Today’s topic is transitioning from sales training to sales enablement.  Sale enablement is about driving revenue per sales head up and time to productivity for new sales hires down.

Joining us today is Brad Kerst, Senior Director of Global Sales Enablement for Intuitive Surgical, a medical device company.  Intuitive Surgical is the leader in surgical robotics, manufacturing and selling the da Vinci® Surgical System.  Brad and Greg discuss the difference between sales training and sales enablement. 

Sales training is the focus on three core areas of technical product knowledge, industry knowledge, and sales skills and execution.  By comparison, sales enablement is a focus on the process and analytics to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the sales force.  Listen to Brad explain how both are interlocked, with training as the background and context and the enablement side is the execution. 

Brad goes into detail explaining how sales training and sales enablement are symbiotic.  Sales training develops the skills and sales enablement defines the behaviors and skills and generate the insights necessary to drive and maximize results.  In the final segment of the program listen to Brad describe his training certification process and blended learning approach.

On today’s show we discuss product strategy. Our guest is Peter Sheldon, the Vice President of Strategy at Magento Commerce. Magento is a leading e-commerce platform providing enterprise solutions. Before his position at Magento, Peter was one of the foremost thought leaders at Forrester on the topic of e-commerce.   

The goal of the call today is to think through product strategy using Magento as a use case.  Your company’s go-to-market model needs to flow out of the product strategy.  

There are different types of product strategy: Market Expansion, Market Share and Market Exposure.  Very different product strategies.  Spend the time to get these right.  Your go to market model for sales will be very different depending on which strategy is selected. 

It’s nearly impossible to build a sales and marketing strategy that makes your number every year if you don’t fully understand the product strategy.  The go-to-market strategy for sales and marketing changes significantly based on how you answer these product questions.  Listen to Peter bring the question of product strategy’s impact on sales and marketing to life with the Magento use case.   

Work with your product leader to get answers to these questions to align your strategies.  Peter answers a series of questions to help sales and marketing leaders understand the impact of product strategy on the overall go to market strategy. 

• Is your product strategy focused on participating in overall market expansion where rising waters raise all ships?
• As you compete in a mature market do you have to take market from your competitors to grow?
• Are you also exploring new growing markets and how to expose your products to grow?
• Do you find that the B2B market mimics the B2C world with a 2-3+ year lag time?
• Is your product strategy to enter fast growing product markets and take revenue from distant companies rather than direct competitors?
• Is your product strategy to define new products that are so innovative as to create an entirely new product category?
• Is your product strategy to grow by persuading existing customers to buy more of a product or related product?
• When adding new products requiring cross-sell/up-sell, how do you know when to use the existing sales force vs. a new sales strategy?
• Is the product strategy based on new product pricing and promotion in a mature market and is therefore likely to be temporary based on competitor retaliation?
• Is the product strategy to force smaller companies out of the market?
• For a concentrated market, is the product strategy to cycle through market share without sustainable share gain?
• Is the product strategy to execute bolt on acquisitions to complete or extend the product offering and leverage the current routes to market

Listen to Peter respond to each question and highlight how to avoid the traps and the approach the market challenges.

On today's show we discuss the different types of revenue growth and their impact on company valuation. Our guest is Charlie DeLacey, the vice president of corporate development and strategy at the Kenan Advantage Group. Kenan is a $1.5 billion dollar transportation and logistics business.

Charlie is responsible for driving and shaping the strategy of Kenan Advantage Group, who has experienced 10-15% growth on an annual basis.

The types of growth discussed include organic and inorganic, and the different returns on capital each type of investment drives.  For example, given the opportunity to grow the same amount of revenue through organic or inorganic, Charlie explains that typically organic growth will drive greater value creation.  However, there are other variables such as time, capital requirements and execution risks.  Charlie describes how to make the decision between organic and inorganic growth.