Roderick Jefferson

Sales Excellence

Episode Summary

Listening to this enlightening Keep Leading!® Live session featuring Roderick Jefferson will give you invaluable insights and strategies that can transform your approach to sales. Embrace this opportunity to learn from one of the leading voices in the industry and equip yourself with the knowledge to navigate the competitive landscape with confidence and expertise.

Keep Leading!® Live

60 Second Videos

 

 

 

 

About Roderick Jefferson
Roderick Jefferson is an internationally recognized business speaker who has delivered dynamic presentations at various events for companies like ATD, B2BMX, Cisco, LinkedIn, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Zoom. He is also a respected thought leader in sales enablement and the author of the bestselling book, “Sales Enablement 3.0: The Blueprint to Sales Enablement Excellence”.

Website
https://roderickjefferson.com/

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/roderick_j_associates/

LinkedIn
https://roderickjefferson.com/keynotes/

Roderick Jefferson’s Book
https://bit.ly/4j6OeAK

Leadership Quote
“We Train animals & enable people”
“Hope is NOT a strategy”

Subscribe, share, and review on Apple Podcasts!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/keep-leading/id1461490512

Subscribe, share, and review on Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/show/0I7uAW3x4AWsLe6cnAzHp7?si=14549a44dec3495f

Full Episode Transcripts and Detailed Guest Information
www.KeepLeadingPodcast.com

Keep Leading LIVE (Live Recordings of the Keep Leading!® Podcast)
www.KeepLeadingLive.com

Connect with Eddie Turner
Website: https://www.eddieturnerllc.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddieturner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/eddieturnerjr
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eddieturnerllc
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eddieturnerjr/
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/EddieTurnerJr
LinkedIn Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/eddie-turner-llc
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@eddieturnerllc
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/eddieturner.bsky.social
Agent: https://gray-miller-agency.webflow.io/roster/eddie-turner
100 Coaches Agency: https://www.100coaches.com/coaches/profiles/eddie-turner/

About the Keep Leading!® Podcast
The Keep Leading!® podcast is for people passionate about leadership. It is dedicated to leadership development and insights. Join your host, Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, as he speaks with accomplished leaders and people of influence across the globe about their journeys to leadership excellence. Listen as they share leadership strategies, techniques, and insights.

Share the Inspiration
Inspired by what you hear? Share the episode with your network and help spread the message of empowerment and leadership. Use the hashtag #KeepLeadingPodcast and join the community of listeners who are dedicated to continuous growth and leadership excellence.

Transcript

Eddie Turner:
Hello everyone. Welcome to the first episode of Keep Leading Live for 2025. I’m Eddie Turner. I’m your host and I am super excited about today’s session. The Keep Leading Live podcast or live session is dedicated to leadership development and insights. And I give keynote speeches, executive coaching, and facilitate learning and leadership events all around this idea of the need for us to keep leading continuously.

For today’s session, I’m excited to have my guest that I have to kick the year off. Before I do that, I want to welcome all of you who have tuned in from LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. Sometimes, those platforms pass over your information and I am happy to share that if you want to be a part of the conversation. It doesn’t always do that. So if I miss you, it’s not intentionally. Drop a note in the comment section to let us know you’re here and where you’re tuning in from. Ask any question that you want to ask of my guest and we will make sure we honor you for having joined us and share that out.

As we start 2025, many of us have set goals that we want to achieve. For those of us in business, those goals might best be achieved by deepening our understanding of sales excellence. To help you understand sales excellence today, my guest is Roderick Jefferson.

Roderick Jefferson is an internationally recognized speaker who has delivered dynamic presentations at various events for companies like the Association for Talent Development, ATD, Cisco, LinkedIn, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Zoom. He’s a respected thought leader in sales enablement and the author of the best-selling book, Sales Enablement 3.0, the blueprint to sales enablement success. So drawing on the lessons from this book and his years of experience, he’s here to share valuable insights and strategies that can transform your sales experience. Roderick, welcome to the Keep Leading podcast.

Roderick Jefferson:
Thank you, thank you, thank you, man. I have been excited and ready for this one today. Thank you and I’m honored to be the first one of 25. So now I get to either set the bar or set the bar even higher. How about that?

Eddie Turner:
Well, that’s why I invited you. That’s why you’re kicking the year off because I want to set the bar high for the year. So everybody’s got to follow you.

Roderick Jefferson:
There we go. All right, let’s put it up high then.

Eddie Turner:
Well, let’s start by talking about anything I may have missed that you’d like to share with our listeners.

Roderick Jefferson:
No, I think you’ve hit it spot on.

Eddie Turner:
All right, very good. Well, many people who are listening to our conversation today know sales. But many might wonder, what is sales enablement?

Roderick Jefferson:
Ah, my favorite topic. It’s interesting. When I get this, there’s a couple different ways I explain it. The first is, think about an orchestra. You’ve got strings, woodwind, percussion, brass, all trying to play the right song. Sometimes they’re out of tune, sometimes they’re hitting wrong notes, sometimes they’re stepping on top of each other. Well, the same thing happens inside of a business. You’ve got marketing, product marketing, HR, engineering, etc. all trying to do the right thing on behalf of the client or the customer, but it requires that you have one orchestra master and that is sales enablement. We take all of that noise and clutter and turn it into a beautiful piece of music.

Now, let’s get a little closer to the ground of the way I look at it. It’s literally about taking and integrating strategy, processes, and technologies to optimize the entire customer life cycle from the very onset of content and contact all the way out until not just when the sale closes, but the continued piece of building business—excuse me, building customers for life. That means aligning sales, marketing, customer success, client services, revenue operations, finance, HR, and don’t forget your partner ecosystem and your product marketing teams. So we’re all rowing in the same direction and moving towards a common goal and that’s sustainable growth.

Eddie Turner:
So are you saying that even though I may not work in the sales department and sales may not be a part of my job title, that I should still be concerned about sales?

Roderick Jefferson:
100% because without sales, you don’t have a job irrespective of what your role is because if we don’t bring in revenue, there’s no way for you to get paid…. The other piece is, I look at it as a mix of revenue sustainability and attainment along with customer success and customer support.

Now, a lot of people say, oh, I work in, let me say engineering. I don’t even see customers. But the problem is, if you aren’t a part of that closed loop ecosystem where sales is now talking to marketing that comes with the right messaging and positioning that now moves to product marketing that now moves to product management that now moves to engineering that now moves to HR, when you think about it, you’re a part of that entire ecosystem, which means you have a responsibility ultimately for customer satisfaction and customer success.

Eddie Turner:
Okay, excellent, excellent. So sales is a part of everyone’s role.

Roderick Jefferson:
Absolutely.

Eddie Turner:
Independent of their title.

Roderick Jefferson:
Oh, absolutely.

Eddie Turner:
Excellent. So if we were trying to make the business case for this, how would you summarize that for us?

Roderick Jefferson:
Um, the business case is that without someone that owns three things, communication, collaboration, and orchestration, then the entire boat won’t float if you will. And let me be clear, there are four components. First is revenue acceleration. How do you make sure that you’re upleveling talent to focus on true discovery and qualification? But you can’t do that unless product marketing now has worked with sales to really define what your ideal client profile is.

Once you know your ICP, now you’ve got to bring in the right people, right? At—we bring in HR for talent assessment and acquisition. The next piece is, we’re hiring all of these people, you can’t peanut butter onboarding. That has to be something that has to be role specific because Eddie, we both know what’s too technical for one is not technical enough for another.

Yes. And if I am simply a BDR, Bizdev rep, I need to go about an inch deep. If I’m a rep, I’ve got to go deeper. Now, if I’m technical, I’ve got to go wide. If I’m customer success or customer services, I’ve got to go deep and wide. So now that means that there are times where these folks are working hand in hand, should I say, cohesively. There’s times when they’re alone. But it’s not enough.

I see a lot of companies, the biggest mistake I see here is they focus on the newbies, the onboarding. What about what I call everboarding? And that is from that point of, let’s say 90 days forward, what are you doing to constantly sharpen the sword for one, the individual contributor? But let’s not forget the managers, right? Because a lot of times people say, oh, you’re already a leader or a manager, you should know this. Well, the problem is and we both know, the way we used to do things does not exist. Because when I grew up as a leader, AI was not something that was in my thought or vocabulary. So now that’s all shifted.

How are you now leveraging AI to drive productivity and efficiency and also consistency around revenue? From there, it’s what are you doing to make sure that—and as a sales guy myself, I know if I had to go search three or four different places, I wasn’t going to go look. So what are you doing to consolidate all of this information into single or at least your tech stack, right? And that’s where you lose a lot of folks to attrition. I can’t find it. There’s too much stuff out there. It’s outdated. It’s enablement’s responsibility to make sure that it’s consolidated, it’s updated, and it’s easily accessible. Wonderful.

And then from there, the next piece is going back to what I was saying earlier, what are we doing to sharpen the sword for those sales leaders? If you don’t constantly evolve them, they are not going to evolve because we both know part of being a sales leader is closing or helping to close deals, but more than anything, sometimes you’re a psychiatrist, sometimes you’re a psychologist, sometimes you’re a sounding board. If you’re not evolving your skills, how can you now grow your people and make sure that they’re evolving as well?

And then the next piece is finally, or not finally, excuse me, metrics and measurements. Enablement is responsible for making sure that everything ties back to revenue focused metrics. I’m not talking about smiley sheets and butts in seats, all right? No one cares about that anymore. All the likes and looks and touches, no. It’s literally about how are we driving that revenue and how are we making sure that we build programs, processes, and platforms that are constantly scalable and repeatable.

The final piece is succession planning. Our job in enablement is to make sure that we’re creating more leaders and less managers…. All right, very nice. That’s not a business case for you. I don’t know what to tell you.

Eddie Turner:
Well, you made a couple of nice points there. One I want to underscore is the shift from onboarding to everboarding.

Roderick Jefferson:
Yes.

Eddie Turner:
That’s a very nice way of putting it. I’ve not heard it put that way. So thank you. That’ll be something really that I wanted to underscore there for my friends in HR. The other point you mentioned was don’t peanut butter it. Now, that’s a phrase I have not heard. Can you explain that for those of us who this is the first time hearing that?

Roderick Jefferson:
Absolutely. Earlier in my career when I was focused on just training as opposed to enablement and I personally believe you train animals, you enable people. Our job as enablement is to prepare them for scenarios before they step into those scenarios. And that’s where the peanut butter piece comes in.

Before we used to just say from the end to end buyer journey, whatever your role is, here’s what you need to know. You need to know the ideal client profile, you need to know how to handle discovery and qualification, you need to understand how to handle objections, you understand how to have crucial conversations. While that’s true, those conversations are different at each one of those stages of the sales process and also very different for each of those roles.

So now I’m talking to a BDR, I’m talking about truly how do you focus on discovery and qualification and making sure that you’re talking to the right people at the right level at the right time with the right content. As I move forward, it becomes far and more and more complex. So I need to say if you’re a sales engineer, you can no longer just be the technical person in the room. You need to understand how to have conversations versus giving presentations and demos. You also need to understand when and why you have a demo and why you don’t need to.

On the back end with customer success, it used to be a time where they were responsible for renewals, period, full stop. Oh, no longer. Now they’re responsible for cross-sell, upsell, and renewals, which means they need a level of sales skills, excuse me, selling skills, not sales, but selling skills that they never needed before. So now it’s understanding to really wrap it up for you, Eddie, the opposite of peanut buttering is and all as we all know, know your audience.

Eddie Turner:
All right. Very nice. Thank you for sharing that, Roderick. I appreciate it. And also, I want to acknowledge that we have a couple of folks who’ve tuned in including the amazing David Lansfield, prolific leadership writer and author from the East Coast if I’m not mistaken of the US. He’s joining from Facebook. He gives us a thumbs up. So we appreciate that. We want the verbal and the non-verbal acknowledgements. We appreciate that, David. Thank you.

And then also joining us from LinkedIn, giving us verbal acknowledgement, Ezra Miller. She’s a master certified coach all the way from Turkey. So thank you, Ezra. She says she’s excited to hear from you, Roderick.

Roderick Jefferson:
Fantastic.

Eddie Turner:
So we want to make sure we acknowledge her as well.

Also, at this point in time, I’d like to stop and acknowledge the sponsor of the Keep Leading podcast. If a single company’s indecision can cost an organization $10,000 to a million dollars, imagine the potential financial impact when more individuals are added to this equation. It can spiral out of control very quickly.

Decision X is a bespoke on-demand service designed to help your leaders overcome indecision and move forward with their work. Visit Papion MDC and discover how you can help your team get unstuck, shift perspectives, and advance today. And that website is on the screen as papionmdc.ca. So I’m grateful to them for being a sponsor of the Keep Leading podcast.

All right, Roderick, I’m going to return it back to just you and I and you have documented a lot of what you’ve said in your incredible book that went on to become a best seller on Amazon. So tell us what made you write the book.

Roderick Jefferson:
Uh, interestingly enough, it was all of the pain that I went through growing up in my sales and my sales enablement career. I wanted to give literally as I called it, a blueprint for sales, for marketing, for product marketing, etc. on what I’ve seen work and also what doesn’t work. This is not a book of rah rah, oh, this is wonderful and I’ve done all these great things. No, I tell stories that are good, bad, and ugly in there because I believe that the only way we can actually grow is to talk about it from every angle. The goal of it is really about how do you do those three things I said earlier, communicate, collaborate, and orchestrate across all of the lines of business to make sure that we’re building customers for life….

Eddie Turner:
Excellent. Well, based on that knowledge that you share in the book, can you tell leaders today how they can navigate the competitive landscape with confidence and expertise?

Roderick Jefferson:
Yeah, thank you for that. There are a couple of things. It starts with making sure that you’re listening more than you’re talking to be quite honest. And I start every one of my one-on-ones with the same three-part question. Do you want me to listen? Do you want me to coach or do you want me to fix? And there’s a reason for that, Eddie, and that is twofold. One, it lets the other person know that this is all about them. And the other is, we are natural fixers as leaders. Most of the time fix is not what we need. Sometimes it’s I want to be able to just share this and get it out of my head and see if it sounds crazy. Sometimes it’s I need some help because you’ve done this before. The other is and the final is the fix, right? But more importantly, what you’re also doing is positive reinforcement and modeling to your team what they should be doing with their clients.

Eddie Turner:
Indeed, and that works not just in business, but any of us who have spouses have no doubt heard, hey, listen, I don’t want you to fix it.

Roderick Jefferson:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I just want to be able to talk and get this out of my head. Absolutely. I may have heard that last night. Allegedly.

Eddie Turner:
I think I did too. Maybe that’s why I still winging in my head. Right. And so going back to that competitive landscape, one, it comes down to knowing your competitors better than they know is what we used to say at one time. I don’t know that that’s feasible, but I will say this, you have to go about it differently. It’s leveraging things like AI tools to go deeper and wider and also working stronger, not just harder, right? And what I mean by that is, we used to just go at the 10Q, 10K, we go look at what’s going on with the acquisition landscape. Take a different approach and ask questions about what they’re seeing, but be prepared now and it’s not just about questions. You’ve got to have questions and answers.

When it comes to the competitive landscape, do your homework as deep as though it were for a test that you have to pass because frankly, that may be the only shot you give. It’s not enough just to know what they do, what they sell, why. More importantly, you want to talk to them about why they should focus and partner with you and your company as opposed to why you shouldn’t buy the other. It’s not about them at all, right? But the number one thing I’ve seen that sales people leave out is a simple question, Eddie, that if they ask that question, it would change the entire landscape of a conversation. It’s as simple as this.

So Mr. or Mrs. customer, I understand what’s going on from a company-wide perspective. I’ve read and listened and I’ve prepared. I have a question for you. What can I do for you specifically in this situation by partnering with my company? Get you out of the dog house, put your name up in lights, get you a promotion. It sounds simple enough to say, let’s talk about you as opposed to the broad piece, but if you don’t ask that question, you’re only getting 50% of why this person would buy. We always talk about, oh, we want to make sure that we develop an internal champion. You know how to do that? Ask them that single question and they will open and flourish like a flower.

Eddie Turner:
What can I do to help you specifically? That’s the power question.

Roderick Jefferson:
Absolutely.

Eddie Turner:
Thank you for sharing that. That will benefit our listeners indeed. Well, you’re known for saying hope is not a strategy.

Roderick Jefferson:
Absolutely.

Eddie Turner:
Tell us what makes that so important to you.

Roderick Jefferson:
First of all, I want to say I love and I firmly believe in hope. But hope alone without words, without an execution plan, without moving forward and actually executing is useless. You know, I talk to mentors, to younger folks a lot and I hear the same things. Oh, I hope that I get into the right college. I hope that I get the right professors. I hope that I can get the classes that I need to graduate on time. I hope that I get into the right company. I hope that I get a great leader or manager…. Like that’s great, but at what point do you take responsibility and accountability and go and make this happen? Where’s your input on this? Because if you just sit back and hope, that means you’re just a leaf that’s floating around. When you put some wood behind the arrow, now it becomes an execution plan, a business plan. It becomes a program, a process, a platform. Without those things, it’s just hope.

Eddie Turner:
All right. Well, those who’ve tuned into today’s session and who will see this recording, they’re going to want to know one thing from you, Roderick, with your expertise. What’s one strategy that you can suggest to those listening that they can implement right now to have a successful sales outcome in 2025?

Roderick Jefferson:
Oh, thank you for that. I would say it’s quite simple. It’s time to recalibrate because the way that we used to do things no longer works. And if you don’t have AI as an integral part of your sales strategy, your selling motions, your sales process, you’re behind the curve and you are woefully behind.

What I would say is find six ways to leverage AI to increase efficiency and productivity. And I’ll give them at a high level really quickly.

First is on the marketing side, using AI to streamline lead scoring. That means prioritizing leads based on their likelihood to convert, but also allowing them to focus their efforts there, being sales people’s efforts on the most promising opportunities.

The next thing would be automating those mundane tasks that we have, whether it be email, outbound, etc., right? That means taking all those things like data entry, appointment scheduling, follow-up emails and then freeing up your sellers to really focus more on those high value activities like, I don’t know, building relationships with prospects as we were just talking about and closing deals.

The next is leveraging AI for real-time analytics. That means allowing and teaching your sales folks to use real life analytics and insights into their sales activities, which then again will help them identify the areas that are strengths and also soft spots or even worse, weaknesses.

The next as we talked about already, Eddie, and that is utilizing AI for personalized coaching. No more peanut buttering. That means providing personalized, I’m going to say it again, personalized coaching to sales folks based on their individual strength and weaknesses, not the way that we used to do it. And then that allows them to analyze their activities like their emails and their calls and their meetings. And so when you have those conversations in one-on-ones and team meetings, it’s a different level of depth in the conversation.

The next is leveraging AI to make sure that you have a more efficient sales process. That means creating things like your proposals and contracts and sales documents that again allows your reps to spend more time selling by automating and streamlining those things the way that we used to do it way back, I know in the Stone Age, but when we used to do it and it was all manual. No, scale and replicate.

And the final piece is automating customer communications with AI. And that means chatbots, virtual assistants, all those things that can handle the basic routine customer inquiries that will now free up your customer success managers on the back end to focus more on those complex and strategic tasks versus the tactical pieces.

Eddie Turner:
All right. Well, you gave us a lot to work with there to implement. Thank you. And what’s the main message you would want to leave our listeners with for today?

Roderick Jefferson:
Stop selling, start helping by having conversations, not giving presentations.

Eddie Turner:
Thank you. And on the Keep Leading podcast, I always ask about what’s your favorite leadership quote or a piece of advice that you received that you use that helps you to keep leading.

Roderick Jefferson:
It even in and it always keeps me grounded as technology changes as we’re moving forward, especially as we advance more into generative AI. It’s a simple statement that we’ve all heard a million times, but it’s so evergreen and that is people still buy from people. So now you need to find a way to integrate the personal human touch in with the AI piece and that’s where you have the nexus of what’s going to make you successful moving forward.

Eddie Turner:
Beautiful. People still buy from people. Well, that is excellent leadership advice and we will implement that on the sales side, those of us who are involved in sales. Well, I want to encourage all my listeners to look for you on social media, connect with you and certainly pick up a copy of your book. What would you like people to know about contacting you?

Roderick Jefferson:
Yeah, to contact me, you can go to my website. You can find both the book we talked about as well as I am going to announce on your podcast today, Eddie, that the presale list for the companion workbook that goes along with my best-selling book is officially been birth. So Eddie, not only are you—am I your first one, but you’re my first as well. So everything you need to know is at Roderickjefferson.com. You can find me on LinkedIn at Roderick Jefferson. You can find us on YouTube at Roderick Jefferson and Associates. So if you’re looking for a fractional enablement leader that’s going to help you implement those things we talked about or if you’re looking for a keynote speaker for your upcoming event, you can find it all at Roderickjefferson.com.

Eddie Turner:
Outstanding. Well, Roderick, thank you for being a great guest and helping me kick off the year with the Keep Leading Live session and I’m super excited. I know that my guests will be able to benefit and kick their year off well because of the wisdom you shared with us about sales enablement and sales excellence. Thank you.

Roderick Jefferson:
Thank you, sir. I’m honored.

Eddie Turner:
And I want to thank you for listening. That concludes this episode of the Keep Leading podcast, everyone. And I’m Eddie Turner, the leadership accelerator, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is about action. Leadership is an activity. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment that we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.