The State of Sales Enablement - with Dave Lichtman, Founder and CEO Enablematch

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We are joined by Dave Lichtman, founder and CEO of Enablematch. Today, we'll be covering four main topic areas with Dave. First, the current state of sales enablement and the B2B SaaS and Cloud industry. Second, the growing importance of sales enablement, especially in light of the great resignation. Third, how has the shift to remote work impacted the sales enablement profession? And fourth, how do you measure the return on investment for sales enablement? Dave, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Dave Lichtman** (1:12)
Happy to. And first, thanks for having me. Many years ago, I was an enablement practitioner, and I spent a bunch of years in the trenches doing sales enablement. Back then, it was called training. And then after there, I sold myself to the dark side and moved into sales for a bunch of years at salesforce.com. I was a salesperson and a sales leader.
And then after that, I was working as sales enablement technology company doing sales. And so I've kind of been around the space for a while. And then just over three years ago, I saw a really big need in the space for CROs to find really good enablement folks. Like it's hard to find the good ones because there's a lot of mediocrity out there, frankly, in the enablement world. And I had a pretty good network and I knew what good looked like. And so I launched what was then the very first recruiting firm for sales enablement professionals. And so I've been doing that for just over three years. And I often joke that my dumb little hypothesis wasn't so dumb and has not been so little. So now I'm three years in and I have the best job out there.

**Ray Rike** (2:17)
Well, Dave, you missed a really important part of your journey to becoming a guest here in the Metrics Major Up. And that is back in the early 2000s, where we worked together, where you led sales training for QRS, the company we worked at. And that's one of the times where I really saw amazing benefit and return from sales training, now sales enablement. So thank you for being a great resource all the way back in 2002

**Dave Lichtman** (2:42)
20 years ago.

**Ray Rike** (2:44)
Well, let's get into the first kind of topic. And that is, as I just mentioned, I've been both a big benefactor and a proponent of sales training. And now we've moved to sales enablement. But 2021 seemed to be a key inflection point in the adoption of sales enablement. So can you provide some insights and how the magnitude of investment in the function and even the profession overall evolved last year heading into 2022?

**Dave Lichtman** (3:11)
Yeah, I'll speak to it first from anecdotally what I've been seeing. And so I'll give you some data points that might kind of help people understand what's been happening in the space. I think first, I'm seeing companies who historically have never done sales enablement or never done it properly realize now is the time. And so in 2021, everyone said, all right, all of our playbooks have been thrown out the window. How we used to sell is not how we sell anymore because of COVID and pandemic thing. So we've got to pivot how we sell. And people have realized enablement are the ones that help them make that pivot. And so you're seeing companies who historically have just never really done or had a sales manager do it on the side or on the weekends. They said, all right, we've got to double down on this enablement thing. So people are finally doing it.
And I'll even say even companies who are really immature or really young startup companies, even as 9, 10 sales reps are already, even at that stage, saying we have to have enablement. And that really never happened before at that stage. And what they're saying is we know what we're doing here. And if we're going to be competitive and if we're going to accelerate and hit the growth that we think we can make, we've got to have this thing scale right. So they're doing it earlier than ever before. And in ways, it blows me away that it's been so amazing. I'll also tell you from my vantage point, in terms of investment, I will tell you that salaries, like the comp packages that enable folks are getting, are by far outpacing inflation. They're really competitive and they're going up and up. And they're now in a lot of places that are comparable to a sales manager, VP of sales in some places where they're really getting a lot of investment from the executive staff who realize this is their leverage point across the organization. I'll tell you probably every week to two weeks I'll have a CRO or a CEO say some version of, this is the most important hire I'm going to make this year. That's an amazing statement from a C-level executive talking about this little training function we used to talk about 20 years ago.