#001 Sales & Revenue Enablement with Candace Taber

​​Steven Morell

Welcome to our new episode of Speak Revenue. Remember, revenue is not a goal, it's a result. But a result of what in this show, we turn our eyes from the output towards the inputs. We speak with sales leaders and entrepreneurs about their journeys. Join us in our quest to uncover and learn the root causes of success. Let's unpack what works for them and what didn't today with our guest, Candace Taber. So nice to have you. Thank you for joining us.

Candace Taber

Thank you for having me.

Steven Morell

It's a great pleasure for our audience. Give us a quick intro. In the good old days, we said Twitter size, those days are gone. But in real quick short terms, who are you, what do you do and why are you so successful?

Candace Taber

I'm a mom, first and foremost. And yeah, love my kiddos. And I do. Enablement. And the way I look at it is it's just bridging the gaps between data performance and content by kind of nerding out and serving other people to equip them for growth.

Steven Morell

So for me and our audience, what is your current role?

Candace Taber

Currently, I'm doing freelancing and consulting and I'm partnering with Michelle over at Demand Conversion. She is an incredible founder. She's got a great marketing boutique. She focuses on Demand Conversion and sales through community. So that's kind of the cool thing there is. Through the sales enablement.

Steven Morell

There's a community called Sales Enablement.

Candace Taber

She was looking to add to her.

Steven Morell

I never heard about this. How can our listeners find this community?

Candace Taber

Yeah, there is you can find them on LinkedIn. So there's two great founders, Stephanie and Matt, who started a community. And.

Steven Morell

There'S so many communities. I love discovering them. Everyone feels like a universe of its own. So tell me a little bit the customers that you serve as a freelancer and together with your partners, what is your ICP? I guess the question is.

Candace Taber

That'S an awesome question. Typically what we find is they're still in the early stages of where they're looking at moving their growth motion. So maybe have a little bit of marketing, but not a complete demand marketing operation and have a little bit of a sales process or are looking at more go to market motions for what they're doing. Right. So they're in those initial stages where they've got a product.

Steven Morell

So that's typically serious. A series B. Are we talking startups at all or are we talking more like legacy traditional businesses?

Candace Taber

We really want to stick around Series A or B, but startups, if they're healthy, we really want to stick around Series A or B. But startups if they're healthy financially. Right? So I think if we have startups who are looking to raise, that's really not going to be where we're focusing because there's potentially too much volatility for us to take on. Or they're looking for putting their money differently. Right. Or they may not have the okay, understood.

Steven Morell

By the way, I believe that startups between Series A and Series B are the most lucrative market there is because number one, they are after Series A, so they have money, they're before Series B and many companies don't ever make it to Series B. So there are just more of them.

Candace Taber

Yeah, I think what's interesting about it from that perspective is but they may still be in a position where, okay, now scale comes into place or moving that revenue flywheel and maybe they're just unsure, okay, what's on that next move to do that and how do we get that going? And you have people who are in positions and probably wearing many hats and you know, you need to expand the team.

Steven Morell

So let's talk now we are talking about the people in the organization. What is the typical persona that you approach?

Candace Taber

Michelle does most of the approaching, so she focuses more on companies that she's working with. She's done a lot of global companies that are in those early stages. So she looks for sales personas. Right. So connect with VPs of Sales, chief Revenue Officers, right?

Steven Morell

Let me ask you a question. Typically if you approach the, say, VP Sales or the Chief Sales Officer or so, and offer them to improve or optimize their sales process, then you run the risk of two objections. Number one, hey, I'm the VP sales here, I know what I'm doing. Number two, even if you convince them that yes, you know what you're doing, but I can add to this, I can add value, then they still have probably go to their CEO, CFO, their peers and tell them, hey, I need, I don't know how much you cost, 30, 50, 60K. Do this and this sales process optimization. And very often they hear from their CEO, isn't that sales optimization? Isn't that what we hired you for? So how do you overcome this double obstacle in convincing somebody that you can do the job better? Of course I'm teasing you. And then how do you unlock the budget to optimize something that probably somebody got hired to optimize in the first place?

Candace Taber

Super good questions of sales or higher level sales or revenue? Super good questions. One, I mean, VPs of Sales or higher level sales or revenue executives? The interesting thing is there they have multiple pressures, right? Multiple pressures. It's not an easy job and I respect what they do a thousand percent. I think what's interesting is depending on where they're at and where they need to spend wisely to get motions and view. So Stephen, it's not uncommon in the US market for a VP of Sales to look at an agency where they want a little bit more BDR lift because they're looking for lead gen or top of funnel. So I think it's almost a little bit of a different perspective where when you're engaging with demand conversion, you're more focused on the inbound approach, in connecting and how that's working to get more qualified or healthier top of funnel because you're looking to help them move that pipeline velocity with just better qualification. So I'm a big believer that revenue motions work. It's just a matter of when they work. And some of the variables and controllable and getting to unlock budgets really interesting right now.

Steven Morell

That's true. Globally, it's not different. Over here in Europe, I think we see this in the space around the.

Candace Taber

Yeah, right. The macroeconomic condition, it is widespread. And so now the key is maximizing spend with not a lot of headcount, not a lot of spend on technology. Right. It's about efficiency. And so a lot of times what you get when you outsource with a specialization, like you're seeing a lot of this marketplaces and different specializations pop up. It's a less spend to engage a specialty like a marketing agency or even a BDR agency to generate those services and work as a part of your revenue flywheel, if you will, on your behalf. So it doesn't mean that there's more tech stack layering or anything like that. Those agencies and services look to engage with what you have and then also take the expertise to get that engine going alongside whatever the VP or sales leader is building. The goal is not rip and replace. It is moving the revenue engine alongside is the key goal. Right. And if your positioning is rip and replace, you're going to get objections all day long, no doubt. But providing a cost effective option with a specialized service that has customer proof.

Steven Morell

To you said proven service.

Candace Taber

To be.

Steven Morell

A little when you reach the crime scene, what are the first things I'm running a webinar series, CSI Revenue, where I do a little bit forensics on things gone wrong. So when you approach a crime scene, what are the first measurements, what is the first thing that you do?

Candace Taber

I love that approach. The first thing it depends what we're looking at. So the first thing I'm very holistic, so I always like to get a picture of where are we at and what are you doing for lead generation or where is your inbound demand happening. And a lot of times there's a point towards meeting sets and that kind of tends to be a common top of funnel metric. But I think it's looking at that first stage conversion is for that top of funnel, then what's happening after that initial meeting is set and where is that velocity happening in the conversion if it's happening? Right. So is there a planned motion for who you're reaching out to? What ICP have you worked with? Are you getting any traction there? Are you solving a real problem with your product or solution offering? And I tend to look at that more holistically because it's really then I'm going to sort through do we have a data issue, a performance issue, or a content issue, and we're just not resonating? Even though you may have a great product or solution, you just may not have found the right way to communicate it to where they're going to respond and go, oh, I get what you're trying to solve for me.

Steven Morell

And if I keep going, suppose I'm, how do you find that fit for me? How do you make sure that I solve a problem bigger and important and expensive enough?

Candace Taber

How do I plan it's? A good question.

Steven Morell

Yes. Step me through your process. Like, imagine I'm the VP. Not VP. Sales. I'm the CEO on Series A startup. How do you help me?

Candace Taber

How do I help you? Well, typically this is where Michelle comes in because she's having the first direct conversations. So then what we take a look at once they come in and where she'll involve me in the process or conversations is we've nailed down some issues once they agree to talk with her, right? And so there's either missing collateral, there's missing messaging for their sales process or optimizing how they're communicating with their customers or their market, right? And so what she does is she takes a look at that holistically of what we need. So we productize the enablement part of it to come in and say, well, we're going to make sure that you at least have with your stage or your deal journey, that you have all the assets that you need for that journey to help get your salespeople in place. It also depends on the size of their sales team and if they have someone, if they have some. What we found recently, right, the sales teams are a lot smaller. There may even be a salesperson of one. And so what we're looking to do is just expand that reach. So she focuses on that demand side, which brings a lot of value because a lot of CEOs and founders are trying to figure out what does generating demand mean? What does that demand piece mean and how do we get that part of the engine going. What I focus on with the enablement piece is getting the salespeople.

Steven Morell

How do you do this? Do you mimic the buyer journey or do you interrogate the salespeople till they give up and tell you what they need? What's your approach to figure out the needs and get a picture.

Candace Taber

In general? Well, what's interesting about just enablement in general is there's companies that can identify that that's a need, right? Or there's sales leaders when they want, they see some gaps in their process or things and they're looking to hire an enablement person internally. So what we do is we kind of look for something similar where they are in the stages of building and most companies are in those early stages. May not have an enablement function yet. They may be looking for it, but we kind of uncover that, hey, you've got a need for enablement. And here's some things that could be really helpful. People are spread thin or they've tried to piecemeal decks and collateral together. You may have someone who's doing marketing operations, but there's one person. So in that early on stage, what we look for is to bridge those gaps between marketing and sales to mimic the journey. Okay, so here's your hypothesis, or here's what current customers you may have in place. This is what their journey looks like. Here's how we're going to map out some assets as a hypothesis and some collateral that you need, get you that collateral. And then we're going to start the iteration process to see if this helps make it a little bit more smoother that you're getting those access and things that's needed to equip people to get the velocity of the pipeline moving a little faster. In that market education piece, buyers are learners. So one of the crucial things we've got to focus on is how are we delivering education? And a lot of times people do a great job trying to get stuff together and want to get something in place. But now when we're looking at more education and sales enablement, now we're taking a look at what that customer journey is and getting those pieces in place that are more succinct, that are communicating the value proposition, that are branded and able to get that micro content that piqued their interest, or hey, I can apply your solution or product this way. So we do, we map out the deal stage and that's how we productize enablement, right, is getting out that deal stage map and go, here are the things that we want to checklist have on hand.

Steven Morell

Does that mean that you map out every stage of the sales process and create a checklist? This is what the customer needs to be able to learn at this stage. And then you can.

Candace Taber

Sorry, Steven. Yeah, that's the idea.

Steven Morell

Yeah, I wrote this down. Bias alertness. That's a beautiful quote. I'm stealing this. I'm getting a tattoo with this. I love this.

Candace Taber

Thank you. Objectives that we want to have. Well, thanks.

Steven Morell

I'm glad you do.

Candace Taber

I think one of the important things we look at is, well, what are the learning objectives that we want to happen in the deal stage, right? Like, what do we want them to learn so that we walk away with some momentum? It's about them and what they're learning. I think a lot of times we've approached buying processes and we're like, what box do we want to check off? Instead of looking at what do we want them to learn? So they're excited to move forward and they feel equipped to adopt the product or solution if they're going to engage in purchasing. And I think that's a big thing with it. So, yeah, it's refining that list of, okay, when this stage ideally, here are some objectives and here are the outcomes I'd like at this stage. So here's the content I want to put in place. And so what we did is we've mapped it out. We have a checklist of things for each stage and what that looks like and start to look at the needs assessment or needs analysis of that company to see which is appropriate for their.

Steven Morell

So many questions, so many things to uncover here. I'm like a boy in a candy store. You speak about velocity. How does buyer enablement or sales enablement speed up your pipeline?

Candace Taber

I think that's where a lot of your curiosity well, Juan, I know you're about speed, so I think that's where a lot of your curiosity. A big thing for you is about process and speed. And I agree with you. But that's the thing that I failed at early on.

Steven Morell

We all did this. If you ask salespeople, there's always a collateral missing. It's this magical flyer that I'm going to send over and it's going to close the deal for me.

Candace Taber

Yes, and that magical flyer either doesn't show up in the inbox or it doesn't close a deal. But I think that's the thing we've got to start with is a great design system that says, this is the ideal collateral I want to have, and then I want to start looking at our stage conversion and the timing to see if that collateral is helping at least keep that healthy. So, for example, looking at what you offer in your system of control, you're looking at that process piece. So what we have to apply to process is also putting the collateral within those stages to see, is this helping control the variable? Is this helping move us along? If not, and we fail fast, then we can go, let's try this right, but move it into that same part so we can see if that's going to work or push things along a little faster. I don't think a lot of times people within enablement talk enough about change management and kind of frameworks that are needed to really organize and map against sales process and customer journey and measuring.

Steven Morell

The before and after. I want to go in a different direction, if you allow me. You spoke about collaterals and educating the buyer. You mentioned marketing. I just had a conversation with Stacey Sussman from New York, and we were chatting about enablement, and we came across what Gong did. Gong. I'm a big admirer of their content marketing. This is how we got into conversation and I realized the content marketing is built around lead magnets. And we all know a good lead magnet is a complete solution for a very narrow problem. And their lead magnet, they are doing a software that records sales conversations and analyzes them. That's the core product of Gong. If your calendar is empty, you cannot use it. Right? First, you need to have appointments that you can actually record and analyze. So what their lead magnets is focused about is, here are 25 templates for cold emails. Here are 25 openers for cold calls. It's all about how do I even fill the calendar? Because if you look at their lead magnets, what it does is enables their customer to even use their product. So my question to you is, have you discovered this? I just realized this a couple of days ago. Have you noticed that or seen a connection between the collaterals that you use in sales and how you can take them and make them lead magnets as standalone solutions for problems?

Candace Taber

But that's part of education. I think that's a really good way to put it. But that's part of education is I think we tend to get really excited and we develop these beautiful pieces that are well written a lot of times and they say a lot of how. How do I get there? How do I get there? And Gong did a really great they connected the dots right early on with their collateral. To do that, they enabled even people who didn't have training or development you could go and get free resources in their downloads and things to basically have a guide or a framework. So I think to your point, we've got to get into the how and create that opportunity. But that's where I talk about buyers are learners now. They're going somewhere else to learn because they don't want to download another white paper or another long winded thing. They want the how. We're in what I would call a learning economy where people are looking to skill up or they're looking to get into different places. The labor market is really interesting with hiring and there's so many changes. The best thing we're looking to do is learn, how do I get to my next step? And the more we focus on how, is where I think we get that attraction. It's one thing if we find something that entertains us, right? We all see content that's entertaining and it's fun and we like that. But if there's no how, it usually kind of leaves us right. Because it's already done its wonder. It's entertained us. We've got that little bit of dopamine and we're kind of done. But the how is what keeps us going and pressing forward and the how is where am I going to get an ROI in your product if I don't know how to apply it? And that's why I think prior when there was a lot more spend in tech and there was a lot higher tech stacks, you had potential investments of tech that weren't getting adopted because I think they may have had beautiful collateral graphics.

Steven Morell

It doesn't help, but the prospect to.

Candace Taber

Grow practical application, pragmatism. Exactly. And that's where we're at, is we're focused on how is this going to make you grow? Right? It's not enough as am I solving a problem, but am I enabling someone to solve the problem themselves and empower them with the how and the solution? And now they're the champion internally in their place. Right. And I think that's a big shift is did I help my buyers learn.

Steven Morell

And get them that's a beautiful way of putting it.

Candace Taber

And be successful where they are.

Steven Morell

What have you tried really win that in hindsight was a total failure? I can tell because you're so smart, you're so experienced and you only learn from failure. You really been around the block a couple of times, you've seen stuff, it shines through. So I'm thrilled to talk to you about this.

Candace Taber

Oh, thank you, Stephen. Well, I think one of the biggest failures I had, I think especially within enablement, was I did a large investment spend on enablement technology too soon. And I was really in pain and needing to scale something and thought that this piece of technology, because I knew the potential of what it had to do, was going to work. Right. Well, it didn't just out of the box do what I needed it to do. So I just thought it was going to come fully loaded, ready to go and it was going to scale this pain point that I had. No, I had to dive in and figure it out and that put me back time, it put me back communication. And we still had an internal problem that I spent political capital saying we were going to solve and I was behind on that delivery. And what I realized a big part of that was process is I needed to think more operationally about how that was going to happen and get equipped in my how to on the operational.

Steven Morell

Execution of it rather than a second price tag. It's not only the cost of the.

Candace Taber

Technology multiply time in ten calendars at once.

Steven Morell

It's interesting how we are willing to invest time before we invest money. We go on demos and we have all the meetings. We are willing to give this away for free. Our time not realizing that time is probably a lot more valuable than money because you can always get more money, but you don't get that time back. You can increase the budget, but the two months you lost in implementing that software and then deciding not to use it for whatever reason, you don't get that back. Right.

Candace Taber

Mindset around time versus the tangibility. That's everything right there. It's the mindset around time versus the tangibility of whether or not we have a budget or not. And you're exactly right, we don't get time back. And so did we end up delivering and putting in place? We did, but we lost time, which exacerbated the performance problem. And that is where we should be now is our focus on time is a lot more expensive. You're right, we don't get it back. But the problem with time is also the mindset around failure. People want to boast about successes and that's great. But you want to know something? I've learned so much more. One of the best things that ever happened was a miscommunication with an executive leader. And they did not hear me or what I was saying, and it was because I was not speaking their language. And revenue. And what I realized is that I had to get really clear about revenue and measurements around sales to communicate the value of enablement or learning. And that has been a practice that has taken place since because that executive didn't care that enablement or learning was needed for customers or people and that's how you value them and that's how you develop and grow. What that executive cared about is what that was going to mean in revenue and potential profitability if it was going to increase deals, if it was going to increase customer retention or expansion. And I wasn't speaking their language and I'm like well they're just not empathetic enough. No, I wasn't speaking the language that was needed for them to communicate the measurement and the results. And I've had to get really clear about this is how we align it and this is how we framework and process so that enablement has value and it's value that doesn't get questioned. Because we are working towards the same goals, generating and expanding revenue or potentially looking at what that looks like to make that successful for sales. Like the goal of enablement, the goal of learning, development, the goal of HR, the goal of operations, we all have revenue goals and the more we can align on that.

Steven Morell

I love how you organization, beautiful story describe revenue is not a goal, it's a result. And we need to understand a result of what in order to achieve that goal. That was beautiful candidates, thank you so much. That brings me to the end of this episode of Speak Revenue. I like how you want to thank you candidates for joining us today and sharing so beautiful and interesting insights. I enjoyed it a lot. Huge shout out to our listeners. Your support means the world to us. Remember to check our website@speakrevenue.com for a full transcript and additional resources and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you go for your listening needs. It really helps to get the word out. Also follow us on LinkedIn and on Instagram and soon also on YouTube. We'll be back with another great guest. Until then, stay curious, keep listening and keep learning. Candice, thank you so much for joining us today.