“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world”
- Howard Zinn
When I started the Enterprise Sales Forum, there was no grand idea. It was simply a place to get startup founders and salespeople to talk so that they would stop bugging me for advice. I still got plenty of requests to “pick my brain”, but the small group that I started in NYC spawned a movement and showed that salespeople around the world are thirsty for knowledge, collaboration, and connecting.
There are now many different communities that have spouted up around sales in the six years since we started. These are valuable organizers, each in their own why trying to elevate the state of sales skills and professionalism. In this growing sea of communities however, I began to wonder what purpose the Enterprise Sales Forum has to serve the needs of salespeople and sales leaders.
With the world getting a sock in the jaw by COVID-19 this year, it was clear that our vision still mattered, more than ever. The drastic shift to distributed work, digital selling, and mass layoffs upended the lives of many sales professionals and left may teams reeling. Navigating this change requires communities that can help seller and leaders find a way through, talk through challenges, and find answers.
The real power of community is the power to instigate change. The small acts we take as a community have a multiplicative effect across the globe. We are the power to make change happen. I have seen this personally as members found great jobs, hired sales talent, turned around stalled careers, connected with mentors, closed bigger deals, and even launched businesses.
This is not just the power of any one community. It is the power of many communities, a community of communities if you will, that can work together to elevate the sales profession, to elevate careers, and to elevate the perception of our industry.
It took awhile for me to understand this. With the disruption to events, the Enterprise Sales Forum team was preoccupied with how to do events virtually, and we have done some interesting experiments. Now it is time to share with you Stage Three of the Enterprise Sales Forum and what it means for you and our community.
Events – We started doing some events, but it was few and far between. Going forward we plan to have one live event per week available across our entire network. Our next one is Oct 1st an AMA “Ask Me Anything” with myself and Jonathan Sroka taking questions on the state of sales in 2020, check it out and sign up now! Following that we have a great Women in Sales session on Oct 7th with Amy Volas and Alexine Mudawar on how Amy sold $100M in software, which you can sign for now!
Content – We never has a consistent mechanism for sharing content, other than this newsletter. We plan to have all our content be accessible from one place so it is easier to share with you and easier for you to find later. This will also allow us to take submissions from you to contribute content, which leads me to the last point…
Community – We always called this a community (well at least I did), but between events there was no place for people to connect to others, ask questions, share jobs, and collaborate. That is changing as we are building a place for our community to live online. This will be our space collectively and we are already starting to seed the community with content, events, and jobs. You can sign up for early beta access for those who wish to help us setup the community and contribute.
I invite you to get involved, even if you participate in another community. We are building something that can be of value to all salespeople and leaders, no matter what your level of experience or success. We can all improve and we all have the power to positively impact others along that professional sales journey.
I will get back to the real content next week with a new series on job searching and hiring. In the meantime, be well and happy selling!
Cheers,
Mark Birch, Founder of Enterprise Sales Forum