decreasing sales cycle and you start focusing, okay, you can do training how calculated customer message and so on better way. But the best way to increase decrease sorry sales cycle for any seller will be discount. As simple as that. And if you just focus on one metrics and that's it, then you may have opposite outcomes from what you expected to achieve. Um, so therefore as we already talked that sales is dynamic. So number one thing that people need to look at is basically look, okay, where that company is now, okay. And the sales startups and the large, sorry tech startups, smaller uh companies, mid sized companies and enterprise, they're all in a different stage of product development, right? They all go into different stages actually develop special framework called growth. So first you generate idea of the product, then it's released on the market, then optimize sales and work on perfection, expanding and hypergrowth. So uh, you probably don't need to do big onboarding training if you just have few servers, right? So it depends where you are. Uh you basically tailor your skills uh uh, and sets of needs and training consequently so and similarly process and systems. So look what you need now, right? Focus on that and that's it. People majority of cases trying to replicate what they've done in a previous company and in sales enablement, typically people either coming from marketing or sales and so on Co. Different one to one, uh, and they differ in the marketing strategy, may differ in terms of product and so on. So therefore yes, you need to have some kind of framework for assessing where they are and where they need to be. And then look at that framework and then you can see the steps to be done to go to that next level they're expecting to be. But first you need to stand where they are. And that's the number one mistake. I actually see people either do like on boarding training, same day done somewhere else or some kind of velocity, uh, measurement for the same companies they've done uh, in the past. Every company is unique, uh, to some extent in combination but the factors are very similar. So basically you can create a framework, take a framework that I was trying to do and then analyze the factors and then uh, out of that frameworks pick up things where you need to focus. And for self level number one advice I will give, look where you have to focus because it's so much to do is so much to be done. Right? Uh, just look where you have to focus and then prioritize your efforts on that focusing area. And from that you have to speak to and engage to multiple stakeholders from a marketing product and sales for sure. But also listen to your salespeople because sales people, not necessarily, sometimes um, even looking at their systems, not using the systems very well and what they say to sales leadership, not necessarily. Exactly. Right, because what's the main reason so

Speaker B: much to unpick in that answer, right? Like, like so many different things. I wanna so the stakeholder bits interesting and the salespeople bits really interesting. I want to ask one question first because I think it's going to frozen frame people listening to this podcast, people can be listening to this podcast going yeah, but this is just for big organizations, right? Like only like huge organizations need sales enablement. And I would love to get your take on that because for me I don't necessarily think that's true. I think actually businesses of all sizes could benefit from sales enablement and sales enablement teams just obviously scaling for the right organization. But I'd love to see your take on what, where you think sale, what type of organization you think will fit for sales enablement or is it any organization?

Speaker A: It's very good question Phil. I think we need to explore a bit. Um, uh, I've seen some Challenges and changes during the times Because I started enablement over 15 years ago some activity on able and I've seen a change. Yes it started in a large organization to be quite honest a lot of large organization now kicked out or streamlined their sales enablement team. Uh the reason they started sales enablement is effectively to streamline and make sales efficient. As I said right. In the tech companies you know we've got just product uh quality and and a sales that you can improve. So uh, when we've got a lot of you know uh market is saturated so effectively so many solutions. So therefore people now focusing more and more on the sales how to make it efficient and that's the reason that a larger company started it. Um so what I've seen the trend people obviously from sales enablement backgrounds try to educate the others what we actually do. Because in the past when I start sales enablement um, my fellow colleagues um asked me okay what do you do now? I said self enablement and said what is that? And that salespeople asking me what is that? It's talking about and understanding what, what sales enablement needs to do. Um and it's still a kind of a question for many. How do you define it? Number one, how do you define enablement? Right. So obviously everywhere I was asking about about that um, I see uh enablement now is um after this education process started and several um summits happening and self enablement collective and several other organization basically involve self enablement as profession and also see a lot of um sellers getting into sales enablement as a profession because they probably had enough from sales but they had the experience of sales uh and it's more a bit strategic so they're kind of interested in this a bit more. Um uh what I see nowadays the trend change and it changed probably for the last three to five years that uh a lot of investors uh in us is private equity firms but also a lot of VC stage investments uh on stage A and B see uh sales enablement as a necessary function to give you money. Because what they see sales enablement is some kind of uh engine to create sales operational machine when you actually need to strategize and make sales as a machine. So as effective as kind of operating in particular way and expanding in the country in a particular way. Um carrying out uh product, you know sales in a particular way. That's the demand is there. So used to be on the stages BC and so on. Now I see investors actually looking for sales name and actually the request for sales enablement jobs Coming from them. So this is basically a condition for CEO to get invested on next stage if you put sales name boom functioning. So um there are some other side of that stories that I see a lot that um those guys uh like a CEO and Antonis uh on the stage ah A and above investment they try and. Okay now we create sales function sales enablement function and we may put it in sales by the way it's another question where to put uh kind of.

Speaker B: Well I was going to ask someone as well. Right.

Speaker A: So we'll come to that one touchdown whom it's supposed to report and they usually report either and sales leadership or sales ops because it kind of you know sometimes in the marketing right. Uh it's still evolving function. Um but what's number one fun problem they doing? Uh they be the oh let's put a, A team and then we have probably ambitious person coming into startup or scale up. Okay I'm I built your sales enablement function uh and then I bring more people. One going to be on boarding doing on boarding the other one going to do uh something on uh things like um tooling. So the other one going to be special like deal clinics and so on. So yeah I've seen the companies who've got a team of five or six for the sales numbers of 90 sellers and if you look now at efficiency and the company saying hold on a Moment, you've got five people in your team to help 90 sellers so how much they need to increase the sales results to justify the cost of that function. So this is another question to sales enablement. It's not necessarily just putting people in a team but it's making things more efficient for the sellers with the focus and making it um more resourceful for sellers. Right. So it's much more important now because what we see now it's a lot of filing by the way kind of people cutting down sales enablement team they explore because they understood it's too much they cannot justify to CFO and the private equity or investors why they bring so much versus you know what they've got what outcome they've got from that uh investment cost. So be thinkful uh about that look at the potential frameworks and that's what are coming in. So I'm trying to bring a framework that can be already useful uh in some environment to speed up that early up some ah self enablement activity with less number of people because the people need to be aware of this um kind of sales enablement is also like a marketing is a Cost function, you want it or not, it is a cost. Yes, we influence revenue making but it's still a cost and we need to justify those cost. Um that that's what people need to be aware nowadays making enablement more efficient and justify think that you kind of bring out of enablement. So yes, so the trend is going lower so getting to even pre seat level good. Get somewhere enable. So I came in quite early on with my company just to fill that space where people not necessarily have full time resource but they need that activity to build sales machine. Uh and that's what I see it. Sales enablement is something like an engine to build sales machine. Effective sales machine.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely. So going back to your point. So where should then sales enablement sit in the bit Because I had a. Interestingly I had a conversation uh, about product marketing recently and there was some discussion about where product marketing should sit in a business. And I was like I get it's marketing but product marketing is more of a for me is more of a function of product. Because the closer they are to product the better that product marketing will be. The closer they are to marketing the more likely they are to be driven off into non product marketing like jobs. Right. So for me I was like well actually you know I'm currently working within a uh, commercial product role within a business. And for me I was like I would quite like product marketing to sit in my team because then I can work with them. We can define the ideas and the whole strategy from creation of a part of a product right through to execution and delivery business. So there was conversations around that.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Where would you in a large organization where would you sit and get um, enablement and in a smaller organization where would you sit Enablement? Because sometimes the structures are very different. Right. Sometimes in bigger organizations you've got CROs and you've got that whole functionality whereas in a smaller organization maybe you've just got like CEO and a head of sales and that kind of sits around. So whereabouts would you position that?

Speaker A: Uh interesting question and kind of can get you some mind take uh and probably plus and minuses from where it sits so similar to what you're talking about marketing. So it pretty much depends. Um, I think the small organization the closer to CEO I will put it, I haven't seen it. But ideally in a smaller kind of organization and yeah stage a scale up I would put it with a functioning closer to CEO maybe because effectively CEO are asked or maybe even sometimes to CFO frankly because CFO are the ones who want to see revenue going on and they would say what's happening? Sales promised me that revenue did never actually again that forecast never happened. So um. And it's interesting dynamic now happens. So C4 getting more and more involved in something that people previously haven't said because it's tougher times now. So uh. So that would have been ideal. The other thing that in my experience sales neighbor people we are the most connected after CEO in organization because we have to collaborate with everyone.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So you have to collaborate with product, you have to collaborate with marketing. Yeah you have to collaborate with sales. Right. Uh you have to collaborate with CFO because you understand the budget. So surprisingly actually a lot of smaller companies making a big big actually um mistakes of not thinking the budget how they're going to allocate ourselves neighborhood although it's cost. Right. So and ask them I don't know just whatever it's we needed and it's not a good answer frankly. Uh and it's going to be backed on their backfired on them at a later stage. Um yeah. So that. That's probably for small organization ideal. In reality it sits in currently typically between marketing either in the marketing and ops. Right. Sales ops are uh sometimes in the sales. So a lot of people in sales enablement saying would be great if we report to sales CRO. Uh I would say in a large organization that's the most possible outcomes and I explain you why. So in IBM I was basically aligned to sales uh and what happens and every quarter sales need to report results and some of them profitability. Right. So number one of things to do it is basically cutting cost. What cost they cut trainings. Unless actually done the training in the mid tab by mid quarter you will be cut. So you kind of learn it. So to optimize. So although you have to be you really closely aligned to sales you have to be the right hand side of the sales be right hand man or woman of the sales leadership. But reporting to sales I would say not the best in uh my experience because of the budgeting issues uh that you may have in a large organization in particular uh if we're talking about marketing that's a constant problem that we haven't explored really or it's a blaming game in terms of you know um. Yeah we've done you a lot of um in terms of lead generation particularly. Right. So we brought you a lot of potential customers and you haven't converted who is a problem marketing on sales and then sales minimum somewhere in between. So it is Easier from a budget because marketing budget typically in a large organization used to be better. But nowadays I uh, hear a lot of from marketeers that they cut significantly. So you maybe feel kind of exposed on that side. Uh, nowadays what happens with a lot of scale ups A and B stage they sit traditionally under sales rev ops and rev ops is required. Why? Because uh, VCs and investors and uh, private equity in particular, they won't have regular figures on what's happening. So uh, who provides those figures? Revops. Another thing that for sales enablement. Sales enablers need to align to the picture of sales happening. Who provide that picture? Sales leadership. But it has to be backed up by data because what sellers can tell to you sales leadership not necessarily indicate the whole truth because no one wants to be exposing their bits and problems. So yeah, so I think sales ops and revops is typically what it sits nowadays and I see it's less contradictory between sitting and uh, the marketing of sales because it's kind of those people need closely working with each other. Yeah, you have to provide the results on um, analytics on the back end. You have to have kind of deal velocity on that and then obviously sales enablement, what do you do with that to improve it? So it's kind of realistically probably better alignment and that's kind of prefer this case but ideally we should see it closer to CEO and CE4 in smaller types of organization function.

Speaker B: Nice. Okay, cool. Look. So I want to uh, talk about digital deal rooms because it's a favorite topic of mine and I notice it's very much under the sales enablement piece. Um, I'm a huge fan of digital dealrooms. Right. Like I think they are a uh, fantastic bit of technology both for sales uh, and an internal perspective. So making sure that you're sending out the right information because like I, I could tell you horror stories of price lists and feature lists that have been sent out from companies I've worked for for products that don't exist anymore that people come back and go I'd love to buy that. And you go m, we haven't sold that for three years because I've just grabbed an old presentation and sent it. But equally it's great for the customer because or for the sales team and the customer because you get ah, a view of who's circulating it around, who's looking at it, who's getting uh, involved. So I am a big fan of kind of the concept of digital deal rooms but weirdly I've uh, also struggled to get them engaged within firms and practices because I think businesses see it as a cost and they go, well we have all this, we have all this data, we have Salesforce, we have AI talky, recording stuff, technical term, we have all of this stuff. Why do we need to add another piece of software? And I think any business that's sales focused, that isn't using a digital deal room is making a huge mistake. So I'd love to get your opinions on digital deal rooms, why you think that some companies are so hesitant to engage with them and what the benefits really are.

Speaker A: Um, I think great question to explore really and I think we need to look kind um of in the background picture to explore it in a bit. So why it's happening and where we are where uh, with the tools at this moment. Um, and if we just rolled back to CRM tools when they actually started, uh, uh, and it was originally for tools for managing customers and um, when you have so many customers you need to basically strategize or databases effectively for managing customers especially where you have so many, many customers. And managing those customers uh, became difficult from Excel. So you had to have some kind of thing uh, to strategize your sales in terms of your structure and your focus and also align your sales cycle so your sale methodology to do stagings where you are with those customers so that you know um, how to kind of articulate uh, and how to communicate uh, to them and so on and report back, you know where you are in the sales uh cycle in the sales process. But then those tools became more and more complicated. So effectively. Right. So to get sales you need to have some kind of marketing information into that. Right? So they created that kind of uh. If you're talking about sales and marketing growth acquisition on the marketing side, right. So you need to strategize who is going there. So you need a bit more information on the leads in terms of customers, kind of how customers kind of have uh, some information on the site. So effectively it became quite a complex system of tooling. And you may say, oh, it's all there, right? It's everything is there. But if you're looking for salesperson, right. It's a quite a complex environment in many companies. Um, so just to digestify this approach and information, someone a long time ago told me a very um, kind uh, of clear picture of what's marketing sales and how marketing differs from sales. So marketing is uh, a uh, function to bring customers to your shop door, right? And the sales is basically a function to take money within that shop, right? So the big difference of bringing of customers to that shop though, right? To your shop, uh, and taking the money out of them. So what? So uh, effectively marketing can do a great job of bringing for example thousands of customers to your shop. And um, within the shop you only have 10 people salespeople. How 10 people can actually look at the thousand potential customers. Some of them by the way may be doing window shopping, just kind of interested what's happening there. Okay, Marketing can say well I actually send you all the information about these customers, look at our tools and self thinking, okay, of those thousand customers, do I need to look at all of them, all of their information or I just go directly some of them on kind of on my field and my experience, uh, and kind of approach them and get something, some info and just figure out what's happening. So it's kind of becoming a radical ineffective way because so much info there and people cannot digestify that information in a very reasonable um, time, uh, frame that they need to do a job because sales effectively have a limited time and a target to close it. Um, market has very genuine group of people, maybe generalist message. Uh, uh, so what you do next, basically you may actually think okay I've got just 10 sellers. What about self counters, self serving counters like in a shop, right? In a retail shop you just profile those people and people who are interested in particular saying this is counter for these people, who knows wants in that kind of product. That's counter for the others and that's for the others. And people come there, people play around, look what the product there. And some people by the way, like 60 to 80% of people US saying that they don't want to uh, deal with sellers. So they basically play around, look around, look at the pricing and buy directly from the counter. Okay, that is still a group of people uh, for whom it's not enough. So for example I go to retail shop, right? And there's still a group of people on the counter checkup, right? So on um, the general kind of dealing in the complex cases, for example, you need to return your goods, right? So you cannot do self service checkout, right? You basically need to speak to your customer. So in this case sales becoming more specialized, more helping uh, the customers. But also sales in this case know much better what the customer's coming to with kind of issue. So uh, and that's what deal room is trying to replicate is some kind of self counting and by the way digital deal rooms effectively it's a kind uh, of part of new strategy called buy Enablement new approaches that sales enable. Moving from a sales name or to buy an album if they actually make buyers to buy themselves. Because uh, they don't want to sometimes deal with sales. Because marketeers already are very good to articulate what is there. So because the customers already can check what is a competitors doing and you actually can profile with a tooling specific customers and match it with specific offerings to them. That can be in many cases enough. Uh, so of course it requires a lot of analytics on the background and so on. But it's slightly different tooling approach instead of CRM like big customers like you come into the door, all of them and then you're trying to figure out what to do with them. Right. Okay. You've got all this information but it takes some time to figure out profile them directly somewhere where they customers buy themselves and um, moving the other group of customers who are in more complex sales situation to specific sellers who can deal with them but have better information how to deal with them. Because I have exactly obvious background on the customer and have more timing to deal with them. Uh so that's effectively where kind of I can comparison analysis if I can what digital deal rooms is trying to do. Why it's typical difficult for the others because effectively it's becoming not CRM centric like it is now for many but it's more AI based uh, customer centric in general. So we have to look at the customer first like every marketeer will say and then look at the customers first and bring them to that self service checkout potential rather than just checking the data and trying to figure out data insights uh from enormous number of uh, um, sets. And by the way someone actually attended one of the marketing conference uh for lead generation a month ago. One of marketeers mentioned there's currently about 14,000 Maktech tools in the world. That's enormous amount of tooling that you can.

Speaker B: 14,000.

Speaker A: I don't know how they count. Wow, it's just enormous. So and imagine like sellers and another thing that we're talking about problems working between marketing and sales. Effectively marketeers bring those thousand people to the shop uh door but once they, they need to understand okay, are the right people. They need to have a feedback from salespeople.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Uh, salespeople at this moment cannot provide it in many cases and don't have a time provided because they focus. They're not yeah the targets to sales not provide time uh to marketeers but because they don't know what information they they export because they sometimes just you know um, just go to the first possible or just what they think may be first possible or just you know uh, running like for multiple rabbits, you know trying to pick up any targets they can. Right. And a general thinking of any person to make sales. Okay, I'll try to can just uh reach out as many customers as possible without trying to get. I'll actually focus on somewhere where I can make more money and then look at kind uh of working with someone just to bring them too close to that stage but spending less time on that. So um, and that's another thing. It's a self sufficiency so focusing. So where do I need to focus just to get those things? So in many cases sales just cannot provide that um the way how they work even with information cannot provide that information back to marketing. So if you've got some integrated environment and digital D rooms effectively is kind of integrating environment generally talking uh, that uh may provide you feedback in marketeers actually on selling figures so that you can retail um, uh so you can uh revamp your offerings for the customers uh based on their statistics based on that analytics. So in making marketeers um, uh more equipped with what happening and how they need to adjust their marketing campaign and who they need to reach and marketing channels and so on. So um, it's more kind of unified environment if you wish and that that's kind of a uh focus and also cutting cost effectively and making us quicker. So instead of people calling everyone and saying do you want it just let kind of focus do someone self service checkout and uh and so on. I fortunately I have not still evolving view so I haven't seen digital deal rooms that do complete self service right checkout. So some of them doing some kind of uh good prospect and some of them doing some uh trying of their products some of them pricing. But I still is still evolving trend and maybe that's the reason that people don't pick it up. But the other thing is if you invest in heavily in your CRM infrastructure CRM and tool around CRM to restructure your investment on something new. Obviously it's a challenge and so it would take some time for people to understand how to transition uh to that's for sure.

Speaker B: Excellent. Well Lua, I can probably talk to you about this for about five podcasts worth of information but I'm conscious we are kind of running out of time. So I guess I want to ask you one really really quick question and it's like a simple thing. What would be your one tip around sales Engagement, sales enablement, sorry, that you would give to anyone looking to introduce that functionality within a business.

Speaker A: Focus on what sales need now to make a life for them better.

Speaker B: Love that. Uh, and look, you nail that and I think the rest is. The rest comes with it. Luba, where can people find out more information about you and the work that you're. You're doing at your company?

Speaker A: Uh, so they can connect to me on the LinkedIn, but also, um, I, on my website is www.sales-expand.co.uk or.com um, so. And then engage with me on LinkedIn and so on. So, effectively, yes, I. Helping people to start focusing where they need to be using my frameworks and helping them to assess where they are versus where they're supposed to be and what's where they need to focus to get their life easier for them.

Speaker B: Perfect. Well, look, that's been, uh, genuinely fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for your time. And that's it for today's podcast. We'll be back for more episodes in the future and please remember to check out all the previous episodes which are available on the website. But for now, that's it. Thank you very much.

Speaker A: Thank you.