ISEs3 Ep4: Gail Behun – President, Revenue Enablement Society (2024)

Inside: Sales Enablement

Hello and welcome to OrchestrateSales.com's Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.

On Episode 5 we begin in the present as Erich Starrett is joined in the OSC Studios with Gail Behun who was announced just last week as the new President of the Revenue Enablement Society!

In this episode, Gail shares insights gained from many milestones on her personal Enablement journey including...

> Her PASSION for the elevation of the Enablement profession, including many companies (and namely those who laid off entire Enablement teams) coming to embrace the reality...

"What was happening to our community wasn't about enablers not showing value. It wasn't about us not doing a good enough job at our job.

It was very reactionary. It was our CROs and CEOs not understanding the value of Enablement.

Going from mentality of growth at all costs to a mentality of profitability at all costs." And that meant they had to cut anything that didn't directly lead to profitability, which meant cutting Enablement because Enablement adds to the cost of sale.

...this crash was not just because of our performance and that we had to be able to own the parts of it that we didn't do well enough. We needed to understand how to better build a bridge to our CROs, and then we needed to understand how do we go forward from here."

"We really need to bring this function back and bring it back strategically. "

> The Sales Enablement Society's decision to rebrand in 4Q23 to the Revenue Enablement Society...

"This is a real recognition that our profession is evolving dramatically...that we have a much bigger footprint that we're empowering, not just sellers, but customer success, solution consultants, marketing, working across product marketing. We really are that connective tissue to the sales organization."

"The title is how people are seeing us. But for me and my passion is how are we seeing ourselves? How do we define what we're doing so that whatever our title is, we know we're having the biggest impact, whether you are, a support level, whether you're just coming in, whether you're a VP level and everything in between, really having a clear understanding of how you can have an impact on those bottom line revenue metrics. How what you're doing ties back to revenue.

> How her love of the live conference community experience led her to lead the annual global SES/RES event...

"It lets me really bring my passion for face to face marketing and the power of conferences and the power of connecting into an organization that I feel so strongly brings so much value to members. One of the things I love about sales enablement is it's still a niche profession. There's not a lot of us, we're still figuring a lot of stuff out. And so you have this community of people who are. Incredibly brave, incredibly creative, incredibly scrappy, and perfectly happy to show you what they're doing."

> Her take on the future of Enablement, and elevating the profession...

"The evolution for me is to continue to make sure that people have outlets to have good discussions with their community on a regional level, on a national level, on a slack level, that they have those conversations, and that those conversations can focus on 'What makes our strategy impactful?' Yeah, we've got to talk about the tactics, like how are we actually going to pull this thing off? But the more conversations we have about the strategy, the more that we speak that CRO / CEO language, the more likely we are to elevate our entire profession."

Please take a listen (and subscribe to!) the podcast to hear about all of the above, and so so much more.

Let's Elevate Enablement TOGETHER!

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