Challenges, Trends & Opportunities in Sales Enablement

Rajiv Parikh: I'm your host, Rajiv. And today, I have Tim Carlson, Director of sales enablement from Netskope. Welcome to the show.

 

Tim Carlson: Thank you, I appreciate it.

 

Rajiv Parikh: So tell us a little bit about Netskope. What does the company do? It's been around since 2012, I believe.

 

Tim Carlson: Right about there.

 

Rajiv Parikh: And it's growing very, very rapidly. Tell us a little about what the company does.

 

Tim Carlson: Sure. So Netskope, as to your point, has only been around a while, five, six years, something that area, and actually the sector we're in is still relatively new. It's currently in its current iteration called Caspi, a cloud access security broker. And I say currently because that is seen to be morphing. It's a sector that is definitely evolving very, very rapidly, not just from Netskope’s perspective but also from an analyst perspective. So basically, what we do is help companies in their journey to the cloud. We help them securely leverage all the benefits of the cloud while maintaining regulatory compliance or just general security practices that are really critical to do it properly. So in our case, we help companies leverage infrastructure, like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as the ton of cloud-based applications that are out there, Dropbox, Salesforce, office, 365, etc. We help them leverage those applications, that infrastructure, etc., in ways that do not get in the way of doing business which is a typical concern when you're doing security is it's going to slow me down, and it's gonna make it harder to do my work. We actually make it as effective, easy and safe as possible.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Gotcha. And you are a Director of sales enablement. And you've been at the company for about 14-15 months now. So what sort of prompted that scope to realize the fact that they needed to hire somebody with your role? And why at that time, what's been shifting in the company to realize sort of the importance of sales enablement.

 

Tim Carlson: So I think it's a couple of things. Obviously, there's been that sales enablement, a component in place, various people covering different aspects of it. But no one person is responsible for it driving and really building a strategy around it. I think the realization came as our solution offering was looking to significantly expand, as was the staff of our field sales organizations. And it just really became the time where, you know, the hit that growing pain was like, Okay, we've got to get someone in here who can truly focus on this and do great things with it. So it just became that pain point a few all.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Gotcha. And prior to that scope, you were at Juniper Networks. Tell us, how did you sort of stumble upon this role? I mean, it's a fairly new term fairly new. It's been around for about five years or so, let's say, we were talking off-camera before this. What sort of profile that you've seen has come across as this particular position? And how did it happen for you?

 

Tim Carlson: It's, as you pointed out, it's a very new function that has an official role. And I've seen quite a number of different people coming into this. I’ve done several roles where sales enablement has been the primary or secondary component of my role. So I've seen, you know, former quota-carrying sales folks in this role who just want to get off the road and not deal with the rat race anymore. Marketing, people who've expanded into this role, and that kind of blurs the line a little bit with the whole marketing enablement piece that we talked about earlier. And a little bit different for me is I'm actually coming from typically a post-sales training side of the house. The First 10-15 years of my career were mostly in helping customers leverage the products that our company sold.

 

Rajiv Parikh: For Customer Success more.

 

Tim Carlson: What would now be termed customer success? Definitely. And that has morphed into a long way. Oh, by the way, you'd be good at, you know, getting our internal support folks up and running on this. So it'd be that Nelson, you know, our sales engineers could use a little different take on that. And then it turns out all your sales guys, so it just kind of became a natural extension for me. So what I found over the last probably 10 years is the ratio really flipped, you know, where before was about 70-80% post-sales focused it very quickly became 60-70-80%. Pre-sales. So it just was a natural transition.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Interesting. Okay. And we were also talking before the camera about the sort of the landscape of sales enablement that we were talking about: the buyers’ journey and the content and the sales process. Tell us a little bit about how you view that world on that scale. What does that look like for you?

 

Tim Carlson: So, you know, we're a kind of a mid-stage startup high growth company at this point, we have a sales process in place, I would not say we have a sales methodology in place, and we're still a ways off from that the sales process we have in place is pretty fundamental, you know, it's run of the mill, it's very much tied to different actions that are taking place with the buyer. We're now actually in a transition state where we are really trying to mesh that up very tightly with her new interpretation of what the buyers’ journey actually looks like. And I say new because it is constantly changing based on a number of circumstances. So we've mapped out a new buyers journey where we think different decision points, inflection points are along the way and starting to map that versus content versus different training that we may need to provide our people to support that. And then ultimately, how does that dial back to the different stages that we actually track a deal in? You know, so, you know, what are those awareness steps? What are those criteria leading up to a PLC, and then ultimately, a decision point?

 

Rajiv Parikh: So let's talk a little bit more about sort of the buyers’ journey. Again like you're sort of taking ownership as Director of sales enablement and that scope? How do you go about defining the buyers’ journey? And what does that look like, based on the sort of the use cases and the products that you're offering?

 

Tim Carlson: So for us, it's interesting, because it's a little bit different, depending on the solution sell that we're making. Two of our solution cells are very similar, very complementary. So and it's the solution that we've been selling the longest. So it's very natural to us. When we went to a platform, play or infrastructure play, it's very different. It's a subscription usage model versus a just butt and seat type model. And it's a struggle that actually a lot of companies are dealing with that are providing infrastructure as a service. So you know, we've had to really flip some things out there, see how it works? Like it's not quite right, we had tweaked it a little bit. It's definitely an iterative process.

 

Rajiv Parikh: And so that's your sort of your messaging, your positioning, how you're selling the product, seeing what's working, what's not, and sort of iterating accordingly.

 

Tim Carlson: Right, absolutely.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Okay, and what have you found that's been working? I mean.

 

Tim Carlson: That's a tough one. And that's always the big challenge, right? You know, you can create a whole lot of content, but what really engages people is the tough one to measure. We recently deployed a new sales enablement platform. And that does give us a little more visibility into that usage. The previous one that we had really distinct has that kind of analytics of sorts. Obviously, there are the very high-end ones, you know, the seismic, and the high spots that go very deep with that kind of analytics, where you can really dig into, you know, what happens when I send this to a prospect and that we're not there? We generally feel we're not quite at that level yet. So.

 

Rajiv Parikh: And was it your decision to bring on a sales enablement solution?

 

Tim Carlson: Yeah, we actually had a platform in place. About a year before I got here and it was one of they brought in, they had a specific use case they wanted to use it for and it did very well. But unfortunately, without a champion driving sales enablement, overall, it just kind of withered on the vine after that first thing was done. So I came in, assessed it for a little bit like you know this, I see why you chose it, but it's not going to take us where we need to be three, four or five years down the road. So I went out there, researched probably a dozen different providers out there and ultimately settled in on a shortlist of three and chosen.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Gotcha. And tell me about your sort of relationship or partnership with marketing as it relates to sales enablement. Is marketing helping the company produce important content to support your sales initiatives? Are you doing that yourself?

 

Tim Carlson: So our model is that sales enablement should be able to curate probably 80% of the content we need, it should exist somewhere in the company in some form, may need some polish means reformatting, but the content should be there somewhere. My general opinion is if we have to generate more than 20% of our content, we're not looking hard enough. We're not asking the right people. We’re not doing our part of it. So you know, marketing is obviously a huge pipe of content coming into us. And so we work very closely with them. The structure that I'm building out here is a program manager style. So I've got a program manager that focuses purely on the account exec and their needs. And then I'm currently looking for one focus on system engineering, technical sales. And another one focuses on the channel. And the idea is to just really understand their needs before they can really even put them into words. You know, I'm focusing on hiring folks in those roles that have enough domain expertise that they can anticipate those needs. And just really working directly with them figuring out okay, great, we got this new content here, let's run it by our SMEs within that organization, make sure it resonates with them and other issues with it, etc. And then, once we actually launch it out, they're really following up saying, okay, you know, we're looking at downloads, usages, or fourteens, or things like that. But also having those conversations with people and saying, hey, okay, we launched this out. What is the takeaway? How are people responding when you're doing this pitch? And, you know, feeding that back in.

 

Rajiv Parikh: And iterating accordingly, based on the feedback you're getting.

 

Tim Carlson: Exactly.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Have you found a type of sales enablement collateral to be more effective than others?

 

Tim Carlson: For us, in our space, it might be a little bit unique to what we do. We're finding that the competitive Intel battle cards are, by far, the meatiest they seem to really resonate. And I think part of that is because we're it's still a very young area that we're in. And it's kind of interesting. The competition that we're up against is a lot of very incumbent security companies that have been around for long decades. You know, the big difference is they're taking a more legacy appliance-based approach, trying to make it work in the cloud. Our solution is actually completely native-born in the cloud. So from a very foundational level, we can take advantage of the things that make the cloud so attractive. Yeah, ultimate scalability and reliability and reach.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Competitive Intel valid cards for your team to have at the helm in order to properly position the company versus these incumbents, and why choose you Netskope over others.

 

Tim Carlson: Exactly.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Okay, gotcha. Very interesting. Can you talk to us a little bit about what your typical day looks like as Director of sales enablement at Netskope,

 

Tim Carlson: I wish I had a typical day.

 

Rajiv Parikh: A typical day, Typical week.

 

Tim Carlson: Right now, if I can break it into chunks, really, and we've got really three main things that we focus on. First, one is effective onboarding, trying to get new folks up to speed as quickly as possible, get them out there pitching and selling closing deals, then we have the ongoing care and feeding, as I call it, which really breaks into product-related and soft skills. And the reason for that breakout is this. Obviously, the solutions are constantly evolving. We are a SaaS product. So every time release comes out, it's available globally. You know, you don't have the luxury of, okay, we launched this, and it'll take people X amount of time to get caught up with upgrades and it's available immediately. So yeah, it is an ongoing effort just to keep people up to speed on what's coming out there.

 

Rajiv Parikh: And how often is that happening, by the way?

 

Tim Carlson: For us about every four weeks or so?

 

Rajiv Parikh: Okay. Yeah, you just go back to the first point in terms of onboarding and getting people up to speed for when they're out there? What's the timeframe that that takes?

 

Tim Carlson: So we have a structured onboarding of about 90 days. And it actually starts from the moment the offer letter side. We actually pre-board people immediately. And this is done through direct communications between sales enablement and the new hire, but also fostering communication with them and their hiring manager at sign buddy, our EVP of Sales reaches out to them. Hey, welcome team, we're so excited. You're here, you know, and we just start building that relationship immediately.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Get them really excited.

 

Tim Carlson: Get him excited, because especially in on a job market, like we have today, you know, ghosting is a reality. But frankly, we've been fortunate. We haven't really had that issue in Netskope. But we also really make sure that we try to make sure that they're excited as possible for every step in the door. So we're providing them with, you know, publicly available, but they don't do a search for assets, you know, emails that they can share out with their contacts, you know, we're hiring sales folks, you know, they've got contacts all over the place. Hey, I'm joining this exciting new cloud security company. Let’s talk in a couple of weeks when I get on the ground. Stuff that they can post on LinkedIn announcing their move assets to get them started studying so they walk in the door, pretty good understanding what's going on, from day one, and even something as simple as the next to go banner that they can put on their social media and things like that. And so we start just building that engagement from day one. We have different people reach out to them and say, Hey, You know, I'm here got any questions, here's my cell phone number, here's my email, let's talk, you know, it's not just the relationship between them and their hiring manager, it's with these people who they're going to have to build relationships with anyway. So we'll get it started right away.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Well, and you know, just to digress, just a bit, that reminds me of something I read recently about Sanjay, your CEO, talking about sort of the importance of the culture now that Netskope is building and really hiring for culture versus domain expertise. I think he said, You know, you're looking for somebody with a that has a 10 for 10 fits for culture, and maybe a seven to eight over 10 domain expertise, because it's really the culture that's going to make the all the difference.

 

Tim Carlson: Absolutely. That Forbes podcast, I believe, And that's very true, I can tell you as a hiring manager, there it is, culture is at the top of the list, and then there's everything else underneath. You know, and I think, one part of that is the fact that we are in a sector of security that is still so new, you're not gonna find many people that are going to hit the 10 on a 10 on the technical side. So we got to build a girl, you know, and that's where you know my role and other enablement functions really come in.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Okay, so we're talking about onboarding, we're talking about product releases every four weeks, making sure everyone's up to speed on that, and there was a third.

 

Tim Carlson: The third one's softer skills, and in particular, talking about account execs. So if you look at sales over the last 10 years has changed significantly. Prospects have an unbelievable amount of access to information about your company, your products, good, bad, indifferent, glassdoor and everything else, lay everything bare.

 

Rajiv Parikh: A lot of transparency out there.

 

Tim Carlson: Right. And so when it comes to selling, you know, they're not looking to engage with a rep until they're much further along in their decision-making process. So a rep walking in for that initial meeting is a little bit of a handicap in some ways. So we have to really provide the types of collateral assets that our sales folks need to be able to have those conversations knowing that the customer is a lot further down than they usually would put them three, four years ago. So combine that with the fact that it is a relatively young technology area. There's a significant amount of storytelling and educating going on. And it's gotten even a year I've been here. It’s changed. But, you know, a year ago, it was a lot about, Hey, are you aware that your company uses a lot of cloud applications.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Educating potential prospects.

 

Tim Carlson: Potential prospects, right. Now, a year later, it's there, they know, there's a lot of cloud apps being used. And okay, how do I go about securing them? Or how do I quantify that? We did a study about a year ago, where we found a typical large enterprise, as in excess of 1000 or 1200, cloud applications being used, of which IT knows, 2 or 3%. So think about the threat factor. It is huge.

 

Rajiv Parikh: So that’s why you stopped doing it for Netskope.

 

Tim Carlson: It is, you know, I mean, five years ago, if you needed, you know, a server compute or storage space, that was an IT project, and you might get it in six months, if you had funding and if you were able to get on the shortlist of projects. You know, the reality now is I can go online, I can set up a Dropbox in five minutes. Problem solved, right? In theory, that's true.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Let's talk about trends. What do you what are you seeing in the industry that's really exciting for you as it pertains to cybersecurity or sales enablement in general?

 

Tim Carlson: So, a couple of things. If I take a look at what Netskope does right now, there's a recent study that came out that showed 85% of an Enterprise's web traffic is to go out and use applications or infrastructure. It's not about going to websites, you know, they're going to Dropbox. They’re going to applications that you wouldn't typically worry about a year ago. You know, we got Facebook or workplace. You have a corporate presence on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and all these others that have legitimate business use, right? That you need to be able to at least monitor and keep track of so 85% of your traffic is going on. Yet most of the legacy infrastructure is focused on are you going to a website. We don't want you to go to a use case a paradigm shift and that is just in the last two years that it's made that just monumental shift. And so security companies are trying to play catch up to that very quickly. Where Netskope comes in, we have a security that solution that plays in all three of those areas. So it's literally a single pane of glass. Oh, your traffic is shifting sweet. Let's enable this and away we go. So it's no longer I need to, you know, kind of duct tape together all these different solutions from multiple vendors or one big vendor that bought up all these companies it's a native solution Ready to go? It quite literally checks the box. And all right.

 

Rajiv Parikh: So how about trends? As it relates to sales enablement? What are you seeing that's exciting.

 

Tim Carlson: So it's been interesting. As I mentioned, we went through an assessment looking for a new sales enablement platform last year. And it's shocking every time I turn around, there's some new player out there, and they've got an interesting take on some technology piece. And of course, the challenge with a sales organization is you need to make sure that your technology stack is pretty lean. You got to go to where the reps are, where the reps live, they live in your CRM. So the path of least resistance is my sales limit platform has to be pretty much just transparent within the CRM, and which is the one we chose does very well. So what we have Brewin out there, though, is he had a lot of these newcomers out here with some really interesting technology. AI is really coming up very quickly. You know, pitch assessment, especially a situation like ours, where there's a lot of storytelling and educational component to our solid process, we really want to use that as a way to make sure that our people can really get the message across very quickly.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Talk to us more about pitch assessment and AI and how that play supports.

 

Tim Carlson: So we use Brainshark as our sales enablement platform, one of the add ons I have here is something called content context and another one is their AI assessment tool. So, the content context within your CRM gives you the ability to surface content relevant to an opportunity they're looking at. So it takes down the barrier of having a sales rep, as they're updating an opportunity to say, Oh, I gotta go find a piece of content that relates to this, boom, it's right there, you know, and it's relevant to the opportunity that they're looking at. So obstacle number one takes care of the other part is as well. So they had this great tool, where you can basically train their AI on what to look for in a pitch. So in our case, let's say we're pitching our SaaS product. You know, what are the key words, we want to hear them say during the pitch? What are the things we don't want them to say? Maybe we're trying to get rid of some old messaging and trying to replace it with new. We can actually tell it to look for those things. But then it also takes, like, the more intangible things, so things like tone of voice, rate of speech, facial expressions, use of filler words, which I'm terrible with use of filler words, things like that. And it really helps them in that softer skill side, which was mentioned earlier, around helping them do a better job of just being a salesperson, you know, so the great thing is, they can do this one time, they can do 20 times until they're happy with it, and then submit, they're getting feedback from the AI, immediately saying, Hey, this is what we see, you know, these some areas where you're talking too fast, or you keep using the wrong messaging, or this wrong term that we want you to get rid of, you know, so you can go through that multiple times within the tool. If they don't want to in the tool, they can upload a video of them doing it and does the same assessment, right. So when they get to that point where they think they really have an opt-in loaded, they can then turn around and submit to their manager, sales enablement, etc.,

 

Rajiv Parikh: And sign off right. And then you're ready to go.

 

Tim Carlson: Exactly. And so that's become an integral part of our new sales accreditation that we're rolling out this year.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Very interesting. And then the final question from me, what are your top sales enablement initiatives?

 

Tim Carlson: Number one is the sales credit action program that we're rolling out this year. It’s going to be, you know, multi-tier, multi-focus, you know, we have three main solution areas that we're going over, so it's kind of an initial, get the right pitch, understand the basic competition, and things like that. What are the assets that are available to you? And then building on from that? So for like a sales engineering demo certified? How can they adequately go or are they proficient and going through a demo around that particular solution set and also giving them real-life scenarios and saying, okay, here's a use case, a real company, anonymized customer, real scenario? Real challenges, you're gonna real face competitors you're gonna face? How do you respond? So it's not typical. We’re just gonna firehose, USBs and feeds and stuff that you'll forget five minutes later. It's a very directly tangible, usable thing they can do the next day. That's number one. And then the second part of that is really expanding out our connection with marketing as well. You know, we've got a significant push for updating not only our content but our messaging, our whole rebranding, if you will, around our company, what we do and why we do it. So it's a big push this year for us.

 

Rajiv Parikh: So that's a very close partnership with marketing. Working closely with the customer. Okay, gotcha, very interesting. I'm going to shift gears and ask a couple of fun questions. That I asked most of my guests So Tim, what's your superpower?

 

Tim Carlson: Interesting. Well, having done training and been a standard trainer for a number of years, number one very thick skin good sense of where to go with it. You know definitely put in my share of uncomfortable situations out there and you have to answer with rooms so.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Yeah, thick skin, I like that. Do you have any daily habits or rituals that keep you productive or in the flow?

 

Tim Carlson: You know, for me it's kind of comical I'm the put the headphones on and crank up a very hot mess of a playlist and go you know, within that scope, you know, it shifts quite a bit right there's a lot of challenges a lot of work to be done lots of things to do at 100 miles an hour it's all the same time so you know I mean the goes back to the basics have a to-do, list for the day and yeah, hopefully, you can get through half of them if you're lucky without adding another 20 to it.

 

Rajiv Parikh: Yeah, for sure. What so what's on your playlist?

 

Tim Carlson: Oh, it is all over the place. It goes from Sammy Hagar for rock'n'roll to mark Antwan, for Latin jazz, the Jonny Lang for blues, just all over.

 

Rajiv Parikh: You have a different genre. Is there anything else you'd like to share with us or the audience before we sign off here?

 

Tim Carlson: Yeah, I think the one thing that I've seen over the last few years, and it's kind of goes back to your comment about you know, some of the technology trends and such like that. There's a lot of really good stuff out there, a lot of really exciting stuff. I think everyday terrain, you're seeing either someone's coming out something new, or someone new is on the scene. The challenge that I see is you have a finite attention span that you're dealing with as far as the sales reps, willingness to embrace a new platform, at the solution, whatever—so having to be very, very cognizant of that fact. You know, there's a lot of really interesting tools and you know, a little bit of the bright shiny object syndrome because it's gonna be great as a rep. I’d love that, right? I'm not a rep. And I'm not trying to close multimillion-dollar deals, right? So having to look at that and say, okay, you know, yeah, that is a really great thing, but am I gonna be able to get enough mindshare to make it worth it?

 

Rajiv Parikh: Thanks, everybody, for watching Tim, really appreciate you being on my show. Tim Carlson, Director of sales enablement from Netskope. Thanks for your time.

 

Tim Carlson: Thank you.