Creating a Successful Sales Team and Future of Sales Enablement

Rajiv Parikh: I'm your host, Rajiv, and today I'm honored to have Hang Black as my guest. Hang is the head of global sales enablement at Juniper Networks. Welcome to the show.   Hang Black: Thank you for having me.   Rajiv Parikh: So, Hang, I want to start with your roles and responsibilities. Can you tell us a little bit about what your roles and responsibilities are as head of global sales enablement at Juniper?   Hang Black: Absolutely. So I get to serve all of Juniper’s sales, services, and partner organization globally, which is the big remit, but it's challenging. And that's what I love about my job.   Rajiv Parikh: Gotcha. And you're an executive in a Fortune 500 company. What are your leadership styles like?   Hang Black: So I have a mantra. I believe every executive should have a mantra. Mine specifically is to earn it, own it, evolve it. There's no room,   Rajiv Parikh: Earn it, own it, evolve it, I love that.   Hang Black: Thank you.   Rajiv Parikh: I have never heard that before.   Hang Black: Thank you.   Rajiv Parikh: Tell us more.   Hang Black: Thank you. So my mentality is this, especially with sales enablement, my guidance, I have to get people to adopt my vision, my framework, my policy, so the only way to do that is through leading by example, is through earning your credibility. But once you earn it, you have to keep earning it every day. So that's owning it. And the last piece is evolving it. If Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, I would say at the speed of innovation that we have today, if you're not ahead of the curve, you're falling behind. So you got to continuously evolve and innovate.   Rajiv Parikh: 100%, we can agree more. So sales enablement, we were talking off-camera that it's been around for many years. And it's I think, catching a little more fire these days, more and more companies realize the importance of sales enablement. Tell us what is your sort of view of sales enablement, as it stands today?   Hang Black: Well, let's talk about where it has been. It has been training specifically around sales skills, and then soft skills, maybe some tools and process, and then eventually, it became all about the product. Sales enablement today is about nurturing the whole salesperson. So it's the product, it's soft skills, it's management, coaching, it's all of those things. And it's not just altruistic, because we know that if you can keep your top sales talent for more than one year, there, your two is typically one and a half to 2x. If you can keep them past two years, beyond that, they are three to 4x, their annual first-year quota. So it's not all altruistic. But of course, we also want to serve our people. And that's actually one of the things I love about working at Juniper. Our culture is our tenant. We live by the values of build trust, be bold, deliver excellence. They had me right there.   Rajiv Parikh: There you go. Yeah, you know, when I think about the world of sales enablement, I think of a very close collaboration with marketing and sales, in reality, you know, working to understand the different personas in the customer journeys, and then creating the right type of material to support your SDR is your boots on the ground? Is that the way you work? Is that how it works at Juniper? Do you have a close alliance with marketing? And how do you sort of define the personas across all these different products? And offerings that you have?   Hang Black: Absolutely. And one of the roles of sales enablement, which is why it's become such a much more strategic function. It's not just delivery. It’s curation. It's working between the different organizations. So I actually have the I've had the unique experience of starting as an engineer, and then a product manager, and then Product Marketing. And then, I did what I would call sales enablement from marketing for sales. And you'll see a trend now where sales enablement has moved specifically into sales reporting into executive leadership. And the reason is we get to provide we get to be that translation layer. We get to make sure that we help marketing land their messaging and drive adoption.   Rajiv Parikh: Yeah, I think it is a really good point in terms of having the right curated set of content, and not just getting content for content’s sake, because then you have this massive, you know, stuff. And it's really short, hard to navigate to find the right relevant content that can actually move the needle.   Hang Black: Yeah. So what I've seen is, content has gotten to where it's just too much, right? We have this phrase, that universe I can't keep up. There's too much content. And the way enablement was run before Well. The sellers didn't see it the first time. Let me just throw it to them a second, third, fourth time, and then you get this massive proliferation. And that's why historically, 67% of marketing content doesn't get consumed. And marketing is trying to do the right thing. And that's where our job enablement is to remove that marketing and sales friction and partner up. So as the lines blur, we help each other.   Rajiv Parikh: Yeah, super, super important. I think that a first-year tight Alliance or partnership will make all the difference. You said something interesting, which I want to let the audience know. So for those of you who don't know, hang black actually has a degree in chemical engineering from Texas A&M.   Hang Black: UT Austin. Don’t go there.   Rajiv Parikh: UT Austin, sorry.   Hang Black: You might have to end there, maybe.   Rajiv Parikh: Yeah. But and also your journey has been really interesting. You know, you have a degree in chemical engineering, you've ended up in sales enablement. And to your point, you know, you have this engineering mindset, which has helped you get to where you've gone to. But tell us a little bit about your journey. You've been a co-founder, you at Cisco for nearly 12 years, you read A by A. What did that look like when you first started and where you are today.   Hang Black: I love that life leads you to where you need to be. And the journey is unpredictable. I was a chemical engineer, specifically because I was premed at the time. And a couple of years into it. I asked my parent’s permission to go to business school because I wanted to be closer to the numbers to the dollar signs. But my parents that your Asian, doctor, lawyer, engineer. Pick one, so I stuck with engineering, and I'm really, really glad because going into finance at the time would not have been the right decision for me. I love engineering. I love that whole problem-solving piece of it. And I always joke that I went into engineering because I like numbers, I like solving hard problems, I went into sales because I like numbers of dollar signs in front of them. So I have I also like to mention that with sales enablement, we have the privilege of solving for hard. So with my journey, as you mentioned, 14 years at Cisco 11, of which were service providers, and then the last period in enterprise, mobility and cloud. I left Cisco about four years ago. I was an entrepreneur for a couple of years, which was wonderful. It was exhausting. And it was wonderful because I got to see so many companies outside of the networking infrastructure ecosystem, and I got to really accelerate my personal learning of sales enablement. And then I ended up joining one of my top clients, which was getting them on in the cybersecurity, a space that I love quite a bit. And I got an opportunity to go to eight by eight take on a bigger role, I was there for a little bit and was able to meet some great people do some great things, and I just got another opportunity to get good reviews. With Juniper, I almost feel like I'm coming home a little bit because I'm back at a company with a really wide breadth of portfolio. And if anything had gotten a lot more complex than when I left Cisco, the personas are have multiplied as far as the different sales and services provoke personas that I need to accommodate. The portfolio is immense and complex. And enablement. People really great enablement. People are a little bit like unicorns because they need to understand messaging, they need to understand the product, they need to be able to speak coherently, intelligently to the rest of the organization in order to get that good that credibility and earn that seat at the table so that they can own and keep delivering every day.   Rajiv Parikh: 100%. Yeah, and I like how you framed this the solve for hard, which I think makes a lot of sense. Can you talk a little bit about the personas and how do you approach the multiple personas? Do you have to define a Juniper based on again the complex matrix of solutions that you that the company offers?   Hang Black: Well, as with anything today, it's just gotten, like I said, more complex. We've got SDRs, we've got telemarketers, we've got traditional AM's and there are flavors of AMS. We’ve got traditional partners, account managers, and different flavors of those. And by the way, when this becomes extremely dynamic, everything that we're doing internally, we'd like to be able to repurpose for our external partners because they are also part of our community and our family. So with that, we've got our services audience, our SE audience, and then we've got segmentation on top of it. It's quite a matrix and fluid, so what we need to do is, it's almost like having a university where you have to build a course catalog. There are some things that you can prescribe, call that your core curriculum, and then you've got electives. And you've got to let people select, but generally, what I tune in for is 80%, similar, and then 20% customization, but that 20% customization is almost as important is that 80%, but I try to make sure that we have that we don't make work for people that they can that we know what they need right at the core, but they know what they need on the periphery.   Rajiv Parikh: And the customer has actually gotten a lot more savvy than they used to be. Meeting the customer where they're at. So they don't have to do that heavy lifting, knowing where they're at and providing that the right collateral material, or long that customer journey, I think can really make a big difference.   Hang Black: Right. And I'll tell you why. Why the industry trends have moved sales enablement into sales. Who knows the customer best? Question.   Rajiv Parikh: Right. The customer   Hang Black: Who knows the customer best, the customer? Who inside the or the vendors’ organization knows the customer best? Sales. Right. And so who knows what sales content sales needs, sales. So that's kind of why the industry has moved in that direction. And that's why it's become such a much more strategic objective for the executive staff.   Rajiv Parikh: So Hang, why do you think sales enablement is an important investment for companies today?   Hang Black: Well, we all agree, in general, that the buyers’ journey has gotten more complex with digital disruption. And its industry data points to the buying committee has moved from a one to one relationship, buyer to seller to overtime, I believe we're at 10.2 now.   Rajiv Parikh: 10.2 touchpoints.   Hang Black: 10.2 touchpoints.   Rajiv Parikh: Multiple decision-makers.   Hang Black: Exactly. Multiple decision-makers, more complex decision buying process on the buyers’ journey. So if we know that digital disruption has made the buyer more sophisticated, then we have to assume that the sellers are more sophisticated. So we are no longer in the age of marketing tells sales what to sell. And when to sell it with a one-to-one relationship, we actually need to engage our sales community as part of that enablement journey. So every company that I consult or work for, I create what's called a sales and services enablement council. So think of everyone that's trying to feed sales, corporate marketing, field marketing, finance, sales ops me, everyone who's trying to feed sales, actually gets an audience with this with our top sales leaders as well. So there's a negotiation that occurs as far as well, this is very important. No, this is very important. And we get to test and pilot and offer our opinions to everyone who's trying to care and feed us.   Rajiv Parikh: The council.   Hang Black: The council does. And because of that, we earned credibility. Again, it's all about earning credibility and your seat at the table. Because of that, we earn credibility with our sales team. We are close to the field. We understand we are listening to them, sure, which means their customers get the point of view and a voice as well. So we prioritize the thing is, as you get into a more complex organization, a more complex portfolio, you still have one seller with a very limited attention span. So if we're not able to deliver bespoke enablement to them, we're going to lose the most important content and the most important messaging to them. And messaging, by the way, it's not always about the product. It's about the sales process. It's about methodology. It's about tools that we're rolling out, it's about negotiation skills and all of that, but it's my charter to have my team be always on top of the industry and continuing to refresh our sales team.   Rajiv Parikh: Yeah. And I like how you're phrasing this sort of getting bespoke point solution is very, very true. Again, going back to define this persona as what are their pain points? What are they looking for? And how can you create those bespoke solutions that are going to meet them where they are on their buyer journey?   Hang Black: Exactly. And furthermore, with our, we're always challenging our sales team to be a trusted advisor, which means they have to be ahead of the curve. They have to be able to offer guidance and thought leadership.   Rajiv Parikh: Going back to be evolving.   Hang Black: Exactly, going back to evolving.   Rajiv Parikh: Right? Same kind of curve. Yeah, great part.   Hang Black: And you know, essentially what we treat our salespeople, they're my customers. So just like, we coach our salespeople to listen to the customers, I listen to the sales teams. Just as we say,we need to be able to offer value to our sales team. So our customers, we try to make sure that we're continually offering value to our sales team.   Rajiv Parikh: What do you think you need to be successful in a sales enablement leadership role?   Hang Black: First and foremost, executive sponsorship, full stop. And from executive sponsorship, we would also need adoption from our executive peer sales leaders because the former will drive the ladder and then the ladder will drive both credibility and adoption among the masses.   Rajiv Parikh: Then in how are you accomplishing that? What is your style in order to achieve the former ladder?   Hang Black: I'm a constant learner. And I'm generally quite positive, too, so I believe energy is contagious. And people look at how you lead. People look at your people. Look at if you people watch. If you are living your values, I work really hard. I don't need to be the smartest person at the table, but I work really hard. And, that's the work ethic that we proliferate at Juniper. It's fun, but it's hard. And we are honored to solve for the heart. And that's what we want to do for our customers. I love the Juniper brand of engineering simplicity. We run our goal at Juniper, which is to run the network and run the infrastructure so that our customers can run their business.   Rajiv Parikh: Engineering simplicity.   Hang Black: Engineering simplicity.   Rajiv Parikh: Which is a lot harder than I think it, you know, on the surface and what it actually takes to become do to make it simple.   Hang Black: Yes, a lot harder.   Rajiv Parikh: A lot harder.   Hang Black: Yes. And because the sales force and the services forces are my customers, sales, simplicity is my goal.   Rajiv Parikh: And you know, we talked earlier, you mentioned culture at Juniper, can you talk a little bit about, you know, what was the culture like at Juniper and how is that sort of embodying your ability to be a great leader.   Hang Black: The culture was definitely the clincher for me. The values are - be bold, build trust, deliver excellence. You can't get more simple and impactful than that. And it comes from the top. We have a culture of respect, integrity, quality work ethic. Like I said, it's fun. It's I wake up. I believe you'd ask me offline. What does a normal workweek look like for him? If I'm not traveling? I'm in my chair at 7 am. I love, I mean. I don't mean to sound like a geek about it. But I love what I do. I love the company that I work for. I respect the product. And I respect my leaders.   Rajiv Parikh: When you think about the problems you're solving between sales and marketing, are you focusing on content?   Hang Black: Absolutely. But having said that, I focus on content curation and delivery, I still depend on my part marketing and PLM teams to actually create the content, because they're the SMEs, where sales enablement falls into a trap is when they try to be kind of the help desk for everyone, where all the voicing is from the sales enablement team because there's no way that we can be the experts at everything. What we can do is help coach everyone to be engaging to land the messaging with sales. We live now in an age of YouTube, and Ted Talk, and Snapchat, right? It's interesting because TED Talk gives guidance of no more than 18 minutes. But remember, in Ted Talk, people are pulling down content at will because they are specifically interested in it. I try to keep our content below 12 minutes. And the reason is having done this multiple times, that's where we see a major drop-off. And that's because we're pushing content. Now we're very careful about what content we push down. And what we have is a very specific guideline of what we need in that 12-minute module. What's in it for the customer? How does it make us better? How does it fit into the rest of Juniper’s solutions? What's in it for the rep who's listening to us or the partner rep or for our partner community? What's in it for our partner community and the call to action? Now, the call to action is what replaces the other traditional 48 minutes of a webinar because people can find that content when they need to. It doesn't have to be delivered immediately all the time. Then   Rajiv Parikh: And Snapchat.   Hang Black: And Snapchat, right? It's interesting because TED Talk gives guidance of no more than 18 minutes. But remember, in Ted Talk, people are pulling down content at will because they are specifically interested in it. I try to keep our content below 12 minutes. And the reason is having done this multiple times, that's where we see a major drop-off. And that's because we're pushing content. Now we're very careful about what content we push down. And what we have is a very specific guideline of what we need in that 12-minute module. What's in it for the customer? How does it make us better? How does it fit into the rest of Juniper’s solutions? What's in it for the rep who's listening to us or the partner rep or for our partner community? What's in it for our partner community and the call to action? Now, the call to action is what replaces the other traditional 48 minutes of a webinar because people can find that content when they need to. It doesn't have to be delivered immediately all the time.   Rajiv Parikh: Then when you say 12-minute content, are you referring to a video? Is it a what is that was that look like.   Hang Black: Typically the videos, we also use a voiceover slideshow. We use tools for that. And then we try to, you know, we try to mix it up, interview style, but mostly videos. That's how people learn these days. However, what's important alongside that is to be able to have the PowerPoint, the company PowerPoint, the company, datasheets, competitive battle cards, sure, point to those assets, we don't need to talk about all of those assets at the very beginning. We can point to those later on.   Rajiv Parikh: Then again, just circling back to the importance of curated content and going back to the fact that we live in a world where sort of attention span is a little bit more limited now because there's so much information coming at you. What is your thought on the importance of these sort of tidbits or bite-size pieces of information, and then that's curated and then going sort of deeper once they sort of know what they need from this bite-sized content and then get to the 12-minute video or whatever that may be?   Hang Black: Yeah, so our launch point is the 12-minute video. Okay, so that's the launch point that has an accompanying typically accompanying web links and call to action. Here are some further webinars here some further Information collateral assets. So that's really, that's kind of belonging.   Rajiv Parikh: That's the starting point.   Hang Black: That's the starting point where I see enablement going is using AI and automation. So, where we've gotten to bite-size digestible, agile, agile content, it needs to be better, not perfect. It doesn't need to be incredibly polished. That takes eight weeks from a vendor. It can be done by it can be created by your content creators with a little bit of coaching from enablement. Beyond that, where I see enablement going is the just-in-time delivery. And we've got there's a big toolset that's exploding around that as well. As far as when you're in this specific sales stage with this type of customer with these types of personas, this is the content that will help.   Rajiv Parikh: Just in time, almost intent personas attempt by.   Hang Black: Exactly.   Rajiv Parikh: And you know, we've talked a lot about AI on my show because it's a hot topic, and it encompasses every facet of a company. What in your perspective excites you about AI as it pertains to sales enablement?   Hang Black: And so good question. I think AI? That's a good question. I think AI will drive behavior because content, as you know, is so difficult to find. So having it served up in a way that is specific to that seller's experience. Again, if you're in this type of stage, have a deal in this type of vertical deals that have won. So here's the automation piece of it. Deals that have won have used this pitch at this stage have used these trap setting questions have used these objection handling content. That’s kind of where we can start to see acceleration.   Rajiv Parikh: So there's a structure there's the algorithm, you plug it into AI, it feeds that you learn from it, it gets smarter, and then you get better and better.   Hang Black: Exactly.   Rajiv Parikh: That holds those different hooks and ways to convert that seller and the buyer.   Hang Black: Exactly, so the machine just keeps getting more intelligent.   Rajiv Parikh: Yeah, love it. Awesome. So as head of global sales enablement at Juniper Networks, what is your definition of sales enablement?   Hang Black: For me, sales enablement is developing an elite sales team, providing them with relevant content, efficient process, and consistent technology. And the reason that's a little bit of a mouthful, anyone can enable a sales team, but I think it is developing in the Olympics sales team, which is given the protein powder regimen, given the ads, even a playlist, right to become much more to give them tools that are to become   Rajiv Parikh: Successful.   Hang Black: Successful Olympic ready.   Rajiv Parikh: Right, champions.   Hang Black: Exactly, so if the content is not relevant, then why are we making it? If the process is not consistent, we're not going to follow it. And technology bringing in technology should not be to bandaid bad behavior, but actually to accelerate the sales process.   Rajiv Parikh: Sure, and so what are your current top sales initiatives at Juniper?   Hang Black: So I break down my mission into three pillars onboarding, ongoing, excellence, and underneath all of that talent, leadership and culture. So if I think about building a house, I've got to do all of it at the same time. So the first thing that we did was built out the framework around it. Now that we have the framework around onboarding, we've got to build out the actual rooms and fill it with furniture, right? So think of that. As for onboarding, we built out persona-based learning paths, prerequisites post requisites, and we're continuing to build that system for ongoing building up the enablement council, getting them to a groomer to select and identify our content, and then rolling out that program. So that becomes a machine. Then the excellence part is around the tool stack around processes. And hooking those together.   Rajiv Parikh: This would be like the landscaping and the lawn.   Hang Black: Exactly, well, the landscaping of the lawn is all about talent leadership. So it's all you know, we're building it and then we and then we beautify it. But it's about it's all about building a scalable, flexible framework.   Rajiv Parikh: Gotcha. And where do you see the organization in the next five years?   Hang Black: Hopefully, we'll be able to get everything under one umbrella, and we'll be able to create that engine that everyone can utilize.   Rajiv Parikh: Okay, great. I'm going to shift gears and ask some fun questions now.   Hang Black: Awesome.   Rajiv Parikh: Okay, let me start, Hang what is your superpower?   Hang Black: My superpower. So I'm quite a left brain, but I'm also a little bit right brain. So I'm also multilingual. So I love being able to be a translation later, to be able to message in a way that lands with whoever my audience is, whether it's a fifth-grader, whether it's my kids, whether it's sales force, whether it's with executives.   Rajiv Parikh: And then how many languages do you speak?   Hang Black: So I speak two and a half. So I speak English clearly. I am fluent in Vietnamese. I read and write in that. I speak French pretty poorly. At least my children tell me so.   Rajiv Parikh: Nice. Yeah. Do you have any daily habits or rituals that keep you productive?   Hang Black: Daily, not really. I have to bucket my life into weeks. So when I'm not traveling, like I said, because I love my job. I am in the chair at the office at 7 am. Every day, I do make it a point to visit with my personal trainer twice a week. If I miss days, I try my best to rearrange it. And I go kickboxing at least three times a week. And I make sure that I cook for my kids give them a home-cooked meal at least four times a week. And it's interesting that the busier I get in my work life, the more disciplined I get in my home life. And, and we talked a little bit about work-life balance,   Rajiv Parikh: We did.   Hang Black: I think it's a little bit different for everyone. Work is in my DNA, whether it's at Juniper or whether it's volunteering, etc. But everything has to be in moderation. My children are my life. So working myself to death doesn't serve my company doesn't serve my kids. But that's why my weekly schedule entails a lot of self-care.   Rajiv Parikh: And you mentioned traveling a few times. How often are you traveling?   Hang Black: I'm traveling right now about 50 to 75%. And it's because I don't believe in phoning it in. We talked about meeting customers where they are. I meet the field where they are constantly changing. As the organization grows, I'm hopeful that I won't have to travel as much. But again, it's my honor and my privilege, and I'm happy to do so.   Rajiv Parikh: Sure, and what's the best part of your job? We love it most.   Hang Black: People have asked me why not just have a sales leadership role that quota-carrying sales leadership role. And the reason I love what I do is I am a constant learner. I think there's a part of me that's a constant teacher. And in the role that I'm in, I get to touch with more organizations. I get to drive more impact. So I love that.   Rajiv Parikh: That's great. Awesome. That's all the questions I have. Is there anything you'd like to share with us before we sign off?   Hang Black: No.   Rajiv Parikh: This was great. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me.   Hang Black: Thank you for having me. Appreciate.