Ben Purton for Sales Enablement Summit, London

Speaker: Ben Purton, International Director of Sales Enablement, RingCentral

Ben Purton: Hi, Ben Purton. I will be looking after you at the summit as a speaker or host, there, but who am I? Well, I'm a chess player, but I'm also a Director of Sales Enablement at Ring Central. I've been doing that for three years, I've been in enablement for just under six. I look after a team of six. We've actually grown from one, myself, to six in the last 18 months. I'm actually gonna be growing to a team of eight, maybe even more, and I hope more, over the coming months and years into 2023.

Ben Purton: I won't be discussing much really. I'll be hosting the event and listening to all these amazing speakers telling us about their amazing projects and enablement programs that they've got their respective organisations. If you had told me years ago when I was first starting out in sales, I was 17 years of age, that I would be able to be hosting such a wonderful event as this sort of young autistic man, or soon to be adult back then, I wouldn't have believed you, so it's a real great honor to be doing this. and that's really what I'll be discussing. I'll be hosting and MC'ing, whatever you want to call it and I'm delighted and honored to do so.

Ben Purton: Not to spoil what I'll be talking about at some other speaking engagements, but this is definitely the one I'm prioritising. I'm the host, which is a wonderful thing, but one of the things that I've been trying to do more of is... we will be learning about loads of amazing programmes and getting some great ideas and I was jokingly saying that the best ideas are the ones you steal, or the biggest form of flattery is when people sort of share your ideas and use them for their own. But, when we are recruiting in enablement, if I ever get a person comes to me and Ben, are you interested in this role? And maybe it's not right for me, for whatever reason, if something's wrong with how they've scripted it, what they're looking for, the renumeration, the structure, I'll often say, well, and I'm not really keen on it, but I've just recruited for a similar, would you like me to talk to your sort of hiring manager and a lot of times I do do that and don't ask anything, I'm not a consultancy and they will, that will help them build a sort of business case. One of the things I'm trying to do more of is get some amazing people such yourself because you'll have better experience in, say, revenue, enablement, other areas of enablement or you might have run a project that I really want to run, and actually utilise that as a network sort of little nugget that I'm trying to, I've been doing quite a bit of actually going in or having people come in, respectively, a two way street, to talk about projects that they do. Now many people say, well actually, Ben, that's maybe a sign of weakness, like surely you should know how to deliver this project and you should say, well actually I spoke to this expert the other day at one of these conferences and they were doing this project, would you like to do this project to my leader of sales? And they might say, yeah, I'm not sure about it. If I said actually, I've got the person at this amazing company who delivered this amazing project and they actually talk to you for 15-30 minutes about that, that's a really powerful thing, and actually we train that in sales. We train executive alignment, your senior stakeholders in from internal, but we also train, here's a reference and here's a customer very similar to yourself, similar business case, maybe similar vertical coming in to talk to you. And one of the big things that I'm a proponent of his networking is amazing. Understanding information is amazing, but how do we utilise those two things and apply them in order to be more successful at what we do. And so that would be, not really a nugget is it's quite a long winded, most long winded answer of the, of these questions, but that that would be what I'm trying to get across and over the over Q4 for really in some respective arrangements and speaking events. But that's hopefully what we're going to achieve. We're gonna achieve a lot of knowledge, amazing networking and we're going to be able to wrap it all together and make it incredible.