Ep23 Who Is the Customer of Sales Enablement & the Ford Edsel

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 23Sales enablement leaders work at the intersection of sales leadership, marketing, product, and operations to help engineer and elevate sales conversations. As Sales Enablement pros work across these stakeholder groups they often experience very high expectations, leading to challenges and friction if not handled well.If you are a sales enablement professional, you know there are a lot of people to serve. You also know that they aren't all your customers, and you can't treat everyone who wants something the same. So, the question is, how do you parse people out? Who do you listen to?  Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Nick Merinkers 00:02Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.Scott Santucci 00:34I'm Scott Santucci.Brian Lambert 00:36Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast for sales enablement, leaders looking to elevate their function, expand their sphere of influence, and increase the span of control within their companies.Scott Santucci 00:49Together Brian, I've worked in over 100 different kinds of sales enablement initiatives as analyst, consultants, or practitioners. We've learned the hard way what works and maybe more importantly, what doesn't.Brian Lambert 01:03That's right, Scott. And today on this show, what we're going to discuss everybody is, who is the customer of sales enablement? That's right. It's a kind of a Zen question, but who is our customer? And as usual, we're going to start with a centering story. Give our episode of scene. So, Scott, what do you have for us?Scott Santucci 01:22Well, I feel like I'm going in a way, way, way forward machine here with a story that starts in 1958, not 1858, if you've been listening to our our show. In 1958, the executives at Ford got pretty much religion on this, this new thing about market research. So, if you've been following maybe watch madman and you realize that, you know, the advertising industry was really starting to evolve in the late 50s and early 60s, and that's actually a true thing. And they started doing market research. And the executives at Ford got this great idea. What if we did market research to design a car? Makes sense, right? So, they surveyed lots of users or lots of cuts or users, that's a modern term, lots of customers about what they want to see in a car. And they design this car based on this feedback of all these people, they're going to get massive market share because they made sure that they got every type of person involved from older people, people with families, single single people, people want to have people who wanted to, you know, a family environment, took all that information. And they designed a car for everybody. And they roll it out expecting marriage is going to clean house and dominate market share. You know what the name of that product was?Brian Lambert 02:57Was it the Edsel?Scott Santucci 02:59It was the Edsel yeah, and the Edsel claim by 1960. By 1960 they pulled it...