Blog
Nathan Fierley is the Senior Director of Sales Engineering at Bigtincan, a company that empowers sales organizations through sales enablement to provide the resources necessary for sales teams to more effectively sell to their target audience. Today’s show covers a wide variety of topics, from learning what Sales Enablement is all about, learning what it means to be a player-coach, the lessons learned from working one job in how it can lead to the next, and so many other things – enjoy!
Gartner’s Definition of Sales Enablement:
“Sales Enablement: The activities, systems, processes and information that support and promote knowledge-based sales interactions with client and prospects.”
Every experience has something to teach.
Nathan’s retail experience at Apple gave him insight to how sales enablement could be done in a really good way – he wanted to be involved in bringing that type of employee experience to other organizations.
Output = Input: Not everyone is going to have Nathan’s experience working in retail, but everyone can. Taking a vested interest in whatever the opportunity has to teach you will lead your professional growth down the line. More knowledge is never a bad thing.
Using tools at one job can eventually lead to you working for the company whose tools your previous company used. Learn anything that will help you grow!
What’s it like selling to sales people?
Surprisingly enough, not very different from selling to anyone else!
Sell value, everyone wants to reap value from a solution.
Sales may be the best, or the worst people to sell to. They know all the tricks and tactics, but also they know how to see value pretty quick.
Every company has sales enablement taking place in one capacity or another. If things aren’t structured now, be proactive and start building out repositories and resources now. You have visibility into what so much of the rest of the organization do not – take advantage of it!
How to contend with Build vs. Buy?
This is the dilemma your customers will always face, should I buy this solution from your company or should I invest resources to build this in-house?
Always sell value, in the world of Sales Enablement, a big driving factor is:
Digital transformation.
Better employee on-boarding/retention.
Consider the idea that your solution is not replacing anyone’s function, but rather is just supplementing/complimenting it.
In today’s knowledge economy, having solutions that replace a part of someone’s job doesn’t mean the scope of their work is forever lessened, but rather that they are now enabled to leverage new tools to provide even more value to their organization.
What is it like being a player-coach? How do you manage it?
Constant prioritization.
Its energizing learning the various perspectives of the individual contributors on the team.
Allows for both a high level and tactical level understanding of what’s required to scale effectively.
What Does Nathan Look For In New Hires (either SEs or SE Leaders)?
Great attitude.
Ability to Listen and to Hear.
Can see and interpret technological trends.
An understanding of sales methodologies and processes.
Don’t settle after being on-boarded, strive to Ever-board.
What is Ever-boarding?
Mindset of continuous learning.
Reintroduce key experiences to tenured people.
Ingest data in bite-sized chunks.
Have knowledge checks.
87% of training is forgotten in 30 days if not used.
If you have the opportunity to use the solution you sell internally, then do it!
Be your own best case study!
Not So Fire Round:
What do you love about being an SE/SE Leader?
The ability to help people get the most out of themselves – sometimes more than they even thought possible.
Identifying great people, prospects, opportunities – and then help each reach their potential.
The method by which you get the most out of people will differ from person to person, there are tools that can enable you to identify the personal nuances for each person.
Lead using MBOs/OKRs
Management By Objectives or Management Business Objectives (MBO): High level organizational goals that filter down to the team/employee level, giving group and individual goals alignment to the overall company objectives.
Objectives and Key Results (OKR)
What’s something you’d change about your role?
Want to be more strategic in how they operate.
Reduce the amount of Email used.
Have central areas of communication.
What are some books, tools and other resources you’d recommend?
Become an expert in the tech stack you use at work (whether it be a messaging tool, an email client, a video conferencing service or any other) – the more effectively you can use these tools, the more effective you’ll be at your job, and you’ll be increasing your technical credibility in the eyes of your peers, which never hurts.
What separates the great SEs from the not so great ones?
The great ones are great colleagues, partners, people in general, and can identify the REAL reason for any ask – Root Cause Analysis.
Able to empower those around them to come to their own ideas of greatness and not just tell everyone what to do.
Able to tailor themselves to their audience.
Resources Mentioned:
