Jen Burns is a Managing Director of Sales Enablement at Interfolio. She is based in Washington DC with global sales responsibility.
On the Sales Game Changers Podcast, she shared stories and insights about how to make sales enablement more effective at your company.
Listen to the Sales Game Changers Podcast Episode 21: Sales Enablement Leader Jen Burns Shares Why Understanding the Buyer Journey is Critical to Your Success and read the transcript.
Here’s an excerpt from the podcast:
Tell us one major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success as a sales game changer.
Jen Burns: I like this question. I like this question because it’s relevant to something I just worked through internally at Interfolio here. One of the things that we’re focused on as an organization, not just as it relates to supporting our customer, our customer in our market but internally as well we really see the value in supporting our organization, our sales organization and our other staff across the company to make them successful, right. And so, there’s kind of a two-fold innovation project happening here.
One of which is around the buyer’s journey so that’s very applicable to this conversation today. One of the things I did when I came into the organization is I aligned very quickly to the marketing organization, the sales organization and the client success organization, and that’s a very sales enablement thing to do because you have to kind of serve as a connective tissue there to drive success across all three of those functional areas. We all sat down as functional leaders so sales, marketing, client success and myself along with our executive leadership team and realized that there was some important changes that needed to be made to our process. And so, with that being said there’s the sales process, right, but there’s also those other influencers that really make it successful.
The buyer’s journey cares about the buyer, so ‘who are our buyers’, ‘what matters to them’ like we talked about earlier so I don’t want to deep dive on that. But also, how are we going to support that internally. And so, we completely revised our sales process. We leveraged the expertise of our marketing organization so we are implementing an account-based marketing approach for the first time which is exciting but also ensuring that our technology ecosystem is set up properly and configured properly to support that. I think a lot of organizations kind of fall flat as far as that’s concerned and unfortunately it’s just common because there’s a lot of technology out there. Getting them all to talk to each other and provide the data on the backend to ensure that you can make informed decisions about your business is not easy.
We went through this exhaustive process. It was tremendously successful and we’re now positioned to fully support not only the buyer’s journey but the customer journey, both in our process, our people, our structure but also our systems and we will now have the data analytics that we need to make the right decisions about how to improve our business moving forward and get the insights we need to understand what we’re doing well and what we’re not doing well. I’m super excited about that. I would say if anyone wants to hear kind of what we did and how we did it, I’d be happy to share.
Jen Burns is the Managing Director of Business Intelligence and Operations at Interfolio, a D.C.-based education technology firm serving the higher education market where she is helping to position the organization for scale and profitable growth. She has been in Sales, Sales & Revenue Enablement and Operations for the past seventeen years. Jen spent years in various sales and business development capacities, was in human capital consulting for a few years and then shifted into enablement and operations building out teams from the ground up to deliver efficiencies and business process improvements while driving innovation to the buyer and to the customer journey. She is the president of the DC Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society.
Listen to the Sales Game Changers Podcast Episode 21: Sales Enablement Leader Jen Burns Shares Why Understanding the Buyer Journey is Critical to Your Success and read the transcript.
