Getting through the Internal Politics with Samantha Burrell
Samantha Burrell, an enterprise solutions consultant at BenchLink, describes how she created and executed a gamified enablement competition called "Demo Face-Off" that helped her SE team stay current with rapidly released product features. She shares her strategy for gaining internal buy-in by framing the initiative around ARR impact, managing execution across two iterations, and adapting based on feedback.
Summary
Samantha Burrell discusses her experience creating and running "Demo Face-Off," a global competition for her solutions engineering team modeled after March Madness. The initiative emerged from a personal need—returning from maternity leave, she found herself under-skilled on newly released products and sought a way to learn from colleagues while addressing a broader organizational gap.
The core concept involves SCs recording 10-minute demos of new product features and competing through bracket-style rounds, culminating in a live championship event with voting. The competition spans approximately two months and involves three regional teams (EMEA, AMER, Enterprise), with judges from product, data science, and business value teams providing feedback.
To secure buy-in, Samantha strategically reframed her personal problem as a business opportunity. Rather than pitching that she personally needed upskilling, she positioned the initiative as a way to capitalize on anticipated outbound sales activity around new products, connecting it directly to ARR impact by showing how early SC involvement in customer conversations correlates with higher conversion rates through the sales pipeline.
Samantha gained support from multiple stakeholders: the global head of solutions consulting, mid-level managers, the enablement team, and product managers. She negotiated low-effort participation by having the enablement team create demo assets, reducing burden on individual SCs. She also pitched to product managers by emphasizing how SC storytelling would improve product adoption in the field and provide better demo assets for product team use.
Execution involved creating a project plan, managing a two-month timeline with multiple rounds, requiring 100% participation in the first digital round, regional semifinals within team meetings, and a live championship round. Samantha handled significant personal responsibilities, including communications with senior leadership and the co-founder. She secured the co-founder's participation through brief, value-focused Slack messages emphasizing the company benefit and team morale aspect.
In the second iteration, Samantha expanded the competition to include data science teams as participants, brought in additional cross-functional judges from the business value team, and invited customer experience teams to attend. She also elevated production quality with special effects, music, and countdown graphics during the live final event.
Samantha received negative feedback in the second iteration from new European team members who viewed the competitive format negatively, perceiving it as unnecessarily hierarchical and overly American in its cultural framing. This prompted her to consider structural changes for future iterations, such as team-based pods rather than individual competition, and to implement focus groups before major pitches to gather diverse perspectives upfront.
About this episode
<p dir="ltr">In this episode, Jack Cochran and Matthew James welcome Samantha Burrell, an enterprise solutions consultant at BenchLink, to discuss how she successfully launched "Demo Face-Off," a gamified enablement competition for her global SC organization. Samantha shares the complete journey from identifying a gap in product enablement when returning from maternity leave to navigating internal politics, securing buy-in from multiple stakeholders, and executing a March Madness-style demo competition that ran over two months.</p> <p dir="ltr">Thank you to Baton AI for sponsoring this episode. Check out more at getbaton.ai</p> <h2 dir="ltr">Follow Us</h2> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Connect with Jack Cochran: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackcochran/">https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackcochran/</a> </p> </li> <li dir="ltr">Connect with Matthew James: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewyoungjames/">https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewyoungjames/</a> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Connect with Samantha Burrell: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-r-burrell/">https://www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-r-burrell/</a> </p> </li> </ul> <h2 dir="ltr">Links and Resources Mentioned</h2> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Baton AI: <a href="https://www.getbaton.ai/">https://www.getbaton.ai/</a> </p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Join Presales Collective Slack: <a href="https://www.presalescollective.com/slack">https://www.presalescollective.com/slack</a> </p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">PSC Unscripted episode with Samantha: <a href="https://youtu.be/2nZjv-vWdF0">https://youtu.be/2nZjv-vWdF0</a> </p> </li> </ul> <h2 dir="ltr">Key Topics Covered</h2> <ol> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Demo Face-Off Competition Structure: A March Madness-Style Global Competition</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Identifying Gaps from Personal Pain Points After Maternity Leave</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Navigating Internal Politics and Getting Multi-Stakeholder Buy-In</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Connecting Enablement Initiatives to ARR Impact</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Using AI Tools for First-Time Project Planning and Execution</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Driving Participation Through Competition, Prizes, and Recognition</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Making Enablement Entertaining with Production Value and Energy</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Cultural Considerations for Global Teams and Iteration Based on Feedback</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Individual Contributor Influence Without Formal Authority</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">Cross-Functional Benefits and Expanding Impact Beyond the SC Team</p> </li> </ol>
Key Insights
- Samantha reframed her personal upskilling need as a business problem tied to revenue opportunity, positioning Demo Face-Off as a way to prepare the team for anticipated heavy outbound activity around new products.
- She connected SC activity directly to ARR by arguing that when SCs engage earlier in deals with compelling product value stories, it increases evaluation conversions and sales outcomes based on historical team data.
- Samantha secured buy-in from product managers by appealing to their mission of feature adoption, offering them access to SC-quality demo assets they could use in their own work.
- She achieved 100% first-round participation by making it a required digital submission at the team level, with managers enforcing compliance rather than relying on voluntary participation.
- Samantha personally handled high-stakes communications like reaching out to the co-founder, despite initially wanting to delegate, which her leader encouraged as a developmental opportunity.
- She approached the co-founder through brief Slack messages rather than attempting to secure calendar time, focusing on what the ask was and why their presence would matter to the team.
- In the second iteration, feedback from European team members revealed that the competitive format was perceived as culturally insensitive and unnecessarily hierarchical, prompting reconsideration of the structural approach.
- Samantha found that extending the audience to customer experience teams created unexpected lasting value, with those teams now directly requesting the assets and talk tracks for use in customer calls.
Topics
Transcript
Matthew, you know what's on my mind? Did you ever do like a March Madness bracket? Sort of on my mind because I'm about to do my fantasy football draft. But yes, I've done March Madness before. It is September. So it's really not the right time of year to talk about March Madness, but I wanted to. But then again, this is a podcast, which means people could be binging this in March. So if you are currently binging this in March Madness and you're listening, could you just shoot Matthew and I and be like, Hey, I'm listening to that episode during March Madness. It would be kind of funny to have that come back like a half…
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