Most enablement leaders come from sales backgrounds, but Trafford Judd's career started in HR—and that unconventional path has shaped everything about how he builds enablement programs today.
From scaling onboarding for waves of new hires to designing manager enablement frameworks that actually stick, Trafford has learned what separates enablement teams that drive real behavior change from those that just create more noise.
In this episode, Trafford joins Alex to discuss how he approaches enablement as a behavior change function and what he's learned building programs at scale.
Enjoy the conversation!
Alex Kracov: Alrighty. So most enablement leaders, you know, really start with like from a sales background, but you spent the first part of your career in HR and then you worked at LinkedIn and spent like six plus years there working in CS and eventually doing CS enablement. Can you talk a little bit about how your HR and CS backgrounds impact how you think about the enablement function?
Trafford: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, enablement is really a behavior change function. And I think that's where the alignment with HR really comes from. You know, HR background gave me a grounding that systems really fail when humans don't feel firstly, psychologically safe, and then secondly, supported by the environment that they're in. It also helped that I was a customer of the solution that I ended up moving to at LinkedIn. And so I had a deep appreciation for the buyer experience. I think that's what made me successful initially in a customer success role at LinkedIn and then in CS Enablement because I could see full circle how that behavior change impacts the effectiveness of a seller and how it impacts a buyer's propensity to buy.
Alex Kracov: How do you think about, I'm already going off script a little bit, but performance management? I used to work at Lattice and the whole company was around performance management. Obviously a big function of HR is performance management. Do you think performance management is a function of sales enablement? Does it fall under that or are you partnering with managers to do performance management? How do you have a high performing sales team? I think that's a really interesting overlap.
Trafford: Yeah, I mean, I think it can definitely be a partnership. I think HR is obviously approaching it from a compliance and risk mitigation perspective, whereas enablement is really there as a performance lever. But I think when the two are in lockstep, it gets pretty magical. Think about just recruiting, for example, if you have strong alignment between your talent acquisition function and your enablement team, you have that closed loop of what's working, who is ramping quickly, and the types of profiles that are set to succeed. Where it doesn't work is where you have HR teams building competencies in a vacuum. You have enablement teams that are trying to deploy a sales methodology and then a manager that's really pulled between a lot of these different frameworks and ecosystems. And it ends up meaning that nothing really sticks and everyone goes rogue and does their own thing.
Alex Kracov: That's interesting. I've never really thought about the relationship between the talent recruiter and the enablement function. Because obviously onboarding new sales reps is such a big part of enablement, especially when you're in a fast growing organization. But yeah, that's such an interesting relationship. What does that look like? What types of things are you talking about with the recruiter to, I guess, probably mold the profile of the salespeople who are successful at onboarding? Is that generally what you're doing?
Trafford: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I've had the pleasure of working with some recruiters that really get the function of enablement, especially the onboarding team can make their life so much easier. You know, I have worked with recruiters who actually attend the onboarding program to fully experience, you know, what those sellers will be going through, as well as even just from an operational perspective, making sure that you have people starting on the same date, so they have a consistent experience. And so I think that that alignment can be really crucial, especially when you're in a high volume setting where you can't really take a bespoke one-on-one approach to a lot of the programs. So when I was at LinkedIn or Slack, we were often onboarding 20, 30, 50, sometimes even 100 folks every week or every month. And so you really need to be crisp on what does good look like and have standardized performance metrics and assessment metrics and competency models so that everyone is really singing from the same songbook.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, that's like I started my career at Yelp and I was like basically an SDR or they called me an AE and you know, it was like crazy cohorts of people. I mean, I think it was like every month, like 40, 40, 50 people would start and by the end of the month, half would be gone. And then by the end of the year, like five or 10 would be left. And I imagine, yeah, like they, they're the trainers, I guess they call them a set of enablement, you know, like had a really close relationship with the recruiters of like the type of profile that they wanted, which I think we're just like, you know, spark college kids, I guess. Yeah.
Trafford: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just think about like the cost of that type of, you know, attrition as well. You know, I think a lot of those high volume companies take that approach initially as kind of sink or swim, but even if you can shave 10% off the people that you lose out during onboarding, it's a huge downstream effect to the recruiters availability, the, you know, hiring costs, the retention costs. And so yeah, I think there's just like so many, you know, multipliers when you kind of have this combined function.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, that's super interesting. I always wanted to get my hands on like the Yelp model of how that whole training cohort thing worked because it was funny.
Alex Kracov: All right, so after LinkedIn, you joined Slack at a pretty interesting time. You joined as like the go-to-market enablement manager. I think it was in like late 2020, which was right after the Salesforce acquisition. Can you walk us through, just talk a little bit about that experience? I mean, that must've been kind of an interesting, crazy time to join the company. And, you know, I use Slack all the time. I'd love to hear about it.
Trafford: Yeah. Yeah. So I can still remember when I found out about the acquisition news. It was my last day at LinkedIn. I was to join Slack on the Monday and I got a load on my mobile phone, I think like 3pm on a Friday saying, yeah. So thankfully, Nikki, my manager at the time at Slack, texted me immediately and reassured me that yes, there's a job and yes, there's going to be plenty of work to do. But really my goal of moving to Slack was to move to a smaller kind of not startup environment, but really get a sense of, you know, what a more nimble organization can look like. So that was where my mind initially went. I was like, man, it's like part of Salesforce now. Like, what are we, am I, am I leaving for the right decision? But ultimately, you know, still decided to make the move. The acquisition itself, the DOJ approval took six months. So we were kind of in this weird like pre-approval stage where enablement kind of had the keys to the castle and was starting to build programs. But a lot of what we were working on was confidential kind of M&A enablement, ready to hit the ground on day one of the acquisition actually closing. So, yeah, I think I learned a ton, particularly around, you know, Salesforce's best practices and their methodologies, and had access to just a plethora of resources on the Salesforce side, which was amazing. And yeah, I think we were kind of in this build period and then on day one when it closed, things just got crazy. So we had just waves and waves of Salesforce AEs that were coming over to Slack every week. We had two CRMs, we had two laptops, two mobile phones, like everything was just like overly complicated and it kind of felt like double work. But it really helped me to build flexibility and agility in the programs that my team and I were running. Ruthless prioritization, I think, really came up. And then just having a really tight partnership with frontline leaders to reduce the thrash that the sellers were going through.
Alex Kracov: Super interesting. So yeah, didn't even think about it. So you had to do all this like internal enablement, obviously, from the Salesforce sales team who want it, who are about to start selling slack. Like, what does that look like? Like, how do you start? Are you doing like recertification programs? Because it's a whole new product that they have to learn.
Trafford: Yeah. And it was actually two ways. So it was enabling Slack sellers on what Salesforce is and then enabling Salesforce sellers, not only on what Slack is, but they were also forced to migrate from like Teams to Slack on day one and like drink the Kool-Aid. And so it was literally like, what is a channel? How to use a channel and then how to actually sell this. And yeah, it was, you know, thankfully we had an amazing enablement team at Slack and you know, I was just owning a piece of the puzzle and primarily my team was onboarding a product was really where we we lent in. So the product side, obviously a lot of work to be done there. A lot of it, as you know, with Salesforce is kind of vaporware that doesn't exist yet. So it's enabling against slides and a dream and a bit of a vision. And then over time, it becomes more concrete. So, yeah, I think what I did appreciate is just having that being able to kind of navigate a complex organization and find the resources that you need. They're out there, people are generally willing to help and, but they're not going to find you, you need to find them. And so that was really the hardest part of that experience, I think.
Alex Kracov: Was there anything you mentioned earlier, but was there anything about Salesforce's actual sales methodology or best practices that like stuck out or super memorable, something that you've sort of taken with you in your, in your career?
Trafford: Yeah. I mean, two things I'd say one, like just value selling overall and their approach to, you know, selling with an ecosystem in mind and being very customer centric in all of that messaging. And that really stood out. I think in practice, it was sometimes a little bit more challenging, especially when we didn't have all the information we needed or the sellers didn't, but certainly as a philosophy, as an ethos, I think it was a really helpful framework to rally behind. And I've pulled a lot of things from there, you know, into, into future roles. The other, I would say is, just a sense of quality and polish in everything that they do. And I think, you know, just the marketing engine that has powered Salesforce and made them so successful taught me a lot around how I build my own programs and how I message things internally, as well as when I do have the opportunity to work on external messaging, learning all of those best practices as well.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, I'm constantly reminded of just the value of value selling at Dock. Like as a founder, just like constantly want to be like, look at all the cool features I built, look at all the things. And that's like the worst way to sell, right? Like, you know, and, you know, we need to obviously, you know, it starts with the qualification and learning more about the business and figure out actually why they want to buy it. And I imagine that's like super a challenge with Slack, especially with companies who, you know, like I was kind of, I guess, you know, startup native brought up using Slack. I just get the value of it. But if you're like an old school organization transitioning to Slack, like showing the features doesn't matter. It's all about the value and how it changes your communication style. Like, yeah, it's a really interesting kind of puzzle.
Trafford: Yeah, yeah. The other thing I would say with with Salesforce is it was really them and LinkedIn both had a really good manager enablement program. And I think in enablement, that's really the key unlock at the end of the day. But it's usually something that companies don't invest in until they're at a certain size and scale. And it seems like a nice to have. You know, as I'm now working at a startup in a small organization, I think really flipping that script is what I would do as this company starts to scale is focus on managers first and enable the reps through managers rather than trying to do it directly.
Alex Kracov: And then after, I want to talk more about like team building. Cause I think after Slack you went to Asana and was that like your first opportunity where you really managed a pretty big enablement team? I think, was it like an 18 person enablement team? Is that, did I read that right?
Trafford: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had a team at Slack as well. I think the difference with Asana is the role I stepped into kind of changed and evolved a little bit. And I kept taking on different teams and we'd have leadership changes and reorgs. And they were really at this kind of post-PLG, post-COVID moment where they'd had this incredible growth and their systems tooling talent hadn't really kept up with the size and scale that they were operating at. And so it felt pretty chaotic. I felt like I was kind of pulled in a lot of different directions. And from an enablement perspective, it made it really hard to anchor on anything that was really going to move the needle. And so our team spent a lot of time on kind of initiative or project-based work, you know, which is valuable, but it also felt like we were kind of missing out on what we could truly deliver.
Alex Kracov: And so how do you figure out like what's the priority? Like what's the one thing that sort of moves the needle? Because there's obviously so many different paths the enablement function can take. You can focus on, you know, onboarding or product certification or retrain it, you whatever it is. And how do you sort of figure out what's the right project to take on?
Trafford: Yeah, yeah, we did a couple of things. I think sort of the roles that you have in your team kind of influence that a little bit. So I'm very big on enablement, having kind of a business partnership functionality rather than just program owners. And so the more that you can kind of structure your team around that, the better they are at diagnosing problems through metrics and data that they have available, building relationships with managers and reps and kind of, you know, surfacing needs that way rather than some kind of like top-down strategic mandate that, you know, I've been fortunate to have it at previous companies.
Alex Kracov: And so that means like you have an enablement person for each, is it by like enterprise sales has their own enablement person, CS has their own enablement person. Like how do you think about kind of that, that team structure?
Trafford: Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, generally geo-based or segment based depending on the structure. So at Asana we had, you know, geos outside of the U.S. with respective leaders in each and then in the U.S. more of a segmental role based approach. I think there's, you know, the downside of that is sometimes if you do need to do something at a global scale, there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen and, you know, you thankfully Asana is a project management tool, so we were able to kind of remove a lot of that friction through through the product itself, but that was definitely a challenge there is kind of bringing all of those stakeholders together, not only on the enablement team, but in sales leadership as well.
Alex Kracov: And what does it mean to be like a good business partner? Are you just meeting with them every week and it's like, Hey, what do you need to increase close rates? And it's like a to-do list you're working on together or like, how are you a good sort of partner to a business leader?
Trafford: Yeah, well, I mean, we started this call with sort of the HR approach and I think it's very similar for enablement. So I think there's two ways that you kind of provide insights. One is that you're monitoring the metrics that you have available. And in HR, that's attrition and time to hire and all that fun stuff. In enablement, it's, you know, deal velocity and win rates and, you know, all of the metrics that you have available. So finding out what your leaders are measured on, a comp plan, what they care about and then bringing to them insights that they might not have time or visibility into themselves. So an example of that might be, okay, we have a particular team that is overperforming compared to the others. What are they doing that's differently? Listening to some of their calls, speaking with them, interviewing the managers and really getting tight on what is the difference that's happening here and then helping them to bring that insights to other teams. So that's kind of how it would play out in practice. The reverse is like from cross-functional initiatives. If you, we were kind of in the rev ops org for a lot of the time. And so they were often kind of pushing things on to sellers where maybe there were different needs across segments or regions. And so having that kind of, you know, early input into those programs before it hits the sales team, you know, helps for those things to feel a lot more custom and bespoke.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it reminds me, as you said it, but it's a lot like the HR, BP, you know, partnership, you know, side of things. Yeah, totally.
Trafford: Yeah, yeah, sometimes it's just therapy, which is always helpful as well.
Alex Kracov: All right. Let's talk about today. Cause this is where I met you working at IntenseEye where you were the senior director of revenue and enablement. I think you joined in 2024 and like, this was your first chance to actually work at a real startup. I think they were like 150 people, right? Or something like that when you joined. What attracted you to IntenseEye? I think it's a super cool company. Like what made you make the move there?
Trafford: Yeah. So I kind of had this realization that even though I'd worked at a variety of sizes and stages of company, every role that I'd stepped into was really a building role. And I was like, well, why don't I actually do this properly at a company that needs something built and you know, it's starting from scratch. And so yeah, I was really interested in, you know, not only the role, but the product as well. It's I like to describe it's AI for good. They're saving lives and helping people go home to their families at night. And so it really kind of mission driven organization that I thought we could do some cool stuff with. So yeah, one thing that also drew me to the company was they were investing in enablement before scaling. And I think my lessons from both Slack and Asana were that if you do it too late, it becomes really painful. And so I felt like I'd be able to kind of build something that's going to help serve for the long term and get in at the right time.
Alex Kracov: It's such a cool company that was think ahead of the AI wave and actually applying AI with a real use case, as you said, for good. You can describe it, can you share what IntenseEye does?
Trafford: Yeah, so we work with industrial manufacturers and warehouses to provide data and insights and visibility really into what is happening on the ground in terms of safety risks or operational opportunities. So we use computer vision to view what is happening and analyze workplace risks and then provide insights to health and safety and ops teams to mitigate those risks.
Alex Kracov: Very cool. Okay, so you joined IntenseEye, it's like 150 people that you said, like you're starting the enablement function kind of before the company has really scaled. Like, what do you do? What's like your first kind of, you know, plan of action?
Trafford: Yeah, so I think the first is establishing credibility. And at a startup, you really need to be able to talk to the solution, the offering, really like own a sales cycle as much as a seller would be able to. Otherwise, you know, your impact would just, you know, not be felt. And so building those relationships with the sellers, really understanding what is happening on their calls, you know, listening and before you provide feedback, and then kind of helping to essentially like extract the best of what's happening and bring it into a system or a process. So when I joined, we had, I think probably five to seven AEs and all different tenures and different levels of experience. But there were some obvious themes that were coming out from what they were doing. So, you know, both opportunities as well as strengths that they were seeing success with. And kind of documenting all of that, getting it into our version of a methodology, if you want to call it that. And then saying, okay, if I have to build this for a new person, what am I going to be actually be telling them to do? And that's where you can kind of start with onboarding as the baseline of what good looks like here and what will set you up for success. From there, I think sales process, making sure that you have a process in place that is realistic and that the reps believe in, and then starting to layer in some of your qualification elements in there as well. And then lastly, I would say is competitive enablement is always a good one to start with because it not only helps sellers be more effective, but it also just helps you understand the industry and the landscape you're working with and get credibility there.
Alex Kracov: And so what does it actually look like to build these programs? When it comes to your sales process, let's say, is it just codifying it in a giant Google doc and saying, hey sellers, here's what our sales process is now? Or is it more codifying it in different systems? How do you think about actually establishing a sales process, let's say?
Trafford: Yeah, yeah, so definitely, I think firstly is kind of mapping what a like successful deals went through. So actually starting with real life examples rather than theory. And then trying to get that into a what I would call like a customer journey or a buyer journey. And I think taking away the jobs to be done initially is really helpful because you can start to see, what does a buyer actually need to go through to go from, you know, that first call through to making a commitment to a long-term partnership. And then from there, kind of working backwards, okay, how does a seller or a SE or whoever else drive that forward? And yeah, getting scrappy. You know, I did a lot of stuff in Google Docs. We use Notion here, I'm a big Notion fan. So sort of centralizing all of our assets in Notion has been a win. And then sort of getting that into a sort of language that the sellers really understand and appreciate.
Alex Kracov: Is there any like, I don't know, obvious breakdowns in the sales process or things that like you're like, I got to fix this right away that you remember?
Trafford: Yeah, I think two come to mind. One is just discovery in general. I think we were kind of what we spoke about before, not really taking a value centric approach to the discovery and really trying to identify specific use cases that we could solve for rather than problems that the prospect might be having. And, you know, in the safety world, we're typically dealing with less experienced tech buyers. And so they're very open and willing to talk around their problems, but it's, you need to kind of frame the discussion in a way where, you know, we can actually anchor our solution there as well. And so rather than kind of asking them how their plant operates or, you know, what risks that they might have there, elevating that conversation a little bit at the beginning so we can ultimately go deeper and go higher.
Alex Kracov: And how do you think about like training? Because it must be a pretty technical sale, right? Like you're talking about manufacturing plants, talking about AI computer vision. I mean, these are complex things. Like, how do you think about what makes an AE successful at IntenseEye? Like, do they need to have a super technical background when you hire them? Or can you train them on this sort of thing? How do you sort of think about, you know, finding the right AE for the job?
Trafford: Yeah, it's a good question. The sale isn't as technical as I would have expected walking in. I think the role of an AE is actually to keep things very simple for the buyer and give them confidence that the technology works, but not have to dive too deep under the hood. And so they do have SE partners that we can work with, as well as our product and engineering team will often speak with customers directly. What they really do need to be good at is understanding the language of our prospects. And so we spend a lot of time in understanding manufacturing, understanding the employee sort of health and safety landscape so that they can speak to some of those key concepts. And then from there, it's really around, I would say, use case mapping and value selling just like anywhere else. So we have sellers here that are coming from LinkedIn, Oracle, like different places that have never sold in manufacturing before, who are doing great. We also have some that have sold EHS software and know this industry deeply who are also doing great. And so, you know, I'm a firm believer that if you have the right enablement, then anyone can be successful with the, you know, the same common grounding.
Alex Kracov: And I think sales is such a transferable skill once you figure out how to kind of play the game of the qualification, the value selling, and then obviously procurement is kind of the same for a lot of, at least I found it's like segment based matters. Like if you're an SMB rep trying to sell enterprise is really hard, but mid-market enterprise can kind of be the same depending on whatever product it is. That's what I found.
Trafford: Yep, yep, that's why.
Alex Kracov: So we've talked a bunch about recruiting and that partnership is really important. Are there other cross-functional partnerships that are super important for you as the enablement leader? Like are you sitting with the VP of sales all the time trying to figure things out? Are you meeting with the CEO to figure out kind of what are the next initiatives and products? Like how do you think about your cross-functional relationships as kind of the enablement leader?
Trafford: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I would say in all my roles, but it's kind of underscored at a startup is the enablement function is really the most cross-functional role at a company. And so you have a really interesting perspective on, you know, what's going on and how work can move forward. One thing I love about a startup is that, you know, often that puts you in the driver's seat of new initiatives. So rather than just focusing on what is the enablement lens here, you actually kind of become PM of the whole thing and kind of bring all of these groups together and manage those work streams. So, one example is we shifted our go-to-market strategy and product pretty significantly in the back half of 2025. And that involved product work streams, rev-ops, building CRM architecture, sales, obviously, marketing, SDRs. And so I was able to kind of bring all of those groups together, identify the jobs to be done, hold everyone accountable and, you know, enable the team at the same time as these pieces got built.
Alex Kracov: It makes sense because I think your new role is like, what are you VP of operations or SVP something like that. And like, it's interesting this whole conversation we've been talking about, the similarities between HR and biz ops and enablement and different things. So, and honestly, it makes a lot of sense that it's all under one kind of roof. Does it make sense? Like, do you think more companies should be doing structuring it like that? Like, is this a setup that's worked really well for you?
Trafford: Yeah, I do think it makes sense. I mean, I've worked in rev ops teams before and I've always felt like that partnership was critical for enablement, but it's still been missing some of the pieces that I think are needed to be a really successful team. I can't speak for all companies, but certainly for ours, I think it helps sort of speed up decisions and make sure that tradeoffs are really obvious at the time rather than catching them downstream. It also helps sort of just drive accountability and fewer handoffs between different teams. And I think it also, at least in the era of AI, it brings a lot of scalability in terms of who does what as well, because sometimes, you know, one example is just with the data foundations that are needed to make AI effective. If you have teams that are kind of running initiatives on, you know, productivity gains with AI or process improvements, but they don't have that data foundation in place, they're not going to be successful. And so having all of this under one roof is really helpful in kind of seeing all of those lenses that are needed.
Alex Kracov: Context is king, you got to get all the data together to make all this actually work. Let's talk about that. What kind of, okay, can you talk through building AI tools for your internal enablement? So not IntenseEye product, but for the team. So it sounds like you started with the data foundation, but then what else have you done? How do you think about AI's role in enabling the IntenseEye go-to-market function?
Trafford: Yeah. So yeah, I have an amazing rev ops team with three folks that, you know, think about this stuff all day and experiment with new tools. I think a couple of examples come to mind is just centralizing all of the data you have in some kind of data warehouse so that you can pull into various tools as you start to experiment. So we've been spending a lot of time on that in the last year. In terms of how that impacts enablement, one example is just surfacing content at the right time. I mentioned Notion before. I think Notion AI has a world-class product that if you have your content centralized and connected in the right way, it can make life very easy for teams. And so I never get questions around, where is this piece of content? If I do, I direct them back to Notion AI to find it themselves. And I think that's just one way where you can bring the enablement lens with the ops side of things as well. The other would just be, you know, as we start to experiment with these tools, you know, using things like Clay to get better data into your CRM and to kind of automate a lot of workflows. We're starting to see that effort upfront really start to pay off in terms of, you know, even this year when we launched territories, for example, we kind of had all of the data needed to make some really smart decisions without having to start from scratch.
Alex Kracov: And what's a big focus for you this year? As you think about IntenseEye's journey as a company and there's obviously this big AI movement that's happening across the world, how do you think about your priorities for the year and maybe extracting it out? What do you think other enablement folks should be focused on as they tackle 2025?
Trafford: Yeah, I mean, I think really it sucks to be a buyer in this market. And, you know, you kind of have this plethora of information available to you and you have a lot of sellers that are using kind of really lazy techniques to get in front of you as well. And so, you know, what I'm really trying to focus on is like, how do we actually differentiate and become a valuable partner to our buyers using AI if we need to, but really treating that buyer experience at the core. That can come from multiple places. It can come from process improvements. It can come from content. It can come from messaging, but ultimately not trying to take shortcuts with AI and really leaving the buyer at the core.
Alex Kracov: And why do you say it sucks to be a buyer? Just because there's so much information flying around, it's hard to sift through. Is that kind of what you're getting at?
Trafford: I mean, I think you think about any stage of the cycle, like think about the volume of inbound messages that are coming to a buyer on any day. The experience of jumping on a first call with a vendor who has done a ChatGPT research on you and is fitting kind of generic answers. The experience of kind of navigating kind of the like RFP or a comparison project where you're looking at different solutions and you're kind of thinking, I can do this better myself than anyone that's going to be speaking with me. So why would I bother at all? And so it's just, I think just a very fractured market right now. And we've kind of lost sight a little bit of what sales actually is. And it's a, it's a service function. It's helping people to make a decision and, you know, hopefully make the right one. And so, yeah, I think there's just like, we're at an opportunity where we can take a little bit of a reset and think what is it that sales is and how do we actually differentiate our experience from those of our partners.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I love what you say there about sales kind of like helping to be a consultant, like helping the buyer actually make the right decision because there's so much fake information. I mean, even as I talk to ChatGPT about my own product, it's like, this isn't quite right and all this stuff. There's just so much kind of misinformation, AI slough, whatever you want to want to call it out there. And it's like really hard to kind of sift through like what's the reality of it all. And that's like a good place for sales to kind of step in and help there.
Trafford: Yeah, it's also like, I think any AI product and ours included, it's sometimes really difficult to differentiate against other solutions that might appear on paper to do the same thing. And so, you know, one thing that I think makes the role of our sellers really difficult is kind of discussing the quality or the reliability or the accuracy of the models that we deploy and how they are far superior to our competitors. Because in a buyer's eyes, it's like they're used to comparing software features. And if it checks that feature, then why am I paying twice as much for it? So it's almost like there's this additional layer of, I don't know, qualification or value that we haven't really figured out how to communicate yet in a way that buyers understand. And certainly buyers aren't going to find that for themselves either.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I heard one of the founders of Intercom, which sells customer support AI, is like, it's hard when you go into an active sales cycle because everyone has the chat bot that's going to answer all the questions, but these are like iceberg products. They all kind of look the same up on the surface, but underneath they're completely different. And so what he was saying is that they ask their prospects to ask like a hundred questions that they know the other chat bots can't answer. And so, yeah, I don't know. I imagine you have to kind of try and do something similar, although it must be hard in your world if it's touching the physical world like a manufacturing plant or whatever it is. Yeah. Have you found a way to like a gotcha in a sales cycle to be like, to make people realize like how IntenseEye is way more powerful than your competitors?
Trafford: Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I think we have a few. I mean, the ultimate one is getting the pilot on site. And so that's really what we're focused on now is actually getting a physical implementation of something. You know, we obviously tech has done POCs for years, but when it involves like physical install and, you know, physical hardware, it's a little bit more difficult to execute. But yeah, I think we're having early success with that. And I think ultimately that's a great buyer experience too is don't tell me to show me.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, more people are gonna do that. Well, thank you so much for the time today, Traf. It was super fun chatting with you and thank you. Where can people find you if they wanna ask questions or follow up?
Trafford: Yeah. Yeah, this is great. There's only one Trafford Judd on LinkedIn. So look me up and look for the chatting.
Alex Kracov: Love it. All right. Thank you.
Trafford Judd is VP of Operations at Intenseye, where he integrates people, culture, talent, revenue operations, and enablement to scale the AI-powered workplace safety platform.
Before Intenseye, Trafford spent over six years at LinkedIn building customer success and enablement programs, managed GTM enablement at Slack during the $28B Salesforce acquisition (leading complex M&A enablement and scaling onboarding for 200% headcount growth), and served as Head of Global Revenue Enablement at Asana, leading an 18-person team supporting a $700M+ revenue organization.
He began his career in HR, which shaped his approach to enablement as a behavior change function focused on psychological safety and systems that support high performance.
Most enablement leaders come from sales backgrounds, but Trafford Judd's career started in HR—and that unconventional path has shaped everything about how he builds enablement programs today.
From scaling onboarding for waves of new hires to designing manager enablement frameworks that actually stick, Trafford has learned what separates enablement teams that drive real behavior change from those that just create more noise.
In this episode, Trafford joins Alex to discuss how he approaches enablement as a behavior change function and what he's learned building programs at scale.
Enjoy the conversation!
Alex Kracov: Alrighty. So most enablement leaders, you know, really start with like from a sales background, but you spent the first part of your career in HR and then you worked at LinkedIn and spent like six plus years there working in CS and eventually doing CS enablement. Can you talk a little bit about how your HR and CS backgrounds impact how you think about the enablement function?
Trafford: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, enablement is really a behavior change function. And I think that's where the alignment with HR really comes from. You know, HR background gave me a grounding that systems really fail when humans don't feel firstly, psychologically safe, and then secondly, supported by the environment that they're in. It also helped that I was a customer of the solution that I ended up moving to at LinkedIn. And so I had a deep appreciation for the buyer experience. I think that's what made me successful initially in a customer success role at LinkedIn and then in CS Enablement because I could see full circle how that behavior change impacts the effectiveness of a seller and how it impacts a buyer's propensity to buy.
Alex Kracov: How do you think about, I'm already going off script a little bit, but performance management? I used to work at Lattice and the whole company was around performance management. Obviously a big function of HR is performance management. Do you think performance management is a function of sales enablement? Does it fall under that or are you partnering with managers to do performance management? How do you have a high performing sales team? I think that's a really interesting overlap.
Trafford: Yeah, I mean, I think it can definitely be a partnership. I think HR is obviously approaching it from a compliance and risk mitigation perspective, whereas enablement is really there as a performance lever. But I think when the two are in lockstep, it gets pretty magical. Think about just recruiting, for example, if you have strong alignment between your talent acquisition function and your enablement team, you have that closed loop of what's working, who is ramping quickly, and the types of profiles that are set to succeed. Where it doesn't work is where you have HR teams building competencies in a vacuum. You have enablement teams that are trying to deploy a sales methodology and then a manager that's really pulled between a lot of these different frameworks and ecosystems. And it ends up meaning that nothing really sticks and everyone goes rogue and does their own thing.
Alex Kracov: That's interesting. I've never really thought about the relationship between the talent recruiter and the enablement function. Because obviously onboarding new sales reps is such a big part of enablement, especially when you're in a fast growing organization. But yeah, that's such an interesting relationship. What does that look like? What types of things are you talking about with the recruiter to, I guess, probably mold the profile of the salespeople who are successful at onboarding? Is that generally what you're doing?
Trafford: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I've had the pleasure of working with some recruiters that really get the function of enablement, especially the onboarding team can make their life so much easier. You know, I have worked with recruiters who actually attend the onboarding program to fully experience, you know, what those sellers will be going through, as well as even just from an operational perspective, making sure that you have people starting on the same date, so they have a consistent experience. And so I think that that alignment can be really crucial, especially when you're in a high volume setting where you can't really take a bespoke one-on-one approach to a lot of the programs. So when I was at LinkedIn or Slack, we were often onboarding 20, 30, 50, sometimes even 100 folks every week or every month. And so you really need to be crisp on what does good look like and have standardized performance metrics and assessment metrics and competency models so that everyone is really singing from the same songbook.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, that's like I started my career at Yelp and I was like basically an SDR or they called me an AE and you know, it was like crazy cohorts of people. I mean, I think it was like every month, like 40, 40, 50 people would start and by the end of the month, half would be gone. And then by the end of the year, like five or 10 would be left. And I imagine, yeah, like they, they're the trainers, I guess they call them a set of enablement, you know, like had a really close relationship with the recruiters of like the type of profile that they wanted, which I think we're just like, you know, spark college kids, I guess. Yeah.
Trafford: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just think about like the cost of that type of, you know, attrition as well. You know, I think a lot of those high volume companies take that approach initially as kind of sink or swim, but even if you can shave 10% off the people that you lose out during onboarding, it's a huge downstream effect to the recruiters availability, the, you know, hiring costs, the retention costs. And so yeah, I think there's just like so many, you know, multipliers when you kind of have this combined function.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, that's super interesting. I always wanted to get my hands on like the Yelp model of how that whole training cohort thing worked because it was funny.
Alex Kracov: All right, so after LinkedIn, you joined Slack at a pretty interesting time. You joined as like the go-to-market enablement manager. I think it was in like late 2020, which was right after the Salesforce acquisition. Can you walk us through, just talk a little bit about that experience? I mean, that must've been kind of an interesting, crazy time to join the company. And, you know, I use Slack all the time. I'd love to hear about it.
Trafford: Yeah. Yeah. So I can still remember when I found out about the acquisition news. It was my last day at LinkedIn. I was to join Slack on the Monday and I got a load on my mobile phone, I think like 3pm on a Friday saying, yeah. So thankfully, Nikki, my manager at the time at Slack, texted me immediately and reassured me that yes, there's a job and yes, there's going to be plenty of work to do. But really my goal of moving to Slack was to move to a smaller kind of not startup environment, but really get a sense of, you know, what a more nimble organization can look like. So that was where my mind initially went. I was like, man, it's like part of Salesforce now. Like, what are we, am I, am I leaving for the right decision? But ultimately, you know, still decided to make the move. The acquisition itself, the DOJ approval took six months. So we were kind of in this weird like pre-approval stage where enablement kind of had the keys to the castle and was starting to build programs. But a lot of what we were working on was confidential kind of M&A enablement, ready to hit the ground on day one of the acquisition actually closing. So, yeah, I think I learned a ton, particularly around, you know, Salesforce's best practices and their methodologies, and had access to just a plethora of resources on the Salesforce side, which was amazing. And yeah, I think we were kind of in this build period and then on day one when it closed, things just got crazy. So we had just waves and waves of Salesforce AEs that were coming over to Slack every week. We had two CRMs, we had two laptops, two mobile phones, like everything was just like overly complicated and it kind of felt like double work. But it really helped me to build flexibility and agility in the programs that my team and I were running. Ruthless prioritization, I think, really came up. And then just having a really tight partnership with frontline leaders to reduce the thrash that the sellers were going through.
Alex Kracov: Super interesting. So yeah, didn't even think about it. So you had to do all this like internal enablement, obviously, from the Salesforce sales team who want it, who are about to start selling slack. Like, what does that look like? Like, how do you start? Are you doing like recertification programs? Because it's a whole new product that they have to learn.
Trafford: Yeah. And it was actually two ways. So it was enabling Slack sellers on what Salesforce is and then enabling Salesforce sellers, not only on what Slack is, but they were also forced to migrate from like Teams to Slack on day one and like drink the Kool-Aid. And so it was literally like, what is a channel? How to use a channel and then how to actually sell this. And yeah, it was, you know, thankfully we had an amazing enablement team at Slack and you know, I was just owning a piece of the puzzle and primarily my team was onboarding a product was really where we we lent in. So the product side, obviously a lot of work to be done there. A lot of it, as you know, with Salesforce is kind of vaporware that doesn't exist yet. So it's enabling against slides and a dream and a bit of a vision. And then over time, it becomes more concrete. So, yeah, I think what I did appreciate is just having that being able to kind of navigate a complex organization and find the resources that you need. They're out there, people are generally willing to help and, but they're not going to find you, you need to find them. And so that was really the hardest part of that experience, I think.
Alex Kracov: Was there anything you mentioned earlier, but was there anything about Salesforce's actual sales methodology or best practices that like stuck out or super memorable, something that you've sort of taken with you in your, in your career?
Trafford: Yeah. I mean, two things I'd say one, like just value selling overall and their approach to, you know, selling with an ecosystem in mind and being very customer centric in all of that messaging. And that really stood out. I think in practice, it was sometimes a little bit more challenging, especially when we didn't have all the information we needed or the sellers didn't, but certainly as a philosophy, as an ethos, I think it was a really helpful framework to rally behind. And I've pulled a lot of things from there, you know, into, into future roles. The other, I would say is, just a sense of quality and polish in everything that they do. And I think, you know, just the marketing engine that has powered Salesforce and made them so successful taught me a lot around how I build my own programs and how I message things internally, as well as when I do have the opportunity to work on external messaging, learning all of those best practices as well.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, I'm constantly reminded of just the value of value selling at Dock. Like as a founder, just like constantly want to be like, look at all the cool features I built, look at all the things. And that's like the worst way to sell, right? Like, you know, and, you know, we need to obviously, you know, it starts with the qualification and learning more about the business and figure out actually why they want to buy it. And I imagine that's like super a challenge with Slack, especially with companies who, you know, like I was kind of, I guess, you know, startup native brought up using Slack. I just get the value of it. But if you're like an old school organization transitioning to Slack, like showing the features doesn't matter. It's all about the value and how it changes your communication style. Like, yeah, it's a really interesting kind of puzzle.
Trafford: Yeah, yeah. The other thing I would say with with Salesforce is it was really them and LinkedIn both had a really good manager enablement program. And I think in enablement, that's really the key unlock at the end of the day. But it's usually something that companies don't invest in until they're at a certain size and scale. And it seems like a nice to have. You know, as I'm now working at a startup in a small organization, I think really flipping that script is what I would do as this company starts to scale is focus on managers first and enable the reps through managers rather than trying to do it directly.
Alex Kracov: And then after, I want to talk more about like team building. Cause I think after Slack you went to Asana and was that like your first opportunity where you really managed a pretty big enablement team? I think, was it like an 18 person enablement team? Is that, did I read that right?
Trafford: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had a team at Slack as well. I think the difference with Asana is the role I stepped into kind of changed and evolved a little bit. And I kept taking on different teams and we'd have leadership changes and reorgs. And they were really at this kind of post-PLG, post-COVID moment where they'd had this incredible growth and their systems tooling talent hadn't really kept up with the size and scale that they were operating at. And so it felt pretty chaotic. I felt like I was kind of pulled in a lot of different directions. And from an enablement perspective, it made it really hard to anchor on anything that was really going to move the needle. And so our team spent a lot of time on kind of initiative or project-based work, you know, which is valuable, but it also felt like we were kind of missing out on what we could truly deliver.
Alex Kracov: And so how do you figure out like what's the priority? Like what's the one thing that sort of moves the needle? Because there's obviously so many different paths the enablement function can take. You can focus on, you know, onboarding or product certification or retrain it, you whatever it is. And how do you sort of figure out what's the right project to take on?
Trafford: Yeah, yeah, we did a couple of things. I think sort of the roles that you have in your team kind of influence that a little bit. So I'm very big on enablement, having kind of a business partnership functionality rather than just program owners. And so the more that you can kind of structure your team around that, the better they are at diagnosing problems through metrics and data that they have available, building relationships with managers and reps and kind of, you know, surfacing needs that way rather than some kind of like top-down strategic mandate that, you know, I've been fortunate to have it at previous companies.
Alex Kracov: And so that means like you have an enablement person for each, is it by like enterprise sales has their own enablement person, CS has their own enablement person. Like how do you think about kind of that, that team structure?
Trafford: Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, generally geo-based or segment based depending on the structure. So at Asana we had, you know, geos outside of the U.S. with respective leaders in each and then in the U.S. more of a segmental role based approach. I think there's, you know, the downside of that is sometimes if you do need to do something at a global scale, there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen and, you know, you thankfully Asana is a project management tool, so we were able to kind of remove a lot of that friction through through the product itself, but that was definitely a challenge there is kind of bringing all of those stakeholders together, not only on the enablement team, but in sales leadership as well.
Alex Kracov: And what does it mean to be like a good business partner? Are you just meeting with them every week and it's like, Hey, what do you need to increase close rates? And it's like a to-do list you're working on together or like, how are you a good sort of partner to a business leader?
Trafford: Yeah, well, I mean, we started this call with sort of the HR approach and I think it's very similar for enablement. So I think there's two ways that you kind of provide insights. One is that you're monitoring the metrics that you have available. And in HR, that's attrition and time to hire and all that fun stuff. In enablement, it's, you know, deal velocity and win rates and, you know, all of the metrics that you have available. So finding out what your leaders are measured on, a comp plan, what they care about and then bringing to them insights that they might not have time or visibility into themselves. So an example of that might be, okay, we have a particular team that is overperforming compared to the others. What are they doing that's differently? Listening to some of their calls, speaking with them, interviewing the managers and really getting tight on what is the difference that's happening here and then helping them to bring that insights to other teams. So that's kind of how it would play out in practice. The reverse is like from cross-functional initiatives. If you, we were kind of in the rev ops org for a lot of the time. And so they were often kind of pushing things on to sellers where maybe there were different needs across segments or regions. And so having that kind of, you know, early input into those programs before it hits the sales team, you know, helps for those things to feel a lot more custom and bespoke.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it reminds me, as you said it, but it's a lot like the HR, BP, you know, partnership, you know, side of things. Yeah, totally.
Trafford: Yeah, yeah, sometimes it's just therapy, which is always helpful as well.
Alex Kracov: All right. Let's talk about today. Cause this is where I met you working at IntenseEye where you were the senior director of revenue and enablement. I think you joined in 2024 and like, this was your first chance to actually work at a real startup. I think they were like 150 people, right? Or something like that when you joined. What attracted you to IntenseEye? I think it's a super cool company. Like what made you make the move there?
Trafford: Yeah. So I kind of had this realization that even though I'd worked at a variety of sizes and stages of company, every role that I'd stepped into was really a building role. And I was like, well, why don't I actually do this properly at a company that needs something built and you know, it's starting from scratch. And so yeah, I was really interested in, you know, not only the role, but the product as well. It's I like to describe it's AI for good. They're saving lives and helping people go home to their families at night. And so it really kind of mission driven organization that I thought we could do some cool stuff with. So yeah, one thing that also drew me to the company was they were investing in enablement before scaling. And I think my lessons from both Slack and Asana were that if you do it too late, it becomes really painful. And so I felt like I'd be able to kind of build something that's going to help serve for the long term and get in at the right time.
Alex Kracov: It's such a cool company that was think ahead of the AI wave and actually applying AI with a real use case, as you said, for good. You can describe it, can you share what IntenseEye does?
Trafford: Yeah, so we work with industrial manufacturers and warehouses to provide data and insights and visibility really into what is happening on the ground in terms of safety risks or operational opportunities. So we use computer vision to view what is happening and analyze workplace risks and then provide insights to health and safety and ops teams to mitigate those risks.
Alex Kracov: Very cool. Okay, so you joined IntenseEye, it's like 150 people that you said, like you're starting the enablement function kind of before the company has really scaled. Like, what do you do? What's like your first kind of, you know, plan of action?
Trafford: Yeah, so I think the first is establishing credibility. And at a startup, you really need to be able to talk to the solution, the offering, really like own a sales cycle as much as a seller would be able to. Otherwise, you know, your impact would just, you know, not be felt. And so building those relationships with the sellers, really understanding what is happening on their calls, you know, listening and before you provide feedback, and then kind of helping to essentially like extract the best of what's happening and bring it into a system or a process. So when I joined, we had, I think probably five to seven AEs and all different tenures and different levels of experience. But there were some obvious themes that were coming out from what they were doing. So, you know, both opportunities as well as strengths that they were seeing success with. And kind of documenting all of that, getting it into our version of a methodology, if you want to call it that. And then saying, okay, if I have to build this for a new person, what am I going to be actually be telling them to do? And that's where you can kind of start with onboarding as the baseline of what good looks like here and what will set you up for success. From there, I think sales process, making sure that you have a process in place that is realistic and that the reps believe in, and then starting to layer in some of your qualification elements in there as well. And then lastly, I would say is competitive enablement is always a good one to start with because it not only helps sellers be more effective, but it also just helps you understand the industry and the landscape you're working with and get credibility there.
Alex Kracov: And so what does it actually look like to build these programs? When it comes to your sales process, let's say, is it just codifying it in a giant Google doc and saying, hey sellers, here's what our sales process is now? Or is it more codifying it in different systems? How do you think about actually establishing a sales process, let's say?
Trafford: Yeah, yeah, so definitely, I think firstly is kind of mapping what a like successful deals went through. So actually starting with real life examples rather than theory. And then trying to get that into a what I would call like a customer journey or a buyer journey. And I think taking away the jobs to be done initially is really helpful because you can start to see, what does a buyer actually need to go through to go from, you know, that first call through to making a commitment to a long-term partnership. And then from there, kind of working backwards, okay, how does a seller or a SE or whoever else drive that forward? And yeah, getting scrappy. You know, I did a lot of stuff in Google Docs. We use Notion here, I'm a big Notion fan. So sort of centralizing all of our assets in Notion has been a win. And then sort of getting that into a sort of language that the sellers really understand and appreciate.
Alex Kracov: Is there any like, I don't know, obvious breakdowns in the sales process or things that like you're like, I got to fix this right away that you remember?
Trafford: Yeah, I think two come to mind. One is just discovery in general. I think we were kind of what we spoke about before, not really taking a value centric approach to the discovery and really trying to identify specific use cases that we could solve for rather than problems that the prospect might be having. And, you know, in the safety world, we're typically dealing with less experienced tech buyers. And so they're very open and willing to talk around their problems, but it's, you need to kind of frame the discussion in a way where, you know, we can actually anchor our solution there as well. And so rather than kind of asking them how their plant operates or, you know, what risks that they might have there, elevating that conversation a little bit at the beginning so we can ultimately go deeper and go higher.
Alex Kracov: And how do you think about like training? Because it must be a pretty technical sale, right? Like you're talking about manufacturing plants, talking about AI computer vision. I mean, these are complex things. Like, how do you think about what makes an AE successful at IntenseEye? Like, do they need to have a super technical background when you hire them? Or can you train them on this sort of thing? How do you sort of think about, you know, finding the right AE for the job?
Trafford: Yeah, it's a good question. The sale isn't as technical as I would have expected walking in. I think the role of an AE is actually to keep things very simple for the buyer and give them confidence that the technology works, but not have to dive too deep under the hood. And so they do have SE partners that we can work with, as well as our product and engineering team will often speak with customers directly. What they really do need to be good at is understanding the language of our prospects. And so we spend a lot of time in understanding manufacturing, understanding the employee sort of health and safety landscape so that they can speak to some of those key concepts. And then from there, it's really around, I would say, use case mapping and value selling just like anywhere else. So we have sellers here that are coming from LinkedIn, Oracle, like different places that have never sold in manufacturing before, who are doing great. We also have some that have sold EHS software and know this industry deeply who are also doing great. And so, you know, I'm a firm believer that if you have the right enablement, then anyone can be successful with the, you know, the same common grounding.
Alex Kracov: And I think sales is such a transferable skill once you figure out how to kind of play the game of the qualification, the value selling, and then obviously procurement is kind of the same for a lot of, at least I found it's like segment based matters. Like if you're an SMB rep trying to sell enterprise is really hard, but mid-market enterprise can kind of be the same depending on whatever product it is. That's what I found.
Trafford: Yep, yep, that's why.
Alex Kracov: So we've talked a bunch about recruiting and that partnership is really important. Are there other cross-functional partnerships that are super important for you as the enablement leader? Like are you sitting with the VP of sales all the time trying to figure things out? Are you meeting with the CEO to figure out kind of what are the next initiatives and products? Like how do you think about your cross-functional relationships as kind of the enablement leader?
Trafford: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I would say in all my roles, but it's kind of underscored at a startup is the enablement function is really the most cross-functional role at a company. And so you have a really interesting perspective on, you know, what's going on and how work can move forward. One thing I love about a startup is that, you know, often that puts you in the driver's seat of new initiatives. So rather than just focusing on what is the enablement lens here, you actually kind of become PM of the whole thing and kind of bring all of these groups together and manage those work streams. So, one example is we shifted our go-to-market strategy and product pretty significantly in the back half of 2025. And that involved product work streams, rev-ops, building CRM architecture, sales, obviously, marketing, SDRs. And so I was able to kind of bring all of those groups together, identify the jobs to be done, hold everyone accountable and, you know, enable the team at the same time as these pieces got built.
Alex Kracov: It makes sense because I think your new role is like, what are you VP of operations or SVP something like that. And like, it's interesting this whole conversation we've been talking about, the similarities between HR and biz ops and enablement and different things. So, and honestly, it makes a lot of sense that it's all under one kind of roof. Does it make sense? Like, do you think more companies should be doing structuring it like that? Like, is this a setup that's worked really well for you?
Trafford: Yeah, I do think it makes sense. I mean, I've worked in rev ops teams before and I've always felt like that partnership was critical for enablement, but it's still been missing some of the pieces that I think are needed to be a really successful team. I can't speak for all companies, but certainly for ours, I think it helps sort of speed up decisions and make sure that tradeoffs are really obvious at the time rather than catching them downstream. It also helps sort of just drive accountability and fewer handoffs between different teams. And I think it also, at least in the era of AI, it brings a lot of scalability in terms of who does what as well, because sometimes, you know, one example is just with the data foundations that are needed to make AI effective. If you have teams that are kind of running initiatives on, you know, productivity gains with AI or process improvements, but they don't have that data foundation in place, they're not going to be successful. And so having all of this under one roof is really helpful in kind of seeing all of those lenses that are needed.
Alex Kracov: Context is king, you got to get all the data together to make all this actually work. Let's talk about that. What kind of, okay, can you talk through building AI tools for your internal enablement? So not IntenseEye product, but for the team. So it sounds like you started with the data foundation, but then what else have you done? How do you think about AI's role in enabling the IntenseEye go-to-market function?
Trafford: Yeah. So yeah, I have an amazing rev ops team with three folks that, you know, think about this stuff all day and experiment with new tools. I think a couple of examples come to mind is just centralizing all of the data you have in some kind of data warehouse so that you can pull into various tools as you start to experiment. So we've been spending a lot of time on that in the last year. In terms of how that impacts enablement, one example is just surfacing content at the right time. I mentioned Notion before. I think Notion AI has a world-class product that if you have your content centralized and connected in the right way, it can make life very easy for teams. And so I never get questions around, where is this piece of content? If I do, I direct them back to Notion AI to find it themselves. And I think that's just one way where you can bring the enablement lens with the ops side of things as well. The other would just be, you know, as we start to experiment with these tools, you know, using things like Clay to get better data into your CRM and to kind of automate a lot of workflows. We're starting to see that effort upfront really start to pay off in terms of, you know, even this year when we launched territories, for example, we kind of had all of the data needed to make some really smart decisions without having to start from scratch.
Alex Kracov: And what's a big focus for you this year? As you think about IntenseEye's journey as a company and there's obviously this big AI movement that's happening across the world, how do you think about your priorities for the year and maybe extracting it out? What do you think other enablement folks should be focused on as they tackle 2025?
Trafford: Yeah, I mean, I think really it sucks to be a buyer in this market. And, you know, you kind of have this plethora of information available to you and you have a lot of sellers that are using kind of really lazy techniques to get in front of you as well. And so, you know, what I'm really trying to focus on is like, how do we actually differentiate and become a valuable partner to our buyers using AI if we need to, but really treating that buyer experience at the core. That can come from multiple places. It can come from process improvements. It can come from content. It can come from messaging, but ultimately not trying to take shortcuts with AI and really leaving the buyer at the core.
Alex Kracov: And why do you say it sucks to be a buyer? Just because there's so much information flying around, it's hard to sift through. Is that kind of what you're getting at?
Trafford: I mean, I think you think about any stage of the cycle, like think about the volume of inbound messages that are coming to a buyer on any day. The experience of jumping on a first call with a vendor who has done a ChatGPT research on you and is fitting kind of generic answers. The experience of kind of navigating kind of the like RFP or a comparison project where you're looking at different solutions and you're kind of thinking, I can do this better myself than anyone that's going to be speaking with me. So why would I bother at all? And so it's just, I think just a very fractured market right now. And we've kind of lost sight a little bit of what sales actually is. And it's a, it's a service function. It's helping people to make a decision and, you know, hopefully make the right one. And so, yeah, I think there's just like, we're at an opportunity where we can take a little bit of a reset and think what is it that sales is and how do we actually differentiate our experience from those of our partners.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I love what you say there about sales kind of like helping to be a consultant, like helping the buyer actually make the right decision because there's so much fake information. I mean, even as I talk to ChatGPT about my own product, it's like, this isn't quite right and all this stuff. There's just so much kind of misinformation, AI slough, whatever you want to want to call it out there. And it's like really hard to kind of sift through like what's the reality of it all. And that's like a good place for sales to kind of step in and help there.
Trafford: Yeah, it's also like, I think any AI product and ours included, it's sometimes really difficult to differentiate against other solutions that might appear on paper to do the same thing. And so, you know, one thing that I think makes the role of our sellers really difficult is kind of discussing the quality or the reliability or the accuracy of the models that we deploy and how they are far superior to our competitors. Because in a buyer's eyes, it's like they're used to comparing software features. And if it checks that feature, then why am I paying twice as much for it? So it's almost like there's this additional layer of, I don't know, qualification or value that we haven't really figured out how to communicate yet in a way that buyers understand. And certainly buyers aren't going to find that for themselves either.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I heard one of the founders of Intercom, which sells customer support AI, is like, it's hard when you go into an active sales cycle because everyone has the chat bot that's going to answer all the questions, but these are like iceberg products. They all kind of look the same up on the surface, but underneath they're completely different. And so what he was saying is that they ask their prospects to ask like a hundred questions that they know the other chat bots can't answer. And so, yeah, I don't know. I imagine you have to kind of try and do something similar, although it must be hard in your world if it's touching the physical world like a manufacturing plant or whatever it is. Yeah. Have you found a way to like a gotcha in a sales cycle to be like, to make people realize like how IntenseEye is way more powerful than your competitors?
Trafford: Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I think we have a few. I mean, the ultimate one is getting the pilot on site. And so that's really what we're focused on now is actually getting a physical implementation of something. You know, we obviously tech has done POCs for years, but when it involves like physical install and, you know, physical hardware, it's a little bit more difficult to execute. But yeah, I think we're having early success with that. And I think ultimately that's a great buyer experience too is don't tell me to show me.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, more people are gonna do that. Well, thank you so much for the time today, Traf. It was super fun chatting with you and thank you. Where can people find you if they wanna ask questions or follow up?
Trafford: Yeah. Yeah, this is great. There's only one Trafford Judd on LinkedIn. So look me up and look for the chatting.
Alex Kracov: Love it. All right. Thank you.
