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Welcome to the Win Win podcast by Highspot. A short show where we dive into changing trends in the workplace and best practices to navigate them successfully. Hosted by Marissa Gbenro.
Choosing the right sales enablement solution and getting your sellers to adopt it can be challenging, as more than half (51%) of our customers struggled with low sales team adoption of their previous solution before Highspot. So how can you choose the right solution for your team and encourage adoption?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Nicole Olson, director of sales readiness at Deluxe. Thanks for joining, Nicole! I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Nicole Olson: Shawnna, thank you so much for having me. I’m very grateful to be here and be able to tell our story. As you mentioned, I am Nicole Olson, the director of sales readiness at Deluxe Corporation. I started my sales enablement career seven years ago. I came in as an administrative assistant and worked through the corporate world and found myself in sales enablement. I never thought I would be here, but I love every second of it. It’s exciting to see how the environment is changing and staying up with the current trends, especially the technological ones.
SS: Wonderful. Well, Nicole, again, thank you so much for joining us today. You actually recently became a Highspot customer. To start us off, tell us a little bit about the enablement journey at Deluxe. What led you to decide to invest in Highspot as your enablement platform?
NO: We are in the early implementation stages of Highspot, so it’s super exciting. We’ve been with a current enablement platform for three years. Our contract is coming up at the end of this year, which is what pushed us into the market to vet all vendors. We put everybody on the table really to decide what was best for our business. We made the move three years ago to our current vendor. As our business changed and enablement, even in Deluxe has changed as well, it really made us reevaluate what our needs were and what’s going to support our sellers best.
Ultimately Highspot came out on top and we have a lot of excitement internally around it. Everyone’s super excited for the implementation to be complete, but I do remind them that it is a heavy lift. Everyone’s been really enjoying the ride so far.
SS: I love that. Prior to Highspot, as you mentioned, you had a different platform in place. Can you tell us about the experience and maybe some of the challenges your teams were facing?
NO: Ultimately, one of the biggest sticking points for us was analytics. That was one that even our leadership came down on. We need to be able to prove our ROI as an enablement team, but then also to help our cross partners, such as marketing and product. They want to know what’s being used in the market, content-wise. Are we training our reps? It was really hard for us to get those analytics, and so that was one of our top priorities when we went out to the market to vet. Can you provide us with those analytics?
The other challenge is our sales teams were losing adoption because they would go out to their enablement site, search for something, not find it, and then give up. It’s really hard to get somebody to buy back in if they’ve had a poor experience. Since our contract was coming up, it just gave us a clean start and if we wanted to make the change, now would be the right time. Between the analytics and then a less-than-ideal user experience, those are kind of the two main things that really pushed us to make the move toward Highspot.
SS: How have you started to work towards solving some of these challenges since switching to Highspot?
NO: We’ve been deep in the weeds of global lists and thinking through how we want to organize our content. This time around, we’re really involving a lot of different stakeholders, not trying to keep it enclosed in our sales enablement team. We’re pulling in marketing, we’re pulling in the product team, we’re listening to the sellers, what they need, what they want, and what really works for them. I think just by gathering everybody’s feedback, we’re going to be able to push out a much better platform that works for everybody and solves all the needs and not just us working in a vacuum.
SS: I love that. Now, for our broader audience, tell us about your process for rolling out a new tool. What are some of your best practices to ensure not only a successful implementation but making sure that you’re also seeing a good amount of adoption? What role does a strong support team play in this?
NO: I think the biggest thing that I pride Deluxe in is that we’ve created a content governance guideline document. We’ve laid everything out from how to write a title, how to write a description, what this looks like, tagging categories, and how lists should be utilized in different spots. We really broke it down pretty granularly so there’s no question when a seller is going out to search for something, we can kind of follow that thought process. We are using sales enablement to lay out that framework.
Now, we’re in the process of having marketing, product, and sellers vet what we’ve come up with. Again, I don’t want to be the end-all be-all because I’m not the one ultimately using it. Getting that feedback from everybody within the company that’s going to be using the platform is really important. That just makes our support team grow because yes, sales enablement is driving this platform and really building it, but we also need the support of everybody else that’s going to be using it. They have to have the buy-in. They have to feel like it was built for them because that’s what’s really going to help drive the adoption for us because they felt like they had a seat at the table. They were able to provide their input and as long as we listen, which I think we are doing, I think it’ll be super successful in terms of adoption when we do pull it out.
SS: Do you have advice for our audience on what are some of your best practices or your ideas that you guys are thinking about in terms of how to drive adoption of the platform among your reps?
NO: We’re going to meet them where they work. A big push in our leadership is just getting them in Salesforce more. Another reason we went with Highspot is their deep integration with Salesforce really feels like the systems talk closely together. We’re going to work really hard to develop those sales plays and sales guidance within the opportunity.
I think that a key piece we’re missing today is that they have to jump to a different tab or browser to get what they’re looking for. With this implementation, we’re really trying to meet them where they work. Even in Outlook, if they’re sending emails, we don’t want them to have to think about where to get that content. It’s coming right to them. That’s one thing that we’re really focusing on meeting those sellers where they’re at.
SS: I love that. I think that is absolutely crucial to adoption and you guys had to navigate some barriers to adoption with your previous platform. What were some of those barriers?
NO: The biggest one was just the analytics piece. Being able to prove our ROI of why we are making this investment in an enablement platform and n show our value. With Highspot, it eliminated that barrier completely with one click of a button to show us a scorecard. Our partner’s marketing and product are super excited about that feature.
Then, another barrier is our previous vendor ended up being a company of companies. You start to feel the pain points when you’re jumping between a training platform to your content management system platform. Sometimes it kicks you out so you have to sign back in. It really was not giving that seamless experience that we want to provide to our sellers. We really started to feel the effects of that and that’s where some of our adoption was lost. Highspot being a natively built system really solves that barrier and we’re excited to reap the benefits from that.
SS: I love that. To that point, how does having Highspot’s Unified Enablement Platform help you continue to overcome those barriers and maybe a few others?
NO: We throw a lot of technology at our reps. They have a huge tech stack and so allowing them to just, once they’re in the platform that they want to work in, whether it be for an hour or throughout the entire day, we want it to be seamless. We don’t want them logging in and out, jumping from tab to tab. We’re meeting them where they’re at.
The unification that Highspot provides with the training. If we set up our sales plays and guidance correctly, they’ll be none the wiser whether they’re looking at a piece of content or if they’re taking training, which is, I think will benefit our sales team because again, it’ll just become second nature that everything they’re looking for and need an answer to is either right in a sales play. It is nice for them to be guided to them, pulling up at their opportunity. I’m really making it seamless and hopefully allowing them to have more time to sell, which is ultimately what we want to do.
SS: Continuing on the topic of Unified Enablement, I know that you plan to leverage Highspot to support your partners in addition to your Internal sales teams. How does a unified enablement platform help you drive partner growth?
NO: I had our team raise our hand, whether they were excited or not. We have a big solution and a big opportunity in terms of supporting our partners and our resellers. Right now, we kind of have a couple of different pockets where they can go to get resources, but there’s nothing consistent throughout the company. I told them that we were in this negotiation with Highspot. They can sell for the platform and marketing was really exciting. They’re one group that really spoke up because it’s one spot for them to keep the content, whether it’s for internal use or those external partners to come and grab.
Again, I keep harping on the analytics, but marketing can come and see what content is resonating in the market, whether it be for our partners who are reselling our product or internally. They can start using those analytics to feed what they’re doing next in their roadmap. Really being able to have just that central location where marketing can get a holistic view of what’s going on in the market is, I think, going to be a huge win.
SS: Absolutely. On the note of analytics, what has the business impact been so far of investing in Highspot? Do you have any early results you can share?
NO: No, I still think we’re too early in the implementation, other than the fact that everybody’s excited. Highspot is allowing us to also include those view-only licenses, which we didn’t do in our previous platform. We can get those support folks or operations who didn’t really have insight into what sellers were doing. By bringing all of those teams onto the platform, letting them know what’s going in front of customers or prospects, I think helps Deluxe, and us, succeed because then there’s no confusion on what’s being sent and if it worked. Everybody has a line of sight into that.
I think that will quickly prove our ROI, just in terms of having that central location that nobody is getting denied from. They can access it and they can see what we’re doing and hopefully build great adoption throughout.
SS: I love that and I imagine it’ll create a more seamless cohesive experience for your buyers and your customers as well.
NO: Absolutely.
SS: Now, last question for you. To close, what advice do you have for listeners who are interested in investing in an enablement platform and are maybe currently evaluating solutions?
NO: I would say just make sure you put everything on the table and really prioritize what your needs are. The space is getting very competitive. It was a ton of fun just in my role to go out to the market and just see where all the different vendors are, what’s new, and what’s trending. AI has made it very interesting and that’s coming into play as well.
Really just making sure that you have your North Star of what you’re trying to accomplish with a platform. Every time you come up with functionality, if it doesn’t quite fit or meet your needs, challenge it with the vendor and see if they can work with you to solve it. Highspot has been great for us in terms of that we threw them the partner portal and we have a distributor network. We kept throwing them curve balls and they answered every single one of them. Don’t be afraid to say what your needs truly are because most platforms can adapt and work with you and really truly build a platform that’s going to solve the need for your company.
SS: I love this. Well, Nicole, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights and your enablement journey at Deluxe. I really appreciate the time.
NO: Thanks so much, Shawnna. It was great being here.
SS: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
Research from Sales Enablement PRO found that organizations that invest in a sales enablement tool are 25% more likely to be very confident in proving their team’s impact. So why is it so important to invest in the right sales enablement tools?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.
Here to discuss this topic are Bob Bortz, director of sales enablement, and Trula Hensler, senior manager of sales enablement and operations at Baker Tilly US. Thanks for joining, Bob and Trula! I’d love for you to tell us about yourselves, your backgrounds, and your roles.
Bob Bortz: Hi everybody. My name is Bob Bortz. I am the director of sales enablement. My career has been in a number of different areas. I’ve worked in sales, sales training, leadership development, post-sale support, and now, most recently, sales enablement. Throughout the years, my focus has been on learning and teaching the sales process along with the activities and behaviors that support the sales process or support selling. That’s really where I’m at today with Baker Tilly. I have that main area of focus.
SS: Trula, tell us a little bit about you.
Trula Hensler: As you mentioned, I am the senior manager of sales enablement here at Baker Tilly. My career has mostly been spent in marketing and sales management. About five years before coming to Baker Tilly, I decided to dip my toes back into selling and spent five years doing that for a public media company. I loved doing that and then came to Baker Tilly. I spent my first nine years here with marketing and leading a team here that worked with our biggest industry practice.
Then, from there, I got the opportunity to work with and develop the sales enablement effort that we were beginning to realize we needed at Baker Tilly. One of the cool things was about two and a half years in when our sales enablement efforts really took off, that was when we realized how much more we needed. Enter Bob Bortz. We went out and found the best to come in and be our sales enablement leader and to begin to take us into new areas, one of them was Highspot as a matter of fact.
SS: I love to hear that. Bob, one of your key responsibilities as an enablement leader is to enhance productivity and ultimately revenue growth. How does enablement help drive productivity for your business?
BB: I come from the belief that sales enablement and my job is the absolute most important job in the entire company. I hope everybody feels that way about their job, but I feel that way about mine. The reason is that, in the enablement arena, our job, our mission, and our focus is to generate revenue for the organization through sellers. We have to enable our sellers to do that. If they don’t do that then we don’t survive as an organization because we don’t generate the revenue.
Within our team here at Baker Tilly, we created our own personal mission statement. We define sales enablement and our mission as a three-pronged approach. We provide education, information, and support to our sellers in a way that increases revenue and at the same time decreases the complexity of their job. When we think of education, we think about selling skills, and upskilling, we think about information, like the content, insights, and the changes that are going on within our firm and within the marketplace. Then we think about support and we’ll often think about things such as onboarding. We think about coaching and reboarding, and we put all of those together, which hopefully is a nice equation to do just that. This helps us to meet our mission, which then produces a positive ROI from our sales team to increase the revenue that we hope they will be able to generate for us.
SS: Absolutely. I love that definition. In my intro, I mentioned that stat around the ability for tools to help really make sure that we’re confident in proving our team’s impact, especially for enablement. In your opinion, what role does an enablement platform play in helping to improve productivity, Bob?
BB: There’s a number of things. The first thing that I think about when I’m thinking about a platform, it’s kind of a single source of truth. Can we get all of our sellers to go to one spot? We’ve got all the different variations and all the different locations and SharePoint sites and data that are saved to their computer. Having a single source of truth is a big win, just in terms of having the appropriate amount of content and the accuracy of the content. In addition to that, statistics suggest that people invest anywhere between 5 and 12 hours in a given week searching for things. You and I and everybody else, we’re online, we’re searching, and having a platform that has everything in one spot, generally speaking, should suppress the amount of time that we’re searching. If we can go to one spot to that enablement platform to find what we need and go there consistently, know how to use it and how it functions, that will help with that.
Another element within a platform is the concept of being able to take your messaging and your content and being able to customize it for your seller. When you think about a marketer, in my view, how I think about it is marketing is creating a go-to-market approach. They want to get their products and services to market, and enablement is about going to sales who then will go to market. We’re a subset of that function. What we can do with a platform is we can take the go-to-market message, and we can tweak it and we can enhance it, we can provide the insights that maybe are not normally included in a go-to-market strategy to provide that seller and equip him or her with the insights that they need to be successful.
Then the last thing I would say about a platform is that a solid sales enablement platform is actually a revenue generation tool too. We use our tool for outreach, to pitch and share content, and to gain insights from our clients as it relates to what’s being consumed. It’s interesting, here’s a subset of that data that we find incredibly valuable, and that is when that data is shared with other people. When we share something and we find out that there are other people that are involved, that is a huge win for us because statistics also show that there are five to six different buyers involved in a typical purchase. Often we are calling on the decision-maker when in reality there’s a group of decision-makers. When we can find more of those stakeholders, it provides an awful lot of insight. Those are a few examples of how I see an enablement platform providing additional value and helping with productivity.
SS: I love that. Those are some spot-on statistics that you’ve been referencing as well. Now, Trula, to shift gears a little bit, you’ve been at Baker Tilly for about 12 years, working in both marketing and sales enablement. Given this experience, can you share a little bit about Baker Tilly’s enablement journey prior to investing in an enablement platform? What maybe were some of the challenges that were facing your team?
TH: I love this question because it brings back a lot of good memories and a lot of the memories in our firm. Over the years, we have come up with some amazing solutions and this obviously has been one of them. Having been a seller myself, and then working in marketing and working with the teams I worked with, some of the different areas that we were struggling with was, as Bob mentioned, that single source of truth. We had content everywhere. Being an accounting and business advisory firm, this is something that we produce a lot of. We have a lot of content and a lot of thought leadership, so content management became key. We needed an area where we could find our sales-related information as well as any marketing information that we wanted them to be able to share.
Another thing that we found a little bit challenging was the ability to identify where we might have gaps. Those gaps might be something like do we have the collateral that we need in these areas? When a leader would look at it they knew that they had the collateral that they had created or the articles that they may have generated, but we didn’t have any one area where they could look at it and see, ooh, we probably need this for our salespeople, our practitioners, something further to help them be valuable.
The other thing we really struggled with was certain teams were doing this better than other teams. That was what to know, what to say, what to show, and what to do. That was something that we really found challenging. Then, when we began to look at Highspot, it was right after COVID. COVID was still in motion and that really changed our landscape. It changed how we went to sales. It changed how we went to market, and now all of a sudden, we have to begin to figure out how we can be personable, have a relationship virtually, and more importantly, everybody and their brother was sending everybody an email. It became a waterfall of emails, a waterfall of information. Then our challenge became, how do we differentiate? How do we stand out? That was one of the challenges that we were dealing with.
I will say that in our firm, we do a great job of onboarding. We really do. The difference is we have our firm onboarding, but then it is handed off to each practice or each area to train. In sales, our sales enablement charge was to be able to onboard and put together something that was really efficient. We put together a really great spreadsheet. Many, many tabs, but we had a great spreadsheet for onboarding, right, Bob? I got to onboard my boss, by the way. It was a great experience, but those were some of the challenges that we were facing as Baker Tilly at the time.
SS: Got it. Very interesting to hear a look back in time. What led your team to decide to invest in Highspot, and how did that help solve some of the challenges that we’re facing in the business? Bob, I’d love to pass this one back to you.
BB: Well, I’ll maybe ask for some input from Trula as well on this, but the bottom line is as an organization, we’re looking for ways to make the processes more consistent and at the same time, more effective. As Trula suggested, there was an awful lot going on in our organization and there’s an awful lot going on in the marketplace. To create a form of consistency around what they need to know, say, show, and do around sales place, around pitching and outreach, all of those things combined, it was an opportunity for us to make a difference for our sellers so that we can continue to grow and to generate the revenue that we hope to generate. Trula, would you add anything?
TH: When I think about how Highspot’s helped with these challenges I think one of the interesting things to know is that it actually was on Sales Enablement PRO where I found Highspot and some other different options. The really cool thing about that was when we met with James Milligan, my sales rep from Highspot, and had a demo, it was like an epiphany. It was like, oh my goodness, we need this. When we brought in sales enablement and we began to use Highspot, it answered a lot of our questions. One of the things that we did was we began to use and see that Highspot could cover from our outreach, from the lead side of things all the way through the sales pipeline and that process. Number one, that was really important to us. That was going to solve a lot of different areas.
The other thing it enabled us to do was put a lasso around that content chaos. It enabled us to be able to find things. No longer did we have practitioners, or salespeople, when they finally found something, they would save it down to their desktop. Well, we all know how that goes when it gets updated, all of a sudden, we’re not current anymore, and we’re out distributing stuff we don’t want to distribute. Highspot really helped us with that. To be able to have stuff changed on the fly is amazing.
Another thing that we really appreciate is the ability to take the email templates. We did have them, but to be able to have them in an area that makes sense. In context, what to know, what to say, what to show, what to do. Our sales plays were wonderful. They really answered that question for us, and then the email templates that we would pitch, those two were another area that helped us conquer a problem that we had here.
One of the other things I really loved also was we really needed a search engine. We needed something where you’d put something in search and actually be able to find it. Honestly, we’ve never had that like we do now and that’s something that Highspot has really helped us with. I guess the only other two things I might say, would be that I talked about that problem with differentiating ourselves in the market and in that barrage of emails, the video emails, the opportunity to create a video email and introduce yourself to a new prospect or even reintroduce yourself to a client it was game-changing. It allows us to stand out to be at least a little bit different than everything else that might be hitting that inbox.
The last thing, of course, I mean, who doesn’t get excited with the magic that happens with email analytics? All the engagement that happens when our sellers send out these emails as outreach and begin to try and help somebody through their business decisions daily. It helps us because when you get these analytics back, you can look at a particular page that they might have spent a little extra time on, and it might give you a little insight as to the value add that you can bring. Many times we offer three or four different options that somebody should consider. Sure is handy when we can kind of look at that and go. They were able to spend a little extra time on a particular value add service. Certainly helps us understand what we might follow up with. That’s what Highspot helped us really start to navigate in this whole sales enablement process.
SS: I love that. I’ve also heard at Baker Tilly, you guys have been really thoughtful about how you’ve implemented Highspot. One of the core approaches to that was to ensure that you are aligning on the value with your sales and marketing teams. I heard that that was absolutely a key part of your strategy. What are your best practices for driving this alignment and conveying the value of enablement to those teams? Bob, I’d love to pass this one back to you again.
BB: We launched Highspot just like any new tool, it wasn’t done in a vacuum. The whole organization didn’t stop just so that Highspot could get implemented. It was interesting that at that same time, marketing was going through a number of their own implementations, so they had a couple of things. One, they were implementing a new digital asset management system. They were trying to get all of their content from all these disparate locations and put it into one portal. Further, they were also doing a content refresh. They were going through a rebranding, changing some of our color schemes and what have you, so all their content was being updated. Then we came along on the sales enablement side and said, hey, we’d like to also throw something else on the plate, which is we want to incorporate this new platform, Highspot. We kind of set the table there, then what do we do? There is a high level of anxiety in implementing all these things and going through all these changes at the same time.
The first thing that we did was actually not go to marketing. We actually leaned on our Highspot counterparts. I will say that Trula and I, we had not implemented a system like this before. This is our first enablement platform and we didn’t know all the ins and outs, the do’s and the don’ts, and Highspot did. We had a fantastic account team that would meet with us on a regular basis and to this day, we still meet regularly to ensure that we’re going down the path in the proper way and that we’re all set up for success. They also gave us insights related to possibly interacting with marketing in the best way to do that.
Our next step, Trula and I, was to engage the marketing team. They had questions like What is Highspot? They didn’t know what Highspot was. They didn’t have time to research Highspot. We actually took the senior leadership team through a demonstration of the tool. We coordinated it with Highspot as well. We were collaborating, making sure that all their questions were answered, all the proper functionality was shared, and we really positioned it from a point of view that as much as this is a win for us and our sellers on the enablement side of the platform, the reality is it’s a fantastic tool for marketing to validate what content is being used and it’s creating wins and not creating wins.
We started to share all the data and the wins and the insights that they were going to be able to gain from it as well and rather quickly, they said, this is a good tool for us as well. We’re able to show the value, but the other thing that we did is we really own the implementation. It seems obvious, right? We’re sales enablement. We made this purchase. We should own it. Well, the reality is going back to that scenario, they had so many things on their plate that if for a second we thought that we could just delegate things back to marketing, it was going to get, you know, the talk to the hand. We do not have time. We do not have the bandwidth. We do not have the resources to help you out.
To that, we said, we’re going to own this every bit of the way. We needed their help though. We didn’t own every bit of content. In fact, they owned all the lion’s share of the content, but what we did is we created a process of what needed to be done, such as by who and when. We made it goof-proof so that we could share it with marketing and then we could follow this and get it approved by marketing. We didn’t create it in a vacuum, this process. We used some stakeholders from the marketing team to say, hey, we’re good with this. Then not only did I socialize it or Trula socialize it, but we also had leadership from the marketing team socialize it with the different stakeholders on their side of the house. That just created a nice collective collaborative environment.
However, there was one missing piece and there’s one stakeholder that was also critical to the success in addition to marketing and had to play with both enablement and marketing, and that was our IT department. We call them growth technologies, but our IT department ensures that all the effort and work that was going on with the digital access management system with the sales enablement platform, Highspot. The rebranding and content and other platforms that we had to collapse and coordinate some work with. They came to the table as well. A big win that we did, which was an investment, twice a week, marketing, IT, and sales enablement would get on a call and we would provide status updates to our project. We had a collective project plan that we worked through to ensure that the implementation was going smoothly.
Last but not least, on the enablement side of the house, we really ensured that we had enough time to do this job. Like anything else, we wanted this done yesterday. We wanted it done as quickly as we possibly could, but we set the table appropriately. We shared with our stakeholders that Rome wasn’t built in the day type thing. We needed to have the proper time to one, learn Highspot, two, partner with marketing, and three, set up the pages and that collateral so that it was successful for all. By giving ourselves that time, we were able to, and following some of those, those tactics or those steps, I think that we had a very successful implementation when it’s all said and done.
SS: I would certainly say so based on some of the insights and data that we’ve seen as well. You also helped to drive the adoption of the platform by running trainings with all of the divisions you support and offering ongoing office hours. Can you share a little bit more about this approach and the impact that it had on the adoption of the platform, Trula?
TH: Yes. We’ve learned a lot, to say the least. You don’t know what you don’t know, but we had a two-phased approach. The first was we had hands-on training and I say that because the Baker Tilly way of doing training is a little bit different than what we decided to do. We decided to offer the first phase anyway, ten different training sessions. Bob and I, put out all the information, how great of a tool this was, and we gave them the opportunity to sign up for the different calendar times that we had put out there. We probably got about half of our active users that we had given licenses at that point in time.
Bob and I came back together and it was like, gosh, we still got another half that we need to get active. We made a little change in that and we rolled out our second part of that. One of the things we did was we sent out to everybody who was offered a license three different times and we put them on their calendar and we said, they’re optional, choose one. Some people were intentional, went through right away, accepted, deleted, whatever. Some of them used it in such a way that it sat on their calendars and served as a reminder because they showed it as tentative.
One of the things that we learned was that it was working a lot better for us. What I wanted to convey to my team was we need to do this again. We need to do another three and so that’s what we did. We did three more sessions and so we ended up getting the amount of active users that we needed to get by putting on calendar reminders. It’s crazy. It’s something simple like that would do it, but in our firm, typically it’s go and sign up and leave it in more of a passive way.
The other thing that we did, we offered office hours and we did it as a drip campaign. What we did was we would tell them each week what our tip of the week would be. We had sent these office hours out on every salesperson’s calendar, so they could accept it or turn it down. We would tell them what that tip was and then one of the things we did was we would put those tips in that week’s appointment. By doing this you’d save it, it would remind them, it would go in and update on their calendars, and so that ended up being a great way to get people interested in different tips that we did on Highspot.
The really nice thing, though, was every office hour, the first five minutes, ten minutes occasionally, was spent with us giving them a tip. We would record that, we would edit it, and then we would use that as our tip page. We would start with that video recording that they could watch. We also would build out a step-by-step process of what they could do that gave them directions. Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, and it would have a screenshot with it. The combination of the video and those plays worked great. They are still part of our learning sales university right now in Highspot. We were able to kill two birds with one stone.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that recently our office hours were given in such a way that Bob and I were discussing how we can make these better. We have salespeople and we have partners that have gotten very excited about Highspot and ways that it is helping them. One of the things that we are going to be doing going forward is bringing in some of our users, and some of our salespeople, and having them show a tip that they learned this week. What they easily found, if they found a new way to do outreach, a cool video, or just something else from the seller’s perspective. That’s something we’re excited to start doing here soon.
The last thing I will mention is we also started Highspot Headlines. That is where we call out every week bite-sized pieces that they might have missed every week so that they can quickly glance at them and see, if is there anything that I want to know about. The Highspot Headlines have been very helpful in keeping everybody up to date on what’s going into Highspot, especially those that aren’t yet in there every day. It is something that is helpful going forward.
SS: I love that. Those are excellent hands-on tips and tricks to get folks into the platform. It seems like it has been working. I will say we looked at some of your adoption metrics, especially for some of the different capabilities in Highspot, and you guys have seen a lot of success in a lot of areas. A couple I would love to get some insights from you on. You’ve seen a lot of success with the pitch. You guys have 95% pitch adoption. Can you tell us about your pitch strategy and how it has helped your team improve productivity?
TH: We are very proud of what we’ve accomplished here. This really gave us insight into the best way to train our sellers. It also gave them the ability to send their first pitch in training, and then we came around and challenged them to send a pitch after training so that that would be something that they would know how to do. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Some of the key takeaways that we got about the pitch area that we thought would help is that all of our attendees were able, during training, to send a pitch both using Outlook and using Highspot in two different ways.
We also were able to take them the minute they sent it during training live, Bob and I would be there, they would send it to us and we would be on there right away engaging with that email for them so that they would get engagement metrics immediately. That began to start to sink in even more and people were getting excited about it. The other thing we did was in addition to those engagement updates, we were able to go in and show them in Salesforce. We said to look at how these records are automatically updating. I’m telling you, we got a lot of activity, but it was really good for them to see and see it all come together from the pitching to the engagement analytics to how it does their work for them in Salesforce.
The one thing we probably learned most from Pitch is that the biggest thing in our organization that we have had to help them get over is confidence. Confidence and trust in the system. One of the things that we offer to everybody is if you are doing this and you’re sending a pitch and you’re just scared to death because this is an important one and you don’t want to screw it up, we would always offer help. We would say hit us up on chat and we’re happy to look over your shoulder. We’re happy to help you send your first one. It began to give them more peace and comfort and confidence to do it because they were having to learn a new technology.
Pitching, it’s like being put in the spotlight, right? What if I send this wrong? What if I send it to the wrong person? What if something goes awry? We were able to spend time with them. And I think giving them confidence is one of the biggest parts of being ready to pitch and getting out there and doing it.
SS: I love that. That is a phenomenal offer to your field teams. Now, in a similar vein, you have achieved 81% adoption of your sales plays. Tell us a little bit about that. How are you leveraging sales plays to help drive productivity?
TH: A couple of ways that I think have helped, and that is we are spotlighting our sales plays. We do it, as I mentioned earlier, in our Highspot Headlines. We also are spotlighting those. Honestly, and I think Bob would say the same, every time we have a conversation and Highspot is in it, we are evangelizing the sales plays because, for our firm, they are the one-stop shop. They’re an information bundle that they never had access to at this level. When they can go to a sales play and they can see what they need to know about it, they can look at the expertise we have and look at what they need to say, show, and do. The more that we continue to make these as robust as we can, I think they’re only going to continue to improve.
Another thing that I thought Bob did well is when we onboard our sales team now, one of the things we do are onboard from Highspot. We take them right into the tool. We’re showing them, number one, how to use Highspot and number two, about the sales plays. If that particular seller is coming in a particular industry, we can go to that industry sales kit, and show them what it is that is out there, what they have, what is being expected. It’s so much easier when you have everything in one place. It really does help navigate Baker Tilly because the one thing about our firm, we have a lot of service industry experience. We have a lot of areas and new products that are being rolled out.
Nobody in this firm knows everything we do, and so by finally having a place where we can put everything in one place, these sales plays are just a hit. There’s something that people can use also as a resource tool, and that’s the last point I’ll make, is that we have received a lot of requests for getting into Highspot and looking at these sales plays because our resource managers, our marketing team, our learning team, and even our deal desk. They use our sales plays and other information in Highspot to guide them to help the rest of the firm and get them the information that they need.
SS: I love hearing that. Now, we’ve also seen in our research that customers are experiencing some incredible business impact with Highspot, including an average 16% increase in win rate. Beyond the adoption of the platform, what are some of the business results that you’ve achieved since implementing Highspot? Bob?
BB: I think that there are two things that really jump out. First is that we’re seeing that our content is being consumed with the tool, we’re able to actually look at the analytics. Just in the first few months, we had VR pitches, and we’ve been very successful at getting those implemented. More than 81 hours of our content is being reviewed by our buyers. In collective, that’s significant. That’s good news. We’re getting in front of the people and we’re sending it to stakeholders that are looking at it and reviewing it.
The other metric that I think is pretty powerful is the revenue number. Although I don’t have close numbers that I’m able to share, I can say this. In the first couple of months that we launched the tool, we had more than two million dollars in pipeline revenue influenced via pitch functionality by using Highspot. We’re able to get in front of a lot of potential business, and we’re actually able to validate that the messaging and the information that we’re sharing are being reviewed.
SS: I love that. Last question, you mentioned that Baker Tilley’s investment in an enablement team and technology is a competitive differentiator for the company. Why is an investment in enablement a competitive advantage in today’s market, Bob?
BB: Well, there’s a couple of things that come to mind there too. The first one is you have to invest in enablement for two core reasons. In my view, number one is the velocity of change. Change inside and outside of the organization happens quicker than we can keep track of. If we expect a seller to not only sell but to keep track of that change, we’re probably going to set ourselves up for some disappointment. There are some that could do that well, but I think some that are the outlier. It’s not the majority. You need an enablement team to stay up with that change and to be able to filter through it so that we can get the appropriate information to the seller at the time that they need it, so they can be successful.
The second reason I think it’s really important to invest is because the buying process constantly evolves and it’s constantly changing. It’s becoming more dynamic. There’s more research and insight and information available to a buyer than there’s ever been before. If we are, again, going to expect the seller to stay up with all of those different types of insights and information, in addition to what they’re doing on their side of the house, what the buyers are doing, they’re going to really need to understand the why. I see many organizations use the Nike philosophy, just do it. Sellers just do it.
The reality is many sellers don’t know how or what to just do. By investing in an enablement team, you will be able to separate yourselves from your competition because you’re going to be able to provide that education, that information, and support to your sellers so that you do generate revenue and at the same time you reduce the complexity of their job. I guess I stand by my belief that I said when I opened. Sales enablement, I truly believe, is the most important job in the organization. Without enablement, we’re not going to equip our sellers to generate the revenue that they potentially could. For those reasons, I think that enablement is a very worthy cause relating to investing or investments that should go from an organization.
SS: I couldn’t agree more. Bob, Trula, thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciated your time and your insights.
TH: Thank you.
SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
Research from Public Personnel Management found that training alone leads to a 22% increase in productivity, while that impact jumps to 88% with a combination of training and coaching. So how can you maximize the impact of your training and coaching programs?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Jonathan Easterling, senior sales enablement trainer at Ncontracts. Thanks for joining, Jonathan! I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Jonathan Easterling: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me today, Shawnna. I really appreciate it. As you’re saying, my name is Jonathan Easterling. I am the senior sales enablement trainer at Ncontracts currently. I’m just outside of Denver in a town called Fort Collins. Leading up to Ncontracts, I’ve been in various B2B selling jobs, led team management, and went on the traditional path. Being in management, you have the opportunity to develop your team. I really enjoyed that piece. I had a chance quite a few years ago now to jump into training and I have not looked back ever since.
SS: I love that. Now to start, I’d love to hear from you. Can you share a little bit from your perspective about the connection between training and coaching and how the two can complement each other?
JE: I hear this often when these two aspects are decoupled and the way that I think about it is I think of my sellers as fighter jets. We give them the core skills and the competencies to really get them off the runway. That’s where the training kind of fuels the thrusters. We got him up in the air, but the coaching is the aileron. The coaching has the seller moving towards the target and when we decouple the training from the coaching, then we’re leaving a seller with really all thrust and no vector. Sellers, as we know, really want to get after it and they’re happy to fly hard and fast with thrust only. We have to make sure that we’re jumping in post-training and we’re making sure that that coaching is keeping the direction true.
SS: I love that. Now we have a theme going on around what good looks like. I’d love to hear from you. What does good training and coaching look like? In other words, what are your best practices for building an effective training and coaching strategy?
JE: What good looks like is kind of a varietal question. It hits differently for every organization and that’s what I initially thought when I approached that. As I pulled myself to a little bit higher level, which I think is an enabler we have to do, I realized that that’s actually kind of not the case. I want to do a quick little reframe if I may, what does good training feel like to the trainees? When I looked at it from that aspect, I was like, okay, well, what’s the goal? What’s the goal here? The goal of any training is to get the skill and the will levels matched, and ideally, both those levels are very high. The reps feel empowered to do what they want to do and they are excited to do it.
Now, I break it down into just a couple of different categories when I’m approaching this. For me, what good looks like in my organization is tiered, digestive, digestible, and iterative. Let’s just take a peek at a couple of those. Tiered, which means, it’s not a blanket approach. This is targeted, prescriptive, and it’s going to be different for each level of employee. We all know we can’t just deploy one program and say, okay, all right, good job everybody, let’s call it a day.
At the seller tier, they may need something a little more technical, a little more point-and-click, and maybe a little more role-plays or gamification. At the leadership tier, we may need a different level of technical skillset. Maybe they need something a little more administrative, or maybe they need more soft skills and more training on coaching or coaching on coaching to be able to implement that training correctly.
It is all iterative. Luckily, I was part of an organization early on that taught me how to fail forward and really gave me the opportunity to do that. I’m not afraid, and my organizations are not ever afraid to go back and relaunch and edit what we’ve previously done. We don’t really carry that level of indignance with us. We are not under the belief that managers should handle that whenever small iterations come down after training. We go back and republish, we relearn from the mistake and we just do it better next time. It’s iterative.
First of all, it’s digestible. Now this one’s difficult. I’ll tell a quick little story about this. I train at a jiu-jitsu gym and one of the instructors has an adaptive living class called be bold. When you go into a bold class, you will see people of all physical capabilities. You’ll have professional fighters and you’ll have quadriplegics in the same room getting a sweat on and working out. When I looked at that, I said whoa, everyone in this room is baselined and engaged. Now from a training aspect, that is a huge cold water over the head that you’re saying, wow, if this can happen, what am I missing in my groups that are highly vetted? We want to make sure that it’s digestible to everybody in the group.
This isn’t easy. To do that, we can over-communicate with our stakeholders. This is going to be another bucket of cold water for some, for folks, don’t skip your postmortems. If you fail, really rip it apart. Sit in that for a minute and make sure it doesn’t happen again or at least that you learned a lesson to take from the next time. Don’t be afraid to mess up every now and then. I think this is a really interesting time for enablement altogether as we look at what good looks like. Enablement has been completely upended by the change in the workforce. This is one profession that has really set the level playing field. People that have been here for 15 years, people that have been here for five years, they’re kind of on an equal playing foot, figuring out what works in this virtual hybrid environment today. Super exciting to be able to find out what good looks like. You might find something seriously game-changing if you flip your own script.
SS: I love that advice. Now you’ve leveraged Highspot to train and coach reps, both at Ncontracts and in a previous role. What are some of the common challenges that you’ve experienced when it comes to training and coaching reps and how has Highspot helped you overcome these?
JE: I think initially when we have this bevy of information that we have to get inter-departmentally down to the sellers, there’s a couple of key pieces of information that the sellers really need. Finding that content without a repository that’s very simple to navigate, ends up being this byzantine conduit of channels to try to get the seller something that’s actionable. As we know, if they’re not actionable on it very quickly, poof will be gone, the training not strong, and it’s going to be really tough to actually get them to implement it.
When we have a platform, like Highspot that categorizes and organizes a taxonomy that is well beyond any of its competitors in terms of simplicity, user-friendliness, and navigation, now we’re getting those sellers, the type of content that is super relevant to them at the seller’s speed. We need to get things at the seller’s speed. They are going to move fast and they’re going to look for something very quickly. If they can’t find it, then they’ll make up the narrative and we don’t want that. We want them to have the best information possible and always feel equipped to do their job the best.
SS: Fantastic. Now to shift gears a little bit, one thing that caught my eye was on LinkedIn you had shared a few tenants that you collected throughout your career. One of them is to better the environment, better the individuals. How do you help create a healthy sales culture through your training and coaching programs?
JE: I love this saying, thank you so much for being able to pick it out. Luckily in sales enablement, we do that as kind of a proxy. Now, initially, when we’re creating these sales training and programs, let’s start from the beginning, what do we have to do as enablement? We have to stay available. We have a lot of backend stuff, like presentations, events, and curriculum that we’re creating. We have to be present for our sellers initially because they’re telling us what’s wrong, they’re telling us what’s working and they’re telling us what’s not working. They’re really our first toe in the water for a temp check.
Second, but I almost call this 1A is about transparency. There’s no guesswork. Right. That old adage. If it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist. Well, luckily with the analytics that Highspot provides when we’re looking at things like usage time, click-throughs, the specific calls to action that we can set, now we’re setting a level of transparency within the organization that says, hey, we’re all here to do the same thing. Let’s talk about some concrete objectives that we’re working towards.
SS: I think that is fantastic. What are some of your best practices for creating effective training programs in Highspot?
JE: When we’re looking at an effective training program, I’m going to draw it up a little high level because, again, it looks different to every organization. I look at the overall principles. One of the big mistakes that I made early on in Highspot was because it is so exciting to get everything so direct to my reps, I got kind of confused and I created a couple of sales plays that had way too many calls to action. What I took from that is a best practice for an effective training program which is that it has a single or very few calls to action. As I started to implement fewer, more specific calls to action, I found that I had better uptake of the completion of the call to action. I got less recidivism into the programs and I got a better overall average initial scores. That would be the first thing I’d say, just try to focus on as few objectives as possible to get your sellers actionable on those objectives.
Secondly, to kind of harp on what I had said before, iterate, iterate, iterate. Highspot has an amazing function that you are able to not only curate your content, but you can very simply replace a new piece of content that has come out and you’re able to see the longitudinal data of the old piece of content and the new piece of content. With that, you can iterate your approach, you can go back to product and marketing and say, hey, we actually need to iterate this piece of content, but being hypercritical about the things that you’ve done and then letting the data speak for itself.
Oftentimes we can get emotionally tied to this project and this baby that we’ve created. Luckily, with Highspot, we’re able to pull that emotion out of it and say, oh shoot, objectively that just didn’t work like I thought it would. Now, let’s actually make this baby the one I really wanted, but we want all of our babies.
SS: So relatable. How do you then reinforce that training through coaching?
JE: When I’m reinforcing training through coaching, for me, it’s important to be able to, again, I’m going to call back to those specific calls to action that I was able to develop in the past. I can coach on things that are soft skills, like, good introduction or like not hard pivoting from process and value-based discovery. I can teach these things, but when I need to have technical-based coaching, there’s really no replacement for a hard analytic-driven conversation. When I’m pulling that data down, I think for me personally, and from what I’ve heard from my reps it really softens the blow instead of it being heard as a personal thing.
It’s like, hey, I really didn’t like that introduction, but when we combine things like integration of Gong calls with our Highspot scripts into our sales plays, then we’re creating a holistic view of the sales motion and we can say, hey, actually we use this introduction over here, but it actually kind of led to a little bit of a slippage. Let’s try a different introduction that maybe one of your other seller friends had used, again, going back to that transparency part of it and we can have a more factual conversation that says, hey, we’re just going to get you from this step to this step.
SS: I think that is fantastic. Now, coaching can often take a backseat, especially as we all get busy, but teams really can’t afford to let that happen. I know that you are adamant that coaching is a key priority within your organization. Why is coaching such a critical part of the formula for improving sales productivity?
JE: I’m going to go back to the jet analogy, thrust, and vector. As the jet is moving through the air, i.e. as your seller is progressing through a sale to land at the close, we all know the air has weather, i.e. there are other things within that organization, within that client, with their personal life, with their social life, professional, whatever, that is happening. That can really throw a seller for a loop. You give somebody a call, you’re in stage three, and suddenly you’re like, my dog just died, and you’re like, man, how do you pivot off of that one? To be able to have a coach, someone that is close to you during those sales and during those moments, again, with that transparency, with that factual analytic driven conversation to get you to that next level you cannot separate those two.
When we’re going through coaching as in training a coach, we can use dashboards within the platform to get middle-upper management to buy in. Now, how do we do that? Well, it’s very simple to create your own comprehensive dashboards in Highspot. What we can do is we can just hang out. We can hang out with our managers, we can meet with them to identify the metrics that we need to drive with them together you can create these dashboards.
This does a couple of things initially. It makes it super easy for them to jump in and check out where their team is at. They’re already pumped at that point. Secondarily, this is like a mini discovery session for us. We get to find out what are the overarching drivers, are the quick objectives, what are the long-term objectives, what are our quarterlies and what are our annuals. We can always start to have those in mind as we’re developing future trainings down the road. It’s kind of a two-pronged approach.
SS: I love that. Now you mentioned that you aim to encourage coaching and mentoring through the Highspot platform. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you approach this as well?
JE: The aforementioned meeting with the sales managers is one way that I like to build rapport within a new company. I like to come in and say, hey, I’m actually here for you because that’s what I’m here to do. I need to translate what’s important to you and get it to the sellers so we can then we can all go have our quarterly party every year.
One of the things that we implemented recently that I thought was really fun was utilizing the Highspot social aspect. You can comment, you can like, and you can share edits. There is a strong social aspect of it that’s super easy to use. What we’re doing is we’re implementing what we call an SOS spot, or a support on-site spot. This is to increase social interaction and we’re hyper-focusing on this page as a social forum for people to post Gong calls, post emails and get feedback within the organization. It is like a war room where we unabashedly can tear each other apart and go back out into the marketplace and close some deals there.
SS: I think that is very cool.
JE: We’ll see if they do it.
SS: Now you also mentioned how important it is to partner with sales managers to help them be effective coaches and mentors. What are some ways that you leverage Highspot to do that?
JE: As the initial Olympic run of the torch comes through onboarding, that’s how I like to think of us marching down with the torch, lighting up everybody’s brains with all the new knowledge through onboarding, the managers are what is providing that ongoing vector through the air. They’re coaching every day. They see their employees more times a day. They just hear more from the reps. When we’re partnering closely with them initially, that means We’re going to empower them to find the data themselves. We’re going to get very close to them and we’re going to let them know how powerful Highspot is to give them the ability to have real-time insights into what their reps are doing.
For a sales manager, data is king. They love getting data. When we build it in conjunction with them, they have awesome buy-in, and they’re really empowered to use it because it’s metrics that they care about directly. It’s important that we’re meeting between departments as well because our business development manager is going to have different metrics than our enterprise has, and different than our mid-market needs. We have to meet with each of them because then we can start tying the threads together.
Now you’re asking about partnering with sales managers. For us here at Ncontracts and for my previous roles using Highspot, sales plays, and pitch styles have been absolutely integral in providing sales managers with that sales flow motion view. Sometimes we can get a little disconnected by viewing the pipeline in our sales motion in Salesforce. It can kind of seem like a stop-and-go, but with a sales play and a pitch style, you get a holistic view of how a seller is going to move through what you intended from point A to point B. This is what I call from contact to contract. We have a path we want the sellers to take. We partner early with our managers to identify exactly what those calls to action we want them to enact.
Let’s say at stage four, are they using the ABC proposal deck? Then we get with those managers and say, hey, does this sales play actually feed the data that drives your metrics? Are we actually putting information out there that you can pop into that dashboard that we created and see that it’s actually accurate? This is why it is important to go back and meet with that manager and say, hey, is this still relevant? Or, hey, I changed this, do you want to add this type of metric to it?
SS: I love that. On the note of metrics, last question for you, how do you measure the business impact of your training and coaching programs, and how has Highspot helped influence the business impact?
JE: You’re going for a loaded one on the closer, huh? I see how it is, Shawnna. Oftentimes we can find ourselves in a tricky predicament in enablement. A lot of the time as enablement, we fall into the revenue department. Our metrics can align very closely with sales, such as time to close and average deal size, but we don’t necessarily have the direct line like a sales manager would coax that trajectory as it’s happening.
Highspot has some features to help us identify exactly what has or hasn’t contributed to the goal of closing more business. Integrations with things like Salesforce can help me see exactly what piece of content was used or wasn’t used attributing to our slippage and win. We can see exactly what content is converting and we can continue to make that a best practice.
I’m going to go back and I’m going to say that the transparency within the platform, to be able to have a factual-driven conversation when sellers are out there getting beat up every day on the phone is important. It is important to identify that this isn’t an emotional thing, this is just a factual thing that we can get better at. When we’re looking at something that ties directly to revenue, there are interactions in Highspot that we can partner with marketing to share. This could be our click-through, our form fills, or our pitch styles with the content that we’re using, we compare directly interdepartmentally, just like we do to create training programs to then report back and see what the true contributors are to them. Having that level of insight when we obviously want more budget every year, we want to substantiate ourselves. We want to show how much we are contributing and are absolutely integral.
SS: I love that. Jonathan, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me today. I really appreciate it.
JE: You’re very welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
SS: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
A study conducted by Highspot and a B2B research partner found that sales playbooks enable reps to be more efficient and effective, making them a crucial component of any sales enablement strategy. In fact, 42% of best-in-class companies use sales playbooks, resulting in better quota attainment, customer retention, and lead conversion rates. So how can you build effective sales plays?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Jillian Maiorino, the manager of sales revenue training and enablement at Vendr. Thanks for joining Jillian! I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Jillian Maiorino: Thank you so much for having me, Shawnna. I’m really excited to be here. A little bit about me, I was born and raised in Maine, and I’m actually now back in Maine with my family. I have a husband of eight years and two little ones. After having my kiddos, I was trying to think about what I wanted to do when I went back to work. Prior to that, I graduated and went right into the world of sales. I did everything from BDR to full-cycle AE to post sales, customer success, and account management and then went on to become a mother, the greatest job of all.
When I thought about what I wanted to do when I went back into the workforce, and if I was going to leave my babies, what would fulfill me enough to do that? Enablement at the time was still relatively new. When I think about it at my core, I am an enabler. Through words, content, tools, and processes, I am somebody who really strives to support others. I love the art of selling everything that goes into selling and being able to enable sellers to find everything that they need at their fingertips, be their best version of themselves, and coach them through that has been really fulfilling over the last few years.
SS: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Jillian. Now to start, you actually leveraged Highspot at a previous company and now at Vendr. Given this experience, how have you seen an enablement platform play a really key role in the revenue tech stack?
JM: I think an enablement platform provides the tools and resources to enable sales teams to be more effective and efficient in their roles, bottom line. It helps reps stay informed and prepared throughout the entire sales process and it’s meeting them where they’re at and really looking to not disrupt their day-to-day workflow. By equipping sales teams with the right information and tools at the right time, in the right way, the enablement platform is really improving their productivity and enables them to ultimately close more deals effectively, leading to increased revenue.
I think an enablement platform also facilitates the training and onboarding process for new sales hires. It provides a centralized repository for training materials, product knowledge, and best practices really playing a key role in not only getting new hires up to speed but then that ongoing reinforcement and support throughout their entire time.
SS: I love that it is absolutely essential to the revenue tech stack. At Vendr, what are some of the key business initiatives that Highspot helps to support?
JM: That’s a great question. I joined Vendr and one of the first questions that I had was, “Do you have Highspot?” That just goes to show how crucial it was to me at my previous company. At the time, we were making a lot of process improvements and changes to the business as we became more of a platform product company. The core purpose of Highspot is really here to enable sales teams, again, to be more effective and efficient and ensure that they get the right information at the right time, and so we use Highspot for everything from onboarding all the way through ongoing and reinforcement.
We have competitive plays. We have persona-based plays. We outline our sales process broken down by the stage and really so they understand everything that goes into each stage and out of each stage. We meet them where they’re at in Salesforce so that they don’t have to leave their workflow. One of the biggest things we did when we launched Highspot here, we lined it up with our sales kickoff earlier this year when we launched our SLG, or sales-led growth playbook. We built that with Highspot.
Another thing that we do that has really been a big initiative here to make sure that sales reps are getting the right information at the right time is we launched a weekly sales digest, and that is sent via Highspot as well. It is built in Highspot and sent via Highspot, which really allows them to get that highlighted book-ended information of all the things that are getting thrown at them via Slack or in meetings or in trainings and have that end cap at the end of every week surfacing up what they need to know and make sure that they can take action on heading into the following week.
SS: You touched on this, but one area where your company has seen a lot of success in Highspot is through sales plays. In fact, you’ve achieved, I believe, a 91% play adoption rate, which is absolutely incredible. Jillian, can you tell our audience about your sales play strategy and how they support your key business initiatives?
JM: Absolutely. When we think about a sales play, I want to think about it really at the most granular level. We could have a discovery sales play, but within that discovery sales play, I want to have a discovery sales place specifically for our CFO persona. Getting as granular as we can means that reps can pull up the right scenario, sales scenario, and the right play and execute. We break down our sales play with the guidance and the best practices from Highspot into the what to know, what to say, what to show, and what to do framework.
When I think about those sections, the what to know section is really where we’re educating our audience about the scenario with context, information, training materials, and FAQs. The person really responsible for this section is our topic subject matter expert. If we are doing a competitive battle card, our product marketing manager who owns our competitive intel is really owning that what-to-know section. This is where we clearly explain why the play was created, and why its content matters and highlight information like what is it for, who is it for and what outcomes does it drive? Then we incorporate any training courses to solidify the new knowledge around that play if it’s a long tour competitive battle card.
The next section is what to say. Within this section is where we’re really preparing our audience to have an effective conversation with the prospect or customer through talking points, questions to ask, highlighting Gong calls of what good looks like so that they can see that and replicate that and start to practice, as well as customer stories. Now, the person that we have responsible for this section is the audience subject matter expert. The enablement partner is partnering on all of these sections, but the audience subject matter expert really is who is this play intended for? If it’s intended for a sales rep, I may bring on a rep to help me make sure that this is resonating and this is exactly what they need from a what to say standpoint.
We may create different sections for more granularity and give them examples of questions that they can ask to help uncover situations, for example, where this new product launch might be a good fit. We may include demo tracks here or competitive daggers that help reps get familiar with how similar competing products might be positioned. The What to Say section is all about giving them the snippets and the talk track that they need to be successful with this sales play.
In the What to Show section, the goal here is to provide our audience with the most relevant and effective content to engage the prospect or customer either before, during, or after the meeting. This may be white papers, case studies, email templates that might be a follow-up template that’s easy for them to plug and play, or even demo videos. The What to Show is really external-facing content. The individual responsible for this section is again, the topic subject matter expert, along with the enablement SME. Then we’ll have best practices here around the content that can be pitched again before, during, or after.
The last section is the What to Do section. This is specifically where we detail the steps that our audience needs to take in the given scenario. Depending on the play, this section could include something from updating the account progress in Salesforce to coordinating logistics for a meeting as a follow-up. The most often responsible person here is the audience SME as well. We also add a ‘need help’ section to the play, so they have the contact information for the topic subject matter expert as well as the enablement subject matter expert.
SS: Thank you for outlining that. I think those are some phenomenal best practices. In your opinion, if you could sum it up, what does a good sales play look like?
JM: I remember the first time that I was on-boarded with Highspot, and I’m not somebody that likes to reinvent the wheel. I like to follow best practices that Highspot has laid out, and I believe they said, like two and a half scrolls with your mouse. You don’t want to have too much information where the intended audience feels overwhelmed, while also making it super digestible. The what to know, say, show, do framework really allows them to go to the exact section that they’re looking for.
They may go to a play multiple times and need a different section depending on what their action is that they’re taking, so it’s really important to make it digestible. I think that the best sales plays do really have that baseline information on the what to know section, very clear, actionable what to say, snippets, talk tracks, highlighting what good looks like, and then clear follow-up templates and what to do actions to make sure that they’re completing the best practice cycle through whatever it is that they’re learning or executing on that sales play.
SS: That’s absolutely a fantastic definition of what good looks like. As I mentioned, you guys have an amazing adoption rate. What are some of your best practices for driving the adoption of sales plays among your reps?
JM: I love this question because I answer it pretty much the same anytime anyone asks me how enablement is successful. My opinion is that everything lives and dies at the front-line management level. What I mean by that is without your buy-in from your front-line managers, your reps will not adopt Highspot or sales place. The front-line managers really need to be there to drive that adoption and reinforcement and make sure that it’s ingrained in their workflow and their day-to-day.
One thing that we’ve done is really leveraged the weekly sales digest that I send via Highspot, and let’s say we’re launching a new sales play. The following Monday in their weekly team meetings, their managers are, for better or for worse, pop quizzing them on what was shared in the digest and then specifically in the sales plays. That really got them in the habit of at least reviewing once over on Friday and then knowing where their resource is.
The second piece is I think allowing reps to access the sales play in their day-to-day workflow that they’re already in. This gives them no other option because it’s right in front of their face in the opportunity view with the Highspot frame. They know if they’re in a competitive scenario at a certain stage in the sales process, the right sales play is going to meet them right there and they can easily click on it and access it without even leaving Salesforce.
SS: I couldn’t agree more. It is essential to build it in the workflows that your reps are in on a daily basis. How has your sales play strategy helped you to impact the productivity of your reps?
JM: Honestly, I think it really comes down to them knowing how to fish for themselves. They don’t have to take that extra step to Slack me and say, hey, how would I approach this scenario? Or, hey, where can I find this piece of content? They know now that all of those things that they need are at their fingertips with Highspot. They can backslash in Slack Highspot and search for whatever they need and I think that that really has impacted their productivity because they’re not wasting that time searching or asking others. They know exactly where it is.
SS: Absolutely, and in today’s day and age, I think impacting productivity is absolutely critical for organizations to do more with less. What role do sales plays play in your broader enablement strategy? What are some of the key components of your enablement strategy?
JM: I think sales plays play a crucial role in our broader enablement strategy in a few different ways. They are targeted and orchestrated approaches that guide our reps on how to engage with prospects and customers effectively throughout the sales process. They really do provide a structured framework that know, say, show, do, that aligns with the organization with Vendr’s sales objectives, customer needs, and desired outcomes.
Sales play also ensures consistency and alignment, so they help our reps tailor their approach to specific buyer personas, industries, or different sales scenarios. Again, as I said, they provide a proven framework for engaging with prospects. They really do facilitate this continuous improvement and optimization of sales approaches and we’re able to track and analyze the outcomes of the different sales plays, gather the insights on what’s working best and what’s not, and then it allows us to have this feedback loop that enables the refinement and enhancement of sales plays over time.
While sales plays are the starting point of a lot of the things that we do in our enablement strategy, it’s also providing us that feedback loop that ensures the sales team is equipped with the most effective strategies to drive revenue growth and we’re learning from those analytics and insights constantly.
SS: I’d love to know how your holistic enablement strategy helps to also drive sales productivity.
JM: I love this question because I really enjoy taking a step back and looking at enablement from a holistic view because there are so many different components and day-to-day in my role, I can get lost in only one of these pillars, if you will. When you take a step back, you’re really thinking about a few different pillars. The first is training and onboarding. By providing structured training on product knowledge and sales methodologies, objection handling, and effective communication, our reps are equipped with the necessary skills to perform their roles efficiently very early on in their journeys at Vendr.
The second piece is the content management piece. A key aspect of enablement is clearly effective content management, which we achieved through Highspot, and we are able to provide the reps easy access to up-to-date, relevant, personalized content that helps them engage with prospects. more effectively.
The next piece is our sales process optimization. We’re analyzing and optimizing the sales process, looking to eliminate bottlenecks and really streamline their workflow. By identifying inefficiencies or redundancies, or even areas of improvement in the sales process, we’re able to implement changes that lead to increased productivity.
The next big pillar is sales technology integration, Highspot being a main piece of that. We integrate the majority of our tech stack into Salesforce with Highspot Salesloft and with Gong. We’re really able to give this sort of seamless integration, giving our reps a unified view of their customer, of the customer data, streamlining their data entry, and then they can spend less time navigating between those different tools and systems, which results in increased efficiency and more time dedicated to selling. We have the continuous learning and development pillar where we’re promoting a culture of ongoing learning by providing ongoing support, coaching, and resources to help sales reps enhance their skills and knowledge.
Lastly, the analytics and insights pillar of our holistic enablement strategy is crucial so that we can gain valuable insights into rep performance, content effectiveness, and then sales trends to understand what’s working and where we might have areas for improvement.
SS: Amazing results at Vendr. Last question for you, Jillian. What are some of the key business outcomes that you’ve achieved through Highspot? Do you have any data points you can share with us?
JM: I have my sync with our Highspot CSM later today, actually, and so I’m hoping we can get some more fresh data points. I think that truly, the biggest one of all, as I said earlier, is getting reps to fish for themselves and knowing where their resources are. That was a huge pain point for us prior to Highspot. We’re at the point now where more and more cross-functional employees are asking, hey, what’s Highspot? Can we get access? We are thinking of more and more use cases that we can use across the business, that isn’t just the standard sales enablement use cases that you would think of.
I think the other thing that’s been really impactful is the use of microsites. Reps are able to really deliver this world-class experience to their prospects of what it would look like to work with Vendr and being able to give them this one-stop shop for all of the content that they’re reviewing, the recordings from the calls that they’ve attended, making it very easy for them to go to their microsite, see all the things that they need to know about Vendr as they’re making their business case and decision and have it there very easy for them to access. Not only are we making it easy for our reps to access information, but we’re also making it easy for our prospects and customers to access information. All in all, I don’t know what we would do without Highspot.
SS: Well, I absolutely love hearing that. Jillian, thank you so much for joining us on this podcast. I appreciate the time.
JM: Thank you for having me.
SS: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
Research from LinkedIn found that 54% of sellers say sales tools enable them to build trust and close deals with buyers. So, what role does an efficient tech stack play in creating an effective enablement strategy?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Rey Espinosa, senior product consultant at ODP Business Solutions. Thanks for joining, Rey! I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Rey Espinosa: Absolutely. I definitely want to extend my thanks and gratitude for having me join the podcast. As for myself, I’ve actually got about close to 30 years of experience in sales and sales-related roles. I spent about 10 years actually as a frontline sales rep or account manager, and I managed some sales teams. The bulk of my tenure has actually been in a corporate training role, wearing any and all the different hats that trainers wear, facilitator, certified sales instructor, content and rhythm creator, coach, and just everything that’s involved with that. That’s the bulk of my experience. About just over a year ago, our organization adopted Highspot and actually invited me to be the Highspot solution owner for ODP Business Solutions. That is my current goal and I’m loving every moment of it.
SS: Well, thank you again so much for joining us today, Ray. I really appreciate it. Now, I want to get started with obviously understanding what the landscape looked like before. Before Highspot, what were some challenges your organization was experiencing? How have you been able to solve these challenges since having Highspot in your tech stack?
RE: Well, where to begin on this one? The challenges that we’re really facing in our organization with our old content management system really were number one. There was just an overwhelming amount of content on the platform. Our sales teams were challenged with trying to find the content. Even to add to that, when they would find content, a lot of it was out of date, it was old, it was irrelevant, and not usable to share with our customers.
Implementing Highspot, afforded us the opportunity to really wipe the slate clean, which is a great benefit for the organization. We really took a hard look at the content that we had, and we made that conscious decision to be very intentional about what we brought into Highspot. We made sure we only brought in the most recent and relevant content. A few assets were updated to make sure that they were up-to-date and relevant, and then we excluded a lot of content. That allowed us to start from a really great point with our content. We knew the content that was getting uploaded was up to date, it was relevant, it was really healthy.
Also, with this smaller amount of content, it addressed the challenge that our sales teams had with trying to find content easily and quickly, and they knew whatever they would find in Highspot was going to be up-to-date and it was going to be relevant for today’s business landscape. Going through this process, just helped to improve efficiencies and the overall perspective that our users had on the content that we had available for them to use with their customers.
SS: I love to hear that. Now you have also been doing amazing within your organization at ODP Business Solutions. You have an 81% recurring usage rate of the Highspot platform, which, as I said, is outstanding. I’d love to learn from you. What are some key ways you integrate Highspot into seller’s workflows and how has that helped to drive adoption?
RE: Well, there’s a couple of different ways that we’ve done this. From its inception, Highspot has had some really great integration tools and capabilities into the other software tools in our tech stack. That really helped to promote and drive the adoption of the platform. We’re able to provide them access to the content from Highspot through Outlook, through our CRM, and through some of our other sales tools that we’re using. That really helped with adoption. It was easy to get to and easy to use from whichever tool they happened to be using in their workflow.
The other thing that really helped out is we made sure that we had constant and consistent messaging about Highspot to all of our teams. We made sure that they understood that Highspot is out of one source of truth, the content, whether it’s marketing content, product information, process documents, training, or what we wanted our sales teams to know, and they’ve learned that if you’re looking for anything, start with Highspot.
SS: I love that principle. What are some of the benefits of integrating Highspot with some of the other core tools in your tech stack, like Salesforce CRM, for example? What are some of the key business results that you’ve seen as a result of that integration?
RE: Well, again, it goes back to really the strong partnerships that Highspot has with a lot of the other vendors and companies out there. The biggest and most seamless integration that we have with Highspot is within our CRM. The integration that Highspot has with Salesforce allows us the ability to serve up content to the reps while they’re in Salesforce during their normal flow of business and processes.
We have the ability to serve up content at the account records, that opportunity, and contact records, and we can pick and choose what content we want to show for different accounts or different stages in an opportunity or different products that are associated with an opportunity. That was one of the core integration pieces that we love about Highspot. Just to add icing to the cake, you have that integration with Outlook. As a sales rep is starting to create an email interaction or engagement with the customer, they can easily drop in relevant content. The same goes for another tool that we use called Sales Law. There is another great simple integration to bring in content from Highspot when they’re using that tool.
That integration really just permeated through all of the tools that we really use and that our sales teams use on a day-to-day basis. The biggest benefit was that our sales teams didn’t have to adjust or change their processes drastically. It was just a small tweak here and a small tweak there to make sure they’re aware, this is how easily and quickly you can get to the content you need to share with your customers.
The biggest key business results that we’ve seen are improved efficiencies. Reps are able to go in, find content that they need, or we serve up the content that’s most relevant at that moment in time when they really need it for their customers. They’re spending less time doing what we call admin tasks. They’re not having to search for content or figure out what content to use, or even utilize the template capabilities, or pitch templates within Highspot. Now we’re presenting those messages where they’re simply just personalizing it a little bit and sending it out to the customers. It’s a huge improvement in efficiencies, which frees up time to let our sellers do what they’re paid to do, which is engage with our customers, bring the value of a partnership between our organizations, and drive profitability and revenue.
SS: That’s absolutely what the goal should be in terms of where reps are spending and focusing their time because it ultimately drives productivity. Now, I know that, especially in Salesforce, you have been working on a big project to basically build in targeting in Salesforce to ensure that you can deliver that just-in-time content for your reps. Can you tell us a little bit more about this project and how you’re leveraging the Salesforce integration to continue to further improve rep workflows and efficiencies?
RE: Absolutely. With the adoption of Highspot, the first steps are really getting the platform stood up and making sure that the framework is there, you have the right spots, lists, filters, and just everything is all set up so that you can manage that content. The next big step that we’re looking at is now serving up that content, and improving those efficiencies with our users, which are our sales teams.
I guess the easiest way to put this is as you start to want to drive business, businesses have campaigns and initiatives, different pages or different plays that they want to push out where we feel we can generate revenue and bring more value to our customers and with Salesforce and the integration that Highspot has with Salesforce, it allows us to present those initiatives or those campaigns. All of the information that’s relevant to those campaigns and initiatives can be right there at the targeted account. By bringing it up and integrating it into the account record, we now present that data or serve up that information right there on the account and make the sales teams aware, hey, this particular account is really primed and targeted for this initiative. Start to talk to them about these products or these services and solutions.
The great thing is we use play pages from Highspot and we leverage that to know, say, show, and do structure so that they can quickly go to that page, read through it and really understand what they need to do. This really ups their competency level about talking to their customers and how they want to talk to their customers, what they would like to show, and how they can really position the value that we can bring. That’s one of the first real heavy integrations that we’re doing at that account level within Salesforce. Right on its heels is going to be that same type of serving up of content and information on the opportunities. We can serve that up depending on the stage of the opportunity, depending on the product that’s related to that opportunity.
The next step beyond that is looking at the contact level. The individual person that we’re dealing with. We can see what they are engaging with because we want to leverage and serve up the right content at the right time, given that the customer’s title or the industry they’re in, is the decision maker, there are various pieces of information that are available within Salesforce that will allow us to serve that content up that’s going to resonate with that customer, given their buyer persona or their buyer type. You have to speak to a C-suite individual a lot differently from an end user or mid-level manager that has different priorities. Different things resonate with different customers and having the ability to serve up content, we know, is going to resonate with that particular type of buyer is really going to help to generate the interest from that customer and want to actually have those conversations with our sales teams.
SS: That is an amazing undertaking of work though, Ray, so congratulations on that project. I think it’s going to be extremely beneficial to your sales teams. Now, another topic that I know is near and dear to you, and also a way to help your teams improve efficiency, is through this notion of governance. You actually shared your insights on your governance strategy at our annual user conference, Spark ‘22, last fall. From your experience, and for the podcast audience that may not have been able to join that session, what is the importance of content governance, especially when productivity is so crucial to a company’s success?
RE: In a nutshell, the importance is really having up-to-date, relevant, and what we like to kind of call healthy content. You want to make sure that whatever information you’re providing to your customer, it’s going to be relevant for today’s business landscape. As we all know, over these last couple of years with everything that’s been going on in the world, business has changed dramatically. Making sure that the content that you have, the information that you’re sharing with your customer is up to date and reflects how that landscape has changed is going to resonate more with them than just a flier or a brochure that you printed back in 2018 or 2019. The same key points and value that you were trying to present at that moment in time aren’t really relevant anymore given the landscape and the shift in how we’re doing business today.
It all starts with that content governance and making sure that the assets and the content that you’re loading into Highspot it’s up to date, relevant, and healthy. For me, it even goes beyond that. There’s more to consider than just making sure that you’ve got a relevant title and a description, expiry date, and that it’s tagged appropriately for list builders in Highspot. We need to look at the overall spots. The list that you’ve created, the pages that you’re creating from a landing page to a spot overview, to a list overview page, the different play pages, all of that I think is within that realm of governance. I mean, it’s great if you write a really great book, an awesome novel, but if you go into a library and you can’t find that book, nobody’s ever going to know it’s there.
The way that you structure the framework of Highspot is part of that governance as well. If you can do that right and keep it updated, you’ll have to refresh it. It’s not something where it’s one-and-done. You have to revisit it and make sure that you’re keeping up with how you’re doing business and your customer base and your product lines and things like that, but if you keep it up to date, it’s much easier for reps to find what they need. It involves a lot more than just the uploading of content and tagging that and putting an appropriate title on it, it also involves some of the layout and structure of the environment. You want to make sure that when you’re creating your framework and the strategy for presenting content to your sellers that it makes sense, that it is intuitive, and that it’s easy for the end users to find that information. That’s really what’s going to drive the efficiencies, drive productivity, drive revenue. It all starts with governance, but it goes beyond just making sure that you’re checking a couple of boxes on the content properties. It goes well beyond that to really drive that home.
SS: Amazing. You guys, as I said, have been doing phenomenal with governance within your instance. Your governance health score consistently remains at 75% or above, which, as I said, is absolutely incredible Ray. Fantastic job. I’d love to learn a little bit more about our other customers that are really keen to implement governance best practices. How do you partner with spot owners and publishers inside of Highspot to ensure that Highspot is filled with relevant content for your sellers?
RE: It’s a combination of meetings, collaboration, and partnership. With our spot owners and our publishers, we meet with them monthly. As I mentioned before, we’ve only had Highspot for about a year, but these monthly meetings really help to make sure that our spot owners and our publishers, number one, are keenly aware of how important their role is in the Highspot platform and our governance and just overall content management strategy. They need to know how important they are. Having that constant consistent communication and two-way communication really is helping us out.
It makes sure that the spot owners and the publishers feel as though they kind of own a part of Highspot. It’s not just another process that they have to incorporate. It is their baby, as much as it is mine. That constant meeting with them on a month-to-month basis helps out. Beyond that, we also have implemented a Highspot end user committee and a Highspot sales leader committee so that we can meet on a monthly basis with our users. We get their feedback, we make sure that they’re aware of new features, new capabilities, new strategies that we’re implementing features in and capabilities that are integrated into Salesforce. This way they know what they’re going to see and how easy and quick it’s going to be to get to relevant content, but then allowing them to give that feedback as well.
Now, as part of the sales enablement team and owner of Highspot, we can take the feedback from the users, spot owners, and publishers to vet that out to figure out what we can really do. Once we understand that, now we help to partner with our marketing, our product, our merchandising, our sales op teams, and support teams, and our training teams to say, okay, this is what we really need to do. This is the direction that we need to drive Highspot because it’s going to really help from a content management upload process for our publishers and our spot owners, but it’s also going to have a very positive impact on our users. You have to keep an eye on both of those groups. One helps you to maintain the health and structure of the platform, but the other one is the users.
You can build this great efficient car, but if it’s ugly and it’s cramped and you’re not comfortable sitting in it, many people aren’t going to buy it and use it. On the other side of that coin, if it’s really a great-looking car and it’s comfortable and all that great stuff, perfect, you’re going to get a lot of people buying it, but if you didn’t build it the right way, it’s going to break down quickly, so you have to balance those two. I think we’ve done a great job at our company to make sure that we’re facilitating this two-way communication and feedback loop to make sure everybody’s voice is heard and that they understand that your idea, as wild as you may think it is, is maybe the perfect solution for what we need to continue to drive Highspot to drive efficiencies and productivities and drive revenue.
I know that they feel that way because they’re more than welcome to throw out ideas during our meetings and just say, hey, it would be great if we could do this if we could have that. A lot of times we talk to our Highspot support team, which is great, they’re awesome, and they say, yeah, we can do that. Highspot again, just shows its colors and it shines bright at everything that it can do to help support our business.
SS: I love that, Ray. Now another area, because you brought up the topic of partnership that has been crucial to your enablement strategy is training. Can you tell us about how you partner with your training team to optimize training programs using Highspot?
RE: Absolutely. Yeah. I do have maybe an ace up my sleeve on this one, just because I actually was part of the training team and, again, my years of experience in training, but the capabilities that Highspot has really came at the opportune time. We actually don’t have a formal learning management system here at ODP Business Solutions. We were making do with what we could and creating some ad hoc programs to meet our training needs. With the implementation of Highspot, it gave us pretty much everything that we needed within the platform to support our training teams.
When I first came in and started to manage the implementation and really started to drive the solution for our organization, learning more and more about the capabilities of training, I couldn’t wait to get back in touch with the training team to say, hey guys, we now have a tool that can do right out of the box 85 to 90% of what we were trying to do as a sales team. Let’s meet and let’s start showing you the features and capabilities and let’s start building out our training programs. We now have an onboarding training program, as well, as a really good strategy for our continuous education programs within Highspot.
We’re also taking advantage of some of the new features. We’re really, again, leveraging, and I’m going to tout our Highspot success team. They’re always willing to meet with us and make sure that we’re aware of features and functionality that they feel are going to benefit us. We meet with them every two weeks, rain or shine. They really take the time to understand, from a training perspective, what our training team is trying to do. They can really highlight the features, capabilities, and functionalities that align with those goals and those projects that we have for training. With all of that tied together, it’s just another aspect of Highspot that I can’t speak highly enough about.
We now have an individual on the training team who’s getting more and more familiar with Highspot training capabilities and functionality, so they’re working very hard to get everything into Highspot for onboarding because we do have onboarding for our field sales teams and we have a different onboarding program for our inside sales teams. He’s working to bring all that together. I partner with him. Not only do we meet with our Highspot success team every two weeks, but David and I meet at least four or five times a month because he wants to learn how I can use Highspot for courses, lessons, and certification programs. We really love the most recent feature that’s been released, which is the event sessions. That’s a game-changer for us. We love the ability now to create virtual meetings or in-person meetings right within the structure of course. That is just another great feature that Highspot has released.
SS: Beyond sales training, you’ve also engaged in some personal learning programs through Highspot University courses. How have professional development opportunities like these courses help you to continuously optimize your enablement strategy and your use of high spot?
RE: Well, for me, being the content management and the solution owner for Highspot, this is something new for me. I’ve never had these types of roles and responsibilities. I’ve always done training. That’s my bread and butter, so to speak. I had a lot to learn about sales enablement, about content management. The Highspot University is a great initial tool to really kind of get you in tune with Highspot and how to use Highspot for managing people for governing content or adding content. They’ve got some great courses out there and I know you guys are going to continue to build out the offerings that are in Highspot University.
Beyond that, I would also like to give a huge shout-out to the Highspot community. I mean, I go to the community page at least three times a week. I tried to target about an hour in the morning. I’ll focus on governance, one-day sales play the next day, different topics, and different categories each day to continue learning more about what is it, what does sales enablement do, and how can we make it better? What are some of the things that we should be aware of, should be looking at, and should be helping to drive in our organizations? That along with looking at the discussion forums in there and really understanding a lot of the questions that I have about Highspot and how to use it, a lot of other folks out there have those same questions.
Those discussion forums really helped to bring together a huge number of like-minded people that want to improve not only themselves, but Highspot and the environment for their organizations, but really help the leverage and knowledge that we each have little tidbits here and there. Everybody is very supportive of that platform. The community is another great way that helps me to continue to learn. I’ve seen myself as an instructor or a teacher for many years, but it really got me excited to be back on the other side of the fence to be a learner and to learn new things. I know it’s kind of an old saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but I can tell you, I’m an old dog and I’m learning some new tricks thanks to the Highspot community.
SS: I have to say, Ray, that quote alone may have made my whole day. Thank you so much for sharing that. To close, I have one last question for you. What advice do you have for other teams to optimize their enablement strategy with Highspot?
RE: I thought a lot about this question and, you know, I kind of doubted myself in trying to respond to this question to be perfectly honest, Shawnna. I don’t have a lot of experience. I don’t have a lot of experience or time behind this particular driver’s seat, but from what I have been learning, I think the best advice I can give is just to be very open and have very strong, open lines of communication. Not only between the individuals that are helping to manage Highspot or that are on your sales enablement team but really the two-way communication between your marketing teams, your product teams, your sales teams, training, and sales operations. Everybody needs to be involved in and has some level of involvement and kind of skin in the game when it comes to sales enablement.
As a sales enablement team, we’re not on this island just trying to throw up smoke signals and tell people what to do. You really have to take the time to meet with individuals, understand what they’re doing, their projects, their roadmap, and then how that roadmap and how do those projects tie into initiatives, campaigns, training programs, and even just the overall presenting or managing of the content and presenting that content to sales.
Ultimately, as sales enablement, we really want to drive profitability and the success of our sales teams and our organization, but in order to do that, you have to have a full understanding of your business, your business landscape, and the direction that the business is going in. Then be able to look a little bit farther than that on the overall landscape outside of your organization, what’s really working. How can we improve things?
The best advice I could give is communication, two-way open, honest, free communication. There’s an old saying in training that says there are never any dumb questions, only dumb answers. Don’t be afraid to ask those questions to learn and make sure that everybody feels comfortable sharing their ideas because you never know when that one idea is going to come out that’s really going to put you leaps and bounds ahead of the game.
SS: Ray, I have to say you nailed that advice. Thank you for sharing that with our audience. And thank you for joining us today.
RE: Well, thank you. It’s been my pleasure. I enjoyed speaking with you. I even get a little bit tongue-tied every time I start to think about Highspot and what it can do, and I’m so excited about what it’s going to bring for our organization and everyone else in the future.
SS: Fantastic. Thank you, Ray. To our audience, thanks for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can go beyond what good looks like with Highspot.
Research from Sales Enablement PRO found that teams with sales enablement tools are 8 times more likely to have highly engaged reps. So what role does enablement play in the modern revenue tech stack?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Frank Kenney, the director of industry solutions at Cleo. Thanks for joining, Frank! I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Frank Kenney: Thank you. My name is Frank Kenney. I look after industry solutions here at Cleo. I also do a lot of work in the sales enablement role and they’re intertwined. The best salespeople have a very close relationship with the customers and the business of the customers that they serve. If you’re going to sell someone something, you probably should have a good idea of how they make money and how your product is going to help them make money. It’s kind of a no-brainer shortcut to everything from access to the power to access to the purse. It’s just the best way to be. I play double duty.
I have been at Cleo for just six years. We’ll be headed to the seventh year starting in 2024, so just about six and a half years. I’ve been in the industry for the last 25, 30 years and I got my start at Gartner and was there for over a decade. When you’re working as an analyst or any type of academia or anything you tend to sit in an ivory tower and you give people advice on how to do things. It’s always great when you get the opportunity to go out and do things. I am really excited to be here and thanks for the opportunity to talk about Highspot.
SS: We’re excited to have you here as well, Frank. You gave us a little bit of background on your role, but as an owner of industry solutions across your organization, I’m sure you have a wide range of visibility into the overall tech stack. In your opinion, why is efficiency in the tech stack so important?
FK: One of the challenges in any sales or go-to-market organization is that the company wants to have a certain amount of consistency and predictability. The best companies can predict growth, can predict sales, can predict renewals, can predict all of those things that come directly from sales. As any organization or any go-to-market organization, you tend to put in a lot of processes to put up the guardrails so that you can have predictability. The tech stack really just supports those processes.
Now the danger is if you rely too much on the tech stack and you rely too much on the processes, then you lose the humanistic part of it. Kind of like what happened when music lost the analog world and music lost mistakes and we started getting very exact. It kind of just lost a lot of body. It lost a lot of soul. You never really want that to happen.
What’s interesting is it’s not just having great technology, it’s having great technology that can work together. When you do that, you allow your go-to-market organization, whether it’s your account executives, your guys on the front lines like SDRs, the guys that are in the middle, customer success, all of those guys It really allows them to have humanity and do things in a very personal and a very individualistic type of way and the technology kind of just sits there and helps them out with that. It’s not just having great technology, it’s not even having just a great technology stack. It’s having technology that can work together and be consistent in helping you achieve your outcomes.
SS: I love that. One of the outcomes that is really critical to a lot of organizations, especially right now, seems to be sales productivity. How does efficiency in the tech stack help you drive overall sales productivity?
FK: Time is the biggest enemy of any sales process. We live in a world where we have very realistic deadlines and generally, it’s the end of a quarter or the end of a cycle. It could be the end of the month. It could be the end of a quarter. It could be the end of the year. It could be everything in between. Those are all time-based variables. The most precious thing that a salesperson, for instance, would have is their time.
Again, a very efficient tech stack is going to find the opportunity to give that account executive as much of their time back in what they do so that that time can be used more effectively. That’s why productivity is so important because up until now we’ve thrown people at the problem of sales. Do you want to scale? Then just hire more salespeople. If you want to scale in a way that protects things like EBITDA or things like COGS if you want to scale in a very efficient way, then you’re going to bring in a support system for your sales operations to double your capacity, but not necessarily double your sales team. That’s really where the technology and productivity is really going to come from.
SS: I couldn’t agree more. Now, when building out your tech stack, what role does an enablement platform play in your overall strategy for solutions?
FK: One of the things to understand and a big mistake that a lot of companies tend to make is that enablement is a one-time thing. It really isn’t. Every sales enablement professional will find themselves constantly coaching, constantly enabling in terms of, as I said earlier, being able to bring your team new insights into what’s happening in an industry so that they can shift their focus. Well, that doesn’t scale well if you have one or two enablement guys. You’re going to look at technology or an enablement platform to help you with that.
I can have a conversation with five or six people a day or I can have 30 that consume a video with a short assessment at the end to make sure that they’ve picked up the points or a text box to make sure that they’re able to read it back to you or a video system where they can pitch something back to you to make sure that they have it right and then let a team of sales managers go in and take a look at that. That’s incredibly powerful. That to me, it’s not just the new person into a company, you’re going to fire hose them with a ton of material and you could spread it out.
Sometimes you have to do that, but the real gem in enablement is that continual enablement is continually helping people get better and fine-tune and course correct all the way until you land that deal. That’s really what a platform is going to do and a platform is going to allow you to do that at scale and allow you to be incredibly efficient with it.
SS: I love how you think about that holistically. What is the value from your perspective of having a unified enablement platform to help you bring your enablement strategy to life?
FK: Great question and the reason that I say that is one of the things from a sales enablement perspective that you never want to get into is you don’t want to get into this idea that you need X amount of people to succeed or X amount of people to fail, to know that you’re doing it, to know that you’re testing and all of those things. I want my sales guys to use every tool that they have possible. What that means is if I am creating a training module in Highspot, I want all of the materials that my team has reviewed to be available in the content part of Highspot.
If I’m just testing them on information that they’ll never, ever, ever use again, well, that’s not really helpful. What’s really helpful is giving them that material from a content perspective that they can use in a sales cycle or even better being able to take information from a sales cycle and rapidly update a training module because things change. It really speaks having an integrated unified platform really starts to speak to the agility that you need to have in any sales or go-to-market organization.
That includes the whole backend, being able to look at what folks are doing and run analysis, and being able to export that data to get insights or being able to integrate with other parts of an enablement stack to really understand the correlation between items that a rep is looking at training that a rep has done and how many times a phrase may be used on a call. That’s really the value of that integrated stack and that starts with an integrated enablement platform.
SS: I love that. To take a couple of steps back, before Highspot, what were some challenges that you were experiencing when it came to organizational operations and efficiency? How have you leveraged Highspot to help overcome these challenges?
FK: What’s interesting about Cleo’s Highspot story is that it really takes shape in this idea that we organically grew from OneDrive to SharePoint and we started to branch out to things like Google Drive and it just started to become a mess. When you start to add Slack, there are a hundred different ways that we are sharing information, like email and even text messaging and those types of things. Very quickly it was, hey Frank, you created a piece of content that was great and I think you did it two or three months ago. It was that slide with the three dots and whatever, but can you find that and send that over to this rep? They’re on a deal that they really needed.
Then what would happen would be a massive amount of updating and then a massive amount of changing templates and doing all the rest of that stuff. That’s the world that you grow out of when you’re doing content creation in PowerPoint and then you’re saving it to one drive and then you’re sharing it using SharePoint and then people are finding it and searching it. It’s just not efficient for version control and it’s also not efficient because it really promotes reps to save it to their desktop where I don’t have control of that content. Now, if a logo changes or styles change, then that doesn’t work.
Shawnna, I’ll give you a perfect example. Every year we have our revenue kickoff, which is what most companies do and they bring their sales team together. We did well last year, this is how we’re going to do well this year. You end up with so much good content only to kind of cringe when it’s May and you’re on a Zoom call with a potential customer or potential prospect, and you’re on the phone with that account executive and he pulls up a slide and it has all of your theme collateral from your sales kickoff. The sales theme kickoff was Indiana Jones, so you’re sitting here saying, oh my goodness, why is this in the Indiana Jones template and we’re talking to a trucking company? It’s that simple, but those moments absolutely count.
We lived in that world, and the best way for us to convince the business to make this type of investment is to say, aren’t you sick and tired of everyone asking you for slides, or everybody asking you, hey, can you update this? Or everyone asking you, hey, do you remember this white paper that was written and where can I find it? It was very easy to make an initial investment in Highspot. Once you’ve got everybody onto the platform and utilizing the platform well, it becomes very easy as a company grows to start to think about certification and assessments. It’s not, let me go find this other platform and maybe it’ll integrate, it’s exactly what I was saying, where you can reuse. That’s where it starts to just grow and it starts to become part of the culture.
That’s the Cleo Highspot story and that’s where we were before. Of course, we are conducting all of our training, whether it’s new products or new sales techniques or we’re going to be doing a bunch of new hire stuff. That’s really how you grow in your maturity with this type of platform.
SS: I definitely want to drill in and learn a little bit more about how you guys start to leverage training and coaching, but you did mention a really critical factor, which was the usage that you’ve been able to drive of Highspot within your organization. Over the last year, I think you’ve driven nearly 82% of recurring usage within Highspot. What are your best practices for driving the adoption of the platform throughout your organization?
FK: Interestingly enough, if I had to tell a new Highspot user, I would tell them to download the Slack plugin. The reason is, if you talk to enablement professionals that have any type of internal communications mechanism, like Slack or Teams or whatever the case is, that’s where all your requests are coming from. So two things. I jumped into Slack which is connected to Highspot and someone asked me for something. I can easily find it and I find it via Slack and then I just press a button and send it to them. Salespeople are hardwired, so sometimes it takes a lot to re-hardwire them. What I’ve found is after three or four times of doing that, they just say, you know, he’s not answering me as fast as I need him to answer. Let me just go and do a search through this thing.
Again, as a sales enablement professional, what I would say is you only have to work until they win their first deal using this platform and using content from this platform, because once they win that deal, then it becomes part of their process and their superstition. I couldn’t take Highspot away right now. They would be like oh my god, you know what you’re doing in my process, Frank, what are you doing? That’s what they would do. That’s the trick is to get them to believe that it’s critical to their success and successes, getting that ACV, getting that deal, successes, going to the winner’s circle, going to club successes, their face on slides at the end of a quarter or when you’re doing a quarter wrap up.
Every salesperson wants those things. It’s the accelerators on their salary. It’s really just nailing and multiplying their quota. You do that, you not only get that one sales guy, you get the three other sales guys that say oh yeah, we need to do what he’s doing. That’s how we got to that heavy amount of compliance. I think we’re actually driving even higher right now.
SS: Amazing benefits for the sales reps that are using the platform. What would you say has been the effect on the sales cycle since adopting Highspot?
FK: What’s interesting is we are a company that primarily works in the supply chain, and you can go to a Walmart or Target, or Dollar General, you can see the impact of pricing on the food that you buy or the things that you buy. Our business shifts, and sometimes people are buying quickly, and sometimes deal cycles spread out. What I can say is that in a business or with a metric like days to close or days to close won or your sales cycle, that metric is so inclusive of so many different influences. Having one stable piece of data that says this content has gone out this way, we are tracking this many pitches, we are tracking this much consumption. Having that stable data allows you to work on other things like do I need to change this part of the pitch? Do I need to do that?
One of the things that we’ve seen is, and I think this is important, Shawnna, it’s not about how long your sales cycle is or how short your sales cycle is, it’s about if I look across my team, is that consistent across my team? If it’s consistent across my team, I know that I have folks that are pretty much in lockstep, even though they’re doing some individual things, I have people that are lockstep, but that also means that if I can shave something down by five days, it’s going to impact the entire team. It really takes that unknown out of that equation, depending on how big the overall annual contract value is or life booking is or however you look at your sales. Depending on the complexity, you may have some cycles that are 100 days, you may have some cycles that are 300 days, and you may have some cycles that are 40. Being able to predict it is a key part of the business.
That’s what we’ve been able to achieve with Highspot. One of those things where I know that if I look at a sales cycle of 70 days, I’m going to be somewhere really close to that. That really just tells me I can impact change via Highspot, or I can impact change via some other type of coaching feedback, but I can do it consistently. I think that that’s a better way of thinking about the impact of highspot on the overall pipeline or overall sales close to closed won.
SS: I love the way that you guys think about that. Now, there’s been a couple of other areas of success within the platform that you have seen. You’ve seen an increase in responses from prospects through the pitching capabilities. How do you use Highspot to improve buyer engagement?
FK: Highspot was a game changer in this case for us because like any company, when you send out a proposal with your pricing and everything else like that, as a salesperson, you want feedback. What did you think, and is it too high? Or is it what you expected? Or should we go forward, or is this a deal-stopper? The first part starts with, did you get my email? If you can calm a sales organization down at that point, you can keep them from being in their own way.
I now require all of our pricing, implementation, and statements of work and those types of things be sent out via Highspot as a pitch because the account executive will get the feedback that they need, that validation, okay, they got it, they read it. Now, they can go sit back and just watch the metrics from the engagement tab in Highspot. They can just watch the interaction, and the cool part about just being able to watch that interaction, almost in real-time, is that it keeps them from being a nuisance. It keeps them from calling, what do you think? It gives people room to become more objective and to make better decisions. It stopped our salespeople from being pests at the end of the sales cycle and ruining a sales cycle, so absolutely recommended best practice.
Of course, again, when you see that you don’t have to reach out to someone every hour of every day or every day. When you see that they’re still interacting with the content and know that that’s being logged somewhere in Salesforce and being correlated, it allows your sales team to have time to work on another opportunity. You and I both know all the opportunities seem to come in the last month of the quarter, so there’s always plenty to do. It’s a time saver, it’s an anxiety saver. You no longer wonder if they are ghosting you or know if you are alive. It’s classic, she’s reading my text. Okay, so at least she’s reading them. I’m not blocked. It’s that type of comfort that just helps a salesperson get through the day and get to the day in an objective, clear, rational manner.
SS: I’m glad that it gives your reps that level of visibility into how buyers are engaging with them. Now, you talked about this a little bit earlier and I hope we have enough time for at least two more questions because I definitely want to ask you guys about Highspot’s Training and Coaching. Now you’ve started to use these capabilities to help improve the efficiency for sellers on how they consume training and how teams also create training. What are some of the ways you’ve leveraged Highspot to deliver efficient training?
FK: The efficiency on how I look at efficiency is how fast can I get a new rep up and running and contributing to the overall goal of the organization. Again, that’s what I’m here to do. I like to look at it as how fast can I help them make money, and that’s the way that I explain it. When a new rep comes in and does all the onboarding and you give them access to the platform, and you want them to go through some modules, and you do some stuff face to face, and you do some stuff over Zoom, but, they’re going through modules and assessments and they can go back to it, you bring people up to speed faster.
Even more importantly than getting people up to speed with processes and all of that minutiae, the science of it all, you really start to bring them into your culture. Highspot, for us, not only enforces the science of how we do things and how we love to do things at a higher level than other sales organizations, it enforces our culture and our culture of we want our sales guys to make money and make their lives better and make their families lives better. We will give you tools and techniques to be able to do that. So Highspot, besides the training and the coaching modules, is a place where they can learn the science of it. Especially newer reps or more junior reps that are coming through the ranks, when they see it and they understand the investment and the reference that it will become a part of their lives, it becomes a cultural thing. It becomes, wow, this is what Cleo is willing to do for me, and it’s that little difference is what our customers and our prospects end up seeing because it’s a sales guy that wants it more, it’s a sales guy that believes that it’s not just technology. It’s a partnership that you’re buying into.
That partnership is composed of people. Every salesperson and every employee that works for Cleo has entrusted Cleo with their well-being and their family’s well-being. Highspot training specifically is just another validation of an investment and a commitment that we make to our employees and our customers by extension. It really is a much bigger deal than just using it for testing to get people up to speed fast. It really is a reflection and a helper in buying into a culture.
SS: Fantastic. Frank, last question for you. To close, what is your advice on how to maximize the ROI of enablement through tech stack optimization?
FK: I would say, interestingly, out of the box is really helpful for you to get buy-in from your organization. I didn’t have to do anything to get buy-in from my organization, other than what my Highspot rep and my Highspot solutions architect recommended. That helped me get the buy-in from the organization, but really starting to get that return on investment was really when I started going in and making my own reports. I started going in and pulling out data about how things are being used and which things aren’t being used to be able to go back to a marketing team to say, hey, the reason why this particular webinar wasn’t well attended is that we didn’t do enough internal promotion to get people to come. Then, I can turn around and do that and find so much more engagement from a sales organization. Well, that gives you an ROI on all of your webinars or your in-person conferences and all of those types of things.
Being able to really keep salespeople from hurting themselves and asking questions that we probably should have answers to using the engagement and the pitching function is an absolute plus. Don’t look at your ROI by saying how much money Highspot saved me. Look at it from the perspective of how much money did I make or did I save in this particular marketing activity or this particular product launch activity or this particular COGS realignment? How much money did I save I was able to rally my entire sales organization, lickety split in a matter of hours, and get everybody talking about the same thing.
Recently, I just went into our pitch templates, which is the template that our users send out information. I went in and I just put a link to an upcoming webinar, and because our users are pitching so much, that link is going out in a way that it just would not have been seen by our marketing. It’s being seen by the people who need to see it, and when you start to look at the benefits, the ROI, and all the other metrics, that’s where you can measure and you see the best improvement. My recommendation would be, don’t just look at the platform. Look at all of the benefits that the peripheral functions in an organization benefit. That’s where you’re going to start to see your best ROI.
SS: I love that. Frank, thank you so much for joining us today.
FK: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
SS: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that productivity decreased by 2.7 percent in the first quarter of 2023, but hours worked increased by 3%. With productivity needing to be top of mind for many organizations trying to do more with less, how can sales enablement scale what good looks like to drive productivity?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Michal Sever, the senior director of product marketing & product education at Nayax. Thanks for joining Michal! I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Michal Sever: Hi. It’s amazing to be here. Thank you for having me. I’m actually working in this amazing high-tech industry for more than 17 years, practicing innovation at amazing companies. I used to work at Amdocs, Microsoft, Gentrack, and now at Nayax. Nayax is actually a FinTech company, we are specializing in payments addressing retails from all sizes, segments, and regions. We are present in more than 80 countries.
Now, post covid and with self-service on the rise, we are positioned in an amazing place to serve our customers best as we place cashless payment at the center of our gravity, enabling our customers, the merchants, the retailers, the operators to focus on their business, while without hardwired software, they can forget about the hardships of chip payments and just make sure that with our solutions they can increase the revenues and reduce their operational expenses.
At Nayax, I’m leading the product marketing and education team. I have an amazing team and we are at the core of business here. We’re actually the missing link between marketing, market, sales, and product, and we are keeping everything aligned, tackling challenges as they come along, since challenges are inevitable. What drives us, Nayax and I, and my team are learning. We are learning all the time. We have a learning ecosystem and dealing with challenging situations, we find that learning is one of the easiest ways to bridge these gaps. This is what drives me, and my team, and each day it’s a new day here at Nayax we’re learning a lot. That’s me, my role, the company I work at.
SS: Fantastic. Well, one of the things that I love about your background is you have a lot of experience in brand advocacy and storytelling. How does that background help influence your approach to product marketing and product education?
MS: I’m very a strong believer in storytelling. I believe that behind every narrative there are a gazillion stories, but it really depends on the person that you are telling the story to. Eventually, the basis of storytelling is understanding the narrative, and behind these narratives are emotions. Our ability as product marketers and product education leaders is to tell the narrative of our customers or let’s say our prospects or everyone that we want to deliver a story to understand their pains, the challenges of each person that is standing in front of us. This is our superpower. The storytelling, understanding the narrative, understanding the pain behind each act. Once we build the story around these narratives and pains, I think it’s a great capability for each product, marketeer, and product education leader.
SS: What does good product education look like to you? Maybe said another way, what are your best practices for creating effective product education programs?
MS: I think this completely relates to the storytelling aspect and the emotional narrative, again, and I’ll explain. What we do at Nayaz, we are constantly trying to learn about our customer’s journey. The journey doesn’t have to be confronting only us. The journey can start anywhere and at any time. Our customers have their journey that they’re dealing with their businesses with their operations and sometimes even with us. They have a very comprehensive day in their lives each day and in order for us to create the best practices and effective product education programs, we need to really know our customers and to understand their journeys, let’s say across the board.
As I said at the beginning, it’s a learning ecosystem. Each day we learn something new about our customers and about their journey. Once we realize how our customers are looking and what their journey is, only then when we know them, we can set our program into action. This is what we are constantly doing and we call this entire framework the engagement cycle. This is our best practice. We are making sure that we are engaging with our customers in every phase of this journey and in every phase, and it doesn’t matter if it is at the beginning of the cycle before he becomes our customer, and he is still in the marketing or pre-sale phase, or if he’s moving on to the order to activation process after he said, I do, and he decided, let’s say, to get married to us, or if it’s afterward when he wants to upscale or to get more knowledgeable and maybe even to upsell or, or to cross-sell.
In every phase of this engagement circle, we need to understand his problem, his pains, and his emotions in order to address him with the right messaging, the right story, and the right content, which is very segmented. From pre-sale through activation to growth, we always need to make sure that our customers are happy. I think this is like the baseline or the root of best practice in our domain from the bottom up and top down. Keeping a marketing umbrella also gives us air coverage to remain top of mind of our customers and prospects, and eventually maintaining transparency and knowledge, all the time, knowledge about our customers and maintaining the knowledge within the customer’s space is about us. It’s like a road from us to them and from them to us in order to maintain transparency, knowledge, and understanding of each other. I think this is the basis of effective product education programs.
SS: I love that. I think that’s fantastic. Help me tie that back to what we were talking about in the introduction around sales productivity. How can effective product marketing and education drive sales productivity?
MS: The basis of sales productivity that is being affected by our activities, the PMMs activities, first, it really depends on the good relationship between the sales and the marketing teams. Sales and marketing have to go together, especially to make the PMM work. It has to go hand in hand. We need to dance well together in order to be effective and productive. One of the main focus areas for marketing and product marketing and specifically is to create successful and segmented sales enablement kits. By enabling sales in the right manner and with the right content, sales can be more productive, save time, and successfully drive closed-won opportunities. I’m going back to storytelling and emotion and connections. Product marketing managers are in charge of creating the sales kits that will be driven by emotions and driven by relevance in terms of the segment vertical and even the specific timeframe within the touching point.
In order to build a productive sales kit that will affect productivity within sales, all the collaterals, the presentation, the product guides, and other materials have to equip sales in a segmented way. They need to be effectively communicated to the sales from within the PMM team. These materials eventually can empower the sales representatives to deliver constant and persuasive messages during their interactions with the prospects.
I’ll give two examples. The first example in these, let’s say collaterals, that needs to be built is first is creating a relevant value proposition. One of the main focuses within the sales enablement kit is to communicate a unique value proposition and benefits of the specific product that the sales will want to take to its prospects. The sales teams need to articulate the value position to potential customers because when a customer understands how a product can solve their problem or fulfill their needs, they’re more likely to make a purchase, which means that the sales process or the cycle will be more productive.
Another example is, of course, the messaging. Product marketing can ensure that the sales team has targeted and compelling messages that will resonate with specific customer segments because each message relates to another customer. There aren’t two customers or two personas within customers that will agree to the same approach or the same tone of voice. The message can be created in many ways. Tailored messages can enable the sales representative, again, to connect with the customers in a more deep emotional manner or level in order to drive more productivity to their activities. Of course, there is the outbound perspective as well, which means that effective product marketing can help build a strong product or a brand reputation, establishing the top of mind and trust and credibility within the customer’s domains and of course everything that has to do with lead generation throughout the entire customer journey.
I think to sum it up eventually if product marketing and the sales community are working well together and dancing well together, as I said before, there are four main aspects that can be determined as productive and also can be measured because it’s really important to measure success all the time. First, I think by working together, we can give time back to sales that they can either use to approach more prospects or they can just sip a coffee at the beach, whatever they want to do more. No, I’m just joking. Second, everything has to do with a better customer experience. If a customer is happy and satisfied and we are approaching him with relevant messaging and the relevant tone of voice, he might purchase more. He might cross-purchase, et cetera. Third, pipeline creation. If we are delivering the right messaging and the right value proposition in the right channels, we might enlarge the pipeline. Last, we bring a higher, faster win rate, messaging, value proposition, and accurate sales kits. I think all of them, while working with sales, can definitely drive higher productivity for both departments.
SS: Now, prior to implementing Highspot, what challenges were your reps facing as it relates to sales productivity, and how have you been able to solve those challenges since implementing Highspot?
MS: Nayax has massively grown in the last couple of years. We also experienced a very successful IPO and our sales community grew a lot. We became bigger than we used to be, and it became a little bit hard to manage from afar. Our headquarters is in Israel, and it was really difficult to maintain a single tone of voice for everyone. That was a really huge challenge in order to maintain consistent selling. Now that we serve more than 80 countries, just think about the consequences of sales kit creation and the need to create so many different messaging for different personas in different verticals, segments, and countries and, of course, languages, but still keep one unique value proposition and similar brand reputation.
It became messy and the need to bridge between what headquarters wanted to say about the brand and its product and how it was translated to the field became challenging. We had to find some kind of a solution, not only for maintaining one tone of voice but also to have like a single source of truth in which all the content resides, like a content repository that is all the time updated and true to what we are selling. What happened is we saw a lot of people from the sales community just using content from many years ago and not accurate content. We are working in a very rapid environment, everything here is microservices, the ICD and we are all the time continuing to invest and develop, and promote.
We saw that people are not utilizing the most accurate and relevant and latest content, and therefore not maintaining even the transparency and the knowledge that is required for customers. It was a big problem, so we were actually searching for a platform that will solve all of these situations, a platform that will maintain a single source of truth for everybody that will communicate in one voice and eventually, most importantly, solve the content chaos that we had. I know that you guys call it content chaos at a Highspot, so we search for it, and then we find a Highspot. I think the rest is history because the problem was solved almost completely.
One last thing we also wanted to search for a platform that is completely data-driven. It was really important for us now that we have such a large sales community, to make sure that all the sales are working in the right direction. It’s not a matter of trust, it’s a matter of aligning and having productive sales cycles. We search for a system that first will be completely connected to our CRM system, which is of course Salesforce, and that we’ll be able to connect between the marketing collaterals or the product marketing collaterals to the opportunities or leads themselves. We also wanted to save time for our representative. We didn’t want them to search for the right content while they’re in a sale opportunity while they’re on a call, we wanted them to save time and to find the collaterals they need swiftly and without having the headache of messing around.
SS: Well, I’m glad that Highspot could help. I’d also love to understand, we’ve been on this topic of sales productivity, what is an example of an initiative or program that you’ve implemented to drive sales productivity, and how have you leveraged Highspot to support this?
MS: By the way we call Highspot “Nayax Win”, we changed the name in order to fit our community because we call our sales community winners, so we called Highspot ‘Nayax Win’. Which everybody loves. If I’m confusing and saying win instead of Highspot, excuse me, but it’s burned to my head already.
Relating to your question, we love the fact that Highspot is embedded into Salesforce you click on one button and then it opens up and all SDRs and the sales community can see the marketing collaterals that are relevant to a specific opportunity. The fact that it’s just in front of them with the collateral that they need to use within a specific call or within a specific opportunity is really helpful, but it’s not enough. One of the main features that we love about Highspot is the ability to pitch from within the system. We have created many pitching templates according to specific customers, specific verticals and segments, and of course, relating to specific products. The fact that you can be in Salesforce, working on a specific lead, for example, for our product, and then seeing just in front of you the relevant FAQs, frequently asked questions, or objection handling, and then the relevant one page that can close the deal.
Once you finish the conversation with the lead, you tell him I will send an email with all the relevant material, and you just click the pitch button, and then it opens up a screen where you can either record yourself, or you can just send the collateral through to your customers. That’s amazing. Eventually, the customer receives a very nice landing page in which they can see the collaterals, and the summary of the conversation, and I think for both ways, for sales representatives and also the customers, it creates a feeling as if they’re all working on the same page.
For us, the ability to connect the CRM to our Highspot or Nayaz win to ease the journey for our customers on one hand and the work of our SDRs was amazing. We see that it really drives sales productivity from the timesaving perspective, but it’s not enough. What we are reaching to see, and I suppose we can talk about it afterward in more detail, but we want to see the correlation between Highspot usage and the closed won. I’m sure that there is a high correlation between using the right messaging and the right collaterals and right messaging and it eventually leads to fewer touching points.
For us, let’s say, a successful program or to show complete productivity will be the ability to show higher numbers in the closed wons that our collaterals that are pushed into Nayax Win, or Highspot, as opposed to those who didn’t. We can see it all because Highspot is completely data-driven, so we can see the names of the reps who used it and who didn’t. Therefore we can definitely see who is driving productivity utilizing Win, and we see the difference, which is amazing. We are only three months into the process and we already see the difference between a closed won of reps that are using Highspot and those who are not.
SS: I love that. That is fantastic. Now, you also recently hosted your company sales kickoff event a few months ago. You mentioned that your team exceeded your KPIs for engagement from the sales team. I’d love to learn a little bit more about that. I know some of us are heading into kickoff season halfway through the year, what were some of your best practices for delivering an engaging event that really motivated your sellers?
MS: We had an amazing SKO. Actually, at Nayax we do not call it SKO, we call it Connect because our selling model is indirect and direct. It means that we are selling a lot through distributors and partners, so we call it connect because we connect all the groups together. We had a very successful SKO in January after three years that we haven’t met each other face to face. It was really emotional and happy. It was really amazing to meet again after so many years, but when we brought everybody together, we had a lot of content to deliver.
I think the two most engaging sessions, one of them, by the way, was driven by a Highspot, but one of the two most engaging sessions that we had was inspiring. The first one was an expo. We created an exposition of everything that we sell. As I said about Nayax, we are focusing on payment as our center of gravity, but the payment is actually part of a complete solution that is based on hardware and software. What we have first is our integrated point of sale with software that is embedded within the point of sale. Then we have the management suite behind it that can manage all the operations with our services, and of course, all our loyalty and engagement programs for increased revenue and recurring customers.
What we’ve done at SKO, is we brought a lot of our devices that are connected to the retail devices themselves, the unattended machines, the retail machines, and we asked our sales to play with them and to see how it works as if they were consumers, the operators themselves that are having the consumers use their machines. I think they learned a lot about new features and new functions, how to use them, which problems occur, and if they occur, and we had the product managers decide on each solution and product explaining to the sales community once they’re practicing and utilizing the machines as if they are our operators or the consumers of the operators so they can touch it themselves and feel it themselves. It was a true engagement and they loved it.
The second one was actually a role play in which we chose real-life examples of situations in which our sales representative needed to sell something to operators and explain the valuable position and the benefits behind our solutions. We created 10 different situations, which were very complicated, and we had a panel of judges, which was our two CEOs, and our entire c-suite. We asked the sales representative to show how they are planning to manage the sale. How many touching points, which content do they want to deliver in each touching point, and how are they planning to manage it? In the sales plays themselves, what we tested was not what they sell or how they sell the specific product, but also how they are selling in terms of sales soft skills, which was a combination of training and coaching.
I think the combination of coaching on top of the training on the solutions themselves was very engaging and successful because they learned a lot with regard to not only the capabilities of the products but also their capabilities as salespeople and sales representatives on how to leverage their soft skills to better places. These two sessions were incredibly successful, but the entire SKO was amazing and it was so much fun. I can’t wait for the next one. Seriously.
SS: I love that. Now you also have a 92% active learner rate in your training and coaching programs in Highspot. How have you leveraged Highspot’s training and coaching capabilities to really develop engaging product education per programs, and how has this motivated productivity?
MS: I must say it wasn’t easy and I feel as if we only started, but the entire team was really engaged. It’s the sales team and the product team, the product marketing team, and the marketing team. We had a hackathon to build all the materials and we really built it all in order to make sure that we are not neglecting any segment, any vertical, any line of business, any geographies. It’s still a work in progress. I mean, it’s not finalized at all, and we still have a long way to go, but there are a few things that we did that were really important in order to achieve such a high score in a lower period of time.
I think the first one is to have a sales enablement champion that will drive the entire development and engagement and will be like the missing link between sales and product marketing, sales, and headquarters. I think this is definitely something that raised the bow for us. Once we had our sales enablement champ listening to sales pitches and A/B testing scripts and reviewing everything that we’ve done, it really leveraged our training and coaching capabilities. This person from my team really bridged the gap, and once she spoke with the sales teams, she came back to us, to the marketing team on what to fix and what to do better, and this is how we better ourselves. I think it was really important.
In order to motivate usage and engagement, everybody used the programs and system we needed to package it alongside sales enablement sessions. We have a team that we are managing as if it was a WhatsApp team within Microsoft Teams. We are constantly sharing information with it. I think eventually, we are only at the beginning, we still have a long way to go in order for me to feel that we are completely bringing in the productivity from the system, but we are in the beginning, we are already saving time for reps. Let’s say the end game will be to show the complete correlation between closed won and the usage of the collaterals, and then we can definitely speak about complete productivity. We still have a long way to go, despite the high score that you gave us.
SS: Yeah. I love to hear that though. Well, last question for you. What are some key business results that you have been able to achieve since implementing Highspot, especially as it relates to sales productivity?
MS: Each month we see an increase in the usage of salespeople within the system, and we see a correlation between the usage and the revenue from closed won. The first month that we started utilizing the system, which was March, we were standing on zero engagement. Now, in the sales community, we have about 100 users. We already have 35% of engagement. From this 35% of engagement of active users that are actively using pitches and our sales plays and are visiting the various spots on a daily basis, we see an increase. I don’t want to state a number because it’s constantly changing, but we have an increase in there, let’s say closed-won capabilities.
I will be happy to share the numbers, but only in a few weeks because we are still sharpening our analytics there. As I said before, it’s already beginning and we did establish a single source of truth, which is 100% success. We do not see people using any materials from their desktops anymore, which means that this KPI was 100% achieved. In terms of a single source of truth achieved in terms of one tone of voice. This was also, in my opinion, let’s say 90% or 95% achieved.
We see that everybody is using the messaging that we want them to use. We see a clear path in the change and how people are speaking about Nayax in the same messaging, as I said at the beginning, the story that we wanted them to speak about and to tell, we see it and we hear it across the globe from the United States, from Europe, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, everybody is utilizing the same tone of voice, which is amazing.
We still have a long way to go. There is a saying, by the way, which I love. I suddenly remembered from Robin Shama that he said that change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end. I think eventually the adoption of Nayax win or Highspot, it’s all about behavioral change for the salespeople, and from that perspective, from that KPI of a behavioral change, I think we have at least 85% completion because we see the usage and we see people are adopting it.
It’s hard to adopt a different way to utilize content and to consume content, and a different way to pitch after 15 or 17 years that you have been pitching in the same way suddenly to have somebody come in and say, no, do this, do that. It’s hard, but we are on the way and we want to influence the increase in closed won with the system. I believe we will get there. I think the end game for us will be to see a complete correlation between Highspot usage and closed won. In order to do that, we’ll keep pushing and it’s not easy, but eventually, it’ll be gorgeous, so we have patience.
SS: I love that. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us today. I appreciate the time.
MS: For sure. It was lovely being here and thank you for having me.
SS: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
Research from Sales Enablement PRO found that practitioners who leverage a sales enablement platform for their sales teams report win rates that are 7 percentage points higher than those who do not. So, how can teams leverage Highspot to go beyond what good looks like?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. In the quest to drive sales productivity for your business, you’ve likely asked yourself: What does good look like? This month on the podcast, we’re helping you answer this question by exploring best practices on how you can deliver strategic enablement with Highspot. Here to discuss this topic is Peter Zink, the senior director of revenue enablement at Sprout Social. Thanks for joining Peter! I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Peter Zink: Hi Shawnna. It’s great to be here and tell a little bit about our story around Sprout Social. As you mentioned, I head up revenue enablement here at Sprout Social. I’ve been doing it for almost three years over here. I think like many people, I got into enablement probably a little bit by accident. I started off as a sales rep following a career as an intelligence officer in the army and I just had a really big passion for wanting to help others.
I was in a sales role and I started at a small insurance company where we had done a couple of acquisitions and they needed to build an onboarding program. That was my foray into enablement and that was almost nine years ago. I did that for a little while, and then I decided that I wanted to help other companies with that, and I joined a company called Sirius Decisions where I was a consultant helping other organizations with their sales enablement programs.
Sirius was acquired by Forrester and at that point I decided to move back into the practitioner space I have found myself here at Sprout Social and we’re having a really fun time over here and enjoying what we’re doing.
SS: I love that, and thank you so much for joining us. As you mentioned, in your background, you’ve helped hundreds of companies from Fortune 100s to high-growth startups, and you’ve helped them design and deploy sales enablement programs. I’d love to get your perspective on what does a good sales enablement strategy look like?
PZ: First of all, it was just a really great experience to be able to do that. I got to see over a period of time how enablement evolved and how a lot of different companies were sort of shaping this space. What really struck me was that there are just universal challenges out there that no matter what your scale, a lot of enablement organizations struggle with. When we think about driving change management within our own organization, distilling priorities, and scaling enablement effectively, that’s something that I saw everything from a startup to a Fortune 10 organization that we would work with.
When I think about what shapes a great enablement strategy, I think the most important thing is that you really need to come in and define and scope the role properly with your go-to-market leadership. I find that many people throw around the term enablement and it means a lot of different things to different people, so I think the most critical thing with your strategy is to come in and define both the scope of your department in terms of what you will do and what you cannot do. I’ve always tried to align resources around some large strategic priority in the business. I think it’s really critical for enablement to always be seen as your strategy is activating over whatever is most critical for the business.
For example, in terms of scope, when I first came in, enablement was really focused on training exclusively. We had our new hire, we had regular ongoing training, we had training for our managers, and I just recognized that there were a few opportunities out there. For example, we had a new brand story that we were rolling out at the time called See Social Differently, and there was an ask from the floor to anchor our company around that consistent story in sales calls and they needed slideware and storytelling to kind of accomplish that.
When I thought about our own strategy, I realized that this was a huge priority for the business and that we had to own the delivery and the co-development of those assets around the brand stories of the sales team. That’s where we got into a whole stand to deliver certification with our organization. We ended up becoming a very collaborative partner around the development of those sales collateral assets, and it was critical for us to align with a big initiative like that. At the same time, we also defined what we didn’t do when we came in. In our particular case, I’ve seen it before, where enablement-owned sales tools, for example, are covered in our revenue operations function today. We established some clear lines too in terms of where it was most meaningful for enablement to be effective.
In the end, I think a good strategy really comes from defining and scoping what to do, what you do, and what you don’t, aligning whatever your support is on the most important priorities of the business, and don’t be afraid to leverage those opportunities to partner on the most critical initiatives that are gonna impact your revenue team to get there.
SS: I couldn’t agree more. Recently the enablement team at Sprout Social received the sales program of the year award from Forrester, which again, incredible achievement Peter, to you and your entire team. Can you tell us about how the enablement strategy at Sprout Social was formed and what makes it so effective?
PZ: Yeah, absolutely. In this particular case, the sales program in the year kind of drilled down on a specific aspect of our team big shout out to Morgan Momcilovich, who runs this team, but she was really the program of the year winner that set up what we call our field coach program here at Sprout Social. That program, I’ll get into here in a little bit more, I think in a bit, but I’ll just say that that was an evolution of our overall enablement strategy.
When I talked about strategy a minute ago, I would say here that the field coach program is something that is a good example of a program that emerged based on aligning to those most important priorities. We had our broad-based enablement around our product and our campaigns. We had that down really down pat, and we recognized that we needed a role that was closer to the field that serves as that sort of last line of enablement with reps and managers in their organization. We’ve had a lot of success with this program because we’ve hired a lot of people with sales and success experience to then step into this role where they are very much in the day-to-day support of our sellers and our success roles here at Sprout.
I think that’s been again, just identifying a way that we can sort of scale our programs and bring it down to the field and make it relevant is what’s made it so successful and why we were recognized through the program of the year as well. Another cool fact actually, is that the program has been valued so much that we actually even had some quota-bearing headcount transferred to us in order to be able to expand that program effectively.
SS: That is very cool. I want to ask a little bit more about the program that you guys were recognized for with that award. As you mentioned, it is all about the impact of the field coaching program, and you also have a core enablement team. Can you share how you created a unified approach to enablement spanning across these programs?
PZ: Absolutely. A little context today, our centralized enablement team consists of eight people, including myself. The way we structured it basically is, I look at it in two ways. Think of our organization as sort of two structures. I’ve got something called a center of excellence model, so that’s what you just mentioned, Shawnna, about delivering broad-based enablement to the entire organization at once. Think of that as our core plays, such as our new hire program, the rollout of a deck that’s associated with a particular campaign or skill broad-based e-learning that anyone can take, even communications to the field so we try to consolidate what’s hitting the entire sales and success organization at once in a thoughtful way.
That’s very much like our center of excellence model, and that’s really when I talk about the unified approach to enablement and spanning things across, you’ve gotta start with that. You’ve gotta have that model in place that is applied to the broad audience and the entire company to kind of try to build your base of support.
Then the second leg of that stool, so to speak, is what is that go-to-market enablement team, what we’re just talking about with those field coaches. With the go-to-market enablement team, it’s all about aligning key leaders in our go-to-market organization to some tactical enablement support. The responsibility of these roles is to take a lot of the great work the Center of Excellence group does and make it something that they practice and coach on, on a small team basis, really bringing it to life as it’s relevant to each role.
You think about that brand story earlier. That feels different if you’re having a new business conversation versus a check-in for an executive business review with an existing client. There’s a lot that they can do to really bring the material to life and they’re also working on a lot of the fundamental skills that those roles need to be successful. We keep a real, even division and clear responsibilities between these two teams. They even align to different parts of the business a little bit more closely. If you think about the COE, that’s somebody who’s a lot closer to our product org, our marketing organization, and the field coaches and the go-to-market enablement side, they’re really attuned to what’s going on across the sales and success leadership within our org.
SS: I love that you guys have that unified approach. Now, to shift gears just a little bit, I’d love to understand what things look like before, and Peter, I know one of your strengths is around really taking a strategic approach to enablement, and I know that you like to examine the business issues and really kind of come up with an actionable enablement plan to address those issues. With that in mind, what were some of the challenges facing your business prior to Highspot, and how have you overcome them since implementing the platform?
PZ: Absolutely. Just a step back, like when you talk about strategy and what I sort of assess when I come into an organization, and probably things that you’ve heard before, Shawnna, but I assess what is our talent development strategy. That’s a lot of the training that we’ve just talked about. Another aspect that I look at is our assets, so the collateral, the content, not even just the customer-facing content, but the tools or the job aids that our sales and success people can use in their roles. That’s another big area of assessment.
I bring all that up because it kind of talks about the pre-Highspot era. When I came in the training was really quite solid and we had a lot of great stuff to build on there. The asset side was an opportunity for us to get a lot more involved. From what I saw, there were a lot of inconsistent materials that were being shared with the sales organization. We had multiple instances or places where people were going to get what they needed, and usually, that consisted of a shared drive that a particular manager or leader might have been able to consolidate over time.
As I mentioned with the center of excellence earlier, we really stood up a good partnership with marketing on just getting a handle on what decks and sales collateral should be associated with what was rolling out. That was a problem right away that I felt that we could get our hands around and do, and do a better job on. We had a couple of platforms where the content was residing, even though at the time we did have a sales content management tool that was in place.
What I noticed with the tool was that no one was clearly owning it at the time, so we saw it as an enablement tool that we should own, so we took ownership of it, we cleaned up the environment, we streamlined a lot of things within that tool itself, but it was something that had been around for a while. It was something where reps were familiar with existing ways of doing things, and I saw that we had an opportunity to potentially pick a platform where it was frankly a better experience for our reps where we could get better analytics and insights and where we could just have the opportunity to really reset our entire content environment as a company as well, and rethink it. That’s not always easy to do when you have these existing tools in place, so that was the start and kind of where we were with Highspot, so just a few challenges there.
SS: Just a few, but you guys have been making some amazing strides. Tell us a little bit more. It sounds like you guys made a switch from a previous enablement platform. Why did you decide to go with Highspot? I know at a high level you identified a few areas, but I’d love to hear it in your own words.
PZ: It’s interesting. I identified a few high-level issues right off the bat, like when I said, gosh, I would love to find a platform that’s got better analytics, for example, around content. Could we get to a world where, besides knowing what is the most used content, I can actually start to associate content with opportunities and revenue? Highspot appeared to give us a path to get there as an organization with some of the Salesforce integrations and other work that we’re doing, so that was very appealing to me.
I’ve known Highspot for a while, obviously, from being at Serious Decisions and Forrester, and there’s a tagline that the marketing team has at Highspot or did at one point, and that was Reps Love Highspot. I had this as part of our evaluation, but it’s something that’s become very clear as we picked up the tool, the user experience, and the ease with that reps are able to find content and even just quickly get what they need is critical and isn’t something you really know for sure until you actually load your own instance and put your content in there and see how the environment is working with the team.
I think what’s interesting with Highspot is, I don’t know if you know this, Shawnna, on how we launched it, but we launched it at the start of the year and the way we did it was we had our revenue kickoff, which was virtual this year. You had to use Highspot to go to kickoff. I mean, you couldn’t attend sessions, you couldn’t go to breakouts, and you couldn’t even get into the Zoom room unless you clicked around and actually used the content in Highspot. That was literally our onboarding experience for our reps into Highspot, and a big testament to Highspot is, yeah, we had some training and stuff you could take on Highspot, but most of our team has elected not to do that because it’s so intuitive that they’re able to get what they need right off the bat.
That’s just been a big win. From realizing that when things like search work correctly, when the platform is fast and snappy when it’s very intuitive for people to find things, it just naturally leads to good results. We see that in our calls and in our conversational intelligence on just the level of content that people are using, what’s being shared, and the level of engagement. Even people leave reviews on content. There are just a lot of signs that the user experience of the tool has become a key reason why it’s been a big win for us to have a platform like Highspot versus what we had before.
SS: I love that. On that note on usage, you have at Sprout Social an 85% recurring usage rate, which is again, just a testament in itself to how well you have implemented Highspot within Sprout Social. What role would you say Highspot plays in your enablement strategy?
PZ: I do think the percentage is a little higher if we took out marketing and a few executives as licenses there, so I know it’s good, but I bet I think it’s even better, to be honest. We are really proud of our rate and people are going back to it all the time. When you talk about Highspot’s role in our enablement strategy, I see it as more than a content management platform. It is true if I try to hit this holy grail of the one place sales can go and success can go to find what they need, it’s Highspot. Whenever we think about launching something, whenever we think about where we want to point people to learn, we think about where people want to find information that’s relevant to their jobs to be successful. Highspot is the tool that we really want to use to drive people there.
It’s funny, with our last tool, we really just focused on putting buyer-facing slides in there, but we’ve done all of our event management. If we have a big training event management where you need to sign up for a flight or go book a hotel or something like that, we’re using Highspot for that. We’ve developed a whole bunch of stuff around our sales process that I’m sure we can talk about at some point that Highspot helps us push and deliver really relevant content in there. It’s key to everything we do.
Essentially, when we come up with an enable and play or a launch or anything, the end vehicle that we’re going to use is Highspot to deliver that. That’s because it’s got that superior search experience. It’s easy to use. From what I’ve seen, it’s something that our reps feel like they could go in there and engage with and it’s not a painful experience.
SS: Let’s avoid pain at all costs.
PZ: Yeah, no pain at all.
SS: Now, Peter, I love how you really jumped into Highspot and really immersed yourself in a lot of the core features. One of the ones that you have adopted within your organization is Sales Plays. In fact, you guys are in our top quartile there at 99% sales play adoption. You’ve lightly touched on a few examples, but can you tell us more about how you leverage sales plays and also the role that they play?
PZ: I’ll give a little context for the audience, which I think it’s mostly Highspot customers, but just kind of explain why the sales play so critical in the vehicle that we choose to use. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Highspot, the spot is like the container where you put your content. You put a theme around that. There are different themes of these spots and you can put filters. It’s great. You can add whatever filters you need on that particular spot to help drill down and help people find the content that they need.
That is all great, but the cool thing about the sales plays is the sales plays are these pages that allow you to be very prescriptive with the sales team or any role in what they’re supposed to do. We use a play for a variety of things, but the most obvious is anytime that there’s a rollout of a new product feature or major campaign assets that we want the sales and success of or to leverage in conversations, we develop these plays.
The plays provide guidance around all sorts of things. They provide the ability for us to really give some nice talk tracks and messaging that people can use in conversations, they give us the ability to put and house and surface the content that’s most relevant for that sales motion right on one page. A good example is just today actually, we just launched a campaign where our CMO is talking about the impact that social has on our CMOs. We’re able to, on the backend, pull together all kinds of great assets associated with that campaign that our sales and success team can then go into conversation with. They get some talk tracks and guidance around what they’re supposed to do, but we’ve got things segmented in those plays by role to give a lot of guidance around that as well. They have the materials right there where they can share those with any customers or prospects that they’re engaging with.
Basically, the play systematizes and makes it very clear what a rep or a CSM is supposed to do in a particular situation. It provides the context behind all of the great content that’s already housed in Highspot if that makes a lot of sense. We use them all the time. It doesn’t have to just be a marketing campaign either. I am very proud of the team and building what I call playbooks. I feel like the word playbook is another one that’s been thrown around for years. We have built some really cool things with sales plays where no matter where you are in the sales process, no matter what you’re doing with a customer, these plays provide a lot of really great guidance and resources on how to exactly do your job.
In fact, we’ve had people change roles at Sprout and use these playbooks to onboard onto their new roles, which is really cool. We have used sales plays to take our sales methodology content and distill it down and provide some really focused guidance on what they’re supposed to be doing with the sales methodology at any one time. It’s been a big hit, and like you said, Shawnna, we’re at a 99% play adoption rate. I don’t know what it would take to get to a hundred, but I’m very happy with that number.
SS: It is a fantastic number. Now, you talked earlier too about how you guys have taken these plays and created even playbook spots, and I know that your enablement team has partnered and aligned really closely with your marketing team. Can you tell us more about this partnership and the importance of alignment with marketing?
PZ: Sure, I’ll kind of talk about the marrying of the playbooks and the marketing materials like you just kind of mentioned there. I think this is probably the best way to tackle that question. As I mentioned, we built these playbook spots and what that essentially means for those of you listening is I’m sure your company at some point has produced a card or gone through and mapped your entire sales process, and if not, I’m sure that’s something you want to do. Once you have that mapped and you can put that on a card, that’s not enough information or enough guidance for how people can be successful in their role.
What we did in Highspot is we built this really cool experience where we mapped out the sales process in Highspot and you can click into this experience and get a lot of great details like example calls, videos from their peers, materials, and collateral that should be used during the particular play. That’s where the marrying of the sales process and marketing come together.
In the example that I just provided earlier, we’ve released this new campaign about the impact that Social can have on our CMOs and all the great content associated with it. What we have done with that is in addition to having the play about that, we’ve then segmented that content out. We bring that marketing content into our actual sales process to suggest where you can use it. That’s right within Highspot. If we’re in discovery today, even though this campaign launched just yesterday already, somebody’s going to see when they go in there and start looking at discovery and asking themselves, what is it that I should be using with a CMO? The great content that marketing produces is something that’s available to them right within that sales motion. Highspot has allowed us through these playbook spots and to really align our marketing collateral to the sales and success motions that are necessary to be successful.
SS: Very cool. Now, as you know, Highspot has a really strong partner ecosystem and I had actually heard that one of the ways in which you guys leveraged playbooks was around your rollout this past spring of the Challenger Methodology to your entire sales team. I would love to hear more about how you integrated with Challenger and the impact that that’s had on your sales team.
PZ: It was funny, it was not a driving reason why we selected the Challenger Sales Methodology, but it has been so great to work with the third-party integration that’s associated with Highspot. It’s been a big win for our organization. Basically, our organization decided to invest in the Challenger Methodology, and Shawnna, I think we were able to do it in less than 24 hours. We were able to work with the Highspot team to basically activate a whole set of challenger content that was directly piped into the Highspot environment. When I say that, I mean e-learning, a lot of collateral that’s associated with Challenger training aids, everything that you could think of that you need to activate a challenger, we were able to turn on immediately within Highspot.
We took that, and of course, it’s a lot of content, it always is, but we took the content that came on with Challengers. One thing I’ll say is it is super easy. We literally just flipped in and I don’t have to tell people to go to a different environment. I don’t have to tell people that, hey, log into the Challenger website and follow your path there and we’ll email you this content or put it on a Google Drive. It was right there in Highspot.
That goes back to the mission of trying to centralize as many resources in one spot with Highspot. We went in there and we were able to use the sales plays we just talked about to tailor that content and deliver some prescriptive guidance to our sales teams on how to best use the Challenger methodology. Obviously, anytime you bring on a new methodology, there’s very much a foundational set of training that you have to do. We used the sales play feature within Highspot to really call out what people needed to do from a foundational standpoint to be successful with Challenger, and a lot of that was e-learning and some reading that they had to do before we did our live training.
We’ve got some manager resources that we’ve been able to house who are playing there as well. The marketplace integration combined with the ability to give some prescriptive guidance on the challenger training through plays has been really critical for helping focus the attention of our team and rolling out this methodology. It’s frankly key for us and it’s something that I’ve really enjoyed working with.
SS: Amazing. Now, what are some of the key business results that your enablement team has been able to achieve since implementing Highspot?
PZ: I think here in enablement we’ve got to look at a lot of leading indicators. I think before we start to see the business impact and results that kind of comes down. What I can say today for sure, versus what we had before is we are seeing much more consistent behavior from our sales, DEV, and success organization in terms of the content and assets that they’re supposed to be using in customer conversations. It’s very obvious to us that there is a lot of sharing going on, that there’s a lot of viewing what’s going on with the platform, that there is a lot of engagement with what we’re delivering with Highspot, and we have gone upmarket as a company as well over this last year.
I feel like Highspot has helped us to win a lot of deals that are more upmarket and give people the materials they need to go in and have a higher quality conversation than they had eight to 10 months ago with this tool. It’s been critical in that respect.
The other things are too, I would just say from an adoption standpoint with our methodology and how we get consistent in terms of executing as a business, there’s no doubt that we have delivered a lot of clarity around what we should be doing in our sales process and what we should be doing with our customers through the guidance that we’ve been able to provide through Highspot. That’s been a huge win for just unifying our organization and delivering a consistent motion and helping our organization move up the market more and more as each month goes by. We’re really excited by that and we think that’s going to lead to contributing as well to the growth and the great performance that we’re having here at Sprout.
SS: Fantastic. Last question, Peter. A lot of organizations are having to do more with less and be really thoughtful about the investments that they make. What would you tell organizations thinking about investing in the Highspot platform?
PZ: To your point, we are investing less today. I think that Highspot is a productivity multiplier, so think about all of the time that is being wasted in your organization right now. If your reps are building content, finding content, maybe even not engaging with the training or the right materials in the first place because it is a lack of intuitive experience at your own organization on how to do that. I think what Highspot has allowed us to do is we have found a platform that we’ve been able to build an experience for our reps that is a lot more pleasant and a good user experience than what they’re traditionally used to. That has led to high adoption, and I think it’s been a big win for our organization for people to be able to stay on message and be consistent and achieve better results in their business.
I consider Highspot’s mission-critical, and it is a tool that is needed if you’re going to scale and grow as a company, even if you want to simplify the existing workflows and content that you have today and make it digestible for your sales, you do it. In my mind, it’s absolutely mission-critical for the organization.
SS: I love that productivity multiplier comment. Love to hear that. Peter, thank you so much for joining us today.
PZ: Thanks for having me.
SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win-Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can go beyond what good looks like with Highspot.
Research from Gallup found that engaged employees are more productive, resulting in a 21% increase in profits. So how can you deliver engaging enablement programs to drive sales productivity?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. In the quest to drive sales productivity for your business, you’ve likely asked yourself: What does good look like? This month on the podcast, we’re helping you answer this question by exploring best practices on how you can deliver strategic enablement with Highspot.
Here to discuss this topic is Evelyn Velasquez, the director of training and sales enablement at Hyster‑Yale Group. Thanks for joining Evelyn! I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Evelyn Velasquez: Thank you. I’m glad to be here. My role plays a critical role in supporting and enabling sales teams and channel partners to achieve their sales targets and drive business growth through effective training, enablement resources, and optimizing sales processes at Hyster‑Yale Group.
SS: Wonderful. We’re excited to have you join us, Evelyn. I’d like to just start off by understanding from your perspective, what are some of the ways that sales enablement can impact sales productivity.
EV: I think one of the ways that our team does that effectively is by building out the content, the calculators, and the tools necessary to have an effective conversation with customers. When I first started, a lot of our dealer sales teams were creating their own, and we were able to centralize that function by providing one spot to access these tools. We were removing a lot of that effort and work and really focusing that salesperson on learning about the customer, their business, and their needs and not worrying so much about building content.
As you know, creating content requires specific skill sets that generally salespeople don’t have all the necessary tools to build the most effective content to give to customers. That’s one of the things that we do with our teams is to help streamline that process so that salespeople can just focus on selling.
SS: I love that that focus on selling is absolutely critical these days. Now, prior to implementing Highspot, what challenges maybe were some of your reps facing as it relates to sales productivity?
EV: One of the challenges was just finding content. We had this website or this tool, and you would do a search for a specific topic or item, and you would get a thousand results, but you had to go in and click on each item to identify if it was the item that you were looking for. At some point, salespeople stopped going to that tool and reaching for content because it’s just not an effective tool, and this is in the era of Google where you can search for anything and the first three items are usually what you need.
Well, this site was not providing us with that type of support, so we were doing a lot of great things with content, but not a great job in delivering that to our salespeople effectively. That was one of our major challenges. How do we create an ecosystem where it’s easy to use, similar to Google, and they can find what they need within a few steps?
SS: I love that you guys are making it so much easier for your reps when it comes to findability. How have you maybe started to solve some of those challenges since implementing Highspot?
EV: One of the things that we did was we worked with all of our content teams and we deployed Highspot and created the sales play. We started utilizing that for product releases, but now, instead of having to go and know what something’s called to find it, the search bar within Highspot is amazing. Even if you didn’t know what exactly you were looking for, it gives you suggestions and other options and related material, which is great.
You can also just go directly to the sales play for that product, and anything that we’ve created to help you drive those effective conversations is centralized in one area across different teams. That has been very powerful as well because it’s so easy to find all the tools, images, videos, and calculators that you need to be able to position whatever your proposition is for your customer in one spot, so you’re not having to spend hours searching for content.
SS: I agree. You definitely pick up some efficiencies by removing that from your rep’s day-to-day workflow. I’d love to understand, Evelyn, what is an example of an initiative or a program that you’ve implemented to help drive sales productivity, and how have you leveraged Highspot to support this?
EV: The first step was like finding the content. How do we make that easy, and then the second step is the content good enough? Are we driving the right messaging and the right tools? The last thing that we did was how do we create an ecosystem where the salesperson doesn’t have to go to another site to get content because their day-to-day is in Salesforce or a tool like that for their CRM process.
The last thing we did was integrate Highspot with a CRM tool, and that has been magical because we’ve been able to pull relevant data like the sales, productivity, and activities within an account and serve up the specific content and whatever stage they’re at in the sales process. If they’re in the discovery stage, they get specific tools and content, and coaching guides. If they’re on the product side, they get the product training, product, brochures, and technical information that the customer will need.
All they have to do is just work in Salesforce and they get served up everything they need when they’re in this specific stage. Our dealers have been very pleased with that because they don’t have to leave that tool and then go to another tool to go find the relevant information. It’s all in one area.
SS: Fantastic. So as I mentioned in the intro, one thing that we’re trying to understand is what does good look like? From your perspective, what does good look like when it comes to rep productivity at your organization?
EV: That’s a good question. Before, things weren’t integrated and the systems were not integrated, it was really difficult to measure the effectiveness of our sales enablement efforts with sales performance. People can argue, well, this person is just overall a good salesperson, it’s not your tactics or your strategies that are helping them sell more. What the integration with Highspot and Salesforce did for us specifically was give us the data to now correlate how we’re actually impacting the sales team, and we were able to generate a report that showed a direct correlation between if a salesperson is going into Highspot, going into that specific sales play for that product that we just launched, they took the sales product certification that was associated. We see a correlation between their ability to have more quotes in the system and their ability to close more deals.
When you see the salesperson’s report and they didn’t go into Highspot, or they didn’t take the training, or they’re not visiting that sales play, or they’re not closing as much or having increased quotes with that specific product line. That’s something that we’re able to do now with the support of the Highspot tool that we didn’t have before. It was very difficult to measure sales enablement and whether that’s our performer, if we’re helping them or not, being able to close more or get more quotes.
What that helps us do is identify those people, meet with those people, and then get more information about what’s working, and not working, change our strategy, and redeploy. It’s all about agility. Always being current with the trends and what they’re seeing in the market helps us to be the most effective, and be able to share that with other teams.
SS: I love that. I think that’s a great example of what good looks like. You talked a lot about top performers. How do you identify what good looks like amongst your top performers and in particular, the behaviors that are leading to success?
EV: As I mentioned, the behaviors that we’re seeing, the direct correlation is they are utilizing the tools, they’re taking the training, they’re leveraging all the content in the Highspot platform and taking advantage of that. The top performers are the ones who are sending out pitches.
What we did at Hyster‑Yale Group is we created pitch scripts with trends and relevant data, and there’s a lot of effort and work to put these pitch templates together. Top performers are using those and leveraging them to be able to get in the door with accounts or able to move to the next level per decision maker. It’s extremely important for us to be able to support these top performers, and again, like making sure that what they’re focusing on is selling and building their relationships and learning the accounts, not necessarily finding and creating content. We’re seeing that their behavior is leveraging the things that we create.
SS: That’s fantastic. Now, how do you then take what you’re seeing as what good looks like and then scale that across the sales teams in particular amongst maybe middle or lower-performing reps?
EV: You definitely have to have a sales methodology in place. What’s the standard and a coaching program in place as well in order to be able to scale? What we do is we create focus groups, so we do have data and metrics to show us who is performing with what product lines solutions, who are able to get quotes, and who is able to close those quotes. We’re able to create these focus groups and have tailored conversations with these individuals and look through their sales process, such as what tools they’re leveraging.
We are then able to then get those tools, such as if they’re embedded and they’re like on the bottom of the sales play, we move them up and then we deploy them. We do have one of our VPs of marketing, she will send an email out to the entire dealer community with these tools that are working and the strategies that top performers are deploying so that others can learn from these individuals. I think that’s really critical.
It’s not just creating content, but also making sure you’re communicating back to the business. This is how you can do it, how you can leverage it, and what works well, especially if you can see the same methodology being deployed and that person getting success. It’s important to be able to train others on how to do those same steps so that works out really well.
Highspot has enabled us with the pitch functionality, with the reporting, enabling us to be on the training side right of the system to be able to do all that very effectively and seamlessly within one platform. In the past, we used to have a separate learning management system, a separate communication tool to pitch and communicate, and then in a separate content repository and then another tool for reporting. I think all these things are now in one system, and that really helps us focus more on learning the agility to get that learning and submit it back to the dealership, versus focusing on six different platforms and deploying through those because it’s just so easy to use and deploy things through Highspot.
SS: I always love hearing that. Now, obviously, with enablement, it is critical, especially when it comes to what good looks like to be able to share the results of what enablement’s impact has been. What are some of the key business results that your enablement team has been able to achieve since implementing Highspot?
EV: We have a few programs and we’re able to show that people who utilize our tools and our training are able to close more deals. That’s one, and the second piece is it has enabled us to create the training certifications and build consultative skill sets while using the platform. This specifically has shown us that people who have gone through these more in-depth training programs and are using the tools are also selling more.
It’s like a two-way reporting structure. One is through the training arm and building specialization, and the other one is through the agility of just getting content and support. We’re seeing that again, whether you’re going through the training arm and getting specialized or just using the tools that you’re able to get more quotes and sell and close more deals.
That has been very impactful for us because we’re aiming to get into specific niche markets, so we need this data and reinforcement to make sure that we’re learning if our strategies are working. Essentially, at the end of the day, the target is for our salespeople to achieve their sales goals, so if they’re meeting those, then we know that we’re doing a good job.
SS: Fantastic. Last question for you, Evelyn. I’d love to hear your advice for other enablement leaders that are looking to drive sales productivity at their organization. What is the most important action that they can take to get started?
EV: Simplify, simplify, simplify. I mean, sales rep today has a lot that they have to perform, whether it’s entering items in the CRM, tracking various accounts, or knowing where they’re at in different stages. It’s so important to simplify the process for them and make sure that whatever tools you’re using are sales-centric. I’m gonna say that because we did investigate a lot of different platforms and they still didn’t integrate the training, and then another tool, and it just, again, it just wasn’t a simple process.
Salespeople still needed to go to three or four different places. If you can simplify access, simplify the ability to get things mobile through their mobile apps, even their journey if they’re in the CRM system, be able to simplify that and make sure they’re getting what they need through that process that’s going to help salespeople be productive.
Really put yourself in their shoes and their day-to-day and ask yourself like, are these too many steps to get to your document? Are there barriers to access or are there 20 passwords to get to it? I mean, that’s not effective. My advice, everyone, is really look at your current state and simplify your steps and look for a good platform that can help you drive the things that you want to drive more efficiently.
SS: I couldn’t agree more. Evelyn, thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate your insight.
EV: Thank you for having me.
SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can go beyond what good looks like with Highspot.
Research from Salesforce found that many reps have limited time to connect with customers in today’s landscape, spending just 28% of their week actually selling. So, how can you empower reps with what good looks like in enablement to help increase their productivity?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. In the quest to drive sales productivity for your business, you’ve likely asked yourself: What does good look like? This month on the podcast, we’re helping you answer this question by exploring best practices on how you can deliver strategic enablement with Highspot. Here to discuss this topic are Tim Stansky, director of global sales enablement and training, and Inbar Yagur, the Director of Content and Product Marketing at Lusha. Thanks for joining, Tim and Inbar! I’d love for you to tell us about yourselves, your backgrounds, and your roles.
Inbar Yagur: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve been in marketing for about 12 years and got my start in content marketing and product marketing at Taboola, which is these days a big player in AdTech. When I was there, I was basically doing sales enablement under the sales organization on the product marketing side, so that’s where I got my start in product marketing and enablement.
Then I moved on to more leadership roles before coming to Lusha. I was the VP of Marketing at two startups, which I helped bring from Series A to Series B helped do all of the go-to-market, all of the product marketing, of course, and enablement there, as well as drive pipeline. I’ve been at Lusha for about nine months now, building up the product marketing and content marketing organization to a more robust place.
SS: We’re excited to have you. Tim, a little background on you?
Tim Stansky: Thanks for having us, Shawnna. I’ve been at Lusha for just over a year now after being at Oracle for almost five years. My path to enablement is rooted in media and the evolution of media, especially rooted back in, admittedly, three and a half decades of sales experience as an individual contributor sales leader, and also enabling globally, which has been great exposure and experience from startup to enterprise. I’m excited to talk about what Highspot is doing for us in the way that we’re growing our enablement at Lusha globally.
SS: Well, I’m excited to have you both here. On that note, I think the first question I’d love to ask both of you is, prior to Highspot, what were some of the challenges your reps were facing as it relates to productivity, and how have you overcome these challenges since you’ve implemented Highspot? Tim, I’d love to start with you.
TS: Highspot has allowed us to find one place for our salespeople to find that at the moment, need for internal and external resources, but also has given us an opportunity for consistent global onboarding and consistent global training and certification, which is a new path for Lusha as we are growing and making sure that as we grow and go to market, we have consistent way creating value for customers.
SS: Inbar, what’s your perspective on how things were pre-Highspot?
IY: One of the biggest challenges I think when it comes to product marketing and the content that product marketing creates is the fact that oftentimes sales teams get outdated material. They kind of go rogue and save things on their own, like desktops and change things around, so of course, consistency in being able to update materials on an ongoing basis in a way that’s highly accessible to the team was huge. Also, more than anything before we came in and really started using Highspot actively, a lot of the things that we were doing were sort of like making content for the sake of content rather than really understanding who’s engaging with what and what the true need is.
Having Highspot as a content management system on that level has really helped us gain visibility into what our salespeople are engaging with most, and so it helps us plan ahead and create more effective enablement materials and also helps us look back and measure ourselves and measure our success as part of the metric is that, well, how many people are actually looking at this in Highspot. How many people are actually sending this out? That’s a kind of discipline that we really didn’t have.
SS: I love to hear that. Well, as I mentioned in our intro this month, we’re aiming to understand what good looks like when it comes to sales enablement, and I love that the two of you have very unique views on enablement through the lens of your respective remits, so I may toss a couple of questions to each of you along the way. What does good look like when it comes to sales training, Tim?
TS: What good looks like is not only introducing a resource for salespeople that are up and running and in need of resources but introducing new methods and new skills and supporting that beyond the launch to make sure that we’re building new habits with our salespeople. It’s a consistent evergreen resource and there’s one place that we direct our GTM organization too.
IY: I would love to add on that a little bit on the communication and messaging side as well. I think that good also looks like a deep understanding from the sales team of the why. Product marketing teams are in danger of being very much on the how something works rather than what the value is. This is something that we’ve also implemented in parallel to the implementation of Highspot to start now all of our training with why.
I want the how does it work to be the third or fourth point out of five. I want the first point to be what is the pain and why what we’re trying to sell or what we’re trying to bring to market is important in how that solves the pain. From my perspective, it’s making sure that the sales team has a clear understanding of why they’re selling what they’re selling, and not just what they’re selling.
TS: An interesting evolution that we have experienced since launching Highspot because we invest in the content and guidance and also training in coaching modules, and when we looked at what was the adoption, what was being utilized, listening to our own GTM organization, particularly the top of funnel part, they were asking for more clarity on what is internal and what is external. As we’ve grown and learned how to utilize Highspot internally, that’s simple, wait a minute, what’s internal, what’s external decision might seem obvious, but it didn’t seem obvious to us in the beginning. The ability to then shape our Highspot into internal and external resources for the GTM org created more clarity. Then also the ability to pitch through Highspot and integrate it with other parts of our sales tech stack was another evolution in the course of our experience with Highspot.
SS: I think that’s fantastic how you both have really evolved along your journey now. Inbar, I love your perspective from a product marketing and content stance. What does good look like when it comes to sales content?
IY: There are two different kinds of goods. Actually, going back to what Tim was saying about what’s internal and what’s external. The external good and the internal good are two completely different things. I want the internal good to have a very clear narrative and something that the salesperson can read through and have guidance if they’re about to go into a pitch, I’d like them to have three or four reference documents that they can just go over and really just get here are the main points I want to hit on this product or this feature and just be able to kind of grab that.
In terms of the external things, I have a saying with my team, and I actually think this is true for internal documents as well. A lot of times when my team creates content, the comment I leave on things is “Big Words, Hulk Smash.” Okay, so the reason is we write a lot, but people don’t read a lot. It’s not that the written word is going to become obsolete, people still will continue to rely on it no matter what prognosticators say, at the end of the day, we’re still sharing the written word, but because people don’t read, they skim. The philosophy that we have is how we create something that is readable and accessible, both internally and externally, so that people don’t have to work hard to find the information that they need.
By the way, if you go at a higher level in terms of how we organize Highspot, we don’t want people to work hard to find what they need, and I think that’s true throughout the whole journey. Whether it’s something that you send out to a prospect after a conversation or whether it’s something that the salesperson actually delivers live, I want to be able to have something that they can easily read and understand within seconds, rather than having them work hard to find the information. I think that’s the biggest thing because what really happens is if you get in the weeds if you start getting too detailed, if you start using jargon or overly complicated explanations of what you’re actually trying to do, it’ll get lost in translation.
There are clear rules on our team that we don’t use, it’s like supercharged when we can say something that is four letters long, and instead of eight letters long, we’re going to say four letters. I know that sounds really basic, but it’s what makes a lot of the difference in terms of adoption and engagement over the 12, 13 years I’ve been in this business, that’s one thing that I’ve seen consistently. It’s not insulting to anyone’s intelligence, it’s just that we’re constantly in a pile of information and our focus these days is shorter than ever. Even if you’ve got a vested interest in getting the information, you’re still not going to read it in the same way that you read it 10 years ago. So simplicity, readability, diagrams, and the right kind of design are really critical for us, both in terms of what we deliver to the sales team and also what we deliver externally.
SS: I love that and I think both of those perspectives bring a lot of flavor into the topics that we’re going to be talking about. Thank you for sharing with me what good looks like from your perspective. Now that we’ve talked about these two components, what role on the content side and on the training side would you say play in an effective enablement strategy?
TS: It’s the partnership of a plan integrated with the vision of sales leadership, integrated with the vision of the product managers where we come together, and I like to start with the calendar. In the mantra of plan your work, your plan, and the cadence that we’ve set up together. We are the meeting points of the product side and the revenue side, how are we gonna approach this, how do we make sure that all of our stakeholders from all sides are in agreement and aligned, and even to the point of previewing from each side into to revenue leaders, giving them a preview to what their teams are about to see a week in advance, has really helped us build not only that trust and credibility but also get feedback so that when we do see something in a preview, almost a dress rehearsal, oh, that will work really well because of this. It gives us better delivery on the launch.
I would say the critical part is always in our situation of having an office in Boston and one in Tel Aviv with a seven-hour time difference to always be available to our stakeholders and our users, our constituents, and our GTM family, it’s always there and always on and updating. I’ll say the content team has done a great job of making sure that the content is fresh and accurate, and that obsolete information is removed. I’ll say this because I’m one of them, salespeople have a short attention span at the moment when I need it, when I need it. Some are planners and some are learners and some are going at the speed of light, so we want to be able to satisfy the avid learners as well as those who need it in a pinch. I would say always being on is a key benefit.
IY: I’ll add that I think that collaboration is a huge part of this. Tim and I meet weekly and are always very open and work very hard to make sure that we’re aligned on the vision that it’s really easy to have friction between people if they feel like they’re in competing interests, but the truth is that we’re not. We’re on different teams, but we’re not siloed from each other because we have the same exact goal.
My team comes at it from one side and then Tim as a leader in his domain comes at it from another. I think that a big part of it is just keeping lines of communication open consistently. Like Tim said, allowing for feedback when we create something, and really just being open. I think in everything that we do, we need to work with transparency. It’s kind of a mantra of mine and I think that it’s no different in terms of where the sales enablement piece and the product marketing piece meet together. I think we always need to be in a conversation. We always need to be telling each other what’s important and addressing friction points and I think when you do that openly and kindly and collaboratively, that’s really a big key to success.
SS: I love that. Now, what is the value of having a unified enablement platform to help you bring your enablement strategy to life and execute what good looks like? Tim, I’d love to send this one back to you.
TS: It’s a total meta reply because what good looks like is what is demonstrated, allowing for people’s personalities and, more importantly, customer availability, prospect availability, and their personalities. What great looks like is adapting to how the marketplace is, how our buyers are, and how our existing customers are. I would say that it comes back to always being available, always on, methods and skills, and product knowledge, but more importantly, to the why behind something and the outcomes that customers are looking for.
SS: I love that and I love that we’re always coming back to that why. Now, how are you using Highspot’s Unified Platform to drive sales productivity, Tim?
TS: Every learner is different and in the adult learning model, you’ve got people that love to read, people that really learn by video, you’ve got people that learn by experience meeting the learner where they are and trying to adapt to the different media formats that are available. As Inbar was saying, the written word is so powerful, but some people do much better with watching something and then mimicking it. Sometimes there might be a tutorial where one of our GTM members is actually learning a new tool or something, so it’s actually almost like a recorded cooking class. On one screen they’re watching the recording on another monitor they’re actually playing with the tool to follow along because some people get bored with video. The modern professional is always tempted by this compulsion to check their phone.
Keeping them engaged and utilizing clicks and keyboards, keeps them involved in the tool and minimizes the potential for the distraction of a mobile device or another interruption. It’s using different ways that people learn and you think of the senses of eyes and ears and brain and mixed media of learning, so some e-learning is supported by workshops, but also the ability to assign to team leads and managers the opportunity for them to have a scoring rubric to certify people. They’re certifying their own people and having that capability in Highspot has been really helpful, especially when we launched our first product certification course. It’s not enablement, deeming someone as certified. We built the course, and we taught the managers, but it’s the managers, those who hired that actually provided the certification.
Although we had a high success rate, I’m pleased to say that there’s a manager that actually rejected a couple of video submissions. She said they didn’t hit the marks and wanted it to be done better now. Some people don’t record well, and maybe they wanted to do it in person. That’s another opportunity. Meet the learner where they are, where they’re more comfortable. Having all those capabilities for knowledge checks, for video submission. We are pushing the possibilities of what we’re doing with our training and coaching aspect of Highspot. To compliment my colleague Inbar and her team, I think they’re doing a really great job of making sure that we have a premium library of content that’s actionable and insightful and fresh, and not obsolete. I think they’ve done a great job there.
I’ll point to something that happened recently. There’s a BDR that had a vision of, hey, you know, what would work if we had X and one of Inbar’s folks worked with the director and that BDR to envision exactly what this BDR said would help her perform her job better on what prospects we’re asking for. That ability for a BDR who sees the content capabilities and wants to shape it based on a market need, it’s satisfied and then housed in the Highspot. I see that as impacting our internal communication and our sales productivity. It’s allowing the BDR side to the version with the PMM side. This is really within the last couple of weeks, we’re going to see the utilization through the analytics, and we’ll have the data. We’ll also get the anecdotal stories of how a particular piece of information helps someone have better conversations to satisfy needs that turned into revenue because the customers will benefit by investing in Lusha.
IY: I’ve got to piggyback on that because that’s actually a really great anecdote that Tim brought up. As you know, the BDR who was feeling like her needs were not being met and then floated what she needed in order to meet those needs. I think that that really comes back to having an open conversation and being open to listening and understanding that everybody actually everybody has the same goal. There tends to be a lot of gatekeeping when it comes to any marketing team, not just product marketing, and I try to kind of lower that.
Sometimes it’s hard because we’ve got a very big go-to-market organization and you don’t want a hundred people constantly Slacking your team, but I try to keep my finger on the pulse and my ear to the ground, so that if a need comes up, that is felt across multiple people then we can go in and collaborate the way that we’ve done here. I think it’s live now and that particular piece of content and it’s actually going to be a case study of what we can do to collaborate better and whether this kind of collaboration works.
I mean, I’m gonna be honest. It’s not a cakewalk when you’ve got five different people sticking your opinion into something and you’ve got too many cooks in the kitchen. Sometimes it makes things a little messy, but I think the end goal is important enough that you need a little bit of the mess to start. I’m actually really looking forward to seeing how this is going to get adopted to really open up those lines of communication even more, and not just leave it at the leadership level.
TS: Inbar, you’re making me laugh because I remember in my very early, awkward first couple years of being an account executive in media, I remember a coach said, do you understand that a camel is a horse by committee? I didn’t understand it, but maybe we have a camel that will be able to fly. The ability is we can do this and everyone feels as though they were heard.
Maybe there was give and take on each side, but there was something created by people and now we’re going to see how it flies. If it succeeds in impacting revenue directly and we can trace that back, great, but if anything, it shows collaboration and teamwork. Not only across departments but across continents. Someone in Boston collaborating with a colleague in Tel Aviv, it’s the small, global community, the small global village that we’re in. It’s just a seven-hour time difference.
IY: I think what it really does is as a product marketing team, you need to listen to the boots on the ground. They’re the ones who are in the hand-to-hand combat of things. It’s really easy to be like, here’s what’s good for you, and kind of dictate it down, but what’s the point of creating something if people aren’t going to use it or find it useful? I think there’s always a bit of a learning curve. Where does feedback stop being productive, where does collaboration stop being helpful, I don’t think we’re there, though. I think that if we listen to the ground effectively and create a good process, then all we can really do is win on that level.
SS: Now, to round us out a little bit, what are some of the business results that you’ve seen since implementing the Highspot platform and do you have any data points that you can share?
TS: I can point right to a certification course. Our prospecting platform was a game changer at Lusha and created that certification of consistent value delivery we’re coupling the outcomes of a product with a value-centric sales methodology and having people go to market, that certification showed an impact on helping customers realize value out of the prospecting platform, which resulted in revenue because the customers are winning from what the outcomes of the prospecting platform help them do in creating their own revenue.
I would point to the course creation opportunity, but also it’s not just launching a course, it’s what the sales leaders in the GTM org did to support that knowledge and to support the valuation methodology and uncovering needs with customers, and then prescribing, recommending the platform. It created confidence, and knowledge, not just feature dumping, but the outcomes that customers are looking for. Like so what. Okay, you’ve got this thing, what’s it going to do for me in my role in sales or in marketing or in other departments in a company so I can point to revenue on that? You need to track it, but I can point to when the certification course was launched and then the impact of what was pitched, what was closed, and how it hit the bottom line.
IY: One of the biggest challenges, and please Tim, if you disagree, chime in, but I think enforcement of messaging and enforcement of product knowledge is something that’s a challenge in a lot of sales organizations, and doing something like a certification course is a huge contributor into improving the way that sales team talks about the product and talks about the value that the product brings in a way that’s just more trackable.
If you train blind and you don’t have an accountability piece, you’re always going to be in danger of people not being on a message or not really selling in the way that they should be selling and putting it into that kind of format where it’s a requirement and it’s enforced, I think really helps take care of that piece better and make sure that everybody’s on message.
SS: I love that. Last question for you both. How do you plan to continue to evolve your enablement strategy this year and how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help you achieve your vision of what good looks like this year?
IY: My team has grown significantly in the last six months. We were a team of three and now we’re nine, we literally tripled and that is great because it means that we’re creating a lot of good resources and we’re making a huge contribution to the business. One of the things that we’re now trying to kind of work out is what success looks like, especially for the product marketing managers on the team. What does success look like? What are we measuring ourselves on? A big part of those KPIs is coming from Highspot as a tool. It’s really hard to say as product marketing oh, we increased the amount of closed won. I mean, yes, we had a say in it, and yes we were part of a huge team of people that helped get to that closed won, but, we’re trying to understand now what is the kind of in-between metrics that come from an SQL to a closed won and how do we actually impact them. I think that in terms of our strategy going forward and our measurement strategy, Highspot is going to play a really significant role.
TS: I see our growth in how we’re going to be utilizing Highspot for those colleagues that are getting promoted to new roles in the organization, learning paths, onboarding new hires, and more consistent delivery. As a six, going on seven, year-old startup a lot of training enablement and onboarding was reliant on the hiring manager, and the quality of that onboarding was really reliant on the manager who had the time and bandwidth and probably personal discipline to make an excellent first 90 days great.
From what I understand statistically, the first two weeks or first 30 days, first 60 days, that’s when a new hire says this was such a good decision, or, oh, what did I get myself into? I see onboarding new hires and then ever-boarding existing GTM members and also new roles that are created as we continue to grow as a company. I’ll see learning paths, I’ll see more use of video, especially integrating recorded videos of calls and possibly some types of situational training.
SS: I love that. Well, thank you both for joining me today. I loved hearing each of your respective stories.
IY: It was our pleasure. Thank you for having us.
TS: Thank you. Happy selling everyone.
SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can go beyond what good looks like with Highspot.
Driving behavior change can be inherently challenging. Research shows that B2B sales reps forget 70% of the information they learn within a week of training, and even worse, 87% of that knowledge is forgotten within a month of training. So how can you drive lasting behavior change among sales reps through learning programs? We have Mary Rose Debor, the Training Content Specialist at LIXIL, on the podcast today.
Shawnna Sumaoang: Thanks for joining, Mary Rose! I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your organization.
Mary Rose Debor: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so glad to be here. As you said, my name is Mary Rose Debor, the sales training content specialist at LIXIL, which is a global plumbing company. I’m working with our direct sales force to help really make sure they have the skills and the tools they need to succeed as they go out into the field.
A little bit about my background is I kind of fell into this role almost by accident because my original path was education. When I went to college I didn’t know what I wanted to major in at first, but I eventually landed on early childhood special education and I actually stayed with that for a while up until March 2020. I was a classroom teacher in an early childhood setting and then when the pandemic hit, I was briefly furloughed. At my previous organization, I had the chance to do a stint at HR where I got to do some learning and development-related topics also while I was at my previous organization, it was a university and I had the chance to pursue my graduate degree in management with a focus in educational leadership. It had kind of been poking around my brain for a while about transitioning outside of teaching children into using those similar skills in a different setting, in a business setting, and I was very fortunate to have this opportunity at LIXIL come up and I’ve been loving it ever since.
SS: Well we’re excited to have you here. Given your extensive background in education, I’d love to understand how that type of background set you up for success in developing training programs in a business setting.
MRD: Great question, Shawnna. I think the main way this has set me up for this role and to bring a lot of different ideas to this role is just the overall idea that the how of learning matters. I think outside of formal classroom settings, outside of academic institutions, we kind of take it for granted that learning can be more effective when delivered in certain ways. For example, instead of just giving people the information and expecting them to almost by osmosis remember it and retain it, there’s really a lot of thought intentionality behind cognitive science and educational psychology, so many different things you can use to really make sure that this information is delivered in the most effective way possible and to ensure the success of your employees. I think just that really overall drive and passion to make sure that content is given in the most engaging way is how this has set me up for success.
SS: That’s awesome. Now, you mentioned in your intro that you have a background in child development and obviously you have expertise in adult learning. What are some specific ways that adults learn and change behavior and how can training programs incorporate these components?
MRD: I think this is a super interesting question because there are of course differences between how children learn and how adults learn, but I actually think those differences are fewer than most people realize. I like to think of those in terms of more instructor-led learning versus learner-centered instruction learning. That’s the perspective I like to have because I think in either of those contexts that apply to children or adults. To your original question, there are of course some differences with adults and one is the fact that they bring their own skills and experiences to the table more so than children, especially in a business setting where people might have been working there or in the field or the industry for many years.
Another important thing is that versus having subject-oriented lessons or content for adults, it’s much more effective to usually have more task-oriented or behavior oriented. I think we all remember in school when you have math, language arts, or science and for adults, it’s really much more effective to have it centered around tasks or behaviors that are more specific and relevant to their roles. They want to know the why behind what they are learning, which I think will actually talk more about later, but this is super important for adults. I think just really infusing that throughout your instruction is key.
The final thing I think is really important for adults, and this is going to get a little neuroscience-y, and I won’t get too bogged down in the details because I am not a neuroscientist by any means, but your neural plasticity as an adult, it actually is less than as a child. Your neural plasticity is your ability to kind of learning new skills and that’s actually much easier for children to do with an adult, so the repetition for adults is another really major factor to consider because you want to really have that consistent reinforcement to help support the building of those new neural pathways you’re building as you are gaining a new skill or information or trying to implementing something new into your workflow. I hope that answers your question. I know those are kind of long-winded but there’s just so much to talk about.
SS: I love that. When you’re going about creating training programs, I’d love to understand how you identify the gaps between current behavior and desired behavior.
MRD: So for this, I’m going to refer back a little bit to my previous question where I kind of talked about instead of like adults versus children, that instructor-centered versus learner-centered, and this is where I think that learner-centered comes into play. At LIXIL what we’ve started doing and it’s been probably one of the most meaningful things that I’ve done professional development-wise since I’ve started is get training in human-centered design approaches.
I never heard of human-centered design before joining LIXIL, but I’m now obsessed with it. In a nutshell, it’s making sure that you are solving the right problems so you can solve the problem right, and I feel like the best way to do that is by going to the learners and using a variety of techniques like focus groups. Kind of like priority diagramming, there are all these great little techniques you could use to actually talk to learners, and observe what they’re doing during the day or how they do a task, do a focus group around specific problems or issues or part of their workflow, and that way you can really meaningfully see where the gaps might be and how you can design training effectively, because you want to make sure that your training solves the right problem and that you’re just not throwing stuff to the wall to see what sticks.
You really want to know what the gaps are, and I think the best way to do that in most cases is to use some techniques, some sort of focus group or survey to try to figure out what the gaps are. If you could do that in a way that’s as relevant as possible and by that, I mean if you can really see a person do their workflow that helps so much, because sometimes people don’t know what they don’t know right. I’m sure working in software, you might have seen that people might think they have a great grasp on something, but it’s hard for them to articulate exactly what the problem might be. When you can be alongside them and actually see what they are struggling with and where those gaps might be, I think that’s such an effective tool. It’s not always easy to do, of course, and there are going to be times when you have other objectives that are important that you have to do around, but I do think, generally speaking, when you can engage with learners directly to try to identify those gaps that are super impactful.
SS: Absolutely, I agree with that. Now, another thing that we’ve heard from enablement practitioners is that over-communication and repetition are important to drive change. How do you remind and maybe even incentivize reps to demonstrate the change you wish to see?
MRD: I think this is a really great point because it’s really at the core of making sure your training once it’s delivered is successful. It’s rarely going to be a one-and-done thing. So, first, to the point of over-communication and representation, I wholeheartedly agree those are important and I think that you just have to really be conscious of embedding them as much as possible. If you have a concept that you want to drive, you want to make sure that you don’t just have it in one lesson, try to put a nugget about that in other lessons, even if it’s not directly about that. If it applies somewhat and you want to reinforce it, see if you can weave it in.
An example of this is with our sales team, we have an overarching sales philosophy of sales training that we do and originally it was just the reps who went through that sales training then it was done and we realized the importance of reinforcing this new kind of sales philosophy that we wanted them to work on. We started doing a little reinforcement module, actually within our Highspot training. I’ll talk more about specifically how we use Highspot Training and Coaching later, but just again finding the ways where you can really embed little nuggets of reinforcement throughout.
There are a couple of other points I want to make because you do talk about incentives and motivation. I won’t go again into the whole science of motivation, but in terms of extrinsic, so external rewards, and intrinsic, which is kind of your self-motivation, your internal rewards, I think that with adult learners and with certain, especially higher level skills, that internal motivation, so that feeling of autonomy and mastery that you’re accomplishing something is super impactful. Now, of course, extrinsic is valuable. Our company has a swag shop where people can earn what we call LIXIL Bucks, and that’s kind of a nice little training incentive, but using extrinsic rewards sparingly and really just focusing more on how you can have people grow their sense of time, mastery and purpose. Those are ideas that I am completely stealing from Daniel Pink, just to give credit where credit is due.
With intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, when it comes to extrinsic you need to keep a few things in mind. Especially with sales thinking of pay, you just want to make sure that the pay does not outway the intrinsic motivator. You need to ensure that the intrinsic motivators are much more impactful because that can help them succeed. The final point I’ll make is that you have to rethink failures and mistakes because I think with behavior change, it could be really difficult to implement behaviors as a sales rep if you’re worried that there’s going to be a little bit of a learning curve. Maybe you’re not going to do as great with attracting clients while you learn a new sales system because you’re learning it and there are going to be some little kinks and bumps in the road as you’re trying to figure it out. I think it’s really important for management, for leadership to be understanding with that and not to penalize if somebody is using, or learning a new skill or system, but they’re not great at it yet. As much as you can be understanding and supportive if they’re using it. That’s the key thing and it’s going to pay off in the long run.
SS: Absolutely. Now to dive in deeper, ensuring changes are relevant and actionable is also important. What do you do to ensure that your reps understand the why behind the behavior change?
MRD: I’m really glad you brought this up, Shawnna. The why is super important and as we talked earlier with the principles of adult learning, that’s something that can really help motivate them to engage in their training and to be very purpose-driven behind it. I think it goes again, as we said before about over-communication and repetition from as many different sources as possible. By sources including whatever ways of communication you have at your company and I also mean people. I think it is so important if you have not just your trainer but your manager and your leadership reinforcing that purpose and that why as well. That can go miles in terms of helping people really invest their time and their energy into learning.
SS: I think bringing leaders in is fantastic. Now after training programs are complete and changes in behavior are being noticed. What’s next? How are you able to reinforce what is learned for lasting behavior change?
MRD: That’s great because once you have momentum, you certainly want to build on it. I think the first thing to do is you want to acknowledge that and in whatever way that’s possible, maybe that’s a dashboard, maybe that’s a communication from leadership or a manager because you don’t want people to feel like there’s no cause for a little celebration or acknowledgment of that time. However that works well for your organization, just make sure you acknowledge that growth in some way. You can then focus on moving to the next thing.
Another point came up when I was learning about how to teach children, but I think it’s such a good principle of learning that it’s called scaffolding. You want to just kind of very subtly start to build on skills. So basically there’s the skill and then there’s the level of skill that somebody can reach with just a little bit of extra push, we call it the zone of proximal development. It’s probably similar to what most people think of as the comfort zone. That’s what I would encourage trainers and learning and development professionals to think of next, so what’s going to be the next skill that’s related, but just kind of that half step up, that next rung on the ladder, and how you can get them to reach for it. That way it’s still relevant, it still makes sense in their trajectory, and it’s not something totally new and super challenging, but it’s just enough of a challenge to kind of keep that momentum going.
SS: I love that, I actually hadn’t heard that term before, so that’s really interesting. What can leaders do to maybe encourage and support this lasting behavior change?
MRD: Shawnna, I’m really glad you brought this up because I think leadership has such a powerful role here. I think first and foremost, leaders can model the changes they want to see especially if, for example, say you’re a sales manager and maybe some of your responsibilities are similar to those that your sales reps are seeing. If you’re doing the behavior and your reps can see that, that’s going to be so meaningful to them. I think as much as it makes sense modeling that behavior is going to be the most important thing that leadership can do.
Another thing that leadership can do, as I mentioned before, but I’m going to say it again because I think it’s so important, is to be understanding of any kind of mistakes or trip-ups that happen as behavior change occurs. One of our organizational behaviors and values at LIXIL is experiment and learning and I love that because the crux of that value is if you try something and it doesn’t work, that’s okay, just learn from it. I think, again, with leadership there should be understanding and support when there is a behavior change knowing that there’s going to be that little bit of kind of weeds you have to hack through first until you get that beautiful garden. To use that tired metaphor of the garden of knowledge, you need to clear out the weeds first and make sure it’s all good to grow and just know that it will happen. You’re kind of investing in the long-term goals here. In a nutshell, leaders can model and be understanding of mistakes or learning curves that happen when behavior change needs to be implemented.
SS: I love that. Now, last question for you Mary Rose. How has your organization leveraged Highspot Training and Coaching to drive behavior change through training programs?
MRD: Absolutely. We’ve been using Highspot for almost a year now and we’ve had a really big chance to dive into training and coaching. That’s actually what I first started doing when I came on board to LIXIL last year. One of the things I think it’s been really cool about using the training coaching is the ability to really tailor lessons with the various response types and to pull in the content that sales reps are already using and seeing to serve as lesson content. We have these short videos that the reps can watch and also we can pull in things like sales sheets or brochures that they might want to show customers. It’s nice reinforcement too. It’s like they’re learning about the products, but they’re also kind of getting familiar with some important content that they might use in the field when they’re speaking with a showroom, for example.
Another really cool feature and I know this is a newer one on your end, but I’m really excited to use it more is the learning path. The ability to string a variety of courses together on a particular topic or for a particular role is something that really intrigues me. We started piloting this with a group of people at our organization and it seems really well received. I think that’s another really great aspect of Highspot Training and Coaching that we will use more in the future. The final shout-out I’ll give to Highspot, not to the training and coaching specifically, but just the fact that it’s integrated into the overall Highspot main pages so if we are really focusing on a specific topic, I’ll give you a good example, like a new product launch, we can have nice easy navigation right on that Highspot main page that reps will see that’s an easy link to their courses and the relevant resources. So again, we had this new product launch, we’re going to have a nice banner right on the front page, they can click into that and then they’ll see courses, their presentations, the brochures, everything they need altogether. I love how the content piece of Highspot relates so naturally to the training and coaching aspect of it.
SS: I love to hear that Mary Rose, thank you again so much for taking the time to chat with us today.
MRD: Of course. This was great, thank you so much for having me.
SS: To our audience, thanks for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.
Driving behavior change in a sales organization can be notoriously difficult, and yet, it is critical to keep pace with buyer needs. It requires not only training your reps on the right behaviors but also coaching them to demonstrate those behaviors effectively with buyers. In fact, research from Sales Enablement PRO found that when behavior change is a core objective of training and coaching efforts, average rep quota attainment increases by 7 percentage points.
So how can you drive lasting behavior change within your organization? We invited Annie Lizenbergs, the Senior Director of Enablement for Learning & Development here at Highspot, to share her advice. Thanks for joining Annie! I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role here at Highspot.
Annie Lizenbergs: Thank you so much, Shawnna. As you mentioned, my name is Annie Lizenbergs, I’m the senior Director of Revenue L&D here at Highspot. My background spans two careers, both within the education space. First, I was a middle school history teacher and then made my way into both sales and sales leadership and then really found my niche within the learning and development space, really specific to revenue teams. It’s been great to navigate and watch the industry of both sales learning and also sales enablement grow into being such a strategic lever for organizations. Prior to coming to Highspot, I was actually a Highspot customer, so I had the opportunity to see firsthand the way that technology can aid in a company’s ability to drive strategic initiatives and to really set those foundational learning programs.
SS: I am excited to have you here and we’re lucky to have you at Highspot. Kudos, I didn’t realize you had been a middle school teacher, I have the utmost respect for teachers so that is impressive. Now, in terms of learning and development particularly within Highspot, can you tell us how you define what behavior change means?
AL: When I think about it, behavior changes are really being able to connect the right knowledge sets with the skills to be able to put that into action. Teams really need to be confident that they have the knowledge and the ability to go execute. One without the other really creates gaps and what you’ll start to see is inconsistent execution or siloed execution because there’s that lack of confidence. It’s the ability to really put those things together that makes learning an accelerator for the business.
SS: I love that definition. Why is behavior change often necessary in sales? What would you say are some of the ways that you’ve encountered it as a learning and development leader?
AL: Change is constant and really required for our business to thrive. As the market changes, buyers change, and as companies innovate, the business has to be agile enough to pivot and really keep pace with that change. From a learning perspective, it’s often referred to as learning agility. It may be that the organization is moving into a new market or launching a new product, but the ability of the org to really learn faster together gives them that sustainable competitive advantage of being able to capitalize on those new market opportunities.
For example, it may be something as simple as a product demo that might feel really cut and dry, but at Highspot we are shipping new innovations every six weeks. If we aren’t able to evolve the way that our teams demo the product, then our reps really aren’t able to demonstrate the full range of value that we can drive for the customer. We need to change behavior, we’ve got to deliver that new knowledge and really empower them with the right skills to drive the right results for the business.
SS: Absolutely. How can leaders within an organization recognize when there is a need for a change in behaviors?
AL: I always like to look at the sales pipeline. I feel like it’s a great barometer for the health of the business and can help identify when behavior change is going to be required because if your pipeline is down, you’re going to see the impact of that somewhere between two and three quarters from now. You need to diagnose what change is needed and be able to start acting on that right away. With change though, we have to be careful because it can start to feel like the flavor of the month, change really has to be deliberate, it has to be tied to results and irrelevant why and you have to be able to give that change the time and space to land and embed within the business in order to see those right results.
SS: I love that. It’s not the flavor of the month, I think that’s fantastic. What are some of your best practices for identifying some of the winning behaviors that lead to success in sales?
AL: We really focus on leading indicators of success. With any initiative that we’re running, we outline both the calls to action for our team, like what we want them to do, and the outcomes that we’re looking to drive, so how are we measuring whether or not this is a success? It’s those behaviors and activities that let us know if we’re trending in the right direction. Identifying the leading indicators really requires a deep understanding of our audience and their process. It could be things like the number of above-the-line contacts, multithreaded into account or the number of new opportunities added, or the number of new pitches that were sent out to clients. These are all things that we can measure and if those numbers and activities are headed in the right direction, we believe we should see the business outcomes that we’re looking for. Our ability to define and understand those leading indicators gives us the ability to predict success and also to tweak our learning approach as necessary so that it’s never stagnant and it’s never one size fits all.
SS: I think that’s phenomenal. How do you take that information and then design and implement training programs that are aimed at instilling those winning behaviors amongst the sales teams to drive that change?
AL: When we think about the design and development of training programs, we recognize that it often requires a layered approach. There’s no silver bullet to behavior change which often we wish there was. We are often balancing both formal and informal learning strategies to ensure understanding and create routines that drive repetition and execution. For example, with new product innovation, we have a three-part approach. The first can be pretty formal and includes courses and live training, the details, the value, and the differentiation of this new product. The second is the ability to have ongoing and evergreen training content that the reps can refer back to. No one will remember everything from a particular training. I always tell our stakeholders that it’s not for lack of trying, it’s just science and they’re likely not going to go back to a course that they took to try and find something, we don’t see that happen. It’s not really within human nature because when you’re looking for recall, you’re looking for those fast reminders about what you learned.
The number one skill that our reps need is to know where they can go for information when they need it, but without that repository of the always-on learning resources that can be grabbed and go, reps are often having to fill in the blanks. We really put a priority on creating that long tail of learning that they can always go back to. The last piece is the certification which is really measuring their ability to go out and put this learning into practice and it gives managers the opportunity to both inspect and coach and creates accountability to that learning as well. The thing I love about Highspot is that it gives us a platform in order to do that at scale, both the formal and the informal, but you really need both in order to drive that lasting change.
SS: Absolutely. I think our audience would definitely agree, behavior change can often be a difficult process and some reps may even be resistant to change. How can leaders motivate or ease the process of change for their teams?
AL: That’s a great question. Reps really need to know the why behind what they’re doing. In terms of the way that adults learn, it has to be hyper-relevant and hyper-actionable, otherwise, adults will just deprioritize it in their minds. Learning has to be put through the lens of why it matters and where they will apply it. It allows us to create that connection between what they’re learning and what they’re asked to go and do. This really allows us to better really measure the results as well because we’re clear on what those calls to action for our team are and the results that we’re trying to drive so we have clear markers along the way as to whether we are being successful.
SS: I think that’s phenomenal. How can behavior change be reinforced over time beyond an initial learning experience or training program?
AL: I mean that’s so critical. I will shout it from the mountaintops, I fully believe that front-line managers are the linchpin to success. They really become the arms and legs of any initiative and really drive that sustainable change. It’s their ability to really coach to what good looks like that allows reps to move from proficiency within any skill or knowledge set to mastery. Mastery only comes through practice and real-life application and learning along the way. That’s the only way. Our managers have the ability to support and encourage that process every single week.
SS: I love that you brought the frontline managers up. How do you go about helping frontline managers navigate and reinforce some of these behavior-change initiatives?
AL: We take enabling our managers really seriously because we know how important they are to the success of any initiative. So first and foremost, whatever the initiative might be, we are always enabling the managers ahead of our reps. We want to make sure that they feel confident in the knowledge and skills that are required in order to be successful. Beyond that, we’re also giving them the tools that are needed in order to go and inspect and coach. Those might be coaching kids, it might be ideas for things they can do in team meetings and conversations that they can have in their one on ones.
We use Gong to help inspect calls and make sure that the way that it’s coming to life with our customers is on point and gives them the opportunity to coach to real-life situations. Even within our own platform, whether it be practice submissions or testing along the way, we can give our managers rubrics in order for them to be able to consistently measure what good looks like from their team. Then it finally goes back to the reporting, the ability to have the reporting of those ongoing behaviors and activities and the business outcomes that we’re looking to drive, that gives them those indicators of whether or not their team is being successful.
SS: I love that and on that note actually my closing question relates to the metrics and reporting component. How can leaders leverage analytics to understand whether behavior changes are occurring and how it’s impacting the overall business performance?
AL: It goes back to defining those calls to action in the business outcomes that you’re looking to drive up front. What are the behaviors and activities that they’re asked to do coming out of a particular learning program or initiative enablement session? Reps really need to understand what success looks like and be able to have benchmarks along the way. That roadmap of success is really important to adult learners because they always want to check in on where they’re at and what progress they’re making.
We really have to be ruthless about measurement to ensure that the learning strategy is on point and that we can continue to adjust and scale to ensure that the behavior change doesn’t just live and die within a particular quarter, but that you can absorb it into onboarding, you can embed and reinforce it with rep guidance and create supports for recall that really make it become part of the fabric of your organization. You can measure if the behavior and activities are driving the right business outcomes and then learn from that strategy to inform the next initiative or change that your business is facing.
SS: I love that, Annie. Thank you so much for joining us today. I learned a ton from you on the behavior change front.
AL: Thank you so much, Shawnna.
SS: To our audience, thanks for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.
Sales enablement teams are maturing and becoming more established each year, especially as more organizations are realizing enablement’s strategic impact on business. Research from Sales Enablement PRO found that organizations are 48% more likely to have high buyer engagement if their sales enablement processes have been in place for more than two years.
So how can you mature your practices as enablement becomes more established in your organization? Here to discuss this with us is Nav Nicholson, the principal sales enablement program manager at Redis. Thanks for joining Nav! I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Nav Nicholson: Thanks for having me, Shawnna. As you introduced me already, I am the principal sales enablement program manager here at Redis. I own all of the sales tech stacks that we use internally, which include Highspot Outreach, Zoom Info, Linkedin Sales Navigator, and more. Not only do I own it, but I also run the workflows associated with those platforms, I own the ROI that we get from it. In addition to that, I’m also responsible to ensure that folks are using them in a consistent manner and the prescribed workflows.
As far as my background goes, I come from a success world. Before I jumped into enablement I was a customer success manager and my now boss actually stole me from the last place that I was at. He decided to poach me and he brought me on as an enablement person I think it’s actually a pretty good transition, especially for somebody that was in success to join an enablement team and run with the specific focus that I have. As a success person, you’re constantly trying to train and tell people what are prescribed flow, how you should do certain things and so I’m doing exactly that but more from an enablement perspective.
SS: Fantastic. Well, we’re excited to have you join us today. I’d love to start off by just understanding what enablement maturity means for enablement success within your organization.
NN: I feel like this is one of those things that every team is going to define totally different and it depends on who you’re talking to and what their typical focus looks like. My response might be a little different than what other people might say, but how we look at enablement maturity, we have some key components. The key components that we personally look at Redis are basically sales effectiveness, performance, and readiness. In addition to that, we also look at some buyer engagement, and another one that I’m responsible for is content management. All of those play a very critical part in our day-to-day that allows us to determine what our sales enablement maturity looks like.
SS: I think you’re spot on in your experience, how has your enablement strategy may be changed or evolved as it’s matured?
NN: When I joined our team there were only two people. We had a VP and a director, so I was one of the very first actual practitioner enablement higher that owned enablement from the day-to-day perspective, even though our director was super involved in the teams that we support. With me coming on board we started having more hands-on conversations with leadership and management. In addition to that, we started to have more one on one with reps too. Now we have nine people by the way. We started from two to nine and so it all happened because of the need and also the integrated approach that we’re starting to follow for our enablement team.
The way that we’re structured at the moment is we have a person that’s dedicated to account planning, we have head counts that are more focused on team-specific readiness, and then we have an onboarding person and a content writer and you already know that I own the tech stack and then we have a person that’s responsible for just sales performance. We also have charters that help us outline what our focus needs to look like for any given quarter or year. In addition to that, we do follow a lot of different workflows and frameworks that help us define our goals in the long run. I know that’s a long-winded response to your question but our maturity kind of depends on the need for the business, so where does the business want to be, and we kind of align our expectations to that.
SS: Awesome. That does tee us up nicely for the next question. What does your process look like for auditing and optimizing your current workflows?
NN: We’re very data-driven and when I say we’re very data-driven like we have multiple folks on our team that are actually really good at creating reports and putting together dashboards. I know most enablement teams typically work with their ops team, and so do we, we actually have a very strong relationship with our internal sales ops team, but our team also does a very fantastic job. I’m one of the people that create reports and dashboards for us that helps us understand the workflows that we’re creating landing. Like are folks actually following the suggested structure that we’ve given to them to achieve the goals that they have? We are very much so involved in their day-to-day function.
Say for prospecting, as an example, our team is actually telling them where to go, what to do, and at what time. Our flow starts with identifying your accounts and finding your prospects, adding them to the sequence, but what flow do you need to follow to get to that, we prescribe that to them. In addition to that, we also track who’s really performing well with the flow that we’ve suggested. It’s actually pretty easy to see if people are following the prescriptive workflows. The way we can track that is by using some of the reporting and metrics that we’ve rolled out to folks and ensuring that people are hitting those. If they’re not, it’s quite simple for us to know who are the folks that are actually not doing what we’re suggesting that they do.
The way we’re auditing that is using the reporting, but in addition to that our hands-on approach is more with the folks that are owning those teams. We work very closely with managers to kind of have a conversation where they let us know, okay, because these folks are not following the process that you’ve rolled out, here’s the potential reason that they might not be, or here’s the reason why we need to have a direct conversation with them to steer them in the right direction. We have one on ones with our reps that may not be following the workflow that we’re suggesting and we work very closely with the leaders and managers to ensure that we have buy-in from them. At the end of the day, enablement can do so much, but if we don’t have the necessary buy-in from the leadership, the stuff that we’re rolling out is not going to get picked up.
SS: Absolutely, you’re spot on. How do you go about tying your enablement processes and programs to specific business goals that as you said, your leaders care deeply about that will help you get that buy-in?
NN: That’s actually a great question. We have recently started focusing on this and because of how ingrained we are in our seller’s day-to-day, our team is tied to the revenue that our sales teams are generating. Not only do we come into play towards the end of the sale cycle, were involved from the start to the beginning, from prospecting to discovery to evaluation and purchase. All of that. We are very much so involved in the entire process. We’re fully integrated into their day-to-day.
The way that we determine how our processes are really helping the teams is based on the pipeline that they’re generating. In addition to that, we’re also tied to the revenue that they’re generating. If the teams are not producing enough pipeline, it comes down to us identifying, okay, is it because of the workflows that we’ve rolled out and those are not landing? Or is it because folks are actually not following those workflows which are leading to the gap in the pipeline that we were generating?
SS: I’m so excited to hear that you guys are starting to do that within your organization. I think that’s a huge step forward in helping enablement position itself strategically within the organization. What goals do you have for the next year in regard to maybe helping to evolve enablement maturity within your organization?
NN: I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to the maturity models and kind of identifying where we fall in that category. Obviously, I know there are so many different maturity models that are out there and so some of the ones that I’ve looked at recently are like the one from demand metrics and the one from Highspot and there are so many of them. I would say that as far as where we fall today we’re kind of like a good mix between data-driven and partially mature. No one’s ever going to tell you that their enablement team is like fully at a level where they’re optimized and their entire flows are fully integrated with everything. I think we do always have room for improvement.
As far as our organization goes or how our team is functioning as I said, we’re a key player in pipeline tracking and management. In addition to that, we are quite involved with ops and marketing. We also play a very critical factor in driving revenue and growth and we are supported by execs and leadership as I said. We also track usage and adoption, which I mentioned. Our team is extremely data-driven and we try to focus our initiatives based on what we’re really looking for as a team or as a company or as an organization. Our VP of enablement is very close to our CRO. Depending on what our chief revenue officer is looking for, our charters change and our initiatives also change. We always align our expectations with what the company needs and desires.
As far as our future, in the direction that we’re heading, I mean we all know that the economy is kind of experiencing ebbs and flows, so with that comes the revenue that your company is generating is also going to have ebbs and flows. On top of that, pipeline creation becomes quite important because nowadays folks are only going to have conversations with you if the product that you’re selling is necessary for their day-to-day and if it’s going to become a part of their mission-critical approach. Our focus for the rest of this year and going into next fiscal year is to ensure that our teams understand the requirements around, hey, you need to have conversations that are more pain based, you need to follow the workflows that we’re suggesting because those are actually going to help you win the deals that you might have staggered.
In addition to that, if you’re wanting to create a pipeline, it’s important that you follow the structure and the KPI metrics that we’ve rolled out because consistency is going to get you across the board. Being all over the place is not going to help you in any way. Again, long-winded response, but I think the direction that we’re going is going to be very much so just ensuring that we’re understanding their internal data, understanding how our teams perform and aligning our goals, and prioritizing our expectations with that.
SS: Now I’d love to get your perspective. What do you think other enablement practitioners should know about enablement maturity and what can you share to help them prepare their own journeys?
NN: I think the very first thing that they need to look at is how would you define your enablement maturity. How do you define your team’s primary focus? From there build that towards how you’re going to achieve that maturity and look at the primary criteria that are going to enable yourself and also the teams that you’re supporting and the part that leadership that’s supporting you is going to play in that. One of the things that I noticed last week when I was at Sales Enablement Society is folks are hungry to understand how other sales enablement teams are running the function. There’s a lot that goes into an enablement team and the way they function, but as far as the maturity goes for the enablement team, it’s very much so dependent on the desires and the requirements that your company has.
We’re lucky that our CRO understands the importance that an enablement team has in their day-to-day. Not every company does. For a lot of folks, you are going to have to do some internal selling in order for the teams to understand the critical part that the enablement team plays in the actual revenue-generating goals. Long story short, I think the things that enablement needs to consider as they’re going to mature is looking at what’s on the charter, obviously creating that charter on the front end, aligning that with the company goals and the desires that your leadership has, and ensure that you have buy-in from the team’s. Not only from the leadership and executive level but also from the front-line managers. Those front-line managers are the ones that are going to reinforce anything that you’re rolling out. Any framework that you’re rolling out or any workflows that you’re rolling out. If you don’t have to buy in from the front-line managers, whatever you’re sharing is not going to land and it’s not going to show any success.
In addition to that, once you do roll out those frameworks and once you do roll out workflows that you’re rolling out, make sure you have the plan to track the success. Make sure you’ve identified the metrics that are going to help you understand if the work you’re doing is making an impact. We’re at a place where nobody wants to just roll something out just because you think it’s the right thing, they want to see an actual impact that we’re making.
SS: Absolutely last question for you. To close, how has your organization leveraged Highspot to help achieve some of the business outcomes that you guys have seen through enablement?
NN: We rolled out Highspot almost 2.5 years ago at this point, and we actually replaced another competitor of yours. Folks didn’t really believe in a content management system prior to us rolling out Highspot, and here’s why. No one really owned that platform at the time and things were a complete mess. Once we rolled out Highspot, we started to organize our content in a way that it’s easier for people to find it. Now, I’m not going to say that we’re pro at it, one of the projects that I’m focusing on in the coming months is actually restructuring our Highspot content and how we’re presenting that to our sales team. To do that, I’ll be working very closely with our teams and kind of going through the format that we’ve put together and seeing if it will help them in identifying the content.
As far as using Highspot, it has played a very critical part in our seller’s day today. Not only are we using Highspot as a CMS, but we also use Highspot’s Training and Coaching capability and we use Highspot capabilities for our onboarding and so our boot camp sessions and our onboarding sessions, which is set up in a way where folks can just go into a Highspot and kind of complete this, so it’s self-paced. Not only are we just using this for onboarding purposes, but we also use that whenever we purchase a new product. We rolled out 6sense late last year, so I created an actual course. These were two separate courses, one for SDRs and one for AEs that outline the workflow that’s recommended as far as the usage of 6sense goes. That’s how we rolled that out. When we onboard 6sense folks actually had to go through that training, and so whenever a new hire starts, they all go through that training.
That’s just one example. We have many other examples where we’re using Highspot capabilities to ensure that folks understand from the front end instead of just going into some of those other platforms to kind of do whatever they want. Highspot has played a very critical role in our onboarding needs in addition to that also ensuring that our content is up to date. We track buyer engagement with our content, so how engaged are our buyers with some of the content that we’re creating? We have analytics and reporting on all of that too. I’m a big fan and love Highspot and excited to see the way we plan on evolving it in the coming months.
SS: I love to hear that. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
NN: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
SS: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.
Enablement as a business function has evolved significantly in recent years. Alongside this evolution, the push towards enablement maturity has become all the more prevalent with recent research from Sales Enablement PRO finding that 48% of enablement teams are moderately mature while just 1% are among the most mature.
So how can you improve the maturity of your enablement function as the field continues to rapidly evolve? We have invited Highspot’s very own Vice President of Revenue Strategy, Haley Katsman, to the podcast today to help us answer just that. Thanks for joining Haley, I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role here at Highspot.
Haley Katsman: Thank you so much, Shawnna, I’m excited to be here. Hi everyone, my name is Haley Katsman and as the vice president of revenue strategy at Highspot, I lead enablement operations and analytics and planning for our global go-to-market teams. In addition, I lead our company’s account development team focused on pipeline generation. I’ve been with Highspot for almost eight years which is pretty crazy and have built and scaled our revenue strategy team including enablement from zero to about 90 people in the past four years. We have gone through our maturity journey as an organization and I’m excited to talk through that with you all today.
My background is in marketing sales from several different fortune 500 companies spanning consumer products, commercial real estate, marketing, and advertising, and my passion is really building and developing high-performing teams, empowering next-generation leaders, and really solving complex cross-functional problems with data-informed solutions.
SS: I’m extremely excited to have you here Haley. We’ve worked together for several years now and throughout your years in the enablement space, I would love for you to share with us the evolution you’ve seen in enablement and how you’ve seen the space mature over the years.
HK: Well, as you know, we were in it together but when I started at Highspot back in 2014, enablement was a relatively new discipline. That’s not to say that someone in the organization was not doing enablement activities like a manager coaching their reps or someone running an onboarding program or telling reps how to use content, but in most organizations, it certainly wasn’t a dedicated function with a seat at the table in driving strategic initiatives within the organization. We’ve even seen the title of enablement become significantly more prevalent over the past 5 to 10 years and now you see companies like Salesforce, Amazon, Siemens, Twilio, DocuSign, and Airbnb with dedicated and quite large enablement teams with very senior leaders that have a seat at the table and we just didn’t see that back in 2014.
The evolution of it in the past few years, enablement has become so much more than managing content or training reps. The best of the best, some of the companies that I just mentioned are now really aligning go-to-market teams to systematically enable their reps to execute against the behaviors and initiatives that are going to drive specific outcomes that align to revenue target and that’s a different way than thinking about it from just, you know, have my reps gone through 100% completion of a particular training course.
I kind of like to think about the sports analogy, you can pick your favorite professional sports team, and in pretty much every scenario that team not only has a coach, but they have an entire team enabling their success. They have a nutritionist, a personal trainer, a therapist, a doctor, coaching specialists, and analysts that are systematically determining what’s going to make them most successful in winning a championship and they just couldn’t do it without that team. That’s really how I’ve seen sales and revenue teams evolve you can’t just bet on a few top-performing reps that have a book of business or relationships that they’ve been depending on for many years, you have to invest in enabling the team, and have to have a strong team of people that are doing that.
SS: I love that perspective on the evolution of the enablement market. Now, from your perspective, what is enablement maturity and what does that mean for enablement success within an organization?
HK: From my perspective, enablement maturity is shifting from the foundational programs to driving strategic outcomes that are again tied to revenue. For example, foundations are critically important, so it’s not that you don’t do them, enablement must lay that foundation for reps to be successful. Think onboard, sales methodology tools, enablement content, and messaging enablement. email templates, territory planning, you name it, all of those things are foundations to the business, but for enablement to truly be successful in an organization, I think it means three things. I think it means moving the maturity to become more granular and targeted to your approach with specific internal audiences and what they need to do to hit their quota targets. Second, I think it means aligning those foundations to specific business objectives, not just an onboarding program where you learn about everything, but what the rep needs to be successful in the first 3 to 6 months of their ramp to generate the pipeline needed to hit their targets as an example. Third, giving up the maturity model means becoming more data-informed and leveraging analytics to really optimize your enablement strategy and ultimately the business strategy.
Honestly, if I think back to 2014 that probably wasn’t possible because we didn’t have the data at our fingertips or the knowledge in which to know how to use it like we do today. I think that those three things, getting more granular and targeted, aligning to specific business objectives, and becoming more analytical and data-informed in your enablement strategy make the difference between a successful enablement team that has a high ROI and impact on the business. versus one that is still in its early days and focused on laying the foundation.
An example that may bring it to life is let’s say that your business determines that to grow the business and remain competitive in the market, they need to acquire another company. Super common. In your revenue model, there’s now going to be a line item associated with the revenue expected to be brought in via that acquisition. Of course, you’re gonna spend likely millions of dollars acquiring a company and there’s an expected revenue return on that. Now, we know that most strategic initiatives fail. On average, 70% of them fail and acquisition specifically more than 80% of them fail. The question is why. When you get into the execution of it selling this new product that’s been acquired, why would a rep go out of their way to sell a new product that they don’t know about, there are new competitors, and they don’t know what good looks like and they might already be hitting their quota without selling this new product?
Typically, organizations will build a ton of content, throw it over the wall, spend our certifying reps in a siloed environment and then months later find out that they missed the number for the acquisition. Well, if you think about enablement and moving up that maturity model, what if you had a systematic way to ensure that sellers achieve mastery of the activities or the behaviors needed to sell the product from this acquisition, and what if you had leading indicators to understand if you were going to miss the revenue number before you missed it? That’s where I think enablement can have a major impact on revenue. Those leading indicators to us understand, well, if we acquire this product and the reps don’t know about the product, they haven’t gone through the training, they’re not running the plays associated with this acquisition, well, I can tell you right off the bat, you’re probably not going to hit the revenue number.
It’s that transition from enablement, thinking about completion or attendance metrics to thinking about driving consistent performance so that you have most of your reps hitting quota and that quota is associated with the outcomes that you’re trying to drive throughout the business, such as selling this new product via acquisition, as opposed to just hoping that 20% of your reps carry 80% of the revenue. Making that mindset shift and really changing how you run your programs based on that, is that shift that I think enablement really needs to make in order to truly be successful.
SS: I love that perspective and thank you for walking us through that scenario. Now, I know it’s a podcast so unfortunately, we don’t have visuals, but at a high level, can you walk us through the different stages of enablement maturity and how have you experienced these different stages throughout your own enablement career as the field has evolved?
HK: At another time I could go much deeper on the five stages of enablement maturity across different areas of the business, like training maturity and content maturity and all of that, but just to simplify it down, I think that organizations go from being relatively unstructured and reactive in their approach. They’re kind of putting out whatever the most recent fire is, just focusing on those foundational programs like I mentioned, like an onboarding program and as you move up the maturity model, it really becomes more focused on what you need the reps to be able to do in order to hit their quota and for the business to hit their revenue targets. What that transition is from that passive reactive mindset to really start with what are the outcomes that we need to drive from a business standpoint and what are the behaviors that the reps need to accomplish and flip that on its head so that enablement has a way in which to prioritize the millions of things that the business is asking them to do by focusing in on what’s most impactful for the reps to be successful.
You’ll see from an enablement maturity standpoint, going from that unstructured environment and unstructured kind of way of working to being very value-driven, and everything that enablement does need to be tied to specific business outcomes. I’ve seen this come to life in our organization as we have evolved and as the enablement discipline has evolved from just like I said, being much more reactive to whatever is going on in the business and the most recent fire reprioritization that’s needed to happen to really shift where enablement is actually driving the alignment between the go-to-market functions and we’re giving early leading indicators to the business if we’re going to hit our revenue targets or not, and giving that feedback loop to say, hey, this initiative isn’t performing the way that we thought it would or it is, but not everyone is doing it and really able to course correct before we drive off a cliff as it relates to a specific initiative that we have.
That has just really transformed how everyone in the business engages enablement because we’re all working towards one common goal as opposed to having competing priorities and having re-prioritization of everything that we’re working on on a monthly and quarterly basis. We have a long-term plan and we’re working towards that long-term plan.
SS: Now, as advice to our listeners, in your experience, what are some of the first steps enablement practitioners should take to begin to improve their organization’s enablement maturity?
HK: I think there are two things that I would say. As an enablement practitioner, a big part of what we have to do, and I talk with people about this all the time, is we have to be selling enablement internally in our organization all of the time. It’s not the case that every CEO or CRO truly understands the value that enablement can provide and to assume that they do is just not going to help you get to that next level of maturity. I think first and foremost it’s identifying who are the key stakeholders that really need to understand what the value of enablement could look like within your organization. It doesn’t mean that you need to do it tomorrow, but helping them understand that if they partner with you and they make the investments, this is where the enablement function could go within your organization, and here’s how it would positively impact them and their world.
For example, for a CRO, I can help reduce rep attrition, I can help you improve your participation rate, and make more of your reps hit quota. I can help give those leading indicators to understand if you’re going to miss your revenue targets, those are things that they’re going to care about, and again, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to do them tomorrow, but helping them understand what enablement potential looks like will help you get them on your side of the table so that you can better partner with them and begin that enablement maturity.
I’ll also say that a really important step that I always guide enablement practitioners on is really understanding your revenue model. If you want to go and have a conversation with your CMO, CRO, CEO, CFO, or whoever that is to get buy-in, if you’re not speaking their language and understanding what business outcomes you’re trying to drive, they’re not going to take you seriously. You need to understand what the reps quotas are, what your headcount model looks like, at a very high level to the information that you’re able to get, what your revenue model looks like and what are the key strategic initiatives that your organization is investing in for you to hit those revenue targets. Oftentimes it’s not the case that they’re going to come and just volunteer that information to you and so you need to go out and seek out those answers. Sometimes they’ll openly give them to you or just get as much information as you can so that you can align your strategy to those specific metrics in the organization and they’re going to be much more inclined to have a conversation with you about forming a better partnership.
SS: Absolutely. Now, as you mentioned, Haley, evolving from one stage of maturity to the next does not happen overnight. What might a roadmap to maturity look like for an organization and how can teams develop that roadmap together with their stakeholders?
HK: I think the first and most important thing is getting a baseline understanding of where you’re at today and then where you want to go, and in what time frame. I think about that again, like let’s understand the current state where we’re at, where the gaps are and where we want to be call it a year, two years from now. Based on the gap between those things, there’s a set of things that you can do to help crawl, walk, run your way to that longer-term vision. We have something at Highspot called the strategic enablement framework with a set of maturity models, whether it’s your training maturity model or your coaching maturity model that really helps you go through that kind of crawl, walk, run process, but the most important part is getting an understanding of where you are today and where you want to go longer term so that you know what you’re working with.
SS: Absolutely. Now, Haley, one of the things that I’ve always admired about you is you have an extremely proactive mindset. What is the value of having a proactive mindset as an enablement leader versus a reactive mindset, and how can this help the journey toward improved maturity?
HK: I think of having a proactive mindset as looking around corners. Taking that initiative where someone might not have delegated or asked you to go and do something. I think that when you are able to look around the corner and be more proactive, what ends up happening is the business starts to look at you as more of a consultant and a strategic partner and they pull you into conversations more than you have to push your way in. What I hear from a lot of enablement practitioners is frustration and I 100% empathize with that because they’re not sitting in the room when the strategy conversations are happening and then they get delegated something and priorities change every seemingly five seconds, but probably, 3 to 4 times a year. The way to really flip that on its head is to be more proactive and help your stakeholders look around the corners and then like I said, they will pull you into conversations and that’s when you’re doing it right when you don’t have to push your way into the room, but when you’re being pulled in, but you’ve got to show value.
I think that the more that you can be looking around the corner and be proactive, the more value you’re going to be able to provide. The beautiful part about enablement is that it’s one of the only functions in the go-to-market organization that has visibility across the entire funnel and understands what’s working and what’s not working between all the revenue-generating teams, because oftentimes it can be relatively siloed. You have this amazing and unique perspective to share that proactive looking around the corner, those insights, whether they’re analytical or whether they’re more anecdotal. I think that you can really take those insights, package them up and help people look around the corner, and then you’ll get pulled into having a seat at the table as opposed to having to push your way in there.
SS: Fantastic. Maturing and enablement functions require a lot of change management. What are some of your best practices for driving change through enablement?
HK: I would say that change management is difficult but I think that one of the things that are incredibly critical in driving change management is getting alignment on the outcomes that you’re trying to drive. That goes back to what I talked about earlier around understanding your revenue model, understanding the key initiatives that the business is prioritizing to meet those revenue targets and when you’re able to align everyone towards a common goal and a common vision, then you’re able to enlist them all as agents of change in that process.
I think it’s really critical to really understand why the business is doing something. Let’s just take that acquisition example that I gave earlier. Well, why did we acquire that company? Is it because the product that we acquired is going to make us more competitive in the market, or is it because we need to increase our price and ASP and so we need to add more value to our offering? What is the why behind it, because then what you need to do from an execution standpoint, and really what the reps need to be able to do might be incredibly different depending on the why? Let’s say it’s because of competitive reasons, well then as it relates to that acquisition and that new product they’re going to have to really understand the competitive landscape and potentially new competitors that are coming into the deal and how to do objection handling and competitive daggers and whatnot. If it’s about increasing the value of the platform, they’re going to really have to understand value messaging and how to talk about the entire solution and the ROI of your solution, which is a really different thing that you’re asking the reps to actually go and do.
Oftentimes everyone has the why in their own mind and people have different opinions on it and that’s what causes that lack of alignment. Ultimately, if you don’t have alignment, it’s really difficult to drive change and so I think that as enablement leaders our job is to drive that alignment, and the best way to do that is to align the group to those outcomes and to the why behind those initiatives so that you know exactly what you want your reps to go and do and can really get everyone behind systematically driving that change.
SS: I love that now. Not that this is a sales pitch, but how can organizations leverage Highspot to help achieve strategic business outcomes through enablement?
HK: A lot of what we do with customers is of course related to our platform, but a lot of the conversations that we have with them are actually just about how to implement best-in-class enablement discipline in their organization. I think that there are things that we can do from a technology standpoint and then there’s a whole lot of things that we can do as it relates to advising and consulting on how to move through the maturity model, how to get a seat at the table, how to get more investment, how to become more data-driven in your approach, all of those types of things. I think at the end of the day what we really help companies do from a technology standpoint is we really help connect all of the dots in one unified place in which you need to drive that systematic change in behavior.
Instead of onboarding a rep in one platform, teaching them their methodology and another giving them content in another place, and trying to piece together all the analytics in a third-party data source, which is a complete nightmare, it’s not a good rep experience and ultimately at the end of the day, it’s not going to drive any change in behavior. What we’re really focused on is how we help that all come to life in one place where it’s a seamless experience, it’s in context, in the moment of action, and where all the analytics are already stored in one place that you can connect to business outcomes in your CRM. Again, I think there are a lot of advancements that we’ve made from a technology standpoint that unlocks enablement’s ability to be more data-driven and connect better to business outcomes, but at the end of the day, I really think that we’ve helped a lot of organizations move up the maturity model through our expertise and enablement, the best practices that we’ve developed, not just from our own experiences but from the experiences that our customers have had. We work with the best enablement teams in the world and have learned a lot from them and so that’s what really excites me about partnering with companies is really helping enablement get a seat at the table and help enablement make the biggest impact on the business as possible.
SS: I love that, Haley. Last question for you. To close, how do you think enablement will continue to evolve in the next year and beyond?
HK: I think some exciting things are coming. One, I think enablement already is but will continue to evolve beyond just enabling sales. I think it’s going to be about enabling all customer-facing and revenue-generating teams, pre, and post-sale, customer success, partner, marketing, and even evolving into enabling customers. It’s all about starting with the customer experience and with the outcomes that you’re trying to drive around revenue, and customer satisfaction, an enablement really should be taking an aligned approach to enabling anyone that touches the customer. I think that’s one piece, you’ll see revenue enablement as a new title that’s popped up over the past couple of years, whereas it used to just be sales enablement.
Another trend or evolution that I’m starting to see and really hope to see more of is manager enablement. I think historically enablement teams have been focused on enabling individual contributors, like reps, and if you have the business and an enablement team telling a rep to do one thing, but their managers coaching them on something different, who do you think they’re going to listen to? They’re going to listen to their boss. I think that we need to do a better job at really setting the frontline managers and even the managers of managers up for success and understanding exactly what their reps need to be able to successfully do to meet their targets. Manager enablement and coaching is a huge evolution that we’ve made ourselves and has really unlocked a lot of potential for us.
Then, I think this is kind of a specific one, but I really hope and I’m starting to see that enablement becomes model driven from a headcount standpoint. You get what you pay for back to that sports analogy and if you want a winning sales team, you need to invest in setting your revenue teams up for success. I hope to never see any more of these one to two-person enablement teams expected to enable thousands of people because I can just tell you it’s near impossible to move that far up the maturity model if you are not investing in setting your revenue teams up for success. I think the best way to justify that in the business is to make it model-driven just as you would with a sales engineering-type team, whereas in most organizations it’s very model driven based on how many reps you have. I hope to see the same thing from an enablement standpoint because that then is what truly will unlock enablement and thus the revenue team’s ability to perform at the highest level.
SS: That’s fantastic, Haley. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and your experience in enablement with us over the years. I really appreciate your perspective.
HK: Absolutely! Thank you so much, Shawnna.
SS: Thank you to our audience for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.
When enablement teams effectively use data to analyze business impact, they are two times more likely to exceed executive expectations, but with a plethora of data spread across different teams and tools, it can be difficult to know where to look to find the insights that matter. So what are the best ways to gather meaningful data and leverage analytics to increase the impact of your enablement programs?
Today, I’m excited to be joined by Ashley Rosenbaum from LiveIntent to share some of her best practices with us. Ashley, welcome. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your organization.
Ashley Rosenbaum: Hi Shawnna, thank you so much for having me. My name is Ashley Rosenbaum and I’ve spent a lot of my career in media, both on the agency side, buying and planning for various types of clients, and then also on the Adtech and Martech side, supporting ad sales teams in various capacities. I’m currently at LiveIntent where I’ve spent the last 3.5 years building the sales enablement function here and my role is currently sales enablement marketing director, which essentially means I work closely with our sales, customer success, product marketing, and marketing leaders to ensure that our sales and customer success teams are equipped with the information and the materials that they need to successfully engage clients and prospects throughout the customer journey.
SS: Super excited to have you here Ashley. Now to jump right in a common challenge that enablement leaders can face is having limited access to the analytics that matter to track what works and to really prove enablement value. I’d love to hear from you, what are some of the potential ways that this can impact enablement practitioners?
AR: That’s a great question. I would say that since the beginning of my career in sales enablement, I’ve been working through the challenge of limited access to data and analytics that I know would prove the impact and value of sales enablement efforts, but as a result, reporting on sales enablement influence revenue or return on investment specifically can sometimes be sort of lofty and not perfect or consistent enough to actually report on. It’s a matter of being very clear in how you communicate that to your leadership and your manager and making sure that they’re as clear as you are on the types of data that you can report on and what you can use to demonstrate and show where sales enablement has impacted whether that be productivity, whether that be sales effectiveness, self readiness in multiple capacities, I would say it’s just a matter of being very transparent with leadership and also set a goal for yourself that you would like to work toward in proving the analytics that you can use to be able to tell a better story in the future and set some sort of a timeline so that in six months or within the year I’d like to work with your business operations team and Highspot, for example, to see how we can set ourselves up to have that more real data that really ties together your revenue to the sales enablement programs and efforts you’re putting out there.
SS: Absolutely. Now can having actionable insights help enablement practitioners overcome this challenge of understanding what works in proving value and what are some of the ways that you’ve started to use Highspot analytics to gather some of these insights?
AR: At LiveIntent, we’ve become super users of the playbook smart page that Highspot had created a little bit ago and they’re fantastic and really helping us prove out our value from an enablement perspective to many different teams using the data in sort of different ways. Typically when we’re rolling out a new product, I will work with product marketing to build out a playbook to ensure that we’re following the Know, Say, Show, Do structure and equipping sales with everything they need to know, the messaging that’s going to empower them and give them strong conversations to result in a successful business, as well as all the materials and collateral that they can use to show this new product, as well what to do if the if they do win that sale, what can we do internally to get ourselves ready to go live with this client and what can we share with the client that they can provide all that stuff to us and we can go live without a hitch.
Having all this information in a single place means that we can communicate specifically with product marketing on how the content is used. For example, if they built out six different email templates or pitch templates as Highspot calls them, but only two of them have been used more than three times maybe next time for the next product launch they will only create two email templates because it’ll be more specific and direct to sales and customer success on when to use them and why they should use them. Fewer options are sometimes better in the long run. It’s a matter of making product marketing a bit more efficient with their time and not creating things that don’t get used.
We can work with the sales leadership team, so let’s say for a specific product example, it’s one sales team that will be tasked with bringing it to market. If we don’t see 100% adoption of that playbook in general, meaning each of those sellers has gone through the playbook in full and gone through each of the items within it, meaning that they’re equipped and ready to go to market. Then we can work with the sales leaders on the individuals who have not and make sure that they are changing that behavior, but also how many pitches are being sent by each seller. There’s so much data now that they can then go and use it to see all of their direct reports, like how many pitches have they all sent, are they sending about an even amount, and are there sellers that are selling more than others? That can give us a sense of the volume that the new product information is going out and if that then helps us get to our revenue goals in the long run.
Although it’s not a perfect tie from Highspot to our sales force or Looker data to know actual revenue tied to pitch there is a very clear correlation in how sales are doing to the amount of usage, the amount of pitching, the amount of external engagement with those pitches that can then tie back the value of our sales enablement efforts.
SS: Very interesting. What are some key metrics that can be helpful for leaders to determine the success of their enablement programs? How can metrics be correlated with larger business goals to really demonstrate enablement impact.?
AR: We really tap into our sales plays and the analytics within the scorecards of those sales plays. Specifically understanding if we’ve got a specific group of sellers that are being tasked with selling this one new product that we’ve launched, we’ll make sure that we’re checking in on a weekly basis on the percent of the target audience being in this case, the sellers that are being tasked to sell this product, the percentage of them that have read through the playbook from start to finish, the percent of them that have actually externally pitched the content that they were trained to go ahead and bring to customers and market, and we’re able to connect regularly with sales leadership so that they have an understanding of the volume of pitches that are being sent out by their sales reps as well as the engagement that those sales reps are getting on those external pitches.
There’s a direct correlation we’ve found between the pitch volume and as well as pitch engagement in terms of the pitches that turn into closed-won opportunities and revenue for our organization. We’ve just found that the analytics from the scorecard in terms of the number of pitches being sent, as well as the level of personalization in the pitches that are being sent, has a direct correlation in the closed won ratio and our percent that we win will be higher with that sales training, that sort of emphasizes personalization in the pitch that the sellers are going to be bringing to market.
SS: Absolutely, you know, for analytics to uncover valuable insights, having strong adoption is also important to show how reps are using the platform and the impact it’s having on their performance. What are some ways that practitioners can drive adoption and how can adoption help improve the impact of analytics?
AR: Great question. Using the analytics and play scorecards helps our sales leaders understand how sales training is landing and it helps them to understand who is using the materials and the way that they should be. To really hone in on that will use the percent of the audience that’s pitch content and also dive deeper in there. For managers to be able to understand how many of their direct reports of pitch content and how many pitches they have sent and then them going back into our CRM system and looking into the number of opportunities that have been created, the progress on the process of those opportunities and then being able to sort of correlating that to closed won opportunities, but just the fact that there’s the data and analytics for our managers to see if their teams are using the materials in the way that they should be.
What we mean by that is did they read through all of the internal knowledge and information on what the product is, how it works, and what the considerations are then have they gone through and are they using the frequently asked questions and talking points documentation to help them have stronger, more effective conversations with prospects and with customers, and then are they pitching the materials and the information that we’re asking them to. For the manager to really go in and see how sellers are using materials that are available for them and then identify where gaps are and correlate those gaps directly to not hitting quota or not really being able to respond to objections in an effective way really helps the sales leader train and coach their direct reports, but it has also informed sales enablement and product marketing and the materials that we should be creating on a consistent basis for our sellers and customer success managers to use to empower them to have better-improved conversations with our customers and prospects.
SS: I love that. I think that’s fantastic. How can managers maybe even use analytics and coaching conversations to drive rep performance and accountability?
AR: I would say it’s been a process. So helping our managers really understand the in-depth analytics that is available to them and not just like the fact that oh they can go into Highspot to find information and content rather than asking Ashley on Slack. It’s a lot deeper than that. There’s a lot more that goes into it, and so by empowering our managers to see the data that’s behind the numbers that they’re able to see in our CRM or in our marketing automation platforms. Those are numbers, quantifiable numbers, but having information around how much time a seller spent reading through the materials to get to know a product and learn how it works as well as if they’ve even viewed some of the materials that they should be using to arm them with what they need to be successful.
You know, they’re able to see the lack, for lack of a better term. Such as whether their direct reports are being proactive and setting themselves up for success or if they’re being a little lazy and they’re able to sort of call their sales reps out on this stuff specifically.
SS: Absolutely. What are some ways that data can help uncover what is working for maybe some of those high-performing reps? How have you been able to maybe even leverage high spot scorecards to gather some of these insights?
AR: One of the biggest findings that we’ve found, where our top performers are really tapping into pitch templates, and what this sort of says to me and that I’ve said to the sales leaders is they’re making their efforts scalable and they’re using their time efficiently. So rather than individualizing every single email that they write out and having to recreate the wheel every time they’re sending similar information out to similar customers or prospects, they’re able to use the same template over and over again and add some personalization as they see fit. It really makes them so much more effective and efficient at what they’re doing.
SS: Last question for you, Ashley. For other enablement leaders who may also just be getting started in leveraging analytics and using data to optimize their enablement programs, where would you advise them to begin?
AR: I would say the first step is just usage. You want to see your sellers and customer success managers using the platform, exploring what is in there and from there and from usage making sure that they’re pitching the content externally in the way that you want them to be and I’d say setting up reporting for yourself but also for leadership on the sales end and the customer success end too so that you can have some allies and some support in encouraging their direct reports to use Highspot in the right way and to be using it in general. Period. It’s just continuously driving adoption, really being sometimes repetitive but it’s typically not repetitive to the people you’re trying to drive adoption with. Just constantly reminding them how to use things and letting everybody know that you’re able to see who is and isn’t using it and using some of the success stories and the win to back up why they should be using Highspot and the way you’re asking them to. It’s not just for fun, there’s really like proven efficiencies and effectiveness that come from using it in the way you’re asking them to use it and sort of really making sure to stay on top of them and not let things slip by.
SS: Thank you so much, Ashley. I loved your insights.
AR: You’re so welcome. Thanks for having me.
SS: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.
Recent research from Sales Enablement PRO found that organizations that leverage enablement technology is four times more likely to effectively provide insight into what’s working well within enablement. So how can analytics be used to drive business impact and how can an enablement tool, like Highspot, help you gather the insights that make the difference?
Here to tell us all about the power of analytics in enablement today is Highspot’s very own Vice President of Revenue Analytics, Paul Lisagor. Thanks for joining us, Paul. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role here at Highspot.
Paul Lisagor: Absolutely. Hi Shawnna, I’m responsible for revenue analytics here at Highspot. My team is supporting sales, marketing, and the go-to-market strategy and planning functions for the organization. As far as my background I worked in analytics my entire career starting with reporting analyst and a reporting developer role while I was still in high school. Working through the years and across industries I have built expertise in both academic and practical data architecture, data science, finance, software development, and business strategy. I’m super excited to be here and looking forward to our conversation.
SS: We’re super excited to have you here Paul. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’d love to start by hearing about the value of actionable insights from your perspective. How can analytics help enablement teams grow their business impact?
PL: Look, the days when legacy companies could win just purely by showing up are over, and for some of the younger companies and newer industries, these days have never really existed. Companies today must really understand what’s going on within their business environment, what’s going on outside and around them, and of course is going on in our unpredictable world so they can quickly pivot, make decisions, and make adjustments to what and how they operate.
Running a business without having actual data and actual analytics is kind of like driving at night without your headlights on. You can sort of get away with it for some time, but ultimately, it simply doesn’t work. Within the enablement space, I find it to be particularly rich with opportunities where analytics can really help. Because of enablement’s indirect impact, it’s been historically very difficult to get good data and good metrics on the most important thing that enablement teams do, provide and improve business outcomes. Connecting enablement work to business goals and business outcomes is what analytics can do to help, and with knowing the impact, we can start to see where we’re steering toward and point the organization in the right direction.
SS: Absolutely. Why might some teams struggle to uncover insights or leverage the right data? How can enablement teams overcome some of these challenges?
PL: Getting the right signal from the data is difficult. It takes much more than good data technology, much more than fancy and shiny reporting, and certainly much more than simply investing in analytics. It takes time, it takes skill and it takes discipline. I found that most go-to-market organizations operate with so many unknowns and move so quickly that developing the new muscle, like analytics, just seems too impractical, too slow, too difficult, and too uncertain, but these investments, in my experience, and the patients around it have proven to be worth it every time.
To be a little more specific and to be successful, leaders need to find low-cost examples first. These low-cost proof points are extremely valuable. They establish executive support and build an understanding within the organization of what analytics can do. With this, they can then move into hiring the right people, putting the right tools in place, and starting down the path, but starting down the path slowly, iteratively, and measuring outcomes every step of the way.
SS: That’s fantastic advice. What are some of the key ways that you use Highspot analytics in your day-to-day? How do you leverage insights regularly and how do these help you in your role?
PL: Highspot provides a unique set of reporting and a unique set of tools that helps us get started significantly earlier and faster than we normally would. Bringing someone into the organization to build out analytics is, of course, very expensive and takes a long time. They need to ramp up and truly understand the business to build something that truly works. Plus, getting it done on time and on budget is exceedingly complex and uncertain. Having analytics built by experts is incredibly valuable and becomes a huge accelerant in getting started on the journey.
SS: I love that. For business leaders, having access to actionable data is essential for decision-making. How do you help ensure that your stakeholders have access to and understand the analytics that matters for making strategic decisions for the business?
PL: Yes, thank you for that question. This is actually one of the most important things we can do as analytics leaders and as enablement leaders. Make sure that it’s not just the analytics team or just a select few that have access to data, but the larger community and business decision-makers who are able to self-service and get insights and metrics right away. As like we talked about prior, having the most sophisticated data technology, and most beautiful reporting won’t accomplish anything unless it’s used. What I would recommend using are the three ingredients that over my history and experience doing this, I came to appreciate and recognize. Three ingredients to success for getting stakeholders on board and using analytics in a meaningful way. Number one, not surprisingly, is enablement. Companies must develop skills and practices outside of their analytics organizations and within the teams that make decisions to get the right metrics on their own when they need them. Number two is building the culture. The culture around analytics is fairly unique. It’s a set of business practices where arguments are supported by evidence and that are supported by data win versus those that aren’t supported by data. Number three is bringing the right blend of technology and tools and putting that in place. Those are the tools and tech that unlock simple answers to simple questions for key decision makers and personas within the organization that need to make these business decisions at the time that they’re needed. The tech and these analytics and reports need to be simple so that they are also simple to enable and train on. That completes the loop of three. Beginning with enablement, building the culture, and creating the right tools.
SS: Absolutely. A common challenge for many organizations is moving from “random acts of enablement” to a strategic enablement approach. How can analytics help enablement leaders prove the value of enablement as a strategic function?
PL: When I think about a strategic approach, to me, it means achieving long-term objectives and creating enduring business value. It also means being systematic, having a framework and the program with specific outcomes in mind. Analytics is the connecting tissue that really ties enablement to business outcomes. Companies that successfully implement the practices that we discussed earlier become able to now set business hypotheses using data and reporting, and conduct research and analyses. On top of these hypotheses, we can capture the insights in the process, make business changes, experiment, and then ultimately measure the business outcomes that these changes bring about. That sequence of events then helps attribute business value to the outcomes and investment in enablement and in enablement analytics. Measurable business outcomes are the proof in the pudding.
SS: This has been fantastic, Paul. To close one last question, I’d love to hear about your predictions for how analytics will evolve and continue to play an essential role in elevating enablement value in the next year and the years to come.
PL: What we’ve discussed so far has really been about turning the lights on and confidently staying on the road and steering around the obstacles, but when I start thinking about the future, what comes to mind is autonomous driving. There will be more and more data and complexity in this world. Exceedingly it will more and more difficult for humans to process and manage this information and synthesize it into confident decisions without being overwhelmed. As we all know, information overload is real and it will continue to become more and more acute across organizations, across industries, across businesses, across departments, domains, and people. We’re going to need help and I believe AI and ML will have to step in and make decision-making faster, simpler and easier. I think companies that will do it well and figure this out, will turn enablement into a true differentiator. They’ll be able to set themselves apart and then quickly move into the fast lane and accelerate past their competition.
SS: I love that vision for the future. Thank you Paul so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time.
PL: Absolutely. Thank you for having me on.
SS: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
Oliver: Welcome everyone. I’m delighted to be here with a couple of guests. Here at Highspot, we’re lucky enough to work with hundreds of enablement leaders from across the world and one of the key things that we’re seeing is that the function is really moving from tactically, owning some programs like maybe sales onboarding to truly becoming a strategic lever for growing the business.
But when we talk to customers, it’s really all over the map still. Some companies are investing deeply, they’re aligning enablement with the business, other teams are underfunded, overwhelmed, and really just basically trying to keep their noses above the water line. So I’m here today with two seasoned experts in the enablement space who’ve really been helping to mature the discipline generally and especially within their companies. I’m really looking forward to hearing what they have to share with us.
Heidi runs enablement at Nvidia and Bradford runs it for Slack. Thanks for joining the conversation and let’s dive in. So I want to start with what enablement really tries to do. One of the key things that it tries to do is help companies take on really hard challenges.
Heidi, we were talking about this the other day, and you shared some of your experiences in helping to move Nvidia into this incredibly lucrative, but also incredibly complicated new market, which is to use GPU’s for AI and machine learning. How did you help the company which had traditionally focused on very different spaces, really try to enter this incredibly complicated, but exciting new space?
Heidi: Thanks very much for the question Oliver, and you’re right. Embarking on sales into areas like artificial intelligence, which your customers are going to have potential fear or see some areas of risk has to be done in a very careful way and a very well-informed way.
The way that that happened with Nvidia is that we would hire absolute experts, top of their craft in a specific industry area. For example, when we were embarking on introducing the power of AI into healthcare, we brought into our sales organization, heart surgeons. Somebody who had the credibility and had the language and understanding of the market to be able to connect the dots between the value of accelerated computing that Nvidia could offer in both hardware and software and putting that into play in specific healthcare use cases.
That model has actually worked quite nicely by spreading into other industries. Nvidia isn’t a unique position where we’re not competing on price necessarily or just performance factors alone, but it’s really specifically meaning the challenges of an industry use case. So we’ve also brought in experts in the areas of, autonomous driving in the automotive industry or oil and gas and on and on.
Now here’s the challenge though, that does not scale. We won’t have a team of sales leaders that come out of healthcare expertise, but we will have at least one. And that’s where enablement comes in. The enablement organization will partner with that subject matter expert on the sales team that understands the complexity of that industry really well.
And they also understand what conversations resonate most, and what types of, enablement resources have the biggest impact. What kind of training really helps scale that knowledge and we’ll codify that and spread it across the rest of the sales organization. So we don’t have just one expert, but we have a team of experts that are tackling that industry.
It’s made a big difference in our ability to grow and scale. And it’s happened through the enablement organization.
Oliver: So that sounds like a really hard challenge because, you know, if a typical seller doesn’t know anything about heart surgery and you bring in this heart surgeon, I could imagine that those sellers would be really scared about engaging with people in this industry, in a space they really have no background in.
How did you help them really overcome the fear of having those conversations in such a challenging area?
Heidi: Another great question. And I would say that we would not be setting up our salesforce for success if we were bringing people in who had no expertise in the area of healthcare, into the healthcare sales team.
So we might bring somebody who came from another organization, which is common in so many different tech companies in particular, but, but any industry. We might bring somebody who had been selling networking equipment, for example, or working with different software or working with different audiences within those different organizations.
But what we’re looking to do is to scale the true understanding of connecting the value of NVIDIA’s offerings into these use cases. So you might understand healthcare, you may not understand the power of AI in medical imaging. Or the power of AI specific to, proteomics and, and the types of research that is being done.
So what we’ll do is bring people who have general industry expertise and make them prepared to scale that very specialized expertise that we begin with.
Oliver: Got it, that makes a lot of sense. When I talked to enablement leaders in a wide variety of industries, though, many of them are grappling with much more prosaic problems than the kinds of things that you’re describing.
Many of them, you know, they’re just really struggling to get out of fire drill mode. They’re understaffed. They get hit by this constant succession of demand after demand. It feels like they’re on this sort of perpetual hamster wheel. You know, the business is saying, “I need you to do more of this and more of that and more initiatives and build more content.”
Bradford, when we were talking about this and how you’ve seen enablement teams get out of that mode, one of the things you mentioned that really struck me, and I’ve always sort of kept thinking about is, turning that team into essentially a special ops teams for strategic initiatives.
Tell us a little bit about what you meant by that and how can an enablement team really develop that ability?
Bradford: Well, first, I’m just turning over in my head, the term proteomics. And what it must be like to have to learn how to sell to someone who’s asking about that, but I love what you shared Heidi, it’s fascinating.
In terms of creating an enablement team that really is a special operations team for strategic initiatives, there are a few ways that I break that down. The first is that an enablement team above all can be uniquely positioned to harden the problem statement. What is it that we are trying to achieve?
And how will we know if we were successful? Even in relatively mature sales organizations, that question is not asked enough and not interrogated with enough rigor. An effective special operations team like mine, dare I say. Practices that skill practices, the skill of asking that question and demanding an answer to that question in a consultative and supportive manner, because a special operations team for strategic initiatives is not an execution team.
A special operations team is not simply carrying out a mission. What we are doing is upleveling a go-to-market organization to be successful against discrete objectives. And so for us, that means for enablement to be successful, we need product marketing to be successful. We need business operations to be successful. We need sales strategy to be in place. We need sellers to be communicated with. We need managers to be prepared. We need sales leaders to be providing air cover.
And we can do that in a scramble mode, which certainly I think most enablement leaders have experienced, and it is transparently a scramble mode when that happens. It’s hard to target outcomes when you’re scrambling. I’ll give you an example, just perhaps if it’s helpful. We at Slack relatively recently went through a verticalization exercise. Similar to what you shared, Heidi, where we took our sales teams and moved them into a number of much more strategic verticals.
The objective was sort of similar to what you shared, Oliver, enable people on these industries and we could have left it at that and said, okay, we’re going to go enable across 12 industries and 22 subsectors and a hundred subsectors, and we’ll get back to you when we’re done. Everyone involved in that initiative would have been set up for failure, if, in fact, that would have been our mandate.
So we have to prioritize, we have to specify, we have to understand revenue goals and how those goals are going to be broken down from pipeline and targets. Then start at the top.
Oliver: I love that example because I think it really puts your finger on something that a lot of companies struggle with, which is they have this new initiative, they get excited about it, they try to do a lot of things simultaneously, and then it just doesn’t land. It’s hard to prioritize because prioritizing means you have to say no to good ideas.
How did you convince the organization to say no to good ideas when you were deciding which of those things to prioritize?
Bradford: It’s a great question. And I’m very open to debate on this, but I don’t think it is enablement’s mandate, it should not be enablement’s mandate to be responsible for the decision-making. Enablement’s mandate is to facilitate decision-making and ensure that the decisions that have been made are actionable.
But I do not see my team as responsible for saying healthcare is the focus over manufacturing. That’s simply not where we are positioned to have credibility. However, where we can be really good is saying okay, if healthcare is prioritized over manufacturing, here’s how we can action on enabling our healthcare teams to be effective against the defined goals.
Oliver: Heidi, I’m curious if you’ve run into challenges where the business wasn’t making those hard trade-offs and decisions, and how do you go about really convincing people to do that if you need to?
Heidi: In fact, I couldn’t agree more with what Bradford had just said, the decision does come from the business.
Each of us are business people with a different perspective. We have opinions and that’s great, but when it comes to limited resources and important deliverables that need to be prioritized, the best way I’ve seen to do that is basically to go back to the business and those senior decision-makers to explain there’s four things we can do.
Which four would we believe is going to move the needle most effectively and in the biggest way. And then it becomes a natural conversation about what gets left behind or what gets shifted out by whatever time period. But it’s a more logical conversation rather than the big conversation of I’ve got 22 things I could be doing, tell me in what order they ought to be. That that’s not necessary to get from senior leadership, but what is most important is if we can only do a few things, let’s agree on what those are.
Oliver: When you started at Nvidia I think the team was pretty small and since then it’s grown quite a bit. I’m curious for those people in the audience who have a small team and who want to grow its capacity, what did you learn in the process of really building out the team that they could potentially get benefit from or learn some lessons from?
Heidi: Well, what I learned is that you start at the beginning and you have to have a solid foundation. If your sellers are not clear on the basics of what your selling motion is, what resources help them with their product set, what the products are, and what the value is. Those are just the minimum requirements.
So firstly doing that really, really well and really well means not only have great information and resources available but do it in a practical sense, such that people can find what they need easily. They know where to go. Where is the watering hole? Get what’s the easy button for me as a seller. So I’ll make sure I take advantage of those chest foundational resources.
So I organize the team by product set. We had three significant product groups. My sales enablement leaders were each assigned to a different product group. They sat at the go-to-market and launch table so they understood what was happening when and they were constantly thinking about how to translate that into field readiness. For those launches and for the ongoing care and feeding of the product sets.
So we started at the place where you can’t skip. We had to start with the product and as the team grew, because we became more complex. We went through something awhile ago that Bradford just mentioned that he went through and that is how do you then ensure that there’s another layer of sophistication and that is the map to your go-to-market.
Our go-to-market is by industry use case. We needed to ensure that the next couple of headcount that joined the team could then take that product enablement and customize it really customize it for individuals who are focused on a specific industry verticle. And again, to do it in such a way that it felt like an easy button.
If I was in the financial services industry, I knew exactly where to go, to get what I needed. I’m only being asked to be informed and educated in the things that I will actually deploy in the market. And then thirdly, to get even a little bit more sophisticated, we started to look at who are our key go-to-market partners and is there value in us investing dedicated enablement resources for some of those really important partners.
With NVIDIA’s primary hardware side of our business being focused on chips and processors, major OEMs were really important to us, and we need to ensure that we’re connecting dots for our OEM sellers.
In terms of the value of upselling, a GPU accelerated systems rather than something that might be CPU-based or other solutions. So we now have added additional resources to focus on each of the major OEMs so they’re speaking their language, their delivery and resources directly through OEM sellers and then onto those OEM seller partner community.
So as you get more and more sophisticated and want to reach a more relevant and resonant message for those different markets and audiences. You start with a foundation and then you continue to move with your go-to-market model and your commercial strategy in order to ensure that you’re supporting the way that has the biggest impact.
Oliver: That’s really interesting. The focus on partners is hugely relevant for some of our customers. Obviously, some of them are more of a direct business. Bradford, I’m curious, sort of building on that. What do you find is the best way to organize an enablement team because that’s a topic that a lot of our customers ask us about. What are the best practices, what do you think works really well?
Bradford: It’s so interesting listening to you share, Heidi, because in some ways I just have a lot of feelings about this one. I think I’ll share my fear because I do think in some ways my organizational structure is oriented around compensating for my fear. And my fear is that enablement, as we grow drifts up into the clouds and becomes a high altitude, global scaled function that is out of touch with the seller.
That is what I at all times want to mitigate against and am committed to mitigating against because I’ve seen that it’s scalable and maybe your metrics are easy to pull, but truly doesn’t matter on the ground. So for me, the foundation of my enablement organization is my field enablement team.
Those are field-embedded, leader-aligned, enablement partners who are literally having daily conversations with ICS and managers, literally shadowing calls, literally hearing from customers that feedback loop back to the global enablement organization. There is pressure. There is a temptation to say, maybe I should divert some of that headcount up into a more scaled global role, because I need to be enabling all AEs rather than a specific team.
But to date, you know, talk to me in a year. But to date, I really resisted that because a field-connected enablement team is a strong enablement team. In my opinion, it does add extra pressure to enablement to unlock that feedback loop. Right? So as we grow, as we scale, it is more and more important that the feedback loop with the field matches based on the conversations that any given enablement partner is having.
But we have to aggregate what’s happening with customers and we can do that in a number of ways. Conversational intelligence has been a remarkable boon for enablement and our ability to aggregate insights from customers and use those to inform both our enabling roadmap, as well as our product roadmap, our product strategy, our go-to-market strategy, has been hugely impactful.
So there may be a world in which someday we can tap into the minds and read the minds of sellers and managers, but in lieu of that, having enablement as considered to be part of the sales organization and living and breathing the experience of the sales organization is the most important piece.
Oliver: That’s super interesting the way you couch that. Heidi, as you were thinking about scaling a small enablement team to make it larger. What are the key areas of expertise that you think the team really has to be or become great at kind of building a little bit on what Bradford was saying?
Because I think that’s something a lot of enablement people struggle with a little bit is where should I try to get great. I’m curious as you scale a team, how do you think about that?
Heidi: It’s not easy. I’d say that we typically when looking for a new team member or considering where we’ve got gaps and looking to close them, the term unicorn comes out of the mouth in every conversation because you really want somebody who has sales, empathy, and understanding.
So you want somebody who’s been in this sales field and is interested in willing to move into an enablement role and that’s a bit of a unicorn. In our case, we also want somebody who’s got probably, some decent engineering chops. They may have also had either formal education or a deep experience in a very technical role in the past.
Again, that adds another layer of that unicorn. But what we’re looking for, I think, is somebody who is empathetic and understands the reality of being in the field. And that’s where I resonate a hundred percent with what Bradford said, you can’t move your enablement focus away from the field in any way, shape, or form, it’s that honest advocacy for the field.
And you can only be an advocate if you understand what the challenges are when you’re out there. So you’re looking for the ability to listen well, understand well, and then translate that into what the resources are that are provided to the field, whether it’s training or anything else, programs and sales motions, and so on.
I think in addition to that, you also have to be that face back into the company. So we have a lot of forums where the sales organization has dialogue back with everybody from the product development teams to the product marketing team. So that there’s a lot of understanding of what’s working and what’s not working. That doesn’t always come into play, or it doesn’t translate into the final mile in enablement.
What has to happen is I think that you’re looking for individuals who have the skill set to also negotiate internally. They’re also able to have the dialogue and educate the corporate headquarters in a lot of instances that you’re trying to create that sensitivity and empathy more broadly for a more efficient delivery against the support that the sales team needs.
So those are somewhat soft answers, but that’s what makes up that unicorn. It’s skillset experience and the way that they go about that. That together makes the difference whether you’re really successful in enablement or not.
Oliver: I want to pick up on something you mentioned earlier, Heidi, about the importance of really nailing the fundamentals. Bradford when we were talking recently you mentioned that you had a situation where you ran into some trouble because you kind of drifted away a little bit from the fundamentals. Can you tell us that story and what you learned from it?
Bradford: It’s interesting. I think as we’ve grown and as some of our programs became more mature. You mentioned earlier onboarding, you said it’s probably the first thing you set up, and then to keep paying attention to it or not our onboarding program, didn’t keep up with the change that our organization was experiencing. We reached a moment, avery significant change in Slack as an example.
Acquisition. Verticalization. Sales process changes, tooling changes, expectation, changes, and hiring profile changes. I think that we missed a little bit, the fact that we had turned a little bit more onboarding a little bit more into a cultural and product evangelism experience than a do my job and be successful in my role experience.
There were lagging indicators in the business so what we’ve done is reapplied with rigor, our approach to onboarding, to say the purpose of onboarding is not purely to welcome people into the organization and make them feel part of a shared culture. Certainly, that is important, but even more important, is that they understand what differentiates Slack from other enterprise software organizations they may have seen or experienced before and what makes us successful when navigating and executing against defined goals, whether you are a success manager, solutions engineer, a BDR, or an AE.
That reorientation has not been hard to sell to reps. That is in fact, what they ache for, help me understand how to do my job successfully and quickly.
And that’s been a bit of an eye-opening moment for me. There are moments in enablement where you feel like you’re forcing content into the sales organization’s collective mind. And there are opportunities where it’s very fluid and the enablement that tends to go down very fluidly and where I’m going to continue to apply even more focus, is enablement that is incredibly actionable, incredibly relevant, and hopefully quite delightful in design.
Oliver: How do you identify the enablement that meets those criteria? Because I think that everybody aspires to that, but I think that if for those of you out there who are sellers, you can attest to the fact that enablement doesn’t universally achieve that.
So how do you do that? What are some ways you really make that happen?
Bradford: So I will address that, but I will say we do aspire to that, but there are must dues and there are a lot of must do’s and enablement, which occupy enablement bandwidth. Whether that is a big product launch or some sort of organizational shift or restructure or a change to a particular system, which simply aren’t delightful experiences.
There are things that aren’t delightful that occupy bandwidth and so I think in an ecosystem where that is true, it is setting a vision from people like me and Heidi, that the highest leverage and brand protecting elements of enablement are outside of that.
There will be a temptation to focus on the big or either sexy or necessary kind of operational moments. But outside of that is the, how do I generate this order form where tons of sellers are falling down, potentially deals are getting posted because we haven’t created a simple two-minute video or experience, which walks them through that process.
So some of that, those fundamentals, I don’t know that it’s, that we don’t know that they’re necessary. It’s that we get distracted from those things by the, um, kind of Olympics of enablement. The kickoffs and the launches and the other things.
Oliver: Heidi, how do you make sure that you’re staying focused on and keeping fresh the basics at the same time that you’re exotically figuring out about heart surgery and entering entirely new industries, which sounds hard and super fun, but what about, you know, the order form and making sure quote to cash is in the right shape and so forth?
Heidi: You know, as Bradford was talking through what the basics mean in Slack, we’re, we’re really living in different worlds in some ways. If I think about what the basics mean at Nvidia, the predominant value that enablement brings is in the form of education. Going back to the fact that our business model is to work through partners. So a lot of those steps in the sales process are done either differently or you’re relying upon your partners to fulfill so much of that.
So what a lot of the objective around enablement is, is to ensure that both partners and sellers are doing a fantastic job of sharing the art of the possible. It does seem like it’s a very different role and a different world. And that’s probably partly the reason why so many enablement organizations have different definitions as to what enablement means.
So for example, we do use a CRM, of course, and we’ve got a lot of rigor around the CRM and my team does support the aspect of training, whether it’s new hire onboarding or adjustment to process through CRM, we’ll, we’ll deliver the training and resources and all of that in that phase. But a lot of the traditional multi-step process that lives within an overall broader sales process looks dramatically different. For us, it’s more about deep proof of concept or it’s about bringing somebody into our executive briefing center as part of the sales motion.
And we want to ensure that we have clarity for our sellers about all the different steps in those motions as well as resources available to them throughout and make that as simple as possible. But there is a lot more art than science in the type of sales motion that we’re supporting.
Oliver: It’s really interesting to hear about the challenges that you’re both facing because in many ways, there are some really different aspects to it, depending on the nature of your go-to-market. And also the challenges that the business faces.
Sometimes it’s really getting the very basic process pieces in place. In other cases, it’s mastering areas of knowledge that are novel and challenging for the sellers involved. And it really speaks to how enablement, I think has to be a bit of a chameleon and it has to figure out what does the organization need and how do you then go drive that?
So Bradford, I’m curious if you were parachuted into a new company and you wanted to figure out what was most important for the sales organization and how could you deliver the most value, how would you go about figuring that out?
Bradford: That’s a very good question. A tough question, Heidi, you said something earlier, focus on the process, right?
Start with the basics. What is our selling motion? How do we execute against that selling motion? It’s interesting for me, certainly in my time at Slack that has evolved and changed so dramatically, that has never been one. Just as an example, when I started at slack, we didn’t have a professional services arm.
Our executive briefing center was a kind of once a quarter, there’s an event type of thing. And so I really think it does depend so much on the size of the organization and the go-to-market. But for me, if I’m putting myself in a sales mindset rather than success for a moment, the most important thing is where are my leads? Are they good? Can I action on them?
And that never goes away. That is always true. And sometimes that sits with enablement. Sometimes it sits with more than enablement, but it should never not sit with enablement. Our focus should always be on, are we supporting reps to have the right conversations, with the right people, based on the right attributes? And for a product-led growth organization like Slack, we have some real advantages in that regard in that we have what we call product qualified leads or signals based on usage of our free product or customers paying with a credit card.
But even without that, in the broader ecosystem of pure green field accounts, the highest leverage thing that any sales organization or anyone attached to the go-to-market process can do, including enablement is support reps to disambiguate good from bed and to get in front of customers early with the right message.
Oliver: Heidi, when we were talking about ways that the enablement team supports Nvidia’s go-to-market, you mentioned one of what is often a foundational piece for many sales organizations, which is the sales play. It’s an area that there’s a tremendous focus on right now because I think a lot of companies tell us that the sellers have a lot of resources, but they don’t always know what to do with them. And the company doesn’t always help them enough.
They might say we’re launching a new product. Here’s a pitch deck. Here’s a description of it. Here’s a demo script, but they don’t give them really clear guidance about how to go sell the darn thing. You had a challenging experience with sales plays when you tried to address that, tell us a little bit about that and how you’ve evolved your approach on this?
Heidi: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for bringing that up. I’m still feeling the bruises from that. What we found is for the most part, the way that we strive to operate within the bigger field organization is to understand what we, as a bigger Nvidia are trying to achieve.
By understanding what we’re trying to achieve, that allows us to bring some recommendations and proposals as to how that might come to life. In the span of enablement, our sales play exercise many years ago now came in the opposite form. It was, Hey, I’ve got a great idea. It hit someone’s desk, and it was activated.
This is as we became increasingly focused on this go-to-market by industry. So we used, as I mentioned earlier, these subject matter experts who truly understand, we used them to take their knowledge and create sales plays. Who do I talk to? What is the conversation? All of the great resources that really bring that to life.
Years ago though, the size of the team that would be focused on each of these different industries was very small, which meant they were already experts. So we were preaching to the choir. We were burning a lot of cycles by going through the preparation of this sales play, delivered it to people who didn’t need help, they already understood these things and really kind of burned out the opportunity for us to do this in a more meaningful way.
What we realized is we didn’t ask the right questions right up front. It really should have been more of a, what are we trying to accomplish? What is the strategic objective here and then figure out how to address it? Fast forward to today, the team has grown in size by at least double in the last five years. So we don’t have 1500 specialists around the world. We have a lot of account managers. We have a lot of partner managers, and then we’ve got a series of specialists as well.
What we understand today is that sales play concept is going to be quite valuable and we’re at the early phases of reigniting. Now that we’ve got a bigger need, we have a better understanding of objectives. We’re early on in the process of defining what needs to be done, and what the value will be.
So we’re now coming all the way back again, starting with those small groups of subject matter experts, but the audience who is eager to take this guidance from their peers and to do so in a way that is easily scaled. That audience is very hungry, so it’s rather than trying to feed a hunger that didn’t exist, we’ve got great demand.
Oliver: That speaks also a little bit to some of the things that you were mentioning earlier, Bradford around making sure that the enablement team really stays connected to what’s happening on the ground. It doesn’t drift up into the cloud layer. One of the things that we’ve seen repeatedly is that sales plays are often built by people who really don’t understand the details of the go-to-market at the ground level and in some cases, have never actually sold anything. And those sales plays really struggle to land with the field.
I’m curious, given your focus on connecting with what the field needs and what’s really going on, how do you think, providing guidance to them can be done in the most effective way?
Bradford: I love that question, a lot. And I also love what you started Heidi, especially because what you shared, really proves to me that you are paying attention, which is the most important thing, right? And that you can try something, fail, learn, change, and come back to it because it was a good idea. It just wasn’t the right time.
I think that is so important for all of us in enablement. To admit that we don’t know, and that there’s a lot of good ideas out there and sometimes you’re just going to have to try and learn and adapt. I like the sales play. I certainly liked the concept of a sales play less because it is the answer for a seller and more because it formalizes the coalescence of supporting teams across the GTM organization.
So often what partner marketing, product marketing, solutions, strategy, are looking for is a way to tell a single story. The sales play has provided a mechanism by which enablement humans don’t have to serve that function, that there is an asset that there is collateralization of steps in a process and a suggested modality or motion to be successful.
And I stress suggested there because rare is the seller who will look at a sales play and be like, they figured it out. Here we go. I’m in the money. That’s where my field team and sales leaders really have to pick up the ball. Right. What we’ve given you is a guide. What we’ve given you is a way to navigate through the forest, but what we haven’t given you is the answer.
A sales play well-executed should accelerate, and mitigate against the time spent, not knowing where to look and not knowing what to do, but I don’t think we should fool ourselves into thinking it is the solution.
Oliver: Let’s take a minute and look forward to where the discipline of enablement is headed. Heidi, what are you excited about in the future that you’re working towards to really take your organization and enablement generally to the next level?
Heidi: Great question, and it’s a question that’s probably a different answer every six or 12 months.
Today’s answer a couple of different things. Personally, Nvidia is at a point where we are, I feel that I’m constantly describing us as being at an inflection point, but we absolutely are. Where we are today is identifying the fact that we are growing the organization. One of the areas in doing so is to move to a more mainstream market.
Nvidia tends to have very high share in some really high potency, but narrow markets. If you’re looking to expand more broadly, the things that Bradford just mentioned are really, really critical. What is the map through the forest? That’s going to allow somebody who’s new to the market, and more importantly, talking to customers who probably have not given these topics consideration.
So they’re talking to more lay people, rather than those really fabulous lunatic fringe who finish your sentences for you. But instead, you’re talking to people who are in their early stages of consideration. So what I’m excited about is that we are, I see enablement is being very critical in codifying some of that map through the forest to help get that journey to success.
The other thing is in going about that map, you need to understand what’s working and what’s not working. What I’m excited about going forward is more of the analytics that come back to us that say, do more of this and do less of that.
Not only does that help you do a better job of defining either what your sales motion is or what your sales process ought to be, or where you’ve got the strengths and where you’ve got some gaps that allows all of us to become surgical in where we put our efforts as enablement professionals. It also allows you to avoid those pitfalls of here’s the laundry list of things that I’d like for you to deliver as an enablement organization.
Instead, it puts the focus on what are we trying to accomplish and how do we believe based on data, data that comes from the different systems that we’re now using, the engagement with those systems, that tie between them that tell us the correlation between certain activities and the success of closing a sale. All of that is going to allow us to become much more strategic and much more aligned to the outcomes that the business is looking for. That’s what I’m excited about.
Oliver: Bradford, same question for you. What are you excited about looking forward in terms of things that you want enablement generally to step up to, and specifically at Slack?
Bradford: I think I’m pretty aligned with Heidi. I will own up to something that I would guess other enablement leaders do, but which just isn’t going to work in the long term for me is, I have a Slack channel called Bradford’s buds.
In the Bradfords buds channel are a bunch of ICs, sales leaders, people who’ve collaborated with enablement in the past, people I trust, people who are generally high performers and what you might call enablement minded. I will confer with them on our prioritization, our suggested it’s kind of modalities and timing.
I think historically I have over-relied on that group of people. What I would like and where we are moving forward, you know, we’re a seven year old kind of sales organization, and we are sitting on an enormous wealth of data and information in terms of what works and what doesn’t work. I alluded to conversational intelligence before I, we are sitting on just the world’s greatest trove of product metrics.
But what we haven’t successfully done at scale, is provide a robust recommendation engine and an aggregation of winning tips built out of that mountain of data. And I see the technology like really moving in a direction and Highspot certainly is part of this, moving in a direction to provide people data-driven trend analysis and indicators. Discrete from what sales strategy and operations tend to look at that is built on the more qualitative aspects of the sales motion, which forever have been the hardest to unlock and why enabling organizations tend to rely so heavily on those five or six friendly SMEs who will come in and speak at your training is because we don’t know what else to do.
That is changing and it’s changing very rapidly. I think enablement teams that can capitalize on creating intelligence out of information will really be the most successful.
Oliver: Building on that, I think it’s a really interesting point. Doesn’t that call for the enablement team to have new skills? And how do you tackle that? Because traditionally enablement was, I would say, I think it’s fair to say a more intuitively. As it becomes more analytical and more anchored in data. That means you’ve got to have people who are able to do that. I’m curious how you think about that and how you take taking that on?
Bradford: I would disagree, I think not fully Oliver, but I think the same could be said of sales, right? Sales used to be an intuitive art and we, there probably are sales organizations that put sellers through a data analytics bootcamp with some kind and certainly data of fluency is critical to be a seller of Slack.
I don’t put the onus on enablement to learn how to pour through mountains of data and pivot and build a recommendation engines. I put the onus on the systems. We rely on to make that easier for us. And when I’m in conversations with vendors, for example, that is constantly where I’m pressing and probably what you hear a lot in your conversations.
The hiring profile and sort of the enablement profile will change over time, much as it has with the AE. But for me, what will always be most important are the relational aspects of enablement. Someone who can build credibility with sales, someone who can lead and inspire a room. And I don’t want to trade that for someone who is a data analyst, I want to enrich that with someone who’s armed with insights.
Oliver: Heidi. I’m curious how you respond to that answer and what your take on it is?
Heidi: Similar and different. So I agree that the core enablement profile in terms of what kind of hiring profile you’re looking for, it won’t change much, but I do see augmentation in the organization.
For years have worked through a mound of data and I’ll be quite transparent a couple of years ago, we would get reporting from Highspot and really do some gymnastics in order to figure out what the value and what was the message it was telling us. Now I’ve seen great improvements so that it’s more intuitive for us to take other reports directly and make some decisions with it.
But I still think that, uh, you know, to Bradford’s point, we’ll continue to look to the vendors who are coming up with improved analytics that are actionable analytics, but there’s still multiple vendors that we’re working across. How do you decipher the key, um, connective tissue across those different solutions that you’re using?
For us I would say I would augment my team and we have since done so by hiring somebody who’s really good with understanding data, even if it’s just wrangling data from different sources. Even creating high-level insights out of it, that’s a value we couldn’t operate without having a dedicated role like that.
Oliver: One of the things that I find very interesting about what both of you bring up as we look forward in terms of where the discipline is headed is you both focus very much on analytics and data. That’s something that we’re hearing from many, many of our customers. It’s definitely one of the reasons why we’ve been making such really heavy investments in that space and we see huge promise from it.
I was listening to a venture capitalist and I stole a phrase that he is, he described a lot of SAAS environments as moving from Madmen to Moneyball. The notion that you’re moving from a, you know, a world where it’s people who are making decisions on intuition and conviction and charisma, and have the ability to it’s way people to a world where you’re making decisions through a combination of intuition and data.
That really unlocks possibilities that have been latent for so long because both enablement, marketing, all of these disciplines historically often just sort of threw things over the wall and hoped they were landing. Now you can know. And now you can make decisions based on that. So I think that’s really exciting and it’s an area that we, as a vendor are very heavily invested and encouraged by customers like yourselves.
We’re really excited to see how that helps the teams that we serve to be able to really go to the next level in delivering strategic results, not just tactically running programs that are necessary, but that are just so much less than what enablement can offer to the organizations that they have.
Bradford: Oliver, can I ask you a quick question?
Oliver: Yeah, of course.
Bradford: This is not been enablement driven, but certainly enablement supported. We’ve invested heavily in what we call a sales intelligence function at Slack. That is an organization that is separate from strategy, separate from enablement, and it is its own thing and they are product builders truly.
What they’re building are Slack native products fed by information from multiple database, including Highspot and others. We surface signals from that data, both to enablement and directly to reps and managers, in Slack. And I think it is one of the greatest differentiators of selling in Slack is that we have that function.
Would I want that function in enablement? Potentially I can see that, but I also really love having it as a district function within the organization. I wonder if you are seeing that or Heidi, how you think about that more in the marketplace?
Oliver: Well, let’s let Heidi go first and then I’ll give you my take on it.
Heidi: We haven’t been thinking about it in a discreet fashion. I’d say it seems to me Bradford that you’re in a really fantastic position in terms of your ability to get data and insights. It seems to me that you’ve got a more advanced situation than perhaps where we’re starting from and that’s probably why I emphasize that that’s something we’re looking forward to the evolution of in the future.
So we do have sales analytics, but we don’t have a great way of connecting them. We don’t have a great way of connecting sales, analytics, enablement analytics, some marketing analytics, but I’d say that today, unfortunately they’re not fully integrated. It sounds like you’ve got a more holistic visibility of which I’m envious.
Bradford: I don’t want to overplay it.
Heidi: I like the aspiration.
Oliver: What we’re seeing is people are experimenting with different models and nd also many people are struggling to be able to get access to the analytics and BI resources to do these kinds of experiments.
We’ve had kind of funny situations where we have customers who are extremely large, extremely well-funded technology companies, and they struggle to get a very simple BI initiative really funded. We’ve seen some people experimenting with the kinds of things you’re talking about, Bradford.
And then we’ve seen a lot of people say, can’t you just build some scorecards for us, so we don’t have to do any of that stuff. So we get a lot more of the latter. I think that the former, but there are definitely people exploring in this space and I think there’s just such possibility there I’m really eager to see those experiments begin to bear fruit.
I think ultimately we will develop industry best practices for how to go pursue that. I think we’re very much in the early stages and we’re still experimenting, but I’m really excited about it and to see where it’s headed.
So with that I would just like to say thank you to both of you for taking the time, love the insights that you shared with us and really appreciate you giving us a glimpse into what enablement is like at two of the very successful companies in the technology industry and how you’re tackling these problems and upleveling enablement functions in your company. So thanks very much.
Heidi: I appreciate the opportunity, and Bradford, I was furtively taking notes. I’m sure we’ll be in contact.
Bradford: Thank you, Oliver and thank you, Heidi.
Andy Champion: So, hello everyone. My name is Andy Champion. I’m the vice president and general manager of Highspot here in EMEA. Delighted to welcome you to this latest installment of the Win Win podcast. Joining me today, I’m delighted to speak to Scott Edinger. He’s somebody that I’ve spoken to before. He is a deep expert in his field, and he advises many companies globally on how to drive consistent growth. He has over 40 articles published in the Harvard Business Review and has contributed to over 50 articles in Forbes. Scott, welcome to the podcast.
Scott Edinger: Thanks for having me, Andy. I’m excited to be here and talk with you again.
ANDY: Always good to get back together. So Scott, there’s a few topics that I want to touch on today. And the first one I want to start with is this concept of the great resignation. It’s something that I think that, you know, is a topic of conversation with business leaders that I talk to, and it’s been causing quite a stir. Now, I think it’s fair to say there’s been a talent shortage for quite some time now. It’s nothing new. We as sales and revenue leaders have always sought to get the best possible talent. But I think what has changed is the pandemic has caused, I think, a pause in that natural talent lifecycle. It’s caused people to pause and to delay decisions, but as we come out of the pandemic, I think what I’m starting to see is that people are taking this moment to reevaluate their positions, to reevaluate the companies that they work for. But more importantly, I think they’re really taking a long, hard look at the people that they work with and specifically their managers. So I wanted to start there and just get your take on, are people starting to leave companies, or is it really that old adage of “People don’t leave companies—they leave managers”?
SCOTT: Yeah, I very much think it’s the latter. I believe it was the people at Gallup, famous for their organizational surveys, who coined that phrase many years ago. I think it might be like 20 years ago. People don’t leave organizations, they leave their managers. And as much as we have this great resignation upon us, as it were, you know 10 years ago, we were calling this the war for talent. And I was reading some statistics about this great resignation and we certainly have much lower unemployment than we have had, but even the total number of people leaving the workforce, while statistically significant, isn’t dramatic, at least in the U.S. statistics I was looking at. So, it’s not like people who need to work are all of a sudden dropping out of the workforce. I mean, there are people who perhaps don’t need to work who are reevaluating. You know, like you said, the pandemic gives us this great pause to say what’s important in my life. And there is, without a doubt, people who are saying, “Look, I’m not going to work” or “I’m not going to work like I was.” And definitely there’s an Exodus from the workforce from that.
But people who are either sales professionals or engineers or in technology, whatever their roles are, it’s not like they’ve decided all of a sudden, well, I’m just resigning. They’re going someplace else for something better. And they’re looking for something more from the organizations and I think most importantly from their leaders. So I think it’s very much that latter idea, “What more am I getting from my leader?”
ANDY: And I know that that’s a sort of a starting off point for us on a few topics here. And you know, maybe we explore that briefly. When you look to leaders and great leaders, what are some of the core components? What are some of the core behaviors that you see come up time and time again that differentiate the good from the great?
SCOTT: Well, it’s been a dozen years since I wrote my first book. I just realized, I was going to say 10, and now I realize it’s actually closer to a dozen. And that book was called The Inspiring Leader. And I wrote that book along with Joe Folkman and Jack Zenger. And one of the analyses that we had done was to identify which leadership characteristics were most powerful—in particular, which leadership characteristics were most powerful in driving engagement and commitment. One would think that this is the key to retention, right?
So amidst all of these leadership competencies, one really stood out as strongly important. The book title gives it away: the inspiring leader. It’s the ability to inspire and motivate high performance. Now on the surface that may not seem revelatory, right? It’s like, okay, so someone who’s inspiring—this drives commitment, engagement. I can totally see, you know, we all want to be inspired. We all want to have that kind of leader in the workplace. But when you start to break that apart and say, so what is it that makes a leader inspiring? Then you start to get to some really valuable ideas, especially as it relates to this great resignation, war on talent, whatever the next iteration of it’s going to be.
Because again, people don’t leave companies, they tend to leave their managers. So some of the things we found were most valuable was this idea of developing talent. Coaching and developing talent. People were loath to find another opportunity when they worked for someone who invested strongly in their development, who coached them, who helped them to advance in their career.
When you find that, even if there’s better companies, you may find yourself in a really wonderful opportunity with that kind of growth—particularly, I’ll say this, if you’re between the ages of—call it 25 and 45. Which, by the way, is where we see most of the resignation happening, some in the 45 to 55 range. But the more concerning part of the great resignation is in the 25 to 45 year-old group.
ANDY: And maybe we can unpack that a little bit. You know, I’m fascinated around this concept of the culture of coaching. It really resonates as I reflect on my career and it certainly resonates with many of the individual contributors and salespeople that I talk with. And I think it also aligns with how at Highspot we think a lot about consistent execution at scale: How do we help everybody succeed? How do we help everybody make their best contribution? So I wonder if you can sort of unpack that a little bit for us and talk exactly about what does good coaching look like, and why does it matter so much?
SCOTT: Well, when you consider good coaching, you know, it’s usually not in the form of just telling people what to do. Really good coaching is about investing in someone’s development, helping them to get the right kind of training, the right kind of, call it formal education. But then when they’re back on the job, helping them to actually get better at those skills, whether they be selling skills, coding skills, management skills, leadership, even other coaching skills.
So if you consider this idea of investing in the initial growth for people, send them to proper training, But then when they’re back from that, how do you engage with them regularly to help them to improve? Are you able to observe them in action? Are you able to give them proper guidance? Are you able to invest your time in helping them to get better at their job?
I’ll give you an interesting hypothetical here. So if you are interviewing for a job and the manager that you are talking with shares with you all of the really wonderful elements and all the great parts of the company and their benefits. And, you know, maybe we have a sushi chef here once a month, whatever, the foosball table, whatever these things are. They spend their time on this and how great the company is. That’s interview number one. The second interview includes all of that. But that manager says, “A vital part of my success is investing in your development. So I’m going to spend a lot of time and coaching on you. I’m going to spend a lot of time helping you to get better at your job. That way you can drive greater success.”
Which of those sounds more enticing? Both companies may be good, but I think it’s pretty obvious to me, which one I’d want to go with.
ANDY: Yeah, for sure. And one of the things that I wish I’d learned earlier in my career was just how big a determinant of my success my leader and their line manager was. I only came to realize that fairly late on, and I think it was a big mess on my part.
SCOTT: Well, I got lucky on that one. I’ll share a quick story here. When I was 25 years old, I had the second interview. I had a manager who said to me, “You know, I’m going to really invest in your development, in your growth.”
Now, the funny sidebar there is that months after I was on the job—and this person rode me pretty hard on a number of things. His name is John Robens, great manager. Great, great coach. But when we talked about that, he said, “By the way, none of that is altruistic.” He’s like, “I’m not doing that just for the sake of doing it.” He was like, “I want you to grow. I want you to develop. I want you to be successful. But I know if you do that, you’re going to do a better job for me. We’re going to have more success. We’re going to hit our numbers.” There was a lot of things involved with that. So I think if you are a job seeker thinking about this, or if you’re in a job someplace thinking about your manager, or if you are managing others and looking to hire, this is a really wonderful lens to put over the hiring process.
And even more importantly, how you do your job, how you go to work every day, really focusing on developing others and helping them to grow. And that really is the key to coaching.
ANDY: I mean, there’s no downside for this, as you say, whether you are the manager looking to attract talent or whether you are the job seeker looking for your next role. But you know, there’s another aspect to this, right?
And that’s this: What about the people that are staying? What about the people that are remaining in their jobs? This should be applying to them as well. And this could be a conversation that they can have with their manager.
SCOTT: If you’re evaluating, leaving someplace, if you are a part of the great resignation, you want something better, it costs you nothing to try to ask for that at your current location.
And one of those things can be, “What kind of development is available for me? What kind of coaching? How am I going to get better? Improve my ability to bring value to a job?” You know, you have to believe that ultimately your ability to bring more value equals greater compensation, greater degrees of freedom, all the things that are important to people in this pandemic resignation—whatever moniker we’re going to give it next.
ANDY: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. One other aspect of this conversation that I’d be really interested in your take on is the dynamic between the manager and the individual, whether you’re seeking a job or whether you’re in a current job. I agree with you asking for that development is really important, but where does the balance lie between me as the individual owning my career development and owning my growth and the manager inputting into that or providing the guidance. Where does the responsibility sit? Is it with me to drive my own career? Is it with my manager? How does that work?
SCOTT: Well, I think self-determination notwithstanding, we all have a responsibility for our career and where we’re headed in our career. You know, where you don’t necessarily have the responsibility, if you are an employee, is perhaps to kick in the financial resources—though, bookmark that maybe if you want to. If there’s something special you want to do for your growth and development and maybe a company offset there, or maybe you expect the company to fund it.
But I think each of us has to be able to say, “Here’s where I need to grow. Here’s where I want to improve my abilities, my skill sets. These are the competencies or areas of focus I want to get better at or to acquire.” I think we each have to do that, but it can’t be done in a vacuum because you don’t work alone.
So being able to go to your manager, to your leader, the vice president, the CEO, whoever that may be and say, “Where do you need more from me?” And how do we come together on a vision for what my improvement looks like, getting to that proverbial next level in terms of skill development, in terms of knowledge, in terms of capacity.
And what does that look like? And being able to drive that together. In a good company, managers are doing that in collaboration with individuals who are taking responsibility for their own. That’s ideal. You can imagine there’s plenty of non-ideal scenarios where people are driving all of their own development or the company’s trying to get blood from a turnip and trying to get, you know, lots of growth out of people who either don’t have the potential or don’t want to. We see that plenty too. ANDY: So, Scott, one of the things I remember reading some time ago was a quote by Richard Branson and it went something along the lines of, “Hey, you know, train people well enough so that they can leave. But treat them well enough so that they don’t want to.” I’m really interested in exploring that through the lens of the people that are staying and how we should think about balancing all of this investment in them so that they might actually be able to go and get a better job.
SCOTT: Yeah. That Richard Branson character has a good idea now and then, doesn’t he? This is, I think, such an important point, because of all the talk about everybody leaving, the great resignation and the drama of it, it’s really easy to forget about everybody who’s staying. They’re the backbone of your business.
So when I wrote that book, The Inspiring Leader, this notion that inspiring and motivating was one of the top factors in people not leaving their company. And for those who are most inspiring and most motivating in terms of getting the most out of other people, the ability to develop talent was a key factor.
The Richard Branson story reminded me of another story of a vice president of customer service, talking with a CFO about significant investment in training and development. And the CFO responds to the VP of customer service and says, “Well, what if we spend all this money on them and they leave?” And the VP of customer service sort of says, “Oh, that’s a good point.” And responds with, “What if we don’t invest much in their development…and they stay?” Really sort of puts a point on the idea.
You’ve got a lot of people that are staying. In fact in just about every business you have many more that are staying than are leaving. The people who are staying are the real issue for you. And how are you going to invest in their development, make them better at executing your strategy, make them better at interacting with and providing value for customers?
This is ultimately the heartbeat of your strategy: the experience that you provide, not just what you provide, but how you provide that. So making sure that you’re investing in people and their growth is one of the things that I have seen that make people really reluctant to leave a situation, even when there are better jobs available.
When they’ve got really great management, they’re growing, they’re developing, they’re stretching themselves, at least as long as the job opportunities are comparable here. The people are reluctant to leave when they’re in that situation. It also has the added benefit of helping you to compete better in the marketplace.
So you have this really wonderful synergy of factors here of both making people more committed, more engaged in their work and getting better results. Like the manager, John Roben, who I mentioned to, you said to me, you know, “It’s not just altruistic.” Here is a definite gain for the business here that they’re after. And that’s laudable. In commercial enterprise you’re allowed to do that.
ANDY: And I really love that because I think there’s some gold dust in there that I want to be very specific about. You know, when typically when we look across a population in a given company, perhaps in a specific role, you see a bell curve of performance, right? You have far more mid-performers than you do low performers and high performers.
And I think, you know, the temptation can often be as a manager just to focus on, “Hey, if I can get my high performers to perform another 10% better, that’s where my big output is,” but I think what I’ve seen, and one of the things that we focus on, is actually taking some of that time and shifting your mid-performers up by 5% can actually pay off way, way, way more, because you’ve got so much more of them. The concept that I often talk about is the frozen middle. It’s just interesting to me. Does that align with your experience?
SCOTT: Yeah, I’d say there’s a couple of frozen parts. You know, typically when people talk about—this is such an important point—when people talk about coaching and performance management improvement, they almost always gravitate to improving poor performance. And that is not what you and I have been talking about here at all. We’re not talking about trying to remediate poor performers and get them to be okay. We’re trying to take, you know, the entire bell curve, like you said that frozen middle, and shift it to the right to improve everybody’s performance. And I’ll say here that the people most likely to benefit from your coaching, who are most likely to contribute that much more to your business results—it’s certainly true in sales and in technical fields where I’ve seen it—are the high performers.
And managers tend to say, “I’m just going to get out of their way and let them do their job.” But there’s a ton of value in saying, “No, I’m going to double down here. I’m going to invest a lot of time, effort, energy, maybe money, in helping them to get that much better, because they’re in complex jobs where the value that they can contribute is even greater.”
So in everything we’ve been talking about coaching, in my mind, I’ve not been thinking about poor performers at all. I’ve been thinking about average and really strong performers and getting them better because they’re the ones that contribute value. Usually the poor performers we spend a lot of time coaching and investing in performance management with them. If I had a nickel for every time someone got on a performance improvement plan that got off of it and became a top performer, I’d have about 75 cents. It doesn’t happen very often. A lot of effort goes there that isn’t as valuable.
ANDY: So as we wrap up, I want, I just want to come back to where we started, and that’s the great resignation. And we’ve discussed the importance of coaching in every situation, how there is no downside for the individual, the manager, or the company. Everybody benefits here. Just as we wrap up, I just want to touch on briefly, what does good coaching look like? And how does that manifest itself in, for example, the sales job?
SCOTT: Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, I’ve drawn from a few different bodies of work for this, but one in particular, Dr. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University wrote a book called Peak. As in peak performance, P-E-A-K. And most of you listening would not know Dr. Ericsson, but you’ve probably heard of the 10,000-hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. And that was an extrapolation of the research that Dr. Ericsson had done.
I’m going to give you the short version here on what really makes the difference. The short version is, 10,000 hours isn’t the key. It might be less than 10,000 hours. It might be more than 10,000 hours. There’s certainly a significant amount of practice involved in developing expert performance, but there’s no magic in 10,000 hours. According to Dr. Ericsson, who I had a chance to sit down with a few years ago, the real magic is something we’d call deliberate practice.
And that has a few conditions that we as leaders and that we as leaders and coaches can apply to our work every day. The first of which is that you’ve got to have a model for success. What does good look like? I’ll share them and then I’ll do a quick brief on each of these. You’ve got to have a model of what good looks like. And then second, you have to have a chance to practice against that model. You have to try to do it like the model. Third, while being observed by an expert who really understands number one, what great looks like, and then, four: again.
So if you think about any instrument or sport—you know, my daughter’s a violinist. She doesn’t listen to a piece of music once to get what good looks like or great looks like. She listens to it a lot. And she watches how the teacher moves their fingers along the frets and uses the bow and everything. And she watches that very carefully and then she mimics it while being observed. And then she gets feedback: what worked, what didn’t work. So she gets that observed feedback on what worked and what didn’t work. Then she goes back and does it all again. And she doesn’t do that once. She does it dozens and dozens of times, I’m going to say hundreds of times, given how much I’ve listened to some practice (delightful in our house).
But still, you know, nonetheless, you’ve got to do it a lot, whether it is learning to play a sport or an instrument, or be an effective seller. And you asked me specifically about that. So I’ll go take a quick dive on that. So number one, in sales, you’ve got to have a good model of what success looks like. What do you want your people to do differently? It’s not just generate revenue. That’s the outcome. What are the specific behaviors? From asking questions to positioning your solutions, helping clients to see issues that they hadn’t considered, helping them to understand problems in a different way so that they can develop some kind of insight. These are the things we tend to want salespeople to do.
That’s the backbone of every consultative or solution sales course out there. You got to give them that model. I think sending them to a few days of training and expecting them to absorb it and integrate at one time is probably as unrealistic as listening to a piece of music one time and then expecting someone to play it perfectly.
So then they’ve got to have the chance to go practice that while being observed by a manager or another expert. And when I say practice that, I’m going to suggest that you don’t want people to practice on your best customers, your top prospects. You want safe environments where they can get it right and make a few mistakes. That’s not great when you’re negotiating million-dollar deals. So you want to have that chance to practice these skills while being observed by someone who afterward can say, “Here’s what good looks like. Here’s what you did. Here’s what I saw. I liked that. Keep doing that. Change this. You remember when that happened with the customer, how you said that and they responded kind of negatively? I think you didn’t ask the right thing there.”
Whatever these things start to look like. And then to say, okay, when that happens once, then you’ve got one iteration. And if Malcolm Gladwell said the average was around 10,000 hours, how many sales calls do you need to develop not expert, but at least strong performance? So that gives you a bit of a model. It’s like, have the model of what great looks like, have a chance to practice against that. Be observed with it, get feedback on what worked, what didn’t, and start all over again. You can apply that to any sport, skill, competencies…
ANDY: You know, the beauty here that I think as leaders, as managers, our key currency is behavioral change. Long-term behavioral change to help our people achieve their personal objectives, their career goals. And that’s, I think, as we’ve talked about all throughout this, very, very closely aligned to the company goals and the aspirations that we have. Scott, thank you so much for your time today.
SCOTT: My pleasure.
ANDY: I think what I take away from this is that one of our best defenses as leaders in and around this great resignation is to continue to invest in our people to create that culture of coaching, using tools like deliberate practice to be a core part of that. This is about going deep on the individual and the skills and behaviors that they need. But also as individuals, when we are looking at our careers, when we’re assessing, do we make a move? Do we stay? Let’s look at the environment in which we’re in, put that alongside the companies that we look at, and make some decisions around where are we going to get that investment and that development?
Thank you again for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation. I look forward to the next installment.
SCOTT: Yeah, me too. Great to talk with you again, Andy.
Marissa Gbenro: Hello and welcome to the Win-Win podcast by Highspot. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and discuss how to navigate them successfully. I’m your host, Marissa Gbenro.
Today, we’ll discuss how COVID-19 and virtual work have changed the marketing landscape. I’ve invited my friend, Robert Rose from The Content Advisory, to help us explore these challenges and opportunities. Welcome, Robert, and thank you for joining us. Can you introduce yourself and your role to our audience?
Robert Rose: Oh, I certainly can Marissa. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be a guest on your show, which is really, really wonderfully fantastic.
My name is Robert Rose and I am currently — well, I have two roles, really: the chief strategy advisor for an organization called the Content Marketing Institute, which is a media company where we evangelize the approach of content marketing through events and blogs and webinars and all those kinds of things, and then my role as a consultant, where I work with lots of brands all over the world, mostly by Zoom, and help them operationalize their content. I work with these brands to figure out the people, the process, and the technology of how content can be made into a functional strategy in their business.
In between all of that, I, as you know, host a podcast or two and I’ve written a couple of books and keep myself busy in this wonderfully locked-down world that we find ourselves in.
MG: Thank you so much, Robert. I have been a huge fan even before I was able to join your podcast. Thank you for letting me be a part of the amazing content that you’re creating at the Content Marketing Institute as well.
So, Robert, recently at Highspot we conducted a survey across different marketing functions and the goal was to uncover marketing challenges that have emerged as a result of the global pandemic and virtual work. Both, I think, bring similar but different challenges to marketers across the world and the results of the survey felt very relatable. Nothing truly surprised me because I am a content marketer and experienced the same things. But I thought it was really interesting that though they are similar challenges that we’ve seen forever with marketing, it seems these challenges have become even more heightened.
The three biggest challenges that we found through the survey were understanding how to better engage customers, uncovering what content is most effective, and understanding what content sellers find most valuable. Again, this has always been an issue for marketers — I think everyone has these goals that they’re trying to solve — but it seems that they have been exquisitely heightened by working virtually and not having sellers next door to you. Everyone is vying for the eyes of buyers that are also working virtually and every marketer only has virtual ways to now engage with those buyers. Robert, would you say that these are the biggest challenges that you’re seeing as well with the marketers and organizations that you work with?
RR: I think you said it well. These are not necessarily new challenges, but I think they have a new wrinkle added to them which is something that we’ve been calling “the de-commodification of physical space.” Sort of the overarching new wrinkle to those three challenges is the idea of how to engage customers and how to create content that has an impact. All of the things that we were challenged to do with content were always in a world where the digital experience or the content experience we were creating was an adjunct to the physical space. In other words, it was where you went and downloaded the conference presentation after you attended the conference, or it was where you went to get the experience after you had the salesperson visit you in your office, or it was the website that you did the research on before you invited people into your group. It was sort of sitting alongside it. Now the idea of the digital content experience is not just sitting next to — it’s a replacement. It has to actually act as a proxy of that physical, intimate relationship building that we could do in-person at a conference, at a client, wherever it is.
What I see when I see the same challenges that we’ve seen forever is that this wrinkle is really just extra emphasis on the need to get great with digital content and the digital experiences we’re creating because they’re just that much more efficient.
MG: I absolutely love that term “digital experience” because I think what also has become profoundly clear through the last year is that customer experience is more important now than ever before. It’s always been really important, really guiding your buyers, potential customers, or existing customers through a virtual experience that actually convinces them that you are the right vendor or partner.
I feel like marketers have become so much more important to the funnel for organizations because this is really the only way to get buyers in the door before sellers are able to wow them with the product and sales pitches. What is your take on how to elevate these virtual experiences for customers to ensure that marketers are really getting that foot in the door and able to help fill the funnel and convince these buyers to move forward?
RR: Certainly, all of that is true and I think the one thing we’re seeing companies do that are leading this charge is the same things that make up the wrinkles and the challenges that aren’t different. It’s the same answers, but they’re more accelerated now; in other words, the answers to the challenges are the same, which is to get better at it.
What I mean by that is — because that’s an unsatisfying answer for sure — what we’re seeing is the need to connect these digital experiences. What has happened as we’ve gotten more proficient with digital content and the creation of digital experiences is we’ve also become just as siloed. We’ve become siloed in marketing, sales, customer experience, and customer loyalty. All of those digital experiences that we create were kind of off on their own island. In many cases, and while that was okay, everybody sort of realized that’s a problem and we really should try and solve it.
It’s really difficult and it’s not okay anymore. It has to be the pressure to get those things connected. We often look at our website and the only insight that we have into improving it or personalizing it or making it more relevant is the insight we get from the ad tech, basically whatever report that says how visitors were accumulated there. We don’t have data going back and forth between the experiences to help improve them and to connect them in a way that makes them more personal and more relevant and more useful for customers. The answer to that, or where we’re seeing it get elevated, is where you can actually start to connect things to your blog, the website, the e-commerce channel, the email channel, the text experience, all of those things that they know about each other. And they’re using the data in a smart, transparent, and intelligent way to deliver a better experience, instead of the siloed thing that we’ve been dealing with for so long.
MG: I love that answer so much, and it makes me pause to think about ways that we can better provide a cohesive experience from website to email marketing from demand gen to content. A few other challenges that we found in the surveys, as we said earlier: uncovering content that is most effective, better understanding what content resonates most with your sellers, as well as understanding what buyers are looking for. whether it’s topical, what topics are they most engaged with as well as what kind of content. Is it a webinar? Is it a podcast? Is it an infographic? Is it an ebook?
What are your best practices that you can offer or have seen work for some of the organizations and marketers that you work with to really better understand your content landscape as well as what topics and kinds of content are buyers engaging with now to really help move that needle?
RR: Yeah, it’s difficult. There’s no doubt about it. These new wrinkles certainly haven’t made it any easier. The one thing that we say that is helpful to think about when starting is that in many organizations and especially those that have separate field sales, field marketing, enterprise sales, enterprise marketing, demand generation, there are siloed teams working on various parts of the customer journey.
For a moment, don’t think about de-siloing the organization. That’s typically above our pay grade. But what we can do is start thinking about how we decipher the customer’s experience, even if we start with one bridge. Just something as simple as, “Hey, if I subscribed to the blog, I shouldn’t have to put in my email address if I want to subscribe to the resource center on the same website.” Those kinds of simple, easy changes that I know are not so simple and not so easy because you need good technology in order to do all of those things. But really finding the small, easy wins where we can start to connect these experiences in a way that one, gives us a better singular view into the customer journey themselves, and two, starts to join the content journey for them so that they’re not frustrated, that decreases the friction on the things that they’re trying to do as they go through our various digital content and just start small and then do the next one. If you can start to decipher the journey, what happens is you start de-siloing the organization as a result. Maybe that can be a helpful 2021 tip. Don’t think about trying to de-silo everybody. What you can do is start looking at the customer’s journey and start seeing how you can de-silo that, one step at a time.
MG: You got me thinking about some of the organizations and vendors that I follow very closely and you’re right; I downloaded an ebook and clicked a button that said yes, send me newsletters and blog posts and so on and so forth. That’s how I’ve become so consumed by these brands without even realizing it. They swindled me the way that you’re recommending.
I completely agree that it’s all about — coming back to your point — keeping buyers within this virtual experience. It’s about making sure that they have a cohesive experience from start to finish with your brand, regardless of what activation you are putting forth at the time, whether it’s a blog post, a new ebook, podcast, or webinar, it becomes a lot easier to consume that content when you’ve made it easy for me and it’s not taking a lot of my time or energy. I’m going to be more prone to say yes and see what you have to say and mention it to a boss or a colleague as I move further down the funnel and say, “I actually listened to a podcast episode recently that talks about this exact thing.”
This topic has sparked another question for you. What are some predictions that you have that content, product, or field marketing may see change over the next year?
RR: I think it’s a related thing. I mean, there are lots of wonderful predictions and I think many of them you and previous guests will have spoken to the idea of the rise of audio as a format — not this podcast withstanding, right? But then there’s also video and multimedia and the delivery of that, the resurgence or renaissance, if you will, of email marketing. I think there are a lot of trends for 2021 that will continue and, certainly, we’re going to still see the more direct-to-consumer types of efforts both in B2B and B2C because of everything we just spent the last 20 minutes talking about.
But the one prediction that I will mention because I think it’s really important for digital marketers is to join up the skill sets needed for what we would commonly call “content” in the business. It used to be good enough for content marketers to be able to write well, create some good content, maybe do a little design, maybe have some brand journalism in their background, but now we’re seeing businesses say, “You know what, things like taxonomies, workflow, CMS, measurement, SEO, and content structure and all of those things are incredibly important too.” Where we’re seeing content marketers really succeed is when they start to add a bit to their T-shaped skills. So, in addition to being great storytellers, they should also be great content strategists as well. The ones that we’re seeing really succeed are those that can broaden out their skill sets to some of those more technical types of approaches.
MG: In order to be successful with the changes that have occurred over the last year, and we’re still waiting to see how much more things will continue to change, you have to wear many hats and you have to have different sets of skills and talents in order to think outside of the box. You can’t just be a content strategist without putting together what you see this buyer’s journey looking like, or a campaign looking like. I think that, as a content marketer myself, that has been an area that I’ve been forced to grow in over the last year. No more is it just about words, but when I meet up with our design team or our digital team, what is the experience that I want our buyers to have? What does it look like? What is it going to feel like? What kind of emotions are we hoping to tug at to get them to be interested in the things that we’re saying, the story we’re trying to tell? I think that’s hard to do when you’re so siloed in one function of the business, it’s hard for you to come outside of yourself to say “Hey, even though I’m a content marketer, this is how I see it weaving into a campaign for product marketing, customer marketing, or demand gen. Here are ways that we can thread the needle through multiple different functions to make sure that the audience, our buyers, our prospects, existing customers, are getting the best experience possible because it’s not just one way of viewing this interaction and experience.”
One other question I did have for you — similar to the previous one about predictions for the year — are there trends that you have taken note of that you think are a good idea to watch for or jump on board? Are there any insider insights to share from what you’ve seen working with different organizations and marketers?
RR: Well, we just spoke about two, which were the idea of audio and video for sure. We’ve all seen the rise of Clubhouse and some of the acquisitions that Twitter has made in the audio space. We can see podcasts certainly as a new trend with companies like Amazon and Spotify making acquisitions very, very quickly in this space. So, as a content marketer, as a marketer, it really just perks up my ears to start to think about things like audio. How do I start to really take advantage of the audio and video that goes along with it?
My thinking these days has really been around this idea of linear experiences. So, both audio and video — even though you edit them in a non-linear way, they become linear experiences for your consumer. It’s not the kind of thing that people just sort of skip around and browse through, right? Either you’re in or you’re not, right? You’re either listening or you’re not, or you’re watching or you’re not. It’s a huge challenge for us to get really good at this, where we look at great television, movies, radio, and podcasts and go, “Wow. They really know how to create a strong set of narratives there in that linear experience.”
I think that’s where we have the most growth and, quite frankly, a huge opportunity this year with so many people being stuck in front of their screens. Well, we can give them something to look at. We just really need to push ourselves and push the medium and push our creativity.
So, for me, it’s all about audio and video this year and how do we as brands and marketers get really good at it.
MG: I absolutely love that and completely agree that audio and video is the kind of content that I’m consuming and the kind of content that I want to create for other people. I appreciate the recommendation. Is there a recommendation that you have for how to think about that strategy and how to start to deploy that within your organization?
RR: You know — and here’s the funny thing — this will go right back to where we started the show, which is experiences that sit in parallel to the ones you’ve already created. We talked about this as a challenge that we have, and this is really where we can start to expand our brains when it comes to how do we develop content. Just simple things. If you’ve got a blog, one of the things that I’m working on is making all my blog posts available as an audio stream. If you would prefer to listen to it rather than read it, there’s that opportunity. If you’re taking a walk or whatever, and you want to have a five-minute listen instead of a five-minute read, that’s one thing. Webinars, the idea of online content delivered through video shows. Then, of course, there’s the classic launching a podcast, launching a videocast, getting your YouTube channel all set up. All of these things I think are going to play into one side of the spectrum, launching actual shows that we want people to subscribe to. All the way to literally just offering up different ways to consume the same content we’ve been creating. That interview with our CEO? Yes, it’s nice that we have it in a wonderful 1,200 word blog post, but let’s get the audio of that up or let’s get the video or both, where we can start offering ways to consume the content based on the ways that people really want to.
MG: I think that is such a great recommendation because sometimes I will have time and energy to listen to something, but if it’s a video, it feels for some reason more consuming for me to watch a video, even though I can avert my eyes and continue to listen. It’s the idea that it’s in video format that makes me feel like I don’t have the time for it. You say that, “Oh, it’s an audio file,” or, “It’s a podcast,” and somehow I have time for that.
I really appreciate the idea of taking a blog post and putting it into an audio format or taking a video and decoupling it and putting it into audio and video. So, whatever your preference is, giving your audience multiple ways that they can consume the same exact thing.
RR: From what I’ve heard from colleagues who have done it, they say it has increased engagement a lot, they are getting much more increased engagement on the content that they had created. A lot of that, I think, is because it’s that linear experience. So you think about a blog post and you go read it and, let’s be honest, we stretch that term “read” a lot. We read it, but really we read the headlines and maybe we read one of the little blocks of text in there and got the main message of it and went, “OK, I’m done.”
But if it’s a linear experience, like audio, you’re going to listen to it. And to your point, you might listen to it while you’re multitasking or doing other things, but you listened to the whole thing, right? You listen to all five minutes of it or eight minutes of it, or however long it is. So that increased engagement is something I’m hearing that is really valuable. It certainly makes for — going back to our original discussion — a better customer experience.
MG: I’m taking so many notes based on this conversation for things that I’m planning to walk away with and new ideas for our content strategy here at Highspot. So, Robert, thank you so much. This was just as informative and educational for me as I think anyone who may be listening to this, thank you for your time and for joining us on the Win-Win podcast. It’s always a pleasure.
RR: Absolutely. My pleasure, thank you so much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.
Marissa Gbenro: Hello and welcome to the Win-Win podcast by Highspot. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. I’m your host, Marissa Gbenro.
Gartner recently reported that 41% of employees are likely to remain remote post coronavirus pandemic. So what are some best practices for training, specifically onboarding, for a remote workforce?
I’ve asked my friend Shamis Thomson, Hootsuite’s Manager of Global Sales Enablement, to join us as we explore this topic. Welcome, Shamis, and thank you for joining us. Can you introduce yourself and your role to the audience, please?
Shamis Thomson: Thank you so much for having me, Marissa. So, my name is Shamis. I am on the sales enablement team here at Hootsuite. I’ve been at Hootsuite for seven and a half years and on the enablement team for the last four and a half. I focus on supporting our entire revenue organization within the sales enablement team, currently sitting in our sales operations department.
MG: Thank you, Shamis. So, since the start of the pandemic, virtual training and onboarding have become so much more important for organizations, but particularly for sales, who are the main drivers of revenue. And because of that, it’s really important that they get new sellers up and running as fast as possible and as effectively as possible.
I know onboarding is an area of interest for you because, again, it can mean the difference between a great seller or one who struggles to hit quota for a few months or quarters, even. Can you tell us what your biggest onboarding goals are for the next six to 12 months?
ST: Yeah, it’s a good one. We have a lot of ambitious goals around this, and I think the move to virtual has really caused us to have to look at this a lot more closely. One of the things that I’m really keenly interested in better understanding is how our onboarding efforts set up our ongoing employee experiences and, ultimately, their development, and how we can further tailor those experiences to really give them what they need in a much quicker way. That’s going to be one of the big focuses for 2021.
MG: Do you feel that with this move to make sure that everyone can get what they need a lot quicker you have seen anything in particular that has helped you accomplish that goal? Is it tools? Is it processes? Where have you found success with making sure that your sellers or the entire org that you support are getting what they need as timely as possible?
ST: So I think it comes down to a couple of things. It’s really about visibility and communication. You know, having visibility through our technology and understanding how people are potentially experiencing that onboarding experience. Then, in turn, being able to reach out and connect with those individuals and better understand what that experience is like and what we can do to continue to refine it and improve upon it has been a key win for us today.
MG: I know Hootsuite culture is really important to you guys and supporting the growth of your organization. How have you found success in nurturing company culture while also supporting that growth mindset culture?
ST: Culture, for me, is really about beliefs and behaviors. One of the most important things to focus on first is really what you’re measuring. For example, think about one of the best measures of revenue growth actually is LTV or lifetime value, right? From the customer standpoint, it’s really prioritizing that customer experience, and culture often stems from the top. We’re fortunate. We have a new leader, Tom, who is our new CEO and he has a real focus on the growth mindset and bringing that into the conversation, which in turn is helping us revisit our values and where we’re reinforcing them in the business.
MG: It’s always really nice when you have a leader who shares the same values and it’s coming from the top down, right? You don’t have to worry so much about driving this initiative alone because now it’s coming from the top and you get to say, “OK, we all have this vision. Now it is a company-wide initiative and I’m not just over in the corner tinkering and doing it on my own — I have some support here.”
You mentioned a little bit about visibility being important. Can you dive into how you cultivate visibility and accountability in your onboarding program in particular?
ST: Yeah, of course. Visibility and accountability might be my two favorite words. Visibility really comes down to what you can see from the data you have available. We’re often limited to subjective qualitative data, which in turn is often filled with a lot of bias. Getting that quantitative data really allows us to start asking better questions, getting to more root cause more effectively.
We’ve used Highspot, actually, in a number of instances to help us do this and really just shine a light into areas that are relatively dark and that’s been fantastic. Accountability may be the more challenging of the two, and I think it really comes down to trust.
You need to be able to establish trust before you can get anyone’s accountability. It sort of inherently stems from the individual and I often say trust is the currency of movement. If you want to move forward, you need to establish trust. If you find yourself moving in the wrong direction, it’s likely an area you need to revisit.
So, from my experience, sometimes it’s going to involve working through stakeholders who already have that trust in place in order to reduce the amount of time you have to spend developing it yourself. Not to be limited by the circle of trust that you, extend that into the stakeholders you work with as well.
MG: Can you share an example of someone new, such as a new leader you haven’t worked with before — how are you gaining that trust so that you can hold their team accountable or hold their frontline sellers accountable? Everything is distant from what it used to be and being able to have these conversations in-person and meeting someone and building that trust in-person I think is a lot easier than virtually. What are some recommendations that you have?
ST: Don’t do it alone. It’s about establishing that sphere of influence around the people that you want to work with. Trust is earned over time and it’s earned through exposure and experience that you have. So recognize where there are opportunities to work with other people that are already in that sphere of trust and influence and work closely with them to align around what the common goal is. It will only expedite your time towards trust with the individuals you want to work with as well.
MG: I love that. When you mentioned visibility, you talked about one of the metrics of success for culture being lifetime value. Can you dive into the top three metrics that you look at for success when regarding onboarding? How does our audience discover what the metrics of success are for them and what have they been for you?
ST: There’s a there’s a lot of things you can measure, and measurement and tracking are maybe two sides of a coin. When I think about measuring success I think about it from the context often of the average contract value, time to close, pipeline, velocity, things like that. Obviously, we talk a lot about ARR and SAS, but I think LTV is another one that more organizations are recognizing is important.
When I look at the tracking site, it’s a lot more about leading indicators as well. Seeing how engaged our reps are, what is the volume and frequency that they’re engaging with the resources that we provide to them, the training, or the content.
It’s a good indicator of sort of the level of investment that they’re putting into themselves. Another area that we look at is how are they showing up? We use things like call intelligence and other platforms to help us get an indication of how well they’re adopting the material and the training that we’re providing to them. Then looking at effectiveness, win rates, and are they approaching the right opportunities? Are they making the right kind of decisions and digging into those areas?
MG: Have you found that any of your metrics have shifted or changed since moving to a fully remote workforce?
ST: I would say there is a natural sort of evolution and I’m not sure that that the virtual side is necessarily been the driving force behind that yet. But I’m suspecting as we continue to evolve our approach into 2021, there may be some more learnings that we’ll have around that. Today there hasn’t been anything that sort of stands out as, “Oh, now that we’re virtual now the measures change.”
MG: That’s really interesting. I think because so much has changed as a result of virtual life, but so much has stayed the same when it comes to, “Hey, these are the things that are important and this is still our north star.” That continuity for me personally has been very satisfying and helped a lot with this transition to say, “OK, my job has shifted in the way I’m going about it. However, my key metrics of success, my KPIs, the things that I need to accomplish on a grand scale, have remained the same.” I think it does take a little bit of the stress off for managers like yourself to say, “Hey, we still have the same goals. It just may look different the way we go about executing them.”
How do you know if certain actions that are being taken by sellers, certain behaviors are necessarily the right ones? How do you make that correlation between a seller sending 50 emails a week that may have equated to them meeting quota? How do you go back to the metrics and behaviors and connect those two with performance?
ST: I look at it from a couple of perspectives, one is looking for those early warning signs. For example, looking at the data and tracking or monitoring it to see if a particular group hasn’t adopted at the rate that we see for the broader cohort. That’s a bit of a flag that we can then chase down in a more specific way when it comes to measuring. Though typically we’re more focused on more official things that we’ve already gotten placed.
So, I think about the sales process, right? And how are our teams adhering to our sales process? Those are very quantified, measurable steps that involve both ourselves and our customers and really help us understand how we’re moving along. That’s probably where we do most of our measurement relative to that, but there is value in the tracking and those early warning flags for us.
MG: So, Shamis, I think you and I both understand and know the importance of training and onboarding for sales teams, especially now more than ever. Taking a step back and kind of getting broad, can you just share your thoughts and insights on why onboarding is so important? If we’re speaking to a sales leader, what value do you really see when looking at metrics, behaviors, and performance tied to onboarding?
ST: I’d say onboarding is very important. It’s the first impression that someone has of your organization. It can really set the tone for what that individual’s experience is and becomes. So getting that right is critical. Living in this virtual world, there is more consideration that we have to have around how are we improving that experience and adapting that experience to this environment. There are things that we would have relied on previously with face-to-face interaction and all the benefits of that.
I think that we need to recognize that this is also an opportunity for us to go deeper in terms of how we are tailoring that sort of corporate orientation and onboarding into these longer periods. So maybe onboarding was weeks before and now it’s months, or maybe it was a couple of months and now it’s several months. It’s looking at a longer tail to what onboarding is and how we can tailor that more to each of the different teams as well as individuals within those teams.
I think it’s a really good opportunity for us to recognize that we don’t want to put top performers through an experience that is meant for struggling performers. That’s going to chase them out the door. So this is a real opportunity for us to go deeper.
MG: I completely agree that it has to be tailored, especially if it’s a longer tail program. If I’m a top performer and I consistently hit my numbers and the training I’m going to for three hours a day is about engaging customers, that’s not really content that I need to consume.
When looking at tailoring programs, are you going by, “Here are the three buckets that we think are the most important and the sellers that fall within the buckets, therefore they will go to these individual lessons?” How are you deciding who should do what as far as continued education and tailored onboarding programs?
ST: I think the important piece here is to allow people to sort of self-select to an extent into this. Through their actions and their behaviors, the people that want to lean in more should be given more. People that maybe aren’t taking the opportunity to dive into what they’re given, we need to recognize that as a different type of experience that we need to align around.
Whether it’s bringing in more of a buddy system to support those individuals that aren’t as engaged and trying to find other ways to bring them in and get them more engaged. And conversely, with folks that are leaning in, how do we get their IP more distributed within our organization? How do we connect them with other parts of the business that want to hear from our sales organization? And make sure that they’re given that opportunity to sort of share their expertise within the business and reward them that way.
MG: You said something and a light bulb went off. As you said, it’s self-selection to a certain extent and the participant, the seller, whatever their job title may be, has to want to be there. And how do you get these sellers or managers on board and subscribe to what you’re putting down? Essentially, if they’re detractors who don’t really think that they need this they’re tenured, they’ve been selling for 15 years and they don’t need one more onboarding program. How do you win them over and get them really bought in on recommendations that you may have?
ST: I think one of the areas is just showing results. Seeing is believing for most when it comes to overcoming the objections of critics, I think you just have to find ways. Sometimes you have to get creative, but you have to find ways to show them and they’ll see and recognize that there’s an opportunity just waiting for them if they want to take it. We’re not in the business of standing behind people and pushing them, but we’re absolutely in the business of leaning down and pulling people up who want to be pulled up.
I think that it’s important to recognize that we’re all — well, most of us, I imagine, suffer from a resource constraint in our roles, and with a finite amount of bets to place you want to make sure you maximize your results. I am going to bias towards helping those that want to be held probably more. I’d love to help everybody, but my default is to help people that want to be helped first.
MG: I love that term that you used: “I’m in the business of pulling people up who want to be pulled up.” I think that’s actually pretty powerful when looking at training and onboarding — you can’t force anyone to do anything. What you can do is if someone is struggling and they want to get better or figure out where they’re falling flat, then I’m all bought in and I know how to help you.
I think that often with training, onboarding, and any change management role, I can’t help you if I don’t know what you need. I think that’s really at the heart of when you said tailoring programs and training to what the rep in front of you really needs to improve on.
I loved that idea of, “I can only do so much.” So, Shamis, what has helped you in building an effective and efficient onboarding program?
ST: Some of the things that have been really beneficial for us in our development of onboarding programs have really been gaining that visibility into what’s working and what’s not working. It can seem like a kind of an obvious thing. But for our processes, we didn’t have any kind of real granular visibility into just how effective was our onboarding efforts. So by starting to leverage the technology — and Highspot was critical to gain that visibility into how our new owls were going through their onboarding experience. The level to which they were going through and engaging with the resources provided to them. It really allowed us to start to see the connection between the people that were embracing that experience and the people that weren’t. In turn, we were able to work with our business leaders to build out on that more and put more structure and build accountability into that process.
That really solidified that trust element that allowed us to continue to build and refine our efforts there. It really started with just gaining visibility into what’s working and what’s not working. I think maybe if there’s one thing I would leave on, it would be that learning is a learned skill. It’s important to recognize that because it’s something that can be developed and coached, but it’s not something we can just assume everybody has developed already.
MG: Can you dive a little deeper into your experience with that?
ST: So for me, there are really two qualities that are really important in what goes into a successful rep. Emotional intelligence, which is really about interpersonal skills and the ability to control pressure and stress and adapt to the uncertainties of the job. Another area that we don’t often spend a lot of time on is curiosity. The notion of the curiosity quotient. This is, to me, one of the areas where it really stands out because one of the things that identify people that have a higher degree of curiosity is their willingness to invest in their own level of understanding and knowledge on a subject.
They tend to go far deeper than their peers that lack that level of natural curiosity. That’s easier for us to identify from one standpoint, but it’s also about how they show up in conversation too. It’s the way they approach a discovery conversation with a customer. Ultimately combining these two things leads to a better buying experience. When I say learning is a learned skill, it is, but it’s a very identifiable skill and it’s one that I’m always looking for.
MG: Have you found that curiosity and emotional intelligence are the hallmarks of a great seller or someone who’s just going to be very successful within a training program?
ST: Both. I think they are hallmarks of great salespeople, perhaps they’re not requirements per se, and we haven’t made them requirements yet from a traditional selling context. I think that’ll change over time, to be honest. I think as we continue to move into this buyer’s world, we’re going to start to recognize that these are actually the new things that we want.
You know, we’re not looking for closers and all these more historical things that we’ve associated with what great sellers look like. I think the future of great sellers is the current great learner. This virtual forward environment.
MG: I think you are absolutely right — the future is going to require someone with a decent to high emotional intelligence and curiosity because you no longer get the luxury of being personable in person. You have to be personable on an email, over Slack, on the phone. You lose some of that charisma that you can turn on when you’re in-person and shaking someone’s hand. You have to be able to translate that through emails and phone calls now, and you have to be more curious to go find your own answers now that you can’t turn around and ask Shamis anymore.
Gartner recently said that they’re expecting 35 to 40% of sellers not to return back to the office and remain remote. If that is the case, 35 to 40% of people who are selling virtually right now will remain selling virtually. Curiosity and emotional intelligence is going to be detrimental to their success.
If I were to list a few takeaways of a great onboarding program based on this conversation, they would be visibility, accountability, and trust.
ST: Completely agree with that.
MG: Well, Shamis, thank you so much for your time. This has been an amazing conversation and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. It’s always a pleasure to work with you and thank you for joining the Win-Win podcast.
ST: Thank you so much, Marissa.
Marissa Gbenro: Hello and welcome to the inaugural episode of the Win-Win podcast by Highspot. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. I’m your host, Marissa Gbenro. Through my work as a content marketer, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what content people prefer to consume. What did I find? Well, best practices and research are very popular across the board. So, each episode of this podcast will provide insights and best practices on emerging trends to help you stay ahead of the curve. Today we’ll discuss how the impact of COVID-19 has forced many organizations to reevaluate the effectiveness of their revenue engine and how to move forward.
To help us unpack this topic, I’ve invited my colleague, Steve Hallowell, Highspot’s VP of Strategic Services, to be our first guest. Welcome, Steve, and thank you for joining us. Can you introduce yourself and your role to the audience?
Steve Hallowell: Hi, Marissa, and thank you so much for having me. I’m Steve Hallowell. I lead strategic services here at Highspot. My background is that I led sales enablement operations and strategy teams at a number of high-growth technology companies over the past decade. I recently joined Highspot to help our customers benefit from some of the best practices out there, both across our customer base and across the industry.
MG: Perfect. Thank you, Steve. I think we can all agree that 2020 has forced a lot of companies to do an internal audit of what’s working, what’s not, and ways that they can continue to drive revenue. And because of this, I felt that it was only right that the first episode of this podcast cover the strategic enablement framework. What is it? What is the path to mastery and how can people get started? So, Steve, can you start by telling us a little bit about the strategic enablement framework and what it is?
SH: Sure — thank you, Marissa. So, to step back, I would first start with what is the strategic enablement framework trying to drive, and really it’s about trying to drive consistent performance. And I don’t necessarily mean one person being consistent, though that’s a good thing too. But what I mean is that across your team, you may have some people who are doing particularly well. But then most people are doing somewhere around what you would expect. To draw a contrast here in many organizations that I look at, this is true for, I think, a very high percentage of sales organizations.
You have a few people who are doing really, really well, but you have many more people who are actually struggling. So it’s not that they’re just a little bit below quota — they’re actually a lot below. That’s a really unhealthy dynamic for many, many reasons. You know you can imagine these are people who are all consuming marketing resources, they’re using SDR time, they’re using up time from your technical sales team and sales leadership. And yet they’re not turning that into productive value in terms of success in their sales endeavors.
From a morale standpoint, now you have a whole bunch of people that are not being nearly as successful as they could be. That’s no fun for anybody. It’s certainly not helpful for the careers of those folks. So again, when you kind of step back, if you have a situation where some people are doing really well and a bunch of people are struggling, that’s not where we want to be. It does tell us that it’s possible to do well, however.
When you have some people who are doing well, that says, “Hey, there is a path to success here.” We want to be able to turn this into a situation where most people, the bulk of people, are doing what we would call “kind of reasonably well.” Maybe they’re a little above quota, and if they’re a little below quota, it’s solid, healthy performance, and the number of under-performers is much less.
We really want it to look like sort of a bell curve, the way we would imagine it would be. In the vast majority of cases, that’s actually not what the performance of the team what’s like. The strategic enablement framework is something that we developed as we looked across our customer base and saw what the very best customers are doing. There are really two things that the very best customers are doing, and they sound really simple — they’re just hard to do in practice. One of them is defining winning behaviors, define the things that those best people, the people who are succeeding, are doing. The second is systematically helping people master those behaviors. It doesn’t do us any good to define what the best people are doing if nobody can actually go replicate that. Part of the art there is in defining the behaviors granularly enough and crisply enough that we can actually operationalize them. Part of that is about having a really robust way to make sure that no sellers are left behind. We’re bringing everybody along with us, everybody is learning the key things that matter, or we figure out how to teach them better so that everybody eventually gets there.
MG: That’s awesome. Thank you, Steve. One question that I have is how do you measure impact? How do you even know what areas to focus on for metrics of success and key indicators for continuous performance?
SH: Sure. Let me start with a little context. So often in companies we see that there’s a big difference between the folks who are performing really, really well and everybody else. This was true before COVID and I think COVID has not helped this trend. The size of the group of people that are doing really, really well is much smaller than the group of people who are struggling.
I think we all kind of assume that most people are somewhere in the middle, but unfortunately, in many companies, the bulk of the people are actually out in the left in terms of the people who are most struggling. So the opportunity for businesses is that because we have some people doing well, let’s figure out what those people are doing and get the rest of the folks in our company to do those things.
The reality of actually making this happen is often pretty challenging. It’s one of these things that is incredibly valuable. I think everybody wants to do it and yet it can be really hard to do in real life. The strategic enablement framework is really a roadmap for how to do this. It’s been tried and true and applied many times, and if you follow this framework, you really can change the shape of the curve of performance in your organization. It goes from a situation where many people are underperforming to a situation where most people are really doing quite well, with all of the benefit that comes from that, which is you no longer having this big drag on performance across the organization. You no longer have a lot of people who are just failing to live up to their potential. Really, you have most people performing well, driving financial return, and driving the growth of the business forward.
MG: Is there a specific term that you use when thinking of how you phrase closing this gap and what it is?
SH: Yeah, it’s a great question, Marissa. It’s interesting because I hear this question asked in different ways by different people, but it all comes down to the same thing. One question that I hear come up is an enablement leader saying, “Hey, how do I measure the impact of my enablement program?”
It can also come from a very different altitude in the company. Let’s say you have somebody on the board who’s saying, “Hey, I have a company that’s growing quite nicely, but should I be high-fiving the go-to-market organization because they are just killing it? Or do we need to uplevel our game because we’re leaving something on the table?”
Especially in the world that I come from with high growth companies, let’s say you have a company growing at 50% a year. Is that phenomenal? Or should that company be growing at 100%? I actually think this framework can be applied to both audiences to say, “Are we really taking full advantage of the market opportunity ahead of us and using all the investments we’re making — not only in our sellers, but in all the people who surround our sellers? The marketing team, sales consultants, sales engineers, your customer success folks, your account managers — are we bringing the full weight of that company to bear in an effective way or not?” And that comes back to this notion of consistency.
I look at quota attainment, if that’s the metric I care about: How many people are blowing their quota out, how many people are a little bit above quota, how many people are a little bit below, or how many people are really struggling? If I put people into those buckets, what does the ratio look like across those buckets? If I see that most people are kind of in the middle of that, I’m doing really well. Again, the reality for most companies, though, is that far too many people are over in the “I’m struggling” bucket.
That says to me that the organization as a whole has not figured out how to make its people successful. So you can look at this in overall quota attainment but you can also look at this in more specific things, like maybe how quickly folks ramp is a big issue for you if you’re a fast growing company. Then you can look at it in terms of how much business do people close in their first year. Usually when people say they have a ramp challenge, it’s not that nobody’s ramping quickly — it’s that some people are, but a bunch of people aren’t. So there’s, again, disparity between the haves and have-nots.
It’s one of these things that can sound really simple, and can be harder to do in practice. Step one, do I know what those best people are doing? This is something that for a lot of companies you’ll get an answer, but sometimes the answer isn’t specific enough that you can operationalize it. A situation that I’ve certainly been in when leading an enablement team is, let’s say a head of sales comes to me and says, “Hey Steve, go make our people better, we want better performance.” What should I train them to do? What do you want them to do differently? And that’s not really clear when you actually get to the level of running a program to help people get better. You don’t really know where to start. It’s sort of like trying to scale a pile of mush, it’s just a nondescript pile of something. And I want more of it. Well, how am I ever going to copy it because I don’t even know where I’m starting. So the first task really is, do I even know what the best people do? Have I defined that in a way that’s clear enough and crisp enough that I can really operationalize those things? Do I have the blueprint for what I want to replicate?
MG: I was just going to say, I think that defines so much of the pain points for a lot of professionals, “Go do this and do it better.” Well, what is this? What does success look like? And if I come back to you and improved in one area, was that the area that was most important? Is that going to have the most business impact? So getting very clear on expectations of what good looks like and areas that you’ve clearly identified need work and are going to have the most impact are extremely important before even starting. You don’t want to get too far into it and realize you focused all this time and energy on something that no one wanted to change. You have to put the mush in a box so you at least know you want it to have four sides, instead of being told, “No, I wanted it to be a circle or triangle instead.”
SH: Yeah. You know, I think something that you see often is that sales leaders will actually sort of over-delegate to an ailment. They hire an enablement leader. They’re super psyched. They can’t wait to see what we can all go do now that they have a strong enablement team. But they don’t recognize that there are certain things that the enablement leader just simply can’t solve by themselves. So part of defining a set of winning behaviors, for example, is, “Are we really clear about what we want our sales team members to accomplish and our managers tracking, are those things happening?” and then holding people accountable and coaching them when they’re not.
That’s something that there’s a lot of work by the sales leadership team to do there, enablement can facilitate, but they can’t fully own it. Or, similarly, “Are we arming our salespeople with the right content to support having the conversations that we need them to have?” In most companies, the product marketing team has a lot to say about that content and the messaging in that content. If there isn’t the right alignment across product marketing, sales, and sales enablement, then product marketing doesn’t have the right vision for what they really need to build that will help fill that need and really provide the right milestone. Sales enablement can knock it out of the park on the downstream efforts, but if you’re not enabling on the right thing, it’s not going to help.
MG: That absolutely makes sense, and I heard you kind of mention training and coaching a couple of times. How exactly does training and coaching fit into this framework and where is it most important to expect training and coaching to have a real impact, or what are the best key metrics or indicators to expect from training and coaching to make sure you’re really getting the most out of it early on? Like you said, downstream isn’t when you want to recognize something has gone wrong.
SH: So that’s a great question. I think I’d start with there are two things that lead to consistent performance. The first that we were just talking about was defining winning behaviors, but then we also need to systematically help the team master those behaviors. And that’s one of the places that training and coaching fits in. One of the other things I see is that maybe we haven’t defined all of our winning behaviors, but we have at least one thing that we know it’s really important for our teams to go do.
A very common example of that, for instance, is that we know we need our teams to do better business discovery. Before they get too deep into talking about our product, we need to understand the business challenges that we’re going to be solving for. Let’s say that’s the thing that I want people to go do. Many enablement teams will kind of go through the normal things that an enablement organization can control to help with that first. Maybe they publish some discovery questions, perhaps they wrap some guidance around that of here’s when and how to use those assets and materials. That can be wonderful for somebody who is really self motivated to grab those discovery questions.
But the reality is that for most of us when we’re learning something new, we need more than that to get good at doing something. We need some real structure to our training to be able to learn a new concept. We need to be able to practice it and build confidence before we go use it with a customer in what can feel like a pretty high pressure environment. And lastly, we need somebody to hold us accountable for actually going to do it and providing us with the right support when we’re out there in front of the customer. This is where the role of the frontline manager really comes in.
If as an enablement team I can do a wonderful job putting the right content out there — I get the content, I source the material, I package it really well, I make sure everybody knows about it, I even built great training around it, I hold an awesome training session and everybody loves it — I may still fail in the objective of getting the whole team to do it consistently because there’s this extra missing piece on the path to mastery. Am I creating accountability in the field for doing that thing? Are my frontline managers plugged in? Do they see it as being important? Are they providing the right coaching and support when I’m actually out there with customers?
MG: I think that accountability and visibility piece is often overlooked. There’s a box that’s going to get checked of if you did it or didn’t do it, but it’s so much more than that. Accountability is more than saying, “Did you do it?” or “Did you not do it?” but, “Are you practicing these behaviors on a daily basis and using them?” because we know it works. We’re asking you to change behaviors and for you to do these specific things for a reason and that accountability isn’t translated. There’s no open loop of feedback that not only gives you visibility but also holds the person accountable to say, “I’ve tried it, this is the success I’m seeing,” or, “I’m not seeing any success at all and maybe it requires some rework.” I think that aspect is really important and often not talked about enough.
Also, you mentioned change behavior. How do you make sure that we’re helping to build that confidence in sellers and how can enablement practitioners in particular really hone in on making sure that each seller that you’re putting onto the phones is ready and going to smash that call their first time?
SH: I think what you’re kind of touching on here is how you build really effective training. There’s a few things that I’ve seen over the years that make a big difference here. I think one of the first things is getting really specific about how you hope to help people’s training. What is the specific thing you want them to do differently as a result of the training and where are they actually stuck? Sometimes it’s easy to kind of launch into a training and sort of unload on somebody saying, “Here are all of the ways I’m going to try to help you, but I don’t really know what you need.”
It would be sort of like, your car is having some issue so you pull into a shop and they change the tires and the transmission, they change the belts in the engine, they wash your windows, they change the headlamps, and then you have this huge bill at the end of it. You’re not sure they actually fixed the thing you needed to be fixed, but you spent a lot of time and money doing it. Your car is shinier now, but did it actually help anything? As opposed to being able to say hey, I need help with this, I have a squeal in my back left tire and I need a new brake pad. That requires really talking to people, talking to their managers, understanding specifically where they lack confidence, where they need the most support, and recognizing that can vary across different people.
Secondly, it’s about making training that’s actually challenging. I just got off the phone with a sales leader who said, “I want a situation where all the training that my team takes is the hardest thing they ever do. I want them to know that if they get through that training and they’re successful, they would be fully confident to face any situation with a customer.”
Many of us in the enablement field are nice people and we want friends on the sales team, and we don’t want to push too hard, and we want them to feel good about our training. The reality is, if I go through training that’s really easy, I didn’t get anything from it. If you push me in a productive way, outside of my comfort zone, now I’m really getting value and really getting better. Now training will be a good use of my time as opposed to looking back and saying, “That was kind of nice, I had a good time hanging out with so-and-so, but I’m not sure that I’m actually any better for it at the end of it.”
MG: That’s really true. Some of the best trainings I’ve ever gone through made me so intimidated that I thought, “The first time I ever get on a call with a customer, they’re going to ask me all these really hard questions and I’ll have to remember all of these product specs.” But then you get on a call and you’re having a great conversation and it just so happens that there’s this perfect opening where you get to pitch your product and it goes a hundred times easier than what you were prepped for in training. I have to agree, I would prefer training to be the hardest part of my job, as opposed to when I actually get on the phone.
If you had to wrap up the three components that are most important to keep in mind when driving consistent performance, what would you say those are?
SH: I think the first piece is just understanding where you are and understanding if there’s an opportunity to improve consistency. In almost all cases the answer is yes, there is. But the more crisp you can get, the more you can help focus your leadership team on why this matters and what the opportunity is.
The next step is to really robustly define the winning behaviors. But I would say just pick one thing where you and your leadership team know that if only our people could do this thing differently, it would move the needle. It’s not going to solve everything but you know it’s going to help things get better. As we’re in SKO season, think about the major themes you’re anchoring your sales kickoff around. That probably points to a behavior where there’s an opportunity, that if people did that thing, you’d be better off.
The third piece is to really swing all the way through on helping people master those behaviors. Again, with SKO season here, have your SKO, but make sure you’re following up with, “Here’s the content you use to action this thing that we talked about, here’s where you find it, here’s where we guide you on how to use it, here’s the training program around it, here’s how to build confidence through getting coached,” and then hold people accountable for actually going and doing it in the real world.
Make sure you have alignment with leadership. If you get pushback on any of that and leadership says “Oh, we don’t really need to do that,” I think it’s worth asking the question, “Is this behavior really important? Does this actually matter?” Because if it’s not worth the manager’s time to follow up and coach, is it worth your time to put the stuff together? And more importantly, is it worth your team’s time to sit through that session at SKO? So make sure that you really have that alignment across the teams that this is what matters and you’re willing to really drive it through.
MG: I love the recommendation that if you’re receiving pushback, then it’s time to ask the question, “Is this really important? Is it a priority that we should be spending our time on and an initiative we’re trying to still move forward?” If you don’t think it’s that important, then maybe it’s not and we can save a bunch of time and effort that way.
Steve, this was so much fun. Thank you so much for joining us for the first episode of the Win-Win Podcast. It was a pleasure having you.
SH: Thank you, Marissa. Thanks for having me.