
The Revenue Insiders · 2026-06-11 · 31 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
40 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Salesforce's $1 billion acquisition of Contentful - a headless content management system used by a third of Fortune 500 companies - marks a strategic pivot toward API-first, flexible go-to-market infrastructure. Unlike traditional CMS platforms, Contentful enables dynamic content assembly from centralized data archetypes, allowing organizations to serve consistent messaging across channels without rigid administrative overhead. This matters because it validates the hosts' earlier prediction that CRMs as they exist today won't survive; teams increasingly demand customization and agility rather than monolithic platform UIs. However, the implementation challenges are substantial. Rev ops and enablement leaders face critical decisions around data governance, content architecture, and process design. The key tension: most organizations run on dirty data and lack the structural discipline to support dynamic content generation at scale. Molina's use of Notion for AI-powered content cleanup, and Jarod's adoption of Gamma with controlled guardrails, illustrate the crawl-walk-run approach required. The hosts also discuss how this reshapes enablement roles - less gatekeeping between product marketing and sales, more emphasis on governance frameworks and critical thinking. Integration with tools like Claude, Clay, and GONG transcripts could create conversational interfaces for RFP generation and sales play delivery, though enablement platforms themselves aren't immediately threatened by this acquisition.
Contentful is a headless, API-driven content management system used by 4,800+ brands (including a third of Fortune 500 companies) that enables dynamic assembly of content from centralized data archetypes. Salesforce acquired it to move away from rigid CRM UIs and enable flexible, customizable go-to-market infrastructure that teams can build and modify without hiring Salesforce administrators.
Most organizations have outdated, fragmented content and dirty data that breaks when exposed to automated content generation. Rev ops must now partner with marketing ops and enablement to design content archetypes and establish governance frameworks - not just track firmographic data - or risk garbage-in, garbage-out problems at scale.
Not in the near term. While Contentful handles content assembly and delivery, enablement platforms still own digital sales rooms, LMS, and sales play orchestration. However, the market is consolidating, and the long-term winner between best-of-breed point solutions and integrated platforms like Salesforce remains uncertain.
Reps should use Contentful as a conversational tool (via Claude or similar AI) to pull brand-approved data, customer firmographic information, and GONG transcripts into customized RFPs or presentations, but with approval checkpoints and governance guardrails to ensure accuracy and brand consistency.
Frame it as consistency in messaging (a CEO concern when marketing spends heavily on brand) and replacement of an outdated manual process (reps building content independently in shadow tools), not as replacement of existing software. It's selling against do-nothing, not against another tool.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode surfaces a few genuine operational observations - pricing data living in multiple places causing customer-facing errors, sales reps creating unsanctioned shadow content, content governance becoming a structural RevOps problem - but is heavily padded with conversational meandering, mutual affirmation, and generic AI readiness advice.
your data now, if you're in the rev op seat is no longer what is like the firmographic data...you have to think about your aged content and content governance now
we can't go and update at scale thousands of pieces of content. It's impossible
A handful of distinctive observations - Spekit's architecture being better aligned to a headless CRM world, the pendulum-swing consolidation thesis, sellers building shadow decks as the baseline rather than an exception - but most takes recycle familiar AI-readiness and clean-data platitudes.
a speck it who is a much smaller enablement platform...is very well aligned to what Contentful does and I think that that type of architecture is going to start to, to rise the surface
we're starting to go one way and we might like it turns out like when you consolidate them all you're not able to use the best of breed of everything and so you're going to go back the other way
No external guests appear; both co-hosts have some practitioner credibility (Highspot, DocuSign background referenced) but the transcript itself provides thin evidence of deep at-scale expertise, and the conversation never gets more specific than anecdote level.
I worked for a content management solution for a very long time...worked for HighSpot, which is one of the largest enablement platforms
when I was at DocuSign and the way we thought about selling it, our biggest competitor was do nothing
The episode earns credit for concrete Contentful metrics, a named acquisition timeline, and specific named tools and prior guests; however, the forward-looking discussion about how these systems would integrate is almost entirely speculative hand-waving without data or named implementations.
They have more than 4,800 brands using Contentful...a third of the Fortune 500
They were actually valued at 3 billion, I think, back in 2021. This is going through at 1 billion
The two-host format produces a handful of pointed prompts - on content governance scope, AI boundaries, seller judgment - but both hosts consistently affirm each other with no genuine pushback or challenge, and the absence of any external guest eliminates the opportunity for productive tension.
as an enablement leader, does the enablement team's job just become content governance?
Is there a line in the sand in which you wouldn't, you would say like, this cannot be done by AI or by a tool that for the sellers on the seller's behalf
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
TLDR: Salesforce just acquired Contentful, and everyone is calling it a marketing story. Kelly and Tiffany make the case that it is actually a sales, enablement, and RevOps story about content becoming AI ready data. Here is what it means for your team before a Salesforce rep calls you this fall. Full Description: Salesforce signed a deal to buy Contentful, a content platform used by more than 4,800 brands including roughly a third of the Fortune 500. The headlines filed it under martech. On this episode, Kelly Lewis and Tiffany Jones turn it into something far more relevant for go-to-market teams: a preview of what happens when your content becomes structured data that AI can assemble on demand. They unpack the strategic logic of the deal, the eye opening down round from a 3 billion dollar valuation in 2021, and why this fits the broader pattern of Salesforce buying its way toward an agentic, headless future. Then they get practical. What does this mean for the enablement leader, the RevOps team, and the seller on the front line?
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker A: Well, Salesforce just bought another company for a billion dollars and your sales team's probably never heard of it.
Speaker B: Yeah. Let's get into it. I'm Tiffany.
Speaker A: And I'm Kelly.
Speaker B: And we are your revenue insiders.
Speaker A: Big news. Salesforce just announced that they are acquiring Contentful.
Speaker B: I had never heard of Contentful before this hit my LinkedIn newsfeed. So I was, like, immediately interested to hear what it was.
Speaker A: I have heard of Contentful before from my friends in marketing, but because of that, this specific acquisition was very interesting to me. And so for those of you who don't know who Contentful is, they are a headless, consumable content management system. So if you are like me, like, what does that mean?
Speaker B: What are those words mean?
Speaker A: Kelly, what do those words mean?
Speaker B: Tell us what those words mean.
Speaker A: So it means that they're really focused on APIs and integration, and Headless means you can use other solutions with it. And we're going to get into why this matters. But this is huge. It shows where companies are making investments these days. So a little bit about them. They have more than 4,800 brands using Contentful.
Speaker B: It's a big company.
Speaker A: It's a huge company and a third of the Fortune 500.
Speaker B: But they're using it for marketing.
Speaker A: They are. I think there are other use cases. Obviously, Salesforce sees a vision for where this is going, and we're going to talk a little bit about what that looks like.
Speaker B: We think it is.
Speaker A: That's, uh, they're a big organization and it says a lot that this is where Salesforce is headed, where they're going. They were actually valued at 3 billion, I think, back in 2021. This is going through at 1 billion. Obviously. No surprise there.
Speaker B: Yeah, Everything is like, it wasn't a
Speaker A: three billion dollar company.
Speaker B: Everyone was a unicorn in 2021.
Speaker A: But still super exciting.
Speaker B: It's fascinating to me for a few reasons. So one, the way that they have taken content and made it like data archetypes is, Is really interesting. We've talked a lot around this topic, but not about it specifically. And then also this validates what we talked about on the podcast, like a year and a half ago that Salesforce, as it exists today, won't, won't in a few years. Like CRMs won't be necessary. You won't need this, like, rigid UI layer that needs all this administrative work. I think Salesforce is validating that by moving in this, like, very headless direction with the acquisitions they've been doing.
Speaker A: Yeah, no, I don't think this acquisition alone means a headless CRM by any means. But I do think it shows that they're recognizing that the consumer, their clients want more. What's the word I'm looking for? They want more customization, flexibility. Thank you. Agility.
Speaker B: They're. They're used to a world of agents now where their teams can just build on the fly. They don't want to hire Salesforce administrators anymore. They don't want to spend the money. And it doesn't mean if you're a Salesforce administrator, your job is going away tomorrow. But it does mean you probably need to think of your skills outside of just a Salesforce certification. And agent force certification probably isn't the right answer either.
Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. So Contentful's whole promise is a dynamic assembly from data and business rules. So I'm obviously very much excited about this and looking at this from the enablement perspective as the sales leader perspective. But from the rev ops seat, is anyone's data really ready for this? Like, I just think about the organizations I work with, organ companies I've been at, like, talk about some dirty data. Like, do you think we're ready for this?
Speaker B: This is the problem. Like any system, any tool, any AI, if you're putting it on top of like terrible data, you're still getting garbage in or garbage out or terrible processes. So when you're thinking about a Contentful, your data now, if you're in the rev op seat is no longer what is like the firmographic data. Do you have all of the right opportunity information being updated? Like, that's not what you're worried about here, which is probably a problem and maybe could be in how you deploy content full, depending on how Salesforce embeds it into their go to market stack. But I do think that you have to think about your aged content and content governance now. You can't just break existing stuff down into these archetypes. Like, that's where your garbage in, garbage out really is. And is that a rev Ops responsibility?
Speaker A: So, no, I don't think it necessarily is. I think they are a partner in it. And one thing that's come up literally this week in client conversations, if you're my client and you're listening to this, you're gonna laugh. Is that when I talk to anyone who has a traditional content management solution, I said, you know, ask like, what's working, what's not working? And they're like, there's just so much old stuff out there. We've rebranded, we have new products, we've renamed things and our functionality has changed, but we can't go and update at scale thousands of pieces of content. It's impossible. And if you listen to last week's episode with Molina, she was using ingeniously and I love this notion to help her find what content's outdated and automatically update it. So I do think contentful is not the answer to the governance, but it is going to require amazing governance on the marketing side and on the sales side when it comes to what is our, what message are we sending to our customer facing teams and our customer.
Speaker B: Yeah. And I think if anything, this is going to force the RevOps team to be more embedded in your marketing ops, product ops and enablement teams, because they have. They understand the structure of all of the data for the rest of the go to market. And you really shouldn't reinvent the box here. Like, you really should use the same type of structure you've been using that your IT team is working with your RepOps team on to think about how you start to like, store or create or what the right layers are. Because it's just, yes, you've thought about demographic data and firmographic data in a marketing ops role, but you haven't had to think about like data in this type of architecture historically.
Speaker A: Uh, we actually had this debate last Friday. I think it was. I don't even know if you remember this. We were talking about the definition of sales ops, rev Ops and go to market ops. And it kind of brings me back to that conversation because I'm just a strong believer and I see this in more organizations I work with today, that you should have marketing ops as part of your RevOps team because they are one and there's so much, um, data that flows back and forth.
Speaker B: It's a very, that's a very spicy take that you.
Speaker A: It's a very spicy take. And Tiffany may not agree with me and I think she thinks I'm maybe just a little too far ahead in my thoughts there.
Speaker B: Yeah, I don't think that we should rabbit hole ourselves on RevOps versus marketing ops. Uh, sales ops. First, there's so many ops teams, but they do have to work together. And so whether you're part of the same broader organization or you're spl between different leaders that you roll up to, it's really important that you work together to structure your data correctly. So yes, you have garbage in, garbage out. Everyone has that problem. No one should pretend that they don't. And there's no, like, you know, I've worked with CEOs, they're like, well if we were a startup like we would, everything would be perfect because you would design it perfectly. You would not. You'd be moving too fast to design things. Like you need to move with speed as well. And so don't fool yourself into thinking someone has it better off from the start. Everyone's struggling with this and, and you're just extending it to a different type of data now.
Speaker A: Yeah, I think one example that's really exciting to me is pricing. So today pricing lives in your CRM, in your quoting tool, but then there are marketing assets and client facing assets where your pricing lives as well. And I've seen so many instances where the wrong price gets put in front of a customer just because it's sitting on a marketing asset and it doesn't match what's in the CRM. And so I do think this is a great example of uh, with Contentful. If you're able to pull from this single source of truth for things like
Speaker B: that, your website huge. Well take it one step further. Forget cpq. Salesforce is sunsetting it anyways. You're just going to build your quotes from that same pricing artifact. So nothing.
Speaker A: I sure hope so.
Speaker B: So I do think there's a big future for go to market. But let's talk about the AI of it all. I think Kelly, I'd love to get your perspective. We're layering AI and systems on top of everything these days. Yeah, you just mentioned Molina, who we had a great conversation with, uh, who works at Clay and how they're using notion from an AI perspective to do some level of their content governance. Do you think introducing this much AI into content is going to, is really going to make things faster at first or are things going to get messier, out of control when you give it into the hands of more of the go to market?
Speaker A: Great question. I think it gets better, uh, but not right away. And it goes back to exactly what we were just talking about, which is the governance piece. I think if you're going to layer a really powerful tool like this on top of your data and your data's messy, you're going to have a lot of problems and there's a risk of sellers putting things out there that you don't want them to do. I think our jobs change as enablers, supporting teams to the sales team. Yes. Because I do think we spend a lot more time as we should thinking about governance.
Speaker B: I think it also will highlight a process gap that exists. So you have a ton of sales reps out there right now who are creating their own content. They're doing it.
Speaker A: No, they're not. Not. They're just using the deck I created for them.
Speaker B: They're not. Kelly. Sorry. They're creating their own content in Canva or in, you know, their own little website apps. They're, you know, super creative and creating their own apps. Like, they're out there creating content and so now you're giving them the tools to do it. So great. Like, don't have them doing it in a shadow environment. Control the information. So you're taking a great step in that direction. But the reality you'll then face is that you probably don't have a process for, like, does it need to be approved? What content should they put together? Like, there are going to be process gaps. And so again, this is where I think there's a strong partnership in a lot of the ops functionalities to figure out what this process should look like. Don't fix what exists. This is totally new for you. What should the process look like for them to be able to build content at scale using a tool like this?
Speaker A: And I think there's some great examples of this and I think there's some companies that will be ready to do this at scale faster. For example, um, old PMM that I used to work with, vp, uh, he's a cmo, uh, now Jarod, he uses Gamma. And Gerard, when I worked with him, was very controlling of his content. He's been on our podcast. Yeah, he's very controlling of his. He was, I should say, was very controlling of his content in the right way because he wanted the right message out there and he wanted, he didn't want things being created by the sales reps. Totally correct. He was one of the first I saw in that space to adopt Gamma and say, you know what? Actually, as long as you have some controls and I can see what you're putting out there, I'm actually really comfortable with it. And it was a huge unlock, uh, for him and his team. And so I think organizations like that who have started to make these steps contentful is the next step. But I do think this is a crawl, walk, run. This is not a turn it on. Just make it happen. Let's see what happens.
Speaker B: So as an enablement leader, does the enablement team's job just become content governance? Like, right now, a lot of enablement teams do react it real fast.
Speaker A: Ah.
Speaker B: A lot of enablement teams sit in the space between, like, product marketing and sales, where, like, they're forced to Just deliver like they are the gatekeepers of content that product marketing is pushing or sales is asking for. And they become like that, that midpoint that controls the friction on both sides. So if you remove that, because now you have product marketing is creating data architects, archetypes and maybe enablement is too. Does their role become much heavier in content governance than it is today?
Speaker A: So yes, I did have a quick reaction because like, the idea of doing governance as my full time job is very nauseating to me. Uh, I'm sure some people love it, not me. Do I think. Yes. It becomes more important than something you are absolutely thinking about on a daily basis.
Speaker B: Yes.
Speaker A: But I also think there is sometimes a misunderstanding that when marketing creates messaging, that's the messaging the sales team uses and it's not. You have to translate it.
Speaker B: I see. Episode after all.
Speaker A: Sorry. Turns out. So if you were. I did two trainings on this this week, uh, with teams and we discussed, you know, we launched this new amazing marketing message, these new story arcs that were beautiful and so impactful and don't work in real life and no do
Speaker B: in a formal presentation or like in a silo. Yeah.
Speaker A: But like don't work in a conversation when someone walks up to the trade show booth. Doesn't work on the phone, doesn't work over email. And so I spent these sessions helping sales team, not me, them translate the marketing message into their own message. So it feels really authentic. That is where I don't still understand how this works. Like, is there a flexible layer that lets you take the marketing message, run it through your own voice? I know I have a cloud skill. You do too.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker A: And then also have a checkbox to say, yeah, this is close enough to the original that we're comfortable with it going out the door. Or not.
Speaker B: Yeah. I would imagine there's a world in which you build what you are comfortable delivering from a visual perspective. And that visual style with branding, coloring and fonts is like your own as a salesperson and then you're just pulling in the right data instead of like hunting it for it and like a data library and like recreating your own stuff. And yeah, I do think there has to be some level of checks and balances on what's going out the door. But the reality is there isn't today. And so I wouldn't be scared to implement something like this when Salesforce extends it. Because you have to be honest that if you're not providing a tool to do it, your teams are doing it on their own. They are not Using the out of the box things that you've given them. I've, I don't know how many times I've stumbled upon a deck that a sales team, like, I'm in a QBR and a sales team is using slides and I'm like, oh, though I'm like in the middle of the QBR and you can't say anything because the customer's there and you're like, those are very old. Like, I wish I would have seen this before you put this together. And so you do, you do have some level of more control once you introduce this and you give the sales team an easier path to do what they were already doing. And so they're going to adopt it naturally, uh, because it's easier to get their end result too.
Speaker A: Yeah. I remember, uh, being in a meeting, I think it was like 20, 20, 2021 and someone had the little copy right in the corner so you can tell how old the slides are. And it was like 2012. And I was like, okay, it's, we should move on from that deck. We've gotten better. But my question for you, my next question for you is, let's talk about RFPs are something that have a lot of technical information that needs to be really correct. They have pricing information that needs to be really correct, but they also need to be really personalized. Every question that you get from a customer doesn't come in the same. And so I'm, I'm trying to just think of this. Logistically, Contentful feels like a way to make the RFP process easier, but it still requires that critical thinking. And so like, if you are putting this into a process, how do you create?
Speaker B: Yeah, I think that you're, you know, say you're a native, like you're natively adopting things at a faster pace. You're using kind of like the breadth of the best tools out there. And I don't know how Contentful will eventually like, what it will connect to and what you'll use. But say there's a world in which you are using Claude to say, I have a RFP that I need to put together. Here's all the things about the customers. Ideally, that's pulling from clay or some sort of firmographic data source. It's pulling and demographic data source. It's pulling from your CRM or GONG transcripts or, or all the live content you have from a sales process perspective and it's pulling that data from Contentful. So that's the missing piece. So you can store SE level data Company level data. It doesn't just have to be marketing level data and something like this. So if you have all of those pieces and maybe you don't need to store them in contentful Claude becomes like the conversation you have. So then you say like here, nope, I actually need to talk to this person. No, that's not right. You need to be the critical thinker as the user in the conversation. It's not press a button, it is a conversation conversation for sure. And then a skill takes all that information and builds it in a Canva or a Google Doc or whatever. Like your source of output is using all the brand colors and like the process. So I think that's the, the critical thinking I think in all things we do is going to start coming in in the way you have a conversation with the data and so a Claude or a OpenAI ChatGPT, those are going to be the interfaces where I think you have it and it'll be when you just asked for it and don't review it, that's where you're going to get the garbage in, garbage out because you didn't put enough critical thought into what you were, you were getting. And I think you'll see you'll probably be able to in some um, meta See the RFPs you've won against the length of the conversation. People have start to compare.
Speaker A: So I'm thinking ahead, this acquisition is supposed to go through in Q3 of AH fiscal year 27 for them which is going to be this fall, um, based on their fiscal um, year. So we've got some time but pretty soon your salesforce rep is going to be calling you.
Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A: Well legally I don't know if they can but yeah, they're going to be calling you and pushing this a little bit, I'm sure. And I'm thinking if I'm an enablement person or I'm a sales leader or I'm in marketing, like absolutely, sign me up. I'm very excited right now. If I am a rev ops leader, I know that I've got to go justify this to the CFO likely and I need to understand what from my tech stack goes away. How do I justify this? How are you? How would you think about that?
Speaker B: Yeah, I don't think it's something in your tech stack goes away and I think that that's a hard conversation especially for a lot of people in this environment. I realistically this is a net new ad for more accurate data out to your, your clients, to your prospective clients on your website. More consistency. Which CEOs care about CEOs who especially who are brand oriented CEOs. That's the like, that's what you need to hit. It's like this is going to start to guarantee consistency in messaging, which is really important when you're paying an entire marketing team to create that consistency and then can't uphold it. And so that's the uh, that's one of the inflection points I would use. And the second one is like the maybe tired like ROI of the sales reps time. Like the reality is they're doing this themselves and so let's just give them tools to do it. You're not replacing an existing tool, you're replacing a process that's outdated. I think about like when I was at DocuSign and the way we thought about selling it, our biggest competitor was do nothing because you could just stay on paper and fax machines until Covid hit and then it was a different story. But you're essentially like you're not, you're not replacing another tool. You're replacing do nothing.
Speaker A: Totally. I think I m might have a little different spin on it than you. Because of my background, I worked for a content management solution for a very long time.
Speaker B: I wanted to ask for the high spot.
Speaker A: Yeah, um, I feel like I have to talk about it because everyone's gonna be curious about my thoughts on this. So obviously worked for HighSpot, which is one of the largest enablement platforms. Their original offering to the market was a content management solution. It's a lot bigger than that now. The other competitor who they're actually merging with is seismic. But they've. You've got show pads out there, you've got big tin can, a Lego. There's a lot of different offerings in this market. And so when I heard this news, my initial gut reaction is does this mean there's not a need for an enablement platform? And my answer is going to be not yet. And the reason for that is there's so much more in your enablement platform that you can't buy best of breed solutions for yet.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker A: That meet the need and don't make your rep jump around to 100 places. So things I'm thinking about are your digital sales rooms. They are such a powerful tool. If you're not using them, call me. We should talk. You need to be using digital sales rooms. They're so important. And then there's things like your lms. Um, I do still think there's a need for lms. Does it look Very different. And does the content within that LMS look very different? I sure hope so. Uh, those are things. And then the idea of like a sales play. How do you provide a sales play to a rep? I think content can be delivered directly through Slack or through teams. But when you want someone to follow a process or look at an SOP or understand a true sales play, that to me currently still lives in your enablement platform.
Speaker B: Yeah, and I think we haven't talked about this. I agree with you. I do still think that there's a space for enablement platforms. I think that we are in this flux of we kind of. We thought that everything would happen in ChatGPT or Claude and then everyone started specializing their AI solutions. So we went from like every founder was doing like generic AI to like now you're doing really specific tasks. And I think one of the things we're seeing with Salesforce is some of these bigger companies are trying to buy all those small pieces and so we're seeing this consolidation again happen of people trying to say like okay, you can do all your go to market things in Salesforce. You don't need a solution for each, each one. I don't know what's going to win out there. I think we're in a bit of a pendulum swing where like it's we're starting to go one way and we might like it turns out like when you consolidate them all you're not able to use the best of breed of everything and so you're going to go back the other way. So I'm not sure where we're going to land there or if we'll land somewhere anytime soon. So I do think an enablement tool is still helpful. I think that high spot seismic. A lot of these are behind the ball though and how they've architected their tools realistically I think a speck it who is a much smaller enablement platform like we've both read the Melanie's book is very well aligned to what Contentful does and I think that that type of architecture is going to start to, to rise the surface. So whether it's speck it or other players or HighSpot transforms their architecture to look more like that. I do think moving from AI as a co pilot to like your, your data that you're putting in your tool is AI ready like Contentful is is who's going to win out at the end of the day.
Speaker A: It's so fascinating. So Forrester just came out with their enablement uh wave that they, they do spec it was actually not super high on the list in terms of vision.
Speaker B: Oh, interesting.
Speaker A: But that was before an announcement like this. And so all of these standard things that us, uh, procuring new solutions would go to as like, what are the analysts saying? They're like outdated within like two weeks. It's crazy.
Speaker B: Yeah, it is crazy. And we're definitely guessing on how Salesforce is going to position. Totally. I mean, they have a whole marketing platform. They might be thinking of this as like just the marketing side of the play, but it was just once we saw the announcement and started talking about it, it felt like such an obvious move for a go to market system. That's really going to change the way you think about how you're assembling a lot of the things you're doing. So it's, it's interesting. Okay, you took my high spot question I was going to ask you. I agree that they're fine for now.
Speaker A: They're fine for sure, but everyone's only fine for now. Really?
Speaker B: Yeah. So we were talking about this a little bit earlier, but I want to poke at it a bit more. We talked about the how the seller's judgment is now just going to play such a more obvious role. Maybe not bigger than it is today, but obvious because you're setting your process up that way. Enablement isn't just content governance. How do you train their judgment now?
Speaker A: I'm doing it a lot.
Speaker B: Okay.
Speaker A: So good news is sellers for the last 10 years have been really focused on value selling. It doesn't mean everyone's doing it, but it means that there's enough training out there. And this comes from really thorough discovery. And so if there's one skill you're going to get really, really good at when it comes to sales, it's going to be discovery. Because that's how you make the critical thinking and how you adapt something. The critical thinking on is it okay if I adapt? It is a different question. And I think there's going to have to be some governance around it at first because I just don't think, you know, until you've done it wrong or someone's pointed out where you're doing it wrong. And so this is maybe where the role of an SE looks a little different, uh, in terms of. Or maybe you have agents that are running in the background saying, can you sweep this to make sure I didn't do anything grossly inaccurate here. Um, but critical thinking, we've talked about the importance of a salesperson over and over again like that. I don't think it goes away. And I think the critical thinking and the EQ component increases. And part of that is understanding. Like I still need to be very truthful in my answer and so am I overextending by putting the answer I
Speaker B: do think, I mean it is. We've talked about this a lot for salespeople and the emotional intelligence side of things. Critical thinking is the other thing that is, that is a must have more and more as AI takes on more processes. And it's true beyond just sales teams. I think that the people who continue to be successful and grow their career are very high in emotional intelligence and very high in critical thinking. And you can sometimes mask one with the other and be really high in one area. We've all worked with those people. There are plenty of, uh, founders out there that are very, very smart and very good at critical thinking and making decisions and rank very low in the emotional intelligence sector and makes it difficult to work with them. But when you think about being very successful, I think that those are the combination of the two things. Regardless of your role, when you need to, to work with AI. We've had, I mean I, I don't know how many episodes we're at, uh, total, I think, but 75% of them. We've talked about an AI solution that's taking over a go to market process. And like here we are with another one. Is there a line in the sand in which you wouldn't, you would say like, this cannot be done by AI or by a tool that for the sellers on the seller's behalf.
Speaker A: Yes. And I think this continues to come up too is like, what is that line? And that's always going to be a moving goal post. Um, bring it back to the Molina episode. If you have not listened last week's episode, please go back and listen. Because one thing that she's doing that's really unique is she's telling people, you cannot put things. We're not going to automate putting things in your CRM until you've proven you can do it as a human and critically think about it. And I love that. And I think this is true for that same question. If you can prove to me that I know that you're looking back at what AI is producing with a critical eye, I'm totally fine with it. Actually. You can automate a lot of these things. The things that I think have to be very personal and have to represent the person are those buyer interactions.
Speaker B: I was going to say the same thing. I think that the, the buyer Interactions like, you've had this experience in trying to buy tools for our small companies. We're the bottom of the barrel P for everyone.
Speaker A: We are SMB people.
Speaker B: We are, we are micro SMB. Uh, it's just the two of us. But I do think that while there's like all this talk around, like, we won't need sales people anymore, people exist. They will continue to exist. And people want to interact with people. And so I think that's where, like, you have to be a good listener. You have to be, you have to do discovery questions. You have to have an emotional intelligence because people want to have a real conversation. They don't want to talk to like a robot version of a person either. Like, you can't just parrot exactly what your enablement team told you to say. You got to make it your own.
Speaker A: Totally. Okay, well, we covered a lot of ground here. I want to reiterate a couple things. This is definitely a Martech headline that we turned into an enablement rev ops headline. And we did it on purpose because there's something there. There's something there. And we think it's Salesforce isn't thinking about it, which I'm sure they are. I hope they are. Um, we should all be thinking about how do we use these solutions that were built for a certain subset of individuals and government to market and how can we utilize them across the entire, um, group of individuals and roles and responsibilities.
Speaker B: If you're going to buy a tech stack, use it to the full potential. And there's definitely potential here.
Speaker A: The other thing we talked about a lot was the importance of clean data and governance. If you're not thinking about this, yeah,
Speaker B: this is where you should be hiring. This is where you should be. You should have someone on your team at this point because, uh, you are going to interact with an AI solution if you're not already somehow. And you have, have to have governance and clean data. And so this is where you prioritize people. If you are getting a headcount in your planning and you're, you're thinking about another generalist, don't rev Ops enablement, whatever. Think about someone that's going to help support the data structures and cleanliness and keeping it up to date.
Speaker A: Totally. And then if you're in enablement, I think the question we continue to come back to on every episode is how are you helping your teams critically think? How are you helping them think differently?
Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's a rev Ops responsibility as well. Don't you know, if. Whether you're taking the tickets or you have an agent taking the tickets. Don't just always do everything for the sales team. How do you help them realize what they could have done differently? Yes, it takes more time. Sometimes they're grumpy and it feels like they're mad at you or yelling at you on Slack. They're probably not. That's just how written words come across sometimes. I think that in all the roles that support the sales motion, being being thoughtful about how you help people think critically or solve problems for themselves is going to get your entire revenue motion that much further along, that much faster.
Speaker A: Absolutely. Okay, one last question for you. The question we ask every guest what is a point of view question that the listener should be asking themselves?
Speaker B: I want even for myself to go back and think about what would good data archetypes look like if I was using a contentful. What are the. What are the pieces of data? I would think about splitting up all my information into. How would that, what would that look like? Because the governance is what you need first. So. So go back and think about how your content, whatever it is, wherever it sits, how would you break it down so that it's very usable and start thinking about, you know, whether it's contentful or there's other tools that kind of make their way into the go to market space. I think being ready for it just, it's going to come eventually, whether it's this or something else.
Speaker A: Absolutely. Okay. Well, thank you for a great episode. This was fun. A little bit different than our normal, uh, we even had to have notes this time, which we don't normally do.
Speaker B: But I love a highlighter though.
Speaker A: We wanted to make sure we got through, um, and had all the facts straight on this one. So. Thank you, Tiffany.
Speaker B: Thanks, Kelly. This is great. I love our studio. It's working today.
Speaker A: I know. We actually got our studio up and working. You shouldn't two days ago. It was brutal. Guys, it's not good. Um, if you are not following us or have you have not given us a rating on your preferred platform, please do that. We are on Spotify, we are on Apple, we are on YouTube is a great way if you actually want to watch us live. Um, yeah.
Speaker B: Thank you.
Speaker A: Thanks.
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