Sally Ladrach: [00:00:00] If you’re somebody that doesn’t like to waste time, Agile is really great because it’s going to protect you from investing too much time into something that your users aren’t going to adopt. In enablement, a big problem that we have is adoption. I don’t believe that adoption is the end all be all of our success.
Sally Ladrach: Not even close. I do believe that adoption is a prerequisite for impact. What we do, what we work on, can not have an impact or solve a problem if people don’t even want to use it because it’s not in the right application, or they can’t access it on their machine, or it just doesn’t work for what we’re trying to solve for.
Sally Ladrach: The only way to make sure that our stuff is user centric and adoptable is to start with them in mind. Prototype. Test. Refine and keep on going.
Steve Watt: Welcome to The Enablement Edge, the go to resource for enablement and go to market pros. We’re [00:01:00] bringing you the secrets, strategies, and tactics that drive meaningful impact.
Steve Watt: You’ll get valuable insights and expertise from enablement leaders, so you can become an effective change agent. Turn strategy into reality and transform your organization for the better.
Steve Watt: Welcome to another episode of The Enablement Edge. And hello once again to my friend, colleague, and co host, Amber Mellano. Amber, it’s always such a pleasure to have you here. And I know you were really enjoying this conversation with Sally Ladrach too, right? Sally is the Director of Enablement at SavATree.
Steve Watt: which is like this big company that is like not only doing residential lawn care and tree care, but all sorts of, you know, large property developments. And they’re consulting over environmentally sustainable ways to maintain trees. I mean, they’ve got a whole lot of really [00:02:00] cool things going on. It’s also kind of nice for us to step outside of our usual technology And software area.
Steve Watt: Although the funny thing is we got dragged right back into it because we were talking about software development. For half the show, because we got into agile enablement and, you know, the fact that it’s a, it’s a rather new concept for many in the space. It’s a fascinating approach to enablement.
Steve Watt: Something I learned a lot working with Sally and kind of preparing for this. And I know the same is true for you, Amber, what jumped out at you? Most from this conversation with Sally.
Amber Mellano: Yeah. You know, I think, I mean, there were so many things I was wishing I had a pen. I could write it down as usual. I think one of the things that really struck me was how taking that agile approach means that you’re constantly going back to your stakeholders, to your audience and saying, Here’s what we’ve done to, to help you [00:03:00] basically, uh, also know that the great thing she had, our responsibility is to remove the blockers to them generating revenue for the company.
Amber Mellano: And so by getting the opportunity to go to them every couple of weeks and say, okay, this is the latest thing that we’ve done and. It may not be perfect. It is this, you know, it’s designed to be iterated on, but that constant seeking of their input and their feedback, I feel like that would create a really virtuous cycle in terms of how effective enablement can be in developing these tools and these processes, whatever it might be to serve those, those folks is that constant interaction and improvement seemed really powerful to me.
Amber Mellano: I’m really intrigued by this whole thing.
Steve Watt: Absolutely. I found it to be a fun thing. Fascinating conversation. Let’s jump right in. Sally, thanks so much for joining us. Really excited to have you here. And before we get into Agile enablement, I got to learn more about your company. SavATree. I mean, this is, I think, am I right here, Amber?
Steve Watt: This may be the first time, at least the first time this season that we’ve [00:04:00] had a guest who is not from a SaaS company. We’re branching out. See what I did there. And we’re, we’re going to learn about SavATree. Uh, I was just, you know, watching some of the videos from your company on YouTube. I’m really intrigued.
Steve Watt: Tell us a little bit about the company. Tell us a little bit about your role and then let’s jump in.
Sally Ladrach: Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me, Steve and Amber, it’s great to be here talking with you today. I work at, like you said, a company called Save a Tree. We are a tree, shrub, and lawn care company with over a hundred locations across the United States and Canada.
Sally Ladrach: And I might have the most interesting enablement job in the world. So I actually enable a team of sales arborists. And so, you know, they go out and they’re looking at trees and evaluating landscapes and helping homeowners really make their other landscape dreams come true. Both for, uh, you know, your residential customers and [00:05:00] for our B2B audience.
Sally Ladrach: So really, really interesting sales cycle, really interesting. Audience and just general enablement gig. Um, so I’m the director of sales enablement and training. And really all that means is that I’m there to provide the training, the tools, the resources, the process, whatever it is that my arborists need to meet and exceed their sales goals.
Steve Watt: And there’s a lot more than lawn care and tree care going on here. I mean, you’ve got this whole consulting arm where you’re working with property management and developers to make sure they’re really, you know, doing the right things environmentally and aesthetically. I mean, I think there’s a lot more to this business.
Steve Watt: Certainly a lot more than I realized going in. Is that a common reaction as people learn more about your business?
Sally Ladrach: Yeah, I think that especially those that maybe only interact with SavATree in one of those aspects, either as a residential customer or a, you know, B2B property manager of an office park or something along those lines, [00:06:00] you know, we have this whole, like you said, this whole consulting sort of segment of our business.
Sally Ladrach: And I think one of the things I really enjoy about SavATree is that, At the end of the day, I can feel really good about the work that we’re doing because ultimately, you know, being environmentally conscientious is at the center of what we do, um, and we want to have that positive environmental impact.
Sally Ladrach: And so, yeah, I think that it’s surprising to folks how many different ways we do that, uh, whether it’s our policies internally, uh, like our, you know, No idling policy for our trucks or, you know, externally, um, with our customers, how we evaluate and make recommendations for managing their landscapes. So yeah, one of the great things about working here.
Steve Watt: I love it. All right, Amber, let’s kick it off. Let’s get into the enablement talk.
Amber Mellano: Let’s do this. Well, Sally, we typically like to ask our guests how they would define enablement and what they think is the most important or the key to really measuring the success of their enablement efforts. [00:07:00] I would love to hear how you measure The success of your enablement of sales arborists.
Amber Mellano: I really just wanted the opportunity to say that sales arborists. That’s so cool, but tell us more about how you think of enablement, you know, it’s a little bit of a mix in the, in the field about that. So I’d love to hear your take.
Sally Ladrach: Yeah. Yeah. And actually I think that this isn’t just applicable to SavATree or to any companies that I’ve been with prior, but just in general, the way that I define enabling is Honestly, kind of stupidly simple, almost, is that we are there to help the sales team sell more.
Sally Ladrach: Now, the how, how we enable our sales folks to do that varies widely from org to org, right? It could be operational, where there’s some operational kinks that are preventing them from being able to execute on their day to day. Maybe it’s a skills gap where they don’t know enough about a certain [00:08:00] product.
Sally Ladrach: So they can’t actually go sell it. There are so many things that could be affecting someone’s ability to generate revenue. And the key thing that a sales enablement, you know, consultant, or someone who’s in a role, a director, a manager, a specialist, whoever it is, the key thing that I think we have to look at is what are the things that are blocking revenue?
Sally Ladrach: What are the things that my sellers need? In order to help them achieve their goals. And then from there we can figure out, okay, how do we go solve for that? I think the mistake that some companies make is they start with. We need training. We need XYZ solution rather than asking someone with that perspective to come in and look at those true problems and see how we might solve for those.
Amber Mellano: Yeah, I love that. Kind of exploring what are the blocks to our paths to revenue and how can we eliminate those. Really cool. That’s going to tee us up [00:09:00] really nicely into this conversation too. That’s a perfect segue.
Steve Watt: It does. A little behind the scenes peek for our listeners and our viewers. We pivoted on the topic of this episode.
Steve Watt: We were introduced to Sally, uh, suggested that we talk about a different topic. We got on a call and as we started to get to know each other, it became really clear that Sally had a passion in a different area, so we made a smart pivot. Sally really lit up when we started talking about agile enablement.
Steve Watt: Now. Many of you are probably familiar with Agile and how it differs from Waterfall within a product development context. Bear with me if you’re not familiar, because I do need to just quickly lay those foundations so folks aren’t lost. Um, you know, traditionally, software development, product development was done in a Waterfall process, right?
Steve Watt: We started with Gathering requirements. We built out substantial plans. We had sequential development. We were not very [00:10:00] welcoming of change requests as things went on and we toiled away for six months, 12 months, 18 months, whatever the case may be. And we presented the world with our finished product, uh, agile product development really emerged in the.
Steve Watt: Early years of, of this millennium with the agile manifesto in 2001 and everything built out from there and said, wait a minute. No, we need to be more simple. We need to quickly, we need to have iterative, constant learning. We need to break this thing down into a lot of smaller pieces. We need much more feedback from our users throughout.
Steve Watt: And it changed the way product development was done. And now the vast majority. Of software development teams and many in other industries are working on an agile approach. And then it started to move into marketing in other areas, instead of having, you know, annual plans and months long campaigns. What if we had smaller [00:11:00] pods of people, you know, maybe one pod that was focused on increasing customer retention within a particular industry or a particular market segment, maybe another who is focused on retention and upsell and cross sell and these semi autonomous pods that could make marketing more fast moving and more impactful.
Steve Watt: These things are happening and have been happening. I had not heard of anyone talking about Agile within enablement until I met you, Sally, and I’m pretty excited to learn more. So tell us where’s this coming from and, and what’s behind Agile coming into enablement, why should enablers be educating themselves about this if they’re not already educated and how do they start thinking about where and when they may want to apply this approach?
Sally Ladrach: Yeah, so, it’s interesting, I’ve been in the enablement game for a little bit over five years now and throughout that [00:12:00] time I’ve, you know, been in the Slack channels, I am very involved in RES, in the squad, the different groups that are out there, and you hear these same themes come up in terms of How do we really make sure that we’re being effective in our roles?
Sally Ladrach: How do we make sure we’re working with stakeholders? Well, how do we get these giant initiatives and projects done? We often end up being the conductor of the orchestra or the professional cat herders. And so, you know, I think that there’s all of these different, um, I guess challenges that I’ve, I’ve heard consistently across different enablement functions that I’ve, I’ve talked to or work with.
Sally Ladrach: And when I started working at ThoughtBot a couple of years ago, there’s Software Design and Development Agency, and there were about, I would say, 90 percent of the company was developers. And so it was a very interesting gig in that I was in the minority being somebody who is [00:13:00] not a developer at the company.
Sally Ladrach: And everything that we did, the way that we worked, was using that Agile framework. Not just our client projects where we were consulting and building things and delivering software, but in how we accomplished work together as a team. Right? How we carried out our marketing initiatives. How we carried out our enablement initiatives.
Sally Ladrach: And so working in that cadence of, we have a planning meeting on, you know, Monday, every two weeks, we say, these are the things I’m going to pick up for this sprint. We try to complete things inside of that sprint that are small, but complete pieces of maybe some larger initiative. And, you know, I won’t go into.
Sally Ladrach: All of how Agile works, but working in that way really got me thinking, why doesn’t every enablement team do this? Why don’t we all work this way? Because the problems that it solves, in, you know, when a software team is creating solutions for its [00:14:00] users, it’s trying to do one thing, it’s trying to address a problem, right?
Sally Ladrach: Because you don’t use or adopt a solution, a software solution or any other solution, unless you have a problem to solve. And what Agile is really great at doing is putting the user at the center and understanding what those users needs are so that whatever software you build is going to suit those needs in a way that creates adoption and ultimately creates impact for that user.
Sally Ladrach: In enablement, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen teams, and maybe even done a little bit of this myself in the past, you work on that six month rollout of whatever, You put it out there, ta da, and then nothing happens. People don’t use it. Maybe it wasn’t designed with the end user in mind, but then you just, you can’t even have that impact, right?
Sally Ladrach: If your solution for whatever it is, isn’t being adopted. So that was kind of the, I guess, genesis of, [00:15:00] of how I started thinking about Agile and enablement. Obviously I’m not the first person to, to think that Agile is a great way to work, but the, the nature of enablement is that we are building solutions and Agile at its core is about building user centric solutions that are adoptable and solve problems.
Steve Watt: It makes so much sense. You know, continuous delivery of small pieces instead of waiting to present the entire thing, a much closer partnership between the business people and the developers, or in this case, between the sellers and the enablers, continuous learning, testing, measurement, iteration, improvement.
Steve Watt: I mean, it, It’s hard to argue with the logic, but I think where some people would probably get really nervous is the practicality. Like it kind of sounds scary. [00:16:00] Like, I mean, if I can’t plan out what we’re going to do, I mean, does that mean I’m just forever iterating, forever responding? What if, what if every two weeks I’m being pulled in different directions?
Steve Watt: This doesn’t sound very effective. So how do we make sure that if we are going into this approach, that we also have a North star? We know we’re, we know what we’re doing and why, how do you balance that tension?
Sally Ladrach: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that, um, The, one of the other great things about Agile is really how you structure and prioritize your work.
Sally Ladrach: There’s a book called Outcomes Over Output by Joshua Seiden, and he wrote a book about enablement without knowing it. The book is actually written for product teams, and what it talks about is how to prioritize your development time for features or parts of the product that are going to produce outcomes.
Sally Ladrach: In other words. Behaviors that drive business [00:17:00] impact, right? So what that looks like in software is, you know, I might have three, you know, two things in my backlog. One of them is updating the colors on our checkout page. And one of them is adding, um, Apple pay to our checkout page. Now the colors are cool and it’s probably something that we could ship pretty quickly.
Sally Ladrach: So we would get a lot of points in the like, Hey, let’s get stuff done department. But if we look at what the right thing is to do, adding Apple Pay is going to be something that not only enhances our user experience, but it’s also going to drive business impact. We’re going to see increased conversions, we’re going to see a faster time to convert, all that sort of stuff.
Sally Ladrach: So in enablement, one of the things I think that we sometimes do is we get distracted. We get distracted by all the different requests and the thing that I love about looking at that outcomes over output approach is I can look at the things in my enablement backlog and I can say, okay, which of these is going to drive business impact?
Sally Ladrach: Is it going to be this one pager [00:18:00] or is it going to be You know, enabling folks on this cold calling blitz, whatever it is, right? What are the things that are tied to our revenue levers that are going to, to have impact on the business? So if it’s going to affect my win rate, if it’s going to affect my average deal size, if it’s going to shorten my deal cycle length, if it’s going to increase my number of opportunities, those are the things, those are the outcomes.
Sally Ladrach: That I should be focusing on. And so it not only helps us to deliver value more quickly, it helps us to like deliver the right things more quickly. We don’t get distracted by. The, you know, some so called random acts of enablement. So I love using Agile as a barometer for that too, again, you know, what’s going to drive that impact.
Amber Mellano: You know, speaking for a friend, uh, I get a little nervous when I think about putting stuff out there that isn’t fully baked, that might not be exactly right and perfect. I wonder if you [00:19:00] can talk us off the ledge a little bit, uh, by maybe sharing some success stories or even your own. inner workings that sort of help to prioritize this idea of the outcome and the ultimate experience that you’re aiming at not being developed in a silo and how that could overshadow our need for it to be perfect and just right.
Amber Mellano: Any thoughts on that front? Yeah,
Sally Ladrach: I mean, as, as a recovering perfectionist myself, uh, this is something that has been really hard for me to overcome. But I think that the thing that helps me get over it the most is when I think about if I take six months to build something and I wait until it’s perfect and I release it, and then I get the feedback and I did a bunch of stuff wrong along the way, I just wasted six months of time.
Sally Ladrach: If I spend a week Building out a prototype of some small piece of that, or, you know, some small, complete piece of that, put it in front of my end users and say, does this meet your need? Does this solve the [00:20:00] problem? I get that feedback. I only wasted a week if what I did was terrible. Right? Right. So if you’re somebody that doesn’t like to waste time, Agile is really great because it’s going to protect you from investing too much time into something that your users aren’t going to adopt.
Sally Ladrach: Because. In enablement, a big problem that we have is adoption. I don’t believe that adoption is the end all be all of our success. Not even close. I do believe that adoption is a prerequisite for impact. What we do, what we work on, cannot have an impact or solve a problem if people don’t even want to use it because it’s not in the right application, or they can’t access it on their machine, or it just doesn’t work for what we’re trying to solve for.
Sally Ladrach: And the only way to make sure that our stuff is user centric and adoptable is to start with them in mind, prototype, test, refine, and keep on going. [00:21:00]
Amber Mellano: Sally, I love hearing about this agile approach and how you’re really involving the field in the solutions that you’re bringing to them. I wonder, have you noticed that that has improved your relationship or even increased the adoption that you do get from them because you’re essentially involving them in the process and the development of what you’re delivering to them?
Amber Mellano: Yeah.
Sally Ladrach: Yeah, absolutely. And I can tell you what, when I forget to do that, I very much regret it. Because I’m not perfect and I don’t do it every time. But in this role and in other roles, when I have been really heavily involving folks from the field in what I’m creating, when I’ve put stuff in front of them early and said, does this make sense?
Sally Ladrach: Is this helpful? Does this solve your problem? That’s when I’ve hit the home runs. That’s when I’ve put something out and seen it. You know, used across the board. So, you know, I think one of the examples of something that often people get hung up on in sales [00:22:00] enablement, but that really is something that you could like agile very quickly is the concept of a enablement communication.
Sally Ladrach: Right? So, um, in a lot of organizations, there’s communications or asks coming at the sales team from every angle. And so one of the things that we can do as an enablement is to consolidate those, put it together in one place where sellers can look at it and know like, if I pay attention to this thing, I will be paying attention to the right things, right?
Sally Ladrach: There’s an action item for me. It’s going to be in here. And I’ve seen some people. Sit there and like, Oh, you know, they take a month to choose what tool they’re going to use, like a MailChimp or Constant Contact, or do we use an internal something or whatever it is. And just choosing a tool to use can, can really get people hung up.
Sally Ladrach: If we’re just doing agile, right? What [00:23:00] if we just manually asked all the different directors of whoever, Hey, what are your things you need the sales team to know this week? We patch it together inside of, you know, even a SharePoint news post, right? Which you can format to look really pretty, by the way, and send it out to the team and see how they react.
Sally Ladrach: Did they like it? Did they respond and say like, wow, this is really great. Did everybody completely ignore it? You can ask a couple of your folks from the field. What did you think about this? And we didn’t spend six months choosing a tool, perfecting the proc the process of how we would get those updates from our.
Sally Ladrach: You know, different cross functional stakeholders, you know, creating all the documentation around how this perfectly groomed thing is going to work. We just went ahead and did it once, didn’t spend that much time on it. And we can get back that very valuable feedback. So the next one we do, okay, now we’ve proved out that this is actually helpful.
Sally Ladrach: Now let’s go figure out what kind of tool we’re [00:24:00] going to need. Oh, and because we found out information from our users, we also are better informed now As to what path we should take with choosing our own tools to actually go implement this thing.
Steve Watt: Conceptually, we’ve been all over this, but nobody has actually said the words yet, minimum viable product.
Steve Watt: And that’s what you’re talking about. Right, Sally. And I want to go back to something you said a few minutes ago that some listeners may have missed the very small correction you made to yourself. You said, make a small piece of it. And then you stopped and said, make a small, complete piece. And that’s actually an important little correction you made because a minimum viable product isn’t just like the wheel of a bus, you know, a minimum viable product might be a skateboard that becomes a bicycle, becomes a motorcycle, becomes a car, then becomes a bus.
Steve Watt: That we can all ride on. You don’t just take a wheel or you don’t just make a row of seats because that’s not complete and it doesn’t work. So I want to pull on that [00:25:00] thread when you said create something small and get it out there, but it has to be complete. That sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t.
Steve Watt: Could you maybe give us an example? You just actually did give us one example there about that communication piece, but maybe another piece of another example of how you could create something small. So
Sally Ladrach: one place where, um, you have been able to deliver something complete and then iterate was in one of my prior roles, we had to create proposals, like I think a lot of companies do, and we had our proposals inside of this tool that quite honestly was really hard to use.
Sally Ladrach: It wasn’t providing a lot of value. People couldn’t find the pieces of content that they needed. Uh, very easily to put those proposals together and said, you know, let’s, let’s stop, let’s, let’s do something else. What are the user needs? So created user stories around, okay, I need to be able to quickly create a [00:26:00] proposal and still customize it for my customers.
Sally Ladrach: Okay, great. I also need to be able to easily find the, the content that I need, whether it’s the specific case studies or it’s the product specific material that I need to put into that proposal, right? So those are two sort of user needs that we started with and said, okay, we’re going to just take all this stuff out of here.
Sally Ladrach: We’re going to create a proposal template in Google Slides. And we’re going to take these blocks that we have, and we’re going to start with the ones that are most essential, right? It’s like title slide, about us, you know, maybe some product slides, a few of our best case studies. Boom. Your first template is now done.
Sally Ladrach: You’re able to put that in front of people and say, okay, what’s missing? Well, actually we need case studies on XYZ. Oh, we actually are selling more of the service line now, so we really need that slide in here too. Okay, great. Appreciate it. [00:27:00] Now I can iterate and put those things in. What I avoided was just automatically taking every single thing that was in that other tool and taking three months to migrate it over to the new template, which is what a lot of people would have done, what I probably would have done in a past life, you know?
Sally Ladrach: So, so that was sort of iteration number one. And we said, okay, we’ve got like our most important slides in here. And we still had this customer need, this user story around, you know, I need to be able to do this quickly, but still in a customizable way. And so, rather than going to, you know, one of the other solutions I might have gone to in the past, using a different tool, or, you know, saying, well, that’s tough, uh, you just delete the ones you don’t need, whatever.
Sally Ladrach: I kind of sat there and thought about it. I was like, I wonder if we can automate this. What I ended up doing was creating a Google form that people could fill in the client’s name, their name, products that they were going to be talking about in the industry. [00:28:00] And what it did when they hit submit was it would actually, in the background with that Google app script, create a new Google slides deck that had the customized client name in all the places where we had that placeholder.
Sally Ladrach: It would include the relevant case studies. It could include if, you know, the rep’s name was in there, wherever their name should appear. Right. So we started off with this, like this one thing of like, we need this out of this tool, that’s a pain. Okay. Now it’s in Google slides. People have to use it. Okay.
Sally Ladrach: Now it’s the next iteration. Okay. We’re going to add the things that we were missing before. Right. Okay. Now, how do we really get this thing cooking? And so each step, it was still complete and functional, but we were able to make it better every single time.
Steve Watt: Are enablement charters compatible? With Agile, we’ve, we’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about the importance of charters.
Steve Watt: A lot of others in the space talk about the importance of charters. One might think that that’s completely [00:29:00] incompatible, that a charter is inherently waterfall. Can we still have the benefits of a charter and deliver in an Agile way, or is this really two separate worlds?
Sally Ladrach: I mean, first of all, I’m probably the worst person to ask about charters because I’ve honestly never been much of a fan.
Sally Ladrach: Particularly because I feel as though what you do and what you say yes and no to is far more powerful than anything you could put on a piece of paper. However, that being said, I’m not saying that charters are stupid and don’t belong anywhere. I think they do have their use case. But I do think that if you are working in an agile way, a charter might actually be a really useful tool to be able to illustrate to your cross functional stakeholders.
Sally Ladrach: This is how we work as a team. This is how we prioritize. This is how we take in requests and then put them into our backlog. And to really set those rules of engagement, because it’s such a different way of working, especially for folks who are not in the product world, [00:30:00] You might have to spell things out a little bit for them, right?
Sally Ladrach: When you’re like, well, for the next two weeks, I’m actually only working on XYZ. Would you like to come to our planning meeting and take the first five minutes two weeks from now to discuss how we might, you know, handle this request? Because it’s a good one and it’s important, but we’re working on this right now.
Sally Ladrach: That’s a weird thing for a lot of organizations, I think.
Steve Watt: It does seem like there could be a good balance there, that the charter Is the longer term objectives. It’s almost the North star for where we’re heading, but the sprints are all the steps we’re taking to get there.
Sally Ladrach: Yeah. And I think a charter really is like your rules of engagement, right?
Sally Ladrach: If anything, I think that the charter should not outline what you are going to do, because the what is going to change from week to week, from month to month, from, you know, uh, second to second in some industries. But I think that what it [00:31:00] is really good for, again, is establishing your rules of engagement, your ways of working, so that cross functional stakeholders know what to expect from you as an Enablement team.
Sally Ladrach: And you can make it very clear, I’m happy to help you solve this problem. Here’s what I’m going to need from you. I need to be able to actually deep dive on what the problem is and then quantify it before it goes into the backlog. I need XYZ stakeholder at this cross functional sprint on this initiative every two weeks.
Sally Ladrach: Whatever it is, right? You can outline that in a charter really well. I would avoid sort of putting in the what we are doing.
Amber Mellano: I was thinking it would be a great opportunity to share your original point about the outcomes. and how we’re going to prioritize based on how we’re going to drive the business forward versus I need a one pager yesterday or, you know, the popcorn or the fire department request.
Amber Mellano: Yeah, exactly. Looking at this strategically, [00:32:00] that’d be a great place to explain that and, and share that approach in the charter. I like that.
Steve Watt: Okay, Sally, I think a lot of people are going to be convinced that this is an area they need to learn more about. Perhaps they ought to do some experimentation in.
Steve Watt: Can you make it really easy for us? What are some of the, the real key steps involved in approaching enablement through Agile?
Sally Ladrach: Yeah, absolutely. So The first step really is that when you get a request, um, or someone brings you a solution, start with the problem. Do that customer discovery to understand what the root cause is, and then quantify it.
Sally Ladrach: How is this impacting revenue and how many people is this impacting? From there, that allows you to prioritize. Then we’re going to go create a solution, right? You might use design thinking or some other device to try to brainstorm what, how you’re actually going to go solve it. Before [00:33:00] we actually go build stuff, we’re going to prototype it and put it in front of somebody, get some feedback, right?
Sally Ladrach: Build, maybe build the smallest iteration of that thing. Then we’re going to launch it. Okay. After we launch it, let’s do a retro and figure out what could be done better and what we need to do next time. Right? So, and then from there you identify the next problem and you solve it and it just goes around in a circle.
Sally Ladrach: But that’s a very basic high level, if I wanted to start being more agile about my practice. Here’s how I do that.
Amber Mellano: So to close out our podcast, we love to do this sort of rapid fire question and answer piece, and I’m going to ask you to pull out your crystal ball and tell us what do you foresee will be the biggest change that we’re going to experience in the enablement field over the next 18 to 24 months?
Sally Ladrach: I think that one of the things that we are going to see, continue to see change, is the demand for enablement to be data [00:34:00] centric. Data driven. I think a lot of enablers right now have a big gap around their data skills when it comes to understanding how it’s structured, the analysis, right? I think we’ve already seen that the less you’re able to tie your impact to revenue, The less job security you have, um, and so I think that companies are also starting to hire and look for folks in enablement who are data minded.
Sally Ladrach: I was searching for jobs a few months back, went through about 70 interviews, and a trend I was seeing across all those job descriptions, hundreds of job descriptions that I read was data driven. Understands data, analyzes data to identify gaps. And that’s something I think we as an enablement field could, it’s a little bit upskilling in.
Sally Ladrach: So that’s going to become more important. I’m pretty positive about it.
Amber Mellano: Nice. I like that. On the other hand, what do you [00:35:00] think won’t change in the next 18 to 24 months? I think
Sally Ladrach: that the way that people have always bought and the way that people who love to sell are, it’s probably not going to change that much.
Sally Ladrach: Uh, it’s funny, I’ve been getting really into Sandler lately, um, as a sales methodology and I listened to his conglomeration of recordings from the 60s and 70s and the way people bought hasn’t really changed. What works in sales really hasn’t changed that much. It’s, it’s really shocking to me. I think we overcomplicate a lot of it.
Sally Ladrach: I think that has not changed. And I think that sellers haven’t really changed either. They like to be involved. Uh, they like to adopt things that are useful and they don’t adopt things that aren’t. I think that’s why enablement is sometimes called on to be the police, uh, you know, to make sellers do something.
Sally Ladrach: But at the end of the day, I think that’s one of the reasons why agile is so great and why it’s been working really well for [00:36:00] over a couple of decades now is because people and why they use solutions really doesn’t change.
Amber Mellano: Yeah. Interesting. All right. Last question. What would you tell us is the best advice you’ve received?
Amber Mellano: This doesn’t have to be career or enablement advice, just what is the best piece of advice you’ve seen or you’ve heard in your life?
Sally Ladrach: Yeah. I think it’s, um, you know, have a bias for action. I think that that’s been one of the things that for me, again, as a recovering perfectionist has been really difficult at times.
Sally Ladrach: It’s to just do the freaking thing and stop thinking about it, uh, but what I have seen is that those who are, you know, not reckless action, but those who take action more than they just think about doing stuff are the ones who succeed, whether it’s in life and business and whatever, taking that next right step and not letting anything stop you from doing that.
Sally Ladrach: Start. Just start it. [00:37:00] Love it.
Steve Watt: That is a fantastic place to end, Sally. A wonderful answer and a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. I really love that. I hope everyone else did as well, and I hope that many of you are inspired to learn more about Agile and maybe start tinkering around in some areas that you weren’t exploring before.
Steve Watt: Sally, thanks for joining us on The Enablement Edge.
Sally Ladrach: Thanks so much, Mallory. Thanks, Amber and Steve.
Steve Watt: Thanks for joining us on The Enablement Edge. We’re on YouTube and all your favorite podcast providers. See you next time.
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