From enablement to sales performance engineering, with Okta's Lauren Silvers

Welcome to the Sales Compensation show where we share the latest sales performance insights through in depth discussion with experts. Season three of our show is your backstage pass to discovering how today's most successful sales and revenue ops teams support go to market strategy and improve sales performance. Plus, we'll explore what we can learn about incentives from different industries more broadly. Subscribe to hear how leaders are unlocking new growth, implementing the latest compensation trends and their priorities for improving go to market performance. I'm your host CPU CEO of Form AI Vil Alzam Lauren. It's great to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for inviting me. I'm really excited to be here. I always ask a career question first and especially with someone with your background. I always find everyone has their own unique perspective given where they started. But yeah, I would love to learn more about how you found your way into the world of sales ops and sales transformation. Yeah, so I think of myself as helping companies achieve sustainable growth by optimizing sales productivity. Right now I lead sales transformation globally at Okta and I have had a very portfolio career that I think has actually set me up for success in really interesting ways. So I started out actually in New York City in the fashion industry and I was doing like pure business development and contract negotiation. Like, you know, I was representing different talent and like hooking them up with contracts with like Procter and Gamble and for like hair and makeup, you know, deals. And then 911 happened and I kind of questioned everything and I said I think I want to go back and get my PhD in Comparative Literature. And so I really thought at that moment that I was going to devote my life to academia. And I did for a number of years, for about a decade. However, at the time literature was kind of a sadly dying discipline and there were no jobs. So I had to support myself. And so I went across the street and started hanging out with the MBAs. And I said, teach me me everything, you know what my super skill is learning. And so I learned case interviewing and I just immersed myself in the world of strategy consulting and reinvented myself as a strategy consultant. And my explicit focus as I went to a boutique firm was on organic revenue growth, doing everything from building sales processes that mapped onto buying processes to rebalancing territories to building competency models. And ultimately that brought me to enablement. And then via enablement. I've also been in revenue operations for the last last four or five years, not at Okta, but prior to that. So I'm a real systems Thinker. And I think that's really the through line through a lot of what I've been able to grit and systems thinking, I think have set me up for success in my current role and career. I would be interested to understand, like, how your perspective and, and your experience in literature and just having, you know, being that kind of a. The CEO to your point of your own career in the world of academia, what have you found gives you a different perspective than others in the space of sales ops and sales transformation? Because of that background. Yes. I would go back to the critical thinking piece. So I taught undergraduates and graduate students how to think critically, how to look at a text. And when I say text, it could be any, like a text, a building as a text. Right. It's anything that you can read and read into a deck is a text. A room with political dimensions is a text. Right. So always having that critical thinking cap on and being able to really pay attention, get curious, look at things kind of impassively and objectively and being able to tease out, you know, different nuances and really develop an understanding based on that critical acumen and intellectual focus, like I think is really important now. So I would say critical thinking and also, again, systems thinking. So comparative literature is actually a discipline that compares all different disciplines that don't normally talk to one another. So that is very similar to coming in as an enablement professional and building relationships with marketing team and leaders, building relationships with sales leaders, revenue operations, engineering data, and really trying to understand how do they operate and what drives them, what motivates them, what their priorities are. And then really trying to think about how do you build an operating system for behavior change and transformation, leveraging these different bodies. Right. One of the things I've taken away is how humans, you know, we think about like, oh, 200 years ago, you're just, you just naturally assume that we're just so much more sophisticated. But humans were humans back then. And you read some of these, like, you know, these works from 2, 300, 500 years ago, whatever it is. I think probably the thing that I've taken away is they had the same, you know, similar lives, similar takeaways. And the element of kind of comparing, I imagine, different aspects of literature and bringing it together, I imagine give you a very unique perspective as you approach the problems that you're. You're facing. I think it does. I will share one thing with you. So, like you talked about, I mean, there's ancient literature, like Plato, you know, wrote all of his dialogues. He wrote this Dialogue. I think it's the phaedrus I'm like, trying to remember. And Socrates is talking about how writing is a technology. The Greek word for that is techne, which means like, techne is like skill or technology in Greek. In ancient Greek. And he says that writing is going to destroy memory. And they thought memory was the most important aspect of the self and like the mind. And he said, if we have things that we can, if we can write things down, people are just going. Their memory is just going to go away. And so you see this playing out today with AI. Like, if we just use AI, you know, our critical judgment, everything's going to go out the window and we're just going to be like these, I don't know, embodied blobs, right, with like no brain, no mind. And so it's really interesting to like, compare what's happening now to like, the history of technology and the fears around technology. So it's, it's very interesting. I love it. And I actually think, I think this is the point of I was making around, like, I really love, you know, the occasional time when I do read older stuff because it's highlights to you that the problems we're facing today are not that different. And you can actually glean a lot of wisdom. Okay. So jumping back to, you know, sales transformation and the space, sales transformation is so broad. I always find it's a very different role, different organization. But just stepping back and thinking about sales transformation specifically, if you walked into a room, your new company, new CRO, and they asked you, like, what actually needs to change? What's a framework that you've. You use to approach to uncover what needs to change or, you know, the kind of the top three priorities. You know, a lot of times this is driven by the board. The board has certain expectations. Perhaps the, you know, sales organization, commercial organization, is not meeting those expectations or not meeting them to the level that the board would appreciate. And there's like stagnant growth or win rates are down, or there's too much churn and NRR is down. So there's typically like these lagging indicators that would precipitate the need for sales transformation. But I always look at, is sales execution all over the place, right? Is it being done differently in different regions and different teams? Is there an opportunity to standardize? Are people leading with the right behaviors that drive the right outcomes? Often when you come into a sales transformation program, there's not even the data that tells you what behaviors people are leading with, and you have no Way of really tying those to outcomes. So doing the analysis and really understanding what are people doing to today and is it driving those outcomes? Is it not? Is there an opportunity to do things differently and better? And then finally I would say developing like a fact based system where you look at pipeline, you analyze it. Is the pipeline efficient? Right. Are people, you know, chasing the right opportunities? What is a stage conversion between stages? Are there opportunities there to optimize that? What do close rates look like? What do retention and renewal and upsell cross sell rates look like? So really looking at all of the sales performance data and formulating a thesis on where there's opportunities to, you know, just get curious around what can we do differently? And then finally like understanding what has been the organization's relationship to change up until that point. Because a lot of times when I've been brought in to lead change, there's been a lot of change already. And so people already have change fatigue. So you have to be sensitive and empathic to you know, what is actually going on, what has been going on and how can you land change in a way that's going to be adopted and embraced. Yeah, it's always what can actually be changed given. Yes. Other concerns. Yeah, well, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. And I think it is always a problem of prioritization. I thought. I like that kind of framing it of like hey, what's actually important to the most? You know, the stakeholders that are defining the direction of the business, the board. Right. The leadership and then going from there. So I'm curious like how you know from across your career and you've worked across numerous different organizations of in different markets but obviously within the tech space, like fast growing organizations, I guess. What are some of the lessons that you've, you've taken through the experiences you've had those organizations? I find that in pretty much most organizations that I've worked at, like the enablement team, the marketing team, sales ops, operations, we're all siloed from one another even, even in the very much smaller organizations and we're all focused on our own work. We're. It's very self serving and I've always come in and really tried to operate very cross functional and it's really hard when you come in and those cross functional relationships have not actually been built ever. Right. And they need to be built and people operate very differently. They don't quite want to understand one another because they're not motivated to understand one another. It is very, I agree, like it's set up so separate in terms of functions on the HR side, the finance, the product engineering. And so when those communication lines have not been opened, I guess, like how do you approach closing that gap? It's in a critical step if you're going to get everyone moving in the same direction. I think one of the best tactics that you can do to open up those lines of communication is try to understand how can you empower people to do their best work to help you. So I always think about how do I empower pmm, right. Instead of delegating to them or asking them to do something differently, how do I empower them meeting with them? You know, I'm trying to think of like a good example, like we just launched a big sales methodology. Right. Right at at Okta. And this means that PMM can't deliver their you typical bill of materials. Right. But they will often try to certify people on pitches, which is really just two to three minute monologue talking at the customer, which we know that in real sales conversations the best reps, probably the untenured reps would, you know, launch into the monologue and have a slide deck and rely on that. But the best reps are going to internalize that and then use it deftly in discovery. But I always see the job of enablement as like we should be helping drive the behaviors, like I said, that drive the outputs and the outcomes versus giving them the information, training them on it, and having them like the reps, essentially, you know, figure out how to translate it. So with our PMM team, like we pulled them together and we asked them, you know, if we were going to have you think about changing your bill of materials to better align with the methodology. You know, we obviously brought them along the journey so they knew what it was, but they didn't know how to do it. How do we bring your leaders together and what do you need in order to do that? Well, and how can we make sure that you are, you feel empowered to own that as well? So we've been working with them to do that. You know, they want kind of before and after examples. They want gems that we've built for them to make their job easier. And they also want our support as knowledge, you know, as subject matter experts to, to help them be better at adopting the methodology and using it to deliver better outputs for them. And I do feel like it is getting at the heart of like, what is the, what are their leaders incentivizing them and individual teams. Yeah, and kind of broaching, like broaching that ideally you have Kind of a buy in from the very top of like hey, this is a single problem. It's across the board and we need to be thinking about it holistically. But it's not, it's so easy to be siloed because as through the layers like different the PMM team probably reports to someone differently than the, you know, the transformation that you're going through. And so now you have to basically bridge that gap across the. Bridge that gap across the board. But through your careers you kind of have seen organizations do that well versus not like what have been the biggest unlocks to bring people together and actually like move the needle in one direction. So I can't take credit for this because I didn't invent this process. But what I've seen work the best is actually how. Are you familiar with force management? Yeah, great company that offers a methodology called command of the message. They have a tried and true process that they follow that has been proven to work and it's something that I actually do no matter what the transformation is. And that is starting at the top at your executives, making sure you have buy in with a really strong, strong business case. But also like pulling the executives together cross functionally and essentially aligning product marketing and sales around common messaging, common strategy and common execution plan. When you have executives bought in and actually actively working through and debating like what is our strategy, what is our positioning, what is our messaging, what are we trying to accomplish, what outcomes are we trying to drive. They will sponsor the initiative with their respective teams. Then we take it down one more layer where we get representatives from across the business, but also across all different functions and pulling them together to basically build out that messaging and build out the methodology. And so everyone who's really, you have to very obviously choose those people very wisely and strategically. But those people feel so highly invested in what they've built because they've co created it. Essentially then you have change agents throughout the entire business, not just in sales, not just in the stakeholder groups that you're trying to train, but like across the business cross functionally. So that's why when we talk about sales ops and rev ops and technology data and insights, which is like our business technology team and our PMM team and marketing, their executives are bought in. Right. And then you need to go the secondary tertiary levels and make sure that they understand how to apply and utilize the methodology to do their jobs better as well. That connectivity at the top and then bring like digging one one layer deeper is so critical because you need to get alignment on strategy and objectives. And it really is a prioritization thing like, okay, yeah, this is more important than this, but how much more important is it? Two to one? Is it, you know, and then, and then you kind of cascade that down all the way to, to everything else. I'm curious on something else. So everything comes down to incentives, right? Every team is incentivized to deliver something and if it's like bringing it all together in the hope of aligning those incentives for the bigger business outcome, how do you think about timelines when it comes to sales transformation? But more like when you're bringing the executives together in a room and kind of aligning on that strategy and when I say incentives, it's really like their KPIs, whatever metrics that matter to them. And you think about like, oh, okay, like doing a project where okay, I can actually move the needle on one part of the sales transformation in six months, but the right way to do it, I might not see any results until year one and a half. And how do you get people to buy into the different timelines of taking on these map these big transformations? Something that I do is I always try to bring the executives together to basically co create what I call the change story vision, which is not just like, hey, we're trying to produce X outcome and maybe it's three years in the future from now, but let's step in that future and let's talk about what that looks like, like what that feels like, right? And what we believe. And so being able to really produce a very cross functional, aligned, holistic vision of what the future looks like and then work backwards and say, how did we get there? What did we see along the way? You have to build the roadmap for change and that also becomes your measurement roadmap as well. And so doing that up front versus like doing it while you're preparing for the launch or like while you're building a dashboard or some other compelling event is always the best approach because then you're getting everyone bought into that long timeline. And also the timelines that you are agreeing to, right? And then you have these signposts along the way, right? And kind of stage gates where you say, okay, we said we were going to be here right at year one, let's assess, where are we? And then you have kind of a QBR to assess. And then you can basically say we need to do X, Y, Z differently. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So you're basically aligning on kind of much Longer term strategy and then bringing it back to kind of tactical measurements and tracking at a, at a shorter cadence. Yeah, but I would also say it's not just a long term strategy because I feel like a lot of people do that. It's really stepping into that future and trying to get like a concrete, tangible like understanding of what that looks and feels like. So what are managers doing differently? Right. It's not so much like what is an NRR is increased by 25% or like churn is decreased by 20%. It's what does like customer loyalty look like and feel like too. So it's getting at that from a very, almost experiential, you know, visual embodied, almost experience. So people get really attached to those and invested in those outcomes. Exactly. So it's like on a day to day level, this is how we want managers coaching against these things in the future in order to drive these outcomes and then working back from there. Obviously we're, you know, you think about the, the path that we're going right now. I imagine, you know, again, AI transformation, like this is like the forefront of everything we're doing, I guess as a enablement and sales transformation. Professional, sales ops, professional, like what should everyone be focusing on right now to ensure that they're future proofing their careers ultimately? Oh yeah, such a great, great question. A lot of people in my field, which is enablement, have really honed their craft in teaching and learning and training. And they are learning professionals. They understand the neuroscience of learning and they're very attached to delivering training programs that stick, that drive behavior change and they're really, really great at that. I want to say that people still need to be great at that because training and learning, especially in person, is going to be even more important in the age of AI. However, I do think that if you are going to have a career in five years, you need to learn everything about AI and you need to be a systems thinker. Right. Because I think enablement is moving in a similar direction to like go to market engineering, which has been pioneered by Clay. I think enablement is going to be more like performance engineering, like sales performance engineering. And so you have to understand, you know, what is driving productivity, where are there roadblocks to productivity across different systems, tools, people and processes? And how do you optimize productivity and remove those roadblocks and remove things from people's plates that they don't necessarily, necessarily have to do because it's stifling their productivity. And so I think there's this Gartner Stat that people always refer to these days that I think only 27% of a reps or an AES day is actually devoted to customer facing and selling activities or revenue generating activity. And so that means that the majority of their day is you know, devoted to attending trainings, attending meetings like administrative burden and tasks. So to the degree that we can remove all of that from a rep's plate by leveraging AI and understanding how agentic AI works and like essentially building systems that scale and that actually increase productivity, I don't see a lot of enablement professionals doing that unless they're on a RevOps team. But I think that's a huge opportunity for enablement professionals. I couldn't agree more. I think it's funny enough, I actually have seen this with some of our customers where sales enablement and RevOps are kind of of joining hands or get working much closer together and the teams are kind of becoming embedded. But the productivity gain and what you look at what AI is going to do is no different than what every other technology has done, right? You go back 50 or 60 years, a seller may have had one or two big meetings a week that they would have to go travel to meet you in person, whatever. And it's like, and now all of a sudden, you know, a seller in tech can be on three meetings a day if you can get them loaded up that efficiently. And that's like order of magnitude change in productivity compared to 40, you know, years ago, 50 years ago you would work back your math or you'd be like, okay, well X number of meetings a day means X number of meetings a week. If X number per x percent converts, okay then I'm expecting you to convert, you know, to get one close, one deal a month. And now you build off your kind of your targets and everything that way. But if all of a sudden we can increase the most valuable time that we're paying for for a seller is be in front of the customer and actually solve customer problems and run that process. And you can do that eight hours a day because AI workflows and everything sets up and supports in the background. Or you can minimize the time to onboard and training through more effective materials that's personalized for a single seller, et cetera. You can now imagine how much more productive a selling organization can be. It's not just optimizing productivity so they can fill those eight hours with back to back customer calls, but also when we remove all that administrative burden, repetitive tasks off people's plate, building in focus time, reflection time, Critical thinking time. Right. So they can better prepare for their customer meetings and do better research and leverage all the AI tools to really come up with a point of view that will be disruptive and or provide value for the stakeholders that they're meeting with. So I do think that like the future is how do we make sure that reps can do their best work because they have time to prepare and because they have time to do that, the future of sales is going to be a hundred percent agentic. And there's not many sales reps. I'm like, that's crazy. I think salespeople are the most like one of the most protected. Like people buy from humans. It's an emotional purpose and then they justify with logic and it's a, it's not a cost thing. It never has been. Right. Like what I mean by that is, oh, it just gotten, you know, we just increased productivity by sellers. So I'm going to have less sales reps. You're going to be like, no, I can actually now reach more customers. I can create a better experience. Because if you reduce costs and your competition doesn't, then they're likely going to create a better customer experience and have a higher win rate, which is it always kind of levels out to like what's the, you know, the most you can spend to serve and delight customers to solve their problems. And at that point just by being more productive just means you're able to do more. So I agree with you. It's like maybe even if you have more meetings, you're coming to the customer with a better solution. You put more critical thought in and support. So I, yeah, I 100% agree. I mean a good case in point of this is like a couple years ago everyone was talking about automating outbound and like you were able to like scale outbound and it didn't work. You know, people still can detect when they've received like 20 emails that were written by AI and like sent by AI, not sent by a human. It's interesting now like we are seeing the opposite be like the recommended. We're seeing the pendulum swing in the opposite direction where you might use AI to do all your research, but you're the human is the last mile. And if you can telegraph that you are a human trying to get in touch with another human, your connect rate will be so much higher. So I think it just absolutely bears repeating that like humans are the last mile. Keep humans in the loop. Humans want to buy with human from humans. I think you mentioned people buy based on emotion and justify after the fact with logic. And it's true because you do use emotion to make a purchase. AI compared to versus human is, is narrow and win. But AI enabled human versus just human is always going to win because it's, it's so much. There's so much information in the world that is just not processed when we put something together. And I think the power of AI is you're able to apply critical thinking on a much wider array of information to come up with the right solution than you would be able to for the same amount of time, obviously without. And I think that is going to be the competitive advantage of like, like, okay, take that time, solve it. I really like the concept of like, you know, use the increase of productivity to come up with a better problem solution. Apply critical thinking because that's worth way more to the customer. It's worth way more to the business. I will also say that I was just at Revfest, a Revops conference. I would say like the idea that resonated the most out of all of the different talks was taste is your alpha. That sounds weird, but like alpha is this concept of go to market alpha, which is essentially like your moat, like your differentiate differentiation. What makes you able to produce results over your competitors. And in the AI era, that's taste and judgment now, right? So the more that you have taste and judgment and you can understand how to like differentiate versus like sounding exactly the same as everyone else, that's going to be the new competitive moat according to everyone at Revfest. I would agree with that. But the alpha or the taste of like being unique and having a very thought through, clearly articulated, differentiated message is important because I don't want to just buy the average. Right? Like, I don't like when people say AI slop. I mean like to me it's just like, okay, if you just take the average, that's not better than using the average set of data to compile a unique answer that is has had the critical thought and time devoted to producing it. Yeah, yeah, 100%. So I guess like obviously Okta securing AI, it's. You're. You're kind of in, in the space. So I guess I'm curious, like, how are you thinking about AI transformation now that we're on that topic within your organization, within the, you know, the, the sales transformation lens that you have. As you mentioned, a Okta is now securing AI, which means that they have a unique point of view on the risks of AI that a lot of other tech companies who are not in the security space. Don't have. I would say they are. Okta is very restrained in how they are delivering enterprise AI across the business. They understand that AI, especially agentic AI, is a huge risk surface because AI agents have the same identity and permissions issues as humans do. Right. But they're harder to control. There's a lot of shadow AI, there's a lot of rogue AI agents and those are very attractive to a attackers and hackers to hack into. And so we have been essentially much slower to adopt things like Vibe coding tools and even Claude Cowork than other companies, I would say because of that. That isn't to say that we aren't innovating, but it has been a little bit harder for us to scale some of those innovations across the business. So we have a few of our sales engineers who've been able to develop some brilliant tools that we want to use that help bridge the gap. Account planning and actual sales execution and or we had an SE like build a whole digital sales room mutual action planning tool that's rooted in our methodology. But we haven't had the opportunity to actually scale these innovations to the rest of the business, which I think makes us very, very different and somewhat laggards in the AI transformation space. So we are proceeding with caution. But we've. This just means that we've had been able to really prioritize the investment innovations that are going to matter the most to our transformation and drive the most impact and really focus on a few that we feel very confident in versus like letting everyone loose and everyone kind of building everything on their own. Look, at the end of the day, you have to factor in the costs and the benefits. And I think for Okta, I mean the risk of, of getting it wrong from a security perspective given what the business does, is so high. Right. So it's like there's, there's a balance. And I think, you know, the interesting thing is the world is moving so fast that it just seems like you're behind every day. Like it just keeps on moving. And so, and especially being in the world of tech, you kind of see it and you feel it more than, than other industries. But I think it's, it is important to be methodical and methodical from a security perspective and what matters. I also think there's an element of, you know, from a cost perspective like it can, it can actually be quite expensive if you don't proactively architect how you're deploying these workflows because the last thing you want is 10 different sellers in the organization asking the same thing about a single customer and now you're consuming tokens 10 times instead of just having a system that's proactively kind of like running these things one time and more efficiently. And so I think, you know, both from a cost and security perspective, a lot of effort needs to be put in to architecting the way that we engage. And I think for, you know, different businesses, different risk tolerances, you know, you may be able to be more aggressive with how you, you use the agentic layer, but for some businesses it's just, it's too risky. The infrastructure is not fully built up and there's still a lot that has to be done. And I'm saying this from a perspective of like Form AI started 2016, the foundation of go to market data is the data. And there's an element of like a lot of the work that we did early on was just defining the data model so that when you're applying AI, you can confidently say, oh, this data should not be ever accessed by this person. Yeah. And like the amount of effort it took for us to do that data layer was the harder part and like in way longer. And I think that, you know, most organizations have to go through this transformation internally to figure out where they can actually confidently apply without taking massive risk. Oh, 100% like role based access and permissions is so important. So you have to get that data layer right in order to, you know, essentially define those role based permissions. For sure. I wanted to switch over to our front segment and I think to me, again, given your unique perspective, your background, your career, like the different organizations you've worked with and had an opportunity to kind of scale with. I love to get your perspective on a common misconception or like a myth that you hear in the world of sales comp and sales ops. I think the myth that I want to discuss is this notion that's very dear to RevOps teams where activity is a proxy for results and performance. And so RevOps is like they passionately want to measure activity, pipeline touches, you know, emails that go out, multi channel prospecting. How many S2s do we have? Right? How many discovery calls? You know, so there's like this idea that like if you codify a performance system based on activity that will yield results. But as we just mentioned, you know, the strongest best reps out there, they're going to conserve a lot of their energy, right. And really focus on the things that they feel the most confident in, are going to produce the Results and it won't necessarily like be spray and pray or like doing more activity. It'll be focusing on the right activity, on the high value activities that they feel very confident are going to yield those results. So I've always seen this lack of alignment between, you know, who's the top on the leaderboard for the activity and who's actually yielding the best results. Because the best reps, they have an understanding of like they're really clear on what they need to do and they will really focus their efforts and redouble their efforts on the things that they know they need to do in order to achieve those results. So I would say activity tracking as a proxy for performance is a myth that I would like to dispel. And I think it's also going to get even more truthful in the age of AI because you have reps with AI tools learning how to scale their own systems and be more productive and it's not necessarily doing more activity. I do agree on the premise of your best performing reps are almost always optimizing their time. Exactly. To a level and a degree that like is surprising. It's almost in some cases, like you look at them, you'd be like, oh, like this is actually like the least motivated person on, on your team. When in reality they're just, you know, they're very selfish with like how much time they, they have to consume. And that's it is actually important. And you want, that you want them to be, you're thinking about what matters to them. I'm, I'm curious, how do you take that, what, you know, a little bit of the art, right. Like these sellers are able to go into that meeting, understand exactly. Is this worth it? What are the questions I need to ask? Like how do I run this discovery more efficiently to be able to un, you know, uncover if this is an opportunity worth pursuing. And, and then afterwards, of course, the best sellers know exactly who to pursue, who to talk to, and they just navigate it very different. So how do you take that art and like codify it to be able to enable the rest of the organization? I mean that's, that's the hardest part, right. Of, of any enablement, I would say of like understanding exactly what that, that art is that these reps are doing at the top? Yeah. We have to identify who the high performers are. Right. Where are the highest performers? What are their winning patterns? Like what are their things that they do every day? What are their habits essentially and behaviors. And then you have to ask yourself, or we have to ask, are those behaviors actually scalable across the organization? Do they make sense across the different segments that we're trying to enable, but they need to also be tied to the outcomes that we're trying to drive. Right. But I do think that you need to interview and understand your best reps. You also have to interview and understand the average and lower performing reps to understand are they not doing those things right that the best reps are doing. And again, like I think when you have an understanding of those winning patterns that are working for the best reps, that becomes a virtuous cycle that you can scale because people want to do what the people who are winning do. Right? And they want to understand what is the DNA of success and how do I do those same things. So if you can deliver programs and winning patterns, like I said, that are really rooted in, you know, what people are doing, you get the social proof you can take advantage of them to, you know, train others. Because people like to learn from people and oftentimes peers, salespeople like to learn from their peers versus buy from enablement professionals. And yeah, I mean, scaling what is working in the organization and then always building upon that, refining it, I think is a great formula for success in enablement. On the other side, I guess, is there, is there a specific metric that you find, Like a single metric that you find sales leaders obsess over that has the weakest relationship to actual performance? The ones that I'm thinking of, like pipe coverage, number of, you know, S2s, I think those are all valid metrics. Win rates, average sales price. I can't think of one where I'm like, oh, I wish they wouldn't focus on that. There are like enablement, enablement metrics that I would say that enablement leaders want to focus on that I think are not grounded in the reality of sales performance. So like tool adoption is one. Yes, you know, so I would say that, you know, a lot of enablement teams are really focused on covering their own cya, like making sure that they have a res on d'. Etre. So they're like, oh, we're measuring tool adoption or we're measuring methodology adoption. But if you're not measuring actual baseline and behavior change over time and then showing how those behaviors are leading to the leading indicators that lead into the lagging indicators, you need to tell a story of impact versus just focusing on discrete metrics that are self serving. I use the example of like tracking activity and you think about developers, right? If you're actually tracking Lines of code, it's the worst metric because actually the best code is the minimum amount of lines of code written to solve the problem. And then every line of code has a maintenance cost long term. So there's all these implications that's like negative. And I do think, I wonder if in the world world of as AI get starts to get consumed more and more by sellers, if pure consumption of AI is starts to become a metric, then it's again. Oh it is. It's like that's not a good metric. It's how you use it. And you could have seller that uses a fraction but they're just so precise with where they deploy it and how they deploy it that produces much, much better results. Yeah, I was talking to a sales leader a couple weeks ago and they were saying that they're one of like their executives was tokens maxing was like using Claude all the time at like the top of the cloud leaderboard. And they were reflecting like is this person actually doing the job that they were hired to do or are they just like building with AI? So I think that it's definitely become this bizarro world where we're meant to be building, building, building with AI. But also don't vibe code an alternative to calendly. Like you need to ground it in common sense and ground it in what's going to actually move the needle and not just build just to build. Well, just to. To wrap us up here, I always ask two questions. Okay. All my guests. So the first and just to kick it off here is like in this industry, I guess, is there anyone that you would you would most like to take out to lunch and why? Kyle Poyar, do you know him from growth? Yeah, he's very like product growth. Yes, yes. I just think he's one of the most brilliant people in the industry and I subscribe to a ton of newsletters but his is the one that I most consistently read every single word of and get so much value out of. And it's really hard to consistently produce amazing servicey content as he does every couple weeks. He's amazing. He's so smart. I haven't met him yet. I've, you know, connected with him on LinkedIn but I would love to sit down and have lunch with him. He is so incredibly brilliant and such a visionary in the space. I mean, yeah, he's been like even back when he was in the VC world. Right. It's like his focus was purely thinking about go to market and product growth mindset that before. And speaking about it way before it was like the hottest thing. Yeah, he's always ahead of the curve, which is another reason. And the second question is what book, podcast or resource has helped shape your career and how you lead today that you'd like to share with the audience? The book that I recently read that I just think is an amazing book is Ashley Welch's Naked Sales. Have you heard of this? I have not Naked Sales. I know it sounds weird, but it's really around applying design thinking principles to selling and discovery. And so it's taking an outside and approach. And I know we talk about this a lot like, oh, take a customer centric approach to discovery. But this is a real tactical manual for doing this in a way that can be totally scalable and provides much, much better results. So we have been talking about, you know, how do you wisely conserve your time and really focus on the things that matter? I would say everything that Ashley describes in this book should be the things that you focus on on. You know, she, she has such really great, rich vignettes on her time working with Salesforce where, you know, she had a Salesforce rep that was trying to break into a big company, you know, do a ton of research, really, I think embed themselves in the organization and meet with people and even be like a customer of. I think one of the examples was Greyhound, like actually taking a bus like up through from LA to like San Francisco to see where are there opportunities for Greyhound to do better from a customer point of view. And when you're able to share those rich, actual, tangible insights with a C level person, you're providing value. It's really taking it to another level. But then also there's the, you know, how do you scale that approach? Because it's not realistic to do that all the time, especially if you're not in enterprise or strategic sales. And the other podcast that I would recommend is the Change Signal podcast by Michael Bungay Stanier. He interviews change and learning experts and they're just like 20 minute vignettes, but they are so, so good. And every single time I listen to one of these podcasts, I get so many great ideas and I would very, very much recommend both his work and this podcast. I've added that book to the list for sure. I think. Yeah, it's good. And then, and then the podcast is like, those are, that's, that's part of where you get the tactical execution elements or guidance on like change is so difficult across the board in sales transformation. But even beyond, I think anyone can kind of like take a any guidance on how to do that better because it's just part of the day to day every year the sales plan and priorities are shifting and and it's all about change management. So Lauren, thank you so much for for joining. I think I really enjoyed this discussion. There's a lot of ton, a lot of takeaways I think that any sales ops or sales comp or sales transformation expert should walk away from. But thank you for contributing the community and sharing back and being on the show with us today. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation and really appreciated the opportunity the Sales Compensation show is brought to you by Forma AI, the sales performance management platform that fully integrates sales planning with rapid scalable incentive compensation management. Our data platform brings together how you can plan and manage the entire lifecycle of territories, quotas and incentives. With global customers like Autodesk, Stryker and Hootsuite, we enable go to market teams to plan and deploy even the most complex SPM strategies at speed, taking you from idea to execution instantly. To learn more about Forma AI, visit our website at. 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