Taking the Tech Out of the Talk
Ed has been in the enablement space for over two decades and believes we are now entering a time of unprecedented opportunity and revenue growth. With greater access to data and the support of AI, companies can better understand how to improve performance and where their focus should be directed.
Sales enablement is no longer just about teaching sellers product features. It is about creating a unified revenue story where Sales, Product, Marketing, and Revenue Operations work together to help customers see outcomes, not specifications. Discover why taking the tech out of the talk is the key to turning sellers into trusted storytellers who drive meaningful customer conversations.
The power of a unified revenue play
Sales enablement has the opportunity to become the connective tissue between Sales, Product, Marketing, and Revenue Operations, creating one cohesive story that turns sellers from feature presenters into customer storytellers, but that shift only happens when sellers learn to do one thing well, take the tech out of the talk.
The customer should be the hero
Great selling isn't about making your product the hero. It's about making the customer the hero of their own story. The customer has a desired future state, increased revenue, reduced costs, faster growth, greater efficiency, better customer experiences, less risk, or perhaps simply making their working lives easier.
Your product is the vehicle that helps them get there. It is not the point of the story, and the moment a seller starts narrating specs, architecture, or acronyms, the customer stops being the hero and becomes an audience member.
The power of collaboration
Product brings the capability. Product understands what the solution can do, why it was built, and where it is going. Marketing brings the narrative. Marketing understands the market, personas, positioning, competitive landscape, and the language that resonates with customers.
Sales brings the reality. Sales is closest to the customer. They understand the objections, challenges, buying triggers, and conversations happening in the field. Revenue Operations brings the evidence. RevOps can identify what's working, where deals are progressing or stalling, which messages correlate with success, and where the revenue engine needs to improve.
Sales Enablement connects the dots. Enablement turns all of that knowledge into something a seller can understand, apply, and execute, and, critically, into language a customer can actually feel.
Taking the tech out of the talk
Here is the uncomfortable truth, most sellers were trained to know their product inside out, so that is exactly what they talk about. Features. Functionality. Specs. Roadmaps. Integrations. It feels thorough. It feels credible. It is also the fastest way to lose a customer’s attention.
Taking the tech out of the talk doesn't mean knowing less about the product. It means saying less of it out loud. The best sellers do the technical thinking silently, in the background, and only ever speak in the language of outcomes.
That means retiring the acronyms, the feature names, and the internal jargon that means everything to the seller and nothing to the buyer. It means resisting the urge to explain how something works before explaining why it matters. It means trusting that the customer doesn't need a product demo in their head, they need to see their own future, solved.
A seller who has taken the tech out of the talk sounds calm, curious, and consultative. A seller who hasn't sounds like a brochure.
From features to outcomes
Imagine a seller speaking to a sales leader who wants to increase team productivity. A feature-led conversation might sound like, “Our platform has AI-powered call analysis, automated coaching insights, and custom dashboards.”
That's tech in the talk. Every phrase is about the product, not the person.
A storytelling approach, one where the tech has been taken out of the talk, sounds very different, “Imagine being able to identify exactly where your team is losing momentum in customer conversations, understand why it’s happening, and give managers the insight to coach it, without spending hours listening to calls manually.”
Same product. Same features. Completely different conversation.
The second version connects capability to a desired outcome without ever naming the capability. Importantly, it allows the customer to see themselves as the person achieving that outcome, not as someone being sold a feature set.
Creating masters of storytelling
The goal isn't simply to create more training, more playbooks, or more content. The goal is to create confidence and consistency around the story, and the discipline to leave the technical detail out of it until the customer asks for it.
Sellers should know who they're speaking to, what matters to that person, why the problem exists, what happens if it isn't solved, how the solution changes the situation, what success looks like, and how to help the customer articulate the value themselves.
That requires collaboration. Product, Marketing, Sales, and RevOps need to continually feed the enablement engine with insight. Enablement then transforms that insight into messages, plays, frameworks, coaching, and experiences that sellers can take into real customer conversations, experiences built to strip the tech out before the seller ever opens their mouth.
The result is more than product knowledge. It's commercial fluency.
The ultimate shift
The most effective sellers aren't walking encyclopedias of product features. They're storytellers. They listen first. They diagnose the problem. They understand the customer’s ambition. They connect the dots. They create a compelling vision of what could be possible.
And through all of it, they keep the tech out of the talk, letting the outcome carry the conversation instead of the specification sheet. Ultimately, they help the customer become the hero who achieves the result.
That's the real power of Revenue Enablement.
When Sales, Product, Marketing, and Revenue Operations work as one, with Enablement connecting the ecosystem and consistently taking the tech out of the talk, the business stops selling products and starts creating compelling customer outcomes.
And that's when feature dumping becomes storytelling. Storytelling becomes revenue.
Read more from Ed Johnson
Ed Johnson, Sales Enablement Leader and Revenue Enablement & Sales Effectiveness
With a career that has spanned over two decades across multiple industries and cultures, Ed has gained insights into enablement that are unmatched. With sales methodology disciplines in MEDDPICC, Sandler, SPIN, Challenger to name a few, he has a tool belt full of amazing skills and behaviours that companies can leverage and pull from. From his days as a systems trainer at Yahoo! to his most recent venture, ConnectED, he has never been more excited to help companies achieve their full sales potential. Whether you are having problems with opening, discovery, objection handling, consultative close, or gaps in the pipeline, let's take a look together and get you on the next plane.
